Clancy spoke swiftly. “Stay inside the lobby. And keep your eye on any door that might lead to the basement.”
Kaproski nodded agreement, stepped to the sidewalk, slammed the door behind him, and walked quickly across the walk to shove through the double glass doors. Stanton eased the car into gear, edging away from the curb. Beyond the lighted front of Number Forty-five a row of old brownstones stretched to the far corner, their curved stone railings a series of parallel white bands that faded into darkness beyond the scope of the faint glow of the overhead street lamps.
Clancy bent forward, staring tightly from his side of the car while Stanton did the same, bringing his eyes back to the road every second to make sure he held the center of the snow-flecked street. There was no sign of movement anywhere. Clancy frowned. His throat felt tight; his hand squeezed over the butt of his revolver almost convulsively.
They came to the corner. Stanton turned right, speeding up, managed to make the traffic light at Eighty-sixth Street and pushed down on the gas, hurrying to get back to Central Park West and complete his circle of the block. At Eighty-fifth Street he slowed down and once again entered slowly. Everything appeared as before; he applied the brake gently as they neared the apartment, turning to look questioningly at Clancy.
“Park it,” Clancy said tersely. “Just below the apartment. And stay in the car. Turn off the lights and cut the engine. And keep your eyes open. That delegate ought to be getting here soon—if he’s going to get here at all.”
Stanton nodded and drew to the curb. Clancy emerged quickly and walked towards the apartment entrance, his eyes automatically checking the nearest darkened areaways once again. Still no movement betrayed the presence of anyone near. He frowned and pushed through the tall glass doors to the small lobby.
Kaproski was standing there, half-facing the front doors and managing at the same time to cover another door set beside the small self-service elevator. One hand was bunched in his coat pocket. He nodded at Clancy and jerked his head in the direction of the second door.
“It leads to a stairway,” he said quietly. “They go up—and down, too. I didn’t check them out; I figured I’d wait until you got here.”
“They can wait,” Clancy said. “How about the elevator?”
“It’s empty and on this floor,” Kaproski said. He nodded in the direction of the indicator set in the wall beside the push-button. “I pushed the button and the door opened and then closed.”
“Good.” Clancy looked around and then scowled at his wristwatch. “Where in the hell can he be? Even in this weather it shouldn’t take this long to get here from the UN!”
“Maybe he isn’t coming right home …”
“Then we wait for him here if it takes all night,” Clancy said.
A worse thought struck Kaproski. “Or maybe they’re setting the kill up somewhere else.”
Clancy shook his head, although he was far from feeling as confident as he tried to sound. “They wouldn’t know where he might be any more than we do. And this place would be ideal for them.” He frowned, his eyes scanning the modernistic murals that adorned the walls of the lobby. “I wonder where in hell they’re holed up …” He moved to the front of the lobby, peering through the glass, and then stiffened. “Hold it! There’s a cab stopping in front …”
Kaproski moved backwards, setting his back firmly against the door that led to the stairway; any attempt to push it open would have to move him with it, giving ample warning. His large hand tightened ominously on the revolver in his pocket.
Through the glass Clancy could see a figure bending over the back seat of the cab, handing money to the driver. A moment later the figure had opened the door of the cab and was walking quickly across to the entranceway. It was a well-built man wearing a black Chesterfield coat and a Homburg of the same color; in one gloved hand a brown, expensive-looking attaché case swung loosely. He came through the glass doors, noted the two men in the lobby with nothing more than polite disinterest, and walked over, pressing the elevator button. We might as well start with this one, Clancy thought, and stepped forward.
“Pardon me, but is your name Hurtado?”
The man paused, puzzled; a slight frown crossed his handsome face. The elevator door slid open; his eyes flickered to it momentarily and then came back to the man at his side. “Yes, it is. Why?”
Clancy heaved a sigh of profound relief. “We are police officers. I’m Lieutenant Clancy of the Fifty-second Precinct.” He withdrew his wallet, opened it to display his identification, and held it out. The handsome man glanced at it incuriously and then back to the open elevator. As if in response to his attention, the doors slid closed once again. The man shrugged and turned to Clancy. “Yes? And?”
Clancy doubled his wallet and returned it to his pocket. “We’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Hurtado. We have reason to believe there is an attempt on your life being planned.”
A look of complete incredulity crossed the other’s face; it held a moment and then was slowly replaced by a faint smile.
“I’ve heard all of these rumors, of course,” he said. “At the meetings.” His English was excellent, with just the barest trace of accent; it was evident that his schooling had been British. “But I’m afraid you don’t understand. I am the delegate from Uruguay. Such things could not possibly affect me. Our country is not like some of the others.” He shook his head, amused. “I’m afraid you are not very conversant with politics, Lieutenant. Uruguay is quite civilized. In Uruguay …” He allowed the words to trail off. “I’m afraid you must be mistaken.”
“And I’m afraid we are not,” Clancy said gently.
The Uruguayan delegate stared at him a moment, looked around, and then raised one gloved hand expressively. “But you see? I do not even have a bodyguard. I am not armed—in fact, I am never armed. I come alone in a taxi. Why should I have any fear?”
“I’m sorry,” Clancy said firmly. “We still feel and believe our information to be correct. If you don’t mind, we’ll accompany you to your apartment. We …” His words stopped; his eyes widened. Of course! Where else to stay, warm and cozy, protected from the curious glances of passersby and out of the reach of the cold winter blasts? Where else to wait, in such certainty of the eventual arrival of the victim, than in the victim’s own apartment? And certainly getting into an empty apartment would prove no unsurmountable task to men as professional as these! He turned to Kaproski, his eyes lit up with the sureness of his knowledge.
“Kap—you take the steps. We’ll give you time to get to the sixth floor and then we’ll come up by elevator. You make sure that nobody’s in the hall when we get there.” He turned to the handsome figure listening in complete disbelief to the cloak-and-dagger nonsense being uttered so seriously in his presence. “Mr. Hurtado—may I please have the key to your apartment?”
The elegant diplomat shrugged and reached into his pocket. Apparently there was only one way to liquidate this nuisance and that was to play their childish game with them. “All right,” he said. “Of course. But this is truly foolish.…”
The two men rode up in the small elevator without speaking. Kaproski was waiting when they emerged from the tiny cab. With Clancy in the lead and the almost-bored diplomat in the rear, the three men walked quietly down the thickly carpeted hallway.
The entrance to Apartment 6K lay midway along the end passage that intersected the main hallway. Clancy paused, his hand up to stop the others, and surveyed the cross-passage carefully. A single light fixture lit the narrow space; the switch that controlled it was mounted on the stuccoed wall about three feet before the door of 6K. Clancy considered the situation and then nodded. He started to pull the other two with him beyond the projection of the hallway corner, when the faint ringing of a telephone coming from the apartment could be heard.
Señor Hurtado started forward. “That’s …”
“Shhh!” Clancy gripped his arm, dropping his voice almost to a whisper. The ringing continued a moment and
then ceased. Señor Hurtado shrugged; he hoped the call had not been from his date for that evening. Clancy stared at the other two. “They can probably see a band of light under the door frame. Mr. Hurtado—please stay here, out of the way. Kap, when I put the key in the lock—and not before—I want you to turn off that switch.” He took his revolver from his coat pocket and checked it. Kaproski did the same. Señor Hurtado’s eyes widened at the sight of the lethal arms. He said nothing.
“Let’s go!” Clancy said in a hoarse whisper, and moved forward with Kaproski at his side.
He stepped to the near side of the apartment door and then slowly lowered himself to the carpeted passageway; for a moment he wondered what would happen if some neighbor came out of his flat at that moment. He put the thought aside and looked backwards over his shoulder; Kaproski was standing with his large hand on the switch. Clancy steadied his gun in his right hand and slowly reached up with his left, the key held firmly in his fingers. And then the telephone inside of the apartment began to ring again.
Clancy froze, waiting. He wanted the sound of the key to be heard inside the apartment. Seconds ticked by, and then the telephone stopped its sound. Clancy looked up at Kaproski and then suddenly nodded. The key slid into the door with a rasp even as the lights in the hallway disappeared. Clancy turned the key and shoved against the door violently.
There was an instant flash from the darkness beyond, followed almost at once by a dull explosion amplified by the confines of the small room. Clancy steadied his hand and fired at the flash. There was a muffled cry, a hideous gasp lost in the sound of the second explosion. Clancy lowered his hand a few inches and fired again. Kaproski ran forward, stepped hurriedly over him and twisted into the room, gun in hand. His fingers found the wall switch and flicked it upwards.
The man seated in the chair had not required the second shot; the first had found his throat and torn through it brutally. He lay spread-eagled back in the low chair, his head thrown back and twisted, as if trying to avoid the horror of death. The hand with the gun dangled at one side of the chair, impersonal and useless, the gun barrel scraping the carpet. At the far side of the room, sitting stunned by this sudden reversal, was the second of the killers. His hands were locked in a death’s grip on the cording of the chair; his eyes were wide with shock, his mouth frozen open in horrified disbelief.
Clancy pulled himself to his feet and followed Kaproski into the room. The thick fumes of cordite gave an acrid tang to the still air of the apartment; Kaproski was already looming over the second man, pulling him brusquely to his feet, locking the handcuffs about the thin wrists. Señor Hurtado appeared in the doorway, his handsome face ashen as he surveyed the bloody scene. Clancy drew a deep shuddering breath, holstered his gun, and moved to the telephone. He dialed a number, cupping the receiver, and then glanced at the white face in the doorway.
“Better stay in a hotel tonight,” he said, listening to the faint buzzing of the telephone at the other end of the line. “And let us know where you are. We’ll try and find out what this attempt on your life was all about.” The telephone was finally answered; he bent to it, explaining. There was a muffled exchange of conversation. “… and call Captain Wise and tell him he can stop ringing this number,” Clancy finished, and hung up. He looked across at the shaken diplomat. “We’ll have some people here in a few minutes. You should be able to move back in tomorrow.”
Señor Hurtado looked faint. “They …”
“That’s right,” Clancy said. “They were going to kill you.” He walked over, contemplated the dead body a moment, and then reached down to pull the revolver from the unresisting dangling hand. He looked at it a moment and dropped it into his pocket. A siren sounded weakly in the distance, growing in strength as it approached.
“If you have any brandy around, I’d suggest you take a good stiff drink. You look groggy.”
The diplomat looked at him blankly. “But why …?”
Clancy shook his head. “We don’t know, but we’ll try to find out.” The siren screamed beneath the windows and then was cut off suddenly; it sounded like a croupy child being given the satisfaction of a warm bottle in the middle of the night. Clancy looked at the pale man before him; his voice was calm.
“And let me give you one last piece of advice. The next time somebody offers you a bodyguard, accept it.”
Wednesday–9:00 P.M.
They brought in the dull-eyed, shocked survivor of the assassination attempt and booked him under the name of Richard Roe. The desk sergeant, pausing in his efforts to keep up with the words of his superior, looked up from the charge-book.
“What do we book him on, Lieutenant?”
“Spitting on the sidewalk,” Clancy said. “We’ll let the State Department worry about that tomorrow.”
He walked down the corridor and turned into his office, pulling off his raincoat and shaking it to free it of snow. Captain Wise was sitting there, his heavy face lined with anxiety. Clancy removed the gun from his coat pocket and laid it on top of the filing cabinet. He hung up the coat, placed his hat on the adjoining hook, slipped out of his jacket, and removed his shoulder holster. He laid it on the desk, put his jacket back on, and walked behind his desk, sitting down with a slight shrug of satisfaction. The holster and gun went into the drawer; he leaned back.
Captain Wise had been watching this routine with poorly concealed impatience. He waited until Clancy had settled down, waited a moment more, and then exploded. “That was a great message you left me! I’m sitting here I don’t know what’s going on and they call from downtown and say I can quit telephoning!”
Clancy grinned. “Well, I didn’t want you to waste your whole evening.”
“Very funny!” Captain Wise forced himself to simmer down. “Well? So what happened?”
Clancy’s grin disappeared. “Well,” he said quietly, “one of them was shot. Killed. And the other is in the process of being booked right now.” His eyes flicked to the top of the filing cabinet and then back to the rigid face before him. “That’s Martin’s gun up there. It’s been checked out.” He shrugged. “You’ll get it all in the report.”
“I know I’ll get it in the report. Only I want it now.” Captain Wise stared at Clancy, his expression half-angry, half-puzzled. “How in hell did you ever figure they were gunning for the delegate from Uruguay?”
Clancy stared back evenly. “Well, I went through the entire picture—how they arrived, what they planned to do, when and how they figured on leaving. The only thing I forgot was the question of money. This character that Martin caught yesterday had new bills on him; the kind you get at a bank. Or at an airport money-exchange counter.” He nodded in satisfaction. “I’m glad I finally had enough brains to think about it when I did—because they were really set to blast him the minute he walked through that door.”
Captain Wise frowned. “This is explaining? What are you talking about?”
Clancy reached into his pocket for his wallet; he sorted through the multiplicity of papers there, extracted the slip that had been found with the bills in Silent Sam’s pocket, and stared at it a moment. Then he passed it over. Captain Wise looked at it briefly and then back at Clancy.
“So?”
“So if they got money at the airport,” Clancy explained patiently, “—I mean dollars—then they had to put up some of their own currency. When I finally got around to thinking of that, I simply checked the newspaper for the exchange rate. The Uruguayan peso is 26.20 to the dollar; it’s been going down.” He leaned over the desk, pointing to the row of figures. “11/16/1500/26.20/57.26—the first two numbers are today’s date, and how I ever came to miss that I’ll never know. And the rest are the arithmetic of the transaction.”
He picked up a pencil and started to scribble on his pad, explaining.
“They put up fifteen hundred of their own money, which are Uruguayan pesos, at an exchange rate of 26.20 to the dollar. For which they received $57.26 in American money. They actually should have rec
eived $57.27, but never mind—the exchange always takes the break.” He leaned back, thinking. “Our boy downstairs must have been the boss of the three—they split the dough and he got the lion’s share.”
Captain Wise studied the figures a moment and then looked up. “I see. But what would have happened if they hadn’t bought any dollars at the airport?”
“Then we probably would never have gotten them,” Clancy admitted cheerfully. “If they had bought their dollars in Montevideo, the chances are they would have beat us.” He raised a finger. “But remember this: the money control in foreign countries is a lot tougher than it is here. Here you don’t have to give your name, or show your passport, or even furnish any identification. Most other places you do. They probably figured it was safer the way they did it.” He shrugged. “So they were wrong.”
“And thank God for that!” Captain Wise said reverently. Kaproski came into the room just as the large captain pulled himself to his feet; he stepped back against the wall. A sudden thought came to the captain and he paused.
“You know, Clancy,” he said thoughtfully, “those three killers could have still come from Uruguay, just the way you figured, with the intention of knocking off the Chinese Ambassador, too.”
“Sure,” Clancy agreed. “I thought of that possibility as soon as I saw how cool this Hurtado was. But what can you do? You’ve got to play the percentages.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Captain Wise said, and shook his head. “Personally, I’ll be glad when this whole UN thing is over, and all we have to worry about are our own hoods.”
“Me, too,” Kaproski said fervently from the sidelines. He rubbed his knuckles. “Them guys I can make talk.”
Clancy stared around the room and then began to arrange his folders. “That’s enough for tonight, I guess,” he said vaguely. “I’m bushed. I’m going home.”
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