A Dance at the Slaughter House (Matthew Scudder #9) 4

"You're the first," he said. "Tom and Andy'll be here by eleven. Matt, have you thought it over?"

"Some."

"Have you had second thoughts, man?"

"Why should I?"

"It's no harm if you do. There'll likely be bloodshed. I told you that last night."

"I remember."

"You'll have to carry a gun. And if you carry one-"

"You have to be willing to use it. I know that."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. "Are ye sure ye have the heart for it, man?"

"We'll find out, won't we?"

He opened the safe and showed me several guns. The one he recommended was a SIG Sauer 9-mm automatic. It weighed a ton and I figured you could stop a runaway train with it. I played with it, working the slide, taking the clip out and putting it back, and I liked the feel of it. It was a nice piece of machinery and it looked intimidating as all hell. But I wound up giving it back and choosing a.38 S&W short-barreled revolver instead. It lacked the SIG Sauer's menacing appearance, to say nothing of its stopping power, but it rode more comfortably tucked under my belt in the small of my back. More to the point, it was a close cousin to the piece I'd carried for years on the job.

Mick took the SIG for himself.

By eleven Tom and Andy had both arrived, and each had come into the office to select a weapon. We kept the office door closed, of course, and we were all pacing around, talking about the good weather, telling each other it would be a piece of cake. Then Andy went out and brought the car around and we filed out of Grogan's and got into it.

The car was a Ford, a big LTD Crown Victoria about five years old. It was long and roomy, with a big trunk and a powerful engine. I thought at first it had been stolen for the occasion, but it turned out to be a car Ballou had bought a while back. Andy Buckley kept it garaged up in the Bronx and drove it on occasions of this sort. The plates were legitimate but if you ran them you wouldn't get anywhere; the name and address on the registration were fictitious.

Andy drove crosstown on Fifty-seventh Street and we took the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Queens. I liked his route better than the one I had taken. Nobody talked much once we were in the car, and after we crossed the bridge the silence was only rarely interrupted. Maybe a locker room's like that in the minutes before a championship game. Or maybe not; in sports they don't shoot the losers.

I don't suppose the trip took us much more than half an hour door to door. There was no traffic to speak of and Andy knew the route cold. So it must have been somewhere around midnight when we reached the arena. He had not been driving fast, and he slowed down now to around twenty miles an hour and we looked at the building and scanned the surrounding area as we coasted on by.

We went up one street and down another, and from time to time we would pass the arena and take a good look at it. The streets were as empty as they'd been the night before, and the lateness of the hour made them seem even more desolate. After we'd cruised around for twenty minutes or more Mick told him to give it a rest.

"Keep driving back and forth and some fucking cop's going to pull us over and ask if we're lost."

"I haven't seen a cop since we crossed the bridge," Andy said.

Mick was up front next to Andy. I was in back with Tom, who hadn't opened his mouth since we left Mick's office.

"We're early," Andy said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Park near the place but not on top of it," Mick told him. "We'll sit and wait. If somebody rousts us we'll go home and get drunk."

We wound up parked half a block from the arena on the opposite side of the street. Andy cut the engine and shut off the lights. I sat there trying to figure out which precinct we were in so I'd know who might come along and roust us. It was either the 108 or the 104, and I couldn't remember where the boundary ran or where we were in relation to it. I don't know how long I sat there, frowning in concentration, trying to picture the map of Queens in my mind, trying to impose a map of the precincts on top of it. Nothing could have mattered less, but my mind groped with the question as if the fate of the world depended on the answer.

I still hadn't settled it when Mick turned to me and pointed at his watch. It was one o'clock. It was time to go in.

I had to walk in there alone. That figured to be the easy part, but it didn't feel so easy when it was time to do it. There was no way to know what kind of reception awaited me. If Bergen Stettner had decided reasonably enough that it was cheaper and safer to kill me than to pay me off, all he had to do was open the door a crack and gun me down before I so much as set eyes on him. You could fire a cannon and no one would hear it, or give a damn if they did.

And I didn't even know that they were there. I was right on time and they figured to have been in place hours ago. They were the hosts, and it made no sense for them to arrive late to their own party. Still, I hadn't seen a car on the street that figured to be theirs, and there'd been no signs of life in the arena visible to us out on the street.

There was probably garage space inside the building. I'd seen what looked like a garage door at the far end. If I'd been in his position, I'd want to have a parking spot indoors. I didn't know what he drove, but if it was anything like the rest of his lifestyle it wasn't something you'd want to leave out on the street.

Busywork for the mind, like trying to figure out the precinct. They were there or they weren't; they'd greet me with a handshake or a bullet. And I knew they were there, anyway, because I could feel eyes watching me as I approached the door. I had the cassette in my coat pocket, figuring they wouldn't shoot until they'd made sure I had the thing with me. And I had the.38 Smith where I'd stashed it earlier, under my coat and suit jacket and wedged beneath the waistband of my pants. It would be handier now in my coat pocket, but I'd want to have it within reach after I took the coat off, and-

They'd been watching me, all right. The door opened before I could knock on it. And there was no gun pointing at me. Just Bergen Stettner, dressed as I'd seen him Thursday night in the suede sport jacket. His pants were khaki this time, and looked like army fatigues, and he had the cuffs tucked into the tops of his boots. It was a curious outfit and the parts shouldn't have gone together, but somehow he made it work.

"Scudder," he said. "You're right on time." He thrust his hand at me and I shook it. His grip was firm, but he didn't make a contest of it, just pumped my hand briskly and let go.

"Now I recognize you," he said. "I remembered you but I had no mental picture of you. Olga says you remind her of me. Not physically, I shouldn't think. Or do we look alike, you and I?" He shrugged. "I can't see it myself. Well, shall we go downstairs? The lady awaits us."

There was something stagy about his performance, as if we were being observed by an unseen audience. Was he taping this? I couldn't imagine why.

I turned and caught hold of the door, drawing it shut. I had a wad of chewing gum in my hand and I shoved this into the door's locking mechanism, so that the spring lock would remain retracted when the door was shut. I didn't know if it would work, but then I didn't think it was necessary; Ballou could kick the door in, or shoot his way through the lock if he had to.

"Leave it," Stettner told me. "It locks automatically." I turned from the door and he was at the head of the stairs, urging me on with a bow that was at once gracious and self-mocking.

"After you," he said.

I preceded him down the stairs and he caught up with me at the bottom. He took my arm and led me all the way down the hallway, past the rooms I'd sneaked a look at, to an open door at the very end. The room within was a sharp contrast to the rest of the building, and had certainly not served as the location for their film epic. It was an oversize chamber, perhaps thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, with a deep pile carpet of gray broadloom underfoot and an off-white fabric covering and softening the concrete block walls.

At the far end of the room I saw a king-size waterbed, with a throw covering it that looked to be zebraskin. A painting hung over the bed, a geometrical abstract, all right angles and straight lines and primary colors.

Closer to the doorway, an overstuffed couch and two matching armchairs were grouped to face a stand which held a large-screen TV and VCR. The couch and one of the chairs were a charcoal gray, several tones darker than the carpet. The other chair was white, and a maroon leather attachй case rested on top of it.

Along the wall was a modular stereo system, and just to its right was a Mosler safe. It stood six feet high and stretched almost that wide. There was another painting on the wall above the stereo, a small oil of a tree, its leaves a rich and intense green. Across the way, a pair of Early American portraits hung in matching carved and gilded frames.

There was a bar set up on a sideboard beneath the portraits, and Olga turned from it with a glass in her hand and asked what I would like to drink.

"Nothing, thanks."

"But you must have a drink," she said. "Bergen, tell Scudder he has to have a drink."

"He doesn't want one," Stettner said.

Olga pouted. She was dressed as promised in the very outfit she'd worn in the movie, long gloves and high heels, crotchless leather pants and rouged nipples. She walked over to us holding her own drink, a clear liquid over ice. Without my asking she announced that it was aquavit, and was I sure I wouldn't have some? I said I was sure.

"This is quite a room," I said.

Stettner beamed. "A surprise, eh? Here in this hideous building, in the most desolate part of a dreary borough, we have a refuge, a hidden outpost of civilization. There's only one way I'd like to improve on it."

"How's that?"

"I'd like to put it a story further down." He smiled at my puzzlement. "I would excavate," he explained. "I would have a subbasement dug, and I'd create a space running the entire length of the building. I'd dig as deep as I wanted, I'd allow for twelve-foot ceilings. Hell, fifteen-foot ceilings! And of course I'd conceal the entrance. People could search this place to their heart's content and never dream a whole luxurious world existed beneath them."

Olga rolled her eyes and he laughed. "She thinks I'm crazy," he said. "Perhaps I am. But I live the way I want, you know? I always have. I always will. Take off your coat. You must be roasting."

I took it off, got the cassette from the pocket. Stettner took my coat and draped it over the back of the couch. He did not mention the cassette, and I didn't say anything about the attachй case. We were both being as civilized as our surroundings.

"You keep looking at that painting," he said. "Do you know the artist?"

It was the little landscape, the painting of the tree. "It looks like Corot," I said.

He raised his eyebrows, impressed. "You have a good eye," he said.

"Is it genuine?"

"The museum thought so. So did the thief who relieved them of it. Given the circumstances of my own purchase of it, I could hardly bring in an expert to authenticate it." He smiled. "In the present circumstances, perhaps I ought to authenticate what I'm buying. If you don't mind?"

"Not at all," I said.