Росс Томас - Cast a Yellow Shadow

There was a group of people standing about twenty feet from me. Three men and two women. A couple of cars had stopped to watch the fight. One of the men detached himself from the group and came over to me.

“There were three of them,” he said.

“So there were.”

“You carry a knife all the time?”

“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“By God, it’s a good idea. It sure saved your skin, didn’t it?”

I looked down at the knife, closed it, and slipped it into a pocket. “I had your moral support,” I said. “That meant a lot.”

I turned and walked to my apartment. I rode the elevator up to the floor where I lived, unlocked the door, took off my coat, fixed a drink, and turned on the television set. I watched Alan Ladd fall through a skylight and get knocked around by William Bendix. It didn’t seem to bother him much and I wondered why I was still shaking at two-thirty.

I finally fell asleep around six in the morning and awoke at nine-forty-five. The bed was still too large for one person. I got up and went into the kitchen and turned on a burner to heat some water. It was boiling by the time I was dressed. I stirred a cup of coffee and lighted a cigarette, my first for the day. I got the paper from the hall. I called the saloon and told Padillo I was going to be late and he said not to hurry. I didn’t. I had another cup of coffee and read the paper. I didn’t want to go anywhere.

A front page story told about Van Zandt arriving in Washington early because his UN appearance had been moved up. The story said he would confer with somebody at the State Department, apparently nobody important; meet with members of his consulate and trade mission, and hold a press conference at four p.m., which would be just after he was through going over the details of his assassination. He seemed to have scheduled a full day.

There was a brief item on page twelve about Evelyn Underbill, fifty-one, who had been struck and killed yesterday by a hit-and-run driver in the 1100 block of Connecticut Avenue. There wasn’t much else about Underhill.

I thought about Padillo’s plan to have the FBI traipse around after him so that the Africans would think he was too hot and agree to send in Dymec as substitute. Padillo’s reputation would help convince the FBI about his Portuguese nemesis, at least for a little while. Whether Van Zandt and his people would buy the package was something else. They were a hard bunch, hard enough to kidnap my wife, hard enough to kill their opposition by running him down in the middle of the afternoon, and hard enough to plan an assassination. I decided that they were hard enough for anything.

I sat there with a cup of cold coffee trying not to think of Fredl, and not doing very well at it. So I got up and rode the elevator down and walked to the saloon. When I arrived, Padillo was saying goodbye on the telephone. “That was Magda,” he said. “She’s the last to call. We’re to meet them at the Seventh Street address at eleven.”

“You’ll split the seventeen thousand pounds this morning, right?”

“The fifteen thousand. They get five each.”

“Will Hardman be there?”

“No. He says Mush will let us in. We can lock it up when we leave. We’ll keep the key.” He glanced at his watch. “We might as well go.”

“All right.”

“What did you do, go to bed with a bottle last night?”

“No. Why?”

Padillo eyed me critically. “You look like hell. You look even worse than you did yesterday.”

“I got brushed by some drunk-rollers; three of them.”

“Where?”

“About three blocks from here.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I just showed them my genuine pearl-handled switch blade and they went away.”

“Nice neighborhood.”

“One of the best,” I said. “Wait till you see where we’re going this morning.”

If Washington has a skid row, the area between Seventh and Ninth is probably it. It runs as far north as N Street; as far south as H. The Carnegie Public Library, located in the middle of a couple of city blocks between Seventh and Ninth, serves as a kind of headquarters for the down-and-out, the drunks, and those who somehow have gone past caring. They can sit in the sun on the curved benches that Andrew Carnegie built in 1899 and read a sign that says the library is intended to be a “University for the People.” Most of them look as if they would like a drink.

The library sits in a pleasant enough park with wooden benches and grass and trees and a couple of squirrels. There’s a public toilet. In winter one can always go in the library and get warm while nodding over a magazine or newspaper. Across the street from the library on the north side is a deserted seven-story building that once housed a labor union’s Washington headquarters until it moved downtown, closer to the White House. There’s a church on the west side, a string of bars and secondhand stores on the south, and some liquor stores on the east.

The area is to be included in the city’s urban renewal plans someday. In the meantime, the bums sit in the sun and wonder where the next bottle of wine is coming from and read the stone letters above the library entrance which proclaim that the whole thing is “Dedicated to the Diffusion of Knowledge.”

Hardman had his sometime collection office around the corner a block or so from the library on Seventh. We climbed a flight of stairs and Mush was there, leaning against the door. He and Padillo said something in Arabic to each other. Then Mush opened the door and handed me the key. “Hard says keep it long as you need it.”

“Thanks.”

“Need anything, he say, just holler. You got his car telephone number.”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“He’ll be cruisin today.”

“Tell him we’ll see him later.”

Mush nodded and went down the stairs two at a time. We went into the one-room office. The window that faced Seventh looked as if it hadn’t been opened or washed since Roosevelt was sworn in for his second term. There was a yellow oak desk with a telephone on it and a blotter that had accumulated a thick coating of dust. There were six chairs, the metal kind that fold and can be stacked against the wall. There was no name on the pebble-glass door; no carpet on the pine floor. It was an office that would be rented to somebody who sold penny stocks, or who promoted Lonely Hearts’ clubs, or who founded organizations to hate someone or abolish something. It was an office that seemed to have witnessed scores of failures and half-a-hundred shattered dreams. It was an end-of-the-line office, and Hardman sometimes used it as a numbers counting house and sometimes lent it to friends who wanted a place to split up forty-two thousand dollars among three thieves.

Philip Price arrived first. He said hello and looked around the office, dusted off a chair, and sat down. “Am I early?” he asked.

“You’re on time,” Padillo said.

“Good.”

We waited five minutes and Dymec arrived. He sat down without bothering to dust off anything. I don’t think he noticed the office.

Magda Shadid arrived three minutes or so after Dymec. She wore a loose, white wool coat and brown alligator shoes with wicked heels.

“It’s so dirty,” she said. Padillo gave her a handkerchief.

“Clean off a chair,” he said.

“I’ll get my coat just filthy.”

“Is this all?” Price asked.

“This is all,” Padillo said.

“Where’s the nigger?”

“He’s busy.”

“On our job?”

“On something else.”

“Today we get money, right?” Dymec said.

“Today you get money,” Padillo said. “First you get some information. Can you wait?”