Occasion for Disaster

He looked upfrom his crossword puzzle as Malone came in, apparently trying todecide whether or not this new visitor should be greeted with:"Welcome, Brother!"

  Taking pity on his indecision, Malone strode to the desk and said:"Tell Mike Sand he has a visitor."

  The waffle-faced man blinked. "Mr. Sand is busy right now," he said."Who wants to talk to him?"

  Malone tried to look steely-eyed and tough. "You pick up theintercom," he said, "and you tell Sand there's a man out here who's inthe cloak-and-suit business."

  "The what?"

  "Tell him this man is worried about a recent shipment of buttons,"Malone went on.

  "Mister," the waffle-faced man said, "you're nuts."

  "So I'm nuts," Malone said. "Make the call."

  It was put through. After a few minutes of earnest conversation theman turned to look at Malone again, dizzied wonder in his eyes. "Mr.Sand says go right up," he told the FBI Agent in a shocked voice."Elevator to the third floor."

  Malone went over to the elevator, stepped in and pressed thethird-floor button. As the doors closed, the familiar itch ofprecognition began to assail him again. This time he had nothing elseto distract him. He paid very close attention to it as he was carriedslowly and creakily upward.

  He looked up. There was an escape-hatch in the top of the car.Standing on tiptoe, he managed to lift it aside, grasp the edges ofthe resulting hole and pull himself up through the hole to the top ofthe car. He looked back down, memorizing the elevator, and then pulledthe hatch shut again. There was a small peephole in it, and Malone puthis eye to it and waited.

  About twenty seconds later, the car stopped and the doors opened. Alittle more time passed, and then a gun, closely followed by a man,edged around the door frame.

  "What the hell," the man said. "The car's empty!"

  Another voice said: "Let's cover the stairway."

  Two pairs of footsteps receded rapidly down the hall. Malone, gun inhand, teleported himself back to the previously memorized elevator,tiptoed to the door and looked out. The two men were standing at thefar end of the hall, posted at either side of the stairwell andobviously waiting for him to come on up.

  Instead, he tiptoed out of the elevator hefting his gun, and came upsilently behind the pair. When he was within ten feet he stopped andsaid, very politely: "Drop the guns, boys."

  The guns thudded to the floor and the two men turned round.

  "All right," Malone said, smiling into their astonished faces. "Now,let's go on and see Mr. Sand."

  He picked up the guns with his free hand and put them into his coatpockets. Together, the three men went down toward the lighted officeat the far end of the hall.

  "Open it," Malone said as they came to the door. He followed them intothe office. Behind a battered, worm-eaten desk in a dingy room sat avery surprised-looking Mike Sand.

  He was only about five feet six, but he looked as if weighed over twohundred pounds. He had huge shoulders and a thick neck, and his facewas sleepy-looking. He seemed to have lost a lot of fights in his longcareer; Sand, Malone reflected, was nearing fifty now, and he wasbeginning to look his age. His short hair, once black, was turning toiron-gray.

  He didn't say anything. Malone smiled at him pleasantly. "These boyswere carrying deadly weapons," he told Sand in a polite voice. "That'shardly the way to treat a brother." His precognitive warning systemwasn't ringing any alarm bells, but he kept his gun trained on thepair of thugs as he walked over to Mike Sand's desk and took the twoextra revolvers from his pocket. "You'd better keep these, Sand," hesaid. "Your boys don't know how to handle them."

  Sand grinned sourly, pulled open a desk drawer and swept the guns intoit with one motion of his ham-like hand. He didn't look at Malone."You guys better go downstairs and keep Jerry company," he said. "Youcan do crossword puzzles together."

  "Now, Mike, we--" one of them began.

  Mike Sand snorted. "Go on," he said. "Scram."

  "But he was supposed to be in the elevator, and we--"

  "Scram," Sand said. It sounded like a curse. The two men got out."Like apes in the trees," Sand said heavily. "Ask for bright boys andwhat do you get? Everything," he went on dismally, "is going to hell."

  * * * * *

  That line, Malone reflected, was beginning to have all the persistenceof a bass-bourdon. It droned its melancholy way through anything andeverything else. He signed deeply, thought about a cigar and lit acigarette instead. It tasted awful. "About those buttons--" he said.

  "I got nothing to do with buttons," Sand said.

  "You do with these," Malone said. "A shipment of buttons from theNevada desert. You grabbed them from Palveri."

  "I got nothing to do with it," Sand said.

  Malone looked around and found a chair and an ashtray. He grabbed oneand sat down in the other. "I'm not from Castelnuovo," he said. "OrPalveri, or any of the Mafia boys. If I were, you'd know it fastenough."

  Sand regarded him from under eyelids made almost entirely ofscar-tissue. "I guess so," he said sourly at last. "But what do youwant to know about the stuff? And who are you, anyhow?"

  "The name's Malone," Malone said. "You might say trouble is mybusiness. Or something like that. I see an opportunity to create alittle trouble--but not for you. That is, if you want to hear somemore about those buttons. Of course, if you had nothing to do withit--"

  "All right," Sand said. "All right. But it was strictly a legitimateproposition, understand?"

  "Sure," Malone said. "Strictly legitimate."

  "Well, it was," Sand said defensively. "We got to stop scab trucking,don't we? And that Palveri was using nonunion boys on the trucks. Wehad to stop them; it was a service to the Brotherhood, understand?"

  "And the peyotl buttons?" Malone asked.

  Sand shrugged. "So we had to confiscate the cargo, didn't we?" hesaid. "To teach them a lesson. Nonunion drivers, that's what we'reagainst."

  "And you're for peyotl," Malone said, "so you can make it into peyoteand get enough money to refurbish Brotherhood Headquarters."

  "Now, look," Sand said. "You think you're tough and you can get awaywith a lot of wisecracks. That's a wrong idea, brother." He didn'tmove, but he suddenly seemed set to spring. Malone wondered if, justmaybe, his precognition had blown a fuse.

  "O.K., let's forget it," he said. "But I've got some inside lines,Sand. You didn't get the real shipment."

  "Didn't get it?" Sand said with raised eyebrows. "I got it. It'sright where I can put my finger on it now."

  "That was the fake," Malone said easily. "They knew you were after ashipment, Sand, so they suckered you in. They fed your spies withfalse information and sent you out after the fake shipment."

  "Fake shipment?" Sand said. "It's the real stuff, brother. The realstuff."

  "But not enough of it," Malone said. "Their big shipments are almostthree times what you got. They made one while you were suckered offwith the fake--and they're making another one next week. Interested?"

  Sand snorted. "The hell," he said. "Didn't you hear me say I got thefirst shipment right where I can put my finger on it?"

  "So?" Malone said.

  "So I can't get rid of it," Sand said. "What do I want with a newload? Every day I hold the stuff is dangerous. You never know whensomebody's going to look for it and maybe find it."

  "Can't get rid of it?" Malone said. This was a new turn of events."What's happening?"

  "Everything," Sand said tersely. "Look, you want to sell me someinformation--but you don't know the setup. Maybe when I tell you,you'll stop bothering me." He put his head in his hands, and hisvoice, when he spoke again, was muffled. "The contacts are gone," hesaid. "With the arrests and the resignations and everything else,nobody wants to take any chances; the few guys that aren't locked upare scared they will be. I can't make any kind of a deal for anything.There just isn't any action."

  "Things are tough, huh?" Malone said hopelessly. Apparently even MikeSand wasn't going to pan out for him.

 
"Things are terrible," Sand said. "The locals are havingrevolutions--guys there are kicking out the men from NationalHeadquarters. Nobody knows where he stands any more--a lot of myorganizers have been goofing up and getting arrested for one thing andanother.