The other considered a moment. “I guess we’ll all look pretty stupid. It’s not just the private dick that’ll sound like a fruitcake. Me most of all. I was the one who went in after him.”
“You think anyone will believe this stuff?”
“Do you, Ed? You’ve known me a long time. You think I’m cracking up?”
The detective shook his head. “Nah. If you say you saw something, then you saw it. But you’re certain? It was late, Hal. You were tired.
The light wasn’t good, that’s what they’ll say. It’s not the sort of thing people want to hear. You know?”
“Yeah, sure. Let me think about it.”
“Okay, but we don’t have much time. They’ll expect us back at the precinct pretty soon. One way or the other, we have to decide on our story.”
Again he flipped the tape recording.
As the dawn dragged itself skywards, they mentally went over the tape’s contents one last time.
Transcript of the interview recorded by Detective Sergeant Ed Mullins, NYPD. October 14th, 2002. In attendance, police sergeant Hal Vanner.
The voice is that of Mr. N. Stone, a private investigator.
In my line of business, you can’t afford to be picky. Some days, some months, you have to take the rough, as there’s no smooth. Putting it bluntly, these days there’s not a lot of smooth. Smooth is something I get from a whisky bottle. Okay, I draw the line at some stuff: I don’t do divorce cases, snooping on some sucker who’s screwing around, or some wife who’s looking for a new life away from her loaded husband. You can keep that kind of grime. Otherwise I’ll take on the more obscure stuff and brother, I’ve seen some bizarre things. There may be a Hell waiting in the afterlife, but I’ve been there already, more times than I care to mention.
I know a lot of the guys in this town call me Nick Nightmare, usually when I’m out of earshot. That’s about all you need to know about me. You’ll have a file on me. There’s always a file, right? Nick Stone, Private Eye, Public Fist. Tackles the cases other dicks won’t touch, kind of like that beer ad.
So anyway, you want to know about this case. Yeah, well, it’s pretty weird, I’ll give you that.
It started with a phone call. I was workin’ late the night before last, catchin’ up on some paperwork. I’d had a lean week, so I shut myself away to get on with it. I don’t have a secretary. They’d only go nuts tryin’ to work for me. Anyway, this phone call was from some guy who sounded like he was talkin’ through a hole in his throat. Maybe he was, given the kind of crap he was mixed up in.
Wanted me to find a man. Here in New York. Wouldn’t be easy, said the guy. The man he was after was an illegal immigrant, gone to ground. They had a few clues about where he might be, a trail.
I asked for some details, but gravel-voice didn’t want to stay on the phone. Maybe he thought my wire was tapped. It’s not, I promise you. I like my privacy and I have some good contacts for that kind of wire work.
The guy said, was I free now. This was 2:00 a.m. But it suited me. Especially when he told me how much he would pay. You don’t need to know that. So I said, come on over.
Less than an hour later they were knockin’ on the office door. Three of them. I know it’s October, but these guys were done up like they were headin’ for the Russian Front. I thought maybe they had at least three trench coats on, they were so god-dammed broad. And the slouched hats were classics. What little I saw of their faces were white. Not pale, but white. I’m not sayin’ they were zombies, but they did not look healthy. And they never showed their hands. Just kept them at their sides, deep down in their pockets. Shooters, I guessed. Why be different from everyone else in the neighborhood?
Only one of them spoke: the batteries on the other two must have run down. I guess he was the guy I’d spoken with on the phone. His voice was a gargle, foreign, maybe Eastern bloc, like he was full of runny cold. I know the light in my office was pretty poor, but his eyes were colourless. No emotion. Flat. Very cold fish.
He didn’t give me much to go on. The guy they were after, last calling himself Stefan Zeitsheim, had stepped off a boat out of Odessa that had arrived here in New York a few days ago. He had no papers, but had given everyone the slip. He was being hunted. So my job was to find him first.
I may not have the quickest brain this side of the Atlantic, but I figured out pretty sharply that if these handsome guys were good buddies of Mr. Zeitsheim, he would have made a beeline for them once he’d slipped the ship. But obviously he was looking forward to meeting them with as much enthusiasm as a vampire would greet a priest. So he’d gone to ground. Lookin’ at them, I’d say Zeitsheim had his head screwed on.
“We don’t want to meet him,” gurgled my new employer. For the one and only time he took his hand out of his coat. Thick black glove, so no surprise there. He also had a thin black file, which he dropped on my desk. Taped to the front of it was a key. I recognized it: safety deposit box, Grand Central Station.
“Your pay. Half of it. The rest when the job is completed, Mr. Stone.” He shoved his hand back in his pocket, as if it had already been exposed to the air too long.
“So what do I do when I find him? Buy him lunch? Show him around the Big Apple?”
No hint of a smile. “It’s all in the file, Mr. Stone. You kill him.”
That was it, no frills. Just simply, you kill him.
“He is persona non grata. Find him quickly. No one need know.”
Yeah, except for whoever the hell else was hunting him. Like the law, or more likely the KGB, or whatever they call themselves these days.
“You have a suitable weapon?” growled the overcoat.
“If you mean a gun, yeah. Or is this a knife job? Or maybe a glass of something very strong?”
“We leave the means to you, Mr. Stone. But once you have killed him, and this is vital, you must incinerate him.”
There was what the poet once called a pregnant pause. Incinerate him?
“You would rather not accept this commission?”
Oh yeah, with these three monoliths looming over me, like I was going to refuse? I said not.
“Everything you need is in the file. We will contact you again, one week from now, at the same time. Be alone. Provided you have completed the task, the rest of the money will be in the same deposit box.”
* * *
I decided not to waste any time. My initial stop was Grand Central. The first helping of money was in the box all right. I could have moved out of town and set up on the West Coast right there and then, but I had this feeling that the three goons wouldn’t take too kindly to it. I read through the file. I have it safely tucked away. You guys are welcome to it when you want it. It’s not the snappiest read since Spillane. Just a few details about Stefan Zeitsheim, coupla mug shots so’s I’d know him. Looked like he’d spent a month or two in a jail, fed on bread and water once a week.
I grabbed a few hours’ sleep then decided to check out the docks. It was nearly 6:00 a.m. when I got there. Zeitsheim was supposed to have come in on one of the huge rust buckets, with some tongue-twisting Russian name. Easy enough to find the tub, but it would have been a needle-in-a-haystack job finding out from someone where he took off from. Yet already the quayside was crawling with unaccustomed life. Your boys in blue were out in force—maybe you know which ones?
I saw someone I knew over in the shadows of a warehouse. Never mind who: just a bum who tips me off from time to time. In a job like mine, you need eyes and ears everywhere. These guys are my lifeblood.
I eased over to him and slipped him a smoke. “So what’s the story?”
“Hi, Nick. Some guy left that big tub last night and walked straight into the next world. Cut himself up. No kiddin’. Real messy. Seems a long way to come to end it all.”