Дэймон Найт: Orbit 8

“I don’t know if it was booze, boredom, or genius, but I started to talk the deal right then and there. Him being drunk didn’t hurt any. Anyhow, we worked it out, sitting there in that bunged-up Cadillac with the heater running fit to roast your ass off, guzzling raw booze right from that bulky bottle. My collar was wilted next morning from what ran down my chin that night. Anyhow, we worked it out. I’d cover all his liabilities, pay for incidentals like legal fees and so on, and buy him out for...” Harry looked appraisingly at the FBI man for a second. “If you want to know, I guess you could find out. Ninety thou. Go on, you say it if you want. Others have accused me of setting bombs in orphanages.

“I had to sell the house to cover it all, which wasn’t a bad idea. Didn’t take much of a loss. It cost me about forty to cover liabilities—there were a few cars on fire behind the place that he neglected to point out at the time—and about another sixty to get the place fixed up the way I wanted. The way it is now. With my penthouse on the third floor, the pool tables, the stage and all. You know, I looked up the original title on that land and house. Decline And Fall is a restaurant, bar, cocktail lounge, grill, and cabaret with occasional dinner-theater, which can seat four hundred people on two floors and in the Wine Cellar Room. It was built in nineteen ten as a summer house for one family! We’ve lost something somewhere.”

“What happened to the former owner?”

“I got a postcard from him about a year ago. He’s teaching Slavic history at Southern California. Asked if I wanted to join the Minutemen.”

“Did you?”

“Why should I? When I’ve got the Mafia?”

They looked each other in the eye for a little while, and then Harry looked back out to sea.

“Well, Decline And Fall opened, all right. I handed over the practice to the boys—taught them how to incorporate, first—and arranged for them to pay me a percentage for ninety-nine years or until my death, whichever happens first. Then I moved in on the third floor and tended bar and washed glasses. Didn’t even get help, at first. But this resort-area trade just keeps coming and coming. I got tired out at last. But it took time to build up a clientele, especially without a working kitchen—I didn’t know much about the business then—and I had some problems.”

“Such as what?”

“I’ll skip over the little ones, because you want to hear about Joe and the Family. Anyway, that summer, there was a motorcycle gang hit town. Remember?”

“No.”

“Well, they hit it. First it was just messing around a lot in the streets. Then the cops got on ‘em and they had to go to ground someplace.” Harry looked over his shoulder at the FBI man. “Usually it’s a bar they pick.”

“And it was yours.”

“You bet it was. My regular customers—gone! The furniture was crumbling. The bastards never drank anything but draft beer and they’d get on a jag where they’d break glasses after each round. Then they dragged some woman in off the street and just about gangbanged her on the pool table before I got back from upstairs with the shotgun. I kept it under the bar after that.”

“Got a permit?”

“You be damned. Anyhow, that cooled them down a little. Things were halfway back to normal. Things looked good, I was meeting expenses and beating trade out of the other locals. Then. Then one night the Big Sprocket or whatever they call him got paroled and crushed into town from California. The whole bunch came in and set up a long course of getting pie-eyed for themselves. They chased off the other customers in about five minutes.

“Except for a bunch of guys sitting in the back. In the big booth. These were guys I’d never seen before, off a charter boat. They were the usual fishing types—baseball caps, polo shirts, three-day beards—you know. They weren’t paying any attention to what was going on up front, and the Big Sprocket saw that they weren’t. He hitched up his jeans and walked back there and told them to buy a round for the house or get the hell out. One says, ‘Can we drink up before we leave?’ but Big Sprocket had wandered away.

“I guess somebody must’ve gone to the phone. I don’t know who or when. Anyway, a half hour later, Big Sprock remembered them, and he went back with a mug of beer in each hand and said, ‘Are you mutherfuckers still here?’ And the first guy he’d talked to stood up, very soft-spoken and almost fatherly, and said, ‘We better take this discussion outside,’ and Big Sprocket says, ‘You bet your ass we better,’ and he led the way out, with his whole mob following him. And those fishing types.

“By that time, I was on the phone, but somebody’d popped the wires out. So I had a gin-gin and I got the shotgun and filled my pockets with shells and started for the porch. By then, there were sounds of a real, earnest difference of opinion to be heard issuing from the front parking lot.” Harry grinned and smacked his lips at the memory.

“I opened those swinging doors and walked out like Long John Silver onto that quarterdeck,” said Harry, “and there was quite a rumble out there. But it was just about over. Down at the end of each driveway, somebody had parked a dump truck. In the middle of the lot there was a big pile of motorcycle parts. There were four or five guys down there, taking their time about tossing these little bits of motorcycles onto the one truck, the one parked in the ‘enter’ driveway. Then there were four or five guys with sledgehammers and spud bars tearing what must’ve been the last few motorcycles apart and throwing the bits and pieces onto the pile. And right in front of the big front steps were forty or fifty guys with baseball bats, brass knucks, sandbags, blackjacks, loaded canes, and what-all, just beating the living hell out of Big Sprocket and his mob.

“I just sort of stood there. Frozen, you know, at the sight. I thought I was really going to have to shoot somebody, and I was so relieved that I didn’t have to, at least right away, that I just fell into one of those big rattan chairs. You saw ‘em, the ones on the front porch for the neckers and honeymooners, moon over the vasty sea, and all that. Then, somebody put a hand on my shoulder. I practically had a stroke. Then I looked over beside me. There were those fishermen, sitting in these chairs, taking their lordly ease, sipping fresh boozes—and I don’t know where they came from, I didn’t serve ‘em—watching the show just like they’d watch the Wednesday night fights.

“ ‘Here, old buddy,’ says one of them, the one closest to me, who’d put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Have a drink. These are almost as good as yours.’ And I took it. What it was, I couldn’t tell you. I made it go in three seconds, and he grinned at me, and squeezed my shoulder really buddy-buddy and handed me another one.

“Well, to keep from boring you, those guys in the lot and in the driveway finished beating those motorbikers to a bloody pulp and disposing of their mounts at the same time. Some of them took a whack or two at some of the bodies, then started to throw the remains onto the other truck, the one parked in the exit.

“ ‘Hey, Frank!’ the guy beside me calls out. One of the batmen turned and came a few paces toward us. ‘Dump ‘em in the quarry. My quarry, not yours. Show ‘em the Hand.’ And the guy nodded and laughed and went about his business. Then the guy next to me turned and said, ‘And now a gentleman can drink in peace,’ and he drained his drink. Then he said, ‘You’ve got one of the best places I ever saw. Come on back in and build us some more.’ Then he said, ‘You like Italian food?’ “

Harry looked at Roseboom. “I guess that was the first hint I ever had.” Roseboom nodded.