The Falcon's Malteser

THE CASABLANCA CLUB

We were woken up at nine the next morning by the engineer who’d come to fix the phone and we just had time to fall asleep again before we were woken up by Betty Charlady, who’d come to fix the apartment. She had brought with her a bag of tools and was soon assembling Herbert’s desk, hammering away at the wood with a mouth full of nails. It seemed incredible that she should do all this for a lousy ten dollars a day, but I assumed I brought out the motherly instinct in her. Strange how I could never do the same for my mother.

While Herbert got dressed and shaved, I nipped out for eggs, milk, and bread. We hadn’t had time to cash the check and money was running low, so I had to squeeze more credit out of the supermarket owner. The owner, Mr. Patel, is a decent old stick. He also owns a decent old stick, which he tried to hit me with as I ran out without paying, but at least I was able to rustle up a decent breakfast for Herbert and me, and a cup of tea for Mrs. Charlady.

After breakfast, Herbert rang the Casablanca Club and I discovered that it would be open that night—although to members only. Betty Charlady was screwing a chair back together in the office at the time and she must have overheard the call, because when she came into the kitchen she was scowling.

“Wassis Casablanca Club?” she asked.

“It’s in Charing Cross,” I said. “We’re going there tonight.”

“You shouldn’t do it, Master Nicholas,” Betty muttered. “At your age.”

I handed her a cup of tea. She took it and sat down, her eyes searching across the table for a biscuit. “It’s part of our investigation,” I explained. “A client of ours may have gone there, so we have to go there, too.”

But Mrs. Charlady wasn’t impressed. “These London clubs,” she said. “They’re just dens of innik-witty.” She shook her head and the gray curls of her hair tumbled like lemmings off a cliff. “You go if you have to. But I’m sure no good will come of it . . .”

Nonetheless, Herbert and I made our way to the Casablanca Club that same night, arriving just after twelve. There’s a corner of Charing Cross, just behind the station, that comes straight out of the nineteenth century. As the road slopes down toward the river, you leave the traffic and the bright lights behind you and suddenly the night seems to creep up on you and grab you by the collar. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the Thames water gurgling in the distance, and as you squint into the shadows you’ll see figures shuffling slowly past like zombies. For this is down-and-out territory. Old tramps and winos wander down and pass out underneath the arches at the bottom, wrapped in filthy raincoats and the day’s headlines.

The Casablanca Club was in the middle of all this. A flight of steps led down underneath a dimmed green bulb, and if you didn’t know what you were looking for, there was no way you’d find it. There was no name, no fancy sign. Only the tinkle of piano music that seemed to seep out of the cracks in the pavement hinted that in the dirt and the dust and the darkness of Charing Cross, somebody might be having a good time.

We climbed down to a plain wooden door about fifteen feet below the level of the pavement. Somebody must have been watching through the spyhole because it opened before we had time to knock.

“Yes?” a voice said.

Friendly place, I thought.

“Can we come in?” Herbert asked.

“You members?”

“No.”

“Then beat it!”

The door swung shut. At the last moment, Herbert managed to get his foot in the crack. There was a nasty crunching sound as his shoe, and possibly his foot, too, got chewed up in the woodwork, but then the door swung open again and I managed to push my way through and into the hall. A bald man in a dinner jacket gave me an ugly look. If he ever wanted to give anyone a pretty look, he’d need major plastic surgery.

“We’re friends of Johnny Naples,” I said.

The man shrugged. “Why didn’t you say so before?” he asked.

“You didn’t ask,” I said.

He opened the door again. Herbert was writhing on the concrete outside, clutching his mangled foot. “Instant membership—ten bucks,” the bald man said. He glanced at me. “You’re underage,” he muttered.

“You don’t look too good yourself,” I replied.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five?” He sneered. “You got a driver’s license?”

“No. I got a chauffeur.”

I walked on, leaving Herbert to find the money and pay. In the dim light I could have been any age. Anyway, I was taller than Johnny Naples had ever been and they’d allowed him in.

Funnily enough, the first waiter who saw me mistook me for the dwarf in the half-light. “Mr. Naples!” The words were two drops of oil squeezed into my ear and I was led to a table at the front of a large room. There was such a thick haze in the air that my eyes had more water in them than the house whiskey. I loosened my tie and sat down. It felt like there was more smoke in the air than there was air in the smoke. Another waiter passed. “Good evening, Mr. Naples.”

He put a silver bucket and two glasses on the table. I leaned forward. There was a bottle of champagne in the bucket, surrounded by ice cubes, already uncorked. “With the compliments of the house,” the waiter said. I scratched my head. The dwarf must have been quite a regular here. Came regular, drank regular . . . I wondered what else he did regular at the Casablanca Club.

I looked around me. There were perhaps a hundred people there, sitting at tables or crowding around the bar, where three black-tied waiters shook cocktails behind a curving marble counter. The air was filled with the hubbub of conversation, as thick and as indistinct as the cigarette smoke. There was a dance floor at one end, but tonight there was no band, just a black pianist stroking the ivories with fingers that looked too stubby to sound so good. Right in front of my table there was a stage about the size you’d expect a stage to be in a run-down drinking club. The place had no windows and no ventilation. The smoke had smothered the light, strangled the plants, and it wasn’t doing a lot for me either.

I ignored the champagne and poured myself a glass of water out of the ice bucket. Herbert joined me, muttering about the ten bucks and a moment later a spotlight cut through the clouds and the crowd fell silent. A figure moved onto the stage, a woman in her fifties, who dressed like she was in her thirties, with jewelry flashing here and there to keep your eyes off the wrinkles. She was attractive if you didn’t look too closely. At one time she might even have been beautiful. But the years hadn’t been good to her. They’d taken the color out of her hair, put a husk in her voice, hollowed out her throat, and slapped her around a bit for good measure.

Fumes from all the cigarettes were still swirling around me and I was beginning to understand what passive smoking was all about. Spend too long in here and I’d start wheezing and my fingers would turn yellow.

The pianist had come to the end of a tune, but as the woman moved forward he began another and she sang almost as if she didn’t care what she was doing. She sang two or three songs. When she finished, she got a smattering of applause, and as the talk started up again, she moved down to our table and sat opposite me. Only when she was close enough to see the pinks of my eyes (the whites had gone that color in all the smoke) did she see who I was.

“You’re not Johnny,” she said.

“We’re friends of his . . .” I said. I let the sentence hang in the air. I needed her name to complete it.

“Lauren Bacardi,” she said. “Where’s Johnny?”

I looked at Herbert. From the way she was talking, the little guy had obviously meant something to her and I didn’t know how she would take the news. I hoped he’d think of a gentle way to tell her. You know, with a bit of tact.

“He’s dead,” Herbert said.

“Dead?”

“Yup.” He nodded. “Dead.”

She took out a cigarette and lit it. I guessed she needed something to do with her hands. After all, to smoke in the unique atmosphere of the Casablanca Club, you didn’t actually need to light another cigarette. “Was he . . . killed?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I drank some iced water. It tasted like the metal bucket it had come from. “You knew him?”

She smiled sadly. “We were friends.” Her eyes clouded over. Or maybe it was just the cigarette smoke. I thought she was going to get up and walk out of our lives. The way things turned out, it would have been better if she had. But the pianist had slid into a bluesy number and she needed to talk. “Johnny and I knew each other for ten years,” she said. “But we never met. Not until a month ago.

“We were pen pals. He was in South America. I was over here. Maybe you’ll laugh at me, but we kind of fell in love by mail.” She flicked ash onto the carpet. “We wrote letters to each other for ten years and he never even mentioned that he was a dwarf. I only found out a month ago, when he came over, and by then I’d more or less agreed to marry him. The little rat . . .”

She puffed at her cigarette. The smoke in the room grew a little thicker. Herbert waved a hand in front of his face. I knew how he felt.

“He came over,” she went on. “He just turned up one day on my doormat. No. He was standing on a chair on the doormat—to reach the bell. He had these plans. We were going to be rich. We’d buy this little house in the South of France with low ceilings. Johnny didn’t like high ceilings. He told me that he knew where he could lay his hands on five million dollars—enough money to take me away from all this . . .”

She raised her hands, taking in the whole of the Casablanca Club with ten chipped and nicotine-stained fingernails.

“Did he have anything with him?” I asked. “A box, for example?”

“You mean the Maltesers?” Lauren Bacardi smiled. “Sure. He never went anywhere without them. He seemed to think they were important, but he didn’t know why. It nearly drove him mad . . . if he wasn’t mad already. I mean, how could a box of candy be worth all that dough?”

She paused. “But maybe he was on the level,” Lauren went on. “Why else would anyone want to wipe him out? I mean, Johnny never hurt anyone in his life. He was too small.

“And he was afraid—all the time he was in England. He wouldn’t stay at my place. He hid himself away in some filthy pit of a hotel, and whenever we went out together, he always made like he was being followed. I thought he was imagining things.” A single tear trickled down her cheek, turning a muddy brown as it picked up her makeup. “Just my luck,” she whispered. “Johnny getting himself killed just one day after he’d found the answer.”

“He found the diamonds?” Herbert cried.

“No.” She shook her head. “Just the answer. We were out together one day and he saw something; something that made everything make sense.”

“What was it?” Herbert and I asked more or less together.

“Miss Bacardi?” the waiter interrupted. “There’s someone at the door with some flowers for you.”

“For me?” She got to her feet, swaying slightly in front of us. “Just give me one minute.”

She moved away in the direction of the front entrance, followed by the waiter. Herbert looked at the half-empty bottle of champagne. “Did I pay for that?” he asked.

“It was on the house,” I told him.

“What was it doing up there?” he asked.

Neither Herbert nor I said anything for a while, and in that silence I became aware of a little voice whispering in my ear. It wasn’t Herbert. It was actually making sense. It was my common sense trying to tell me something was wrong. I played back what had just happened and suddenly I knew what it was. The flowers. Why had the waiter made Lauren Bacardi walk all the way to the entrance instead of bringing them to her? And there was something else. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. But now I remembered. The waiter had spoken with a German accent. I was on my feet making for the door before I knew what I was doing. Herbert ran after me, calling my name. But I wasn’t going to stop and explain what was going on. I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring the shouts of protest and the crash of breaking glass. That was one time I was glad I wasn’t fully grown. Before anyone could see me to grab hold of me, I was gone.

I reached the door and the cold night hit me like an angry woman, slapping my face and tearing at my hair. The first thing I saw were the remains of what had been a bouquet of flowers. But now the cellophane was torn and the flowers were scattered over the steps, the stalks broken. At the same time, I heard someone calling out. It was Lauren Bacardi. I took the steps three at a time, and as I reached the street, I just had time to catch sight of her being bundled into the back of a dark blue van. A shadowy figure slammed the door and ran around to the front. The engine was already running. A moment later, so was I.

I ran across to the van, intending . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought I’d be able to pull the door open and get Lauren out, but of course it was locked. So instead I jumped onto it, slamming into the metal like a hamburger hitting a griddle, and hung on for dear life as the van roared away. I’d managed to get a foothold of sorts on the license plate and I had one hand on the door handle, one hand curled round the rim at the edge. I was half spread-eagled and traveling at about thirty miles an hour when the van turned a corner. Whoever was driving put their foot down then. Perhaps they’d heard they had an unwelcome passenger. I guess the van was doing sixty when I was thrown off. It was hard to tell. After all, I was sort of somersaulting through the air, and if I’m going to be honest, I might as well add my eyes were tightly closed like I was praying—which, in fact, I was.

All I knew was that me and the van had parted company. It roared off to the left, its tires screaming. I flew off to the right. I could have been killed. I should have been killed. But if you go down that part of London at night, you’ll find that the offices put a lot of junk out on the pavements, to be cleared up by the garbage trucks the next day. My fall was broken by a mountain of cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Better still, the bags were full of paper that had been put through the shredder; computer printouts and that sort of thing. It was like hitting a pile of cushions. I was bruised. But nothing broke.

A minute later Herbert reached me. He must have been convinced that I was finished because when I got to my feet and walked toward him, brushing strips of paper off my sleeves, he almost fainted with surprise.

“Did you get the van’s number?” I asked.

He opened and closed his mouth again without speaking. It was a brilliant impersonation of a goldfish. But I wasn’t in the mood to be entertained.

“The license plate . . .” I said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You were standing on it . . .” He still couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.

I looked back down the empty road. Lauren Bacardi had been about to tell us something important and now she was gone. Our only chance of finding the secret of the Maltesers might have gone with her.