Scarlet Night Read Online Free Page A

Rubinoff said. “I only hope your Ginni has not been too clever for her own good—for the good of all of us.”
    “Her calculations have worked till now.”
    “So it would seem.” Rubinoff sighed and turned in his seat as though he could finally bear to look at him. “Sean O’Grady, is it?” He offered his hand, a wet sponge that O’Grady wrung lightly.
    “Most people call me Johnny. Sean’s my professional name.”
    Rubinoff put the car in motion. “Where do you want to go?”
    “I’m going to McGowan’s Bar and Grill on Forty-fifth and Ninth, but you can drop me anywhere midtown.”
    They turned north on Sixth Avenue.
    “You’re an actor?” Rubinoff asked, harking back to the professional name.
    “I’m a merchant seaman, but I read a bit of poetry now and then from the stage—you might say for political purposes.”
    Rubinoff threw him a furtive glance. You had to know that politics was not his game. An aging fag, O’Grady decided, which was sad. Except that he had money, at least a part of which had to be legitimate. Otherwise he would not have been all that persona grata among the crowd at the gallery. Or with Ginni. This was no caper for a common crook. An uncommon one maybe.
    Rubinoff said, “I haven’t seen Maude for years. She used to be a beautiful woman. Would you believe it?”
    “I would, knowing the daughter.”
    “Do you know her well?” He trailed the word out in a way that you could not escape its meaning.
    “Intimately.” O’Grady laid it on heavier than he might have with another man.
    “Oh, dear,” Rubinoff said, as though he didn’t approve of intimacy.
    “This operation might never have come off otherwise, Mr. Rubinoff.”
    The man looked at him with amazement.
    “Watch the road,” O’Grady said and then went on defensively: “She knew who she was picking. It was no small matter, bumping another seaman from his berth at Naples in order to take his place. Otherwise, how would I have been on the docks here to get our boy through customs?”
    “I’m sure I don’t know.” Rubinoff shook his head. Nor did he want to know.
    But O’Grady was determined to rub his snooty nose in the dirty end of the business. “It was a good fight till the police broke it up. And in the end they did my work for me, giving the poor bastard a crack on the skull and carting him off to sober up before presenting him to the American Consul. By that time his boat was well out in the Mediterranean and me in his berth.”
    “Remarkable,” Rubinoff murmured, patient now, as though deciding it was better that O’Grady unburden himself to him than to a stranger.
    “Customs was the easy part. I’ve a friend, an inspector on the Brooklyn docks, see, and every time I’m overseas I bring him back a little vial of Rumanian pills for his mother’s arthritis. All I had to say was I knew the boy, and him and his paintings sailed through without a question.”
    Rubinoff made a noise of approval.
    Having told it all, O’Grady wished he hadn’t. It didn’t sound like much, laid out. “It’ll be a trickier business, the return trip.”
    Rubinoff aimed the Porsche between a bus and a mail truck, both heading into the same lane. The Porsche shot out front like a spurt of toothpaste. Rubinoff drove like a teenager and he had to be fifty.
    “You pulled that one off well,” O’Grady said, grudging admiration.
    “Tell me a little about Ginni,” Rubinoff said.
    “Have you not met her?”
    “No.”
    “Ah, she’s a wild, beautiful woman. Her father’s a count or some such. He’s well off.”
    “That I know.”
    “She plays him like a mandolin, coaxing money out of him for this artists’ commune she’s set up.”
    “Are they all as talented as Ralph Abel?”
    O’Grady laughed. “Don’t be too hard on the lad. Flattery makes fools of the best of us. Ginni’s up to a number of things I don’t think would interest you, Mr. Rubinoff.”
    “I dare say.”
    “She was on the other end of a