The voices, when I heard them, seemed far away and I walked on, aware that someone was speaking angrily. The first door opened into a kind of anteroom. I went in cautiously and moved through darkness to where a thousand fingers of light pierced a lattice screen.
Coimbra was seated at his desk, one of his heavies, Gilberto, at his back holding a gun. Herrara, the man who had brought Burke up from the cafe, leaned against the door, arms folded.
Burke was standing a couple of yards away from the desk, legs slightly apart, hands in the pockets of his bush jacket. I could see him in profile and his face might have been carved from stone.
‘You don’t seem to understand,’ Coimbra was say-ing. ‘No one was interested in your proposition, it’s as simple as that.’
‘And my five thousand dollars?’
Coimbra looked as if he was fast losing his patience. ‘I have been put to considerable expense in this matter -considerable expense.’
‘I’m sure you have.’
‘Now you are being sensible, major. In business these things happen. One must be prepared to take risks for quick returns. And now you must excuse me. My men will escort you. This is a rough district. It would desolate me if anything were to happen to you.’
‘I’m sure it would,’ Burke said dryly.
Gilberto smiled for the first time and hefted the Luger in his hand and Burke took off his bush hat, wip-ing his face with the back of his right hand, looking suddenly beaten.
But I could see what they could not. Inside the crown of his hat an old short-barrelled Banker’s special was held in place by a spring clip. He shot Gilberto from cover, so to speak, slamming him back against the wall, turned and covered Herrara who was starting to draw.
‘I don’t think so,’ Burke said, and I was aware of the power in the man, the vital force.
He made Herrara face the wall and searched him quickly. And Coimbra, man of surprises to the end, opened a silver cigar box and produced a small auto-matic.
I had a friend once who took up golf and was a scratch man within three months. He had a natural flair for the game just as some people have language kinks and others can rival computers in mental calcula-tion.
On one memorable Sunday afternoon during my first month at Harvard, another student took me to a local pistol club. I’d never fired a gun in my life, yet when he put a Colt Woodsman in my hand and told me what to do, I experienced a new feeling. The gun became a part of me and the things I did with it in one short hour had astonished everyone there.
So I was a natural shot with something of a genius for hand guns, but I had never aimed at a human being. What happened next seemed so natural that, in retrospect, it was frightening. I flung open the door, dropped to one knee and grabbed for Gilberto’s Luger where it lay on the floor. In the same moment, I shot Coimbra through the hand.
Burke swung, crouched for action, a tiger ready to spring, his own gun in one hand, Herrara’s in the other. Although I didn’t realise it then, it said a lot for his control that he didn’t shoot me as a reflex action.
He gave me one brief glance and I thought he would smile. Instead, he opened the outside door, listened, then closed it again.
‘The kind of place where people mind their own business,’ I told him.
He walked slowly to the desk. Gilberto crouched against the wall clutching his chest, blood at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open, but he was obviously in deep shock. Coimbra had gone very pale and held his right hand under his left arm as if trying to stop the bleeding. Burke touched him between the eyes with the barrel of his revolver.
‘Five thousand dollars.’
Even then Coimbra hesitated and I put in quickly, ‘There’s a safe inside the walnut cabinet by the door.’
Burke thumbed back the hammer of his revolver with an audible click and Coimbra said hastily, ‘The key is in the cigar box under the tray.’