Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  Maury said, “It’s a very interesting story for a true romance magazine, but I’m not a fiction writer. I handle facts that I have to prove. Was it necessary to bring me down here at this time of night in this hobo outfit to tell me something that’s coming in over every wire service every minute of the day?”

  Beshara Shebab’s young face darkened under the tan. He tossed down the raki that remained in the old tumbler, then picked up the fresh one and added some water from a carafe on the table. The clear liquor in the glass turned milky.

  “Cheers!” he said. “Since you’re not interested, Mr. Morel, let’s just drink to each other and we’ll go. I can’t buy another for that dollar you saw me give to the girl cleaned me.”

  Maury lifted his beer and took a swallow, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I wouldn’t be here, young man, unless I was interested, but this coat and beard stuff strikes me as being a mixture of bird-seed and corn. If you’re just a seaman who has jumped his ship, I’ll be glad to stake you to a ten-spot tomorrow morning, if you’ll come down to the Globe-Star office. But, sonny boy, you have to come up with a lot more detailed vital statistics about who, what, when, and where, if you hope to get a plugged dime out of the generous Globe-Star.”

  Beshara Shebab was watching three men who had left their table and started toward the front door. They went out. Shebab said, “I’m sure you won’t believe me, but I’ve gotten you into a mess here, Mr. Morel. I’m the son of a rich and important man, but I couldn’t have left Beirut alive without the help of friends, who smuggled me onto a freighter as a deckhand. These are the only clothes I have to my name, and I don’t have a cent. I heard when I inquired about you that you had the reputation of being a pretty fancy dresser. That’s why I suggested those clothes you have on to meet me here. I hope we’ve attracted no attention—but I’m afraid we’re not so lucky. I know we would have if you had dressed in any other way.”

  “All this could be a build-up, you know,” Maury told him.

  “Yes, it could. Everything that we’ve come to regard as inevitable in Lebanon is a build-up for some racket, in the U.S.A. I can give you facts and startling ones, but I want enough money to get some clothes, and I want introductions to several men I have to see.”

  “What else?”

  “I want you to fix me up with the immigration authorities if it’s possible to do so. I have no passport. If I was picked up, I’d be deported in a day.”

  “You’re overrating the power of the press as well as my credulity,” Maury informed him soberly. “I can’t promise anything, except if you want to start talking, to listen to what you have to say.”

  “Did you ever hear of the Claudius Office?”

  Again Maury shook his head in a silent negation. He groped in his pockets for a cigarette and found he had none. He knew plenty about the Claudius Office, but he wasn’t putting out right now. The more he could get Beshara Shebab to talk the quicker he would find out what the man really knew.

  “Hitler set the Claudius Office up in Berlin before World War II. It’s object was to uncover every means, fair or foul, of economic penetration into other countries. Robbery on a large scale by securing a maximum profit on foreign exchange, and by acquiring stock to control cartels.”

  “So the war’s over,” Maury said.

  “Really?” Beshara Shebab put both blistered hands palm up on the table and looked at them sadly. “You say that only because you and your countrymen are watching it now from grandstand seats. They’re expensive seats, Mr. Morel—and far enough away from the players, you hope, so that you won’t get hit with a foul ball.” He swished his raki around in the glass and took another swallow.

  “The Russians took over the Claudius Office when they moved into Berlin after World War II. I presume that’s the number of the war that you claim is over. Anyhow, the Claudius Office was moved to Moscow, lock, stock, and barrel, including many of Germany’s best financial brains who went along with it. The headquarters of the Office is housed in a sumptuous villa on the outskirts of Moscow, where it is operating right now—penetrating this country, as well as many others. If you’re interested I’ll go on.”

  “Go on.” Maury swallowed some beer.

  “I’ll tell you how. This penetration is being carried out through the use of financial intermediaries—numbered accounts in Swiss banks, some in South America—and my father’s bank in Beirut. Without the use of those numbered accounts there would have to be full disclosure of who controls those vast sums of money. If that was known, there could be no penetration.”

  “Vast sums?”

  “Russia has a gold reserve which the lowest estimate rates at over five billion dollars,” Beshara Shebab continued. “One of your top financial writers on The New York Times rated it at twelve billion not so long ago. My father rates it at fifteen billion, and he’s in a good position to know.”

  “You were going to tell me what you know.”

  Shebab leaned closer across the table. “Several million dollars of that Russian gold is in a numbered account in the Banque du Shebab-Syrie. I know the name of the man who controls that account, as well as untold millions more in numbered accounts in Switzerland. That man is here in the United States. I know how he got in, the name he’s using, and what he is trying to do.”

  A sailor got up from a nearby table and went into the men’s room, brushing close to the back of Beshara’s chair. Beshara leaned still closer to Maury, whitening under his tan. “I’ve told you all I intend to, here. If you want more, where can we talk in privacy?”

  “My apartment,” Maury said uneasily. “It’s just a few blocks from here. We can walk it. I assume you have proof to give me.”

  “It’s all right here, sewed into this jacket. I’m getting out of here, Mr. Morel, but not with you. I’m—” Beshara Shebab bit his words off as the man came out of the men’s room and returned to his table.

  “Sit here and wait a few minutes.” Shebab was talking in a barely audible whisper now. “I’m going in the washroom and out the window there. There’s an alley in back of this place that runs up to Charlton Street. Meet me there in five minutes and I’ll walk on home with you.” He got up and went into the men’s room, with his jacket over his arm.

  Maury slowly finished his beer before he got up to make his way through the tables and out the front door.

  Quiet, darkness, and drizzle wrapped around him tightly, broken only by the blool-red glow drifting down from the Beirut neon sign. He quickened his steps up to Charlton Street, suddenly anxious for company. If Beshara Shebab really had proof, as he claimed he had, his information was worth money—plenty of money. Hal Gow, the city editor of the Globe-Star might not have the authority to pay it. If he hadn’t, Maury would take it up to the Old Man, himself—Walter Jeffers owned twenty-one papers in the G-S Syndicate. He’d pay out a lot on Maury’s say-so. He’d done it before, and Maury had never let him down.

  At the dark narrow slot of the alley, he stopped and listened, gripped by an apprehension that for him was most unusual. He was off his regular beat, he decided—prowling a part of New York City that by night was as foreign as the byways of Casablanca or Cairo.

  He looked around at the rain drenched street, deserted and still. At his muted cry of: “Shebab, are you there?”—he was answered by a groan just inside the alley.

  Numbly, his fears swept away, he took a couple of steps toward the sound and knelt beside the man at his feet. Feeling him cautiously, Maury’s hand touched warm blood and the haft of a knife that was jammed to the hilt under Shebab’s left shoulder.

  “Beshara! Who got you, fellow? Was it Pringle? Tell me where I can find him.” He tried to turn the limp deadweight half over, and noticed that the jacket was gone. “Who got you, Beshara?” he asked again. “Tell me where I can find him!”

  “Try Turlock—Turlock,” Shebab’s breath whistled out two more last words: “Amity … rest.…” Then the world crashed down on Maury’s skull and dropped hi
m like a stone.

  Chapter Three

  Mike MacGmulley, a brawny longshoreman, knocked off work unloading a freighter docked in Pier 42, about midnight. He had developed a tremendous thirst for himself after eight solid hours of wielding a bale hook. His first stop under the West Side Highway was in a saloon near Le Roy Street.

  There, a couple of shots of whisky washed down by half-a-dozen beers made him feel better, but not entirely full. It took three more stops plus an indeterminate number of boiler-makers before Mike felt rested enough to navigate an unsteady passage westward to the room he lived in on lower Seventh Avenue.

  It was nearly one o’clock when he stopped at the corner of Washington and Charlton Streets and squinted owlishly through the rain at the red sign of the Beirut Café.

  He could stop in there and use the men’s room, and have himself just one more drink, or maybe two, except experience had taught him that it wouldn’t stop there. The two would grow into six and he wouldn’t get home until all his money had gone down the drain. Maybe he’d even tangle with the cops again.

  Still, he was facing a physiological problem that had to be dealt with. He had enough beer inside of him to float that rusty old tub that he’d been unloading.

  Well, half a block from where he stood was a nice clean alley. No charge. No bar. It had served him before in emergencies such as this one. Tonight it could serve him again.

  Mike staggered along toward it, steadying himself with his right hand against the wall.

  A moment later he stumbled over something soft and fell flat on his face. Stunned with the unexpectedness, he lay still for seconds, his arm stretched out in a trickling stream of water that was cascading streetward down a narrow gutter in the center of the alley.

  Finally he pushed himself to his knees, cursing softly, and groped around in the inky black. His powerful fist closed hard on the heel of a shoe.

  “’Tis just as I thought—some filthy, lousy, guzzling sot, sleepin’ here in me own little alley to make me fall and break me precious neck!”

  MacGulley wiped his wet hands on the seat of his work pants, found dry matches in the pocket of his windbreaker and struck one. It flared up bright, shielded from the drizzle by his cupped hand.

  Suddenly his stomach retched, tearing his insides into pieces. White and shaken, he got to his feet, cold sober. “Mither of God, ’tis dead they are, not drunk at all!” he kept telling himself. “Dead as a couple of fish in the harbor. Not one, but two!”

  It was ten minutes past one before Mike found a telephone booth outside of a nearby closed-up filling station. He dropped in a dime, and dialed Spring 7-3100.

  On the third ring a man’s voice answered: “Headquarters, 82.”

  “I stumbled over a body,” Mike said. “In fact there’s two—up an alley off Charlton Street, between Washington and Greenwich. One’s got a knife sticking out of his back. I didn’t wait to see more.”

  “Your name, please.”

  “Charley MacCarthy.” MacGulley hung up in a hurry, and hurried back to his humble room. God be praised, he had nothing to do with murders like that. He might go after a man with a box hook, if the fight was fair, but sticking a knife in his back was a type of murder that he didn’t hold with. Not a nice thing to do.

  Police Operator 82, on switchboard detail in the Trouble Turret, frowned as he heard the click of the phone. Some drunk, probably trying to get a vicarious thrill. On legitimate calls the phoner would usually give his name, say where he was calling from, and wait there for the police to arrive. Well, the calls kept pouring in to Communications Bureau faster than your eyes could watch the lights flash on. Hoax or not, every one had to be followed through.

  Operator 82 notified a radio announcer behind the glass cage at the end of the room. Dispatcher 10 threw his practiced glance over the large detailed map of the streets spread out before him, where numbered toy cars were spotted all about the city.

  Car 26 was at Varick and VanDam, just two short blocks from the alley off of Charlton. Car 31 was at Hudson and Clarkson, almost equally close to the scene of the crime—if there’d been a crime.

  Speaking into the microphone, the Dispatcher said, “Calling Cars Twenty-six and Thirty-one. Proceed to alley on Charlton Street between Washington and Greenwich. Repeat: Proceed to alley on Charlton Street between Washington and Greenwich. Signal Thirty-two. Dispatcher Ten. That is all.”

  Reaching over he moved the two toy cars on the map to their new location. In less than a minute both of the radio cars were there, and the brilliant beams from their spotlights were lighting the alley.

  Looking incredibly long through the raindrops, the handle of the knife protruding from the back of Beshara Shebab cast its shadow against the nearby streaming wall.

  “The one in the overcoat is still alive,” Officer Ruark of Car 31 told his partner, Silenski.

  Silenski went back to the car to report to headquarters.

  Five minutes later the vast machinery of the New York Police Department had gone into action, spreading outward and upward to reach the brass, like the mushroom from an H-bomb.

  Detective Lornegan, catching squeals that night in the local precinct station, was notified. He and his partner, Detective Abe Greenbaum, rolled for the scene after calling the Precinct Squad Commander, Lieutenant Hutchinson, and routing him out of his home.

  Acting Captain Ben Knox, a lieutenant drawing captain’s pay, was the head of Homicide Squad, Manhattan West. The phone call to him roused him from a very sound sleep at half past one. He got the details from his assistant, Lieutenant Frank May.

  Captain Knox had developed some strange sixth sense through the years. This case of a seaman stabbed to death, and a bum knocked cold, could have been routine, but somehow it impressed the captain as being sticky. He decided to roll, when actually he didn’t have to. It was well within his province to leave that night routine up to Lieutenant May.

  Charlton Street was a blaze of lights, and choked with cars, when Captain Knox got there. He was greeted by Lieutenant May, three detectives from Homicide West, and a detective stenographer—useless for the moment since there had been no one found to question.

  A photographer and a fingerprint expert from the Bureau of Criminal Identification had already been busy with their kits working up the alley under floodlights set up by a crew from the Emergency Service truck, who had also roped off the scene.

  Captain Knox pushed his way into the alley, accompanied by Lieutenant May. “What happened to the bum?” he asked one of the uniformed officers from Car 26.

  The man saluted. “The ambulance from St. Vincent’s was the first thing here after we phoned in.” He pointed down to Beshara Shebab. “The intern pronounced him ‘dead on arrival,’ but the bum was still alive. They took him to St. Vincent’s.”

  “Who’s staked out with him?”

  “Ruark and Silenski went up with him in Car 31, Captain. They said they’d stick around until they got a patrolman to relieve them.”

  Lieutenant Hutchinson, the Precinct Squad Commander, came up behind Captain Knox and touched him on the arm. “It might be a good bet, Sir, if you and Lieutenant May, and the rest of Homicide came back with me to the Beirut Café. Lornegan is carrying this case. He and his partner, Greenbaum, are down there now.”

  “What makes in the café?”

  “We may be on to something,” Lieutenant Hutchinson said as the group walked down Washington Street. “There’s a window out of the men’s can into the alley. The men from the Tech. Lab. took a shot of some prints there a few minutes ago. Good ones they claim. The window frame was dusty. They got a footprint, too, off the sill. If they match with the corpse, he went out out of the café by that window.”

  “How soon will we know?”

  “Any minute. They’re bringing them up in the darkroom on the mobile lab. truck right now.”

  Detective Lornegan met them inside the door, his sharp face glum. The café seated eighty, but not more than twenty were left
around among the tables.

  Detective Greenbaum came up from the rear. “There were twice as many customers here when we got here,” he told the Homicide men. “We did what we could and got nothing at all in seven languages. I’ve got what names and addresses they gave me. Ships, mostly. If we need to look them up again we’ll find them in Japan.”

  “See what you can get out of the rest of them.” Lieutenant May turned loose his three Homicide men to question the remaining guests. He pointed to the two waitresses who were having coffee at a far back table in the corner. “You’re carrying this case, aren’t you, Lornegan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “Yes, sir. The thin one thinks that a man who was sitting right by the men’s room door might have gone in there and out the window, but he’d paid his check and she isn’t sure.”

  “Anyone with him?”

  “A dirty-faced man with a three day growth. Old tan overcoat on. Looked to her like a bum.”

  “Sounds promising,” May said. “Take both of them and see if they can identify that corpse as the man who was there. Make sure. Who owns this joint?”

  Lornegan jerked his thumb toward the mean-eyed stout man who was resting his sleeve-gartered arms on the bar. Captain Knox said, “You take him, Lieutenant,” and took a chair at a nearby table.

  Lieutenant May beckoned the stenographer and went with him to the front of the bar.

  “Do you own this place?”

  “Yes.” The stout man’s face grew sullen.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Abul Khaled.”

  “Spell it, will you?”

  The proprietor spelled it.

  Lornegan passed them, herding the two unwilling waitresses out the front door.

  “Where do you live?” Lieutenant May went on.

  “Upstairs here.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your nationality?”

  “I’m an American. A taxpayer.”