Shadow of a Tiger Read Free

the single elevator. The night clerk was just as solid, neither old nor young, neat and a friend.
    â€œI’m going to wait for someone asking for room 427 or Claude Marais, George. I’ll be quiet, and I’d appreciate a high sign. Okay?”
    â€œAny trouble involved, Dan?” George Jenkins asked.
    â€œJust talk, I hope. It’s worth ten, okay?”
    â€œKeep your money, Dan. Drink the beer out of sight, and put the cans in the bag. The manager’s touchy.”
    I nodded thanks—ten saved is ten earned—and found an armchair where a rubber plant hid me. I could see the entrance, desk, elevator and stairs. There were no other ways up. The lobby wasn’t air-conditioned, and the chair was heavy and hot. It was going to be a bad night.
    For money and nothing else. I felt like a fool, a tool, or worse. A job I really knew nothing about, and didn’t care a damn about—because I had to have money. Work I should have turned down because it was work in the dark, but a desperate man can’t afford that luxury. The story of most men.
    I had just finished my first beer when the stocky younger brother came out of the elevator and headed for the street. I had been paid to keep anyone away from Claude Marais, so I went out after him. In the stifling night, he turned uptown on Ninth Avenue. He didn’t act like a man with someone out to kill him. He just walked uptown in that slow, gliding walk as if he had a weight dragging him back. When he crossed Nineteenth Street, I guessed where he was going.
    There was a light inside the pawn shop of Eugene Marais as Claude turned into it. He had to wait for the door to be opened. After he had gone in, I took up a station across the street, lit a cigarette, and waited. The whole city was out in shirtsleeves, walking aimlessly in a vain attempt to find, or make, a breeze.
    It was just past nine when Claude Marais came out of the pawn shop again. He wasn’t alone. A short young girl was with him—heavy-bodied and big-breasted, her dark hair long on her bare shoulders, her face full-lipped and petulant. She wore a loose blouse off her shoulders, and tight shorts, and I recognized her—Danielle Marais, Eugene’s daughter. Nineteen, her heavy body was full and sensual.
    I followed them back to the Stratford. They went up together. I wondered if the wife, Li, was up in the room? After all, what did I really know about why I had been hired? Or who I was really staked out to watch for?

    Somewhere around ten, a big puff of cooler air ran around the lobby for a time, and I finished my second beer. I was about to open the third before it boiled, and almost missed the night clerk’s high sign.
    The youth at the desk wasn’t middle-aged, scarred or German, but he had asked for Claude Marais or his room, and I cornered him at the elevator. I knew him—a twenty-year-old street kid from south of Houston Street: Charlie Burgos.
    â€œVisiting friends, Charlie?”
    He curled his lip. “What’s it to you, Fortune?”
    Defensive and aggressive—both together, and immediately. Defensive, because like all street kids of the slums he knew his powerlessness. Aggressive, because aggression, immediate and animal, was the only hope of power any street kid had. Strike before you’re struck. The street kids of poor, dirty, tough, abandoned streets that didn’t exist to the daylight world of affluent America.
    â€œI’m going to check you out, Charlie,” I said.
    He had been checked for weapons all his young life, Charlie Burgos, whenever he ventured beyond his own streets and alleys. Guilty, until reluctantly found innocent by cops who knew that crime did live in the slums.
    â€œCheck,” Charlie Burgos said, indifferent.
    My right to check him was power, nothing more. Physical power because I was older, social power because I had at least some standing in the proper community. Not like Charlie Burgos or