Checkpoint Charlie

Eddie said, “If you were a cop you couldn’t do me any good. I don’t want somebody to read the bastard his rights — I want somebody to nail him.”

“I’m not a hit man, Eddie. I don’t kill people.”

“I don’t want him killed. He didn’t kill me, did he?” His eyes glittered. “I just want him to hurt.”

“Who is he?”

“Calls himself Clay Foran. I doubt it’s the name he was born with. What he does, he lends money to people who can’t get it from the bank.”

“Loan shark.”

“Yeah.”

“Eddie, Eddie.” I shook my head at him. “You haven’t grown up at all.”

“Okay, I can’t move, I’m a captive audience if you want to deliver yourself of a lecture.”

“No lecture. What happened?”

“An apartment house construction deal. I ran into cost overrides — rising prices on building materials. I had to come up with another fifty thousand or forfeit to the bank that holds the construction mortgage. I figured to clear a four hundred K profit if I could complete the job and sell it for the capital gain, and of course there’s a whopping tax-shelter deduction in that kind of construction. So I figured I could afford to borrow the fifty thousand even if the interest rate was exorbitant.”

“Vigorish.”

“Yeah. Usury. Whatever. Trouble is, I was already stretched past my limit with the banks and the building-and-loans. Hell, I was kiting checks over the weekend as it was, but I was in too deep to quit. I had to get the building completed so I could sell it. Otherwise the bank was set to foreclose. So I asked around. Sooner or later somebody steered me to Clay Foran.”

“And?”

“Very respectable businessman, Foran. Calls himself an investment broker. Of course he’s co

“How big is he?”

“Compared to what?”

“Nickle and dime, or million-dollar loans?”

“In the middle. It didn’t pinch his coffers to come up with my fifty K but he did it after I offered him a little extra vigorish on the side. Mostly I imagine he spreads it around, five thousand here, ten thousand there — you know, minimize the risks. But hell, those guys get five percent a week; he’s rich enough.”

“Two hundred and sixty percent a

“You got it. I know, I know. But I was in a bind, Charlie, I had nowhere else to turn. And I figured to sell the project inside of a month. I figured I could handle it — ten grand interest.”

“But?”

“You see what they did to me. Obviously I came up short. It wasn’t my fault. The building next door caught fire. My building didn’t burn but the heat set off the automatic sprinkler system and it ruined the place. Seventy thousand damage — carpets, paint, doors, the works. The insurance barely covered half of it, and the damage set me back more than two months behind schedule. I had to bail out, Charlie. What choice did I have? My construction company went into Chapter Eleven. It’s not my first bankruptcy and maybe it won’t be my last — you know me — but I’d have paid them back. I tried to keep up the payments. I was a few days late a couple of times and we got threatening phone calls, so forth — you know how it goes. Then it wasn’t a week any more, it was three weeks, and you see what happened. They took out their vigorish in blood. I guess they wrote me off as a bad debt but they figure to leave me crippled as an example to other borrowers who think about welshing. Nothing personal, you understand.” His lip curled.

Margaret took his hand between hers. Margaret was always there to cushion Eddie’s falls: good-humored, fun-loving, careless of her appearance. She had endured all his failures; she loved the real Eddie, not the man he ought to have been. If I ever find a woman like Margaret I’ll have won the grand prize.

Eddie said, “I know the ropes, I had my eyes open, I’m not naive. But they’ve crippled me for life, Charlie. Both kneecaps. They’ll be replaced with plastic prosthetics but I’ll spend the rest of my life walking like a marionette. Two canes. I figure they hit me too hard, you know. I almost died. Maybe I still will. We don’t know what’s bleeding inside me.”

“You knew those guys played rough, Eddie. You knew it going in.”

It sounded lame and self-righteous even as I said it. Eddie’s eyes only smiled at me. He knew I’d pick up the baton.

*   *   *

MY LONG-DISTANCE CALL to Myerson was lengthy and exasperating. He kept coming back to the same sore point. “You’re asking me to commit Agency facilities to your private vengeance scheme. I can’t do it.”

“The Company’s got no use for it. Never will have. The press blew its cover in 1969 and it’s been sitting there ever since, gathering dust. They’re carrying it on the books as a dead loss — they’ll be tickled to unload and get some money out of it. From your end it’s a legitimate transaction and the profit ought to look pretty good on your efficiency report. And one other thing. If you don’t authorize it I’ll have to apply for a leave of absence to help my brother out. The Agency will grant it with pleasure— you know how eager they are to get rid of me. And of course that would leave you without anybody to pull your chestnuts out. You haven’t got anybody else in the division who can handle the dirty jobs. You’d get fired, you know.”

“You fat bastard.”

*   *   *

FORAN WAS slight and neat. The word dapper is out of fashion but it fits. He had wavy black hair and a swimming-pool tan and the look of a nightclub maître-d’ who’d made good.

It took me a week to get the appointment with him, a week of meeting people and letting a word drop here and a hint there, softly and with discretion. I’m good at establishing the bona fides of a phony cover identity and in this case it was dead easy because the only untruth in the cover story was my name: I didn’t want him to know I had any relationship with Eddie.

His office on the top floor of a nine-story high-rise had a lot of expensive wood, chrome and leather. The picture windows gave views of the city like aerial postcard photographs. It was cool inside — the air conditioning thrummed gently — but you could see heat waves shimmering in the thin smog above the flat sprawling city: the stuff was noxious enough to thin out the view of the. towering mountain ranges to the north and east. I felt a bit wilted, having come in from that.

Foran had a polished desk a bit smaller than the deck of an escort carrier; it had a litter of papers and an assortment of gewgaws made of ebony and petrified wood. He stood up and came affably around this display to shake my hand. His smile was cool, professional: behind it a ruthlessness he didn’t bother to conceal.

He had a deep confident voice. “Tell me about the proposition.”

“I’m looking to borrow some money. I’m not offering a prospectus.”

“If my firm authorizes a loan we have to know what it’s being used for.” He settled into his swivel chair and waited.

“What you want to know,” I said, “is whether you’ll get your money back and whether I’ll make the interest payments on time.”

“I don’t know you, Mr. Ballantyne. Why should I lend you money?”

“I’m not being cute,” I said. “If I lay out the details to you, what’s to keep you from buying into the deal in my place while I’m still out scrounging for capital?”

“That’s a risk you have to take. You’d take the same chance with anybody else, unless you’ve got a rich uncle. At least give me the outlines of the deal — it’ll give us a basis for discussion.”

I brooded at him as if making up my mind. I gave it a little time before I spoke. “All right. Let’s assume the government owns a small private company with certain tangible assets that are of limited value to any domestic buyer, but might be of enormous value to certain foreign buyers to whom the present owner is not impowered to sell. You get my drift?”