“Listen, I’m no bank, lady. But I’ll give you a fair price. What do you know?” I shoved a few more greenbacks at her. She counted the money, folded it and shoved it somewhere private.
“A few nights back, the place was jumping. Rock and roll night and more than a few fresh customers from outside. We all had a good time. Two of the new faces were hoods. It wasn’t just the suits that gave it away. I can smell hoods a mile away. Not sure whose mob they were from. Maybe outta town. Carrying enough hardware to start a war.”
“You talk to them?”
“Nah, but I listened in over the shoulder of the bozo who was trying to carry me off into the night. Fat chance. I was holding him up.”
“So what did these guys talk about?”
“Something was going down. Big action. They were posing as talent scouts. Like I’m an opera diva. Talent scouts! White slavers more like. Anyways, they was watching the girls’ acts. I watched them. Weird thing was, they didn’t take a load of notice of all the naked flesh on display, you know, the tasteful dancing and stuff. Most guys had their eyes and tongues hanging out. These two were listening.”
“For the singers?”
“Sure. You mentioned two names.” She looked around as if it would be a bad idea to repeat the names like they were a curse or something. “When they did their acts, these guys perked up.”
“The girls were good?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I got a good ear. These two had class. I’d give a lot to have a voice like that. And they had the chassis to go with the voices. Sleek. I hated them.”
“What happened?”
“I heard one of the hoods say these two would be right for some woman. I guess she was their boss. She had a fancy name.” She swigged her gin as if it would fuel her memory. Her eyes blinked in concentration. I motioned for the barman to top up her glass.
“Cadenza?” she said. “Was that it?”
I felt as though a sudden cold wind had blown across the room. “Carmella Cadenza.”
“Yeah, that wuz it. Mouthful. Sounds like some piece from Hollywood. Anyway, the hoods muscled their way over to the stage and spoke to the girls and I reckon they bought them drinks. That wuz it. Cleared off soon after.”
“You said these guys were talking about something before that.”
“My head was full of booze—when isn’t it?—so I didn’t get much more than the drift of it. Something about power. The girls wuz gonna help this Cadenza woman get some kind of power.”
The cold wind blew colder. I’d crossed paths with Carmella Cadenza before and it had taken a certain amount of strange power to foil her unsavoury ambitions. She’d lost out, but my guess was she was the kind of woman who’d go looking for an alternative means to get what she wanted, none of it any good for the rest of us. If she was kidnapping young women, there were several potential reasons that sprang to mind, all of them unpleasant.
“You look like you could do with a stiff drink, mister,” said Selene, like she was mounting a half-hearted attempt to seduce more cash out of me.
“You have any idea where these hoods and the girls went? Does anyone?”
She shook her head. “I’ll ask around. Come back tomorrow. I’ll have something for you, even if it’s only a warm bunk.”
* * * *
I spent the next day mooching around town and I was beginning to get the feeling that I’d have to go back to The Gunrunner Club and see if the delectable Selene had dug up anything for me, other than a warm bunk. With more than a little reluctance, I was heading in that direction, when a voice behind me pulled me up short.
I turned to face the cracked smile of a grizzled old sailor, Sten-Gun Stan, mechanic to the eccentric Henry Maclean, a youngster who spent a lot of his time cruising about in an unlikely tin can he called The Deep Green—a submarine of sorts, in which I had once experienced the very dubious delights of underwater travel.
“Been looking for you,” he said. Stan’s crumpled jacket reeked of oil like he’d just finished greasing the engines on that infernal machine of his.
I let him direct me to one of the buildings along the sidewalk, a place where auctions were held from time to time. Today was one of those times, and a crowd had assembled within, shoulder to shoulder, so I wondered what they were pedaling.
“Keep a low profile,” said Stan.
“You expecting trouble?” I asked, but it was a dumb question. Whatever he and Henry were up to would likely have questionable ramifications.
“Henry’s after something. There’s a whole load of musical instruments up for bids, most of it junk, some of it the real deal, and one item in particular of special interest. Henry has set his heart on it, but we think there are others who want it, too.”
“Others?” The word dripped with painful possibilities.
“Toughs working for someone higher up the food chain. You got your hardware?”
“Does a dog have fleas?”
He grinned and we muscled our way further in, ignoring the scowls and grunts of annoyance from the press of bodies. I saw Henry a few rows ahead. As usual, he was dressed in a tee-shirt, a patterned thing that would have looked more in place on a West Coast beach, his mop of blonde hair standing out like a sunflower in a bed of nettles.
I also saw the big guy in a trench coat tucked in directly behind him. My guess was, he was up to no good. I could smell it on him. Henry and I eased our way towards him and got as close as we could. So far he hadn’t noticed us.
“Cover my back if things liven up,” said Henry. I wasn’t sure what he was expecting—this was the last place you’d want to start a gunfight or any kind of fight for that matter. We were hemmed in by the crowd.
There was a stage at the front, and the auctioneers, a team of three guys, were getting through their wares, slick and fast, gabbling in their own weird language, and as far as I could see, bids were flying in from all directions, snapping up the various gewgaws on offer.
“This next one’s ours,” said Stan, referring to a grubby programme he’d picked up. He pointed to a photo of what looked like a guitar, although it was pretty damn weird—vary narrow, elongated base and a stretched neck. My guess was it was one of those hybrid things from the Orient, and it would make twisted sounds, gimmicky and off the wall. Yeah, that would attract Henry’s interest.
The bidding started low like no one was that interested. Henry waited for a while, then slipped in a bid of his own. It was countered by a thick-set guy across the hall from us. He looked like the double of the big trench coat who was now pressed up behind Henry, like a leech about to attach itself. Two big uglies in trench coats. I wasn’t liking this.
Henry and the guy across the room exchanged bids, lifting the price up to a sum that surprised me and got the crowd buzzing. Then I saw the guy behind Henry say something to him, into his ear. It must have been a threat. Drop out of the bidding, something like that. I saw Henry stiffen, but Stan had squeezed ahead of me.
The guy across the room had upped the bidding and held the initiative. Stan had almost got himself into a brawl, but he pressed up behind the trench coat. The guy stiffened and slumped. Stan started to indicate to those around him that some guy had fainted. Pretty soon a space had cleared and the guy was stretched out on the deck, dead to the world. Henry must have slipped a needle into him, a needle loaded with enough dope to knock out a horse.
Henry immediately upped his bid for the guitar and I looked across at trench coat two. His face was a picture. Not a pretty one, at that. He snarled a higher bid, but there had to be a ceiling on what he was allowed to offer. Henry bettered it. He sure wanted that guitar.
Now,