“Sit down, St. Ives,” Demeter said, and his voice sounded like thick ice cracking. “Sit down and I’ll tell you why you goddamn sure as hell aren’t quitting.”
Chapter sixteen
Sergeant Fastnaught left his seat at the window and moved over to the door. He leaned against it as though it were the most comfortable spot in the room. An itch seemed to develop between his shoulder blades because he rubbed his back against the molding of the door without shifting his gaze from me. Demeter leaned forward in the chair, his big, tightly curled head thrust forward, his red lips slightly parted as he breathed through his mouth. The cigar burned unnoticed in his right hand.
“What you’d really like me to do is to put the Scotch in my bag and try to go through that door,” I said. “That’s really what you’d like.”
“Get off it, St. Ives,” Fastnaught said.
Demeter looked at him. “Well, now, Sergeant Fastnaught, what do you expect him to think? I’ve just told him that he’s not going to quit and there you are at the door, looking for all the world like you’d like to bust him in the mouth if he tried to go through it. St. Ives has got a point and we ought to respect it. After all the talk about police brutality, what do you expect him to think?”
“Sorry,” Fastnaught said in a voice that was a couple of blocks away from being contrite. “I forgot about the role assigned to us by society. Of course, busting him in the mouth could help us pad out our scrapbooks. Paste in some clippings with headlines like ‘Police Pummel New York Go-Between in Hotel’ or even ‘Cops Clobber New York Man in Posh Hotel.’”
Demeter nodded gravely. “You’ve got a flair, Sergeant Fastnaught. I’d say you’ve got almost a real genius for public relations. Don’t you agree, St. Ives?”
“He’s a wonder,” I said.
“Now then,” Demeter said, leaning back comfortably in the chair and drawing on his cigar. “I was going to tell you why you’re not going to back out, wasn’t I?”
“You did mention that, but maybe I’d better go first. Maybe I’d better tell you why I am going to back out.”
Demeter waved his cigar at me. “The floor is yours.”
“If your mathematics are right, four people have been killed over this shield. The reason that they were killed is that they either knew or had a pretty good idea who stole it. So there’s a very good chance that anybody who’d shove a knife into a New York cop in the lobby of the Madison Hotel would be less than queasy about getting permanently rid of a go-between about three o’clock in the morning on some lonely road in Virginia or Maryland. But even if they come up with a safe switch, one that involves no contact, I’m still the loose end, the one they’d wake up at five o’clock in the morning and start worrying about, wondering if they’d somehow made a slip and that I just might be able to identify them. Now that’s only a slight chance, maybe a ten-to-one shot, but it’s more than I’m willing to take for twenty-five thousand or even fifty thousand. I’m sure you follow me.”
“Perfectly,” Demeter said.
“Then that’s it; I’m out.”
“No,” Demeter said. “You’re not.”
“Don’t push it,” I said.
Demeter got out of his chair and walked over to the window. “Washington’s a funny town,” he said. “It’s not like New York or Chicago or even Philadelphia. When you get right down to it, a handful of congressmen run this town and if anybody’s got a hold on those congressmen, then he’s got a pretty good grip on Washington, too. You follow me, St. Ives?”
“I follow you.”
“You notice how polite the homicide boys were? Not many questions, not much excitement, just kind of a quiet routine even though a cop was killed and an out-of-town cop at that.”
“I noticed.”
“It’ll probably be about two paragraphs back with the leg-sore ads. No more. You see, St. Ives, the word’s come down. They want that shield back without any fuss. Now you’re going to ask where’d it come down from and I can’t answer that because I don’t know, but if I was to guess I’d say it came down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, drifted up to Capitol Hill, and sort of trickled down to Fastnaught and me. We got the riot act read to us the other day — day before yesterday, wasn’t it, Fastnaught?”
“Day before yesterday,” Fastnaught said.
“They used the carrot and the stick on us. They told about all the nice things that were going to happen to us if we got the shield back and then they told us about all the not-so-nice things that were going to happen if we didn’t. They weren’t bothered that some people were dead because of a hunk of brass. That didn’t worry them one bit. All they want is the shield back and they gave us carte blanche — that’s the right expression, isn’t it? So Fastnaught here speaks up and says, ‘What happens if the go-between gets cold feet and wants to back out?’ Well, they just looked at us for a long time and then one of them said, ‘I trust you’ve heard of harassment, Lieutenant Demeter?’ So I said yes, I’d heard of it. And then they just looked at us some more.”
“Being harassed is better than being dead,” I said.
Demeter turned from the window and shook his head, a little sadly, I thought. “You’re not going to be dead, St. Ives. Not if Fastnaught and I can help it. Let me tell you something. My whole future’s riding on you. Fastnaught’s younger; he could do something else, but I’m past forty-five and that’s too old to start all over again. Now when they say harassment, they mean it. They’ll drag you through courts on income tax. You’ll spend every dime you’ve got on lawyers. And if you go on living in New York — or anyplace else — they’ll send some buttons after you at three o’clock in the morning with a warrant for your arrest for jaywalking or spitting on the sidewalk. Your life won’t be worth living. I don’t say I like the idea, but there’s lots of things in this country I don’t like.”
“It’s just your job,” I said.
“That’s right, St. Ives, it’s just my job and some days I don’t have to like that either.”
It was still raining and for what seemed to be a long time the rain on the window was the only sound in the room. Demeter went back to his chair; Fastnaught maintained his vigilance at the door, and I crossed to the window and stared down at Fifteenth Street and the shiny tops of wet cars. The pressure could have come, as Demeter said, from the White House, from one of those faceless aides who’d been chivvied by someone at State. Or it could have come from a senator or a matched pair of congressmen who owed their re-election to someone, someone who wanted the shield back and not too many questions asked. But the pressure was there all right, strong enough to bend a couple of tough cops and leave a sour taste in their mouths. And the threat of harassment was real, too. I’d seen harassment before, a couple of times, and one had wound up in a sanitarium and the other had fled to Italy, which he didn’t much like but which he liked better than what he’d gone through in New York for eighteen months before his nerves shattered.
I turned from the window and looked at Demeter, who was staring at the floor. “You win,” I said.
“Some prize,” Demeter said to the rug on the floor. “I win a go-between. A brass go-between.”
The phone finally rang at three-thirty. Fastnaught was stretched out on one of the twin beds. Demeter was still in his chair reading a newspaper that I’d sent down for. The voice on the phone was the man again and he still had a mouthful of wet cotton.
“Do you know Washington?” the voice asked.
“No.”
“There’s a golf driving range in the northwest section.” He gave me the address. “Do you have that?”
“Yes.”