Scimitar

by Ed McBain

  “Sonny!” she’d yelled, and “Sonny!” again, and then, embarrassed to death—first her gushing to Mrs. Thatcher and then bouncing out of her chair like a teenager—she almost whispered his name the third time, a question mark at the end of it this time, “Sonny?” and since she was standing anyway, she muttered, “Excuse me, please,” and went after him. By the time she reached the corridor, he was gone. Penn Station all over again. And now, ladies and germs, it gives me great pleasure to present The Amazing Disappearing Dr. Krishnan Hem … oops, where’d he go? Amazing.

  He probably hadn’t seen her or heard her. There’d been a lot of noise in the place, after all, people talking and laughing and table-hopping, waiters bustling about, it was entirely possible that her voice had been drowned in the babble and boil. Because surely, after what they’d done together, after the intimacies they’d shared, he wouldn’t just ignore her … would he? I mean, if he’d heard her or seen her, would he have just run off that way? Unless there was some kind of dire emergency that required a doctor. Which may have been the case, after all. His beeper had gone off and he’d …

  Wasn’t that a walkie-talkie she’d seen in his hand?

  Well, a doctor.

  She supposed doctors sometimes carried walkie-talkies. She guessed. Especially at a large important function like that one, where he was most likely the doctor in attendance, that was the word she’d been looking for. There to be on hand in case anyone had a fainting spell or a fit, I’m a doctor, ma’am, please let me through. Open the woman’s blouse, put his stethoscope to her chest, lucky lady. Just thinking of him, she …

  Damn it, she had to stop this.

  He had heard her.

  He had seen her.

  He had ignored her.

  Period.

  She picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number at the beach.

  She let the phone ring a dozen times, and then she hung up and punched out the numbers again, and let it ring another dozen times. On the offchance that Mr. Hackett next door might have gone out there by now—this was Thursday already and a lot of people were starting the Fourth of July weekend early—she dialed his number, too, and let it ring and ring before finally giving up.

  In the basement of the Hackett house, Sonny was dissecting Carolyn Fremont’s body.

  He worked expertly, wishing he had a scalpel or a surgical saw, but settling for a cleaver he’d taken from the kitchen, and a hacksaw he’d found hanging on the basement wall. He planned to pack the separate body parts into plastic garbage bags, disposing of them tonight, after yet another glorious Hamptons sunset. Tie the bags loosely so that the air inside would eventually escape and cause them to sink. Toss them into the ocean on separate strands of isolated beach, miles apart, watch them floating away to Europe. The head, the torso, the severed legs and arms.

  Even though he hadn’t dissected a cadaver since medical school, the task was virtually automatic, requiring little thought. He found what he was doing somewhat relaxing, in fact, the way roller skating or riding a bicycle might have been, his hands reverting to a skill he had learned years ago, freeing his mind for other thoughts.

  The idiot last night.

  Calling out his name in a room thronged with strollers and spooks.

  What the hell was she doing there?

  She hadn’t followed him there, had she? Well, no, she couldn’t have. It was just one of those damn ridiculous coincidences that sometimes toppled empires. It all got back to the train again. The mistake he’d made on the train. Automatically giving her the Sonny Hemkar cover name instead of the Scott Hamilton double cover. Dumb. But excusable. No. Unforgivable. Because now she was here to haunt him, popping up like a nemesis where he’d least expected her, shrieking “Sonny!” at him across the room, when his name plate and his ID card read something entirely different.

  Come on, he thought, and hacked again at the cartilage separating femur from tibia.

  Perhaps he should call her.

  Ask her to please stop bothering him.

  No.

  Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

  He picked up the portion of leg he had severed, dropped it into a black plastic garbage bag, and set the bag on the floor beside the work bench.

  Carolyn Fremont’s lifeless blue eyes stared up at him as he began severing her head from her torso.

  The two people staring up at the Statue of Liberty were not the slightest bit impressed by her awesome majesty. They were looking for good camera angles. These were the President’s advance men, and they were here to make certain that everything went well, campaignwise, on the Fourth of July. You could maybe fool some of the people most of the time and most of the people some of the time, but you couldn’t fool anybody anytime when it came to a good television show. Heather Broward—who was female but nonetheless one of the President’s men—sometimes thought that America itself was one big gaudy television show.

  “How about we line the band up behind him?” she suggested.

  She was dressed for work—linen slacks, loafers, a sand-colored, long-sleeved cotton blouse, a peach-colored ribbon holding her short brown hair, a Polaroid camera slung on a strap over her shoulder. Ralph Dickens, the man with her, was sixty-three years old and had been setting up Republican campaign stops from when Nixon was making his first bid for the presidency, but thirty-one-year-old Heather was his boss. He figured placing the band up behind The Man would steal his thunder, but he said nothing about it. He was thinking it was nice and cool out here on the island with the river breezes playing. He was wondering how hot it would be on the Fourth.

  “Think they’d all fit up there?” Heather asked. “The band?”

  She was indicating the area above ground level, some fifteen, twenty feet higher than where they were standing and looking up. White wall, looked like limestone or something, good backdrop for the podium behind which the President would stand, battery of network microphones on it. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie—the Republican uniform. White wall behind him. Above him the Marine Band in dress uniforms, all red-white-and-blue, and then the grey stone of the pedestal and above that the Lady herself all coppery green. Not bad, Ralph had to admit.

  “How many people are in the band, anyway?”

  “We can trim it to fit,” Ralph said.

  He’d been through this shit a thousand times before. The President of the United States wanted a four-hundred-piece orchestra, he got a four-hundred-piece orchestra. He wanted just one guy with a piccolo up his ass, he got that, too. When you were President of the United States, you got whatever you wanted, period.

  “We’d better go up there, check out the width, see how many musicians we can fit up there,” Heather said.

  “Good idea,” Ralph said.

  “How the hell do you get up there?” she asked.

  The more CIA Agent Alex Nichols studied the letter purportedly written by Bush when he was Vice President in 1986, the more he wondered why it had been written and how it had ended up at the General Investigation Directorate in Tripoli.

  During World War II, MI5—in collaboration with Naval Intelligence and the Twenty-Two Committee—sent a British submarine to the coast of Spain. Its mission was to drop off the corpse of a so-called Major Martin of the Royal Marines, who incidentally happened to be carrying in his dispatch case plans describing a forthcoming totally fabricated Allied invasion of Greece. The Germans fell for the ruse, and were caught with their pants down when the Allies invaded Sicily instead.

  When you got hold of something like this letter, you had to begin wondering why somebody had gone through all this trouble. Well, maybe not so much trouble, after all. Any intelligence agent worth his salt—as Miss Piggy Peggot had put it—could work up a piece of vice-presidential stationery and type on it any damn thing he felt like. The stupid part, the amateur part—and this was what separated the men from the boys—was that he’d used Bush’s presentday signature on it, instead of …

  He suddenly wondered if Moss
ad had cooked up the letter; he wouldn’t put anything past the Israelis, they were the sneakiest fuckin’ spies in the entire universe.

  But why?

  Work up a phony piece of goods, hide it like it was the family jewels till some sucker took the bait and nabbed it. Then sit back and wait for it to work its way into the hands of the GID. Which, if their information was correct, was exactly where it had finally surfaced, only to be pilfered yet again by a conscientious digger.

  If the Israelis were behind all this, what were they hoping to gain?

  Nothing that he could see.

  In fact, what could anyone gain by faking a letter and making certain it got into Libyan hands?

  And then, all at once, Alex remembered something he’d been taught at The Farm, when he was just beginning to learn his craft. The instructor was a man who’d spent twenty-two years in the Middle East before coming back home to teach new CIA recruits like Alex. He’d been talking about Iraq’s Al Mukhabarat, when suddenly he’d cocked his head to one side and said—somewhat wistfully as Alex now recalled—“There’s an old Arab proverb that’s saved my life more times than I can count. ‘He who forgets is lost. He who forgives is doomed.’”

  The fake letter had ended up in the hands of Libyan intelligence.

  It placed directly at Bush’s doorstep full responsibility for the air raid that had killed Quaddafi’s fifteen-month-old daughter.

  Alex figured he now had something to go on.

  The telephones were secure. The one here at the beach, the one at SeaCoast. They could freely discuss whatever they wished, with no need for codes or veiled meanings.

  “A man’s fate is written on his forehead,” Arthur said.

  “I know that,” Sonny said.

  “If it had been fated for Bush to die last night, God would have willed it,” Arthur said. “This means only that the Fourth will be a more propitious date.”

  “I’m sure,” Sonny said.

  He wasn’t at all sure.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said.

  “Yes, I have your messages. But I’ve been busy working for you, Sonny.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard or read anything about this second murder …”

  “I have, yes.”

  “I’ve been trying to find out who or why.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Well … I hope you haven’t been targeted.”

  Sonny hoped so, too.

  “What have you got so far?” he asked.

  “Not much. But I have my very best people on it.”

  “Good,” Sonny said.

  He was thinking two of Arthur’s very best people were already dead.

  “In any case, I don’t want you to be concerned about it.”

  No, huh?

  “If it turns out you’re in danger, you’ll get all the protection you need.”

  Like the protection the two women got?

  “But getting back to last night,” Arthur said, “at least it gave you an opportunity to study the security setup.”

  “It won’t apply,” Sonny said.

  “No?” Arthur said, sounding surprised.

  “It wasn’t representative,” Sonny said. “There were agents from four countries there. It won’t be that way on the Fourth.”

  “Lighter, do you think?”

  “Almost certainly. The island will be closed to the public till noon. If there’re half a dozen people around him, I’ll be surprised.”

  “That should make your job easier.”

  “God willing,” Sonny said.

  “But be prepared for …”

  “I will be.”

  “… the worst,” Arthur said, the tone of impatience creeping into his voice again. “There’s a saying you may not be familiar with. My mother taught it to me. It goes like this. ‘When you hear of no robbers, lock the door twice.’ It means …”

  “I understand,” Sonny said.

  “They may double the security only because they feel too secure.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “So expect an army …”

  “I will.”

  “And be happy with a platoon.”

  “I’ll be prepared for either,” Sonny said.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Arthur said.

  “At ten,” Sonny said.

  “Is there anything I can do for you meanwhile?”

  “Yes,” Sonny said.

  Elita caught the jitney to Westhampton Beach on Seventieth Street and Lexington Avenue at eleven-fifteen that Thursday morning. She had packed into her mother’s Louis Vuitton bag the lingerie and shoes she’d requested, and she had packed for herself a small duffle containing a pair of blue jeans, four T-shirts, a half-dozen panties, a pair of sandals, and—just in case—a pair of French-heeled shoes and a black cotton shift. She planned to stay at the beach only through the Fourth, returning to the city sometime Sunday.

  Her concern for her mother had given way to anger.

  A person should know better than to go gallivanting around—an expression her mother was fond of using—without first informing any other person who might be worried about her. When Elita went off to UCLA a year ago, she and her mother made a deal of sorts. If ever one of them planned to be away for a while, even if it was just for a couple of days, she would inform the other, and leave a number where she could be reached. A simple bargain which Elita had, in truth, begun finding too restrictive in recent months, but which had served them both extremely well until then. Until now, actually, when her mother apparently felt it was perfectly okay to break a solemn contract and disappear from the face of the earth without so much as a lah-dee-dah. Just a phone call would have been sufficient. Hi, Elita, I’m off to Phoenix, Arizona, for a few days, here’s where I’ll be. But, no. Silence instead. And anxiety. Or anger. Which was how anxiety usually translated itself, thank you, Professor Jaeger, Psychology 101.

  The jitney dropped her off in front of the Quogue Emporium Mall at a bit past one-thirty. She got into a waiting taxi and gave the driver the address on Dune Road. He didn’t want to go into the sand driveway because his tires were either too low, or too inflated, or whatever the hell they were, she couldn’t make any sense at all of what he was saying. Either way, he dropped her off at the top of it, for which discourtesy she tipped him only half a buck. Carrying the bags down the drive, she noticed a car parked at the Hackett house next door, and wondered why Mr. Hackett hadn’t answered the phone all those times she’d called.

  Shrugging, she went around the side of the house to the service entrance where her mother always hid the key in a little magnetized box fastened to the rear side of the fill spout for the oil tank. The key was where it usually was. Elita unlocked the kitchen door, put down the bags, blinked into the sunshine streaming through the window over the sink, and yelled, “Mom?”

  There was no answer.

  “Mom?” she yelled again, and stood stock still, listening.

  Where the hell are you? she thought, and then, aloud, she shouted, “Mom? Where the hell are you?”

  There was only silence.

  In the driveway next door, she heard the car starting.

  She went to the window and saw it backing out.

  The sun glancing off its windshield made it impossible to see the driver’s face.

  Detective-Lieutenant Peter Hogan welcomed the opportunity to get out of the office. He had always thought of himself as an active street cop until he’d been promoted three years ago, and all of a sudden found himself pushing papers around a desk. The murder of one of his best detectives—and incidentally one of his closest friends—gave him the excuse he needed to get out into the field again.

  He started the investigation into Al Santorini’s death the way he’d have started any other homicide case. He tried to work it backwards from the time Santorini’s body was discovered in the laundry cart, hoping to learn what had brought him to the Hilton in the
first place. The assistant manager who’d talked to Santorini informed Hogan that he’d clocked the call in at one o’clock sharp, and that all the detective had wanted to know was the name of whoever was in room 2312. He’d told him they had a man named Albert Gomez registered in that room, and that he’d checked into the hotel on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June. That was it. The manager remembered that the call had come at one, because he’d just got back from lunch.

  Hogan was trying to piece together a 24-24.

  The twenty-four hours preceding a homicide were important because anything the victim had done, anyone the victim had talked to during that time might provide information leading to his killer. The twenty-four hours following a homicide were important in that everything was still fresh during that time. The killer, unless he was more professional than most murderers Hogan had known, would not yet have covered his tracks. The trail would not yet have been obscured. The longer a murder case dragged on, the narrower became the hope of solving it. Al Santorini had been killed on Monday. This was now Thursday. As far as Hogan was concerned, the killer already had a three-day edge.

  He went through the Detective Division reports Santorini had filed in triplicate. He’d been investigating two separate murders, the victims both women with British passports, both of them tattooed with some kind of green sword. One of them had lived on the upper west side, the other on the upper east side. East side, west side, all around the town, some fuckin’ city. Santorini had been in contact with someone named Geoffrey Turner at the British Consulate and also with an FBI agent named Michael Grant, downtown at Federal Plaza. Nothing in the files told Hogan where Santorini had been on Monday before he ended up dead at the Hilton.

  But the desk sergeant at the Two-Five, where Homicide North had its offices, told Hogan that the last time he’d seen Santorini was around ten-thirty that morning when he’d passed the desk on his way out. He’d said only, “Heading downtown, George,” which was the desk sergeant’s name. He did not say where downtown. Both of the dead ladies lived more or less downtown. Since the Two-Five was located at 120 East 119th Street, Hogan decided to check out the more convenient east-side location first.