Flashpoint

by Dan J. Marlowe

  I didn't like the way he said it. "Persuade?" I repeated. "Cooperate?"

  "I'm sure that Hazel would prefer to have you return to the ranch with a renewed assurance of no future repercussions."

  So there it was. Gloves off and foils unbuttoned. "I had the assurance, you mangy son of a bitch," I told him. "What the hell are you, an Indian giver?"

  He ignored the nomenclature. "You have a stake in this, too," he reminded me. "Or Hazel has. Forget your lone-wolf complex for once and get in on a piece of action where people are available to do things you couldn't do yourself."

  "Your people?"

  "That's right."

  "When would we be going?" I wasn't all that opposed to going to New York; I was opposed to going on Erikson's terms. If I could get away from him now, I could make a move on my own.

  But he drove a nail in that coffin. "Right now. As soon as we can drive to Tucson Municipal Airport."

  I could dump him in New York City any time I took the notion, of course. And if Hazel and I didn't stay at the ranch afterward he couldn't find us. We could set ourselves up anywhere. "Okay," I said. "Since you asked me so nicely."

  He ignored that, too. Karl Erikson is a single-minded type with a great facility for ignoring anything not on the main track of his particular interest of the moment. I'd learned that about him in Cuba.

  I called Hazel from the airport.

  Erikson stood fairly close to the booth. I didn't think he could hear me, but I wondered if he could read hps. A couple of times before he'd demonstrated talents I hadn't expected him to have.

  "I've been invited to continue on to New York City with our mutual friend," I told Hazel when she came on the line.

  "I was afraid of that." Her tone was resigned. "What does it mean?"

  "Not much, probably. Right now he's hung up on the fact that I'm the only one who saw the guy who got away. We've got one lead, a bar on the New York east side, but it will be like looking for a virgin in a sorority house. I'm sure I'll be back in a couple of days."

  "You be careful, y'hear?"

  "You do the same, big stuff."

  I left the booth and rejoined Erikson.

  Eighty minutes later we were winging eastward in another of Senor Boeing's man-made birds.

  ***

  We took a cab downtown from Kennedy International Airport. Erikson kept looking at his watch. "I'll drop you at Lexington and Forty-sixth," he said finally. "The bar is in the next block. It's called the Alhambra. I want you to take a quick look at it, then come to my office at Five-O-Five Fifth Avenue."

  "What if the taxpayers find out they're supporting the government in the lap of luxury on Fifth Avenue?" I needled him.

  He paid no attention. "Don't spend more than a few minutes in the bar, because there's a meeting at my office I want you to listen in on. When you come to the Fifth Avenue building, take the elevator to the sixteenth floor and turn right when you get off it. Halfway down the corridor you'll find a door marked Intercontinental Plastics Company. Got it?"

  "Got it. What should I be looking for in the bar besides the hijacker?"

  "Impressions. Is it a neighborhood bar or a flossier place? Some bars in that area cater to Madison Avenue types. Get the name of the owner from the license on the wall, and I'll check out the management. It probably won't tell us anything, but you never can tell. Don't hang around, though. I want you to see the people who are coming to my office."

  "You think I might know them?"

  "I doubt it, but we shouldn't overlook the possibility. These men are Israelis."

  "Intelligence again? How come they're running around loose in this country?"

  "It's an unofficial situation." Erikson's tone was dry. "Complicated by the fact that at the moment I have no official status myself. I'm set up as a listening post to filter acquired information. These Israelis are good men, and they have none of the inhibitions inculcated in our own foreign agents. It makes some of the guys on Pennsylvania Avenue a little nervous."

  It had turned dark during the ride in from Kennedy, and a fight rain was falling. The cab was hurtling along through the bravura neon atmosphere of east-side Manhattan. I recognized Fifty-seventh as we hummed through the intersection with the green light, and I leaned forward to be ready to tap on the glass and attract the cabbie's attention.

  "It's eight-thirty now," Erikson continued. "Be at my office no later than nine."

  "Okay." I rapped on the glass. "Forty-sixth," I told the driver when he turned his head. The cab slowed and angled from the center of the street in toward the curb. I stepped out into rain that had degenerated into a heavy mist.

  The sidewalks were deserted. Even if the area catered to Madison Avenue types, at this hour the boys in the gray flannel suits were out of the club cars on the New Haven and sitting with their feet cocked up in front of their Darien and Westport mortgaged homes, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood kids in the swimming pool.

  ***

  The Alhambra wasn't hard to find. In the middle of the block a Gothic-lettered illuminated sign in a plate-glass window flashed on and off. The bottom half of the window was painted black. I walked up the block and opened a door with a massive brass handle. The door felt so heavy I took a second look at it. In the semidarkness I couldn't be sure, but it felt like solid oak.

  The interior was dimly lighted. I had the impression of an attempt at an old-world style: heavy, ornate furniture, elaborate gilded mirrors, crystal chandeliers, rich-looking leather and wood. A garish canopy ballooned out over the bar, and the pictures on the walls showed the Alcazar and other Spanish architectural wonders which looked familiar but which I couldn't name. Everything in the place seemed pseudo-Spanish or pseudo-Moorish.

  The customers were a mixed lot in looks and dress. The place seemed to be almost a League of Nations. There were black faces in African robes and black faces in Western business suits. In one corner three Japanese women in colorful kimonos chattered to a Japanese man in correct formal dress. In another a bearded Sikh in a white turban spoke animatedly to a shaggy-haired man wearing a Basque-like beret who was sitting next to a goateed, olive-skinned man in a skullcap. Sprinkled throughout the room were a variety of airline uniforms, both pilots and stewardesses.

  I slid onto a vacant leather-cushioned stool at the bar beside a slim female in a sari. "Jim Beam on the rocks," I told the Spanish-looking bartender when he materialized in front of me. He turned to the bottles on the back bar. In its mirror I could see that my next-stool companion was a Nordic blonde with enormous gold earrings and a jewel carefully pasted in the center of her forehead. Her sari hung loosely upon her slenderness, and her eyes were wide-staring as they met mine in the mirror. "You're wearing a hairpiece, aren't you?" she said to me in a little-girl voice. Her intonation was slow and dreamy-sounding.

  "That's right," I said, seeing no point in denying the obvious to a close observer. This girl hardly looked the part of a close observer, though.

  She turned on her stool to look at me. "And you've been badly burned," she continued. "They did a good job on you, but my best friend was burned when she was fifteen, and I can always tell."

  The bartender returned with my drink. "I'm looking for Hawk," I said to him as he took the bill I placed on the bar.

  "He comes and goes," the man said, and went to the cash register with my money.

  So at least there was a Hawk, genus unknown.

  "Do you have any speed?" the girl on the next stool asked me.

  I took another look at her. New York permits eighteen-year-old drinkers, but this girl didn't look eighteen. Glancing down, I could see her feet under the soiled hem of her orange sari. They were bare and dirty. Her small features had an almost angelic expression, but I could see dirt smudges on her face, too. "No," I said.

  "Too bad. I'd like to get high."

  There was no particular inflection in the childish voice. A half-empty beer glass reposed on the bar, but she didn't sound drunk. She didn't sound
sober, either. I haven't had much contact with marijuana, but the dilated eyes and dreamy-sounding voice had me thinking marijuana. "What's your name?" I asked.

  "Chryssie," she said gravely. "C-H-R-Y-S-S-I-E. Short for Chrysanthemum."

  "I see. You're a flower child?"

  She smiled, a sweet, untroubled smile. "Nobody ever corrupted a flower, did they?"

  "You've been corrupted?"

  The dilated eyes removed themselves from the introspective examination of her beer glass and fastened upon me. "I corrupt."

  "Now that I find hard to believe."

  But the blonde girl's gaze had withdrawn itself to her glass again. She said nothing. I tried a few more questions, but she seemed to have stepped into a private room, closed the door, and turned the key. I let it go and resumed my examination of the other occupants of the smoke-hazed room.

  Finally I glanced at my watch. It was getting close to the time Erikson had set for my appearance at his office. I drained my Jim Beam and set down my glass. Swiveling on my bar stool before sliding from it, I became aware that the blonde was back in the land of the living. She was watching my face. "So long," she said.

  "So long?" I echoed.

  "You're leaving, aren't you?"

  "That's right." She gave me another of her otherworldly smiles. "So long, Chryssie."

  I went out to the street and hailed a cab.

  4

  FIVE-O-FIVE Fifth Avenue wasn't one of the newer buildings in the area. I studied the wall directory in the rundown lobby. Employment agencies dominated the second and third floors, after which the emphasis shifted to publishing companies. I recognized none of the names.

  The slow-moving self-service elevator took me to the sixteenth floor. I emerged into a dimly lighted corridor with frosted glass doors stretching away in precisioned monotony on either side. Following Erikson's instructions, I passed doors lettered Magazine Bureau, Inc., M & M Publications, Inc., before I came to Intercontinental Plastics Company.

  I knocked and waited. Erikson opened the door and stood aside to let me enter. We walked through a tiny office, large enough to contain a desk and a switchboard, into an inner office four times as large but hardly the lap of luxury. There was linoleum instead of carpeting on the floor, and there were no draperies over the Venetian blinds. A metal desk was piled elbow-deep with carelessly strewn papers. Funeral-home-type chairs lined two sides of the room. A topographic map of the world covered most of one wall space, a fair-sized painting of Emmett Kelley in clown costume another, and a detailed chart whose composition and purpose I couldn't fathom a third.

  "You cut it fine," Erikson said as he closed the door between the two offices. "I'm expecting them."

  "What's with the plastics company label when everyone else is in the publishing game?" I asked.

  "I didn't want people trooping in and out of here trying to exchange shop talk." Erikson crossed the office to the clown picture and pressed its upper right corner. The section of the wall on which the picture rested pivoted at right angles as a hidden door opened, disclosing another small room beyond it. The joining was so cunningly fashioned as to be invisible except to the closest inspection.

  I followed Erikson into a narrow room lined with shelves of equipment and benches loaded with gadgetry. It seemed almost an electronic arsenal with miniature recorders, cameras, microphones, and other exotic devices for eavesdropping, recording, and monitoring. I saw some more practical hardware items as well, including weapons camouflaged as fountain pens, cigarette lighters, and wallets.

  I sat down on a padded stool that Erikson indicated. I was facing a benchlike counter on which three shoe-box-sized television monitors confronted me. "I want to explain how these operate first," Erikson said, "then if we have time you can tell me what you found at the Alhambra. I don't want-"

  "I can cover that in one sentence," I interposed. "There's a Hawk who comes and goes, but who's to say if it's the right one?"

  "At least it's not a complete dead end. Be sure you get a good look at my visitors."

  "You don't think Israelis did the hijacking?" I said in surprise.

  "No, but these types really get around. Look at them carefully in these TV screens. Each screen is connected to separate, wide-angle lenses in the office. Two-way mirrors are passe in today's intelligence work, and any observant agent would spot an observation window or peephole the moment he entered a room. Television has replaced the direct-view system."

  He flipped a switch, and suddenly I was looking at sharp details of the tiny outer office. Erikson hit another switch and his paper-strewn desk and the office space around it floated into view on a second screen. He pointed to one of the recorders. "This is set to monitor as well as record, and it's already running. You'll be able to hear everything that takes place. I have it running because some of these sharp intelligence men now carry a meter which shows an added electrical impulse inside a room. A buzzer will sound in here when anyone enters the outer office."

  I waved a hand at some of the items on the benches. "I recognize the snooperscopes on that shelf, but what's some of the rest of this junk?"

  "We keep two laboratories busy turning out this 'junk' as you call it," Erikson said. "The majority of which isn't for public sale." He pointed to a bench piled high with gadgets. "Those are bumper beepers that operate from a triple-antenna switch."

  "Bumper beepers?"

  "Magnetized boxes attached to the underside of cars so that beeps from the box permit a following car with a receiver to trail them. The better ones have a range up to three miles, with an audio-homing device that makes the pings louder as the distance lessens. Those big discs next to the beepers are parabolic reflectors for gathering up sound waves and channeling them to a receiver. Next to those are suction-cup wall listeners. Some have their own transistor amplifiers."

  "Whatever happened to freedom of speech and all the rest of that jazz?"

  "That's not a concern of ours in the areas in which we work."

  I pointed to several microphones with extremely long snouts, almost like rifle barrels. "What about those?"

  "Two-directional long-range mikes. Aim one of those at a fly on the roof of a barn three hundred yards away and you can hear the shingles crackling under his feet. Now let's see you operate the monitors."

  I turned the screens off, then turned on all three of them. The third screen offered another view of Erikson's office from a different angle. Satisfied with my performance, Erikson went back into his office and closed the wall panel.

  I sat down again on the padded stool. There was a faint whispering sound from the monitor, and it took me a second to realize it was the slurring noise of Erikson shuffling papers on his desk. The microphone inside must really be as sensitive as he claimed, I decided. I fit a cigarette and settled down to wait.

  Then a girl's voice sounded faintly. "I won't do it!" she said in a high-pitched voice. "It's not like you said!"

  I leaned toward the tape-recorder monitor expectantly before I realized the voice hadn't come from it. The television screens showed no one in Erikson's office except him at his desk.

  "Cut the stalling and unwrap the merchandise, baby," a man's voice said. Like the girl's, the voice was faint but clear.

  I looked around the room. There was a door at the opposite end of the room from the hidden entrance. When I approached it, I saw the door was steel. It had a powerful spring-bolt lock. I eased the lock back, half-expecting to find the door locked on the other side. It wasn't. I inserted a hand and explored the other side of the door. It was paneled wood, concealing the steel, and it didn't have a keyhole. I opened the door wider.

  Glaring light dazzled my eyes. I blinked and tried to focus. It was another moment before I could make out three women and two men in a room that looked like a photographer's studio. Cameras on tripods and high-intensity lights on standards with wires trailing from them were deployed seemingly at random. Along one wall was a backdrop depicting a beach scene. In front of the
flat was a metal beach chair in a sandbox.

  "When you said photos in the nude, you didn't say it was a gang job!" the girl's voice spoke up again. I could see her now. She was a frosted blonde with flippy curls and tight waves that made up a short, bouncy hairdo topped with short bangs.

  "Look, Marcia," the younger-looking of the two men said. "We're paying you forty an hour and we thought we were buying a pro. Now either strip or bug off. The door is right over there."

  The frosted blonde bit her lip. Her companions, a cynical-looking brunette and a chubby brownette, were already removing skirts and blouses. By the time the brunette peeled down a girdle and stood there rubbing at the red pressure marks on her slim flanks, the blonde was pulling her dress off over her head.

  "That's better," the man said.

  The brownette stripped to garter belt and stockings, the blonde to canary-yellow bikini panties. The second man, the photographer, held a light meter against each of the girls' bare bodies in turn. "That's a real nice piece of meat you've got there, Ginger," he said to the brownette as he removed the meter from the vicinity of her broad, nude buttocks. "Okay, Edna," he addressed the brunette, "get into the beach chair. I can't shoot your tail till those girdle marks fade out."

  The brunette sauntered to the sandbox with an exaggerated hip flourish, tested the sand delicately with a toe, then sank down into the chair. Immediately she bridged with shoulders and heels, thrusting her stomach upward. "Goddammit, that's cold!" she cried out.

  "Here's a blanket," the younger man said soothingly. He arranged it beneath her arched form and the brunette relaxed again. The man patted her bare belly. "That's the girl, Edna."

  "Pants off, baby," the photographer said to the blonde. "We're all girls together here." He waited while the canary-yellow panties were removed. "A real blonde, hmm? When we do the black-and-whites, we'll have to touch up your bush with a little lampblack or there won't be enough contrast. That pale fleece of yours'll come through good in color, though. Now-"