Ian St James Compendium - Volume 1

by Ian St. James

  Dorfman listened to the details of the bombing which had killed Cassidy and another man and then began his questioning cautiously. But as his head cleared and he pushed his tiredness beyond the threshold of pain, his questions grew to a stream and the stream became a torrent.

  They started with Cassidy's record. Such as it was. Nothing very solid - not much was known. Cassidy had been suspected of IRA involvement - suspected of gun-running - suspected of all manner of things - but little was actually known.

  "What happened during his interrogations?" Dorfman wanted to know. "Was Cassidy nervous?"

  "Not really. He said we'd have to release him," one of the CID men answered. "Said we'd nothing to charge him with."

  "And had you?"

  "Not really."

  "So you would have had to let him go?"

  "Within a day or two probably."

  "And he guessed that?"

  "That's right."

  "So he was pretty relaxed about the whole business?"

  "Was he hell!" The CID man shook his head firmly. "Cocky enough to begin with. Said he wasn't going anywhere till Saturday, so he might as well eat our grub as his. He hadn't been charged you see, so he still had his cigarettes and things like that. But he got really stroppy on Friday."

  "Why was that?"

  "Because of Saturday. He was a lorry driver, long distance stuff." The detective had a sudden thought. "You did know that, didn't you?"

  Dorfman had missed it in the file in front of him. His mind was still full of Conlaragh and the fishermen - men like Reilly and the others. He had assumed. Assumed Cassidy was a fisherman along with the others, but a fisherman who could drive a lorry part-time.

  "Get back to Saturday," Dorfman said.

  "Cassidy had to take a load out for the firm he worked for - that's all. But he was worried about it - you could tell that. Maybe he'd have lost his job if-—"

  The cut above his eyebrow throbbed so badly that Dorfman wondered if the stitches had opened. "Who employed Cassidy?"

  "His job you mean?" The policeman reached for the file. "It's here somewhere - hang on a minute. Here it is - Exide limited of Cork."

  Dorfman felt a crush of disappointment. For a moment he had dared hope he had found a worthwhile lead. Callan had been so certain - "a lorry all the way to Germany." Perhaps Cassidy had planned to go sick from his job and take Reilly's truck instead? Could that be it?

  "Can we get them on the phone?" he asked.

  "Exide you mean?" The CID man was astonished. "At this time of night?"

  "They must have a key-holder registered with the local police. Start with him and keep going until you get an answer. Get on to the bloody chairman if need be."

  "An answer to what?" asked the bewildered policeman.

  "If Cassidy was taking a lorry to Germany for them on Saturday." Dorfman fought off the waves of fatigue just long enough to have one more idea. "And if he was, find out who went in his place."

  And with that Dorfman asked for an empty cell and went to bed.

  0600 Monday

  Most people have a favourite city. Rome, Venice, San Francisco - something can happen in almost any place to give it a special touch of magic - maybe a girl, the food or the atmosphere, or even a business deal. But nobody had ever touched Bonn with magic. Whoever said it was half as big and twice as dead as the central cemetery in Chicago was being charitable. Even the Germans hate it. Come Friday evenings they flee in their thousands to the fleshpots of Cologne or Dusseldorf, taking half the city's prostitutes with them and leaving the others to crochet a G-string or devise new ways of tempting their jaded customers. In Bonn everyone's jaded. It's in the atmosphere. Sniff the air in Kennedy Park and it smells of politics. Liberation Park it used to be called, and before that Adolf Hitler Park, and before that Kaiser Wilhelm Park - and if that doesn't make the point, nothing will. Bonn is dull, sterilised and neuter. But this time it promised to be different.

  "You okay, Harry?" Ross asked.

  We were in the RAF Valiant which he used as a company car. Elizabeth sat opposite and the doctor and Max were toward the rear somewhere with a heavily sedated Suzy.

  "I'm fine." Apart from a splitting headache. Apart from being worried sick about Suzy and the whole damn mess. Apart from being convinced we would all be dead by the end of the day.

  He had been forward with the pilot and air crew, accepting a coded radio message from a man called Twomey.

  "Any news?" I asked.

  He shook his head. The location of the bomb was still unknown.

  "What happens in Bonn?" I asked.

  "You've a suite registered at the Steigenberger-Hof. Booked last night."

  I was impressed. Steigenberger-Hof was class all year round, but you had to be a Foreign Secretary to get a suite there during a summit conference. Whoever was pulling the strings was yanking them pretty hard. Bonn's not as short on hotels as it used to be, but when the circus is in town people camp out at Bad Godesberg or Konigswinter, or even as far away as Cologne.

  "I've got a suite?" My surprise was obvious. "You turning me loose?"

  He bared his teeth in a smile. "Elizabeth will be with you - just to make sure you don't run away."

  "Perhaps we'll elope."

  His look said the idea was preposterous. "You'll find a copy of the hotel's register in your room. The guests are fifty-fifty, politicos and newsmen, but the newsmen are the heavyweights. You know most of them - talk to them at breakfast and find out all you can."

  "Like if their morning wheaties came wrapped in a Deir Yassin Press Release?"

  "You got the idea."

  "And if they were?"

  "Play it down - dismiss it - some crank or a hoax - you know the patter."

  I was tired of telling him that "the patter" wouldn't make a scrap of difference, so instead I said: "Suppose whoever publishes the bulletin calls a press conference?"

  He smiled grimly. "That will never happen. Every hotel within twenty miles of the Bundestag is under surveillance. All mail is being screened. All messages are being monitored. Telephones are being tapped wholesale and we've got a man in every bar and lobby in town. With luck we'll make an intercept before anyone gets within a mile of a newsman."

  "All the hot breath on their necks will upset the press."

  "At a summit they expect it." He kept the fixed smile firmly in place. "Harry, I'll tell you - Bonn's sewn up. If someone as much as sneezes he'll be in the infirmary before he can reach for a tissue."

  I hoped he was right, but I had a nasty suspicion that all the breezy confidence was as much to reassure himself as to convince me. I sighed and closed my eyes, only to be confronted with the nightmare scenes of Suzy's interrogation. It had lasted hours. Most of the time she was incoherent and delirious, but Ross had extracted a lot of information from her, even if every answer she gave had to be repeated four or five times for us to understand. Altogether Ross had collected quite a story. Such as the man, Abou Assam, being an agent for Red China and having run Tubby Hayes for at least two years. And if that had already been suggested by LeClerc's discoveries in Paris, then other parts of her story were a revelation. For instance, Abou Assam himself would be distributing the press release in Bonn. For instance, Assam had promised Suzy that Ross would be compelled to release her for the nine o'clock press conference. But the biggest for instance of all was confirmation that they really did have a bomb! When Ross heard of the Irish connection his face mottled, and when he learned that the bomb was being transported from Ireland he swore non-stop for about five minutes. But after that Suzy's information was all a bit vague. She neither knew the type of vehicle being used, nor its registration - she neither knew who was accompanying it, nor its route - and most important of all, she neither knew its destination in Germany, nor what was the ultimate plan. During the telling of her story she had collapsed three times, and after the fourth they mercifully sedated her and were keeping her that way until we reached Bonn. By then it had been almost midnigh
t and Ross had spent the next hour sending signals - but it seemed there was still no trace of the bomb.

  "The doctor took some blood samples from that girl of yours," Ross said.

  "And?"

  "She was hyped up to the eyeballs when she reached us."

  "He needed a blood test to find that out?" I gave him the look I normally reserve for gullible old ladies.

  "Just to confirm it. But you see what it means, don't you?" He was going to tell me anyway. "It means whoever sent her knew she would crack."

  The thought ran wild in my mind for a moment until I made a guess at it. "So they're not worried about what she told you?" I still couldn't say "us," even though I had been there when it happened.

  "Wrong. They wanted us to know."

  Even if that was right I could see no sense in it, but the world Ross lived in had taught him to expect sugar in a salt-cellar. "And that helps?"

  "Twomey has a theory about it," Ross said, looking at Elizabeth.

  Whoever Twomey was, he must have been triple A classified because they made no effort to enlighten me. After a while Elizabeth said. "I can guess."

  Ross looked at her and waited. Then she said, "He's saying it's not Red China at all."

  "You got it," Ross said.

  I shook my head in bewilderment. "But what about LeClerc's evidence? You said it was so damn solid—"

  "Perhaps we were meant to find it." Elizabeth's eyes watched me so carefully I might still have been number one suspect in her book. "Sooner or later."

  "Is that what you really think?"

  "Twomey does," Ross said, still looking at Elizabeth.

  After a moment's pause Elizabeth asked, "And what do the China watchers say?"

  "Same as Twomey," Ross said. "They're amazed."

  “Like the Yanks at Pearl Harbour," I said helpfully.

  Ross scowled. "No. Nothing like the Yanks at Pearl Harbour. There's a deception in this which runs a million times deeper. Even the opening move was a blind. I never told you, but that hi-jacked container was a dummy. There never was any plutonium in that shipment. Yet they demonstrate a one Kiloton capability?" He shook his head furiously. "Twomey's right - we've been fed phoney information from the word go. Vampire Katoul turns out to be a pincushion. The PLO have never heard of the Deir Yassin Memorial. And we're being fed planted evidence that Red China's running the show."

  I struggled to keep up, but if Elizabeth was having the same difficulty she showed no sign of it. Her face was expressionless.

  Ross rubbed the side of his jaw with his tin hand hard enough to get shrapnel in his chin. "It's the old magician's trick," he growled. "Everyone watches the left hand and the right rips your balls off."

  "Suzy must believe the Palestinian end of the deal," I ventured.

  He bit a cigar, picking the end from his teeth with gloved fingers. "She'll believe anything to get that heap of sand back. She'll even believe smoking is good for her. A hundred cigarettes a day for Chrissakes! I bet she has a fall of soot each month instead of a—"

  "What else did Twomey say?" Elizabeth asked pointedly.

  Ross puffed the cigar. "Says Dorfman's late in reporting back. Says my people are saying 'Yanks go home' to the President every five minutes. Says the French are wetting themselves, the Japs are ready to fall on their ceremonial swords and the Germans have worked out how to rebuild Bonn in forty-eight hours."

  "And the politicians?" she asked.

  "Screaming bloody murder, but still sitting tight."

  "What about the search?"

  "From midnight last night every vehicle coming out of Ireland is being stripped down to its back axle. All cargoes are being opened, whether customs sealed or not. All phone calls to and from Ireland are being tapped. The German Army is in police back-up positions and every border crossing is swarming with men." He paused for breath. "Christ, wherever this bomb is, they must find it soon!"

  I looked at my watch. 0630. Soon would have to be within two and a half hours to stop that press conference from ripping the town apart in panic.

  0735 Monday

  The knock at the front door had awoken Molly. Heavy-eyed with sleep, she shuffled down the narrow stairs in her faded blue housecoat, opened the door by the narrowest crack and blinked out in the morning light.

  "Registered letter, Mrs. Malone." It was Connery's boy, all grown-up in a postman's uniform. She could remember him running the streets with his backside hanging out of his trousers. Trust him to make a mistake.

  "It'll not be for me," she said and went to close the door.

  "Mrs. Molly L. Malone," he said. "And it's your address."

  Not many people knew about the L. L for Lillian. Horrible English name. Why her mother had chosen to saddle her with an English name was something she had never fathomed. But her mother was long since dead and her father had been too drunk most of the time to know her first name, let alone her second. She reached for the envelope and inspected it as if it might bite her.

  "You'll have to sign for it," Connery's boy thrust a book toward her, held open with an elastic band and a chewed stub of pencil. "Sign there, please."

  She didn't want to. It couldn't be her letter. Why should she sign for something not hers? But the address was right and she was Molly L. Malone, wasn't she? Frowning furiously she wrote her name along the line he indicated and got rid of him.

  In the kitchen she put the kettle on and sat at the table to stare at the envelope. A crest was printed on the flap with the words "Bank of Ireland" underneath in blue print. She turned it over and studied her name and address at the front. All typewritten and official. It seemed funny to think of somebody she didn't know sitting at a typewriter to type her name. She wished Mick was here. Mick would know what to do. Perhaps she would leave opening it until Mick got back? She brightened at the thought. That would be best, they could open it together.

  She took a cup of tea up to the boy and went to her room to get dressed. Her sister, Kathleen, would be round early to take her into Cork to get the week's shopping. Not that they would need much - she and the boy would be eating at Kathleen's at the weekend, so there were only a few days to bother about - and now it had come to it she wished she hadn't promised Kathleen that she would go. But she had and she couldn't get out of it.

  "What's the letter about, Mum?" the boy asked over breakfast. He picked it up and read the Bank of Ireland inscription on the back.

  "None of your concern, whatever it is."

  "Aren't you going to open it?"

  "It can keep till your Dad gets back."

  "But if it's addressed to you?" He caught the warning look in her eye and contented himself with some final advice. "I just thought it might be urgent, that's all."

  She took it away and put it on the mantelpiece. When he had finished eating she helped get his school things together and watched him leave the house. Urgent! How could it be urgent? When it had to be a mistake in the first place. She washed the breakfast things and tidied the kitchen in preparation for Kathleen's visit, thinking all the while about the Dublin postmark on the letter and that whoever had sent it knew her middle name. Or at least her initial. Perhaps she should tell Kathleen about it? Half of her wanted to, but the other half said Mick wouldn't like it. Mick thought Kathleen an old tittle-tattle, forever gossiping about other people's affairs. Well, everyone did that didn't they? Even if perhaps Kathleen did more than most. She'd need to think about it - there was an hour yet, more even before Kathleen arrived. No need to rush a decision she might regret later.

  But Kathleen arrived much earlier than expected. Anyone could see they were sisters. Kathleen was two years older and had never been as pretty, but she shared the family nose and the fair hair wisped white like the fur of a marmalade cat. She was out of breath and her coat was lopsided where she had buttoned it wrong in her hurry. The headscarf thrown over her head had worked loose and lay rumpled around her collar, and her face was red from the exertion of walking quickly.

 
"Whatever's the matter?" Molly, still recovering from the shock of the letter, was ill equipped for further emergencies.

  "You'll spend the day guessing and never get it." Kathleen unbuttoned her coat, her face alive with the satisfaction of someone about to impart a secret. "But haven't I just had the strangest phone call of all my life."

  "Phone call?"

  "Long distance." Kathleen nodded smugly, sitting at the kitchen table, folding her hands and quivering with undisguised pleasure.

  Dublin, Molly thought. I've had a letter and she's had a phone call.

  "From Germany."

  Molly sat down quickly, her hand clutching her throat, fear all over her face. "Mick!"

  "And who else would it be? And him as clear as being in the next room."

  "What's happened?" Oh Mary Mother of Christ - how do I get to Germany? Me, who's never been past Dublin in my life and there only once. He should never have gone. Bonus or no bonus. He's not strong enough these days. The factory should have known—

  "He's all right, Molly - he's all right."

  Molly bit her thumb and tried to believe her. Once Mick was back she'd never let him away again. Never, never!

  "He's phoning again," Kathleen said excitedly. "This afternoon, he said. Molly, he wants to talk to you - urgently. You're not to worry yourself though. There's nothing wrong and it's good news he's got. Molly, he sounds so excited!"

  Molly unwound enough to put the kettle on. Mick phoning all the way from Germany? To talk urgently. Her eyes strayed to the mantelpiece and the letter still unopened.

  "What can it be about d'you think?" Kathleen said.

  It had to be the letter, Molly thought. Didn't the boy guess right after all? An urgent letter from a bank in Dublin addressed to her? She walked over to the mantelpiece and took it down, turning it over and over in her hands while she thought about it. She could tell Mick about it when he phoned. But wouldn't he want to know the insides of it? Not just the envelope. The kettle shrilled behind her and she put the envelope on the table, while she made the tea.

  "Phone calls and a registered letter?" Kathleen said, eyeing the envelope. She picked it up and read the inscription on the flap. "From a bank! You're mighty important all of a sudden Molly Malone, that's for sure. And aren't you going to open this then?"