The Whole Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

chance of being important handed to him at the very moment when he was wishing for it.
    Cudgels … The Snake: yes, it was certain. He’d never mixed in such business, but you couldn’t live in this broken-down quarter of the city without hearing those names occasionally and learning that they were gang bosses and rivals. A club would be smashed up, a store’s biggest plate-glass window broken, a young tough carried to the hospital from an alley lined with garbage cans and floored with his blood. Then one heard mention of Cudgels Lister and Horace “Snake” Hampton. Also a car would be pointed out by a knowing youth: “The smart way to the top; I’m going that way one day!”
    Painfully, to the accompaniment of hard breathing, Howson forced himself to the crucial decision.
     
     
     

 
     
    v
     
     
     
     
     
    The street was still called Grand Avenue, but it had been one of the focal points of the crisis period. Afterwards people shied away from it, beginning the decline which had now reduced the side streets nearby to a status barely above slums. Even so, it was well lighted, and the garish stores had glaring windows, and Howson would normally have avoided it. He preferred the darker side of any street, and night to day.
    Now, heart hammering, he braved it. There was a place at the far end—a club and bar—which served as the Snake’s front for tax and other purposes. It was no use trying to make his ill-formed face look severe for the menacing encounter he was bound to; a mirror on the door of a barber’s told him that as he passed. The best he could hope to do would be to look … well … casual.
    The hell. It was what he had to say that mattered.
    He hobbled clear past his destination the first time, because his mouth was so dry and his guts were so tense. He stopped a few yards farther on, and deliberately evened his breathing until he had some semblance of control. Then he plunged.
    The bar was chromed, mirrored, neoned. Music blasted from speakers high on the wall. At tables early drinkers were grouped in twos and threes, but there was no one at the bar yet. A bored bartender leaned on his elbows and eyed the short stranger with the limp.
    He said, “What’ll it be?”
    Howson didn’t drink, had never tried alcohol. He’d seen shambling drunks and wondered why the hell anyone gifted with ordinary physical control should want to throw it away. The thought of being even more uncoordinated filled him with disgust. In any case, he had no spare money.
    He said, “Is … uh … Mr. Hampton here?”
    The bartender took his elbows off the counter. He said, “What’s that to you, Crooky? He’s not for public show!”
    “I have something he’ll want to hear,” Howson said, mentally cursing the reedy pipe which had to serve him for a voice.
    “He knows everything he wants to know,” the bartender said curtly. “There’s the door. Use it.”
    He picked up a damp cloth and began to swab beer rings off the bar.
    Howson looked around and licked his lips. The customers had decided not to stare at him any more. Encouraged, he went the sidewise pace necessary to confront the bartender again.
    “It’s about some business of Cudgels’,” he whispered. His whisper was better than his ordinary voice—less distinctive.
    “Since when did Cudgels tell you his stories?” the bartender said sourly. But he thought it over, and after a pause gave a shrug. Reaching under the bar, he seemed to grope for something—a buzzer, maybe. Shortly, a door behind the bar opened and a man with oily black hair appeared.
    “Crooky here,” the barman said. “Wants to sell news about Cudgels to Mr. Hampton.”
    The oily-haired man stared unbelievingly at Howson. Then he too shrugged, gestured; the flap of the bar was raised for Howson to limp through.
    In back was the stockroom of the bar. Oily-hair escorted Howson through here, through a door lined with red baize, down a badly lighted corridor to a similar door. And