Read Make Room! Make Room! for Free Online Page B

Western Union,” he said and looked around the empty cubicle for the source of the voice.
    “Let me see your board.”
    It was then he realized that the voice was coming from a grille above the inner door, next to the glassy eye of a TV pickup. He held up the board so that it could be seen by the orthicon. This must have satisfied the unseen watcher because there was the click of the circuit going dead and shortly after that the door opened before him, letting out a wave of chilled air.
    “Let me have it,” Michael O’Brien said, and Billy handed him the board and waited while the man broke the seal with his thumb and opened the hinged halves.
    Though he was in his late fifties, iron gray, carrying an impressive paunch and a double row of jewels, O’Brien still bore the marks of his early years on the West Side docks. Scars on his knuckles and on the side of his neck—and a broken nose that had never been set correctly. In 1966 he had been a twenty-two-year-old punk, as he was fond of saying when he told the story, with nothing on his mind but booze and broads and a couple of days’ stevedoring a week to pay for the weekends, but when he had walked into a roundhouse swing in a brawl at the Shamrock Bar and Grill it had changed his life for him. While recovering in St. Vincent’s (the nose had healed quickly enough but he had fractured his skull on the floor) he had taken a long look at his life and decided to make something of it. What it was he made he never added when he told the story, but it was common knowledge that he had become involved with ward politics, the disposal of hijacked goods from the docks and a number of other things that were best not to mention in his hearing. In any case his new interests paid better than stevedoring and he had never regretted a moment of it. Six foot two, and swaddled in an immense and colorful dressing gown like a circus elephant, he could have been ludicrous, but wasn’t. He had seen too much, done too much, was too sure of his power ever to be laughed at—even though he moved his lips when he read and frowned in concentration while he spelled out the telegram.
    “Wait there, I want to make a copy of this,” he said when hecame to the end. Billy nodded, happy to wait as long as possible in the air-cooled, richly decorated hall. “Shirl, where the hell is the pad?” O’Brien shouted.
    There was a mumbled answer from the door on the left and O’Brien opened it and went into the room. Billy’s eyes automatically followed him through the lit doorway to the white-sheeted bed and the woman lying there.
    She lay with her back turned, unclothed, red hair sweeping across the pillow, her skin a whitish pink with a scattering of brown freckles across the shoulders. Billy Chung stood unmoving, his breath choked in his throat; she wasn’t ten feet away. She crossed one leg over the other, accentuating the round swell of buttock. O’Brien was talking to her but the words came through as meaningless sounds. Then she rolled over toward the open door and saw him.
    There was nothing he could do, he could not move and he could not turn his eyes away. She
saw
him looking at her.
    The girl on the bed smiled at him, then reached out a slender arm to the door, her breasts rose full and round, pink tipped—the door swung shut and she was gone.
    When O’Brien opened the door and came out a minute later she was no longer on the bed.
    “Any answer?” Billy asked as he took back the message board. Did his voice sound as strange to this man as it did to him?
    “No, no answer,” O’Brien said as he opened the hall door. Time seemed to be moving slowly now for Billy, he clearly saw the door as it opened, the shining tongue of the lock, the flat piece of metal on the wall with the hanging wires. Why were these important?
    “Aren’t you gonna give me a tip, mister?” he asked, just to occupy a moment more.
    “Beat it, kid, before I boot your chunk.”
    He was in the hall and the heat