Run Lethal p-8, page 8
part #8 of Parker Series
The other cab trailed along like something attached by a string. Grofield looked back at it from time to time and laughed, picturing the Parker-like face of that Federal man back there. When he got out of the cab at Crystal’s place he paused long enough to wave at the Fed before going on into the building.
Grofield heard music, movie-type background music. He heard it all the time, in every part of his life. For the last half hour or so the music had all been of cops-and-robbers movie type, with a lot of drums and trumpets and syncopation, but now as he went up in the elevator to Crystal’s apartment the music changed, became light, frothy, semi-comic, the kind of music that backs Jack Lemmon or Cary Grant on their way to see Shirley MacLaine or Doris Day. Grofield strode out of the elevator whistling and did a little dance step in the middle of the hall.
At first, after he rang the bell, he thought she wasn’t home. He waited and waited by the closed door, while the music began to change again, and soon the air around his head was swollen with tear-stained violins; missing in action, erroneously reported dead, he was returning home at last, shattered in mind and body, five years after the war, not yet knowing his wife had remarried.
But then the door opened and she was standing there in a robe, not entirely awake. Sleepiness didn’t bloat Crystal, as it does to so many, it merely made her a bit fuzzy around the edges. She said, ‘Wha? What is it?’
‘It’s two P.M., my darling. Forgive my waking you so early, but I didn’t want you to miss the sunset.’
‘I was taking a nap. You want to come in?’
‘Sweetheart, you don’t know how I’ve longed to hear those words from your lips.’
She squinted, trying to bring his face and her mind both into focus. Her robe was half open, and underneath it she was wearing pale blue pyjamas. ‘You’re kidding around,’ she said.
‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘I am. Do you want to sleep some more? I’ll come back later.’
‘No, no, that’s all right. Come on in.’
She stepped out of the way and Grofield walked into the apartment, shutting the door behind him. They both went into the living room, and she said, ‘You want a cup of coffee or something?’
‘Coffee? I didn’t just get up, you did. I’ll take the something.’
She waved a hand vaguely. ‘Bar’s over there. Excuse me, I’ll be back in just a minute.’
‘Don’t get dressed,’ he said.
She squinted some more. She was one of the few women Grofield had ever met who could squint without ruining her looks. She said, ‘What was that?’
‘You look very sexy,’ he said. ‘Robe and pyjamas, very sexy. If you just had the robe on, half open like that, that would be just conventionally sexy, you know what I mean? But with the blue pyjamas, just the hint of an outline of breast, swell of hip, it adds a whole new dimension.’
She was waking up now. ‘Is that right?’ she said, and her tone said tell-me-more.
Grofield said, ‘I’ve noticed the same thing about my wife.’
‘You’re married?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded thoughtfully. ‘You start a pass,’ she said, ‘and then you tell me you’re married. Now you go back to throwing the pass, right?’
Grofield grinned and nodded. ‘Right.’
‘And if I take you up on it, it’s on your terms. I already know you’re married, so I can’t have any complaints later on.’
‘If it was a line I’d worked up, honey,’ he said, ‘I would have used it before I was married and today I might not bemarried.’
‘If you are.’
‘Oh, I am, all right.’
She seemed to consider, and then she said, ‘If I’m going to be catching passes, I ought to have something to drink. But I just woke up.’
‘Coffee royal.’
‘I was thinking the same thing. Wait here, I’ll go make the coffee.’
Grofield smiled after her as she left the room. Easiest thing in the world, and a nice pleasant way to fill the mornings and afternoons between now and work time. A lot more fun than tantalizing Feds, too.
Parker was crazy, moving out on something like this.
She came back eventually with two cups of black coffee on a tray. She set it down on the coffee table and went over to the bar, saying, ‘I don’t understand you guys, and I’ve met a million of you.’
Grofield didn’t believe there were a million of him. He said, ‘Such as?’
‘Married, but on the prowl. If you’re gonna keep going back to the wife, why leave her? If you’re going to keep leaving her, why go back?’
‘Two different things,’ Grofield told her, thinking he ought to call Mary today. He’d do it when he left here.
‘Two different things,’ echoed Crystal. ‘I don’t get it.’ She came over with a bottle of whisky. ‘Where’s your wife now? In town here?’
‘Good God, no. In Estes Park, Colorado.’
‘Is that where you live? How much of this stuff should we pour in?’
‘As much as the cup will hold, my dear. Very nice. No, she is acting with a theatrical troupe. As will I be in a few weeks.’
Interest quickened in her eyes. ‘You’re an actor?’
‘The heir apparent to the crown of John Barrymore, that’s all.’
‘What have you been?’
But the doorbell sounded, breaking into the question, leaving Grofield with mixed emotions. He was glad the trite question had been interrupted, but irritated to have the progression with this delightful girl interrupted. He said, ‘Ignore it.’
‘I can’t. It might be something important.’ She was already on her feet and halfway across the room.
‘Ah, well. Hurry back to me.’
She flashed him a smile over her shoulder and went on out to the foyer. A minute later she was back, looking troubled, and behind her came two men, one of them the Fed who earlier had refused to share a cab with Grofield. He was the one who said, ‘Alan Grofield?’
‘You have the honour,’ Grofield told him.
Crystal said, ‘Is that your first name? Alan? I like that.’
‘Nice of you.’
‘You come with us,’ said the Fed, talking to Grofield.
Something cold touched Grofield in the pit of the stomach. ‘This is a pinch?’
The other Fed said, ‘You’re not under arrest, don’t worry about it. We want to talk to you.’
‘Why don’t we talk here? Such lovely surroundings, a charming hostess
‘
‘Downtown,’ said the first Fed.
‘You,’ Grofield told him, ‘are trying to be difficult. And are succeeding wondrous well. All right, if you insist you insist.’ He got to his feet and said to Crystal, ‘I’ll come back when I can. We’ll continue our discussion.’
‘I’ll like that.’
Grofield smiled at her, a trifle sadly Rex Harrison as the gentle jewel thief, being taken from the hotel suite in Cannes and patted her cheek as he went by. The background music was ironic, sophisticated, subtly jazzy.
Riding down in the elevator between the two Feds, Grofield said, ‘I hope you realize what you loused up there.’ Neither of them answered him.
There was no talk at all on the fifteen-minute ride to the Federal Building in downtown Galveston. They escorted Grofield in, up an elevator, down a corridor, and into an office where a middle-aged white-haired gent who looked like Hopalong Cassidy said, ‘Sit down, Mr. Grofield.’
Grofield sat down. ‘I won’t tell who Mister Big is,’ he announced. ‘My lips are sealed.’
Hopalong Cassidy rewarded him with a thin smile. ‘We know whoMister Big is,’ he said. ‘What we want to know is wherehe is. Where’s Parker?’
Grofield did Willy Best, big eyes and sagging underlip and all. ‘Who? Who dat?’
Hopalong Cassidy shook his head, but was still smiling around the corners of his mouth. ‘Don’t play like that, Mr. Grofield,’ he said. ‘If you won’t talk sense with me, I’ll just have to have you detained for a day or two until you feel more reasonable.’
Grofield shook his head. ‘No, you won’t. You detain me and everybody else runs out and the whole deal is off. You know that as well as I do.’
‘They’d leave you?’ Hopalong acted as though he thought he could get mileage out of that idea.
Grofield nipped it in the bud. ‘They’d leave me,’ he said, ‘almost as fast as I’d leave them.’
Hopalong leaned back in his chair and tapped some fingers on his desk. ‘We want to know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘We want to know where Parker is, and we want to know when you people are going out to that island.’
‘We go out there every night.’
‘You know what I mean, Grofield.’
Grofield was suddenly bored. He shook his head. ‘Parker’s doing some of the groundwork,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where he is because it doesn’t matter where he is. When he’s got things set he’ll get in touch with me, and a few days after that we’ll do the job.’
‘Why did Parker lose our men?’
‘No, no, it’s the other way around. You want to know why your men lost Parker.’
‘Parker deliberately shook them.’
‘Maybe for fun, the same as me this afternoon. I shook two of them, and I could have got rid of the third one too.’
The third one was one of the two Feds standing over by the door. He cleared his throat and said, ‘Don’t be so sure of yourself, you.’
Grofield smiled at Hopalong Cassidy. ‘Shall we have a dry run? Use all the men you want, in one hour I’ll be clear. Little side bet to add spice?’
Hopalong shook his head. ‘I don’t understand you people,’ he said. ‘You don’t make sense. You do this, you do that, but nothing happens.’
‘We’re subjects of the red queen,’ Grofield told him, knowing he wouldn’t get it and not giving a damn.
Hopalong waved a hand as though he were tired of Grofield, disgusted with Grofield, uninterested in Grofield. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go on about your business.’
‘Bless you.’ Grofield, smiling, got to his feet. To the two at the door he said, ‘Come along, chums. We have unfinished business in a lady’s apartment.’
2
BARON Wolfgang Friedrich Kastelbern von Altstein lay on his back on a maroon carpet and raised his bare right leg perpendicular to the floor. He lowered it again and raised the left leg. Then the right leg. Then the left leg. Across the way, Steuber sat morose in a red-upholstered Victorian chair, his watch in one hand and an exercise book in the other. He counted aloud as Baron he called himself, these days, Wolfgang Baron raised each leg, and when he reached thirty Baron rolled over on his face and started doing push-ups.
Steuber looked at his watch. ‘Forty-five seconds ahead,’ he said.
Baron grunted and kept on with the push-ups.
He was fifty-seven years old now, but no one would guess he was much over forty. He kept himself in good physical and mental shape at all times. Doing push-ups now, dressed in white T-shirt and black bathing trunks, he looked the picture of health, a man with thirty or forty years of life left in him.
His life had started, in Kiel, Germany, just a few years before the First World War. His father, the fourth Baron, was at that time a major in the German army, a Prussian career officer like his own father and his father’s father. By the time the war had nearly run its course he was a general, and then just a few months later he was a civilian. By 1920, bewildered by a world that seemed to have no use for any of his barbaric arts, he was dead in his own bed and his son Wolfgang had inherited his title, his old uniforms, and his debts.
Baron grew up in a Germany of chaos. He was too young to be part of the Freikorps,battling the undeclared war on the Polish frontier in the early twenties, but he turned eighteen and graduated from the gymnasium just in time to be swept into the maw of National Socialism, the new movement that was already being called by the slang word Nazi. He was living in Danzig then, with an uncle on his mother’s side, and every Sunday he could be found in the big park wearing his brown uniform, singing the marching songs, and listening to the speeches.
The SA was a good place for a young man in the late twenties. Comradeship, good drinking parties, singing and marching, carousing, truck rides in the country, now and then a good brawl with the Poles or with some other political bunch. Baron was pleased to be in the SA, and the SA was just as pleased to have him; some day he might prove useful, what with his hereditary army connections. The army at that time had not yet been brought within the Nazi sphere.
After Hitler’s take over and the capitulation of the army, it was suggested to Baron that he leave the SA and accept an army commission, but he was still youthful at heart and preferred to stay with the crowd he knew. It was only with the murder of Roehm and the near-downfall of the SA organization completely that he decided to move on, and then it was not to the army that he went but to the SS. The army had killed his father by becoming all important to him and then deserting him. The army would have no such chance with the son.
The war, when it arrived, matured Baron and taught him things about himself he’d never guessed were there. He was already in his thirties, but still acted like a college kid on a spree, until the war came along.
The first thing he learned about himself was that he was afraid to die. Men could fight for the Fatherland anywhere in the world they wanted, but they’d fight without Baron. It wasn’t patriotism that had stirred him at the rallies all these years but merely pageantry, and it wasn’t the Fatherland that had lifted his heart but merely the Fatherland’s beer.
The second thing he learned about himself was that he was a natural opportunist, with innate skill and native balance. In a world gone mad, self-interest approaches the level of a sacrament, so it was with a will that Baron launched himself into his new-found vocation: Looking Out for Number One. (He had a little joke in those days, used only when among his closest and dearest friends. ‘I hate to be chauvinistic, but
‘ and then finish the sentence with something viciously anti-Nazi or anti-Hitler or anti-Germany or possibly just pro-Baron.)
His activities during the war were varied, lucrative, and extremely safe. He entered France well behind the combat troops three months behind and became one of the overseers in the plunder of French art treasures, most of which was shipped to Germany but some of which Baron siphoned away for his own use at another time when the world should roll over once again. Later he was an administrative part of the famous scheme to flood Great Britain with bogus pound notes, and a few cartons of the counterfeits very quietly disappeared to a cache that only Baron knew.
Although almost everything he engaged in during the Second World War was a crime, none of it he was always a careful man came under the heading of war crime, so the name Wolfgang von Altstein appeared on no one’s list of most-wanted Germans. The war’s end found him in Munich, in hastily assembled civilian clothing and armed with the false set of identity papers he’d had made up two years before for just such an emergency. On these identity papers the name Wolfgang Baron first appeared. The papers claimed Baron had been a language teacher at a school in Berlin he did speak English, French, and Spanish, all fluently and that his sole connection with the Nazi Party or any German military organization was his membership in the Volkssturm,the home guard of the old, the very young, and the lame, assembled from the remnants of German maledom towards the end of the war.
With the coming of peace, Baron traded his black uniform for the black market, exchanging watches and cameras for coffee and gasoline and cigarettes. This interim activity kept him going and earned him some pleasant profit until 1948, when it was possible for him to move abroad and begin converting various of his acquisitions to cash.
He lived in France for the next eight years, slowly selling off the art works he’d commandeered during the war, and it was his expectation to live the rest of his life in France, well off and well out of trouble.
But then the roof fell in. The biggest Nazis had long since been taken care of, and the lesser Nazis were almost all either dead or captured. Smaller and smaller fish were being added to the lists of wanted men, simply because the lists gave so many men in so many countries a source of livelihood, and in the late fifties the name of Baron Wolfgang Friedrich Kastelbern von Altstein made the grade. Charge: war crimes. Specifics: the looting of France. Some enlisted men, truckdrivers and such, had ratted on him.
He found out in time to get out from under, but not in time to liquidate all his assets. He landed in Spain still a wealthy man, but with his wealth cut just about in half and with his opportunities for accumulating more money drastically diminished. He lived for several years in Spain, living on his capital, and when he was approached by the Russians for potential espionage work he was more than willing to take their money. Unfortunately the deal fell through before he made a pfennig; the truth was, he didn’t know anything the Russians could use and he didn’t know any way to find out anything the Russians could use. Espionage had never been a part of his world.
Still, this contact with the Russians proved fruitful a couple of years later, when he decided to move on, establish himself in a country more productive of opportunities for money-making than Spain, and made the mistake of first choosing the United States.
He never did find out how they’d got onto him. He had established himself in New Orleans, being part owner of various night clubs and motels, and suddenly he was in the middle of a covey of Federal agents. He ran like a hare, and if it hadn’t been for the reserve fund he had prudently salted away in a Swiss bank he would have left the United States penniless.
As it was, he was far from rich. He took immediate refuge in Cuba, the one place in the western hemisphere he was sure American policemen could not enter in search of him, and established his identity by mentioning the names of the two Russians with whom he had had dealings in Madrid a few years before. He claimed now to have contacts within the United States, and promised to create an espionage apparatus for the Russians if he was given their co-operation. No money, he assured them, not until and unless he delivered. All he asked was their nonfinancial support in his establishing himself. If thereafter he failed to produce anything worthwhile, the Russians would not have lost a thing.
