The Box (11 page)

“I don’t think you finished,” said Remal. “You didn’t say ‘or else’. Your kind always says ‘or else’.”

The bastard, thought Quinn. The ugly bastard—

“ ‘Or else’ what, Mister Quinn?”

Quinn sat down on a chair, put his arms on the table and looked at his hands. He didn’t give the right answer. He’s still on my back, no matter if I put him there or if he jumped on by himself, and now—He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. He felt the dislike creep in again, like cold fog. The straight talk is over. I didn’t know I could talk that straight, but it’s over now and back to the conniving.

He looked up at Remal, and this was the first time that the mayor really saw the other man. He had missed everything that had gone before. He might have been looking at Quinn some time back, somewhere in New York, and there would have been no difference. I’ll kill him, of course—

“Mayor,” said Quinn. “For my information: let’s say a man, some man who lives in the quarter, comes up to you and says, ‘Sir, give me ten dollars or I go to the authorities and tell them everything I know about your shipping business.’”

“Who knows about it?”

“Don’t be naive. Everybody does.”

Remal let that go by. He conceded the point by closing his eyes. When they came open they were on Quinn again, taking him in with great care and interest.

“What would you do if some man came up to you like that?”

“Kill him,” said Remal.

Quinn smiled. He was starting to like the game.

“Now let’s say I come up, just like that rat from the quarter.” Quinn stopped smiling and leaned over the table a little. “You think you can do the same thing to me
and
get away with it?”

Remal thought for a moment because he had never considered that there might be a difference.

“I’m under official protection,” said Quinn, “of official interest. I’m a citizen of another country. I’m an active case with my consulate, and then suddenly I
disappear
.”

There was a silence while Remal folded his arms, looked up at the ceiling. When he looked back at Quinn, nothing had changed. Neither Quinn nor Remal.

“Yes,” said Remal. “You will just suddenly disappear.” He shrugged and said, “It has happened before. Even in your country it happens, am I right? And you have so many more laws.”

Now the bastard is laughing at me and he’s right and I’m wrong.

“Was that the blackmail, Mister Quinn?”

“No. And all I wanted from you…”

“Come to the point.”

There was a magazine on the table and Quinn flipped the pages once so that they made a quick, nervous rat-tat-tat. Then he looked up. “I’ve got some of your merchandise.”

“Also a thief, I see.”

“And this merchandise talks. She was going out on a boat tonight, white slave shipment to some place, which would interest anyone from your local constable to the High Commissioner of the Interpol system.”

This time Remal sat down, but he was smiling. “All this, Mister Quinn, so I don’t put you on a curfew?”

“That’s how it started,” said Quinn, which he knew didn’t answer the question. That’s how it started, he thought, but I don’t know any more. I might like to go further.

Remal threw his head back and laughed loud and hard. When he was done he did not care how Quinn was looking at him.

“You found her where, Mr. Quinn, on my boat?”

“In the quarter.”

“Ah. And she was being used, no doubt, somewhere in an alley.”

“The point is I have her.”

“Was she thin and young, Mister Quinn?” And when Quinn didn’t answer, Remal said as if to himself, “They usually are, the ones Hradin brings in.”

“Maybe you didn’t get my point, Mayor.”

“Oh that,” and Remal sighed. Then he said, “More important, you’re not getting mine. I know the trader who brought her, I know from which tribe she comes, and I know something else which seems to have escaped you. She, her type, has been owned since childhood. One owner, two, more, I don’t know. Uh, Mister Quinn, have you talked to her?”

“I don’t speak Arabic.”

“Neither does she. But have you talked to her?”

“Get to it, Mayor.”

“I will. The ones Hradin brings in, the women of her type—” Remal, in a maddening way, interrupted to laugh. He got up and kept laughing. “Mister Quinn,” said Remal from the door, “when or if you see that little whore again, ask her to open her mouth. She has no tongue, perhaps not since she was five.”

Remal slammed the door behind him, but even after that he kept laughing.

Chapter 11

First Quinn sat, and it was as if he were blind with confusion. But this did not last. He sat and was blind to everything except his hate for the laugh, and for his own stupidity. Because, for a fact, Quinn was not new to this. Neither to the contest with the man, Remal in this case, nor to the simple, sharp rules of the game: that you don’t go off half-cocked, that you don’t threaten unless you can hit.

Quinn got up, left the house fast. His teeth touched on edge, as if there were sand there and he needed to bite through the grains. The garden gate was locked. He went back to the house, stumbled once on a stone in the garden.

“Quinn?” he heard in the hall.

One light was on over the stairs and Beatrice stood on the first landing, no longer looking half asleep. She came down, saying his name again.

“Open the gate for me,” he said. “It’s locked.”

She stepped up to him and put her hand on his arm. “Perhaps—” She didn’t seem to know how to go on.

“You got the key or not?”

“He’s gone,” she said. “He went out the back gate. If you like, you can stay here.”

He looked at her and felt surprised that she could seem so hesitant.

“What did you do?” she said. “He came back cold as ice.”

“I asked him to get off my back and he laughed.”

“Quinn, stay—”

“I’m getting out. I’ve got to.”

She misunderstood. “Can you leave town? If you let me help you…”

He stepped hack, not to feel her hand on his arm. He felt sorry he had met her like this and had a small, rapid wish—it only leaped by, nothing more—that she might be elsewhere, and himself, too. But then he sucked in his breath to interrupt, because unless he knew why he had this wish about her, he would not permit it.

He thought he knew, of course, why he felt anger with Remal, so he stuck to that.

“I’m going out there and don’t worry. Open the gate.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked and ran after him into the garden.

“Have you got the key?”

She went back into the house and brought the key. She said nothing else, brought nothing else, just unlocked the gate and let him go out. She wished she knew what to say, what she wanted. Then she locked the gate.

It was no darker now than it had been before, but as Quinn walked hack to Whitfield’s he thought it was darker, and colder. I have to see Turk and set something up, he kept thinking. Whitfield? No help there. But I’ll need help. Either because of what the mayor does next or what I want to do next. What? I’ll see. First, check out that girl, check out Turk, even Whitfield—he knows the mayor, he can help make this clear if I’m imagining that something’s going to break—

He walked fast, which preoccupied him, and got to the yard out of breath. He stood for a moment there in the dark and called Turk. There was no answer. There was only the pump sound of his blood and the hard sound of his breathing. You listen to that long enough, he thought, and you get scared.

“Turk?”

Nothing. He’s with the whore, of course.

Quinn ran up the stairs and the first door was open. The light was on inside and the room was empty. No girl, no Turk. In the next room, Whitfield was asleep.

Quinn did not know what to think and did not care to think. He ran to the bed and started to shake Whitfield awake.

“Listen, listen to me,” he kept saying, until Whitfield opened his eyes.

There was an empty gin bottle on the floor and Quinn kicked it out of the way.

“How was she, huh?” said Whitfield. “Okay?” He sounded thick.

“Shut up and listen to me.”

“Once a week. Back next week. Okay? Nice girl—” Quinn tried a while longer but was too anxious to give Whitfield a chance to come out of his drunk. Quinn was so anxious he could feel himself shake inside.

Everybody gone, he thought. I’m imagining something, but not this. Everybody gone and me alone here. End up dead in an alley this way. That’s no imagination. Like the first time wasn’t imagination. End up dead in a coffin, next end up dead in an alley. That’s twice. That doesn’t happen to me, twice—And he let go of Whitfield as if he were a bundle of laundry. But Quinn didn’t race out. He felt alone but now this did not give him fright but strength. He picked up the gin bottle and left Whitfield’s apartment. In the yard he cracked the bottle against a stone wall and held onto the neck. He looked at the vicious jags on the broken end and heard his own breathing again.

“Turk?” he called once more.

Only his breathing. It didn’t frighten him this time, only made him feel haste. He left fast, to go to the only other place which he knew, which was Beatrice’s house. He didn’t get there.

On the way he saw shadows, imagined shapes, and fright played him like a cracked instrument. He bit down on his teeth, held his bottle, and with a fast chatter of crazy thoughts going in and out of his head, he had to stop finally or come apart.

It was very quiet, and except for a cat running by some little way off he seemed to be alone. His jitters embarrassed him now, but not much. Stands to reason, he thought. Stands to reason getting worked up like this, but no more now. Ninety-five per cent imagination. Try sticking with the other five for a while. He wished he had a cigarette, and the wish was ordinary enough to take the wild shimmer off his imaginings. In a while, standing by the wall of a house, he felt better. He moved on.

As he turned the next corner, he stumbled over a man lying on the ground.

Quinn saw everything very fast. The man was dead and bloody, throat all gone, and something went padding away, fast, in the dark. The sound wasn’t a dog or a cat. It was a person running.

But no panic this time. The act was so clearly wrong it pulled Quinn together. He ran after the sound of the feet.

At the next corner Quinn slowed. He did not think he was making a sound and then he saw the man waiting by a wall.

Knife, thought Quinn. He could see it. That would be twice, wouldn’t it? But not for me, Jack the Ripper, not for me—In great haste Quinn thought, why run after him anyway, why think he means me with that knife, why think that the dead man in the street has anything to do with me—

Suddenly the man with the knife stepped away from the wall and slowly moved towards Quinn. He said something in Arabic and stopped. He spoke again and came closer.

“And the hell with you, too,” said Quinn and didn’t wait any longer.

He thought the man was startled, that he moved back, but then the man with the knife never had a chance to start running. Even before he got his weapon up Quinn was on him like an animal and with a sharp hack tore the bottle across the dark face.

The man jerked like something pulled tight with wires, spun and screamed. He screamed so that Quinn swung out to cut him again. He felt so wild he heard nothing until the last moment.

He heard fast footsteps, then the voice. “No, Quinn. No!”

It was not the man with the ruined face. Quinn spun around and saw Turk. Confusion and Turk. Bloody face falling down on the stones, knife clatters, and Turk now.

“Come on. Run,” Turk hissed. “
Run
. Now the others will come—”

“Who?…”

“Not now!”

Quinn hadn’t meant who are the others, he had meant who was the man whose face he had cut and who was the man who was dead just yards away and who in this night town knew anything to explain anything—

And there wasn’t any more question about anything when two more Arabs came running. At first Quinn could only tell they were there by the white rag wrapped around the bead of one of them and the long white shirt fluttering around the other. And he felt how Turk tensed. They ran.

The other two got distracted by the man in the street whose face had been slashed, and when Turk stopped sharply and turned to run up the stone steps between two houses, Quinn looked back quickly and could tell what the two others were doing. They stooped over the man on the ground, a motion of white cloth and then they leaped up.

Quinn followed Turk up the steps and saw they were in a dead end. There was a blank wall and a door which was recessed deeply.

“In here,” said Turk. “It’s all right. You’ll see.”

They squeezed into the doorway and watched the other two come up the stairs.

“You got a gun?” asked Quinn.

“Too noisy. Besides, they can only come up one behind the other.”

They did. They seemed to know where Quinn and Turk must be hiding. They were going more slowly now.

“You know how to throw a knife?” said Quinn.

“I would lose it.”

“When I throw the bottle we jump them,” said Quinn.

Turk only nodded. When Quinn stepped out, to block the steps, the two men below looked up and stopped. It was slow and weird now, because Turk talked to them and they talked back.

“What goes on?”

“I am bargaining.”

“And?”

“The one in front says he’ll let us run again and the other one says he doesn’t care. They are both lying.”

Quinn suddenly threw the bottle. He threw the bottle because a new figure had showed at the bottom of the stairs and startled him. The bottle hit the first Arab’s arm and the man gave a gasp. He staggered enough to get entangled with his friend. Turk rushed past Quinn now, knife field low.

When Quinn got halfway down the steps the two Arabs were scrambling, or falling—it was hard to tell which—back down to the bottom. One lost his knife, the other was holding his arm. Turk was over them and the third man stood there, too. They were talking again when Quinn got there. Then the man with the rag around his head made a hissing sound and Turk pulled his knife out of him.