The Case

by Leopold Borstinski

  “Who should I speak to about that?”

  He pointed his head towards the corridor and, in an almost whisper, said: “Go down there, my friend, and someone will look after you.”

  I thanked him and gingerly walked down the passageway until I came to the first door on the right, which was wide open, and contained a middle aged woman sitting by a desk and a string of girls sat in near silence, semi-naked, on chairs and a sofa on the far wall. I quickly checked each of them out to see if I recognized Sally, but no joy. All titties and bare belly buttons. No Sally.

  The madam listened carefully as I explained how I was looking for a particular kind of girl. And I described Sally in all but name. The woman nodded and told me she understood how some of her patrons were more particular in their needs than others. She suggested I sat down with the girls and she’d see if they had anything special I’d be interested in.

  So there I was, still recovering from the excesses of the pipe, with several semi-naked girls stroking, touching and generally meandering their hands all over my body. And I mean all over: there was no part of me left untouched by their desire to get me to splash cash in their direction.

  I popped five spots in the G-strings of the girls who had actually groped me and left the rest of them alone. If any were over sixteen, I’d have been amazed. With some of them, you could see the track marks lining their arms and those whose track marks weren’t visible meant they were mainlining in between their toes or somewhere worse.

  The madam returned and beckoned me over to the door. We walked further down the corridor, away from the main entrance until we reached the third doorway on the right. She opened the door just wide enough for me to walk in and closed it behind me.

  THE ROOM WAS dark: just a single bulb on a bedside light, so I took a minute to adjust my eyes to the darkness. First of all, there was a blond girl on the bed and then, as I become used to the light, I could see more details. Next I realized her arms and legs were naked and the only reason I could sense darkness in her middle was that she was covering her groin with a black silk cushion. She was lying on her side, but you could see her body was riven with tension.

  As my eyes moved from the cushion up past her pointy young breasts towards her face, I could see this was Sally, friend of Simone, and a woman totally out of her depth.

  “Time for us to take you home. Simone sent me,” I explained because I knew there would be little time between this brief greeting and our need to get the hell out of there.

  Sally didn’t move. didn’t say a thing.

  “Are your clothes in here? Do you have any clothes to put on?”

  She shook her head, not wanting to believe her time in this place might soon be over. I grabbed a blanket lying on the floor near the bed. It was the best I could do on short notice with nothing to work with.

  “Sit up and let me help you.”

  She did as I instructed almost immediately. I bent down to wrap her in the blanket and I saw the needle marks in her arms and the circular burns caused by tips of cigarettes. She’d been in the wars this one.

  “Stand up,” I whispered, so she’d know not to stomp about and that we’d be exiting this room shortly. I held her hand firmly and took us both to the door. I leaned in to hear what was happening on the other side of the wood, but I couldn’t discern a single thing.

  Gingerly, I opened the door: slowly, slowly until I was certain there was no-one immediately near us. Still squeezing Sally’s hand, I bolted out of the room, dragging the girl in my wake.

  Somehow, as soon as we were in the corridor with nowhere to hide, an Arab guy appeared at the end where I had come from.

  “Badri!” screamed Sally and that was all she needed to say. We scrambled away from him down the corridor and tore left at the end. There were two closed doors, both identical. I had no idea which to go for.

  “Which one’s the way out?”

  Sally pushed the left one and we piled down a fire escape. There were voices behind us and it didn’t take an Einstein to figure they’d worked out where we were going.

  Sure enough, round the corner came two heavies with Badri only a couple of paces behind them. The dude sure could run.

  Badri’s henchmen blocked our progress down the alley we found ourselves in, but I had a secret up my sleeve. I always kept a small lady’s gun in a hidden holster, so I drew it and pointed the dainty thing at the heavies in my way.

  “Might look like a pea shooter, but the bullets’ll rip through you all the same,” I warned. One of the no-necks turned to Badri to see what to do.

  “What are you waiting for? Kill him, just don’t harm the merchandise.”

  Hearing the news, I squeezed two shots out at each of them. A pair at their hearts: much better to aim at the torso rather than the head. Much easier kill.

  As the two bodies toppled over onto one another, Badri leaped forward to grab Sally and reached her other arm. He yanked her towards him and as I held my ground, he revealed that in his hand was a small plastic bottle. He squeezed it and a rippling arc of clear, acrid liquid shot out of the bottle and onto Sally’s face.

  She screamed and fell to the floor. Acid.

  I aimed at Badri’s head and plugged him first in the eye and then, as he took his turn to scream, into his groin. I put my arm under Sally and we scurried away from the scene of destruction, down the alley, down a side street. Then we bundled into a taxi and headed straight for the ER. Once I knew Sally was being looked after, I called Simone to tell her where we were.

  When she arrived at the hospital, Simone gave me a peck on the cheek.

  “Thanks, Jacko. You’re a decent man.”

  Sally’s face was all bandaged up, but the doctor had told us the damage was not too bad under the circumstances. Several skin grafts and she might not be as good as new, but she’d get along fine for the rest of her life.

  I left them to be alone. Besides, I’d done all that Simone had asked of me and there was nothing more to be said.

  I walked down the road, sauntering along with my hands in my pants pocket. My right hand came upon the roll of money I’d got from Simone. My original plan had been to buy her off Badri, but that wouldn’t have worked. I clenched the cash in my pocket and realized this had been quite a profitable day.

  Twenty-four hours later, I got a call from Darryl’s parents. The weaselly little tyke had appeared at their doorstep that morning. The hunt was over, but I made certain they agreed to pay me until my return to New York.

  I spent the rest of the day in a different opium den before I flew back to receive my payment. Sure loved that warm smoke.

  PART THIRTEEN

  SAN FRANCISCO 1979

  31

  THE MOMENT I received the final installment for Daryl, I forgot his existence, but I can’t say the same for the image that echoed round my head of Simone, bending over Sally’s acid-crumpled face in that hospital room. Simone’s skirt was tight on her body and I could sense the roundness of her butt cheeks. Took me weeks to get that out of my mind. The next time I saw her was getting out of that airplane and walking down the steps.

  But, if you remember, last time I mentioned all of this, Colonel Mumford and I were beating the crap out of Dakila Valdez at the Wisconsin State Fair and heading off to San Francisco with a key in our hands on a wing and a prayer.

  We landed at San Francisco International by around ten in the morning and grabbed our baggage off the conveyor belt. The key had remained in my pocket all the journey. So far it had cost one man his teeth and an eye socket - and I didn’t want to be added to that list.

  We followed signs around the building until we realized we needed to get to Terminal 2 instead. The transit bus took us over there while we kept a watch out for imagined people following us. If I had been on my own, I reckon my head would have twisted off my neck. As it was, Mumford covered half the panorama for me, but the truth was we were alone in the sea of passengers. The only guys who could have followed us were on the plane we
took and there was no-one from that flight anywhere near us.

  We got to the lost luggage lockers and only then did I take the key out of its safe haven of my right pocket. We walked along the rows until we found the right one and I pushed the metal into the hole and, once I’d found that it fit just right, I twisted the key until the door popped open and I heard the mechanism reset itself, waiting for another quarter to drop into the coin slot.

  I pulled the small door wide and Mumford and I peered inside at what we figured was so important contained within the depths of that space. Then we looked at each other quizzically and looked back into the locker. I grabbed the contents and shoved them into my jacket pocket: a newspaper - the Boston Globe from March 27, 1976 - into my inside right pocket and a white envelope which I popped into the left inside to balance things out.

  We both checked up and down the locker aisle to ensure there was no-one trying to crowd us out and then we headed straight to the taxi rank to go somewhere private to study the contents, because there was no way on God’s green earth that Don Michael was paying us to hunt down a copy of an east coast paper he could have read in the New York Public Library.

  A Holiday Inn seemed the best option as there was one near the airport - surprise, surprise - and there were bound to be a room for hire at zero notice. We took two adjacent rooms, just like in the good old days, and after three minutes in the room, there was a knock on the door and the best of the British Secret Service appeared.

  I LET MUMFORD in and we peered at the occasional table. He sat down on the easy chair and I sat on the edge of the bed. I had put the paper and the envelope placed one next to the other.

  “Well open it, goddamn it,” said Mumford after a spell.

  “Yeah, yeah, I was just getting to it.”

  I turned the envelope over twice, trying to get a handle on its weight, what might be in it and how to open it up without ripping the contents too.

  Felt like a sheet or two of paper but almost all the gum had been licked and stuck down. I held the thing up to the light to see how much the paper occupied the envelope. There was a clear inch on one side after I’d tapped it down one edge to shift the paper contents to that same end. So I tore the envelope along one of the shorter edges until I could reach in and pull out the sheet. Just the one sheet, folded in half.

  I opened the paper, placed it next to the newspaper on top of the envelope and we both stared at its contents for several seconds.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked after about half a minute of utter bemused silence.

  “Beats the hell out of me,” was Mumford’s honest reply. In front of us was a page filled with about fifteen letter and number pairs, neatly spaced out.

  “One hell of a code,” I intoned.

  “You don’t say?” sneered Mumford and I gave him a look that would kill.

  We turned our heads back to the page and carried on staring, hoping that some sense would materialize through the act of looking. But no joy.

  I shrugged and picked up the newspaper. The fact it was in the locker meant it had some kind of significance and I hoped we could use it to crack the code.

  The Globe felt pristine, like no-one had ever opened it before, but then there was a knock on the door. Mumford looked at me, looking at him. We both placed our hands on our firearms and I padded to the door, hoping not to make a sound with my footsteps. Looking through the eyeglass, I saw a stretched out face through the fish-eye lens. Despite the distortion, it had a familiarity I was not expecting.

  “Be cool,” I intoned to Mumford and I undid the chain and opened the door to let Phil McNamara, FBI Detective, into the room. We shook hands and I made the introductions. When I looked down, I saw the page was missing from the table: Mumford had hidden it just as I had put the newspaper back into my jacket pocket. Before you think my jacket was gigantic, there were only a few of the outer pages of the Globe actually in the newspaper, so it wasn’t that hard to do.

  “How d’you trace me to this hotel, Phil? I paid cash.”

  “You did but I’ve had your name on alert as soon as I thought you might head into town. We’ve been following you ever since you landed.”

  “I’m glad the FBI is so concerned over my whereabouts.”

  “Not really, I was kidding with you. It was the locker we had under surveillance, so once you guys had cracked it open, we realized we had a live one.”

  The three of us were silent for fifteen seconds as those words sunk in. The FBI already knew about the locker and were waiting to catch whoever opened it. Once Phil recognized me, he came over for a visit rather than send in the goon squad. Kind of him. But that still meant the FBI knew about the locker.

  “AND WHAT WAS your interest in the locker, anyway?” asked Mumford, who had just reached the same conclusion.

  McNamara looked at Mumford and then eyed me and back to Mumford.

  “We were interested in the contents - and also whoever picked it up.”

  “Do you know what was inside?”

  “No. We left everything alone to sit and wait to catch a fish.”

  “And here we both are, Phil.”

  “Yes, here you both are, Jake ... and where is the contents by the way?”

  “Safe,” said Mumford, who didn’t trust this Hoover man enough to disclose any information unless he had to. British Secret Service versus US federal government. Good luck with that.

  I took a chance, because I might not trust the FBI, but I trusted Phil: a shared past goes a long way in this life.

  “There was a code and an old newspaper. We only just got to look at them when you came a-knockin’.”

  Mumford was not happy with my big reveal, but I ignored the cold stare bearing down on me from his direction. He knew to trust me too and I knew I had to wait for him to remember that and he’d be okay.

  Mumford nodded and pointed out we’d be much better off figuring out the code if we went to the local FBI office so we could use their resources, instead of sitting in a hotel room by San Francisco International.

  The local office was in the middle of an industrial estate in the exact middle of nowhere. Good news was it was an unassuming building, completely anonymous. Bad news was it was a bleak building in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

  Anyway, real-estate considerations to one side for a minute, we huddled round McNamara’s desk with the code page and the newspaper staring back at us. We were as defeated as when we were in the hotel room, only now we had free coffee on tap. McNamara took a copy of the page and faxed it over to the cipher department back in Washington. He said he’d let the eggheads take a look. They’d do no worse than us.

  At one point, I tried flipping through the pages of the Globe hoping to see the connection between the code letters and numbers and the newspaper, but nothing spoke to me.

  The rest of the day was spent staring at those pieces of paper and writing all sorts of rubbish down as we tried to decode the indecipherable.

  By five, we’d all had enough and called it quits. McNamara took us to a local bar for a bite to eat and, maybe, the odd slug of beer. We shot the breeze for an hour or two over a burger although Mumford ordered a steak because he said he didn’t want to eat a sandwich for his dinner.

  We agreed we knew no more about the code than we did this morning and not one of us had any real idea why we were chasing the package. Don Michael was the connecting fact, but he’d not explained why he wanted it nor what we were really chasing - other than some kind of parcel.

  Three beers later and we were all set for sleep, so off we went.

  Next morning we met up back at the FBI building, but as soon as we arrived in the reception space, I knew something was amiss. The hustle and bustle had an air of tension. Not only were there so many suits walking around, but they kept their eyes down on the floor. No-one acknowledged anyone else’s existence, like they didn’t know each other or didn’t care about keeping connected to their fellow workers. Even in a place like the FBI,
you work your network to succeed. So something was up.

  WHEN MCNAMARA CAME out of the back to bring us in, he looked like someone had died. I mean really died, no joke.

  “Follow me, there’ve been some, ahem, developments.”

  Mumford and I looked at each other and followed McNamara. He took us into the same meeting room as before and we sat down. There were still people walking up and down the corridor outside, traveling at full pace. Something had surely happened.

  “Spill,” I said to McNamara as soon as we were in our chairs. He sighed.

  “This is it. There was a break-in last night.”

  “You gotta be kiddin’,” I replied under my breath. McNamara faltered for a second and carried on.

  “The whole place is a mess but one thing I know is they took the code. No idea about anything else: this is the only case I’m working on. But my colleagues said other paperwork has been taken too.”

  “So you have no idea who are the perpetrators?”

  “No, Colonel. Not right now.”

  “The only people we can rule out are the three of us and our respective agencies,” I proffered.

  “That leaves a lot of others. Could be a foreign power,” and Mumford then trailed off into his own thoughts, trying to work out which country could be interested in the Don’s code.

  I knew Mumford’s first thought would be to blame the Soviets. From memory, he always blamed the Soviets and with some cause. Back then, the Cold War was still raging and we blamed the Ruskies for just about everything that went wrong in our country. Easier than blaming the people running the damn country besides.

  In this instance the Russians might not be such a bad place to start, I thought. If the FBI, British secret service and the Mafia were interested in the package, why wouldn’t the Russians want to take a peek inside the envelope too? But then I thought some more and reckoned if it was the Russians, they’d have done more than steal a code for Don Michael’s parcel. They’d have had overnight access to a bunch of FBI files far more juicy than whatever it was Don Michael had us chasing our tails all over the country.