Scimitar Page 5

  The detective’s name was Al Santorini.

  He was not the same detective who’d called the Consulate on Monday to report the murder of a British subject. This one was a detective from Homicide. He explained that in this city, at this particular point in time, Thursday morning, the twenty-fifth day of June …

  “It changes practically every day,” he said, “but this is what it happens to be at this particular point in time …”

  —the precinct detective catching the original squeal, even if it was a murder, was usually the one who followed the investigation through to its conclusion.

  “If there is a conclusion,” Santorini said. “Lots of them end up in the open file.”

  But in this particular case, where the victim was someone believed to be a foreign national, and where now there seemed to be some question about whether the person really was British …

  “It’s merely that we believe the passport is a forgery, you see,” Geoffrey said.

  “Yeah, I understand that,” Santorini said.

  He was somewhat taller and broader than Geoffrey, with a shock of very black hair hanging on his forehead, and dense black hair curling over the collar of his shirt. Forty-two, forty-three years old, Geoffrey guessed. A rough-hewn streetwise look about him. Brown eyes that matched the color of his sports jacket. Rumpled brown slacks and unpolished brown loafers. Smoking a cigarette, even though one of the doctors sawing open a skull looked up every now and then and frowned at him. Detective/First Grade Allan Santorini, Homicide Division.

  “The point is, that’s why I took over the case,” he said. “Well, me and my partner. Jimmy Halloran, you ever hear of the Grey Ghost?”

  “No,” Geoffrey said.

  “He used to play ball for L.I.U.,” Santorini said. “He holds the record for most bases stolen in college baseball.”

  “I’m not too familiar with the sport,” Geoffrey said.

  “Yeah, well,” Santorini said drily. “Anyway, he’s famous. Used to be famous before he became a cop. The Department frowns on famous cops.”

  “I would imagine,” Geoffrey said. He was thinking it was rather like the foreign service. They didn’t want anyone to shine. Brilliance was a definite handicap. “But you see,” he said, “the fact that she was carrying a forged British passport doesn’t necessarily mean she was British to begin with, don’t you see?”

  “Oh, sure, but her landlady seems to think she was.”

  “Well, how would she have known?”

  “From the funny way she talked.”

  “I see,” Geoffrey said, and cleared his throat.

  “The landlady says she sounded English. Not British, she didn’t use the word British. She said English.”

  “I see.”

  “So that’s all we’re going on so far. So far, what we’re going on is an English lady with a phony British passport, or so you tell us, who gets shot four times and immediately cashes in. Also, we found two weapons in the apartment, a nine-millimeter Walther in the lady’s handbag, and a Browning automatic in the night table alongside her bed. So this doesn’t seem like your usual English lady taking a stroll in Piccadilly, does it?”

  “If she’s English at all,” Geoffrey said.

  The smell in this place, and the fact that Santorini kept insisting the dead woman was English when for all anyone knew she could be Czech or Lithuanian or Mongolian for that matter, was beginning to irritate Geoffrey. He didn’t know why he was here in the first place. On the phone, Santorini had said something about positive identification, but how was he supposed to positively identify a woman he’d never seen in his life who, into the bargain, had been carrying a forged British passport? The doctor looked up from the open skull he was examining and again frowned at Santorini, who took a last puff of his cigarette and then ground it out in a small stainless steel cup that may have contained a pint of blood not half an hour ago.

  “What I’d like you to do,” he said, “is take a look at the corpse.”

  Oh, great, Geoffrey thought.

  “You realize,” he said, “that I’ve never laid sight on this woman, don’t you? So my taking a look at her now, especially in her present unfortunate condition …”

  “Yeah, her head all blown away,” Santorini said, and shook his own head sadly.

  “Yes, exactly,” Geoffrey said, “could hardly serve any purpose, now could it?”

  “Well, looking at her head wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Santorini said.

  “You told me you wanted a positive identi …”

  “No, what I told you was I thought what we found might help you guys get a positive ID.”

  Geoffrey looked at him.

  “So come take a look at her,” Santorini said, and walked over to where a man in a white uniform was sitting behind a desk reading a magazine. “We’re here for the Jane Doe,” Santorini said, and showed the man his shield. The man stood up without saying a word, leaned over the desk while he finished the paragraph he’d been reading, closed the magazine—which Geoffrey now saw was one of the American girlie books—and then walked to a stainless steel door set in a stainless steel frame. He opened the door. A chill rushed into the room.

  It was not the chill of death—although at first Geoffrey thought it might be, given the circumstances—but was instead the chill of a refrigerated compartment. He followed the attendant and Santorini into a vast cool room, listened to them haggling over which unidentified female Santorini wanted to see—apparently there were three such stiffs, as the attendant called them, in residence at the moment—and was relieved, he guessed, when they finally settled on the woman who’d been brought in this past Monday.

  The attendant opened a small door and rolled out a tray.

  The woman on the tray was naked and blond.

  Part of her face and most of her skull were entirely gone.

  Geoffrey wanted to throw up.

  “Take a look at the left tit,” Santorini said.

  Geoffrey looked.

  Tattooed just below the nipple was what appeared to be the silhouette of a sword:

  A tiny green sword.

  He was just coming out of the shower that Thursday morning when Elita noticed the tattoo.

  At 6:25 last night they’d boarded the Lake Shore Limited in Chicago, and were already eating dinner when the train passed South Bend, Indiana. She drank a single scotch before dinner—no one asked her for identification—and two glasses of white wine during dinner, and then they went back to his bedroom again. And while the rest of Indiana, and then all of Michigan and Ohio, flashed by outside in the darkness of the night, she gave herself to him as she had the night before and the night before that, again and again and again, mindlessly and completely. By dawn, when the train entered New York State, she was utterly exhausted.

  It was now a little past nine in the morning.

  They planned to eat a late breakfast before the train pulled into the Albany-Rensselaer station. They were scheduled to arrive in Penn Station at twenty minutes to two that afternoon, and she was hoping he would take her to lunch in New York, although he’d made no mention of it thus far.

  She was lying naked on the wide lower berth where all last night they’d made love, a faint, pleased smile on her face, her long blond hair fanned out over the pillow, her head turned toward the closed bathroom door. The train was still heading eastward, it would not begin its true southern descent until they left Albany. The compartment’s picture window was facing north, it splashed a cold clear light into the room, broken occasionally by the dappling of infrequent trees along the track. The bathroom door opened.

  He came out into the sharpness of sunlight streaming through the window, materialized like some dusty pagan god wearing only a white towel around his waist, his brown hair wet and plastered to his head, his grey-green eyes reflecting the light, his face breaking into a grin when he realized she was observing him solemnly and silently and—well, reverentially, she supposed, and felt suddenly embarrassed.r />
  There was another glint of green, echoing the green of his eyes, darker in hue, curling like a misplaced eyebrow on his left pectoral, just below the nipple. She realized all at once that it was a tattoo, and further realized that it was a sword … well, some sort of sword … one of those swords you saw in the waistbands of guys wearing turbans and baggy pants … that kind of sword.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

  “Is what what you think it is?” he said, drying himself now, the towel in his hands and no longer around his waist, his cock—he had taught her to call it a cock, and not a dick or a prick—his cock faintly tumescent even in repose. Her first boyfriend … well, the first boyfriend she’d known intimately—had called it a dick. That was when she was sixteen. The other two had called it a prick. That was when she was respectively seventeen and just nineteen. Last night, when she stopped being a teenager altogether, Sonny had informed her that a prick was what you called a son of a bitch. A cock was what he was about to put in her mouth.

  “It is a tattoo, isn’t it?”

  “Oh,” he said. “This.”

  And looked down at his chest as if discovering it for the first time.

  “A samovar, right?” she said.

  He burst out laughing.

  “No,” he said. “Not a samovar.”

  “Well, what do you call that kind of sword?”

  “A scimitar,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s what I meant,” she said, and felt suddenly childish, suddenly the teenage girl again and not the woman she’d become, the woman he’d miraculously caused her to become. Still drying himself. The towel behind his back, an end in either hand, working the towel. His cock hanging there. Moving slightly with the movement of the towel. Like a pendulum. Hanging there. Moving. Waiting to be touched. By the woman, not the girl, not the child. She had a sudden desire to take him in her mouth again.

  “Where’d you get it? The tattoo, I mean.”

  Her eyes on his cock.

  “In San Francisco,” he said.

  “When?”

  “I was still very young. Just out of medical school.”

  “Why a sword? A scimitar.”

  “Why not? The other new residents were getting mermaids and hearts and such. I figured a scimitar would be more original.”

  “Why green? To match your eyes?”

  “No, it was St. Patrick’s Day. We’d gone up there for the weekend. I thought green would be appropriate.”

  “Bring it closer,” she said.

  He walked to the bed. She reached out to touch the tattoo.

  “Cute,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “This, too,” she said.

  Geoffrey placed the call to Nepal at 1:00 P.M. sharp, New York time. He had eaten a hamburger and french fries at his desk, washing his lunch down with a Diet Coke, waiting for the appropriate time to call. By his calculation, it was now 10:40 P.M. in Kathmandu. Alison should be in her apartment and in bed at this hour, with nowhere to rush off to and plenty of time to talk. The phone rang once, twice, three times …

  “Hello?”

  A man’s voice. A brusque tone even in that single word. Had they put him through to the wrong number? Halfway across the bloody world?

  “Yes, hello,” he said, “excuse me, I’m trying to reach …”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  Same brusque tone, more impatient now.

  And then, somewhere in the background, “Who is it, Spence?”

  Alison’s voice. But who …?

  “Is Miss Haywood there, please?” he said.

  “Who is this?”

  The voice thoroughly impatient now, virtually rude.

  “Geoffrey Turner. May I please speak to Miss Haywood?”

  “Moment.”

  And off the line.

  Muted voices in the background.

  Spence who?

  “Hello?”

  Alison again. On the phone this time.

  “Who was that?” he asked at once.

  “Spence,” she said.

  “Who’s Spence?”

  “You know very well who Spence is.”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. Who in bloody …?”

  “Sherwood Spencer Hughes,” she said.

  Sounding every bit as impatient as Spence himself had a moment earlier. Sherwood Spencer Hughes, Her Majesty’s Consul-General, familiarly known as Snuffy, except apparently to a certain female Grade-9 who called him Spence and in whose rooms he happened to be at—what the hell time was it?

  “What’s Snuffy …?”

  “People do call him Spence, you know.”

  “I’m sure,” Geoffrey said. “But what’s he doing at your place at this hour of the night?”

  “Late meeting,” she said.

  A shrug in her voice.

  “Alison?” he said.

  “Yes, Geoffrey?”

  Cool. Precise.

  “Alison … what’s going on, would you mind telling me?”

  “I assure you nothing’s going on.”

  “Then what … I call your place at whatever the hell time it is there, and Snuffy answers the …”

  “Geoffrey, I’m truly sorry, but this is an inconvenient time for me. As I told you …”

  “Inconvenient? I’m calling all the way from …”

  “Yes, but we’re in the midst of a meeting here.”

  “Well, I’m awfully damn sorry about your meeting, but …”

  “I’ll have to ring off now,” she said.

  “Not before we …”

  The phone went dead.

  “Hello?” he said. “Alison?”

  And looked at the receiver in his hand.

  Snuffy? he thought.

  He’s sixty-two years old!

  One moment he was there, and the next he was not. He was carrying only a single suitcase, whereas she was carrying trunks and trunks full of clothes, which she probably should have shipped by UPS as her mother had suggested. But until these past several nights of ecstatic instruction, she’d been merely a rebellious teenager who’d objected automatically to any suggestion her mother made, and so the tons of trunks—well, actually one camp trunk and two oversized suitcases.

  Plus a duffle full of dirty clothes.

  And a traveling case with her cosmetics and perfumes in it.

  And her tote, which contained—in addition to her wallet and Kleenex tissues and chewing gum and hairbrush and whatnot—a pair of jogging shoes which she would have put on if she’d been alone and not with Sonny. Sonny preferred heels. So she stood now with her luggage, wearing moderately high heels and a trim blue suit, no hose because of the suffocating heat, long blond hair pulled back in a cool, elegant and she hoped womanly bun, the tote slung over her shoulder, waiting for him to come back with a porter.

  Penn Station looked worse each time she saw it.

  When she’d been home for the spring break, she thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, there was just no way on earth it could look more like New Delhi, she had to ask Sonny if he’d ever been to New Delhi and did Penn Station look worse? Although he’d already told her he’d been born in London and had spent most of his childhood and young manhood here in the United States, which didn’t come as much of a surprise since he didn’t sound British at all, despite his mother.

  The big wall clock across the terminal read five to two.

  It would probably take him a while to find a porter. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen a porter in Penn Station. Most of the people who came through the station day and night were commuters who didn’t need porters. In any case, there seemed to be a dearth of them here on the upper level where there was not a similar scarcity of homeless people. She hoped none of them came over to beg from her; she found them frightening. Then again, there were a lot of things that frightened her; she did not think of herself as a particularly strong or self-sufficient person. The fact that she hadn’t even been able
to buy herself a drink on the train, the fact that she’d had to ask a strange man—well, he had been a stranger at the time—to intercede on her behalf …

  At two o’clock, she wondered what was keeping him.

  At two-thirty she realized he simply wasn’t coming back.

  The Hilton on Sixth Avenue was the sort of hotel in which a person could lose himself entirely. Host to conventioneers from everywhere in the United States, popular as well with tourists from all over the world, the hotel was normally booked to capacity, a condition Sonny found entirely suited to his current needs.

  He had kept a dozen credit cards active and in readiness for the past ten years, preparing for just the contingency that had brought him to New York today. The reservation here at the Hilton had been made under the name to which one of those alternate credit cards was issued. His original name, the name given to him at birth, was buried so deep in GID files he’d almost forgotten it himself. Here in America, he’d been Sonny Hemkar for what seemed forever. But his train reservations had been charged to an American Express card made out to one Albert Gomez. As he checked into the hotel now, he offered Albert Gomez’s Visa card. Gomez was leaving a clear trail that led to a post office box in Los Angeles. Dr. Krishnan Hemkar—Sonny Hemkar to his friends and associates—had disappeared from that city on the twenty-first of June. When and where he could safely surface again was anyone’s—

  “Enjoy your stay, Mr. Gomez.”

  “Thank you.”

  The desk clerk tapped a bell. A uniformed bellhop appeared at Sonny’s side, took the proffered key and registration slip, and said, “Good afternoon, sir, is there just the one bag?”

  “Just the one,” Sonny said.

  “If you’ll follow me, please, sir,” the bellhop said, and lifted the bag and began walking through the crowded lobby toward the elevators, Sonny following him like a quarterback behind a blocker. In the elevator, the bellhop said, “Will you be with us long, sir?”

  “Not very.”

  “You’ve hit some nice weather. A little hot, but much better than the rain we had last week, don’t you think?”