Len Deighton - Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

I took Red Bancroft’s arm. ‘I’d better get you home,’ I said.

‘The police will want to talk to me,’ she said.

‘No. Tony will fix that,’ I said.

Tony Nowak nodded. ‘You get along home, Red. My driver will take you. And don’t lose any sleep about those guys … we’ve had a whole string of muggings here over the past month. These are rough customers. I know the Deputy Inspector – I’ll get him to keep you out of it.’

I thought the girl was taking it all with a superhuman calmness. Now I realized that she was frozen with fear. Her face was colourless and as I put my arm round her, I felt her body twitch violently. ‘Take it easy, Red,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to stay on here.’

‘They’re both dead,’ she said, and stepped high over the body of the man in the doorway, without looking down at him. Outside in the swirling snowstorm she stopped and wound her knitted scarf round her head. She reached up for me and planted a sisterly kiss on my lips. ‘Could it work out to be something special … you and me?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. While we stood there a police car arrived, and then a car with a doctor’s registration.

Tony Nowak’s driver opened the door of the Lincoln for her. I waved, and stood there a long time until the car could no longer be seen. By the time I got back to the lobby the cops were there. They were stripping the dead gunmen naked, and putting the clothes into evidence bags.

Tony Nowak’s apartment is in the seventeenth police precinct, but dead bodies from those plush addresses go down to the Twenty-First Street Morgue and are put in the chilled drawers alongside pushers from Times Square and Chinese laundrymen from the Tenderloin.

‘Can we smoke?’ I asked the attendant. The cold room had an eerie echo. He nodded and pulled the drawer open, and read silently from the police file. Apparently satisfied, he stepped back so that we could get a good look at the hold-up man. He came out feet-first with a printed tag on his toe. His face had been cleaned of blood and his hair combed, but nothing could be done about the open mouth that made him look as if he’d died of surprise.

‘The bullet hit the windpipe,’ said the attendant. ‘He died gasping for air.’ He closed the file. ‘This has been a heavy night for us,’ he explained. ‘If it’s OK with you guys, I’ll go back to the office. Put him away when you’re through with him.’ He put the clip-board under his arm and took a look at his pocket-watch. It was 2.15 A.M. He yawned and heaved the big evidence bag on to the stainless steel table.

‘Medical examiner had them stripped at the scene of the crime – just so Forensic can’t say we lost anything.’ He prodded the transparent bag that contained a peaked hat, dark raincoat, cheap denim suit and soiled underwear. ‘You’ll find your paperwork inside.’ He twisted the identification tag that was on the dead man’s toe so that he could read from the UF6 card. ‘Died on Park Avenue, eh. Now there’s a goon with taste.’ He looked back at the body. ‘Don’t turn him over until the photographer has finished with him.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Your other one is in drawer number twenty-seven – we keep all the gunshot deaths together, at this end of the room. Anything else you want and I’ll be in the ME’s office through the autopsy room …’

Mann opened the bag and found the shirt. There was a bullet nick in the collar.

‘A marksman,’ I said.

‘A schmuck,’ said Mann. ‘A marksman would have been satisfied with the gun arm.’

‘You think this hold-up might have a bearing on the Bekuv situation?’ I said.

‘Put a neat litle moustache on Bekuv and send him up to Saks Fifth Avenue for a 400-dollar suit, grey his temples a little and feed him enough chocolate sodas to put a few inches on his waistline, and what have you got?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing. What are you trying to say?’

‘Mister snap-shooting goddamn intruder alarm – that’s who you’ve got, stupid.’

I considered for a moment. There was a faint superficial resemblance between Bekuv and the intruder alarm man. ‘It’s not much,’ I said.

‘But it might be enough, if you were a trigger-happy gorilla, waiting in the lobby there – very nervous – and with just an ancient little snapshot of Bekuv to recognize him by.’

‘Who’d think Bekuv would be with us at Tony Nowak’s party?’

‘Greenwood and Hart: those guys wanted him there,’ said Mann.

I shook my head.

Mann said, ‘And if I told you that thirty minutes after we left Washington Square last night Andrei Bekuv was in his tux and trying to tell the doorman that I had given him permission to go out on his own?’

‘You think they got to him? You think they gave him a personal invitation to be there?’

‘He wasn’t duding-up to try his luck in the singles bars on Third Avenue,’ said Mann.

‘And you agreed?’ I asked him. ‘You told Hart and Greenwood and Nowak that you’d bring Bekuv to their party?’

‘It’s easy to be wise after the event,’ said Mann defensively. He used his tongue to find a piece of tobacco that was in his teeth. ‘Sure I agreed but I didn’t do it.’ He removed the strand of tobacco with a delicate deployment of his little finger. ‘These guys in the lobby: they didn’t ask for cash, wrist-watch or his gold tie-pin, they asked for his wallet. They wanted to check – they were nervous – they wanted to find something to prove he was really Bekuv.’

I shrugged. ‘Wallet … bill-fold … a stick-up man is likely to ask for any of these things when he wants money. What about the Fulton County number plate?’

‘Do you know how big Fulton County is?’

‘On a black Mercedes?’

‘Yes, well we’re checking it. We’ve got the guy from the Department of Motor Vehicles out of his bed, if that makes you feel any better.’

‘It does,’ I said. ‘But if we’d found that “ancient little snapshot of Bekuv” amongst these personal effects that would make me feel even better still. Until we’ve got something to go on, this remains a simple old-fashioned New York hold-up.’

‘Just a heist. But tomorrow, when we tell our pal Bekuv about it, I’m going to paint it to look like they are gunning for him.’

‘Why?’

‘We might learn something from him if he thinks he needs better protection. I’m going to tuck him away somewhere where no one’s going to find him.’

‘Where?’

‘We’ll get him out of here for Christmas, it’s too dangerous here.’

‘Miami? or the safe house in Boston?’

‘Don’t be a comedian. Send him to a CIA safe house! You might as well take a small-ad in Pravda.’ Mann rolled the body back into the chilled case. The sound set my teeth on edge. ‘You take the back-up car,’ Mann told me. ‘I’ll drive myself.’

‘Then where will you put Bekuv?’

‘Don’t make it too early in the morning.’

‘You’ve got my sworn promise,’ I said. I watched him as he marched through the rows and rows of cold slabs, his shoes clicking on the tiled floor and a curious squeaky noise that I later recognized as Mann whistling a tune.

I suppose Mann’s insouciant exit attracted the attention of the mortuary attendant. ‘What’s going on, Harry?’ He looked at me for a few seconds before realizing that I wasn’t Harry. ‘Are you the photographer?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then who the hell are you?’

‘Seventeenth Precinct know about me,’ I said.

‘And I’ll bet they do,’ he said. ‘How did you get in here, buster?’

‘Calm down. I saw your colleague.’

‘You saw my colleague,’ he mocked in shrill falsetto. ‘Well, now you’re seeing me.’ I noticed his hands as he repeatedly gripped his fists and released them again. I had the feeling he wanted to provoke me, so that he had an excuse for taking a poke at me. I was keen to deprive him of that excuse.