She edged toward the wall, her shoulders hunched protectively. ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to go back up there.’
‘No, no, you have to come. Everything will be all right. Mr Shaw will be with us. He’ll make sure everything is fine.’
His look said she was coming with them one way, or the other.
Ambrose looked to Karl. ‘Doctor, are you coming?’
‘Of course.’
Magda looked over the tops of her glasses. ‘I will finish looking at the questions the girl managed to ask him. I’ll follow in a minute.’
They went up the stairs to the third floor, Ambrose and Karl leading, Maxie sandwiched between them and Shaw. The thin fabric of the robe clung to her, and Shaw admired her ass as they climbed.
‘What’s that robe made of, Maxie, nylon or something?’
‘What? I don’t know.’ Distracted. ‘Yeah, nylon, or maybe Dacron.’
‘Very nice.’
They stopped in front of a door on the third floor. ‘Calm and quiet, everyone,’ Ambrose said. ‘No agitation. Calm and quiet. Agreed?’ It wasn’t really a question. ‘Shaw, are you armed?’
‘Yeah.’ He touched his tweed jacket where the gun was holstered beneath his left arm.
‘Just in case.’
Ambrose reached for the doorknob. Maxie moved behind Shaw. Karl Brandt stepped to one side. Ambrose looked at Shaw and raised his eyebrows. Shaw nodded. Ambrose opened the door.
Chris Collins, the evening’s experimental subject, was crouched in a corner of the room near a standing lamp with a tasseled shade. His naked body was covered with sweat, and the light made it shine. He looked at them with unseeing eyes and scratched at himself as if insects crawled beneath his skin. Collins’s shoulders and arms were striped with deep bleeding furrows from his fingernails, and he had gouged his face bloody.
‘Jesus,’ Shaw said in awe of the man’s capacity for self-savaging.
‘Interesting,’ Ambrose said. ‘He doesn’t seem to feel any pain. Dr Brandt, have we seen that before with any of the others?’
‘No. You’re right; it is interesting. If the drug can mask pain, it is something we should explore. It may be another application,’ Brandt said.
‘What are we going to do with him,’ Shaw asked. To him the end of these evenings simply presented a disposal problem. Usually it was a matter of persuading the men that it was time to leave. Yes, of course the girl was in love with him. Yes, it was wonderful that she was so interested in what he had to say. Yes, of course he could set up a date for another time. Leave a phone number. Of course she’d call. He would bundle the man downstairs and out the door and into the waiting car, and they would drive uptown and leave him on a corner a couple of blocks from wherever he lived. And that would be that.
Tonight was going to be a little more complicated.
The naked man stopped scratching. His lips drew back from his teeth, and he snarled like a dog.
‘It’s all right, Mr …’ Ambrose looked to Shaw for the name.
‘Collins,’ Shaw said.
‘Mr Collins. Everything is fine. We’re here to help you. Now, I want to give you something to calm you.’ He took a small pill bottle from his pocket and selected one tablet. Shaw retrieved a half-full glass of water from the bedside table. ‘Mr Collins, this is meprobamate, or Miltown, as people call it. It’s going to calm you down, and make you feel better.’ Ambrose spoke in a soothing voice. ‘All right? I’m just going to give it to you with this glass of water. I want you to swallow the pill all the way down with some water. And then you’ll feel better. Okay? Here we go.’ Ambrose approached Collins slowly with the glass held out in one hand and the pill in the other. As he went he bent his knees and ducked down to minimize his height, to lessen any sense of threat. ‘All right. Here we are. Everything’s going to be just fine.’
Collins lunged forward, snarling, his teeth snapping. Ambrose jerked back, and the pill flew one way and the glass shattered on the floor. Collins crouched back in the corner and began to tear at the skin on his legs.
Ambrose pushed his glasses back up his nose and took a deep breath to calm himself. ‘All right, we’ll do this another way. Shaw, you and I will hold him. Maxie, you’re going to feed him the Miltown.’
‘Uh-uh. Not a chance. The guy’s nuts. I’m out of here.’ She turned for the door. Ambrose looked to Shaw for help.
‘Maxie,’ Shaw said, ‘I know where your parents live.’ She stopped and looked back at him in surprise. ‘The sweet little church up the street. Dad’s real-estate business. Mom’s job at the library. Your brother just starting out at the bank. And I’ve got some wonderful photographs for them.’ He glanced at the one-way mirror.
The threat registered. ‘You shit.’
‘Yeah, I know. You’re absolutely right. Sometimes I just feel so bad about what I do. But then, you know, I think what the hell? Somebody’s got to do the dirty jobs, and I like them. So come on over here and feed this guy a pill, and we can all go home.’
‘Why can’t the other doctor do it?’
‘You’ve been fucking the guy. He likes you,’ Shaw said. ‘Just do what you’re told. It’ll be over in a second.’
Shaw came at Collins from one side, and Ambrose from the other. ‘Slowly,’ Ambrose said. ‘No sudden moves.’
Collins scratched at himself. His head was down, and his breath came and went in long, shuddering gasps.
Shaw met Ambrose’s look. A quick nod. They moved in unison. Shaw grabbed Collins’s right arm as Ambrose grabbed his left. Collins howled, and bucked against the restraint. He tried to bite Shaw, who grabbed his hair and pulled his head back hard. Collins opened his mouth. Maxie darted in and pushed the tranquilizer into Collins’s mouth. His jaw snapped shut, and Maxie screamed and jerked away, blood pumping from her forefinger which was now missing its tip to the first joint.
‘Oh, shit,’ Ambrose said.
Maxie held the ruined finger up in front of her face, unable to look away, and screamed until she ran out of breath.
Collins jerked out of Ambrose’s grip, and slammed sideways into Shaw. Shaw lost his hold on Collins who lurched for the door in a strange, disjointed run.
‘Stop him,’ Ambrose yelled.
Shaw bolted after the running man. By the time he got to the stairs, Collins was halfway down to the second-floor landing, where Magda Brandt, on her way up, stood in surprise, the clipboard in one hand.
‘Stop him,’ Shaw yelled.
Magda pressed back against the wall, her hands up in defense, and as Collins hurtled by, she stuck out a foot and tripped him. Collins stumbled across the landing, lost his balance, and pitched off the top step in a dive. When his head hit the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, the impact shook the house.
Shaw went down the stairs fast and turned Collins over. He felt for a pulse, but there was no need. Collins’s head lay at an awful angle. His neck was broken. He was dead.
Magda Brandt looked down at Shaw without expression from the second-floor landing. Ambrose and Karl appeared above her on the third floor. Ambrose had his arm around Maxie. He had bound her wounded finger with a piece of cloth. She leaned against him and sobbed as he guided her down the stairs.
THIRTEEN
A cold, gray afternoon darkened toward an evening that promised rain. A breeze swirled dead leaves against the park wall as Cassidy walked toward the hotdog cart at Columbus Circle. A woman in a stained tan raincoat and wool cap over dirty gray hair walked away from the cart in high-top Converse basketball sneakers cut open at the toes to accommodate her sore feet. She was eating a large pretzel. The brown paper bag she carried was spotted with grease. The Greek watched Cassidy approach and waited for him to order. Cassidy showed him his badge.
The Greek looked at it without expression and shrugged. ‘My permit up to date. You like see?’ His accent was thick. He wore a blue wool vest over a white shirt buttoned to the collar, and a brown windbreaker, all protected from food splash by a dark gree
n apron spattered with ketchup, grease, and mustard. A battered fedora warmed his head.
‘No.’
The Greek nodded in resignation. Another cop looking for a free meal. ‘So, what you want? On the house. Hotdog? Sausage?’
‘No, thanks. What’s your name?’
‘Stavros. Stavros Contomicholos.’
‘Mr Contomicholos, I want to talk to you about Leon Dudek.’
‘I don’t know him. Who is he?’
‘He’s the horse cab driver who was killed in the park.’
‘Oh, sure, sure. A nice man. Always, hello, how are you, please and thank you. Very polite. Hotdog man. Sometimes mustard, sometimes ketchup and onions. Sometimes this, sometimes that. Maybe once a month a sausage. Nice man.’
‘Did you see him the night he was killed?’
‘Sure. Like always.’ Contomicholos adjusted the gas under his griddle and shoved a tangle of onions to a cooler space. He rolled six hotdogs over so they would cook evenly and put two sausages in the warmer to stay hot while he talked. ‘Midnight he comes for a hotdog. Mustard and ketchup that. No drink. He almost never have a drink.’
‘Did you see him talk to anyone? Was there someone waiting at his cab?’
‘I hear him shout, “Hey, you,” something like that. I look. A man and woman. I think he shout at them.’
‘Did they say anything back?’
‘I don’t think so. He shout again. They go into park. He go after them, maybe. Maybe just go in park. I don’t know.’
‘What did the man and woman look like?’
‘Big man, small woman.’
Cassidy waited. ‘Anything else?’
Contomicholos shrugged. ‘No. Big man, small woman.’
‘How old were they?’
The Greek shrugged again. ‘No young. No old.’
‘What was the man wearing?’
Contomicholos checked the bun warmer while he thought. ‘Overcoat.’
Cassidy waited.
‘No hat. He no wear a hat.’
Most men wore hats. ‘What about the woman?’
The Greek nodded. ‘Sure. She wear a hat. Little hat.’
‘What else?’
‘Overcoat. Mink, maybe. Expensive.’
‘Did you ever see them before?’ Cassidy offered him a cigarette and took one for himself. The Greek lit them both with a match struck on the griddle.
‘Thank you. Maybe I see them. Maybe no. I think I see them before, but …’ He shrugged again. ‘Maybe rich people look the same.’
‘How do you know they were rich?’
Contomicholos smiled. ‘Good clothes. Mink. And the rich walk like they own everything. The poor man is like this’ – he hunched his shoulders and stooped – ‘the rich man, like this’ – he threw his shoulders back, stood tall, raised his chin, and puffed out his chest – ‘yah?’
A city garbage truck pulled to the curb. The driver and the can thrower got out and approached the cart. The Greek saw them coming.
‘Anymore?’ he asked Cassidy.
‘No.’ Cassidy passed him a business card. ‘If you think of anything more, or if you see them again, give me a call.’
‘Sure.’ He tucked the card in his jacket pocket and turned toward his customers.
By the time Cassidy left the stationhouse at the end of the day, the rain had started – a cold, steady rain that dripped from the buildings and awnings and ran deep in the gutters. People hurried, heads down, under umbrellas. The weather matched Cassidy’s mood. The Dudek investigation was going nowhere. The search for the heroin dealer Connor Finn and his girlfriend was just as wet, but a little luck swung Cassidy’s way when a cab stopped to let three people out in front of Schubert Theatre. He sank gratefully into the back seat and gave the cabbie the address of the New York Post. When they got to the Post building, Cassidy told the driver to keep the meter running. He’d be right back.
‘Hey, man,’ the driver looked back from the front seat. ‘The only way to hold a cab in this weather is with a gun. Somebody’s going to get in and tell me where to go.’
Cassidy opened his jacket and showed him the .38 under his arm.
It wasn’t enough to throw a New York cabbie. ‘Good enough. Anyone gets in, I’ll hold him here till you come out and shoot him.’
Cassidy went into the large, echoing lobby and called Rhonda from the bank of pay phones near the elevators. She said she needed ten more minutes, so he bought a fresh pack of Luckies and the New York Times from the newsstand in the lobby and sat on a marble bench under good light while he read.
Egypt and their new friends from the Soviet Union rejected the idea of international operation of the Suez Canal, and the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rejected Egyptian Foreign Minister Dr Mahmoud Fawzi’s assertion that the US had refused to support the building of the Aswan Dam in retaliation for Egypt’s close ties with the Soviets.
Cases against communists led the Supreme Court’s list of upcoming hearings.
An Army veteran of the Korean War named Harold Green was indicted for shooting and killing three fellow workers at a trucking firm in the Bronx. His lawyer claimed diminished capacity. Mr Green, the lawyer said, had been brainwashed by the Chinese while a prisoner of war in Korea.
Rhonda was putting on her coat as she came out of the elevator. He stood to kiss her and threw the paper in a wastebasket.
‘Reading the New York Times in the Post building is worth your life.’
‘I like living out on the edge.’
She took his arm and they went out and made a run for it through the rain to the taxi.
The driver dropped them at a small Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street called Aldo’s. Because of the weather, the place was only half full and the owner, Aldo, a small, happy man with the energy of a cricket, was delighted to see them. He led them to a table by itself near the window, presented the menus with a flourish, and leaned close with an air of conspiracy to announce, ‘The saltimbocca is sublime tonight, sublime. And I bring you two martinis. So good to see you, Mr Cassidy, Miss Rhonda.’ He went off clapping his hands as if to start a band. He was back in a minute with their drinks, which he had had the barman start the moment he saw them enter.
The first clear, cold sip. ‘God, that’s good,’ Rhonda said. ‘It makes the rest of the day insignificant.’
‘A bad day?’
‘No. A good one. Just a little frustrating. I spent the day in the library looking for stories on Nazis coming to America.’
‘Find any?’
‘One, a couple of column inches in 1950 in the Boston Globe about a rocket scientist working at Fort Devens in Massachusetts who turned out to be a Nazi. He was deported in 1951 after an immigration hearing. I talked to people at the paper here, and a couple of them remember a story we did from around then, on someone like the guy up in Massachusetts. I’ll chase it down in the next few days.’
Aldo arrived with two more martinis and took their orders, the saltimbocca for Rhonda, which made him beam, and veal Milanese for Cassidy, which got him a nod of approval. Cassidy ordered a bottle of Barolo, which got him a nod and a smile, and Aldo went away humming.
‘I spoke to a guy I was in the Army with. They kept him in Germany after the shooting was over because he spoke German. He was supposed to help round up scientists of different kinds who people thought would be useful over here.’
‘What kind of scientists?’
‘All kinds. Rocket scientists, chemical warfare, biological warfare, I don’t know what else.’
She put her glass down and watched him intently. ‘And?’
‘They started off with orders that no committed Nazis were to be included. The way he described it, it became a race between them and the Reds, and the orders changed. Useful scientists got their records expunged, got new papers, new histories, and were shipped over here.’
‘Nazis?’
‘Nazis.’
‘Here in New York?’
‘Maybe. I don�
��t know. He didn’t know. But here in the country, so why not New York?’
‘So maybe Leon Dudek did see someone he knew, someone from Auschwitz.’
‘Maybe. But he thought the baker was one of them, and he wasn’t, and there were a couple of other mistakes like that.’
‘Someone killed him.’
‘It could have been a mugging. His wallet was missing.’
‘Michael, what the hell? The guy told you there are Nazis here. What are you saying, that you don’t believe him? I want to talk to him.’
‘He won’t talk to you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He said he wasn’t going to talk about this stuff anymore. He says it’s classified. He signed some sort of secrecy thing. He doesn’t want to get in trouble.’
‘I can persuade him. Ask him if he’ll talk to me for five minutes.’
‘He said no.’
‘Jesus Christ, Michael, we’re talking about mass murderers, people who helped kill millions of people.’
‘I’m not giving this guy up. There have to be a lot of other people who know about this. You’ll have to find them.’
‘But you’ve got this guy. Come on.’
‘I can’t.’
‘What the hell?’
‘He’s a big reason I got through the end of the war alive. I owe him.’
She started to say something and then stopped. ‘Okay Okay. But I’m going to get this story. It’s my story. If I break this …’ She shook her head at what it could mean.
‘If what he says is true, then this was a government operation. It’s classified. They are not going to like anyone poking around.’
‘Sure. Sure.’ She grinned at him and clinked his glass with hers. ‘Michael, you just handed me my future.’
‘Just don’t jump the gun on this. I’m still looking for whoever killed Dudek. If he turns out to be some Nazi, you’ll be the first to know. But don’t get ahead of me on this.’
‘I heard you. I heard you. I’ll just do some background stuff, research, and get ready.’
The rain had stopped by the time they finished dinner, and they walked home in a city that felt washed clean. Occasional cars swished past on the wet streets, and the few people they passed nodded in greeting as if they all shared something rare and wonderful.
Night Watch Page 12