Sir Alan Lascelles sat in the wing chair beside the window in the well-named Pink Room on the second floor of Springwood, President Roosevelt’s estate in the Hudson River Valley, and smoked a cigarette. Her Royal Highness had carried herself off to bed shortly following the disastrous and disastrously late dinner during which an entire service of Limoges china had been shattered when a serving table collapsed. The king was off with the Canadian prime minister chatting away happily about events of state. When Lascelles had left Roosevelt’s smoking room twenty minutes before they had been discussing their mutual distaste for the Russians, and Lascelles, neither a diplomat nor a member of the Foreign Office, tactfully withdrew.
In the royal household, overhearing some conversations was decidedly unwise and could easily lead to banishment to some god-awful corner of the empire where it either never stopped raining or never rained at all. As the eldest daughter of the late viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, Lascelles’s poor wife, Joannie, had spent enough time in awful climates. At their age neither of them were up to a stint in someplace like British Guyana or the Ivory Coast. A chill ran down his spine at the very thought of it.
He finished his cigarette and sat back in the comfortable chair, allowing himself to relax a little. There were only three events scheduled for tomorrow: church, a picnic, and tea at the First Lady’s cottage at Val Kill. Roosevelt, bless his shrewd heart, had seen to it that their leave-taking from the United States would be without too much in the way of pomp and circumstance, sending them on their way with a minimum of fuss. Another few days and they’d be back aboard ship and on the way home. He smiled at that. Home—now didn’t that have a nice ring to it. A week or so of leave with Joan and the children at their country house in Dorset, without a single royal in sight—what a treat that would be!
A knock at the door brought him out of his reverie.
“Come in.”
The door opened and Hugh Cameron, the king’s policeman, stepped into the room. “Sorry to interrupt you, sir, but there’re two men who’d like to see someone in authority.”
Lascelles glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost ten. “Who are they and what do they want at this time of night?”
“They’re policemen, sir. One of theirs and one of ours, so to speak. They say it’s extremely important.”
“Where are they?”
“Two Secret Service men are detaining them in the main hall downstairs, sir.”
“I’ll come down,” said Lascelles. Picking up his cigarette case and lighter he followed Cameron out of the room.
Jane was tired and she was running out of hotels. She’d checked the first three on the list, first looking through the parking lots and on the street, then going in and buttonholing the hotel night clerks, paving the way with a ten-spot each time. No white Dodge and no late check-ins that even came close to the description of the elusive Mr. Green, or whatever his name was.
She turned off Main onto Market Street, then turned again onto Cannon, finding the Poughkeepsie Inn just a little off the corner. She parked the bright yellow Plymouth across from the hotel entrance, then climbed out of the car and went across the street. The parking area filled up the corner lot beside the six-story brick hotel, lit by a pair of streetlights. She felt her heart jump in her chest as she spotted a ghostly white Dodge parked at the back of the lot. Threading her way between the other vehicles she saw that it was a ’39, brand-new, just like the one stolen from the World’s Fair site. Reaching the car her spirits fell as she saw that the plates were all wrong. Instead of 3J 20 86 the plate on this car was T9 33 47. She let out a long breath and turned away. Time to start hitting the smaller places along 9A and State 9 itself, the old Post Road highway that was the main road to Hyde Park and Albany.
She stopped in her tracks and turned back to the big coupé as the realization hit her. The Dodge couldn’t have that plate number because all license plates in New York State had a number-letter pair at the beginning except for trucks, which always started with the letter T. She walked back to the Dodge, took a careful look around to make sure no one was watching her and bent down to check the plate. Sure enough there were fresh scratches around the screw holes on the rear plate. She didn’t even bother with the front plate. She knew she’d hit pay dirt. Tom Barry was sure the killer was Irish, and it was a pretty sure bet that only someone from New York would know about that small peculiarity with the license plates. If he’d chosen a car instead of a truck she would have missed it.
Standing up, Jane headed back to the sidewalk, feeling the weight of the small Brazilian copy of a German Walther that Pelay had given her along with the car. She had no idea where he’d got it from and the little man had offered up no explanations. Reaching the sidewalk Jane stopped, adjusting the heavy bag on her shoulder. She checked her watch. It was just past ten.
The smart money said she should go into the lobby of the hotel, get a bunch of change from the night clerk and use a pay phone to make a trunk call to the Plaza and leave a message at the desk there. She had no business bearding lions in their dens and even less business getting too close to a man who’d already killed several people, including an FBI agent, and by her definition was at least partly the reason her first true love had been murdered and then dumped in a New Jersey ditch like so much garbage.
“Well, screw the smart money,” she whispered angrily under her breath. This was her fight and her story as much as it was any man’s and she was goddamned if she was going to give it all up now with a pretty little curtsey and go stand on the sidelines while the men played the Green Hornet and Kato from the serials. One way or the other she was going to put the finger on this guy and make him real instead of some sort of ghost. Ghost or not, according to Tommy he’d taken three shots to the chest. Even though he’d had a bulletproof vest on, he would definitely have a bruise or two.
She looked down at herself. Blue cardigan over a pleated white silk dress, blue linen shoes and no hat. She looked more like she was going off to play a round of golf than hunting down a killer, but at least she didn’t look like a broad on the make. She adjusted the heavy bag on her shoulder and went into the hotel. The lobby was long and narrow, leading to the elevators, the carpet inevitably red. The reservation desk was on the left and a pair of double doors led into the restaurant-bar. The sign over the doors read The Henry Hudson Room and a sandwich board on the floor announced the piano stylings of “Gloves” McGinty. The fuzzy eight-by-ten pasted onto the poster showed a leering man in his seventies holding up a pair of long-fingered hands encased in white gloves. What a gimmick. Jane headed for the reservation desk and a young clerk with a poor complexion who reminded her of Ricky, the soda jerk back at Walgreens.
“I wonder if you can help me,” she asked.
“You want a room?”
“Maybe later. Right now I want information.”
“Like what?” He frowned and his whole face wrinkled up like a raisin. “You’re not a pro, are you? My uncle hates pros coming in here.”
“Do I look like a pro?”
“I don’t know what a pro’s supposed to look like. I don’t think we get a lot here. All I know is my uncle hates them and he owns the hotel and he says don’t let any single woman into the hotel unless she’s got a phoned-in reservation and luggage. You got any luggage?” Ricky the soda jerk was a Don Juan compared to this kid. He had the personality of an earthworm and a brain to match.
“I’m not a pro, I promise.”
“So what kind of information you want?”
“Information about the guy with the white Dodge in your parking lot.”
“What about him?”
“Is he registered here?”
The kid smiled. “I can’t remember.”
Jane reached into her bag, took out her wallet and dropped a sawbuck on the counter. The kid swept up the ten-spot and slipped it into the pocket of his red uniform jacket.
“The white Dodge.”
“He’s registered here.”
“When?”
“ ’Bout an hour ago, little less.”
“Under what name?”
“I can’t remember.” The kid smiled.
Jane offered up another ten. “Now can you remember?”
“Green.”
“What room?”
“509.”
“That’s the fifth floor?”
“Yup. But he’s not there.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him go into the bar about ten minutes ago and he hasn’t come out, so I guess he’s in there.”
“How do I recognize him?”
“Tall, thin, a little on the pale side, like he doesn’t get a lot of sun. Real dark hair.”
“Black hair.”
“Yeah. A bit long.”
“Clean-shaven?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” said Jane, “you’re a peach.”
“You got any more questions, lady? I could use the dough.”
“Maybe later,” said Jane.
John Bone sat in the end booth of the Henry Hudson Bar and sipped his double shot of ice-free Jameson. Thankfully the bald, white-gloved piano player had taken his leave a half hour before, so at least he could drink in peace. Almost eight hours had passed since the incident under the bridge at the World’s Fair and the initial burning pain of the bullets’ impact had dulled to a deep ache now. By morning, when it came time to play out the final act of this game, his muscles would be stiff, but not enough to influence his aim. Everything else seemed to be in order as well.
Bone had heard about Sterling’s development of the DeLisle, but somehow Lavan, the late gunsmith, had managed to get his hands on a prototype. The carbine seemed to be based on a Lee-Enfield bolt action but was fitted with an integral silencer all the way along the barrel and was chambered for the U.S. .45 pistol cartridge, itself subsonic. Bone had fired off a dozen shots in Lavan’s basement and it was almost completely soundless. He had also taken care of the matter of transportation. Coming in to Poughkeepsie he’d stopped at a service station to use their toilet facilities, and he’d noticed an old Harley-Davidson WJ Sport chain-locked to a pipe behind the station with a cardboard FOR SALE sign hanging on a string from the handlebars. The padlock on the chain would be easy enough to pick and the motorcycle would give him exactly the same kind of advantage the 500cc Dresch had given him in Marseille.
The Sport was known to be a very quiet machine, which would make his approach to Val Kill safer. Afterward the Harley-Davidson could take him where no automobile could follow. Looking over the maps he saw that he could use back roads to get out of New York State and into Connecticut within twenty minutes with no chance of being followed. He could be in Danbury within an hour and from there it would be a simple thing to take a Greyhound north into Boston. From there he could either sail or fly out of the country without any difficulty.
Bone caught a hint of movement out of the corner of his eye and looked up from his drink. The restaurant-bar was a long rectangular room set with booths on either wall, tables running down the middle and the bar built against the short wall nearest the door. A small riser and the piano took up the back wall. A woman with a large bag over her shoulder was standing by the door, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, blond, wearing a white dress with a blue cardigan. She was startlingly beautiful, her eyes large and intelligent, her cheekbones high and her mouth just a little too large, which made her all the more attractive. She said something to the man behind the bar, who nodded and disappeared through a door that led back into the kitchen.
The woman came down the length of the restaurant and stopped at the table directly opposite his booth. She took the bag off her shoulder and dropped down into the chair facing Bone. She let out a long sigh, then turned to her bag, rummaging around in it until she came up with a package of Lucky Strikes. Apparently she had no matches or lighter to go with the cigarettes.
“Shit,” she said. She looked across at Bone and smiled. “You wouldn’t happen to have a light, would you?”
Bone slid out of the booth, took two steps, then reached down and plucked the book of matches out of the spring clip of the metal ashtray on her table. There was one exactly like it in his own booth and at every other booth and table in the restaurant. He opened the book of matches, tore one out, struck it and held the flame toward the woman. She shook out one of her cigarettes and lit it without making the slightest attempt to seem surprised that the matches had been in front of her all the time.
“May I join you?” Bone asked. The woman certainly wasn’t a prostitute, and that made the situation even more interesting to him.
“Sure,” said the woman. “Ships that pass in the night and all that.” Bone turned away for a moment and retrieved his drink, then came back to her table and sat down. “My name’s Jane,” said the woman. “What’s yours?”
“John,” he answered.
“John and Jane, now that’s convenient.”
“Convenient?”
“For ships passing in the night.”
The barman came out of the kitchen with a sandwich on a tray. He paused to draw a glass of beer from one of his taps, then went down to the table. He put both the sandwich and the beer in front of Jane. She took three singles out of her bag and waved away the change. She pinched out her cigarette and left it in the ashtray.
“Egg salad,” she said, lifting half the sandwich. She took a healthy bite, wiped her lips with a paper napkin and sipped her beer, wondering just what the hell she was doing. She’d called the Plaza and left a message, complete with hotel name and room number. Then, like an idiot, she’d stepped into the bar and sat herself down ten feet away from the man. The trick with the matches was the kind of thing you saw Myrna Loy doing to sucker a suspect in a Thin Man movie. On the other hand, it had worked.
She saw the man across from her open his mouth to speak and she stopped him with a wave of the hand. “You’re about to ask a really dumb question.”
“I am?”
“You were about to ask me what a girl like me was doing in a place like this.”
“It had crossed my mind,” he answered. “One doesn’t often meet an attractive woman alone in a bar in Poughkeepsie.”
Jane smiled and took another sip of beer. There was something just a tiny bit wrong with the way he pronounced Poughkeepsie. There was also something horribly wrong with the things she was finding herself thinking about. He was handsome as hell, in a ghostly sort of way, but it wasn’t so much that as the look in those cold gray eyes of his. Violence and some kind of terrible hunger. It was making her weak in the knees. If she’d been forced to stand up at that instant she knew she would have fallen down. She took another bite of sandwich and washed it down with another slug of beer.
“So what is a girl like you doing in a place like this?” he said.
“I’m a reporter,” Jane answered. “Doing a society piece on their royal personages when they go to church tomorrow. Couldn’t find a hotel room left in Hyde Park, so I came down here.” It made sense and she could back up the reporter part of it without much trouble. “How about you?”
“On holiday,” he said. “Taking in the sights.”
“Been to the fair?” Jane asked, cursing herself silently the instant the words were out of her mouth. You didn’t play word games with a killer.
“Several times,” Bone answered.
“Exciting, isn’t it?”
“I found it a little too . . . enthusiastic,” he said, looking for the right word.
Jane took a long swallow of beer, relit her cigarette and forgot about the rest of her sandwich. “So what do you do for excitement?” she said quietly, knowing exactly what she was doing now, but not exactly why. She saw the night in front of her as clearly as a photograph appearing in the developing tray. Wish me luck, Annie, she thought and sent up a little prayer.
“I meet beautiful women reporters who like egg salad sandwiches and beer and can’t see a book of matches a foot away from them on the table.”
“I’m farsighted.”
“You’re very lovely,” he answered.
“I bet you say that to all the girls.” But of course he didn’t, because he didn’t have to. The terrible attraction of a snake about to strike and the looks of a lothario—any woman’s secret dream.
“I don’t meet many girls like you.”
“Like me?”
“You’re not afraid.”
“Of what, you?”
“A stranger in a strange land. Most women would be.”
“Should I be? Afraid, that is?”
He smiled and in the movement of his lips and the small softening of his eyes Jane saw something of his past, a shadow of his youth. “Some women enjoy fear,” he said at last. “It makes life more exciting for them,”
“What makes life exciting for you?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “Excitement can cause you to make mistakes. It’s something to be avoided.”
“Even when it comes to women?”
“Every rule should have one exception.” He smiled again, and she was lost.
They undressed on opposite sides of the bed in his room and for the first time in a long time Jane felt no shyness or embarrassment at revealing her body to a man. He stared at her frankly and she did the same, studying the play of muscles in his arms and chest, the spray of thick dark hair between his nipples and the heavy swelling pulse of his organ as it lifted out of the thicker black hair thatching his groin.
She stepped out of her panties and laid herself on the pale sheet, her legs falling open like a gift as he covered her, his biceps corded and palms flat just below her armpits, the skin of his wrists just touching her breasts, hard with the ache she felt. She was wet and ready to take him, but even so, it was a shock as he slid into her inch by inch and then began to move in a steady rhythm that seemed to go on forever.
She lost track of time as he changed his motion and her position beneath him and finally, after some endless length of time, he lifted her legs over his shoulders and began to pound into her almost savagely. At the same time he moved his hands, cupping them under her shoulders in a small, gentle motion that made her hips arch upward and said everything about the man he might once have been and made her think, just for an instant, that perhaps she was wrong.
But she knew, had known from the instant he’d taken off his shirt and she’d seen the bruises put on him by Thomas Barry—the man she should have felt this way for and never would. The man with Tommy’s mark on him exploded inside her so hugely that she thought he’d torn something inside her, burned her up, destroyed her soul. Even when he was done he stayed hard and in her for a long time, not moving, staring down at her until at last, with exquisite slowness, he withdrew inch by tender inch until he was gone and lay beside her, his breath barely louder with his exertions. She turned half on her side and put her hand flat on his chest and felt no heartbeat.
“It’s true,” she whispered.
“What is?”
“Nothing. Just something someone once said to me.” He was a ghost, just like Thomas had said. She let her hand lie there for a moment longer and then she roused herself. “I’ve got to use the bathroom. Be right back.”
“Don’t you hurry on my account then,” he answered, his voice in a soft lilt she thought might be the voice he was born with, so much the same as Tommy’s and two such different men. “I’ll just smoke one of those cigarettes you have such a hard time lighting.”
“Sure,” she said, her heart thumping hard. “As long as I can borrow your shirt.” She shivered, but not from any cool breeze. “It’s a bit chilly in here.”
“Of course.” He leaned over the side of the bed and brought up the shirt. She shrugged into it then stood and went to her bag and tossed him the Luckys, the book of matches tucked in between the package and the cellophane. He caught the package one-handed, and while he worked the matches out and lit his cigarette she crossed the room, hands crossed under her breasts, and opened the bathroom door and shut it behind her.
Once inside the bathroom she sagged back against the door and struggled hard to keep from sobbing aloud. She’d just made love to a killer and had never been so aroused in her entire life. She’d just betrayed a man she’d begun to fall for and here she was standing half naked in a bathroom, wondering what in God’s name she should do next. She eased her left hand out from under the shirt and gently put the automatic pistol Pelay had given her on the toilet tank.
If John, or Mr. Green, or whoever he really was had gone looking for her cigarettes on his own he would have found the gun and that would have been the end of it. A bullet to the head, just like Howie. She felt tears forming and wiped them away quickly. She wasn’t crying for poor old Howie. She was crying for herself, baffled by herself, terrified of the man who lay naked on the other side of the door, but still feeling the stolen heat from him like a hot coal just below her stomach.
Jane squeezed her eyes tightly shut and tried to put herself in the man’s mind. If you were a guy who was going off to kill the King and Queen of England the next day you might want to take a woman to bed, but you’d probably hire a professional, of which there were undoubtedly a few, even in Poughkeepsie. What would you think when you were given the come-on by a woman at ten o’clock at night in the hotel bar, and she told you she was doing an article on the king and queen and had he been to see the New York World’s Fair?
You might get a little suspicious, so what would you do then? You’d go through my bag, you murderous son of a bitch. That’s what you’d do. You’d start going through my bag the minute the bathroom door closed.
And what would you find? Oh Jesus, you’d find all the names and telephone numbers written down on all those scraps of paper, Howie’s itinerary coming back from Florida and his name, the name of the clerk at the law firm, and the name of the law firm itself. Hennessy’s name and rank, Tommy’s name with Scotland Yard scribbled beside it. Doodles of little crowns on stick people and a stick person firing a gun done on a paper napkin from the Claremont.
Enough to charge, convict, sentence and execute you for being a fool. Stupidly, the only thing she could think of was that her bare feet were cold on the bare white-tile floor, and in her reflection half seen in the medicine cabinet mirror she had a serious case of what her high school friends used to call bed hair. Then she had a split-second vision of rosettes of blood spreading across the white shirt she was wearing, the spreading stains over the same place where Tommy’s shots had struck before.
She leaned away from the door and picked up the pistol. Turn the button on the barrel down, pull the side back to insert a shell into the chamber and then squeeze the trigger. Eight shots. She put her ear to the door but she couldn’t hear a thing. She grabbed a towel off the rack beside her and wrapped the gun in it, using her thumb to twist the safety button down. Then with the towel muffling the sound she pulled back the slide, wincing at the heavy click. She put her ear to the door again but still heard nothing. Maybe he hadn’t moved at all and was still lying in bed smoking and staring up at the ceiling with that big, thick cock of his lying across his thigh, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom so they could start all over again. She would look stupid coming out the door in his shirt with a gun pointing at him, saying, “Hands up. I’m making a citizen’s arrest!”
But he wouldn’t be in bed, covered in the streetlight glow spilling through the window. He was waiting outside to kill her. Suffocate her with a pillow, strangle her with his belt, a quick snap of her neck with those strong hands. It would be quick and it would be silent and she knew she’d never have the nerve to actually point the stupid gun at him and squeeze the trigger because that’s what cops and killers did and she wasn’t either of those. She was the one in the pictures she sometimes took for Hennessy. She was about to be Howie Raines, lying in a ditch with some cop photographer using a little wooden compass to show which way her head was lying.
“Like hell,” she whispered. She ground her teeth together, opened the door and stepped out into the room, her right hand bringing up the Walther. The next day, a week, a month, a dozen years later and it was always as though time stood still. She saw her lover at the end of the bed, the sheets littered with the contents of her shoulder bag. He had his trousers on and was leaning over his own suitcase on the little bench at the end of the bed, his hands sliding a fat-barreled rifle of some kind out of a gun case, working the sliding bolt with a single slap of the ball of his thumb, bringing the weapon up, aiming at her. Just then there was a crash of splintering wood as the door to the room smashed inward, both Dan Hennessy and Tommy surging through the doorway, guns drawn, but too late because her lover had swung the rifle in his hands around at the first sound of the door opening and was already firing.
But so was she, her finger squeezing the trigger, the pistol jumping in her hand, striking with all eight shots, stitching holes in him from his thigh to his jaw, blood spurting in great arcs from his femoral artery, one shot under his arm going through both lungs and heart, the seventh and eighth bullets blowing pieces of his face against the far wall, bits of bone rattling across the wallpaper like tossed dice before they tumbled to the floor. He dropped to his knees, the DeLisle falling from his hands, and then fell forward on the ruins of his face.
“No vest this time,” said Dan, sliding his pistol back into its holster. “Nice shooting, Janey.”
She stood stock-still, the empty gun still dangling from her hand, the smell of gunpowder and blood filling the room, her ears ringing from the shots she’d fired. She turned and saw Tommy looking at her from a few feet away, looking at her in the dead man’s shirt, knowing what it meant, the smile of relief on his face faltering for a small moment, and then he stepped forward and took her, weeping, into his arms.