Manhunt Is My Mission

by Stephen Marlowe

  I said nothing. I thought of Marianne, and for a moment I had her face in front of my eyes but pretty soon it became Princess Farat’s face.

  Samia looked at me gravely. “It’s … too soon, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s too soon.”

  There was a knock at the outside door of the suite. I went and opened it. A uniformed cop, young and earnest-looking, stood there. “Mr. Drum?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m Walters, Central Squads. Lieutenant Borah sent me. There’ll be three of us, around the clock.”

  Samia came to the door behind me. “Hello,” she said.

  Walters was a blond kid, blue-eyed, clean-cut. He had a shy smile and he used it and fidgeted with his cap when he got a look at Samia. “Ma’am,” he said.

  He stood in the doorway awkwardly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

  “Come in,” Samia said. “Both of you.”

  I shook my head. “Not me. I’ve got an appointment with a guy named Morpheus.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Samia caught Walters staring at her. It wasn’t a lecherous stare and not even a speculative one. I thought: they don’t make cops the way they used to. It was a stare of earnest and objective appreciation. Walters had decided, with pleasure and surprise, that the body he had to guard belonged to an attractive woman.

  I think Samia read as much in his stare as I did. What she saw there pleased her. The faintest of smiles touched her lips.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Walters. Bob Walters, ma’am.”

  “Come in, Bob Walters. I never had a bodyguard before.”

  Walters went in, fidgeting with his cap. “If you want to know the truth, I’ve never been one before.” He smiled his shy smile again.

  Samia Falcon was back in business as a human being.

  22

  IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN when I drove up in front of the building in Georgetown where I had an apartment. The place was a two-story town house subdivided into four flats. A faint, unseasonal mist had drifted in off the water and made the red brick sidewalk glisten under the street lights which looked like, but weren’t, gas-lamps. There was no wind. Bright moonlight dapple-shadowed the leaves of the big curbside plane trees. The moon was full and sported a perfect halo. For anyone who took his Farmers’ Almanac seriously, that meant rain tomorrow.

  If you spend most of your time, when you are not traveling to hell and gone, in the frenetic whirl and bustle that is Washington, a place to hang your hat in Georgetown is an anachronistic reminder that there are calmer places and have been calmer times. Especially at night, especially by moonlight, Georgetown’s tranquil red brick solidity is something out of the eighteenth century.

  The place where I hung my hat was owned by the widow of a Congressman from Virginia. She was a small, reserved woman who loved cats because she had a cat’s independent, fastidious, no-nonsense personality. There were nine of them in her town house, none of them pedigreed and all of them allowed the run of the place.

  A big black torn was licking its left forepaw on the stoop. Its flat eyes looked at me under the coach-light, and it resumed its toilet. I went inside. The hall was dark except for a light at the far end, where the stairs were. The music of a Mozart horn concerto drifted out into the hall from one of the downstairs apartments. I reached the stairs and climbed them. The pool of light faded quickly behind me. There was no light on the second-story landing. The bulb must have blown, I decided. I felt my way along one wall of the upstairs hall. A cat purred at my feet. It rubbed against my leg. That would be the big aloof Angora. For some reason known only to itself, it had singled me out as its favorite human being. It didn’t like anyone else, not even the woman who owned the joint. I should have been flattered, she always told me. I’d be flattered, I always told her, as long as she didn’t mind Angora fur on all the upholstered furniture in my apartment. Then she’d accuse me of not tolerating or understanding cats, and I’d say I was too busy trying to tolerate and understand human beings.

  Rubbing against my leg, the Angora drifted down the hall with me. It made as much noice as a puff of smoke. We reached my apartment door. The Angora purred.

  “Not tonight,” I said. The Angora’s odd rasping purr sounded disappointed, as if it understood. Then suddenly it snarled. When I looked down I could just make out its eyes. It had grasped my trouser-cuff with the claws of its forepaws. I could feel its body tensing and its back arching.

  Then three things happened simultaneously. I stooped to disengage the claws. The door of my apartment burst inward suddenly and I started to look up. A bright light which I had time to realize was a flashlight gleamed over my head.

  The Angora snarled again and leaped up and past my head. I was still crouching. The light wavered.

  A tremendous explosion rocked me. A gout of orange flame seared past the right side of my face. It was that close.

  I thought I heard the Angora scream, thought I heard a hail of pellets rattle on the opposite wall of the hallway. Both were probably my imagination. The blast was still ringing in my ears. I couldn’t have heard anything else.

  The blast had been the roar of a shotgun.

  I got up and swung wildly, hitting the doorjamb. The flashlight moved quickly up and then down. It struck the side of my head and I thudded to one knee, feeling a sickening lurch toward, but not into, unconsciousness. A man sprang past me and ran for the stairs, the beam of the flashlight bobbing ahead of him. I lumbered after him, hitting both walls of the hallway with my shoulders. It was Like running in a dream. I couldn’t hear my own pounding footsteps. I couldn’t hear his when he hit the stairs and went down.

  He had too much of a lead on me. He’d make the street before I reached the door. He’d have a car of course. Like any good hired killer, he came complete with sawed-off shotgun and getaway vehicle.

  In the darkness at the top of the stairs I waited. I gripped the newel post to keep the house from spinning. You can never trust those old places in Georgetown. Just when you least expect it, they up and start spinning on you.

  I was thinking: if he knows there’s a back door and he uses it, he’s home free. But if he doesn’t, he’ll have to come back along the downstairs hallway on his way to the front door. There is light down there. You’ll see him. He tried to kill you. The bastard tried to kill you. If the Angora hadn’t sprung at him, you’d be wearing a face full of shotgun pellets.

  If he doesn’t use the back door he’ll pass right under you.

  He didn’t use the back door.

  I vaulted over the banister and dropped toward him.

  There may have been a split-second when he sensed I was above him and riding gravity in his direction. Just a split-second, it only took that long, and then I made the kind of landing the stunt men make in the movies, with all my weight and the drop of ten feet behind me as my knees struck his shoulders.

  He collapsed as if his legs had been hammered into the floor up to the hips. I sprawled on top of him. The back of his head jarred my teeth. I tasted the salt and iron of blood in my mouth. Somewhere I faintly heard a door slamming. He managed to squirm over on his back. I pinned him there. His heels pounded on the floor. He was still holding the flashlight and tried to hit me with it, but all he could move was his forearms. He had no leverage. He had sandy hair, wide, terrified eyes and a nose that had been broken at the bridge and set crookedly. The barrels of the shotgun he had used protruded out from under the small of his back. I yanked at them with my right hand. They had been sawed short. They were still warm. I sat back on my haunches with half my weight on his gut. By its barrels I raised the shotgun over my right shoulder. His head started to come up like a snake’s head will when you play the right kind of music.

  “Go ahead and move,” I said. “We’ll decorate the floor with your teeth.”

  His head settled back. Beyond it I saw a pair of plump matronly ankles and the hem of a housecoat.

  “Mrs.
Storm,” I told my landlady, and my voice was so calm and matter-of-fact it surprised me, “if you hop upstairs you’ll find a gun in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk in the living room. Be careful. It’s loaded.”

  She went and got it. She thrust it at me. Her hand was steady, but there was death in her voice. “Upstairs,” she said. “One of the cats. Was it the Angora? I … you can’t tell.”

  “He saved my life.” I got up with the Magnum in my hand, ready for business. “Turn over on your stomach and stay that way,” I told the hired killer.

  He did it. For the first and only time I heard Mrs. Storm use bad language. “I never saw a person killed,” she said. “You go right on and kill this son of a bitch now, Chester.”

  But instead I told her: “Call the police department. Central Bureaus and Squads. Ask for Lieutenant Borah.”

  He came inside of fifteen minutes. The best of cops have an instinct for trouble. He must have been waiting with the phone on his lap.

  23

  THE PUNK’S NAME WAS Greer. He had been hired right here in Washington, on Custer Street. Lieutenant Borah knew him by reputation. He had a record as long as an anteater’s tongue.

  “Who set it up?” Borah asked him.

  Greer smirked. “I’d like to go on living a few years yet, cop.”

  Borah hit him, backhanded and hard. Greer’s nose started to bleed. “My name is Lieutenant Borah,” Borah said. “Who set it up, punk?”

  Greer cast a furtive glance at me and at the two uniformed cops who had come with Borah. He smirked again, but you could see it took more effort this time. “Lieutenant Borah set it up.”

  Borah back-handed him again, much harder. Greer rocked with it. His eyes glazed and he spit out a tooth. One of the cops studied his fingernails. The other, with grave studious attention, lighted a cigarette.

  “Well, punk?” Borah said. “We could take turns.”

  Greer looked at his tooth on the floor. He felt his face and winced. His shoulders moved in a surrendering shrug. “The Sailor.”

  “Sailor Costain?”

  Greer nodded. Borah said: “Take Mr. Greer downtown and book him”

  At two A.M. I was sitting in Borah’s office at police headquarters. “A blank wall,” he said, turning away from the phone. The knuckles of his right hand were swollen. “Sailor Costain owns a Chesapeake Bay bugeye ketch. It’s fast and it’s a good shoal boat and the C.G. never caught Costain with as much as an extra pair of long-johns.”

  “He’s a smuggler?”

  “Smuggler’s collection man, outside the three-mile limit. Or he was. Yesterday he put. the bugeye in dry-dock and sailed out of Baltimore able-bodied on a Panamanian freighter bound for Capetown. You think Costain was the middle-man between those Arabs and Greer?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Borah said: “If you’re right about the Arabs, sure. They must have paid Costain to get lost, in case something went sour. And Greer, of course, can’t finger them for us.”

  The phone on Borah’s desk rang. “Borah,” he said into it and opened up the pit of his silence for a full minute and a half. Finally he said, “Right. Send it. Thanks.” He told me: “Verbal report from the police garage in Alexandria on the Capehart car.”

  “They keep late hours.”

  “They throw away the clock when somebody this close to the top is involved. They also throw it away when they’re dealing with murder.”

  I tried some of his silence on him. It worked. “Steering worm,” he said. “It had been bent out of shape. Before the accident because—” He frowned. “I forget the technical lingo. It was before the accident. Dr. Capehart was murdered.”

  “Greer?”

  “I doubt it. He’s alibied up until about nine last night. We’re checking that out. I think it will hold. Sailor Costain was practically running an employment agency for your Arabs.”

  Three people knew too much, I thought. One of them was dead, and attempts had been made on the lives of the other two. It wouldn’t stop there. It couldn’t. Sooner or later, if El Thamad was to hang out the business-as-usual sign in Motamar, he’d have to try again. What happened or didn’t happen at the AUC wouldn’t alter that. Another time would come when Samia could—and would—hurt him with what she knew. Another time would come when I could. El Thamad knew that just as well as I did.

  “Coast Guard’s radioing the Panamanian freighter,” Borah was saying. “They have no jurisdiction, you understand. They’re doing us a favor. The Colón will have to check with its home port and if they get the green light a cutter will make the run out to pick up Sailor Costain. Maybe he’ll finger your Arab.”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I’d hardly heard him. I was thinking: murder that looks like an accident but isn’t, and Dr. Capehart’s dead. Attempted murder that looks like an accident, and Samia’s lucky to be alive. They didn’t have to be so subtle with me. I’m a private eye and I’ve knocked around and from here to South America and Europe and India. The kind of enemies I’ve made are the kind who like to see their enemies dead. For me all they needed was a sawed-off shotgun and a guy willing to use it.

  I waited through the wee hours with Borah. He brought out a deck of cards and I took seventeen bucks off him at ten-cent poker. At four-thirty he got a preliminary report on Greer’s alibis. It looked as if they would check out. There was at least one, and possibly two additional hired killers on the loose.

  “If we bring Costain in and he identifies them,” Borah told me, “you and Miss Falcon may be off the hook.”

  Until El Thamad recruited more talent, I thought. “Raise you a dime,” I said.

  “Back,” he said.

  “Call.”

  “Two pair, kings up.”

  “Three treys.”

  I felt calm. I was sitting with a guy who could grow to be a friend and winning at dime poker and liking it. A man had fired a sawed-off two feet from my face a, few hours back, but that didn’t seem to matter. I’d had this feeling of bewildered rage when Dr. Capehart died at the hospital in Alexandria. I’d felt sorry for Samia and done what I could to help her. Both times I’d been involved emotionally; too involved to think calmly and objectively.

  Now, because it was me they had tried to kill, I didn’t feel emotionally involved. That sounds like a paradox but isn’t. However you die, you must go to your death alone. The involvement, if you are lucky and if any, is other people’s. Leading the life I led, and not dramatizing it, I did not expect to die in bed. It could have been Greer with his shotgun. It might be another Greer with another shotgun. It would be quick and it would be brutal and if my final enemy was quicker than I, I might never see it coming.

  If you worry about how you are going to die, you get out of my business. If you take my line of work seriously—always admitting, of course, a certain amount of necessary caution—you must put your own life on the line for other people. When things get hairy, it is what you have to offer.

  What caution I’d had was for Dr. Capehart and Samia. There is an element of doubt: you do not play with other people’s lives. By trying to kill me, Greer had made it both personal and impersonal. El Thamad had made it both personal and impersonal. It is not pleasant to be a target, but it is less pleasant to learn that you have saved a man’s life for nothing, or that though you will try to save the life of a frightened girl, you may fail.

  I was now the target. I was glad. I was calm. I knew what had to be done.

  When a dirty gray dawn that promised rain was smudging the window of Borah’s office, the call came from the Coast Guard. He listened, then hung up and told me: “Master of the Colón won’t stop. That’s his privilege. Perishable cargo—he says.”

  “Or a fat wad of bills for ballast.”

  We played another hand of poker. I pulled a ten-thousand-to-one shot, drawing one card to the inside of a straight flush and filling it.

  “If it wasn’t my deck,” Borah said wryly, “I’d swear you were educating those cards.”

>   “It’s my lucky night.” I stood up and went to the window. The first fat drops of rain splattered against the panes. “I’d like to push my luck,” I said slowly. “You willing to take a chance with me?”

  “I’d like to bet with—not against—a guy who can fill a straight flush on the inside. But you’re not talking about poker, are you?”

  “Listen. El Thamad’s contract killers can make their move today, or tomorrow, or next week—and there’s nothing we can do about it because we can’t touch El Thamad and his cronies. Right?”

  Borah nodded but said: “I don’t like the gleam in your voice. What’s up?”

  I told him. He listened with that silence of his. The only sign that he was reacting to my words was that the vertical groove between his eyes deepened. When I finished, he leaned back in his swivel chair, clasped his hands behind his head, stared at the ceiling, smiled, swore under his breath, stopped smiling, suddenly leaned forward and said: “Mister, I draw a salary every two weeks. I work for the District of Columbia. I can just see Commissioner Mann pinning a medal on me for making like a con-man. Besides which, El Thamad and his cronies have diplomatic immunity—remember?”

  “Sure they do. It means they can’t be prosecuted. Show me where it says they can’t be brought in for questioning.”

  “Then say we go ahead with it. The worst they can be reamed is to be declared personae non grata. Even if they get kicked out of the country, how’s that going to affect the status of their hired killers?”

  “It won’t, unless we can give them the kind of press that would make King Khalil drop them like three hot potatoes. If he does, they’ll no longer have a stake in what happens in Motamar. There’d be no reason for them to have Samia Falcon killed.”

  “And of course they’d be wild about you.”

  “I’ll worry about me.”

  “It occur to you the easiest way out of the corner you want to put them in is to have you hit on the head first?”