CHAPTER 21

I ran all the way back to Mama Netti’s. Midge was gone, of course. I phoned her right away.

“Hello?” Her voice was sharp and bright. She must have been sitting at the phone waiting for my call. “Steve?”

“What happened, Midge? Who met Vivian?”

“The great man himself. Kutner.”

“How long ago?”

“Kutner arrived only a few minutes after you left. He went in and came right out again with Vivian on his arm. They walked off in the direction of Bleecker Street. I finished my spumoni and came home. What are you groaning about?”

“You. No guts. No curiosity. Why didn’t you follow them? It could mean a lot if I knew where in hell those two were going.”

“Sorry, boss. Obeying your orders. Anything else?”

I told her what had happened at Helen Sutton’s studio. I snapped my fingers for a glass of Chianti and the young waiter brought me a tall tumbler full of the rich red wine and I sipped it and let it soothe my nerves while I told Midge what I wanted her to do.

“Get this now, sweetheart,” I said. “I want you to take a plant outside Lila Martin’s place. You have the address—the fancy dump uptown. There’s a little delicatessen diagonally across the street from her place. Friendly owner, who keeps the joint open all night. Stay there and watch Lila’s lobby. I have an idea she’s going to have company tonight. I don’t know when, but it has to happen. I’ll reach you at the delicatessen.”

“You want me to wait there?” She chuckled. “No high adventures? You don’t want me to follow Lila if she comes out?”

“She won’t come out.”

A fine and frigid drizzle began to fall when I started up town. The November air was charged with the threat of winter. But November was reluctant to give way to the northern blasts, and the fresh cold only clouded the air with a deep and biting fog, thick enough to lay a veil over the quiet streets and fill the dark corners with a curtain of creeping gloom. Up above the Sixties on the west side of Central Park, the streets were bathed in the gray blanket. The cab moved slowly, not fighting to make the lights. When he pulled up to the curbing I stepped out into a misted void.

Number 46 was a soulless façade in a row of brownstones. Number 46 was only a copper-riveted number on an old-fashioned door under the light of a match. Above me the windows were sightless eyes in a granite body. The ancient house seemed asleep and dreaming of its past. To the right, a few yards away, the place next door showed dull light in the downstairs window. But where I stood, in the black pit of the tiny vestibule, the world seemed miles away. I was moving in a tomb of silence, alone in Sigmund Hess’s doorway.

The front door was easy, operating on the second try in my stock of passkeys, the ancient type of lock that has no special fittings. The venerable latch responded with a dull groan, a sound-effect in keeping with the light and the hour, I pushed it open and stepped inside.

The living room, under the thin light from my pocket flash, resembled a stock background in an Addams cartoon, the furniture covered with pale gray linen, each piece a fantasy of abandonment against the somber background. Sigmund Hess must have been ready to move in the recent past. A few crates and packing cases stood among the chairs and tables, some of them wrapped and ready for shipment, others in the process of final packaging. The tag on one of the crates read: BOLIVAR STORAGE WAREHOUSE.

The dining room, too, featured the same casual disarray. There were two sideboards, built in the classic tradition to harmonize with the house itself, giant pieces that might have served huge families in the dim and distant past. Right now, their drawers were empty, but the silverware still lay in unclosed crates. I fingered a few of the pieces. They were of the best English sterling, out of some baronial home on the snug little isle. They were expensive and ornate, a design that might have satisfied Sigmund’s granddad. But the silver didn’t come out of Sigmund’s family. Each piece bore the monogram B D over a crest, the sort of cutlery collected by antique hunters.

There were other signs of Sigmund’s temperamental background. On the wall, over the long buffet, a great shield hung. The heraldry belonged to sixteenth century England, strange griffons rampant on a field of flowers. Sigmund must have worked hard to gather such items around himself. He was beginning to come alive for me, a jewelry executive who made lavish living his hobby.

I ducked back through the great kitchen and started up the servant’s stairway at the rear of the house. The narrow winding passage led up to the second-floor landing, a large and squarish hall on the way to the two bedrooms. The first door opened into the master bedroom that faced the street. Here Sigmund had created a masterpiece of regal decor. His bed itself must have been built for some ancient chateau, a broad and bulky unit covered with an archaic canopy. The room smelled faintly of decay, a mixture of old wood and older cloth. These windows had not been opened in many weeks. The walls were hung with many oils of an indefinite period, pictures of royal personages of all types and flavors, some French, some British. On one of the smaller paintings, the brass nameplate read: GUSTAVE HESS—1723-1801. A relative of Sigmund’s? Or had he dug this up and hung it because he prayed perpetually for this type of ancestor?

I was bent over the inscription on the frame when I heard the noise downstairs.

Somebody had come in by way of the front door. I could place the sound in my memory easily; the long, sighing grunt of the old latch under pressure. Or had the wind blown it open?

I didn’t wait on the landing. Whoever came in would hear me if I tried the old stairs down to the front door. Instead, I backtracked through the bedroom and down the servant’s stairway.

I saw him as I came through the kitchen door. He had a light in his hands and swung it around the living room. It moved like a giant eye, pausing to survey the covered furniture, the crates and the boxes, and, finally, the entrance to the dining room.

I jumped for him as he entered the dining room. He was a sudden fist in my face. He must have heard me before I crossed the room and dove at him, because his hands were ready for me as I came. His flashlight dropped and rolled away and we went down together, bumping and thudding against the great oak table. He kicked out at me. He caught me high on the leg, under the knee and hard enough to make me yell with pain. He wasn’t playing it the standard way. He would ruin me if he could find my groin with his active toe. His body had no lard. And he was loaded with an itch for perpetual motion, struggling to squirm away from me between lunges and thrusts at my gut.

I caught him as he moved away. I kicked out at him, feeling the soft flesh of his stomach under my foot, and then the sucking, sighing intake of desperate breathing.

“Ooggghhzz—” he whispered. His voice rising on a note of pain. “Ooggghhzz!”

He lashed out at me again, connecting with a right cross. When we rolled off together, he was fumbling for a gun. I kicked that hand.

“No guns,” I said.

“Ooggghhzz—” as I caught his scrawny neck, and then a piercing shriek. I stepped on his gun hand and enjoyed the higher notes of his distress. I mashed the hand under my heel.

“No guns,” I repeated.

“Bloody bastard—” he hoarsed.

I knew him then, of course. I got hold of his active hand and began a lesson in judo, bending the fingers up so that they would crack off unless he lay on his stomach and played dead. He chose to relax under the pressure. His flashlight lay up against my knee. I lit it up and focused it.

Into the face of Fred Pate.

“Fawncy meeting you here.” I chuckled. “Come in for the crumpets and scones, Englishman?”

“You broke my blasted hand,” he wailed.

“Your neck is next.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Have yourself a bloody look,” I invited. I aimed the light under my chin. He recoiled when he recognized me. “It’s a real London night, isn’t it, Pate? You decided to come out in the fog? Why here, Englishman?”

“Knock it off,” he muttered. He sat up now, massaging his dangling wrist. His fingers were a welter of blood. My shoe had almost mangled them. Permanently. He aimed his rat eyes up at me. He clenched his bony jaw. “I’m here for what I can pick up, naturally. What else?”

“You’re a liar,” I told him. “A bloody British prevaricator.”

I found his gun in a jacket pocket. He was sporting a neat tweed suit, something out of Finchley’s and done in the upper-class style of tailoring. A well-dressed heist man. Veddy, veddy Briddish. “You’re a smart lad, Pate. Too smart for casual larceny of this type. What brought you to this particular place?”

“The owner was moving.”

“How did you know?”

“I have my own methods.”

“Let’s hear them, Pate. How would you find out the owner of this brownstone was moving out?” I said it loud and I said it close to his lean nose. I let him see that this was no moment for games. “Better tell me the truth, Englishman. Or I’ll kick your snotty nose in.”

“I told you the truth.”

“How did you know this place was empty?”

His eyes played tag with an invisible object above his head. When they returned to mine, a thin line of sweat bubbled on his upper lip. “Real estate research,” he said. “Notices of sale.”

“You can do better than that, Pate.”

“I’m leveling with you.”

“You’re on the wrong level. Try again.”

“I tell you—”

But he didn’t tell me. He had long black hair, greased up with a slick pomade that made my fingers slip when I grabbed him. I clutched a handful of his hair and slammed back. His head came loose from the hinges on his shoulder. His head cracked back against the stout leg of the dining room table.

Craggghk! His eyes popped, but he wasn’t budging for me. The sweat began to drip now, from under his oily hair and down his corrugated brow and into his eyes. There were small flecks of red, veined and insolent, in the corners of his eyes.

Craggghk! I slapped his head back again. His eyes closed and his jaws hardened under the impact of the blow. But he was still stubborn and arrogant, letting me see his disgust by the way he clamped his surly mouth shut.

I showed him the nose of his own little gun. I shoved the gun under his right eye. Then I pulled back and waited for him to react to the reality of it. It was a foreign automatic, built in Britain by specialists. It was strangely heavy for a gun of its size, and I wondered what would happen if he tasted the full strength of it. Just once. Across the jaw.

“Come off it,” he whispered weakly. “I told you the truth.”

So I smacked him. Not too hard, but where it would soften him permanently. The butt of the gun connected with his cheek and the sound of the hit was a sickening clop against the frame of his jaw. He began to cough and splutter.

“You’re lying, Pate.”

“My head,” he groaned.

“I’ll break your bloody head the next time.”

“Don’t hit me.”

“Talk,” I told him.

“Don’t hit me again.”

“Talk, Englishman! Who sent you here?”

“Malman.”

“That’s better.” I jerked him up, lifting his scrawny neck and letting him see the gun, up close to his head. He was beginning to fade out for me. His eyes were two marble agates in a pool of dirty milk. I ran into the kitchen and filled a glass of water and threw it in his face. He bobbled his head and blinked. The water dripped over his cut lips and he licked at it blearily. I slapped his jaw until he could focus on me again.

“What did Malman want you to get here?” I asked.

“The stones.”

“Which stones?”

“Sigmund Hess,” he groaned.

The laughter spilled out of me. Something snapped out of the jigsaw puzzle and slipped into place. The mention of Sigmund Hess pricked my intellect.

“Hess has stones hidden in this dump?” I asked.

“That’s what Malman told me.”

“Where’s Malman?”

“Right now?”

“You want another massage?” He bunged his sleepy eyes at me when I put my fist against his chin. He tried to crawl into a crack in the wall. “You’re too banged up to be clever anymore, Englishman. Better tell me where I can find your boss.”

“Warburton Arms.”

“You’re lying.”

“Please.” He held up his hands feebly. “I’m telling you the truth.”

“If you’re lying, I’ll put you in a hospital.”

“The truth,” he muttered. “Malman’s at the Warburton.”

“His room number?”

“Nine seventy-three.”

“On your feet. We’re going to see him.”

“Can’t move.”

“I’ll arrange it.”

I pulled him up. His cute little alpine hat had been knocked off and lay near the parquet, between the dining room and the living room. I adjusted the feather and slapped it on his head. He was all bones and air in my hands. But he would pass for a drunken friend on the way to the Warburton. He would sway and shiver with all the genuine symptoms of alcoholic abandon.

I hauled him down the steps and into the street.

“Ooggghhzz—” he mumbled as I slid him into a cab.

“Watch your language,” I said.