Chapter Twenty-Two

The ringing phone awoke me at eleven o’clock that morning and on the other end was the aged Apex butler, Jack, once known as Gentleman Jack Brooks, notorious jewel thief and scourge of the Riviera.

“The pram cost fifty-two quid, sir,” the ex-scourge said.

“You must have bought the best.”

“Bottom of the luxury line at Harrods. That’s always the best buy, sir.”

“You downstairs?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have everything else?”

“It’s all tucked into the pram.”

“Well, you’d better come on up.”

“Right away, sir.”

The tea and toast that I ordered beat Jack to my room. I was just pouring a cup when he knocked at the door and wheeled in what may have been the fanciest baby buggy in London. It was a glistening black with a convertible top, big wire wheels with white rubber tires, and little round clear plastic windows so that its small occupant could look out at the trees when the top was up.

Old Jack seemed proud of his selection so I said, “Very nice. Very nice indeed. Did they throw in a tape deck?”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“Why don’t you have some tea while I count the money?”

“Thank you, sir. I wouldn’t mind a cup.”

This time the money was in a large attaché case that was tucked up all nice and warm under a pale blue blanket. I took the case over to the top of the TV set, opened it, and counted the money. It was all there so I tucked it back up in the pram.

“Everything all right, sir?”

“It’s fine. Thanks very much, Jack.”

“Oh. One more thing, sir. Mr. Ned asked me to give you this.”

He reached into his pocket and brought out a large, round magnifying glass. “You forgot it the last time out,” he said.

“So I did.” I took the glass and slipped it into my bathrobe pocket.

“I was just thinking, sir, on the way over from Harrods. I could have used a gentleman in your line of work once. Old Tom and I were talking about it the way a couple of old lags will; no offense, sir.”

“I’m flattered. You were one of the best. They never did tag you to that New Weston job you pulled in twenty-nine, did they?”

The old man stiffened and then relaxed. Then he smiled and I decided that he must have had a lot of charm and style at one time. “There’s only one person that could have told you about that, sir.”

I nodded. “Sammy Farro. I spent a couple of days with him after he got out of Dannemora in sixty-three.”

“I didn’t even know he was inside. Old Sammy.”

“He killed a man on Park Avenue in thirty-two. There was an emerald necklace that Sammy had his eye on. The man and his wife came home early, the man pulled a gun, there was a fight for it, and the man got shot. Danny got life. He did thirty years.”

“The New Weston Hotel,” the old man said in a dreamy tone. “We made a proper haul that night.”

“They tore it down,” I said.

“How’d he look when he got out?”

“Bad,” I said. “His mind was going, but he remembered you. He said some nice things about you.”

“Oh, he was a smooth one, Sammy was. Is he still about?”

“He died a year after he got out,” I said. “Alone in a room. They didn’t find him for a week.”

The old man put his tea down and rose. “Too bad you weren’t around back then, sir. We might have done some business.”

“We might have at that,” I said.

After Gentleman Jack Brooks left, I had room service bring up a typewriter. I sat before it in my bathrobe, unshaved and unwashed, and typed steadily for three hours, much like a suicide who never gets around to killing himself because he keeps thinking up new and compelling reasons why he should. I filled nearly ten pages of Hilton stationery and put them into an envelope that I addressed to Myron Greene. I wrote air mail and par avion all over it, mixed a weak whisky and water, and sat there in my bathrobe, thinking about whether what I had written made any sense. I thought about that until it was time to get dressed and go buy back the Sword of St. Louis.


At twenty minutes to three I was pushing a baby buggy containing an attaché case stuffed with £100,000 east on Mount Street toward South Audley Street wondering if, at thirty-eight, I really deserved all those smiles and encouraging nods that came my way.

I dawdled along, arriving at the park at five minutes to three. It was a nice little park with a large iron gate that made it look as if it should be forbidden to the public, but it wasn’t. It was shaped like a pot with the handle tapering off east toward Berkeley Square. It had always had a soothing effect on me and I had used it, years ago, as a place to compose myself after a fight with my ex-wife. I had got to know it rather well, there toward the end.

They had her dressed up as a nanny, sitting on the bench that she was supposed to be sitting on, the one that had been donated by the American woman out of gratitude for having been allowed to sit in a public park. The dressed-up nanny’s pram, I noticed with a twinge of envy, was bigger than mine, but it would have to be, if it were to hold a sword whose blade was thirty-four-and-a-half inches long.

Her head was turned, but when I pulled up beside her she looked at me and although somebody had dressed her up as a nanny, she didn’t look much like one, unless it was the nanny in a blue movie I had once seen. She still wore too much green eyeshadow and I don’t think that she had washed her face since I had first seen her, which was when she had opened the door of Tick-Tock Tamil’s establishment in Paddington.

“Hello, love,” I said. “Is the poor little tyke over his cold yet?”

“You’re not clever,” she said. “Where is it?”

“In a case under a blanket to keep warm.”

The two prams were drawn up side by side. She rose and moved over to mine, bending from the waist as if to peer in at its darling occupant. “Don’t try nothing,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said and bent over the pram. I pulled back a blanket, a pink one this time, and there it lay, wedged in at an angle. It didn’t look like a million pounds or so, but I was no judge. I heard a click then and I looked down. An open switchblade knife was in the girl’s right hand.

“Don’t try nothing,” she said again.

“All you have to do is count up to a hundred,” I said. “If you can’t go that high, I’ll give you a hand.”

“Clever bastard,” she said and went on counting the £1,000 packets.

I took the magnifying glass from my jacket pocket and examined the hilt just below the pommel. There were two tiny scratches there all right, shaped like the letters NN. I took the Polaroid shots from my pocket and compared them with the sword that lay in the baby buggy. They duplicated it in every detail.

I straightened up. “Okay,” I said. “I’m satisfied.”

She snapped the lid closed on the attaché case with her left hand and drew the blue blanket over it. Her right hand still held the switch blade. “I go first,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, my eyes on the knife. “I just noticed something though.”

“What?”

“You’ve got rubber baby buggy bumpers.”

“You’re balmy, you are.”

“No,” I said, my mouth and throat suddenly dry. “I just wanted to see if I could say it.”

She backed slowly away from me, one hand pulling the £52 pride of Harrods, the other holding the open knife down by her side in the folds of her dress that wasn’t quite a uniform. When she was about five yards away, she closed the knife and dropped it into the pram. She stared at me for a moment, as if to make sure that I wasn’t going to try something tricky. Then she turned the pram around and walked east, pushing her £100,000 toward Berkeley Square.

“Tell Tick-Tock I said hello,” I called after her, but she didn’t respond, she just kept on walking, her hips swaying a trifle too much for a nanny. Not too much for a Swedish au pair maybe, but too much for a proper nanny. I turned and pushed my pram toward South Audley Street, crossed the street, and moved on to Number 57 where the gray Rolls with old Tom at the wheel was waiting in front of Purdey, the gunsmith. I wrapped the sword up in the pink baby blanket as well as I could and climbed into the rear seat, leaving the pram at the curb.

“Everything all right, sir?” old Tom asked.

“It had better be,” I said.

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