There were plenty of cabs waiting at the airport. I sat back and relaxed, watching the sun glint off the distant column of the Washington Monument as we crossed the Potomac. Up Constitution Avenue, then across to Virginia Avenue, and—stop. I won’t go into details. But at five minutes after nine I was ushered into the familiar office. I was rumpled and sweaty and bloodshot, but the job was done.
“Hello, Nick,” the boss said.
I grinned at him. “Say it again, will you? It’s music to my ears—my real name.”
“You don’t hear it often, do you?” he chuckled.
“That’s for sure,” I said.
I lowered myself into the big plush armchair facing the desk, and helped myself to his cigarettes while he took a phone call. I marveled at the way he could look so fresh and crisp after having been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.
He hung up the phone and gave me the million-dollar grin, and began to fill me in on the details that had developed while I was leaving Philadelphia.
Litwhiler and six of his goons had been killed in the gunfight at the Casablanca, it developed. Five of Klaus’ men had been killed too. Klaus himself had not taken part in the battle, but he had been there to gloat, and the police had nailed him. He was behind bars right now, along with the survivors of his gang and Litwhiler’s, all awaiting arraignment on counterfeiting charges.
And Elena Szekely and her father were in custody, too, along with the evidence I had secured. The printing plant had been raided, and everything confiscated. Old Szekely would be needed to testify as a material witness against Klaus, but after the trial he would be a free man at last, and the government would make sure that nobody like Klaus ever showed up to threaten him again.
As for the real Vic Lowney, he was on his way back to California—but not as a free man. The Internal Revenue people had done some checking on him in his absence, and they had some matters they wanted to discuss with him.
So everything was wrapped up snug as a bug in a rug. Klaus canned, Litwhiler and Chavez and Minton defunct, the Szekelys free. My week in Philadelphia had been a bloody one, but fruitful.
And now?
A nice long rest-and-recuperation period. At least, that’s what I thought until I brought the matter up.
The man on the other side of the desk gave me a warm, sympathetic smile. I knew that meant trouble.
He said, “Nick, I know exactly how you feel. And nobody could deny you’ve earned a vacation. But it happens that we’re a little shorthanded right now, and I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind postponing your vacation by, oh, ten days, to tidy up a little job for us in the middle west? I won’t insist, of course, but—”
What could I say?
So here I am. I’ve had two days to catch my breath and start fitting into my new role. The plane leaves at noon, with me aboard. And when the job is done, I get my vacation. If I’m still around to take it.
Oh, it isn’t an easy life. But I don’t mind. The job gets wrapped up and they hand you a new one, and you wonder what the next one’s going to be like, and whether maybe it’ll be the last. And you keep thinking, maybe this is the time to call it quits, get a transfer into some safer division, let somebody else do the dirty work now.
But deep down you know you won’t ask for that transfer. You’re going to keep walking the tightrope as long as you can. It’s a cold job, a lonely job, and there are times when you hate it like poison. But it’s the job they gave you. It’s your job. And you know you’re going to stick with it until they carry you out on a slab.
Afterword
The year was 1959. Dwight Eisenhower was in the final years of his presidency, the United States was making its early wobbly attempts to match Soviet achievements in launching space satellites, and the science fiction business had just tanked. I was 23 years old, three years out of college, and had been earning my living since graduation by traversing time and space for the readers of Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy, Infinity, and a host of other magazines of that ilk—most of which had just gone out of business as a result of the distribution troubles that were plaguing many of the smaller magazine publishers that year. With science fiction seemingly on the verge of extinction, I needed some new markets for my work, fast, and very quickly I found them.
For the burgeoning flock of men’s magazines I wrote allegedly non-fiction articles with titles like “The Secret Sex Rites of Uganda” and “Island of Love-Starved Women.” For paperback houses like Midwood Books and Nightstand Books I wrote mildly erotic novels about suburban adulterers. And for a couple of crime fiction magazines called Trapped and Guilty, whose editor was also the editor of Super-Science Fiction, one of my regular science fiction outlets, I turned out a host of nasty little thrillers about hit men, juvenile delinquents, serial killers, and other unsavory sorts very different from the space explorers and time travelers I was accustomed to writing about.
Then I got a call from the editor of the s-f magazine Fantastic Universe, to which I had sold a number of stories in the past three years. His publisher was starting a companion magazine, he said, a crime fiction magazine, which, in the old-line pulp tradition, was going to feature in each issue the exploits of an undercover agent named Nick who traveled around the country masquerading as a criminal in order to snare evildoers. Did I want to write the first “Nick” story for the initial issue? I certainly did! So in September, 1959, I did a 6,000-word story called “Bridegrooms Scare Easy” for the new magazine. They liked it. They liked it very much, in fact, and immediately asked me to do a novel-length “Nick” story for them. I wrote it the very next month.
Unfortunately, the ongoing distribution crisis did in both Fantastic Universe and its new companion magazine a couple of months later. I did get paid for my novel, but it never was published. I put the manuscript away, forgot about it, and went back to my suburban adulterers and my virile tales of exotic adventure (“Opium Den in Vietnam,” etc., etc.). Super-Science, which had been one of my science fiction standbys, paying quickly and generously, was another victim of the 1959 publishing collapse. But its two companions, Trapped and Guilty, were still staggering on, and each month I would bring to the mid-town Manhattan office of their editor, W. W. Scott, one or two crime stories, which he bought for a cent and a half a word—nice money at the time—and published under such bylines as “Dan Malcolm,” “Ray McKensie,” and “Ed Chase.” He never rejected a one.
A word about W. W. Scott seems appropriate here. He was a veteran pulp editor who looked to be seventy or eighty years old, though probably he was 55 or thereabouts. His voice was a high-pitched cackle; he had a full set of top and bottom dentures, which he didn’t always bother to wear; and I never saw him without his green eyeshade, which evidently he regarded as an essential part of the editorial costume. I was a good deal less than half his age, but we became friends, of a sort. He was always glad to see me and told me many a lively tale of earlier days in publishing.
One day in 1962—Trapped and Guilty were tottering on the brink of extinction, now—Scottie told me that he wanted to try a desperate last-gasp experiment. Instead of running ten or twelve short stories in an issue, he would use one long novel, with a couple of shorts as fillers, and redesign the cover to make it look like a paperback book rather than a magazine. Could I write a 45,000-word crime novel for him, more or less overnight? Well, yes, I could, because I suddenly remembered my unpublished undercover-agent novel of a couple of years earlier, sitting there in my file cabinet. I dug it out, brought it to him the following week, collected another $800—with a purchasing power of at least ten times as much in modern money—and it was published in the November, 1962 Trapped under Scottie’s gaudy title of “Too Much Blood on the Mink” and the “Ray McKensie” byline. That was, so far as I am able to discover, the last issue of Trapped, though I would not blame its demise on my novel. And I proceeded to forget the novel’s existence for the next 49 years, until the resourceful Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime foun
d a copy of that old Trapped somewhere and suggested a reissue.
I got out my file copy of it, read it with great pleasure—after half a century I didn’t remember a single thing about the story, so I came to it as though I were a new reader—and here it is once more, in book form for the first time, with a slightly altered title. By way of filling the book out I’ve included two short stories typical of the ones I was doing for Trapped and Guilty back then, each of them bearing some slight thematic resemblance to the novel. “Dangerous Doll,” a Ray McKensie opus from the March, 1960 Guilty, runs a different riff on the counterfeiter plot, and “One Night of Violence,” published as by Dan Malcolm in the March, 1959 Guilty, is a precursor of the gang-shootout scenes in Blood on the Mink.
Long, long ago. But when I read them again last month, half a century after the fact, I offered my younger self of that distant era a round of applause. He was still wet behind the ears, then, or so it seems to me from the vantage point of the senior citizen that he has become, but even back then, I think, he told a pretty good story. I hope modern readers will agree.
—Robert Silverberg
March, 2011
DANGEROUS DOLL
Eddie drove into Los Angeles around ten in the morning on a Tuesday. It was four days since he had left Chicago. He hadn’t rushed the trip any—no more than eight or nine hours’ driving a day. It was important to make a safe trip. There would be all kinds of hell to pay if he got into a crackup and the police found plates for ten-dollar bills in his car.
They were good plates. Real good. Almost as good as the real thing, the Chicago people had told Eddie. Eddie was just the courier. He carried the plates around the country for the Syndicate. The engraver, Klein, worked in Chicago. Eddie had only met him once. He was a tiny hunchbacked man with thick glasses and spidery fingers, and he was a wizard with an engraver’s tools.
During the war, they said, Klein had been one of Hitler’s engravers, preparing plates for counterfeit Allied money to mix up the war effort. After the war, Klein just took his skills and his tools to America.
Klein engraved the plates. Eddie delivered them. There was a press in Los Angeles, and one in Seattle, and one in Chicago, and one in Atlanta, and one in New York. The Syndicate covered the whole country. They turned out ones and fives and tens.
The ones were the easiest to pass, but you had to pass a hell of a lot of them before it was worth the risk. Tens were harder, but the return was better. It cost about a nickel to print a fake ten-spot, all expenses included, and that left $9.95 profit every time you passed one.
Eddie didn’t worry about the economics of it. The Syndicate paid him to carry the plates around, and they paid him in good honest twenty-dollar bills, guaranteed genuine.
It was warm in Los Angeles. Eddie liked that. It was winter back in Chicago, with snow piled deep on the ground and bitter winds forever sweeping in from the Lake, but here in L.A. the temperature was close to 70 and the tall spindly palm trees gave no hint of having endured a season of winter. It was too bad, he thought, that he couldn’t stay longer than a few days. But the Syndicate wanted him to return to Chi as soon as he had made the delivery here. Klein would have another set of plates finished and Eddie would have to take them up to New York.
It was winter in New York too. Eddie looked forward to the day when he could quit the Syndicate and settle down in California, where winter never came.
He parked the car in front of a rooming house on Fifth Street just off Broadway. Making sure that the trunk was locked and all the windows were closed, he went inside and asked about a room.
“Sure we got rooms,” the landlady said. “Three bucks a night, pay in advance. How long you figuring on staying, huh?”
Eddie shrugged. “Three or four days, maybe. Look, here’s ten bucks. That’s for tonight, tomorrow, and the night after.”
She wrote it down and gave him a dollar change. Eddie mentally added the dollar to his take for the trip. The Syndicate gave him two hundred bucks in queer tens as his expenses, aside from the actual delivery fee. Anything he could save out of passing the tens was pure profit for him.
Eddie went upstairs, looked over his room, nodded, and brought his suitcase up. The plates were in the suitcase. He unpacked, putting the little locked box containing the plates under a pile of shirts in his dresser drawer. He carefully arranged a thread that would tell him if anyone had been snooping in the room while he was away. Sometimes the landladies of these places liked to come in and nose around.
When everything was set, Eddie locked up carefully, went downstairs, and walked up the block to the nearest post office. He bought a 4¢ stamped envelope, took a sheet of paper from his pocket, and slowly printed in big block lettering the address of his rooming house and the number of his room.
He folded the sheet up, put it inside the envelope. He sealed the envelope and addressed it to a post office box number in Beverly Hills. He studied the sealed envelope for a moment, nodded, carried it over to the mail slot, and dumped it in.
He was sweating. This business of writing letters and mailing them always knocked him out. Eddie didn’t go much for writing letters.
But now his part in the job was just about complete. Tomorrow the local Syndicate man would get the letter and would know instantly what it meant. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after, the Syndicate would send somebody over to the rooming house to pick up the plates. The messenger might be almost anybody, from the top West Coast man right down to the goons on bottom. Eddie didn’t care who they sent.
The messenger would be carrying one half of a ripped-in-two ten-dollar bill, and if it matched with the half bill that Eddie was carrying in his wallet Eddie would turn over the plates, no questions asked.
And then Eddie would turn around and go back to Chicago, where he would collect thirty twenty-dollar bills for his courier services, and a new assignment to deliver plates.
He walked out of the post office and looked around. He was dressed in winter clothes, and he was sweating. He had nothing to do now, nothing to do but wait until the Syndicate got his address. They wouldn’t receive it before tomorrow morning. He had time to kill.
He went to see a movie and sat through the main feature twice. Then he had supper in a cafeteria and went back to his room to wait.
The girl moved in around half past eleven the next morning. Eddie watched from his window and saw her taxi pull up, saw her get out, carrying a medium-sized suitcase, saw her come into the building. He waited, wondering if this was the messenger from the Syndicate. She was really a looker—around twenty-three or twenty-four, a willowy blonde with a long yellow ponytail dangling down her back.
She was wearing red pedal-pushers that clung tightly to the stunning curves of her hips and buttocks. Her breasts thrust steeply out of the print shirt she was wearing. Even from three stories up, the view was eye-opening.
A couple of minutes passed, and then Eddie heard footsteps coming past his door. They didn’t stop. He couldn’t resist a peek; he opened the door, peeped out, and saw the sensational blonde and the landlady disappearing into a room at the end of the hall. Eddie ducked back into his room and closed the door.
Not a messenger from the Syndicate at all. Just a new tenant. But he didn’t mind that. In the next couple of days, he thought, maybe he could make some hay.
At twelve sharp he left his room and went out to get some lunch. The arrangement with the Syndicate always was that he would be allowed to leave his room from nine to ten, from twelve to one, and from six to seven.
The rest of the time he had to stay put and wait for the pickup to come. He walked up to Broadway and ate in the cafeteria where he was having all his meals, and broke another queer tenspot for a $1.25 lunch.
When he returned to the rooming house he noticed the ponytail girl walking a few paces in front of him. He quickened his speed and caught up with her.
Eddie liked to think he was a big man with the ladies. He pulled up alongside her and said, “Hello
, neighbor.”
She smiled. Close up, she was a knockout.
“Hello.”
“We live on the same floor. I saw you move in this morning.”
“Oh. Then we are neighbors.”
They reached the rooming house and turned in. They walked up the stairs. Eddie made light talk with her, and he could see she liked him. His throat was dry with excitement. She was fabulously built—big high breasts, narrow waist, flaring hips. The legs revealed by the skin-tight pedal-pushers were flawless. Eddie wondered if she were some kind of starlet. She sure had a Hollywood figure. But what was she doing in a cheap dump like this, in that case?
She smiled at him and went on into her room. Eddie stood in the hallway, looking moonily after her until she had closed the door.
He hadn’t had a woman in a long time. And he didn’t even remember when he had had one like this. And something told him that this girl was available.
The Syndicate didn’t like him fooling around with women while he was on a delivery trip. They wanted him to keep his mind on business, and nothing but.
But the Syndicate didn’t have to know, did they? Eddie walked to the window and looked out. He wished the Syndicate would send its man over to pick up the plates. Then he could take himself a couple of days to make time with the blonde, before he went back to Chi.
*
The afternoon passed along, and Eddie fidgeted. He couldn’t leave his room. And no one showed up.
Sometimes they waited, he thought. He remembered once in Seattle when the town was lousy with FBI men because of a kidnapping, and the Syndicate had been afraid to make the pickup until the heat died down. So Eddie had had to sit around for four whole days waiting for someone to come take the plates from him.