In the Shop Part 2

Anyway it's dusk and closing time, and next to the shop down a spiral staircase is a bar, already brightly lit and inviting. Tempting to stay.
And as I see the pallid languid boys leaving, and the gangster proprietors put their white heads together, the colours of their sharp suits blending in the shadows, I begin to imagine. What if I could stay here through the night, when the place was shut up and quiet...
What if I could stay forever? What if I was a spy cop private dick there to eavesdrop, I'd hide myself in a long gallery-space upstairs, behind thick curtains. Down in the shopspace the old gangsters have taken out a bottle and shot glasses, in the dimness by the counter they sit and murmur. One of these old geezers has an enormous head of white hair, is crafty, distrustful, unsmiling.
And perhaps the spy cop, the investigative journalist, is in the overhanging gallery, or hiding behind the curtains, or locked in the hushed ballroom when he steps on a loose floorboard that creaks its echoes around the wide room, one of those lovely varnished floorboards so often seen in galleries. The gangster's heads glance up and the FBI man's cover is blown, his mission aborted.
Now he runs him outside to the anonymous-grey back of the store, where a short gravel path  leads from the fire exit, simultaneously drawing his official handgun from its holster at his side. He sees, almost before he has time to take it in, the white-haired, huge-headed, portly gangster dashing down the concrete fire-escape, and he seems to the hero movie spycop to be reaching for a weapon, to make good his escape. The honest man from the bureau's firearm flashes in response once, twice, and the gangster-actor performs a marvellous stunt, plummeting down the concrete steps, really impressive and I hope the actor, who must be over 60, hasn't hurt himself.
His weasely, thin-faced accomplice meets a similar fate, while dashing across a nearby concrete gangway. At the end of it a squad car has already sped up, and the sexshop gangster is bundled inside, in a flash of gold bracelet and spiv moustache.
Another triumph for the G-Men.