Terror Is My Trade by Stephen Marlowe

Author:Stephen Marlowe [Marlowe, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9019-4
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-11-05T14:28:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

I HAVE HAD BRUSHES with violent death before. It’s an occupational hazard, like stoop-shoulders for an accountant or lead poisoning for a painter. It’s there. You learn to live with it. The physical reaction, afterwards, is always predictable. When Gino and I turned the corner and merged with the fun-seeking crowds on St. Michel, my legs began to shake. They were still shaking when we got into a cab.

The cabbie chomped on a dead cigar and craned his neck at us. “Messieurs?”

“Anywhere,” I said. He scowled. “Place de la Concorde,” I told him.

“Maybe I’d better drop you at the hotel,” I said. “I want to walk.”

“No. Anything at all.”

We got out on the south side of the Place de la Concorde and walked to the foot of the Champs Elysées. We stopped at a sidewalk cafe for a drink. Gino had four Irish whiskies, neat. He didn’t say anything about the virtues of Italian wine. He just drank. I smoked and had four bourbons-on-the-rocks. They went down like water, but when I finished the fourth my fingers had stopped fluttering.

Suddenly Gino started talking. It was compulsive as my need to walk off excess energy. We paid our bill and got up and walked under the Arc and past the wavering flame of France’s Unknown Soldier. Gino talked about a lot of things. “I’m no good, guapo,” he said. “But I came up the hard way. Everything I got, I got for myself.” We walked and he rambled on. It was the disjointed story of his life, in fits and starts. Boyhood in the Tuscan hills. Early manhood in Firenze. Gino had been a pimp at seventeen. Early manhood in Chicago. The gangs. Capone. Prohibition. Then the uglier, deadlier rackets after Repeal. Gino had never spent a day in jail. He was proud of that because he’d broken more laws than most three time losers and got away with it. He was here, wasn’t he? Deported, but a free man.

“The income tax people,” he said. “They really socked it into me. You think I’d bother with the Insurance? I’m practically broke, guapo. I could turn out my pockets and a pan-handler in Montmartre wouldn’t get the price of a good meal. It was either pay up or serve time. Then out you go, Gino, we don’t want you anymore. I can’t blame them. I’m no good.”

A light misty rain began to fall. We crossed the street and went down the other side of the Avenue, back toward the Arc de Triomphe. Toward lights. Toward people. Toward life.

“You knew the Rumboughs in the old days,” I said finally. They were almost the first words I had spoken. “Didn’t you?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I heard Rufus talking to Wade. And Helen told me.”

“Yeah? She’s a good kid. A real good kid.”

“Was she going to stay with you—in London?”

He passed a hand over his face. He was suddenly weary. “She didn’t know what she wanted. She’s all mixed up.”

“Would you have let her?”

“She’s free, white and—”

“That’s not answering my question.

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