Exactly as ordered. Any improvisation would be punished. This man, this Jake Fallon, would leave his nephew's apartment building some time between ten and midnight. He would be without a bodyguard. The taxi was to be waiting for him. During the ride back to Brooklyn, the driver was to talk to him of baseball. First of baseball, and then of the driver's wife and children. Nothing else. But when the time came, when this Fallon climbed into the taxi, and had waved goodbye to his nephew, he was clearly in no mood to talk of baseball. The driver had been warned that this might happen. “He'll probably have a lot on his mind about then,” said the man who had sent the driver. “Just keep saying your lines. He'll rise to the bait soon enough.” Jake Fallon, however, had said nothing at all except to give his address and to say what route should be taken. The driver knew these things already. Last night and this morning he had practiced the run from the nephew's building—it was high on Manhattan's West Side—to Fallon's fine brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.
