The Falcon's Malteser

KILLER IN THE RAIN

I didn’t go back to the flat that afternoon. It wouldn’t have been the same without Herbert. Quieter, tidier, less dangerous, and generally nicer . . . but not the same. Also I was worried about him. I wouldn’t want to spend half an hour with Snape and Boyle, let alone a whole day. Boyle could have killed him by now. On the other hand, if Herbert told them about the Maltesers, I’d kill him myself. Either way he was in big trouble, and the sooner I found out just what was going on, the better it would be for him.

Things might have been different if Lauren Bacardi had been able to tell me where the dwarf had been when he worked out what the Maltesers meant. If I could see what he had seen, maybe I’d be able to work it out, too. But I had a nasty feeling that the only way I’d be able to talk to Lauren again would be with a Ouija board. The people who had snatched her were playing for keeps. By now she probably had more lead in her than a church roof.

That just left the dwarf. Johnny Naples might be pushing up the daisies himself, but if I could pick up his trail I might still learn something. His book of matches had led me to Lauren Bacardi. I wondered what else I might find in his room. So that afternoon I took the subway to Notting Hill and walked back down the Portobello Road to the Hotel Splendide.

I passed Hammett’s newsstand on the way. The old guy who owned it was standing in the window and he saw me pass. I’m only guessing now, but I suppose he must have picked up the telephone and called the hotel a moment later. And at the hotel, Jack Splendide must have made a phone call of his own. Like I say, I’m only guessing. But it took me ten minutes to walk from the newsstand to the hotel and that was just about all the time they needed to arrange my death.

The hotel was just like I remembered it, leaning carelessly against the overpass. The plainclothes policeman and the dog had gone, of course, but the garbage cans were still there, spitting their leftovers into the gutter. It was after three and already it was getting dark, the sun sliding behind the horizon like a drunk behind a bar. An old man carrying two plastic bags full of junk stumbled past, on his way from one nowhere to another. A cold wind scattered the litter across the street. Depressing? Well, it was five days to Christmas and I was pretty depressed myself.

I went into the hotel. Jack Splendide was sitting behind the counter where I’d found him on my first visit. He was reading a dirty paperback. It was so dirty, you couldn’t read half the words. It looked like somebody had spilled their breakfast all over it. He was still sucking a cigar—probably the same cigar, and he hadn’t changed his shirt either. The last time he’d changed that shirt I probably hadn’t been born.

“Hello,” I said.

“Yeah?” He really knew how to make a guy feel welcome.

“I want a room.”

“How long for?”

“One hour.”

He frowned. “We only rent by the night. Fifteen dollars. Sixteen dollars with a bed.”

I’d managed to grab all Herbert’s cash before we parted company and now I counted out the money on the counter. Splendide took it, then stood up, reaching for the key.

“I want Room thirty-nine,” I said.

“Suppose it’s taken?”

I gestured at the hooks. “The key’s there,” I said. “Anyway—who needs it? The room doesn’t have a lock.”

“This is a class hotel, kid.” He was offended. The cigar waggled between his teeth like a finger ticking me off. “You don’t like it, you can check in someplace else.”

I didn’t like it. But I had to go through with it. “Just give me the key,” I said.

He argued a bit more after that. I thought he was holding out for more money, but of course he was keeping me waiting on purpose. That was what he had been told to do. In the end he let me have the key—like he’d been intending to all the time. I should have been smart enough to see right through his little act, but it had been a long day and I was tired and . . . okay, maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought.

Anyway, he gave me the key and I climbed up the stairs to the fifth floor, then along the corridor to Room 39. It was only when I’d opened the door and gone in that I began to think that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It was unlikely that the room had been cleaned since the dwarf’s death—it was unlikely that the rooms at the Hotel Splendide were ever cleaned—but the police would have been through it with a fine-tooth comb. But now that I was here, it wouldn’t hurt to have a look. And I had paid.

I began with the drawers. There was a big, asthmatic chest of them. They groaned when I pulled them open and the brass rings rattled. But apart from a bent safety pin, a moth-ball, and the moth it had killed, they were empty. Next I tried the table. That should have had two more drawers, but somebody had stolen them. That just left the bed. I went and sat on it, remembering how Johnny Naples had lain there with that red carnation blossoming in the buttonhole of his shirt. He had sat in this room. He had lived in it. He had worked out the location of a five-million-dollar fortune in it. And he had died in it.

The traffic thundered past about six feet away from the window. It was still a mystery how Johnny Naples had ever managed to sleep here at all.

My eye was drawn to a wastepaper basket in one corner. It was a green plastic thing, so broken and battered that it should have been in a wastebasket itself. I leaned across and flicked a hand through the rubbish that lay in the bottom. There wasn’t much: two potato-chip bags, the wrapper from a chocolate bar, a couple of dead batteries, and an empty pack of cigarettes. I was about to leave it when I remembered. It wouldn’t have meant anything to the police—that was why they’d overlooked it—but it meant something to me. Back in the office, the day it had all started, the dwarf had smoked Turkish cigarettes. And this was a Turkish cigarette pack. It had belonged to Naples.

I plucked it out of the wastepaper basket and opened it, hoping . . . I don’t know . . . for a telephone number scrawled on the inside or something like that. What I got was even better. It was a shower of paper: little white squares that had been neatly torn up. I knelt down and examined the scraps. Some of them had writing on them, parts of words written in blue ink. I slid them across the carpet with a pointed finger, putting the jigsaw puzzle back together again. It didn’t take me long before I had it: five words in English with what I guessed were the Spanish translations written beside them.

DIGITAL PHOTODETECTOR LIGHT-EMITTING DIODE

Frankly, they were a disappointment. Why had Johnny Naples written them down? I was certain they had to be connected with the Maltesers. That would explain why, after he’d torn the paper up, he’d taken the extra precaution of hiding them in the cigarette pack. He’d have flushed them down the toilet if the hotel had toilets. It was the Spanish translations that helped me figure it out. Suppose Johnny Naples had come across the five words in his search for the diamonds. His English was good, but it wasn’t that good. He might not have understood them. So he’d have written them down to look up later.

The only snag was, I didn’t understand them either. Obviously, they were something to do with science, but science had never been my strong point. If you met my science teacher, I think you’d know why. I don’t think science was his strong point either.

I scooped the pieces up and put them in my pocket. I’d searched the drawers, the table, and the wastepaper basket. That left just the bed. I tried to look underneath it, but a wooden rim running down to the carpet made that impossible. It was one of the oldest beds I had ever seen, a monster of thick wood and rusty springs with a mattress a foot and a half thick and about as comfortable as a damp sponge cake. It took all my strength to heave the thing up on its side, but I was determined to look underneath. Not that there was much to discover: a yellowed copy of the Daily Mirror, one slipper, and about ten years’ worth of accumulated dust.

But it was the bed that saved my life.

I was just about to set it down when I heard the window shatter and at the same time a car roared away.

Something dark green and about the size of a softball had flown into the room. It took me about one second to work out that it wasn’t a dark green softball and another second to throw myself to the ground. The grenade hit the bed and bounced back toward the window. Then it exploded.

I should have been killed, but I was already hugging the floor and there was this great wall of springs and mattress between me and it. Even so it was like being inside a cherry bomb on New Year’s Eve. Suddenly it seemed that the whole room was on fire—not just the room, the very air in the room. The floor buckled upward like a huge fist, pounding me in the stomach. The explosion was so loud I thought it would crack open my skull. All this happened at once, and at the same time I was seized by the shock wave and hurled back, twisting in the air, and finally thrown out of the room, my shoulders slamming into the door and carrying it with me. I was unconscious by the time I hit the floor. I don’t know how long I stayed like that. Maybe ten minutes. It could have been ten days.

I woke up with a mouth full of splinters and two hysterical opera singers screaming in my ears. Actually, there weren’t any opera singers, but that’s what it sounded like. My clothes were torn to ribbons and I could feel the blood running from a cut above one eye. Other than that, I seemed to be in remarkably good health for someone who had just been blown up. There would be plenty of bruises, but there were no broken bones. I stood up—one bone at a time—and leaned against a wall for support. The wall slid away. There was too much dust and smoke in the air to see. I stood where I was, waiting for things to settle down a bit before I made any sudden move.

Which was just as well. The Hotel Splendide had been waiting for an excuse to fall down for twenty years or more. The grenade had been all it needed. The whole of the back wall, the one that faced the overpass, had simply collapsed and I was now standing on a piece of floor that stretched into thin air. I shivered as the breeze whipped the smoke up around me. The traffic roared past, a blur of brightly colored metal whirling endlessly into the night. I was surprised that nobody had stopped . . . but how could they? It was an overpass. Doubtless the police would shut it down soon enough, but anyone stopping right now would only add a multiple pileup to the evening’s entertainment.

I stepped back, looking for the staircase or whatever might be left of it. This looked like it would be the hotel’s last night. The hotel, what was left of it, was on fire, the flames spreading rapidly, the wood snapping, water hissing out of broken pipes. My hearing still wasn’t back to normal, but I could just about make out the sound of people shouting. In the distance, police cars or fire engines or something with sirens were drawing nearer. A naked man ran past, his face half covered in shaving foam. I followed him. We’d both had a close shave that day.

My guardian angel must have been working overtime just then. Lucky it didn’t belong to a trade union. The iron bar narrowly missed my head and I didn’t even notice it until it smashed into the wall, spraying me with plaster. I wheeled around and there was Jack Splendide, lifting the bar to try his luck again. His shirt was in shreds and his stomach wasn’t a whole lot better. Both his trouser legs had been blown off at the knee. I realized he must have been close to the dwarf’s room when the explosion happened—perhaps in the room next door. And he didn’t seem too happy that I’d survived.

He swung the bar again and this time I dodged. He was about forty pounds overweight and that made him slow. On the other hand, he didn’t need to be too fast. He was between me and the staircase. I had the flames on one side of me and a five-story fall right behind me. I wondered if I could jump across onto the overpass. It was only about six feet, but the way I was feeling right then it was about three feet too far. I leaped back, avoiding a third blow. Now I was in the ruins of what had been Room 39. The flames were getting nearer. So was Jack Splendide.

He was shouting at me. What with all the din and the screaming in my ears, it was difficult to make out what he was saying, but I gathered that he blamed me for the destruction of his hotel. He must have really liked that place. There were tears running down his cheeks and he was holding that iron bar (part of a towel rail) with genuine affection. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t my fault that a passing motorist had decided to hurl a bomb at me, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. Jack Splendide had flipped. And he wanted me dead.

The iron bar came curving up over his shoulder as he swung it with both hands, but then the top got snarled up in a loop of wire. As it came down, it tore the wire out of the wall and for a few seconds electric sparks danced in the air. That distracted him just long enough for me to grab hold of a piece of table and bring it crashing into his stomach. He howled and dropped the bar. I hit him again, this time propelling him forward right to the edge of the floor.

He flailed at the air with his hands. There was a fall of at least forty feet to the cold, hard concrete below and I thought that was just where he was heading. Unable to regain his balance, he yelled and plunged forward, his body lunging out into the night. But at the last moment he managed to grab hold of the very edge of the overpass. And that was how he finished up: a human bridge. His feet were on the floor in what was left of Room 39. His hands were desperately clutching a piece of metal jutting out of the side of the overpass. His body sagged between the two.

I looked behind me. The flames were closing in. I wouldn’t even make it through the shattered doorway now. But I wasn’t too keen on jumping across to the overpass. Jack Splendide was the only answer. A human bridge. I took two big steps. One foot in the small of his back and I was across—safely standing on the edge of the road.

“Kid . . . hey, kid!” I heard him and walked back over to him. He was a big, strong man, but he couldn’t stay like that much longer. “Help me!” he rasped, the sweat dripping off his forehead. The wind jerked at my shirt. The cars roared by, only inches away now. Some of the drivers honked at me, but they couldn’t see Jack Splendide. I crouched down close to him. By now I’d been able to put a few things together.

“Who was it, Splendide?” I asked. “Who threw the grenade?”

“Please!” His hands tightened their hold as his body swayed.

“You must have told them I was here. Who was it?”

There was no way he could stall me. He was getting weaker by the minute and across the gap the flames were creeping up on him. He could probably feel them with the soles of his feet. “It was the Fat Man,” he gasped. “He guessed you might go back to the hotel. He paid me . . . to call if you did.”

“Why?”

“You insulted him, kid. Nobody insults the Fat Man. But I didn’t know he was going to try and kill you. I mean . . . the grenade. Honest, kid. I thought he was just going to take a shot at you—to scare you.”

Yeah, I thought. And you came up to the fifth floor to watch.

“Help me!” he whimpered. “Give me a hand, kid. I can’t hold on much longer.”

“That’s true,” I said, straightening up.

“You can’t leave me here, kid. You can’t!”

“Wanna bet?”

I walked away, leaving him stretched out between the flames and the overpass with a long, long way to fall if he let go. Maybe the police or firemen reached him in the end. To be honest, I don’t really care. Jack Splendide had set me up to be killed. He might not have been expecting a grenade, but he’d known the Fat Man didn’t play games.

It had begun to rain. Pulling the remains of my shirt closer to my shivering skin, I walked down the overpass and forgot about him.