Scimitar

by Ed McBain

  “What time will the President be in?” Hogan asked, changing the subject. Schedules, he knew. Police investigation always entailed schedules. Time tables. Who was where when? He could deal with schedules.

  “He’ll be speaking at twelve o’clock. Probably get to the island minutes before. He’s an old pro at this sort of thing.”

  A campaign speech, Dobbs thought. Pure and simple. Worst damn thing was he’d probably get re-elected. The thought of another four years of a Republican president—any Republican president—made Dobbs shudder.

  “What if it rains?” he asked. “It looked like rain when I came in.”

  There were no windows in the office. For all they knew, it could already be raining.

  “I don’t know where he’ll do the speech if it rains,” Nichols said.

  “Maybe stay in Washington,” Dobbs said. Which is where I should be, he thought. “Do it from the Oval Office.”

  “Maybe. Statue of Liberty’d be better, though.”

  A Republican, Dobbs thought. Always looking for the angles, camera or otherwise.

  “I keep wondering why those two broads were killed,” Hogan said.

  Murder, he could deal with. There were reasons for murder. Crazy reasons sometimes, but always reasons. If you were a homicide cop, you always asked why.

  “Conflicting interests?” Nichols asked, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Like?” Dobbs said.

  “An agency that wants to keep the President alive.”

  “Like?” Dobbs said.

  “Mossad?” Nichols suggested.

  “What’s that?” Hogan asked.

  “Israeli intelligence. Better the devil they know, huh?”

  Dobbs was thinking, This is a dumb waste of time.

  “So what do you want from my team?” he asked.

  “How many are you?”

  “Six.”

  “Let’s bring ’em out there tomorrow,” Nichols said.

  “How about us?” Hogan asked. Meaning the NYPD.

  “More the merrier,” Nichols said.

  “I’ll call the First, see if I can get some detectives out there.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” Nichols said, and looked to Dobbs for approval.

  Dobbs grimaced sourly, clearly in disagreement.

  “Did anybody ask the Brits about those two women?” he asked.

  “According to Santorini’s reports …”

  “Who’s Santorini?”

  “One of my people,” Hogan said. “He was investigating the murders.”

  “He was later killed himself,” Nichols explained.

  “Conflicting interests?” Dobbs asked sarcastically.

  “The Brits told him the passports were forgeries,” Hogan said.

  “Scimitar would have any number of good cobblers,” Nichols said.

  Hogan wondered what the hell shoes had to do with passports. He didn’t ask. Dobbs didn’t know what the expression meant, either, these fuckin’ CIA jerks.

  “Who told him that?” Dobbs asked. “About the passports?”

  “A guy at the British Consulate,” Hogan said.

  Which was how Geoffrey Turner got dragged into it again.

  When Elita got off the bus at a quarter past two that afternoon, Geoffrey was waiting in the pouring rain with a big black umbrella over his head. He looked very British with the umbrella and all, a big grin cracking his face as he hurried to her and took her bag, covering her with the umbrella and asking solicitously if she’d had any lunch. She told him No, she hadn’t, but she wasn’t very hungry …

  “In which case,” he said, “I’ll make an early dinner reservation.”

  She was actually very glad to see him.

  In the taxi on the way to the Park Avenue apartment, she filled him in more completely about her mother, and took enormous comfort from his genuine concern and little murmurs of reassurance. By the time they reached the apartment, in fact, she was beginning to believe that her mother was truly all right, and that her failure to communicate was merely inconsiderate.

  She did not know that on Beaver Street at that very moment, a policeman in a black rain slicker was opening the black plastic garbage bag containing her mother’s head.

  The story was news only because of the downpour.

  Sonny caught it by accident, flipping through the dial, never expecting to find a news broadcast at two-thirty in the afternoon, surprised when the Statue of Liberty popped onto the screen. Standing in the rain. Hand with the torch held high over her head, rain pelting her. The camera panned down over her face, down, down past the tablet cradled in the crook of her left elbow, down over the folds of her robe, and then zipped on down to ground zero, where a roving reporter in a yellow raincoat, the hood pulled up over her head, her glasses spattered with raindrops, stood with a microphone in her hand, interviewing a pretty young woman whose blond hair was blowing in the wind.

  “I’m here with Heather Broward,” the reporter said, “who is organizing the President’s appearance here tomorrow. How does it look, Heather?”

  “Well, I’d have preferred sunny skies along about now,” Heather said. “But …”

  Both women smiled.

  “… hopefully we’ll have good weather today.”

  Can’t even speak their own language properly, Sonny thought. Wouldn’t mind being in bed with both of them, though, rainy day like today.

  “When do you think you’ll be hanging the bunting?” the reporter asked.

  “Well, Mary …”

  Mary and Heather, he thought.

  “… I was hoping we’d have it up by now, but this rain …”

  She shrugged prettily. Bad case of the cutes, Sonny thought.

  “But the minute it stops, we’ll begin draping the wall just behind the President,” she said, and indicated the white wall behind the women. “The podium’ll be here,” she said, “just about where we’re standing …”

  Good, Sonny thought. Just where I figured.

  “… and we’ll be decorating that, too, around the Presidential Seal, of course, and in keeping with the theme of freedom and prosperity …”

  In this wonderful country of ours, he thought.

  “… in this great nation we’re so lucky to live in,” Heather said.

  Close but no cigar, Sonny thought.

  “Thank you, Heather Broward …” Mary said.

  Thank you indeed, Sonny thought.

  “This is Mary Mastrantonio at the Statue of …”

  He clicked off the set. The manila envelope Arthur had given him this morning was sitting on the desk. He took the sign from it, studied it again, and then sat down behind the desk. Using a black Magic Marker, he added a handwritten message to the sign, and put it back in the envelope.

  Then he began packing his camera bag.

  The three men were waiting for Geoffrey when he got back to the consulate office. They introduced themselves and then began asking him all sorts of questions about the two women with the false British passports. He had frankly thought that both women were well behind him by now, and he was tired of explaining to everyone—including Joseph Worthy of Her Majesty’s own infernal spy machine—that neither was in actuality British, and that therefore the British Government felt no obligation to pursue the matter further.

  “Joseph who?” the one named Nichols said.

  “Worthy,” Geoffrey said. “He was called in when London learned the passports were false. Although, actually, I suppose it was the tattoos that alerted them.”

  “He knew about the tattoos then?” the one named Dobbs asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What’d he think about them?”

  “He thought a Libyan intelligence group might be hatching a plot against the former Prime Minister.”

  “Mrs. Thatcher?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of plot?”

  “Assassination. Which turned out not to be the case at all. She’s come and gone quite sa
fely.”

  “Pretty good guess, though,” Nichols said.

  “Bush instead,” Hogan said, and both other men cut sharp glances at him.

  “Well, thanks for your time,” Dobbs said. “We appreciate it.”

  “Not at all,” Geoffrey said, and led them out, wondering what in blazes that had been all about.

  After he’d left Arthur’s office this morning, he’d made two stops. The first thing he’d bought was a black fedora. The next thing he’d bought was a camera bag. The bag was made of a sturdy black fabric, its flaps fastened with Velcro. There were removable panels inside it, to accommodate lenses and cameras of different sizes and shapes. There were pockets outside the bag, to hold film or lens paper or whatever. It was an entirely convenient bag, some seventeen inches long by at least fifteen inches wide and ten inches deep. The man at the camera shop told him it would hold a video camera, at least two still camera bodies, several lenses, and whatever Sonny chose to stuff in the pockets. He pointed out that there were two Velcro-fastened straps on the rear side of the bag, designed for carrying a folding tripod. It was an entirely convenient bag. Sonny packed into it:

  The bottle of sarin, wrapped in a towel and sitting upright in one of the compartments.

  The loaded 9-mm Parabellum pistol.

  Two extra magazines for the gun.

  The basting tool.

  The walkie-talkie.

  The muted silk tie.

  The various identity cards McDermott had cobbled for him.

  The sign Arthur had given him this morning.

  The roll of transparent tape.

  A four-foot length of the monofilament fishing line.

  His Walkman radio.

  And a box of toothpicks.

  “How’d you happen to find this?” the cop asked.

  The man he was talking to was from Pakistan. He had given the cop his name three times, and the cop still hadn’t caught it. Something like Pashee. Or something. And the cop didn’t know whether this was his first name or his last name or both names put together. The cop, whose name was Mangiacavallo, wished names were still simple in this city.

  “I was throwing garbage in the dumpster,” Pashee said. He had a terrible accent, but Mangiacavallo had been listening to him for ten minutes now and was beginning to believe he understood Urdu. Except for the guy’s name. “I tossed up a bag, and it hit this other bag on top of the pile …”

  “This one?”

  “This one, yes. And it came toppling down.”

  “So how come you opened it?”

  “It looked like something might be in it.”

  What was in it was a fuckin’ human head, is what was in it. What the fuck did he think was in it?

  “What’d you think might be in it, sir?” Mangiacavallo asked politely.

  “It felt like something heavy. I thought it might be something good.”

  “So you opened the bag.”

  “Yes. And closed it again right away.”

  I’ll bet, Mangiacavallo thought.

  “What’d you do then?”

  “Called nine-eleven.”

  So here we are, Mangiacavallo thought.

  It was still raining, but only lightly, when the man walked out of the Marriott at three o’clock that afternoon. The man was wearing a dark blue suit, black shoes, and black socks. His white shirt was buttoned to the very top button, and he was wearing no tie. A black fedora rested atop his head, and he was carrying what appeared to be a black duffle bag. He looked somewhat like an Orthodox Jew.

  The homicide cop who caught the squeal on the severed head was a detective/first grade named Max Golub, who worked out of Homicide South in the Thirteenth Precinct downtown on Twenty-first and Third. He dutifully typed up his report in triplicate and at three-twenty that afternoon, he gave one copy of the report to his lieutenant, whose name was Albert Ryan.

  Ryan was eager to get home—he would be relieved at a quarter to four and didn’t want to get involved in any long telephone conversations. But he knew that in cases where you found one part of a body, you could suddenly start finding other parts all over town. So he called Detective-Lieutenant Peter Hogan, his counterpart in Homicide North, and asked if any arms or legs had turned up in his bailiwick today? Hogan told him he hadn’t seen any yet, thank God, but he’d keep his eyes open.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “’Cause we got a head belongs to a white female down here, blond lady tossed in a dumpster on Beaver Street.”

  Which is how Hogan found out that Carolyn Fremont was dead.

  Although nobody yet knew the dead woman’s name.

  He caught the almost empty three-thirty ferry to the island. The rain had tapered off to a drizzle. No one asked to look into his camera bag. He had not expected that anyone would. He wandered around the deck with the rest of the tourists—though there were not very many of them on this wet afternoon—eyes wide in wonder, looking like someone who might next visit Ellis Island to trace the history of an ancestor who had come here from Russia or Poland.

  At Kufra, disguise was nonsense entertained only in fiction. In real life, it was better to teach annihilation and survival. He knew that to appear absolutely authentic, he should be wearing unshorn earlocks and a beard. But he’d have felt ridiculous applying crepe hair, and he’d reasoned—correctly, it now seemed—that the familiar costume alone would confirm his identity. People rarely saw beyond the uniform. Moreover, he carried himself with an air of solemn religiosity premised on an inner belief that he was, in fact, an Orthodox Jew on a rainy day’s outing. Smiling thinly in his beard—the beard he believed he was wearing, although it did not in actuality adorn his face—he thought, To me I’m an Orthodox Jew, and to you I’m an Orthodox Jew—but to an Orthodox Jew am I an Orthodox Jew? There were no Orthodox Jews on the ferry today.

  He stepped off the boat at five minutes to four. Again, none of the rangers on the dock asked him to open his bag. His good old friend Alvin Rhodes was not among them. Like a rabbi davening in prayer, he muttered his way past them. At five o’clock, he went into the restaurant and bought three hamburgers, a can of Diet Coke, a container of orange juice, and a hard roll. He sat at a table to eat the hamburgers and drink the Coke. He put the orange juice and the hard roll into the camera bag, in the compartment alongside the pistol.

  At a quarter past five, the announcements started, telling visitors to the island that the last boat back would leave in half an hour.

  He went into the base of the statue, and up to the men’s room on the second level.

  Two men were at the urinals.

  He could see shoes and bunched trouser legs under one of the stall doors.

  He went into a free stall, locked the door, and waited. At five-twenty, the man in the stall on the right flushed the toilet, stood up, pulled up his trousers, and left. Sonny heard water running in one of the sinks.

  A man’s voice—calling from the doorway, it seemed—yelled, “Last ferry leaving in fifteen minutes!”

  A urinal flushed.

  Silence.

  Sonny took the box of toothpicks out of the camera bag. He grabbed a handful of them and stuffed them into the right-hand pocket of his jacket.

  He took the loop of fishing line out of the bag and put it into his left-hand pocket.

  He could hear a loudspeaker announcing that the last ferry from the island would leave in ten minutes.

  He pulled his feet up onto the toilet seat.

  The same man who’d called from the doorway earlier—an attendant, a ranger, whoever the hell—now came into the room and shouted, “Last ferry’s about to go. Anybody in here?”

  Sonny did not dare breathe.

  “Last call for the ferry,” the man said.

  There was a long silence.

  He heard the man grunt, and visualized him crouching to look under the stalls. Another grunt as he rose. Then his voice coming from the corridor outside, “Last call for the ferry,” retreating down the hallway, “last
call for the ferry, last call …”

  And then silence.

  Sonny came out of the stall at once.

  He went to the wooden outer door, painted to look like bronze, and pulled it closed. If he had to, he was prepared to pick the lock on the utility closet door in the alcove—but the door was standing open, just as it had been last Saturday. He took a toothpick from the handful in his pocket, inserted it into the keyway, and snapped it off flush with the face of the lock. There was still room in the keyway’s slit for another one. He slid one in, snapped it off flush, pressed both stubs in solidly with the flat side of a quarter, and then reached into the camera bag at his feet, removing from it the manila envelope bearing the sign Arthur had given him this morning. He took the roll of transparent tape from the bag and began fastening the sign to the door, a sliver of tape at each corner. The sign read:

  His hands were trembling.

  He was putting the tape back into the bag when he heard footsteps in the corridor. Distant. But approaching. The attendant, the ranger, whoever was coming this way again. He rushed into the closet and took the loop of fishing line from his pocket. Hooking it over and behind the thumb bolt, the only grip on the inside of the door, he was pulling the door toward him when he heard the man’s voice again. Just outside the closed entrance door now.

  “Who the fuck?”

  Wondering who had closed that outside door.

  Sonny tugged on the fishing line.

  He heard the outer door opening.

  The bag!

  He’d left his bag outside the …

  He shoved the door open again, reached down for the bag and was stepping back into the closet when the man suddenly appeared in the alcove.

  Tall and burly and wearing a ranger uniform.

  Blue eyes and a reddish-brown mustache.

  His mouth opening in surprise.

  “What …?”

  But Sonny was already moving forward. As Rhodes reached for the revolver in the holster at his waist, Sonny brought his right arm back, the elbow bent, the hand coming up close to his left cheek. As the gun came free, Sonny released his cocked arm, chopping the hard edge of his hand across the bridge of Rhodes’s nose. He heard the bone shatter, heard Rhodes yelp in startled pain, stepped around him at once, caught the back of his head in a double-handed lock, snapped it sharply forward—and broke his neck.