On Monday, Carmine was allowed to see Philip Smith, who occupied a private room high in the Chubb-Holloman Hospital. At Carmine’s request it was the last room down a long corridor, and as far from the fire stairs as any room could be. The room opposite had been requisitioned by the County and served as a recreation area of sorts, enabling Smith’s round-the-clock guards to use its bathroom, have a coffee carafe on permanent tap, and sit in comfortable chairs on their breaks. How the Commissioner had wangled it Carmine didn’t want to know: the FBI was picking up the tab.
Smith’s room was filled with flowers. That, together with the soft lilac of its walls and padded vinyl furniture, gave it an un-hospital look at first glance. Then, past such things, the eyes noticed the sterility of the bed, the ropes and pulleys, the incredible way any occupant of such an infernal rack was automatically shrunken in size, stripped of authority and power.
This Philip Smith looked older than his sixty years, his handsome face collapsed in on itself a little, his blue-grey eyes unutterably weary.
When Carmine entered, only those eyes moved. Smith probably had to be turned and adjusted by a nurse, given his arm and shoulder. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a nurse in attendance.
“I’ve been expecting you for several days,” Smith said.
“Where’s your private nurse?”
“Fool of a woman! I told her to wait at the station until I buzzed. I’m grateful for the attention when I need it, but I loathe gratuitous solicitude. Can I do this for you, can I do that for you? Pah! When I want something, I’m capable of asking.”
Carmine sat in a padded lilac vinyl chair. “For what they charge, these should be covered in Italian kid,” he said.
“So a visitor’s toddler can wee on them? Have a heart!”
“True. Save Italian kid for boardrooms and executive offices. Where you’re going, Mr. Smith, there won’t even be vinyl. Just hard plastic, steel, mattress ticking and concrete.”
“Rubbish! They’ll never convict me.”
“Holloman will. Have you been interviewed by the FBI?”
“Interminably. That’s why I’ve hungered to see your face, Captain. It has a certain Romanesque nobility the FBI faces have lacked. I think the only person who hasn’t made the journey from Washington to see me is J. Edgar Hoover himself, but I hear that he’s a disappointment in the flesh—soft and rather chubby.”
“Appearances can be deceiving. Have you been charged?”
“With espionage? Yes, but they won’t follow through.” Smith’s lips drew back to reveal teeth yellowed by his hospital stay. “I lost my luck,” he said simply. “It ran foul of yours.”
“Men your age shouldn’t drive twelve-cylinder sports cars, more like. It was wet, the road was a mess, you were going way too fast, and you weren’t concentrating,” Carmine said.
“Don’t rub it in. I must have driven that road a hundred times to board a hired plane. I guess it was the thought that this time I’d be boarding my own plane.”
“I’m charging you with the murder of Dee-Dee Hall, Mr. Smith. We found your coveralls and the razor.”
The hatred blazed; his body stiffened, battling to shed its restraints until the pain struck. He groaned. “That unprintable, unmentionable whore! She deserved to die as all whores should—cut from ear to ear! The scarlet yawn for a scarlet woman!”
“I’m more interested in why Dee-Dee didn’t flee or fight.”
“I need the nurse,” he said, groaning again.
“Now look at what you’ve done!” the woman chided, slotting a syringe into an outlet on his IV drip.
“Speak not in ignorance, you moron!” Smith whispered.
Bridling indignantly, she left.
“I’d like to know the why of Dee-Dee,” Carmine said.
“Would you indeed? The thing is, do I feel like telling you?” Smith asked, settling into his pillows gratefully as the pain ebbed. “Are we alone? Are you recording what I say?”
“We are alone, and I am not recording us. A tape would not be valid evidence in a court of law without witnesses present and your consent. When I charge you formally, I’ll have witnesses, and remind you of your rights under the Constitution.”
“So much solicitude, and all for me!” Smith mocked. His eyes clouded a little. “Yes, why not? You’re a cross between a mastiff and a bulldog, but there’s cat in there too. Curiosity is your besetting sin, Erica said to me, very frightened.”
His lids fell, he dozed. Carmine waited patiently.
“Dee-Dee—!” he said suddenly, eyes open. “I suppose you searched for my Peace Corps daughter?” he asked.
“Yes, but I couldn’t find one.”
“Anna wasn’t interested in good works,” Philip Smith said. “Her bent was purely destructive, and America suited her because here there are so few social brakes one can apply to headstrong children. She was the wrong age to make the move from West Germany to Boston and then Holloman—the bleakness of her old life was blown away on the gale of indulgence, promiscuity, infantile aspirations, undisciplined passions. The wrong age, the wrong place, the wrong child…” Smith stopped.
Carmine said nothing, did not move. It would come out at Smith’s pace, and in chunks.
“School? What was school, except a place to avoid? Anna played hookey so much that Natalie and I were obliged to give it out that we were teaching her at home. We were utterly impotent, we couldn’t control her. She laughed at us, she mocked us, she couldn’t be trusted with socialist enlightenment. From her fourteenth year onward, it was like having an enemy in the house—she knew we were hiding something. So Natalie and I agreed that she should have whatever money she wanted, and do whatever she wanted.” Came a sinister chuckle. “Since she hardly lived at home or acknowledged us, few people knew of her, isn’t that odd? We were able to continue our socialist duties by giving up Anna as a lost cause.”
Another pause. Smith dozed, Carmine watched.
“She acquired a boyfriend when she was fourteen. A twenty-year-old petty criminal named Ron David—a black man!” Smith shouted it; Carmine jumped. “Sex enthralled her, she couldn’t get enough of it or him, would rut with him anywhere, anytime, anyhow. He had an apartment on the edge of the Argyle Avenue ghetto— disease-ridden, rat-infested. Full of whores, including Dee-Dee Hall, who was a good friend of his. Ron introduced Anna to Dee-Dee, and Dee-Dee introduced Anna to heroin. Does that appall you, Captain Delmonico? Don’t let it! Save your horror for my next item of news: Anna and Dee-Dee became lovers. They were inseparable. Inseparable…”
Dear God, thought Carmine, I don’t want to hear this. Take a break, Mr. Smith, sleep a while. Did you love your wayward daughter, or was she an embarrassing nuisance? I can’t tell.
Smith continued. “There was no difference between Dee-Dee and the heroin. Both were vital necessities to Anna, who moved out of Ron’s apartment and into Dee-Dee’s.” Another sinister chuckle. “But Ron refused to take his marching orders. The money Anna had lavished on him was now being lavished on Dee-Dee. You would think, Captain, wouldn’t you, that my daughter would have accepted my offer to house her and Dee-Dee in the lap of luxury on the West Coast? No, that would have been too convenient for her parents! She and Dee-Dee liked living in squalor! The heroin was easy to obtain, and what else mattered?”
“How long were Anna and Dee-Dee together?” Carmine asked.
“And this was back in the very early 1950s?”
“Yes.”
“Then Dee-Dee wasn’t much older than Anna. Two kids.”
“Don’t you dare pity them! Or me!” Smith cried.
“I do pity them, but I don’t pity you. What happened?”
“Ron invaded Dee-Dee’s apartment with a cutthroat razor, intending to teach them a lesson. I am not conversant with the cant, but I gather that he was ‘off his face’ with drugs. So it was Anna used the razor. She cut his throat very efficiently. Dee-Dee called me at home and told me. I was obliged to deal with that nightmare just as my—my patriotic socialist duties at Cornucopia were commencing. Ron vanished—and don’t hope to find his body, Captain! It lies very far from Connecticut.”
“Where is Anna now?” Carmine asked.
“In a camp in Siberia where she has no access to heroin or sex or whores,” her father said. “She’s thirty-one years old.”
“And all these years later you took out your spleen on a poor, defenseless whore?” Carmine asked incredulously. “Christ, has it never occurred to you that you yourself might be to blame for some of it?”
Smith chose not to hear the second part. “Defenseless, nothing! Poor, nothing!” he shouted. “Dee-Dee Hall is a symptom of the disease rotting America’s stinking carcass! Women like her should be shot or put to hard labor! Whores—drugs—Jews—homosexuals—blacks—adolescent promiscuity!”
“You make me sick, Mr. Smith,” Carmine said evenly. “I don’t think you’re a patriotic socialist, I think you’re a Nazi. Marx and Engels were both Jews, and they’d spit on you! How long is it since you slid inside the original Philip Smith’s shell? He was a full bird colonel in the U.S. Army, but a shadow. He answered to no one, he did what he pleased, he went where he pleased, and everybody on his West German base assumed he was someone big with one of the secret services. How do I know this when the FBI thought you were CIA and dropped their enquiries? Easy, Mr. Smith! I spent the war in the military police—there’s nothing and no one I can’t learn about. In 1946, when he went on a secret mission, one Philip Smith was kidnapped and shot, and another Philip Smith took his place. That Philip Smith—you—returned from Germany to Boston early in 1947, complete with foreign wife, like so many of those Occupation guys. The hardest thing to conceal was the age of your marriage and your kids. But you did it the best way—you just appeared, a discharged colonel and his family, in Boston.”
Smith was listening impassively, his mouth shaped into a sneer. But the eyes, windows on a morphine-dulled brain, were confused and astounded.
“The aristocratic Boston millionaire adopted an aloof pose that enabled him to fill the shoes of someone never seen since 1940, when the original Smith, having no close relatives, joined the army way ahead of Pearl Harbor. You manufactured a blood kinship to the Skepses in the shrewdest way—simply say it to all and sundry, and sooner or later all and sundry will believe it. Including the Skepses. You joined the Board of Cornucopia in 1951, four years after your reappearance in Boston society. Having built that beautiful house, you moved to Holloman and became who you really are—a rude, arrogant, ruthless shit. People at Cornucopia, including the very young Desmond Skeps, accepted the fact that you adorned the Board but did no work. After all, what’s unique about that? Most members of boards do nothing except take fat fees.”
“Envious, Captain?” Smith asked with a purr in his voice.
“Of you? No way, Mr. Smith. I am consumed with admiration of the dedicated socialist agent doing his patriotic duty as he lives high off the hog among his ideological enemies. You’ve never lived in a cold-water walk-up flat on the sixth floor where the pipes freeze, and you never will. You, Mr. Smith, are far above ordinary people, and that won’t change, whichever country you live in, will it, huh? The USSR or the USA, you’ll still be in a limousine, still have servants to treat like dirt, still have all the perks of a rich and powerful party man. Here, it’s a capitalist party. There, it’s the Communist Party. Makes no difference to you! Well, you’ve failed both masters. You’re of no further use.”
“What a romantic you are, Delmonico,” Smith said, lips distorted in an anger he couldn’t quite suppress.
“I’ve been accused of that before, but I don’t find it an insult.” Carmine leaned forward in his chair until his face loomed close to Smith’s. “You know what’s most romantic of all? That you were exposed for what you are by a capitalist toy like a sex-symbol sports car. You so nearly got away with it! That you didn’t is entirely your own fault. Think about that when you sit on your stinking toilet in your prison cell, staring at the stains on your hand-me-down mattress! They’ll have to isolate you because the most degenerate killer or child molester will deem you the pits—a traitor to your country. Oh, but you figure you’ll be imprisoned for murder, not treason, right? Rich guy, bribing the warden for special privileges? It won’t happen, Mr. Smith. Whichever prison is honored by your presence is going to know all about your treason. Your books will arrive covered in shit, your magazines will be torn to ribbons, your pens won’t work—”
“Shut up! Shut up!” Smith screamed, his face the color of his bedsheet. “You wouldn’t dare! The FBI and CIA won’t let it happen! They need names, they think I can give them names! I will be very comfortably housed, wait and see!”
“Who’s the romantic here?” Carmine asked with a grin. “They’ll leave you to Connecticut’s mercy until one of your names bears fruit, and none will. The only names you know belong to your own cell, all implicated in murder.”
“You’re wrong!”
“I’m right. You’ll never come to trial for treason, it’s too sensitive. Prison for murder suits everyone, Mr. Smith, and there won’t be any comfort.”
Smith’s free left hand flailed. “All this for a whore?”
“You bet your life it is,” Carmine said grimly. “Desmond Skeps found out about Dee-Dee and Anna, and brought Dee-Dee to the Maxwell banquet to flaunt her in your face. I’m guessing that he blamed you for the breakup of his marriage and then his affair with Erica—why, I suspect you don’t know any more than I do. He was a paranoid kind of guy, and you represented a bunch of things he envied. You wore your clothes as easily as you did your persona, while he was behind the door when God handed out the gifts. Among his other deficiencies, he lacked courage, so he fortified himself with booze that night. What he didn’t know was that you were Ulysses—but Erica did. She told him. Your good luck that he was too drunk to take it in. Yet that banquet was the start of your downfall.”
“Nonsense, all nonsense,” Smith said wearily.
“Not nonsense. Good sense. How you must have sweated! Though it looked as if you’d gotten away with it, you still made your plans in case you hadn’t. Four months went by. Four whole months! Then Evan Pugh fronted up to your office, bold as brass, and handed you a letter. By the time you’d read it, he was gone. But you’d set eyes on him, and you knew what he was. It takes one to know one. The plan swung into action.” Carmine stopped.
“I’m tired, and in pain,” Smith said. “Go away.”
“A bear trap!” Carmine said. “What was its significance?”
“It had none because I have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s because of people like him that you’re persecuting me. Not because of a whore. Dee-Dee Hall doesn’t matter.”
“She does to me,” Carmine said, and walked out.
“It was unreal, John,” he said to the Commissioner later. “At first I thought Smith adored his daughter, but he couldn’t have. No one who loves would incarcerate the object of his love in a Siberian concentration camp. He could so easily have shut her away in some plush asylum—places like L.A. and New York must abound in them! No, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.”
“I do.” Silvestri chewed on his cigar and grimaced, then threw it in his wastebasket. “Where did you find the time to do all the research?”
Carmine smiled. “A bit here, a bit there. It seemed so far out that I couldn’t share it until I’d gotten it all straight. I think maybe Smith’s people in Russia were czarist aristocrats who switched camps in time to ride the Communist parade. Lenin was short of educated helpers in 1917 and probably willing to overlook the antecedents of some eager volunteers. Smith himself would have grown up under the system from his tenth birthday. We tend to forget that it’s only fifty years since the Red Revolution.”
“A mere mote in history’s eye,” Silvestri said. “It runs so counter to human nature that I’m picking it only has another three or four decades to go before the greedies pull it down.”
Carmine’s eyes danced. “I love it when you philosophize,” he said, grinning.
“Any more remarks like that, and you’ll feel the toe of my regulation boot up your ass.” He changed the subject. “I’d feel happier if I thought we were any closer to catching Smith’s assistant, Carmine.”
“Not a sign of the bastard,” Carmine said. “He’s lying low and waiting for orders. What I don’t know is if his orders will come from Smith or Moscow.”
“I’m fed up with wars, especially cold ones.”
“Insane, isn’t it? Smith’s not in a position to issue any orders at the moment. The FBI or CIA or whoever are tapping his phone.” Suddenly Carmine bounced in his chair. “Want to hear something weird, John?”
“Weird away.”
“Smith can’t bring himself to use the word ‘spy.’ When he came to a spot in his narrative where he had to say it, he went all melodramatic on me and called it his ‘patriotic socialist duty.’ I’ve never heard anything weirder than that, spoken by a sophisticated smoothie like him. For a minute I really felt as if I were in the pages of a Black Hawk comic book.”
“In denial, I suppose,” Silvestri said.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“When are you going back to Smith’s property to play with your garage controls? It might pay off.”
“I agree, but give me a day or two, sir! The Judge can be very exasperating,” Carmine wheedled.
It got him nowhere. “Tomorrow, Captain, tomorrow.” Then Silvestri relented. “I’ll call the persnickety old terror and beg him to be nice. Once he hears the story, he’ll play ball.”
Abe and Corey were in their office, sufficiently bored to follow Carmine to his room with alacrity.
“We have two controls,” Carmine said, “and five acres of landscaped gardens as well as a three-storey mansion to search.”
“No, sir, three controls,” Abe said. “The one that opened the column might open another door out of signal range.”
“I don’t know about that,” Corey said dubiously. “I heard that a garage door control on Long Island was opening the missile silo doors on a base in Colorado.”
“Yeah, and we can all get Kansas City on our television sets if the weather’s right,” Carmine said. “Well, on this exercise we’re not going to worry about missile silo doors or Kansas City, okay? You’re right, Abe, we should use all three controls. What I want to do today is work out a plan.”
“Delia!” said Abe and Corey in chorus.
“Delia?” Carmine called.
She came in quickly, the only one of his little task force disappointed at the solution of the importance of Dee-Dee Hall; her mission of exploration had fizzled as soon as Smith explained about his daughter.
“Isn’t it lucky,” she said gleefully, “that I have aerial survey maps of Mr. Smith’s property? I got maps of all four suspects’ properties and had Patsy blow them up to poster size.”
“One step ahead as always,” said Carmine.
Though the picture was black-and-white, it displayed most features clearly, provided they were not under the canopies of trees. A border of tall conifers surrounded Smith’s five acres. The house showed all its exterior features, from cornices to the radio shack, and the artificial lake proved to have a tiny isle in its middle joined to land by a Chinese bridge. The picture had been taken with the sun directly overhead—a necessity for a useful survey from the air.
“The white or grey dots must be statues, and the fountains are self-explanatory,” Delia said. “The jumble behind the house must be garages, garden or equipment sheds, the usual appurtenances of a mansion on a fair-sized piece of land. See there? That’s a patch of dead or dying grass, so you should check it for a slab of concrete underneath. My papa insisted on building an atomic bomb shelter in our back lawn, and the grass was never the same over it. He still keeps it stocked with food.”
“Well, I don’t think we should deal with the outside first,” Corey said firmly. “If I were Smith, I wouldn’t have my secret compartments anywhere I’d get wet. And what about a hard winter? Feet of snow!”
“You’re right, Corey,” said Carmine. “We do the house first. Also the outbuildings and the immediate vicinity of the house. He has an army of Puerto Rican servants to clear snow away.”
“There’s one more thing,” Abe said.
“What’s that?” Carmine asked, enjoying listening.
“The controls might trigger more than one door each.”
“Depending on missile silo doors and Kansas City. What a bummer! Who can give us advice?” Carmine asked.
“The new guy working with Patrick,” Corey said. “I had lunch with him the other day. He was the one told me about the missile silo doors—he used to be a master sergeant in the air force. This guy—his name is Ben Tucker—is a utility player. Photography, electronics, mechanics. I can ask him for tips.”
“Do that, Corey.”
“What about warrants?” Delia asked.
“The Commissioner assures me that Doubting Doug will play ball,” Carmine said.
“Huh! I’ll believe that when I see it,” Abe muttered.
* * *
Whatever Silvestri had told Judge Thwaites worked. When Carmine appeared in chambers the next morning, his warrant was already waiting for him.
“Commie spies!” His Honor exclaimed, wearing the same face that saw him hand down a maximum prison term. “You nail this bastard to the wall, Carmine!”
Their plan had been worked out: they would start as far from each other as possible, Carmine upstairs on the roof working down, Abe on the bottom floor working up, and Corey in the outbuildings. Each had a control, understanding that, having done it all, they would have to exchange controls and do it again, and yet a third time. For that reason, a system was mandatory, and each man was doomed to the same territory three times over.
It took less time than they had originally envisioned. If the batteries powering the controls were kept fresh, one press on a button could last as long as the thumb or fingertip doing the pressing. They became expert at standing in the center of a space and pressing, rotating slowly as they did so. Provided the signal beamed out above occluding furniture or objects, it was powerful enough to work in situations where a garage control would not have. Carmine began to understand the Long Island garage and the missile silo doors. Wow! That must have sent people back to the drawing boards! But what genius to trace the offending control! Kansas City was more captious by far.
They discovered a total of seven concealed compartments, only one of which was triggered by the folly control. That one yielded a metal box similar to three others found elsewhere, all fitted with padlocks. Each compartment was photographed, contents in situ, then contents removed, and contents themselves.
“When are you going to tell the FBI?” Abe asked, back at Cedar Street.
“Only after I’ve filtered out evidence of eleven murders,” Carmine said. “Once that’s done, they can have the espionage data and the controls. Knowing Special Agent Kelly, they’ll be there for months, and end in tearing the place apart stone by stone. Pity, but I can’t think anyone would ever want to live there again.”
Carmine kept Delia but liberated Abe and Corey to take new cases and go back over Smith’s murders.
His trove consisted of four locked metal boxes the size of a shoe box, a stack of ten thin children’s exercise books, five fatter leather-bound books, and a series of Holloman County property plans, including the Cornucopia Building, the County Services building, the Nutmeg Insurance building, and Carmine’s house and grounds on East Circle.
“These, we keep,” he said to Delia, putting the plans to one side. “None relates to his spying activities.”
The leather-bound books were all to do with his spying: codes, ciphers, a journal written in Russian Cyrillic script.
“We hand these over to the FBI,” he said. “If they need additional proof of espionage, here it is.”
“The microdots were proof enough!” Delia snapped.
“Ah, but he’s an embarrassment, you see. In the social pages of papers and magazines, object of articles in the Wall Street Journal and News—how terrible! What do we inspect next? The exercise books or the tin boxes?”
“The boxes,” Delia said eagerly.
“Pandora at heart.” Carmine picked up the one taken from the compartment triggered by the folly control. “If there’s tangible evidence of murder, this is the one.” He picked up a pair of double-action snips and broke the padlock’s U.
“Ohhh!” sighed Delia.
The box held an ampoule and a vial of two curares, six 10cc glass Luer-Lok syringes, a hypodermic needle, steel wire, a tiny soldering iron, an ordinary safety razor, and two small bottles fitted with thick rubber caps.
“Bingo!” cried Carmine. “We’ve got him for the murder of Desmond Skeps.”
“Why on earth did he keep all this?” Delia asked.
“Because it amused him. Or fascinated him. Or he couldn’t bear to part with it,” Carmine said. “Mr. Smith is a mixture.”
Two of the three remaining boxes contained money, each to the sum of $100,000 in mixed denominations.
“But Carmine, he doesn’t need money!”
“His cache for a fast getaway,” Carmine explained. “Once he got to Canada, it’s enough to hire a private jet to anywhere.”
The last metal box contained a 9mm Luger automatic with spare clips and assorted travel documents; among the passports was a Canadian one for a Philippe d’Antry.
“There are none here for his wife,” Delia said sorrowfully.
“Rats and sinking ships, I’m afraid. Just as I’ll bet he’s left her to fend for herself in this crisis. If she has any sense, she’ll have a cache of her own, and disappear.”
“Remain only the exercise books,” Delia said, handing them to Carmine.
“Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian,” he said as he tossed each of the top five onto the FBI pile. “Ah! We have English!” He read for a moment, then looked at Delia, his face puzzled. “It’s as if he has two personae. The spy thought, wrote and worked in Russian. The killer thought, wrote and worked in English. His entire life is compartmentalized! If ever a man was made to be two different men, it’s Mr. Philip Smith a.k.a. whatever his Russian name is.” He reached for the phone. “I’d better tell Desdemona I won’t be home early. With any luck, I’ll find out who his assistant is, maybe even his hirelings.” He held up five of the exercise books. “Straight down the middle. Five in Russian, five in English. And I can’t leave until I’ve read my five and digested their contents.”
He leaned over, took Delia’s hand and lightly kissed it. “I can’t thank you enough, Miss Carstairs, but your part in this is done. Go home and relax.”
“It was my pleasure,” Delia said gruffly, “but I’m not going home. First, I’m off to Malvolio’s to get you a snack and one of Luigi’s thermoses of decent coffee. A burger, a bacon roll or a roast beef sandwich?”
“A burger,” he said, crumbling. Two dinners wouldn’t hurt for one night, would they?
“Then,” she continued, “I’m going around to see Desdemona and Julian. I’ve been so busy since they got back from England that I haven’t had a chance to find out how my potty papa is.”
“From what I’ve been told, potty,” Carmine said.
The first exercise book contained the sketchy details of Smith’s occasional forays into crime during the first fifteen years of his tenure on the Cornucopia Board. The first entry of all, however, predated his appointment.
“The first Skeps has to go,” it said in part. “My orders are explicit, as the son will be much easier to fool. It will be perfect KGB—as much powder as will fit on the head of a thumbtack, made from the same plant my mother used as an aperient when I was a child. A smaller dose would do it, but the swifter the better. In the first teaspoonful of the caviar I buy him, old miser. He wonders at its quality.”
And then, some entries later: “The old man died, and the clock stopped, never to go again. A good song, I like it. The second Desmond Skeps has inherited, and Phil is there. Phil is always there. But I have refused to sit on the Board.”
Two more entries saw Smith on the Board, though the book made no mention of Dee-Dee and his daughter.
It was kept, Carmine was interested to see, as a kind of diary; each entry was dated as day, month, year, which was not the American way of month, day, year. Each entry spoke about the murder of someone who had gotten in Smith’s way, always dispatched by a dose of the magic powder developed by the KGB—a vegetable alkaloid of some kind, probably, unbelievably potent. Which plant? And why did none of his eleven victims of April third, 1967, die of it? Apparently it caused a total breakdown of the body’s systems akin to the death mushroom, and produced a diagnosis of nonspecific septicemia, etiology unknown.
There were no references to what secrets he stole, or when he stole them; these must be in the Russian diaries. What a feast the FBI was in for!
The second-to-last book contained the Maxwell Foundation banquet, but it also contained many ravings about the perfidies of Dr. Erica Davenport, whom Smith loathed.
“I curse the day Moscow foisted this idiot woman on me!” Smith said, his anger—rarely expressed until now—let loose. “A fool, a beautiful fool who has left a trail a kilometer wide for the Americans to trace. When she appeared ten years ago I inundated KGB with protests, only to be told that she had powerful Party friends out to bring KGB down. Said friends have put her here to report on my loyalty. She transmits my every move to Moscow! Ah, but she’s afraid of me! It didn’t take me long to establish ascendancy over her, to intimidate her, to make her cower and cringe. But fear of me does not prevent her reporting back to her Party friends in Moscow, I am perpetually aware of that. Of course I report on her to KGB: I complain of her, I criticize her stupidity. Her friends in the Party may defend her, but I have the ear of KGB, I hold high KGB rank, my power in Moscow is greater than hers.”
Carmine leaned back in his chair, metaphorically winded. So that’s it! Stupid of me, to assume they were a team working together to steal our secrets. They turn out to be opponents in a game of surveillance, constantly watching each other for evidence of ideological disloyalty. Her Party bosses were appalled at Smith’s lifestyle, whereas his KGB bosses, pragmatists to the core, understood that his lifestyle was imperative for success. So Smith deemed Erica the spy, and Erica deemed Smith the spy. The mere smuggling of secrets was incidental to their political tussle. Only one of them could win in Moscow, and Erica knew she was losing. KGB rules, not the Communist Party.
He read on. The date was the fourth of December. “The crazy bitch! I abominate obscenities, but she is a bitch—a stringy, fawning female dog. Six days ago she came to me in hysterical tears to tell me that Desmond had finished with her services as a fellatrix—he’s going back to Philomena. Oh, the tears! The grief! ‘But I love him, Phil, I love him!’ So what? was my answer. You continue to do your patriotic duty! You will be nice to him, you will feed him business inspirations that I have fed you, and he will be grateful, he will be impressed, he will advance you even higher. All that and more I told her while she shivered and howled, the stupid bitch.
“Now she was here again with a new confession, hard on the heels of my witnessing last night with my own eyes Desmond Skeps arm in arm with Dee-Dee Hall! He brought that whore to the banquet! No wonder he chose to sit far from me and the other executives! ‘I know your secret, Phil,’ he said to me as he passed by. ‘I know what happened to your daughter. What would the world make of the pristine Phil Smith and a junkie girl?’ I pondered the answer to that question as I watched him at the fat banker’s table, Dee-Dee preening in skin-tight puce satin and white mink. It was she got him drunk, of course. Desmond can’t take a second drink. If he does, he keeps on drinking.
“I saw Erica, drunk, weave her way to his table and sit there for a few minutes. Why can’t people govern their passions? Desmond was drunk because he’s missing Erica’s fellatio and unsure of Philomena, Erica was drunk because she’s in love with Desmond. Round and round they go, where they stop, only I will know…
“Today I learned what transpired when Erica sat down with Desmond. She has confessed to me that, in the throes of her drunken state, she told Desmond that I am Ulysses. Confessed to me in floods of terrified tears! It is the weapon I’ve needed to fire at her Party friends in Moscow for ten years, so I made her write it out in Russian, and had Stravinsky witness it. ‘However,’ I said to the stupid bitch, ‘if you do as I order you, I won’t send it to Moscow.’
“I am released from her! I have my lever! Desmond was too drunk to hear what she said. She swore it, and I believe her, having seen him with my own eyes. Now I have my lever, and I wait. I wait to see what will ensue. If the Ulysses story comes out, Erica has to deny it—convincingly. I have my lever!”
What a world you live in, Mr. Smith, Carmine thought, the book dropped as he poured himself another mug of coffee. What a world you live in! Dog-eat-dog is too kind. Snake-eat-snake, more like. It’s Smith who is the financial genius, not Desmond Skeps, not Erica Davenport. They were his pawns, he used them to build that company ever upward. More and more secrets. And that’s how come he could finally dispense with Erica—a written confession for Moscow, himself the head honcho of Cornucopia. He didn’t fear her Moscow bosses anymore.
His plans were made with KGB thoroughness.
An entry on the tenth of December read: “Not a peep about Ulysses the master spy as yet, but I have been thinking, and thinking hard. If there is a peep, I must be ready to move as quickly as a bolt of lightning, and with the same devastation. It won’t be Desmond who makes the accusation—I’ve spoken to him many times since the banquet, and he suspects nothing. All he feels for me is gratitude that I gave him my special hangover cure. He doesn’t even seem to remember that he brought Dee-Dee Hall, and when I asked him why he had, he looked utterly blank. In the end he said it must have been a combination of booze and her ability to perform fellatio—he was missing Erica’s attentions in that department, but Philomena had insisted that Erica must go, and he was desperate to get Philomena back. I believe him on that point; he showed me a suite of pink diamonds he had bought her—a million dollars! Coming from Desmond, that’s desperation. He’s an inveterate miser. It must have been Dee-Dee who told him about Anna, and asked him to take her to the banquet just to torment me, the whore gone sanctimonious.
“Erica won’t say anything, that is a given. Therefore the accusation, if it comes, will be from someone else at the table—someone not too drunk to remember. I do not believe Erica’s protestations that her voice was too low for anyone save Desmond to hear. However, were it to be made in a spirit of patriotic zeal, I think it would already have been made, and loudly. That it has not predisposes me to think it will come as blackmail, either to Erica or directly to me. I have alerted her, which terrified her anew, the silly bitch. All I do is clean up the messes she makes.
“Naturally I have observed all the people attached to the table, so I have a fairly good idea whence the blackmail will come, if come it does. Blackmail is a two-edged sword, and Stravinsky agrees with me there. We have concluded that, if a blackmail threat does arise, all eleven people will have to die.
“If I commenced now, I could kill them one by one over time. The local police are surprisingly good, but not of KGB excellence. On the other hand, I confess that I am intrigued at the prospect of killing all eleven en masse. Such a coup! It would do more than merely confuse the local police—it would bamboozle them. And the exercise in sheer logistics is very appealing. Stravinsky demurs, but Stravinsky will obey orders. All good tools do, and Stravinsky is a good tool. A dream project! I am so bored! I need the stimulus of a completely new and novel project to lift me out of my doldrums, and this particular project is feasible. Stravinsky is forced to concur. Who would ever suspect one hand at the back of eleven deaths, if the way each person dies is utterly different? Oh, what a challenge! I am wide awake at last!”
And there you have it, Carmine thought. Ulysses had his espionage work down to such a fine art that he was bored, needed a fresh stimulus. A nice backhanded compliment for the Holloman Police— we’re surprisingly good, though not the KGB. I thank whatever gods there are for that!
“I’ve discovered that two of the men at the table have wives who can be tricked,” wrote Smith on the nineteenth of December. “Mrs. Barbara Norton is quite insane, but hides it well. Disguised as a bowler named Reuben, Stravinsky struck up a conversation with her. An empty gourd where her brain should be. Norton the fat banker terrorizes her, and she’s ripe for murder.
“The same can be said of Dr. Pauline Denbigh, though I will appeal to her personally, as one snob to another. Her husband beats her sadistically—what scum! She showed me those of her wounds that can decently be exposed. A mind of her quality, scorned for adolescent sluts! I’ll leave her a jar of cyanide. She’ll do the rest without prompting, except that I’ll force her to act on the date of my choice. She’d resist all bribes except a Rilke original. I’ll let her see it, and arrange that she’ll have it after she’s acquitted. I’ll pay Bera a fortune—anonymously—on condition that he gets her off. He will!”
That would do it, Carmine thought. I doubt anything Smith has said in here would alter the jury’s verdict, either. It’s the mention of her wounds that will matter, not the date. A Rilke original! Man, the guy must have some contacts! Not that the jury would ever see this diary. Bera would find some way to have it struck from evidence.
And the feminism aspect fizzled out with Pauline Denbigh. Carmine abandoned it without much regret. All his enquiries had produced nothing that helped the case against Dean Denbigh’s wife, nor had it unearthed a lover. Perhaps she truly was a sexually frigid person. Perhaps all her energies were channeled into women’s causes and her love of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Bianca Tolano tore at the heartstrings. “I noted her at the table next to Dee-Dee the whore, and couldn’t tell the difference between them,” Smith said on the twenty-second of December. “A pair of whores! One the brassy finished product, the other the demure, sweet whore-in-the-making. The one in the making reminds me of Erica, so I’ll visit the death on her that I long to give Erica. I’ve seen my tool. A sycophantic crawler named Lancelot Sterling drew my attention to him when I paid a visit to the twentieth floor of Accounting. A crippled runt named Joshua Butler. I admit I went there thinking Sterling might be my tool, but he’s a deviate, not a cripple. Scum! When Joshua Butler left work I loitered in my Maserati and offered him a ride home. He was enthralled! I ended by taking him out to my house—no one was home—and giving him dinner. Stravinsky waited on table and agreed he was perfect for our purposes. By the end of the evening he was so enchanted he would have done anything for me. Not that I mentioned what I wanted! I simply started peering into his more disgusting fantasies. He’ll do beautifully, though Stravinsky, stronger-stomached, will have to do most of the psychic exploration.”
Intermixed with Smith’s cold-blooded planning were touches of—mercy? Carmine wasn’t sure that was the right word. But he did seem to have compassion for two of the victims, Beatrice Egmont and Cathy Cartwright. Eventually Carmine concluded that Smith esteemed them as worthy matrons who did not deserve to die, so should die quickly, painlessly.
Evan Pugh, he was interested to see, was intended to get a dose of KGB powder and die of nonspecific septicemia. Not a pleasant death by any means, but not as payback as the death he did get. Nor as terrifying while the agony lasted. He would have been in the hospital, drugged to the limit and not really suffering the way the bear trap made him suffer.
The three black victims had their entry.
“The waiters will have to die too. Interesting, that for all their prating, white Americans still use black ones as their servants. And their whores, witness Dee-Dee. Stravinsky will procure out-of-state assassins—three, one for each. I like the idea of three different guns, all American-made. With silencers, as in the movies. Stravinsky thinks I go too far, but the decisions are not Stravinsky’s. I—am—so—bored!!! These American fools can’t catch me, so what does it matter?”
Jesus, you supercilious bastard! You’re bored! Isn’t that a shame?
The entry for the twenty-ninth of March was fascinating.
“And to think I was convinced the threat was over! Now I find it isn’t. How stimulating! I am wide awake, alert and intelligent, as their advertisement says. Well, Mr. Evan Pugh, Motor Mouth is going to kill you differently than originally planned. The bear trap will be used, with Stravinsky doing an impersonation of Joshua Butler. The preparatory work has already been done, just in case. I have suspected for a long time that the blackmailer would be Mr. Evan Pugh, so the beam has been located and the bolt holes reamed out one size too small, no threads. Stravinsky has the proper tools, a strong right arm and sufficient height. You shall have your wad of money—a drop in the ocean to me! And you shall have a most painful death. Motor Mouth. So American. The bear trap is made in America too.”
The entry on the fourth of April concerned Desmond Skeps.
“Dead at last, Desmond Skeps, with your perpetual whinging about Philomena, your denial of your own guilt in driving her away. A very good woman, for an American.
“I did enjoy watching him die! I despise those men who obtain sexual pleasure from the suffering of others, but I confess that I was moved to an erection at the sight of Desmond Skeps trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey, eyes and brain alive, the rest of him as dead as a dodo. I played with him, I and my tiny soldering iron. How he tried to scream! But his vocal cords weren’t up to it. Just hoarse yowls. The ammonia in his veins really hurt, but the Drano at the end was inspired. What a way to go! I loved every minute of it. From the moment he told me that he’d appointed Erica as young Desmond’s guardian, he had no further use. He was so enamored of her business acumen, never knowing that the acumen was mine. Bye-bye, Desmond!”
Of Erica’s murder he had nothing much to say; clearly it wasn’t necessary for him to dwell on her agony.
“Stravinsky broke the bitch’s arms and legs one bone at a time, but she gave nothing away except the names of her Party friends in Moscow. Had she had anything more to confess, she would have. Stravinsky especially enjoyed it. We agreed that it would have to be the hired assassin Manfred Mueller—as good a name as any—who got rid of her body. I wanted it put on Delmonico’s property, Stravinsky thought that a mistake. Of course I won the argument, so Mueller took the body there. My luck that the gigantic wife appeared. Not that it made much difference. Mueller got away cleanly. So, unfortunately, did the wife. A grotesque.”
The entry on the sniper in the copper beech was extremely interesting; Smith was very rattled.
“I have lost my luck,” he wrote. “The great Julius Caesar believed implicitly in luck, and who am I to contradict him? But the trouble with luck is not that it runs out—it doesn’t. Rather, it encounters another man’s luck that is stronger, and fails. As mine has. I have encountered Delmonico’s luck. Now all I can do is send him in a thousand different directions at once. Manfred Mueller is willing to kill as many of Holloman’s illustrious citizens as he can, and lay down his own life in the process. His price? Ten million dollars in a Swiss bank account in his wife’s name. I have done it. But Stravinsky says it will not answer, and I very much fear that Stravinsky is right.”
Interesting, thought Carmine. He said something like that to my face. About losing his luck because mine is stronger.
That was the last entry in the fifth book. Tired and sick, Carmine gathered his evidence together and put it in an old box he marked ODDMENTS—1967. Then he took it to the cage and saw it put among a dozen other equally grimy boxes. Even if the faithful Stravinsky donned the uniform of a Holloman cop and came asking, he would not get it.
Stravinsky… A code name, it had to be a code name. The exercise books had given absolutely no hint as to who Stravinsky was. The music? No, surely not! Any bets Stravinsky is Stravinsky because Stravinsky picked the name? Or the KGB bosses? He’s like Smith, KGB. And here I thought Desdemona had seen him when Erica’s body was dumped. Now I learn that the sniper dumped the body. Smith always spoke of Stravinsky as an almost-equal, as someone whose opinion he respected. Stravinsky was treasured, valued too much to confide his identity to the pages of these diaries of murder.
“I always feel let down at the end of a difficult case,” Carmine said to Desdemona that evening. “As usual, the end of it depends on the courts—anticlimactic, not high drama. Smith can’t escape conviction, but I strongly suspect Pauline Denbigh will, and as for Stravinsky, he won’t even be identified.”
“You don’t think he might be Purvey or Collins?” she asked.
“No, that feels wrong. This is master and apprentice, not a hierarchy.”
“What will happen to Cornucopia?”
“There’s only one hand strong enough to take the helm, and it belongs to Wal Grierson, who won’t like it one little bit. His heart’s at Dormus with the turbines, not spread across thirty different companies.” Carmine shrugged. “Still, he’ll do his duty—pray note that I do not include the word ‘patriotic’ in that! Meaningless cant, when it’s trotted out endlessly.”
“Your mama will come out of her conniption fit the moment she hears the villains have been caught. Though what will she hear, Carmine? How much of it will make the news?”
“Precious little. Smith will be written off as a maniac found fit to stand trial. The information in the exercise books will never be used. He’ll go down on physical evidence—the razor for Dee-Dee and the killing kit for Skeps. His motive? Control of Cornucopia,” said Carmine without regret.
“How can that be stretched to encompass Dee-Dee?”
“The DA will allege that she tried to blackmail him as one of her customers.”
“He’ll hate that! He’s a shocking Puritan.”
“Then let him produce a better reason for killing her. One thing for sure, he won’t admit to treason. He’s convinced he won’t stand trial for treason.”
“Do you think he will?” Desdemona asked curiously.
“I have no idea,” Carmine said.
“He must be a very vain man.”
“Vain in every way,” Carmine said with feeling, “from his custom-made clothes to his custom-made house.”
“Not to mention his custom-made sports cars.” She unwound her legs. “Dinner.”
“What is it tonight?”
“Saltimbocca alla Romana.”
“Wow!” Carmine slipped an arm about her waist and walked with her to the kitchen.
“Myron’s bringing Sophia home,” she said, setting out the dishes and checking her ziti in tomato sauce. The frying pan was already sitting on the stove, the veal and its prosciutto waiting alongside a small bowl of minced fresh sage. “Fancy a sear of marsala liquor in the pan afterward?”
“Why not? Has Myron gotten over his depression?”
“The moment, I gather, you ripped him a new arsehole for making Sophia’s life hard.” She lit the gas under her pan, wiped it with a smear of olive oil. “Fifteen minutes and we can eat.”
“I can hardly wait.”
* * *
“Have you decided which one gets the lieutenancy?” asked the Commissioner.
“Sir!” cried Carmine, looking thunderstruck. “That’s not my decision to make!”
“If it’s not yours, whose is it, for crying out loud?”
“Yours and Danny’s!”
“Crap. It’s yours. Danny and I will go along.”
“Sir, I can’t! I honestly can’t! Just when I think one guy is it, the other one comes back stronger than ever! Look at their last two cases! Abe collars the mummy fruitcake in a brilliant piece of work. Right, he’s got Larry’s job. Then Corey collars Phil Smith’s papers in a brilliant piece of work. John, they’re both so good! It’s a crying shame that I have to lose one of them to another police department when he doesn’t get the job. Abe is intellectual, thoughtful, sensitive, calm and precise. Corey is clever, thinks on his feet, seizes the initiative, has enough logic to pass, and copes. Different qualities and different styles, but either of them would make a much better lieutenant than Larry Pisano, and you know it. So don’t go passing the buck to me, Commissioner! You’re the head of this department—you make the decision!”
Silvestri listened solemnly, temper unruffled. When Carmine ran down he smiled, nodded, and looked insufferably smug.
“Did I tell you that I had a call from J. Edgar Hoover this morning?” he asked. “He was mighty pleased at the solution to the Cornucopia mess, and very happy to have the FBI take the credit for what was Holloman Police Department work. Well, I played along all dipshit dopey local cop, then I struck a pretty neat deal with him. I wouldn’t contradict a thing, provided that he took Mickey McCosker and his team onto the FBI payroll. J. Edgar was delighted to oblige.” Silvestri huffed, immensely tickled by his own crafty thinking. “Therefore, Captain Delmonico, there are two lieutenant’s jobs going begging. One for Abe, and one for Corey. And I’ll have a proper number of detectives on my payroll at last.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“You can have the honor of telling them, John.”
“Any idea who you want for your own team?”
“One certainty. Your niece Delia, if she’s willing to go to police academy and qualify.”
Silvestri gaped. “Delia? Honest?”
“Dead earnest. That woman is a brilliant detective, she’s wasted as a secretary,” Carmine said.
“She’s too old and too fat.”
“Depends on her, doesn’t it? If she makes it through, she makes it through. I’m betting she will—she’s got all of the Silvestri guile and brains. She doesn’t need to be Hercules, just capable of giving chase and tackling. If she can’t cross a foaming torrent hanging onto a rope by her arms, tough shit. She comes from the academy straight onto my team.”
“What about Larry’s men?”
“I’ll split them up. One to Abe, one to Corey. That way, we each have one experienced detective, plus one new. We’ll choose our second-stringers from the applicant pool.”
“It might earn Delia some enemies.”
“I doubt it. The most the pool will be hoping for are two men into detectives. Instead, there’ll be three.”
“No one will ever believe she’s a cop!” Silvestri cried.
“Ain’t that the truth?”
What fantastic news! Carmine left County Services in the Fairlane, a very happy man. Summer was almost here, though it rarely became hot until after Independence Day, six weeks away.
He picked up the winding, leafy domain of Route 133 and headed for Philip Smith’s property. It bore the scars of much frantic digging, he noted after he passed through the imposing gates and followed the curves of the drive to the house.
“Though,” Special Agent Ted Kelly had told him, “no one’s found another secret compartment. You Holloman cops scooped us. Great stuff you found!”
One of the better outcomes, Carmine reflected as he pushed the bell, was the disappearance of the FBI back to their federal playground. No one would be more relieved than Wal Grierson.
Natalie Smith opened the door, then put her finger to her lips and led him back down the steps to an exposed position on the grass many yards away from the nearest FBI hole.
“They have put microphones inside,” she said.
“How did you know that what I have to say is better said without federal eavesdroppers?” he asked.
The impossibly blue eyes narrowed as the face smiled. “I know because you are the only one who really understands,” she said, her accent far less thick. “Philip found it impossible to believe that a local policeman could spoil his plans, but I knew differently.”
“The faithful Stravinsky,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Stravinsky? Who is that? The composer?”
“You, Mrs. Smith. Stravinsky can’t be anyone else.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“No. I have no proof.”
“Then why do you say I am this Stravinsky?”
“Because your husband is a very rigid, puritanical man. He has strong feelings about women, wives, whores, the whole feminine half of the human race. Yet on the surface he seems to have abandoned you, his wife. That, Mrs. Smith, he would never do. Therefore he knows that his wife is capable of looking after herself. As would Stravinsky. Who else can the faithful Stravinsky be, except you? Who else shares Philip’s days, nights, thoughts, ideas, aspirations, plans? Who else could impersonate Joshua Butler going up the sophomore stairs at Paracelsus? And why couldn’t Stravinsky get rid of Erica’s body? Because he didn’t have the strength. Mounting a bear trap took every ounce of it. He could hold a pillow over an old woman’s face, or slip a needle into a drugged woman’s vein. His appearance can be so scary that he could walk the streets of Harlem looking for professional gunmen in complete safety. You, Mrs. Smith, you! Don’t bother denying it. You’re a master of true disguise. You alter your appearance from inside your mind.”
She stared across the lawn, red lips compressed. “So what are you going to do with Stravinsky, my dear Captain?”
“Advise him to quit the country in a hurry. Not today, but certainly tomorrow. You must have your cache—money, a weapon, travel documents. Use them!”
“But if I choose to stay with Philip, what can you do?”
“Hound you, Mrs. Smith. Perpetually hound you. Do you think, because I can stand here talking to you as if you’re a human being, that I’ve forgotten you tried to murder my daughter? I haven’t. It burns my brain like a white-hot poker. I’d give a lot to kill you, but I prize my family too much.”
“You won’t stop my going?”
“I can’t.”
“I too am KGB,” she said, staring at North Rock.
“Stravinsky would have to be. I trust that fact will make you welcome in Moscow?”
“I will survive.”
“So will you go?”
Her shoulders hunched. “If I can say goodbye to Philip, I will go. He would want it.”
“I’m sure you’ll have plenty to tell them in Moscow when they debrief you.”
“You would indeed hound me,” she said slowly. “Yes, you would. I will go tomorrow.”
“Tell me how. I want to be sure you do.”
“I will send you a telegram from Montreal. It will say, ‘Stravinsky sends greetings from Montreal.’ Of course I could have someone else send it, but my patriotic duties in America are at an end. KGB will want me back.”
“Thank you, the telegram will be fine.”
* * *
A sorry conclusion, but the only one, Carmine thought as he drove away. Today Stravinsky will visit the hospital to see Smith, and say her farewells. He, good KGB agent that he is, will wish her well. Any federal tape recorders will inform those who listen that the grieving wife is simply telling her husband that her psychiatrist is putting her in a private hospital for a few days, and that it’s on the outskirts of Boston. She’ll catch the commuter plane from Holloman to Logan, but not to leave the airport. She’ll switch to the Montreal plane and be away, the faithful Stravinsky. A murdering bitch, but indeed a faithful one. That squat figure, that shapeless body, that rather terrifying face. But most of all, those spooky blue eyes. A contradiction, that’s Stravinsky.
There was still time to make his last call on this nasty case, a kind of valediction his so-called insatiable curiosity made imperative. Namely, a visit to some of the inhabitants of the Cornucopia Building.
He took an elevator to the thirty-ninth floor, and found Wallace Grierson occupying Desmond Skeps’s old office.
“Look what you’ve done!” Grierson said angrily.
“You’re in a suit and tie,” Carmine said mildly.
“And you don’t care, do you?”
“It’s not my fault. Blame Philip Smith.”
“Don’t worry, I do.” Grierson’s spurt of temper died. “I may have found a way out of my predicament, however.”
“May you? Who?”
“You’re quick, I’ll give you that. None other than Mr. Michael Sykes.”
“Ah, Michael Donald himself!” Carmine said, grinning. “He was promoted, but as Smith did the promoting, I wasn’t sure the rest of the Board would—er—come to the Party.”
“Ha ha, very funny! Actually Phil may have done us a big favor. Mickey turns out to be amazing.”
“Mickey?”
“That’s his diminutive of choice.”
“It fits.” Carmine held out his hand. “This is goodbye, sir. I won’t be haunting your corridors anymore.”
“Thank God for that!”
And why not? Carmine asked himself when the elevator came. He pressed 38, wondering which floor M. D. Sykes was occupying. Floor 38, it turned out. Richard Oakes was in the outer office and went so white when Carmine filled his gaze that he seemed likely to faint.
“Is your boss in?” Carmine asked.
“Mr. Sykes?” It came out as a squeak.
“The very one. May I see him?”
Oakes nodded, throat working. It was probably a signal to proceed, Carmine decided, and proceeded.
He found Michael Donald Sykes sitting at Erica Davenport’s lacquered desk, but it was hard to associate this person with the disgruntled denizen of a managerial limbo. Sykes actually seemed to have trimmed down in size yet grown in height, and wore a well-cut suit of Italian silk, a shirt with French cuffs and gold links, and a Chubb alumnus tie. No wonder he’d resented being passed over! He had the proper credentials. Carmine felt a rush of pleasure at the thought that Sykes had triumphed.
A cardboard box sat on the desk in front of him, spilling curly wood shavings, and about a dozen two-inch-high figures, exquisitely painted, stood freed from their packing: Napoleon Bonaparte and his marshals, all on horseback.
“Mr. Sykes, I’m very glad to see you here.”
“Why, thank you!” the not-so-little man exclaimed. “What do you think of my new acquisitions? I can afford to add Jena and Ulm to my battles! Aren’t these gorgeous? They’re made in Paris by the best militaria model maker in the world.” He picked up a splendid figure wearing a leopardskin hussar’s pelisse. “See? Murat, the great cavalry commander.”
“Wonderful,” said Carmine. He held out his hand. “This is definitely goodbye, Mr. Michael Donald Sykes.”
“Don’t tempt fate, Captain! Still, Cornucopia is safe now, and in excellent hands,” Sykes said.
He escorted Carmine to the elevators and saw him leave, then returned to his office and sat for a moment drinking in the sight of his new goodies. Inside his desk drawer was a powerful magnifying glass with a battery-operated light; Sykes switched it on and stared through it, his blue eye huge, its white shot with scarlet veins. Murat was close to hand; he lifted the figure and turned it over, looking for any impairment, any sign that Murat had been maimed. Then he sighed, smiled, and produced a dissecting needle. It went under the edge of the satchel Murat wore and pried a section of the paint away.