by Mitch Silver
Mustache was already at the top of the stairs by the time Amy had made it to the bottom. Her panicked look back showed her his wig had ridden back from his forehead in the commotion. She knew him! But from where?
“Dr. Greenberg! Don’t make this any harder on yourself!”
That didn’t sound good. He’d catch her if she ran even ten more yards. But the 5:19 to Croton-Harmon was filling up right in front of her. She raced ahead in an all-out sprint and got on.
People were taking off their coats and opening their books and papers as Amy hurtled past and, a couple of times, into them. “Sorry.” “Pardon.” There was a bathroom at the end of the car. Amy got to it, closed the door behind her, and slid the latch shut.
The smell. Part disinfectant, part the thing the disinfectant was disinfecting. Just one more reason for Amy to hold her breath as she heard feet come running up to where she was. He seemed to wait there. Deciding something? Amy’s hands were so slippery with perspiration from running, the computer case she hadn’t dared put down on the dirty floor now slipped from her grasp and landed with a soft thud. Had he heard? And then the heavy door at the end of the railroad car made its characteristic open-and-shut sound. He was searching the rest of the train. Amy wanted to give him a minute, enough time to get a couple of cars ahead of her before she made a U-turn back to the stairs and safety.
And then she knew where she’d seen the limo driver before. Hurriedly she rummaged in her purse for her day planner and flipped through the pages to the sketches she’d made of the people at the Dublin bank. With her pencil she quickly added a mustache to the man’s face. It was Macken, all right. The Irish bank manager.
This would have been a perfect time to whip out her cell phone and call Scott for help. Or 911 for that matter. If she’d brought it with her. She thought about using the pay phone on the train, just a few feet away. But no, it would take too long to punch in her credit card number. Then an announcement on the train’s PA system made up her mind for her. “This is the five-nineteen express for Croton-Harmon. Watch the closing doors.”
Amy flew out of the bathroom, getting to the doors at the same time as three or four late arrivals who were trying to get on. Push came to shove and Amy broke free, almost bowling over a woman. “Well, I never!” the woman whined to Amy’s back.
Her plan would have worked were it not for the conductor’s announcement. The problem was, it seemed to have had the same galvanizing effect on Mustache/Macken, who sliced through people boarding the train two cars ahead. He came flying toward her.
She had no chance, but she went for it anyway. Back along the platform, then up the steps. No Trespassing? Not a chance. She pushed on the door and it gave way. There was a narrow platform on the other side, and then more steps down. She knew where to cross the old tracks and their third rails without electrocuting herself. Macken was so close, she could hear his ragged breathing. Or was that hers?
She could see the green vestibule door and the lock with the five buttons. Could she will herself onto the elevator and safety?
Chapter 52
No, she couldn’t. Amy got to the door all right, but in her haste to push the five numbered buttons on the combination lock her sweaty fingers slipped and she hit the wrong code. The door wouldn’t budge. And then came the sharp pain from a five-inch barrel of metal poking into her ribs.
“Turn around…slowly.” The man gasped for breath. The two of them fought for air as if they’d just run a marathon. They were standing in a little cul-de-sac hidden from even the view of the maintenance people. They couldn’t be seen. Or heard.
She could see the underside of the man’s toupee and the double-sided tape that had held it on. The man’s mustache was ridiculous, clinging to a single spot on his upper lip at a forty-five-degree angle to his mouth.
“Mr. Macken!” Calling a man holding a gun on you “Mr.” was dumb, but she’d forgotten his given name.
“If you’d have just gotten into the car.” He reached up and took the wig off and threw it on the ground. “We could have talked. I could have explained my position…our position.”
Amy tried to stay calm, but the gray barrel of the gun aimed at her heart looked enormous. Maybe she could stall. “Position on what?”
The question made Macken testy. Only then did he remember the mustache, and he swatted it off his face. “Why, the Fleming material, of course.” He took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead with his nongun hand. “A point-by-point indictment of English treachery. And by an Englishman for once.”
The academic in her said, “Fleming was Scottish.” That was another dumb thing to say to a sweaty guy holding a gun.
Through the heavy breathing and the perspiration, Macken was still trying to explain. “The point is, he wasn’t Irish. So it isn’t the old complaint from the old complainers. I’d love to see the face on that pompous old prince when we tell him what we’ve got.”
Who? Prince Charles? Conversing at gunpoint wasn’t helping Amy’s little gray cells. “But I thought—I thought this was a German thing. Wasn’t Kaltenbrunner a part of your—”
“How do you know about Jürgen? What happened at your hotel? Why didn’t he get off the plane?” Macken had been dabbing at what remained of the spirit gum on his upper lip, and the hankie made a little adhesive sound every time he pulled it away. Now he stopped and made Amy tell him about Sheridan and the CIA man’s using Kaltenbrunner’s name. “Your government are in league with them, you know. They call it ‘the special relationship.’ ” He actually spat on the ground. Disgusting. “We could have covered all this in the car. The English are the daemons of the world.” Amy was sure he’d said “daemons.” “Everywhere they go, everything they touch. Africa…look at the Afrikaaners. Egypt. Iraq, Palestine…India, the Pacific. What they did to the aborigines in Australia. You Americans forget you fought two wars just to get away from them. This is bigger than just a bunch of angry micks.” Macken sought her eyes with his. “Jürgen Kaltenbrunner was a soldier in the fight. His father starved to death in an English concentration camp.”
Amy’s body was drained by the fear, but her mind seemed to be working off some auxiliary power source. “English concentration camps? C’mon.”
Macken was rummaging through the pockets of his jacket with his left hand as he kept the gun aimed at her with his right. “You’re a professor, you’re supposed to deal in the truth. Look it up. The Isle of Man. Only, they called it an internment camp.” He found whatever he had been looking for in his inside breast pocket. It was a photograph. He shoved it in Amy’s face. “Here. Look.”
Macken was so agitated he had trouble holding the picture steady. Even so, Amy could tell it was of one of the documents from Fleming’s manuscript, the one of Hess’s dental records. Amy could clearly see the yellow hotel bedspread in the background.
The man with the gun was all-out angry now. “You see? Churchill killed Rudolf Hess, just as he killed thousands of German POWs. The English…they…they make a desert and call it peace. Fleming found out about this; he must have explained all this.” Macken looked down and seemed to remember the gun. “Okay, talking’s over. I still need the papers, whether I get them from Jürgen or from you.”
Amy tightened her grip on her computer case. If only she’d gotten the door’s combination right. “Look, Mr. Macken.” His name came back to her. “Milo. I’ve read the whole thing. It’s not about English treachery. It’s treachery, all right, but one man’s—the Duke of Windsor. And he was helping the Germans, like your friend Jürgen’s father.”
Macken actually smiled. “A teacher, but so much to learn. You’re confusing a people with its leaders. The former English king was helping Hitler and selling out his people. We know something about that in Ireland. Now, the papers. Hand them over and no one gets hurt.”
What do they say about muggers? Give them what they want. It’s not worth getting killed over. And then, behind her assailant, the light flickered. As if the naked bulb l
ighting the cul-de-sac were about to blow. Or the shadow of a tall someone had noiselessly moved between the light and the wall for just an instant. Amy needed a little more time.
“How did you know what Fleming left me? How did you know to have the maid take the pictures?”
Macken rose to the bait. “In my father’s day it was common knowledge Fleming knew dangerous things. Rumor was, he’d written them down. And then, as it happened, with the bank failing, I asked Colleen O’Beirne to give me the list of the people I needed to contact about their boxes. The owners. By mistake, she also gave me the old list of purchasers, and Fleming’s name was on it. I had to know for sure what he had, so we set a few things in motion.”
“Colleen O’Beirne’s accident. Did you set that in motion?”
“Actually, that was your doing. Your clumsiness with the box, all those papers you dropped. Unfortunately, it’s all on videotape these days. Can’t have any loose ends.”
“Am I a loose end?” Amy’s heart was beating at an all-time high. To protect it, she instinctively held the computer case in front of her. “I promise I won’t say anything. You said no one would get hurt.”
Macken took his handkerchief and wrapped it around the muzzle of his Glock nine. “I lied. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s don’t trust anyone. Now, if you’ll just put the case on the floor. Wouldn’t want to bloody any of the—unnh!”
Chapter 53
Milo Macken fell forward so violently, the computer case was trapped between their bodies. In no more than five seconds, he really was a body: it was horrifying for Amy to learn just how fast a human being can die from a knife wound in exactly the right place.
Brian Devlin calmly picked up Macken’s gun from where it had fallen. Amy was nauseated at having a second dead man lying on top of her and simultaneously euphoric at being rescued from imminent death. She wanted to hug her rescuer, and would have if Macken hadn’t come between them. At the same time, her intuition told her—screamed at her, actually—that Brian Devlin wasn’t the cavalry, no matter how good his timing.
Ever the English gentleman, Devlin peeled Macken from Amy and deposited him on the ground in such a way that he wouldn’t be seen easily from the cul-de-sac and yet wouldn’t keep the green door with the lock on it from opening. He unwound the damp handkerchief and used it to clean the blood off the blade of his stiletto. Then he pocketed both the gun and the blade and stuffed the handkerchief into the dead man’s chauffeur’s jacket. Finally, he smiled that too-even smile of his. “That was a close thing.” Like balancing his tea on his newspaper, he’d done this before.
“Thank you.” It didn’t seem enough under the circumstances, but it was all she could manage.
The question going through Amy’s brain must have been visible in her eyes because he answered it. “I knew he was following you, so I followed him. Caught up to him at the light on Forty-second Street. The rest was police work.”
“Then you’re a policeman. I thought you were a publisher.”
“I’m whatever they tell me to be.”
“And who are they?”
“Now, Dr. Greenberg, that would be telling.”
He was charming. She had to give him that.
Chapter 54
It seemed only right to offer a drink to the man who had just saved her life. Several, if that’s what he wanted. Amy once more bent to the task of tapping in the code that would open the locked door. This time she made no mistakes. The space they stepped into was the hastily built 1980s vestibule, but in three strides they were back in the luxe days of the early twentieth century, before America entered the Great War.
Amy and Devlin found themselves standing in front of brass elevator doors, covered with scenes of old Yale in raised relief. They even had period cars of the New Haven Railroad running past the campus (in reality the tracks were about three miles away, but Amy had always chalked their being there to artistic license). The elevator doors were surrounded by marble, a step up from the material used in the rest of the station. A brass plate held a single button to call the elevator. The brasses and the marble and the elevator cab itself, when it came, had collected decades of tarnish and dust.
All those years of running around the Club as a child made the next part a snap. The elevator was programmed to make freight runs to only three floors: the bar on 2, the athletic courts on 5, and the rooftop restaurant on 22, the three places in the club where food and drink were delivered on a regular basis. Amy pressed the first button, and the old lift started up with a jerk.
A question had been nagging at her. “How did you get to New York ahead of me? I saw you waiting at the airport.”
Devlin looked at her, Macken’s gun bulging in his left-hand jacket pocket. Good thing the Yalies hadn’t gotten around to metal detectors. “The Royal Air Force. We’ve been watching Macken for some time—had a man right there in the bank.”
A man with bad teeth, Amy thought.
“He tipped us that something was going down and then went silent. That’s why we tried to keep you from getting on the plane. We found out Macken did a bunk to New York last night, and then we had to double-team his German friend this morning at Shannon. So I hopped a ride on a Harrier to catch up with this one. But the best-laid plans…” He let his words trail off as if to say, “all in a day’s work.”
Another little jolt told her they’d arrived at the second floor. They made their way along the short service corridor that had once been a regular entrance to the Club’s main bar. Nowadays, people hiked up the staircase from the lobby or took one of the row of modern elevators. Scott was sitting at a table, nursing a beer. Amy saw him and ran the rest of the way.
He wasn’t a big man, but he was tall, with long arms. And now they encircled her in a ring of protection. He tried to kiss her but all she wanted to do was to hold on tight and be held in return. It made a nice tableau for the other members, the early crowd that like to get their drinking in while the sun is still up. It hadn’t been this way before coeducation. For the older ones, hugging and kissing in the bar was probably a novelty.
It was a good minute before Amy looked up at Scott and realized he was eyeing the stranger in the nice but bulging suit.
“Oh, forgive me. Mr. Devlin, this is my fiancé, Scott Brown. Scott, this is Brian Devlin. I think he’s with Scotland Yard. He saved my life.”
Devlin held out a manicured hand. “Special Branch.” There were those pearly whites again.
Scott seemed no more taken with Mr. Devlin’s incisors than Amy had been, but that could have just been male territoriality. He got out the words “Nice to meet you” and gestured for them all to have a seat before motioning the waiter to come over. “A glass of red wine, Amy?”
She nodded.
“And for you, Mr. Devlin?”
“Brian.”
“All right, Brian, what’s your poison?”
“I think a Dewar’s and water, thank you very much.”
Scott pointed to his beer. “And another of the same for me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Brown.” When the waiter walked away, Scott leaned over and kissed Amy on the cheek. “So, Brian, you ‘saved’ Amy’s life. Did you give her a lift or something?”
Amy put a still-trembling hand in Scott’s. “Honey, he literally saved my life.”
Scott put down his glass of beer so abruptly it made a little bang on the wooden table. “What are you talking about? The man who died on the plane…?” He looked at Devlin. “Did you kill him? Was that why—”
She hesitated for a moment, unsure just where to begin. All that came out was, “No, no…that was another…”
Devlin leaned back in his chair. “Sorry, old man, but I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Miss…I mean Dr. Greenberg was followed from the airport. There was an attempted robbery, and I happened to intervene at the right time.”
Scott brought Amy’s hand up to his lips and kissed it gently. “I had no idea. A robber?”
&nbs
p; Amy nodded. Suddenly her mouth was dry as a desert, and her vocal cords had stopped working. The shock must be hitting her.
Their drinks came. Amy took an unladylike gulp of the cabernet. No one said anything for a surprisingly long stretch. Scott seemed to be taking it all in and Devlin had the look a man has after sex. When you knifed someone to death, was there an afterglow?
Scott broke the silence. “Shouldn’t you be calling someone?”
The question seemed to take Devlin by surprise. “Whom?”
“The cops. NYPD. You broke up a robbery, you’ve got his description, the guy’s probably still in the area.”
Devlin had no sense of urgency. “Oh, he’s still in the area all right. On the floor downstairs. Quite dead.”
Scott finally understood. “You—you really did save her life. I’m enormously grateful.” He thought for a moment. “But don’t you have to call the cops anyway? The morgue? Somebody?”
It was funny. For the last couple of minutes, Amy had had the feeling that Devlin was inching his chair closer to hers, that he was leaning in next to her. What was he doing, making a move on her, right in front of her fiancé? In the bar at the Yale Club?
“Oh, I’ll be making a call,” Devlin said. Amy had been concentrating on Scott, to see how he was handling the news of Macken’s death. So even though she shouldn’t have been surprised at the nearness of Devlin’s voice, it startled her. His mouth was right next to her ear. “But not to the morgue. That is, if you do exactly as I say. Do you see what’s in my right hand?”
Amy looked left and down and so did Scott. Under the table, the stiletto in Devlin’s right hand was half an inch from Amy’s kidney.
Then he did the strangest thing—swung his right leg over Amy’s left, obscenely immobilizing her. People at the other tables who couldn’t see their legs would think he was the fiancé, just sitting a little too close.
