The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels (Mammoth Books)

by Greenberg

  Saunter was biting his lower lip. “I really don’t think we should discuss this in front of Wilder. But I can say you’re all wrong. We’re not trying to kill the man, only find him.”

  “Now is it all set for tomorrow night?”

  “I’ll be at the meeting. Hopefully, they’ll allow Wilder here to come in and look them over. If they won’t, we’ll have to set him up outside the house and check them as they leave.”

  Saunter was frowning a bit. “When you tip your hand, Venice might run for it.”

  “So! At least we’ll know who he is, then, won’t we?”

  “What about your reports? Did Walter Moon visit any of them the night before he was killed?”

  “Only Jerome Farngood admits to seeing him. But of course Venice would hardly volunteer the information. Moon might have called on one of them, realized the man was Venice, and not bothered with the rest.”

  “He’d have phoned me in Washington if he had that information,” Saunter insisted.

  “Probably. Still . . .” Leopold paused, deep in thought. “Anyway, have Wilder out there about nine o’clock tomorrow night. Across the street from Farngood’s place. I’ll get word to you somehow.”

  Saunter nodded. At the door he turned to Wilder. “If there’s anything you need, the men are right outside.”

  Leopold followed them out, and one of the men in the hall came forward. “We’d better go in for a while, Jim,” he said. “A couple of people gave us suspicious looks out here.”

  “All right,” Saunter told him. “Look, see if you can get a convention badge somewhere. Then they’ll never notice you.”

  They rode down in a crowded elevator, next to a middle-aged woman complaining about the noise. The lobby, when they reached it, was a confusing maze of mid-evening activity. As they threaded their way through it, a familiar feminine face loomed suddenly before Leopold. It took him an instant to realize it was Jerome Farngood’s daughter, Helen.

  “Hello again,” he said. “What brings you here?”

  “Captain Leopold, isn’t it? I was checking arrangements for a dinner party next week. It seems I picked a bad night for it, though.”

  “Knights of Columbus convention,” Leopold explained. “They’re harmless enough.”

  She smiled, closing her eyes to narrow slits. “Do I know this gentleman too?”

  “I don’t believe so. Miss Farngood, Jim Saunter.”

  Saunter nodded casually, apparently missing the significance of the name. “Pleased to meet you,” she told him. “I must be getting along now.”

  When they reached the street, Leopold said, “That was Farngood’s daughter. The Peacock man.”

  “Yeah?” Saunter turned, as if hoping to catch another glimpse of her. “Is she one of them?”

  “No. Though they do have women members. At least one, anyway. I know her slightly.”

  Saunter lit a cigarette. “I’m going to turn in early. Tomorrow looks like a long day.”

  “Are you at this hotel, too?”

  The CIA man nodded. “Different floor, though. I’ll phone you in the morning, Leopold.”

  After they parted, Leopold strolled back to his car and drove to Headquarters. He was looking for Fletcher, but the sergeant had already gone home. Leopold sat for a time at his desk, staring at the telephone, then called Fletcher at his home.

  “This is Leopold.”

  “What’s up, Captain?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh.”

  “Fletcher?”

  “What?”

  “How many pills were there?”

  “What pills?”

  “Are you asleep or something? Walter Moon. The cyanide. How many capsules were left in the bottle? You said the lab checked them.”

  “Yeah. But I forgot the number. It was about half full, I guess. Maybe forty or fifty capsules.”

  “Thanks, Fletcher.”

  “Does it mean anything, Captain?”

  “Probably not.”

  He hung up and started pacing the office. He was still pacing ten minutes later when the telephone jingled. It was Jim Saunter and he was excited. “Get down to the hotel fast, Captain. Somebody just tried to kill Tony Wilder.”

  The hotel corridor was crowded with confusion when he arrived. Confusion and the scent of recent violence. A doctor was in Wilder’s room, along with Saunter and the two men who’d been on guard. All of them were grim-faced and tense, as if unsure of how to cope with the situation.

  Wasting no time, Leopold asked Saunter, “What happened? How bad is it?”

  The man from Washington stared down at the faded hotel carpet. “I don’t know, I just don’t know. We were guarding the door so carefully we forgot about the window.”

  “It’s only a flesh wound,” the doctor said. “Painful, but not serious.”

  Leopold glanccd into the bedroom and saw Tony Wilder stretched out on top of the spread. His left shoulder was bandaged and his face was the color of chalk. “How did it happen?” Leopold asked again.

  “He heard something knocking at the window,” Saunter explained. “It was something on the end of a long string, and as he watched it, the thing fell. He naturally opened the window and leaned out, and our killer dropped a knife on him. Luckily, it just caught him in the fleshy part of the shoulder. Six inches to the right and it would have gotten the neck.”

  Leopold saw something glinting on the coffee table. “Is that the knife?”

  “Yeah. You probably should check it for fingerprints.”

  Leopold took out a handkerchief and gingerly picked up the weapon. It was of Middle Eastern design, with a heavy curving hilt. The blade, too, might have curved at one time, but it had been narrowed through numerous sharpenings to a narrow shaft of steel. Now dried blood coated some two inches of it, and there were stains, too, on the coffee table where it had rested.

  “I don’t think our man left any prints,” Leopold said. “What about the thing Wilder saw at the window?”

  One of the nameless men from the hallway produced something from his pocket. It was a length of string some thirty feet long, with a bar of hotel soap tied to one end. “This is it,” the man said. “We found it down in the alley.”

  While Leopold studied it, Saunter explained, “Somehow Venice found out he was he was here. He got a passkey to one of the rooms above, went in, and dangled this gimmick from the window. When he figured he had Wilder’s attention, he let it drop – and when Wilder looked out the window, Venice used the knife. It might have worked, you know. In fact, if Wilder had fallen back into the room and died, we’d have had a pretty baffling murder on our hands.”

  “I suppose you’ve checked the rooms above?” Leopold asked.

  Saunter nodded. “As soon as Wilder yelled out for the guards, they notified me. I checked the rooms myself with the hotel detective. The four floors directly above are all occupied, but were empty tonight. Everybody’s down at the convention banquet. Venice could have used any of them.”

  “You’re sure it was Venice?”

  “Who else could it be? Besides, it’s an Arab dagger of some sort. I think I told you he was known to carry one up his sleeve.”

  “Let’s talk to Wilder,” Leopold said. They went into the bedroom where he was sitting up now, getting a bit of his color back. “How you feeling?”

  “I’ll live,” he said.

  “You think it was Venice?”

  Wilder nodded. “It was him.”

  “Still want to go through with it tomorrow?”

  “More than ever. Now I know he’s here. If I don’t get him, he might get me.”

  Leopold nodded and turned away. It was the same with all of them – kill or be killed. Track down the hunter and slay him in the streets. He wondered how it all would end.

  Jerome Farngood met him at the door, smiling what was intended as a sincere greeting. “Come right in, Captain Leopold. It’s a chilly night.”

  “It is indeed. And I thought spring was here.�
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  “We’re just about ready for the ceremony,” he said. “Come this way.”

  Leopold followed him down a dim hallway to the back of the house. There were six others in the room they entered, and he recognized the lone woman as the hat-shop lady. The men looked like bankers or doctors or lawyers. All were middle-aged and none looked like a murderer and spy. But the thing that riveted his attention was the great ebony statue of a peacock that completely dominated the room. It was as if, for the first time, he realized that these people were serious.

  “Amazing,” Leopold breathed.

  “Please keep silent during the ceremony,” Farngood whispered. “It is essential if you are to remain.”

  Leopold found a folding chair near the back of the room and settled down to watch in silence The people of the Peacock were dressed in regular street clothes, but as he watched, Farngood passed out flowing white robes, each embroidered on the breast with the figure of a peacock.

  Leopold noticed for the first time that the feet of the black peacock rested in a shallow pool of water, and that the floor around the pool was covered by crisscross patterns in the tile. The seven robed figures seated themselves on low hassocks and one of them took up a stringed instrument not unlike a guitar. As the first strains of music filled the air, the others began to sway, ever so slightly. The water around the feet of the peacock statue began to bubble.

  For twenty minutes Leopold watched in silence, seeing first one and then another of the worshippers leap to his feet and do a sort of dance around the figure of the black bird. At the conclusion, the dancer would throw a rolled piece of paper into the water at the feet of the peacock.

  Finally, as quickly as it had begun, the strange ritual was at an end. Farngood came over to Leopold’s chair, slipping out of the white robe as he did so. The music had stopped and the others were apparently preparing to leave. “Were you impressed?” Farngood asked.

  “I guess so, but I won’t claim to have understood it. What were those rolled-up papers in the water, for instance?”

  “Not coded messages, as you probably assume,” the man answered with a smile. “You see, we believe the peacock to be the source of all power, and we throw him our innermost thoughts and hopes and fears, in the same way that you might pray to your god.”

  Leopold grunted. Then, “Before I leave, I do have one favor to ask, if I might.”

  “What, Captain?”

  “We have a witness outside, a man who knows and can identify this Venice. We’d like to bring him in here.”

  Farngood’s face went grim. “I’m afraid I could not allow that.”

  “He’ll see them outside anyway, as they pass under the street light.”

  “So be it, then. But these people are here as my guests.”

  “You’ll promise not to warn them or let them slip out the back?”

  “I won’t warn them. I don’t need to. None of these is the man you seek.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I know them. None hides a secret past. They are just people. Uncomplicated.”

  “We’ll see what our witness says about them,” Leopold decided. The first of them were leaving already, and he walked over to the window to signal Fletcher and Saunter in the car with Tony Wilder. He hoped vaguely there would be no shooting.

  When they’d all departed, he walked quickly out to the car himself and leaned in the open side-window. “Well?” he asked Wilder. “Which one was Venice?”

  The man looked blank. “None of them.”

  Saunter sighed and lit a cigarette. “Maybe he used plastic surgery after all.”

  “And maybe he was never here,” Leopold countered. “Maybe he’s peacefully raising sheep in Australia or something.”

  “You forget a couple of things. Walter Moon came here to find him and was murdered. Tony Wilder came here to identify him and was almost murdered.”

  “All right,” Leopold said. “Come with me, Wilder.”

  “Where?”

  “Up to the front door. There’s only one of them you haven’t seen, and that’s Farngood himself.”

  Fletcher slipped out from behind the wheel. “I’ll cover you, Captain.”

  “I don’t want any shooting.”

  Leopold led the way, and when he reached the door, Jerome Farngood was already waiting there. “I thought you’d want to see me”’ he said.

  “Well?” Leopold asked, turning to Tony Wilder. “Yes or no?”

  “No. I never saw him before.”

  They went back to the car. Ahead, hurrying along the sidewalk on some nighttime mission, Leopold caught a glimpse of Father Regan from the church up the street. Perhaps he was only going downtown to the convention. At that moment, his life seemed simple compared with Leopold’s.

  They went back to headquarters and sat around smoking cigarettes. After a while Leopold sent Fletcher out for coffee and they smoked some more cigarettes.

  “Bad for your health,” Saunter said once. “So much smoking.”

  “Being a cop’s bad for your health too. Sometimes it’s fatal.”

  “I’m sorry we took up your time.”

  “That’s all right. How about it, Wilder? Describe him once more, huh?”

  The Russian who looked like an Englishman leaned forward in his chair. “I’ve told you. Medium. Medium everything. How do you describe somebody like that?”

  Leopold frowned and thought about it. “Somebody killed Moon. That’s the only fact we have. Somebody here, in this city, is a murderer.”

  “It has to be Venice,” Saunter insisted.

  And Leopold nodded. “It has to be. Otherwise there’s no motive at all. But where is he?”

  “He’s one of the Peacock people. He has to be. Who else did Moon see while he was here?”

  Who else? Leopold thought about it, remembering the priest from the church up the street. “I have an idea,” he said. “I need to check something.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Stick close to the telephone. I may need Wilder again tonight.”

  But it took Leopold only an hour to track down the records on Father Regan and see that he’d been wrong in his wild assumption. The priest had just come to the city, true, but he’d been stationed in Manhattan and was well known to half the other priests in town.

  All right.

  All right, then.

  Leopold sat alone in the drugstore near Farngood’s home, drinking a Coke, and watching the clock move slowly toward twelve.

  All right, Venice. Come out and be killed. There’s no retirement for a spy. Not even in a place like this, with tree-lined streets and a sweet scent of spring beginning to form in the air.

  He saw Helen Farngood at the counter, buying a carton of cigarettes. “Hello, there. You’re out late.”

  “It’s that sort of night,” she said with a smile. “Did you get your man?”

  “You know we didn’t.”

  “You’ve given up? You’ll stop bothering us?”

  He closed his eyes as if against a great pain or a flashing brilliance. “I suppose we never really give up. It’s like in books.”

  “You really think you’ll find Venice?”

  “I think so,” he said. “You see, there’s one possibility I didn’t consider until this very moment – the possibility that Venice is a woman.”

  A police station is a lonely place at two in the morning, lonely even with the constant hum of activity as shifts change and arrests are made. The corridors at times are lined with the drunks and degenerates that are any night’s fair sweepings, but it is the bolted darkness of most offices that gives the place its lonely look. There is none of the daytime bustle of young secretaries or wandering politicians. There is only the slight smell of sweat from the cellblock and the late-burning lights in offices like Leopold’s.

  “It fits,” Leopold was telling a tired Jim Saunter. “Don’t you see that it fits? You told me yourself that Venice escaped from England disguised as a woman.�
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  The man from Washington nodded. “I know, I know. But you heard what Tony Wilder said when we asked him. There’s not a chance of it. Venice is a man.”

  “But perhaps disguised as a woman once more.”

  “Perhaps. But it’s not Helen Farngood. The matron checked her carefully enough.”

  Leopold nodded, fighting the twin tortures of depression and exhaustion. He’d had too many wrong guesses in the case. Helen Farngood had been the latest, and now they’d had to release her. “Leave me alone for a while, will you?” he asked Saunter.

  “Sure. Can we take Wilder back to the hotel?”

  “Keep him here for a while,” Leopold said. “I want to question him once more about his meetings with Venice. You two can stay in my office. I’m going upstairs with Fletcher.”

  He found the sergeant sleepily drinking a cup of coffee with the downstairs desk man. “Can we go home now, Captain?” Fletcher asked.

  “In a little while. I want to take a look at the evidence again.”

  “What evidence?”

  “Moon’s bottle of capsules and the knife that was used on Tony Wilder.”

  “What are they going to tell us?”

  “Where I went wrong, I hope. They’re the only links we have with Venice.”

  “Venice! Sometimes I wonder if the guy really exists at all, Captain. I think it’s a game these guys in Washington invented to pass the time.”

  Upstairs, Leopold inspected the bottle once more, spilling the capsules on to a glass-topped desk while he puzzled over them carefully. “These have all been checked by the lab?”

  Fletcher nodded. “The poison musta just been in one of them.”

  Leopold picked up the oddly shaped dagger and hefted it once more. “He never carried this thing up any sleeve. Not the way that hilt curves.”

  Fletcher yawned at the wall clock. “Can’t we go over this in the morning, Captain? Why don’t we just get all the Peacock people down here tomorrow, and flip a coin or something?”