John Abbott - Scimitar

“What information?” she asked.

They were on the corner of Fifty-ninth and Third now, waiting for the light to change. The moment it did, he sprinted for the opposite curb. She almost tripped trying to keep up with him. A cab driver blasted his horn at them even though the light was nowhere near turning against them.

“Will you for Christ’s sake slow down !” she shouted.

“I’m late,” he said, and glanced at his watch without really noting the time and without breaking stride.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “The coronation?”

“Close but no cigar,” he said.

“What information do you have about him?” she asked.

“Krishnan Hemkar,” he said. “Doctor of Medicine.”

“Yes,” she said. She had already told him this. It was nothing new.

“There was nothing on him in our computer, British mother or not,” Geoffrey said. “But you said you’d met on a train coming from Los Angeles, so I...”

“Yes.”

“... called our consulate there and asked them to conduct a routine paper chase...”

“Oh good,” she said.

He broke his pace for only an instant, giving her the look an exasperated older brother might have given a dumb kid sister who’d floated his stamp collection in the kitchen sink. Their eyes locked, blue on brown. He began walking again, even more swiftly, it seemed.

“There is, in fact, a Dr. Hemkar in residence at a hospital in Los Angeles. A call there netted a home address and a telephone number. I can let you have those,” he said, “in case you’d like to make further inquiries yourself.”

“That was very kind of you,” she said.

“What was?”

“Calling the hospital.”

“My colleague in Los Angeles made the call, not me.”

“Either way, it was very kind.”

They were waiting for the light to change on the corner of Fifty-ninth and Park.

“You have to go the moment it turns green,” he said. “If you expect to get past the median and all the way to the other side.”

“I know,” she said.

“I despise Park Avenue,” he said.

“I live on Park Avenue,” she said.

“Then you should make it narrower,” he said, and then, “There it goes,” and bolted off the sidewalk. She ran after him, past the median divider, onto the opposite curb.

“If you’ll let me have the number,” she said, “I won’t bother you further.”

She sounded very British. She guessed it was contagious.

“It’s back at the office,” he said.

“Couldn’t someone...?”

“I was ready to give it to you on Saturday, but you hung up on me.”

Still sulking, she thought. The stupid ass.

“Well, isn’t there anyone who...?”

“Lucy would never find it.” He saw her puzzled look. “My so-called secretary.”

“I really would like to get started on this.”

“Yes, I realize. But I do have this other business to attend to, you see.”

“Maybe if you told me where it was...”

“Quite out of the question. Besides, I don’t know where I put it, exactly. I’d have to look for it. You’re fortunate I didn’t just toss it in the wastebasket when you hung up on...”

“Look, are you going to carry that to the grave?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I mean, get off it, okay? I’ve apologized six times already, do you want me to slit my throat?”

“We’re here,” he said.

They were standing in front of the Plaza Hotel.

The ASPCA had taken away all the cats, but the place still stunk of their piss. Santorini opened all the windows the minute he got in the apartment, leaving the door open — CRIME SCENE sign still tacked to it — so’s he could get a crosscurrent of air. But it was so fuckin’ hot today you prolly couldn’t even find a breeze at the beach, which is where he wished he was instead of sniffing around a dead lady’s whatnots. He’d had to go up the One-Nine to get the fuckin’ key to the padlock on the door, and a fat lot of good that done him. He’d been here for almost an hour now, going through every closet and drawer in the place, but so far he’d come up with nothing. Truth was, he didn’t know what the fuck he was looking for.

If this really was some kind of spy shit here, where was the shortwave radio and the little book of codes? Where was the list of safe houses? Where were the dozen passports in different names? Where was the little vial of poison you had to swallow if you got captured by the enemy? So far, all he’d found were dresses and skirts and sweaters and socks and bras and panties and overcoats and shoes and checkbooks with the lady’s name, Angela Cartwright, printed on them, and some letters from somebody with the same last name in Liverpool, England, probably a relative, Jesus, it stunk in here.

He decided to go through the lady’s garbage.

Going through the garbage was something most cops hated doing, which is why he was guessing nobody from the One-Nine had yet gone through it. You could tell by just a casual glance at anybody’s garbage whether or not it had been sifted. This garbage did not look as if it had been touched by human hands since the time it was placed here in the pail under the sink, whenever the fuck that had been. The lady was already dead since Thursday, and here it was Saturday already, who knew how long the oldest of the garbage had been sitting here? Cop hands, neither, for that matter. Just one look at this shit under the sink and Santorini knew it was pristine, so to speak. Between the stink of the garbage and the stink of the cat piss, he wished he had a gas mask.

He got down to work.

Top layer first, because usually the top layer was the closest in time to the victim’s hour of departure from this earth, may she rest in peace, he thought. Peeling off all the shit layer by layer, studying it, placing it on the newspapers he’d spread on the kitchen floor, this was some terrific job here. If the pay wasn’t so good — gimmee a break, willya? — he’da left the job in a minute, become a spy himself, go to bed all over the world with exotic girls trying to pry secrets from him. All over the world. Istanbul, wherever that was. Lots of spies came from Istanbul.

Going through the shit bit by bit, wanting to pinch his nose together, but his hands were all dirty already. Then going through it all over again, wondering how much money spies made, thinking if this limey lady here in this apartment was a spy, sword on her tit or not, he would eat all this garbage. Spies were supposed to be glamourous. The stuff in this lady’s closet and drawers reminded him of what his Aunt Christina used to wear. And the leftovers in this lady’s garbage pail were the kind somebody with no imagination at all would eat, weren’t spies supposed to be inventive? Creative even?

Was plain yoghurt creative? Empty container of it, coffee grinds clinging to the inside of it, Jesus. Half a squeezed grapefruit, covered with mildew. A rancid stick of butter. Or margarine. Or whatever the hell it was. When was the last time anybody emptied this garbage pail? At least a dozen empty cans of cat food. Seafood Delight, and Beef and Cheese Mix, and Liver and Eggs, the cans stinking worse than all the other garbage and the cat piss combined. Crumpled restaurant menus, undoubtedly slid under her door and never making it past the kitchen. Unopened junk mail, did she used to take her mail into the kitchen and open it at the counter here? Empty bottle of cheap white wine. Was the lady a wino? Spies drank absinthe, didn’t they? And smoked cigarettes in long black holders. Crumpled piece of pink paper torn from the phone pad on the counter, under the wall phone there. He smoothed out the sheet of paper.