Walking into the Ocean (33 page)

As they traversed the first intersection offshooting from the canal, Peter glanced to his left and glimpsed the harbour a couple of streets down. As if looking through a gun slit, he saw all the way to the open Mediterranean, which the Bible called the Great Sea. Bahti remained focused straight ahead along the shadowed street. With basic hand gestures, he stopped Peter at the next corner. He was clearly worried that his nephew, Marko, hadn't appeared. There was still no one about. Peter halted next to his new partner. He was out of breath and for some reason felt bone-weary. He hadn't caught up with his sleep yet, but that wasn't it. Part of it was the constant brightness of the whitewashed rock; the sun was coming up rapidly now, promising to expose everyone and every surface to its spotlight glare. He needed to keep moving, to get this arrest over with, to discover the false name under which Lasker was finally returning home.

Bahti stayed motionless a minute longer. He looked over at Peter; Marko would find them. And so it proved. The boy, making good use of the morning shadows, appeared out of a doorway in the next block. He waved for them to follow. Silence was understood. The boy was lean and tanned. He wore shorts and a dive-shop T-shirt; Peter noticed that his toes, which stuck out of rubber sandals, were calloused and nicked, presumably from surfing, although Peter knew nothing about the sport. He was taller than the average Maltese and had the sleek black hair and olive complexion of a nascent gigolo.

Marko led them to an entrance two more streets along; there was no house number, nor a directory at the doorway. He pointed upwards and whispered in Maltese in Bahti's ear. The detective turned to Peter.

“He does not think that Kamatta is resident in his flat this morning. But someone saw him last night in a hotel bar in the vicinity.” Peter noted that Bahti's diction was more heavily accented than before.

The lobby of the two-storey building presented a dark cocoon, and therefore was dangerous. There seemed to be a back door, but it was too shaded to be certain. On the ground floor, several alcoves, of inscrutable purpose, could allow a man to conceal himself, while the narrow stairs meant that there was only one way up. Neither detective was happy about their exposure. Only Bahti was armed, but he carried two guns; he handed Peter a .38. They both removed their jackets and their shoes, but Bahti told the boy to keep his sandals on and wait on the ground level. Without saying so, he was telling him to do his job as a lookout, but nothing more. Peter expected that the boy was carrying a knife under his shirt. Bahti handed his radio to Marko; this seemed to represent a vote of confidence, and the boy smiled.

Peter still didn't like the situation. For one thing, he was unsure about Bahti's plan. Did he even expect the door to be locked? Did he think that Kamatta would be armed? He wasn't entirely certain that Bahti and Marko had worked out their signals. They padded up to the second landing. There were only two flats there, one with a bubblegum pink door and the other canary yellow, both chipped and stained. Both appeared to have solid Yale locks.

Bahti pointed to the yellow one, which showed more pedestrian wear, and knelt down to examine the lock. There was no way of telling if it was engaged, or if the door was booby-trapped, and there was no keyhole. He rapped and quickly stood back. Waiting a timed sixty seconds, he then shook the doorknob. So ended the pantomime. He and Peter agreed with a look that no further ceremony was justified, and Bahti stood back and kicked in the door.

Conspirators tended to live in strange rooms, in Peter's experience. The criminal life and the need to cover it up breed odd practices and bizarre décor. Look for specialty items, an investigator knew. A marijuana grow operation must be kept humid as a rainforest, with the windows blacked out. Narcotics operations have to be sterile and well ventilated. A forger may hide his tools, but he needs a large workbench and a strong lamp. And there it was: a ten-foot table stood along the bigger wall, across from the window, with three gooseneck lamps clamped to it. To be sure, there hadn't been a serious effort at disguise, unless Kamatta had been planning on protesting that he was a watchmaker or a jeweller.

Clearly there was no one in the two rooms, but Bahti knew his professional moves. He pocketed his gun while he searched for any form of booby trap or self-destruction mechanism that could immolate the evidence, and them with it. There was little enough in the flat to search. The whole forgery factory seemed minimalist to Peter. The back room contained a sagging bed, a clothes rack with two shirts hanging from the hooks, and a turquoise bathmat with a grinning sunfish on it. For some reason, the man had moved the bathmat to the bedroom; the atmosphere was anything but cheerful. There was an air-conditioning unit wedged in the bedroom window. Bahti avoided the lavatory for now. In the main room, he slid the table drawers open and came up with various scribing tools, ink pads, jars of glue and textured paper. The only out-of-place indulgence was a dehumidifier under the table.

The two cardboard boxes in the corner offered their best hope. Peter closed the yellow door and placed the two guns on the table. He and the detective each took a carton and opened it. Peter's contained stacks of both blank and finished European Union passports, but every finished one was missing the photograph — that page had been torn out. Bahti's carton contained more official documents, including passports from the United States, South Africa and Switzerland. Peter leaned against the end of the table and scanned the room for clues that plainly weren't there. Bahti sat on the floor against a wall and tapped on the hardwood planks in frustration. The room was stifling.

“Shall I turn on the air conditioner?” he said.

“No.”

“We could tear up the floors. Dig in the walls.”

“Not very promising,” Peter replied. He was thinking — the way he did best. “Kamatta has made a run for it. At least we know he does passports.”

“He was Lasker's forger,” Bahti said. “He likely gave Lasker the names of real people whose passports he had stolen, tourists probably, and Lasker provided him with photographs of himself.”

The room, which had been kept largely free of dust, was now fetid with the exposed glues and inks of Kamatta's illegal craft. Bahti's shirt collar was dark with sweat and he suggested again turning on the air-conditioning unit. But Peter needed another minute, and he held up his hand. There was something wrong with this scene, this ascetic abode of a busy forger. There was something missing.

“Signal Marko that we'll be down in five minutes,” he said. The detective wiped away a patch of the grime on the window and peered out to the street. He shook his head; he couldn't see the boy.

There is a chain of logic that will tell me what's wrong, Peter thought. He took his .38 from the table. He opened the splintered door and took in the somewhat fresher air on the landing. This forger is expert at concocting foolproof passports. He uses the stolen documents of real people when he can, though not always. He has to replace the old photos with new ones.
Where does he get those photos?
The client supplies them. Lasker used up at least three phoney passports, one to get into Malta, another to exit the island, and the Willemsea Malta document to use while he was here. He probably had Kamatta make more documents under the other names on the shipping manifests for the exported cars. Peter was willing to bet that he had six or seven done. But Kamatta did good work — he did a steady business, evidently — and that meant he took the portraits himself.

So, where is the camera?

“Bahti,” he said, “why did you choose the yellow door instead of the pink one?”

“Because there were more dirt marks — smudges? — around the doorknob and the what-you-call-it?”

“Door jamb.”

“Yes. More traffic in here.”

They both stepped clear of the sweltering flat and looked down the stairs. Marko was nowhere in sight.

“Did Marko say that Kamatta lets this flat only, or both these flats?”

“He did not say. I assumed just this one place.”

Bahti went downstairs in his stocking feet and padded out the door. In a moment, he returned with Marko. Bahti put on his trainers, since there was less need for a silent approach now, and they brought up Peter's shoes too.

“You want me to break down the pink door? It will be a bit easier with shoes on.”

“Marko, you have a knife in your belt?” Peter said.

Marko brought out a narrow filleting blade with a black plastic handle, and handed it to Peter, who slid it into the groove between the strike plate and the frame, prying the metal loose. He had noticed that the Yale lock on the other door was lighter than it looked; he probably could have opened it with a credit card. With the next twist of the knife, Peter felt the
thunk
of the brass shaft withdrawing, and they were in. Bahti pushed the door open on its oiled hinges, and since he had retrieved his gun, he entered first. But Peter could already see, straight ahead of them in the revealed room, the mantis figure of a photo enlarger and the clotheslines from which two dozen film strips hung. They reminded him morbidly of the stockings wafting from Anna Lasker's shower rod.

The light on the landing darkened a tone as a form at the bottom of the stairs filled the doorway. Bahti was inside and didn't notice, but Peter and Marko turned to the shadow at the same second. Peter received a faceful of plaster as the first shot bored into the ceiling. He estimated that the gunman had centred himself in the opening. Peter launched himself across the landing at a downward angle. The shooter was making the mistake of firing his full cylinder as fast as he could, thereby reducing his accuracy. The second shot sheared the plaster on the wall by the yellow door.

Peter drew the .38 and pumped shots wildly down the stairs. He dragged the boy to the floor but not before the attacker's third bullet seared a bloody groove along Peter's left forearm. Peter had been shot at before, and he knew the sound of an automatic revolver with a double action hammer. The amplified noise in the funnel of the stairway was deafening, but he was able to pick out the rough sound of each explosion, something you wouldn't get in a pistol. Unless the gun was relatively new, it would contain no more than six shots.

Three to go.

The fourth hit Marko in his left foot, which had projected beyond the top step when Peter pushed him down. The boy screamed and blood arced over his and Peter's body like a fan of sea spray. But by now Bahti, who had also hit the floor inside the pink room, had slid out into the landing, his left arm projecting between Marko's ankles. He snapped off five shots downwards, hoping for a ricochet if he hit the sloping ceiling of the staircase, and praying that the spewing blood from his nephew's foot did not cause his pistol to slip out of his hand.

But that was the last shot. Bahti's scattered but rapid fire had deterred the assailant, who simply ran from the entrance, leaving the three men bunched like players in a rugby scrum on the confined landing. Bahti rolled over on the slippery platform and turned to examine the wounds of the others. Peter, who was already pulling out his belt to use as a cinch on Marko's lower leg, shouted: “We're okay. Go!”

Peter watched as Bahti reached the stone base in one long leap and propelled himself into the street. The explosions must have wakened the entire town, Peter thought. His own arm throbbed and leaked bright blood across everything near it, but he was more worried about the boy. The foot has twenty-six bones and many blood vessels and tendons to tie them all together. By sweeping away the heaviest blood, he saw that the bullet had hit one or more tarsal bones and perhaps even the tibia of the left foot. Triage principles demanded that he control the bleeding first, and this he did with his belt. The second task was to get him to a podiatric surgeon, and that had to mean Valletta.

As Peter was considering whether to drag Marko into one of the rooms, Bahti rushed into the house and vaulted back up the stairway. He assisted Peter in tying off the belt tourniquet and instructed Marko in Maltese to stay quiet. He checked the boy's eyes and found them clear, no fogging of the lenses. Marko had been carrying the telephone and it had tumbled to the base of the stairs. Bahti wiped the blood from it and tapped in a stream of numbers. He began an awkward conversation half in English and half in Maltese with Martens up on the access road. They were to call an ambulance — Peter was immediately able to hear a thin voice in the background start to shout into a different mobile line — and only then to intercept Kamatta. Bahti looked over at Peter, who understood that Kamatta had no choice but to take the hill route. The fugitive would reach the top of the road in minutes.

Peter lay back. He was sinking into medical shock and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. He tried to stay calm. Bahti took off his own jacket and wrapped Peter's peskily bleeding arm. It was funny, Peter thought there on the landing, where the three men lay entangled like shipwrecked refugees on
The Raft of the Medusa
, what affects you in a crisis. The last thing he remembered before passing out was the shift of Martens's voice through the line to a cold, diamond-hard sound as he said, in clear English: “We have to go.”

On any other day, Sir Stephen would have loved Malta. He could always use the sun.

Guilt, frustration, worry, a slipping thread. And Joan Cammon, a woman who, Bartleben now realized, knew him better that his own wife did. His four-hour flight from London, sitting next to her, had proven this. It was very disconcerting. He felt like a fraud. All these years, he had been glad to pose himself next to Cammon as a
team
. He sent Peter into the field while he backed him up from the London office. No other operational detective had Stephen's home number. Peter often expressed surprise that Bartleben usually picked up the phone himself (office or house). He would always answer, it was accepted; his staff were instructed to find him, wherever he might be, short of the Palace or Number 10. If only Cammon knew the bureaucratic steeplechases Bartleben ran to keep up his end of the bargain. He'd had to sweet-talk that déclassé local fellow Maris at Whittlesun Police, and had browbeaten Stan Bracher, his brilliant but oddly footloose Canadian, to stop his wanderings long enough to relocate to the region for a week and put himself on call for Peter. A day ago, at Peter's request, he'd made the call — he a deputy commissioner — to that front-line detective, Hamm, in Whittlesun. Actually, that had been fine, given the information the fellow had supplied.

It was daunting, mobilizing everything to give Peter Cammon what he demanded, and troubleshooting all the time, but, standing in the corridor of Valletta Hospital, Sir Stephen accepted the more compelling reality. He had sent his man into danger too often, too blithely, and now he was wounded, scarred. Peter had danced with death twice in the last week (and on the most ordinary of assignments, Bartleben thought). The imbalance, in terms of risk, had been too conveniently in
HQ
's favour this time. He must make amends, even if it meant being held captive by Joan Cammon.

Sir Stephen had to come to terms with the fact that Peter was a man he didn't really know. Joan and Peter were the real team, and, as he and Joan stood waiting in a corridor painted pale green and pink pastel, just like London hospitals, the Malta sun kept out by screens over the windows, and with little left to say between them after that long, uncomfortable flight, he saw that only one of them understood how Peter had been living in his own mind over the last three weeks. Joan had known the toll the Whittlesun crimes were taking. But for now, standing there, she and Bartleben were talked out.

For the second time in those weeks, Peter Cammon found himself lying half-dressed on top of the covers on a hospital bed, and again he was on the brink of walking out in defiance of his doctors.

Though the bullet had burnt a channel down his forearm — the brand would be picturesque — and generated a lot of blood, ultimately the wound would be classified as superficial by the Yard's consulting physicians. The Maltese paramedics, who had run him to the helicopter pad just up the hillside from Marsalforn, couldn't be blamed for thinking it worse, given how much Peter's blood, combined with Marko's, saturated everything in the ambulance. They had injected a morphine sulphate dose into his leg. This wasn't the right treatment for a man facing hemorrhagic shock — Joan later raised an eyebrow — but it certainly calmed him down. He remembered asking repeatedly about Marko, who lay on the gurney next to him in the back of the ambulance. As Peter sank into morphine delirium, the madcap, jostling ride up the hill turned to grim farce. Bahti, uninjured himself but perhaps the bloodiest of the three, had tried to reassure Peter that Marko would make it, while the boy kept up a stream of Maltese curses each time they hit a bump. The presiding paramedic tried to sponge off Peter's face, but with little effect.

As they reached the hilltop turn, Bahti shouted at the driver to pull onto the verge. He raised up Peter by the shoulders and cried, “Look!” Peter recalled looking where the detective was pointing and seeing the stern expression on the face of Lieutenant Martens, but nothing else before he fell back on the gurney. He did remember smelling smoke.

Peter turned as the door opened. For a flash, he expected Sarah to come in with his shoes. It was Joan. This should have been a surprise, but the residue of morphine had shifted him into a surreal hospital ward in some Neverland, and he simply said matter-of-factly, “I'm ready to go.”

Joan came close and stroked his head. It was neither patronizing nor done out of anxiety, but it wasn't a gesture she would have offered, say, five years ago. She wasn't sure what was different about this time. Perhaps, if the touch meant anything, it was concern that their partnership was aging, that the potential for severance was greater now. She said nothing in reply to his statement, but quickly, since Bartleben was waiting in the hall behind her, raised his bandaged arm. She was tempted to unwrap it, and would at some point soon, but the work seemed competent enough. Even better than Sir Stephen, she understood that their main job was to get Peter home. She sensed the endgame. Her husband couldn't remain in Malta while André Lasker was wandering around England with his intentions unknown.

But he had a haunted, druggy look that caused her to reassess.

“Can you walk?” she said.

He perked up, fell for her sucker line. “Yes. I'm ready to go.”

“How do you know you can walk? I bet you haven't tried.”

“Let's get going, Joan.”

“Here's your deal, Peter, take it or leave it. We go to the hotel, fly home tomorrow.” He groaned. “Sir Stephen is in the antechamber, wants to talk to you. Tell him you're cooperating.”

“With whom?”

“All of us. Say what you need to. You'll be in my care, even if that's only vaguely true.”

“Meaning,” Peter said, “you want me to get
him
to go home immediately.”

Joan leaned over the bed and whispered, “I'd rather not have to sit next to him on another flight to Heathrow. He hates not controlling everything. I hate sitting next to a fidgeting, under-occupied bureaucrat for five hours at a go.”

“Lasker's back in England.”

“I have no doubt,” Joan said. “Ten minutes with Stephen, then we check out. Unless you want more bed time.”

“No,” he said.

Sir Stephen gave her a worried look as she exited. They passed like exchanged prisoners at Checkpoint Charlie. The worry was for himself; she remained self-possessed. He approached Peter's recumbent figure but he couldn't find a comfortable place to sit to conduct the conversation. The chair placed him too low to the bed. He finally chose to sit on the end of the mattress. He hated hospitals. The smell of disinfectant had penetrated his suit, and he was glad once more that he hadn't gone the Harley Street route.

“How's the boy?” Peter said.

“Several bones broken in the left foot. Two transfusions. I'm told there was blood all over the place. The paramedics had trouble figuring out who was shot and who wasn't. They operated on the lad last night, and he should be fine.”

“Does that mean he'll walk?”

Bartleben smiled ruefully. “Your partner, Detective Bahti? I spoke to him this morning. He'll come to see you. Tough customer. He told me to tell you the boy will be surfing again in a month.”

All this time, Peter had been stretched out on the bed, dressed but for his stocking feet. His body aching, the bandage on his left arm a little too tight, he swung to a sitting position on the edge of the mattress. Bartleben hesitated to help him; he hated feeling like a boxer's manager wondering whether to aid his bruised fighter after the match. He knew there was little time remaining alone with Peter before Joan re-entered, and he had business to cover. Peter winced with the effort of sitting up. He was struggling, Bartleben could tell, but there were some matters they never made explicit. Peter was never prone to depression or self-pity; his frustration was more likely to surface as anger at various bureaucracies — hospital rules, police management, or whatever was at hand.

“Damned morphine knocked me out,” Peter said. He didn't say that he still felt a bit disoriented, not in command. “What happened on the hill road? I wasn't awake for that.”

“Okay, here it is,” Sir Stephen continued. “Kamatta's dead. I understand he ran from the building after blasting away at the three of you, got in his car and took off from the town on the only road out. There was a police car waiting at the top of the hill.”

“Martens and his partner.”

“Did Detective Bahti warn them? I presume so, but he didn't actually tell me. In any event, they were waiting, guns drawn. From what Deputy Commissioner Albanoni informs me” — Peter grunted at the name — “they opened fire on the car immediately and the man veered off the hill. The car burst into a ball of fire.”

Peter vaguely remembered the smoke. “And the flat? Kamatta's second room?”

“We hit the jackpot. He had a box full of altered passports, although none with Lasker's picture in them. Very professionally done. But even better, we found a list glued to the bottom of a drawer that included all the false names our man used on the export applications over the years, and a number of others that might have provided aliases for Lasker. Albanoni told me about an hour ago that he matched one of the latter with the name of a departing passenger on yesterday's flight to Barcelona.”

“What about Barcelona to London?”

“Still waiting for Interpol to pin down the flight schedules out of Barcelona yesterday and today. I made sure the Spanish authorities had the names from the list kept by the late Mr. Kamatta. Of course, Lasker could still be in Spain. But do you think he's headed back to England?”

Peter understood that his boss had accomplished most of this from the plane.
Within earshot of Joan?
He looked straight at Bartleben.
Why did Joan comprehend what Bartleben failed to?
“He's already there.”

Sir Stephen decided to change direction. “I have what may be even better news. You asked me to call Detective Ronald Hamm?”

“Ah, yes, the phone message.”

“Do you know an F.R. Symington?”

Peter called up the image of the stage of the Whittlesun Community Theatre, the red seats. “Yes, I interviewed him. Lasker volunteered at the local theatre.”

“Well, it seems that a man reported to Whittlesun Police that his wallet and passport were stolen from him six months ago. When asked why he was carrying around the passport, he said that he regularly takes the Newhaven-to-Dieppe Ferry, which was a reasonable enough explanation. But the reason he waited six months to report it was that he finally began to suspect that it was stolen while he was at that very theatre. You see, he performs in their plays.”

“So, why did Hamm become suspicious of Symington?”

“He didn't, initially. But he checked all the recent reports of lost passports, both in the local files and with Immigration, and found another filing of a stolen passport three months before the first theft. He called the fellow and asked if he had any connection to Whittlesun Theatre. The man seemed quite proud of his turn as Captain Queeg.”

“Was that passport stolen while he was at the theatre?”

“Not that one. It was taken from his house, he believes. He always kept it in the same desk drawer.” Bartleben recomposed himself on the end of the bed. “But here's the loop. Both names showed up on Mr. Kamatta's list. We didn't find the passports themselves, and so perhaps he finished them, and handed them over to Lasker for future use.”

“We need to check entry points across Britain to see if either character crossed through customs.”

“I've started the process, but I need to get back to London.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I have an Air Malta connection in two hours.”

Bartleben saw the idea flit across Peter's face: he waited for Peter to ask him to arrange tickets for himself and Joan on the same flight. But Peter didn't say it; in fact, he didn't come close to saying it. He winced again as he flexed his bandaged arm.

“And what else do we know about Symington's involvement?”

Sir Stephen moved to the window. The disinfectant smell increased. For some reason, there was no view to be found of the great Valletta Harbour. “How well do you know Detective Hamm?”

“We had our adventure together. I seduced him into danger, I'm afraid. A good man.”

Bartleben turned back to the bed. “Here's the story, the way I understand it. Hamm went to see Symington. Maybe he was still in the flush of his good detective work regarding the passports, though I expect he was just being fastidious. After some evidently aggressive questioning, Symington admitted he knew of Lasker's plan to disappear. And now we know that Lasker was planning to abscond with a considerable amount of skimmed profits from the garage, and the proceeds from the shady export scheme. But Symington denied knowing that Lasker was organizing a fraud; he claimed he knew nothing about the cars.”

Peter finished the line of logic. “But he wasn't in a position to deny knowledge of the theft of the passports from his crew and cast.”

“Symington is in serious trouble. Aside from the aiding and abetting charges that Hamm says will be preferred, he's likely to be fired from his teaching job and dismissed from the theatre.”

Peter had liked the philosopher in Symington, but had no explanation for his role in the escape. He suspected that he had bought in selectively to the romantic elements of André's plan and had failed to consider the potential for havoc. Naiveté is also a romantic's impulse, the belief that all will work out well if motives are pure and trust is established. Taking someone into your confidence is a con man's first principle. The passport dodge should have alerted Symington to Lasker's nasty side.

Bartleben returned to his bedside; he began to fidget, and tapped on the iron frame of the hospital bed.