Текст книги "Gangway!"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

Соавторы: Donald E. Westlake
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CHAPTER SIX

    Ittzy Herz was happy. He was out on his own and that was a rare treat. His Mama kept saying all the time, "Ittzy, you got to stay home where it's safe, people always want to take advantage of you. You got to stay home in your room where it's safe." Never had a man had such a protective Mama, and never had a man needed one less.

    He didn't mind sitting in the back room while the rubes paid a quarter to look in at him through the peephole. It made him feel important. And it gave him time to read, play solitaire, and think about where he'd go and what he'd do when he was finally free for good. What he minded most was Mama fussing over him all the time. And maybe even worse than that was the times when store business was brisk and peephole business was slack-like it had been tonight. Mama would make him put on an apron and get behind the counter just like everybody else in the family.

    Ittzy didn't like that at all. After all he was in show business.

    So today when her back was turned he'd scooted out of his apron and out of the store. And here he was: free. It was the first time he'd run away in quite a while, and it was just as much fun as always. All the people gawking at him, trying to touch him, fawning over him as if he were royalty.

    He didn't quite know what all the fuss was about. Everybody seemed to think Ittzy led a charmed life. Well, his father before he'd died had been fond of reading from the Book, and it said right in the Book that a man had threescore years and ten. So Ittzy knew he still had plenty of years to live. The Book said so. What was everybody so surprised about? Ittzy was only thirty-four years old-he still had thirty-six to go.

    He stopped into the Golden Rule Saloon for a beer and people crowded one another aside at the bar to get near him. Ittzy saw people he knew and he waved to them the way he'd seen opera stars wave from their open coaches to the applauding crowds they passed.

    Over at a table with a skinny Easterner and a whole lot of food was a nice girl named Evangeline Kemp whom Ittzy knew slightly. He waved to her and she waved back with a pretty smile, and Ittzy felt good. He thought he might write a poem about a pretty girl's smile. It sounded like a good original idea, and he began to work out the wording in his head. He'd written thousands of poems. Someday someone would recognize his genius and publish one of them.

    A big fellow with an enormous moustache came rolling into the saloon and slugged his way to the bar near Ittzy, although Ittzy had the feeling the man hadn't seen or recognized him. The man slammed a hammerlike fist down on the bar and roared, "Anybody around here sell anything that'd approximate a drink?"

    Ittzy sipped his beer and basked in all the admiring attention he was getting. But he glanced from time to time at the guy with the huge moustache, who was just about the only person in the room who didn't seem to have noticed Ittzy's presence. It bothered Ittzy to have somebody who didn't know who he was. Especially since he was sure he'd seen that face before.

    The big fellow's drink was delivered by a sweating barkeep and the guy took a healthy swallow, almost gagging on it. He said hoarsely, "Christ, they seem to be puttin' bigger snakes in these here bottles this season." His eyes were watering and he shoved his face into the crook of his elbow to wipe his eyes on his sleeve. When he dropped his arm his eyes lit on Ittzy for the first time. He froze.

    Ittzy began to smile, enjoying his little triumph, even if it was belated. At least the guy recognized him now.

    The guy with the moustache stared at him without blinking-without even seeming to breathe. Then his face slowly changed. It got dark, suffused with blood. The big jaw under the mustache crept forward to lie in a grim belligerent line. The guy's hand dropped off the bar and he suddenly bent over, lifting one foot.

    Ittzy couldn't figure out what the man was doing. But then he saw he was working the boot off his foot.

    Finally the boot came off and the big fellow turned and hobbled toward Ittzy on one booted foot and one dirty socked foot.

    Ittzy frowned.

    The guy with the moustache came right up to him, elbowing everybody else out of his way, and shouted right in Ittzy's face, "You're the fellow sold me this boot!"

    Ittzy just looked at him. He couldn't figure out what the fellow was getting at.

    The big man waved the boot in Ittzy's face, and the sole flapped open and shut as though it were the boot talking instead of the man. "This is what you sold me!" the big fellow said (or the boot said). "What you aim to do about it?"

    "Me?" Ittzy didn't think of it as his problem; it wasn't his boot, and it wasn't his store. "Nothing," he said, turning back to his beer.

    The big fellow grabbed his elbow. "I say you sold me this boot!" he yelled.

    "Did I?"

    "You're damn right you did! Two hours ago!"

    Ittzy smiled in friendly fashion. "Maybe you better talk to my Mama," he said. "It's her store."

    "I'm talking to you!" the big fellow yelled, flapping the boot some more like a ventriloquist. "You're the one sold me this boot!"

    "I'm just trying to drink my beer here," Ittzy said, still working at being friendly.

    "You got to make good on this!"

    "My Mama doesn't put any guarantee on her goods."

    "Two hours!"

    Ittzy shook his head and went back to his beer. All he wanted was a little peace and quiet in which to enjoy this rare moment of freedom before his Mama came looking for him, as inevitably she would.

    But the big fellow yanked him around yet again by the elbow and this time instead of the boot he had a gun in his hand. He wave the big old mean-looking .45-caliber revolver in Ittzy's face. "Well, gee whiz," Ittzy said, in mild complaint.

    The big fellow was breathing pretty hard, but he did try to keep his voice at a reasonable level. "I want to know what you're going to do about that boot," he said.

    "Well," Ittzy said helplessly, "just nothing, I guess."

    "You're asking for it."

    "I'd admire to finish this beer."

    The big fellow's big thumb curled over the hammer of the .45 and drew it back to full cock. "You're gonna get it!" he yelled, no longer trying to control his voice.

    Ittzy shrugged, and turned away to address himself once more to his beer. Everybody in the saloon was bolt still and silent. He wished the big fellow would go somewhere else. There was nothing Ittzy could do to help him out, which he'd already explained, so why didn't he just take his boot and his gun and hop off to pester somebody else for a while?

    But he didn't. Instead, he yelled at the top of his voice, "All right!" and yanked Ittzy around by his elbow for about the twentieth time. Then he fired that big .45 revolver point blank at Ittzy from two feet away.

    It was a terrible noise, up so close like that. Ittzy blinked, and the gent at the bar next to him said, "Uhh," and folded slowly forward, fading down onto the floor.

    Everybody looked at the gent on the floor. The fellow with the gun in his hand cocked his head to one side, as though listening to something he didn't understand, and said, "George? Not you, George, him. George?"

    There was a lot of ruckus in the bar. Ittzy frowned and picked up his beer to finish it, since he doubted he'd have much more time to sit here in quiet and contentment. That poor sport with the talking boot sure could louse up a man's afternoon off.

    The bar had gotten completely silent just before the shooting, but just after it everybody had started talking at once. Now all of a sudden everything was quiet again. Ittzy turned around to see what had happened, and another actor had entered the scene. It was a very tall skinny cop with bright red hair sticking out from under his bobby helmet; he had bustled into the Golden Rule and stopped just inside to appraise the situation.

    Ittzy was at the bar and the big fellow with the moustache was down on one knee saying, "George? George?" The smoking gun in his right fist was forgotten. Everybody else had crowded back away, leaving a little open space around them.

    The cop pushed his way through to the open circle. He was talking, wanting to know what was going on, who fired that shot, what happened.

    A dozen people started explaining things, all at the same time. And from the edges of the circle, other customers began to drift Ittzy-ward. In a city full of transients possessed by gold fever, a guaranteed good-luck charm could draw a bigger crowd than a shooting.

    They started to touch him. A hand would reach out of the crowd and pluck at his sleeve. Somebody's finger touched his cheek. Someone whispered, "You be my good luck charm too, huh Ittzy? Huh?"

    Ittzy concentrated, as best he could, on his beer.

    Somebody said, "Well at least George ain't dead. I guess he'll pull through. Get him right over to the nearest doctor, will you?" It sounded like the cop talking, but the crowd had jammed in around Ittzy and he couldn't see. Then the cop was saying, presumably to the big fellow, "You, there, you're under arrest for assault and disturbing the peace and attempted murder."

    "ITTZY!"

    Oh, no. He closed his eyes in misery. It was Mama's voice, you couldn't mistake that claxon.

    The two of them approached him at the same time from different directions, the tall red-haired cop and Mama. They reached him simultaneously, and the cop opened his mouth to speak. But Mama quick grabbed Itzzy's ear and pulled him off his stool. "Now," she yelled, "you come right home with me!"

    The cop said, "Hey. Wait a minute. I want to question this here witness."

    Mama turned and leveled her ferocious stare on the cop. "You want to see my boy Ittzy up close, Officer McCorkle, you come around my shop and pay twenty-five cents, the fourth part of a dollar, just like everbody else."

    "Oh, Mama," Ittzy said.

    Mama took a firmer grip on his ear and headed for the door.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    Gabe watched Ittzy's mother lead Ittzy toward the door. "Maybe I ought to go touch him too."

    Vangie said, "Why?"

    "If a fellow wants to be in New York and finds himself stuck in San Francisco, what kind of luck would you call that?"

    "Better than the fellow deserved," she said. "You finished eating?"

    Gabe looked at all his empty plates. Four of them. "I believe I am."

    The red-haired cop, McCorkle, was dragging the kicking and howling moustachioed guy out. Ittzy and his mother were gone. The crowd was separating into smaller excited knots of people, everybody talking at once. Vangie said, "I hope there's enough in that wallet to pay the bill for all this."

    It was something he hadn't thought to investigate. He fumbled the wallet open anxiously.

    It was all right. There were two five-dollar greenjackets in the wallet. He paid the supper tab and still had five dollars and fifty-five cents, of which minus-$4.45 belonged to him.

    This wouldn't do. He was going to have to get himself in motion; he couldn't spend the rest of his life living off this girl's ingenuity. "Let's get out of here."

    "Where to?"

    He was trying to think but it was no good. The heaps of food with which he'd filled himself had replenished most of what he'd lost on the river, but it didn't make him any more alert and wide-eyed. Seasickness took a lot out of you.

    "I need sleep before I can start making plans. Let's check out those hotel rooms of yours."

    "Right," Vangie said. Leaving the table, they threaded a path through the crowd and emerged onto the street.

    It was dark. A cold breeze swept past them, stirring tendrils of fog. Gaslights were encircled by vague misty halos and the people who went by were sinister moving shadows. Gabe shivered. "Which way?"

    "We'll try up here first."

    The climb made New York's Washington Heights seem like a molehill by comparison. What idiot had decided to put a would-be city on the side of a cliff? Out here in the West they just didn't know how to do anything right.

    "Where are you from anyway?"

    "You mean where was I born?" Vangie asked. "On Mission Street in a second-story flat across the street from the church."

    "Mission Street where?"

    She looked at him as they crossed an intersection. "What do you mean where? Right down there." She pointed down the hill behind them.

    "You mean you were born in San Francisco?"

    "Of course."

    He did some rapid arithmetic. Well, it was possible after all. The gold had been discovered in 1848; they must have started building this excuse for a city right after that. That was twenty-six years ago.

    "It isn't there any more," she said.

    He was beginning to puff from the climb. "What isn't?"

    "The place where I was born. It burned down in the fire of fifty-four."

    Which narrowed things down to a six-year span. So she wasn't younger than twenty, and she wasn't older than twenty-six. Gabe began to feel fiendishly clever.

    But she shattered this feeling. "I'm twenty-four, if that's what you're trying to figure out."

    "Did I ask?" he demanded. "Did I?"

    "How old are you?"

    "What difference does that make?"

    "Well, I just asked. You don't have to throw a fit." She stopped so abruptly that he banged into her. He looked up at a bulky five-story building. Vangie said, "Let's try this one."

    Gabe headed for the porticoed door, but Vangie dragged him back by the sleeve. "Not that way. Come on."

    Around the side of the building. Past dark windows and a rubbish pile. Finally she turned and pulled open a door that Gabe wouldn't have seen in the dark alley.

    A dimly lit corridor. Kitchen smells, the sound of rattling utensils in a dishpan. Vangie led him stealthily past the kitchen door and up a rickety flight of backstairs, keeping her weight on the inner edge of the treads and motioning to Gabe to do the same.

    She preceded him up the stairs and stopped at a door on the landing. "I'll check first," she whispered. "They may have rented it to somebody else."

    He waited, holding the stairway door ajar and watching her tiptoe down the carpeted hall to a door. She slipped the key into the lock. He heard the faint click of the latch and then Vangie disappeared inside.

    Almost instantly she flew out into the corridor, followed by an irate shriek. She rushed back down the corridor and fled past him. Gabe pulled the stairway door shut.

    He didn't catch up until they had reached the alley. Vangie gave him an embittered look. "You wouldn't believe what that woman was wearing to bed. All right, the next one's just a block over. Come on."

    Gabe stood at the head of the backstairs, very winded and very tired. He hoped desperately that this one would be all right because it was at the top of a six-story hotel and he just didn't have the strength to go on climbing hills and stairs for the rest of the night.

    But there was a scream and his face fell.

    Then he recognized the voice. It was Vangie screaming this time.

    Gabe rushed across the corridor and collided with Vangie as she came pell-mell out of the room, skirts flying and followed by a long-armed miner in long Johns.

    The miner was leering at the fleeing girl and didn't seem to see Gabe. There was only a split second while the miner roared past him, but Gabe used it to whip the knuckle duster out of his pocket and apply it to the rear of the miner's head.

    He fell down and began to curl up like a strip of frying bacon.

    Gabe took Vangie's arm and hustled her down the stairs. On the street she stopped to get her breath; she tipped her head back to look at him. "My goodness. You're faster than the telegraph."

    "Well, you know back East in New York, where…"

    "Where men are men. Yes, I know."

    "Yeah. Well. Your luck seems to be about as good as mine. Maybe we ought to go pay the twenty-five cents to see Ittzy."

    "Well there's still one hotel left. This way."

    He followed her to the curb and they set foot in the street, about to cross it. But a sudden clamor of bells clanged nearby.

    The street instantly cleared of people. Vangie dashed for the nearest doorway while Gabe, still in the middle of the street, looked around, baffled. The bells were getting louder.

    "Gabe!" Vangie yelled, from the protection of the doorway. "Run for it!"

    He was about to, even though he still didn't know why, when another voice from another direction called in accents of surprise and joy, "Why, Gabe! How are you? It's been years!"

    Vangie shouted, "Gabe… come on!"

    He looked back and forth in confusion. The bells jangled and clanged. Vangie stood in her doorway with one hand extended, beseeching him. From the other way-across the street-a willowy young man, rather overdressed, came strolling forward out of the fog with smile and hand both outstretched.

    "Well, I'll be damned," Gabe said. "Francis Calhoun."

    Francis Calhoun approached, smiling, saying something else that was lost in the racket of the bells. From the other side, Vangie came rushing back out to yank Gabe to safety. And all at once something came around the corner, big, loud and fast. It tore hell for leather in their direction.

    A fire engine. The biggest, fastest, reddest horse-drawn fire engine in the entire world-bell clanging, white horses raging, wheels clattering, the whole mess hurtling their way like a falling roof. Gabe stood there in the middle of the street, Francis Calhoun on one side of him and Vangie on the other, and like an avalanche at Grand Canyon the fire engine roared on by.

    The wind of its passage all but knocked Gabe to the ground. He yelled something, but even he himself couldn't hear what it was. Then the thing was past and careening on down the hill, gathering its noise around itself like coattails.

    Gabe blinked. He looked around in the dust cloud the thing had left in its wake, and damn if Vangie wasn't still there. Damn if Francis Calhoun wasn't still there. Gabe looked down at himself; damn if he wasn't still there.

    "Oh, my goodness," Vangie said faintly.

    Francis, dusty but unruffled, continued to wear his welcoming smile as he said, "How are you, old cock?"

    Gabe looked down the street. A few blocks below, the fire engine roared around a corner, swaying far over, not quite capsizing, righting itself, and swooping on out of sight and gradually out of hearing. Past that corner, straight on down all the way to the waterfront, the street was as empty as Tenth Avenue after a shot has been fired. "Now, what " he said, then swallowed and tried again. "Just what in hell was that?"

    "Fire engine," Francis said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. "That garish color," he said.

    Gabe turned to Vangie for a fuller explanation. "What was it?"

    A pale Vangie clutched her throat. "The closest I've ever been to being posthumous," she said.

    Gabe said, "We've got fire engines back in New York, too, but not like that."

    Vangie said, "Gabe, this city's burned down twice so far. You can say what you want about San Francisco, but the people here aren't stupid. We do get the point after a while, so now we've got ourselves the finest, fastest, most modern fire engines in any city in the whole world."

    "Clang, clang," Francis said disapprovingly. "You wouldn't believe how they carry on."

    Vangie peered curiously past Gabe at Francis. "I don't think I…"

    "Nor have I," Francis said. "Do introduce us, Gabe."

    "Yeah," Gabe said reluctantly. "Uh, Vangie Kemp, this here is Francis Calhoun. I, uh, used to know him back in New York."

    "One of my dearest friends," Francis said. "Was that Angie or Vangie, dear?"

    "E-van-ge-line," Vangie said, smiling with her teeth.

    Gabe looked all around, making a point of not meeting Francis' eye. "Well," he said, "it looks safe now. I guess we can all move on, huh?"

    Francis was saying, "Dear Gabe and I grew up together. Didn't we, Gabe?"

    "Yeah, that's right," Gabe said. He was ready to depart from there, call the conversation quits, and have nothing more to do with Francis Calhoun forever. It was true they'd grown up in the same neighborhood, but they hadn't exactly been together. Having little interest in beating up the weak and defenseless just for the fun of it-as opposed to doing so for profit-Gabe had been one of the very few children in the neighborhood who hadn't gone out of his way to make Francis Calhoun's youth memorable. If Francis now looked back on that inactivity and remembered it as a deep and abiding friendship that was his own business, but Gabe wanted no part of it.

    But Vangie was saying, through that rather odd, toothy set smile, "Well, any friend of Gabe's is a friend of mine."

    "My feeling exactly," Francis said. His own smile didn't seem to have any teeth in it at all; his lips curved limply, like a couple of anchovies on a plate.

    "I guess that must be an Eastern suit," Vangie said, aiming her smile at his loud clawhammer coat.

    "I'm glad you like it," Francis said, preening a bit. His clothes were flamboyantly cheap and somewhat the worse for wear. The worn coat was shiny here and there, but the colors were nearly blinding at this close range. Over it he wore a short cape with a bright pink lining. His dark hair was all wet down, and he gave the general appearance of a lunatic undertaker or an apprentice carnival barker. Drawing a lace-fringed handkerchief now from the cuff of his coat and dusting himself off, he said, "One does pick up so much dirt in the street, doesn't one? Did you say you were a local girl?"

    She smiled sweetly. "I didn't say. Do you spell Francis with an i or an e?"

    "Well, that does depend."

    For a reason he didn't entirely understand, these two were making Gabe very nervous. Before either of them could say anything more, he stepped between them, took Vangie's arm, and said, "Nice seeing you again, Francis. We'll have to have a drink sometime and talk over the old days."

    "An excellent suggestion," Francis said, taking Gabe's other arm. "And no time like the present. Shall we go somewhere for an aperitif?"