by Greenberg
“What?” Leopold looked up. “Flip a coin?”
“Why not?”
His eyes went blank for a moment, and then gradually began to clear. “But the motive . . .” he said, almost to himself.
“You got something, Captain?”
“Something I should have had a long time ago. It was the motive that threw me off. We had the wrong motive for Moon’s killing. The wrong motive all along.”
“You mean this Venice didn’t really kill him?”
“Oh, Venice killed him all right, but not for the reason we thought. Come on – we have to talk to Tony Wilder once more.”
Downstairs, they found Saunter and Wilder together in Leopold’s office, talking about Berlin. Leopold slid easily behind the desk, suddenly wide awake. “Any new thoughts?” Saunter asked him.
“I have one. It concerns the motive for killing Moon.”
“What about it?”
Leopold leaned back in his chair. “Well, I don’t think Moon was killed because he’d found Venice. I think he was killed so you’d think he’d found Venice.”
“Huh?” Saunter looked puzzled.
“Venice wanted it to seem that Moon had found him, when nothing could have been further from the truth.”
Tony Wilder slid a hand inside his jacket to scratch himself. “Why would he do that?”
“To make it seem that Venice was up here someplace when he was really safely hidden in Washington. The game is over, Wilder. You’ll never find Venice for us because you are Venice.”
Tony Wilder’s hand was coming up fast, bringing something from his jacket pocket. Saunter hesitated only an instant, then shot him through the forehead.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Fletcher said, stooping over the shattered, bloody body of the man they’d known as Tony Wilder. “He was only reaching for this capsule. More cyanide, I suppose.”
Saunter laid the gun carefully on Leopold’s desk as the office began to fill with people. “I couldn’t take a chance,” he said. “The man was a killer.” Then he asked Leopold, “How did you know?”
“Let’s get out of here and I’ll tell you.”
They went into one of the other offices and Leopold settled grimly into a chair. He didn’t like the memory of Wilder’s face when the bullet hit.
“Well ,” Saunter said, “they told me you were good, and you are. He had us buffaloed.”
Leopold started talking. He’d gone through the scene many times before, in front of murderers and judges, but somehow this time his heart wasn’t in it. “Of course Venice killed the real Tony Wilder during the last meeting in Iraq. He probably chose Wilder because the man was almost as unknown to the West as he himself. If you analyzed it, there really couldn’t have been any other motive in luring Wilder into the middle of the desert. Certainly a man as careful as Venice – who was rarely seen even by his associates – would hardly have explained his retirement plans to a man he barely knew. He probably told Wilder about coming to America all right, and then killed him and assumed his identity. The body would have been buried somewhere in the desert, and probably destroyed forever when you bombed the place.”
“We didn’t bomb . . .” Saunter started to protest.
“I know, I know. Anyway, the bogus Wilder arranged to fall into your hands and got a free ticket to America on the grounds that he could help you to find Venice. What better gambit for a master-spy? What better cover identity than that of a man searching for himself? You’d guard him and wine him and dine him for a while, and finally after he’d failed to locate Venice you’d let him settle down peacefully and forget about it. Only things were getting dull in Washington and I imagine he needed something to convince you that Venice was over here. So he killed Moon.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. I don’t imagine it bothered him too much. Those capsules were a bit of evidence too. You assumed – we all assumed – that one of the people Moon saw the night before he died made the switch. But actually the mathematics were against it. There were more than thirty capsules left in the bottle. Even if Venice dropped the poisoned one on the top, the odds would be greatly against Moon getting it the very next morning. When I thought about that, it was only a step to the probability that the poisoned capsule had been in the bottle for some time, possibly since several days earlier when Moon was in Washington. You see, Venice didn’t care where Moon died, as long as he died. But it was doubly lucky for Venice that it happened up here, where the Peacock group could be blamed.”
“But how could Venice have poisoned Moon’s pills?”
“He told me Moon came to question him one night in Washington. And we know Moon had to take his allergy capsules every morning and evening. He took one in front of Farngood, remember? I suppose he left the bottle while he went to the bathroom or something. Venice-Wilder already had his own supply of cyanide, and it would only have taken him a minute to empty a capsule and substitute the poison.”
“All right,” Saunter conceded. “I’ll grant you that Wilder could have done all you say. But is that all the evidence you had?”
“Well, there was the negative evidence that Wilder failed to identify any of the Peacock people as Venice. But more on the positive side, there was the faked attempt on his life. Take a look at that knife again and you’ll note that the hilt is quite heavy and curved. Most knives, when dropped from a height, will land point first. But not that one. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m willing to bet that the curved hilt would cause the knife to start turning in midair after it had fallen a way. A few feet, maybe, but twenty or thirty feet and it never would have gone into Wilder’s shoulder like it did. It would have cut him, maybe, but never gone in straight for a couple of inches. Also, of course, there was the bar of hotel soap used to weight the rope and attract Wilder – supposedly – to the window. A man who stole a passkey and came prepared with a dagger wouldn’t have been so unprepared that he had to rely on a bar of hotel soap. No, Wilder was improvising, just as when he killed Moon. He thought a murder attempt was needed to further convince us that Venice was in this city. He dropped the soap and string from his own window, of course.”
“How’d he stab himself in the back of the shoulder?”
“There are at least three ways that come to mind. Probably he simply held the knife in a door jamb and backed into it Painful, but he was playing for big stakes, remember. He was playing for his life.”
“He lost.”
“He lost,” Leopold agreed.
“One more question. How’d he manage to hide the knife and that string and those pills from us for all these months?”
“You would have had no reason to conduct a careful search of his belongings. And I imagine a man with a lifetime in espionage knew enough tricks to avoid any routine searches.”
“He was a clever man,” Saunter said. “Did it all just come to you like that?”
“It never just comes to you. The capsule bit stuck in my mind from the beginning. And then tonight Fletcher said something about flipping a coin and I got to thinking of the dagger flipping over as it fell.”
Fletcher poked his head in the door. “Could I see you for a minute, Captain?”
Leopold nodded and excused himself. He was tired once more, very tired. “What is it, Fletcher?” he asked in the hallway.
“They’ve got the body out. What should I put in my report?”
Leopold glanced back into the office where Saunter sat calmly smoking a cigarette. Somehow it was that instant which decided him. That instant and the memory of a man who’d traveled halfway around the world to get his brains splattered against Leopold’s office wall.
“There’s been too much killing, Fletcher,” he said a bit somberly. “The real Wilder, and Moon, and now Venice himself. And a lot of nameless people out in the middle of a desert. It has to end somewhere, to end with a law and a court and a verdict. Otherwise, what good are we, any of us?”
“What do you mean, Captain?”
Leopold put a hand to his forehead. “I mean that I’m holding Saunter – for the Grand Jury. I know they won’t indict him! I know I’ll have Washington on my neck, but I’m going to do it anyway! Call it a gesture if you want.”
Fletcher nodded. “I guess maybe I understand.”
Leopold stretched and seemed to come awake with decision. The night had passed. It would be morning very soon. “Book him, then, for manslaughter. I’ll phone the district attorney.”
JOHN JAKES
Dr. Sweetkill
1
For three weeks Nick Lamont heard nothing from Wilburforce. For three weeks he drank too much, stayed out too late in the clubs round Soho, and stared with eyes that grew more gritty with each successive hung-over morning at the credit notices piling up in the day’s post.
Then finally, one drizzly evening when Nick had touched his last friend for a few pounds, he was forced to hang around the flat because he was broke. That was when Wilburforce rang him up.
“Kemptons Luggage has a little task for you, Nicky,” Wilburforce said. Kemptons Luggage was a shadow-firm in a shadow-office. It was the cover behind which Wilburforce and his counterparts in British intelligence farmed out their nasty work to free-lances like Nick. “Of course, this is rather a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.”
Nick Lamont kicked one of his expensive calfskin lounging slippers halfway across the room at the grate. He wished he could smash his fist into Wilburforce’s white, narrow, no-nonsense face.
Take it or leave it. Did the bastard think he could do anything except take it after the Tenderly mess? He was nearly washed up in the trade as it was.
“I’ll meet you,” Nick said after a moment. “Five tomorrow at the usual place?”
“Sooner. Luncheon.” Wilburforce mentioned a posh grille. “Actually, Nicky, I didn’t think you’d hesitate as long as you did. I’m glad to hear you’re so enthusiastic about working again.”
Nick Lamont’s dark-burned face turned white around the edges of the lips. “I haven’t said I’d take the thing. I’ll listen.”
Wilburforce clucked. “Try to control that red temper of yours, please. You’re hardly in favor. If you want to keep on working for the firm, you’ll pick up our little – ah – sales errand and relish it.”
Nick’s epithet was short.
Nick had made dozens of pleasant acquaintances among the British in his years in London. Not friends, really. You never could afford friends in the trade. But Wilburforce was another case. Wilburforce disliked Americans. He disliked reasonably competent Americans like Nick even more. Nick had done some jobs well.
But now Wilburforce had no reason to conceal his antipathy. As a result of the blunder in Gibraltar, Nick’s stock as a freelance was sharply down.
Wilburforce said: “Am I to interpret that filthy language to mean you are interested?”
Across the flat on the writing desk loomed the bills. Nick wanted the new silver-gray Jag so badly he could taste it.
And there was Tenderly. Tenderly, and the gun in Nick’s hand in the frowsy little room upstairs over the restaurant.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said.
“When you arrive,” Wilburforce said, “try to be civil. This is not the state of Ohio, Nicky. Nor are you the muscular hero athlete who can dictate his own contract. We shall be writing the contract this trip, and you shall accept our terms, or none at all. Good evening.”
Cursing, Nick slammed the dead phone down.
He walked to the windows opening onto the terrace. Rain dribbled down the glass. When he turned round to fix a whiskey-soda from the liquor cabinet, he passed the mantel mirror. He avoided glancing into it. He knew what he would see if he did; a big, husky man now turned thirty-five, and a little heavier than he should be.
But flat in the gut. Hard. His hair was still wild, curling black, though it was turning a little gray around the ears. Occasionally his hands shook when he lit a match to a cigarette. But the eyes still had the old temper-spark on occasion.
While the London rain pelted away, he drank three whiskeysodas and then fell into bed, hoping for no dreams. He wanted to sleep soundly, in preparation for meeting Icy-Guts, as he called Wilburforce behind his back.
But he dreamed.
He dreamed intensely, vividly, yet disjointedly. There was the stadium in Ohio under a crisp purple and gold late afternoon sky. The stands thundered. Women’s faces shone here and there, red with screaming. Suddenly, just before he made the field goal he heard an amplifier roar, “Nick the Kick does it again!”
Yet at the dream-moment when his foot should have connected with the ball and sent it sailing between the uprights, he was in the room in Gibraltar.
Nick had been flown over to bring back one Wing Commander Saltenham, who had, according to the evidence, been jobbing electrostatic copies of an air defense network alarm system to a notorious middleman on Gib. Wilburforce’s section wanted Saltenham quietly withdrawn from circulation, in order to subject him to extended interrogation at a country estate discreetly maintained by the section in Kent. Along with Nick had gone one of Wilburforce’s own operatives, an aging, modestly attired clerk type named Arthur Tenderly.
On Gib, Nick ran Saltenham to earth in the room above the restaurant. The Wing Commander was bounding a bawdy little girl with Moorish eyes and nothing on except several cheap rings. Nick threw her out, aimed his pistol at Saltenham and told him they were departing via a special flight which would take off shortly.
Tenderly had knocked, entering with hardly a sound. The ’copter was standing by, he reported. Saltenham knew he was finished. Fear coated his cheeks with acrid sweat. Yet he had guts.
Either he would be carried out dead, he announced, or he would not go. In other words, Nick would have to use the gun. Saltenham was snide about it, too. In a physical go, even with two against one, the Wing Commander promised to knock their jawbones down their throats. He looked as though he meant it. And he had one advantage – his correct guess that Nick Lamont and Tenderly had no orders to kill.
That didn’t prevent Nick from going at the man with the raw sight-end of his pistol. He charged in, trying to counter-buffalo the suspected spy with a slash of the muzzle. Arthur Tenderly disapproved of Nick’s gambit. What he didn’t know was that Nick had, regrettably, lost his temper under Saltenham’s snide needling. Tenderly chose the moment to intervene.
He seized Nick’s arm to prevent serious damage being done by the rather notorious American.
“I’m running this and I’ll run it my way,” Nick shouted, trying to shake Tenderly’s pale, small grip off his forearm. In that moment, as Nick gave his right arm a wrench to free it, the pistol, off safety, exploded.
The Wing Commander tried to escape through the window. Nick pumped one bullet into his right calf because it was already too late to do the task without a racket. Arthur Tenderly died of a gunshot wound forty-five minutes later in the naval base hospital.
After Nick had returned to London with his prisoner, his stock had begun to decline. He was questioned, requestioned and finally cleared. But the phone failed to ring – until tonight.
And now, in the tortured dream that brought him wide awake to hear the midnight toll of bells, he somehow still saw Tenderly at his elbow. The gun had exploded. Tenderly was falling back, aghast. Somewhere an announcer thundered, “The Kick does it again!”
Two more drinks managed to send Nick back into a dull, thick slumber.
At 11.30 the next day he took a cab to the Castlereagh Grille.
Smoking in the cab, Nick tried to think back. Where had he gone wrong?
He had started out fine in college. All-American. Some said he was the most powerful, accurate kicker ever seen on a football gridiron. Then came the Army. A stint with Intelligence. He didn’t lack brains, and he preferred to be of some damn use, instead of playing ball for one of the base squads.
His Army record hadn’t been bad. Afterward, he had no trouble landing on a p
ro club. For three years The Kick made them stand up and yell themselves silly.
Meanwhile a taste for good living built and built. It included liquor. The liquor unlocked the temper – and that led to the awful night he wrecked four rooms in a motel. After the team failed to renew his contract, he drifted to Europe. He’d grown to like a fast, expensive life. And rather quickly he found a way to earn money.
For a time he sold his services to the Allies: NATO, the French secret service twice. Then he was invited to London, with a pretty good guarantee of income as a free-lance. The work was sometimes dirty. The trade was never clean. But he enjoyed the cars and the wine and the girls the money bought. So long as he checked that temper, he was all right.
In Gib, one wild swipe of his arm had exploded a gun and killed a man. And the phone hadn’t rung for a long time.
Well-dressed in a Saville Row suit and an expensive rainproof, Nick climbed out of the taxi in front of the Castlereagh Grille. He hurried inside. He didn’t look like a man who was up against the fact that his luck had run out. But in the trade, you kept a hard face.
Three flights up, down a corridor and through a succession of small private dining rooms, he came to the elegant, thick-walled chamber with steel behind every inch of patterned wallpaper. Here executives of Kemptons Luggage now and then met for “conferences.” Here, by a dim little table lamp that threw a long shadow of the senior agent’s bald head on the wall, Nick lunched with Icy-Guts.
Wilburforce picked at his chop. “Because of the Tenderly business, Nicky, you damn well may never get another assignment.” He smiled. He had a gold tooth, which glowed. “Unless you take this one.”
“How much is the fee?” Nick felt sarcastic. “Half the usual?”
“Twice,” Wilburforce said.
Nick’s scalp crawled. The jokes were over.
Thrusting aside his willow-patterned plate, Wilburforce began to speak in his flat, dry manner.
“You will be assigned a target which is a perfectly legitimate and prosperous chemical corporation near Munich. Chemotex Worldwide G.m.b.h. Some of our lads working in the East, on the other side of the Curtain, have come up with the news that while the factory is indeed legitimate, its department of basic research – a separate ring of the home building – is in fact a thriving laboratory doing research on nerve gas and bacteriological agents.”