Des Casey was waiting for me in the Peerage Brokers reception area, a soldier uncomfortably out of uniform. Beyond his attitude, the only thing G.I. about him was his shoes and socks. For some reason, career guys never seem to change those when they get into civvies.
Down on the street, we caught a cab and climbed in. Since Rickerby had used him to summon me, Casey seemed apologetic when he asked, “They give you a rough time up there?”
“It’ll get rougher.”
His shook his head and his eyes widened. “Brother, did they lay into me for letting you take off alone.” He handed me a small notebook and said, “I think I got most of the information you were looking for. Didn’t take that long.”
“How did the senator come out?”
“Clean, Mike. As close to spotless as I figure any politician could be. He has no suspicious business ties, has cut himself off from any of the proceeds from his law firm while he’s in office, and he’s known for voting his conscience... even when it’s at odds with campaign donors.”
“You said ‘close to spotless.’”
His grin had a nice boyish quality, surprising from such a rugged guy. “Well, I don’t have anything to support that, but your friend Hy Gardner told me there were. how did he put it? ‘Whispers’ about Jasper’s personal life. Mr. Gardner said if you wanted to know more, you should stop by his office in person.”
“That sounds like Hy. Okay, I’ll do that.”
“What next?”
“How are your contacts around this town?”
“They go back a few years. But I still got ’em.”
“Good. See what you can get on a deceased punk named Pietro Romanos.”
I gave him everything Pat had passed on to me. That he’d been out of the loop for a while actually gave Casey a certain advantage. His military status overshadowed any of his police background, and a G.I. on leave can get into all kinds of places no questions asked. And there was always the excuse of looking up an old buddy, if somebody asked—after a couple of belts of booze, those old-line infantrymen will always talk up a storm with one of their own.
“Listen,” I said, “act like you don’t know Romanos is dead. Say that he’s a longtime pal you’re trying to get in touch with. When you ask somebody about somebody who turns out to be dead, all kinds of information comes pouring out.”
“How would I have known Romanos?”
“Des, you’ve got the perfect excuse to reach out to him. This Romanos was a competition sharp shooter. You took several division championship pistol matches, right?”
“Right.”
“Isn’t it conceivable that at one time or another, you went up against Romanos at a meet?”
“It is. You’re pretty good at this detective stuff, aren’t you, Mike?”
“Yeah. I gotta be.” I grinned at him. “The killing evil bastards part doesn’t pay that well.”
The kid thought that was pretty funny, but the cabbie was frowning at us in the rearview mirror.
“Then, Mike, you want me to go off on my own again?”
“I do. But it’s strictly volunteer. I can’t promise I can protect your stripes, son.”
“I never wanted to be a sergeant forever, anyway.”
Two blocks from our apartment building, I got out, waited for the cab’s taillights to disappear around the corner, then started to walk west. The drizzle that had greased the streets stopped momentarily, then the wind came back with a soft chill to it and the rain began with that strange quality of blanketing the sounds that were the heartbeat of the city.
I didn’t see them, but I knew they were there. Field glasses would be trained on anyone entering the apartment building and the doorman standing out of the wet wasn’t the same one I had seen last time. Neither was the porter who was making a sad show of emptying clean ashtrays into a pail in the lobby. God bless ’em, they couldn’t hide it. There was too much training there. They looked at me casually, nodded half-heartedly, playing the game to the hilt, but they might as well have left their badges pinned to their shirts.
I went on upstairs to two floors above Velda’s, pushed the down button and reached in to punch the floor before the doors closed, then took the stairs. In the lobby, they’d be watching the floor pointer above the elevator doors and wondering what the hell that was all about. It’d break the monotony for them a little bit.
My coded knock didn’t get a response right away, and I was just getting worried when she answered the door in a short baby-blue terrycloth robe, in the process of towel-drying all that raven’s wing hair. She grinned at me as I stood there taking all of her in, then said, “Stop breathing through your mouth, Mike, and come on in.”
I did, and she shut the door and bolted it. There was no fear in her—we were in a hopeless situation, but we’d been in those before. Any concern in her now would be for me. And the same was true of me for her.
When she took my hand and squeezed it, I knew she knew about the attempt to abduct her.
“Who told you, Velda?”
“Pat called me. Come over and sit with me on the couch.”
Her apartment was small and homey, inviting in its soft colors and comfortable furnishings. Nothing about it indicated the remarkable woman who lived here, not unless you started opening drawers and looking in this decorative box and that apparent humidor and saw the four .32s salted around the little living room.
She curled up on the couch with her legs under her. I sat beside her with my arm along the back cushions.
“Pat didn’t get any official confirmation,” she said. “The NYPD just had an accident fatality report come in, and those get run past Homicide. Pat noticed the address and put two and two together. But he really added it up after he saw the names on the sheet of those men working out of Washington.”
“Okay, Rickerby’s crew had your back, and good for them. But from here on out you stay put.”
“No way,” she said fiercely. “I’m in this as deep as you are.”
“I’m still your boss.”
“I’m your partner. There’s a difference.” She shifted her bottom a little and leaned my way, some edge in her voice. “I knew damn well I was being tailed by our people, and it didn’t bother me. If I’d wanted to shake them. well, you taught me some pretty fancy tricks and I’ve picked up a few on my own.”
“No dice. You’re grounded.”
“Damnit! What happened today shows that they have me covered just fine! You are one stubborn. damn you, sometimes!”
When she got mad, she got even more beautiful. Her dark eyes danced with a peculiar sparkle and those lovely breasts heaved with the heat of her anger. I grinned at her and before she could protest, I moved in, my arms around her, my mouth on hers, tasting all that loveliness until she was just a breathless bundle of female who could only say, “You may know how to shut me up, Mike. but you still lost the argument.”
“This is losing?”
She kissed me. It wasn’t just a kiss, not when her tongue went searching for the back of my throat. Then she asked, “Am I still grounded, Daddy?”
“...No.”
“Turns out Mike Hammer can be bribed.”
“Not with money.” I eased away from her. “Now, can we talk a little business?”
She leaned toward me. “Why don’t you finish what you started first...”
“Turn off your switch.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t find it. Why don’t you look for it...”
I backed away. “Later, baby. Business, first.”
“Okay. Your loss.”
“Be useful, why don’t you? Get us a couple of beers.”
She gave me a Sieg Heil salute and got off the couch, flashing some skin under that terrycloth robe, making me want to reconsider or maybe kick myself. All those months were still racked up inside me and I wanted her so bad that the hurt was as physical as it was emotional.
She brought back two Blue Ribbons and I drained half of mine with a single gulp and set the can down. For ten minutes I brought her up to date, then said, “How about your end?”
“How about my end?”
“Be good.”
Her handbag was on the nearby coffee table and she snapped it open and got out several folded sheets of paper. She passed them to me.
“Here’s what I found on the senator’s partygoers,” she said. “I didn’t come up with anything suspicious much less dirty. Jasper’s friends have everything from A-1 credit ratings to security clearances. The only one I had trouble with was the Contreaux woman.”
I glanced from the sheets. “Why?”
“For one thing, when I spoke to her briefly at her apartment today, she was polite but not terribly forthcoming.”
“There’s something else?”
Velda nodded. “She’s Dr. Giles’ assistant and personal secretary, and they are both engaged in classified work on various space projects.”
“But he’s retired.”
“Yes, but he’s still doing liaison work when necessary, and has a top security rating. Still doing research at Manheim University, too, who don’t like inquiries into their staff. Or at least not into their government-funded projects.”
“So you came up empty on the Contreaux doll?”
“No, I got everything,” she said, “it just wasn’t that easy.” She was gesturing to the papers in my hands. “Keep looking, you’ll see. With the senator backing you up, they finally gave me everything I asked for.”
“Maybe I need to dig a little deeper.”
“No!”
She said it so fast and hard that it knocked me off balance. Then she smiled and laughed a little.
“Okay, so you caught me,” she said. “You called her a ‘doll,’ and you’re not wrong. She’s a little too beautiful for me to send you out there investigating her, uh... background.”
“She’s too beautiful? Ever look in the mirror, kid?”
“Even if the mirror says I’m still the fairest in the land, that girl’s got something, Mike, and you damn well know it.”
“I’m just trying to be thorough.”
“You be thorough with me,” she said, with a minxy little smile. “Anyway, you met her at the party, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but just briefly. I was there to do a job, not mingle with the guests.”
“But she accompanied you with Dr. Giles to his office, to patch you up.”
“Did she? After I caught that slug, I wasn’t too interested in ‘dolls.’ What can you tell me about Lisa Contreaux?”
“That I hate her.”
“Quit kidding.”
“Who’s kidding?” She sighed and folded her arms over her bosom. “All right. She’s twenty-nine, has a doctorate in physics and has been with Harmon Giles two years. Apparently she has an important position, is well-liked, well-respected, and attends to Dr. Giles’ needs.”
“All of them?”
“Keeping in mind the age difference of twenty-some years, I doubt that.”
“Some of us old guys still got some spunk left, kitten.”
“I know all about your spunk, big boy.” She dug her elbow in my ribs. “To be fair, when I said she wasn’t forthcoming, I should have cut her some slack. She is, after all, in mourning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, her fiancé died, recently—apparently a nice innocuous young scientist. It’s in my notes. Dennis Dorfman. He worked with Dr. Perry Gleason in Organic Science Studies at Manheim.”
I was sitting up now “How did the Dorfman boy die? He was just a kid, so don’t tell me natural causes.”
“Well, it’s natural to die when you get run over by a Buick.”
“Don’t tell me—hit-and-run driver.”
“Yeah. Just about a week ago. And before you bite my head off, I checked with Pat. It went down near the campus. Witnesses saw a college-age kid behind the wheel of what turned out to be a stolen car. Appears to be a joy ride that turned tragic.”
“And the driver has never been found.”
“No, Mike. Pat said there was one little odd thing about it.”
“Yeah?”
“The kid’s last words. Young Dorfman was unconscious at the scene, badly injured, but he came around when they were loading him in the ambulance. He died on the way to the hospital.”
“What did he say, Vel?”
“He said... ‘Complex 90.’ He said it several times, apparently. The ambulance attendants said he was grabbing one of their shirts when he said it for the last time, right before he passed out again. In minutes he was gone.”
“Complex 90.”
“Does that mean anything to you, Mike?”
“No. How about you?”
“No. Not a thing. Now, that might be worth asking Lisa Contreaux about, at that. I can do it for you, Mike, tomorrow.”
“I’ll handle it. I’m capable of talking to a beautiful woman without becoming a crazed sex fiend, you know.”
“Yeah, well the jury’s out on that one. Oh, speaking of Pat and stolen cars, he said the vehicle with those plates you called in— the one you sent on a wild goose chase? It was found abandoned on the East Side.”
“Did they dust it for prints?”
“They hadn’t yet when I talked to him. He said the car was being towed over to the city garage, where a forensics team would be waiting.”
I was sitting there brooding, so she got up, got me another Blue Ribbon, and sat back down to patiently wait for me to process everything she’d told me.
“What else?” I said finally.
“I didn’t talk to this Harmon Giles in person,” Velda said, picking right up. “I think maybe you should check in with him.”
“Right, if nothing more than to ask him for some painkillers. He may be a hot shit with N.A.S.A., but he did a lousy job on my leg.”
“So complain to him in person. You were lucky he was there. He has a reputation for being one of the best surgeons in the country.”
“You could have fooled me. Anything interesting on the other guests?”
She gave that a little thought, then said, “Well, apparently this Wall Street whiz, who was to have been Irene Carroll’s date that night... Warren Bentley? Word is an engagement is imminent.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Why?”
“Call it a hunch.” I decided not to tell her about earlier, when Irene Carroll pressed herself to me like a suction cup on glass.
“Velda, could any of that crowd, besides the senator himself, have been important enough to rate an assassination attempt?”
“Maybe Dr. Giles.” She touched the tip of my nose with a forefinger. “Or you, Mike. You do have a few enemies left alive. Not all of them are behind the Iron Curtain, either.”
I sipped the beer, shook my head. “It all begins with that party at Jasper’s penthouse pad. The cops figured it a botched jewelry heist, but it was something else.”
“How odd,” she said, frowning, but also laughing a strange little laugh.
“What is?”
“That that’s what led to you winding up on the run in Russia. When the same damn thing happened to me.”
* * *
During the war, when she was an agent with the O.S.S., Velda had been part of the effort to break up Butterfly Two, a freelance espionage ring that dated back to the early twenties, headed up by one Gerald Erlich. Butterfly Two had offered its services to the highest bidder, and Hitler’s Germany had won. No Nazi himself, just a hard-bitten, cold-eyed pro, Erlich disappeared post-war with all his accumulated wealth, and the Reds swallowed up the spy ring.
Less than a decade later, in New York, independently wealthy Rudolph Civic became known as a generous donor to charity and the arts as well as a prominent contributor to local political campaigns. His wife made frequent appearances on the society pages, but Civic himself was known to be camera-shy. Not surprising, given that Civic was Gerald Erlich, hiding behind a new, respectable identity.
Knowing nothing of this, I got hired on a routine security job for a society event of Civic’s that I sent Velda to handle. Dressed to the nines like just another jet setter, Velda could mingle more effectively than me and even follow Mrs. Civic and her fabulous gems into the powder room.
A routine enough job... until the host made a late arrival at his own party, and the two former spies, Velda and Civic, recognized each other at once. They had a tense confab in the midst of clinking cocktails glasses and brittle laughter, the former Erlich assuming Velda had tracked him down, Velda assuming Civic had lured her there. Either might have mistakenly shot the other had fate not intervened. In the bedroom where Civic and his wife had gone to freshen up, with bodyguard Velda in attendance, a gang of Red agents posing as jewel thieves broke in and abducted all three, emptying the safe of its valuable stones.
The next day, Civic’s wife, a pudgy dame, was found in the river with her fat fingers severed to allow the removal of the precious gems she wore. This convinced the cops—and me, at the time—that this was a heist gone horribly wrong, the work of uncommonly vicious thieves.
In reality, Civic and Velda were smuggled out of the country and wound up prisoners in central Europe. Civic, actually Gerald Erlich, was considered a very dangerous loose end by the Kremlin, since every major agent he’d employed was now working for the Soviets—the names, the identities, even the places inside his head made him valuable... and dangerous. Somehow Civic and Velda slipped their captors and made their own inside-Russia escape, and the chase was on. The two pooled their resources and information, and were on the run for an incredible seven years. Civic they killed. Velda made it back.
A lot of the details I didn’t know As close as Velda and I were, two factors had kept me from asking her a thousand questions— first, this had been a government mission, an ex-agent called back into service by unforeseen events, and much of what happened was simply not my business. Second, she had a right to her privacy. She would tell me what she wanted to, and hold back what she wanted to. I understood. I was fine with it. All I had ever wanted was her back in my life. I had spent seven years inside a bottle because she was dead. When she turned up alive, I wasn’t interested in the fine print.
* * *
“Now,” she said with a shudder, cuddled close to me on the couch, my arm around her terrycloth-covered shoulders, “after all these years. the damn Soviets again.”
“But we have a ticket out of this mess.”
She nodded. “Turn over one live K.G.B. agent, and your friend Rickerby has the bargaining power with the Kremlin to get you taken off the big hit list.”
“And to swap some of our guys out of East Berlin stir.”
“We’ve both been in prison over there now, Mike. We both know what it means to get out.”
“Well, my stay wasn’t very long, sugar.”
“Nor mine. I never told you, but. I’m sure they let us escape.”
“You and Rudy Civic, you mean?”
“Yes. We all but waltzed out of there, nothing like what you had to pull off. They thought Civic would lead them to agents of theirs, former agents of his, that they couldn’t trust.”
“But you shook them. You shook them off.”
She nodded. She was trembling. “Mike. Mike, I love you.”
“Well, I love you, baby.”
“There’s something. something I never told you. About what happened over there. To me.”
“You don’t have to.”
“You should know. There’s something... important.”
“The past isn’t important.”
“This part of it is... Mike, don’t you ever wonder why I’ve never insisted you marry me? Why I’ve stood by and let you... just... you know... with other women?”
The hurt in her voice made me feel like the heel that I was. “I guess I’ve wondered. I’ll marry you tomorrow, kitten. I’ll marry you tonight. Say the word. Hell, I’ll move us down to Florida and buy a fishing boat and we’ll raise a passel of little Mikes and Veldas.”
She flew out of my arms.
“What? Baby?”
Then she was standing in the middle of her little kitchen, her arms clutching herself in a desperate self-hug, sobbing, sobbing, from the tip of her toes to the top of her head. Such a tall woman, now she looked small, petite. Tiny in her sorrow
I went up behind her and stood close, my hands on her shoulders.
“Kitten... what is it?”
“They tortured us, Mike. When they first had us. They tortured Civic and he told them everything he knew. They thought the two of us were partners, the way you and I are partners, and... but I didn’t know the secrets that Civic did. I had nothing to tell them. They... they brought in a man that we later learned was the K.G.B.’s top expert in torture. He... he did terrible things to me, Mike. He did things to me with tools, with knives, with red-hot instruments of. of torture, Mike. Inside me, Mike. He.”
She was sobbing again, her body wracked with shuddering sobs.
“Baby. baby. don’t put yourself through it.”
I heard her swallow She turned to me. She looked so small without her heels, in bare feet, just a frightened little girl.
“Okay, Mike. I’ll say nothing more about that. Well, there’s one other thing to say, but.”
“Honey. Please don’t.”
Her smile was a terrible crooked thing. “Mike, when we first met. when I was on that undercover assignment with the Vice Squad, that horrible man I was working to put away. I. I had to get close to him. Surely you knew that.”
Why was she jumping to this subject?
“Sure,” I said, “of course, you’d have to get close to him.”
I hadn’t known she was working Vice back them—I thought she was just a poor kid victimized by a sadist. Which was why I killed the slob
“And later, Mike, you knew I’d been in the O.S.S., and. well, from the first time I met you, you had this thing about wanting the woman you married to be a virgin. It was. so cute. So sweet. So old-fashioned. So. unrealistic. Mike, I lied to you. All those years. Why you believed me, I’ll never know”
“Not important, kitten. Not important.”
She sat at the kitchen table. Folded her hands as if saying grace. She was staring into nothing. I sat beside her, put a hand on her shoulder.
She said, “You’re such a big dumb lug. I could tell you I lost it riding my bike, and you’d buy it. So you wanted to marry a virgin. I’d be a virgin for you. But it was a lie.”
“I don’t care, Vel. I don’t care.”
Now she turned her lovely face to me, streaked with tears and snot and desperation. “What that beast did to me in Russia, Mike...” She beat her belly with a small fist. “The doctors... over there... later... the doctors... here. Mike, there can’t ever be any little Mikes and Veldas. That Commie bastard stole them from us, Mike. He... he... stole them from us...”
And she fell into my arms and I carried her back to the couch and held her in my arms cradled like a child. She wept. And then she slept. Not long.
Just long enough for me to imagine a million ways I would torture that torturer if I ever got my hands on him. But the impossibility of that was a torture that I knew I would suffer for the rest of my life...
Finally, Velda got up and went into the bathroom a while. I heard the water in the bathroom basin running. She returned in the same terrycloth robe, but she’d redone her make-up and she looked fresh and new. Across from where we sat was a gas fireplace and she got that going, switching off the end table lamp that had been the only other light in the room, to let the flames flicker orange and blue against the darkness. As the fire reflections lashed her flesh, she moved cat-like over to her stereo console and let the soft strains of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique fill the room.
Then she came and sat beside me again. The smell of her was a subtle, heady thing, nothing but soap and the natural scent of her, and I closed my eyes with the sheer pleasure of being close to her.
Velda let out a soft moan as her mouth reached for mine. The kiss had a liquid warmth sparked by the fire of her tongue that spoke of all the longing she had known these past months too, and all the secret hurt of so many years. The robe slipped off as if of its own accord, and her skin was pure velvet under my hands, every vital curve and hollow of her trembling with desire. My fingers drifted across the tips of her breasts, bringing them to instant rigidity. When I gently touched her stomach I could feel the concave plane of it flex with the knowledge that there were other places to explore and she squirmed with a feline movement to give me access to all of her.
Then she slipped from my arms and stood before me, loomed above me, tall again suddenly, a goddess with a mane of black, uncombed hair, gypsy wild, high full breasts and a narrow waist and flaring hips and more wild dark curls. She gave me a wicked smile. She crooked a finger, like a mother summoning a naughty child.
On the round braid carpet in front of the fire, she got down on all fours, then looked over her shoulder at me, as the twin globes of flesh beckoned, and she said, “Take me, Mike. Take me where I am a virgin. Take me. Take me.”
I took her.
The record ended, but we never noticed. The music we made ourselves was wilder and louder, the theme of it bigger than any instrument could interpret, ending in a smashing climax that seemed to wipe out time itself, the present, and the past.