to Leo
Margulies
CHAPTER I
Tony Guarino, destined to be the greatest of all
America's notorious gang leaders, was eighteen when he committed his first serious
crime. And the cause, as is so often the case, was a woman.
But what a woman! Standing there in the dark alley
that gave access to the street from the sheet-iron stage door of the cheap
burlesque house, Tony could visualize her easily. A tall, stately blonde with
golden hair, and a pink and white complexion and long, graceful white legs.
From the audience he had watched those legs many times while she danced her way
through the performance and they never failed to give him a tingly thrill that
left him rather breathless.
The stage door opened suddenly, letting a square
of yellow light out on the throng of dark, over-dressed men and older boys
waiting, like so many wolves, for their night's prey. Then the door slammed
shut with a dull clang, plunging the alley into darkness again, and a girl
swished rapidly through the crowd, seemingly oblivious of the hands that
reached out to detain her and of the raucous voices that brazenly offered
invitations.
It was she! Nobody but Vyvyan Lovejoy used that
particular heavy, sensuous perfume. Tony plunged after her, toward the lights
and noise that indicated the street.
She paused at the sidewalk, a lithe, slender
figure, overdressed in a vivid green ensemble suit with a skirt that was both
too short and too tight, and glittering with much imitation jewelry. People
with a proper perspective would have recognized her for the false and dangerous
beacon of allure that she was, but to Tony she was marvelous, something to
worship and possess.
He moved up beside her and took off his cap. That
was one of the things he had learned from the movies, the only social tutor he
had ever had.
"Good evening, Miss Lovejoy."
She turned on him the face he thought so lovely.
He couldn't see that its complexion was as false as her jewelry; couldn't see
the ravages of dissipation that lay beneath the paint and powder; didn't notice
the hard cruel lines about the garish mouth, nor the ruthless greed in the
painted, rather large nose. As she surveyed him, contempt came into her
hardened bold face and her greenish eyes took on a strange glitter.
"You!" she said. "Again."
"No—yet." Tony laughed at what he
thought a brilliant witticism. "And I'm goin' to keep on bein' here every
night till you gimme a date."
The girl laughed, a short, sharp, mirthless sound
that was more like a grunt.
"Can y'imagine the nerve o' th' punk?"
she demanded, as though addressing an audience, but her cold green eyes bored
straight into Tony's defiant black ones. "Just a mere child without even a
car and tryin' to date me up. Say, kid, do you know who my boy friend is?"
"No, and I don't care," retorted Tony
with the passion-inspired recklessness of the Latin. "But I'm goin' to
be."
"Well, it's Al Spingola."
Something inside of Tony suddenly went cold. Al
Spingola was one of the city's important gang leaders, a ruthless man with a
big income, a lot of hoodlums who were loyal to him because they feared him and
he paid them well, and a quick trigger finger himself. A dangerous man!
"Aw, I bet he ain't so hot," answered
Tony stubbornly.
"Well, maybe not," conceded Vyvyan,
"but at least he can give a girl somp'm more substantial than kisses. . .
. Whenever you get a flock o' dough, kid, an' a big car, why come around and
then maybe I'll talk to you."
She laughed again and stepped out to the curb as a
big shiny limousine drew up with a rush and stopped. Tony started after her.
Then he paused as he recognized the man at the wheel of that car. It was Al
Spingola! A heavy-set, swarthy man with hard, reckless dark eyes and a cruel
mouth with thick, brutal lips, handsomely dressed in gray and with an enormous
diamond glittering in his tie. As every one knew, the most important part of
his dress lay snugly against his hip, a snubnosed blue steel revolver seldom
seen, but when it was, sure to be heard and felt by somebody. Tony realized
that for him to say another word to Vyvyan then would be certain death. Not at
the moment, of course, because that place was too public. But within a few days
his body would be found in an alley somewhere.
Spingola glanced at Tony as the girl climbed into
the car. And the boy felt cold and nervous until the expensive machine purred
away at high speed. Spingola, like other of his ilk, always drove at high
speed, thereby lessening his availability as a target.
Tony watched the car race away, then he put on his
cap and lighted a cigarette. Walking around the corner to a pool room which was
his main hang-out, he sat down in one of the high chairs to think out this
thing that was his first adult problem. Usually his mind, even though
uneducated, was alert and precise, its processes rapid and sound. But now it
was dulled by the gnawing, overpowering hunger of his first great passion. Of
course he had had any number of affairs with the neighborhood girls; no boy as
good-looking as he could help that. But somehow they hadn't satisfied him. He
wanted something bigger, more mature than the shallow, entirely physical
emotion that these girls offered. He was shockingly old for his age, as is almost
every boy from such an environment. He looked twenty-five with his wise eyes,
cynical mouth and well-developed beard that left a heavy pattern on his swarthy
cheeks. And he possessed more actual knowledge of mankind and its vagaries than
most men acquire in a lifetime. You could have set him down flat broke in any
city in the world and he wouldn't have missed a meal. Nor would he have needed
to steal; stealing was the way of people without brains. He held a contempt for
thieves; particularly those of the "petty larceny" variety.
"Say!" whispered a surly voice in his
ear.
Tony looked up into a rat face topped by a dirty,
rumpled checked cap.
"Well?" he said coldly.
"Some of us are goin' out and knock over some
gas stations," answered the other boy hoarsely. "Want to come
along?"
"No."
"It'll be an even split all round."
"No, I said. I ain't riskin' a pinch for a
coupla bucks."
"Aw, there'll be more'n that, Tony. All them
places got fifty, sixty bucks layin' around. An' there'll only be about four of
us."
"Screw!" snarled Tony. "Before I
paste you one."
The other boy hurried away, muttering to himself.
To the other boys who loafed around this pool room, Tony was a puzzle. They
never became intimate with him the way they did with each other. Somehow it
just never occurred to them to do so. They realized the difference; so did he.
But neither of them knew the reason. A psychologist would have explained it by
saying that Tony had a "mental percentage" on the others, that it was
the difference between a man destined for leadership and men destined to run in
the pack.
Most of the boys in the neighborhood made illegal
forays nightly. Never in their own ward, of course, because that would have
alienated the alderman. Whereas when they made raids only in outside wards,
their own alderman—in case they were arrested—would come down to the station,
tell what fine reputations they had in their neighborhood, and help get them
out. Then on election day, each hoodlum not only voted fifteen or twenty times,
but hordes of them swept through the ward and threatened everybody with dire
reprisals if the alderman were not reëlected by a handsome majority. And the
people, realizing the truth of these threats, reëlected the alderman, even
though they knew he was a grand old thug.
Tony always refused to join these nightly
expeditions for ill-gotten gains. "Petty larceny stuff," as he
contemptuously referred to their depredations, did not interest him. He wanted
to be a "big shot," a leader, perhaps a politician. He had a hunger
for command, for power, for wealth. And he meant to have it all. In the
meantime, though he had no job that anybody knew of and although he refused to
fall in with the criminal ways of his neighbors, he dressed better than they
and seemed to have all the money he needed. Many of the boys wondered about
that, but inasmuch as he chose to volunteer nothing, it was likely to remain a
mystery for, in that neighborhood, one did not inquire into the source of
income of even an intimate friend. And Tony had no intimate friends.
There was a sudden commotion at the front door of
the pool-room and several burly men came in. Some of the people already present
tried to escape by the back door, only to be confronted and driven back in by
other burly men coming in there. Detectives, of course, going to look over the
crowd.
Knowing that they had nothing on him, Tony watched
with faint amusement and a large sense of virtue while the dicks when through
the poorly-lighted, smoke-filled room, tapping hips, asking questions, occasionally
bestowing a hard, backhand slap on the ugly mouth of some hoodlum who tried to
talk back. As he had expected, they made no move to molest him.
"This kid's all right," said a man he
recognized as Lieutenant Grady from the neighborhood station. "He's Ben
Guarino's brother."
"That don't mean anything," retorted a
burly, cold-eyed man whose hard-boiled demeanor identified him as from
headquarters.
"Does to Tony!" snapped Grady.
"We've never heard of him bein' outside the law yet, either in this ward or
any other."
"Thanks, Lieutenant!" smiled Tony.
"Can't I buy a cigar for you and the boys?"
They all laughed at that. Not a man of them but
what was old enough to be his father, yet he called them "boys" and
they liked it. With all the poise and self-possession of a judge on his own
bench, Tony led the crowd of officers to the front of the pool-room and
purchased cigars for them all. Then they exchanged cheery
"Good-nights" with him and departed. Already Tony had learned the
manifold advantage of having a good "rep" with the cops. Also he knew
the great power that came from having people in one's debt, even for such
little things as cigars. Tony seldom accepted a favor from any one, but if he
did, he always tried to return one twice as big, thus removing his moral debt
to them and making them indebted to him. He had the mind and soul of a master
politician.
Tony suddenly realized that the stuffy,
smoke-filled atmosphere of the pool-room had given him a headache, and decided
to go home. Except for occasional oases like the pool-room, the neighborhood
was a desert of gloom and deserted frowsiness. Street lights were infrequent
and those that existed were of the old-fashioned, sputtering type that, like
some people, made a lot of noise but accomplished little. It hadn't rained that
night, yet there was an unhealthy dampness about. The dingy old buildings, with
their ground-floor windows boarded up like blind eyes, seemed to hover
malevolently over the narrow, dirty streets. One street that served as a push-cart
market by day was littered with boxes and papers and heaps of reeking refuse.
An occasional figure, either hunting or hunted, skulked along. Infrequently, a
car raced past, awakening echoes that could be heard for blocks through the
quiet streets. Over all hung a brooding stir of everpresent menace, an
indefinable something that made sensitive strangers to the neighborhood
suddenly look back over their shoulders for no good reason.
This was the setting of gangland, its spawning
place, its lair and one of its principal hunting grounds. It was also Tony's
neighborhood, the only environment he had ever known. But he could not see that
a great scheme of circumstances, a web much too intricate for him to
understand, had gradually been shaping his destiny since the day of his birth,
that it was as difficult for him to keep from being a gangster as it was for a
Crown Prince to keep from becoming King.
Tony reached the little grocery store that his
parents owned, and above which the family lived, passed to the door beyond,
inserted his key and clattered up the dirty, uncarpeted steps. A light was on
in the dining room, which also served as the parlor. Seated in an old rocker
which had been patched with wire, sat Ben Guarino reading the paper, his blue
uniformed legs and heavy, squaretoed black shoes resting on the dirty red and
white checked tablecloth. His revolver, resting in its holster, hung suspended
by the cartridge belt from the back of another rickety chair upon which rested
his uniform coat and cap.
As Tony came in, Ben looked up. He was a stocky
chap in the middle twenties with a brutal mouth and jaw and defiant dark eyes
that usually held a baleful glitter. For a number of reasons, all of which he
kept to himself, Tony felt that his brother was going to be a big success as a
policeman. To Tony, the only difference between a policeman and a gangster was
a badge. They both came from the same sort of neighborhoods, had about the same
education and ideas, usually knew each other before and after their paths diverged,
and always got along well together if the gangsters had enough money.
"Where you been so late?" demanded Ben
truculently.
"What the hell's it to you?" retorted
Tony, then remembering the favor he was going to ask, became peaceable. "I
didn't mean to be cross, Ben. But I got a nasty headache."
"Down to that O'Hara joint again, I
s'pose?"
"Well, a fellow's got to have some place to
go in the evening. And the only other place is some dance hall with a lot o'
them cheap, silly broads."
"Gettin' choosy about your women, now,
eh?"
"Yes,"
"Well, that's right," answered Ben with
a grin. "There's nothin'll take a man to the top—or to the bottom—faster
than a high-toned woman eggin' him on." Suddenly his feet struck the floor
and he leaned forward, his eyes boring straight into those of his brother.
"Say, what's this I hear about you deliverin' packages for Smoky
Joe?"
"Well?"
"Didn't you know there was dope in them
packages?"
"No, I didn't. But now that I do, it's goin'
to cost him more."
"You let that stuff alone."
"Oh, all right. I s'pose some cop belly-ached
to you about it. Well, he can have that little graft, if he wants it. I got
other things I can do."
"Yes, I guess you have," agreed Ben
dryly, "from all I hear. So you been a lookout down at Mike Rafferty's
gamblin' joint, too?"
"Yes. And why not? That's a decent way of
makin' a few bucks. Would you rather have me out pullin' stick-ups like the
rest of the guys in the neighborhood?"
"Of course not." He leaned forward and
spoke seriously. "Don't ever get in no serious trouble, Tony; it would
ruin me at headquarters."
"I won't. Don't worry about me. You got
enough to do to watch your own step."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothin'," answered Tony casually with a
smile, enjoying the sudden fear that had come into his brother's face.
"That's just a friendly tip from a fellow that knows more than you think
he does."
"Who?" demanded Ben hoarsely.
"Me." Tony grinned again and flipped his
cigarette ashes on the bare floor. "Say, Ben, can I have your car
to-morrow night?"
"No. I'm usin' it myself. That's my night
off."
"How about the next night?"
"No. You'd prob'ly get in trouble with it.
Kids and cars don't go together."
"All right. I'll have one o' my own pretty
soon and I'm goin' to get it as easy as you got that one."
With which parting shot, Tony went in to bed,
slamming the door shut behind him. How a fellow making a hundred and fifty a
month could acquire honestly a car that cost nearly three thousand dollars was
too much for Tony. But then all policemen had big cars, and captains had
strings of apartment buildings and sent their children to European finishing
schools.
The strange quiet that momentarily descended over the
Guarino household at this time of night was balm to Tony. It was the only
period of the twenty-four hours that he could spend at home without feeling
that he was about to go crazy. The rest of the time it was noise . . . noise .
. . noise. . . . He wondered if other people's homes were as uninviting and
repellent; all those he had ever seen were.
He undressed quickly and climbed into the grimy
bed which he and Ben shared. He wanted to sleep before Ben came in so that they
couldn't argue any more. But his mind was racing and it kept swinging around to
Vyvyan Lovejoy. Even to think about her made him alternately hot and cold all
over and left him trembling with anticipation. He would have her; nobody could
stop him—not even Al Spingola.
The fact that the woman he wanted belonged to
another made not the slightest difference to Tony. All life was a battle and
the strongest man got the gravy. Anyway, she had said she would talk to him if
he had a car and some money. Well, he'd get 'em both, and be back at that stage
door to-morrow night.
CHAPTER II
Promptly at ten-thirty the next night Tony Guarino
entered the dark alley that led to the sheet-iron stage door of the tawdry
Gaiety Theatre. And he swaggered a little as he walked. He felt big and
powerful and grand, an unnatural exultation due partly to his having visited
three saloons on the way over—an unusual occurrence for him —but due mainly to
the fact that he was ready for anything. At the curb stood a fast and expensive
sport roadster that ordinarily saw service in more nefarious enterprises. He
had rented it for the evening—just why he didn't know. According to the people
who were in that racket, stealing a car was about the easiest of all crimes,
both to commit and to get away with; it was the way ninety per cent of
criminals started. But he didn't intend to be pinched the very first time that
Vyvyan honored him with her company—because she was going to go with him
to-night, even if she didn't know it yet—so he had rented the roadster for the
night.
In his pants pocket bulged a wad of bills that
totaled two hundred dollars—all the money he had in the world. It was so
arranged that a crisp new bill of $100 denomination served as
"wrapper" on the outside. The inside, a few fives but mostly ones,
expanded the $100 note until the roll looked to be worth ten times its real
value.
Thus he had everything she had asked for. But he
also had something else. In his right hand side coat pocket rested an ugly blue
steel revolver he had bought that afternoon. He had never carried a gun before
and he found in it a big thrill. It gave one a sense of security and power, of
equality with all the world. Why, with this revolver in his pocket he was just
as good as Al Spingola. Thus Tony argued himself into a state of exaltation and
high courage. But deep in his own soul he wondered just how he would act if he
should be forced into an actual life-and-death encounter with Spingola.
Vyvyan came prancing out a little early,
glittering and fragrant as usual, an enormous picture hat framing her hard
face.
"Well, fer Gawd's sake!" she exclaimed
when she saw him. "Mary's little lamb is on the job again."
"Betcher life," grinned Tony. "An'
I got the car an' a flock o' dough, like you wanted."
"You have?" she said mockingly.
"Well, that puts little Johnny at the head of the class."
Tony's grin faded suddenly and he grabbed her arm.
"Listen, sister, don't try to kid me!"
he snarled. "You an' I are goin' steppin' to-night."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah! So you might as well make up your mind
to it and come along."
"Well," she said wearily, "I'm not
to see Al till to-morrow night so I s'pose I might as well take a chance on you
now. But I don't want anybody to see us, so that he'll hear about it." She
shivered slightly. "Al's dangerous, kid. So drive to the corner of Taylor
and Sangamon and wait for me there. I'll take a taxi and be along within five
minutes."
"You're not giving me the run-around?"
"Absolutely not. I'll be there."
"Well, you better," said Tony darkly.
"Or I'll be back to-morrow night and shoot up the place."
He entered the roadster and roared away, feeling
very important. At the appointed corner, he waited nervously, muttering dire threats
to himself. But she came, and hurriedly climbed in beside him. The narrow
confines of the roadster caused their thighs to touch for their whole length
and he felt a sudden thrill from the contact. When she looked up at him
suddenly with a queer light in her greenish eyes, he knew she had felt his
revolver.
"S'all right, baby," he grinned
reassuringly. "I won't use it unless I have to."
He drove her to a North Side restaurant that was
noted for its discretion. Seated opposite each other in a small private
dining-room on the second floor, they consumed a fine and expensive meal, and
two bottles of champagne. Those were the days when real champagne could be had
at almost any restaurant.
The meal over, and with only another bottle and
glasses on the table, Tony moved his chair around beside Vyvyan's. She had
progressed nicely and by now had reached the stage where she occasionally blew
a long breath upward along her face with a loud "Whoosh!", as if to
blow her hair out of her eyes.
"Well, kid, how do you feel?" asked
Tony, reaching for her hand.
"Kinda warm," she giggled.
"So do I."
When he took her home shortly before five in the
morning, she kissed him good-night and climbed out of the roadster with a heavy
sigh.
"Boy, you sure can love!" she said
weakly and tottered into her cheap hotel.
Tony arose at noon that day. A close shave with
plenty of powder at the end made him look a little less haggard. There was a
curious sense of elation singing within him. At last he had mastered a real
woman, a woman much older and more experienced than he. He had found, too, that
it was the mastering of another that he enjoyed in love. The thirst for power
was almost a mania with him. And the fact that circumstances and conditions
made it so that he had no right to ever expect to have any made him want it all
the more.
His sister, Rosie, a tall, pretty girl of sixteen,
cooked a meal for him. The six other children were at school. He ate hurriedly
and in silence. There was so much to do now.
Clattering down the stairs, his mother's raucous,
commanding shout reached his ears. He hesitated a moment, then entered the
store, looking sullen and defiant. Mrs. Guarino was a squat, wrinkled Italian
woman of fifty, with a figure like a loosely packed sack tied tightly in the
middle, dressed in a shapeless, indescribable gray wrapper whose waistline was
invisible from the front due to her breasts dripping over it. Her unbobbed gray
hair was drawn up all around and screwed into a tight knot atop her head. Heavy
plain gold ear-rings hung from holes punched through the lobes of her ears. Yet
despite her ugliness and barbaric appearance, her features were good, indicating
native intelligence and honesty. Carlotta Guarino was a good citizen. If only
she could have made her children as good citizens as were she and their
father—but then that was impossible, though she didn't see why, nor did they.
"Where were you so late?" she demanded
in rapid-fire Italian. "It was after five when you came in."
"Aw, I was talkin' business with
somebody," answered Tony in English.
"What kind of business could you talk at that
time of the morning?" she demanded again in Italian. "You come home
earlier. You be a good boy like Ben and don't get us into any trouble."
"All right," assented Tony and hurried
out, relieved at escaping after so short a grilling.
That was the way it always went, reproaches,
recriminations, cautions. She and his father could think of more things he
shouldn't do. It never occurred to him that they were endeavoring to implant in
him their own code of ethics and honesty. Their crudeness of expression kept
him from realizing that. Even if he had realized it, he wouldn't have accepted
it. Because, while he loved his parents with the fierce, clan-love of the
Latin, he did not respect their ideas. There were many logical reasons for
that—their inability to learn English well, their inability to "keep
step" with the times and country, their bewilderment—even after twenty
years—at the great nation which they had chosen for their new home, the fact
that even with his father working hard every day and his mother tending the
little store they had been able to make only a bare living for the large
family. So why should he accept their ideas on ethics? Where had those ideas
gotten them? Tony didn't intend to live in squalor like this all his life; he
meant to be a "big shot." Thus another decent home spawned another gangster,
as inevitably as an oyster creates a pearl.
There were other factors, of course, that
contributed strongly in making Tony a gangster. His attitude toward the law,
for instance. His first contact with it had come at the age of six when,
hungry, he had snatched a pear off a push-cart and a policeman had chased him.
Thus, from the first, he had known the law as an enemy instead of a protection,
as something which stood between him and the fruition of his desires.
His affair with Vyvyan seemed to have crystallized
all this within him, to make him think and act with a ruthlessness and
lawlessness hitherto foreign to him.
From a booth in a corner drug store he telephoned
her at her cheap hotel.
"Hello, darling!" he said. "How do
you feel?"
"Not so hot," she answered wearily. She
sounded as if she had just awakened.
"I'm kinda tired myself," he admitted.
'But it was a great night, so what's the difference. . . . Listen, Vyv, don't
forget that we got a date again to-night?"
"I'm s'posed to see Al to-night."
"To hell with Al!" Tony burst out
angrily. "You're not seein' Al any more. Get that, baby. An' if he gets
rough, I'll take care of him. I can gather up just as many gorillas for a
battle as he can. So don't worry about him. Leave as early as you can
to-night—he never gets around till late—and meet me at the same corner where we
met last night. An' be there, baby, or there'll be hell to pay."
The rest of the day Tony spent in making an
inventory of all his "rackets" or ways of making money, with a few
calls putting into smooth running order those that he had neglected somewhat
recently and with other calls starting brand-new ones which were not a bit
popular with the unwilling customers but which were going to be profitable to
him. From now on he could afford to be interested only in the most profitable
ones because he had a hunch that Vyvyan was going to be a mighty expensive
proposition.
Lounging early that evening in his usual poolroom
hang-out, Tony looked up in surprise as an ugly wop slunk into the next chair
and nudged him.
"Well?" said Tony coldly.
"You're Tony Guarino, ain't you?"
"Yeah. What of it?"
"Just this. If you go out with Al Spingola's
moll again, you won't last a week. An dat's from de boss himself."
"What do you mean?" demanded Tony,
though he knew well enough.
"Don't be dumb. Dey'll find you in an alley
some night wit' your t'roat cut."
"I'll take my chances with him and his
gorillas," bluffed Tony, and laughed. "A gun's better'n a knife any
time and I can shoot better'n any of 'em. So run along, sonny, and tell your
whole damn' gang to chew that on their back teeth."
Tony laughed outright at the expression of
amazement on the henchman's ugly face, then with a sneering smile watched the
fellow move away. In his side coat pocket that revolver still rested comfortably
and reassuringly. It was amazing how much courage that weapon put into him. It
bridged the difference between a David and a Goliath—it always does to a born
gangster. Also that afternoon he had arranged for a friend of his who was a
good shot to trail him everywhere he went at night now, and be ready to shoot
down from behind anybody who tried to get Tony in the same way.
Vyvyan was nervous and shivery when she arrived at
the appointed corner in a taxi and climbed into the roadster beside him.
"I'm scared, Tony," she said and gripped
his arm while she looked back over her shoulder. Then half-screamed. "Oh
there's another car starting up after us."
"Don't worry; that's my body guard."
"Oh! . . . Well, just as I started into the
theater to-night the meanest looking man I ever saw stepped right in front of
me and jammed a note into my hand. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had
started to murder me right there. But he went on. When I got into my
dressing-room I read what he had given me. It was written in pencil, all
scrawled and dirty, but plain enough. This is what it said: 'If you stand me up
again, your life won't be worth a lead nickel. Remember that!' It was from Al,
of course," she finished.
"Yeah, Another one o' his muggs tried to
bluff me at the pool-room to-night but I told him I was able to take care of
myself with Spingola or anybody else."
They drove to the same restaurant as the night
before and were shown to the same little private dining room. Half an hour
later the door was thrust open violently and Al Spingola stood framed in the
opening. His swarthy face was a sort of ghastly gray, his eyes blazed with the
fires of hell, and his brutal mouth was set in a nasty snarl. Most important of
all, his right hand was plunged deep into his side coat pocket.
Tony had turned a strange greenish white and his
eyes were glazed. The encounter between himself and Spingola had come at last
and that it was a life-and-death fight was obvious.
"Al!" gasped Vyvyan. "Don't
do—" Her voice trailed off.
Tony and Spingola were staring straight into each
other's eyes. The younger man looked nervous; it isn't easy to kill your first
man.
"So you couldn't take a warning, eh, you two
punks; you thought you could get away with giving me the run-around."
"Who are you?" asked Tony, knowing that
to be the most disconcerting thing he could say.
"Who'm I?" spluttered Spingola.
"I'll show you—"
And at that instant Tony fired through his coat
pocket. He had been reaching for his napkin when Spingola came in. Immeditely
but without perceptible movement, his hand had shifted to his gun. He had had
the drop on Spingola the whole time and had merely created a little diversion
to make absolutely sure of winning his first gun battle.
Spingola looked surprised, then sagged to the
floor. With a handkerchief Tony quickly rubbed his gun free of fingerprints,
then threw the weapon out the window into the alley below.
"Come, dear," he said coldly, reaching
for the shaking Vyvyan's arm. Now that the deed was over, he felt strangely
calm and strong, ready for anything.
He dropped a fifty dollar bill on the table and
rushed the girl down the back stairs. Through the alley they hurried, to where
their roadster was parked. They raced away down an impenetrably dark street
just as two uniformed policemen hurried in through the café's front door. Tony
wasn't worried. He knew that the owner and waiters would give a description of
the people who had occupied that private dining room but it would be so vague,
in case it were not actually false, that it would be absolutely valueless to
the police.
