LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

switched off and stared down at my desk. There was some mail, an airmail letter marked personal, and I opened it to stare at a shiny photograph of a man and woman with a couple of kids. I turned it over, but it wasn’t necessary for me to read the inscription.

      Sight of the letter made me remember the past, way back to where, almost, it had all begun. Outside, the wind hammered against the windows and that reminded me too. Years ago now, way back when I rented a cheap room and lived on the thin edge of debt, which is the penalty of any man who tries to make his own way in an overcrowded racket.

      I stared at the photograph and sipped the Scotch. I felt tense, expectant, all keyed up, as if something was about to happen but I didn’t know what. I’d felt like that before, and I didn’t like it.

      I rose and stared out of the windows again: still rain, still winds, still the red light making the gutters full of blood. I shivered. Different place, different building, but the same weather.

      I crossed to the desk, and the faces of the couple smiled up at me.

      Susan and Marvin. Boy and girl. Married now and with a couple of kids. I wondered whether the Colonel was still alive.

      Thinking of him triggered something in my mind, and I crossed to a green metal filing cabinet set against one wall. It was filled with neat, bound, typed pages. Some thick, some thin, but all with one thing in common. They were cases, some clean, some dirty, some, a very few, marked as unsolved. I let my finger run over them until I found the one I wanted. It was among the first, and I took it out and carried it back to my desk.

      I was still tense, still expectant, but I just couldn’t sit there and wait. So I opened the case and began to read, and as I read I went back...back...back to another night in another office where I sat waiting—and alone.

      CHAPTER TWO

      From where I sat at the desk, I could see the black marks of my name lettered on the frosted glass panel of the door. They were peeling flaked, but even in reverse I could figure out what they said and what the smaller lettering beneath them was supposed to say. Private Investigator. Me. An agency of one man in a crummy office, ready and willing to take care of all the troubles of the world.

      Sight of the lettering reminded me of the rent I hadn’t paid and the money I hoped to earn that night.

      Midnight, the Colonel had said. Midnight to discuss a matter of the utmost privacy and desperate urgency. I discounted them both; trouble, no matter of what kind, is always desperate and urgent to the one who has it.

      I rose and looked out of the window. Through the dirt I could see the rain and through the rain the lights looked fuzzy, as if they had lost their form and shape. A gust of wind pressed against the dirty panes, cold wind, bitter, heavy, with a hint of the coming snow.

      It was a night to be indoors.

      I thought so, and the sight of a few late pedestrians hurrying along the sidewalk, their collars turned high against the rain and hats low against the wind, made me certain of it. I stood staring at the snaggle-toothed skyline of New York, and the too-bright neon of Broadway shone from the low clouds as if half the city was burning.

      An illuminated clock on a warehouse had both hands together as it pointed upwards in mechanical prayer.

      Midnight.

      The Colonel was late.

      I sighed and lit a cigarette, sucking the smoke deep into my lungs and letting it plume against the glass of the window in swirling clouds of blue and grey. The smoke clouded the pane and I rubbed it, wiping a patch clear, then paused to stare at my reflection.

      A face, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin. Just a face topped with thick, slightly curly black hair. A face that had looked at the world with grey eyes for thirty years now, not a handsome one, not an ugly one, just a face, a mask for what went on within my skull. A thin scar puckered the cheek on the left side. One ear had a slight notch, a relic of my early days when the bullets fired had been with Government licence, and my lips seemed to have thinned a little and tended towards a downward curve.

      I wondered if my mother would still have known me had she been alive.

      I knew my father wouldn’t have.

      I shrugged and dragged at the cigarette, trying to find in the smoke some anodyne for the pressure I could feel building up inside of me. I had been idle too long and, unless I got a case soon, I’d join the ranks of those who accepted discipline for a steady wage.

      So I stood and smoked and thought, and the flashing lights of the city painted the wet streets with changing tides of red and orange, green and amber, while the dim shapes beneath me hurried through the bitter wind.

      I was still standing there when the limousine drew to a halt at the kerb below.

      It was a long, smoothly-finished job, glittering with chromium and polish, looking like some huge, hard-shelled beetle as it rested on the street ten storeys below. A man slipped from the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind him as, head down, he ran towards the building. Almost at once the harsh sound of the buzzer echoed around my ears.

      I pressed the button releasing the night lock on the street door and, sitting down at my desk, waited for whoever it was to enter the office.

      He was young, neatly dressed in chauffeur’s black, his peaked cap throwing his eyes in shadow, and the close-fitting uniform didn’t hurt his chest and shoulders one little bit.

      ‘Mr. Lantry?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Mr. Mike Lantry?’ His voice was smooth and even, the schooled tones of a servant, a professional man, or a confidence trickster making his play. I nodded impatiently.

      ‘That’s right. What do you want?’

      ‘Will you come with me, please.’

      I didn’t move. I stared at him, the cigarette between my fingers sending up a thin coil of smoke. After a time he realised that I was waiting for him to speak.

      ‘My employer, the Colonel, is waiting in the car,’ he said irritably. ‘He wants to see you.’

      ‘So what?’

      ‘So you’d better do as he wants.’ The mask had slipped a little, the voice lost some of its careful schooling and, in the shadow of the visored cap, his eyes glinted with a mingling of rage and contempt. I shrugged.

      ‘He’s going to be awfully disappointed. Go back and tell him that, if he wants to see me, he knows where to find me.’

      ‘You refuse to come?’

      ‘I refuse to obey the orders of any dressed-up lackey,’ I said evenly, and something within me smiled at the expression on his face. ‘Go back to your boss and tell him that.’

      ‘You know who he is?’ He couldn’t seem to understand why I wasn’t fawning at his heels. ‘Colonel Geeson is a very rich man. Now, will you come?’

      ‘No.’ Deliberately I dropped the cigarette and crushed it beneath my heel. ‘I’m different from you, buster. I haven’t sold myself to ten million dollars, and I don’t have to jump when he gives the orders.’

      ‘Why, you stinking shamus!’ The mask had slipped all the way now and naked rage glared at me from the shadow of the visor. ‘If he wanted to he could buy a dozen just like you from any store. Who the hell do you think you are?’

      ‘A man,’ I said grimly. I got up from the desk and stepped towards him. ‘Now get out of here and tell your personal god that I’m waiting to see him as arranged.’ I stared at him. ‘Better hurry, sonny: your nice, clean boots might get all dirty.’

      He swung at me then, a wild, rage-dictated blow at my face, and I felt the wind of its passing as I swayed back. I didn’t mind the blow, I’d asked for it; what I didn’t like was the way his boot swept up towards my groin.

      That made me annoyed.

      I

Скачать книгу