Mickey Spillane - Survival... ZERO!

A gypsy cab driver having coffee and a doughnut in his car scanned the photo and said he was pretty sure he had seen the guy around, but didn't know where or when. It was the eyes, he said. He always looked at people's eyes, and he remembered seeing him. He told me to look for Jackie, the redheaded whore who swore she was a prostitute because she wanted money to go to college, Jackie knew everybody.

Jackie knew Beaver, all right. He had bought her pitch about two weeks ago, gone to her apartment and parted with ten bucks for sexual services rendered, leaving her with a few welts and bruises. She had seen him once after that, getting into a taxi down the block. She knew he didn't live in the area, but assumed he dropped up to see a friend who did. No, she couldn't even guess at who it was. The neighborhood was full of itinerants and strange faces. She took my ten bucks and thought I was a nut for not getting the whole go for the money.

Now, at least, I was in the area.

There were three construction sites within two blocks. One was a partial demolition job and the other two were leveled. The last one had wiped out a row of three brownstones all the way to the corner and the cut went deep into the solid rock that was the bed of the city. The hole was spotted with small ponds of rainwater and a yellow backhoe tractor stood lonely and dead-looking in the middle of the gorge, its toothed claw ready to pounce into the granite, but dead, like a suddenly frozen prehistoric beast.

Silent air compressors and equipment shacks lined one side of the street, abutted on either end by battered dump trucks. A square patch of dim light outlined the window of the watchman's stubby trailer and from behind the locked door I could hear Spanish music working toward a

finale of marimbas and bongo drums before the announcer came on to introduce the next number.

I knocked on the door and it opened to a toothy grin and a stale beer smell and the young-old guy standing there said, "Come in, come in. Don't stand in the rain."

"Thanks." I stepped inside while he turned down the radio.

"Not much of a place," he said, "but I like it."

"Why not?"

"Sure, why not? It's a living. I got my own house and nobody to bitch at me. Pretty damn noisy in the daytime, then I got so I could sleep through anything. Maybe that's why they keep me on. Me, I can stay awake all night and sleep daytimes like they want. Don't get much company, though. Now, what can I do for you?"

I showed him the picture of Beaver and let him study it. "Ever see that man?"

He looked at it intently, then handed it back. "Can't say. Daytimes I sleep, y'know. After a while them damn compressors get to be like music and they put me right to sleep. Know something? I got so's I can't sleep without "em going."

"You're sure?" I asked.

He nodded. "Don't remember him. We've been here a month already and I don't remember him. Know most everybody else, though. Especially the kids. The ones who like to climb all over things."

I was about to leave when I turned around and looked at him. "The crew work in the rain?"

"Hell no! They finished up right after it started and shut everything down. Them boys got the life, they have. Busted up my sleep real awful. When the compressors went off, I woke up. Shit, feller, I haven't been able to get back to sleep since. Everything's just too damn quiet. Look, you want a beer?"

"No thanks."

"You a cop? Maybe for the company?"

"Private investigator."

"Oh, about that stuff the kids took last week. Hell, we got it all back before they could hock it."

"You been cooped up here all day?"

"Naw, I walked around some. Didn't leave the block, though. Just bought some grub and beer, walked around to stretch out. Never leave the place alone long, and never at night. That's why they keep me on."

I pulled up a folding chair with my toe and hooked my leg over it. "See any strange faces around at all?"

"Ah, you got bums comin' through all the time. They go from ..."

"Not bums. These wouldn't be bums."

"Who'd come down this way if they wasn't bums? Maybe some kids from ... hey ... yeah, wait a minute. When I went for the beer ... before it got dark."

"So?"

"I see this car go by twice. New job with two guys in the front seat. It stopped halfway up on the other side and one got out. Then the car went up further and parked. I really didn't pay no attention to it on accounta it was raining so hard. When I came back the car was gone."

"A late-model, black, four-door job?"

"Yeah, how'd you know?"

"It's parked up on Columbus outside the drugstore," I said. "You got a phone here?"

"Under the blankets on the cot there. I like to keep it muffled. Can't stand them damn bell noises."

Pat wasn't in, but I got hold of Sergeant Corbett and told him to get a message through and gave him my location. He told me Pat had assigned an unmarked cruiser to the area earlier, but they were being pulled out in another thirty minutes. Too much was happening to restrict even one car team in a quiet zone on a quiet night and I was lucky to get the cooperation I did.

I said, "It may not be so damn quiet in a little while, buddy."

"Well, it won't be like the U.N. or the embassy joints. Everybody's in emergency sessions. You'll still be lucky if you get thirty minutes."

I hung up and tossed the covers back over the phone. The watchman was bent over the radio again with a beer in his hand, reading a comic book lying open on the floor.

My watch said Velda had left her post fifteen minutes ago. Somehow, someway, she'd find a thread, then a string, then a rope that would draw her right to this block.

I went out, closed the door and looked up the street, then started to walk slowly. On half the four-floor tenements were white square cardboard signs lettered in black notifying the world that the building was unfit for tenancy or scheduled for demolition. The windows were broken and dark, the fronts grime-caked and eroded. One building was occupied despite the sign, either by squatters with kerosene lamps or some undaunted tenant fighting City Hall. In the middle of the block was one brownstone, the basement renovated years ago into a decrepit tailor shop no wider than a big closet. A tilted sign on the door said a

forlorn open, and I would have passed it up entirely if I hadn't seen the dot of light through the crack in the drawn blind.

Sigmund Katz looked like a little gnome perched on his stool, methodically handstitching a child's coat, glasses on the end of his nose, bald head shiny under the single low-watt bulb. His eyes through the thick glasses were blue and watery, his smile weak, but friendly. An old-world accent was thick in his voice when he spoke. "No, this man in the picture I did not see," he told me.

"And you know everyone?"

"I have been here sixty-one years, young man." He paused and looked up from his needlework. "This is the only one you are looking for?" There was an expression of patient waiting on his face.

"There could be others."

"I see. And these are ... not nice people?"

"Very bad people, Mr. Katz."

"They did not look so bad," he said.

"Who?"

"They were young and well dressed, but it is not in the appearance that makes a person good or bad, true?"

I didn't want to push him. "True," I said.

"One used the phone twice. The second time the other one stopped him before he could talk. I may not see too well, but my hearing is most good. There were violent words spoken."

I described Carl and Sammy and he nodded.

"Yes," he said, "those are the two young men."

"When they left here ... did you see where they went?"

The old man smiled, shook his head gently and continued sewing. "No, I'm afraid I didn't. Long ago I learned never to interfere."