Len Deighton - Violent Ward

I twirled the combination lock, opened the door of the safe, and looked inside. My stomach turned over. Flopped on top of a bundle of papers was an ugly brown withered hand, a severed hand. I jumped back like it was going to bite me. I looked again. There it was, like a huge tarantula poised to strike. It made me want to vomit. A hand! In a foolish and useless gesture I pushed the safe door closed while I went and got a flashlight from the garage.

With the light I could see right into the safe. Now that the light was shining on it I could see it was a glove, a heavy-duty protective glove used in factories and warehouses. I pulled the papers forward, holding papers and glove under the ceiling light to see it better. It was a leather glove, bent, battered, and whitened in use, the kind that might have been rescued from some industrial garbage bin. Even now it took me a moment or two before I could touch it. It seemed to be pulsating with life, but then I realized my hand was trembling. There was no message with it, but it was just the kind of prank that Goldie would pull on a guy who might not at first see reason.

This was getting a little too rich for my diet. I flipped open my notebook and called the Century Plaza, where Vic Crichton was staying. They put the call through to his suite and it was answered immediately. I said, ‘Can I speak to Vic?’

‘He’s not here. This is Mrs Crichton. What is it about?’

‘Dorothy, this is Mickey. We were talking tonight, remember? I know Victor was pretty smashed but drag him out of bed and order some coffee from room service, honey. We’ve got to talk.’

‘My name is not Dorothy. This is Mrs Crichton, and I’ve just arrived from London, and I’m waiting for him to get back. Who is this?’

Shit! All these British voices sound the same to me, especially after a long day at the office. ‘Murphy. I’m Sir Jeremy’s West Coast attorney. I’ll call again when you’ve had a chance to settle in.’

‘You say you saw Victor tonight?’

‘No. I mean, it must have been someone else. It looked very like him, but it gets crowded at the health club, and I was in the pool with the chlorinated water getting in my eyes.’

‘I planned to surprise him,’ said Mrs Crichton. ‘But there are no messages here, and the office number I have doesn’t answer.’

Surprise him; she’d do that, all right, and surprise his girlfriend too if they both went back to his hotel. ‘I’m sure he’ll show up,’ I said. ‘Will you ask him to phone Murphy? Tell him it’s a matter of life or death.’

‘Life or death?’

‘I’m exaggerating,’ I readily admitted. ‘This is Southern California; everything is a bit larger than life around here. And a bit smaller than death.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Crichton.’

I hung up, and then I began worrying whether some bastard had tapped my phone. I would have unscrewed the handset and looked for a hidden microphone, the way they do in movies, except that this was a Japanese phone with a handset of welded plastic.

‘What should I do about the paperwork, Rex?’ I said, but Rex had disappeared. He always was a go-to-bed-early kind of dog.

I felt like going to bed too, but the Westbridge files, three boxes of them, were in my downtown office, some twenty-five miles away. And Camarillo was forty miles in the other direction. Why did I pick up that lousy phone? Why didn’t I let Goldie leave his messages on my answering machine?

I had to have something to show that bastard Petrovitch. I mean, I wasn’t in a position to tell him to drop dead. When the deal went through and my check was cashed then maybe it would be different, but not right now. Goldie was right; no matter about the fine print, the fact was that Petrovitch owned me and the whole kit and caboodle. Maybe the written record was secret, but all those sheets of paper, on which it was typed or written, were owned by him. So what did I do? I went and climbed back into my Caddie.

By four o’clock in the morning I was sitting in my office sorting out all the Westbridge stuff with a big industrial-size shredder at my side. It was spooky in that place in the dead of night. In the street there were some strange people patrolling, I’ll tell you: hookers, drug dealers, and kids from the gangs, armed to the teeth and pupils dilated. The janitor was useless. He has an apartment as part of the deal but he didn’t budge from it. I could have rolled the whole building away without his coming down to see where we were headed.

I boiled some water and stole a little of Miss Huth’s instant and found where she stashed the chocolate chip cookies. Then I went through the papers sheet by sheet. I made three piles: one, don’t matter; two, grand jury for Vic Crichton; three, trouble for Murphy. And I’m telling you I made sure everything in the third pile was shredded into paper worms, shaken, and stirred too. As I sorted through that stuff I saw indiscreet little items that could have had me disbarred a dozen times over. I didn’t take a deep breath until only two piles remained. Trouble for Westbridge, Inc., was something I could endure.

Then I crammed all the totally innocuous stuff into my best pigskin document case. With that done I sprinkled a few trouble-for-Westbridge items over them just to make it look kosher and stuffed it tight and strapped it down. Then I took the more delicate Westbridge material – one three-quarter-full Perrier-water box of it – and put it into my trunk and drove back home with it.

I put it on a rafter in the garage together with a lot of other cardboard boxes that had formerly contained my desktop computer, my microwave oven, my coffee maker, and all that kind of stuff, because if you don’t keep the cardboard boxes the stores won’t fix items that go on the blink. Did you know that? They won’t fix them without the boxes.

The dust and dirt I dislodged from that garage made me dirty enough to need a good long hot shower. By the time I was through washing up there was no time for sleep. I changed into a sport coat and cords to show all concerned that this wasn’t a part of my regular schedule and then went along Ventura Boulevard to Tommy’s Coffee Shop.

Fancy Goldie remembering our breakfasts in Tommy’s. It’s one of those restaurants that open at dawn and close in the early afternoon. I parked at the back. The sun crept out of the darkness and peeked over the roofs, to be reflected in my lovely old Caddie. With its original gold-colored paint job, it was spectacular. I stood there admiring it for a long time; I love that car. Even the radio was original. It would have made a stunning color photo the way it looked that morning. Maybe I should buy myself a camera.

I went in through the back door. Already the dining room was crowded with men on their way to work. Brawny fellows in bib overalls and plaid work shirts, men who adjusted machinery, fixed appliances, and mended utilities; straight-speaking American heroes like my mother’s brothers.

Goldie was already there, sitting near the window, watching the cook cracking eggs and flipping hash browns on the shiny steel griddle. We said our hellos. Goldie looked tired. Judging by the clothes he was wearing and the blue chin, he’d been up all night. The smell of bacon got my appetite roused and I went ape and ordered sausages, bacon, fried eggs, pancakes with butter and syrup, toast, honey, and coffee. It was just like being back with my folks. The coffee was fine, the eggs went over easy, and it was the only place around there that opens at five-thirty in the morning.

‘Hello, Mr Murphy,’ said Cindy. She picked up Goldie’s empty plate and gave him a refill of coffee.

‘Boy, are you looking great, Cindy!’ I’d known Cindy Lewis for years. She was a hardworking, sensible woman with two grown daughters. Her husband had been a marine killed in ’Nam back in the early days. When Danny was very young she’d regularly come in to baby-sit for us.