The Day of the Guns (17 page)

“Yeah. Fun. The little pebbles inside could gouge an eye out.”

“They work the same way, only these have the intensity of a hand grenade.”

“Stable?”

Ernie shrugged eloquently. “They’re new. They worked fine under lab conditions. Keep them in your pocket and don’t jiggle them too much.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

“I’d suggest you keep them wrapped in a handkerchief or in different pockets. Someplace where they won’t rattle around. And don’t hang your coat near a radiator. Anything over a hundred degrees will set them off.”

“What’s their primary purpose?”

“Same as a grenade. If you have something to pack them with the charge becomes directional and can take a steel fire door down. The one with the white line around it has an incendiary capacity.”

“Thermite?”

“We’ve progressed, Tiger. Something like it only better. Devlin used it in Yugoslavia to get through the safe he got the Morvitch papers out of.”

I dropped one in each side pocket of my raincoat and put the fireball job inside my jacket. “You hear about Toomey?”

“Grady told me,” he said. “I’m happy to stay inside and leave the field work up to you idiots.”

“You’ll never meet any broads in here,” I told him.

“Hell, I got more than I can handle at home. If you use those things let me know how they work. Anything can be improved.”

“Sure, buddy.”

 

There was a column in the evening papers about the dead man being found in the Chester Hotel. He was identified as a small businessman from a Midwestern city with a passion for gambling, a known welsher and a person upon whom murder had been tried before. The story said he arrived late that evening and occupied a room just vacated and was probably killed by person or persons unknown with whom he had gambled, lost and refused to pay off. Whoever wrote the story made it look like an old story and a warning to the sheep who came East to be fleeced. The big boys take a dim view of the type.

I.A.T.S. were on their toes and had the local police department following their line whether they liked it or not. If the story held, Vidor Churis might take an easy breath. He’d have time for another try at me without any heat on him. A bad kill wouldn’t concern him. He’d know I was still around and he could move with some latitude, knowing the cops were on the wrong trail. He couldn’t make a fast move and would have to wait for me, and this wasn’t going to happen again. Not if I could help it.

But I could stir things up a little.

I called Rondine.

I said, “It’s Tiger, doll.”

Her breathing was audible in my ear.

“First the others, then you,” was all I said. I heard her sob before I put the phone on the hook.

 

Rain again. I walked in it and watched it wash the streets down with the angular fury of the small storm that seemed to hover above the city. I walked past the row of newly renovated buildings and spotted the apartment that belonged to Alexis Minner. And company.

Funny, how birds always looked for a common nesting place. Dell’s tip put Vidor Churis in the same neighborhood, a hodge-podge of nationalities where an accent or conversation in a foreign tongue wouldn’t be out of place at all. The area was peopled by those of queer habits and odd customs and by nature wouldn’t be looking for spots on someone else’s back. It was an end of New York where privacy meant being lost in a crowd and you could be drinking buddies with your neighbor at a bar five blocks away and never find out he lived next door to you until you walked home with him one night.

There would have to be some liaison between the Embassy and the operatives and what better place than the apartment of a supposedly minor clerk who was, in actuality, a director and executor of kill operations taking orders from the big boss, Stovetsky.

It wasn’t Moscow. It was New York. It wasn’t a dictatorship, it was a democracy and they could move without being harassed by secret police and tapped phones. They worked in an atmosphere of trust and respectability and stuck our noses in it, utilizing every advantage our country was sucker enough to give them.

Crime? Hell. Our diplomats walked on tippy toes for fear of making a single bad move. Oh, don’t offend anybody ... let them get away with murder, park their cars by hydrants, make our government a joke all the way down into Mau-Mau territory, needle the nithead countries until they tear our flag down in student uprisings and shoot up our nationals, snipe at our military ... and then don’t slap them down, don’t even bitch about .. instead, try to remove the intelligence officers who gave the command to shoot if shot at and protect our interests. Make it appear that we were to blame because this country was rich and smart and powerful and everyone else downtrodden because of it.

Brother, what would the militiamen who fought at Concord or the pioneers who cleared the land of hostile Indians say to that! John Paul Jones had a damn good answer to that one ... so did the commander at the ridge of Bunker Hill.

We made it the hard way and now the clunkers wanted to take it away and the eggheads were willing to give it to them. But there were some of us who weren’t going to let it go. There are ways of doing things and if there had to be a modern-day tea party we could do that too. If we had to stand in line abreast and challenge officialdom, red tape and radical thinking, it would be done.

They’d never expect it. They knew the usual pattern of things, the way the compromise would come or the total back-down when the propaganda pressure went on. But let them know there was more to us than what they thought and some revisions would be made. Fast. Nobody liked to die at all.

Who was it that had called it the day of the guns? It was back again. You can’t win with scared diplomacy, but a bullet on the way to somebody’s gut doesn’t know any fear at all and moves too fast to be stopped. It has a power all its own of changing the shape of things instantly and instituting a propaganda factor that sticks in a person’s mind all his life. They could stand up to words and would hold down a gun themselves, but what they did when the big hole in the end was pointed at them and they saw the hammer go back was a different story entirely and if ever there was a moment of truth it was then, and not in a bull ring.

I called Wally Gibbons from a drugstore and finally got him at his office. He was excited, but kept his voice down. “Where the hell are you, Tiger?”

“Why?”

“Buddy, you have everybody on your neck. You know they’ve bugged me three times in the last two hours trying to make a contact?”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Come on, I can read between the lines. They don’t show badges but I know who they are. I’ve seen them work before. You’re hot, feller.”

“Tell them anything you want to.”

“Like what? I’m only a Broadway columnist, remember? Only there are other types on this paper and when Ted Huston who handles the political end saw those guys up here he leaned on me for my bit in it. Something big is rattling our guys and theirs and they’re in a huddle like never before. The Russians have been at a top-level meeting all day and the British and Americans have decided to scrap their differences and hit this thing together. Now on top of all this scrambling going on they take time out to look for my old friend, Tiger Mann.”

“Nice of them,” I said.

“Give me the pitch, will you? If I have to do a cover-up, the least I can have is a track on the business.”

“I told you you’d get it all, Wally. We’re almost there so don’t put anything out until I call it in.”

“Sure ... thankś ... you’re a great help. Not even a human-interest line except for Burton Selwick.”

“Now what?”

“Oh, staunch British devotion to duty. He’s up out of a sick bed calling the signals at the joint meeting. Vincent Harley Case is doing all his leg work for him, but Selwick’s on the mound. Next week is going to be a turning point in international politics.”

“Great. Maybe they’ll cut taxes.”

“Look, Tiger ... I’ll be here all night. If you feel like talking, give me a call. I got a creepy feeling you’re some kind of a time bomb ready to go off.”

I laughed at him, said so long and hung up. Without knowing it Wally had tossed the dice for me and came up with a point. Now I had to make it the hard way.

And it was time.

The windows in Alexis Minner’s apartment were dark and if they were in a tight huddle I’d have an opportunity to get inside. This time I didn’t cruise past the building for a final look. I just turned in the doorway, used the stairs to get to his floor and went to the door. I rang twice, got no answer and took out the set of keys Ernie Bentley had made up. The second one fit, opened it and I walked inside.

As I did I felt the slightest wispy touch of something across my cheek and swore at myself for being so damn careless. Minner had put a check on his door someplace.

I found the thread with the pencil flash on the floor. It was about two inches long, black and as fine as a hair. He would have rigged it from the outside, a trick that could only be done as you closed the door from the hallway, and without it in place he’d know either someone was inside or the place had been broken into.

It wasted a full half-hour, but I managed to get the thread back where I imagined it would have been and hoped he wouldn’t look too carefully if he got back unexpectedly. If there was any edge of surprise, I wanted it myself.

When I closed the blinds over the window I flicked on the light switch, saw that it turned on a single globe in the small alcove, then rigged the bulb with some tinfoil so that when it went on again it would burn out in a normal fashion after a second or so. That set, I opened the blinds and used the flash to get the furniture located and feel my way around.

The apartment was an expensive place and had been tastefully decorated. Apparently Alexis Minner wasn’t concerned about bourgeois decor. There were cigarette burns on every piece of furniture, butts in flower pots, candy dishes and a few ground into the rug. Two vodka bottles and one of Scotch were on the table and some more dirty glasses along with the remains of a sausage.

At one side there were adjoining bedrooms with twin beds in each. Although they were made up, the cigarette burns on each side of the night table between them said all had been occupied and might well still be. Even though one guy rented the apartment, he could have visitors as he pleased and with just the single superintendent and neighbors who liked their privacy, it would be simple enough for them to come and go as they pleased without causing any comment.

Before going through the dresser drawers I looked for any thread checks like he had on the door and didn’t find any. There wasn’t much of anything else, either. The occupants might stay here a long while, but they were ready for a quick move out at any time. There weren’t enough clothes to take up two suitcases.

The bathroom was the cleanest room in the place. Maybe they never used it. There was dust in the shower stall and tub. A glass on the sink held tiny pieces of soap and I could remember them doing that in Europe during the war years. Some things had a stubborn pattern that couldn’t be wiped out, like trying to get too many shaves out of a blade.

Nobody had bothered to clean up the kitchen. The bottles and glasses were still there and a couple of flies had dropped into one and died there. The closets on the wall held a miscellaneous assortment of canned foods and spices, more like emergency stuff than a steady diet. The last one you could smell before you opened it because there were a half-dozen smoked sausages hung from the cup hooks on top.

I grimaced, started to close it and saw the corner of the box on the shelf. It was of heavy cardboard, about eight inches square and pieces of tissue packing were sticking out of the fold-in top. I flipped it open, separated the tissue and saw the bottles inside that reflected pale blue back into the light of the pencil flash.

Very gently I eased the cap off and smelled the contents, then tasted it to make sure.
Sodium pentothal.
Interesting. There were ways of using the stuff to get things out of a person the easy way. Two of the other bottles were clear glass and didn’t take any tasting to determine the contents. One was prussic acid and the other strychnine.

This bunch was ready for anything and it wasn’t subtlety.

I put everything back the way I had found it and closed the closet door. Legally, anyone could own the stuff so there wasn’t any great necessity of hiding it. Especially if you had diplomatic immunity and never expected a search of the premises.

Which led to some curious speculation.

I began to poke around some more.

With what little clothes they had it was improbable that they’d use the washer-dryer combination that was set in the niche in the wall. I started on the washer and went through it first, but it was the dryer that paid off. I had no definite idea of what I hoped to find, but thought it would be guns.

It wasn’t.

It was a packet of brand-new thousand-dollar bills wrapped in wax paper and stuffed in the area just forward of the heating unit. If anyone had ever turned the machine on, forty-one grand would have gone up in smoke. I slipped out three of them, repacked the rest and put them back where I found them.

Let me be right in what I was thinking and there were going to be a few people declared
persona non grata
tomorrow.

But that day might be a long way off.

I heard a key go into the lock on the front door and the murmur of voices, a satisfied grunt and some low-key laughter. I said, “Damn!” to myself, ripped the .45 out and got behind the kitchen door. There were at least three of them there and they’d be pros, so what had to be done had to be done fast.

Someone flipped the light on and it glowed for no more than a second. It went out in a bluish flare with a soft popping noise and in that brief interval I saw one thing that brought back a minute from a few days ago. The one in front was wearing a funny velour hat with a feather in the band and the last time I saw him he had been directing the bit when the others shot up the pillows in my bed and I was on a ledge outside, forty floors above the street.