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Page 6

 

  “There were blanks in the gun,” she said.

  “You didn’t know?”

  “How would I have known? Lord, that was a wrench, wasn’t it? Has my hair suddenly turned gray?”

  “No. ”

  “That’s remarkable. I think he’s coming awake, Evan. ”

  He was indeed. His eyes went in turn to his bonds, to me, to Julia. He tried unsuccessfully to rock the chair. He looked at Julia again. “Effing little bitch,” he said. “I thought you were too bloody good to be true. ”

  I told Julia to take a taxi home. She told me not to be silly, that she was as anxious as I to hear what he had to say. I said that Nigel would worry about her, and she said that Nigel was at the theater.

  “You may not enjoy this,” I said.

  “Oh, but I will, Evan. ”

  What’s-his-name looked up at me. “Evans, eh? And a good day to you, Mr. Evans. ” He didn’t sound much upset. “Wha’d you shoot me with?”

  “A blank. ”

  “An effing blank. ” He laughed. “That’s a good one. I’ll remember that one, I will. ”

  I pulled a card chair up and sat down in front of him. “You’ll have to remember quite a few things. Your name, to start with. ”

  “Wyndham-Jones, Mr. Evans. ”

  “Not Smythe-Carson?”

  “Who’s he, Mr. Evans?”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I said, “There are some things you’ll have to tell me. I’m not interested in you at all, just in your information. There was an American girl named Phaedra Harrow. You may have known her as Deborah Horowitz. ” I showed him her picture. “I want to know where she is and what’s happened to her. ”

  “Glad to oblige,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s have another look at the picture. ” His eyes narrowed in concentration. Then he smiled. “Don’t know as I can help you, Mr. Evans. Never saw her before in me life, not the least bit familiar. Names don’t ring a bell either, sorry to say. ”

  I let him have the gun butt on his left cheekbone. His head flew to the side. I heard Julia suck in her breath, but He Who Got Slapped didn’t make a sound. The smile came back and the same flat cold light glinted in his eyes. He said, “Two or three hours, I’ll have a ruddy great bruise there. All blue and purple it’ll be. ”

  “The girl. ”

  “Still don’t know her, Mr. Evans. Me memory’s no better. ”

  I swung the gun backhand and caught him on the right cheekbone. I knew he’d ride with it, so I made it harder. “Now they’ll match,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll be the pretty one. ”

  “I can stand this longer than you can. ”

  “Oh, can you now?” His lips tightened and his voice turned harder. “You effing bastard, I’ve taken dumpings from professionals. You haven’t the stuff to kill me, and you’d have to do that to learn the first bloody thing about your little American twist. I’ll sit here and take it while you puke at the horror of it all. ”

  I hefted the gun. He didn’t even wince. I stood up, turned to Julia. She was standing near the door and looked vulnerable. It was senseless. We had the son of a bitch tied up, and he was in control of the situation while Julia looked vulnerable and I felt impotent. I took a few deep breaths and concentrated on visions of a naked Phaedra being tortured and burned at the stake. I was trying to work up some genuine fury, and it just didn’t come off. That sort of reaction either happens or it doesn’t. You can’t think it into existence.

  So to Julia I said, “You see the problem? You pinpointed it earlier. I’m just not the menacing type. I don’t ooze brutality. I’ve got a bad image. ”

  “Evan-”

  “Now if it was me in the chair and this clown asking the questions, he wouldn’t have to lay a hand on me. One good glower from Hyphen here and I’d sing like a goddamned roomful of castrati. ” I thought for a moment. “Go home,” I told her. “You don’t want to see this. ”

  “I’m not going anywhere. ”

  “Go home. Now. ”

  She shook her head.

  “Horrible image,” I mused. I left the room and wandered through the rest of the flat. I had wondered what sort of person would live in a whorehouse, and the other rooms answered the question for me. A whore lived there, and Hyphen had borrowed her place for the evening. There was female clothing in the closets, messy cosmetic tubes and jars and bottles scattered in the bedroom and bathroom. In the kitchen I fumbled through drawers until I found something that was a sort of cross between a regular knife and a meat cleaver. I think it’s used for chopping up heads of lettuce.

  I got a roll of adhesive tape from the bathroom cabinet and tore off eight or ten six-inch strips, fastening them together to make a square patch. I returned to the front room. He was as I had left him.

  “Last chance,” I said. He told me what to do to myself, and I fastened the patch of tape over his mouth.

  “What’s that, Evan?”

  “A gag. So he won’t scream. ”

  I bent a loose end of picture wire back and forth until it frayed. The piece was long enough to wrap around the index finger of his right hand five times, and while I was doing that Julia asked me what it was.

  “A tourniquet,” I said.

  “What is it for?”

  “So he won’t bleed when I cut off his finger. Go in the other room, Julia. You don’t have to go home if you don’t want to, but please get the hell out of here. ”

  She went. I caught a glimpse of her face on the way out. She looked slightly nauseous. I picked up the cleaver and looked at Hyphen. For the first time his eyes had lost that maddening assurance.

  I said, “You think I’m bluffing but you’re not certain. You can gamble, but if you’re wrong it’ll cost you a finger. Ready to talk?”

  He nodded. I yanked the gag off. “Last chance,” I said. “Make it good. ”

  “You’d cut off a bloke’s finger. ”

  “Yes. ”

  “Undo that wire, mate. Me whole finger’s throbbing. ”

  “Talk. ”

  He sighed heavily. “It’s a fiddle I’ve got. A smuggling fiddle, the birds do the smuggling. A perfect blanket, six lonely birds looking at bleeding tombs. ”

  “Go on. ”

  “I could do with a cigarette, mate. ”

  “You could do without one. You took the girl along. Then what happened?”

  His face clouded. “Bloody thing went bad. The peelers landed on us with both feet. All six girls wound up in the moan-and-wail. ”

  “And you?”

  “Bought me way out. Would have bought them out, but I hadn’t enough of the ready. ”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “ Turkey. Ankara. We brought guns in and would have brought gold out, but the bloody-”

  I never found out what the last bloody was intended to modify, because I cut off the flow of words by slapping the tape back in place. I said, “You’re very stupid. You don’t know how much I know, so it’s a bad time to try lying to me. You’re a dreadful liar to begin with. It’s just not your bag, and from now on you’ll have to avoid it. This one particular lie just cost you a finger. ”

  He struggled. His whole body went rigid, and for a moment I thought he might be strong enough to snap the wire. He wasn’t.

  I cut through the finger just above the second joint, about half an inch below the wire tourniquet. There was hardly any bleeding at all.

  He did not turn his eyes aside. He watched his finger until I had succeeded in separating it from his hand, his face growing steadily paler, and then he quietly passed out.

  “Just never expected it of you. The way you talk and all, and how you handle your face, and especially you being a Yank. ” His tone was soft and marveling, as if he had just witnessed something extraordinary on the telly. “You’re all at once Lee Marvin in the bloody movies. An effing butcher working on a side of beef.

  “I told you. ”

  “Don�
��t say you didn’t, but Jesus effing Christ, you could have told me forever and I’d have gone on sending you up. You know what? Me finger hurts. Now why in hell should it do that? I mean it hurts where it was. Like the air hurts where me finger would be if you hadn’t sliced it off. I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t such an important finger. The little one on the left hand, say. ” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Did you cosh me afterwards or did I do a faint?”

  “You fainted. ”

  “What I thought. Never did that before in me life. And you just sat there cool as ice. ”

  “No. I went into the other room and was sick to my stomach. ”

  “Did you? And if I don’t talk now, or don’t tell it straight, you’d do it again?”

  “I’d do the thumb next. ”

  He sighed again. “Not half hard, are you? And then?”

  “Use your imagination. An eye, an ear, I don’t know. ”

  “Holy Bloody Mary. Imagine if the peelers bought your line. They’d never bring a lad in but he’d tell ’em anything they wanted to know. Be no staying out of jail then, would there? And imagine the poor bloody pickpockets with their hooks trimmed down like this. Be the end of crime, wouldn’t it?”

  He clucked at the wonder of it. Oh, it would be quite an innovation, I thought. It would return English criminal procedure to the days of the sixteenth century.

  I said, “The girl. ”

  “Oh, you’ll get the whole of it now, mate. The fiddle’s a sweet one. I worked it twice last year and once in the spring, and then in August with your bird. How it works, see, you try to attract the type of bird who’s all alone in the world. They all of ’em come to London, you know. Maybe they’ve got a mother in Ireland that they don’t even write to, or a maiden aunt up in Geordie country, or nobody at all. The others you send away, tell ’em the position’s filled. You do the same with the dogs. They don’t have to be beauties, you know, but they won’t do if they’re too fat or too thin or too old. ”

  “Go on. ”

  “Well, you get six or seven, see, just enough but not too many, and then you feed ’em a tale. The first time I made it that we were off to rob a tomb and everybody’d have a share in the plunder. Didn’t go down as well as it might have. Oh, I filled my boat, you know, but some right ones shied away from it. ” He smiled suddenly. “Got the tale from the only other man who ever worked this fiddle, him that told me about it when we did a spell at Broadmoor together. And since then somebody put a flick in him, so I’m the only chap who knows it. Made up a better tale since then. I sort of worked in this espionage angle, James Bond and all, and-”

  “I know the story. ”

  “Oh, right, your bird told you. Well. I check ’em all out, see, and then I swear them all to secrecy. Nothing a bird likes better than being trusted with a secret, especially the lost and lonely ones that wouldn’t know who to tell it to anyway. Once they’re sworn to secrecy and once you’ve got the right crew, then you fly the lot of them to Istanbul. That’s in Turkey. ”