One of those permanent guests is Karl Marx and his statue glares out at the hardy bands of pilgrims who journey to it from such places as Minsk and Ploesti and Sarajevo and, I suppose, Berkeley and Ojibway Falls. Even at seven o’clock there was a band of them there as I approached the tomb of the prophet. They wore big wide hot-looking suits and sensible dresses and they had scrubbed, Slavic faces and they were all taking each other’s pictures. The one who nobody else would talk to, and there’s one on every tour, shoved his camera at me and said something in a language that came from somewhere east of what used to be called the Iron Curtain. He was a prissy-looking type, with gold rimmed glasses, and rather than create an international incident, I put down the Roosevelt Hotel laundry bag and snapped his picture. Then he started gesturing and pointing and there was nothing to be done but for me to pick up my sack of £100,000 in Kapital and stand in front of the tomb of the old man who had taken such a dim view of it so that the tour outcast could take a picture of me and my money.
I turned right after the statue of Marx and headed down the graveled path. I remembered the tombstone that was carved to about a five-eighths scale in the shape of an open grand piano. I didn’t remember who rested beneath it, but I long ago had made him up to have been a gay, insouciant type with a pleasant flat in Mayfair, an open Bentley, and any number of girls all called Pam and Jo and Liz who would plead with him to play something jolly as he entered the drawing room for drinks after having dressed for dinner. There’s more to it, of course. With a cheerful nod and casual ease, much reminiscent of Fred Astaire, my dead hero would take his drink over to the piano and run through such numbers as “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” “Nora,” and “Avalon.” This all took place, of course, in the spring of 1938 a few years after I was born. And he had died, this golden youth that my fantasy had placed beneath the open marble piano, during the Battle of Britain when his Spitfire bought it just after he had scored his fifth kill. He went down cleanly with no flames, of course, whistling “Nora.”
During one of our picnics at Highgate I had made the mistake of telling my wife all this. She had looked it up and later informed me that no golden pre-war youth lay buried beneath the awful piano tomb. Rather it was a fat Armenian called Clarke who had changed his name from Keshishian. She had told me this, but I hadn’t believed her.
There were more weeds growing up around the piano than there had been a dozen or so years ago when I had last seen it, but that was all right. The weeds in Highgate during the spring seem to take on a luxuriant green that would grace any garden.
I looked around but I could see no one, which didn’t mean anything, because a full-strength platoon could have been hiding in the overgrown bushes or behind the tilting tombstones.
I approached the piano-shaped monument from the sloping side of its opened lid. I couldn’t see any sword, but the lid could easily have been concealing it. I looked around once more, saw no one, made a dumb show of examining my watch, and when it was seven o’clock exactly I stepped up to the marble piano and looked beneath its open lid.
There was plenty of room for a three-or-four-foot sword. There was also plenty of room for the man who lay curled up there. I jumped, but he didn’t move. He didn’t move because his throat had been cut but there was no blood on the marble. His face was no longer pink. It was a pale, almost waxy white. His gray eyes were open and so was his mouth with its matching gray teeth. He still wore his gray tweed jacket with the black patches on the sleeves and on the crown of his head there was still the thick white scar that I had last seen when he had bent down to pick up the drink that he had knocked out of my hand at the Black Thistle.
There was no sword. I made sure of that. Then I backed away from the dead man. I backed away until I came to the path. Then I turned and ran all the way to the statue of Karl Marx and past that to the waiting Rolls-Royce.
Chapter Fourteen
The crowd was big enough for a small wake and the gloom was thick enough for a huge one. Five of us were gathered in the red room of the Belgravia mansion on Groom Place: the Nitry brothers, Eddie Apex, his wife Ceil, and I. We were all slumped into various Victorian chairs and sofas, forming a rough circle around the Roosevelt Hotel laundry bag that squatted, a bit reproachfully, I thought, on the floor where I had dropped it.
Norbert Nitry sighed again, staring at the money bag. “So you think there’s a mob of them, do you?”
He was looking at the money bag, but talking to me. I sipped some of the tea that I had chosen over coffee. It was quite good. “There were at least three to start with,” I said. “Maybe four. Maybe even more.”
“Why do you think so?” Ned Nitry said.
“Well, the dead man and whoever called me on the phone this morning weren’t the same. I’d heard the dead man talk — in the Black Thistle that time — and he had a strong London accent. I don’t think he could have changed his voice that much, but it really doesn’t matter because by the time that I got the call this morning at six, his throat had already been cut and I’m assuming that he didn’t make any phone calls after that.”
They looked at me. None of them said anything. They simply looked at me as though daring me to go on and prove what I had said. I went on.
“When your throat’s cut, you bleed, and usually you bleed a lot. It’s messy. But there wasn’t any blood around at the cemetery and that means he was killed someplace else and then taken to Highgate. Right?”
Nobody nodded. Nobody said damned good thinking there, St. Ives. They just looked at me until I answered my own question.
“Right. Now then, how do you get a body weighing around one hundred eighty or one hundred ninety pounds into Highgate Cemetery and tucked up underneath the lid of a marble piano?”
It wasn’t exactly a rhetorical question, but I didn’t get a nibble, not even a headshake. If I were going to ask damn fool questions, I was going to have to answer them, too, so I did.
“Well, you carry him,” I said, “and if you’re half smart, you carry him at night, and that means before dawn, which comes at about five-thirty this time of year and that means that the dead man was already dead and tucked away in his marble piano by the time I got my call this morning.”
I would have settled for anything — even a polite sneer or a raised eyebrow. I got nothing, so I talked some more.
“Well, one man’s not going to carry one hundred eighty pounds of deadweight. At least not that far. I know I couldn’t. So he’s going to have some help — at least one other person and possibly two. That means that there were at least three to begin with and now there’re at least two, but possibly more.”
I leaned back and waited. I don’t know what I was waiting for, possibly a way to go, St. Ives! What I got was a slow nod from Ned Nitry who said, “One hundred and eighty pounds. About thirteen stone, isn’t it?”
“About that,” I said.
Eddie Apex stretched his long legs out in front of him, folded his hands behind his head, stared at the ceiling, and said, “Why?”
“Why what?” I said.
“They could have had the money. We followed their instructions exactly. You were right on time. There weren’t any police. What the Christ more do they want?”
“You asking me?” I said.
“You’re the expert.”
“Well, to use an expert’s bromide, thieves fall out. The ones we’re dealing with sure as hell have. Probably because a two-way split of a hundred thousand pounds is better than a three-way split. I still don’t know how many are involved, but as I said there were at least three to begin with. And as for why the stall this morning, maybe they remembered who they’re dealing with.”