Оливер Блик - The Highbinders

She put her glass down and turned back toward the window. “That was it,” she said, “but that’s not it now. I’m stuck with Eddie. I’m in as deep as he is now.”

“And Eddie still trusts you, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. He trusts me.”

“That’s more than I do.”

She turned. “What about my proposal? Will you give us our twenty-four hours to patch things over?”

“No.”

She stood there looking at me. This time she had slipped on a thoughtful expression. “If you do find the sword, I know where and how we could sell it.”

“For three million pounds.”

“Yes,” she said. “For at least three million pounds.”

“Just you and I.”

“The two of us.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with that, honey.”

“What?”

“For some reason I don’t think I’d live long enough to spend mine.”

Hammersmith isn’t all that hard to find. You just start heading west and run right into it. But Robin Styles didn’t seem to be too sure where it was, so I had to get out a small map and start giving him rights and lefts.

“Don’t you ever get out of Mayfair?” I said.

“Certainly, but I don’t come here very often. No occasion to, really.”

He had picked me up in the Volkswagen promptly at midnight, but because of our wanderings through West Kensington, we didn’t pull up in the alley behind 14 Beauclerc Street until nearly one. We coasted up to the back door of the locksmith’s shop with our lights and engine off.

I reached into the back seat for my sack of impromptu burglar tools and suddenly remembered one I had forgotten. “Shit,” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot to buy a flashlight.”

“Here,” Styles said, “I have a pocket torch. One of these disposable things that you throw away when it burns out.”

“You always carry it?”

“No, I bought it late this afternoon. I noticed that you didn’t buy one at the ironmonger’s, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

“Thank you. I’m very sensitive.”

“Not at all.”

Holding my sack of tools in one hand and the small flashlight in the other, I got out of the Volkswagen and went around it to the back door of the locksmith’s shop. I was worrying about what tools I should use to pry open the door, especially since it was a locksmith’s door. I was also worrying about the murder squad from Scotland Yard and whether they had sealed the door. Homicide does that in New York sometimes. Seals the door. I ran the flashlight up and down the locksmith’s door. It wasn’t sealed. At least not from the outside.

“What’re you doing?” Styles whispered.

“Trying to decide what I should use.”

“Mind if I have a look?” he said. “I’ve locked myself out a few times.”

I could see that he was going to be a great help. He took the flashlight and ran it up and down the door, inspected the hinges, and then shined it on the locks. There were three of them. “Hmm,” he said and gave the doorknob a tentative sort of try. It turned easily and the door opened.

Robin Styles stood there as if expecting to be congratulated, or maybe even knighted, so I handed him his prize, the monkey wrench.

“I say,” he whispered, “what’s this?”

“A blunt instrument,” I whispered back. “The door’s open. That means somebody has gone inside and is, or is not, still there. If the somebody is still there, you may wish to bash him with a blunt instrument.”

“I’ve never done anything like this.”

“You virgins are all alike. Here. You can carry the tools, too.”

“What do you have?”

I showed him the huge screwdriver, the nearest thing to a legitimate jimmy that the ironmonger had.

“You seem to know the way,” he said. “I think you’d better go first.”

Well, why not, I thought. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test that I had once taken on a female psychologist’s dare showed that I had definite leadership potential. Most people who rate high on the schizophrenic scale do, and she’d said that I was right up there with the best of them, Huey Long, Pancho Villa, George Custer. People like that. The real crazies. But I’d rated very low on paranoia. “That’s your trouble,” she’d said. “You not only believe that there’s nobody out to get you, but you wouldn’t give much of a shit if they were.”

St. Ives, the born leader, stepped into the workshop of the dead locksmith and shined the light around. Nobody shot at me so I let my breath out and took one in, the first in a long while, it seemed. From the little light that the small torch made, the place looked much the same except for the floor near the anvil. There was no dead body slumped against it at an odd angle, but a thick white chalk mark outlined where it had once lain.

I crossed the shop and this time looked carefully behind the thick tan curtain that separated the work area from where the customers were served. There was nobody there.

“Up the stairs,” I whispered to Styles and we went up them slowly, I with my screwdriver, he with his monkey wrench, both of us poised to run like hell if there had been the slightest noise. There wasn’t and we came out into the kitchen which, from what I could see, was still as neat and tidy as ever.

I led Robin Styles through the small dining room into the sitting room. I found myself holding my breath again, but when the light from my flash picked out the Christmas tree, I let it out. It was still there.

“A Christmas tree?” Styles whispered, putting a lot of exclamation into it.

“That’s right.”

“But it’s May.”

“Maybe it was always Christmas in his heart,” I said and ran the light around the base of the tree. The packages still lay there, but they looked different, and I saw that they had all been unwrapped and then rewrapped by somebody who didn’t know too much about wrapping packages. The police, I assumed, looking for clues. I hoped they had found one.

I located a small table and put the flash on it so that its light shined on the tree. “Give me that sack of tools,” I said to Robin Styles and he handed them over.

I took out the long-nosed pliers and the saw and squatted down by the tree. I put the pliers down and started sawing away at the tree’s lowest branches. When I thought I had sawed enough of them off, I turned my head toward Robin Styles and said, “This thing rests in a big bucket. You hold onto the bucket while I pull.”

He knelt down and awkwardly grasped the lips of the big pail or bucket. I could think of no graceful way that he could have done it. I grasped the tree by its trunk and pulled. Nothing happened. I pulled again and metal scraped against the sides of the pail and the base of the tree moved up about six inches. I gave another mighty pull and it was free.

The branches had scratched my face and hands and were making them itch. I lowered the tree until it lay on its side. I picked up the flashlight and shined it on the base of the tree, the part that had been resting in the pail. Billy Curnutt, locksmith, had been a proper craftsman. A section of iron pipe about an inch and a half in diameter looked as if it had been run horizontally through the trunk of the tree. When wedged down into the pail, the pipe would have braced the tree firmly.

I ran the light up the trunk of the tree. Although almost invisible, a thin gray wire was wrapped tightly around the trunk. The wire was almost the same color as the bark of the tree, if a Scotch pine, which is coniferous, has bark, and I suppose it does.

I took the long-nosed pliers and started snipping the wire. Once I had it started it unwrapped easily. Then I held out my hand.