Lone Wolf #10: Harlem Showdown Read Online Free Page B

organization. He slapped Gianelli flatly across the mouth, a dull, hollow, single impact.
    Gianelli took it, his face broadening under the impact, his eyes springing involuntary tears. Otherwise, he remained impassive.
    “Don’t say that,” Miller said, “don’t you ever say that again.”
    “I’m not here to talk,” Gianelli said, cautiously rubbing his cheek as if it were someone else’s; this is not happening to
me
, his eyes said, someone else, some phantom Gianelli stands in this room being slapped around, the real Gianelli is merely observing this from a far distance. He wouldn’t be any part of it. The real Gianelli would not undergo such humiliation. “I’m not here to talk,” he said again, “I don’t want to talk. Are you going to let me go after him?”
    “I don’t know,” Miller said, “it depends. Why don’t you give me your information and let
us
go after him?”
    “No. It’s not information anyway, it’s just a feeling. I’ve got a feeling for this guy, I’ve studied him, I know his moves, where he probably is. But it’s nothing I can tell you.”
    “We won’t give you any men,” Miller said. “We’ve lost enough men going after him. This time we’re not going to take any risks at all.”
    “All right,” Gianelli said, the knowledge sinking into him that he was going to get almost nothing. “So I don’t get any men. I don’t get any help. Then all I want is permission.”
    “Permission for what?”
    “Permission to work in your territory. Permission to kill him. That is all I want.”
    “It’s a free country,” Miller said, “I can’t stop you.”
    “No, but you can make things very unpleasant for a man operating without your permission. I know about such things,” Gianelli said. “I am, after all, not any kind of a fool and I know how these things are done. If you will not give me help, you must at least give me permission so that I can avenge my old friend.”
    “Listen,” Miller said, turning to face the window, back from the window and to Gianelli, who was now rubbing his palms together, his eyes bright and somehow limitless in their apprehension. Miller saw small, doomed images of himself pinned in those eyes, blinking, blinking, blinking away. “Now listen, Calabrese wasn’t killed. Calabrese, I mean, he was
killed
all right but not by Wulff. There was no sabotage on that plane, the indications were that it just went down—”
    “No difference,” Gianelli said loudly, waving a hand, and Miller began to feel the focus of the conversation shift, now he was no longer in control: how had he lost control of this? It had been he who had slapped Gianelli the petitioner. Now it was Gianelli who controlled the room. “No difference, he sent my old friend to his death as surely as if he had pulled a gun on him; he was responsible for his going to Miami, he was responsible for bringing my old friend to this position, he put him on that plane, and he made him die. You know nothing of honor or vengeance,” he said, little white streaks appearing on his face, “you know nothing of these qualities; you come from a generation that laughs at these qualities, mocks them, makes the words stand for something that is only cause for laughter,” Gianelli said, and he was suddenly quite powerful, the dominance in the room was no longer something that Miller merely imagined. It was a physical fact. Gianelli looked years younger, his body seemed distended to great proportions, his face alive with youth—or merely energy, it was difficult to tell, they could have been the same thing. “This is for my old friend, Nicholas, and it is not for you to stand between the two of us. I do not do it for profit,” he said, “I do it for honor.”
    Miller had nothing to say. What could he say? There was no way to respond to the old man. In fact the old man was right, he was now being put into a context that had nothing to do with the way he regarded life, tried to run it. Life for