by Walter Wager
Clean.
No gun.
He would not carry any weapon, not tonight.
At 9:50 P.M., a liveried black butler at the entrance to the sixty-foot living room of the eighth-floor penthouse announced, “Mr. P.T. Carstairs.” The room was buzzing with a score of conversations, but Pikelis heard. He’d been listening, waiting. He interrupted his conversation with Ben Marton and Mayor Ashley to welcome the handsome celebrity.
“I’m John Pikelis, Mr. Carstairs,” the graying ganglord said.
“The man who bought the other Cookson flintlock.”
Pikelis grinned, pleased and a little surprised.
“No hard feelings, I hope?”
Carstairs’ famous multimillion-dollar smile glowed.
“I may be a bit spoiled, but I’m certainly not piggy,” he answered amiably. “No, no hard feelings at all. I admire your good taste, as well as your Southern hospitality. Thanks for an excellent dinner.”
P.T. Carstairs wasn’t at all spoiled, or pompous, or even world-weary, Pikelis was cheered to discover.
“And thanks for the kind invitation to your party, Mr. Pikelis,” the yellow-haired spy added.
“I couldn’t do less for a fellow collector,” the racketeer replied.
Then he guided him to Marton and Ashley, who’d been watching.
“Mr. Carstairs, I’d like you to meet two of our most important and efficient public officials—perhaps, no, probably our most important and efficient in Paradise City. This is Captain Marton, Chief of Police, and our distinguished mayor, Roger Stuart Ashley.”
As if in some film about the FBI, Williston’s neatly typed dossiers on the two corrupt officials jumped into focus and filled Carstairs’ mental screen. Actually they appeared side by side in a split-screen effect, hung there for a long moment and vanished as the millionaire reached out to shake hands with Ashley.
“An honor to meet you, Mr. Mayor.”
“Welcome to Paradise City. I hope your stay will be a pleasant one,” Ashley replied.
He was a fine-looking man with an aristocratic demeanor and faintly glassy eyes that hinted at considerable drinking. Tiny lines, a few telltale ruptured blood vessels and a subtly ravaged face all confirmed what Williston’s dossier had reported.
“If Mr. Pikelis’ hospitality is typical of the graciousness of Paradise City,” Carstairs assured, “then my stay should be very pleasant indeed.”
Liveried waiters were circulating steadily among the fifty or sixty people in the large room, and Mayor Ashley accepted a glass of champagne from one of these servants before he replied.
“Without minimizing the friendliness of our fine citizenry, I’m afraid that nothing about Mr. Pikelis is at all typical. In his generosity as in everything else, our host is an exceptional person. In determination, imagination, strength—especially strength—Mr. Pikelis is unique,” Ashley explained. “He’s a born leader, a natural leader and executive.”
It was difficult to tell whether he was admiring, simply describing or discreetly sneering at the ruthless man who ruled Jefferson County.
“That makes you one of nature’s gentlemen, Mr. Pikelis,” Carstairs judged.
Pikelis grinned, plainly delighted by the phrase.
“I’m flattered by the mayor’s compliments,” he announced, “since I’m basically a self-made man and Roger’s family is one of the oldest and finest in the state. His great-grandfather was a Confederate major, a cavalry major who lost an arm at Chancellorsville.”
It was neatly done. The way Pikelis said “Roger” made it clear who was the master here.
Carstairs nodded, turned his attention to Marton.
“I didn’t mean to be impolite, Captain. I’m pleased to meet you too—especially since I know I’m not illegally double-parked.”
The beefy police chief half smiled, extended a heavy, thick-fingered hand that was both meaty and muscular. It was oddly unpleasant to shake.
“Any guest of Mr. Pikelis wouldn’t break our parking regulations, at least not so’s we’d notice it,” Marton assured. “You going to be in town long?”
The spy took a glass of champagne, sipped.
“Hard to say. My plans are, as usual, somewhat indefinite. I’ve been visiting some old hunting friends who have an estate in South Carolina, and I’m on my way south to Daytona to talk to a driver I may team up with for next year’s race.”
Marton shrugged, almost openly indifferent to this rich stranger whom he regarded as a shallow dilettante.
“Of course I hope to stay long enough to persuade Mr. Pikelis to let me see his collection,” Carstairs continued.
“That won’t be difficult,” promised the ganglord. “I don’t get that many serious collectors passing through here, you know, and I love to show the weapons. My collection may not be anything as big as yours, but—”
“He’s got some great old guns,” Marton interrupted. “I don’t go for those antique irons myself. I like something modern and simple and useful, like a thirty-eight Police Special.”
Carstairs sighed.
“That’s a workingman’s tool, not a collector’s item,” he observed.
“Captain Marton is a workingman, a very hard workingman,” Pikelis confirmed with a chuckle. “Ah, there’s our guest of honor, Mr. Carstairs,” he announced a moment later.
She was very pretty.
Kathy Pikelis wasn’t at all dramatic or glamorous, but she was very pretty. She was a lot prettier and softer looking than she had any right to be, Carstairs thought behind his fixed mask of smile. A vicious racketeer’s daughter shouldn’t be that lovely, that serene, that innocent in face and eyes. The low-cut Yves St. Laurent gown might have been sexually provocative on another woman, but on this one it was simply elegant. Her skin was dark—as her late mother’s had been—and her eyes were large and direct, and her voice was gently furred with the soft accents of this part of the South.
They met and they spoke—of Paris and Rome and wines and the pleasures of coming home—and when the trio in the corner began to play they danced. She was graceful, quick and warm in his arms. As if that weren’t enough, there was a full moon shining outrageously and Kathy Pikelis smelled subtly of jasmine.
It was all ridiculously romantic.
The scene in the basement of the 17th Street police station was much less romantic. Three patrolmen and a sergeant were systematically hurting Sam Clayton, a twenty-eight-year-old black man who drove an ice truck. They had been wanting to hurt him for several years, ever since the civil-rights organizer from New York had spent a week in Clayton’s small wooden house. Now the police were shining lights in his eyes, striking him and pouring ice water over his face and doing many other cruel things that would cause pain but leave few marks. Clayton, a square-shouldered and round-faced man who didn’t look the least bit like Sidney Poitier, was neither handsome nor particularly articulate. He moaned and he cursed and sometimes he screamed, because they hurt him a great deal and they wouldn’t stop.
They were determined, as they explained, to compel him to confess to the murder of “that colored girl who got all cut up over on Larabee Avenue.” Equally determined not to confess to a crime that brought the death penalty, angry at the illogic of it all and furious with the senseless agony, Sam Clayton suffered terribly. They wouldn’t listen to his explanation that he’d been at the church dance during the period in which the woman had been stabbed, and they wouldn’t stop hurting him.
“He’s a tough mother,” one policeman said shortly before midnight when Clayton fainted for the fourth time without confessing.
“You got anything better to do tonight?” challenged the sergeant.
A number of obscene and untrue remarks followed, and then the savage and unconstitutional abuse of Sam Clayton resumed. In Room 407 at the Hotel Jefferson, a man who called himself Arthur Warren was preparing a list of “blind drops” that he’d selected for use by the Sledgehammer team. “Blind drops”—places where an agent left a mess
age to be picked up by another agent—were hardly the ideal method for a réseau, a network, to maintain communication. A chain of human couriers, preferably including a “cut out” or two to prevent the entire group from being “burned,” was certainly quicker. But when a small infiltration team was compelled to operate in hostile territory where it had no local allies and the counterespionage organizations were energetic, “blind drops” such as hollow trees or the spaces behind loose tiles in a public toilet were often the only way. Colonel Abel of the Soviet KGB had run his New York City apparat with “blind drops,” and the CIA had used them to collect Penhovsky’s film in Moscow. Sledgehammer would use them too.
At the Fun Parlor on Ocean Road, Gilman was working at a roulette wheel as he continued his discreet study of the layout, personnel and security procedures of the tastefully decorated gambling establishment. A number of tastefully decorated young women wandered in and out of a quilted green door at the rear, often with male customers in tow. No one had said it, but by now the man from Las Vegas realized there were private rooms back there. Through the large arch on the other side of the gambling room, Gilman could see the blond head of the singer working with the house quintet. The Art Phillips band was cool and adequate, but the voice of Judy Ellis was much more than that and Gilman’s head bobbed in unconscious approval of the way she performed “What the World Needs Now.” Bacharach and David would have liked what she did with their song, the stickman calculated.
Seventeen miles away at Crowden’s Caravan Camp on Route 121, the stunt man sat in his trailer watching his Uher-400 record the broadcasts of the Paradise City police radio. He had reconnoitered—and photographed with infrared camera—the transmitter earlier in the evening, and now he was collecting voices and standard phrases and numbers used to designate various types of “calls.” He had already figured out what several of the “signals” meant; in due course he would know them all.
It was going well. On the top floor of Paradise City’s finest hotel, the community’s most distinguished citizens talked and laughed and drank to honor the homecoming of a notorious racketeer’s daughter, and John Pikelis himself beamed at the sight of her dancing with the second most eligible bachelor in America. North America, anyway. Parker Terence Carstairs was also smiling, for Sledgehammer was developing on schedule. The fourth infiltrator had passed—undetected—through the enemy lines and was operating within the headquarters of the occupation forces.
The secret battle had been joined.
16
Sunday.
The next day was Sunday, July 12, as everyone expected.
There were very few surprises in Paradise City, an orderly community where might made right and left was something people read about in magazines and the large complacent center was both quiet and relaxed.
Sunday, traditional day of rest in the Christian world.
Insurance salesmen, physical-education teachers, dental technicians, grocery-store proprietors, switchboard operators, TV repairmen, bookkeepers, junior executives, factory workers, civil servants, bartenders, PTA leaders, whores of all prices and descriptions, ophthalmologists, proctologists and assassins such as porky Luther Hyatt all rested. The police who had been illegally and immorally hurting Sam Clayton rested too—having finally forced him to submit—and their victim slept in hopeless, ruined exhaustion.
July 12, the day that Julius Caesar and Henry David Thoreau were born—some 1917 years apart. It was a good day for rest, but the four infiltrators worked. Williston reconnoitered the areas around the police headquarters, the power plant and Pikelis’ Jayland Realty offices while Gilman completed his sketches of the interior and alarm systems of the Fun Parlor. The stunt man developed and studied his photos of the police radio transmitter, and Parker Terence Carstairs awoke at noon to keep his appointment to see the racketeer’s antique arms. In an Italian movie, he would have awakened beside some baby-faced nymphomaniac and said something cool as he lit his cigarette. But this wasn’t an Italian movie—it wasn’t even a Canadian Film Board cartoon—so he awoke alone, washed and dressed and ate a light brunch before his 2:15 arrival at the penthouse. The ganglord’s daughter was just leaving to play tennis with some friends at the country club, and Carstairs decided that he’d been correct about her the night before. She was much more attractive and appealing than she had any right to be, as well as intelligent.
“Do you play tennis, Mr. Carstairs?” she asked.
“A little—mostly to admire girls’ legs.”
It was then that her father guided the blond millionaire to the terrace window, pointed out the club on the horizon and mentioned how good the courts were. Taking the hint, Carstairs suggested that he might drop by there later for a drink after he’d finished examining the gun collection. It was a good collection—not great—and both men enjoyed the connoisseur’s talk about rare historic weapons. At four o’clock, Carstairs arrived at the club, where Kathy Pikelis was completing a doubles match with Wanda Ann Ruggles and two young lawyers. Wanda Ann, a large red-headed girl in a small tennis outfit, was the daughter of the president of the Paradise National Bank and she laughed a lot. Somebody had once told her that she had wonderful teeth, so she laughed to show them.
The two young attorneys were less jolly, for their teeth were rather ordinary and they resented the intrusion of the older and more famous stranger. One of the crew-cut lawyers invited Carstairs to play, offered to lend him shoes and a racket. It was more than an invitation; it was a challenge. The second most eligible bachelor in the United States first pleaded fatigue and then lack of practice and then age, after which he blasted the smart-ass attorney in straight sets. Not only straight sets, straight games.
“That was a mean thing you did to George,” Kathy Pikelis reproved softly over a drink ten minutes later.
“I’m mean—and sneaky. I don’t deny it,” Carstairs acknowledged.
“I’m used to sneaky men.”
“A pretty young woman would be—or should be. Of course, I’m sneakier than most,” he warned. “I practice sneaky thoughts and sneaky things all the time, so I’m a champ at it.”
She took a cigarette from the pack on the table, and he lit it for her deftly.
“George is quite a good tennis player, you know,” she scolded.
“In my distant youth—back when covered wagons and DC-3s crossed the great plains—I was fortunate enough to be intercollegiate tennis champion,” he confessed. “Yes, I was spry and dashing and I was widely hailed—nay, acclaimed—as the best goddam college tennis player in the nation.”
She shook her head.
“Poor George,” she sighed.
“I still play once or twice a week to remind me of my boyhood glory,” the sportsman continued.
“You didn’t say that you were a champ.”
“I told you I was sneaky—and that hostile youth deserved it anyway,” Carstairs replied glibly. Then he told her a lot of other charming things—quite easily and almost automatically—before they had another drink and he brought her home to the penthouse. That evening, he meticulously examined the Breckenridge Suite and discovered two hidden listening devices—one in the phone and the other in the lamp beside the bed. It was reassuring to know that somebody cared, he reflected as he wondered when and how Williston would deliver the list of “blind drops.” The radio schedule of times and frequencies had been established and memorized before any of them had left The Inferno, and the standard rules on duration of transmission—fifty seconds—were in force. At 11:51, the second most eligible bachelor in the United States put a blanket over his telephone and unplugged the lamp before carrying his radio into the bathroom and closing the door. Then he turned on the hot and cold taps in the tub.
At 11:52, he flicked on the receiver and tuned it to the first of the five pre-agreed frequencies. He glanced down at the face of his gold Rolex, watched the sweep second hand move steadily past the “4” toward the “5.” As it hit the “6”—precisely at 11:52 and a half, or 23:5
2:30 if you preferred military time—he heard the stunt man’s voice.
“Tampa tower, Tampa tower…would you please repeat runway number and landing instructions? Runway Four is clear, right?”
That was it.
Arbolino was reporting that he, Gilman and Williston had arrived and that he presumed the fourth agent—P.T. Carstairs—was also in position.
“This is Tampa tower,” the millionaire heard Gilman reply. “Yes, Runway Four is clear. Descend to two thousand for downwind leg.”
Total elapsed time on the air: eighteen seconds.
Much too short a conversation for anyone to record or “fix” with radio-location gear.
Gilman had confirmed that the gun collector was in the hotel, had made contact with Pikelis. Operating from the same hotel, the man from Las Vegas would have to serve as Carstairs’ line of communication with the others. The radio telephone in the Bentley was only for emergency use, they had agreed. They had also decided to strike only after thorough on-the-spot “eyeball” reconnaissance of the area and the occupation-forces defenses.
On Monday, Williston went to work in his role of public-opinion scholar and started his interviews. He began with the genial gross “critic” who treated television, motion pictures and local “community theater” and “classical ballet” for the Paradise City Trumpet. He discovered that Frederick U. Kimberley, a large, pretentious man whose cloying after-shave cologne suggested that most of his friends were unfrocked Boy Scout leaders, didn’t really care for any of the films or shows that he regularly praised in print but saw no harm in lying. By giving the editor and the advertising department what they wanted, he observed primly, he got what he wanted—a weekly check and an annual trip to New York to report on the theatrical and musical “scene” and gorge himself in some of those chic French restaurants.
“Of course, I’m busy with my own writing too—my creative writing,” he concluded.
“A play, I’ll bet?”
Frederick U. Kimberley smirked gratefully.
“Nothing commercial, you understand,” he admonished as he nodded. “A one-act work—rather avant-garde by popular standards—set in the Queen’s toilet in Buckingham Palace on the eve of an atomic war. I hope that I don’t sound hideously presumptuous, but it does have an Ionesco quality—a tone.”