Tangier Bank Heist

by Sean McLachlan

  We decided to leave the first mate to Chason—it was his collar, after all—and worked on Demitrios.

  First we let him stew for an hour, alone in a dark office. Gave him time to think about how hopeless his situation was. That also gave us time to check the cocaine was really cocaine. Chason tended to shoot from the hip and we wanted to make sure we had something on these jokers.

  We did. It was pure and uncut, just like the Frog said.

  Gerald and I went into the office. Demitrios was still handcuffed to the chair in the corner. I checked the cuffs. They were locked. Demitrios moved one hand away from my groping fingers. I felt his hand and it bunched up. Grabbing it, I pried open the fingers one by one. By the third finger I felt something thin and metallic.

  “Give it over,” I said, twisting his pinky.

  He gritted his teeth and struggled for a moment. I twisted harder.

  “Give it over,” I repeated.

  He gave in. It was a paperclip. I chuckled.

  “You gotta be a pro to jimmy handcuffs with a paperclip, my friend.”

  “Attempted escape,” Gerald said in a low cool voice. He switched on the table lamp and aimed it at Demitrios’s face. It silhouetted the police chief, making him look like a specter. “That can get you an extra year on top of the ten you’re facing for the cocaine.”

  “What cocaine?” he said. “Where’s my lawyer?”

  Gerald laughed. Quite menacing. He could turn on the menacing when he needed to. Not that he’d ever do anything to a prisoner in his care, he was too much the public schoolboy for that, but Demitrios was accustomed to Moorish and Greek policemen. With them anything was possible. The things the Greek cops did with broom handles was enough to give you the shivers even if you weren’t under arrest.

  “There’s no lawyer coming for you,” Gerald said as I looked for a broom closet. “Now tell us about Pieter Vlamin before I start breaking your fingers.”

  I stopped looking for a broom. If Gerald was playing bad cop, that meant I had to play good cop. I had figured I’d get the bad cop role after the head-butting and punching and all. I guess he wanted to go for bad cop and badder cop.

  “Who’s Pieter Vlamin?” Demitrios asked.

  “You bloody wanker!” Gerald rushed at him.

  I didn’t miss my cue. I intercepted him just inches from the prisoner, pushing him back. Gerald struggled, really struggled, and I had to put some muscle into it and only got him to back up a couple of steps. Gerald was what you call a method actor.

  But Demitrios was made of nails. He had barely flinched when the police chief rushed him. And once I got Gerald out of punching range, the fishing boat captain sneered.

  “I know nothing about any cocaine, and I know nothing about anyone named Pieter Vlamin,” he said.

  I had to hand it to him. He kept his cool. Not that we believed him, but this was going to take some time.

  Now it was my turn. Keeping Gerald at a distance, I talked to Demitrios in a friendly tone.

  “Look, pal. We can put you away for the cocaine, but we got bigger fish to fry. What we really want is Pieter Vlamin. We know you dumped his bank in the sea. What we really want is him and the money. If you can steer us to that, we might overlook this whole cocaine thing.”

  “To hell with that,” Gerald barked. “We have enough to put them away for years.”

  I knelt by Demitrios. “You don’t want that, and we don’t want that. All we want is the Dutchman. Give him to us, and we’ll let you and your crew go. You’ll even get to keep your boat. You’ll lose the cocaine, of course, but what’s that? That’s just business. You can make up the loss. If you don’t, this copper is going to walk all over you and your crew until somebody squeals.”

  Demitrios didn’t reply. I could practically hear the wheels turning behind that weather-beaten face.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Demitrios said at last.

  “We know you murdered Ronnie the Pusher,” Gerald snapped.

  For a brief moment terror sparked in the Greek’s eyes and was quickly hidden.

  “Who? Who got murdered?”

  “We have your fingerprints at the crime scene,” I lied.

  “No you don’t, I wasn’t there,” he blurted.

  There was a pause while all three of us let that sink in. Demitrios sputtered, trying to think of a way out of what he just said.

  “So who was?” Gerald asked.

  Demitrios didn’t reply.

  We worked on him for a while but he didn’t say another word.

  “Never mind, Gerald,” I said at last. “I have a hunch I can find who was there.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The holding cells were in the basement, nice and dank and dark the way they ought to be. At the bottom of the stairs, a short hallway ended with thick iron doors in front and to either side. Beyond each of these was another hallway ending in a holding cell. Gerald’s predecessor had this designed specifically so you could break up gangs into different holding cells and keep them from communicating. It’s hard to create an alibi when you don’t know what your buddies are going to say when it’s their turn under the lamp.

  A Moorish guard turned a heavy brass key in one of the doors and led Gerald and I down an echoing concrete hallway to where it ended in floor-to-ceiling bars. Four Greeks stood inside, clustered in a corner. A drunk lay passed out on the floor. A couple of Moorish toughs sat glowering on the cell’s lone bench.

  I poked a flashlight through the bars and shined it on the Greeks. I recognized the guy I had head-butted. He had a bloody handkerchief pressed against his mouth. But he wasn’t who I was looking for. I gave him a grin and we went to the next cell.

  There’s where I got lucky. When I shone the flashlight on the Greeks inside, who like their buddies had clustered together in a corner away from the other prisoners, one of them turned his back on me.

  “Hey you! Turn around,” I said.

  He didn’t budge.

  Gerald nodded to the policeman, who unlocked the cell, went inside, and forced the man to face me. He was bigger than most of his shipmates, and looked to be about twenty.

  I shone the light on his face and saw a couple of fading bruises.

  “Where did you get those?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

  “No English,” he replied.

  I switched to Spanish. “Maybe not, but you speak Spanish. Everyone on the docks does. Now tell me where you got those bruises.”

  After a pause, the fisherman said, “In a bar fight.”

  “Horse pucky. Ronnie the Pusher gave you those. Bring him out.”

  The guard hauled him out and locked the cell behind him. We went to the third cell to check if Ronnie had slugged anyone else before he died, but we didn’t find any old bruises. We found some new ones, though. All three Greeks in this cell had fresh welts on their face. One guy’s eyes were swelling shut. Four tough looking Moors sat smugly on the other side of the cell.

  Leaving them to suffer through a long night, we took our man up to one of the interrogation rooms.

  After we got him handcuffed to a chair, I took Gerald aside for a quiet word.

  “You find any prints in Ronnie’s place?”

  “None but his. Ronnie didn’t even have a Fatima.”

  A Fatima was what everyone called their Moroccan cleaning lady, no matter what their name. They left their fingerprints on everything and the poor dears got pulled into the police station any time a residence got dusted for prints.

  I shrugged. “It’s never that easy, is it?”

  “Rarely.”

  I went over to the fisherman.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tymon.”

  “Who helped you kill Ronnie the Pusher?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Tymon said.

  “We found your prints at his place.”

  A brief look of worry, quickly replaced by assurance.

  “You’re lying.”

 
OK, so he wore gloves.

  “We got you for the cocaine. We can put you away for years. Long enough to gather our witnesses and make a case for the murder charge. You can hang for that. But if you cooperate, the police chief here will go easy on you. We’ll drop the cocaine charge and only charge you with manslaughter. You’ll do ten years, eight if you behave.”

  The Greek studied me, weighing options. Then I hit him with the big guns.

  “You killed the wrong man. Ronnie didn’t kill Nikolas.”

  Tymon’s eyes widened. After a moment he regained his composure. He didn’t say a word, probably not trusting himself to speak.

  “We found his body in the Grotto of Hercules,” I went on. “You shoved him out into the water to give him a burial at sea, but you weren’t thinking straight. The waves brought him back in. Oh, you probably watched for a while to make sure that didn’t happen, but came back he did. Whether he was under the surface and you couldn’t see him, or if he washed back after you left, I don’t know. Whatever happened, he got jammed between two rocks and that’s where we found him. We got his name off his shirt. What is it you sailors say, the sea always gives up its dead?”

  The Greek hung his head.

  “We did an autopsy and found he was killed with a .38. Ronnie carried a .32. Didn’t you wonder why Ronnie opened the door to you without a fuss? That’s because he had a clean conscience. He only resisted when your pal got behind him and drew the rope around his neck. And after he slugged you a couple of good ones you didn’t think to wonder if you had the right man. Ronnie didn’t kill Nikolas, Pieter did.”

  I wasn’t a hundred percent on that, because there might be somebody else involved, somebody I didn’t know, but I wanted more information on Pieter and I figured that would be the way to get it.

  It was.

  Tymon groaned and shook his head. Tears came to his eyes, not crocodile tears like you usually get in these situations, but genuine ones.

  I knelt in front of him and waited until he pulled himself together.

  “You’re not a bad guy,” I said. “You’re just a regular working Joe trying to make a living. So you smuggled a bit of cocaine. Why not? Who cares what the rich people put up their nose? I sure as hell don’t. And smuggling out the bank, well, someone else would have done that if you hadn’t. You’d have never killed a soul except that you thought some lowlife heroin dealer plugged one of your friends. Anyone would kill in that situation. And yeah, Ronnie deserved to die, but not for the reason why you strangled him. Heroin kills lots of people. It’s killing one of my friends. But Ronnie didn’t kill Nikolas. So tell me, where can I find Pieter?”

  He shook his head slowly, not looking at me but at some point on the floor.

  “I don’t know. I swear to the Mother of God I don’t know,” he said.

  “What do you know? Anything that can help. The more you help me, the more we can help you.”

  Tymon paused for a long moment, then nodded as if to tell himself to continue.

  “Ronnie came to us a week ago. I didn’t know him but some of the fellows said he was a heroin dealer. He knew some of the smugglers but only the ones with small, fast boats. Most of the drugs go through them. That cocaine you found was unusual for us. We hardly ever move drugs but we chanced on a good deal. I don’t know the details. But Ronnie came to us because we have one of the biggest, strongest boats in the Tangier fishing fleet.”

  A trace of pride came through in those last words, and I almost felt sorry for this poor sap. His life was ruined, ruined because of Pieter’s greed. Pieter’s customers’ lives would be ruined too if I didn’t get to the bottom of this.

  “So Ronnie hired your boat,” I prompted him when he trailed off.

  “Yes. He was acting as go-between for Pieter Vlamin. Got a finder’s fee from Demitrios and probably one from Pieter too. Pieter rented a truck to bring all the furniture from the bank down to the pier one night really late. Paid García a bundle to look the other way. We loaded the stuff on and sailed it out to the spot where we dump the young fish. It’s deep there and we knew all of it would sink to the bottom. It’s strange, but he already knew all about it.”

  I stifled a smile. Robert’s drunken lecture on fishing must have rubbed off on the banker.

  “And Pieter went with you?” I asked. “Did you drop him somewhere?”

  “No. Ronnie came along to make sure we did the job. Pieter had another way to get out of the International Zone. Nikolas knew someone who makes fake passports. Nikolas was Macedonian and had cousins in Bulgaria. They wanted to get out from there, the Reds are ruining everything in Bulgaria, so Nikolas had the guy make Greek passports for them.”

  “The Bulgarian Communist Party are just stooges for Moscow,” I said, “They’re not real Communists.”

  The Greek looked at me, confused.

  “Never mind. Go on,” I told him.

  “So Nikolas made a deal with Pieter to act as go-between with this guy. Pieter already had some other plan to get out of the Zone but leaving with a fake passport was a much better bet. Nikolas was going to get a big fee from Pieter but didn’t want to tell Demitrios. Demitrios takes a cut of everything. But Nikolas didn’t trust Pieter and wanted me and…someone else to come along to make sure Pieter didn’t try anything.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  Tymon ground his teeth. “We tried. Nikolas pretended to be sick so he didn’t have to go out that night, but we had to go, otherwise it would look suspicious. We figured we’d have plenty of time. We always get back before dawn and they were supposed to meet at the cave an hour after dawn. But we had engine trouble out at sea and it took a while to fix. We got back late and took a taxi to get to the cave but we were too late. When we got there, we found Nikolas dead. The bastard shot him in the back. His pocket was turned inside out. Pieter must have given him his money, and as soon as Nikolas turned to walk away he shot him and took it back!”

  “So why did you think it was Ronnie and not Pieter who killed him?” I asked as Tymon cursed under his breath.

  “We didn’t see anyone in the cave. We looked all around, and didn’t see a soul. No cars on the road, nothing. So we started running on the beach back to Tangier, hoping we’d catch Pieter. When we were almost all the way back we saw Ronnie walking ahead of us. He was wearing his usual suit, not a bathing suit, so we knew Ronnie had been to the cave. We hurried to catch up to him. He was walking away from us and with the surf he couldn’t hear us. We thought we had him, but before we could catch up, he saw an Arab who acted like he knew him.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I met that guy. Ronnie did know him. He was a customer of the bank. Ronnie told him he wanted to kill Pieter.”

  Tymon’s eyes widened at that. “So he got ripped off too. Pieter must not have given him his share but he heard about the rendezvous somehow and came to the cave.”

  “But he was late as well for some reason, and all he found was Nikolas lying dead,” I said.

  Tymon slumped. “If he had come a few minutes later he would not have seen him at all. We gave him a burial at sea. He deserved a sailor’s burial.”

  And you didn’t want a body around that would have brought the cops to the pier, asking questions. I thought.

  “So what happened after he talked with the Arab?” I asked.

  “After that we got scared. We could see a couple of people further along the beach. We were already too close to Tangier to kill Ronnie without being spotted, so we decided to go to his apartment. Demitrios had already had us find out where he and Vlamin lived in case anything went wrong with the bank deal.”

  “So you and your friend went to Ronnie’s apartment and he let you in, not knowing you thought he was Nikolas’s murderer.”

  “Yeah,” Tymon sighed. He sat slumped in his chair, utterly dejected.

  I turned to Gerald, who had been watching this conversation with increasing impatience, and translated it all for him.

  “Ask him who his accomplice was,” the
police chief said. “And ask him if he has any details on this passport forger. We are already monitoring a few people we suspect of that sort of thing.”

  As Gerald lit another cigarette, I turned back to Tymon. I decided on the easy question first.

  “So who is this forger?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I swear I don’t know. Nikolas sold that information to a couple of different people, but I never needed a passport so I never asked him.”

  “You know anything about him?”

  “Nikolas let slip one or two things. He’s an Armenian, and was born here.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I don’t know anything more about him.”

  “This has been a great help, Tymon. I’m sure the police chief will put in a word with the courts to go easy on you. Ronnie was only a heroin dealer anyway. It’s not like the judge is going to get all choked up about his death.”

  Tymon winced, and I realized my poor choice of words. I can really put my foot in it sometimes.

  Now for the tough part.

  “Tymon, the judge will go even easier on you if you tell us who came with you to Ronnie’s apartment.”

  Tymon looked at the floor and shook his head.

  “I can’t. It’s bad enough he killed the wrong man. He’ll have to live with that for the rest of his life. But I just can’t send him to jail.”

  I sighed. This guy was young, barely out of his teens, and he was going to lose a big part of his youth in prison. I put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Good luck to you, Tymon. Get yourself a lawyer, and if he wants to call me as a character witness, I’ll do it.”

  I took Gerald aside and told him what I’d learned. He snapped his fingers.

  “Kevork Bagdasarian! He’s on our list. His parents fled the genocide in the Ottoman Empire and set up a carpet export business here. Kevork was born here.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him already.”

  “We play tennis together.”

  I blinked. “You play tennis with a suspected forger?”

  “Why not? He’s never been convicted of anything. And he’s a good egg. He went to Oxford.”