The Return of Service

Another Look at the Blackbird

My name is unimportant. They call me Sam. If I had another name, I’ve already forgotten it. This is the story of my first caper.

One night, frying my back on a foam rubber sofa in the living room of friends, unable to sleep for discomfort and jealousy, I noticed that the door to Mellisa Markey’s bedroom was open. Otherwise, I would have never, uninvited, soft shoed into her room. The open door was my invitation. Everything, insofar as I understood anything, had a reason even if it was no reason.

As I entered Mellisa’s hothouse of a room I could see that something was wrong. She was lying on her side, her back to me, the covers down, the whole show given away. The lady was asleep or pretending, I thought. I moved to the foot of the bed — a pink sheet in a wad on the floor as if in sleep, he, she, they, someone had kicked the thing off. I was sorry it hadn’t been me with her. “Are you okay?” I asked. She may have been wearing the clothes she was born in but looked a damned sight better than any baby I had ever seen. Looking, I got hungry, had the urge to take her by surprise. The thing is, it wasn’t my style. No private dick worth his salt would be caught dead doing it with an unconscious girl.

I spoke her name several times, then turned her onto her back, her eyes like a doll’s snapping open. She seemed all right, nothing missing, everything where it ought to be. I checked out her pulse, which was no news at all. I put my ear to her chest. No heartbeat. I tried the other side. No thumps, nothing. “Damn it, get up,” I said, shaking her. “You’re asking for trouble.” And then I saw the purple bruises on her neck.

She was dead. She, Mellisa Markey, sister of my best friend.

Dead. I was too stunned to move and sat mindlessly on the edge of the bed, looking over my shoulder at what was unmistakably the body of a naked woman. When someone murders a person it’s your job to protect, you’re supposed to do something about it. Thinking — police siren already in the wind — what do I do about it? I was only twenty at the time and inexperienced with vengeance.

Early the next morning, I called Mellisa’s roommate, Sweetheart, from a phone booth in a subway station. “You don’t have to believe this,” I said, “but I’d like you to. I’m innocent.”

“You must have the wrong number,” she said, her voice so weak I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t inventing her conversation.

I called again an hour later. “Where are you, Sam?” she asked.

“Place is unimportant,” I said. “It’s time that matters. Mellisa’s boss was the last one to see her alive. I heard them before they went into her room.”

“That’s eavesdropping,” she said.

Sweetheart had a fine idea of the world and when reality didn’t correspond to that idea she tended to shut it out of mind. I put things in perspective for her. “A beautiful woman’s dead and an innocent man’s being sought for the murder. If you want to help solve this thing, you’ll give me the name of Mellisa’s boss.”

She said she would on the condition that I let her tag along, and wouldn’t if I didn’t. I agreed to her terms, but warned her that she might be sorry afterward.

“I’m always sorry afterward,” she said. “His name is Harvard Sollness. And don’t break your promise or you’ll burn in hell.”

Hell, I can tell you, was the least of my worries. There was no Harvard Sollness of any spelling in’ the Manhattan phone book. There was a Harris H. Solness on East 67th Street, and H. L. Solness on West 72nd, a Dr. Harwood Sollness (two l’s) in the Squibb Building and that was it. I would have to wait for Sweetheart to find out which of these Sol(l)nesses was the right Sol(l)ness. I was in a bad mood. There was nothing in the morning papers on the murder, which I can tell you made me suspicious. “Never trust a woman that wasn’t standing where you could see her.” my father used to say. “And you’re a damn fool if you have nothing better to do than gawk at a woman all day.” He was a smart old bird but they got him when he turned his head.

I was thinking murderous thoughts when I saw Sweetheart coming toward me at the corner of l20th and Amsterdam wearing a large floppy pink hat, a yellow summer frock, and dark glasses, looking worried and swell.

The man I was looking for, she told me (her milky tongue circling the globe of an ice cream cone), was director of a non-profit government organization called the Trade Winds Foundation which had something hush-hush to do with Latin America. Mellisa hadn’t told her much, she said had acted as if there was some mystery involved, something not quite right.

I glanced at my watch while Sweetheart nibbled at the edges of her cone. It was late and getting later. I had to get to Sol(l)ness before the heat got to me, which meant get to him fast. Though new to the detective business then, I had an instinct for it. It was in the blood, I guess. My old man had been a private eye, one of the best, before women and booze and an excess of integrity did him in. I improvised a plan which was something, if I do say so myself, to catch the conscience of a king. “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?” I asked when I had finished.

She nodded, licked her lips. “Why don’t we go back to my place and make whoopee. Sam?”

I could live to be thirty-three and never understand the way a woman’s mind worked. “Mellisa is dead.” I reminded her.

The news seemed to surprise her. “I forgot,” she said. “I’ve always had a short memory, Sam. You want me to phone Sol(l)ness and say I’m Mellisa. That’s it, isn’t it? What if he doesn’t believe I’m Mellisa?”

“He’ll know that you’re not Mellisa, Sweetheart, but he’ll be too clever to let you know that he knows.”

“Then I’m to tell him that I want to see him, that it’s a matter of life and death. Then…don’t tell me…just give me the first word.”

“You make an appointment to see him. You write the time and place on a scrap of paper and leave it for me in a phone booth on the northeast corner of Broadway and 121st.”

I went over the plan with her again. “You tell him, see, you know everything.”

“I know everything,” she said as if a transforming self-discovery. “You know, for example, he took her out to dinner and brought her home shortly after midnight. Playing on her weakness, he insinuated himself into her room.”

“Of course. Insinuated himself.”

“You overheard them from your room. At about 1:30, they had an argument — perhaps about his wife, perhaps about the Trade Winds Foundation and she said something that made him murderously angry, something unforgivable.”

“It was unforgivable.”

“And then…” I hesitated for effect…”pretending that you wanted to make up, you put your arm around her neck, and gradually increasing the pressure, very gradually — she might have thought she was being hugged — you strangled her to death.”

Sweetheart choked on the last remnant of her cone. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I was in my room at the time. You said so yourself.” Her thumb wormed its way into her mouth.

I punched her affectionately on the chin. “You’re good, Sweetheart,” I said. “You’re very good.”

“I wish we could be together under other circumstances,” she said, smiling through her tears.

“Someday we will.” I kissed her goodbye, warned her to be careful, lit a cigarette to steady my nerves and looked out at the river. What a screwed up piece of business life is, I thought.

I lost another ten minutes in the race against time, riffling the phone booth, before I found Sweetheart’s note ingeniously concealed in the coin return.

I looked at my watch. Then I noticed a big beefy man in a dark blue suit waiting outside the phone booth, his back to me. If you didn’t follow your hunches, right or wrong, the old man used to say, you were halfway to being a machine and therefore no match for them because they had better machines than you could ever hope to be. I called the weather.

The temperature at 1 pm in Central Park is 84 degrees relative humidity 82 percent. Variable winds at ten to fifteen miles an hour. The forecast for today

The forecast for today

The booth opened and something hard came down on the back of my head. Something quite hard. I remembered thinking: what the. I never saw it coming, saw only the shadow of the blow, an intuition of its reality reconstructed after the fact like an imagined or remembered dream.

I woke as if from the dead. My head hurt like hell. “He’s moving,” a voice said, which was certainly true. “Hold him,” a woman said, a matronly broad in a flowerprint dress. “He has no business going anywhere in that condition.” She took a whistle from her purse and blew a lightning bolt against my eardrum. No doubt she meant well. I went into the nearest building, which was Teachers College, and into a Men’s Room which smelled of structured curriculum and lonely afternoons. There was somewhere I had to be, dim urgency prodding the surface of memory. Water was supposed to revive you so I turned on the cold and put my head under the faucet.

The bathroom door opened. Once slugged, twice shy. If I was going to be hit, it would not be from behind. My visitor was about my own age and height, though sporting muttonchops and Fu Manchu mustache; said his name was Marlowe. He had found me unconscious in a phone booth, he said, and had carried me to the sidewalk. I thanked him for his trouble.

“Get separated from anything?” he asked.

Nothing, it turned out, but the note. I looked at my watch. It was twenty after two. In this business, five minutes could seem like an hour.

“If you’re in a hurry,” Marlowe said, “I have an Alfa parked outside.”

As we drove downtown in Marlowe’s Alfa Romeo, I told him as much of the present business as a graduate Sociology student could be expected to assimilate.

“Why should Sol(l)ness steal a note containing information of a meeting he himself had arranged?” I asked, wanting to see what he would say.

“He didn’t want it around to be used as evidence against him.

Or — there’s another contingency we shouldn’t overlook — maybe it wasn’t Sol(l)ness. Maybe it was someone of whose existence neither of us is yet aware.”

Everything is a paradox they teach you in college, and after awhile you can’t see your own reflection in the mirror without thinking it’s someone else.

Marlowe gave the illusion of driving fast, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. “Look at the facts,” he said. “There was about two hours between the time the man you assumed was Sol(l)ness left Markey’s room and the time you happened to make your visit.”

“Probably no more than an hour.”

“In which you slept.”

“Sleep and I are strangers. Can’t you go any faster?”

“I’m going as fast as the traffic will bear. It’s a common phenomenon not being aware of having slept. Let’s say you dozed off. From your own account there’s someone else it could have been. Someone who had as much opportunity and motive as Sol(l)ness. “

“You don’t think it’s — ?” I said, though the more I thought of it the more likely it seemed. “Even if you’re right, you’re wrong,” I said, throwing him a little paradox of my own.

It was two minutes past three o’clock when we pulled up to the Scandinavian Pavilion. I was getting out of the car when I noticed the mug who had slugged me (a mug who looked like the mug — he had changed the cut and color of his suit) coming out of the restaurant. “It’s him,” I said. “Sol(l)ness?” “Slugger,” I said. We watched him get into a cab. “It would be nice to know where he’s going,” I said. “I’ll follow him for you,” Marlowe said. We arranged to meet at Teachers College at six and Marlowe took off, leaving me to my business at the Pavilion.

The restaurant was dark as sin — candlelight gave the illusion of elegance — and three-quarters empty. I found Sweetheart sitting alone at a table in the back, drinking something green. There was another setting. “Where’s Sol(l)ness?” I asked her.

“Said he was going to the Men’s Room.” Her voice was thick.

“Such a nice man. He offered me the price of hope.”

“Did you get a confession?”

She nodded, then shook her head. “If he sees us together, don’t know what he’ll do.” She looked around nervously.

I found a place at the bar where I could keep tabs on them without being conspicuous. Five minutes went by and Sol(l)ness hadn’t returned. The bartender was staring so I ordered a shot of red-eye, which they didn’t have. In my old man’s day, they used to carry a special bottle of the poison for his private use. Just then a man who wasn’t Sol(l)ness, not the Sol(l)ness I knew, sat down at the table opposite Sweetheart. Whoever he was, I could see he was no stranger to her. I worried about the message I was getting. Nothing apparent to the eye. A scent as subtle as the memory of a breeze in a pall. The seismograph in me registered the first subterranean tremors of some evil working its way through the psychic underground of the room.

Sweetheart got up, holding her purse against her belly as if concealing something in one or the other, not too steady on her pins. I figured she’d be going to the Powder Room and I thought to head her off, took two steps and felt something hard against my ribs. “Act natural,” a voice with a slight accent instructed.

“Nature isn’t always right,” I said and sent him a special delivery message with my elbow. It hit neck and he folded. The next thing I knew there were waiters coming at me from all sides. An excessively polite fat man, chewing on a cigar, popped up and offered me his chair. I took the chair and held it out in front of me like a lion tamer while backing toward the door.

“If you put any value on your life, sir, you’ll put down that chair without a fuss.” The fat man had a small gun and was pointing it at me. I let go of the chair. The ox, tugging at the other end, sailed backwards across the room until a wall interrupted him.

“I never wanted the chair,” I said. “Your friend can have it if it means so much to him.”

“Sir, we have matters of mutual interest, I’m bound to say, that would be best discussed in the privacy of my office. Be so kind as to walk ahead, keeping your hands where I can see them. I am an excellent shot at close range.”

I thought I’d play along until I found out what his game was. His office looked more like a museum than an office, more like an antique shop than a museum. I don’t think there was an object in it, including the waste basket, that was less than a hundred years old. The fat man sat down behind an ornate desk that might have been used by one of the Borgias to write poison pen letters.

“Let me say, sir,” he said in an asthmatic voice, “you are a young man of exceptionally nice wit.” He laughed, folding his hands over his expansive stomach. “You are a man of action, which is the kind of man I admire. I hope you won’t take offense at my speaking so directly.”

“You didn’t bring me here to swell my head with compliments, I hope.”

“I did not, sir. I most certainly did not. I have a business proposition to make to you. Let me introduce myself. Heinrich Stockholm, Exporter-Importer, man of rare taste and discernment. And you, sir?”

“Charles Chan.”

“You are a character, sir. Indubitably, you are. The Chan, to whom you refer, is, if I’m not mistaken, an Oriental gentleman.”

“What are you, Stockholm, some kind of racist?”

The fat man nodded his head and one of his mugs jabbed the butt of a gun in my back. “I’m Charles X. Chan,” I said. “Illegitimate Occidental son of…” Anticipating another blow, I brought the side of my hand down sharply against the wrist of the mug who had been working me over, knocking the gun to the floor. I fell on the gun (a little trick I had learned from the old man), before Stockholm, fumbling with the drawer of his desk, could get to his weapon.

“All right,” I said, collecting guns. “Let’s everyone keep his hands in front of him. Stockholm, what do you know about Sol(l)ness?”

The fat man laughed his asthmatic laugh. “Egad, sir, it never fails to amaze me how the most intelligent and perspicacious of men confuse appearance and reality like schoolboys. It had been my impression, sir, that you were working for Sol(l)ness. And it had been your impression, correct me if I’m wrong, that Mr. Sol(l)ness and I were, so to speak, partners in crime. In point of fact, Sol(l)ness and I are working to somewhat different purpose. An amusing contretemps. You see we do have interests in common, sir, you and I.”

“Do we?”

“We do indeed, sir. There is the matter of the black bird.”

I had heard stories about the black bird since I was a kid.

Rumor was the original was worth anywhere from five hundred to five million dollars depending on condition and how badly you wanted it. “Where does the Trade Winds Foundation fit in?” I asked.

“The Trade Winds Foundation, and I dare say I’m not telling you any more than you know, is a front for…”

He never finished the sentence. The phone rang and we were informed by an anonymous tipster that police had entered the restaurant and were looking for a suspicious person.

“This is the work of our friend Sol(l)ness,” he said. “I suggest, sir, that we, in the parlance of our profession, take a powder. Unless of course you welcome an interview with the law.”

Perhaps the police weren’t there but couldn’t take the chance of finding out, followed Stockholm and his two henchmen through an opening in the teak-paneled wall and down a winding stairway into an underground passageway. We went in single file, the bodyguards, Wilmer and Fritz (or Fritz and Wilmer), followed by the fat man wobbling delicately on his toes like a ballerina, pulled up the rear, rod in hand, directing traffic. “How far is it?” I asked him.

“If your gun is too heavy, sir, give it here,” he wheezed. “Fritz or Wilmer will be glad to carry it for you.” The fat man laughed, the sound reverberating.

“Just keep walking, fat man. If I want any advice, I’ll write to Miss Lonelyhearts.”

I heard footsteps coming from behind and turned, gun cocked, though saw nothing. The tunnel had crazy acoustics. Sounds in front, I realized, echoed as if coming from in back. But then what did it mean if you heard footsteps in front of you? The fat man’s laugh was getting on my nerves. I stumbled but recovered without falling.

There was a steel door at the end of the passageway and Wilmer or Fritz opened it with a tiny steel key. On the other side of the door was a room almost identical to the one we had just left. Fritz (unless it was Wilmer) went in first, followed by the other, followed by the fat man. My turn never came. “You have had weapon long enough,” a woman’s Oriental voice purred into my ear. “Please throw rod into room.” I hesitated. “I am perfectly willing to shoot you down like dog,” she hissed, “if you leave this foolish woman no other choice.”

“What guarantee do I have if I throw the gun away, you won’t kill me anyway?”

“You have word of Dragon Lady,” she said. I gave up the ghost of my gun.

“I’ll ask only once,” Stockholm said, pointing the gun while the Dragon Lady tied my hands behind me; “where, sir, is the black bird?”

“It’s just a story,” I said. “There is no black bird.”

The fat man laughed. “You are a character, sir, or my name isn’t Heinrich Stockholm.”

“Trust me,” the Dragon Lady whispered. And then she was gone, the steel door slamming shut, the echo reverberating through the long hollow chamber. Stock-holm Stock-holm holm holm holm holm holmmmmmmmmmm. I felt as if the lid of my head had been flapped shut.

It looked bad for a few minutes, and I regretted a lot of things I had done in my time and a lot of things I hadn’t done, and I regretted regretting them, when I heard footsteps front and back and Marlowe appeared on the dead run and untied me. We went back through the passageway to Stockholm’s office in the Scandinavian Pavilion.

“How did you find me?” I asked when it was clear that we were out of danger.

“It’s a long story,” he said and proceeded to tell it.

Marlowe had followed Sam’s assailant — beefy man in gray suit — to the Chelsea Hotel, room 9C, which according to the desk clerk was a suite rented to a man named Hans Seeley. Marlowe was waiting in the hall for Seeley, if that’s who it was, to come out when he heard a muffled shot. Five minutes later another man, slight, with horn-rimmed glasses, came out of the room in a hurry, carrying a package wrapped in newspaper under his arm. Marlowe asked him if he had a match. The man, mistaking Marlowe for a confederate, handed him the package and said: “The boat thails tonight.” “What boat?” Marlowe asked. The Little Man, discovering his mistake, asked for his package back. Marlowe was too quick for him. Before Little Man could get to his pistolero, Marlowe had his arm wrenched behind his back.

Marlowe took the Little Man, who said he was Seeley, into room 9C — there was no sign of the other — and fired questions at him. What happened to the man who came in here? What boat thails tonight and what does it mean?

At first Seeley insisted he knew nothing, but under pressure of inquiry, he admitted to being a double agent in the employ of both Stockholm and Sol(l)ness, willing to sell out either or both for the right price, an ideologue of the necessary. Stockholm had hired Seeley to infiltrate Sol(l)ness’s organization. It didn’t take Sol(l)ness long to discover what Seeley was up to — perhaps Seeley even wanted him to find out — and so to stay alive Seeley was persuaded to betray Stockholm to Sol(l)ness. It was further possible that Stockholm had discovered that his agent was now in the employ of the enemy and had “persuaded” Seeley to betray Sol(l)ness in the guise of betraying Stockholm. Perhaps there was even a third force to whom Seeley betrayed both Stockholm and Sol(l)ness. Marlowe never got to find out. A shot from the window silenced Seeley’s lips forever.

Seeley’s assassin, bleeding profusely from a wound in the left shoulder, escaped down the fire escape, taking the last four stories in a final step.

Seeley’s last words, stammered in Marlowe’s ear, were something like (last words are often deceiving) — “The thoul is the heart’s hostage;”

“Thollness?” Marlowe asked, trying to decipher the message, but Seeley had no more words to speak.

The next thing Marlowe did was to tear open the package he had acquired from Seeley. Inside were a pair of brown men’s shoes, size 10—1/2D. On the sole of one he discovered what was apparently a treasure map drawn in childlike scrawl in red crayon.

Marlowe was studying the drawing when hit on the head from behind. When he came to, Seeley was gone and so were the shoes. He questioned the desk clerk, who insisted he knew nothing but remembered, after Marlowe slipped him a tenner, that he had seen a man dressed as a woman come through the lobby in a hurry, carrying the body of a mug who resembled Seeley.

“Just as Marlowe thought.” Marlowe said, and he went back to the Scandinavian Pavilion to find his friend Sam. where indeed, as we have seen, he did just that.

“For a long story it could have been longer.” I said. “How did you find the tunnel?”

“It’s an extraordinary example of devious planning,” he said:

“One admires it grudgingly.”

“What I mean is, how did you get to it?”

“Same way you did. Through the paneled wall in Stockholm’s office. What you really want to know is how Marlowe found out you were trapped in the tunnel. Am I right?”

“That’s what I wanted to know.” I admitted.

“It’s Marlowe’s view that we’re into something unbelievable here. Sam. Something really incredible. We are dealing with a conspiracy so intricate, subtle and diabolic, that it is beyond the invention of language to conceive. -6##-7&………/:……/-(&) = ++ = +……/,#9#9#9 &&&&&&&&&&&) $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$/

($) $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$-***# %@#$/#="

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Nevertheless,” said Marlowe, “we live in a time in which anything is impossible.”

“I want to see Sol(l)ness.” I told the receptionist at the Trade Winds Foundation, an Oriental dwarf with the face of a depraved cherub.

“Whom shall I say is calling?” she said, winking at me.

“Use your imagination,” I said.

On electronic signal, the smoked glass doors behind her swung open into a simulated Mexican adobe hut. The whirr of tape recorders — six to naked eye going at once — like insects in the air.

Attractive brunette with pleasant smile in peasant blouse, past first bloom and blush, introduced herself with slight trace of East European accent as Madame Sol(l)ness.

“I am looking for a Harvard Sol(l)ness,” I said, taking quick sharp glance at surrounding environs. The detective must see with the eye of the poet.

“Do you mean my husband?”

“If you’re his wife, he’s who I mean.”

“My husband is at present in Mexico collecting new tapes.

Perhaps I can help you. Harvard and I work hand in glove.” She sat down crosslegged on what I assumed was a Mexican rug — the design on it like a treasure map or an algebraic equation — indicating with her head that she wanted me to sit next to her. “In Mexico, my friend, you do as the Mexicans.”

I squatted down next to her. “When did your husband leave Mrs. Sol(l)ness?”

“Call me Katerinka. Please.”

“I’m here on business, Madame Sol(l)ness. Three people are already dead because of something somebody wants. I think the key to it may be in this room.”

She pulled on her skirt, calling attention to her long legs.

“Three isn’t much. Do you think three is an especially large number? Perhaps they were accidents.”

“Does the name Mellisa Markey mean anything to you, Madame Sol(l)ness?”

“The name means nothing to me.”

“She worked for your husband.”

“Oh that Mellisa Markey. You ought to be more specific, Sam.”

I got up and walked behind Madame Sol(l)ness. “Mellisa Markey is dead,” I said dramatically.

She shook her head, denying the undeniable. “Her Spanish wasn’t very good. She had no sense of the conditional.”

“It won’t get any better,” I said. “What kind of work did Mellisa do for your husband, Madame Sol(l)ness?”

“Call me Katerinka. Odds and ends. Interviewing, translating, typing, window dressing. She laughed at his jokes.” The phone rang and Madame Sol(l)ness got up from the rug to answer it. “We live quite simply, my husband and I, as you can see. We admire simplicity. The simple life in our opinion is the good life.” She spoke Spanish on the phone in a high musical voice.

I was impatient. Three people were dead, one of whom I cared about, cared a lot about, and I didn’t know any more about the murderer’s identity than when I had started. “Bad news?” I asked. She was trembling.

“Sansho Dayu is dead,” she said and collapsed. I grabbed her before she hit the floor. “Was your husband responsible?” “We are all in our own way responsible,” she said in a soft familiar voice.

“Tell me what you know,” I said. She smiled slyly, stuck out her tongue. “All right, Madame Sol(l)ness… Katerinka, I’ll tell you. You found out — this was some time ago — that your husband was having a thing with Mellisa so you got him to fire her. Am I right so far?”

“A thing? What means, a thing?”

“He was having his way with her,” I said. “Go on,” she said coldly.

I was guessing wildly. “He fired her, but he didn’t stop seeing her, didn’t stop giving her tapes to translate. You knew because you had them followed or followed them yourself. It wasn’t the sex business that bothered you — you and your husband had an understanding about such matters — it was the tapes and the confidences. It didn’t matter to you that your husband preferred intimacy with other women, but what you wouldn’t put up with was his trusting another woman’s judgment above yours. That was the unforgivable sin, am I right?” Katerinka cleared her throat. “Especially a woman like Mellisa who was in your opinion no more than an ignorant girl.”

“Very interesting,” she said, “your story.”

“Should I continue?”

“How does one stop you?”

“There was a time, several months of time in point of fact, when Mellisa refused to see your husband and you had him, Katerinka, in a manner of speaking, all to yourself. You were happy then.”

“Was I? I don’t remember.”

“But your husband was a persuasive man, Madame S…

Katerinka. Who knew that better than you? He persuaded Mellisa to see him again. You found out about it through one of your spies and the discovery of Sol(l)ness’s infidelity threw you into a fit of rage. Hell has no fury. Am I making sense?” Her eyes were closed and I had to shake her to get an answer.

“Yes no. I don’t think she knew more than one position.”

“Comparisons are invidious,” I said.

She batted her big brown eyes, moistened her lips with a snaky tongue. “Do you think I’m less attractive than that Markey person?”

The next thing I knew I was kissing her, into something beyond the invention of language, my position compromised. “So,” I continued, resisting distraction, “you wanted revenge.” “Yes,” “My first idea was that you followed your husband to Mellisa’s apartment, but then I realized that wasn’t the way you worked.” “Oh yes.” “What you wanted, Katerinka, was both of them out of the way. You knew enough of the operation to write Sol(l)ness’s books without him. And with the business came what was at the end of everybody’s rainbow, the black bird.” “Yes.” “So you turned him over to Stockholm.” “Yes, yes.” “And now comes the really beautiful part.” “Yes.” “You knew your husband’s style so well, inside and out, hand in glove as you say, you could imitate him if.” “Yes.” “Could actually impersonate him if.” “Yes.” “So disguised as Sol(l)ness it was you that took Mellisa out to dinner.” “Yes.” “It was you disguised as Sol(l)ness.” “Yes.” “Who went into her room with her.” “Yes.” “That fateful night.” “Oh yes,” “In her bed the masquerade could no longer.” “Yes.” “Persist.” “Oh yes yes yes yes.” “You.” “Yes.” “Strangled Mellisa until she.” “Yessssssssssssss.” We arrived at the same conclusion.

“Do you love me, Sam?” she asked.

I nodded my head. She was nibbling on an ear, whispering Mexican-Spanish endearments. “I’ll teach you all the Spanish I know,” she said, “We’ll do his books together. I’ll be good to you, Sam. Oh how good I’ll be.”

“No deal,” I said.

“You don’t love me, Sam.”

“If I let you go, Katerinka, every halfway good-looking woman around will take me for a sucker. That’s if I live that long. What’s to stop you from turning me over to Stockholm any time the whim goes through that pretty head of yours?”

She kissed me. Katerinka a persuasive woman with a kiss, turning my head. “You’re kidding, aren’t you Sam?”

“Get your clothes on, Katerinka. I’m turning you over.” “What’s it got you, your precious incorruptibility? You’re a failure, Sam. Look at your clothes. No one dresses that way anymore.”

She didn’t understand. There were things you did and things you didn’t do and if you did the things you didn’t do or didn’t do the things you did, you might as well be led by the nose by whatever Katerinka there was around to lead you. I picked up the phone and asked the operator to get me the police.

“Which police do you want, sir?”

“Put down the phone, Sam. Don’t make me do something we’ll both be sorry for. The Bolivian General Staff is in the next room.”

“Just get me any police, lady. This is an emergency.”

“I’ll make you rich and famous, Sam. We’ll share the black bird between us. Don’t make me push the button.”

“All lines are tied up,” the operator was saying. “Hang up and dial again. This is a recording. This is.”

“You leave Dragon Lady no choice,” she said and pushed the button.

When she pushes the button, Wilmer and Fritz come in, followed by the massive configuration of the fat man. From the pained look on Katerinka’s face, I can see it is not what she expected.

“Scotland Yard,” says the fat man, flashing a phony shield.

“You have something in your possession, madame, that belongs, if I’m not mistaken, to Her Majesty’s government.”

“Don’t believe him, Sam,” she says. “He’ll say anything.”

“How do I know, Stockholm,” I say, “you are who you say you are?”

“Sir, who else would I be?”

His answer puts an end to civil conversation. Our guns are out, his three to my one, putting me at an obvious though inessential disadvantage. When the fat man claps his hands, Fritz and Wilmer begin to take the room apart. Katerinka uses the occasion to slip noiselessly behind me. “If we get out of this alive,” she whispers, “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

The fat man and his colleagues desolate the room. Hours of tedious quest pass before Wilmer discovers a package wrapped in newspaper in a hollow space under the floorboards. “We have here the fruits,” Stockholm says, stripping the wrapping with his grotesquely truncated fingers, “of years of single-minded dedication. …Fools.” Inside the package is a single black open-toed woman’s shoe. “It is not even my size,” he says and laughs insanely. Fritz accuses Wilmer of a double cross. Wilmer in turn accuses Fritz. Several guns go off. In the confusion I grab the treacherous Katerinka and leap through a window. She is the last proof of my innocence.

“My hero,” she says as we fall. “My black bird.”

Wherever I go, the bird comes up one way or another. We pass a newsstand on the way to the police station. The headline on the late edition reads:

The fix was in, I guess. It always is, even when the whole world stands on its head and says no.

“I’ll make you rich,” she whispers.

I say something about truth and justice coming before money and having to look at your face in the mirror in the morning when you shave.

“Who’s talking about money,” she says, “or shaving for that matter.”

I take her to an abandoned warehouse in the West Bronx overlooking the Harlem River and question her intensively night and day without rest, without regard for personal safety. There is more evidence than one can say. The lines of implication are myriad and complex. Guilt is everywhere.

“Hurry,” she whispers, my silky-skinned, downy-legged spy. “I have to be home at six to give the kids dinner. And please, whatever you do, Sam, don’t leave any marks.”

Sometimes in this business, you can be on the same case for as long as you live.