Оливер Блик - The Highbinders

“Where?”

“Perhaps in Shaftesbury Avenue. Perhaps in the Fulham Road. Perhaps one of those wogs will need some cash one Saturday and flog it down on Shaftesbury Avenue for a quid or two.”

“And you’ve got a new hobby, haven’t you?” I said. “Sword collecting.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I’ve got a new hobby.”

I reached into my jacket pocket and took them out and handed them to Deskins. “Here,” I said. “These’ll help with your new hobby.” They were the Polaroid shots of the Sword of St. Louis that Ned Nitry had given me.

He stared at the color photographs and licked his thin lips twice. “So that’s what it looks like?” he said. “That’s what three million quid worth of old sword looks like.”

“That’s it,” I said.

“You don’t believe it, do you? You don’t believe that it’ll turn up?”

“No. I don’t. I believe that it’s at the bottom of the Thames in about ten feet of muck. Maybe twenty.”

Deskins shook his head. “It’ll turn up. It’ll turn up one of these days.”

“On Shaftesbury Avenue,” I said.

“That’s right. On Shaftesbury Avenue.”

They called my flight then and Deskins stuck out his hand and I shook it. “Well, good luck, St. Ives.”

“Pleasant dreams,” I said.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Eddie, the Adelphi Apartment-Hotel’s bell captain, greeted me warmly. “Where you been?”

“London,” I said.

“Whadja wanta go there for?”

“To look at the Queen.”

“Yeah, well, that lawyer of yours got here earlier, so I let him into your place. I don’t figure he’ll steal nothing.”

“Not enough to worry about anyway.”

Myron Greene had lunch ready, all spread out on the poker table. I was touched. He had bought some Filipino beer that I like, some thick roast beef sandwiches, potato salad, and even some Polish dills. “What’s the occasion?” I said.

“It’s May nineteenth.”

“What’s May nineteenth?”

“It’s the feast day of St. Ives.”

“I didn’t know you were Catholic, Myron. You don’t much look it.”

“He’s the patron saint of lawyers.”

“I didn’t know that”

“His emblem is the cat.”

“I didn’t know that either. And I don’t think you did until you looked it up.”

“My secretary looked it up actually,” Myron Greene said, pouring himself some beer. “After I got that letter of yours, I had her look up St. Louis and while she was at it, I decided to find out about St. Ives.”

“Well, thanks for the feast day.”

“St. Louis was real enough,” Greene said, “but according to a friend of mine at the Metropolitan Museum, his sword is nothing but rumor.”

I tried the sandwich. It was excellent. “Well, tell your friend that three million pounds’ worth of rumor is lying at the bottom of the Thames. That’s just my opinion though. Somebody else thinks it’s going to turn up any Saturday now in a secondhand store on Shaftesbury Avenue.”

“Maybe you’d better tell me about the rest of it,” Myron Greene said. “About what happened after you wrote me that letter.”

So I told him and when I was through, he said, “Well, you won nearly as much as your fee would have been. I didn’t know you played poker quite that well.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I was betting a cinch hand. That’s not real poker because you’re not gambling anymore. It’s a form of licensed stealing, something like an insurance company. But it’s free money, isn’t it? The tax people don’t have to know about it?”

Myron Greene sighed. “Hand it over, will you? Yesterday I got a call from our friend at the IRS. It seems that Inland Revenue in London has gone to a great deal of trouble to notify Washington of just how much you won. Our friend at IRS thought we’d like to know.”

“It really does go with death, doesn’t it?” I said. “Taxes, I mean.”

Myron Greene shifted in his chair and looked uncomfortable, the way that he always looks when he thinks that I’m going to try to say something profound. “What were you going to do with the money?” he said. “I mean the money that you weren’t going to tell the tax people about?”

“I was going to spend it,” I said.

“How?”

“I had this fantasy coming back on the plane. I always have fantasies on planes. There’s this guy out in Vegas who calls himself Amarillo Slim and is supposed to be the world’s champion poker player. Well, in this fantasy I was going to take the money and fly out to Vegas and challenge him for the title.”

“That’s a good fantasy,” Myron Greene said.

“There was only one thing wrong. I couldn’t think of what to call myself. I needed something snappy and halfway sinister like Amarillo Slim.”

“How about Philosophical Phil?” Myron Greene said.

I told him I would have to think about it.