Coward's Kiss

by Lawrence Block

  Maddy was grinning. She had come to Armin’s room determined to hate the little man. Now she liked him. He was a charming son of a bitch.

  “I accept your terms,” he said. “One hand shall wash the other, as it were. It is a bargain.”

  I hesitated.

  “Isn’t it a bargain?”

  “Just one thing,” I said. “About the briefcase.”

  “Go on.”

  “If it contains espionage material, it’s no bargain. Papers relating to the security of the United States of America . . . Hell, you know the cliché, I’m sure.”

  He smiled.

  “I’m an American,” I went on. “I don’t wave the flag, don’t sit around telling everybody what a goddam patriot I am. But I don’t play traitor either.”

  He puffed on his cigarette. “I understand,” he said. “I was not born in this country myself, as you must have guessed. My native land doesn’t exist at the present time. It was a small state in the Balkans. The patchwork quilt of Europe—that’s what they once called it. Now the patchwork quilt has turned into a red carpet. But that doesn’t matter.

  “I’ve travelled all over the world, Mr. London. You might call me a picaresque character. I’ve lived by my wits, really. Now I live in the United States. I married an America girl, and, a number of years ago became a naturalized citizen.”

  He smiled at the memory. “I prefer this country,” he said. “However, I don’t think it’s paradise on earth, or that all other countries are perforce wretched and abominable. I’ve been to them and I know better. The fact that you elect your officials and that these elections, except in certain urban localities, are honest ones, doesn’t intrigue me much. I’m a selfish man, Mr. London. In the pure sense of the word. My comfort is more important to me than abstract justice.”

  “That’s not so uncommon.”

  “Probably not. But what I’m really trying to say is that I find it easier and more pleasant to live in America. The police may not be honest, but they are a little less blatant in their thievery. They may slap a person around but rarely beat him to death. A person’s more free to live his own life here.”

  He sighed. “I won’t go so far as to say that I wouldn’t sell out the United States of America. I know myself too well. I probably would. But the price would be extremely high.”

  The room stayed silent for several seconds then. I glanced at Maddy. She’d been listening very carefully to Armin and her face was thoughtful. I looked back at Armin. He was putting out his cigarette. I wondered if he had meant to say all that he said, if maybe his words had carried him away.

  He looked up, his eyes bright. “I become intolerably long-winded at times,” he said apologetically. “You asked a most simple question and I delivered myself of a long sermon which didn’t even supply the answer to your question. Set your mind at rest, Mr. London. I’m no spy. The briefcase contains no State secrets.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Thus,” he said, “there are no problems, no barriers between us. Unless you have another question?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Then we work together? It’s a bargain?”

  “It’s a bargain,” I said.

  NINE

  HE shook out a cigarette and held it loose and limp between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He didn’t light it. Instead he turned it over and over, staring thoughtfully at it. Suddenly he shrugged and stuck it back in the pack.

  “I smoke too much,” he said. “I also have a tendency to waste a great deal of time. But it is difficult to know where to begin. I want to give you as much information as I possibly can, yet I also want to take up a minimum of your time. Your time and mine as well. Time is precious. We will profit more through action than through words. Yet words are essential, too.”

  In turn he studied the floor and the ceiling and his neatly manicured fingernails. He looked up at me. “Let me begin somewhere in the neighborhood of the beginning, Mr. London. You are a detective. Your profession must bring you in line with crime and criminals to a greater or lesser degree. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Wallstein jewels?”

  A soft bell rang somewhere in the back of my mind. I told him I never heard of the jewels.

  He said: “Franz Wallstein was the second son of a Prussian industrialist. He was born shortly after the turn of the century. His father was a typical member of the Junker caste—a second or third-rate Krupp or Thiessen. The older son—I believe his name was Reinhardt, not that it matters—followed the father into the firm. Franz, the younger son, struck out on his own. In the early thirties he entered the service of a particularly noxious Austrian corporal.”

  “Hitler.”

  “Or Schicklgruber, as you prefer it. Franz Wallstein was neither well-mannered nor intelligent. Followers of fascist movements rarely are. His sole virtue was his dedication to this questionable cause. While never becoming particularly important, he rose to his own level quickly and enjoyed a certain amount of security. He possessed the qualifications of height, blonde hair, blue eyes. He was assigned to a troop of Himmler’s Elite Guards in the SS. Later, during the war, he was placed second in command at one of the larger concentration camps. I think it was Belsen; I’m not entirely sure. In that capacity his dedication did not prove entirely flawless. He stole.”

  I lit my pipe. “You were talking about jewels.”

  “That’s correct,” he said, but went on as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “It was standard operating procedure to confiscate any and all possessions of concentration camp prisoners, up to and including the gold from their teeth after they had been gassed. This property, in theory, became the property of the German Reich, but the facts did not always follow theory. Goering, for example, looted Europe to augment his private art collection. Minor guards would take wrist watches for themselves, a bracelet for a wife or mistress. Franz Wallstein followed along these lines. He seemed to have an interest in precious stones. If a prisoner managed to retain possession of valuable jewelry until he reached Wallstein’s camp, the jewels generally wound up in Wallstein’s foot-locker.”

  He stood up, paused for breath. “Things went smoothly for Wallstein,” he went on. “They did not go smoothly for Nazi Germany. The war moved to an end. Wallstein was at once a hunted man, no longer a trusted servant of a secure government. He was not pursued as avidly as Bormann or Eichmann or Himmler himself. But he was on the wanted lists, as they say. His wife was pregnant at the time and must have seemed like excess baggage to him. He left her in Germany, bundled up his jewels and fled the country.

  “He went first to Mexico. The political climate there soon turned out to be less than ideal and within several months it was time for him to make his move again. This time he picked a nation where he felt he would be more welcome. He chose Argentina.”

  I shook out my pipe, glanced briefly at Maddy. She was listening closely. So was I, but I wished he would get to the point already. Bannister and the briefcase were more important to me than a crooked Nazi and stolen jewels.

  “Argentina was a natural home for him,” Armin went on. “It is certain that he found countrymen there. German is supposed to be the second language of Buenos Aires. Wallstein made himself comfortable, bought an attractive house in a fashionable suburb and married a local girl without bothering to divorce the wife he’d left in Germany. He changed his name to Heinz Linder and opened an importing concern in Buenos Aires. Strong rumor has it that he engaged in smuggling of one sort or another, probably of narcotics. But this remains to be proved. Q.E.D. Whatever his actual means of support, Wallstein-Linder added to his collection of jewels. They reposed in a wall safe on the second floor of his home.”

  “And somebody hit the safe?”

  He sighed. “Not exactly, Mr. London. The situation is a bit more complex than that. Wallstein was not entirely forgotten. A group of Israeli agents similar to the ones who caught Eichmann were looking for former SS men, Wallstein among them. Two agents followed his tr
ail to Mexico City and lost him there. A few years later they extended the trail to Buenos Aires.”

  The bell went off again, louder this time. “I remember now,” I said. “About a year ago. He was found dead in Argentina and identified as Wallstein. There was a short article in the Times.”

  Armin was nodding, smiling. “The same man,” he said. “There wasn’t much of a story at the time. The Israelis didn’t bother to drag him off for a trial as they did with Eichmann. Franz Wallstein was not that important. They only wished to even the score with him: they tracked him down, broke into his home, shot him dead and left him to rot. The news value was small. The Argentine officials denied that he was Wallstein, not wanting to be accused of harboring a fugitive. The Israelis leaked the story but it still got little publicity.”

  “They shot him and took the jewels?”

  “No, of course not. They were assassins, not thieves. They did their work and left him there. But the small amount of publicity attendant upon the killing was enough to attract the attention of that sort of professional criminal who specializes in precious stones. A ring of Canadian jewel thieves flew down to Buenos Aires and stole the jewels. I don’t know the precise details of the crime but it was done well, it seems. They broke into Wallstein’s home, tied up his widow, tied up her maid, cracked the safe, grabbed up the jewels and took the first plane out of the country. As I heard it, they were in and out of Argentina in less than twenty-four hours. That may be an exaggeration. At any rate, they worked quickly and left no traces.”

  “Any insurance?”

  He chuckled. “On stolen jewels? Hardly. He was just a small-scale importer with not too much money—on the surface. He couldn’t attract attention by insuring his collection. It was too great a risk.”

  I nodded. “Go on,” I said.

  He shook a cigarette from his pack again and rolled it around some more between his fingers. This time he put it to his lips and lighted it. He drew in smoke.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to change the subject.”

  “But you didn’t, Mr. London.”

  “No?”

  “Not at all. The fact that the jewels were not insured is really most relevant. Do you know much about jewel thieves?”

  I didn’t know a hell of a lot. “They’re supposed to be an elite criminal class,” I said. “They steal jewels and sell them to a fence. That’s about all I know.”

  “They’re elite,” he said. “The rest is inaccurate.”

  He smiled when my eyebrows went up. “For a good group of jewel thieves, a fence is a last resort. Their first contact is with the insurance company.”

  I didn’t get it.

  “Let us suppose that a collection of gems is insured for half a million dollars, Mr. London. Once the theft is a fait accompli the company is legally obligated to pay out the face value of the policy to the policyholder. Now let’s suppose further that an agent for the thieves approaches an agent of the insurance company and offers to sell the jewels back for, say, two hundred thousand dollars. The company invariably pays. It’s a clear saving to them of three hundred thousand. And a top thief always prefers to deal with an insurance company, you see. He gets a better price and runs less risk of a double cross.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the company has to preserve its good name in criminal circles. I’m not joking, Mr. London. It sounds ludicrous at first but it follows the laws of logic. Perhaps, insurance companies only encourage criminal behavior by this practice. They don’t seem to care. The figures on their own balance sheets are of greater concern to them.”

  “That’s . . . that’s unfair!”

  That was Maddy talking and we both turned to look at her. Armin grinned at her. He said: “Unfair? To whom, my dear? Not to the policyholder, certainly—he gets his—possibly—irreplaceable jewelry returned. And not to the insurance company, which saves money. And not to the thieves, unfair to whom?”

  ‘To the public——”

  “Oh, but the public gains, too,” Armin told her. “Any loss the company sustains is passed on to the public in the form of higher premiums, therefore, it’s to the public’s advantage for the company to save money.”

  “But——”

  She stopped after the one word and looked around vacantly. She was very unhappy. She’s slick and smooth and big-city, but she was lost now. I rescued her.

  “Okay,” I said. “The jewels weren’t insured and the Canadians had troubles.”

  “Correct,” he said. “They had troubles. They flew from Buenos Aires to New York, then from New York to Toronto. That was their base of operations. They cached the spoils and took up residence, for a time, in some hotels on Yonge Street.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Four men.”

  “And how much were the jewels worth?”

  “That’s hard to say. Prices of stolen goods are almost incalculable, Mr. London. There are so many factors involved. The Hope Diamond is priceless, for example but worthless to a thief. He couldn’t sell it.”

  I wanted facts and he kept giving me background. “That doesn’t apply here,” I told him. “The original owners are nameless, probably dead.”

  “Precisely. The Wallstein jewels are as readily convertible into cash as valuable jewels could be. Still, an appraisal is difficult. The figures I’ve heard quoted place the total worth at somewhere around four hundred thousand dollars. Retail, that is.”

  I whistled. Maddy took a deep breath. And Peter Armin smiled.

  I said: “That’s a lot of money.”

  “And that’s an understatement. At any rate, the thieves had to find a fence, a receiver for the jewels. Two of them were in debt and strapped for cash. They couldn’t unload a little at a time. They needed a big buyer to take the lot off their hands right away. They were willing to settle for one hundred thousand.”

  The picture was shaping up but the edges were still fuzzy. I wanted to hurry him up but it didn’t seem possible. He was giving me plenty of theory and plenty of background with an occasional fact for flavor. He sat in his chair and smoked his Turkish cigarettes and I listened to him.

  “The thieves knew several reliable fences. All of them were financially incapable of handling a transaction of such proportion. They might have arranged to split the deal between a few of them but they wanted to get it all over with in a hurry. They wanted one fence for the works.” He paused for breath. “They couldn’t find such a man in Toronto. There was one in New York, but they knew him solely by reputation.”

  “Bannister?”

  “Of course. Mr. Clayton Bannister. What do you know about him, Mr. London?”

  I knew that he played rough and talked ugly. I knew I didn’t like him at all.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “A most impressive man in his own way. He began during World War II with two partners named Ferber and Marti. The three of them grew fat with a number of black market operations. Gasoline stamps, unobtainable items, that sort of thing. They made a good thing of the war, Mr. London. Of the three, Mr. Bannister alone remains. Mr. Ferber and Mr. Marti are dead. Murdered.”

  “By Bannister?”

  “Undoubtedly, but no one ever managed to prove it Since then he’s made an enormous amount of money in extra-legal activities while retaining a veneer of respectability. He has close ties with the local syndicate and remains independent at the same time. I’ve already said that he acts as a receiver of stolen goods. He does other things. He probably imports heroin, probably exports gold, probably receives smuggled diamonds and similar contraband. He heads a small but strong organization and his men are surprisingly loyal to him. He rewards the faithful and kills traitors. A good policy.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Like a gorilla. But I can do better than that. I have one of the few photographs in existence of him. A rare item, that. Here—have a look at it.”

  He took a snapshot from the pigskin pocket secretary and passed it
to me. I looked at a head-and-shoulders shot of a man about forty with a massive and almost hairless head, a wide dome with fringe around the edges. He had a bulldog jaw and beady pig eyes set wide in a slab of a forehead. The mouth was a firm thin line, the nose regular, a little thick at the bridge.

  I studied it, passed it to Maddy. “This the man at the party?”

  She looked at it.

  “Add five years,” Armin told her. “Add twenty or thirty pounds. Add the foul-smelling cigar he habitually smokes. And you’ll have Mr. Bannister.”

  She said: “I think it’s him.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “Almost sure, Ed. He had a hat on when I saw him and he never took it off. And that bald head is the most distinctive feature in the picture. I’m trying to imagine him with a hat on. I didn’t get a good look at him and it was months ago and there wasn’t any point in remembering him, not at the time. But I’m pretty sure it’s him.”

  “It has to be,” I told her. I turned to Armin. “Okay—how did the thieves get in touch with him?”

  “They didn’t.”

  “No?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. He lit another cigarette and looked at me through a cloud of hazy smoke. “Mr. Bannister seemed to be the right man for them. But they didn’t really trust him. None of them knew him. Honor among thieves is largely a romantic invention and they had no cause to believe that Mr. Bannister was an honorable man. They wanted to deal with him without getting close.”

  “Sure. They couldn’t stop him from taking the jewels and telling them to go to hell.”

  “Precisely. They could hardly take him to court. They had skill and wits while he had muscle. They picked an intermediary, a go-between.”

  “And that’s where you fit in?”

  He laughed. “No, not I. Not at all. One of the thieves was sleeping with an American girl at the time. They sent her to New York with a message for Mr. Bannister.”

  Maddy said: “Sheila Kane.”

  “If you wish. They knew her as Alicia Arden. A young girl, young and strangely innocent. A lost soul, to be maudlin and poetic about it. Previously she had associated with elements of what they seem to call the Beat Generation. That was in San Francisco. In Los Angeles her friends were petty mobsters. By this time she was living with a jewel thief in Toronto. He briefed her, sent her to New York.”