Scimitar

by Ed McBain

  “Okay, fuck it.”

  “Nice talk,” Elita said.

  Carolyn turned away from her and hurled the pearl-buttoned sweater into the suitcase.

  The two detectives who’d caught the squeal were pounding up the steps ahead of Santorini. One of them was called Hawk for Hawkins because his first name was Percival and anyone who called him Percival or even Percy would have risked a mouthful of knuckles. He did not look like a hawk at all. He looked, in fact, more like a bear. Two hundred and fifty pounds if he weighed a dime. Wearing a blue polyester suit he’d bought at some discount joint. White shirt and red tie. Beer barrel belly hanging over his belt. Sweating bullets as he climbed the steps.

  His partner was black. The strong silent type. Wearing his hair in what they called a hi-top fade, looked like some kind of upside down flower pot sitting on top of his head. Plaid sports jacket, looked like wool, the guy’d never heard of tropical weight fabrics. Tall and slender, maybe a bit over six feet, a hundred sixty-five pounds stepping out of the shower onto a scale. Big knuckled hands of a street fighter. Eyes as black as midnight. Skin the color of a coconut shell. Santorini figured him for the sharper of the two. And the more lethal. Down here, this was the One-Nine. If he ever worked anything down here again, he had to remember to ask for Lyall Gibson, which was the black guy’s name.

  Hawkins was doing all the talking. Puffing up the stairs, throwing the words over his shoulder. Santorini was doing a little puffing himself; the victim was in an apartment on the fifth floor of the walkup. There were the usual cooking smells you found in any building in this city, even some of the expensive condominiums. Made you want to puke sometimes, the smells in the hallways. They kept climbing. Hawk kept talking.

  “… saw the inter-departmental alert you guys put out, figured this one would really interest you. You’da got it anyway, sooner or later …”

  “Not necessarily,” Santorini said.

  He was not eager to take on another case. The stiff rightfully belonged to Gibson and Hawkins, they were the fucking cops who’d caught the squeal. So why were they busting Homicide’s balls?

  “… the coincidence and all,” Hawkins was saying.

  “It’s no coincidence, Hawk,” Gibson said.

  He pronounced it coincidence, the way people from the South pronounced umbrella or police. Santorini figured he hadn’t been up North too long. Either that or he’d picked up his speech patterns from a mother who’d been born in Mississippi or Georgia.

  “I hate these buildings got no elevators,” Hawkins said.

  “No doorman, either,” Gibson said.

  “No doorman, she gets a coupl’a bullets in the head,” Hawkins said.

  Santorini wished he had a nickel for all the homicide victims he’d seen who had doormen and a couple of bullets in the head. They were on the fourth floor now. One more to go. They turned and walked across the landing to the next flight of stairs. As they began climbing again, he could see a pair of blue uniformed trouser legs at the top of the stairwell. Puffing, he followed the two detectives onto the landing. The uniformed cop was standing outside the door to apartment 5A. The A, some kind of metallic shit that wasn’t real brass, hung crookedly from one screw.

  “How you doing?” Hawkins said to the cop outside the door.

  “Okay,” he answered.

  “Everybody still here?”

  “Yes, sir. Except the M.E., he just left.”

  “They didn’t take away the stiff, did they?”

  “No, sir. Lieutenant gave strict orders Homicide had to see it first.”

  “Well, this here’s Detective Santorini from Homicide, we’re gonna go in now, show him the body.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Santorini wondered what all the fuckin’ fuss was about. Dragging him all the way down here to look at some dame got shot in the head ’cause she didn’t have a doorman? Why couldn’t he have viewed the corpse at the morgue? A stiff was a stiff no matter where or how you looked at it. They went into the apartment. At least it smelled better than the morgue. Big burly guy in a grey tropical suit and wearing a greyish straw fedora came over with his hand extended.

  “Lieutenant Costanza,” he said, “we got something good for you.”

  “I wonder what it could be,” Santorini said, thinking he was making a joke about calling Homicide in to see yet another dead body. But everybody here was looking so serious and solemn, like they just found the latest victim of Buffalo Bill; the trouble with too many cops nowadays was they saw too many fuckin’ movies.

  “Over here,” the lieutenant said.

  The dead woman was surrounded by what had to be a dozen cats, all of them looking confused. One of them, a white cat with yellow eyes, was sitting closest to the woman and meowing incessantly.

  “Goddamn cats,” the lieutenant said.

  The woman herself was half-seated, half-lying on a sofa with floral-patterned slip covers. There were two overlapping bullet holes between her eyes. The slugs had torn out the back of her skull and splashed the wall behind her with blood the color of the slipcover flowers. Her hair was clipped short, a sort of reddish color, but not as bright as the blood. She was wearing a grey sweater. The M.E. must’ve unbuttoned it a bit to slip his stethoscope onto her chest; she had good firm breasts. Santorini figured she was fifty, fifty-five years old, a woman who might have been good-looking when she was younger. There were cat hairs all over the grey sweater.

  “Her name’s Angela Cartwright,” Hawkins said. “We found a passport with her name and picture in it.”

  “A British subject,” Gibson said.

  So that’s the coincidence, Santorini thought. Two fuckin’ Brits get killed in the same week, right away they run to Homicide.

  “You know …” he started to say.

  “M.E. noticed this while he was examining her,” Costanza said, and unbuttoned the dead woman’s sweater to reveal her white brassiere. Gently, almost tenderly, he eased her left breast out of its restraining cup. Just beneath the nipple, Santorini saw:

  “We figured it tied in with the one in your alert,” Costanza said. “Two Brits, both of them with swords tattooed on their chests.”

  “Guy kills ’em and tattoos ’em,” Hawkins said, and shrugged at the simplicity of it all.

  Santorini knew this wasn’t the case; the coroner’s report had indicated that the tattoo on the last victim had not been a fresh one at all.

  “Anyway,” Costanza said, “we figured we’d turn it over to you right away.”

  Terrific, Santorini thought. Now I’ll get to talk to that dumb fuck at the Consulate again.

  Arthur Scopes had chosen the venue himself; his private office at SeaCoast Limited had been swept for listening devices and further equipped with a babbler to confound long-distance ears. On the telephone, he told Sonny that he knew the place was completely sanitary. The words private office conjured for Sonny a wood-paneled area offering both space and solitude, with windows overlooking on one side Seventy-second Street and on the other Columbus Avenue. But as the ancient elevator in the soot-stained building creaked and whined its way up to the third floor, he began to realize that his expectations may have been a trifle ambitious.

  SeaCoast was at the end of a narrow hallway that contained two other offices, one an accountant’s, the other a firm that repaired electric shavers. The door to the shaver-repair firm was standing wide open. An electric fan swept back and forth over a counter opposite the entrance, wafting cool air into the hallway as Sonny walked past. At eight-thirty this morning, just before he’d left the hotel, a television forecaster was predicting temperatures in the high nineties.

  The words SeaCoast Limited were lettered in black on the upper, frosted-glass panel of the company’s entrance door. Sonny grasped the brass doorknob, turned it, opened the door, and found himself in a smallish room where two people—one an Asian girl, the other a white male—sat at desks with telephone receivers to their ears.

  A pair of windows at the
far end of the room admitted mid-morning sunlight. The room was noisily air-conditioned by a single window unit in the window on the left, a virtual babbler in itself. The Asian girl was speaking in what Sonny assumed to be Chinese. The white male was saying “… three-ninety-nine a pound for the chicken lobsters, six and a quarter for the jumbos. May I take your order, sir?”

  An organizational cover beyond reproach. A legitimate business that could withstand even close scrutiny. Sonny was impressed. The Chinese girl—she was in her twenties, Sonny guessed—finished her conversation, turned from the phone, and asked, “May I help you, sir?” Her speech was entirely accent-free. She was wearing a white blouse and a blue mini-skirt that rode high on her upper thighs. Sandals with white leather thongs. Good Chinese-girl legs. Long black hair fastened with a blue plastic barrette. Sonny had recently read that Chinese women were undergoing cosmetic surgery to remove the folds in their eyelids and make their eyes look rounder. He figured the women in China were going crazy.

  “I have an appointment with Martin Hackett,” he said.

  His everyday cover name.

  “And your name, sir?”

  “Scott Hamilton.”

  “One moment, please.”

  She rose in a single fluid motion, smiled briefly, and went to a closed door Sonny assumed was Hackett’s private office. She knocked …

  “Yes, come in.”

  … opened the door, entered, and closed it behind her. Sonny waited. The white male on the phone was still giving prices to whoever was on the other end of the line. He did not so much as glance at Sonny. The Asian girl came out, said, “Mr. Hackett will see you now,” and stood aside for him to enter.

  The door eased shut behind him.

  He was looking at a large man wearing a white cotton jacket of the sort people wore in supermarkets. Embroidered in red over the breast on the left-hand side of the jacket were the words SeaCoast Limited. The man’s looks were clearly Arabian. Black hair and dark brooding eyes, an aquiline nose. A strapping man of the desert stuffed into a cheap white jacket that was too tight across his shoulders. But this was no camel herder.

  “I’m Arthur,” he said, and smiled, and rose, extending his hand.

  Arthur Scopes. The Martin Hackett was for civilians, but Arthur was the code name he’d be using for the business at hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” Sonny said.

  “Sit down, hmm?” Arthur said, and indicated a straight-backed wooden chair in front of his very dark, virtually black, indeterminately wooden desk. The windows here in the front office faced the Columbus Avenue side of the building. On the street below, Sonny could hear cab drivers impatiently honking their horns. The walls were painted a grim shade of grey. There were two pictures hanging on the wall behind the desk, one of what appeared to be a French landscape, the other of a laughing peasant girl with golden curls. Sonny took the chair. It was uncomfortable.

  “So,” Arthur said. “You’ve been briefed, hmm?”

  “I’ve been briefed, yes.”

  “Have you read the letter?”

  “I’ve read it.”

  “Does it explain everything?”

  “Everything,” Sonny said.

  He had read the letter at least a dozen times. Remembering the events it had triggered, he became enraged all over again, the anger igniting his eyes—but only for an instant. He was a professional; there was work to be done here.

  “What happened to Mother?” he asked.

  “Mm, Mother,” Arthur said, and tented his fingers. Huge hands. Blunt fingertips. Manicured nails. “She was murdered,” he said.

  Sonny’s eyebrows went up.

  “We don’t know who or why. We’re watching it closely. This may be a countermeasure of some sort.”

  “How was she killed?” Sonny asked.

  “Gunshot wounds. All we really know so far is what we’ve read in the newspapers. The police are still investigating. I’ll keep you informed.”

  “I hope you will. If my back needs covering …”

  “Oh, no question, we’ll let you know at once.” He hesitated a moment, and then said, “Were you told this is a No-Fail operation?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what it is. Does that trouble you?”

  “Not particularly. I’ve been trained for any eventuality.”

  “You understand, don’t you, that a pistol is out of the question?”

  “Yes. That’s what No-Fail …”

  “Because pistols aren’t infallible, are they?” Arthur said. “We don’t want him surviving, the way Reagan did. And we don’t want him left a vegetable, either. He’s to be eliminated, hmm? Cleanly. Completely. And anonymously.”

  Sonny looked at him.

  “We’ll claim no credit afterward, we want no later retaliation. Just kill him, Sonny. And vanish.”

  Or die if I must, Sonny thought.

  “Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. What will you need?”

  “A drop.”

  “Use SeaCoast.”

  “Can I have deliveries made here?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are we still using the same cobbler?”

  “McDermott, yes.”

  “Is he at the same address?”

  “Yes. East Seventieth Street.”

  “I’ll also need some basic information.”

  “What sort?”

  “Precinct numbers, the addresses of police supply …”

  A buzzer sounded on Arthur’s desk console. He hit a button.

  “Yes?”

  “A Mrs. Fremont on four,” the Chinese girl said.

  “I told you not to disturb us.”

  “She said it’s urgent.”

  Sighing heavily, Arthur hit another button on the console and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” he said, and listened for a moment. “No, don’t be silly,” he said, rolling his eyes heavenward, “always plenty of time for you.” He listened again, nodded, said, “Mmm, I see. Yes, a very good idea, and I quite agree it’s of paramount importance to make certain the fish is fresh. But, you know … SeaCoast is a wholesaler, hmm? Yes. To restaurants and fish markets and the like. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes, I see. Well, what I could do … hmm? The seventeenth, did you say? Well, that’s … well, let me see,” he said, and glanced at his desk calendar. “That’s still three weeks off, I’m sure I could …” He rolled his eyes again, impatiently this time, and listened for what seemed an interminably long time. “What I was going to suggest,” he said, “was that I put you in touch with a retailer on the island … yes, I’ll be happy to do that. I’ll find a good one and get back to you. I’m sure I have your number, but let me have it again, hmm? Uh-huh,” he said, writing, “uh-huh, good. I’ll call you as soon as I … what? Oh. Thank you. The seventeenth, yes, I’ll put it on my calendar. Good talking to you,” he said, and hung up and expelled his breath in exaggerated exasperation. “A neighbor,” he explained. “She’s having a fish party, God help me.”

  Sonny smiled.

  “You were saying?” Arthur said.

  “Police supply houses, police precincts …”

  “You’re planning elementary substitution, hmm?”

  The “hmm?” was an annoying verbal tic that threaded his conversation like a shiny metallic wire.

  “I’m not sure,” Sonny said. “But I’ll need to know which precinct the Plaza is in …”

  “Of course. But you realize, don’t you, that we’re still not sure he’ll be at the Canadian affair?”

  “I’ll be there, anyway.”

  “Ready to improvise, hmm? Play it by ear, so to speak.”

  “No, I’ll have a plan by then.”

  “It’s not that far off, you know.”

  “I’ll have a plan, don’t worry.”

  “You’ll want to check out the Baroque Room …”

  “Is that where the …?”

  “Yes, sorry. I got that today.”

  “Stil
l at the Plaza?”

  “Yes. The Baroque Room at the Plaza Hotel. It’d be convenient if he did decide to come, wouldn’t it? Get him and the bitch at the same time, hmm? But I haven’t yet heard if that’s likely. The Statue of Liberty’ll be harder. It’s on an island, you know …”

  “I know.”

  “… and security will be very tight, I imagine. So …”

  “I’ll need the number of that precinct, too.”

  “I’ll get it for you. But … I was about to say … if you’re planning to go in as a cop, it might be extremely difficult. The space is too confined, and getting close to him …”

  “That’s what I’ll have to figure out.”

  “Be much easier at the Plaza. Big ballroom, lots of space to roam around in, lots of exits and entrances. Even so, it won’t be easy. I don’t know what kind of security the British will provide for Thatcher, if any at all, now that she’s out of office, but I’m sure the Canadians and Mexicans’ll have agents all over the place. And if Bush does show up …” Arthur rolled his eyes. “Be literally thick with them, hmm?”

  Sonny nodded. He was thinking that either way—the ballroom or the island—he might have to do a lay-in job. He didn’t want to discuss that quite yet, not until he knew for sure what his weapon would be and how he would …

  “What weapon did you plan to use?” Arthur asked.

  Mind reader, Sonny thought.

  “I don’t know yet. I didn’t know this was a No-Fail till just …”

  “Of course. The point is, will you need help?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ll let me know, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know,” Arthur said, and hesitated. “The Canadian affair is on the first. That’s only five days away.”

  “I realize that. But I got here as soon as I could. My outside deadline …”

  “Of course, I’m merely saying. The point is … if you have to go for the second option, that’s only three days later. So if you’ll need any weaponry assistance from us … will you be considering explosives, for example?”

  “I’m not considering anything yet.”

  “Because we have a man who can rig whatever kind of …”