Oliver came back the next day to work with concentrated fury, barely
stopping to eat and not stopping to talk. Lee got it out of him, but not
easily. After being trapped in a half dozen contradictions about feeling
well and having a headache, about his throat being sore and the pain
having gone, he put down his pen and whispered steadily: "I didn't want
you to worry friends. But it looks bad. There is a new crowd in town.
Twenty couples have been pulled in by them--_couples_ to prove who they
were. Maybe fifty people have been pulled in for questioning--what do
you know about this, what do you know about that. And they've begun
house searches. Anybody you don't like, you tell the new Regan about
him. Say he's sheltering Europeans. And his people pull them in. Why,
everybody wants to know, are they pulling in couples who are obviously
American if they're looking for Europeans? And, everybody says, they've
never seen anything like it. Now--I think I'd better get back to work."
"Yes," Lee said. "I think you had."
Charles was at the window, peering around the drawn blind. "Look at
that," he said to Lee. She came over. A big man on the street below was
walking, very methodically down the street.
"I will bet you," Charles said, "that he'll be back this way in ten
minutes or so--and so on through the night."
"I won't take the bet," she said. "He's a sentry, all right. The Mob's
learning from their friends across the water. Learning too damned much.
They must be all over town."
They watched at the window and the sentry was back in ten minutes. On
his fifth tour he stopped a young couple going down the street studied
their faces, drew a gun on them and blew a whistle. A patrol came and
took them away; the girl was hysterical. At two in the morning, the
sentry was relieved by another, just as big and just as dangerous
looking. At two in the morning they were still watching and Oliver was
still hunched over the table tracing exquisite filigree of color.
* * * * *
In five days, virtually without sleep, Oliver finished two Michigan
City-Buffalo travel permits. The apartment house next door was hit by
raiders while the ink dried; Charles and Lee Falcaro stood waiting
grotesquely armed with kitchen knives. But it must have been a tip
rather than part of the search plan crawling nearer to their end of
town. The raiders did not hit their building.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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