Once a Spy (4 page)

“He probably just went inside one of the buildings,” Charlie said, hoping that would be the end of it.

“It’s easy to find a parking space around here,” Drummond said.

Charlie took it as a non sequitur. “So?”

“It’s strange that he had no truck.”

It was a decent insight, Charlie thought, particularly given Drummond’s condition. The gas men drove everywhere, and if they couldn’t find a spot within a short waddle of their appointment, they double-parked. If somebody gets blocked in for a couple minutes, their pragmatism dictated, them’s the breaks. Yet there had been no gas company truck parked on Prospect Place, and there was no truck parked here or driving off.

“Still, there’s a ton of good reasons he wouldn’t have his truck,” Charlie said. “Like, at his last stop, it got blocked by the phone company truck.”

“What got blocked by the phone company truck?”

“The gas man’s truck.”

“Oh,” Drummond said. “I hope we’ll have as nice a day tomorrow.” He turned and strolled back toward his block.

When Drummond had first come charging onto Nostrand, the gas man—really, Dewart—was on the sidewalk, just fifty feet away, one of
the six pedestrians. On rounding the corner, he’d whipped off his coverall and slung it into a trash can. Underneath he had on a black running suit that fit snugly over his slender frame. The tight knit cap, which he yanked from a pocket, compressed his thick hair, transforming the shape of his head dramatically, and even more so when seen from behind—Drummond and Charlie’s vantage point. His intent was to appear to them, and to anyone else, as no lumbering gas man but, rather, as a trim yuppie en route to a jogging path in Prospect Park.

In fact he had visited Drummond’s house on matters pertaining to gas. Before leaving, he lowered the thermostat to fifty-six. He figured Drummond would raise it when he returned home, at which point, on the opposite side of the readout panel, the thermometer coil and the mercury switch would rotate, sending current through the mercury and energizing the relay to the furnace two stories below. The burner would light a small amount of fuel, generating hot gas to warm the air in the house. The burner would also light the wick that was held in place, as of a short while earlier, by a nylon sleeve the size of a cigarette. The wick would set fire to a great deal of additional gas. Upon inspection, the resulting explosion would pass for a leak resulting from ordinary wear and tear. As the saying goes: Anybody can kill someone; it takes a professional to make someone die an ordinary death.

10

The house
smelled to Charlie of his childhood: industrial-strength cleanser. As ever, the place had all the warmth of a chain hotel—no framed photographs, no bowling trophies, none of the knickknacks usually found in a home. The closest the old man ever came to decorating was shelving books in alphabetical order by author.

The only thing new was unopened correspondence, stacks of it, all around. After Drummond went to bed, Charlie nosed through it. He found numerous memos from Perriman Appliances, where Drummond had been placed on long-term disability leave. Charlie also found three unpaid utility bills. Adding them to his sudden awareness that the house was freezing, he figured he’d solved the mystery of the gas man: The guy had been here to cut the old man off.

Charlie climbed upstairs. Tiptoeing past Drummond’s bedroom and to the end of the narrow corridor, he checked the thermostat.

Fifty-six.

So much for the gas man theory. On this cold night, Drummond must have
lowered
the heat. Charlie cranked the thermostat to seventy-five.

On the way back to the stairs, he paused at the doorway to his old room. The only remaining mementos of youth were the scale miniatures his father used to bring back from sales trips to D.C. Dust made it appear snow had fallen on the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. Charlie again felt the chagrin of the birthday when he tore off the gift wrap, hoping for a PlayStation joystick, and found a Washington Monument.

His recollection was cut short by a gunshotlike crack that rippled into
the night, leaving the mirrors and windows upstairs
abuzz
. He froze, until hearing the creak of floorboards in Drummond’s bedroom.

Drummond had gotten out of bed in response to the cold, Charlie pieced together, then heaved open his bulky, spring-loaded window, which sounded like a gunshot.

Charlie stepped into Drummond’s bedroom. In robe, pajamas, and slippers, Drummond stood at the wide-open window, gazing at the dark patch of a backyard a story below. Charlie joined him. There was nothing to see but the swing set Charlie’s mother had given him, now just three rusty legs and a rusty crossbar.

Charlie said, “It’d probably be best to shut—”

The blast, which must have been heard for miles, made it feel as if the house jumped its foundation. Cupboards banged open. Doors jumped off their hinges. Drawers flew. Glass shattered.

A mass of bluish-red flame surged up the stairs, through the door, directly at Charlie. He was burning hot before it was upon him. He thought he would be incinerated.

Drummond dove, wrapping his arms around him and propelling them both out the window.

11

The explosion
left walls charred on the houses on either side of Drummond’s. Scraps of stucco and wood and metal littered the block. Burning hunks of timber fell from Drummond’s eaves and glowed in the alleys. Waves of fire made a loud, crackling meal of the rest of the house. With coats thrown over nightclothes, dozens of neighbors poured onto the sidewalks and watched, through smoke and haze and heat, as the men of Engine Company 204 slashed the flames with shafts of water.

Among the spectators were Charlie and Drummond, uninjured but for bruises from run-ins with the swing set crossbar—fortuitous, because it slowed their descent—and the frozen ground.

Charlie was the only person in the crowd not wholly fixated on the firefighters. “Maybe something was up with the gas man after all,” he said over the din.

“Oh,” said Drummond.

The firemen reduced the blaze to a few stubborn sparks, and, eventually, just steam. The house was left a blackened skeleton.

While neighbors offered Drummond their sympathies and returned home, and soot-streaked firefighters coiled their hoses, Charlie shared his concerns of foul play with Engine Company 204’s chief, a wiry man with a whisk broom of a mustache like those of his professional antecedents.

“We found the heat exchange tubing halfway up the block,” the chief said. “Ten times outta ten, that means a fuel leak caused a boiler blow. We see it all the time with these older electric ignition units, especially with seniors who forget to check the fuel valve.”

“Wouldn’t the
gas man
have checked the fuel valve?” Charlie asked.

“We looked into that. The gas company hasn’t got a record of any service here so far this month. Their nearest call today was way down on Bergen, at ten
A.M
.”

Frustration heated Charlie. “Doesn’t that make it
more
suspicious that the gas man was here this afternoon?”

The fireman smoothed one end of his mustache to a point. “All due respect, sir, gas men haven’t got the exclusive on white uniforms.”

Charlie turned to Drummond for corroboration. Drummond was hunched on a stoop, engulfed by an oversized, lime green down coat lent by neighbors who probably were in no rush for its return. He was watching the ribbons of steam blend into a purple sky. In his right mind he’d be distraught. His eyes showed only childlike wonder.

“If the guy were a house painter or Mister Softee or anybody else in a white uniform, it’s still strange,” Charlie said to the chief. “The way he glanced up the block, then rushed off—now that I think of it, it was like he was on the lookout for my father. Then he just
disappeared
onto Nostrand, which is a bunch of locked brownstones without alleys between them. There was no time for him to get inside a building. And we looked everywhere else; if there were even a manhole for him to have gone down, we’d have found it. So you have to think he had some kind of escape route.”

The chief glanced at his truck. His men were all aboard now, impatient to go. Returning his focus to Charlie, he pursed his lips. “Sir, there are set fires that go past us, sure. It takes a real professional though, and I mean a heckuva pro. Why would a guy of that caliber be in this neck of Brooklyn picking on a senior citizen?”

Charlie weighed the odds that “HumDrummond” would be the target of a professional assassin.

“I guess you’re right,” Charlie said.

The fire trucks barreled off into the darkness, and Prospect Place reverted to its usual eleven
P.M.
form—the occasional taxi, the odd homeward-bound drunk, talk shows flickering behind window shades. Charlie and Drummond should have been in a taxi headed to Charlie’s
apartment for the night. But the gas man was stuck in Charlie’s thoughts like a sliver of glass.

Settling alongside Drummond on the stoop, he asked, “Dad, have you been playing the horses lately?”

“Do you mean gambling on horse races?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never done that.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

“There used to be
Racing Forms
around the house all the time.”

“There used to be
whats
around the house?”

“Racing Forms
. As in the
Daily Racing Form
—‘America’s Turf Authority Since 1894.’ You used to pick it up at the magazine store or the newsstand in the subway, like, every day. You couldn’t have been reading it just for your edification.”

“I suppose not.”

“I was thinking, what if you called in a bad bet, then forgot, for whatever reason, to pay up? The characters in that racket don’t take it so well when they don’t get their money—or so I’ve heard.”

“Pardon the intrusion?” came a man’s voice.

Charlie looked up to find a lanky twentysomething in a conservative, dark-blue suit and gray overcoat. He had fine features; precisely combed, wavy hair; and the earnest demeanor of a student body president. Charlie had noticed him before, among the spectators.

“My name’s Kermit Smith,” the young man continued in a smooth blend of country and urban refinement. “I’m an attorney—”

“He was thrown out of the bar,” shouted a second man, walking the curb like a tightrope and failing, probably a function of the brown paper bag he clutched and the bottle of booze it surely contained. He was about the same age as Smith but shorter and stouter. He too wore a blue business suit and gray overcoat. His shirt collar was open and the knot of his tie was halfway down his chest.

“That’s my friend, for lack of a better word, MacKenzie,” Smith apologized to Charlie. “The bar he referenced is the Blarney Stone on Flatbush. Probably by now you’ve developed a theory as to which of us in fact was the problem.”

Clever guy, this Kermit Smith, thought Charlie. But ambulance chaser all the way. In this part of Brooklyn, at this hour, the Samaritans were only bad.

Seeming to have read Charlie’s edginess, Smith said, “Cutting to the chase, I overheard some of your chat with the fire chief. I’m with Connelly, Dumbarton and Rhodes, notable for winning twenty-four of twenty-four negligence suits against boiler manufacturers by convincing juries that the victims would have needed to be rocket mechanics to adequately maintain the dozen or so indeterminate valves on the older electric ignition units. If you’re at all interested …”

The fire had made selling the house hugely problematic. Who knew how long it would take and how much work would be required to collect the insurance—assuming Drummond had remembered to make the payments? “I guess it couldn’t hurt to know about, on my father’s behalf,” Charlie said, faking a yawn so as not to appear overeager. This was an arena in which a clever ambulance chaser could yield a big score.

MacKenzie griped, “Come on, we’re gonna miss last call at Flanagan’s.”

Turning his back on his friend, Smith said to Charlie, “Why don’t we step into my office for a moment?” He took a few steps down the sidewalk.

“Just give him your card already,” MacKenzie said, prompting Smith to stray farther.

“Dad, please don’t go anywhere for half a second?” Charlie said.

Drummond nodded. Charlie’s concern was eased only a little.

Catching up to Smith, he noticed a sparkling new black BMW Z4 roadster four parking spots down. “I’ve always wanted to win a boiler manufacturer negligence suit and buy one of those,” Charlie said.

Smith advanced to take the car in. “Well, this could still be your lucky night.” He halted in a pool of shadows between streetlamps and reached into his coat, presumably for a business card or BlackBerry.

Smith’s larynx was crunched by a fist, thrown by Drummond on a dead run.

So strange was this turn of events that Charlie closed his eyes, expecting that when he opened them, the hallucination would be over and Smith would be standing there, by himself, BlackBerry at the ready.

When Charlie opened his eyes, he found Smith teetering, his attempt to breathe resulting in a feeble croak. Charlie saw Smith had drawn from his coat not a BlackBerry but a pistol with a barrel capped by a silencer.

Drummond’s right fist blurred into an uppercut, snapping Smith’s wrist and costing him his hold on the grip. The gun hit the sidewalk with a metallic bass note and bounced away.

Drummond drilled a left into Smith’s abdomen. The tall man reeled.

Eyes aglow with more than the reflection of the streetlamps, Drummond kept after him, heaving a roundhouse into his jaw and driving him backward. Smith stumbled over a cluster of full trash bags and appeared to lose consciousness in the tumult of cans and bottles.

Charlie looked on, cold air filling his gaping mouth. As far as he knew, Drummond had a hard time hitting a Ping-Pong ball.

Drummond meanwhile darted after the pistol. With it just inches from his grasp, he stopped abruptly and reversed course, leaping onto a stone stoop. From up the block came a muted cough. A bullet rang the metal banister inches above his head.