Hark!

by Ed McBain

  Melissa had pointed this out to Adam.

  “We don’t look at all alike,” she’d said.

  “No problem,” he’d assured her. “One thing certain about a so-called personal banker is that he wouldn’t know you if he tripped over you in his own bathroom.”

  She hoped so.

  She did not know what crime it might be to try getting into someone else’s safe-deposit box, but she had a feeling she could spend a lot of time upstate if she got caught doing it. Be ironic, wouldn’t it? Get sent up for signing someone else’s name on a bank’s signature card, after she’d been hooking all these years with never so much as a blemish on her spotless career—well, that one prostitution bust in L.A., but she was still Carmela Sammarone then.

  Her high-heeled shoes clicked noisily on the bank’s polished marble floor as she approached the desk at the rear. A bespectacled woman looked up at her, smiled. Handing her the little red envelope with the key in it, Melissa returned the smile. The woman shook the key out of the envelope, opened a file drawer with numbered index cards in it, fingered swiftly through them, yanked one out, silently read the name on it, looked up, asked “Miss Stanford?,” and without waiting for an answer, handed the card to Melissa for signature. Gloria Stanford’s true signature marched down the length of the card like so many identical siblings:

  Gloria Stanford

  Gloria Stanford

  Gloria Stanford

  Gloria Stanford

  Gloria Stanford

  Gloria Stanford

  Gloria Stanford

  Melissa added her forgery just below the last true signature:

  Gloria Stanford

  Close, but no cigar.

  On the other hand, who was watching the store?

  The lady in the eyeglasses glanced cursorily at the signature, and then opened the gate in the railing and led Melissa back to the rows upon rows of stainless steel boxes. She used first Gloria’s key and next the bank’s own key to open the door to one of the boxes, and then yanked the box out of the row and handed it, deep and sleek, to Melissa.

  “Will you need a room, Miss Stanford?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” Melissa said.

  Her heart was pounding.

  In the small room, with the door locked, Melissa lifted the lid of the box and peered into it.

  There seemed to be a whole big shitpot full of hundred-dollar bills in that box.

  She wondered if Adam would find her and shoot her if she ran off with all that money.

  She decided he would.

  WHEN EILEEN BURKE got to the bank, the woman in the eyeglasses told her that Miss Stanford had been there not ten minutes earlier. She showed Eileen the signature card Miss Stanford had signed. Eileen knew she’d now have to go all the way downtown for a court order to open that safe-deposit box. She also knew that when she opened it, she would find it empty.

  Just as she was going down into the subway kiosk to catch a train to High Street, the second message that day was being delivered to the stationhouse.

  Shake off slumber, and beware:

  Awake, awake!

  “There he goes again!” Meyer said. “Taunting us with Shakespeare.”

  “If it is Shakespeare,” Kling said.

  “What else could it be but Shakespeare?”

  “Calling us dummies,” Meyer said.

  “Maybe we are dummies,” Genero said.

  No one disagreed with him.

  “Let’s try to figure out what he’s saying,” Carella said. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  “I got better things to do,” Parker said, and went off to the men’s room to pee.

  “He’s telling us to wake up.”

  “Or else.”

  “ ‘Shake off slumber and beware.’ ”

  “ ‘Awake, awake!’ ”

  “It doesn’t even rhyme,” Genero said.

  DR. JAMES MELVIN HUDSON was head of the Oncology Department at Mount Pleasant Hospital, not too distant from where Sharyn Cooke maintained her private practice in Diamondback. As a member of the medical team in the Deputy Chief Surgeon’s Office in Majesta, however, he reported only to Sharyn, his immediate superior.

  At twelve noon that Thursday, while Detective Eileen Burke was on her way downtown for her court order, Hudson asked Sharyn if she’d like to go down for lunch, and they both went downstairs to a sandwich joint called the Burger and Bun, right there in the Rankin Plaza complex. The strip mall in which the Deputy Chief Surgeon’s Office was located also housed a dry-cleaning establishment, a fitness center, a Mail Boxes, Etc., and a branch of the Lorelie Records chain of music shops. A cop who’d recently been shot or merely kicked in the ass could therefore have coffee or lunch before being examined by a doctor, get his uniform jacket pressed while he was having his chest X-rayed, develop his pecs or his abs after his exam, and then buy and mail a CD to his mother for her birthday, all in the same little mall. Location, location. All was location.

  Timing was important, too.

  At a quarter past noon, when Hudson and Sharyn entered the Burger and Bun, it was jammed with similarly minded lunchers. Heads turned nonetheless. Here was a strikingly good-looking black couple, both obvious professionals, both wearing white tunics, a stethoscope hanging around Sharyn’s neck, another one dangling from Hudson’s pocket. He was six-feet two-inches tall. She was five-nine. All conversation almost stopped when they came through the door. The proprietor showed them to a booth near the rear of the shop. They ordered soups and sandwiches, and then earnestly and seriously discussed a patient they’d both seen earlier that morning, Sharyn because the cop had been shot two months ago, Hudson because the cop had revealed to him that two non-malignant tumors had been removed from his bladder three weeks before the shooting. When their food came, they dropped shop talk for a while, Sharyn mentioning a movie she and Kling had seen over the weekend, Hudson telling her he was getting sick and tired of movies aimed at fifteen-year-old boys.

  “There’s nothing made for grownups anymore,” he said.

  “Not all movies are that bad,” Sharyn said.

  She was bone weary.

  Her police workday was only three hours old, and she was ready to go home. Still had to bus back to the city for her own office hours this afternoon. Sometimes, she wondered.

  “I’d rather stay home and listen to music,” Hudson said. And then, without preamble, “Are you familiar with the work of a rap group called Spit Shine?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t much like rap.”

  “Well, it’s come a long way from ‘Let’s All Kill the Police,’ if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I don’t know what ‘Let’s All Kill the Police’ is.”

  “I’m categorizing a form of gangsta rap,” Hudson said. “Spit Shine went beyond that. Spit Shine addressed the ills of black society itself. Didn’t try to lay it all on Whitey. Asked us what we ourselves were doing to denigrate…”

  “I don’t like the expression ‘Whitey,’ ” Sharyn said.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean it in a derogatory way. In any case, Spit Shine no longer exists. Guy who wrote their stuff got killed in the Grover Park riot a few years back. Remember the riot there?”

  “Yes.”

  She remembered. The day after the riot, a white detective named Bert Kling had called her from a phone booth in the rain to ask if she’d like to go to dinner and a movie with him.

  “Twenty-three years old when a stray bullet killed him,” Hudson said. “His name was Sylvester Cummings, his rapper’s handle was ‘Silver.’ Wrote wonderful lyrics. Wonderful.” And again without preamble, he began beating out a rhythm on the table top, and began singing in a low, somehow urgent voice.

  “You dig vanilla?

  “Now ain’t that a killer!

  “You say you hate chocolate?

  “I say you juss thoughtless.

  “Cause chocolate is the color

  “Of the Lord’s first children

 
; “Juss go ask the diggers

  “The men who find the bones

  “Go ask them ’bout chocolate…

  “Go ask them ’bout niggers…”

  “I don’t like that word, either,” Sharyn said.

  “Man was trying to make a point,” Hudson said.

  Their food arrived.

  He seemed about to say something more. Instead, he just shook his head, and began eating.

  Go apart, Adam, and thou shalt hear how he will shake me up.

  “Adam,” Meyer said.

  “Adam Fen,” Carella said.

  “The Chinese guy again,” Genero said.

  “The Deaf Man,” Kling said.

  “If he’s deaf, then how can he hear?” Parker asked. “ ‘Thou shalt hear.’ ” “And what’s with all this Quaker talk all at once?” Willis asked. “ ‘Thou shalt hear?’ What’s that supposed to be?”

  “ ‘Thy hat and thy glove,’ ” Eileen said. “That was a good movie.”

  This was now ten minutes past three. She’d been back in the squadroom since a quarter to. As she’d suspected, the FirstBank safe-deposit box was empty. She was wondering now if it was worth sending Mobile over there to dust it for prints. Had “Gloria Stanford” put on gloves before opening it?

  “Friendly Persuasion,” Kling said, remembering.

  They had seen it together on television, Eileen lying in his arms on the couch in his studio apartment near the Calm’s Point Bridge. That was when they were still living together. That was a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.

  “ ‘Thee I love,’ ” Eileen said, remembering.

  “He’s telling us he plans to shake us up,” Parker said.

  He hated this fucking Deaf Man. Made him feel stupid. Which maybe he was. But he didn’t even like to consider that possibility.

  “Shake us up how?” Brown asked.

  “You think he’s gonna tell us all at once?”

  “Oh no, not him.”

  “Piece by piece.”

  “Bit by bit.”

  “Listen.”

  “Go apart and listen.”

  “Hark!” Willis said.

  And this time, no one questioned his use of the word.

  THE CALL FROM MILAN came at three-thirty, which Carella figured was either nine-thirty or ten-thirty over there in Italy. The call was from Luigi Fontero, the man who was about to marry Carella’s mother on June twelfth and whisk her off to Italy shortly thereafter. Life With Luigi, he thought.

  “Hey, Luigi,” he said, feigning a jovial camaraderie he did not feel. “What a surprise! How are you?”

  “Fine, Steve, and you?” Fontero said.

  Mild Italian accent. Somehow it grated.

  “Busy, busy,” Carella said. “We’ve having trouble again with a criminal we call the Deaf Man. That would be ‘El Sordo’ in your language.”

  “Il Sordo,” Fontero corrected.

  “Right,” Carella said.

  Thanks, he thought.

  “So what can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know how to begin.”

  Carella immediately thought He’s calling off the wedding!

  He waited.

  “About the wedding…”

  Breathlessly, he waited.

  “I don’t know how to say this.”

  Just say it, Carella thought. Just tell me you’ve made a terrible mistake, you’ve now met a lovely Italian girl drawing water from the well in the town square, and you’d like to call off the entire thing. Just say it, Luigi!

  “I don’t wish to offend you.”

  No, no, Carella almost said aloud. No offense, Luigi, none at all. I quite understand. We all make mistakes.

  “I want to pay for the cost of the wedding,” Fontero blurted.

  “What?” Carella said.

  “I know this is not customary…”

  “What?” he said again.

  “I know the groom is not supposed to make such an offer. But Luisa is a widow…your mother is a widow…and we are neither of us youngsters, there is no father of the bride here, there is only a loving, devoted son who has taken it upon himself…”

  He’s rehearsed this, Carella thought.

  “…to shoulder the burden of a double wedding, his mother’s and his sister’s. And, Steve, I cannot allow this to happen. You are a civil servant…”

  Oh, please, Carella thought.

  “…and I cannot allow you to assume the tremendous expense of a double wedding. If you will permit me…”

  “No, I can’t do that,” Carella said.

  “I’ve offended you.”

  “Not at all. But I’m perfectly comfortable paying for both weddings. In fact it’s been fun talking to caterers and musicians and…”

  “I can hear it in your voice.”

  “No, Luigi, truly. It’s very kind of you to make such an offer, but you’re right, this isn’t something the groom should have to do, pay for his own wedding, no, Luigi. No. Truly. When do you plan to come over?”

  “Are you certain about this, Steve? I’m ready to wire to my bank there…”

  “No, no. Not another word about it. How’s the weather there in Milan?”

  “Lovely actually. But I long to be there. I miss your mother.” He hesitated. “I love her dearly,” he said.

  “I’m sure she loves you, too,” Carella said. “So when do you think you’ll be here?”

  “I fly in on the eighth. Four days before the wedding.”

  “Good, that’s good,” Carella said.

  There was a long silence on the line.

  “Well, I’d better get back to work here,” Carella said.

  “Are you sure I haven’t offend…?”

  “Positive, positive. See you next week sometime. Have a good flight.”

  “Thank you, Steve.”

  Carella broke the connection.

  HE WONDERED NOW if actually he had been offended.

  Here at the ragtag end of the day’s shift in this grimy squadroom he had called home for such a long time now, he wondered if the offer from the rich furniture-maker in Milan had offended him.

  As a working detective, Carella currently earned $62,857 a year. By his most recent calculation, the double wedding was going to cost almost half that. Without doubt, Mr. Luigi Fontero could more easily afford to pay for the coming festivities than could Detective/Second Grade Stephen Louis Carella.

  But there was this matter of pride.

  When he was still in college, one of his professors—and he truly could no longer remember which class this had been—called him in to discuss his term paper and his final grade. The professor told him it was a very good paper, and he was grading it an A, and then he said he was giving Carella a B-plus for the semester.

  He must have seen the look on Carella’s face.

  “Or do you really need an A?” the professor asked.

  Carella didn’t know what that meant. Did he really need an A? Everyone really needs an A, he thought.

  He looked the professor dead in the eye.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t really need an A. B-plus will be fine.”

  And he’d picked up his term paper and walked out.

  A mere matter of pride.

  So what the hell? he thought now.

  My mother and my only sister are getting married. So thanks, Mr. Fontero, but no thanks. I’ll find a way to pay for it myself. Even if it takes me to the poorhouse.

  Which was just when the Deaf Man’s final note of the day arrived.

  And now I will unclasp a secret book,

  And to your quick-conceiving discontents

  I’ll read you matter deep and dangerous,

  As full of peril and adventurous spirit

  As to o’er-walk a current roaring loud

  On the unsteadfast footing of a spear.

  “Now we’re getting there,” Meyer said.

  “Where are we getting?” Parker wanted to know. “It’s just more damn Shakespeare
.”

  “But he’ll be sending us a book!”

  “ ‘A secret book,’ ” Kling corrected.

  “Didn’t Shakespeare write sonnets?” Genero asked. “I hope it’s a book of his sonnets. I like his poetry.”

  “Personally, I find it somewhat shitty,” Parker said.

  “We’ve got to put them all together,” Carella said. “His notes. The four notes we received today.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they won’t make sense otherwise. Same as the anagrams.”

  “You’re right,” Willis said. “We’ve got to look at them as a whole. Otherwise they’re just nonsense.”

  “You want my opinion,” Parker said, “they’re just nonsense, anyway. I mean, what the fuck—excuse me, Eileen—is this supposed to mean? ‘As to o’er-walk a current roaring loud on the unsteadfast footing of a spear.’ I mean, that isn’t even English!”

  “Let’s take a look at the other ones,” Carella suggested, and removed the previous three notes from the center drawer of his desk.

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date…

  “He’s telling us he’s planning something for the summer.”

  “Or maybe even sooner.”

  “Sometime closer to May…”

  “ ‘The darling buds of May,’ ” Eileen said.

  “ ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’ ”

  “He’s telling us the party’s gonna get rough.”

  “Let’s see the second note.”

  Shake off slumber, and beware:

  Awake, awake!

  “Previews of coming attractions,” Meyer said. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “We can expect a full-screen ad for a furniture store next,” Parker said. “I hate going to the movies nowadays.”

  “Oh, me, too,” Eileen agreed.

  “Wake up, he’s telling us. ‘Shake off slumber.’ ”

  “Let’s see the third one.”

  Go apart, Adam, and thou shalt hear how he will shake me up.

  “Uses the name ‘Adam’ this time,” Willis said.

  “Lets us know this is the same Adam Fen who sent us the anagrams.”