“That would explain it.”
“They never think of people on a business schedule. My name is John Pettis.”
Marley offered the name on the passport he was using. Neither man moved to shake hands.
“It’s getting foggier outside,” Pettis said. “I took a look out just a minute ago.”
“Then I think I’ll head back now,” Marley said.
“Where did you find a room?”
“The Leas.”
“Oh, that’s a coincidence,” Pettis said. “Too bad they don’t have a dining room. And I can’t say much for the plumbing.”
In the half hour he had spent inside the domed arcade building, the fog had consumed the beach. It took Marley a while to find a stairway back up to the road, and when he found it he walked on past it another twenty feet and stood in the shrouded darkness, his back against the stone retaining wall, and listened. When ten minutes had passed, no one had come after him. Pettis might play the penny machine until they turned out the lights. Or he might know better than to follow another man into the dark.
There was a television in the hotel’s sitting room, and four other guests occupied easy chairs and watched a comedian in a wig and housedress pretending to be prime minister. Marley recognized three of the passengers from the Calais ferry, two women who were traveling together and a much older man with a white mustache who had a cane propped against his knee. The fourth person, a woman, occupied a wheelchair and had the air of a permanent resident whose routine had been disturbed by the visitors.
“Hello,” said the old man, looking away from the television. “I’m Buchsman. These are—” His glance jumped to a middle-aged woman and a younger woman. “—Mrs. Muir and Miss Porter, fellow castaways.”
Marley stayed where he was, at the edge of the room, and repeated the name he had given Pettis.
“Going on to London?” the old man asked.
“I was planning to.”
The man sucked his teeth. “I’m in no hurry. It will be there tomorrow. Or not, in which case what do I care?”
“Shush,” said the woman in the wheelchair.
The only telephone was beside the tiny registration desk. It wouldn’t do. Marley went back outside and climbed two steep blocks toward the center of town. The fog hadn’t reached here, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it had: The streets were empty, the buildings unlighted, the sense strong that he had wandered onto a shabby theatrical set. He fed tokens into a phone and dialed the number he had for Siminov in London. The answer came not in Russian but in bloatedly cheerful West Country English. “Evening! May I help you?”
Marley hung up.
He called a different number, in the Belgravia section. Eight years ago, Charles Marley had had Popper under his wing. Now the younger man was moving up. As London station chief, Larry Popper was touted for deputy director of operations once the Reagan crowd left office, unless someone managed to poison his career. Popper’s wife answered the phone, and Marley waited until the hesitant, sexless male voice came on. “Charles?”
“Siminov isn’t going to be available tomorrow.”
And what was that evidence of, the younger man would wonder. Could he even assume Marley’s information was correct? But he wouldn’t ask if Marley was sure.
“I called his flat and there seems to be a new tenant,” Marley said.
“Are you compromised?”
Charles Marley watched the dead street. Nothing. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“Folkestone. The trains aren’t running and—”
“I’ll send a car. Although . . .”
“That’s not necessary.”
The “although” had tipped his decision: no, no car. He finished Popper’s thought. Although . . . if the Russians had gotten to Siminov, why would they bother with a case officer who no longer had an appointment to keep?
Walking down the hill to the hotel, Marley looked at one answer and felt a thrill of importance. If Siminov had been a plant, there was an answer. But why lure him from Paris to England? Why lure him anywhere? If the Russians thought they had a score to settle, why would they be subtle?
He opened his topcoat as he entered the hotel, though it was not warm inside. There was a snug bar to the right, beside the sitting room. John Pettis and one of the women travelers stood beside the bar. The woman was middle-aged, with a pointed jaw and the kind of eyes that might go with an acid tongue.
“This is Mrs. Muir,” Pettis said. “Mr.—”
“We’ve been introduced,” the woman replied. She held a small glass half full of something clear. “John says you’re both Americans, which means that I’m going to reach home before either of you. By tomorrow—”
Pettis interrupted, warned Marley, “If you have any secrets, be careful. Mrs. Muir works for Fleet Street.”
“I don’t have any secrets,” Marley said. “What sort of reporting do you do?”
“Economics,” the woman said. “So I can’t tell you about Princess Di.”
Pettis raised a hand, fending off the thought. He asked Marley, “What work do you do?”
“My company publishes books,” Marley said. He mentioned a name they would recognize, where his cover was more than skin deep.
“What’s your role?” Muir asked.
“I try to acquire them.”
“Crime stories? I prefer crime stories when I have my shoes off.”
“We publish memoirs and politics mostly. You’ll have to excuse me—long day.” Marley went up to his room, which was at the front. It hadn’t occurred to him, when he was on the street, to call the apartment in Paris. Now he was tempted to go downstairs and try. He knew she wouldn’t be there—would have left already to meet whoever he was—and if he tried phoning now he would try every hour until dawn. That would break him completely. As it was, being half broken, he could function, though it occurred to him, as he sat looking down on the street, that he wasn’t thinking clearly when he told Popper not to send a car. He had no reason to spend the night in this place, except to see if Siminov’s people had sent someone after him.
So why had he said no?
In Paris the small publisher—a man of short stature who oversaw a sparse list—had been enthusiastic about Siminov’s memoirs. It didn’t hurt that Marley mentioned financial assistance from a foundation that barely existed except on paper. The foundation had supported publication of a number of anti-Soviet books in Europe as well as providing capital to a literary magazine that only occasionally strayed into politics but was believed, for reasons no one quite understood, to be pro-American. The small publisher, whose taste in novels had never made him wealthy, argued that the foundation should budget a reasonable amount for advertising Siminov’s book. “There is no point in printing copies for the warehouse,” the man pointed out.
“Of course,” said Marley.
“So we should discuss an amount for that,” said the publisher. And they did, and Marley let some more money go, which he didn’t care about. The book would be published in Paris, by a small but reputable literary house, and there would be a British edition and perhaps one in the U.S., but that really didn’t matter. People in Europe would have more evidence of Moscow’s repression, in this case of writers. Siminov claimed to have known Pasternak and Rybakov first hand. “They were bendable,” the old Russian’s letter said.
So the book might cause a literary stir, as defenders of the maligned Soviet writers rallied in newspapers and monthlies—not that it would matter. Little of what he did mattered, Marley suspected, but he did it anyway. It told him something about the state of the conflict that in place of KGB colonels queuing to double he was dealing with second-string novelists with scores to settle. The fact the Russians had let Siminov emigrate told him they knew he was harmless.
His apartment in the not-so-chic Fourth was empty. Larry Popper had introduced him to her while everyone was in Washington. “Pretty girl, a little difficult,” was all that P
opper had told him about the young woman. He had discovered for himself that she was vain and, unrelated to the first fact, didn’t love him. But by then he was in love with her, and he became a little more so with every betrayal, which told him something about himself. Speaking of scores to settle . . . Larry had no idea.
The cold in the second-floor hotel room kept him awake. He was huddled at the window when a car drove up in front of the hotel and disgorged two passengers. The woman from Fleet Street, a scarf over her head, came out from under the portico to meet them. All three passed out of his sight into the hotel. Marley glanced at his watch. Three-twenty A.M. He remained by the window, not caring if his room was their destination. He listened for sounds in the hall and on the stairs, but it was as if fog had swept in and silenced the building. In several minutes the woman came out and opened the boot of the car. The two men brought John Pettis’s body between them and put it out of sight. The men climbed into the car and drove off. The woman came up the hotel steps. Marley left the window and got ready for bed. He had recognized only one of the men, from London station. He was in his pajamas when there was a tap on the door. He ignored it and climbed into bed.
In the morning the woman who called herself Muir couldn’t keep the pleasure off her pointed face. “You’re supposed to finish the trip to London,” she said. “We’ll share a cab to the train.”
Feigning surprise, Marley said, “Orders from Fleet Street?”
Muir busied herself with a bag. The younger friend she’d picked up was nowhere to be seen. Had she been stage dressing, Marley wondered, or an accidental bonus?
They didn’t speak during the train ride.
“You should be glad we got that one off stage,” Popper said. He had adopted all the airs of a City banker except for the bowler hat. “Freelancer, you’d never have guessed he was Dutch, would you?”
They were having lunch in a small room Popper thought it was amusing to call the Drones Club. It had no windows, just a new-looking blond table and eight chairs, fabric-covered walls in a pattern that resembled nothing in nature, sandwiches and chips from a nearby shop.
“I wouldn’t have guessed he was anything but Russian,” Marley said. “Why did they send him after me?”
“They lost a man in Berlin in August.”
Marley had been in Berlin in August. “I was in deep cover,” he pointed out. “And I didn’t kill anyone.”
Popper shook his head. “Who knows who put the idea in their heads?”
Protesting, perhaps, when no one had accused him.
“What about Siminov?” Marley asked.
“They put him in the river. Unfortunate.”
“Yes,” Marley agreed. “Do we have a manuscript?”
“As a matter of fact, we do. You can take a copy back to Paris with you.”
Marley watched the younger man. He thought: He couldn’t view me as a rival, could he? Because, Marley knew, he couldn’t possibly stand in the way of Popper’s advancement. The man might or might not get the deputy director job, but it wouldn’t turn on anything Marley was or did. Retiring Pettis surely boosted Larry’s chances, proved he was capable on the operations side, though Mrs. Muir might deserve some of the credit.
Marley left the building, forcing himself to believe Popper hadn’t fed him to the Russians.
But he understood: He hadn’t mattered. It had been the Dutchman who had to be lured into the field, who had been important.
He felt a stab of joy when he phoned the apartment from Gare du Nord and his wife answered and told him to hurry, they could have dinner in the neighborhood, she missed him so. He made himself believe that too. What did he really know about her habits—all surmise, built on fragments of observation; as the London station chief would point out, he knew nothing that was necessarily true. The Metro took him only so far, and then he had to walk along the busy evening streets. It was, if possible, colder in Paris than it had been along the channel, but there was no fog. He found himself wishing he had been brave enough to leave the Folkestone hotel one more time the previous evening, before Muir had done her work, inviting the Dutchman to come out into the fog with him. He wished he had done that, regardless of how it might have turned out. He held an imaginary conversation in the fog, and for some reason the assassin’s voice was a woman’s.
“You must be very unhappy to risk coming out like this,” she said.
“I am,” he replied.
But then, who would have killed whom? He couldn’t answer that. They both were looking for release or neither would have been out there. Which of them would have found it? Marley looked down the boulevard, but he couldn’t see the lights of his building.
Copyright © 2012 John C. Boland
* * *
THE ELEVATOR MAN
A FOUR HORSEMEN STORY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN | 5123 words
Art by Andrew Wright
John Barrymore had shed blood at the California Hotel.
Then again, maybe not. After destroyers and DeSotos, lurid legends were Detroit’s major export.
If the story was true—and an old report at Receiving Hospital of the release of one “Jack Smith” with minor facial lacerations and twenty-three stitches in his right arm was one point in its favor—he was the only guest of his stature ever registered there.
Naming the hotel for the home of Hollywood had failed to attract the glamorous horde the original owner had counted on. When Mary Pickford or Buster Keaton came to town, they generally stopped at the Pontchartrain, or accepted the hospitality of one of the auto pioneers in Grosse Pointe.
Barrymore may have holed up in the California to elude private detectives hired by his wife. A woman named Ruby LaFlor was booked for soliciting there the same night, it was rumored, the star of Don Juan drank too much and walked through the Art Deco glass door of the shower in his suite; but if the events were connected, the publicity value was doubtful.
In any case, that was twenty years in the past. If anyone could shed light on the affair it was Hank, the elevator operator. The hotel staff insisted that the men who’d built the shaft in 1915 had taken his measurements before making the car.
Dan McReary wasn’t curious enough to ask Hank because their average conversation ran four seconds and varied not at all:
“How’s it going, old-timer?”
“Good as can be expected, punk.”
These exchanges always left the detective third-grade feeling privileged. As far as he knew, the gaunt old man never opened his mouth in the presence of any other member of the Racket Squad. He sat stonefaced on his low stool with his gaze straight ahead and his fist on the lever, wearing what was likely the same brass-buttoned tunic and pillbox hat that had been issued under Woodrow Wilson. From year to year nothing changed, except the length of hair growing out of his big pendulous ears and his license in its frame on the elevator wall, renewed on the same day annually.
“What about it, Sarge?” McReary asked once. “Ever get a rise out of old Hank?”
Sergeant Canal worked his cigar, a lonely channel marker bobbing in the sea of his big Slavic face. “I got a grunt out of him when I gave him a portable radio last Christmas. I figured he’d want to keep up on the war, but I never saw it again. Probably sold it on the black market. Now I think about it, it might’ve been just a burp.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like to be reminded. Maybe he lost a grandson or somebody overseas.”
“His great-grandson would be too old even for the Civil Defense. I think he ran Lincoln up to his box at Ford’s Theater.”
“You know that doesn’t make sense.”
Detective Burke, the biggest man on the detail when Canal wasn’t around, chuckled from the bed he was stretched out on in shirtsleeves and stocking feet. “Canal never would’ve made citizen if he didn’t take the test next to a smart Mexican.”
“I was born here, you Irish SOB. Some of us got birth certificates.”
“What’s it say next to Father: ‘Player to be announced later’?”
/>
Canal shrugged and took out his resentment later on a suspect in a rape.
The California strained a budget already drawn thin by absent department personnel, scattered from Guadalcanal to the Black Forest. The skeleton crew left behind to maintain order patched up the cigarette burns in its uniforms and cannibalized junkyards to keep official cars rolling. Automobile manufacturers were too busy building warplanes and submarines to replace the aging vehicles on the road.
But Sergeant Canal, detectives Burke and McReary, and Max Zagreb, their lieutenant, considered the expense necessary. Cases broke more efficiently without meddling from the brass at 1300 Beaubien, police headquarters. When requisitions were slow, they pooled their paychecks to make rent.
“This time when the bean counters come through, let’s add room service,” Burke said. “I’m sick of running out for liquor.”
McReary poured a cup of chicory from the pot. “Of all the gall. I’m the one does the running. The clerk in the store on the corner thinks I’m a soak, and I never touch the hard stuff.”
“Boo. And while I’m at it, hoo. Go cry in your Orange Crush.”
They were the Four Horsemen in the press. The pro-administration Detroit News used the term in the heroic sense, while the reform-conscious Free Press thought it appropriate to a quartet of barbarians. Hearst’s Times straddled the fence. Police Commissioner Witherspoon wanted to be mayor and was waiting for a consensus before deciding whether to disband the squad. The fate of the four’s draft exemption rested on the outcome.
“Although God help Omar Bradley when that bunch ships out,” Witherspoon confided to his cronies at the Athletic Club.
McReary didn’t pursue the Hank subject, and eventually forgot about the discussion. As the youngest Horseman with the least seniority, he had his hands full running errands for the others when he wasn’t contributing to their impressive arrest record. When not much was happening in Europe and the Pacific, they sometimes managed to shove World War II below the fold.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Page 8