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She waved a hand. “Back there. You’ll have to move that rack.”

We went behind the counter, down between the racks of cleaned clothes, and I saw the lines of the door in the linoleum floor. I shoved the rack out of the way, and the girl said, “Take it easy with the clothes.”

I ignored her. I lifted the door, and it was pitch-black down there. We didn’t have any flashlight, and it wouldn’t have looked good to back out. I just hoped there was a light switch somewhere.

I just barely saw it as I was going down, tucked away behind a beam next to the door opening. I clicked it on, and continued down, and Bill came after me.

There was a wide, balanced firedoor off to the right. It was filthy dirty. Instead of a lock, there was a latch and hasp, held shut by a twisted piece of thick wire broken off a hanger. By the time I got it untwisted, my hands were coated with dirt. My forehead was wet with perspiration, and I could almost feel the dust settling against it and sticking.

I shoved the door aside on its roller and pawed around on the other side till I found the switch. I turned it on and saw a bigger chunk of basement, just as filthy as this. Up ahead, there was humming. Machinery, not voice.

I went back to the foot of the stairs and shouted up. The girl came over and looked down at me. She stood with her legs pressed together and her palms flat against the front of her thighs, so I couldn’t peek up under her skirt. She said, “I got a customer here. What do you want?”

“We’re going on through this way,” I said. “You can close that door now.”

She started to bitch about it. I turned away and went through to the other part of the cellar. Bill was already over there, waiting for me. The girl kept bitching about how it wasn’t her job to close trap doors. I pulled the firedoor shut and then I couldn’t hear her.

Off this room there was a corridor, low-ceilinged, with concrete walls. The walls were dirt-gray except where fresh concrete had dribbled away and showed flaky white. At the end there was another firedoor. This one wasn’t fastened at all. We slid it open and went through to a part that was already lit. The humming was louder ahead of us.

We came to the end of the corridor a little ways after that door, and found a relatively clean part, with an old chunk of linoleum on the floor, and a battered old desk, and a girlie calendar on the wall. There wasn’t anybody there except a cat asleep beside the desk. The cat woke up when we got there, and slunk away to the doorway where the humming came from. It was brightly lit in there. I got a glimpse of metal stairs going down and a lot of dirty black machinery and a guy with a white housepainter’s cap sitting on a kitchen chair.

On the opposite wall, there was the door of the freight elevator. I pushed the button, and you could hear the loud groaning of the machinery in the bottom of the elevator shaft, even farther down than we were. The elevator came. It wasn’t fancy, like the one for the customers. It had wide plank flooring and chest-high sides and only a kind of grillwork on top and a grill gate at the front. We got on and I shut the gate and pressed the button for our floor. The elevator ground up slowly and stopped, and we got off. I pressed the top button and unlocked and closed the door. It went on up.

We came down the hall from the opposite direction that we usually took. There was nobody around. There was a telephone ringing. When we got closer, I could hear it was coming from our room. It rang six times and quit.

I listened at the door of the room. Then I unlocked it and shoved it open fast and ran in crouched, cutting to the right while Bill faded to the left. But I’d heard right, there wasn’t anybody there.

We packed what we needed in one bag and left the other one still open on a chair. Then we rumpled the beds. The place had been searched. Quietly, with things put back more or less in the right spot. Nothing had been taken, not even the two guns.

We went out to the hall, and I was just putting the key in the lock when the phone started again. Bill said to forget it but I told him, “No, we still live here. We don’t want them looking somewhere else.”

I went back in and picked it up on the fifth ring. A guy’s voice said, “Kelly?”

“That’s me,” I said. Behind me, Bill brought the suitcase back in and shut the door.

“Will Kelly? Will Kelly, Junior?”

“No, this is Ray.”

“Let me talk to Will.”

“Who shall I tell him is calling?”

“Never you mind, kid brother. You just put Will on, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Hold on. I’ll get my big brudda for ya.”

“Thanks.” He thought he was the one being sarcastic.

I dropped the phone on the table and said to Bill, “Some guy. He’ll only talk to you. But he says Will instead of Bill.”

“Okay.” He came over and reached for the phone. When his fingers touched it, I saw the stagefright hit him, and I said, “What the hell. All you have to do is listen.”

“Yeah.” He picked it up and held it to his face and said, “Bill Kelly here.” He waited and said, “Why?” Then he waited and said, “What’s your name, friend?” Then he waited some more and said, “The hell with you.” His eyes swiveled to me and he grimaced. Into the receiver he said, “No I’m not hanging up.” He made writing motions with his other hand.

I went over and got the hotel’s pen and a piece of the hotel’s stationery. Behind me, Bill said, “For all I know, this is some sort of gag.”

I came back and put the pen and paper on the table and he said, “What was that name? No, I didn’t hear it.” His eyes found me again and he grinned and asked the phone, “Eddie Kapp? Who the hell is Eddie Kapp?”

I grinned back at him. I lit two cigarettes and held one of them for him. I walked around the room.

“To you maybe it’s comedy,” Bill told the guy, “but to me I’ve got better things to do. You want to give me a number, go ahead.”

I walked back and stood watching.

“I’ve got pencil and paper,” Bill said. He was enjoying himself now, acting like he was bored and irritated, all his stagefright gone. He picked up the pen. “Go ahead,” he said. “Shoot.” He winked at me, and I nodded and laughed.

“Circle,” he said, writing it down, “five, nine, nine, seven, oh. Yeah, I’ve got it.” He read it off again. “Maybe I’ll call it, maybe I won’t” he said. He grinned. “Up y—” Then he looked at me. “He hung up.”

“You, too. Here’s a cigarette.”

He traded the receiver for the cigarette. “He wouldn’t give me his name. He said all he wanted was to give me the phone number. We should stick close to the room until Friday, and then we should call that number. When I asked him why, he said maybe the name Eddie Kapp would tell me.”

“He’s getting out Thursday,” I said.

“I know.”

“Hold on a second.” I dialed the number, and after two rings a recorded female voice told me it wasn’t a working number. I hung up. “Okay, let’s get out of here. That guy’s already calling his buddies in the lobby. The Kellys are home.”

We went out and down the hall to the freight elevator. I’d unlocked the door on the way in. I pushed the button, and when it came down we got aboard and I pushed the lock button on the inside of the door. Then I closed the gate and we went down to the cellar.

The cat was sleeping on top of the desk. She raised her head and looked at us. Way down to our right were some whiskey cases. We went down there, and looked around. In a shallow concrete pit there were four tapped beer kegs, the copper coils running up the side wall. So it was all right, it was the bar and not the liquor store. We went over to the stairs and up them. This was a regular door, not a trap like in the cleaners. I opened it and peeked out. I was looking at the corridor between the bar and the kitchen. It was empty. We went through and made a sharp left into the men’s room. We washed our faces and hands, and then went down the long length of the bar and out the street door. We turned the corner and walked crosstown and downtown to the West 46th Street parking lot where we’d left the car. There was a sullen veteran in khakis and fatigue cap on duty, and he walked back to the car with us and stood looking in through the windshield at the steering wheel as he said, “I’m taking a chance on this, but what the hell. I don’t do their goddamn dirty work or anybody’s.”

He sneaked a quick look at us and glared back at the steering wheel again. “They screwed me out of two hundred fifty bucks. What am I going to do, call the goddamn cops on them? They got the goddamn cops in their pocket.
You
know that.”

I said, “What’s the point?”

His cheek twitched, and he kept staring through the windshield into the car. “I just want you to know, that’s all. How come I’ll do this. I’m paying the bastards back, that’s what, two hundred and fifty bucks worth.” He tugged at his fatigue cap, and turned around quick to look out at the street. Then he turned back. “A guy came around yesterday afternoon,” he told the car, “with a sheet of paper and your license plate on it. He give me, and said I should call in at Alex’s if the car shows up. He described the car, red and cream Merc like this one. Only, I wouldn’t give them the sweat off my stones. And you’ve got an out-of-town plate, I figure you’re tourists or something and they’re trying to give you a bad time. So the hell with them. I didn’t call. And I smeared mud on your plates.”

“You did?” I went over and looked at the back of the car. He’d done a good job, realistic, with mud and dirt on the bumper and over the license plate, so a part of each number was showing. Enough so it didn’t look like a covered plate, but it wasn’t easy to read the numbers.

I went back and said, “Thanks. You did a good job.”

“You better go back upstate,” he said.

I dug out my wallet and found a ten. I slid it down the fender to him. “Here’s an installment on the two-fifty,” I said.

“You didn’t have to, but it’s okay.” He palmed the ten.

“This guy, what’s his name?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard him called Sal. Or Sol, I don’t know which. He comes around sometimes, and sometimes he works here. Every once in a while, he parks some fancy car here. The boss knows him. He’s big, with a great big jaw like Mussolini.”

“And Alex’s?”

“That’s a car rental place, up by the bridge. Up in Washington Heights.” He swiped another quick look at me. “You don’t want to spoil with them, Mister. You better go back upstate.”

“Thanks for the help,” I said.

He shrugged. “You got to wait out by the sidewalk,” he said. “I’ll bring the car to you.”

“Okay.”

We walked back over the gravel to the sidewalk, and he drove the car out and gave it to us without a word. We went around the block and down to 39th Street and through the Lincoln Tunnel. In Jersey City, we parked the car on a street off Hudson Boulevard and took the tube back to Manhattan, switched to the subway and went uptown to the hotel. We unpacked the suitcase and showered and brushed our teeth.

Bill said, “Do you want to follow up this car rental place?”

I shook my head. “That’s a Pacific campaign. Fight your way across every useless little island you can find for five thousand miles, before you get to the big island you wanted all along. I want to stay away from the little islands. That’s why we switched hotels. Thursday we get to the big island.”

“Fine with me,” he said.

Later on, we went to a movie. I couldn’t sit still, so we went down to Brooklyn on the subway and drank a while at a neighborhood bar. He closed at four and we took the subway back. There wasn’t anything to drink in the room. I lay on my back in the dark and stared at the ceiling. “Bill,” I said, “I think I know why they futzed around on all those little islands.”

But he was asleep already.

Monday afternoon I called the other hotel. Beeworthy and Johnson had both called, leaving messages for me to call them back. Since I now knew it was Eddie Kapp I was looking for, at least to begin with, there wasn’t any point in calling either of them.

Bill went out for a deck of cards and was gone an hour. When he came back, he had a haircut and he said he didn’t know I’d be worried. We played cards and I walked around and the room got smaller. We went out after a while and went to see a movie up in the Bronx. Then we went to a bar.

Tuesday, I called Johnson, just to have something to do. He was frantic. He said, “Where the hell are you people? I’ve been going nuts. Did you move out or something?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “We’re still here. We aren’t around the room much.”

“Jesus Christ, I guess not. I’ve been over there half a dozen times. I was ready to think those guys got to you.”

“Not a peep,” I said.

“They haven’t been around at all?”

“Nope.”

“You son of a bitch, you’ve moved someplace else.”

I grinned. It was fine just to be talking to somebody. “We’re still registered at the Amington,” I told him, “and our suitcase is still there. I mean here.”

“All right, you shouldn’t trust me with the address, but you don’t have to lie to me.”

“We’re still at the Amington, Johnson,” I said.

“All right, all right.” He was irritated. “On that other thing,” he said, “do you want to hear what I’ve got to say or not?”

“It’s up to you.”

“Oh, crap. You’re just trying to get under my skin. I’ve got it narrowed down to two people. A cop named Fred Maine. And a guy named Dan Christie, he’s an investigator works for Northeastern Agency. It’s got to be one of those two. I’m pretty sure Maine gets two paychecks every week, one of them from the city. And Christie is a poker buddy of Sal Metusco, he’s a numbers collector midtown on the west side.”

“Keep up the good work,” I told him. I didn’t say anything about the veteran in the parking lot, because Johnson would only have told the next guy who broke his arm.

We talked a little, about nothing at all, and I said I’d call him back. I didn’t say when. Then I looked at Beeworthy’s number, but I resisted the impulse. He’d want to do a lot of interviewing, and I wasn’t in the mood.

Bill wanted to go to another movie that night, but I couldn’t take it. So we sat around the room and drank and after a while I threw a gin hand out the window. A little after midnight, we went down to 42nd Street and saw an important movie that had been made from a Broadway play called
A Sound of Distant Drums.
It was about homosexuality and what a burden it was, but the hero bore the burden girlfully. It didn’t convert me.