EQMM, Jan. 2003, page 5
“My God.” Lofgren swallowed, hard. And I glimpsed the rage and despair in his eyes. Which was probably the last thing the two Russians saw. Before he put them in the ground.
“What happens now?”
“I don't know.” He took a deep breath, glancing around, as if seeing the bluff for the first time. Or the last. “It's a real mess, isn't it? Amateurish. It was my first time on the wrong side of the law. I guess it shows.”
“Maybe you're not cut out for a life of crime. It's not too late to straighten out.”
“Sure it is. The thing is, I'm not cut out for prison, either.”
I heard the finality in his tone. He'd been chewing over his options as we talked. And he'd decided. The same way he'd decided about the two Russians. I dove to the left, clawing for my weapon. But the Swede was right. I lost.
* * *
I woke in a grave. Facedown, dirt in my mouth. Breathing the foul stench of decay. But breathing. Opened my eyes, but couldn't see much. I was sprawled across the bodies of the Russians. But I hadn't joined them in death. Not quite yet.
Risked raising my head an inch, looking around. Didn't see Lofgren. Which didn't mean he wasn't there. But it didn't matter. I couldn't bear one more second of the godawful reek. I staggered to my feet. A big mistake.
The earth lurched, I stumbled over a dead Russian and went down again. Hard. My head was buzzing and I could feel blood trickling from my earlobe. Touched my temple gingerly with my fingertips. They came away bloody. Tried to remember what happened.
I'd reached for my weapon. Lofgren must have clipped me with the shotgun butt. My gun was gone. So was Lofgren.
Wasn't sure how long I'd been unconscious. Looked at my watch but couldn't seem to make sense of it. I'd been out awhile, though. I was freezing, cold to the bone, and the blood on my face was already drying.
I stood up again, more carefully this time. Wobbled a little, but managed to stay upright. Looked around, took stock. I was standing in the grave. Injured. Couldn't tell how seriously. Which was a bad sign. Concussions can kill you and the first symptom is disorientation. I qualified. In spades.
Needed help. Fumbled for my cell phone. Gone. Like the gun. Probably just as well. 911 might bring Lofgren back. To finish the job.
Started for my car, one unsteady step at a time. Didn't make it. Kept hearing a buzzing in my head. Took me a moment to realize the noise was real. Coming from the bluff.
I stumbled back to the deck, following the sound. The buzz was an engine. A powerboat roaring out of the harbor at Burns Cove. A county patrol boat, throttle wide open, rocketing through the bergs and breakers like a maritime half back, headed for the open water where he could swing northeast toward the Canadian shore.
I had to find a phone. Unless I alerted the Coast Guard, Lofgren could vanish into Canada. If that was his intent.
I'll never know. Half a mile out, the patrol boat slammed into an ice floe at full speed. Maybe he misjudged the distance. Maybe he meant to hit it. I only know the boat never swerved. Punched into that berg like a truck hitting a train.
The collision flipped the powerboat. It went airborne, engine howling, then smashed to splinters on the floe. And exploded. Sending a greasy fireball roiling up into the steel-gray overcast, smoke churning skyward as a curtain of snowflakes descended, whiting out my view.
It didn't matter. I'd seen enough to know there were no survivors. Which was probably just as well. Swede was right. He wasn't cut out for prison. He was better off ... wherever he was now.
In hell.
Or maybe ... in Viking heaven. With Eric the Red, Leif, and the rest. They weren't saints, those old raiders. Sacking cities, looting churches. The Swede's mistakes were small stuff compared to theirs. Maybe they'd make room at the table for him. Drink a toast to his luck. In...
Viking heaven. I tried to focus. Couldn't seem to think.
What was the name of that place?
Copyright © 2002 by Doug Allyn.
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Brass Monkey by Reginald Hill
In January of 2002 Delacorte published the nineteenth book in the Dalziel and Pascoe series by Reginald Hill. “Permeated with [Hill's] sly and delightful sense of humor,” said the Christian Science Monitor of the book. Dalziel and Pascoe were the protagonists of Mr. Hill's very first published novel, A Clubbable Woman (1970), and they're as fresh and likable today, in books and in stories such as this, as they were then.
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“By the cringe!” said DCI Peter Pascoe, his teeth chattering together like tiny icebergs. “It must be twenty below.”
“Aye. Grand weather for tracking a brass monkey,” said Andy Dalziel gleefully, adjusting his binoculars.
He stood there, bulky as a polar bear and apparently as impervious to cold, peering down the tree-scattered slope to the house below. Is he human? wondered Pascoe, stamping his rapidly numbing feet in the snow.
More importantly, is he right?
The windows of Hollybush Grange glowed gold, and before it the tall shapely tree, which presumably provided its name, was festooned with fairy lights and topped with a gossamer-winged angel poised for f light. It looked more like a traditional Christmas card than a villain's lair.
“Sure this is the right place, sir?” he asked.
“Sure as if I'd been led by a star,” said the Fat Man.
In fact, the light which led them to this frozen rendezvous had been lit by an exploding lasagna rather than a helpful deity.
Two weeks earlier a woman in the cafeteria at Mid-Yorkshire's famous Helm Museum in scenic Narrowdale had complained her snack wasn't properly defrosted. The overworked waitress replaced the dish in the microwave. A minute later, the oven exploded in flames.
The fire spread rapidly, or at least its smoke did, filling the building and setting off the state-of-the-art fire alarm whose fearful screech made it physically impossible for any human being to stay inside.
Except, that is, for a burly man in a Russian fur hat fitted with what must have been industrial-strength ear muffs, who had been admiring the Helm's most treasured possession, the Cellini Monkey.
This was a figure, about ten inches high, of an ape of indeterminate species, exquisitely wrought in gold and adorned with precious stones, which the great Florentine artist had wrought for a daughter of the Medici. Its value was said to exceed all of the other exhibits put together.
Once alone, the man stepped across the velvet rope separating him from the display area, lit a cook's blowtorch, and directed the flame at a sensor in the wall which, at a temperature of 200 degrees Celsius, released the electronic locks on the display cabinets.
A moment later, with the monkey in a poacher's pocket inside his capacious overcoat, he was pursuing his fellow punters to the exit.
Naturally all this activity triggered other alarms, but they were no match for the screaming siren, and it wasn't till the fire was brought under control that the theft was discovered.
Andy Dalziel was just getting his teeth into the case when news came through that the NCS were taking it over.
“NC bloody S!” snarled Dalziel. “You know what that stands for?”
“The National Crime Squad?” suggested Pascoe.
“No. Never Caught Short. They gobble up all the glory, but if things go wrong, they walk away and leave the locals to clean up the mess. Flash bastards!”
The formation of the NCS a few years earlier had been aimed at providing a law-enforcement agency whose remit was to deal with major crime and whose authority wasn't limited by the boundaries of local police forces. The fact that its officers were recruited from the Criminal Investigation Departments of these same local forces was meant to have prevented the kind of rivalries and antagonisms existing between cops and the FBI in the States, but inevitably, to many of the older denizens of CID who'd seen everything and got scars to prove it, NCS officers either got the job because they were born flash bastards or they became flash bastards as a condition of doing the job.
The flash bastard in this instance was DCI Dai Davison, who looked about eighteen, sported a Welsh Rugby Union tie, and wore trousers so tight they made Dalziel's eyes water just to look at them. “Jesus!” he muttered to Pascoe, “here's me trying to do a man's work and they've sent us the Boyo David!” before putting on his village-idiot face to greet the new arrival.
The Boyo, speaking very slowly, explained that the NCS's theory was that the Cellini figure had been stolen for use in the international drugs market. “Big money leaves a big trail,” he said. “So the major traffickers are into barter. To them, all the Cellini Monkey represents is a million-dollar marker.”
“You mean they'll use it as brass!” exclaimed Dalziel, his look of rustic astonishment terrible to behold. “D'you hear that, Pete? This is really a brass monkey they stole.”
And so the Cellini figure was christened.
The Boyo's team hung around Mid-Yorkshire for several days, during which time the Fat Man overwhelmed them with cooperation. Requested to provide an officer with detailed local knowledge, he immediately asked Uniformed if they could spare PC Hector for plainclothes duties. They gave him up with tears of gratitude and mirth.
Pascoe was horrified.
“Last time they let him out on patrol, an old lady had to show him the way back to the station!” he reminded Dalziel.
“Aye, he'll really test their commitment,” said the Fat Man, looking with delight on Hector who, with his expression of haunted vacancy and a shiny black suit a size too small, could have been a Victorian undertaker's mute. “I give ‘em two days.”
It took only one for the Boyo David to decide the monkey was by now probably several continents away. He took his leave, pursued by smiling reassurances that if anything relevant came up in Mid-Yorkshire, he would be the first to know.
But as the Boyo's gleaming BMW vanished from sight, the smiles faded, too.
“Right,” said Dalziel. “Now we can get started.”
He was convinced the monkey was still on his patch, and quickly spread the word among his snouts that if they brought glad tidings before Christmas, their reward would be a choice of gold or frankincense, but if they withheld even the scrappiest scrap of information, they'd better stock up on myrrh.
Pascoe watched all this with some uneasiness, having strong suspicions that the Boyo's ears had more chance of being pleasured by Madonna's tongue than by the entry of any information thus garnered.
On the morning of December twentieth, Dalziel got a phone call and left the office alone. Some time later he returned, whistling a merry tune. For the next couple of days he was hard to find. But on the third day he reappeared again after lunch.
Pascoe went to see him, but paused at the closed door as he heard a strange voice within. It was saying in a hoarse, very broad Scots accent, “Aye, Hollytree or bush maybe, in Borrowdale, that's what I said. Aye, Borrowdale, Cumbria, is there anither? And it's this selfsame nicht, definite!”
Pascoe went back to his desk. When he returned to Dalziel's room later, he found the door ajar. The Fat Man was alone, studying a folder. Pascoe glimpsed the name Palliser Estates before it was slid out of sight.
“Thinking of moving, sir?” he said lightly.
“Somewhere I can get a bit of privacy, mebbe,” growled Dalziel. “What do you want?”
Before Pascoe could reply, the phone rang. Dalziel picked it up, listened, then banged it down.
“Snout,” he said. “Reckons he might have something on the brass monkey.”
Pascoe stood up and said, “Let's go.”
When interviewing registered informants, two officers were required.
Dalziel said indifferently, “No. Probably a waste of time. I'll take Novello. Show her how it's done.”
But when he returned, he was much more excited.
He said, “Ivor ‘ull tell you the tale. I need to ring the Boyo.”
The tale WPC “Ivor” Novello told was of a meeting with a snout who'd passed on the information that the gang who'd stolen the monkey were possibly hiding out at Hollybush Hall on the edge of Narrowdale, not twenty miles from the museum.
She'd been impressed by her boss's surprisingly subtle technique.
“This guy was really nervous. But Mr. Dalziel put him at his ease with a glance, got the info, and sent him on his way. That's the way to handle snouts, I thought.”
Pascoe didn't like the feel of this. In his experience, the Fat Man's handling of informants involved fistfuls of shirt and hurricanes of hot breath. Also the memory of the Scotsman he'd overheard talking about a house called Holly something in Borrowdale, Cumbria, kept coming back. Surely there had to be a connection...?
But the Fat Man, on his return, made no mention of this.
“They say the Boyo's off on some urgent case. Probably broken up for the Christmas hols already, idle buggers. Any road, I've left a message. And I've had a word with the chief. He agreed we should set up a discreet observation. Ten bodies should do it.”
“Ten?” exclaimed Pascoe. “For observation? What is this place? Some kind of palace?”
“Better safe than sorry. See if Uniformed can lend us a few. I want ‘em in plainclothes. Don't want to draw attention. Go on, Pete. Chop-chop!”
The duty uniformed inspector was unenthusiastic, but offered three men, as long as one of them was Hector, who'd been boring them all with tales of his exciting NCS attachment. Dalziel groaned and said, “Needs must when the devil drives!” But he still didn't mention the Scotsman.
It was already dark when the little convoy finally set off, led by Pascoe driving Dalziel, who sat nursing his mobile phone.
“Expecting a call, sir?” he said.
“You wha'?” said Dalziel, looking at the phone as if it had emerged from his fly. “No. Why should I be?”
The phone rang.
He put it to his ear, listened, said, “You're sure? Thanks.”
To Pascoe he said, “New info. My snout reckons there could be some kind of exchange fixed for tonight.”
“Exchange? What kind of exchange?”
“Drugs, he's heard. Some Krauts. All right, don't look like you've sucked a lemon, Germans, I mean.”
But it wasn't political correctness that was causing Pascoe to look unhappy. It was his growing sense of performance, which deepened as the Fat Man now rang NCS, expressed histrionic exasperation on learning Davison was still unavailable, and left another message for him to get in touch urgently.
“Shouldn't you have mentioned where we're going?” he said.
“He can always ask a policeman,” said the Fat Man, pulling out the Palliser Estates folder, which Pascoe was not surprised to see contained details of Hollybush, including a map of the grounds, copies of which Dalziel passed on to Sergeant Wield to aid him in the disposition of his troops when they rendezvoused in the woods flanking the approach to the house.
Pascoe didn't bother asking how these useful bits of literature happened to be in the Fat Man's possession. The whole thing stank, and the less he knew, the better.
But as he stood there freezing in the snow, he decided that the risk of losing his toes as well as the risk of Dalziel losing his job required one more effort to get the Fat Man to abandon this dubious operation.
“Sir,” he began.
“Hush!” said the Fat Man.
“What?”
“Did you not hear summat?”
Pascoe strained his ears. There was something ... a long way away ... rising ... fading...
“Carol singers,” he said. “Must be from the village. Sound really travels in the cold.”
“Aye. Too bloody far sometimes.”
Pascoe looked at him curiously
“How do you mean?” he said.
“I were just recalling my Great-Uncle Hamish,” said Dalziel. “He often stayed with us at Christmas, and one frosty night much like this him and me were coming back from a walk in the park when he stopped and stared up at this line of trees, like he were listening. I said, ‘What is it, Uncle Hamish?’ and he said, ‘D'ye no hear it, laddie?’ And he began to croon this carol, ‘Silent Night’ it was, only the words he were singing were in German. Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, that's what he sang. He'd served in the Great War, didn't talk about it much, but one thing he did talk about was Christmas nineteen fourteen—how the Germans sang carols, and the Tommies sang back, and then they all came out of the trenches, carrying bottles of booze, and they played football together, and got drunk together. And I'll tell you a strange thing, Pete. When he said, ‘D'ye no hear it, laddie?’ and I strained my ears, blow me if after a bit I didn't hear it, and in German, too! Like the man said to Horace, there's more things in heaven and earth, eh?”
“Oh, yes,” said Pascoe, deeply affected, not so much by the story as the Scots accent Dalziel had put on when quoting his uncle.
Either the ghost of Great-Uncle Hamish had been in the Fat Man's office that afternoon or—his mind rapidly supplied the more likely explanation—or Dalziel had been on the phone to Davison, making sure he was well out of the way on a wild-goose chase up in Cumbria when the carefully staged delivery of this “new” information he'd probably got from his snout at least three days ago came through!
If any of this ever came out, Dalziel would be lucky to save his pension, let alone his job. Only complete success—drugs confiscated, bodies in the cells, and the brass monkey recovered—could keep him secure.
He opened his mouth to remonstrate, but the Fat Man said excitedly, “Hey, look there. This could be it.”
Pascoe looked. Distantly he could see the line of the road picked out by the headlights of a car.
Dalziel was on his radio, talking urgently.
Pascoe said, “They're turning into the lane.”
“Yes ... yes ... Wieldy's onto it. It's a Merc, four passengers.”
“And how many in the house?” wondered Pascoe. “We could be outgunned.”
“Only two inside,” said Dalziel confidently. “And no guns with this lot, guaranteed.”
“What about this other lot?” said Pascoe.
