Highbinders (19 page)

“Who put you up to it, dad?” Ned Nitry said. “Who bought you?”

The old man raised his head. A couple of tears had made tracks down his face where he had forgotten to wash. “I don’t know,” he said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“It was just a voice. A voice over the telephone.”

“A man’s voice?”

“Yes, a man’s voice.”

“What kind of accent, English, American, or what?”

“There was no accent.”

“He had to have one or the other.”

“I couldn’t tell. I tried to, but I couldn’t.”

“I couldn’t either,” I said. “It was probably the same guy who called me. I couldn’t tell what he was and I tried.”

“How much did he pay you, dad?” Ned Nitry said. “How much did he pay you to lie to us?”

“A thousand pounds. He sent it round by taxi in an envelope.”

Ned Nitry turned to old Tom. “Get him out of here, Tom.”

While Tom was ushering the old man out, Ned Nitry turned to me. “How did you know, goddamnit? How did you know it was faked?”

“I didn’t know for sure,” I said. “I only suspected because I knew somebody who could have done it. In fact, he probably did.”

Ned Nitry got interested. “Who? Who did the fake?”

“A man called Curnutt, but it doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. He was murdered.”

“I read about him,” Bert Nitry said. “He was a locksmith, wasn’t he?”

“Among other things.”

“If you knew it was faked, why didn’t you tell us?” Bert said. “Why’d you pay out all that good money, if you knew it was a fake?”

“I didn’t know. I only suspected. I didn’t really know until I banged it down on the slate. If it had been a real diamond, I’d have looked like a fool, but that’s all. The slate wouldn’t have hurt the diamond. And as I said, I’d’ve looked a little like a fool, but not as much like a fool as you would, if you tried to sell it. I figured that there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would be the real thing. The thieves wouldn’t deal with an expert—and besides, the only one you had could be bought. So I spent your money. I don’t think I made a mistake. I think I gambled and I lost.”

“With our money,” Ned Nitry said.

“That’s right. With your money. So I still have sort of an obligation.”

“To do what?” Ned Nitry said.

“To get your sword back. Or rather Styles’s sword. You’d like all that lovely money, wouldn’t you, Robin?”

“You know damned well I would.”

“Good,” I said. “Then you can come along and help.”

I
HAD A HARD TIME
breaking away from the Nitry brothers because they kept asking me questions for which I had only guesses as answers. Guesses or lies. So I kept telling them I didn’t know and that they should ask Eddie and no, I didn’t know where Eddie had gone off to sudden like that.

When we finally escaped from the Nitry mansion, Robin Styles and I caught a taxi. I told the driver to take us to the Avis car rental garage off Park Lane.

“What do you need a car for?” Styles said.

“To carry the sword in,” I said.

He didn’t seem too impressed with what I rented, a Volkswagen, but I had decided that what I needed was anonymous reliability rather than flash and speed. After I signed for the car, I told Robin Styles, “You drive.”

He got behind the wheel, checked the brakes, fiddled with the seat adjustment, tested the clutch a couple of times, seemed to check what gauges there were, and we were off. He drove very well, but then he did everything very well, except gamble.

“Where do you want to go?” he said.

“A hardware store,” I said.

“A what?”

I had to think a moment to make the translation. “An ironmonger.”

He knew of one on Edgware Road so we went there to make my purchases. I bought the largest screwdriver the shop had, a small handsaw, a pair of long-nosed pliers, and a monkey wrench, a request which had the shop assistant puzzled and me resorting to gestures until I remembered the English translation and asked for a spanner. It wasn’t all that bad though. I once had spent an entire afternoon trying to find a bottle of rubber cement. I never did find any, nor did I ever learn what the English call it. Elastic gum paste perhaps.

I also bought a cloth bag to carry my new tools in and when we got back to the Volkswagen, I tossed it into the rear seat. “I’m going to walk back to the hotel,” I said to Styles. “I’d like you to stay out of sight for the rest of the day. Go take a drive in the country. Find a girl. But stay away from your usual spots. Why don’t you just consider yourself as being temporarily in my employ for the next twenty-four hours or so, if you can stand it. Working, I mean.”

“It will take some adjustment,” Styles said.

“Well, here’s fifty pounds to help it along. For expenses. I don’t expect an itemized accounting. When you get your three-million-pound sword back, you can buy me a small castle someplace. Maybe in the Cotswolds.”

Styles took the fifty pounds and put them into his wallet. He looked at me, then at the bag of tools in back of the VW, and then back at me. “When do we do it?”

“Do what?”

“Burgle whomever you have in mind.”

“After midnight,” I said. “They tell me it’s always better after midnight.”

“And you want me to pick you up?”

I nodded. “At the stroke of twelve in front of the Hilton. I’ll be the man in the domino mask.”

Styles shook his head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Mmm,” I said and let him interpret that anyway he wanted to.

There were no messages for me at the desk at the Hilton so I went on up to my room and said hello to Ceil Apex who was standing by the window admiring my view of Hyde Park.

She turned slowly. “You don’t seem overly surprised.”

“I was expecting either you or Eddie.”

“And you got me.”

“So I did. Would you like a drink?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would rather.”

I fixed two whiskies with water from the bathroom tap and handed her one. I lifted my glass a little and said, “To the biggest scam of all.”

“Eddie’s,” she said.

“And yours.”

“Yes. Mine too.”

“Where’s Eddie?” I said. “Out trying to patch things up?”

“Something like that.”

“And you’re here with a proposition.”

“A proposal,” she said.

“What?”

“Do nothing. Do absolutely nothing for twenty-four hours and Eddie’ll have it worked out by then.”

“You’ll have to do some convincing.”

“How?”

“Well, there’s your fair body, for instance, although that may be a sexist notion that’s gone out of style.”

She looked at me coolly with those cat eyes of hers. “If you want it,” she said.

“And then there’s money. That’s always in style.”

“We haven’t any.”

“None at all?”

“We’ve been stony for nearly a year. Eddie sank everything into a couple of ventures that went sour, probably because they were legitimate and he was out of his depth. We’ve been living off Dad.”

“And then the sword turned up.”

“Yes. The sword turned up.”

“What would Eddie’s share have been, if it had all gone the way it was supposed to have gone?”

“Dad and Uncle Bert had agreed to give him the finder’s fee.”

“Ten percent?”

She nodded.

“So if they made around eight or nine hundred thousand pounds net after expenses out of a three-million-pound deal, he would get ten percent of their profit. About eighty or ninety thousand pounds.”

“And we owe that much,” she said.

“He would,” I said. “So he decided to go for the whole pot.”

“We decided.”

“Yes,” I said. “You both decided. He’d have to have you in on it or he couldn’t have used old Jack Brooks and he needed an expert thief to steal the thing, didn’t he? Eddie’s no thief.”

She sighed. “I didn’t give poor old Jack much choice really. I told him we’d have to sack him unless he helped us. It was like telling your grandfather to get out, but Jack didn’t need much persuasion.”

“Then the killing started,” I said.

“Eddie had nothing to do with that.”

“No?”

“No.”

“All right. Who did?”

“We don’t know.”

“Remember when I called Eddie early that morning and told him I had to go to Highgate? That’s all I told him. That I had to have the one hundred thousand pounds and a ride to Highgate. But when old Tom picked me up, he knew that we had to go to the Swain’s Lane entrance. Eddie must have told him. So if Eddie knew that he also knew that the dead man was already tucked up underneath the piano lid out there. You should watch that superannuated help of yours. Their minds wander. They talk too much.”

“We had to use what help we could get, and the cheaper the better.”

“Such as Tick-Tock Tamil?”

“Yes, we used Tick-Tock to get the name of his man Curnutt. Then we used Curnutt’s son to dope your drink.”

“I still don’t understand that,” I said.

She sighed and turned toward the window once more. “We needed the time. Or Curnutt did. It was taking him more time to make the duplicate sword than he had thought. You were already here so it was merely a slight delaying tactic.”

“You handled Curnutt, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean handled him?”

“I mean that you talked him into it. Persuaded him to make the duplicate sword.”

She nodded, her back still to me. “Yes, I persuaded him. I even convinced him that I was going to make certain that the real sword got back to its rightful owner. We even had a code worked out. A torn playing card. He was rather a romantic little man.”

“So is Robin Styles,” I said. “He believes you, too.”

“Another of my assignments,” she said. “Robin. Keep Robin happy, I was told. I must say I tried.”

“Now you’ve got another assignment,” I said. “Me.”

She turned. “Neither Eddie nor I had anything to do with those men being killed.”

“And you don’t know who did.”

“We don’t know.”

“Crap,” I said. “Eddie had it all set. Curnutt would make the duplicate sword and Curnutt’s son would return it for the one-hundred-thousand-pound ransom. That was to be their cut and it would also take care of Tick-Tock, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, that was the way it was to have been, originally.”

“Then when I brought back the fake sword, Eddie had that old man all bribed up to swear that it was real. Everybody would be happy then, until your father and uncle tried to sell the sword and learned that it was fake. You and Eddie would express a lot of horror and commiseration. But Eddie would have the real sword stashed away someplace and then, maybe a year from now, maybe less, he would make his own deal for the entire amount and split with no one—not Robin Styles, not your uncle or father, no one. The French would never tell who they’d bought it from. That was the way it was supposed to work, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. That was the way it was supposed to work.”

“And I would even get paid in full for what I did. Your father and uncle would be satisfied that the real sword was delivered to them, the genuine article. They would have old Doc Christenberry’s sworn word for it. I would be back in New York spending my money before they ever found out that the sword was a fake. And if they started suspecting me, then that would be just too damned bad as far as you and Eddie were concerned.”

“You are rather clever, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not clever,” I said. “I just kept stumbling over dead bodies. They always make me think. Or worry. That’s what Eddie should have done. Worried a little. Thought a little. He should have thought that a three-million-pound sword might cause people to go around killing other people, especially the people he knows. Where is he now?”

“He’s out looking for Tick-Tock.”

“Does he know where to look?”

“He thinks so.”

“He also thinks that Tick-Tock has the real sword?”

“And that Tick-Tock killed Curnutt and his son?”

“Who else could have?”

“Robin Styles, for one,” I said.

Her face changed without her knowing it. Up until then, she had been making it do what she ordered it to: express quiet sorrow, faint irony, weary resignation. Now it expressed surprise and even shock and she almost had to struggle to get it back under control.

“He couldn’t have.”

I smiled at her. “You really were going to doublecross Eddie, weren’t you? You called Curnutt romantic, yet from what I’ve learned about him, he was about as romantic as a doorknob. But he was religious and I can imagine the cock-and-bull story you fed him about how he should pass the real sword over only to the upright Christian who would come calling for it with the other torn half of the jack of spades. Then what? Then you and Robin Styles were going to ride off into the sunset with a three-million-pound sword that you could peddle as well as your father and uncle could because you knew all their tricks. That was about it, wasn’t it?”

She put her glass down and turned back toward the window. “That was it,” she said, “but that’s not it now. I’m stuck with Eddie. I’m in as deep as he is now.”

“And Eddie still trusts you, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. He trusts me.”

“That’s more than I do.”

She turned. “What about my proposal? Will you give us our twenty-four hours to patch things over?”

“No.”

She stood there looking at me. This time she had slipped on a thoughtful expression. “If you do find the sword, I know where and how we could sell it.”

“For three million pounds.”

“Yes,” she said. “For at least three million pounds.”

“Just you and I.”

“The two of us.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with that, honey.”

“What?”

“For some reason I don’t think I’d live long enough to spend mine.”

H
AMMERSMITH ISN’T ALL THAT
hard to find. You just start heading west and run right into it. But Robin Styles didn’t seem to be too sure where it was, so I had to get out a small map and start giving him rights and lefts.

“Don’t you ever get out of Mayfair?” I said.

“Certainly, but I don’t come here very often. No occasion to, really.”