“What’s that supposed to mean?” Apex said.
“He means, darling,” Ceil Apex said, “that your reputation is still preceding you. You have been known to resort to the sly trick now and again. As for Dad and Uncle Bert, well, they’re not usually thought of as being particularly angelic either.”
“You think that’s it, St. Ives?” Ned Nitry said.
I nodded. “Possibly. It could have been a combination warning and dry run. I’ve known some who’ve gone through four or five dry runs before they finally got their nerve up.”
“I somehow don’t think it’s a question of nerve or their lack of it,” Eddie Apex said.
“Not with a dead man with his throat cut, it isn’t,” Uncle Bert said. “Never did like slicers. Never did like doing business with ’em.”
“We haven’t got any choice though, have we?” his brother said.
“You think that’s what it was, St. Ives?” Uncle Bert said. “That the dead bloke was sort of a fair warning?”
“I think they might have been trying to tell us something,” I said.
“So what do we do now, wait?” Eddie Apex said.
I nodded again. “That’s about all that you can do.”
“What do you mean, ‘you’?” Apex said.
“I don’t like sliced throats and I like even less the people who go around doing it,” I said.
Eddie Apex shot a glance at his father-in-law and then at Uncle Bert. If I hadn’t been watching both carefully, I wouldn’t have caught their almost imperceptible nods. “We’ll go up to fifteen percent, Phil,” Eddie Apex said. “Fifteen percent of one hundred thousand pounds. That’s nearly thirty-six thousand bucks.”
“I’m not trying to jack up my price.”
“Of course not,” Ceil Apex said. “It’s just that Eddie’s trying to provide you with a little incentive to carry on.”
They were all staring at me now. I was the goose that was supposed to lay their golden egg and if I didn’t, well, they could always have roast goose for dinner. I tried to decide who I’d rather have mad at me — the Nitry brothers or the sword thieves. I wasn’t sure that it was much of a choice.
“All right,” I said after a while. “One more time.”
They all seemed to relax. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past eight. I stood up. “I’m going back to the hotel,” I said. “If they want to set it up again, they’ll call me there.”
“Anything else?” Ned Nitry said.
I looked at the laundry bag on the floor. “Yes,”I said. “Find something not quite so cute to put the money in.”
Even go-betweens must sleep, even the ones who play poker all night and stumble over dead bodies in the morning. I went back to the Hilton and went to bed and nothing at all happened until I awoke at a quarter till two that afternoon feeling hungry. I was New York-hungry, not London-hungry, which gave me a couple of choices. I could either go to a place I knew off Leicester Square or I could try one of the Great American Disaster hamburger joints that had been touted to me by a couple of disenchanted tourists from Colorado Springs. Or I could be really adventurous and try a Wimpy Bar. I’d never eaten in a Wimpy Bar, but then I must be the sole remaining American who has never tried a McDonald’s hamburger either.
A couple of reasons decided me on the place that I knew off Leicester Square and I decided to make a walk of it. I showered and shaved and dressed and then headed down Mount Street, because I happen to like it. I walked slowly, pausing now and then before the windows of the tony estate agent offices to admire photographs of some of the stately homes and country manor houses that I could steal for as little as a quarter of a million dollars.
I skirted the north end of Berkeley Square and paused on Bruton Street to gaze up at the window of the office I had once occupied. It had been nothing more than a partitioned cubicle really, but it had been a fancy enough address and at the time, that’s what the paper thought I had needed. I hadn’t really because I had written the column at home and had gone down to the office only for the mail and whatever gossip there was.
I went on, past the Westbury Hotel, down Bond Street, around Piccadilly Circus, over to Leicester Square, and down one of those small side streets that come out on Charing Cross Road. I wasn’t sure that the place I had in mind would still be there, but it was, and the neon sign still read Manny’s New York Delicatessen and Bar, Ltd.
The firm’s managing director, principal shareholder, and chief bartender was Emanuel Kaplan, formerly of somewhere in the East End, Tel Aviv, Tangier, Marseille, San Francisco, and New York. After getting out of the British army in 1946, Manny Kaplan had led what has been described variously as an interesting life, a checkered career, and a villain’s existence.
It is an establishable fact that he had helped Hank Greenspun run guns into Israel in 1948. It is equally provable that he smuggled cigarettes out of Tangier in 1949 and ’50. Not so easily proved — or disproved — is his claim that he had spent the early fifties in San Francisco as constant companion to an aging sugar heiress who kept him on a five-hundred-dollar-a-week retainer. In the late fifties it gets a little murky although he was in New York and he did work in a Second Avenue bar and also in a Sixth Avenue delicatessen. When I had done a column on him more than ten years before, he insisted that he had acquired the capital necessary to open his present establishment by knocking over six savings and loan banks in Jersey. But when I checked it out none of the amounts and half of the dates of the robberies were wrong, although most of the details were right, so I decided that he probably had won his stake in a crap game and picked up the information about the robberies from the people that he palled around with in New York, who were some of the ones I knew, and who, for lack of a better description, could be called the wrong crowd.
When I walked into the place he was behind the bar and he hadn’t changed much although he was close to fifty now. He still wore the perpetual cigarette in the right corner of his mouth and he was fatter and grayer, but who isn’t. He looked up at me and said, “What the hell do you want, St. Ives?”
I sat down on a stool at the bar and said, “A corned beef on rye with a slice of onion and a bottle of Lowenbrau and, gosh, it’s nice to see you, Manny.”
“You know I don’t handle no Nazi beer.”
“Make it a Heineken if you’re not mad at the Dutch.”
Kaplan yelled my order at his sandwich man and served the beer himself. He spoke around his cigarette in a low, rapid tone that made almost everything he said sound private, perhaps even confidential, and he got his accent and his phrasing mixed up so that his speech was a curious blend of New Yorkese and Londonese, although neither was very far out of the gutter.
“I hear that you’re in New York,” he said. “I hear that you’re back there and that you can’t get a job and that you’re doing something a little bent.”
“Word gets around,” I said and looked the place over. It hadn’t changed. There was the long row of booths and some round stand-up tables and the bar and the refrigerated display case that was choked with all of the goodies that you’d find in any quality New York Jewish delicatessen. One wall was covered with autographed black and white photos of assorted actors, actresses, four playwrights, a couple of New York congressmen, three Members of Parliament, five bigtime gamblers, four pretty fair con men (including Eddie Apex), and about two dozen other photos of fox-faced men with wary eyes and strained smiles, a few of whom I recognized as being wanted by the police of at least two countries and possibly a third, if you counted Mexico.
I pointed at one of the con men. “I heard he got dropped in the bay at Hong Kong.”