I followed his directions, found Emory Hill Road. I nosed the Chevy past a batch of estates that would have embarrassed Veblen. They were all the last word on the subject of conspicuous consumption. I passed them all by until I found one which made the rest look like Tobacco Road set to music. It had to belong to Clayton Bannister. Nobody else would want it.
First there was the house itself. The manor house, that is — I’m sure that’s what he called it. It was a cockeyed cross between Christopher Wren and Le Corbusier, a mixed marriage of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries with the assets of neither and the liabilities of both. I had never seen anything like it before; twentieth-century baroque was a brand-new concept. Flying buttresses do not go with picture windows.
The architect must have shot himself.
There were two other small houses. One must have been the guest house. The other was the garage but it looked more like a stable. A futuristic stable, of course, but still a stable. I saw a Rolls Silver Ghost and a Mercedes 300 and tried to imagine Bannister at the wheel riding to hounds, with Ralph and Billy bellowing “Tallyho!” at the tops of their impure lungs. An arresting picture.
I parked the Chevy in front of the estate and looked around for a chrome-and-steel hitching post. There should have been one, but there wasn’t. I yanked the emergency brake, killed the ignition and got out of the car. I looked at carefully landscaped grounds covered with too many different kinds of shrubs and flowers. He’d have done better cultivating one small garden.
I filled a pipe and got it going. I dropped the match onto the lawn and hoped it would start a fire. Then, briefcase tucked under arm, I started up the road to hell. It was paved with flagstones instead of good intentions.
When I was about thirty yards from the manor house its carved oak door burst open and a gorilla exploded out of it, gun in hand. It was Billy. He ran quickly and awkwardly and stopped a yard away from me.
“Whatcha want?”
I said: “Take me to your leader.”
“Huh?”
“The boss,” I said patiently. “I want to see the boss.”
When he looked as though he understood, I held up the briefcase. “For the boss,” I said. “A present.” He reached out a paw to snatch it away but I pulled it back and smiled sadly. “Not for you, Billy Boy. For the boss. Mr. Bannister. The king.”
He was still mulling that one over when the other half of the goon squad appeared. Ralph. He walked up quickly, his face a mask, took the gun away from Billy and listened to my speech.
“Go tell the boss who’s here and what he wants,” he told Billy. “I’ll stay here and watch him.”
He stayed there and watched me while Billy hurried home with the message to Garcia. We had nothing to say to each other so we stood and glared away. He kept the gun on me and looked as though he wanted me to move so he could put a hole in my stomach. I didn’t and it made him unhappy.
He broke the silence.
“What I figure,” he said, “is the boss’ll tell Billy to tell me to take the briefcase away from you and send you home.”
I didn’t answer him.
“What I figure,” he went on, “is you want him to pay you for it. It’s stupid, you ask me. He woulda paid you before, when he asked you. You weren’t selling. You were so smart and you had to get beat up, now you come to sell to him? He can kick you out on your ear. You could of saved yourself a drive, you could of put it in the mail or called up and said come and get it. You don’t make sense.”
I didn’t answer him. A bird sang songs in a nearby tree. The wind rustled leaves in other trees. The big carved oak door opened and Billy’s big head appeared.
He called: “The boss says bring him in.”
Ralph managed to register surprise without changing expression. A neat trick. He nodded slowly, then stepped aside and motioned with the gun. I looked at the gun. It was bigger than the Beretta in my pocket.
“You go inside,” he said. “I walk behind you; I keep this pointed at you. Don’t get fancy.”
I didn’t get fancy. There were three marble steps at the head of the flagstone path. I climbed them and walked through the open door into the room. Billy pointed through another doorway and led me through to the living room. I followed with Ralph right behind and felt like meat in a sandwich.
The living room had thick wall-to-wall carpeting and a beamed ceiling. The beams were huge. They almost gave the room the air of a cathedral, but misfired slightly. The furniture was large and heavy and ugly. There were books in a bookcase, all expensively bound, mostly in sets, all, undoubtedly, unread.
I looked at the room. I looked at Ralph and Billy, both standing in front of me now. I looked at Ralph’s gun.
And I looked at Clayton Bannister.
He didn’t look like his picture now. His baldness didn’t show because he was the world’s first country squire to wear his hat in his house. He also wore light gray flannel slacks, a red plaid hunting shirt open at the throat and expensive shoes. He had a large cigar in his mouth and he talked around it.
“You’re tough to figure,” he said. “You’re supposed to be tough and you’re supposed to be smart and I don’t think you’re either one. What’s the bit, London?”
“I brought you a present.”
“And you think you’ll get paid for it? You had your chance, dumbhead. You know what I woulda paid for that briefcase. Twenty grand. Maybe thirty. Now I get it for nothing, dumbhead.”
I fingered the briefcase. “You’d pay me twenty grand,” I said. “Then you’d send some boys around to take the money back and blow my brains out. That’s smart?”
His face darkened. “A cutie,” he said. “Don’t get cute. I don’t like it. You gonna give me that thing?”
I tossed it to him. He caught it with surprising grace for a man of his bulk. He opened it with his eyes on me, then lowered his gaze to study the contents. He read the letter quickly, nodding from time to time to prove he could read. Then he looked up.
“Where’s the keys?”
“In the pouch with the zipper.”
“They better be,” he said darkly. He opened the zippered compartment and took out the keys. He studied them, smiled with obvious pleasure, put them back in the pouch, zipped it shut, put the letter back, zipped the briefcase and tossed the whole thing onto an overstuffed sofa.
“You know what it’s all about, London?”
“Jewels,” I said.
“Smart boy. Just jewels?”
“The Wallstein jewels.”
“Very smart boy.” He took the cigar from his mouth and pointed at me with it, looking at Ralph and Billy as he did so. They stood on either side of him, Ralph with his gun drawn, Billy with his apey arms at his sides.
“This is a smart boy,” he told them. “You look at this boy; you listen to him; he’s smart. You hear how he talks? He talks better than you two put together. He talks better than me and I’m not so damn stupid. He’s what you call cultured.”
He sighed. “But he’s still a dumbhead. You see?”
They both nodded dutifully.
“You,” he said. “London. You take a good look at this place? The house and the grounds? You check out the trees and furniture and all?”
“I saw them.”
“Whattaya think?”
“Impressive,” I said.
“Impressive,” he echoed. He thought it was a compliment. “You think I know a goddam thing about architecture? I know what I like, anybody knows that, but that’s all. You see that picture on the wall? It’s by Matisse. What I know about art you can put in your ear. What I know about Matisse you can put in the same ear and have room left. I bet you know a hell of a lot about architecture. And about art. I bet you know about Matisse. Right?”