[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.""What is it?""There's one of 'em won't come out.""Won't come out?""A Mr.Joe Kavalier.Foreign kid.Can't be more than twenty.""Why won't this fellow come out?" said Al Smith."What's the matter with him?""He says he has too much work to do."Love snorted, then averted his face so as not to offend the policeman or his host with his amusement."Well, of all the— Carry him out, then," Smith said."Whether he likes it or not.""I'd love to, Your Honor.Unfortunately." Harley hesitated, and mauled his jowls a little more with his big hand."Mr.Kavalier has seen fit to handcuff his self to his drawing table.At the ankle, to be exact."This time Mr.Love contrived to cover his laughter with a spasm of coughing."What?" Smith closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them."How the hell did he manage that? Where did he get the handcuffs?"Here Harley flushed deeply, and muttered a barely audible reply."What's that?" Smith said."They're mine, Your Honor," said Harley."And to tell you the truth, I'm not really sure how he got ahold of them."Love's coughing fit had by now become quite genuine.He was a three-pack-a-day man, and his lungs were in terrible shape.To prevent public embarrassment, he generally laughed as little as possible."I see," Smith said."Well, then, Captain, get a couple of your biggest boys and carry out the goddamn table, too.""It's, uh, well, it's built in, Your Honor.Bolted to the wall.""Then unbolt it! Just get the stupid S.O.B.out of there! His damn pencil sharpener is probably booby-trapped!"Harley signaled to a couple of his stoutest men."Wait a minute," Smith said.He checked his watch."God damn it." He pushed his derby toward the back of his head, making himself look at once younger and more truculent."Leave me have a word with this pup.What is his name again?""It's Kavalier with a K, Your Honor, only I don't see the use or the sense in letting you—""In all my eleven years as president of this building, Captain Harley, I have never once sent you or your men in to lay a hand on one of the tenants.This isn't some flophouse on the Bowery." He started toward the door of Empire Comics."I hope we can afford to devote a minute to reason before we give Mr.Kavalier with a K the bum's rush.""Mind if I come with you?" Love said.He had recovered from his spasm of mirth, though his pocket handkerchief now contained the evidence of something evil and brown inside him."I can't let you do that, Jim," Smith said."It would be irresponsible.""You have a wife and children to lose, Al.All I have is my money."Smith looked at his old friend.Before Chapin Brown had rushed in to interrupt them with word of the bomb threat, they had been discussing not the Hudson River Bridge, a scheme that with Love's subsequent, abrupt retirement from public life came, once again, to nothing, but rather the man's strongly held and oft-aired views on the war that Britain was losing in Europe.A loyal Willkie man, James Love was among a small number of powerful industrialists in the country who had been actively in favor of American entry into the war almost from its beginning.Though he was the son and grandson of millionaires, he had been troubled all his life, much like the president of the United States, by wayward liberal impulses that, however fitful—the Love mills were all open shops—made him a natural anti-fascist.Also figuring into his views, undoubtedly, was the memory, handed down from millionaire to millionaire in Love's family, of the colossal and enduring prosperity that war and government contracts had brought to Oneonta Woolens during the Civil War.All of this was known, or more or less understood, by Al Smith, and led him to conclude that the thought of risking death at the hands of American Nazis held a certain appeal to someone who had been trying to get into the war, one way or another, for almost two years now.Then, too, the man had lost his famously beautiful wife to cancer back in '56 or '37; since that time, vague rumors had reached Smith's ear of profligate conduct that might suggest the behavior of a man who had, in that tragedy, also lost his moorings, or at least his fear of death.What Smith did not know was that the one great and true friend of James Love's life, Gerhardt Frege, had been one of the first men to die—of internal injuries—at Dachau, shortly after the camp opened in 1953[4][4] Smith did not suspect, and never would have imagined, that the animus James Love held against Nazis and their American sympathizers was, at bottom, a personal matter.But there was an eagerness in the man's eyes that both worried Smith and touched him."We give it five minutes," Smith said."Then I have Harley drag the bastard out by his suspenders."The waiting room of Empire Comics was a cold expanse of marble and leather moderne, a black tundra frosted over with glass and chrome
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]