“You staid British doctors are all the same,” I said. “No doubt. Please drop your pants and lie across the bed, face down.” I did what I was told. The leg was hurting a lot now, and I knew the back of my pants leg was soaked with blood. Dignity is not easy, I thought. But it is always possible. The doctor went into the bathroom to wash. The cop in the light raincoat said, “You know either of these people, Mr. Spenser?”
“I haven’t even gotten a look at them yet.” The doctor came back. I couldn’t see him but I could hear him fumbling around. “This may sting a bit.” I smelled alcohol and felt it sting as the doctor swabbed off the area. “The bullet still in there?” I asked. “No, went right through. Clean wound. Some blood loss, but nothing, I think, to be concerned over.”
“Good, I’d just as soon not be carrying a slug around in the upper thigh,” I said.
“You may choose to call it that if you wish,” the doctor said, “but in point of face, my man, you’ve been shot in the arse.”
“There’s marksmanship,” I said. “And in the dark too.”
8
The doctor put a pressure bandage on my, ah, thigh, and gave me some pills for the pain. “You’ll walk funny for a few days,” he said. “After that you should be fine. Though you’ll have an extra dimple in your cheeks now.”
“I’m glad there’s socialized medicine,” I said. “If only there was a vow of silence that went with it.”
Downes showed up as the doctor was leaving. And he and I explained my situation to the gray cop and the young one. Two guys came with body bags and before they took away the bodies we looked at them. I got out my Identikit pictures and both of them were in the pictures. Neither one was out of his twenties. Or ever would be. Downes looked at the Identikit picture and the fallen kid, and nodded. “How much you get for him?”
“Twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“What will that buy in your country?”
“Half a car.”
“Luxury car?”
“No. ” Downes looked at the kid again. He had long blond hair and his fingernails were very recently clipped and clean. His still hands looked very vulnerable. “Half an inexpensive car,” Downes said.
“He ambushed me,” I said. “I didn’t lay in wait for either of them.”
“You say.”
“Oh come on, Downes. Is this the way I’d do it?”
Downes shrugged. He was looking at the traces of talcum powder still in front of the door. White partial footprints were now all over the room. “You powdered the room before you left,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“If one of them hadn’t?”
“I’d have opened the door very slowly and carefully and checked the floor inside before I went in,” I said.
“And you waited them out. Shoved the door open and stood in the corridor until they made their move.”
“Yeah.”
“Well now, you’re intrepid enough, aren’t you.”
“The very word for it,” I said.
“The problem is,” Downes said, “we can’t have you running around London shooting down suspected anarchists at random and collecting the bounty.”
“That’s not my plan, Downes. I don’t shoot people I don’t have to shoot. I’m here doing a job that needs to be done, that you people are too busy to do. These two clowns tried to kill me, remember. I didn’t shoot them because they were suspected anarchists. I shot them to keep them from shooting me.”
“Why did you powder the floor when you left?”
“Can’t be too careful in a foreign land,” I said.
“And the ad you placed in the Times?”
I shrugged. “I had to get their attention.”
“Apparently you succeeded.” A uniformed cop came in with my bag of disguises and handed it to Downes. “Found this down the corridor, sir, round the corner.”
“That’s mine,” I said. “I left it there when I discovered the assassins.”
“Assassins, is it,” Downes said. He reached in the bag and took out my wig and mustache and make-up cement. His broad placid face brightened. He smiled a large smile that pushed his cheeks up and made his eyes almost close. He held the mustache under his nose. “How do I look, Grimes?” he said to the bobby.
“Like a ruddy guardsman, sir.”
“My ass is hurting,” I said. “And I don’t think it’s the wound. ”
“Why a disguise, Spenser? Did they know who you were?”
“I think one of them spotted me yesterday.”
“And you arranged a meeting?” I didn’t want Downes at the meeting. I was afraid he’d scare off my quarry and I needed to make another contact.
“No, they just left a letter in my mailbox and when they saw me take it and read it they knew who I was. There’s no meeting yet. The letter said they’d be in touch. I think it was a setup. So I thought I’d change my appearance a bit.”
Downes looked at me silently for maybe a minute. “Well,” he said, “certainly there will be little grieving for these two. I do hope you’ll keep in touch with us as things develop. And I do hope that you do not plan to bring all of these people to justice this way.”
“Not if I have a choice,” I said. The technicians zipped up the second body bag and trundled it out on a dolly.
“Half an inexpensive car,” Downes said.
“What kind of gun did the guy in here have? The one that shot me?”
The cop in the light raincoat said, “Same as the one in the hall, Colt twenty-two target pistol. They probably stole a crate of them somewhere. You’re lucky they didn’t steal a forty-five caliber, or a Magnum.”
“Might have taken a good deal more of your butt than it did,” Downes said.
“Thigh,” I said.
“Upper thigh wound.” Downes shrugged. “I’d lock my door if I were you, and be quite alert, all right?”
I nodded.
Downes and the other two were all that were left in the room now. “Keep in touch, won’t you?” Downes said.
I nodded again.
Downes gestured at the door with his head and the three of them got up and left.
I closed the door behind them and slid the bolt. The doctor had given me some pills for the pain if it got bad. I didn’t want to take them yet. I needed to think. I sat on the bed and changed my mind quickly. Lying was a better idea. Lying on my stomach was the best idea of all. Shot in the ass. Susan would doubtless find that funny. Only hurts when I laugh.
This was not a dumb group. They had me thinking about tomorrow and while I was thinking about tomorrow they would ace me tonight. Not bad. But now what. Would they show up tomorrow? Yes. They would be there looking to see if I were there looking to see if they were there. I couldn’t know that tonight’s trouble was them. They didn’t know I had Identikit drawings. Even if I did, I wouldn’t know-hell, I didn’t know-that the people who wanted to see me were the same ones who tried to blow me away tonight. Maybe there really was an informant. Maybe tonight’s people were trying to stop me from getting to the informant. I’d have to go tomorrow.
I left a wake-up call for seven-thirty, took two painkillers, and in a little while I went to sleep on my stomach. It was a pill and pain sleep, fitful, and full of brief awakenings. Killing two kids didn’t help any. I was up before the wake-up call, relieved at the dawn, feeling like I’d backed into a stove. I had slept in my clothes and my pants were stiff with dried blood when I took them off: I showered and did my best to keep the bandage dry.
I brushed my teeth and shaved and put on clean clothes. Gray slacks, blue-and-white-striped shirt with a button-down collar, blue knit tie, black-tasseled loafers, shoulder holster with gun. Continuity in the midst of change. I pasted on my fake mustache, adjusted my wig, put on a pair of pink-tinted aviator glasses and slid into my blue blazer with the brass buttons and the full tattersall lining. You can trust a guy with a tattersall lining. I checked the mirror. The roll in my collar wasn’t quite right. I loosened the tie
and redid it not quite as tight.
I stepped back for a look in the full-length mirror. I looked like the bouncer in a gay bar. But it might do. I looked a lot different than I had yesterday in sweat pants and track shoes in the lobby. I put six more bullets in my inside coat pocket and I was ready. I powdered the floor again, and went to the hotel coffee shop. I hadn’t eaten since the steak and kidney pudding and it was past time. I ate three eggs sunny side up and ham and coffee and toast. It was eight-ten when I got through. In front of the hotel I got a cab and rode up to the zoo in comfort.
Leaning a little to the right as I sat.
9
They were there.
The girl I’d spotted before was looking at the flamingos as I walked up from the south gate past the hawks and eagles in the birds of prey displays. I stopped with my back to her and looked at the parrots in the parrot house. She didn’t know I had spotted her before so she made no attempt to hide. She just looked casual as she strolled over to the crows’ cage. She didn’t take any note of me. Spenser, master illusionist.
For the next two hours we did something difficult and complex like the ritual mating dance of ring-necked pheasants. She looked for me without appearing to and I watched her without appearing to. There had to be some others around. People with guns. They didn’t know what I looked like, though they probably had a description. I didn’t really know what they looked like unless the Identikit drawings were very accurate and they were the same people who had wasted the Dixons. She strolled to the chimps’ lawn. I strolled to the cockatoos. She walked to the parrots, I moved to the north end of the gibbons’ cage. She looked at the budgies while keeping an eye out for me.
I had a cup of coffee at the garden kiosk while making sure I didn’t lose her. She was wondering if there were undercover cops around. I was looking for members of her group. We were both trying to look like ordinary zoo patrons who chose to stay around the east tunnel area of the zoo. My part was complicated by the fact that I felt like a horse’s ass with my wig and my mustache. I was having a little trouble with the coffee because of the mustache. If it fell off that might give the bad guys a hint that something was up. The strain of it was physical.
By eleven o’clock I was sweating and the back of my neck hurt. My wound was hurting all the time. And not limping was a matter of concentration all the time. It must have been hard for her too, though she hadn’t been shot in the back of the lap. As far as I knew.
She was a pretty good-looking person. Not as young as the people I’d met last night. Thirty maybe, with straight hair, very blond that reached her shoulders. Her eyes were very round and noticeable, and as close as I’d gotten they looked black. Her breasts were a little too large but her thighs were first quality. She had on black sandals and white slacks and a white open-necked blouse with a black scarf knotted at the neck. She had a big black leather shoulder bag, and I was betting a gun in it. Handgun probably. The bag wasn’t quite big enough for an antitank gun. At eleven-forty-five by the clock tower she gave up. I was nearly two hours late.
She shook her head twice, vigorously, at someone I couldn’t see and headed for the tunnel. I went after her. The tunnel was something I wanted to avoid, but I didn’t see how I could. I didn’t want to lose her. I’d gone to a lot of trouble for this contact and I wanted to get something out of it. But if they caught me in the tunnel I was dead. I had no choice. Disguise, do your duty. I went into the tunnel after her.
There was no one in it. I walked through slowly, whistling and unconcerned, with the trapezius muscles across my back in a state of tension. As I came out of the tunnel I ditched the pink-shaded glasses in a trash basket and put on my normal sunglasses. I took my tie off and stuck it in my pocket and opened the collar of my shirt three buttons. I read in a Dick Tracy Crime Stopper that a small change in appearance can be helpful when following someone surreptitiously.
She wasn’t hard to follow. She wasn’t looking for me. And she was walking. She walked east on Prince Albert Road and turned down Albany Street. We went south on Albany across Marylebone onto Great Portland Street. To the left the Post Office Tower stuck up above the city. She turned left ahead of me and started up Carburton Street. The area was getting more neighborhood and small grocery store. More middle class and student. I had a dim memory that east of the Post Office Tower was Bloomsbury and the University of London and the British Museum. She turned right onto Cleveland Street. She had a hell of a walk. I liked to watch it and I had been now for ten or fifteen minutes. It was a free, long-striding, hip-swing walk with a lot of spring to it. It was fast pace for walking wounded, and I felt the gunshot wound with every step.
At the corner of Tottenham Street, diagonally across from a hospital, she turned into one of the brick-faced buildings, up three steps and in the front door. I found a doorway with some sun and stood in it, and leaned against the wall where I could see the door she’d gone in, and waited. She didn’t come out until almost two-thirty in the afternoon. Then it was just to walk half a block to a grocery store and back with a bag of groceries.
I never had to leave my doorway. Okay, I thought, this is where she lives. So what? One of the things about my employment was the frequency with which I didn’t know what I was doing or what to do next. Always a fresh surprise. I have tracked the beast to its lair, I thought. Now what do I do with her? Beast wasn’t the right word, but it didn’t sound right to say I’ve tracked the beauty to her lair. As so often in dilemmas of this kind, I came upon the perfect thing to do. Nothing. I decided I’d better wait and watch and see what happened. If at first you don’t succeed put it off till tomorrow.
I looked at my watch. After four. I had been watching the girl and her doorway since before nine this morning. Every natural appetite and need pressed upon me. I was hungry and thirsty and nearly incontinent and the pain in my backside was both real and symbolic. If I was going to do this for very long I was going to need help. By six I had to pitch it in. It was less than two blocks from the Post Office Tower. They had most of what I needed and I headed for it.
On the way I took off my wig and mustache and stuffed them in my pocket. The dining room opened at six twenty and the second thing I did after I reached it was to get a table by the window and order a beer. The restaurant was on top of the tower and rotated slowly so that in the course of a meal you saw the whole 360-degree panorama of London from much the highest building. I knew that rotating restaurants like this atop a garish skyscraper were supposed to be touristy and cheap and I tried to be scornful of it. But the view of London below me was spectacular, and I finally gave up and loved it. Furthermore, the restaurant carried Amstel, which I could no longer get at home, and to celebrate I had several bottles.
It was midweek and early and the restaurant wasn’t yet crowded. No one hurried me. The menu was large and elaborate and seemed devoid of steak and kidney pudding. That in itself was worth another drink. As the restaurant inched around 1 could look south at the Thames and to the east at St. Paul’s with its massive dome, squat and Churchillian, so different from the upward soar of the great continental cathedrals. Its feet were planted firmly in the English bedrock. I was beginning to feel the four Dutch beers on an empty stomach. Here’s looking at you, St. Paul’s, I said to myself. The waiter took my order and brought me another beer. I sipped it.
Regent’s Park edged into view from the north. There was a lot of green in this huge city. This sceptered isle, this England. I drank some more beer. Here’s looking at you, Billy boy. The waiter brought my veal piccata and I ate it without biting his hand, but just barely. For dessert I had an English trifle and two cups of coffee, and it was after eight before I was out on the street heading for home. There had been enough beer to make my wound feel okay and I wanted to walk off the indulgence, so I brought out my London street map and plotted a pleasant stroll back to Mayfair. It took me down Cleveland to Oxford Street, west on Oxford and then south on New Bond Street.
It was after nine and the beer
had worn off when I turned up Bruton Street to Berkeley Square. The walk had settled the food and drink, but my wound was hurting again and I was thinking about a hot shower and clean sheets. Ahead of me up Berkeley Street was the side door of the Mayfair. I went in past the hotel theater, up two stairs into the lobby. I saw no one in the lobby with a lethal engine.
The elevator was crowded and unthreatening. I went up two floors above mine and got off and walked down toward the far end of the corner and took the service elevator, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, to my floor. No sense walking like a fly into the parlor. The service elevator opened into a little foyer where linen was stored. Four doors down toward my room from the service elevator the cross corridor intersected.
Leaning near the corner and occasionally peering out around the corner down toward my door was a fat man with kinky blond hair and rosy cheeks. He was wearing a gray gabardine raincoat and he kept his right hand in the pocket. He didn’t have to be waiting to ambush me but I couldn’t think what else he’d be doing there. Where was the other one? They’d send two, or more, but not one. He should be at the other end of my corridor so they could get me in a crossfire. They would know who I was when I stopped and put the key in my door. I stood very quietly inside the linen foyer and watched.
At the far end of the corridor the elevator doors slid back and three people got out, two young women and a fortyish man in a three-piece corduroy suit. As they came down the corridor toward me a man appeared beyond the elevator and watched them. All three passed my door and the guy down the corridor disappeared. The one closer to me turned and looked down the cross corridor as if he were waiting for his wife. Okay, so they were trying again. Industrious bastards. Hostile, too. All I did was put an ad in the paper.
I got back in the service elevator and went up three floors. I got out, went down an identical corridor to the public elevators and looked in behind them. The stairway was there. I descended around the elevator shaft and it was in the stairway that the other shooter was hiding three floors below. I’d take him from above. He wouldn’t be looking for me to come down. He’d be waiting for me to come up. I took off my coat, rolled my sleeves back over the elbows and took off my shoes and socks. It was psychological on the sleeves, I admit, but they bothered me and made me feel encumbered, and so what if I humor a fetish. The fifty-dollar black-tasseled loafers were lovely to look at, delightful to own, but awful to fight in, and they made noise when you snuck up on assassins. Stocking feet tend to be slippery. With my shoes off, my cuffs dragged and I had to roll them up. I looked like I was going wading. Huck Finn.
The Judas Goat s-5 Page 5