Cynthia

by Howard Fast

  “Dear Mr. Krim!” my hostess cried, leaning toward me as if she were about to kiss me but then remembering that we had not met before. “Dear Mr. Krim, how good of you to come!”

  She had quite a breath. She was no vodka drinker; the load she had consumed surrounded her, and suddenly I was filled with respect for the fact that she walked quite steadily.

  “Please come inside, Mr. Krim,” she said with careful dignity. “Do you like Mallietti’s work? He’s called the Purple Queen. But I do think that is rather nasty, don’t you? I mean a man’s sex life should have absolutely no bearing upon his talents as an interior decorator—and don’t you think Mallietti is the most precious in talent we have? I mean, don’t you?”

  “I am sure,” I agreed.

  The butler opened the door to a living room and then closed it behind us. The living room was about thirty by thirty, and the walls were covered with picture-paper scenes of French gardens done in various shades of lavender. Most of the furniture was white, and the floor was sheltered by an Aubusson carpet that probably cost no more than a hundred shares of IBM.

  Mrs. Brandon steered herself across the room to an end table, which was decorated by a beautiful Chinese porcelain horse that was unhappily split in half. It was a sort of purple.

  “It’s not so much that the damn thing is broken,” she said. “But it’s the only one of its color. It really can’t be repaired. And there’s no other like it in the whole world. It’s real T’ang, you know—sixth-century.”

  She handed the two pieces of the horse to me, and I looked at them carefully and with great interest.

  “Not sixth-century,” I said. “T’ang was 618 to 906, as nearly as they can date it, but this would be ninth-century, I think. It’s the Bactrian horse, which the Mongols rode on their raids into China, and then, lost, strayed, stolen, captured, it bred as a Chinese animal. The very fine one at the Met here has the same red paint on the saddle.”

  “How wonderful!” She clapped her hands and applauded me. “You are clever, Mr. Krim. We must have a drink to celebrate. You know, Mallietti charged me eleven thousand dollars for it—and it’s worth ten times that, don’t you agree?”

  “It would be if it were real, Mrs. Brandon,” I told her. “There are maybe ten of these things in the whole world, and they are all glazed blue. This lavender thing is a fake and maybe not the best fake in the world. I think I could put my finger on the kiln in Italy where it was glazed and fired. It’s good work, and it’s worth sixty dollars in Bloomingdale’s—but that’s all.”

  She froze and then she unfroze. “How dare you, you crumby little bastard!” she exploded. “How dare you come in here and talk to me like that! I ought to toss you the hell out of here!” All through this, her expression of wan daintiness shrouded in purple never changed. The anger was of voice not of attitude, and then the voice dropped and she said, “The hell with it, Buster. Let’s have a drink.” She took the two pieces of the horse and dropped them into a waste basket. “What’s yours? Do business with queens and you get what you deserve. Well, Jesus, don’t just stand there, Buster—what do you want to drink?”

  “I don’t drink during working hours,” I apologized.

  “Well, wouldn’t you know it! How do you want to celebrate the ten grand you just saved the company? Do you mind if I have just a touch of gin and soda. I got gas—chronic. I know it sounds like hell for a delicate lady in lavender to be belching all over the place, but there it is. You don’t mind if I have one? Gas is the lousiest affliction a lady can have.”

  “Please.”

  She poured fluid into a glass, half-gin, half-seltzer, toasted me and wanted to know how come I knew so much about T’ang horses.

  “You get a rounded knowledge in the insurance business, but I’m not here about T’ang horses, Mrs. Brandon. If you have a ten-thousand dollar specification on that piece of pottery, my company will pay it without a whimper—much less send a man over here to check it out. If you want me to, I’ll put in a memo to the fact that it broke in two. I don’t have to mention that it’s a fake because they couldn’t care less in the Brandon account.”

  “You mean E.C. is good for that kind of business?”

  “He certainly is, Mrs. Brandon.”

  “Just between you and me, Buster, how much is he worth?”

  “Anybody’s guess—but the way they talk, he must have more money than Fort Knox. Don’t you know?”

  “Me? Buster, day by day, I know less about E.C. Brandon.”

  “Shall I put in for the horse?”

  “For the ten grand? What for, Buster? What can I do with ten grand, drink it? That is, if I ever got my hands on it. If E.C. ever found out that I had flimflammed him on ten thousand dollars, he would take me apart. He dreams about money the way a hooker dreams about virginity. No—nothing is a rescue mission. You are looking at a faded lavender flower of forty-two—ah, nuts to that. I am forty-seven, Buster. I made it. I married a rich man. And if you are not here for the filly, what brings you?”

  “I thought maybe you’d bring it up.”

  “Bring what up?”

  “Cynthia.”

  “Cynthia? What about Cynthia, bless her heart?”

  “I hear she walked out.”

  She came up to me and kissed me lightly on the cheek Except for the physical blow of alcoholic vapors, it was a sort of nice gesture, but I am hardly ever objective on the question of women. I like them, regardless of shape, height and age.

  “Bless your heart, Buster,” she said, “if you were E.C.’s daughter, wouldn’t you walk out?”

  “It’s hard for me to think of myself as E.C.’s daughter, Mrs. Brandon, but maybe under the circumstances I would.”

  “Call me Alice. We are practically getting drunk together, and I begin to see through my lovely inebriated haze. E.C. has buzzed you on the kidnapping. You know, E.C. is a nut on the question of kidnapping. But what has that got to do with an insurance company?”

  “He carries kidnapping insurance,” I told her.

  “No.”

  “It’s a fact. And he also carries a nice bundle of life insurance on the girl.”

  “Oh? And who is the beneficiary?”

  “He is. He also owns the policies.”

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “he is a worse son of a bitch than I had imagined.”

  “Well, I don’t know. He likes money.”

  “Who doesn’t? But you don’t think Cynthia has been kidnapped, Buster, do you?”

  “Do you?”

  “No. Cynthia got a dose too much of E.C. and walked out. She should have done that long ago. Only Cynthia has principles. I would have robbed him blind.”

  “You like Cynthia?”

  “We got a common enemy.”

  “And where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The enemy,” I said.

  “In his office. Presently, if the mood takes him, he returns here, looks at me with withering contempt—and so starts another lovely evening.”

  The door opened as she began to speak, and presently we both turned, and there he was, regarding us both with withering contempt. He wasn’t bad-looking for his age and he kept in condition. He had a square jaw, a look of considered toughness, and if he had dyed his gray hair, he would have looked a good deal like Ronald Reagan. He had pale blue eyes which he fixed on me, demanding to know who I was and what I was doing there. I explained that my name was Harvey Krim—which never seems to impress anyone—and that I worked for the company that wrote his insurance.

  “Then your business is with me and not with my wife,” he said flatly.

  “The last of the great gentlemen,” Alice Brandon sighed. “Go with him, Buster. And drop in again—when we lose a diamond or an oil well or something.”

  “That will be quite enough, Alice,” Brandon said.

  Then she shut up. The ice in his voice was evidently a warning, and she took heed. I guessed that without the liquor, she was very afraid of h
im.

  In his study, floor to ceiling with leatherbound books that no one ever read and two chopped-out areas for ancestor portraits—Kennedy Galleries at a very good price—Brandon motioned for me to sit down. He then endeared himself to me by saying, “They told me they were putting their best man onto this. You don’t look like anyone’s best man. What did you say your name was?”

  “Harvey Krim,” I answered sweetly.

  “Well, what do you propose to do about it?”

  “About what?”

  “Finding my daughter.”

  “I am told you believe that she’s been kidnapped. Why?”

  “She’s been missing since Monday. Today is Thursday.”

  “Why kidnapped? Couldn’t she walk out?”

  “She tried that once. I told her that if it happened again, if twenty-four hours passed without her letting me know her exact whereabouts, I would cut her off without a penny.”

  “I see. She’s the daughter of your former wife?”

  “Exactly—which is neither here nor there.”

  “But if she were kidnapped—the note, the demand for money—the routine of kidnapping.”

  “They’re biding their time.”

  “Still—”

  “God damn it, Krim—I tell you she’s been kidnapped! Do you know what it would do to my position right now if I had to come up with three, four million in cash?”

  “But you are insured—”

  “Don’t be a horse’s ass, Krim. This is going to be a large operation—”

  “If she has been kidnapped—”

  And so it went. He had her kidnapped and the ransom fixed at anywhere between five and ten million, and he could not be shaken from that position. I managed to get a few other facts about her, but it was hard to get him off the subject of the ransom.

  Finally, I said to him, “Mr. Brandon, suppose I were to accept the proposition that your daughter has been kidnapped. Suppose you were asked to pay five million in ransom. Would you?”

  He thought about it for a while, and then he said, “Smedly thought you would want some pictures.” He handed me a little pile of pictures from his desk. One was in color, and it showed a head of red hair that must have come from her mother. She was a tall, long-legged, rangy kid, and while it doesn’t exactly shine out of a picture, she seemed to have a mind of her own.

  “Would you pay the ransom?” I asked again.

  “What do you earn a week, Mr. Krim?” he asked, unable to keep an edge of contempt from his voice.

  “I take home about two-sixty.”

  “Then you can hardly have any real relationship to a sum like five million dollars. To you, it’s words. To me, it is reality.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “In the market, Mr. Krim, you are not worth five million. I could buy a hundred better than you for five million. Why should it be any different with my daughter.”

  “Why indeed?” I could not help smiling a bit. “Still, it would be bad public relations, wouldn’t it.”

  “It would. And before you grin at me like that again, Mr. Krim, I would ask you not only to remember that I have power in terms that money can buy—but that physically, I could break you in two.”

  “I will remember that,” I said seriously. “No one wants to be broken in two, do they?”

  “No, Mr. Krim.”

  “Meanwhile, it enlarges my knowledge to know that you are dangerous, Mr. Brandon. Shall I tell you something about myself?”

  “Please do, Mr. Krim. I shall be pleasantly surprised to learn that you too are dangerous.”

  “No, I am not dangerous, Mr. Brandon. Not at all. But I am smart, which can be more worrisome.”

  “If you are smart, Mr. Krim, find my daughter.”

  “I may at that.” I smiled and told him quickly, “I am not grinning, Mr. Brandon, so don’t get ready to use your muscles. I am merely smiling with quiet satisfaction.” Then I turned around and walked out of the room, and don’t think it didn’t take guts to do that. I half-expected him to slug me from behind, but he let me pass peacefully. It’s funny how many men dream of themselves as big, persuasive punchers, and it’s a little obscene, too. Only I hoped that I hadn’t damaged the company’s standing. After Smedly had been so nice to me, I would not want to cut down his score of fat premium payments.

  The butler let me out. His name, according to the research sheet supplied to me by the company, was Jonas Biddle, but I am sure that was only a butler name and that he began life as Stanislaus Brunsky or something of the sort. Before he closed the door on me, I asked him, “Just how big a puncher is the master, old chap? Does he really haul off and take a shot at people who displease him? And how often?”

  “Information has a price,” he said softly.

  “Go bite your hangnails,” I told him. “You’ve been reading too much Mike Hammer.”

  “I don’t read. I watch TV.”

  “Drop dead,” I told him in a friendly manner. He did not take umbrage at hangnails but he knew all about dropping dead, and he slammed the door in my face. I took the elevator twenty-nine stories down and crossed the lobby to the dull afternoon haze, and there was a squad car from the nineteenth Precinct blocking the entrance and the big, youthful, handsome tweed-clad form of Sergeant Kelly awaiting me.

  “Where do you buy your suits now?” I asked him.

  “Brooks.”

  “You still look like a cop.”

  “Like hell I do. Harvey, tell me something—why do you always try to make it worse for yourself?”

  “I don’t try. It just comes naturally.”

  “Well, the Lieutenant wants to see you. You can ride over in the car or take a taxi or walk.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to see the Lieutenant.”

  “Harvey, you want to see him.”

  “OK, I want to see him. I’ll walk.”

  It had begun to snow, and it had been that way all day, snowing, pausing, snowing. March is a lousy month. Kelly walked with me and grumbled that he had always tried to like me.

  “Everyone tries to like Harvey Krim,” I agreed. “How did you know I was in there?”

  “Where?”

  “At 626 Park.”

  “A little bird told us.”

  “A lousy ratfink little bird of a doorman called Homer Clapp.”

  “Why be so bitter, Harvey?” Kelly said. “He’s supposed to tell us. We haven’t enough men to stake out the place. You know that.”

  “I pay him and he tells you.”

  Nor was our conversation any more enlightening as we walked to the precinct. The nineteenth Precinct is on 67th Street, between Lexington and Third, an ancient, unwashed, red brick building that stands in the heart of the posh Silk Stocking district of Manhattan. Lieutenant Rothschild occupies a small room on the second floor of this building, where he sits behind a beat-up desk and sips milk for his ulcers and nurses his already substantial mistrust of the human species.

  As I entered, he said to me unpleasantly, “Sit down, Harvey.” And when I had placed myself gingerly upon a rickety, dusty chair, he continued, “You know, Harvey, a cop is a lot of things, day in and day out. He wants to be loved; we all want to be loved; but who loves him? You know what’s worse than not being loved, Harvey?”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t guess, Harvey. Worse than not being loved is to be made a patsy.”

  “I can understand that, Lieutenant,” I agreed. “No one wants to be made a patsy.”

  “Good. I am glad you are so understanding, Harvey. We go out to catch crooks and put them in jail. You fence their merchandise and get the charges dropped. You make fools out of us every day of the week. You know what you do to my ulcers?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Like hell you are. What were you doing at 626 Park?”

  “What is this, the Gestapo? Do I have to account for my movements to you?”

  “No. Don’t account for them. I’ll make it so hot
for you, you’ll walk on blisters every step of the way.”

  “Lieutenant,” I said gently, warmly, “why can’t we be friends?”

  “Because I don’t want to be your friend, Harvey. I want to know what you were doing at 626.”

  “Seeing a friend?”

  “No, Harvey. E.C. Brandon is no one’s friend.”

  “That’s the way it is with a cop. He’s never going to admit that he knows anything. He’s got to beat it out of you.”

  “Why were you seeing E.C. Brandon, Harvey?”

  “He insures with the company.”

  “Harvey—listen to me.” His eyes narrowed to thin slits, and his ulcers took over. “Now listen—you crap around with me on this one and I’ll make it so hard for you—Goddamn you, Harvey, what in hell do you think the nineteenth Precinct is? We got more money sitting under our nose than practically all the rest of the world put together. That is no lark, Harvey. Now listen to me—where is the girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “Damn you. Cynthia Brandon. And never mind how I know that she’s missing. Maybe cops are stupid—but not as stupid as you give them credit for being, Harvey. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “All right. I am going to believe you—for the next ten minutes. Now what are you doing at Brandon’s?”

  “I told you. He insures with us.”

  “You told me nothing. I get more out of some crummy doorman than from you.” Rothschild scowled and gulped his glass of milk. “So he insures with you. What’s missing? What’s been stolen? Why are you on the case?”