Scimitar

by Ed McBain

  Rhodes went limp against him.

  He dragged him into the closet and eased the door shut again. Tugging on the fishing line as hard as he could, he heard at last the heart-stopping click of the spring bolt snapping into the engaging strike plate. He was sealed inside now. No one could unlock that door from the outside, not with the lock effectively jammed.

  He hunkered down beside Rhodes’s body.

  Settling his back against the wall, he stretched out his legs and sat back to wait.

  It would be a long night.

  Geoffrey had brought two flat tins with him, one filled with forty water-soluble crayons, the other with thirty water-soluble pencils, for finer work. He’d confessed at dinner that he no longer had the pencils he’d used to paint on the shiner all those years ago, and had gone to an art supply house the moment he’d left her this afternoon. Now, in her mother’s Park Avenue apartment, he displayed his wares and asked her which eye she wanted done.

  “Will it wash off later?” Elita asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “They’re water soluble. In four languages.”

  Indeed, the printed matter on both tins read water soluble, wasserlöslich, solubles à l’eau, and solubili in acqua.

  “Pick an eye,” he said.

  “Which do you think?” she asked.

  “It’s hard to decide, they’re both so lovely,” he said. “But let’s try the left one. I’m right-handed, so it’ll be easier to work on that side of the face.”

  “Are you sure it’ll wash off?”

  “Positive.”

  “You won’t get any on my blouse, will you?”

  “No, no.”

  “I hope not.”

  She was wearing a white long-sleeved silk blouse she’d bought at Bendel’s. The last thing she wanted …

  “I’ll need a glass of water,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “To dip them in,” he said, and started for the kitchen. “Actually, this isn’t the proper way to use them, one should also have a brush. But it’ll work this way as well.” He found a glass on the counter drainboard, called, “Okay to use this?” and filled it with water. When he came back into the living room, Elita was studying the array of crayons in the larger tin.

  “What gorgeous colors,” she said.

  Each of the crayons was wrapped with a band the color of the crayon itself. The range covered the entire spectrum, modulating subtly from shade to shade of yellow, red, orange, blue, violet, purple, grey, brown—and green.

  She thought suddenly of Sonny.

  And just as quickly put him out of her mind.

  Geoffrey put the glass of water on the end table beside the easy chair in which she was sitting. Perching himself on the ottoman in front of it, he said, “I think an undercoating of yellow, don’t you?” and chose from the tin the lightest of the three yellow shades. Dipping the crayon into the glass of water, he applied the tip gingerly to the flesh under her eye. She was still afraid he was going to drip this stuff all over her blouse.

  “Listen,” she said, “would it be all right if we got a dish towel or something?”

  “Of course,” he said, and went back out to the kitchen again.

  “Inside the door under the sink,” she called.

  “I’ve got it,” he called back, and returned to the living room. Like a beautician fussing over a client, he draped the towel over her shoulders, stepped back to look at the yellow undercoating he’d already applied, and went to work again.

  It was clear from the start that this was to be an artistic creation. No mere application of makeup was this, oh no. Carefully choosing his shades—a bit of red, a bit of blue, a bit of violet—he painstakingly colored the skin, working slowly and carefully, putting down one crayon to pick up another, chatting all the while. He was telling her now about the visit he’d had today from a police lieutenant and two men he suspected were spooks …

  “… though, Lord knows, neither of the two identified himself except to offer a name, which was probably false anyway. These cloak and dagger people give me a severe pain in the arse, forgive me, don’t they you?”

  But she had stopped listening. The moment he’d mentioned a police lieutenant, her mind leaped back to Westhampton Beach and her last conversation with Detective Gregors. She hadn’t heard a word from him since. She wondered now if she should call him again. She didn’t want to make a pest of herself, but goddamn it, this was her mother!

  “… impression they’re worried about President Bush.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “what …?”

  “These men who came to see me. Do you remember my telling you about the two murdered women? The first time we had lunch togeth …?”

  Mention of murder caused her mind to leap to her mother again, and the awful possibility that something terrible had happened to her. She felt an uncontrollable urge to go to the telephone this very instant, and almost leaped out of the chair. But he was working so closely, concentrating so intently …

  “… the green tattoos,” he said, and picked up a green crayon.

  A green the color of a jungle glade in brilliant sunlight.

  “Which they seem to think identifies some sort of Libyan intelligence group,” Geoffrey said, and dipped the green crayon into the glass of water. “The green scimitar,” he said.

  “What?” she said.

  “The tattoo on each of the women. A green scimitar.”

  His face was not six inches from hers. The green crayon was in his hand. A green the color of the scimitar tattoo on Sonny Hemkar’s chest. Her eyes opened wide.

  “A green what?” she said, and the telephone rang.

  She leaped out of the chair at once, almost knocking over the glass of water on the end table, rushing to the phone at the other end of the room, yanking the receiver from its cradle.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Miss Randall, please.”

  “This is she.”

  “Detective Gregors, Westhampton Beach Police.”

  But she had recognized his voice from his very first words.

  “Yes, Mr. Gregors,” she said.

  “We’ve got a pretty good composite on this guy your mother was with the other night, and I was wondering how we could get it to you. I could have it messengered, I suppose … you don’t have access to a fax machine, do you?”

  “No, I … oh. Just a minute. Geoff!” she called. “Is there a fax machine at the consulate?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “Can you let me have the number, please?”

  Ten minutes later, Geoffrey unlocked the door to the consulate office, punched the security code into the panel to the right of the door, and ushered her in. The fax machine was at the far end of the room, near Lucy Phipps’s desk. The fax from Detective Gregors was already sitting in the grey plastic receiving tray. Elita picked it up.

  She was looking at a very crude drawing of Sonny Hemkar.

  14

  During the night, the body made sounds.

  Rigor mortis setting in, tissues stiffening, the sounds of the dead. He shivered each time the body made another sound. He tried to catch some sleep, but the small insistent noises the body made kept waking him up from fitful slumber. He was afraid the body would rise up alive again, to slay him. He was afraid some of the sarin would somehow spill out of the sealed bottle and kill him. He was afraid they would find him here in the closet, force open the door, murder him like a trapped animal.

  He must have dozed at last.

  A new sound jerked him into startled wakefulness.

  The lock. Someone trying to force a key into the jammed keyway. The key clicking, clicking, an effective burglar alarm.

  A voice in Spanish.

  “Mierda!”

  Silence.

  Reading the OUT OF ORDER sign.

  Or trying to read it.

  A heavy sigh outside the door.

  Footsteps retreating.

  He tapped the light
button on his digital watch.

  6:30 A.M.

  He released the button. Beside him, the ranger’s body kept stiffening, whispering of death.

  He tried to sleep again.

  Hogan kept wondering who had hung the shiner on the girl.

  The Turner kid from the British Consulate was telling him about yet another green scimitar tattoo, but all Hogan could think of was what a beautiful shiner the girl was wearing. Had the Turner kid been knocking her around? You could never tell with the quiet ones.

  “On his chest,” the girl said now.

  Elita Randall. Healthy-looking blond girl. Big blue eyes.

  “On the left pectoral,” she said.

  He wondered how she knew this, but he made no comment. He was suddenly reminded of the two women who’d contradictorily described a word tattooed on a man’s penis as SWAN and SASKATCHEWAN. Hogan was up to his ass in tattoos, and was beginning to wish he’d joined the Fire Department all those years ago. Besides, the two kids had been waiting for him when he’d got to work at a quarter to eight this morning, and he hadn’t even had his coffee yet.

  “You want some coffee?” he asked. “I’ll send out for some coffee.”

  “This is the man her mother was last seen with,” the Turner kid said.

  “On Monday night,” the girl said.

  “What’s his name?” Hogan said, and picked up the phone. “Harry,” he said into the receiver, “order me three cups of coffee, willya? And some cheese Danish. How do you like your coffee?” he asked.

  “Regular,” the girl said.

  “Black,” the Turner kid said.

  “Sonny Hemkar,” the girl said. “His name.”

  “Two regulars, one black,” Hogan said into the phone, and hung up. “How do you spell that last name?”

  “H-E-M-K-A-R,” the girl said. “And his first name is Krishnan, the Sonny is just a nickname. K-R-I-S-H-N-A-N.”

  Hogan was writing.

  “What is he?” he asked. “Pakistani? Afghan? Something like that?” The guy probably drove a taxi; the city was full of camel jockeys these days.

  “Indian,” the girl said. “Well, his father’s Indian. His mother’s British.”

  “British, huh?” Hogan said, and looked shrewdly at the Turner kid, reminding him that the two dead ladies had been carrying British passports, no matter what anybody said.

  “He’s a doctor,” the girl said.

  “Here in New York?”

  “No,” she said. “L.A.”

  She gave him the name of the hospital where Sonny was in residence, and also the phone numbers Geoffrey had provided, and then she told him the Westhampton Beach police were looking into her mother’s disappearance and suggested that he might want to get in touch with them. Hogan said he would.

  The coffee came some five minutes later, by which time Hogan had asked a police clerk to photocopy the faxed drawing of Sonny Hemkar and to check with the BCI for any criminal record on the guy. Like a family sitting down to breakfast together, the three of them drank their coffee and ate their cheese Danish at Hogan’s desk. The clerk came in just as Hogan was draining the last few drops from his cardboard container. He reported that Hemkar had no criminal record, was there anything else, sir? Hogan told him to call the hospital out there in L.A., see if they could fax them a photograph of this character, back up the drawing with something concrete.

  “Could you call them now, please?” Elita said. “The police in Westhampton?”

  “Sure,” he said, though that wasn’t what he really wanted to do right this minute. “Who was the person you spoke to out there?”

  She gave him both detectives’ names, and Hogan placed the call, asking for either Gregors or Mellon, and was told they were both out in the field just now. Hogan left a number and asked that they call back. The sergeant who’d taken the call said he’d make sure they did.

  “So,” Hogan said, and shrugged. “I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”

  Actually, he didn’t much care about where the girl’s mother might be.

  What he was eager to do now was talk to Nichols and Dobbs, tell them a fuckin’ Indian with a green scimitar tattoo had surfaced in New York.

  By a quarter past nine that morning, the haze had burned off, and the day was clear and bright. The weather forecasters on all the morning talk shows had promised wonderful weather for the Fourth of July weekend, and it seemed that for a change they were going to be right.

  In the harbor at the approach to the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty held her torch aloft and seemed to bask in the rays of a beneficent sun.

  In the men’s room supply closet on the second floor of the monument, Sonny sat in the dark with a dead body still making noises. An earphone button was in Sonny’s right ear, its connecting cable plugged into his Walkman radio. The radio was tuned to CBS, 880 on the dial, traffic and weather every ten minutes. Eating the hard roll he had bought yesterday, drinking from the container of orange juice, he listened to the weather report. He had been fearing more rain. He now heard that the day would be sunny and fair, albeit hot.

  He did not mind heat.

  Nothing could be hotter than the desert sands of Kufra.

  In the darkness, he smiled a secret smile.

  Then he bit into the roll again.

  The return call from Detective Gregors out in Westhampton Beach came at ten minutes to ten. To Hogan, the guy sounded like a hayseed. You’d think Suffolk County’d have somebody spoke English like the cops in New York did. Instead, there was this kind of molasses-dripping drawl. A fuckin’ hick.

  “We don’t have any paper on this Hemkar character,” Hogan said, “but …”

  “Neither do we,” Gregors said.

  “But we’re working some other murders that may be related.”

  He went on to tell Gregors all about the two British ladies with the tattooed tits …

  “No kidding?” Gregors said, obviously impressed and probably wide-eyed, the jackass.

  … and the murdered cop from right here at Homicide North …

  “Boy,” Gregors said.

  Probably never saw a murder victim in his life, Hogan thought.

  “Yeah,” he said, “and since Hemkar has the same tattoo …”

  “Didn’t know that,” Gregors said.

  Well, you know it now, jackass, Hogan thought.

  “Yeah,” he said, “he does. So we’re thinking there might be some connection. Can you tell me a little more about the missing woman? I had the daughter in here a while ago, but she was a bit distraught, if you know what I mean, and I didn’t want to ask her too many questions about her mother. I think somebody’s been batting her around a little, she was wearing a shiner the size of Staten Island.”

  “Didn’t have one when I saw her,” Gregors said, sounding surprised.

  “Well, she’s got one now. Anyway, can you fill me in a little on the missing woman?”

  “I’ll fax you what the daughter gave us, if you want,” Gregors said.

  “Well, just give it to me on the phone, if that’s okay,” Hogan said.

  “Sure. Just thought I’d save time. Let me get it for you.”

  He was away from the phone for about three minutes, coming back with what Hogan guessed was a complaint form, and began to read from it like a kid reciting in class.

  “White female,” he said, “thirty-nine years old, five feet seven inches tall, a hundred twenty-five pounds. Blond hair, blue eyes, no identifying scars, marks or …”

  “Blond, did you say?”

  “Blond,” Gregors said.

  Hogan had suddenly remembered yesterday’s call from Homicide South.

  He hoped to God he was wrong.

  The two plainclothes cops standing on the Battery Park dock were from the First Detective Squad, here to check the identification of anyone going out to Liberty Island on the special ferry. This was now ten in the morning, a glorious day, and the cops were grateful for a cushy assignment like this one, w
hich certainly beat looking down into the face of a stiff on a city pavement.

  An earlier ferry had carried to the island forty-two Marine Corps Band musicians in their dress blues, three members of the President’s advance team, and four Secret Service men from the New York field office. Most of the people boarding the ferry now were from the three television networks and CNN, all of them wearing lucite-encased press cards, the rainbow peacock on the NBC tag, the black-and-white CBS eye on the Channel 2 tag, the big 7 on the ABC tag. Some of them were carrying cameras, others were carrying sound equipment, others seemed to be carrying only clipboards. All of them seemed happy to be outdoors on a nice day like today. Chatting amiably among themselves, here on a cooperative assignment where there was no sense of rivalry, the men and women boarded the ferry together with nine men wearing dark blue suits, white shirts, and muted ties.

  The television people were savvy enough to know that these nine guys weren’t a baseball team. Whispers ran around that this was Secret Service, but the surmise was only two-thirds correct. Six of the nine were, in fact, Secret Service: Dobbs and the men he’d brought with him from Washington, D.C. The other three were CIA: Alex Nichols, Moss Peggot, and Conrad Templeton.

  None of them knew that Sonny Hemkar was already on the island.

  Hogan hated this part of police work more than anything in the world.

  They stood together in the stainless steel silence of the morgue. There were stainless steel tables with stainless steel cups brimming with blood. There was a burn victim on one of the tables, his fists clenched, his hands raised in the characteristic pugilist position. There was the stench of putrefying bodies. The clock on the wall read twenty-eight minutes past ten. It had taken him ten minutes to get to the Park Avenue apartment and another twenty minutes to drive them down to the hospital. Hogan was here to show Elita Randall the head Homicide South had recovered.

  She looked at it and gasped.

  Covered her face with her hands.

  Nodded into her hands.

  And turned away and ran out.

  “Thanks,” Hogan said to the attendant, and followed her out to the corridor, where she stood sobbing in Geoffrey’s arms. “I’m sorry about this,” Hogan said. She nodded, kept sobbing. “I’d have given anything not to have …”