Стивен Хантер - G-Man

Charles sat alone at the table. He was in shirtsleeves, but the hand-tooled, tied-down shoulder holster harnessed his shoulders in leather belting, holding the holster firmly below his left shoulder; a further strap ran from the toe of the holster to his belt, looped it, then returned to snap tight. He smoked Camels as he worked, as he didn’t want any of the boys to see a tremor in his hand as he worked his fixings.

Before him, in fifty-two separate parts, sat his Colt Government Model, 1928 Commercial Variation, 157345C. Each of the fifty-two had been inspected for wear, oiled lightly, and dried off. Now he worked with a fine-grain needle file, doing the little things that could be done to turn the pistol into as smooth an operator as possible. He took just a few grains of steel off the ninety-degree angle at the cusp of the frame, where the cartridge rode from magazine to chamber under the propulsion of the slide’s forward motion. He wanted to break the sharpness of degree a tiny bit so that no burr from a cartridge — they had already been inspected, of course, twenty-one government-issue .45 hardballs from the Springfield Armory, Springfield, Massachusetts, already fit into three likewise inspected magazines — could catch during the firing transaction. It took a while, and a great deal of judgment, because too much made the passage tricky. When he was satisfied, he moved on to work the sharp edge of the sear, where the disconnector pivoted under the trigger pull to remove it from its nook and thereby drop the hammer. Again, the harshness of the angle was just a bit too much and he gently softened it into a blur, which reduced the trigger pull from six pounds to two and a half, though still leaving enough metal to guarantee the hold’s security.

“Charles, what’re you doing?” asked Ed Hollis, who, though a competent armorer, had never seen the inside of the frame before.

“If I have to draw and shoot fast for blood,” Charles said, “I want the one-in-a-million chance the gun will hang up on me reduced to one-in-a-billion.”

“Can you do it to my Super .38?”

“Not today. Sometime in the future.”

“Got it,” said Ed.

After an hour of careful work, everything wiped clean, and wiped clean again, Charles swiftly reassembled 157345C, making sure all pins were centered, all screws were tightened up to the max, and that function was perfect. Then he reached into a paper cup and withdrew a six-inch piece of rawhide from its soak in the water.

Again, carefully and with much dexterity, he looped it around the pistol grip, including the grip safety, a shoulder of metal that emerged from the curve under the sweep of the hammer well and had to be depressed by a proper placement of hand to gun for the weapon to go bang . It was one of three safety systems John M. had designed into the piece. He pulled the loop tight, flattening the grip safety in the off position, tied a knot, then called Ed over.

“Not your finger, but hold this knot tight with a screwdriver or something.”

Ed did as told, and Charles doubled the knot over the first knot, pulling it tight with his long, strong fingers. Then with his pocketknife he trimmed the extra lengths of rawhide down to the knot, which he adjusted till it was under the trigger guard.

“Old Texas Ranger trick. I want the safety grip pinned so that if my draw is a little off and I don’t get square on the gun, it’s still going to fire. I’d hate to have to provide my own bang while Johnny’s filling me full of pills.”

“Nothing to chance.”

“Not where this damned character is concerned. Now, as the rawhide dries, it’ll pull even tighter. Trick is, don’t let it soak too long or it gets brittle. Then what have you got except a vaudeville that can turn ugly in a split second.”

With that, he slipped a magazine in, threw the slide to hoist a cartridge into the chamber, and pushed the safety lock up into position, freezing the gun in pre-volatility. He slipped it into the holster, then slid the two additional magazines into the leather keeper on his belt behind his right hip, praying that if there were a fight, it wouldn’t last long enough to require a reload.

“Sheriff Swagger?” It was Mrs. Donovan at the door.

“Mr. Cowley wants you. Big powwow in Mr. Purvis’s office.”

It was like something out of Arabian Nights , a pleasure palace decreed into existence in 1927 by two genies named Marx, then sold to two other genies named Balaban and Katz in 1930. The Marbro even had what could have been a minaret outside it, piercing the sky. It was a vast, domed structure, covered with fretwork, pale in the vanishing sun, on Madison Street, the 4400 block.

Charles had infiltrated a few minutes early, from a staging point a couple blocks away. Sam, wisely, didn’t want a mob of agents showing up at once so played them in at odd intervals so that at no particular moment it seemed unusually hectic. The traffic was heavy, the octane fumes intense, the theater buzzing with desperate souls ready to spend a few hours in the adorable company of a dancing tot in order to escape their dull lives as well as the crushing heat.

Charles had no such luck. He and his new pal Zarkovich tried to appear indifferent to their situation, which required milling in front of a women’s haberdashery in the steamy heat just across the street from the Marbro while waiting to see Johnny appear. He would be with two gals: Mrs. Sage and another one, Polly something. Mrs. Sage would be dressed in orange. Johnny would be wearing a straw hat, a white shirt, and tan slacks over white suedes. That meant if he had a gun, it would have to be a small one, concealable in a pant pocket. No .45 auto was coming out, and he wouldn’t have six more mags stashed in a jacket pocket. It also meant he wasn’t wearing steel, so a torso shot would bring him down if that’s how it broke.

All along the street, agents and East Chicago detectives — but not Chicago cops, for they had been exiled from the plan, out over worries about leaks and too big an assemblage to maneuver quickly — lay about with similar supposed lack of interest. The plan was fluid, depending on the whimsy of the actuality.

Sam originally wanted two teams of agents to thread down the aisles from each side of Johnny’s seats, squeeze their way in, and go to guns immediately upon closing, presenting him with such an array of muzzles, he would see the idiocy of resisting. But Charles didn’t like it.

“Sir,” he’d said, “all those men, all those guns, all those people, all in the dark with a thirty-foot-high four-year-old dancing on-screen, plus music and picture talk blasting away, it could get away from us real easy, and nobody wants a shoot-out under those circumstances. Lots of people could get hit, our target hard to see and track, chaos everywhere.”

“Duly noted, Charles. But my thought is, take him as early as possible, because the longer he’s free, the bigger the chance of him seeing something and bolting. I’ve been on the phone with the Director all day and, believe me, the pressure’s on this one. We can’t let it fall apart.”

Clegg was big on the inside arrest, which in itself was an argument against it. Purvis was agnostic.

“If you wait till he leaves,” Clegg said, “you’ve got him in a flow of people and you don’t know how they’re going to react and mess things up. If they’re seated and we do it fast, I think it’s actually safer. They won’t even figure out what happens.”

“Moving in from the aisles on him seems tricky,” said Charles. “He’s too salty a boy. He’d see it coming and he might draw. Then you’ve got your shoot-out among three thousand suckers.”

“Probably won’t be a full house,” sniffed Clegg.

“Charles?” asked Sam.