“May I help you, sir?” the man said.
A hot rush of fear was allayed slightly when Tony realized that the uniform was one of hotel service, not of the law, and he swayed forward again, having leaned backward at the sudden startling appearance. The match burned his fingers and he dropped it with a muffled oath. His inquisitor waited. Sway and mumble brought quick memories of the previous night’s condition and he simulated it now in instant disguise.
“Can’t find room—went to zha bar and can’t get back. Want to find cazhetta number seven.” Another sway to add verisimilitude to the words.
“If you will be so kind as to follow me.”
Well trained, thou good and faithful servant; he trod in the other’s footsteps and dug out peso notes to overtip him when they reached a small building with a gilt seven under an iron-caged bulb. Money rustled, thanks were murmured, and he tried the knob with his face carefully turned from the light. The door was thankfully unlocked and he pushed through into the darkness beyond, closed it and fumbled at the wall looking for a light switch. As he did this something very hard was pushed deep into his side and an even harder, high-pitched voice hissed in his ear.
“Move or even twitch and you are a dead man.”
With a great effort he controlled the tendency to leap into the air generated by this shocking suggestion and stood stock-still instead. The hard object ground deeper into his kidney and the voice, apparently satisfied by his response, spoke again, this time calling out shrilly.
“All right, open up.”
The response was immediate. The inside door to the entrance hall was thrown wide and lights blazed. Tony blinked at them, then, through slitted eyes, looked at his captor. The hard object was a gun as he had suspected, a very large, blue-black, and deadly looking device. The young man who held it, while pink not blue-black, looked just as deadly, freckled, blank-faced redhead with his block-shaped head sat squarely on a weight-lifter’s thick neck of columnar muscle. Equally large muscles bulged his shirt and rose in corded knots from his forearm to thicken at his wrist: If he squeezed the trigger it appeared he would crush the gun like licorice.
“Put it away, Schultz, he is all right,” a familiar voice said. FBI agent Ross Sones rose from behind an overstuffed chair and holstered an equally impressive hand weapon.
“I thought you were expecting me?” Tony asked, angry now.
“Never hurts to take precautions. Agent Schultz, this is Agent Hawkin.”
“Name’s Billy,” Schultz said in his surprisingly tiny voice while extending a bulging and deadly looking hand. Tony took it gingerly, expecting to have his pulped, and it was like squeezing a log of wood. “You must be the Tony Hawkin we have been hearing so much about back in the Bureau.”
“I suppose I must be,” Tony answered, suddenly very tired. He dropped gratefully into the soft chair as Sones sidled out from behind it, letting his airline bag slide to the floor. Sones looked down at it.
“Is the Cellini painting there?”
“It is. Make me a drink, large scotch and soda, plenty of ice, and I’ll dig it out for you.”
They exchanged favors, each more happy to receive than to give. Sones unwrapped the box while Tony drank deep.
“And don’t think it was easy bringing that thing here.”
“I am sure that it was not. How did you manage to get by the police?”
“Professional secret. What is more important at this moment is how are you going to get this to Washington, get the authenticity checked, then have it back here in time to deliver to D’Isernia by tomorrow night?”
“Have you been drinking? I told you in Acapulco that we were getting a specialist down here.”
“Yes, of course, forgot in the rush of events.” Forgot in the rush of drink was more truthful. Sones was pretty close to the target there; the entire evening still had a number of blank spots.
Sones carefully took the painting from the box and held it to the light, with Billy looking over his shoulder.
“Simply amazing color,” the muscular agent said in his tiny voice.
“And what are the other arrangements?” Tony finished the last of the drink, gratefully, and chewed an ice cube.
“We have brought the specialist here.”
“Who is it? Billy Schultz?”
Billy smiled happily with the assumption and Sones brushed it off.
“No. He is our operational backup man. A specialist. The painting authority is in the other room.”
“And wondering very much when you were going to let me out,” the husky voice said from the doorway.
“Come in, I was just going to call you. The ‘St. Sebastian’ is here.”
She entered. A wide-hipped, long-legged, short-skirted young woman with a wealth of blond hair that dropped well below her shoulders. Her face was full-featured and attractive, in a large Slavonic way, her bosom full, also in the Slavonic way, so much so that the top button of her white blouse had opened under the strain. She looked dark-eyedly at Tony from under long lashes, one eye closed halfway because of the smoke that rose from the cigarette that projected straight up from a silver holder shaped like a small pipe that she held between her teeth.
“I am Lizveta Zlotnikova.” Her accent was Russian, slight but still irrevocably there.
“Tony Hawkin.” He thrashed slightly as if wanting to rise but did not, extending his hand upward instead. She seized it and shook it twice, and strongly, from the elbow, as though she were pumping water.
“Miss Zlotnikova is our authority,” Sones said, handing the painting to her. “Co-opted from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. An authority on restoration and dating. Is the painting real?”
She took it from him with great respect and held it under the light tilting it backward and forward slowly. The smoke curled up into her eye and, around the silver holder, she whispered, “Boshe-moir!”
“What did you say?”
“That was merely an expletive of appreciation drawn out of me involuntarily.”
“Then this is the authentic thing?”
“I cannot tell truthfully until I have examined samples of the wood and the paint chemically and by spectroanalysis. Also X-ray plates must be made. These assure positive identification.”
“Which we will want. But can you tell us something, a rough professional guess or the like that we can operate on?”
“I can do that. The color is incredible, the brushwork that of a genius. If it is a forgery it is so exceptional that the forger must be a master.”
“Good enough. Do you agree, Hawkin?”
“I do. Completely!”
Lizveta Zlotnikova put the painting carefully back into its case and turned to face Tony, her open eye sighting across the tip of her cigarette as though the holder itself were a gun. “I did not know that you were an expert too, it was not told me. What museum are you associated with?”
“It’s not that simple—”
“Indeed? Please explain.”
“Enough of that,” Sones broke in. “There is no need for you to have that information on a classified operation. Why don’t you start work on the analysis now?”
“It is very late.”
“Stalin used to work all night,” Tony said brightly. “Did his best work then they say.”
“What is the meaning of that?” The cigarette gun aimed again, more deadly than ever. “Are you insinuating that I am an unconverted Stalinoid cult of personality non-revisionist?”