He sighed mightily. Back to poverty! No more brandy and champagne; back to beer, and probably some slop brewed within the past few hours, tasting as it did just after the war! No more fine lunches; back to cucumber sandwiches with the cucumbers sliced wafer thin by sniffling girls in shops with soiled napery, watercress salads produced by herb-pinching misers; and back to the malevolent and accusatory looks from tipless waiters and waitresses! No more vacation trips — although he was forced to admit that Briggs, for one, would probably cut his legs off at the knees before he took another cruise. But that wasn’t the point. The point was — no more almost anything!
He tried to look at it philosophically. The stock certificates were certainly colorful, and there was that stain on the wall of his room he had been meaning to cover with a picture for some years now. A few of the shares, properly framed, would do the job nicely, and he would be surprised if Briggs and Simpson, using their imaginations, could not also find an equally useful outlet for their certificates. Besides, of what benefit was crying over spilt milk? After all, they were no worse off than they had been a few months back. Still, that had been no bed of roses, so there was little consolation in that thought. Possibly he should not have objected when Briggs wanted to sell that airplane insurance; it simply proved that one never knew in this world. And as for that idiot American author, what did they owe him? It might, in fact, even teach the moron to be a little more sure of his facts before he put his inanities to paper.
He sighed again moodily and tightened his seat belt as the sign went on above his head. Poor Tim and poor Cliff, he thought, and lurched forward gently as the plane touched down.
If Assistant Commissioner of Police Horace Winterblast was not particularly famous for his contribution to the law and order of the area supposedly under his jurisdiction, he was, none the less, quite well known through the British Isles. Scarcely a week went by without the florid face of A.C. Horace Winterblast being seen on one or more television programs. On news programs he was usually explaining why perpetrators had not been apprehended; on talk shows those deep, well-recognized nasal tones easily balanced any humor that might have been attempted by an invited comic. On public service programs Winterblast could be guaranteed to come up with some homily about the hard-working police — although many suspected he would need a map to find his own office, so seldom was he there — while on game shows he usually sat as one of the panel of judges, eyeing each contestant malevolently, as if he were a criminal, or — far worse — a candidate for the A.C.’s job.
So pervasively intrusive was Assistant Commissioner Winterblast in the everyday life of most Englishmen, that it never occurred to customs officer James J. Griggsby to be surprised to hear the familiar voice on the telephone, or to be curious as to why Winterblast was calling him, or even to wonder at the omniscience of the A.C.’s intelligence service.
“Winterblast here! You will act immediately!” the familiar voice was saying with its normal callous authority. “Immediately, do you hear? Most blatant case of smuggling I ever heard of! Diamonds, drugs, animal skins!”
It was with an effort that Clarence restrained himself. He had a tendency to get carried away with his impersonations. He got back on the track and carried on.
“Two scoundrels, a short miscreant named Timothy Briggs and a tall thin one called Clifford Simpson! Traveling with a man named Carruthers, but he’s quite all right, yes, quite all right. Wouldn’t touch him, you know, under any circumstances, related to Lord Hummmmohhh, I once heard. But the others, this Briggs and this Simpson, shouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t aliases. Yes. Hummmmph! Arriving on Flight 129 from Gib, that’s Gib, you hear? Should be coming in any minute now, I should imagine.” The voice suddenly paused and then came back on, highly accusative. “Are you listening to me, sir?”
“Yes, sir. Oh, yes, sir, I am!”
“I was beginning to wonder. All right, get on with it then, son. But you understand, no fuss! No fuss, you understand!” The voice became querulous. “You do understand, don’t you?”
Customs officer Griggsby did not understand.
“I beg your pardon, sir? No fuss?”
“Exactly!” The booming nasal voice sounded pleased at the other’s instant grasp of the situation. “Glad you see it my way, son. No sense inviting a lot of publicity about these things, eh? What? Give people ideas, eh? What? No, just take those two someplace, into a private office or something, and give them the business, eh? Take them apart, what? Top to bottom, turn them upside down and shake them, pockets inside out and things like that, eh? What? But it’s not for me to tell a man how to do his job. Not even my department, customs, eh? But we’re all Englishmen and loyal to the Queen, what? Just see that it’s done, eh? What?”
“Yes, sir! Right away, sir!”
“Good-o! Hummmph! By the way, what’s your name, son?”
“James... er... Griggsby, sir.”
“James R. Grizzly. I shall not forget this. Grizzly! Now, do your duty!”
“Oh yes, sir, I shall, I shall,” Griggsby began to say, but he was protesting his intended efficiency to a dial tone. He hung up and turned to the small computerized television screen on his desk; at the moment he would not have been surprised to see the familiar florid features of Assistant Commissioner Horace Winterblast glaring at him from the flickering screen for wasting time. But what he actually saw was the schedule of arriving and departing planes, and he was pleased to see that Flight 129 from Gibraltar had just landed and was even now trundling its way to the unloading area.
Plenty of time, he thought, and smiled to himself as he reached for the telephone again. All it took was one break, he thought. With luck A.C. Winterblast might even get him a spot on one of the more lucrative game shows. If he did the job right, of course, and James J. Griggsby had no intention of not doing the job to perfection.
The three elderly friends filed from the plane with the other passengers. They climbed aboard the waiting bus, each with his own thoughts, and climbed down at the Immigration building, the newspaper with the tragic news tucked under Carruthers’ arm. They formed up in the obligatory queues at the obligatory windows, had the obligatory stamps pressed onto their passports by the obligatorily sour-faced personnel after the obligatory delays, and made their way into the luggage-claim area, paying small attention to the loud-speaker that was blaring above their heads. Suddenly Simpson paused. Either because his mind was less occupied, or because his extreme height brought him closer to the noisy diaphragms suspended from the ceiling, he seemed to recognize at least a portion of the words, which was rather remarkable, considering airport acoustics.
“I say,” he said wonderingly. He had been in the process of lighting the remains of his Corona-Corona which he had obediently stubbed out at the exhortation of the sign above their seats upon landing. He shook out the match and tucked the cigar into his breast pocket. “I do believe they are referring to us—?”
“Us?” Briggs said truculently, and tilted his head back to stare distrustfully at the cloth-covered boxes spouting sounds from above. “That’s right,” he said, frowning darkly. “They’re paging you and me, Cliff. Why just the two of us? Why not Billy-Boy, too?”
“It’s probably nothing to worry about,” Carruthers said, but in a worried tone. Could it be, he wondered, that some ill-wisher — Potter, the club secretary, possibly — could not wait for the newspaper story to reach them regarding the failure of Namibian Chartered Mines, Ltd., but wished to get in first with the dire news? But that was impossible. Other than the three of them, nobody knew what they had invested in. And Potter would certainly have aimed his poisoned dart at all three of them, not just two. “It’s probably just the Journals again,” he suggested, “or the S.S. Sunderland offices wishing an endorsement. You go along.” It seemed as good a time as any to share the bad news; they could not be kept in the dark forever. “And take this along,” he said sadly, handing the newspaper to Simpson. “Page two.”