Wes Cagle landed on the railing of Waterloo Bridge, hung there for a moment, and then went over the side down into the Thames. He screamed all the way down and made a very large splash. After that he didn’t scream anymore.
Eddie Apex leaned over the railing and looked down. Then he turned toward me and I saw that he was clutching his stomach. There was blood on his hands. He leaned against the railing of the bridge and then he started sliding down awkwardly, much like Robin Styles had slid down the side of the Volkswagen. Like Styles, Eddie Apex landed in a sitting position with sort of a plop.
I didn’t want to watch Eddie Apex die. I didn’t want to listen to his last words. I was sick of last words. I didn’t want to watch anybody else die that night with a quip on his lips so that he could be remembered as having died well, the way you’re supposed to. I knew that when I died, unless it was in my sleep or instantaneously, I would die cursing and screaming and blaming somebody, the doctors probably, and demanding all the sympathy that there was around. That’s the way I had come into the world. And that was no doubt the way I would leave it.
The Rolls pulled up alongside and old Tom poked his head out. “Get an ambulance and the cops, Tom,” I said.
“Is he hurt bad, sir?”
“I don’t know. I think so. The knife got him.”
Tom looked as if he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. He turned the big Rolls around and sped off.
I squatted down by Eddie Apex. “How bad is it?” I said.
“Bad. It hurts like hell. Where was it?”
“What?”
“The sword. I never got upstairs at Curnutt’s.”
“He split his Christmas tree and hid it in there.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Who killed him, Cagle?”
“Sure. Killed his son, too. The old man got cold feet and was talking about going to the cops. The son was almost as bad. I tried to talk Wes out of it, but it was no go. He got greedy. They all got greedy.”
“I talked to your wife,” I said.
“I know. She told me. She got greedier than anybody. We could have worked it with the three swords, if they’d just listened to me.”
“What do you mean three swords?”
Eddie Apex made himself grin. “You’re not sure now, are you?” he said. “You’re not sure which one you tossed into the river.”
“What three swords, Eddie?”
“There were three swords, not two,” he said, still grinning. “Tick-Tock has the third one.”
“Tick-Tock’s dead.”
“When?”
“At Curnutt’s. I tripped and the sword went through him.”
“No shit?” he said, smiling at the news. Then the blood gushed out of his mouth and like almost everybody else that night, English Eddie Apex died.
There were some other questions that I wanted to ask him, of course. Such as which sword was in the river and which one did Tick-Tock have, and now that Tick-Tock was dead, where was that sword? But Eddie was answering no more questions, so I squatted there beside him with the small crowd that had formed, halfway across Waterloo Bridge, and waited for the ambulance and the cops to arrivé.
The cops got there first. They always do.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
They didn’t exactly deport me. After asking me questions for two days, and not believing half the answers I gave, they mentioned that it might be nice if I were to go on out to Heathrow and catch the next Pan Am flight to New York.
Furthermore, to make sure that I had no trouble finding the airport, they were sending their man Deskins along as guide.
I think William Deskins was the only man in Scotland Yard who believed me. He had sat in on some of the questioning and after that he had conducted his own investigation based partly on the answers that I had given. Now over a drink at the airport he was brooding about some of the questions that still remained unanswered.
“The Nitry brothers had almost never heard of you,” he said. “You were a friend of their late son-in-law who dropped by for tea a time or two, but they weren’t really sure what line of business you were in.”
“And Ceil?” I said.
“Well, according to Ned Nitry, his daughter was so overcome by her husband’s death that she had to go abroad for her health and he wasn’t really quite sure what country she was visiting, although he expected a postcard any day now and as soon as it arrived, he’d let me know. And good God, no, they didn’t know shit about any ancient sword. They’d never heard of it. Furthermore, they weren’t interested.”
“What about old Tom and Gentleman Jack Brooks? You get anything out of them?”
He shook his head. “Those two old lags? Old Jack went senile on me. He’s about as senile as you are. Tom said he was driving his governor along Waterloo Bridge when they spotted this altercation. That’s what Tom calls it. Altercation. The governor jumped out to see if he could be of assistance, and the next thing he knows he’s stabbed by this American chap which only goes to prove, Tom says, that one should never step into a fight between foreigners.”
Deskins was silent for a while as he rubbed his thrusting chin. “Doctor Christenberry,” he said finally. “I went to see him, too.”
“Is he still hungry?”
“You know what he was doing when I called in? He was sitting there in front of a brand new color telly with the biggest box of chocolates I’ve ever seen, cramming them into his mouth, and giggling and laughing at this children’s program. It was an American program, too. I didn’t understand it. There were a lot of strange-looking puppets.”
“‘Sesame Street’?” I said.
“What?”
“The name of the program. Was it ‘Sesame Street’?”
“I remember it was some kind of a street. It looked like a slum. But Christenberry was har-har-haring away at it. He wouldn’t turn it off either.”
“What did he say?”
Deskins sighed. “He said what his solicitor had told him to say. He said he had been engaged to consult the late Mr. Apex on a matter of a highly confidential nature, which he could not reveal without the permission of Mr. Apex or his heirs. Well, Eddie Apex’s heir is his wife.”
“That sounds weak,” I said.
“It is, but he’s seventy-six years old and God knows what his heart would stand. So what do you want us to do, take him downtown and punch him around a bit until he talks? Besides, I don’t think he would tell us anything that you haven’t already told us.”
“Well, good luck to you,” I said.
Deskins nodded. “I wonder where it really is?”
“What, the hundred thousand pounds that the Nitrys paid to ransom that fake sword?”
“Oh, she’s got that. Tick-Tock’s blond bint that you told us about has got that money all right.”
“No trace of her though?”
“We don’t even know who she is. Tick-Tock changed his women the way you’d change your sheets. All we know is that she’s blond and young and wears too much green eye shadow. There can’t be more than a million of them like that in London.”
Deskins looked down at his drink and then up at me. “Which one do you think it was?”
“Which one what?”
“Which sword do you think it was that you chucked into the river, the real one?”
I grinned at him. “It’s got you, hasn’t it? You’re hooked. You really think there were three swords, the real one and two fakes.”
“You got it from the lips of a dying man, St. Ives.”
“I got it from the lips of a man who’d forgotten how to tell the truth. Eddie Apex wasn’t comfortable with the truth and I think he wanted to die comfortably and one last con would help.”