At the Point of a. 38

5

Shayne’s phone rang several times in the night.

He heard the ringing, but it was far away, as though taking place in somebody else’s dream. On the dot of seven, the phone struck again. This time it partially woke him.

He tried to reach for it but he seemed to be strapped to the bed. Nothing worked as it should. He was off balance and sliding. He lunged with his left hand and knocked the phone off the table. That stopped the insistent ringing. He still had no idea where he was, or why one of his arms was in a cast.

Rolling with difficulty, he sat up.

Scratching sounds came from the floor, as though a family of mice was trapped in the phone. Shayne crumpled and threw away an empty cigarette pack. He got out of bed, supporting the weight of the cast with his left hand. After some clattering and fumbling, he put water on for coffee. He used the bathroom. Then he put his head in a stream of cold water and held it there until he remembered a few of the questions that had been in his mind when he went to sleep.

He towelled himself off, still a long way from normal, and returned to pick up the phone.

“Shayne speaking.”

A long-distance operator asked him to hold for Leonard Dodd. Shayne pinched the bridge of his nose. He was still thinking in categories. Dodd. Washington. State Department.

A voice said, “Apologies, Mike. From the noises I’ve been hearing, I assume we woke you up?”

“I took a pill. I won’t be all the way back until I get some coffee.”

“Then maybe I’d better say my name again. Leonard Dodd. Do you place me?”

“State Department, isn’t it? Give me a minute. A couple of years back, something about forged passports. I seem to remember you were ninety-five percent human. In your department that’s high.”

Dodd laughed. “That was two years ago. My wife tells me I’ve slipped a few points since. Mike, I tried to reach you last night without any luck, and I thought I’d better get started early before you went anywhere. Have you had a call from somebody named Esther Landau?”

“The phone’s been ringing. It didn’t get all the way through.”

“I don’t know when she’s due in-she’ll call from the airport. This is a nice bright Israeli chick, and I’ll give you her name again. Esther Landau. She works for the Shin Bet. That’s like their FBI, but it covers more ground.”

“Never heard of it,” Shayne said. “And I’m not sure I want to right now. Try me again in half an hour.”

“Mike, hang on, please. All I’d like to do is establish her bonafides, and ask you to see her.”

“Does she speak English?”

“With a cute accent. And she’s nice, Mike. Very down to earth, and I think you’ll like her. She was an army lieutenant. That doesn’t mean she’s not totally feminine, if you don’t mind that old-fashioned word. An interesting mixture, and she has an interesting problem, just your kind of thing.”

Shayne breathed in and out slowly. “I’ll be tied up later, I’m not sure for how long. Talk a little slower. Don’t be afraid to say things twice. As I keep saying, I haven’t had coffee yet.”

At the other end of the conversation, Dodd made an effort to slow down, but the pace wasn’t natural to him. In a moment he was speaking as rapidly as before, in staccato bursts.

“The channels on this I won’t go into, but they’re gilt-edged. It carries a high priority, shall we say. The Ambassador put in a personal request, and that’s why I got up so early to make this call. What Esther wanted us to supply was the name of a competent and discreet-and I’ll say that again, discreet — investigator in Miami, with connections to handle an important undercover assignment. The name Michael Shayne sprang to mind. If you’re too busy to take it on, I hope you’ll talk to her and recommend somebody else. The bill comes to us.”

“To the State Department? That must mean you really think it’s important.”

“You’re remembering the trouble you had getting paid. This is different, it’s out of contingency funds and it won’t have to be approved by so many people.”

“I have to talk to the cops about something that happened last night. How pressing is this?”

“Rather. I want her to tell you about it, but maybe I can whet your appetite. Murray Gold.”

“Yeah?” Shayne said slowly. “And she’s from Israel. That’s enough, you’ve hooked me. If she’s a cop why don’t you send her to our cops here and save your department some money? They’re as interested in Murray Gold as I am.”

“If you try hard enough, maybe you can guess why. All right, great. That’s all I want to say on the phone. I won’t tie up your line any longer. She may be trying to get through. Call me if you have any questions.”

The phone rang the instant Shayne put it down. It wasn’t the Israeli woman he had just been told about. It was Rourke.

“Man, are you O.K.? What happened last night?”

“Two or three things. I’m waiting for a call, Tim, but quickly: I saw a guy putting a body in a car and I chased him around for an hour and a half. He finally got away from me. That’s more or less all, except that at one point he bought ten or a dozen stolen submachine guns from a master sergeant at Homestead. I haven’t decided what to do with that. Don’t print it, but if you want to pass it along, go ahead. I’ll be talking to Gentry later. Have you heard anything about Murray Gold in the last couple of weeks?”

“Gold. Now there’s a newsworthy name. Where does he connect?”

“Tim,” Shayne said curtly. “I want the line.”

“Just the usual rumors that he’s been seen. The bondsmen are so anxious to get their hands on him they’re catching at anything. If he really is around, and I doubt it, he has to have a damn good reason. O.K., I’ll hang up,” he said when Shayne made an impatient sound. “But remember your good friend Rourke. Remember I’m in the newspaper business.”

The water was boiling. Shayne made coffee, adding a sizeable dollop of cognac. While he sipped, he watched the local news. He frequently made this program. This morning he made it twice. He listened with no change of expression to several misstatements of fact, no more or less wide of the mark than usual. He poured more coffee and dressed.

His next caller was his daytime mobile operator.

“This is a funny one,” she said. “I have a call from your own car phone.”

“My car’s in the garage downstairs, I hope. That’s where I left it.”

A woman’s voice, speaking quickly: “Mr. Shayne. My name is Landau. I am here in this country from Israel, and I would like to consult you on a matter. I am sorry to say that I believe some men have been following me. It seems I have evaded them, but I decided against using one of those glass cages the phones are in on the street. I persuaded the man to show me your car, and it is from there I am calling. May I tell you the subject I would like to discuss?”

“It’s O.K. Dodd called me from Washington. Come on up. Take the elevator from there. You won’t have to go through the lobby.”

“That was what I intended, but for these people to know I am here in Miami has surprised me completely. Do they also know that I hope for the assistance of Michael Shayne? I would dislike to have our discussion interrupted by gunfire. If you would come down, perhaps I can compress myself into a small space, out of sight, and you will drive us somewhere.”

“O.K., compress yourself,” Shayne said with a smile. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

He finished his loaded coffee. He took cigarettes, a half-filled fifth of cognac, and in case of trouble on the way, a Walther. 38, which he concealed in his sling.

The elevator took him to the basement garage without stopping. His Buick seemed at first to be empty. The woman was on the floor of the front seat, her knees high, a gun in her hand. She was older than she had sounded, but better looking than he had expected from Dodd’s description. She looked more like an ex-Harper’s Bazaar model than an ex-lieutenant in the Israeli army. She had black shoulder-length hair and olive skin, and was so slender the bones of her shoulders showed through the fabric of her black dress. Her earrings might have been diamonds. High-heeled shoes elevated her knees still further. She had a stern look, and the lines of concentration around her eyes were likely to stay there, Shayne thought, even after she stopped concentrating.

“You have a broken arm!” she exclaimed. “Can you drive a car?”

“Not easily,” Shayne said, getting in. “But I put on quite a few miles last night, and I’m getting better at it.”

She opened a shiny purse and put the pistol away. “Am I down far enough? I regret this, Mr. Shayne, and it is possible, of course, that it is all my fancy. One reads so much about violence in America. But these men did seem to have a certain-intentness. I was quite frightened.”

Shayne backed out of the berth and eased the Buick around. He nodded to the attendant, who glanced in and saw the woman on the floor.

“I hope it was all right, letting her use the phone. She showed me her credentials.”

“Sure.”

When they were out on the street the woman said, “I showed him credentials, and I also tipped him five dollars.”

“That’s how we do things here.”

“In Israel too, I’m afraid, more and more.”

He turned north along the Miami River. “Any special place?”

“No, somewhere we can talk.”

She began to change position to come up on the seat. Shayne said quietly, “No, stay down there. We’ve got somebody with us.”

There were two men in the car he had spotted. Both had a charged air, as though when they moved they would go directly from repose into violent action. A third, who had been looking into a show window, crossed the sidewalk, too hurriedly, and joined them.

“A green Pontiac, three men,” Shayne said, still speaking quietly. “They’re new at this. They aren’t being too careful.”

“Oh, God. What do we do now?”

She had been about to put on dark glasses as they came out of the garage. She completed the movement, and her face partially disappeared.

“If they give us a few minutes we can call a cruiser and have them arrested,” Shayne said.

“They won’t wait so long. I really believe they’ve been hired to kill me. Can you keep ahead of them?”

“Probably.”

“I’m so sorry to involve you in this, Mr. Shayne. I had no idea whatsoever that anyone knew-”

He was driving easily in third, keeping the following car centered in the rearview mirror. It moved up but made no attempt to pass.

“They don’t look quite right,” he said after a moment. “The guy jerked getting away, and he’s using too much brake. Who are they?”

“I would like to know! They must realize I am here in the matter of the arch criminal Gold.”

Shayne took a hard right, passed a truck on the wrong side, forced himself into a narrow opening between cars, and turned left.

“I haven’t heard anybody called an arch criminal in years.”

“That’s what he is, however, from the inside out. It makes one ashamed to be a Jew.”

They were approaching 36th Street. Arrows pointed to the airport expressway. Suddenly a second car, a large sedan, moving fast, passed the Pontiac and then passed Shayne, cutting in sharply and forcing him to brake. The change in speed threw the woman forward.

“If they want it this way, then,” she said grimly, opening her purse.

One man was out of the car ahead, waving Shayne over. Again, there was something slightly off about him-he wasn’t one of the arch criminal Gold’s usual people.

“Brace yourself,” Shayne said. “Get all the way down and tighten up.”

She responded instantly, tucking her knees under her chin and rolling. Shayne was trussed up in his seat-belt, but if she hadn’t reacted promptly to his warning, she would have been thrown violently forward against the dashboard when the Buick’s reinforced bumper caved in the rear end of the stopped car, and drove the car ten feet forward, clearing the entrance to the expressway. Shayne reversed-he was becoming more adept at this difficult one-hand movement-and went past on the inside, kissing fenders.

He was leaning forward, using his cast to steady the wheel. The woman, off the floor, extended her arm behind his head and fired out the side window. The unexpected crack of the gun behind Shayne’s ear caused him to pull the wheel. They ran out on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said, after bringing all four wheels back on the concrete. “We can outrun them.”

In the side mirror, as they carried into the curve, he saw the man in the street bend forward clutching his stomach. The curve took them around so their assailants were now on their right. The woman reversed herself and fired twice more, through the window on her side. Then Shayne was out on the expressway.

She had held the pistol in both hands as she fired. Now, turning, she lowered it between her knees.

“I believe I hit one of them.”

“I believe you did,” Shayne agreed. “Hang on now. We’re going to do some steeplechasing.”

He shifted lanes abruptly without signalling, moving into the middle lane first, then the highspeed lane to the left. Again, using only his speed and judgment, he came all the way back across and left the expressway. If any other cars had been following, they would have been swept past the exit in the stream heading for the airport.

The woman was sitting forward, her knees locked, her mouth a straight line. She didn’t seem to notice that her arm was bleeding.

“Esther,” Shayne said gently. “You can put the gun away now. The fight’s over. You did very well.”

“I did, didn’t I? I always made a good score shooting at a paper target. That was the first time I shot at a living man.”

“I doubt if you killed him. It’s almost impossible at that range with a handgun.”

The gun dropped and she began to shudder lightly. In a moment she was sobbing.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” He pulled over and stopped. “Everybody takes his chances in a war. The guy signed up to knock you over before you could talk to anybody. You fired first. I’ll repeat-I don’t think you killed him. He took a little stutter step and stayed on his feet. If he was going to die, he would have sat down. So brighten up and we’ll go somewhere and get some breakfast.”

“Yes,” she told herself. “And one more or less of such people hardly matters, does it?” She added, “Except that for some reason it does seem to matter.”

He offered her the cognac. “This sometimes helps.”

“I don’t drink.”

“It’s a good time to start. Go ahead, it’s not that habit-forming.”

Still tense, she took the bottle, looking at Shayne doubtfully. “Are you sure?”

When he nodded, smiling, she put it to her lips and drank deeply. She sputtered, waited and drank again.

“Strong, isn’t it?”

“That’s the whole idea. Now let’s get something to eat and you can tell me what this is all about.”

“Food?” she said faintly. “I really feel extraordinarily-”

A Sanitation Department truck passed, clanking and emitting a smell of garbage and partly-burned diesel fuel. She forced herself to sit erect.

“I’m quite all right,” she said firmly. “It is merely, you see, that I haven’t slept for two days, and the way it is necessary to do now, step in an airplane in one time zone and step out in another, I hardly know what planet I’m on. A doctor gave me some pills to keep from falling asleep. You wish to eat breakfast, I will accompany you. But order nothing for me.”

He crossed beneath the expressway and entered it from the other side, joining the citybound flow. He was watching the mirrors closely. Nothing showed up; apparently their pursuers had definitely broken contact. He was heading for a nearby motel, which had a restaurant and coffee shop.

After a moment’s strained silence, the woman took another pull at the cognac. The neck of the bottle chattered briefly against her teeth. She screwed the cap back on deliberately, and set it on the floor between her feet. When she straightened she made a faint sound and pressed her hand to her mouth.

“Can you stop, please.”

“This is a bad place to stop. Hang on for one minute.”

She gagged violently. He pulled over, setting his emergency blinkers. She grabbed blindly for the door handle but didn’t get it open. Everything came up in a rush. She caught some of it in her cupped hands but the overflow went on her skirt. Then she was able to get the door open and was partially out of the car, vomiting hard. Shayne stayed in his seat-belt. Between spasms, she apologized.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’d get out and hold your forehead, but that always seems a little silly.”

She was holding her hair back from her face with both hands. The dark glasses were still on. After a time she fell back into the seat.

“I’m so ashamed. I don’t know how that could have happened. Look at me, I’m a mess.”

“Are you finished for now?”

“I think so.”

He told her to close the door, and he moved along the highway to the motel turnoff. He rented a room while she lay with her head back and her eyes closed, pale and embarrassed. Returning, he parked in front of a ground-floor unit and helped the woman out of the car.

“Did you leave your suitcase at the airport?”

“Yes, but never mind it for now. I have some things I must tell you. If I can wash my dress it will dry quickly. I’m so disgusted. Disgusted! I have been a soldier, you know, and soldiers are not supposed to behave in such a weak fashion. But I can’t stop thinking about how the man put a hand to his stomach as though to keep it from emptying on the road. Yet I must tell myself, as you said, he is one of Murray Gold’s gangsters, and if he dies or not, it doesn’t matter a particle.”

Shayne closed the door after them. “These weren’t local people. I don’t claim to know every button-man in Miami by sight, but I do know what kind of clothes they wear, how often they get haircuts and what kind.”

Without her dark glasses, she gave him a puzzled look. “You mean they were imported from some other city?”

“That’s possible, but there may be more to it.”

She shivered again. “First I must stop feeling so wretchedly ill, then perhaps I can think. Somehow they knew I was coming to see you?”

“That’s how it looks, if you’re part of it at all. I’m involved in more than one thing.”

Her face wrinkled as she smelled herself. “First I must clean this off, then we can talk.”

Shayne had brought the cognac in from the car, but he didn’t drink. The bathroom door-like all motel doors, a layer of air separating two layers of one-eighth-inch plywood-had been badly hung and gave her little privacy. He heard her clean her mouth and spit. She filled the basin and washed her dress. A bit later, she came out in her slip, and though she was wearing a bra underneath, she had arranged a bath towel modestly over her bare shoulders. Some of her color had come back. She had used a comb and lipstick.

She sat down on the edge of one of the double beds, knees together, but groaned faintly, piled two pillows together and lay back against them, her feet up.

“Take your time,” Shayne said.

“But that’s the point, you see. If I lie here being sick while everyone else is hurrying, I will go home with empty hands. And if you knew how much arguing before they agreed to let me come.”

She had left her purse in the bathroom, but had brought a small leather folder, which she opened to show Shayne.

“To start being formal. Though you don’t read Hebrew, I fear.”

“You fear right.”

“I am a member of the Shin Bet, which is a sort of police, but also part of the army. How much did the man from Washington tell you?”

“Not a hell of a lot, just to expect you and it had something to do with an arch criminal who broke out of one of your jails.”

“Arch criminal, I must remember not to say that any more. This is all you were told?”

“If it turns out I can help, the State Department will be paying my fee, and they’re so damn tight they wouldn’t suggest it unless somebody in your government thinks it’s important.”

“Which expresses it mildly. Very well, Murray Gold. We didn’t publish the reason at the time, but he was arrested for heroin.”

“For doing what with heroin?”

“For buying, to smuggle into the U.S. You realize his presence in our country presented a serious problem. Was he truly a poor Jew, or was that merely a ruse to persuade us to give him asylum? We were watching him, not very seriously. He had a young paramour in his house. We persuaded her to report to us who came to see him, how he filled his time. And she has vanished, by the way. We think she is no longer in the country.”

“Just a minute.”

Pulling the phone toward him, he dialled the combination to get an outside line, and then Tim Rourke’s number.

“Tim, this has to be fast,” he said when his friend answered. “Can you give me a better description of that woman last night?”

“The one we pulled out of the Ford?”

“Yeah.”

“The labels were cut out of her clothes. On the short side-say five-four. Broad through the can. She was shot in the face, and that changes anybody’s looks. Oh, heavy eyebrows-all the way across. When she rented the car she gave a New York address, but it’s a phony. Fingerprints negative. That’s about all.”

Shayne thanked him. After hanging up, he repeated the description to the woman on the bed.

“Those eyebrows!” she exclaimed. “Her most conspicuous feature, the very strong eyebrows. Hair pulled back tightly. You mean she’s here?”

“Her body’s here. Somebody killed her last night.”

“My word,” she breathed. “Gerda Fox is her name. How complex it becomes. What we think, this is the current theory about Gold, is that when he first came he was authentically without money. At the same time, not ready to take his place as a working Israeli. He was constantly looking about for some crooked way to recover his fortunes. And one fine day he had a visitor from America. He was very much taken by surprise, and he jumped out the window and sprained an ankle. But afterwards they talked companionably. It meant nothing to us, merely an old friend or so. But Gerda reported that from this time on he had money. Now we began getting hints that heroin was entering the country. After the laboratories were closed down in the south of France, the smugglers were setting up new routes. And we are determined to keep this filthy traffic on the other side of Israeli frontiers. Many of our people have money-grubbing in their background, and heroin profits are so huge! Our Murray was behind this, we believed, but in police work it is always nice to draw a complete diagram before the pounce, to be sure of getting everyone. This time we couldn’t wait. He was accumulating a shipment, of this we were convinced. Where it was hidden, how it would be transported, these things we had not yet discovered. A decision was reached, and we came down on him like wolves and put him in prison under the Emergency Regulations. We continued our investigation, and it proved to be very true. He had invested a large sum in Turkish opium, and installed refining equipment on a fishing boat. They did the work at sea, so if the boat should be stopped for a search they could dump the evidence over the side. That he is clever, we already knew. Today, thank heaven, there is nothing left of the organization he put together. All have been jailed or have fled.”

“Why didn’t you charge him and put him on trial?”

“Because his big cache was still missing. So long as he was on preventive detention, it was possible to hope that he would come to terms. He was not a young man, or a well one. Our offer was one year, to be followed by deportation, in return for a guilty plea and the handing over of the hidden narcotics. He declared himself innocent. Then he escaped. Now I should tell you why I am coming to you and not the regular police. That person who visited him before he became less poverty-stricken also visited him in prison. Usually detainees are allowed no visitors, but this man presented police papers from the city of Miami, and stated that he wished to interrogate the prisoner on some criminal matter. What was actually said between them, we have no way of knowing. The escape happened a week later. So you see why I must be careful. One has heard accounts of police corruption in this country.”

“What name did he give?”

“Those records were destroyed in the explosions. The commandant was killed. Two of the survivors remember the visitor, but their descriptions differ. They agree that the name commenced with a J sound, Jennings, Jenny. The first name was Will.”

“Will Gentry?”

“Perhaps. Do you know such an officer? Is it likely?”

“I know him, and it’s damned unlikely. But go on.”

“I’ve been assigned to this business for a matter of months. I take it a little too personally, I’m sorry to say. This man tried to fool us, claiming the protection that has been earned by genuine victims of persecution. It was an affront to the memory of the millions who perished. Now if he is to succeed, after all, and live to a prosperous old age with good food and liquor and corrupt young women, it would be painful to me, in the extreme. So here I am. I have been convinced that he would come to Miami. I believe that immediately after his escape he recovered the hidden drugs and managed to slip across the border. How? It couldn’t have been simple, because it is my firm conviction that we had totally smashed his group. Every person who had the faintest, most cobwebby connection with that scoundrel.”

“Why Miami? It’s true he comes from here, but it’s also true that everybody knows him.”

“First because of his Miami visitor,” she said. “If here is where the money came from, here is where the drugs will be delivered. Second.”

Shayne had followed her story carefully. Now he was trying to bring back the dimly-lit scene in the parking lot the night before-the two cars, the Ford with its trunk lid raised, a glimpsed figure struggling to lift a woman’s body. Murray Gold? Gold had always been a man who committed his crimes behind a screen of lawyers. The funny cap, the beard, the quick lift of a shoulder. It seemed almost as unlikely as her other idea, that Will Gentry had visited Gold in an Israeli prison. “Second,” the woman repeated.

Her hand was at her mouth, and she was showing signs of returning distress.

“I’m sorry as the devil, but I think I am going to vomit again.”

She ran into the bathroom. The door slammed. She retched violently, and the toilet flushed.