Shaw gave it up for the time being and looked out of the cab’s windows at the snow-muted streets, at the skyscrapers of Manhattan, whose tops were lost in the whirling snowflakes. The traffic slushed along. The day was dark with the weather and lights shone from offices and stores, the latter bright and attractive with their various offerings. People got out of expensive automobiles and were hustled into the lighted doorways of those superheated buildings. A fine time, Shaw thought, to hold a nuclear test — with the weather like this. He had raised the timing question with Pullman, as a matter of fact, just before leaving Washington, and Pullman had answered edgily that in any case the date still hadn’t been announced but that timing was relatively unimportant while time as a commodity was quite the reverse — also that an actual attack was just as likely to come at a time of adverse weather conditions as at any other, and Canaveral wasn’t in the northern states anyhow, so what the hell? They weren’t testing Warmaster as some kind of spectacular circus turn, but as a weapon of war that might preserve the peace — right? Shaw had simply shrugged and said, ‘Yes, right,’ but he had thought to himself wryly, that since the thing seemed shrouded in this mysterious fear, it was fortunate that it was still a long time to Christmas…
The cab alternately crawled and flew, making its spasmodic progress towards West 104th, coming into a tenement type of district. At last it made it, turned to the left, and stopped about half-way along a rather dingy street.
The Shamrock Hotel was a crummy-looking building with faded brown paint peeling from its window-frames, and its stonework grimed with city smoke and a long streak of green slime where water had overflowed from a blocked gutter for what looked like the past decade. Shaw got out into a freezing temperature and a biting wind that whipped up the snow into crazy spirals, and paid off the cab. In the doorway of the Shamrock, at the top of a short flight of steps, he saw a sleazy doorman wearing a scuffed peaked cap but still, despite his inelegance, looking out of place in this district. This man waited surlily as Shaw carried his grip up.
When Shaw reached the top, the man moved to open the door. Pointedly Shaw said, ‘Thank you very much.’
‘You’re welcome.’ The man had no interest in guests at all, had probably given up expecting tips years ago unless it was a case of a man and a woman together who preferred not to be seen that way. The door shut. The doorman stayed where he was, moodily contemplating the snow. Shaw walked on towards Reception. Reception was no more than a bored young man in a kind of box-office that had a small aperture in the glass for guests to speak through — physically short guests. The clerk was picking his nose as Shaw approached and bent to speak through this uncomfortably placed aperture. The whole place depressed Shaw beyond words; he tried unsuccessfully to square it with all he had heard about Rosemary Houston. He doubted if Rosemary had really fallen for the man Fleck. So far he knew nothing against Fleck, but the man was a German, and in the circumstances of Rosemary’s violent death the whole thing was just a shade too neat. Much more likely, if there was anything behind this at all, she had been on to something involving Fleck and intended to find out a little more even if it meant going to bed with him. Maybe she had been that keen on her work. Or maybe Fleck had set out to seduce her and to charm secrets out of her. And if either of those two alternatives proved to be right, it would mean that Fleck could undoubtedly provide Shaw with at least some of the answers — as he had hoped.
Meanwhile the clerk was looking at Shaw with his mouth hanging open. Shaw said, ‘I have a room booked. The name’s Shaw.’
The clerk consulted a list. ‘Shaw, huh…’
‘That’s right.’
‘Yeah. Got it here. Number 38.’ The clerk reached behind himself and detached a key from a hook on a board. Keeping the key in his hand he glanced up. ‘Expecting anyone to join you?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Shaw said, wondering if the covert production of a ten-dollar bill would guarantee a woman in this joint.
The clerk made no offers but pushed forward a book. ‘Sign in, please.’ Shaw signed and pushed the book back. The man said, ‘Thanks,’ and handed him the key of his apartment. Shaw carried his grip into the elevator and pressed a button. The elevator grumbled its way upward. When he reached his room Shaw was surprised to find it moderately comfortable and clean. The bed was a double one. Probably they all were, in the Shamrock.
He put down his grip, took off his jacket, and had a wash in the hand-basin. He looked critically at his face in the mirror and told himself not to look so anxious. He was in New York, he was in the Shamrock. So far, so good… but the next thing was Rudolf Fleck and Patricia O’Malley and certainly that wasn’t going to be quite so simple; he’d already found a number of Flecks, too many of them with an R among the initials, in the telephone directory, and the Fleck he wanted might not live in New York City anyway. And he hadn’t got all the time in the world…
The nosey man had also moved up from Washington, and once again he was tailing Shaw, which was a tactical error on somebody’s part, for the nosey man wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Shaw spotted him looking into a shop window when he came out of the Shamrock Hotel after a passable lunch, and something clicked. He remembered that cheery face with its bulbous strawberry nose and placed it accurately.
It might be just a coincidence, of course. Yet it was just a trifle suspicious that a man who had been outside that Washington apartment shortly before it had been done over so thoroughly — however harmless and unremarkable his presence had appeared at the time — should be right here in New York concurrently with Shaw, and hanging around outside the very hotel where Shaw had been booked in. Shaw didn’t like that — and for another reason beside the obvious one: How had Nosey, if he was a tail, got the word that Shaw had been New-York-bound — and how, indeed, had he been so well briefed that he’d even got the name of Shaw’s hotel? So far as Shaw could see it meant only one thing, and that was a leak in the Pentagon, in fact a leak from someone on Pullman’s own staff. Or perhaps the girl had been made to talk and then they’d assumed he would come to the Shamrock sooner or later. In any case he was pretty sure he hadn’t been tailed from the airport, and Nosey certainly hadn’t been on his plane up from Washington. That meant he had arrived independently and in full possession of the facts.…
No one would have guessed that Shaw had rumbled the tail; he simply walked right ahead into Broadway and turned downtown, huddled into the collar of a thick greatcoat. He wasn’t going anywhere special in any case; he had just had an idea that, before he started asking discreet questions in the Shamrock, it might be useful to him if he acquainted himself with his immediate neighbourhood as soon as possible in case he had to do any fast moving. It was a sound maxim that an agent should know the topographical details of any area in which he might have to operate.
Now, however, he had a more definite objective, and this was to let Nosey incriminate himself and prove what he was hanging around for. Nosey might turn out to be a good short cut if he was made to talk.