Contract Null & Void

Chapter Thirty-five

Their idea was very basic: slap around Charlie Bagnis, manager of Mood Indigo, until he told them who had asked him to put Bart next to the Vulture and the Mormon. Then slap him around some more, find out who they were.

Desperate stuff, but Bart was in a desperate place.

Only they couldn’t find him. The emergency number he’d given Bart turned out to be disconnected. Information said there was no listing for Bagnis in 415, 510, 708 or 408 area codes.

Mood Indigo was closed up tight. They used Bart’s keys, snooped it for Bagnis’s address. There was none. Listed owner was the Ace Corporation, a post office box at the Rincon Annex. The number listed for emergencies had no machine, didn’t answer.

“How about the union?” asked Heslip. “The Vulture and the Mormon just gotta be members of Local Three.”

“Their descriptions fit half the guys on the union books.”

“What about Amalia?”

“What can she do without names?”

“So we gotta wait ’til Monday. If I make it that long.”

“You’ll make it, Bart,” said Larry. He pulled away from the curb. “Let’s go back to my place, get you off the street, wait for Mood Indigo to open so we can get hold of Bagnis.”

In the black sedan that could almost have been a short limo, the whine of the electronic tracker changed tones.

“They’re moving again,” said the Mormon.

The Vulture tossed his cigarette out the window and started the car, following the impulse being sent from the beeper he’d left under the back bumper of Bart’s car just before his partner had blown old Rick Kiely away. He’d put it there just in case the nigger somehow slipped the noose, and damned if he hadn’t.

And damned if the nigger and Ballard weren’t asshole buddies. The deception pissed him off, especially that damned charade in the alley. He didn’t voice his thoughts. It took very little to set his partner raging like a mad dog. They were here just to get information, not to do anything. Yet.

He kept a good six blocks behind Heslip’s car; with the beeper in place, there was no need to get any closer.

Giselle had spent a delightful — and tasty — two hours with the French pastry chef. Antoine was a pussycat under his zut, alors and his bristling mustache, his French as Parisian as his pastry. She came out feeling the premises were secure and that she’d spent the afternoon at a sidewalk café in St.-Germain.

As she waited for the light inside the Fort Mason gates, Inga’s little yellow Porsche went zipping by on Bay Street. Giselle fell in behind her. Where had little Inga been after the signing on this, the biggest day of her husband’s life? And where was she going now?

Presumably, prosaically, she’d had her hair done and was now going back to Marin to dress for the banquet; but where was the fun in being prosaic? Inga made the expected right into Laguna for the dogleg into Marina Boulevard past the Marina Safeway. But instead of continuing on toward the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin, Inga abruptly turned into the parking lot for the yacht harbor that flanked the east end of the Marina Green.

Giselle, four cars back, made the same turn, found a slot overlooking the moored yachts.

Inga went down the slanted incline and opened the locked gate in the Cyclone fence blocking access to nonmembers. She walked out one of the jetties to a forty-foot cruiser with BASIC PASCAL, whatever that meant, incised on the stern in gold-painted letters. The top of a man’s head appeared at the companionway as Inga climbed aboard. They disappeared below.

Gotcha, baby! Giselle would give odds forever that the man on the yacht was Inga’s would-be murderous lover, Frank Nugent. But she could be wrong; by a stretch it could even be Paul on the yacht. She turned the radio to classical 100.7 FM, and settled in to see what would happen next.

Treasured Things was on the second floor of a beautifully kept-up yellow-with-white-trim house in the middle of Cow Hollow’s upscale shopping area on Union Street. Wide wooden steps, freshly painted, led up to the antiques store; below the stairs, down a few steps from street level, was a bookstore.

The only thing higher than the turnover in shops doing business on Union Street was the rents, but Dan Kearny knew that Treasured Things had been there since the ’70s and was always solvent because, after hours, much more than just antiques moved through the place. This was the Colonel’s lair.

He paused under the marquee of the movie theater across the street to slip his reading glasses down on his nose where they wouldn’t be in the way but might give him a touch of the scholar. He had to think rich, think eccentric; going up against the Colonel, he would need every edge he could get.

At the top of the stairs was a narrow porch and an ornate door with TREASURED THINGS hand-carved into its thick oak panels. A tinkly bell jangled when Kearny opened the door and went in. The place was crammed with spindly-legged chairs, ornately scrolled mirrors, and tables glowing darkly like the depths of precious gems, their heavy legs varicosed with carvings. It smelled of old wood, lemon oil, new wax, dust, old mildew.

“May I be of service, sir?”

The voice was deep, cultured, faintly British.

“I hope so, I truly hope so,” minced Dan Kearny. “I have a rather unusual request to make.”

“We deal in the unusual,” rumbled the Colonel.

Mid-60s, towering over Kearny, at least six-six and 260 in his ancient Stornoway Scottish wool tweeds soft as linen. Hair, still mostly black, but gray-shot at the temples. Face, all heavy bone, eyes black and flat, mouth surprisingly full-lipped and calipered by deep lines running down from either side of a nose that looked as if it had been struck off a Roman coin.

“I wish to examine Treasured Things’ rarest, most delicate, most expensive ceramic treasure.”

“May I ask your intentions, sir?”

“If it pleases me, I shall wish to buy it,” said Kearny.

“If it pleases you.” The Colonel boomed laughter. “My God, man, if it pleases you! Let me show you something.”

He strode to a cabinet with glass doors at the back of the shop. Inside was a foot-tall gently bulbous black pitcher with a graceful handle that rose from its shoulder and then curved tightly down to the rim. Concealed light illuminated a picture in rich russet tones that went all the way around its glossy black belly. The Colonel swung open the unlocked cabinet door carelessly, as if he knew no one would dare try to rob him.

“You are looking at an ancient Greek oinochoe.” The word had a harsh softness the way he pronounced it; his tone was almost reverent. He obviously was a man who loved beauty as much as he loved the dark underbelly of society. Indeed, Kearny was counting on it. “A pitcher, a standard wine jug. Functional design is always a mark of Greek pottery. They developed five standard shapes very early on and stuck to them.”

Depicted on the oinochoe was a man in a loincloth kneeling before an ornate stone or marble altar with a small and obviously squealing pig. Another man, standing, was raising a short, thick-bladed sword to slaughter the pig.

“What’s the story?” asked Kearny.

“It is a pre-Games ceremony at the Panhellenic Games that were held at Olympia every four years. After the pig was dead, the athletes would swear they had trained hard for ten months, everybody would eat pork, and then the Games would begin.”

Now they never went out of training, Kearny thought. In his rich eccentric’s voice, he asked, “And the pitcher’s worth?”

The Colonel’s lip unconsciously lifted at his crassness. “Inestimable. It was recovered intact — usually Greek ceramics are just a jigsaw puzzle of shards that have to be fit together. Then, it’s from an Olympic Games during the Peloponnesian War in the latter half of the fourth century B.C. Finally, although war was always suspended for the Games, during these Games, the city-state of Sparta was fined for violating the truce, and—”

“Fined?” asked Kearny. The Palestinian terrorists who had murdered the Israeli athletes at Munich hadn’t been fined; but they had been tracked down and dealt with by Israeli agents.

“It was a more ordered age than ours. Anyway, that’s the ‘story,’ and that’s what makes this pitcher unique.”

Kearny sighed silently: back to business.

He said, “You sold a German transmitter, some French plastique, and an Israeli radio-signal detonator to someone probably calling himself Frank Nugent. I want to know if he’s using that name, where I can find him, and what else you sold him.”

“You play games with me!”

The Colonel’s face congested, but Kearny snatched up the oinochoe in his right hand and held it over the hardwood floor.

“My Christ, man! Don’t—”

“So I’ll ask you again,” said Kearny. “Who was he, where can I find him, what else did you sell him?”

The Colonel couldn’t take his eyes off the oinochoe.

“He... called himself Frank Nugent and was recommended by a reliable contact. The address he gave me was a residence hotel out in Noe Valley — 746 Diamond, room 212.”

Kearny started backing out of the shop with the oinochoe. “What else did you sell him?”

“A grenade. Vietnam vintage but still reliable.”

“I’ll leave your pitcher by the front door.”

The Colonel said through gritted teeth, “Perhaps we will meet another time, we two.”

“I’m around,” said Kearny.

Then he was gone, surreptitiously wiping the sweat from his face with shaking hands as he went down the wide front steps.

Time was passing and Inga had not returned, but Giselle hated to just leave without learning... something. Then she saw a man wearing a down vest and carrying a tackle box and a broken-down fishing rod crossing the lot. She timed her approach so he was ahead of her, was sorting out her keys as he opened the gate.

“Oh, hey, thanks,” she said.

She went out the jetty to the Basic Pascal. The air smelled of brine and fish. Gulls wheeled and turned overhead. A westering sun was turning the bridge into a spidery black smile on the mouth of the Golden Gate.

She sang out, “Ahoy the boat.” No response. She grabbed the cable railing, pulling herself up, stepped over it to the deck. Her heels made tocking sounds against the planking. At the closed companionway door, she called, “Hello down there!”

A muffled voice finally called up from below, “Ye... yes?”

“Harbormaster.”

The door slid open. A pale oblong of face looked up at her. She could make out no features, but the voice was not Paul’s. And she’d left that silly pistol Kearny had given her locked up in her glove compartment! Some slick private eye.

“We’re... ah, checking all yachts for illegal boat people.”

He backed up a step, so Giselle just naturally had to start down the steep narrow companionway ladder. Light through the side windows was strong enough to show her a tall, thin man with a bony face, high forehead, thinning brown hair, good eyes, nice mouth, and a surprisingly beaky nose.

A face she had seen before in a photo in Paul’s workshop.

“Mr. Nugent, I believe,” she said, jamming her right hand into the purse hanging by a strap from her shoulder. “Don’t even think about it, I’ve got a gun in here.”

But his hands had shot up. “Ohmigod, you’re not the harbormaster! Don’t shoot! Ohmigod! You’re that detective woman who guards Paul! I knew I shouldn’t have let Inga hide me here!”

“You shouldn’t go around trying to kill people.”

He still had his hands up. “I never tried to kill anyone! I wanted to turn myself in after Inga said it was me with the pickax the other night, and say that I was innocent. But Inga said no, and who’s going to believe me now?”

“Then who tried to kill Paul all those times?”

“Tried not to kill Paul all those times.”

Giselle whirled at the deep, mocking voice from behind her. Standing halfway down the companionway ladder was a husky black-haired guy with a tough face and a hard-looking body under a white T-shirt with black letters on it that read:

She thought: Double negative. You are here, so you are shit.

He was grinning and his right hand wore a gun and wore it well. The gun was pointing at Giselle. It looked black and mean and efficient. She was going to have to learn about guns.

Nugent burst out, “Eddie! What are you—”

“Seeing how the rich bastards live. Drop the purse, girl.”

Dan Kearny had told her funny stories about him and Stan Groner looking for this guy — and here he was. What did that mean? She let the purse slide from her shoulder. It hit the floor with a useless clatter — compact, nail file, lighter unused since she’d quit smoking for the umpteenth time, sunglasses...

Graff came down the last few steps, motioning them back. He seemed very pleased with himself.

“All the murder attempts before the signing were fakes — so no one will suspect Inga when Paul gets killed after the signing.” He chuckled. “Poor demented Frank here, unable to control his guilt—”

Frank Nugent had heard only one thing. “Inga would never be involved in anything to hurt Paul! Inga would never—”

“Inga would. Inga is. Tonight Paul dies. Unfortunately, at your hands. And afterwards...”

He started a high-pitched giggle, his tongue caught between his teeth, and Giselle realized with a frisson of near terror that he was doing Richard Widmark’s deranged killer Tommy Udo in the famous old black-and-white gangster saga Kiss of Death.

“Afterwards, I’m afraid that both of you are going to have to do the same thing... die!”

Tommy Udo, who shoved an old woman in a wheelchair down a long flight of tenement stairs and laughed at her all the way to the bottom.