Jake didn’t have a mean face, a vicious face, even a very Italian face. He looked like every other man who stands in a dirty white apron beside a green-grocery stall in an open market. He hardly lifted his voice. “Toledo,” he called, and Toledo, who did have a vicious face, came in from the dark hall.
It was not necessary to say anything to Beau about the meaning of Toledo’s summons.
Toledo had, a month before, landed three crashing blows on Beau’s face, flooding him with agony, weakening his knees, almost making him throw up.
“I just want to know,” Jake said, “if this is hot money. I don’t care whether it’s hot or not. I take it, either way. I just want to know. Ask him, Toledo.”
Before Beau could cry, “No!” the first blow knocked him off his feet and halfway across the dirty, worn carpet. He got up. He got out a handkerchief. Shaking like a rabbit in a snake’s mouth, he said gaspingly, “Okay. I had to borrow a couple of bonds from a dead account at the bank. You guys won’t wait. The bank can.”
“Whose account?”
“I forget,” Beau said.
“Ask him whose account, Toledo.”
Beau managed to stave it off this time by darting to the farthest corner as he said, “John Jessup.” Jake nodded thoughtfully. “So okay. What are you hanging around here for?”
Beau ran out of the room, ran down the stairs, tripped, almost fell, and found the gloomy sanctuary of night. He hadn’t gone many blocks before he realized, clearly, rather than in a horror-strewn corner of his brain, that now—and forever—Jake really had him by the short hair.