West read the letter and glanced at its envelope. Then he read the letter again, this time out loud, and slowly.
“ ‘Some friends of mine think you ought to know about a certain contract because it is in England in a place called Flaxborrow and these friends think it is wrong and bad for our image if American boys make hits in other countries never mind what the contract has done even if he is a crosser. They think it is a wheel this contract, a British wheel of course, but no name. Also they do not know for sure who is making the hit. I am not a nut this is straight.’ ”
After consideration, West said:
“This letter” (he turned it about in his hand) “is hand-printed out on a poor quality paper of a kind that might be used in merchandising. Its origin would be hellishly difficult to trace. So would the ballpoint that was used. What you are really asking, though, sergeant, is whether I think it is genuine. Am I right? Genuine, that is, in the sense of being a piece of information on which we ought to act. Right? A piece of bona fide information, in other words.”
“Right.”
“In that case, let us prepare a balance sheet of probability. Don’t you think that is the most sensible course, sergeant?”
“I go off duty at five, sir.”
“A logical approach is always the quickest in the end. And let me prove that by telling you that I have already reached a decision by just that process.”
Bast tried to look impressed and was saddened to find how tired he felt.
West took off his square, gold-rimmed glasses and with the tip of his little finger flicked from one lens a flake of dandruff.
“This letter, friend, is not only melodramatic. It is packed with the sort of slightly out-of-date gangsterisms that anybody could pick up from a Mafia thriller. Note the patriotic ketchup. The writer is unquestionably a criminal. I pronounce it a genuine tip-off.”
“So I can leave it with you.” Bast had half turned towards the door. He was scowling. At this end of the day, West’s humorous portentousness gave him a pain.
“Sure. I’ll have headquarters notify the British police.”
Against his better judgment, Bast hesitated. “This Flaxborrow...”
“Borough,” West corrected. He was scrutinising the envelope. “Flaxborough. Like Scottsboro.” Then he said: “Hey, this is the first one of these I’ve seen. Isn’t it hideous?”
Bast looked. Hideous? He formed the unfamiliar word mutely upon an inward breath and tried to fit it to what West was indicating. But how in hell could a stamp be hideous? A little scrap of paper. Who cared, anyway? Or did West mean he considered the representation of the President hideous?
“Saw one yesterday,” Bast said. “Maybe it’s not much like him, at that.”
“I am talking,” said West patiently, “about the design of the stamp as a whole. Commemorative issues are supposed to have dignity. They are historical documents. That”—he pointed again at the purple-hued picture of the President with Capitol Hill in the background—“looks more like a for-sale sticker.”
But Bast had noticed something else. He pointed to the hand-printed address. “He’s a joker, this guy, ‘The Occupier’. That’s us. And just ‘Nearest Precinct House’. I’ve never heard of cops being called occupiers before.”
“Nicer than some of the names we get.”
The sergeant gave a short, humourless laugh and again started to leave, but West’s voice beat him to the door.
“You were going to ask me what I know about this little English town.”
“English town?”
“Flaxborough.”
“Hell, no. I just wondered what’s so special about it that we suddenly start exporting killers there.”
“I stayed there once.”
“No!” Bast searched the mild eyes behind the big square lenses but they showed only dreamy benevolence.
“The ambassador went up there to unveil a memorial at what had been a US Air Force base outside the town,” West said. “We stayed the night as guests of the Lord Mayor. Or maybe he’s just a mayor, I forget. We fed damn well, that I do remember. The Lord Mayor was in the meat business. A little town with the oldest jumble of housetops you ever saw and a pub and a church every twenty yards, and girls like flowers and very, very slow-moving old men with brick-coloured faces who looked as if they’d have to be hit by lightning before they’d die. And everywhere bloody bicycles.”
He paused, lost in contemplation of bicycling girls, buoyant-breasted in the thin summer dresses of 1958.
“They were nice people.” He shook his head, as if surprised at himself, and reached for the phone. “Get me Rawlings, of Interpol.”
“Let’s hope one of those nice people don’t get knocked off,” said Bast, leaving. “The species is nearly extinct.”
Chapter Eleven
Captain West, of New York City, was not the only policeman to be ready to speak well of the citizens of Flaxborough (England). Their own chief constable, Mr Harcourt Chubb, would have echoed his sentiments even to the choice of adjective, for “nice” was a word that he used rather in the manner of a talisman, a device to ward off trouble.
“Nice dog,” Mr Chubb would say to any dog he happened to pat. It was really a plea not to be bitten.
On entering an untried restaurant, he would remark to his wife: “Looks a nice place, dear,” this being his way of trying to beat the fearsome odds stacked against them by the catering trade. The same abiding sanguinity, or, as it might be said, discounting of experience, sustained the chief constable in referring to the Flaxbrovians in general as “a nice lot” or even “a perfectly nice bunch”. If the truth, as enshrined in the annual crime statistics, did not altogether accord with Mr Chubb’s estimate, that was not his fault. The forty or fifty indictable offences that went on record each year showed merely that in every barrel there would be found a rotten apple. And it was the chief constable’s belief that apple rot was not endemic but an imported infection.
Thus, when he received an urgent message from London that an American gangster might be on his way to Flaxborough in order to commit a crime, Mr Chubb saw no reason to view it sceptically.
“As I understand these matters,” he explained to Inspector Purbright, “the Americans—who are nice enough people, by and large—have allowed themselves to be imposed upon by a well organised criminal element. The Syndicate—would that be the term they use?”
“It would,” confirmed Purbright, anxious not to waste time by questioning a possibly outdated expression.
“It seems to be a very professional affair, in a nasty way, of course, and the consequence is that crime over there has become big business.”
Purbright forbore from pointing out that this proposition was palindromic. He said instead: “So I believe, sir.”