“Well, I might meet you, but I can’t promise…”
“That’s all right, Mr. Stevens. At the corner of Jefferson and Felman there’s a cafe. We might meet there. What time would suit you?”
He said he would be there at nine.
“I’ll be the guy wearing a hat and reading the Evening Herald,” I told him.
He said he would look out for me and hung up.
I had nearly two hours to wait before I met him, and decided to pass the time at Finnegan’s. It took me a few minutes to lock up the office. While I was turning keys, closing the safe, and shutting the windows, I thought about Nurse Gurney. Who had kidnapped her? Why had she been kidnapped? Was she still alive? Thoughts that got me nowhere, but worried me. Still thinking, I went into the outer office, looked around to make sure the place was bedded down for the night, crossed the room, stepped into the passage and locked the outer door behind me.
At the end of the corridor I noticed a short, stockily-built man lolling against the wall by the elevator doors, and reading a newspaper. He didn’t look up as I paused near him to thumb the bell-push calling the elevator attendant. I gave him a casual glance. He was dark skinned, and his blunt-featured face was pock-marked. He looked like an Italian; could have been Spanish. His navy-blue serge suit was shiny at the elbows and his white shirt dirty at the cuffs.
The elevator attendant threw open the doors, and the Wop and I entered. On the third floor, the elevator paused to pick up Manfred Willet who stared through me with blank eyes and then interested himself in the headlines of the evening paper. He had said he wanted secrecy, but I thought it was carrying it a little far not to know me in the elevator. Still, he was paying my fee, so he could call the tune.
I bought an Evening Herald at the bookstall, giving Willet a chance to leave the building without falling over me. I watched him drive away in an Oldsmobile the size of a dreadnought. The Wop with the dirty shirt cuffs had collapsed into one of the armchairs in the lobby and was reading his newspaper. I walked down the corridor to the back exit and across the alley to Finnegan’s bar.
The saloon was full of smoke, hard characters and loud voices. I had only taken a couple of steps towards my favourite table when Olaf Kruger, who runs a boxing academy on Princess Street, clutched hold of me.