Landis raised his eyebrows.
“You want it?” said Port.
Landis went to the desk, sat down, took a pencil and moved a long pad into position. Port walked back and forth in the room and while he talked Landis wrote it all down.
When Landis got up he drank what was left of his coffee, never noticing that it was cold. Then he said, “You realize this implicates your organization as much as the Bellamy group.”
“I'm through here.”
“Yes. I see that. May I ask how you expect to survive this kind of exposure?”
“What I gave you is local. Nothing else.”
“Yes. I see that.”
Port went to the door.
“If you want to start,” he said, “two of them are in the jug right now. Eighteenth precinct?'
“Really?”
“Bellamy and Paternik. The charge on them won't hold unless you get down there before morning.”
“What!” His robe flapped when he rushed to the phone.
Port said, “Thanks for the ticket,” but Landis didn't hear him.
Port had let the taxi go. He walked down the street carrying one suitcase, and Ramon had the other one. With the dawn almost there, a clammy coldness had come into the streets. It made the pavement look harder and the light from the posts seemed more distant. They listened to their footsteps and the air felt empty.
Port stopped at a corner. He put down the suitcase and waited till Ramon had done the same.
“Where is Shelly, Ramon?”
The question didn't sound the same to Ramon as it had before. It did not stiffen his back and make the blood pound in his head.
“I sent her away.”
If Port would hit him now, in order to force him, it would mean little to Ramon, and the little it meant would not have to do with Port, but with Shelly.
“How could you do it, Ramon?”
How? He thought of several answers, all true, then told one.
“I told her you had been killed in a fight, trying to leave.”
Port sucked the cold air into his lungs, then let it come out. “Why did she leave?”
“Why stay?”
Now he would ask the next one, the one about Ramon. He would want to know why Ramon had done it. Then maybe Port would swing at him or do something like that. Ramon touched the side of his face and felt the pain. He had no more fever, just pain.
“Where is she, Ramon?”
“You are going there?”
“After you tell me.”
Ramon nodded. Then he said, “Will you tell her I want to—I send my regards?”
“Yes.”
Ramon turned so the street light fell on his hands, and with a small pencil he wrote an address on a matchbook cover. “She went to the West Coast. Near the Border.” He gave Port the matchbook.
Port put it into his pocket. When he looked up again he saw Ramon walking down the dark street.
THE END
of a novel by PETER RABE
Table of Contents
Beginning
Peter Rabe
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two