Chapter 6
A telephone bell was ringing and it woke him up. A bar of sunlight fell across the room and Sal blinked, staring at it, staring at the room. The telephone bell kept on ringing. Then he discovered that it was on a stand next to his bed. He picked it up, answered it.
"Mr. Bennett?" It was a clipped female voice. "It's twelve o'clock noon."
"Thanks," he said and put the telephone back. He looked around the room and remembered where he was. He didn't feel so hot; he had a headache; he guessed champagne wasn't his dish. He must have left a call at the desk, but he couldn't recall doing so, or why, at first. Then he did remember. He left the call because at the time it seemed a good idea; Mr. Bennett of U.S. Steel would certainly leave a call....
He raised up his head again from the pillow, and the pain was terrific. No more champagne for him. He hated the idea of getting up and going out for breakfast, but then he remembered that this was the kind of hotel where you could have it sent up.
He had it sent up.
Ham and eggs and two pots of coffee made him feel better. Then he shaved, had a shower, got dressed. He had a couple of things he wanted to do, but there was no hurry about them; and at least one of them would be best done after dark. He put his cigarettes on the arm of an upholstered maple chair and pulled it up beside the window, where he could watch the traffic in Broad Street, three floors below.
Today was today, but yesterday kept coming back to him. The high-winding intoxication was gone; he was no longer walking on air; the reaction had set in. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, thinking over yesterday. All in all, it wasn't too good. He thought he was smart but in a lot of ways he was as dumb as they came. He examined himself and his actions with cold bitterness, bitterness tinged with remorse-not remorse for anything he had done, but remorse for the dumb plays he'd made.
"Sal," he told himself, "sometimes you don't make a hell of a lot of sense."
There was that business with Carola, for instance. Why the hell did he have to slug her? It was the worst possible thing he could have done. But she goaded him. Her hot body pressed against him, hard and soft at the same time, and then the belt in the face with the handbag. He didn't have anything against women, and yet he was always doing something like that to them. They goaded him, and when a woman goaded him he went off his rocker.
His mother, for instance. A little woman, hard-working, with lines of anxiety at her eyes and mouth, trying to make him go the way she thought he ought to go, being exasperated because he was going some other way. He had slugged her, too. Physically, a couple of times. And always, day after day, in some other way. When she tried to tell him what to do he went off his rocker. What the hell, he couldn't help it. If these dames wouldn't leave him alone, if they insisted on infuriating him, what the hell could they expect? What they got was just a reflex of mind and muscle.
He thought about the girl cashier. He remembered how the door sprang open, all of its own accord, and he remembered how she tumbled out head first, spurting blood. He put his hand across his eyes, because he didn't like the look of that memory. But it came back again, and along with it came another thought, murky and formless in the depths of his mind. Did he, Sal Naples, shoot her on purpose? Did some screwball twist way down deep in him, in the back of his mind, in his gut or heart or wherever these screwball twists came from, make his arm aim the pistol at the girl when he meant to aim it at the cop?
No, it was one of the risks of the game, he told himself, he hadn't counted on it, hadn't wanted it to happen, but it had happened, and he could see now that a thing like that was in the cards. If you were going to play this game you had to figure on somebody getting hurt, somebody getting killed. It was a fact you had to accept. All right. He accepted it. The hell with it.
But there were some really stupid things he'd done; he had been too excited. He thought he was being cool, but he had been excited. He saw that now. The worst bonehead stunt of all was that Cad. A stolen Cad in New York City was the next thing to riding around in the pokey wagon. It was only blind luck he hadn't been picked up even before he got Carola home. It wasn't much better than blind luck that he got away.
He thought about how the Cad's wheel went spinning down West Street in the direction of the Lackawanna ferry, the screaming crash when the Cad hit the pillar ... It was nothing but luck he hadn't run into more cops when he ducked back along Barclay Street past the telephone building.
Well, that was real kid stuff. He was drunk-drunk in a funny kind of way, not altogether scotch and soda and champagne. Drunk on excitement, drunk on the feel of the .32 Mauser in his pocket, drunk with success, drunk with the feel of Carola's body, pressed hard and soft at the same time, against him. But it was kid stuff. That was what you could expect from Shoney or Pete Koscki or some of those other North Newark punks. It wasn't the way he wanted to be.
There was a sharp knock at the door.
Sal, who had been in his shirtsleeves, grabbed his jacket off the end of the bed and slipped into it. His .32 Mauser was in the jacket pocket. He put his hand around the stock and unlatched the door, opening it a crack. It was one of the maids.
"Don't you want your room done?" she asked.
He took his hand off the stock of the .32 and tried to look and act like Mr. Bennett of U.S. Steel.
"I'm going out in a few minutes," he said. "Are you in a hurry?"
"No, sir, I ain't. But I go off duty at four."
"I'll be out long before that."
"All right, sir. Here's your paper." He opened the door a little wider and she handed him the paper. He shut the door, heard the spring latch snap into position, heard the maid moving off down the hallway, opening another room with her passkey.
Sal sat down in the maple chair and looked at the paper. The big black type of the main headline said: "Three Killer Bandits Hunted." He looked through the story, but there wasn't much more in it than the one he had read in the evening paper the night before. It had the same picture of the girl, Rosa del Valle, on the front page. Underneath it was a story about her and her family. She had been an honor student in school, lived with her father and mother at a number on Mount Hope Street in North Newark. He read it all through twice, then he cut it out with a penknife, folded it up and put it in his pocket. The rest of the paper he stuffed into the wastebasket.
Sal sat down in the maple chair again. He looked at his watch and it was two o'clock. There was a dirty haze rising in the blue sky in the direction of New York.
There were three things he would do better next time. He puffed on his cigarette and ticked them off with his small delicate forefinger. One: Don't get tied up with any dumb bastards like Pete or any jittery ones like Shoney. Pick smarter guys for the team. Two: Don't pick any more spots in North Newark. Get farther away. Three: Make the getaway smarter. Get away faster, slicker and farther.
"Son of a bitch!" he exclaimed.
He got up, got his topcoat out of the closet, put it on and started to go out of the door. Then he stopped. He took the napkin from the Crown Club out of his pocket and, sitting on the bed with the telephone in his hand, called the number.
Carola's voice sounded sleepy.
"This is Sal."
"Oh," she said, and then, after a pause: "Yes?"
"I want to apologize," he said. "I'm sorry about last night. Very sorry."
He waited. There was a long pause. Then she said: "It wasn't your fault, Sal. I lost my head first." There was more then sleepiness in her voice, there was a sort of warm languor.
"Are you mad at me?"
The pause again. "No, Sal. I was for a while but I got over it. It was my fault in the first place."
Sal didn't know exactly what to say. He had hardly expected this.
Then he said: "I'd like to come and see you again and make it up to you."
"All right." He didn't know what her voice held. Possibly indifference. "When? Tonight?"
"No. Not tonight. Tomorrow night. Pick me up at the club at midnight and take me for a ride. Could you do that?"
"Sure," he said. "Sure." He tried to keep his voice cool, cool and smooth, tried to keep the eagerness back. He wondered how he was going to explain away the Cadillac that he wouldn't have. "Sure," he said again.
"All right. See you then. How's the plumbing business?"
"The what. Oh, fine, fine."
"That's good," she said. "Bye now." She hung up and he sat for a moment with the phone in his hand. Then he put it back in the cradle. What the hell! There was something dizzy about that dame, like all dames. What did she mean by that crack about the plumbing business? Didn't believe him? Had she got him figured out, guessed what kind of a business he was really in? And if so, didn't she care? A swift thought crossed his mind: maybe she was a police plant. No, that was impossible; even if they had figured him in they wouldn't have figured her in. There was nothing that hooked up.
He thought about the warm lazy tone in her voice. Maybe she was like Angela; maybe a sock in the jaw made her feel good. Could that be it?
He picked up his key, went down the elevator, paid another day's room, and went out into the street. The murky gray that had risen from the east now covered the whole sky. The afternoon sunlight, slanting across Broad Street through the hazy sky, was the color of lead.