Katukov nodded. “Wise of you,” he said. “Julius, Mr. Drum is permitted to remove his jacket and roll up his sleeve.”

  “Okay by me,” said Julius in a bored voice.

  I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my cuff and rolled up the sleeve. Katukov stood at the bar with his back to me. I didn’t think he was making anyone a drink.

  He turned around holding a hypodermic syringe and releasing the plunger to clear the air bubbles from the colorless liquid.

  “You won’t feel a thing,” he promised. He came toward me. “Now you will repeat the schedule once more, please.”

  I repeated it: UN and Bazarov, Bern and Sitnikov, Vienna and Abel, Rijeka, which was once called Fiume when it belonged to Italy and now is Yugoslavia’s chief seaport, and Dobuchin. Katukov was hovering over me. I felt the sting of the needle when I said Rijeka. I was just able to say Dobuchin. It took all of a second for everything to go black.

  FOUR

  A WINDOW, AND TORN chintz curtains blowing in the summer breeze. A sun-filled view down a slope of land to a broad blue river with cliffs on the far bank and, at the water’s edge below the cliffs, small silver coins that might have been gasoline storage tanks.

  It wasn’t the Nile, I thought, not seeing signs of the Sahara Desert anywhere. It wasn’t the Mississippi, four i’s but no cliffs. It wasn’t the Ganges. It just didn’t feel like the Ganges.

  I was sprawled across a bare mattress. I tried to get up. I couldn’t get up, though with considerable effort I could move my head about half an inch to make the view of the river and the cliffs go away and see, instead, four scabbily papered walls and a doorway. A water tap was dripping somewhere. I felt as weak as a starving leech clinging hopefully to the belly of an anemic field mouse, but after a while I sat up. Julius appeared in the doorway.

  “A little bit tired, honey?” he said. He stuck a needle in my arm and it took the same second or one just like it for everything to go black again.

  It happened twice more, the same waking that wasn’t quite waking, the same visit from Julius, once at night with a flashlight, and once more of a balmy summer day, and both times the needle and the quick hurtling plunge into unconsciousness.

  The fourth time I awoke, no Julius. I propped myself up against the brass bars of the headboard. It was day again, early morning, with birds outside the window singing like mad to prove it. The river was flat and calm and the color of lead. I waited. Julius didn’t appear. I explored my face with a palsied hand. It made a rasping sound. Two days of beard, I figured. That would make this Monday morning, and I had an appointment Monday morning. Clarence Darrow in a Brooks Brothers suit, alias Axel Spade’s lawyer Scribner Kellogg.

  After a while I more or less got up. I did what nurses in a hospital call dangling after the patient is sufficiently post-operative to sit on the edge of the bed and let his feet hang in the general direction of the floor. The effort made me pant as if I had just carried a sack of coal or a dead man up the Washington Monument. I hung my head between my knees. That helped a little. “Hey,” I croaked. “Julius?”

  Still no Julius. My lips and throat were parched enough for me to start thinking it might have been the Nile out there after all, surrounded by a lot of Sahara Desert.

  I took a mighty leap and vaulted off the bed. I kept saying yes but my knees said no. They buckled under me and there I was on the floor in a heap, panting and making snuffling noises against a dirty hooked rug. I dragged myself toward the doorway and got up a tenth of an inch at a time and held on. The water tap was still dripping. I homed in on the sound, lurching down the dim hallway with first my left shoulder and then my right shoulder banging the wall to keep me upright. Found the bathroom, turned the dripping tap all the way on, held the grimy edges of the sink, ducked my head, took a long drink, ducked my head further and let the cold water run over it. I came up gasping and made the mistake of looking in the mirror. Whoever he was, he had seen better days. Had he seen any worse, they would have killed him. He was wearing a slept-in suit and no tie. He had a two-day growth of beard, hollow cheeks, red-rimmed eyes with dilated pupils like a junkie and a nervous tremor all over. He made a ghastly face at me. One of us was trying to smile.

  I heard a sound: thunk. And then another sound: thunk.

  A boy’s voice shouted: “A fly, lemme have a high fly.”

  There was another long pause and then something, such as a baseball, rustling through leafy branches, and then the thunk again.

  “Gimme a grounder.”

  Running footsteps, a less decisive thunk and then a very decisive one right after that and a small argument.

  “Out at first.”

  “He woulda beat the peg.”

  “I said out at first.”

  A stairway at the end of the hall. I went down one slow step at a time, gathering my strength at the landing. I felt a little better, but not enough to go out and celebrate. Downstairs I looked into a kitchen at a pile of chicken bones and four or five empty cans of something called Complete Spaghetti Dinner All You Do Is Heat and Serve, the detritus of Julius’s stay on the Nile or the Monongahela or wherever the hell we were. An old refrigerator with its door gaping and the rusty shelves staring at me stood next to the table. I didn’t see a bottle of booze anywhere. I wished Julius had been a drinking man.

  I made it to the front door and opened it on creaky haunted-house hinges. Two kids were in the driveway throwing a baseball back and forth.

  “Hello out there,” I said brightly.

  They looked at me. A fly ball came down and disappeared in the weeds.

  “Let’s get out of here,” one of them shouted, and they started running.

  Alone again, and sufficiently invigorated by the fresh air to try some walking. A big sign, hanging askew on a tree trunk, told me that the house was for sale. It had probably been for sale ever since President Hoover had failed to put a chicken in every pot. I went along the driveway to the two-lane blacktop road. It curved and dropped down toward the river on the left. It rose over a gentle rise to the right. A garbage truck came by from the direction of the river. On its side were the words: Rockland County Sanitation. I cleverly deduced that I had been held by Julius in Rockland County, which is one of New York’s bedrooms north of the city on the western bank of the Hudson River. I looked at my watch, which said four thirty, some day or night or other. It wasn’t ticking. I turned right on the blacktop road and kept on walking, not at all fast and weaving like a drunk. The road was called Railroad Avenue. There was a small country store and then a housing development of shoebox-sized houses, neatly planted in rows each with its own fifth of an acre so that the developer could call the whole thing something-or-other estates. A woman in a halter and white shorts that displayed a pleasant rear end was walking a rotary mower back and forth on her estate with a preschool kid trotting along at her heels.

  “Excuse me,” I called. “Do you have the time?”

  She looked at me and stopped the mower and said: “Come on inside, Jimmy, I’ll give you some chocolate milk.” I felt unloved and rejected.

  I crossed a double set of railroad tracks and saw a main highway ahead, with trucks and cars whizzing by. There was a gas station on the corner. The pump attendant was a fresh-faced kid in a neat white uniform with the name Arty stitched over the left breast in blue thread. I asked him what time it was.

  “A quarter to ten,” he said.

  “Where’s the railroad station?”

  “We got no railroad station, bud.”

  “How do people get to New York, fly?”

  “There’s the bus. Trailways. Depot’s a couple a hundred yards up the road.”

  I walked a couple of hundred yards up the road to the big cinderblock bus station. My heart was pounding too hard and too fast, like a coked-up drummer trying to beat his way out of the cage of my ribs. I went inside to the ticket window, deciding I’d call Scribner Kellogg after I knew what time I’d hit New York.

  “When’s the next bus to New York?”

  “Ten-ought-seven.”

  The ticket-seller was an old man wearing a green eyeshade. He hadn’t looked up at me.

  “One way, please.”

  Then he looked up. “Be a dollar fifteen cents,” he said.

  I got my wallet out. Whatever Katukov had paid Julius, it hadn’t been enough. Julius had made up the difference with the contents of my wallet. It was empty.

  “Go on, ya bum, get moving,” the old man said.

  The bum got moving, with less spring to his step than that with which he had entered the bus terminal.

  And found a taxi parked outside a luncheonette in a big shopping center across the highway.

  I waited. Whatever Julius had shot into my veins made me feel a sense of urgency, like too many cups of black coffee to cure a hangover. I leaned into the cab and pushed the horn ring. A fat man still chewing his late breakfast came waddling out of the luncheonette.

  “Okay, okay already,” he said, and then he took a look at me. “What the hell do you want?”

  “There’s a hundred bucks in it for you if you drive me into New York.”

  “Yeah, sure, and you write me a check drawn on a bank in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when we get there.”

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t got a nickel on me.”

  “That comes as a big fat surprise, it does,” said the fat man.

  “You get paid at the other end. A hundred bucks.”

  “Flake off, mister, so I can finish my breakfast.”

  “Come on inside and we’ll make a phone call,” I said. “One call, your dough, to New York. What have you got to lose?”

  “Two bits,” the fat man said, but he said it stoically.

  “Against a hundred bucks,” I said. “Unless you don’t need the money. Maybe you drive a hack for a hobby.”

  We looked at each other. He had a moon face and about a hundred strands of blond hair combed neatly over his scalp. He smiled suddenly. “It’s just crazy enough,” he said. “Come on.”

  I found Scribner Kellogg’s number in the Manhattan book. The hackie jammed his bulk into the booth and dialed.

  “Chester Drum,” I said. “An appointment at ten o’clock. Tell him I’ll be late.”

  He nodded and started talking. My name got him through to Kellogg, and he said what I had told him to say.

  “Now tell him I’ll need a hundred bucks on arrival.”

  “In cash,” the fat man said, cupping the mouth-piece.

  “In cash,” I said, and he said all of that into the phone.

  “He wants to speak to you.” The hackie squeezed out of the phone booth. I slipped in.

  “I had a little trouble, Mr. Kellogg,” I said. “Having to do with your client. Can you send someone over to the Dorset Hotel? I’ll need a change of clothes and my razor. Just have him see the bell captain. They know me there. Everything from underwear and socks on up. Unless you want me to stop at the hotel on my way over.”

  Kellogg asked where I was calling from, and I told him. “I have a busy schedule this morning,” he said. “You’d better get right over here. I’ll take care of everything. What the devil happened?”

  “That,” I said, “is a long story.”

  I went outside with the fat hackie. He was shaking his head and smiling. “Let me take a guess,” he said as we got into the cab. “You brought one of them call girls out into the country for the weekend and got yourself rolled.”

  “Brother,” I said, “you must be psychic.”

  He started driving.

  FIVE

  THE SIGN ON THE door said Kellogg, Witte, Williams, and Bakewell. Beyond it, the waiting room looked like an upstairs room at the University Club, where the president of Old Siwash takes the rich alumnus to milk him of a few hundred thousand bucks. It had indirect lighting, paneled walls, worn but well-cared-for leather furniture arranged in discreet conversational groups and a handful of well-heeled types with their heads together deciding what they ought to do before Scribner Kellogg and his associates took their dough for telling them what they were going to do.

  The fat hackie moved into this atmosphere a little uncertainly, hand-combing his hundred strands of pale blond hair and walking ahead of me as if he was reluctant to admit we knew each other. I followed him to the receptionist’s desk, the well-heeled types doing subdued double-takes when they saw me. My appearance didn’t faze the receptionist, though. Pretty in a slightly horsy British mode that is the style these days in any office in New York selling anything more exotic than tennis sneakers, she gave the fat man a small smile and me a dazzling one.

  “You’d have to be Mr. Drum,” she said.

  “Good guess,” I told her dryly, and that got another dazzling smile.

  “I want my hunnerd bucks,” the fat man said.

  She looked at him and through him. “Will cash do?” she asked sweetly.

  “And a buck seventy-five for the parking lot. You can’t park nowhere on the street in New York no more.”

  The receptionist produced a single crisp hundred-dollar bill that looked as if it had been in circulation about twenty minutes.

  “What about my buck seventy-five?”

  “I had no instructions about that.”

  “Give it to him,” I said.

  “And charge your account, Mr. Drum?”

  “I didn’t know I had one.”

  “You do now.”

  The fat man got his money. “You got to watch them call girls,” he said. “It happens all the time.” He went out past the well-heeled types, not looking back.

  “Your—ah, material arrived from the hotel a few minutes ago,” the receptionist told me. “You go through that door and then the first on the left. Twenty minutes, Mr. Drum, and then Mr. Kellogg will expect you.”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  The British accent went away. “Funny guy,” she growled an octave lower. “Mr. Kellogg has a busy day. Get a move on.”

  I saluted and got a move on.

  Scribner Kellogg’s desk was Danish teakwood and glass, not quite big enough for a state dinner. You could buy one just like it for the price of a modest family sedan or a couple of weeks for two in Acapulco. I approached it exactly twenty minutes after I had received my orders, having used the executive suite bathroom in the interim for a shave, shower and change of clothes. Kellogg sat in a black leather swivel chair, the expensive Park Avenue sunlight shining in through the window on his mane of white hair.

  “You look a little peaked,” he said.

  “I’ve been on drugs for two days.”

  “Are you serious? What kind of drugs?”

  “They didn’t bother to tell me.”

  A white eyebrow climbed toward the white hair.

  “I could use a drink,’ I said, “and then something to eat.”

  He picked up the phone, said, “Lunch for two and no calls,” and hung up. Scribner Kellogg was not the sort of guy who would take a client’s eating preferences into account. You ate what he ate or you went hungry. He swung a teakwood door back to reveal a small but well-stocked bar that even contained a two-cubic-foot refrigerator. After some clinking noises he gave me a Bloody Mary.

  “Double,” he said. “I’ll sit this round out.”

  I drank it down and returned the glass for a refill. I began to feel a little better, but not well enough to take on the Spetsburo single-handed. I sipped the second drink and told my long story. Scribner Kellogg was a good listener. He didn’t interrupt once. He didn’t even clear his throat or say yes or ahem or go ahead. A Scotch and water appeared in his hand and he drank it, his steady gaze never leaving my bloodshot eyes. The air conditioner hummed. Our empty glasses hit the desktop simultaneously and a doll in an aluminum cloth blouse and a black skirt came in without knocking, deposited a tray on the table, said “Bon appétit, messieurs” in a perfect French accent and went away.

  We ate paté sandwiches on French bread and shared a bottle of Nuits St. Georges ’57. “A bistro on Third Avenue,” Kellogg told me. “The bread is flown in from France twice a day.”

  I mumbled my appreciation of the jet age and kept on chewing. Kellogg, recognizing dedication when he saw it, said nothing else until I had finished two big sandwiches and most of the wine. Then he said, as though I had just finished talking:

  “Interesting but erroneous. Axel Spade is dead.”

  “Tell it to the Spetsburo.”

  An expressive shrug and no answer.

  “Who found the body?”

  “His doctor. Who called this office immediately, of course.”

  “Did you see Spade dead? Did you actually see the body?”

  Kellogg shook his head. “It was a closed casket funeral, as specified in Axel Spade’s instructions. But you know that.”

  “No, I don’t. By the time I got to Freeport, there was just an urn full of ashes. When were the instructions made?”

  “Standing instructions, Mr. Drum. Axel Spade always thought putting a corpse on display was a barbaric custom. I share the sentiment.”

  “But you didn’t see the body before the funeral.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means you didn’t see the body. Did anyone else?”

  “Spade’s doctor. He is Martin Sain. Park and I think Seventy-ninth. And of course the undertaker people. What are you going to do?”

  “Find Spade, find out what the Spetsburo wants from him and hand it over in exchange for Mrs. Baker’s freedom.”

  A chuckle, very expressive. “I know your reputation, Mr. Drum. I believe you could actually do all that, except for one detail. Axel Spade is dead. Dr. Sain is a reputable physician.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “If Martin Sain signed the death certificate, and he did, Axel Spade is dead. Sain couldn’t afford to jeopardize his position.”

  “Were they friends?”

  “I imagine Sain was as close to Spade as anyone. As I was, or as you were.’”

  “Close enough to phony up a death certificate because Spade’s life was in danger?”

  “Come now, Mr. Drum. What would they have done for a body to take Axel Spade’s place?”

 

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