Оливер Блик - The Highbinders

I stuffed the wallet back into the dead man’s hip pocket and stood up holding the half card. I stood there, my back to the front of the shop, and I remember thinking that what I should do was to hurry with the card down to 221 Baker Street and knock up the principal resident there, tell him my tale, let him figure out what the card meant, and if he couldn’t, perhaps he wouldn’t mind giving his brother a ring.

That was the London I really wanted, of course, the London of clopping hansom cabs, and killing fog, and Sherlock Holmes, and bad drainage, mass poverty, a thirty-two-year life expectancy, and Queen Victoria.

What I had was London of the seventies with roaring inflation, a fading youth cult, a housing pinch, a Parliament that seemed to have lost its way, Queen Elizabeth, and a church-going Baptist forger with a touch of genius who preserved old Christmas trees and who lay dead at my feet of a broken neck at age fifty-one.

I like to think that I was lost in thought, but I’m afraid that it was fantasy again. Whatever it was, it kept me from hearing them. They must have been in the front of the shop, which was separated from the work area by a heavy tan curtain. I think I might have heard the curtain rustle. I sometimes still pretend that I did and that I carefully planned what followed.

But I don’t think that I ever really heard them. I don’t even think that I knew that they were there until they grabbed me from behind and slipped the cloth sack over my head. But I remembered what had happened the last time somebody had grabbed me from behind. I had used a couple of gutter tricks and I’d wound up in jail. I didn’t use any gutter tricks this time, not even any pseudo-karate. I fainted. Or pretended to.

It wasn’t easy, pretending to faint. I had to make my body go completely limp. The body doesn’t want to do that because if it does, it’s going to fall, and if it falls, it’s going to hit something hard, and that’s going to hurt. But I fell anyway and whoever had been holding me let me fall, out of surprise or out of hope that I would hurt myself and thus save them the trouble.

One of them said shit and the other one shhh. Then I heard them moving across the room. A door opened and closed. I took the cloth sack off my head and got up. Then somebody started pounding at the shop’s street door. A voice yelled, “Mr. Curnutt! You in there?” It was a policeman’s voice. I’m not sure how I knew that. I just know that I knew.

I didn’t want to talk to any more policemen. Not just then. So I went the way that those who had grabbed me had gone. I went out the back door and down the alley. I didn’t run. I wanted to, but I didn’t run. And I didn’t stop shaking until I was sitting in the bar at the very top of the Hilton with a double shot of I. W. Harper in front of me and another one already inside. I still don’t know why I ordered bourbon. I really don’t much like it.

They were pushing the roast beef at the Mirabelle that night, probably on the presumption that since I was American I would prefer hearty British fare to something French and funny. I ordered something French and funny anyhow, the blanquette of veal, because I wanted to see if they did it better than I did and, of course, they did.

Earlier at the Hilton I had called Eddie Apex and made what arrangements I had to for the next day. Then I settled down with the Evening Standard and read all about the Marble Piano Tomb Murder in Highgate Cemetery. It was the Standard ’s kind of story and it had even pushed an old standby, GUARD DOG SAVAGES CHILD, back to page seven or eight. I read the dog story, too, only to learn that the child was a sixteen-year-old girl who had been teasing the dog who had nipped her. Once.

The Standard didn’t have too many facts on the Highgate murder either, but it had gone with what it had. One William W. Batts, twenty-seven, of some place in Islington, had been found dead with his throat cut in Highgate Cemetery, tucked up underneath the open lid of a marble grand piano. A mysterious Bulgarian tourist was helping police with their inquiries. That was about all they could dig up on the late Billie Batts, so they had turned to the other dead man, the one who lay buried beneath the piano, and I learned that my ex-wife had been right. He had been an Armenian and so there went another illusion.

I kept seeing Billie Batts’s dead gray eyes and there was something about them that bothered me. So I telephoned the Standard, was given a sub-editor who sounded knowledgeable, and asked if he happened to know what the W in William W. Batts stood for.

“Why?” he said.

“Because a William Winston Batts owes me a lot of money,” I said.

“I’ll check,” he said. After a few moments he came back on the line. “You’re in luck,” he said. “The dead chap in Highgate’s name was William Wordsworth Batts.”

I wanted to ask some more questions, but I had already asked one too many, so I hung up. I wanted to ask if the late William Wordsworth Batts’s mother hadn’t once been married to one William Wordsworth Curnutt, locksmith, and had divorced him years ago, taking her son with her. I wanted to ask whether she hadn’t remarried and given her son the surname of her new husband. I wanted to ask those questions, but I didn’t really need to because the still gray eyes of William Wordsworth Batts, ne’er-do-well, that had stared out at me from underneath the open lid of the marble piano had been just like those equally still gray eyes of William Wordsworth Curnutt, locksmith, that had stared up at me, sort of upside-down, as their owner had lain propped up against an old anvil, dead of a broken neck.

I sat there in the Mirabelle until ten, dawdling over coffee and wondering about the dead father and son and wondering, indeed, if they were father and son, and if they were, what they had been up to, and why were they now both dead. After three cups of awful coffee, I still didn’t know, so I paid my bill, crossed the street, walked another hundred yards or so, and entered Shields, A Gambling Emporium.

Shields was a club, of course, as are all the gambling hells in London. At one time, tourists could join any of them for a pound or so. They still can, but they have to wait a while, forty-eight hours, I think, before they can lay their money down. I don’t know who thought up this rule, or why, or even when, but I assume it was passed to give London’s other fun purveyors a crack at the tourist dollar, or mark, or yen, before they fell to the croupier’s rake.

William Deskins, the man from Bunco, didn’t look much like a gambler or a tourist as he leaned against the bar, a glass of beer at his elbow. Instead, he looked like a cop who wanted to go home, but couldn’t, because he had to wait for some idiot who was always late.

The man at the door said, “Good evening, Mr. St. Ives,” and didn’t bother to ask for any membership card, which I didn’t have. I wasn’t particularly flattered that the man remembered me. He should. He was the dealer that I had tipped twenty pounds.

“Cagle around?” I said.

“Yes, sir. Would you like to see him?”

“In a few minutes,” I said and moved over to the bar.

“Hello, St. Ives,” Deskins said. “I thought you might turn up.”

“Ah, Inspector Deskins. What brings you out on a foul night like this?”

“I’m not an inspector and it’s a nice night.”

“It was just something that I’ve always wanted to say. I’ll buy you a drink.”

Deskins shook his head. “You’re the odd one, you are, St. Ives. But I’ll take your drink.”

I ordered two large whiskies from the bartender and after Deskins had tasted his, he said, “Ever hear of a chap called William Wordsworth Curnutt?”