“My God, Michael! Do they read Shakespeare in your village?” At least he was stirring a bit, and some color was creeping back into his face.
“I read it, and I’m sure Jennifer Beatty did too. She was an American kid, over here attending college, and she just took the wrong turn in the road. If there’s fault to be found, it started a long time before you or I ever knew her.”
Segar shook his head, as much to clear it as to deny the truth of Michael’s words. “There is nothing to keep you here any longer,” he said.
“Yes, there is.”
“What’s that?”
“The iron angel.”
“A heroin dream, nothing more. Our men searched the basements and found nothing.”
“Wouldn’t an angel more likely be up than down?” Michael was examining the contents of the victims’ pockets, especially the numbered slips of paper. “This 470 and 117. They could have been written by the same person. The sevens are almost identical. And both slips seem to have been torn from a notebook of some sort.”
“We know what 117 is — the address of the office building where they gathered for the heroin parties. But what about 470?”
Michael pondered that, studying the slips of paper. “I can’t believe Conrad would have written down the street number to give someone. And why should he have needed it for himself?” Then suddenly he knew. He knew it all. “Up, Captain, up! The angel is up, not down.”
“Up?”
“On an upper floor of one of those buildings, where your men didn’t search. Come on — I’ll wear the body microphone again.”
“You’re going back there? It’s almost midnight.”
“I have to bring the killer to justice. I owe Jennifer that much.”
As soon as he saw men entering the building at 117 at this late hour, he knew it was the place he sought. This time he went upstairs instead of down to the cellar, following people to the top floor of the old building. No one stopped or questioned him. He passed through a door with the others and found himself in a large darkened loft area lit only by a half-dozen small, smoky fires. Beyond them, the focus of everyone in the room, stood an ancient statue of iron, as tall as a man, its colors chipped and faded with the passage of time. The men approached one by one, and as they turned away they seemed to drop an offering into one of the burning pots.
Michael joined the line, speaking softly into the body mike. As he drew nearer he saw that each person paused only an instant before the statue, gazing into its three evenly spaced eyes.
Then it was his turn. He saw the faded face of the iron angel and looked into its three eyes and gazed upon the truth he had expected.
To his left, through the smoke, old Kurzbic appeared holding a Luger pistol. As he raised it to fire, it seemed to Michael’s eyes that everything moved in slow motion. It seemed that Segar would never make it across the room before the Luger fired.
But then he was onto Kurzbic, toppling him to the floor as the weapon fired harmlessly toward the ceiling. Lights went on and people scattered in every direction as more police filled the room.
From the floor Segar asked, “What did you see in the angel’s eyes, Michael?”
“Today’s number is 525. The iron angel is a gambling device.”
Later, though he was bone-tired, Michael Vlado dictated a statement to complete Captain Segar’s investigation. They were back in Segar’s office.
“Somewhere, while adding to his collection of eighteenth-century clockwork automatons, Kurzbic came upon this large figure of an iron angel, fitted with three eyes and spring mechanisms to bring random three-digit numbers into view at the push of a lever. One digit appeared in each eye opening, and because they were small a viewer had to step right up to the statue to read them. Kurzbic decided to set up a daily lottery, a sort of numbers game, selling chances on whichever number the buyers wanted to play. He recorded the number in his book and gave the player a slip with the number written on it, as a receipt. Those were the slips we found on Jarie and Conrad. In the latter case, Conrad simply played the address of his drug den because he felt it was a lucky number.”
“It wasn’t lucky for him,” Segar said. “What were those fires for?”
“Simply to burn up the losing tickets after betters had checked the day’s number. Kurzbic must have feared a police raid would have turned up numbered slips in everyone’s pockets. He had the master list, of course, to check for payoffs, but he kept that well hidden. I believe Jarie Miawa must have confronted Kurzbic on the night he was killed. Perhaps he discovered that with his clockwork skills Kurzbic was fixing the mechanism to stop only at numbers on which there’d be few winners, avoiding those that were getting a heavy play. In any event, Miawa was stabbed. He managed to stagger downstairs to the heroin den and died there. Kurzbic could have quickly wiped up any spots of blood on the steps.”
“What about Conrad Rynox?”
“It was his death that identified Kurzbic as the killer. Shortly before the murder I saw him toss his wristwatch aside because it had stopped. Yet when we found his body the battery-operated watch was running perfectly. Conrad left the apartment with a watch that wasn’t running and had it fixed within a few minutes. The only possible conclusion was that he visited a watch shop and purchased a new battery. Kurzbic’s shop is across Furtuna Street and just around the corner on Grivitei, and Sigmund told me he was an occasional customer there. There’d have been no time for him to go anywhere else, according to the autopsy report. During those important minutes I’d taken Sigmund down the street for coffee, and old Kurzbic was alone in the shop.”
“That’s the trouble. He was alone! If he killed Conrad, how did he get his body around the corner to 117 and into the basement?”
“You’re forgetting that the basements in that block all connect. Conrad must have indicated he knew the truth about Jarie’s death. After Kurzbic replaced the battery he stabbed Conrad and pushed his body into the basement, waiting until later to move it over to where I found it.”
“Hundreds of people must have known Kurzbic ran this gambling game.”
“Of course! They bought numbers from him every day, and if they couldn’t wait to hear the winner they went at midnight to watch the angel’s wheels spin. I should have guessed a gambling involvement from the beginning. The first thing Jennifer told me about Jarie Miawa was that he liked to gamble. When I finally made the connection in my mind between those three-digit numbers and the three eyes of this fabled iron angel, I suspected an antique gambling device of some sort. That pointed me toward Kurzbic and his collection of clockwork automatons. When he saw me tonight he knew it was over and drew his gun, probably the one he mentioned keeping behind his counter.”
Captain Segar sighed and signaled that Michael’s statement was at an end. He looked tired himself. “I must thank you again, old friend. I could never have concluded this case without you.”
Michael Vlado shook his hand. Without them, Jennifer Beatty might still be alive, but neither spoke those words. Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference. Perhaps her number had simply come up, on the face of another iron angel somewhere.
Howler
by Jo Bannister
It didn’t look like a haunted house. It looked like a 1950s seaside bungalow, with bow windows and pebble-dash walls. Before the garden ran riot it would have been indistinguishable from all the other seaside bungalows in the area: prim, square, gazing out over the Channel with an air of cosy smugness.
But something happened at Mon Repose which, having no echo at Sans Souci up the lane or Dun Roamin on the corner, lifted it forever out of the seaside bungalow main sequence — for seaside bungalows, like stars, have their natural paths and life spans. The only difference is that stars grow to greatness while bungalows are at their brightest soon after construction and slip slowly down the scale of magnitude until they become weekend cottages for art teachers from Birmingham, the seaside bungalow equivalent of white dwarfdom.