Ted Bell - Tsar

“Officer, look, I’m in kind of a hurry here, and I’d appreciate it if you’d just give me my license back and take the rest as a small token of my undying gratitude.”

“Look, pal, I-”

“Okay, okay, I gotcha.”

Strelnikov stuck his hand back inside his pocket and pulled out a neatly packed wad of cash.

“Five thousand dollars. That’s my final offer,” Paddy said, giving the guy his killer smile, the one he’d learned on the streets of Brighton Beach and Coney, use it just before you punch some scumbag’s lights out. “Christmas is right around the corner, you know, officer. Five large could come in very handy.”

He could tell from the look on the cop’s face which way this thing was going to go. Due south.

“Okay, sir, I’m going to ask you to step out of the vehicle. Now. Keep your hands up where I can see them.”

“Look, you’re making a fatal mistake here, officer.”

“Out of the car, sir,” the trooper said, backing away with his hand on his holster. “Now!”

The honest cop didn’t see the ugly little snub-nose appear just above the windowsill. Maybe he’d missed that word, fatal. Too bad, it was a key word.

Pop pop , went the.38. Two of the best, smack dab in the middle of the trooper’s noggin.

“Buh-bye,” Paddy said, looking out the window at the dead man splayed in the red snow as he accelerated away, the Mustang fishtailing wildly on the icy shoulder of the highway.

Hey. Shit happens.

All you can do is try, right?

Teakettle Cottage perched on a narrow coral precipice some fifty feet above the turquoise sea. It was a study in simplicity. The cottage was perfectly suited to Hawke’s needs. In addition to satisfying his desire for peace, the precariously situated house provided a sense of “living rough.” Hawke’s more romantic instincts, which he would never admit to possessing, equated roughness with reality.

He had discussed this rather arcane notion over cocktails one rainy evening with the brainiest man he knew, the famous criminalist Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve of Scotland Yard.

Congreve had said that Hawke’s very human instinct, he suspected, equated the sheer discomfort and occasional violence of living directly on the sea with some guarantee of authenticity. Living always on the very edge of things the way Hawke did, with the attendant lack of safety, provided Hawke, Congreve believed, with a measure of truth.

That, Hawke had informed his friend, was laying it on a bit thick. But while Hawke much preferred to swim on life’s surface, Congreve tended to dive deep. It’s what had made their lifelong friendship such a lasting and successful one. In the cloak-and-dagger world they inhabited, they needed each other.

Hawke’s modest limestone house was partially hidden in a grove of ancient lignum vitae, kapok, and fragrant cedar trees. Coconut palms lined a sandy lane that finally arrived at the house after winding through a mature banana grove. The layout of the house proper was an exercise in minimalism: a broad coquina-shell terrace that overlooked the Atlantic fanned out from a rounded, barnlike main room open to the elements.

A crooked white-bricked watchtower on the seaward side of the domed house formed the teakettle’s “spout.”

The large whitewashed living room, with its well-worn Spanish-tile floors, was furnished with old planter’s chairs and cast-off furniture donated or simply left behind by various residents over the years.

The massive carved monkey-wood bar standing in one corner had been donated by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who’d lived in the house on and off for many seasons. At one end of the bar stood an ancient but still operable shortwave radio. The old set was rumored to have been used by Admiral Sir Morgan Wheelock, commandant of the Royal Navy Air Station Bermuda during World War II. From Teakettle’s terrace, he’d monitored the comings and goings of U-boat and German merchant marine traffic just offshore.

Rumor also had it that Teakettle was once a safe house for briefing British spies en route to assignments in various Caribbean stations. Having heard that rumor, Hawke delighted all the more in his tiny home, his little den of spies.

The battered mahogany canasta table where Hawke took all of his indoor meals was allegedly a gift of Errol Flynn. Flynn sought refuge in the cottage for a few months in 1937, during a particularly stormy period in his marriage to Lili Damita. Leafing through the faded guest book one rainy night, Hawke saw an entry in Flynn’s own hand, saying he’d found Teakettle “a perfectly ghastly house, no hot water, pictures of snakes plastered all over the bedroom wall.”

There was plenty of hot water now, and Flynn’s snake pictures were mercifully long gone. There were only two pictures in Hawke’s bedroom now: an old black-and-white of his late parents seated in the stern of a gondola on their honeymoon in Venice and a picture of his late wife, Victoria, taken when she was a child. In the photograph, she was sitting on an upper limb of an old oak tree on a levee beside the Mississippi River.

On a table in the bedroom’s corner was an old Victrola, a Cole Porter disc still sitting on the turntable, next to it a Royal typewriter. Hawke had seen Hemingway’s name scrawled in the guest book. Papa had apparently stayed at Teakettle a few times, too. He’d visited the island during a fishing tournament, staying on as a guest of Flynn, working like mad to finish his book Islands in the Stream . Hawke could imagine him over there in the corner, shirtless and sweating in Bermuda shorts, sipping Cinzano from the bottle and banging away on the Royal.

Hawke took great comfort in his strange little house. Oddly enough, considering his substantial real estate holdings, it offered him a sense of abiding peace he’d not found elsewhere. In addition to his small room, there were three other bedrooms. Hawke had chosen the smallest for two reasons. It had three large windows, framed with vivid purple bougainvillea, that opened directly onto the sea. And the most intriguing thing of all was that it had a secret door, one that concealed an escape hatch.

At the back of his cedar-lined closet, a door-sized panel slid upward to reveal a serpentine staircase of hand-hewn coral. The narrow steps curved down to the most perfect fresh saltwater pool you could imagine, a fairly large deep-water lagoon, sheltered within rock walls but with a sizable opening to the sea. The deep blue pool was edged with jade where it washed over the rocks. He’d had a wooden dock built and kept his pretty little masthead sloop tied there, the Gin Fizz .

Hawke had indulged himself with one expensive eccentricity. Knowing his bedroom was some twenty feet directly above the surface of the lagoon, he’d had a three-foot-diameter hole cut in the floor and installed a gleaming brass fireman’s pole in the center of it. This system allowed him to slip naked from bed of a morning, still half asleep, grab the pole, and slide into the water below without even opening his eyes until he was three feet below the surface.

It was a lovely way to wake up.

He’d paddle around for ten minutes or so in the pool of sea-blue water, swim out into the open Atlantic, and commence his five-point daily regimen.

The newly devised fitness program was straightforward enough.

First, a 500-yard open-water swim, breaststroke or sidestroke, to be completed in less than twelve minutes, thirty seconds. A minimum of eighty pushups, four sets of twenty in two minutes. He would do the last set with one arm. Next, a minimum of eighty situps in two minutes. A minimum of eight dead-hang pullups. And finally, a 1.5-mile run along the beach to be accomplished in less than eleven minutes, thirty seconds. This run was always completed wearing combat assault boots, namely his old Oakleys from the Royal Navy.