Chapter XIX

Charles walked down the street and ran immediately into a challenge from a police sergeant.

“Where you from, mister?” the cop demanded, balanced and ready to draw.

Charles gulped and let Lee Falcaro’s drilling take over. “Oh, around, sergeant. I’m from around here.”

“What’re you so nervous about?”

“Why, sergeant, you’re such an exciting type, really. Did anybody ever tell you you look well in uniform?”

The cop glared at him and said: “If I wasn’t in uniform, I’d hang one on you sister. And if the force wasn’t all out hunting the lunatics, that killed Mr. Regan I’d pull you in for spitting on the sidewalk. Get to hell off my beat and stay off. I’m not forgetting your face.”

Charles scurried on. It had worked.

It worked once more with a uniformed policeman. One of the Chicago plain-clothes imports was the third and last. He socked Charles in the jaw and sent him on his way with a kick in the rear. He had been thoroughly warned that it would probably happen: “Count on them to over-react. That’s the key to it. You’ll make them so eager to assert their own virility, that it’ll temporarily bury their primary mission. It’s quite likely that one or more pokes will be taken at you. All you can do is take them. If you get--when you get through, they’ll be cheap at the price.”

The sock in the jaw hadn’t been very expert. The kick in the pants was negligible, considering the fact that it had propelled him through the gate of the Michigan City Transport Terminal.

By the big terminal clock the Chicago-Buffalo Express was due in fifteen minutes. Its gleaming single rail, as tall as a man crossed the far end of the concourse. Most of the fifty-odd people in the station were probably Buffalo-bound ... safe geldings who could be trusted to visit Syndic Territory, off the leash and return obediently. Well-dressed, of course, and many past middle-age, with a stake in the Mob Territory stronger than hope of freedom. One youngster, though--oh. It was Lee, leaning, slack-jawed, against a pillar and reading the Green Sheet.

Who were the cops in the crowd? The thickset man with restless eyes, of course. The saintly-looking guy who kept moving and glancing into faces.

Charles went to the newsstand and put a coin in the slot for The Mob--A Short History, by the same Arrowsmith Hunde who had brightened and misinformed his youth.

Nothing to it, he thought. Train comes in, put your money in the turnstile, show your permit to the turnstile’s eye, get aboard and that-is-that. Unless the money is phony, or the pass is phony in which case the turnstile locks and all hell breaks loose. His money was just dandy, but the permit now--there hadn’t been any way to test it against a turnstile’s template, or time to do it if there had been a way. Was the probability of boarding two to one?

The probability abruptly dropped to zero as a round little man flanked by two huge men entered the station.

Commander Grinnel.

The picture puzzle fell into a whole as the two plainclothesmen circulating in the station eyed Grinnel and nodded to him. The big one absent-mindedly made a gesture that was the start of a police salute.

Grinnel was Maurice Regan--the Maurice Regan mysteriously unknown to Oliver, who knew the Chicago police. Grinnel was a bit of a lend-lease from the North American Navy, called in because of his unique knowledge of Charles Orsino and Lee Falcaro, their faces, voices and behavior. Grinnel was the expert in combing the city without any nonsense about rights and mouthpieces. Grinnel was the expert who could set up a military interior guard of the city. Grinnel was the specialist temporarily invested with the rank of a Regan so he could do his job.