Gentry shook his head. Power went on, “It meant something to me, and it meant something to the agent who put it in the dossier. Actually we know quite a bit about the man, considering that we don’t know if Adam is a first or a last name. He’s English, probably not by birth. What we all agree on is the nature of his business. He finances the international movement of guns, drugs, gold, stolen paintings-you name it. He may or may not use an actual bank, nobody knows. We don’t know if he’s one man or a group. We don’t know where his headquarters is. It could even be some kind of a code name, though that I really do doubt. Well, I haven’t put away quite enough beer to give you my lecture on international underworld finance, and I don’t know such a hell of a lot about the subject anyway. But if you’re in the legitimate export-import business, shipping goods from one currency system to another, you need a legitimate banking connection. And if you’re in a crooked export-import business, you need a crooked connection.”
Shayne shrugged. “You’d do better to take this to the FBI. Everybody there has to be either a lawyer or an accountant.”
“That’s not what I need,” Power told him. “I need somebody to get this girl’s confidence. I ought to mention that when she isn’t working, she seems to prefer large, rugged men.”
“Which is why you thought of Mike,” Gentry said gravely.
“Hell, we need everything going for us we can get.”
“Christ!” Shayne said.
Power opened a folder on the bureau and handed the detective a six-by-eight glossy photograph of a girl in a two-piece bathing suit, standing in a stiff breeze on the bow of a sail boat. Shayne studied it for a moment.
“About the fee,” he said, “I’ll want that in writing.”
Power laughed. “You can have it in writing. I had a feeling you’d like her looks. Now how could a lovely girl like that get involved in something like this?” He picked up his beer again and looked into it as though if he stared hard enough a scene would take shape. “I think they were sitting around somewhere in the south of France, she and our Mr. X-Adam something or something Adam. He mentioned a proposition he’d heard about in New York. A hundred-thousand-dollar investment, a couple of million in return. And what a coup for their side! The poor underpaid cops worked and slaved for two long years, picking up a dribble of heroin here and a dribble of marijuana there, and then they lose it all in one afternoon. He’s toying with the idea, but he can’t use any of his regular connections in the business because he’s afraid they’ll throw it away. And the girl, who’s tired of running penny-ante errands, says, ‘Let me!’ Adam likes to work with gorgeous girls, it’s one of his trademarks. He gives her the name of a New York gun, Tug Wynanski, who will do all the donkey work. Now cops always go by likelihood and percentages. How many would believe this girl was the contact on a big-time stickup? I’m retiring next year, Mike. This would make a nice thing to retire on. Listen-even if you can’t get anything conclusive on him, find out his name! Blow his anonymity and he’s more or less through. Sure, somebody else will come along six months later, but that’s the condition of police work. It goes on.”
Shayne poured himself some more cognac. Both men watched him.
“And what if I do succeed in getting in without getting myself killed? I’ll be at the bottom. How do I find out anything about this banker you don’t already know?”
“We can bypass the girl. Say they have a series of ten steps. You carry out the first nine, and then pull a fast switch that puts you in possession, you personally. Then you can make him come to you. That’s only the outline. It needs a lot of work.”
“I’ll say it needs work,” Shayne said. “What do you think about it, Will?”
Gentry said impassively, “I wouldn’t have asked you over if I didn’t think you could swing it, Mike. You’ll be in touch with Sandy all along, and he’ll have his men within shouting distance. There’s a risk, but maybe it’s no worse than some of the jams you get into under your own steam. You know what I think about the heroin business. I think everything about it stinks.”
“If you want to stop it,” Shayne said evenly, “all you have to do is change the law.”
“Mike, I know you think doctors ought to handle the problem instead of cops, and it could be I agree with you. But that’s not in the cards right now and you know it. Personally I don’t like the idea of these creeps thinking they can make monkeys out of the New York police. My God, if anything went wrong no cop anywhere could show his face in public for weeks.”
Shayne thought about it while he finished his drink, balancing inevitable dangers against possible results. It was wild and improbable; common sense told him that the odds against coming to grips with the shadowy banker were very long. But Shayne had always done his best work against the odds, and he found himself calculating how much luck he would need to bring it off.
“I just hope they don’t ask me the way to the Empire State Building,” he said, and reached for the phone. “I’ll see if Tim Rourke can talk his paper into giving him a few days off on speculation. He’s a born ham. Nothing he’d like better than hitting himself in the face with a cackle bladder.”
CHAPTER 6
In the washroom in the eerie Victorian house on Staten Island, Shayne unfastened the wire from his battery case after reporting in to Inspector Power, opened the window and tacked the wire to the outer sill. Then he washed his face in rusty water. Dying his hair and eyebrows had changed his appearance more than he had thought possible. Everything had gone as Power had predicted until the moment when Szigetti said he thought he had seen Shayne somewhere.
Quickly Shayne reviewed what he knew about Szigetti. Power had had little information about the man. His arrest record was short and unimportant. He had been a Marine for four years. He had been court-martialed for selling supplies but acquitted for lack of evidence. His discharge had been honorable.
A transistor radio, tuned to a disc-jockey program, was playing when Shayne entered the living room. Irene danced toward him with thin arms extended. He embraced her. Without a partner, her entire skinny body had been in active motion, but this was not Shayne’s style of dancing at all.
“You’re creaky, Dad,” she said.
Shayne let her go with a disgusted wave. “Where do they keep the liquor?”
She tried to hold him. “I didn’t mean anything. I like to dance that cornball way. It’s a change.”
“I want a drink. Where’s Billy? He’ll dance with you.”
“He had to go back on guard. And who’s going to drive in here in the middle of the night? I mean, it’s nuts.”
“There you are,” Shayne said, spotting a bottle. “I don’t suppose we have ice.”
“Sure we have ice.”
She went to the kitchen. Shayne emptied somebody else’s watery drink out of a jelly glass and filled it from a bottle of blended rye. Irene came back with a handful of ice cubes.
“Where did Michele find you, anyway?” she said, putting one in his glass. “I really thought we were raided when you walked in.”
“I like to see a girl put up a fight,” Shayne said irritably.
She laughed. “It only took five of us to slow you down. You know what I was thinking when I had you around the waist?”
“Don’t tell me.”
She was standing close to him, drinking. She was older than he had thought at first-twenty, perhaps. Her torn blouse was held together with a straight pin. There was a prominent horizontal bone at the top of her ribcage. Her skinniness was charged with vitality, like a naked wire. Her hair was long and messy, and not much face showed. From across the room she had merely looked eccentric, but at a distance of less than a foot she was an arresting and unsettling girl. She idly slid her fingertips inside the waistband of his pants and gave him a small tug.