Ed McBain (6 page)

There was a lot of uniformed brass around the cars, too, and they all talked it up, figuring who was going to be the first to die, in case Harry was carrying a gun. Harry was born and raised right in this neighborhood, and all the kids knew him from when he used to be king of the hill. And Harry was always heeled, even in those days, either with brass knucks or a switch knife or a razor or a zip gun, and later on he had a .38 he showed the guys. That was just before he lammed out—the time he knocked off that crumb from uptown. I remember once when Harry cut up a guy so bad, the guy couldn't walk. I swear. I mean it. He didn't only use the knife on the guy's face. He used it all over so the guy couldn't walk later, that guy was sorry he tangled with a customer like Harry, all right. They only come like Harry once in a while, and when you got a Harry in your neighborhood, you know it, man. You know it, and you try to live up to the rep, you dig me? You got a guy like Harry around, well hell, man, you can't run the neighborhood like a tea party. You got certain standards and ideals, I guess you would call them. So we was all kind of sorry when Harry had to take off like that, but of course he was getting all kinds of heat by that time, not only from the locals who was after him for that crumb uptown, but also he was getting G-heat because the word was he transported some broads into Connecticut for the purpose of being illegal, leastways that's the way they read it off on him at the lineup, and I know a guy who was at the lineup personally that time, so this is straight from the horse's mouth.

But if those cops were wondering whether or not Harry was heeled, I could have saved them a lot of trouble if they wanted to ask me. I could tell them Harry was not only heeled but that he was probably heeled to his eyeballs, and that if they expected to just walk in and put the muscle on him, they had another guess coming, or maybe two or three. It didn't make one hell of a big difference anyhow, because the cops looked as if they took along their whole damn arsenal just to pry Harry out of that seventh-floor apartment.

The streets were really packed now with people and cops and reporters and the emergency cop truck, and I expected pretty soon we would have President Eisenhower there to dedicate a stone or something. I began to wonder where the hell the boys were because the rooftops were getting lined pretty fast, and if the cops and Harry were going to shoot this thing out, I wanted to watch him pick them off. And unless we got a good spot on the roof, things would be rugged. I was ready to go looking for Aiello when he comes back with Ferdy and Beef.

Ferdy is a guy about my height and build, except he's got straight black hair and brown eyes, and my hair is a little curly and my eyes are not brown really, they're amber—that's what Marie says, and she ought to know, dad. I been going with Marie since we was both thirteen, and that makes it close to three years now, so she knows the color of my eyes, all right.

"This the straight dope?" Ferdy asked. Ferdy used to be on H, but we broke him of it 'cause there's no room in our bunch for a hophead. We broke him by locking him in a cellar for about two weeks. His own mother didn't even know where he was. We used to go down there and give him food every day, but that was all. He could cry his butt off, and we wouldn't so much as give him a stick of M. Nothing till he kicked the heroin monkey. And he kicked it, dad. He kicked it clear out the window. It was painful to watch the poor guy, but it was for his own good, so we let him claw and scream all he wanted to, but he didn't get out of that cellar. Pot is okay, 'cause it don't give you the habit, but anybody wants to hang around me, he don't have no needle marks in his arm. He can bust a joint anytime he likes, but show me a spoon, and show me a guy's bowing to the White God, and I break his butt for him, that's the truth, that shows you the kind of guy I am.

"Harry's up there," I told Ferdy.

"How you like that?" Beef said. Beef must weigh about two thousand pounds in his bare feet. He don't talk English so good because he just come over from the old country, and he ain't yet learned the ropes. But he's a big one, and a good man to have in the bunch, especially when there's times you can't use hardware, like when the bulls is on a purity drive or something. We get those every now and then, but they don't mean nothing, especially if you know how to sit them out, and we got lots of patience on our street.

"What took you guys so long?" I said.

"A only just reached us," Ferdy said.

"A's turnin' into a real slowball," I said. "Look at them goddamn rooftops. How we gonna watch this now?"

The boys looked up and seen the crowd.

"We shove in," Beef said.

"Shove this," I told him. "There's grown-ups up there. You start shoving with all them bulls in the street, and they'll shove you into the Tombs."

"What about Tessie?" Ferdy said.

"What about her?"

"Her pad's right across the way. We stomp in there, dad, and we got ringside seats."

"Her folks," I said sourly.

"They both out earning bread," Ferdy said.

"You sure?"

"Dad, Tessie and me's like
that,
" Ferdy said, crossing two fingers.

So we lit out for Tessie's pad.

She didn't answer the door till we told her who we was.

Even then, she wasn't too keen on the idea. She played cat and mouse with Ferdy, and he's honeying her up, come on doll, open the door, and all that kind of crap until I tell her to open it or I'll bust the goddamn thing right off the hinges. She begins to whimper she ain't dressed then, so I told her to throw something on because if that door ain't open in three flat I'm going to bust it open.

She opened thé door then, and she was wearing a sweater and skirt, and I said, "You're a fast dresser, huh?" and she nodded, and I wanted to paste her in the mouth for lying to me in the first place. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's anybody who lies.

We go over to the windows and throw them open, and Tessie says, "What's all the noise about?" and Ferdy tells her Harry's in the apartment across the way and maybe we'll see some lead soon. Tessie gets the jitters. She's a pretty enough broad, only I don't go for her because Marie and I are that way, but you can bet Marie wouldn't get all excited and shaking because there might be some gunplay. Tessie wants to clear out, but Ferdy throws her down on the couch and she sits there shaking as if she's got pneumonia or something. Beef goes over and locks the door, and then we all pile onto the windowsills.

It's pretty good because we can see the apartment where Harry's holed up, right across the alleyway and only one floor down. And we can also see the street on the other side where the bulls are mulling around. I can make out Donlevy's strut from up there, and I feel like dropping a flowerpot on his head, but I figure I'll bide my time because maybe Harry's got something better for that lousy bull.

It's pretty quiet in the street now. The bulls are just about decided on their strategy, and the crowd is hushed up, waiting for something to happen. We don't see any life coming from the apartment where Harry's cooped, but that don't mean nothing.

"What they doing?" Beef says, and I shrug.

Then, all of a sudden, we hear the loudspeaker down below.

"All right, Manzetti. Are you coming out?"

A big silence fell on the street. It was quiet before, but this is something you can almost reach out and touch.

"Manzetti?" the loudspeaker called. "Can you hear us? We want you to come out. We're giving you thirty seconds to come out."

"They kidding?" I said. "Thirty seconds? Who they think he is? Jesse Owens?"

"He ain't going out anyway, and they know it," Ferdy said.

Then, just as if Harry was trying to prove Ferdy's point, he opens up from the window below us. It looks like he's got a carbine, but it's hard to tell because all we can see is the barrel. We can't see his head or nothing, just the barrel, and just these shots that come spilling like orange paint out of the window.

"He got one!" Beef yells from the other window.

"Where, where?" I yelled back, and I ran over to where Beef was standing, and I shoved him aside and copped a look, and sure as hell one of the bulls is laying in the street, and the other bulls are crowding around him, and running to their cars to get the ambulance because by now they figure they're gonna need it.

"Son of a bitch!" I say. "Can that Harry shoot!"

"All right," the loudspeaker says, "we're coming in, Manzetti."

"Come on, you rotten bastards!" Harry yells back. "I'm waiting."

"Three cops moving down there," Ferdy says.

I look, but I can only see two of them, and they're going in the front door. "Two," I say.

"No, Donlevy's cuttin' through the alley."

I ran over to Ferdy's window, and sure enough Donlevy is playing the gumshoe, sneaking through the alley and pulling down the fire-escape ladder and starting to climb up.

"He's a dead duck," I said.

"Don't be so sure," Aiello answered, and there's this gleam in his eyes as if he's enjoying all this with a secret charge. "They may try to talk Harry away from the fire escape."

"Yeah," I said slow. "That's right, ain't it?"

"I want to get out of here," Tessie said. "He might shoot up here."

"Relax," Ferdy told her, and then to make sure she relaxed, he sat down on the couch and pulled her down in his lap.

"Come on," she said, "everybody's here."

"They only the boys," Ferdy said, and he starts mushing her up. You can hear a pin drop in the street down there. Everybody on the rooftops is quiet, too.

"What do you think..." Beef starts, and I give him a shot in the arm to shut him up. From inside the building across the way, and through Harry's open window, I can hear one of the cops talking. At the same time, while they're pulling Harry over to the door of the apartment, Donlevy's climbing up that fire escape. He's up to the fourth floor now, and going quiet like a cat.

"How about it, Manzetti?" the cop in the hallway yells, and we can hear it plain as day through Harry's open window.

"Come and get me!" Harry yells back.

"Come on out. Throw your gun in the hallway."

"Screw you, cop!"

"How many guns you got, Manzetti?"

"Come in and count them!"

"Two?"

"
Fifty-
two," Harry yells back, and that one really busts me up. I stop laughing long enough to see Donlevy reaching the fifth floor, and making the turn in the ladder, going up to the sixth.

"He's gonna plug Harry in the back," I whisper.

In the hallway, the bull yells, "This is only the beginning, Manzetti. We haven't started playing yet."

"Your friend in the street don't think so," Harry answered. "Ask him if we started or not. Ask him how that slug felt."

Donlevy is almost on the seventh floor now. He steps onto the fire escape as if he's walking on eggs, and I can see the Detective's Special in his fist. I hate that punk with every bone in my body. I almost spit out the window at him, and then he's flattening himself against the side of the building and moving up to Harry's window, a step at a time, while the bull in the hallway is talking, talking, and Harry is answering him. Donlevy gets down on his knees, and he's got that gun in his right hand, and he's ready to step up to the window and start blasting.

That's when I started yelling.

"The window, Harry! The window!"

Donlevy looks up for a second, and I can see the surprised look on his face, but then he begins to back off, but he's too late. The slugs come ripping out of the window, five in a row, as if Harry's got a machine gun in his mitts. Donlevy grabs for his face, and then the gun flies out of his hand, and then he clutches at his stomach, and then he spins around and he's painted with red. He stumbles forward to the fire escape, and then he crumbles over the railing and it looks as if he's going to hang there for a second. The crowds on the rooftops are cheering their heads off by now, and then Donlevy goes all the way over, and Harry is still blasting through that window, pumping slugs into Donlevy's body, and then Donlevy is on his way down, and the cheers get cut off like magic, and there's just this god-awful hush as he begins his drop, and then a lady in the street starts to scream, and everybody's screaming all at once.

"He got him!" I said, and my eyes are bright in my head because I'm happier than hell.

"He got Donlevy!"

"Two down," Beef said.

"They'll get him," Aiello said, and he's got a worried look in his eyes now.

"You sound like you want that," I tell him.

"Who, me?"

"No, the man in the moon. Who you think, who?"

"I don't want them to get Harry."

"Then stop praying."

"I ain't praying, Danny."

"There ain't a bull alive can take Harry," I inform him.

"You can say that again," Ferdy says from the couch. Tessie ain't saying nothing anymore. She figures she might as well play ball or Ferdy will get nasty, and she knows Ferdy's got a switchblade knife in his pocket.

A phone starts ringing somewhere across the alleyway. It's the only sound you can hear on the block, just that phone ringing, and then Harry's head pops up at the window for just a second, and he waves up, not looking at us, not looking at anybody, just looking up sort of, and he yells, "Thanks," and then his head disappears.

"You saved his life, Danny," Ferdy said.

"And he appreciates it, dad," I answered.

"Sure, but what're they gonna throw at him next?" Aiello says, and from the tone of his voice I figure like he wants them to throw a Sherman tank at him.

"Look, meatball," I tell him, "just keep your mouth shut. You talk too much, anyway."

"Well, what the hell. Harry ain't nothing to me," Aiello said.

"Hey," Ferdy said, "you think the bulls are gonna come up here and get us?"

"What the hell for? They don't know who yelled. It could have been anybody on the roof."

"Yeah," Ferdy said, and he kisses Tessie and Tessie gets up and straightens her skirt, and I got to admit Ferdy knows how to pick them, but she still don't compare to Marie. She goes in the other room, and Ferdy winks and follows her, and I figure we lost a good man for the proceedings. Well, what the hell. There's just me and Beef and Aiello in the room now, and we're watching through the window, and it suddenly dawns on me what Aiello said.