London always excited McCall. Bad weather notwithstanding. Even after a rain-filled two-year tour of duty in that city, he still liked rain. He recalled again that his son had been born there sixteen years before—while it was raining.
London was crowded. The attraction was an international bill of fare: The city offered a new play and two musicals from the United States, a ballet from Russia (complete with human-rights pickets), an Italian opera, the Berlin Philharmonic, an art exhibit from France, a Japanese trade show of new electronics products, and, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a special presentation of Indian Art Under the Raj.
The British had put up new signs for their foreign visitors. LOOK RIGHT BEFORE STEPPING OFF KERB.
Peno Rus had his penthouse off Green Park in one of the most expensive areas of downtown London. In the late afternoon McCall strolled through the park in a heavy drizzle to examine the building. According to the report, Rus owned the entire structure.
In just thirteen years Rus had gone from the status of penniless Russian journalist who had been granted political asylum in England to a ranking among the wealthiest gunrunners in the world. Every stone and steel beam in the building had been bought with human blood and agony.
Like all great salesmen, Rus had dazzling charm and graciousness. A great psychologist and reader of men’s souls, he knew instinctively to whom to offer a bribe and to whom to extol altruism. He had a paunchy body, like Pan piping through the woods with his nymphs—a body he dressed with British tailoring. The only flat note in his appearance was the almost Oriental flashiness of a diamond ring on his left pinkie.
It was Rus’s throat, the fullness and fat of it, that intrigued McCall. That throaty wattle told McCall more than Rus’s small Russian eyes did. It was a public confession of his sybaritic greed.
McCall had practically memorized the psychograph on Rus: claustrophobia, terror of heights, rarely flies, rarely travels except to his chateau near Nice. How did he manage to live in his penthouse? How could he use the elevator to get up and down? It must take a superhuman act of will for a claustrophobe to enter that shut-up steel box and ascend or descend six stories. McCall pictured Rus fighting his phobias every inch of the way, the damp brow, the shortness of breath, the mounting terror until the door opened to free him from his terror one more time.
But in Rus’s eyes, wealthy British gentlemen lived in penthouses. And he was determined that he would have all the outward trappings, regardless of the terror. Give us this day our daily dread.
Well, how do you kill a man? In his career, McCall knew of possibly a hundred murders in the arms world. It was not a difficult art in itself. But to kill a Peno Rus—that was going to take great skill. Rus took every precaution, from burglar alarms to bodyguards, from bulletproof cars to anti-bomb patrols in his offices. He would not be the victim of a cheap shot. Still, he had his vulnerabilities. Everyone did.
McCall walked past Rus’s doorman, who saluted him. Were there any flats to let? The doorman assured him there weren’t—hadn’t been for years. He went to a drawer in a lobby highboy and took out a card of the rental agents. But there was little hope, you see.
No matter. McCall had decided how Rus would die. It was extremely simple and appropriate: inside the elevator. Rus would drop down the shaft six stories from his penthouse to the bottom. He would do an appropriate imitation of the Tumbler’s last cry. All that was needed was the man who would do the job. And McCall already knew who that would be. Major Mudd.
Major Archbold Mudd was Rus’s Master of the Arsenal.
He was a small and smoldering, peppery man. He had slick black hair and an unpleasant ferret’s face which he had half-hidden behind a large guardsman’s moustache. A graduate of Sandhurst, he was known to have many excellent contacts in the British bureaucracy and in the British military, an invaluable attribute that Rus exploited eagerly.
Unpleasant tales followed after Mudd. A story persisted that he had been discharged from the military for cowardice. He was accused of being a sneak. Some said he was vengeful and vicious, a back-shooter, a sniper from behind the garden wall, a house burner, a letter-bomb practitioner. Eager to be offended, he cherished his resentments.
McCall had taken some pains to learn about Mudd’s ambitions and game plan. The key word was snob. A man of no particular antecedents, Mudd was a dedicated social climber who wanted to get his two sons into the best schools in England. He was raising them to be gentlemen in the City. Stockbrokers. Barristers, perhaps.
He was just the man to assassinate Peno Rus.
Before going to dinner, McCall called Major Mudd at his home.
“You need to sharpen up your skills, Major,” he said.
“Who’s this?”
“Now who else would it be, Major?”
“Give me your number. I’ll call you right back.”
So Major Mudd was worried about wiretaps. Some ten minutes later he telephoned McCall.
“What is it you want?”
“It’s not what I want, Major. The question is: Are you sure you want a piece of this quarrel between Rus and me? And are you sure you’re siding with the winning team?”
“Where can we talk?” Major Mudd demanded.
“How about a nice chat in my car?” McCall suggested.
“Make it mine.”
“Fine. Would you like to pick me up at the Marble Arch in, say, an hour?”
When Major Mudd picked him up in his Jaguar, the man was distraught. He was as carefully dressed as a tailor’s dummy, in a custom-made houndstooth hacking jacket and a military-cut raincoat—but he nervously tugged at his cufflinks and stretched his neck out of his shirt collar.
“Well, how have you been, Major?”
“Bloody awful, now that you ask.”
“You really botched the job, you know. I’m supposed to be in my grave.”
“I didn’t do it. Not me. It was Rus. Bloody fool. I told him not to use those hacks. That idiot they dropped down the stairwell could hardly make change of a pound note, and the other two—if their brains were dynamite, they wouldn’t have enough to blow their noses.” He looked at McCall with the ghost of a smile. “He nearly had a stroke when he got your note. ‘Missed.’ Dear God, I thought I was going to be rid of him that day. Deep-purple face he had. It’s a bleeding miracle he didn’t have a fatal heart attack. ‘Missed.’ Aha.”
“Still in all, Major, it was not a nice way to try to kill me. Dropping down a stairwell.”
“I told you, I had precious little to do with it. I think the man’s gone mad. I mean, he’s taking on the entire U.S. government, isn’t he?”
“Then it’s time to leave him.”
“Leave him!” Mudd narrowly missed hitting a bus. “You and I have been through this before, haven’t we, McCall? You know bloody well Rus has no ex-employees. He’s paranoid about betrayal. If you quit, you die. And if he thought I was going to leave him—sweet Jesus. I’m master of his arsenal. I know too much. I’m a constant danger to him. I also have a personal score to settle with him and he knows it.”
“What’s that, Major?”
“It’s personal, I told you. But Rus knows I could do him in for it.”
“He must have done something terrible to you.”
“To my family,” Major Mudd said. “He’s bound to make a move against me anytime now. Every day I wake up I say, ‘Today’s the day he’s going to do it.’ It’ll be my bedroom that goes up. Or my car. I’m damned if I stay and damned if I leave. Imagine him taking on the U.S. government. I mean, you don’t have to read tea leaves to know how that will turn out, do you?”
“It has already turned out, Major. Peno Rus is a dead man. Here’s your chance to escape with a whole skin.”
“What are you telling me? You’re going to do it for Rus?” Major Mudd swerved widely around a truck, then slammed on his brakes to avoid hitting another car.
“Yes.”
“Deliverance. Dear God. Deliverance.” Major Mudd glanced
sharply at McCall. “I don’t want to know anything about it. Not a bloody word.”
“Major, you’re going to know everything about it.”
“I am?”
“You’re going to do the job.”
Major Mudd skidded violently, flinging gravel and dirt as he rode his brake to a violent stop on the shoulder of the road. Then he looked with disbelief at McCall. “If you think I’m going to do away with Rus, you are a bleeding fucking madman.”
“Now come on, Major. You’re the only one who can do it and you know it. You don’t have any other options. You can’t run and you can’t stay. And if you don’t beat him to the punch, he’s going to ace you.”
The major’s face had gone bone-white. He bunched his two fists in his lap and stared down at them. “Sweet Jesus.”
“You’ve known in your heart for a long time you have to do it. And I’m just the man to help you. We share a common objective.”
“How?”
“How what?”
“How am I—how is the job to be done?”
“Very simple. His elevator.”
Major Mudd took a long time to read McCall’s face. “Elevator.” He shook his head slowly. “Bleeding monster you are.”
“It’s no worse than pitching a man down a stairwell, Major.”
Mudd looked solemnly at him. “But it pulls you down to the same level with him, doesn’t it?”
McCall left London for Paris on the late-afternoon flight. It was pouring at Heathrow when he left and it was pouring at De-Gaulle when he arrived.
He sat in his hotel room near the Pont de la Concorde. He watched the rain on his window and wrote some notes and letters, fighting off a strange feeling of depression. Later he had a leisurely and solitary meal in his hotel dining room.
At nine he left the hotel to keep his rendezvous with Jamil. He slumped in the seat of the dark cab listening to the beat of the windshield wipers.
McCall sat in the brasserie on Avenue de Clichy behind a large pane of glass and watched the rain pound down on the outside tables and chairs.
He was bemused with himself. In a few moments, he would set into motion a plot to kill another man. It would be violent, coldblooded, premeditated murder. Without an indictment. Without a hearing. Without a jury trial. Without even a warning of any kind. It would be done in the back in the dark.
There were only a few people in the bar, and they sat in their raincoats, separate, turned inward, twisting their glasses morosely, stirring their coffee endlessly. No one talked. Occasionally, outside, a few people dashed up the rainy steps from the Metro and disappeared running into the darkness. The sad side of Paris.
Three murders. And all the while that he was considering this, in his memory, ineluctably, his Constitutional Law professor uttered two words over and over, wrote them endlessly with chalk that stuttered with passion across the blackboard: DUE PROCESS. DUE PROCESS. DUE PROCESS.
“It’s the only thing that keeps man from a tragic slide back into the cave. Never, never forget: It was due process of law that made modern civilization possible. We cannot survive without it. Due process!”
Due process.
McCall told himself to get up, drop a few francs on the saucer, put on his raincoat and leave the brasserie, step down into the Metro and ride back to his hotel, and get the morning flight back to Washington. And find another way.
“There is no other way,” he said almost audibly. He’d been over this ground so many times, he was weary of it.
Stand up. Leave. While there is still time to turn back. Before it is too late. He wondered if there really was a hell.
McCall decided to play a game with himself. A form of Russian roulette. He would prepare to leave the brasserie. If he got to the Metro steps before Jamil arrived, he would go back to Washington and cancel the whole plan. But if Jamil arrived first, the plan would go through. The fates would decide. Ready. Aim. Pull he trigger.
McCall stood. He put a few francs on top of the white cash-register slip in the saucer, deliberately slipped his arms into the sleeves of his raincoat, picked up his collapsible umbrella, and turned to walk the few steps out in the rain to the Metro stairway and the ride back to his hotel. Back to Washington. Back to Due Process.
Like Nemesis, a cab hurried out of the darkness and stopped at the curb. The gods had made their decision. Jamil stepped out.
Slim as a boy, impeccably turned out, Jamil walked grandly under the large black wheel of his umbrella, across the sidewalk, past the outside tables and chairs, and into the café. A regal procession.
He was expensively turned-out, as usual—tailored gray flannel suit, custom-made white shirt, and maroon foulard necktie, all elegantly contrived to set off his handsome olive boy’s face and chestnut hair. He languidly cast off his raincoat, capewise. Then he sat. Or rather, he arranged himself in the chair.
He nodded at McCall. “So,” he said.
“So,” echoed McCall. So: there would be no flight back to Washington. There would be three assassinations.
“You will forgive me, I know, for insisting on a public place.” Jamil waved an arm in benediction. “As you can see, no one we know comes here.”
He watched McCall’s unconvinced expression. “Well, you do see. It is a workingman’s neighborhood. Just a corner brasserie on a rainy night with no one about. We are perfectly safe here.”
“Your words are a great comfort,” said McCall.
Jamil smiled at the sarcasm. “Alas. You are upset. But one cannot be too careful.”
“Meeting in public is hardly careful.”
“Meeting in a less public place is, for me, even less careful.” Jamil had spoken on the matter. He dismissed it by changing the subject. “So, Mr. Smith …” He waited.
“I have some work,” said McCall.
“Good.”
“For you.”
“Good. Anyone I know?”
“Perhaps.”
“Indeed.”
The waiter approached. Jamil favored him with a small smile as he gazed at the youth’s blond hair.
“Alsace?” Jamil asked.
The waiter shook his head. “Brittany.”
Jamil gazed frankly at the boy’s body. “Vive la Bretagne.” He ordered a Sambucca with a coffee bean and watched the waiter walk off.
“So. Someone I know.” Jamil lit a cigarette with a gold lighter.
“Slane.”
Jamil raised his eyes from the lighter flame and looked at McCall. “Oh. Slane. Yes. Slane.” He pocketed the lighter and looked thoughtfully at McCall. “So you know about Slane and me?”
“I thought you’d be interested.”
“Oh. Indeed.”
“I’ve come to you, Jamil, because you have a reputation for discreet management of your affairs.”
“Of course. I have never botched a job.”
“I was talking about silence.”
Jamil breathed smoke through his nose. “Yes. Well. That’s essential, isn’t it? Careers like mine are built on silence.”
Jamil watched the waiter serve the drinks. He cast the youth a grateful small smile and watched him walk away. “Have you ever been to Brittany, Mr. Smith?”
“This project is going to take a good deal of planning, Jamil.”
“Oh, yes. To do Slane will require a masterpiece. A great deal of planning. And time. It will take some time.” Jamil turned large brown eyes to McCall. “It will also be expensive. Very expensive.”
McCall’s face remained expressionless.
Jamil reached a manicured fingernail into the Sambucca and hooked out the drowned coffee bean. “Fascinating, you know. This could be my chef d’oeuvre. What a marvelous challenge.” He put the coffee bean into his mouth, kissed his wet fingertip, and contentedly chewed. The flavor of Sambucca in the bean made him shut his eyes languidly. “Marvelous.”
The conversation drifted. Jamil seemed to lose interest in the offer. Then, decisively, he drank the last of his Sambucca.
“I see.” He sat back. He placed a thoughtful thin finger on his lips. “The first question one must ask is, can it be done at all? Is it doable?”
“There’s more,” said McCall.
“Oh?”
“He’s to be killed with his own favorite weapon.”
“Ah. His rifle. Poetic justice. You are an artist, Mr. Smith.”
“Do you want to handle this, Jamil?”
“Handle it? I think this could make me the uncrowned king of my profession.”
The brasserie emptied and the waiters watched television while Jamil and McCall held a long conversation, exploring every aspect of the subject. Much of the time Jamil sat pensively turning his glass, deep in thought.
“Very clean,” he said at last. “You will provide the setups, the locations, and the weapons. And I will provide the action. Very clean indeed.”
He cast an eye at the white plastic shopping bag at McCall’s elbow. FRERE JACQUES TOYS AND GAMES was printed on it in merry letters. In four languages.
McCall touched the bag. “Do you play pinochle, Jamil?”
“I think I should say yes.”
McCall slid the plastic bag across the small table. Jamil took it and slipped out a cardboard box. Pinochle was printed on it in a flowing script. Inside were two decks of cards and a row of black chips. Jamil slid his fingernail along the spine of the chips, he counted fifty. He plucked one from the stack and glanced at the legend imprinted on it: PEDRO’S CASINO LONDON.
Jamil raised his eyes to McCall’s. Each black chip was worth $1,000.
“I have just become an avid lover of pinochle.”
“The balance on delivery. Another fifty chips.”
“A Slane might cost somewhat more than that.”
“I see.”
“I was thinking more in the range of a quarter of a million. After all, there are very few men with enough cunning to do Slane.”
“It’s too high, Jamil.”
“Alas.”
“One hundred fifty chips is all I can offer.”
“I can’t possibly do it for less than two hundred.”
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