Snark

by William L. DeAndrea

  Sir Lewis looked at him, blinking behind those absurd spectacles. The beard dangled from the left side of his face.

  “Can you move?” he asked solicitously.

  That was the limit. That was the last straw. “No, I can’t move! Get me out of this, you bloody madman!”

  “I didn’t think so,” Sir Lewis said calmly. He began patting his beard back in place.

  It occurred to Celeber how often, in normal conversation, he used the phrase, I’m afraid. He didn’t say it now. He merely felt it.

  Celeber noted that Sir Lewis still had the reports in his hand. Good. Let him take them and leave. Then—the phone should be on the floor here somewhere, Celeber could hear the dial tone. He’d squirm around and get it and ring 999...

  Then Sir Lewis did something odd. He removed the spectacles and started taking off the tape. Then he saw something that made him stop. He replaced the spectacles. He said, “Ah,” and walked around the desk. He stooped to pick something up. It made a fluttering sound as it moved through the air.

  When the old man walked back around the desk, Celeber could see what it was. The spindle. The bodkin from his desk. The fluttering was the sound of the still unprocessed Inland Revenue forms held in place by that nice sharp point.

  2

  BELLMAN STOOD TO THE side of the door with a gun in his hand and demanded to know who it was. It shouldn’t have been anybody—all Felicity’s visitors had to be announced.

  “Mr. Bellman?” a puzzled voice said from the other side of the door. “Is that you?”

  “Who are you?” Bellman demanded.

  “Maurice Stingley,” the voice said. “DI Stingley. From Sussex.”

  Bellman closed his eyes. He recognized the voice now. He had three choices—he could fire through the door, which was tempting but probably counterproductive; he could tell Stingley to bugger off, which would only irritate him and make him more persistent; or he could let him in.

  Bellman took off the lock and the chain bolt and opened up.

  Stingley walked in wearing an expression he’d swiped from the foreclosure officer at the bank. He took off his hat (a homburg—Bellman would have thought a bowler would suit him better) and put his gloves and scarf in it. Bellman took them, and the policeman’s coat, and draped them over a chair. Stingley’s face showed disapproval, but Bellman didn’t care.

  “To what do we owe the honor?” Bellman asked.

  “May I sit down?” Stingley asked.

  Bellman reflected that this guy’s mother must have been strict when it came to manners.

  What the hell. “Of course. Pardon me. Please do. Would you like some tea?”

  Stingley gave him a that’s-better-no-reason-we-can’t-be-civil-about-this smile “Thank you, no. I—um—was expecting to find Miss Grace here.”

  “She’s still asleep. Medication. I’m looking after her during her convalescence.”

  “Kind of you,” Stingley observed. “Any chance of my talking to her?”

  Bellman shrugged. “If she wakes up.”

  “I consider a talk with Miss Grace as unfinished business. Shortly before she left my patch—before both of you left my patch, in fact—she told me about three unidentified bodies in a sand pile, and promised me an explanation the next day. Now, our caseload in Sussex in such that three bodies more or less isn’t such a great number, but I’d still like that explanation.”

  “That was also the night,” Bellman reminded him, “that Miss Grace ran into the Sussex Cyclops.”

  As soon as he closed his lips behind the final s, Bellman knew he’d made a tactical error. No reference to the Cyclops was going to make Stingley any easier to deal with.

  “I know,” the DI said. His tone was still amiable, but he was now talking without moving his lower jaw. “I mean to have a chat with her about that, as well.”

  Bellman said, “I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.”

  Stingley caught hold of his temper by the tip of the tail. “Now, see here,” he began heatedly, then took a breath and relaxed. “Look, Bellman. I know you’re America’s answer to James bloody Bond, and Miss Grace is Modesty Blaise or whatever the hell. I’m just a simple copper, trying to catch a maniac before he does a better job on the South East of England than William the bloody Conqueror. Doesn’t that strike you as a noble enough end? Shouldn’t I get a little cooperation? Or failing that, the reason no one higher up seems to want him caught?”

  He leaned forward and looked Bellman square in the eye. “I’m not a fool, you know. I know what National Security is all about, but no one has mentioned that to me yet. You’ve come the closest, with your bloody international terrorist. Of whom, I might add, neither hide nor hair has yet been seen. I have been on this case for over a year, and I have boiled it down to one question: What the bloody hell is going on here?”

  Trusting Stingley wasn’t the problem. They’d trusted him before, and Tipton’s men had been running constant checks on

  Stingley since. He’d passed no word along, not even to his superiors. He was a clean, honest cop. A true-blue Briton. The reports told him that, and Bellman’s instincts backed it up. The trouble was, he was too clean, too honest, to be told a nasty little secret like this one.

  “I’m a visitor here,” Bellman said. “It’s not my story to tell.”

  Stingley made a face and gave a tight nod in the direction of a copy of that morning’s Times that lay in a heap on the floor where Bellman had dropped it when the doorbell rang.

  “He struck again last night,” the policeman said. “Here in London. Skewered a private dick with the bodkin off his own desk. Can’t get fingerprints off a bodkin, but the stroke is right. Our boy’s expanding his field.”

  “That’s why they called you to London?”

  “Nobody called me to London,” Stingley said bitterly. “I bloody well came. Was about as welcome as a hedgehog in a pair of tights, but they didn’t actually try to chuck me out. What do you know about it?”

  “Just what was in The Times,” Bellman said.

  Bellman had been reading The Times assiduously the last two mornings. Particularly the personals column. He was looking for an ad addressed to The Captain signed Snark. The Congressman wouldn’t decide whether to meet Leo’s demands until the second meeting had to be arranged.

  The ad hadn’t appeared yet, just the story of Sir Lewis Alfot’s latest peccadillo. It was more of the same—all it did was refresh the story in the minds of the press and public, and add weight to Leo’s threat to blow the lid off.

  “There was nothing new,” Stingley said. “Well, one thing. This Celeber, the victim, had a wisp of false hair caught under his ring. So perhaps the Cyclops wears a disguise. The Yard”—Stingley said it like the name of a disease—“the Yard are finding out if Celeber used it in his detective business.”

  Stingley slapped his knees with both hands and stood up suddenly. “So. There you have it. I came to get information, and I find I’ve been giving it out. Perhaps there’s more to you spy chaps than I thought.”

  Bellman handed him his things. As he put them on, Stingley said, “So long as I’m giving out the information, let me tell you this. I’m a patient man, Mr. Bellman, but everything has a limit. I don’t like these killings. They are sick; they are nasty; they turn my stomach. I think they could be stopped, but something the government or whoever have in mind is letting them continue. I don’t pretend to know more than the people in power, but my conscience is itching, Mr. Bellman, and the itch gets stronger all the time. Eventually, I will be forced to scratch it.”

  Stingley put his hat on. “Kindly pass that along, will you? And give my regards to Miss Grace. I still hope to have that explanation someday.”

  Bellman let him out, locked up behind him. He stood looking at the door, reflecting on Leo Calvin’s sense of humor.

  Snark, he thought. Lewis Carroll’s mystical, unseeable, unknowable menace, hunted across an enchanted island by a collection of madmen led by th
eir Captain, the Bellman.

  But the reality was madder than Carroll’s nightmare. This hunt had no readily defined quarry. This one was each against all. Bellman hunting Calvin; Calvin hunting Bellman. The Russians after Calvin and Sir Lewis. Leo after Sir Lewis. The Americans after the British and the Russians, and the British and the Russians each after the other two. And God alone knew who Sir Lewis was hunting. Besides more victims.

  Who was the Snark? In the poem, to look on him (it?) was to “softly and suddenly vanish away,” provided the Snark was a Boojum.

  Maybe that was the answer. In this nightmare, the Snark was the last one unvanished.

  3

  BY THE TIME GRIGORI Illyich Bulanin had stopped being a Raven, he thought he had had his fill of sex for a lifetime. He was wrong. Borzov had been right when he’d told him that sex is the most powerful of desires—neither indulgence, nor overindulgence, nor forced overindulgence to the point of disgust had been able to destroy Bulanin’s sexual needs.

  But his previous life had had its effect. Bulanin was all too aware that a man’s sexual or emotional attachments might be used against him. He was positive that given enough time, they would be.

  So Bulanin would form no attachments. He had nothing to do with American women when he had been stationed in Washington. He had nothing to do with English women while he was here. It would be all too easy for the CIA or British Intelligence to slip a Swallow in on him. As demeaning as he had found it to be the one to play that sort of trick, Bulanin was sure it would be even worse to be the victim of one, and he wouldn’t take the risk.

  For the same reason, he would have nothing to do with the women who worked at the Embassy, though some were attractive, and more seemed to be interested. Bulanin knew that anyone could be turned, given the right pressures. He had no intention of becoming intimate with a woman who had been seduced by the other side, and would defect as soon as she had accumulated all the knowledge from him she could. You might as well, he thought, hand a woman a gun and let her point it at you while you are naked.

  He also refused to go to prostitutes. That could be a trap as well, the one-way mirror, and the camera whirring behind it. Or a newspaper photographer might see him emerging from the home of a known prostitute and snap a picture then. The photographs were certain to make their way back to Moscow and offend old men Bulanin simply could not afford to offend. All the powerful old men would hold it against him—some because they were strait-laced old fools whose sexual urges were sublimated into power games. Imprisonments. Liquidations. Others would be against him, and justifiably so, Bulanin thought, for being foolish enough to allow himself to be embarrassed in such a way.

  Bulanin knew that the closer he came to realizing his dream, the more men would be against him. That was the nature of power, and the nature of the struggle to obtain it. Bulanin wasn’t the only young man with this dream; he had to have power within reach before he made too many enemies. In the minds of many who could help lift him to the height he intended to reach, his past, especially the sexual element of it, was something he might be forgiven. If he proved valuable enough otherwise.

  So Bulanin turned to the one source he knew would not recoil on him. Every three months or so, he had Borzov send him a woman. She would be assigned to the Embassy in some menial capacity—typist, telephone operator, even maid. That was for the British, who had approval over diplomatic personnel.

  For Bulanin she was therapy. In three weeks or a month his sexual tensions would be released, and she would be sent back to Moscow, with the thanks of a grateful KGB.

  The new one had arrived yesterday. Her name was Magda. They were all named Magda or Olga or Natasha, and they lived up to their names. Common. Forgettable. Details changed, the overall impression remained the same.

  Magda dyed her hair blond. Her face was quite pretty, and her breasts were large. Her waist and legs were thick, but Bulanin had stopped expecting anything else—Borzov seemed to think that after you made love to a woman you were supposed to harness her to a plow and take to the fields.

  Bulanin didn’t mind. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t even have noticed. Now, however, he was noticing everything. Did Magda seem a little smarter than her predecessors? Was it possible that she would report to Borzov about him? The thought had occurred to Bulanin before, but before he never worried about what Borzov would think of his actions. That was no longer true. Bulanin scowled.

  “I don’t please you,” Magda said.

  “You please me to death,” Bulanin told her. “Keep doing what you have been doing.”

  Magda smiled and bent her head. Bulanin gave her a pat to encourage her. He didn’t want her running to Borzov with the news that Bulanin had lost interest in sex.

  He looked around at the walls of the hotel room. The hotel was a modern one in North London. American-style. Air-conditioning in the summer. Coin-operated machines in the hallways for soft drinks and wine and crisps. Free ice, there for the taking. Color television.

  Bulanin always stayed in this sort of hotel when he had a woman on his hands. Somehow, it felt more prudent not to do it within the confines of the Embassy. It was also, Bulanin thought, more exciting. Bulanin had frequently heard Americans decry this sort of place, but he’d never been able to understand why. What was the excitement of staying in a building with no pillows on the beds, or antique plumbing? To Bulanin, this style of place offered comfort and convenience, and more, predictability. When he came to this place he knew what to expect, just as he knew what to expect when Borzov sent him a woman.

  Which was more than he could say about the rest of his life, lately.

  There had been too many surprises, nearly all of them unpleasant.

  “Don’t bite, damn you,” he said. Magda murmured an apology.

  The latest and perhaps most unpleasant surprise had been his reaction to what had happened with the American the other night. It was not at all the correct response. The correct response would have been fury, either cold or hot. Plans for revenge, not necessarily violence, mind you, but determination to find a way to make the American feel as foolish as he’d made Bulanin feel.

  Instead, he felt fear. It was an empty sort of fear, a melancholy. A mourning perhaps for the death of his dream.

  “No!” he said aloud.

  Magda looked up quizzically at him. Bulanin said nothing.

  Magda emptied her mouth and sighed. “Comrade,” she said. “This is not going well.”

  “Never mind how it’s going,” Bulanin told her.

  “Comrade, I would not tell you how to be a diplomat. This is not going well. You are too tense. You must relax.”

  “I have too much responsibility to relax,” he told her. And, he thought, I am in too much trouble. Potentially. If my bungling of the past few weeks gets whispered in the proper ears.

  “If you don’t relax, you won’t be able to carry out your responsibilities.”

  Bulanin looked at her. She was smarter than the others.

  Braver, at least. None of the others would dare to talk to him that way. “Why do you dye your hair?” he asked her.

  “Sometimes I like it this way, sometimes I like it the natural brown. Here, Comrade Grigori, let me rub your neck. It will relax you.” She scuttled around behind him and began to squeeze the muscles at the base of his neck.

  “You are tense,” she said. “We’ll soon have these lumps softened up. You’ll feel better.”

  Soften them by all means, Bulanin thought. They’ll be easier for Borzov to cut through when I am recalled to Moscow for failing to deal with Leo Calvin.

  Magda continued her work. She was good at it. As Bulanin relaxed he solved his problems by deciding to quit worrying about them. He would deal with the American as best he could; he would have his agents on the alert for Leo Calvin, who surely had to die, and he would trust his Destiny to see him safely through.

  He felt much better. He told Magda to lie down.

  A few minutes later she said, “You se
e? This is much better.”

  “You were right. I needed to relax.” He resolved to stay that way.

  The resolve lasted until his return to the Embassy, where he found the message from Leo Calvin waiting for him.

  4

  THERE HAD BEEN TWO TAILS on Leo Calvin when he’d left the meeting with Bellman. Now there were none. The first dropped off the second day after the meeting; the second one was taken off the job this afternoon, when Leo had pulled him up an alley, ducked into a doorway, jumped out, chopped the guy in the Adam’s apple, pulled him into a hallway, chopped him twice more, and finished him.

  He almost hated to do it—it had been such a nice, friendly setup. They had been keeping tabs on Leo to see if he intended to keep up his part of the proposed bargain with Bellman’s people. And, since Leo, for once in his life, had had every intention of doing so, it made no difference to him. It was an unusual, low-pressure situation. Leo had begun to enjoy it.

  It made a difference now. Leo was on his way to make a phone call to Bulanin’s special number at the Russian Embassy, and no flunky of Bellman’s was going to have any chance of knowing about that. Furthermore, Leo could no longer afford to be followed. By anybody.

  This guy was apparently British. He had no credentials on him, but then, a spy wouldn’t have. His driving license was made out to Anthony Edge, which to Leo sounded like something from the cover of a spy novel. He was unarmed. He had sixty-two pounds thirty on him, which Leo pocketed. That was primarily to keep the bobbies happy, but it was nice to have the money, too. Benton and the other still had to be paid.

  The right people would know this was no robbery. Bellman and his British friends would find out soon enough. Let the body serve notice that all bets are off. Leo Calvin was going back to Bulanin.

  Back to Bulanin. Leo laughed out loud at the thought—a couple of old people turned to look at him. To hell with them. Laughed again. A day ago—two hours ago—the very thought would have seemed like suicide.

  It was still dangerous. Leo wasn’t kidding himself. But he could work it. If he did it right, he could have everything he’d set out to get at the start of all this—Bellman/Driscoll dead, the Russians off his back, money, security. Plastic surgery. A new identity. Back to America. Back in business. Those bastards hadn’t seen anything yet.