Al Sarrantonio - Cold Night

More marble. A hallway, the walls bordered with bronze-framed mirrors every half dozen feet. The hallway ended in a right turn. There was another length of hallway which finally ended in huge double doors. Another doorman, more red velvet and brocade. This one stood. Again no seat. The doorman had heavy-soled shoes on, brightly and blackly polished. The build underneath the pillbox cap and organ-grinder's monkey suit looked like ex-middleweight.

"Mr. Paine," the doorman said. His eyes were flat, devoid of expression.

The doorman must have been miked; he never moved but the doors opened from within. As Paine walked in, the doors were closed by yet another doorman.

This is getting silly, Paine thought.

He was in an entrance hall as large and as furnished as his apartment. Gloria Fulman was there to greet him.

"Mr. Paine," she said, her voice as flat as the doorman's.

"Hello," Paine said.

She turned, personally escorting him to a sitting room off the entrance hall. She even opened the white doors leading into it herself. Paine was more interested than flattered at the attention. She wanted more than to buy him, that was sure.

The sitting room was elegant and cold. The rugs looked as old as Persia.

"You'll take coffee?" she asked. On cue, the maid Paine had seen at the suite in New York appeared with the same silver service and the same kind of tea sandwiches. The maid handed coffee to him the way he liked it.

Gloria Fulman sat down on a lavender Sheraton sofa, and Paine sat down on a matching piece on the other side of the coffee table. As in New York, Gloria Fulman didn't touch her coffee.

"I want you to do an important piece of business for me, Mr. Paine," she said.

"And what would that be?"

"I want you to find Les Paterna's brown folder."

"You'll have to stand on line to get it."

Something stirred in the coffee-cold depths of her eyes.

"I know all about Henry Kopiak," she said. "This matter concerns the Fulmans. Your employer understands."

Paine stood up and walked to a framed etching on one wall. It was a beautifully frozen moment capturing two young girls on a swing in a park arching into the air, while a bum on a bench admired them. "So you're saying you made a deal with Barker that if I find the folder, you get it, and the hell with Kopiak?"

The etching had a pencil signature in the lower right-hand corner and was dated 1907.

Behind him, she rose from the couch.

"Mr. Paine," she said, and he turned to see her standing nearly at his elbow. She was pleasantly plump as he had remembered her, but this close he saw that she would look even more plump if she did not have the finest clothes altered with precision. If she had been forced to buy off-the-rack, she would not look so pleasant. Up close, she still looked ten years older than twenty-five.

"I'm saying that your employer expects you to do what you're paid for. My circumstances are. . special."

He waited for her to go on. After trying to stare into his eyes for a few moments she turned and paced away from him.

"My husband," she said in a lowered, careful voice, "is in a precarious political position. There are people who will destroy him if they can."

"Are you being blackmailed?"

She stopped in front of her coffee and sat down again. She picked up the cup and then put it down. Her hand slipped, and coffee spilled over the rim onto the saucer. Paine watched a drop of it fall to the highly polished coffee table. He expected an alarm to go off, the mechanical maid to rush in with lemon polish and whisk the drop into oblivion.

Paine said, "I can smell blackmail a mile away. I smell it everywhere I look with your family." He looked at her levelly. "Did you know Lucas Druckman?"

This time he had caught her. Her eyes shifted subtly, filled in with life before going blank again. Her hand brushed across the top of her coffee cup, upsetting it again. "Who?" she said, not as firmly as she wished.

He took Druckman's picture out. "I already showed you this once."

"I don't know him," she said. She looked at the coffee table, and for a horrible moment Paine thought she was going to summon the maid to clean her spill. Instead she dabbed it up herself, with the corner of a napkin.

Paine sat down on the sofa and leaned forward. "Mrs. Fulman, has someone tried to kill you?"

"What do you mean?" she said. She was more and more unsure of herself, and Paine admitted to himself that he was enjoying it.

"I mean the bodyguards posing as bellboys you've got all over this place. I know hired muscles when I see them. This place looks like a Mafia don's love nest. I doubt you keep three armed men around all the time, even if your collection of etchings is valuable. Has someone tried to kill you?"

"Yes," she said.

"And you're sure that whoever tried to kill you killed Les Paterna, and maybe your father and sister, too?"

She had regained some of her composure. "I've hired you to find out who killed Les Paterna."

"Why do I get the feeling I'm only getting exactly what you want me to know?"

"Because that's true."

"Was Les Paterna blackmailing you?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Why didn't you tell me you knew him?"

She was silent, a part of the furniture, the room, the money itself.

Paine suddenly swept his arm across the coffee table, knocking the china cups, the coffee, the tea service, the little square sandwiches with the crusts removed, onto the rug. There were coffee droplets spattered in a line along the coffee table, and coffee stains setting comfortably into the Persian rug. He hoped they would be hard to get out. He hoped there was mayonnaise in the tea sandwiches, and that that would be hell to get out, too.

Gloria Fulman didn't move.

There was a polite knock at the double doors, and then they opened. Paine heard what sounded like a kitten crying. The maid wheeled a large white bassinet on large wheels into the room. The crying came from the bassinet.

"It's time for her four o'clock feeding, ma'am," the maid said. "I thought you'd want to know."

"Thank you, Barbara," Gloria Fulman said. There was a baby in the bassinet, small as a cat, and she picked it up. Paine studied her face and there was something akin to maternity on it.

Gloria Fulman said to Barbara, "We've had a little accident. We'll need someone to come and look at the rug. And please tell Jeff to bring the limousine around front. Mr. Paine will be going back to the airport now."

At twenty-five thousand feet in the air, with the sustained muffled scream of jet engines to lull him, Paine closed his eyes and the third bad place found him.

It was a night place. There was only darkness, the snick-snick of windshield wipers, the tarp-bright, slick blackness of wet street reflecting the colors of man-made night: dirt-yellow streetlamps, squares of dim light in rows of dead black buildings. The windows in the patrol car were down; the night smelled wet and close and dirty. Dannon was driving, and he wouldn't stop talking. He had been talking ever since they went on shift, first about his fishing trip, the Pennsylvania walleye pike he had caught in a big reservoir. Then he talked about the Yankees.

Paine felt sick. There was a constant gnaw in his belly that had risen slowly to the back of his head and settled behind the back of his eyes where it throbbed dully. His head felt like a giant squeezed fist.

"Sure you don't want to go in?" Dannon kept asking. He knew Dannon was taunting him. Good cops did their job. Good cops stuck with their partners, didn't go in sick in the middle of a shift.

"Come on, Jack," Dannon said with mock heartiness, punching him lightly in the ribs. "Want a nice bowl of chili? Maybe a greasy bucket of Chinese ribs?"