Lawrence Block - When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

My boys would be going to camp in a couple of weeks. One of them had woven me a lanyard like the one Bobby wore. I had it somewhere, packed away in a drawer or something. Or was it still in Syosset? If I were a proper father, I thought, I'd wear the damned thing, whistle and all.

Skip was telling Bobby that he needed his beauty sleep.

"I'm supposed to look like a jock," Bobby said.

"We don't get yououtta here, you'regonna look more like a truss." He looked at his cigarette, dropped it in what was left of his drink. "I never want to see you do that," he told me. "I never want to see either of you do that.Disgusting habit."

THE sky was lightening up outside. We walked slowly, not saying much. Bobby bobbed and weaved a ways ahead of us, dribbling an imaginary basketball, faking out an invisible opponent and driving for the hoop. Skip looked at me and shrugged. "What can I tell you?" he said. "The man is my friend. What else is there to say?"

"You're just jealous," Bobby said. "You got the height but you haven't got the moves. A good little man can fake you out of your socks."

"I wept because I had no shoes," Skip said solemnly, "and then I met a man who had no socks. What the hell was that?"

An explosion echoed half a mile or so to the north of us.

"Kasabian'smortar," Bobby said.

"Fucking draft-dodger," Skip said. "You wouldn't know a mortar from apessary. I don't mean apessary. What is it a pharmacist uses?"

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"A pestle," Skip said. "You wouldn't know a mortar from a pestle. That's not what a mortar sounds like."

"Whatever you say."

"It sounded like blasting for a foundation," he said. "But it's too early, the neighbors would kill anybody started blasting at this hour. I'll tell you, I'm glad it's done raining."

"Yeah, we had enough of it, didn't we?"

"I suppose we needed it," he said. "That's always what they say, isn't it? Every time it rains its ass off, somebody says how we needed it. Because the reservoirs are drying up, or else the farmers need it or something."

"This is a wonderful conversation," Bobby said. "You'd never get a conversation like this in a less sophisticated city."

"Fuck you," Skip said. He lit a cigarette and started coughing, got control of the cough and took another puff on the cigarette, this time without a cough. It was like a drink in the morning, I thought. Once you got one to stay down you were all right.

"The air's nice after a storm," Skip said. "I think it cleans it."

"Washes it," Bobby said.

"Maybe."He looked around. "I almost hate to say this," he said, "but it ought to be a beautiful day."

At six minutes past eight, the phone on Skip's desk rang. Billie Keegan had been talking about a girl he'd met the previous year on a three-week holiday in the west ofIreland. He stopped his story inmidsentence. Skip put his hand on the phone and looked at me, and I reached for the phone that sat on top of the file cabinet. He nodded once, a quick bob of the head, and we lifted the two receivers in unison.

He said, "Yeah."

A male voice said, "Devoe?"

"Yeah."

"You have the money?"

"All set."

"Then get a pencil and write this down. You want to get in your car and drive to-"

"Hold on," Skip said. "First you got to prove you got what you say you got."

"What do you mean?"

"Read the entries for the first week of June. That's this June, June of '75."

There was a pause. Then the voice, taut now, said, "You don't give us orders, man. We're the ones say frog, you're the ones jump." Skip straightened up a little in his chair, leaned forward. I held up a hand to stop whatever he was about to say.

I said, "We want to confirm we're dealing with the right people. We want to buy it as long as we know you've got it to sell. Establish that much and we'll play out the hand."

"You're notDevoe speaking. Who the hell are you?"

"I'm a friend of Mr.Devoe's."

"You got a name, friend?"

"Scudder."

"Scudder.You want us to read something?"

Skip told him again what to read.

"Get back to you," the man said, and broke the connection.

Skip looked over at me, the receiver in his hand. I hung up the one I was holding. He passed his own from hand to hand like a hot potato. I had to tell him to hang up.

"Why'd they do that?" he wanted to know.

"Maybe they had to have a conference," I suggested. "Or get the books so they can read you what you want to hear."

"And maybe they never had them in the first place."

"I don't think so. They'd have tried to stall."

"Hanging up on somebody's a pretty good way to stall." He lit a cigarette, shoved the pack back into his shirt pocket. He was wearing a short-sleeved forest-green work shirt withAlvin 's Texaco Service embroidered in yellow over the breast pocket. "Why hang up?" he said petulantly.

"Maybe he thought we could trace the call."

"Could we do that?"

"It's hard even when you've got the cops and the telephone company cooperating on it," I said. "It'd be out of the question for us. But they don't necessarily know that."

"Catch us tracing calls," JohnKasabian put in. "We had our hands full installing the second phone this afternoon."

They had done that a few hours earlier, running wires from the terminal on the wall and hooking an extension phone borrowed fromKasabian's girl's apartment into the line so that Skip and I could be on the line at the same time. While Skip and John were doing that, Bobby had been auditioning for the role of referee in the brotherhood commercial and Billie Keegan had been finding someone to fill in for him behind the stick at Armstrong's. I'd used that time to stuff two hundred and fifty dollars into a parish fund box, light a couple of candles, and phone in another meaningless report to Drew Kaplan inBrooklyn. And now we were all five in Miss Kitty's back office, waiting for the phone to ring again.

"Sort of a southern accent," Skip said. "You happen to notice?"

"It sounded phony."

"Think so?"

"When he got angry," I said. "Or pretended to get angry, whatever it was. That bit about jump when he says frog."

"He wasn't the only one got angry just about then."

"I noticed. But when he first got angry the accent wasn't there, and when he started with the frog shit he was putting it on thicker than before, trying to sound country."

He frowned, summoning up the memory. "You're right," he said shortly.

"Was it the same guy you talked to before?"

"I don't know. His voice sounded phony before, but it wasn't the same as I was hearing tonight. Maybe he's a man of a thousand voices, all of them unconvincing."

"Guy could do voiceovers," Bobby suggested, "in fucking brotherhood commercials."

The phone rang again.

This time we made less of a thing out of synchronizing our answering, since I'd already made my presence known. When I had the receiver to my ear, Skip said, "Yeah?" and the voice I'd heard before asked what he was supposed to read. Skip told him and the voice began reading ledger entries. Skip had the fake set of books open on his desk and followed along on the page.

After half a minute the reader stopped and asked if we were satisfied. Skip looked as though he wanted to take exception to the word. Instead he shrugged and nodded, and I spoke up to say we were assured we were dealing with the right people.

"Then here's what you do," he said, and we both took up pencils and wrote down the directions.

"TWO cars," Skip was saying. "All they know is me and Mattare coming, so the two ofus'll go in my car. John, you take Billie and Bobby. What do you think, Matt, they'll follow us?"

I shook my head. "Somebody may be watching us leave here," I said. "John, why don't you three go aheadnow. Your car's handy?"