361 - Donald E. Westlake [47]
“Not the last one. Little Irving.”
“Oh. Little guy, baldheaded. You’ll recognize him.”
“All right.”
“Fine. Now, all you do is stay with me. You don’t have to talk unless you feel like it. The less said the better, maybe. But stick with me, at least till the talking’s done. You got to pee, do it now.”
I shook my head.
“You sure?”
“Goddamn it.”
“Okay, okay. Just so you know. You got to stay right with me. Right side, you see? On my right side.”
“All right.”
“You got your brother’s Luger?”
“The other one’s smaller. The revolver.”
“Where is it?”
I pointed at the dresser. “Top drawer.”
“Wear it. Where you can reach it, where you can show it. But not where you can’t hide it. You know what I mean?”
“In my belt, at the side.”
“Okay, fine.” He stood up, smoothed the wrinkles out of his jacket and trousers. I reached off the bed for the ashtray and put it on my chest. He said, “Don’t get me wrong. Nobody’s going to shoot nobody. But maybe somebody wants to know if you’re carrying, you see? And you are.”
“Okay.”
He walked around the room, blowing cigar smoke like a big cattleman. “There’s two kinds of people in this world, Ray,” he said. “There are leaders, and there are followers. And there’s only the one kind of follower, but there’s all kinds of leaders. There’s glorious leaders that take a whole goddamn country over the cliff, and there’s ward leaders that wouldn’t last a day without the snow-shovel patronage. And all kinds of leaders in between, you see what I mean?”
“I see what you mean.” It was a phrase I’d heard him use before. He was talking now because he was nerved up. I didn’t even have to make believe I was listening.
“Now most of these guys that are going to be here tonight,” he said, “they’re what you might call middle-ground leaders. They can lead a bunch of followers fine, just so long as somebody else tells them how. Somebody else like Nick and Irving and Little Irving, you know what I mean?”
I looked up at the ceiling and blew cigarette smoke at it. The ashtray rode my chest. Kapp prowled around the room, talking to let off steam. “Most of these guys,” he said, “these middle-ground leaders, they’ve been around straight on through since the thirties. But their top men, like Nick and the Irvings, they’ve been out of commission for a while. So the rest of these guys have just drifted. Some of them are with the mob now, way down at the bottom of the list, where the crumbs fall. They’ll be here, because they want to move up a notch. And they figure Nick or one of the Irvings for their real boss anyway, not one of these thin, slick snotnoses like they have today. So there they are, they’ve already got a little chunk of the organization in their pocket. When the time comes, they consolidate that chunk and then maybe send a couple arms to help straighten out some other neighborhood somewhere. See what I mean?”
“Yeah.” I moved the ashtray off my chest and sat up for a while.
“And the other kind of guy we’ll see,” he said, “is the independent. New York’s a big apple. There’s independents working right inside the city limits, not even paying off to the regular organization. A neighborhood book, a little quiet unionizing, one thing and another. All off in little corners, out in Brooklyn and Queens. Small-time leaders again. They want to be part of the mob, if Nick and the Irvings and me are running it.”
“Yeah.”
“We got half an organization already,” he said. “All we do is grab the other half. Like plucking a peach.” He laughed. “You know what I mean? Like plucking a peach.”
Over our heads people were walking back and forth. Kapp looked up at the ceiling. “I better go up,” he said. “You come up as soon as you can.”
“Yeah.”
He went to the door and opened it. Then he looked back at me and closed it again and said, “You sore at something, boy?”
“Nothing special.”
He shook his head and grinned at me. “You’re a surly bastard,” he said.
“I’m the strong silent type.”
He widened his eyes. “You sore about that little trick