John Abbott - Scimitar

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“That sounds reasonable.”

“And will you let me know when you get here?”

“You can be sure,” he said.

The proper sign off.

He put the phone back on the wall hook.

His heart was pounding.

At ten minutes past noon that Saturday morning, it was still raining in New York City, a relentless summer rain that drilled the pavement surrounding the sidewalk telephone. In New York nowadays, you couldn’t even go into a proper phone booth to escape a downpour. There were only these ridiculous little shells — not even those, really. Just these stingy little — Gillian was at a loss for a word to describe them. Listening posts? Narrow and constructed two abreast, with a plastic divider falsely promising privacy between them. The phone position — as good a word as any — alongside hers was still vacant. She fished in her handbag for another quarter, dialed a number, and listened to the insistent ringing on the other end.

“SeaCoast,” a male voice said.

“Mr. Scopes?” she said.

“Who’s this, please?”

“Priscilla.”

“Go ahead, Mother. This is Arthur.”

“Arthur, I’m calling about the shipment we were expecting.”

“Which shipment?”

“From Los Angeles.”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“It will be here on the twenty-fifth.”

“Very good. And will you keep me informed?”

“You can be sure,” she said, and hung up.

She put the receiver back on its hook, felt automatically for her quarter in the coin return chute, and then stepped out boldly into the rain. Her umbrella was one of those flimsy little folding jobs the size of a rolled tabloid newspaper when it was closed. Open, it seemed incapable of braving the unseasonably fierce wind. As she turned left at the corner, into the full onslaught of the wind roaring eastward through the narrow canyon from the Hudson, she felt certain the umbrella would either flip inside out or else be torn from her hands. The umbrella was red. She held it like a small shield, pushing it into the wind and the rain, muttering to herself about the dreadful weather. She was drenched to the skin by the time she reached her apartment building on West End Avenue.

Sighing audibly, she stood in the small entrance hallway for a moment, catching her breath, marvelling that she had neither drowned nor been blown to bits and pieces. She shook out the umbrella, pulled it into its miniaturized state, fastened its Velcro strap, and then reached into her handbag for her keys. They were lying on the bottom of the bag, alongside the muzzle of a Walther 9-mm Parabellum pistol. Casually, her hand moved the gun aside to get at the keys. She unlocked the glass-paneled inner door, and climbed the steps to the second floor of the building. There were two keys to the locks on her apartment door. She was home at last. She put her bag and the umbrella on the hall table, took off her soaking wet raincoat, hung it on the brass coatrack near the mirror, and then stepped out of her low-heeled walking shoes. Barefooted, she padded into the bedroom and began getting out of her wet clothes.

The apartment was what they called a two-bedroom in this city, but which was in reality a one-bedroom with a small dining room that converted into either a second bedroom or what she used as a sitting room. The living room faced south and was quite sunny on good days, and the kitchen had been entirely redone only two years ago. There was only one bathroom, this off what was laughingly called the master bedroom, which — given its size — might better have been called the maid’s room. She unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped her skirt, yanked down her pantyhose, unclasped her bra, stepped out of her panties, and dumped the whole lot unceremoniously on the floor in a sodden little pile. Naked now, she looked at herself appraisingly in the full-length-mirror fastened to the closet door, dismayed as always to recognize yet another time that the good full breasts were beginning to sag ever so slightly, the once flat tummy was developing a most unattractive bulge. She supposed this was forty-nine. If so, she wondered what dread calamities fifty would bring. Eyes still a clear and penetrating blue, however, hair at least reminiscent of the blond it had been in her youth, silver threads beginning to show among the gold, but legs still long and lithe and shapely, a woman’s legs never changed. She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

She was drying herself some fifteen minutes later when she heard the front door opening.

She remembered all at once that she’d left her handbag on the table in the hall.

Near the front door.

Her pistol was in the handbag.

“Yes?” she called.

Silence.

Perhaps she was mistaken.

“Is someone there?” she called.

More silence.

And then a board creaking under someone’s footfall.

She dropped the towel at once, stepped swiftly out of the bathroom, and was moving toward the bedroom where she kept a second pistol in the nightstand beside the—

He loomed suddenly in the narrow hallway.

A giant of a man wearing a black trenchcoat and a black rainhat pulled low on his forehead, black gloves, a black pistol in his right hand, it looked like a Colt, it suddenly exploded.

The first bullet was low, he’d been going for her throat, the muzzle of the gun had been tilted up toward her head. It shattered her clavicle instead, sent her reeling back from the impact, colliding with the wall, bouncing off the wall in a frantic half-turn toward the bedroom, the gun, the spare gun in the—

The second bullet took her in the back, high up between the shoulder blades. It knocked her stumbling forward through the entrance door of the bedroom, sent her falling to the floor beside the small pile of damp clothing she had removed not twenty minutes ago. On her knees, she scrabbled toward the bed, threw herself headlong across the bed, and was stretching to reach the night-stand on the far side when the third bullet took her at the back of her head. She did not feel this one. It blew out her forehead and spattered tissue and bone and brain matter onto the wall and onto the top surface of the nightstand where the Browning automatic rested on a pile of pink panties in the top drawer.

The man leaned over her and fired again, unnecessarily, into what was left of her head. Then he hurriedly left the apartment and walked out into what was now a cold, slow, steady drizzle.

The next holiday would be the Fourth of July.

Independence Day.

It said so on the mimeographed sheet tacked to the bulletin board on the wall opposite Geoffrey’s desk. This was one of the easier ones. Like Christmas or Good Friday. Some of the others — like Martin Luther King, Jr., Day or Memorial Day — were a bit more difficult for an Englishman to remember, no less comprehend.

The mimeographed notice had been sent round at the beginning of the year, two copies to each registry, intended to be seen by all staff in the Hong Kong Office, the Embassy in Washington, the North America Department FCO, the UN Department FCO, the Resident Clerk FCO, and all Consular Posts in the USA. It was flanked on Geoffrey’s bulletin board by another mimeographed sheet listing the addresses and telephone numbers of all British Consulate General offices in the United States and yet another sheet listing all the police precinct telephone numbers here in New York City.

Actually, Geoffrey was not at the moment the least bit interested in any of the mimeographed information fliers. He was, instead, consulting a properly printed sheet that had been produced by the Cartographic and Map Section and distributed early last year to every British Consulate in the world, including the one here in New York. Its headline, boldly marching across the top of the page the way the redcoats must have done at Lexington or Concord, read: