“And now?”

  “Now Tito’s mellowed. There’s been more and more free enterprise in Yugoslavia. It works better. Increasingly Tito’s been casting a weather eye to the West. He likes the way we do things. He doesn’t like the way they do things in Moscow. Last year his Communist party announced plans to give up its commanding role in the life of Yugoslavia. That was a fancy way of saying the same thing Jovanović was pushing ten years ago. So now Jovanović is out of jail to help Yugoslavia along the road to—well, call it limited capitalism. Tito needs him, so once again they rewrite the history books. Old Man Jovanović is a hero again. Ostensibly he’s living in retirement on the Dalmatian Coast, but the firm has the word that Tito’s cabinet ministers are tripping over each other in their hurry to see what the Great Man has to say.”

  “You sound cynical.”

  “I am cynical. Jovanović and Tito are both old men. What happens after they join the great big Politburo in the sky?”

  That was the firm’s problem, not mine. I said: “Okay, we have this much. A couple of weeks after Jovanović walks out of jail a hero, Axel Spade stops sitting on his hands. It could be a coincidence, except that Jovanović’s name is in Spade’s note to me.”

  “Kind of a cryptic s.o.b., isn’t he?”

  “Spade’s a guy who never gets his picture taken and never puts anything in writing if he can help it. He’s wanted by the law in twenty countries, the U.S. one of the few major ones not included. He’s the last of the real international financial wheeler-dealers. He told me once that if he had to serve all the sentences he’d been condemned to in absentia in places like France, Spain, Italy and India, he’d spend about five hundred years in jail. He plays everything close to the vest. He has to.”

  “He left you that manuscript or whatever the hell it is.”

  “Sure. After our little junket in Spain, I knew that the Spanish gold might be up for grabs. That made two of us. So when he was ready to make his move he left me a copy.”

  “You mean in case anything happened to him?”

  “As insurance. If the Spetsburo got hold of him and the original, they’d still have to worry about me and the copy. But let’s get back to Jovanović. Could he have been involved in the gold transaction in nineteen thirty-six?”

  “That’s a long time ago,” Jerry said. “He’d have been about fifty, and while he was no Red, he was way out in left field to be one of King Michael’s advisors. He also had a reputation as an economic wizard and a man of fantastic integrity. Moscow would have trusted him, if Moscow ever trusts anybody. So would the Spanish Loyalists. If they needed a go-between, Jovanović could have been their man.”

  A half mile farther on Jerry asked: “What are you going to do with Spade’s papers?”

  “Mail them to my bank in Geneva for safe-keeping before I take off tomorrow,” I said.

  Jerry laughed. “A private eye with a Swiss bank account,” he said. “What kind of rates do you charge?”

  “It’s probably the smallest account in the history of Swiss banking,” I said. “No more than four or five million in cash and the rest in securities, such as I own the controlling interest in IBM International, Royal Dutch Shell and the Swiss Credit Bank, but don’t tell anyone.”

  “Seriously, there’s still time to stop at the Yorktown post office and get that thing in the mail if you want.”

  “No hurry,” I said. “I’ll try to get a night flight out of Kennedy tomorrow. Maybe we’ll let your linguist look at the papers before I take off.”

  I still wasn’t sure if I wanted the firm to look at the papers. I figured I could decide overnight.

  That was a mistake.

  Jerry Halpern’s place in the country was a restored eighteenth-century farmhouse that George Washington could have slept in. It had a few rolling acres, a good-sized pond for swimming and enough second-growth timber to insure absolute privacy. Jerry and his wife Christy loved the house. I couldn’t blame them. It and their warm and easy relationship almost made me wish I had married Marianne somewhere along the line and gone into some saner line of work, such as hanging my hat in the office next to Jerry’s and tangling with the Spetsburo under the auspices of the firm instead of single-handed.

  I borrowed a pair of Jerry’s swim trunks and the three of us had cocktails at the pond. I did enough swimming to realize I was pretty beat. My still-bloodshot eyes ogled Christy, who was a tanned and sexy brunette from Kentucky and looked great in a white bikini. She enjoyed the ogling in a low-key way, and so did Jerry. It made him strut.

  “Not only that,” he said once when we both had a good rear view of Christy approaching the water with considerable but unaffected pelvic sway, “but she can cook.”

  She could indeed cook. We changed and ate dinner on the screened porch at twilight, watching swallows hunt the insect population of northern Westchester. Christy had whipped up some beef Stroganoff in between plunges into the pond and tending to the unpredictable needs of Jerry Jr., who was six months old. It was delicious. On the way out Jerry and I had stopped in Yorktown for a couple of bottles of Fleurie ’61, so nobody had to go thirsty. The wine, on top of the cocktails we’d had in town and at the pond, left Jerry and me feeling no pain.

  I waxed sentimental about Marianne. “Not that I don’t like brunettes,” I said, after describing Marianne’s blonde attractions in considerable detail.

  “Why don’t you marry the girl?” Christy asked in her soft Southern voice. There was enough magnolia in her accent to make the word “you” come out like an evergreen hedge.

  “It’s a long story,” I said, feeling maudlin.

  “We have lots of time,” Christy said, “unless Junior starts in caterwauling again.”

  “I love everything about this wife of mine,” Jerry said, “except how she insists on trying to marry off all my bachelor friends. After a while they stop coming back here.”

  “I like marriage,” Christy said.

  Jerry kissed her, only a little drunkenly.

  “Hey, cut that out,” I protested. “The food and booze are great, but nobody thought of providing a dame for me.”

  Christy, in an exaggerated Southern accent, said: “Let’s get back to this here Marianne. Why don’t we call her?”

  I looked at her. My head was spinning. I said: “She’s on her way to Yugoslavia.”

  “Yugoslavia?” Christy said.

  “Kidnapped.”

  Christy thought I was kidding. “Don’t you mean shanghaied?” She waited for somebody to laugh. Nobody laughed. “God, I’m sorry. Are you serious?”

  “Cut it,” Jerry said. “No business discussions out here on the farm. Now if you two lushes will excuse me, I’m going to make a long-distance phone call.”

  He went inside. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Christy said. “We discuss business all the time. Why, all our neighbors know Jerry’s a traveling salesman who sells merry-go-round horses to amusement parks.”

  “No, what do they think?”

  “That Jerry’s a lawyer, which he once was, and that his firm specializes in international patents, which explains how come he’s out of the country so much. Who kidnapped your girl?”

  “The firm’s biggest business competitor,” I said.

  “You mean that, don’t you?”

  I said I meant it.

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “They want something they think I can get for them.”

  “Can you?”

  “I can try.”

  “And that’s what Jerry’s on the phone about?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “I just love the way you hand out information.”

  “Christy,” I said gently, “let’s let Jerry decide how much he wants to tell you. Okay?”

  She was peeved for a couple of minutes, but a game of Trivia mollified her. I asked her who wrote the lyrics to “Come On-a My House.” She asked me the derivation of Samuel Clemens’s pen name. I asked her how many games Denton T. (Cy) Young won in his major league career. She asked me the name of the Last of the Mohicans. She couldn’t answer my questions and I couldn’t answer hers, which is the way Trivia usually goes. It made each of us feel a little smug by the time Jerry came out on the porch.

  “The firm says it’s interested,” he announced. “That doesn’t come as any big surprise.”

  “Who or what is Van Lingo Mungo?” I said.

  “Van what?” Christy said.

  “Pitcher,” Jerry said. “For the Cincinnati Reds in the late thirties. I’m the Trivia champion of northern Westchester.”

  “That’s not fair,” Christy said. “Where’d he ever get a name like that?”

  “You can’t trust the Reds,” I said.

  “But can you trust the firm?” Jerry asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “We can’t force you, but we sure as hell would like your cooperation.”

  “Let me sleep on it,” I said. “And meanwhile use the phone?”

  “If you call Hong Kong,” Jerry told me, “please ask for time and charges.”

  I went inside and called an old girl friend who worked for Pan-Am. She was home. It was almost dark by then and I switched a lamp on. The living room was snug and comfortable in an antique colonial way. I batted the breeze for a while with my Pan-Am friend and heard a car stopping outside. Footsteps crunched on the gravel walk.

  “Can you get me a flight to Yugoslavia tomorrow night?” I asked.

  “It’s the height of the tourist season,” my friend said. “Throngs of gay holiday-bound types are leaving these shores like lemmings.”

  “Can you?”

  “Why, sure. There’s nothing direct though.” I heard voices on the porch. “Pan-Am to Geneva, Swissair to Zurich and then JAT to Belgrade. Will that be all right, Chet?”

  I said it would be fine.

  “So what are you doing in the meanwhile? It’s been ages.”

  “When do I take off?”

  “Six thirty out of JFK.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “I’m still the hostess in Pan-Am’s VIP lounge.”

  “Could you sneak out for a drink?”

  “That’s all you do is come and go across the Atlantic,” my friend complained. “You’re like a Ping-Pong ball. But the answer is yes.”

  We chatted another minute or two. Feeling a little high and a little loved, I wandered back to the screened porch.

  Where Julius and a tall burly type and Colonel Katukov were waiting.

  NINE

  JULIUS HAD ALREADY received his one-track instructions. His long blond-streaked hair was neatly combed and his sallow face set expressionlessly as he pointed a Luger at about the level of Christy’s navel. She was seated in a wicker armchair and trying hard not to look scared. Jerry stood next to her with his hand on her shoulder, as though posing for one of those old tintype portraits.

  The burly type was lounging against the jamb just inside the screen door. His Beretta revolver was pointed nowhere in particular. Julius managed to make it look superfluous. Almost, but not quite. A Beretta never does.

  Colonel Katukov, looking like an ageing commuter who had taken the 6:05 to Croton-on-Hudson, nodded pleasantly at me. The day’s heat hadn’t ruffled him. His white shirt looked like it had been changed five minutes ago in an air-conditioned dressing room. His tie was a conservative number in black silk with a single silver fleur-de-lis on it. Every strand of his graying wavy hair was in place.

  “We have wasted two days,” he said in his no-accent voice. “That was a foolish mistake on my part.”

  “It didn’t bother you as much as it bothered Dr. Sain,” I said.

  “What we should have done, of course, was turn you loose at once. When you move, Mr. Drum, you display considerable momentum. Julius and his friend here had a hard time keeping up with you.”

  “Julius is a crook, Colonel,” I said, to let Jerry know, in case he had any doubts, who he had to contend with. “He stole a hundred bucks and some change off me.”

  Julius snickered. Colonel Katukov said: “You visited Spade’s lawyer, then the office of the late Dr. Sain, then the mortuary of James Stewart & Son, then the apartment of Mrs. Baker. Finally you met this gentleman at the Café of the Hotel Regency. You established a pattern, and he violates it. Who is he?”

  “I’m Mr. Drum’s lawyer,” Jerry said. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  If the answer didn’t satisfy Katukov, he let it pass. “At some point during the day you received a key to a locker at Grand Central Station. You emptied the locker and drove out here. I want what you found.”

  Upstairs the baby began to cry. Christy’s head jerked up, a strand of dark hair falling over her eye.

  “A child?” Colonel Katukov said. “Children have a way of getting to the root of things, don’t they Julius? You will accompany the young lady upstairs while she brings the child down.”

  Christy looked at her husband. Jerry looked at me. I thought of Dr. Sain, his body mutilated over his last long weekend. I saw his thumbnail, ripped out at the roots. I saw the burns on thighs and scrotum. Maybe they had been the work of the burly type lounging at the door. I thought of Marianne, two days at sea by now.

  I said: “The kid can stay upstairs, Colonel. I’ll give you what you’re after. If the Nawojowa calls at a port this side of Yugoslavia.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gibraltar or Algeciras. Someplace on the Riviera or Naples. You name the place. I’ll be there to collect Mrs. Baker.”

  Katukov smiled his brief reluctant smile. “Why on earth should I agree to that?”

  “You asked me to get something for you. I’ve got it. I’m ready to hand it over.”

  “I asked you to find Spade for me.” Katukov laughed very briefly, like the smile, a busy professional man making his little joke. “Are you trying to tell me he was in the locker?”

  “He left something there for me.”

  “Of course. And I want it. Now. Mrs. Baker will be released in Rijeka, when I have Axel Spade.” Katukov looked at Christy. “We are wasting time. The child, please.”

  My attempt at not-very-fancy bargaining had failed. Colonel Katukov was calling the shots. “Does your talkative friend at the door understand English?” I asked.

  “No,” Katukov said.

  “Tell him I’m going to reach into my pocket. I have some papers there. I’m going to give them to you.”

  Colonel Katukov said a few fast words in Russian. I got Axel Spade’s papers out of my pocket, minus the cryptic six-word note. It probably didn’t matter, because Katukov could have chosen anywhere in the world but had sent Marianne to Yugoslavia.

  Katukov riffled through the papers. His eyes behind the bifocals caught on a word here and there. Five minutes passed. We weren’t there anymore. The baby stopped crying. Finally Katukov pocketed the papers.

  “May I have the key to the garage?” he said.

  Jerry glanced at me. “Maybe,” I suggested, “Julius wants to steal a tire.”

  “You gentlemen will go out to the garage,” Katukov said. “The lady will go upstairs to her child. We will lock the garage and leave the key in the mailbox. By the time the lady retrieves it, we will be gone.”

  “It’s our getaway,” Julius said brightly.

  We were heading across the gravel driveway toward the garage, the burly type behind me and Julius behind Jerry, with Colonel Katukov bringing up the rear. At first Jerry was walking dejectedly in a slouch, and then, in the moonlight, I could sense the change. He straightened. He went up on the balls of his feet. I could tell what was going through his mind. His wife was upstairs, with the baby, both of them out of harm’s way. His call to Langley, Virginia, had been received with interest. He was a karate expert and karate, unlike its distant cousin judo, is no gentlemanly little game of self-defense. With karate you can render a man helpless in a split second. If rendering him helpless wasn’t enough and if you had a slightly longer split second, you could kill him.

  It was all there in the way Jerry’s posture and walk had changed by the time we had covered half the distance to the garage. I remembered Jerry’s reputation as a hothead from our old days together in the FBI, and I didn’t like it. Karate is quick, but a Luger and a Beretta are very much quicker.

  “Let it go,” I muttered under my breath.

  Jerry’s way of letting it go was to shout, “Now!” and in one fluid motion pivot and find the leverage he needed and throw Julius at the burly type.

  They fell heavily, in different directions, the burly type losing his gun but Julius holding onto his. That committed me. I went for the gun on the driveway. Jerry was closer to Julius and went for him. It ended in a hurry. “Don’t kill,” Katukov said quickly, and Julius fired the Luger just once, the muzzle spurting orange as Jerry jerked back and went down. I was on my knees, my hand a few inches from the Beretta. “You?” Julius said, and I froze there and told him no. The burly type got up slowly. He walked over to Jerry, who was crouching on the gravel, and kicked him in the head. “Stop that,” Katukov said, not very angry. The burly type obediently stopped it. “The garage,” Katukov said.

  Christy came running out of the house, the screen door banging shut behind her. She reached Jerry just after I did. He was conscious.

  “Where are you hit?” I asked.

  “Leg. Above the knee. I don’t think it got bone.”

  “Jerry,” his wife said. “Jerry, Jerry.”

  Katukov told her to go back to the house. She shook her head.

  “Get going,” I said harshly. “We’ll have a doctor here that much sooner.”

  She went. Between us the burly type and I got Jerry into the garage. The burly type dropped his end of the package to tackle the garage door. His end of the package was Jerry’s legs. Jerry yelled. The big overhead door came swinging down. A few seconds later I heard the sound of their car fading into the night silence and then Christy’s footsteps running across the gravel.

 

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