He turned to Mortie. “Go to Apartment 18F and ask for Mamie. Give her this and she’ll give you a package.”

“In there?” said Mortie, looking at the ominously dark building. “And when you return,” said Heller, “I’ll give you another hundred.”

Mortie grabbed the cap and contents, leaped out, raced up the steps.

Three minutes later, he raced down the steps carrying a package. He threw it at Heller, started the car up and got out of there.

“Mamie was a man with a gun,” said Mortie. “But he took it with no questions.”

Heller told him to take him to the corner of First Avenue and 42nd Street. He shook the pack, listened to it and then sniffed it. Well, at last he was getting cautious for it well could have been a bomb. He pried up a corner and pulled something out.

“What’s a first class ticket to… Buenos Aires, Argentina, worth?” he asked Mortie.

“I dunno,” said Mortie. “Maybe three grand.”

“Can you cash one in?”

“Oh, sure,” said Mortie. “Just take it to the air terminal. What’s the matter, ain’t you going?”

Oh, if Heller only were!

Mortie let him out at First and 42nd. Heller said, “Now, do you think I really passed, or do I need more lessons?”

Mortie appeared to be thinking it over carefully. Then he said, “Well, kid, with experience you could become a top New York cabby. There’s more I could teach you about shortchanging customers and running up extra meterage but, otherwise, that’s about it. You pass. Yes, I’d say you pass.”

Heller counted him out six one-hundred-dollar bills. He instantly stuffed the money in his shirt and drove away at high speed.

Heller trotted along, clickety-clack, and soon arrived at the Gracious Palms.

In his room he opened the pack. Money in small old bills!

He counted it. ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!

I shuddered. My Gods, Bury must be angry to offer such a price!

Heller put it in the paper sack his breakfast had come in. He went down to the personal safes and put it in.

Vantagio was in his office and saw Heller through the open door. He called to him, “Getting out some money, kid? You’ll need dough for school! Don’t blow all you got on night life. This is an expensive town!”

“It sure is,” said Heller, adding the hundred grand to his fifty thousand already in the safe. “Prices just keep going up!”

He went to bed and was shortly peacefully asleep.

I wasn’t! Bury had unlimited funds and I didn’t even have a clue on how to get that platen!

Some hours later, the next report of Raht and Terb didn’t help. It said:

He went to a place called the Tall Man’s Shop and they must have given him a job and a place to sleep. He’s still there! But we have our eyes on him.

The Hells they did! They were still spotting in on the bug we had sewn in his coat!

I was getting frightened that I might have to go to America myself to handle this. And I didn’t have the least idea what I could do even if I did.

Chapter 6

Heller was up bright and early the following day, the viewer alarm blasting me out of a sodden sleep.

He was being very industrious and purposeful. He brushed his new suit where it had been messed up on the girders, put on a clean white shirt with an Eton collar, put a new baseball cap on the back of his head and then packed a shoulder-strap satchel which looked, for all the world, like one of these kiddy schoolbook bags.

In the bag he put a spool of fish line, a multihooked bass plug, a tool kit, a dozen baseballs, a roll of tape and the New Jersey license plates. Was he going fishing?

Down to the lobby he went. It was early for a whorehouse: the desk clerk was asleep, a guard in a tuxedo was reading the Daily Racing Form, ball point in hand, and an Arab sheik was wandering drunkenly around, apparently trying to choose amongst several throw rugs as to which would be best to use for morning prayer.

Heller counted ten thousand out of his personal safe and put it in his pockets. The Arab gave him a deep obeisance, Heller repeated the bow and hand motion exactly and presently was trotting down the street, clickety-clack.

He stopped at a deli and got breakfast in a sack, went out and found a cab.

“Weehawken, New Jersey,” said Heller. “One way.” And he gave the address of the garage where the Cadillac was!

“Double fare as you won’ be comin’ back,” said the cabby.

I suddenly chilled. Up to then I had not grasped what Heller was going to do! He was on his way to get his car! Bury knew where that car was. It would be rigged! That “won’t be coming back” was all too prophetic!

“Double fare,” agreed Heller.

He had his sweet rolls and coffee as he rode along. They were soon across town. They dove into the Lincoln Tunnel and roared along under the Hudson River. They soon were in New Jersey and turned north on the J. F. Kennedy Boulevard.

They turned out of the roaring traffic to approach the garage. But one block away from it, Heller told the cab to stop and wait. The cabby looked at the decayed, semi-industrial neighborhood. “You mean wait here?” he asked.

Heller took a fifty-dollar bill, tore it in half and gave the driver half.

“I’ll wait,” said the cabby.

Heller got out and trotted around a corner en route to the garage. He stopped.

Trucks! Trucks! Trucks! The whole area in front of the huge, low building was jammed with trucks! Crews of men were unloading stacks of cartons onto handcarts and taking them into the building.

Heller went closer. He stood at the garage door and looked in. The place was being filled up with stacks of cartons higher than a man’s head and in separate islands.

He moved a bit to see deeper in. The Cadillac was there. The license plates were missing.

There was something else going on. Voices. Heller shifted. He saw the plump young man and a burly monster dressed like a trucker. They were having a flaming argument.

“I don’t care! I don’t care!” the plump young man was shouting. “You can’t store that stuff in here. I don’t care whose orders it is! You don’t understand!” He half gestured toward the Cadillac and then didn’t.

Abruptly I knew his dilemma. The crews were putting valuable stuff in a garage/warehouse with a car which was rigged! And the young man couldn’t say why.

“We ain’t clearing nothing back out!” said the burly man. “If you’d been here on time, we mighta listened. But it’s too late now! This stuff stays! Besides, we get our orders just like you. I am not going to let some punk like you work my men’s (bleeps) off just…”

The plump young man had seen Heller at the door. He stiffened. He turned and raced off to an exit in the back wall like the devil was after him. He vanished.

Heller quietly withdrew. He walked through the boil of men and handtrucks, turned the corner and got back in the cab.

“You got further to go,” said Heller. “Take me to 136 Crystal Parkway, Bayonne.”

The New York cabby had to look at a map. “This is foreign country,” he explained. “It ain’t as if you were still in civilization. This is New Jersey. And you can’t ask directions. The natives lie!”

But soon they were headed south on J. F. Kennedy Boulevard, got through Union City, went under the Pulaski Skyway, passed St. Peter’s College and roared along through the increased traffic of Jersey City. Docks and glimpses of the New York skyline could be seen.

“Is that a statue way over there in the water?” asked Heller pointing east.

“Jesus,” said the cabby, “don’t you recognize the Statue of Liberty? You should know your country, kid.”

They went past the Jersey City State College and were soon in Bayonne. The New York cabby was shortly all tangled up. They got turned back from the Military Ocean Terminal, got trapped into going to Staten Island, came back over the Bayonne Bridge — paying a toll both ways — and finally asked a native.