Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  Now Red Tie shifted gears, asking a series of perfunctory questions about my background as a Californian, a rock singer. How old was I? How many times had I been to England? Reason for visiting? For staying? Then he came back to his first line. “You have been playing detective; that’s not illegal, but it is dangerous. Has it ever occurred to you that Mrs. Steyning might have been murdered? That it could put you in serious danger?”

  “I’m an incompetent rock singer; no one would take me seriously as a detective.”

  Red Tie’s smile said amen.

  “So, are you professionals close to finding Mrs. Steyning?”

  He wasn’t a bad poker player except for a slight twitch at the left side of his mouth. I took that for a no. Blue Tie came in here, suddenly the voice of reason. “What have you found in your amateur detecting?”

  “Nothing.” I held it there for a moment. “Nothing firm, anyway.”

  “And what do you have that’s loose?” He liked his joke.

  Red Tie was back now. He had read the confidence behind my reluctance. “You have an obligation to tell us what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything. I have an obligation to tell you the facts.” I guessed that was right.

  “Look at it from our side. Rock singer comes over here, blunders into criminal fraud without even knowing it. No doubt misjudging or not even thinking about who his girlfriend’s father is, what he’s capable of. Of course it will be rather hard for us to take you seriously. And yet we are so open-minded and, let’s be honest, desperate, that we’re prepared to listen to what you’ve got.”

  I knew he was trying to get to me, had got to me, but I was powerless to control myself.

  “Claudia Steyning is overseas. She was forced there by Constantine Lyubanov. He had his hooks into her in 1995, went to jail for six years, and as soon as he was out he went right back to working on her.”

  I had their attention now. They would have to ask me about him. Maybe I would make them beg. Red Tie and I looked at each other. I tried to hold back on a you-don’t-know-who-he-is-do-you? kind of smile. Red Tie swallowed hard, but also smiled. “Okay,” he said, admitting defeat. I explained about the former KGB operative, the possible double agent who had gone into money laundering in the ‘90s and had somehow connected with Claudia Steyning.

  “How is he pressuring her?”

  My theory of what happened was weak in many places. The only thing I was reasonably sure of was that Lyubanov was our man. The dates of his imprisonment neatly bracketed the first and second wrangling between Claudia and Francine over the Vial. Then he went missing at the right time. But it was the high wire now, adrenalin. I had talked myself into a corner, and would now have to talk my way out.

  “Natalie Steyning’s house was broken into. Early September or just before, whenever school starts over here. It could of course be a coincidence, but it fits a pattern so I say no, it is not a coincidence. It was Lyubanov.”

  “And your pattern?”

  I needed to slow down; I also needed to keep going. The adrenalin was working its magic. I was making connections that felt right. Whenever I had any doubt about Lyubanov I went back to Hardcastle’s supreme effort to overcome the forces of mental disintegration to warn me. Those dark brows tightening. That stamp of frustration. His one gift to me.

  It was during this pause that two additional policeman entered the room, one of them obviously senior from his age, bearing, and smarter suit. He introduced himself as Detective Superintendent Hill. The other stayed anonymous.

  “He alleges that the daughter’s house was broken into.” He went on to explain about Lyubanov. Hill nodded to his anonymous companion, who left the room.

  “Did we know about this break-in?” Hill asked. He looked at me so lightly I was practically expecting a wink.

  “I’d have to check, sir. Mr. Shalabon was just about to tell us about some pattern he claims he sees.”

  “Faint. It may be all in my imagination,” I said.

  “If we’re talking about an ex-KGB man,” Hill started, “one would expect any pattern to be faint. So, what pattern?”

  The interruption had cooled me down. I’d have to talk myself up again.

  “Natalie’s house was broken into. My guess is that Lyubanov took something, an article of Natalie’s clothing. Let’s say it’s a blue beret. I say that because it went missing after the burglary. Claudia wakes up one morning to discover it somewhere that’s normal, but obvious to Claudia as impossible. Maybe Claudia fights that off as a one-time mental slip. She puts any dire scenarios on hold. She invents some reason; she doesn’t look at it too closely. Then she hears about the break-in. It screams that Lyubanov has been standing over her daughter while she slept. Also, he must have been in Claudia’s flat to put the beret there. How can Claudia go to the police over a beret that quite reasonably should be in her flat, just not in that exact place? She’d look like a scatterbrained mother. And how could she bring in the police without involving Natalie?”

  “Why’s he doing all this?”

  “He wants her offshore money. Claudia paid herself as agent for Madeline Crowell. Into an offshore account. At least £6.7 million.”

  This time my questioner nodded, but not before looking at his boss.

  “I never met Claudia,” I continued. “However, she impresses me as a forceful character. Maybe even Lyubanov would have met his match. He avoids her and goes to her main weakness, her daughter. He has stood in Natalie’s room while she slept. Claudia understands only too well the implied threat he’s making.”

  “You said pattern,” Hill said.

  “Faint,” I said, stalling. There was something else. I had it just there in front of me when I was on fire. The only part I remembered didn’t make any sense. What I remembered was that it directly involved me. I wasn’t anywhere near London when all this happened. I hadn’t arrived at Onslow Mansions for another two months. Wait a minute. That was part of it.

  “Onslow Mansions,” I said, just to put even more pressure on myself. “Why am I staying there?” I was asking myself as much as anyone. “It was offered to my bandmate Kirk back in late September by our London agent. Originally it was Claudia’s idea…‌to rent out that flat.” Then I had it. “The flat above Claudia was empty. The owner’s in prison. Why would Claudia call up Jack Ross, my agent, a business friend of the owner, and suggest he rent it out? Why especially when there was not a lot of love lost between Claudia and that owner? Could Lyubanov have been up there? Walking around above her while she tried to sleep? Making sounds, going bump in the dead of night? Again, how could she prove anything?”

  With a chill I realized this was my flat I was talking about.

  My flawed MO as an amateur detective was to connect to my feelings, tap into the other intelligence that, if I did not look away, provided gestalt reactions to evidence. I guessed a seasoned police detective might call this his gut. But all that was out in the open now, there to be picked apart by these doubting, cynical cops.

  The anonymous cop re-entered, shutting the door quietly. All faces turned to him. “It all fits. Apparently this Lyubanov is one of the best operatives we’ve seen over here.”

  Red Tie looked at his notes, considering, swallowing as if a bitter pill. He mentioned dismissively my allegations of double breaking and entering.

  “It wouldn’t be breaking. MI5 says he moves like a ghost. They also confirm they’ve lost sight of him.”

  Red Tie persisted. “We have nothing on him…‌as one of her men friends.”

  I said, “Did you go back six years? That’s when he would have known her.” That’s a lot of men ago, I thought.

  The four cops proceeded to talk among themselves. Red and Blue Ties clearly didn’t want me to be right. The anonymous cop helped them where he could. Hill let them dispute among themselves.

  Suddenly their voices sounded tinny and far away. It was like turning a radio dial; our current station sl
urring into garbled static, then slowly the next station emerges out of the noise and into clarity. It’s funny how the mind works sometimes. Like my inspiration about Hardcastle as Kirk’s real father, it was another letter in a mailbox—all I needed to do now was open it. It involved the Vial, Kirk, Drysdale, and Francine. But first, I needed to go to the end and work back from it. Did I want to tell the cops about the Vial? Kirk? Would I be breaking the law in not doing that? While I mulled that over they continued to pick holes in my Lyubanov story. That settled it; I would hold out if I could.

  Eventually Red Tie asked me why I thought Claudia was overseas.

  “It’s just a wild guess.” There was a pretty solid train of logic there, but I didn’t want to listen to them try to tear it apart.

  Hill gave me a doubtful look, smelling avoidance. “No, that makes sense. If he’s this consummate spy, then he will always play the percentages. If he killed Mrs. Steyning, he wouldn’t risk being seen with her. He would do it at her flat. If he did that, he would hardly risk moving the body. He’s more than capable of disguising the murder as something else, breaking and entering for example.” He turned to me now. “Anything else?” Clearly he was on my side.

  “Her offshore money; has it been touched?”

  “No, it has not.”

  “Then if I may make a suggestion? Look for a corpse that matches Lyubanov’s description, one that has died with cocaine and meth in its system.”

  There was silence.

  Hill understood me and was prepared to play the long game. He probably wanted time to develop the Lyubanov thread. When they started off with their questions, all at once, he held them off. “Let’s look into this Lyubanov character. Mr. Shalabon, we’ll talk to you again in a few days. I hardly need tell you that you are not a suspect, but please don’t go anywhere without checking with us first.” He gave me his card and stood up.

  I asked, “What about this forged loan?”

  Blue Tie, suddenly amiable, said, “Consider it a warning. Now you know what Panos Lamzaki is capable of.” He got up now. “We would dearly love to nail that bastard.”

  I turned down their offer of a lift home. A complicated wash of oppression and triumph buzzed through me. I had worked my way into the cop’s game, held my own against them. However, there was Lamzaki’s staggeringly excessive forgery. Why fend me off when he could extinguish me like a shoe sole would a cigarette?

  I needed to walk. The snow had let up; the sidewalks were clear. It would be a chill four-mile walk from Scotland Yard to my flat. I might even stop by that lonesome alley, Kirk’s Last Stand. It was nearly in a direct line between the two.

  I fought off the chill question: did Sula know about the forgery? That was the police’s implication; assuming, that is, the police weren’t simply jerking my chain. I had come a long way with Sula; softened, opened up, took willing risks. Now I needed to harden my heart in case it was back to only me. I was confident Sula was on my side. Even then you play a game where you have to think the other way so you don’t jinx it. Nevertheless, this looming shape was casting its dark shadow over all. Lamzaki’s enormous, cynical, breathtakingly all-on-one-throw maneuver, his forged loan document. Lamzaki was not afraid of showing the raw face of his evil self to his daughter, betting she didn’t have the will to go against him. He was forcing her to bet on our future—bet heavily, and bet early. What had Lamzaki said to me? “A hypothesis must be tested with all the rigor at our disposal.”

  When Sula arrived at my flat that night there was no hiding my state, mental or alcoholic. I had stopped off at a pub in Kentish Town for a Kirk Howell special. The thing is, one sets you up for one more, after which your judgment is relaxed about another one. I had debated all the way back what, if anything, to tell her. In the end, alcohol trumped caution: I dumped on her.

  I watched a slow, sick, determined smile spread on that beautiful face. We sat in silence for a long time. I wanted to go to her; I couldn’t move.

  “Maybe it was Sparshott, or someone else?”

  Her head remained down, thinking. She slowly got up from her favorite armchair, came over, pecked the top of my head. She went down the hall to the second bedroom, one she had appropriated as a staging area for Operation Shalabon. She closed the door. Soon I could hear her yelling, shouting, then silence.

  After many long minutes I knocked on her door. She didn’t answer. I have to admit that I thought about that window, where it opened onto. The door was unlocked, so I opened it. She was sitting on the bed, a sick, hollow freeze on her face. I hadn’t realized until that moment what a profound parental betrayal this had been. Her father had been her life. No doubt there were large areas of it she purposely avoided. Now she had been forced to face something essential about that man: he didn’t care about her happiness.

  “I tell him I will never see him again. Never.”

  I sat next to her, trying to balance support with intrusion in this private agony. I had her to myself now; she had nowhere to run. Could it work like that, all on me? This was the crux of that cynical Greek bet. Her life had been one brave fight that had been pared down to the essential things. One of those had now been banished.

  “He’s just being overly possessive. He wants you all to himself.”

  “Please. Please, Jim. Don’t talk to me about that man. Do not pretend to know him.”

  She had a point. This powerful man, however, was not going to lose his daughter without a fight. I tried to see things from his perspective: he was a man who was used to getting what he wanted, including his daughter. He’d had his elaborate game with me. Yet there was a destructive over-exuberance to it. Why break up this budding romance when you can crush it under your heel?

  I worried that Sula was now cut off from too much of what had been her life; now too dependent on me. It was like we were murderers on the run, enjoying our last days of freedom before the implacable forces bearing down on us prevailed.

  CHAPTER 21

  Sula went back to Imperial the next day; I did nothing but wander around London, adjusting to recent revelations, to wild, scene-shifting jumps in my case, to Sula and her despotic father. I walked the streets around Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square. For some reason I needed milling tourists, street touts, chestnuts roasting on braziers, laughing, pushing knots of Italian teens, grumpy American waddlers and cold-cheeked British beauties looking through me. Humanity. Normality. Innocence.

  I was angry, restive, confused. I had an urge to act, and in acting take control of what was coming at me. I decided to take the train to Oxford to visit Dr. Drysdale. She may have ignored my repeated phone calls, but let’s see what would happen when I showed up unannounced on her doorstep in the early evening. If she wasn’t home I’d practice my stake-out skills. It would help if I had a car.

  Hers was a small row house in the eastern outskirts of Oxford, one of those English streets of identical shells. Sixty-six Malvern Terrace. The only marker of individuality was the color of the door. Hers was cherry red, similar to the stair carpet at Ravenhall’s club. She answered the door in trust mode, just swept it open to whomever. Her look said she would have been much happier with a salesman.

  “I knew you would be back.”

  “And I know why…‌”

  “I suppose I should ask you in.” She made me wait for a long moment before gesturing me inside.

  She escorted me down the hall, past an old bicycle leaning up against a radiator, mail on its seat. A large mirror in an ornate frame hung above it. She was wearing a heavy-weave fisherman’s sweater, neatly ironed jeans and blue moccasins. She led me down that hall like a doctor with bad news.

  “I’ll make some tea. Make yourself comfortable.”

  I looked at the formidable array of books in her living room, all walls floor-to-ceiling with shelves. Science, art, photography, literature, more photography. The room was period. The only light switch I could find was a desk lamp on a table by one of the bookcases. It lit
up an old horsehair couch in faded rose. Hand-painted tiles, sun and sky themes, yellows and blues, jumped out of the gloom of a mahogany coffee table. On it stood a vase of flowers, roses, commercially similar.

  The games you play in these situations, always as if a hidden camera is monitoring you. I chose a random photography book, a strangled, vowel-challenged Eastern European name, playing at interest, invading her private space. It was mainly nudes, no attempt at coyness, either. Luck of the draw.

  “You are too young for that one,” she said, entering with the tea tray. I guess my look betrayed me. “Yes, I know; I am too old. Oh well.”

  Catherine Drysdale put the tea tray between us and went to turn on another light, a low-wattage torchiere in an opposite corner. I sat on the horsehair sofa; she in a French provincial chair with elegantly curved legs, a tufted seat that contrasted with its hard wooden arms. We exchanged small talk about my journey up from London. You don’t get down to it before the tea is poured. I knew this by now.

  Two paths. Chase her ducking and weaving through a thick stand of saplings, or point a gun and tell her not to move. I’d already had my fill of her flushing cheeks, her tentative eyes. So the latter. I told her about my Iken adventure, about the Note for File.

  “It’s all in that file,” I said. A partial bluff.

  “Dear Francine; she plots the perfect murder and it turns out to be hers.”

  That certainly sounded cold. There had been a slight tremor over “murder” as her eyes tried to read how far along I was, which told me I had further to go.

  “That didn’t come out right, did it?”

  I tried for a neutral smile.

  “I’ve decided that I’m rather glad you’ve come. I will tell you what I know and get it off my inconsiderable chest. Just…‌well, let me do that, because…‌well, to tell the truth, I want to hear what it sounds like out loud.” Her eyes darted to mine as her shoulders straightened.

  “Yes, I advised her on the pharmacology of the murder weapon. I had no clue, none, that she would want to acquire this substance. My God, this was supposed to be fiction! When she first approached me, she didn’t care about details, just that such a compound existed—in case her publishers asked. No, wait a minute; she did ask me whether I could concoct it in my lab. I thought then for authenticity.”