by Ed McBain
“No funny stuff,” she said as she folded the bills into her white apron.
“What room is he in?” Lawless responded.
“Seven.”
18
I was surprised by the hominess of the room. Darkish yellow walls with a real wood-framed bed and knickknacks on the shelves and bureaus. On the wall with the largest expanse hung a framed picture that was at least six feet wide and almost that in height. The colors were buff and pale blue. It was a beach at first light. Almost devoid of details it seemed to me a commentary on the beginning of the world.
In a small padded chair next to the one window a thin white man sat looking out on the street. He wore a gray robe over striped blue and white pajamas. His elbows were on his knees, his small mustache was crooked.
“I, I, I thought you were here for me,” he said softly.
The only clue that we were in some kind of medical facility was a metal tray-table at the foot of the bed. There was a medical form on a clipboard hanging from the side. Lawless unhooked the clipboard and began to read.
“Yes,” he said to the patient. “I was told that you’re suffering from a mild breakdown. I was called by Dr. Samson to administer Cronomicin.”
“Wh-what’s that?”
Lawless put his briefcase on the metal table and opened it. He took out a hypodermic needle that had already been filled with a pinkish fluid.
Gesturing at the needle, he said, “This will alleviate your anxiety and impose a feeling of calm that will allow you to sleep and wake up without a care in the world.”
I wondered if he had given me some of the same juice.
“Why haven’t they, why haven’t they given it to me before?” Lionel Strangman asked.
“Cronomicin is very expensive. There was a hang-up with the insurance.” Lawless’s smile was almost benign.
“You don’t look like a doctor.” Strangman seemed to be speaking to someone behind the big amber liar.
“Catch me at office hours and I’ll have on my smock just like everybody else.”
“Maybe I should—” Strangman started.
“Give me your arm,” Lawless commanded.
The thin white man did as he was told.
Lawless took a cotton swab and alcohol from his briefcase, cleaned a spot on Strangman’s arm, and then began to search for a vein. I turned my back on them. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe I thought if I didn’t see the injection I couldn’t bear witness in court.
I went to the picture on the wall. It wasn’t a print, as I had at first thought, but an original oil painting. It was old too. From a few feet distant the beige sky and faint water looked to be seamless. But up close I could make out thousands of small brushstrokes composed of dozens of colors. I imagined some asylum patient of another century making this painting for the inmates of today.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Strangman?” Archibald Lawless was asking the man in the chair.
“Good,” he said without hesitation. “Peaceful. Maybe I should lie down.”
“In a minute. First I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay.”
“Dr. Samson told me that you had the collapse after a theft.”
“Yes,” he said. He looked down at his hands. “Funny, it doesn’t seem so important now. They were beautiful, you know. Almost like rubies.”
“They were stolen from a safe in your home?” Dr. Lawless asked.
“Yes.” Strangman looked up. His eyes were beatific as if they were meant to be paired with that painting of the primordial first day. “I woke up and they were gone. They must have drugged me because the police said that they used an explosive on the safe.”
He brought hands to lips as a reflex of grief but the sorrow was forgotten now with Lawless’s elixir in his veins.
“Do you know Benny Lamarr?” Lawless asked.
“Why yes. How did you know that?”
“He called to ask how you were doing. Him and his friend Wayne Sacorliss.”
“Wayne. To look at him you’d never think that he was from Lebanon, would you?”
“No,” Lawless said carelessly. “It surprised me that he was a Moslem.”
“Oh no,” Strangman said in a high feminine voice. “Christian. Christian. His mother was from Armenia. But he’s an American now.”
“Did you work with him?”
“No. He works for Benny. Poor Benny.”
“Why do you say that?” Lawless asked.
“He brought his fiancée to a party at my house. The next night she was in my bed.” Even under the spell of the narcotic Strangman was a dog.
“Who are you?” I asked Archibald Lawless.
We were sitting in the window seat of a twenty-four-hour diner on the West Side Highway at 2:57 A.M.
“You’re not questioning my name again, are you?”
“No. Not that. How did you get into that clinic? How did you know what drug to give Strangman? How did you know what that killer was thinking? No one man can do all these things.”
“You’re right.”
“I thought so. Who do you work for? Really.”
“You’re a very intelligent young man, Felix. But intelligence alone doesn’t help you rise above. You see clearly, more clearly, than most, but you don’t apprehend.
“I am, everyone is, a potential sovereignty, a nation upon my own. I am responsible for every action taken in my name and for every step that I take—or that I don’t take. When you get to the place that you can see yourself as a completely autonomous, self-governing entity then everything will come to you; everything that you will need.”
A waiter brought us coffee then. I sat there drinking, thinking about the past few days. I had missed two seminars and a meeting with my advisor. I hadn’t been home, though I doubted if my roommate would notice. I had been arrested for suspicion of my involvement in a murder, made love to by a woman I didn’t really know, I had been an accessory to a killing, and party to the illegal impersonation of a doctor—in addition to the unlawful administration of contraband drugs. I was temporarily in the employ of a madman and involved in the investigation of the theft of millions of dollars in diamonds. And, even though I was aware of all those aspects of the past few days, I was still almost totally in the dark.
“What are we doing, Mr. Lawless? What are we involved in?”
He smiled at me. The swamp of his eyes grew to an endless, hopeless vista.
“Can’t you put it together yet, Felix?”
“No sir.”
He smiled and reached over to pat my forearm. There was something very calming about this gesture.
“To answer one of your questions,” he said. “I once saved the life of the daughter of a man who is very influential at the St. Botolph Hospital.”
“So?”
“Botolph funds Oberman’s Sanitarium. I called this man and asked him to intervene. A price was set and there you are.”
“I thought all you wanted me to do was take notes,” I said, exhausted by the stretch of Lawless’s reach.
“Tonight we’ll go to a place I know across the river and tomorrow we’ll come back to clear it all up.” He reached in his pocket and came out with two dollar bills. “Oh. I seem to be a little short. Do you have any cash, son?”
“What about that big fat wallet you paid the nurse from?”
“I only had what I needed for the bribe. Don’t you have some money left from that IOU you left me?”
I paid the bill and we left.
There was a motorboat waiting for us off a dilapidated pier across from the West Side Highway. Because there were no stairs we had to jump down onto the launch, which then took us upriver and deposited us at strange river inn on the Jersey side of the Hudson.
The inn had its own small dock. The boat captain, who was dark-skinned and utterly silent, let us off there. The key to the door was in a coffee can nailed to a wall. Lawless brought us in an area that was at least partially submerged in the river.
There was no one else in residence, at least no one there that I could see. The door Lawless opened led to a circular room that had four closed doors and led to an open hallway.
“Room two is yours,” the anarchist told me. “Breakfast will be at the end of the hall when you wake up.”
The bed was bunklike but very comfortable. Maybe the drug I’d been given before was still in effect but whatever the circumstance I was asleep as soon as I lay down.
19
The sunrise over Manhattan was magnificent. It sparkled on the water and shone brightly in my little cockleshell room. For almost the first full minute of consciousness I forgot my problems.
The respite was soon over, however. By the time I sat up anxiety was already clouding my mind. I dressed quickly. The hall outside my door led to a wide room under a low roof that was dominated by an irregularly shaped table—set for two.
“Good morning, Felix.”
Archibald Lawless was eating scrambled eggs. A small Asian woman sat on a small stool against the wall. When I entered the room she stood up and pulled out the seat next to the anarchist. She nodded for me to sit and when I did so she scuttled out of the room.
“Mr. Lawless.”
“Don’t look so sad, son. Today all of our problems will be solved.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, half smiling, looking like the main deity of some lost Buddhist tribe that found itself marooned in Africa an eon ago. “This is a halfway house. One of many such places where certain unpopular foreign dignitaries and agents come when they have to do business in America.”
“Like who?” I asked.
“Militants, dethroned dictators, communist sympathizers, even anarchists have stayed here. Presidents and kings unpopular with current American regimes have slept in the same bed that you have, waiting to meet with clandestine mediators or diplomats from the UN.”
“But there’s no security.”
“None that you’ve seen,” Lawless said, bearing that saintly mien. “But there’s enough protection close at hand to fend off an NYPD SWAT team.”
“You’re joking,” I said.
“All right,” he replied. “Have it your way.”
The small woman returned with a plate of eggs and herring, a small bowl of rice and a mug full of smoky flavored tea. After serving me she returned to her perch against the wall.
I ate for a while. Lawless looked out of the window at Manhattan.
“So at the office you look at New Jersey and here you look at New York.”
He cackled and then laughed. He grabbed my neck with his powerful hand and said, “I like you, boy. You know how to make me laugh.”
“Who do you plan to kill today?”
He laughed again.
“I talked to your girlfriend last night,” he said.
“Who?” I wondered if he had somehow gotten in touch with Sharee.
“Lana,” he said articulating her name as an opera singer might in preparation for singing it later on. “She and Mr. Lamarr practised being engaged before she seduced Strangman.”
“Okay.”
“He told her things.”
“What things?”
“People he trusted … places where certain transactions were to transpire.”
“And where might that be?” I asked, sucked into the rhythm of his improvisational operetta.
“Today we go to the Peninsula Hotel,” he said. “There all of our problems will come to an end.”
We exited the Refugee Inn (Lawless’s term for it) by climbing a steep trail which led to a dirt path that became a paved lane after a quarter mile or so. There Derek was waiting for us. He drove off without asking for a destination.
On the way Lawless talked to me about my duties as his scribe. I was tired of arguing with him, and just a little frightened after seeing how easily he killed the assassin Wayne Sacorliss, and so I let him go on without contradiction.
A block away from the hotel I began to get nervous.
“What are we going to do here?” I asked.
“Have breakfast.”
“We just had breakfast.”
“The sacrifices we must make for the movement,” he said. “Sometimes you have to wallow with the fat cats and follow their lead. Here, put these on.”
He handed me a pair of glasses that had thick black rims and a blond wig.
“What are these for?”
“You’re going to be incognito.”
I donned the glasses and wig because I had already learned that there was logic to every move that my would-be employer made. I also half believed that the outlandish getup would get us thrown out of the hotel.
We entered the restaurant at about ten-thirty. No one gave me a second look.
When Lawless introduced himself the maitre d’ guided us to a table in an isolated corner of the main dining room. Lawless put himself in a seat with his back to the rest of the room. I was seated in an alcove, hidden from view by the banquette.
He ordered salmon hash with shirred eggs and I had the Mascarpone pancakes with a side of apple smoked bacon.
After the breakfast was served I said, “I’m not going to work for you, you know.”
“I know that you don’t expect to take the job but the day is young.”
“No. I’m not working for you under any condition. I don’t even know what we’re doing now. How can I take a job where I don’t even know where I’ll wake up in the morning?”
“You’d rather have a job where you’ll know where you’ll be every day for the rest of your life?” he asked.
“No. Of course not, but, I mean I don’t want to be involved with criminals and dirty politics.”
“You’re the one who said that he always pays his taxes, Felix,” he said. “That makes you a part of an elite criminal and political class. If you buy gasoline or knitted sweaters or even bananas then you belong to the greatest crime family on Earth.”
I don’t know why I argued with him. I had been around people like him ever since college. Politico dingbats is what my father calls them. People who see conspiracies in our economic system, people who believe America is actually set against the notion of liberty.
I talked about the Constitution. He talked about the millions dead in Africa, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Nagasaki. I talked about the freedom of speech. He came back with the millions of dark-skinned men and women who spend most of their lives in prison. I talked about international terrorism. He brushed that off and concentrated on the embargos imposed on Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.
I was about to bring out the big guns: the American peoples and the part they played in World War Two. But just then a familiar man came up and sat down at our table.
“Right on time, Ray,” Archibald Lawless said.
Our guest was dressed in a dark blue suit with a white shirt held together at the cuffs by sapphire studs. Raymond, I supposed his first name was. The only title I knew him by was Captain Delgado.
“Archie,” he said. “Felix. What’s up?”
The way he said my name was respectful, as if I deserved a place at the table. As much as I wanted to deny it, I liked that feeling.
“Two tables over to your right,” Lawless told the police captain. “A man and a woman talking over caviar and scrambled eggs.”
I leaned over and slanted my eyes to see them. Through the clear glass frames of my disguise I recognized Valerie Lox, the Madison Avenue real estate agent. The whole time we had been talking she was there meeting with a man who was unknown to me.
She was wearing a red Chanel suit and an orange scarf. I’d never seen the man she was with. He was porcine and yet handsome. His movements were self-assured to the degree where he almost seemed careless.
“You were recently made aware of a diamond theft, were you not, Captain Delgado?” Lawless asked.
“Are you telling me or digging?” the cop asked back.
“Red diamonds,” Lawless replied. “Millions of
dollars’ worth. A syndicate represented by Lionel Strangman reported it to their insurance company.”
“You have my attention.”
“Is Felix still being sought in connection with the murder of Henry Lansman?”
“Until we find another candidate.”
“Wait,” I said. “Why would you even think of me?”
Delgado shrugged but said nothing.
“The boy has a right to know why he’s being sought,” Archibald said.
“The gems,” the police captain said as if it were patently obvious. “A special unit started investigating Lamarr as soon as the theft was reported. They had Lansman, Brexel, Cornell, and Ms. Lox over there under surveillance. There was a tap on her phone. When she called Cornell we picked up your name. Then when you were photographed at the scene of Lansman’s murder you became a suspect.”
“Why not Sacorliss?” I asked.
“He’s out of bounds,” Delgado said. “Works as an informant for the FBI.”
“Regardless,” Lawless said. “Sacorliss is your killer.”
“Who does he work for?” Delgado asked.
“As you indicated,” Lawless said with a sense of the dramatic in his tone, “the same people that you work for. He also killed Benny Lamarr and Kenneth Cornell. If you look into the records of those deaths you will find that they have disappeared. Gone to Arizona, I hear.”
“Fuckin’ meatheads,” Delgado muttered.
“I agree,” Lawless said. “You have another problem, however.”
“What’s that?”
“The man sitting with Ms. Lox is Rudolph Bickell, one of the richest men in Canada. She is passing the diamonds to him. She may have already done so.”
“You want me to arrest the richest man in Canada on your say-so?”
“It’s a toss-up, my friend. Take the plunge and maybe you’ll lose everything. Don’t take it and pass up the chance of a lifetime.”
Lawless gestured for the bill and then said to Delgado, “You can pay for our meal, officer. Because even just the arrest of Wayne Sacorliss will keep you in good standing with your superiors.