“The one with the tie claims that he traded with a drunken American tourist in a Frankfurt bar,” Speke said.
“Who paid them?” Carmingler said.
“The same story they told your people. Some chap in Berlin whom they know only as Willi. They got two thousand marks each plus expenses.”
“D’you think you’ve got everything out of them that you can?”
Speke nodded. “I think so. We’ve been at them day and night for three weeks.”
“Drugs?”
“Your people did. We used — uh — other methods and after a while they talked readily enough.”
“But not about Mrs. Dye?”
“Curiously no. They don’t seem to mind confessing any number of political assassinations, but they were quite adamant in their denial that they had participated in a rape-murder.” He glanced at me. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“So you’re through with them?” Carmingler said.
“Yes. I should think so.”
“Dye needs to look at them.”
“Quite.”
We left the office and went down the hall to another door that opened onto a flight of stairs. The stairs led to a bricked cellar with a cement floor that ran underneath the entire length and breadth of the warehouse. At one end was a small room, not more than twelve by twelve. It was much newer than the rest of the building and had been constructed of cement blocks with a metal door that had a small opening covered with heavy iron mesh. Two men sat outside the door in wooden armchairs. They wore coats and sweaters and had an electric three-bar heater which was plugged into the double-socket of a bare bulb that hung overhead.
“Bring them out,” Speke said to one of the men, who nodded and rose. He took out a ring of big keys and unlocked the door with two of them and then slid back a heavy iron bar which squeaked and for a moment I was back in Shanghai, in Bridge House, where the sounds had been the same, and I could imagine the apprehension felt by the two inside the cell. They must have known that there never would be any good news again.
Both of the men who guarded the cell were up now. Both had produced revolvers, 38s from the look of them. One stood directly in front of the door while the other pulled it open. Two men dressed in dark suits and sweaters came out. They wore no ties and probably no belts. The laces were gone from their shoes and they had to shuffle to keep them on. One was tall and one was short.
Speke told them what to do in English. “Stand over here,” he said, motioning to the brick wall. They shuffled over to the wall and stood facing it. “Turn around,” he said. They turned around. I walked over and looked at them.
Mutt, the taller one, was about five-eleven with sloping shoulders and long arms that ended in hairy-backed hands. He had brownish hair and light blue eyes with ordinary brows that ran into each other across a nose that leaned a little to the left. His mouth was small and almost pursed and it didn’t go with his big chin and thick neck. He also needed a shave.
Jeff, the shorter one, had long, light blonde hair, almost white, that kept flopping down into blue eyes that were a little piggy and mean. He had a potato nose and red splotches on his cheekbones, light almost invisible eyebrows, and a surprisingly hard slice of a mouth that looked as if it had been drawn with a ruler. He had a sharp chin, a slight build that was probably all gristle, and skinny hands.
“Well?” Carmingler said. He was standing at my elbow.
“They wore masks,” I said. “Halloween masks. The rubber kind.”
“Their size, their build?” he said.
“Could be.”
“The big one. Hairy hands.”
“A lot of people have hairy hands,” I said.
“You can’t make either of them?”
“Drop your pants,” I said to the taller one.
He looked at Speke and frowned so I said it again in German and told him to be goddamned quick about it. Speke told him the same thing. The man grumbled something and then undid his fly and dropped his pants so that they lay in what seemed to be a dark puddle about his shoes.
“Your shorts, too,” I said.
He didn’t like that at all. “What is the meaning of this?” he said.
“I want to look at your cock,” I said.
He almost blushed and shot another look of appeal at Speke, who must have played the only friend role with them.
“Drop them,” Speke said.
The taller man did blush this time and dropped his shorts. They were blue-and-white striped ones, but a lot of men wore those. I looked at his penis. He wasn’t circumsized and it lay there shriveled from cold and fear and embarrassment. I went down on one knee to get a better look at it and he jumped. I rose and stared at the man. “You remember me, don’t you?” I said. “You remember how I got to watch you rape my wife and then shoot her one Saturday night?”
He was a good liar, but not good enough. There was a twitch in his left eyelid when I mentioned Saturday because it hadn’t been Saturday. It had been Friday. It was only a twitch, “I don’t know you,” he said. “I have never seen you before.”
I turned to Carmingler and Speke. “Are you through with them both?” I said.
Carmingler said, “We are,” and turned to Speke who shrugged.
“May I use one of those pistols?”
Speke nodded and one of the guards handed me his. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson, I noticed. I turned back to the pair and pointed the gun at the smaller one. “You remember me, don’t you?” I said.
“No,” he said and locked his blue eyes with mine.
“I remember your friend there because of the blue spot on the end of his cock.”
The taller one jerked his head forward to look for the blue spot. “There isn’t any,” he said.
“You got it cured after all.”
“I didn’t have—” He stopped then.
“I’m going to kill you both, you know,” I said.
The taller one must have believed me. He swallowed and began to work his lips around. I knew what he was doing, so I waited. When he had enough saliva he spat at me and it landed on the lapel of my topcoat. He was snarling now. “She was rotten sex!” He yelled it in German. Then he switched to English and screamed it. “She was a lousy fuck!”
I almost killed him then. I tried to. I remember that my finger was beginning to pull at the trigger and the scene came back of him sprawled across Beverly, his pants and shorts down to his ankles, as he grunted and lunged. I recalled her face and how she looked and what had happened to her eyes. I tried to kill him then, but instead I turned and said, “Ah, shit,” and shoved the gun at Speke and hurried for the stairs before any of them could see my face.
We flew back to New York the next day.
Chapter 25
The friendly folks at Swankerton’s First National Bank couldn’t have been nicer. Someone smiled pleasantly when I said that I wanted to open a checking account. Someone else beamed when I rented a safety deposit box in which to store the $20,000 in cash delivered to me that morning by Carol Thackerty. A vice-president was absolutely radiant when I showed him the letter of credit from Orcutt’s St. Louis bank and for all I knew they were equally charming to those who said they could use a couple of hundred till payday.
I was rich now, I decided. I had more money than I’d had since I was eight years old and a partner in a crap game on the Gripsholm. I had $19,500 in San Francisco; $20,000 in a Swankerton safe-deposit box; $5,000 in a checking account for expenses, and the promise of another $25,000 on the way from Ramsey Lynch. I also had $816.59 cash. I thought about retirement and that kept me busy until around eleven o’clock when Homer Necessary called from the lobby and said that he was on his way up.