Mission Earth Volume 2: Black Genesis

  “Right!” said Vantagio.

  Some madames swatted their palms together and the assemblage began to disperse, several sets of lovely eyes remaining reluctantly on Heller. Did they suppose, I thought disgustedly, that he was something to eat? He was far too young for their general taste!

  A uniformed attendant came up and struggled with Heller’s baggage. Heller helped him, and because the elevator was jammed, they walked up to the second floor on thickly carpeted stairs.

  Vantagio led the way down a long hall and they came to a small room. It was plain but it was clean—almost sanitary. The iron bedstead was white and so was the chest of drawers. The bathroom was small but modern. All strictly utility.

  “How’s this?” said Vantagio.

  “Fine,” said Heller.

  Some of the women had followed down the hall. But Vantagio peremptorily ordered them away. He got out some old cards and a ballpoint. Using the back of one, he wrote an address on it.

  “Now, this,” he said to Heller, “is a tall man’s shop. You go out and buy yourself a summer suit you haven’t grown out of. And get something besides baseball shoes! You got dough?”

  “Lots,” said Heller.

  “Good. But you wash up and when you come down, bring any excess dough and I’ll give you a small personal safe with your own combination. We want to keep this an honest house!” He left.

  Heller stowed his things, washed up, checked the lock on his door and then went down with the fifty thousand in the paper sack his breakfast had come in.

  Vantagio showed him the battery of private safes and how to open one. It seemed UN people carried documents and things around they wanted stowed for the few hours they might be there.

  Heller mastered how to change the combination and then changed it so fast I couldn’t read it off! But it would be impossible to get near it or even get to his baggage. My interest in stealing it was purely academic. It punched through how protected he was now!

  He left the Gracious Palms on foot, happy I suppose to have some exercise. I wasn’t happy. He had more guns pointing at him now than I could easily count. The Faustino mob knew his face and he had killed three of their men, one of them maybe a lieutenant of the mob! And add in Police Inspector Grafferty. He had seen Heller face to face and cops remember things—that’s their trade: mentally cataloguing who to shoot down next!

  Shortly it did not help my morale a bit to receive the day’s report of Raht and Terb. It read:

  Went to whorehouse and got (bleeped) and they stole his baggage. He’s probably broke but seems safe.

  I could have killed them!

  PART SIXTEEN

  Chapter 3

  Miles from the UN area, and now in the garment district, Heller was clickety-clacking along, on his way to I knew not where but, if I knew Heller, up to no good.

  It was evidently a hot midday in New York and people were slouching along, mopping their faces and carrying their coats over their arms. One would have thought that they would have glanced at Heller but New York is a peculiar place: practically nobody ever looks at anybody no matter what they are doing—including rape and murder. Even dead bodies can lie on the street until the sanitation department gets a complaint—and answers it if they happen to have any appropriation that month. So Heller was attracting no attention.

  Wait! I was wrong!

  Heller glanced back and I saw someone quickly turn. Was it Raht or Terb? I got the other screen working and stilled it. No, it wasn’t Raht or Terb. It was too brief a glimpse to make it out. But someone had noted his departure.

  They push delivery carts of racked clothes through the streets of the garment district at a mad pace and Heller was dodging these. He had come to a shop. The sign said:

  TALL AND BIG MEN

  Heller was shortly involved in trying to purchase something that fit. It was off-season—too late for summer clothes to be in demand, too soon for winter clothes—and because business was bad, the shop was dedicated to making it worse.

  He found a dark blue suit of summer weight. He couldn’t find a normal shirt—they all had collars of twenty-five or so inches and girths of sixty. Finally he located three drip-dry cotton ones. They had Eton collars! These are the kind the undergraduates wear in England!

  The real tailor that did adjustments was on vacation and the helper he had left behind botched the suit alteration. He adjusted the coat sleeves and pants cuffs too short again!

  But Heller dressed anyway. He was now in dark blue with an Eton collar and he looked younger than ever!

  He presented the store with the red-checked jacket and the blue-striped pants. And because those clothes were bugged, I bitterly surmised that Raht and Terb, who were depending on those bugs, would now stake out the tall man’s shop!

  He couldn’t find any shoes he liked so he kept the baseball spikes on, popped his red baseball cap on the back of his head and was shortly engaged again in what seemed his favorite pastime: examining fenders of parked cars.

  In peripheral vision, I saw the figure again. He was being tailed!

  But Heller? Did he take evasive tactics? Run through a large store with two entrances? Dash into a crowd? Not Heller! He didn’t even inspect the street behind him! Amateur!

  He knelt down by the fender of a very modern car and bent it with his fingers—an easy thing for anybody to do. Then he looked around quickly to see if the unintentional act of vandalism had been noticed. Apparently to make sure he covered it up, he stood, turned, folded his arms and sort of lounged back against the fender. It really buckled!

  He walked off. And then, abruptly, began the craziest series of actions I had yet seen him engage upon

  He caught a cab. Breathlessly, he said to the driver, “Quick! Take me to the bus terminal! Five-dollar tip!”

  They went westward. No especially hurried ride. Heller got out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and paid the driver.

  Immediately, he got another cab. He leaped in and said urgently, “Quick! Take me to the Manhattan Air Terminal! I’m late! Five-dollar tip!”

  Aha! I thought I understood at last! He had noticed the tail and was shaking it!

  Cross-town rides are slow and it was very uneventful.

  At the Manhattan Air Terminal, he paid the driver and got out.

  Then Heller walked along a line of cabs, looking at their fenders. He found one with some bashes. It was a Really Red Cab Company hack.

  Heller leaped in. “Quick! I have to be at Broadway and 52nd Street in two minutes and nineteen seconds. There’s a five-dollar tip!”

  Disregarding other drivers’ protests that it was not his turn to go, the cabby zipped out of line, screamed into high gear. He cut a corner, bashed a car out of his way, ran a red light, sent a works-in-progress sign skyrocketing and stopped at Broadway and 52nd Street. Heller looked at his watch. It was two minutes!

  Heller paid him the fare and the five-dollar tip.

  AND THEN HELLER JUST SAT THERE IN THE CAB!

  The driver, expecting Heller to rush out, looked at him in amazement.

  “How would you like to teach me to drive in New York?” said Heller.

  Oh, my Gods! Heller was not shaking a tail. He was trying to find a reckless cab driver! Heller was a hopeless idiot!

  “I ain’t got the time, buddy,” said the driver.

  “For a hundred bucks would you have the time?”

  Silence.

  “For two hundred bucks would you have the time?”

  Silence.

  Heller opened the cab door to get out.

  The driver said, “I’m almost off shift! I’ll race up to the barn, turn in and come back. You wait here. No. You come with me. I’ll turn this wreck in and get a decent hack.”

  Promptly, driving rapidly, the cabby started for the Really Red Cab barn. “What’s your name?” he shot back through the open glass partition.

  “Clyde Barrow,” said Heller.

  I snorted. That was a famous gangster! Nothing was sac
red to Heller!

  “I see on the card here,” said Heller, “that you’re called Mortie Massacurovitch. Been driving cabs long?”

  “Me?” said the cabby, glancing back at Heller without regard to a near collision. He was a very tough-looking oldster. “My old man was a hacker in this town and I learned how from him. In the last war, on the strength of it, they made me a tank driver.”

  “Get any medals?” said Heller.

  “No. They sent me home—said I was too brutal to the enemy!”

  Heller waited outside while the hacker turned his cab and receipts in. And suddenly it dawned on me what he was up to. He had believed that tale about it being too hard to drive in New York! He was going to bring the Cadillac into town!

  Oh! No, no, no! There was no way to warn this naïve simpleton! One of the things Bury would surely have done was to have that Cadillac rigged to explode! Bury had not wanted it to be near the planned murder of the bogus Rockecenter, Junior. But aside from that, it was strictly textbook that he would have it set to explode, particularly now that he had missed. Bury was the sort of man who did multiple planning and handled eventualities.

  So I sat there helplessly while Heller, in a forthright fashion, industriously planned his own suicide!

  PART SIXTEEN

  Chapter 4

  Shortly, Mortie Massacurovitch came out of the huge garage they called a barn. He beckoned and Heller went inside.

  Way back in the corner, covered with dust, sat the remains of a cab. Most of the paint was off by reason of dents and scrapes. It still had its meter and its top taxi lights but it was a long way from a modern cab. It was sort of square, with no smooth gentle curves.

  “Here,” said Mortie, “is a real cab! It has real steel fenders, quarter of an inch thick. It has real bumpers with side bars and hooks. It has real bulletproof, nonshatter glass.” He looked at it proudly. “They really used to build them! Not plaster and paper like today.”

  A passenger could ride with the driver in this one and Mortie wiped off the seat and got Heller in. Then the cabby got in. “Gives you the edge,” he said. “My favorite cab!”

  He got its oil and gas checked and off they went, back to town. And, in truth, there was nothing wrong with its motor. It seemed to have more acceleration than modern cabs in that it got away from lights way ahead of everybody. “Geared down for fast darts,” said Mortie.

  Heller learned how to handle the gear shift and clutch on a quiet street and Mortie, satisfied now on that score, took over. “Now, let’s see, where is the traffic thickest this time of day?” He looked at his watch. “Ah, yeah. Grand Central Station.” And off they roared.

  It was creeping up to afternoon going-home time when they neared the area. The traffic was THICK! And fast!

  “Now,” said Mortie, “this is going to require your close attention because it is a very high art. People are basically yellow. They always give up before you do. So that leaves you a very wide scope.”

  Chattering along, naming each maneuver as he went, Mortie Massacurovitch performed.

  It was horrifying!

  They dashed between two cars to make the cars split each way! They squealed brakes to startle people “because honking was frowned upon.” They swerved to make a car dodge away from its intended parking place and then stole it. They dove in ahead of another hailed cab and when the passenger tried to get in, told him the cab was engaged. They bashed backwards to widen a place to park. They bashed forward to get a place to park. They did a skid “to alarm a motorist, who then stamps on his brakes and you grab his place in line.” They followed an ambulance to get somewhere quick. They followed a fire engine to really run the meter up fast, “but setting a fire ahead to get the engines to run is frowned on.”

  Heller then got under the wheel. He did all those things Mortie had done, with a few embellishments.

  With bent fenders, raw voices and screams of anguish and terror strewn behind them, Mortie now guided Heller to a cabby bar on Eighth Avenue. It was a time of traffic lull and one had better have a sandwich.

  Heller tried to order a beer and got scolded both by Mortie and the proprietor: “Trying to make the place lose its license?” So Heller had milk with his steak instead. “You got to have respect for the law, kid,” Mortie told him. “Learn to grow up to be a good, peaceful, orderly, law-abiding citizen. That’s the only way to get ahead.

  “Got to get going!” said Mortie. “Time for theater traffic around Times Square.”

  En route, Mortie told him, “Now you got to learn how to handle police. When a cop stops you for speeding, you stop, see. You wait until he comes up and then you whisper, ‘Run for your life. This fare is holding a gun on me.’ And the cop will beat it every time!”

  Heller thanked him.

  “You got to know these things, kid.” But something else had attracted Mortie’s attention. “You got any enemies, kid? Your parents looking for you or something?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’d have to be you. I never made an enemy in my life. A cab started up behind us when we left the eatery and it’s still back there.”

  Mortie did a right-angle turn, went down an alley, went the wrong way on a one-way street. Looked back. “Don’t see him now. I think we shook him. So we can get busy.”

  They were into the theater district. It was well before the evening start of the shows but the traffic was THICK!

  “Now, you see that line of cars, kid? Watch!”

  Mortie came up alongside of a cab in the line. He stopped. He screamed an insult at the driver. Mortie made a motion to get out of his cab. The other driver, in a rage, leaped out of his. Mortie didn’t leave his cab. The line moved ahead. Mortie slid the cab into it, taking the place of the immobilized cab. “See, kid? Art!”

  Mortie got to an intersection near a big hotel. There were several cabs and few customers. Mortie sailed in, skidding to block the exit of the driveway, and killed his engine. Other cabbies screamed at him. He screamed back, “I’m stalled!” As he was now first in line, an elderly, well-dressed man and woman tried to get into Mortie’s cab. “Sorry,” said Mortie, “I’m going to the barn.” He drove off. “See, kid, I could have had my pick of fares. You got to know what you’re doing and think, think, think all the time.”

  He raced down a line of traffic. A car looked like it was going to turn out and block him. He sideswiped it with a scream of metal. The car pulled hastily back. “Don’t try it with limousines, kid. They’re really yellow. Scared for their paint. You don’t have to sideswipe. You just gesture, like this.” He veered toward a limousine and it promptly climbed the curb.

  The bright lights of theater marquees, the flashing advertising signs, the throngs and ticket lines. A lively, blazing night.

  “Now, you see that car ahead there that’s stopping. I’ll show you how to take off doors.”

  The streetside door swung open. The old cab was there before anyone could get out. There was a rending crash and off came the door.

  “It’s timing, kid. All timing. Now, you see that guy up the street waving for a fare? Over there on the wrong side for us?”

  Mortie zoomed ahead to forty miles an hour, stamped on the brakes, did a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and skidded sideways to the curb. The hopeful fare started to get in. “Sorry, we’re heading for the barn,” said Mortie.

  He found a one-way street. They backed down it at forty miles an hour. “You see, we’re pointed the right direction so it ain’t illegal.

  “See that red light? Now we’re going to rush it. If you listen you can hear the switch in the box and you can claim it was yellow.

  “Now here is a curb bounce. That’s a nice curb. If you hit it right, you can bounce back into the street and the guy that was about to pass you, thinking you was parking, gets sideswiped! Watch.”

  They bounced. There was a rending scream of metal. Headlight glass tinkled to the pavement.

  “All right, kid. Now let’s see you do it.”
br />   Heller took the wheel. He started up. He went through the routine. But just as he was about to rush a red light, the sound of a heavy thud shook the cab.

  “What was that?” said Mortie. Then he pointed. The side window had a star. “Jesus, that’s a bullet!”

  Another thud!

  “Get the hell out of here, kid! Somebody is breaking the firearms law!”

  Heller was on his way!

  He went down 42nd Street, headed west. He was not going very fast.

  “Step on it, kid! A cab just came around the corner behind us!”

  “You sure?” said Heller.

  “Hell, yes! He’s gaining!”

  But Heller was loafing.

  He was watching in the rearview mirror. Sure enough, there was a cab behind them, gaining!

  A bullet hit the rear window!

  “Now we can go!” said Heller.

  He fled down 42nd Street.

  He passed the Sheraton Motor Inn.

  I grabbed a New York map to see if he was leaving the country.

  The old cab negotiated the approaches to the West Side Elevated Highway. Traffic was light. Below them over the rail, the ground level street was dim. To their left lay the North River and the passenger steamship docks. Yes, on this route he could escape to Connecticut!

  Heller checked the rearview mirror. The pursuing cab was still coming.

  Below the elevated highway, to their right, the De Witt Clinton Park fled by and was gone.

  Heller wasn’t moving fast. The other was close behind!

  A sign ahead and a split in the elevated highway: 55th Street!

  Suddenly, with a yank of the wheel, Heller sent the cab into a ninety-degree right turn! He stamped on the brakes! The rail was right in front of him! The lower street was fifty feet down!

  He was stopped!

  The other cab was coming on.

  Heller suddenly backed up!

  There was room for the other cab to pass in front of his radiator. It started through the hole.

  Heller sent his cab ahead!

  The bumper hit the other cab’s front wheels.

  The other cab was punched over toward the rail!

  With a shattering crash, it went through the guard!