“I am giving it for Torben, not you. I do not want gratitude. It would be inconvenient for both of us if you tried to repay it. Our dealings end at Helsing0r.”
“All right, but even so ‘
“I telephoned a contact of mine in the police while you were downstairs. There will be no record of our conversation. He told me a body was found on Knippelsbro last night. It has been identified as Torben Hammelgaard, former associate professor of theoretical physics at the Niels Bohr Institute.”
“It didn’t take them long, did it?”
“They knew the name before they picked him up. An anonymous telephone call. Did you make that call?”
“Of course not.”
“His killers, then. Making life difficult for us. You’re lucky we got to you before the police. Are you always so lucky?”
“Not so you’d notice.”
“Why don’t you ask me how Torben died?”
“Do the police know?”
“No. They will make an autopsy later today. But why haven’t you asked me? It’s the obvious question.”
Harry shrugged. “Because I guessed the answer, I suppose. There have been other deaths. They looked like accidents or suicides or … anything but what they were. There’s something behind this I don’t understand. Torben thought he understood, but he was wrong. He was sure nobody could be following us, me or him. But somebody must have been.”
“Nobody was watching the hotel. We left clean. A second car followed us to make sure. There was nothing. Ikke no get Take my guarantee.” Jensen smiled cautiously. This is my profession. To carry valuable cargoes. I know what I’m talking about.”
“Have you been sheltering Torben?”
“I fixed him a place to stay. So shelter, yes. But you mean protection. He never asked for that.” Jensen refilled his cup from a coffee-pot on the stove and poured Harry a cup as well, then topped both up with brandy. “You think it would have been no good, don’t you? You think they’re too clever for us. Always a step in front.”
They have been so far.”
“Nobody will guess Sweden. Nobody will follow you onto the ferry. I do my work well. Extra well for a friend.”
“I expect you’re right,” said Harry doubtfully, swallowing some of the laced coffee. “And I’m sorry about Torben, really I am.”
“Ja, ja.” Jensen pleaded for reticence with a faint motion of his hand. “Finish your coffee. Then we go. While it’s still night. Second rule of travel. Always leave in the dark. That way, nobody will even know you’ve gone.” He looked round at the blank black window. “If you’re lucky.”
“Right.” Harry gulped down some more coffee. The brandy was making him feel better already. “Well, that should be no problem. You said I was a lucky man.”
“Ja,” said Jensen reflectively. “But luck is like gasoline. When you run out, you’re always a long way from a filling station.”
TWENTY-TWO
They’ll be waiting by the phone,” Jensen had said. If so, they had to be deaf to ignore its ringing for so long. Harry stood at one of a row of pay phones in the arrivals hall at JFK Airport, listening with ever mounting anxiety to the distant electronic bleat in his ear, trying desperately not to think what he would do if there never was an answer. He did not know who he was ringing. Strictly speaking, he did not know why he was ringing. Exhausted by a day and a half of trains, boats and planes, of changing time zones and money and just about everything except his clothes, unshaven, hung over and more thoroughly drained than a Hebridean roof in winter, he needed someone to pick up that phone, whoever they were, wherever it was.
He was late, of course. That might be the explanation. Half an hour stacked in the sky, waiting for a landing slot. Another half hour collecting his luggage, then emptying it for the satisfaction of a customs officer who clearly thought Norman Page had a smuggler’s face. Plus a full forty minutes in the immigration queue clutching his coffee-stained visa waiver form. All in all, it had not been a New World arrival to eclipse Oscar Wilde’s.
He had been worn down by something more insidious than mischievous circumstances, however. What had really stretched his nerves was an uncertainty he knew he would have to live with for a little longer yet. Were they on to him? Had they followed him in spite of all Jensen’s precautions? Logic and observation said no. But something more primitive than either, something that raised the hairs on the back of his neck whenever he surrendered to it, sang its own sinister song.
“Yuh?”
The voice interrupted his thoughts with such gruff abruptness that Harry was for a moment struck dumb, unable to recall how he had planned to introduce himself.
“Who the hell is that?”
“I… er … This is Harry Page. Christ, sorry, I mean Barnett.”
“You’re sure now?”
“Yes. My name’s Harry Barnett. It’s just It doesn’t matter.”
“It might matter to me.”
“I think you’ve been expecting to hear from me.”
“Yuh. Most of the afternoon. Why wait till I’m in the John?”
“Sorry. Delayed.”
“Then I’d better not delay you any longer. Got a question first, though. Torben said you’d be able to answer it. You and nobody else. When you first met Torben, a few years back, who was with him?”
Harry sighed. “David Yenning. And a girl called Hanne.”
“On the button. Seems you’re Barnett even if you’re not sure yourself.”
“Yes, I am. And you are?”
“A cautious guy, Harry. Listen good. Where are you now?”
The airport.”
“OK. We’ll meet in one hour at the United Nations Building. You know it?”
“Not really. I ‘
“You got an hour to find your way there. Four o’clock. Don’t be late, ‘cos I won’t linger. Wait out front by the flags. You’re from Denmark, right? So wait under the Danish flag. That way there can’t be any mistake.”
“Hold on. I don’t The burr of a disconnected line stopped Harry in mid-protest. He had never been to New York, let alone the UN Building, before. And he would not have been able to identify the Danish flag if it was wrapped round a Viking. But he supposed an hour was sufficient to cope with both disabilities. There might even be time
He looked at the telephone clutched in his hand and wondered, as he often had since leaving Copenhagen, if he should try to call Iris. He would have liked to assure himself there had been no deterioration in David’s condition. Maybe, just maybe, there had even been an improvement. Beyond that, he was aware that sooner or later Iris would learn Hammelgaard was dead and assume Harry’s attempt to contact him had failed. What she would make then of his failure to contact her he could not guess. As to the possibility that the Danish police might suspect him of Hammel-gaard’s murder and request Scotland Yard’s help in tracking him down, his mind reeled helplessly before the welter of consequences. Should he alert Mrs. Tandy as well as Iris?
No was of course the answer. “Don’t contact your friends or relatives,” Jensen had advised him. “Don’t give yourself away. Run silent; run safe.” Good advice, but hard to follow. Yet follow it he would. He dropped the telephone back into its cradle, grabbed his bag and headed off across the concourse, scanning the overhead displays as he went for directions to the taxi rank.
TWENTY-THREE
A cloudless sky was beginning to lose its colour and the still air such warmth as it may have had as Harry trudged along the line of flags hanging listlessly at their poles outside the United Nations Headquarters. Up the steps on the esplanade, in front of the General Assembly Building, some tourists were posing in front of a sculpture of a gun with a knotted barrel while others gaped across the East River at a giant Pepsi-Cola sign on the opposite shore. But Harry had neither aesthetics nor commerce on his mind. The man on the gate had told him which end the alphabetical sequence of flags began at, but as to which was Denmark’s, he was on his own.
Time was shor
t, his taxi-driver having turned out to know New York’s road system scarcely better than he knew the English language. They had jolted in from the airport along a succession of drab expressways before bridging the East River and becoming snarled in north-creeping traffic between towering skyscrapers and trash-strewn sidewalks. The stuff of Harry’s New York imaginings, fed by fifty years of Hollywood indoctrination, had blended with the bustling blaring reality of Manhattan on a winter’s afternoon: camera-slung tourists threading through the hotdog-vendors and the shoe shine boys, the lost souls and the lavish spirits, while steam rose like dragon’s breath from the manhole covers and sunlight twinkled on the soaring cliffs of steel and glass.
At length, excessive length it seemed to Harry, they had reached their destination. Leaving Harry no spare moment in which to le at his surroundings. A clue was what he needed. And it duly arrived in the form of the Canadian maple leaf. That he certainly recognized. It should, he thought, be a simple matter to count down through the letter C to D, if he could only remember how many countries started with a C. Chile, of course. And China. Colombia, whence came Mrs. Tandy’s favourite coffee. Cuba, where Barry Chipchase had always claimed the world’s finest cigars were rolled on the world’s finest thighs. But hold on. Was Cuba actually a member of the UN? If not
That’s the Ivory Coast.”
“What?” Harry whirled round from his skyward squint to find a large gum-chewing face glaring at him through the open passenger window of a rust-pocked old Cadillac.
“You Harry Barnett?”
“Yes.”
“Get in.” He pushed the door open and fell back into the driving seat, leaving Harry little option but to obey. Toss it in the back,” he said, nodding at Harry’s holdall. Then he took off with such a tyre-squealing lurch that Harry nearly dislocated his shoulder while hoisting the bag over his seat. “Woodrow Hackensack,” he announced, raising one ham-like palm from the steering-wheel in greeting. “Sorry about the flag stunt. Bit of a specialty of mine. Denmark’s red with a white cross. Ivory Coast couldn’t be more different if it tried.”
“I must have gone straight past Denmark,” said Harry, craning over his shoulder for a glimpse of the flags only to find they were already out of sight.
“Nah. You were still in the Cs. Ivory Coast’s Francophone. Goes officially by its French name. Cote d’lvoire. Get it?”
“Ah, yes.” Hackensack was a paunchy shambles of a man, dressed in ill-assorted outsize sports clothes, rounded off with a baseball cap that even at maximum adjustment could do no more than perch on his crew-cut crown like a howdah on an elephant. His appearance somehow made his sarcasm harder to bear. “Was that pantomime really necessary?” complained Harry.
“I’ve never done pantomime. All my work’s been on the cabaret circuit.”
“Really? As a comedian, presumably.”
“No. Conjuring, illusionism, escapology. The whole bag. Plus feats of memory. Some involving instant identification of obscure national flags.” He grinned. “I like to keep my hand in.”
“You’re a magician?”
“Was. Been retired a few years now. Couldn’t take the pace.” Though pace on the streets of New York seemed to be a different matter. They were dodging and weaving between lanes to an accompaniment of protesting horns. But if Hackensack heard them, he did not seem to care. Torben tells me you’re David’s old man.”
“Yes, I am.” Harry knew he ought to break the news of Hammelgaard’s death straightaway, but Hackensack’s white-knuckle driving style seemed one good reason to delay doing so. “How did you and David come to be acquainted?”
“Pure chance. A lucky chance for me. David pulled me out of a hole I dug myself into, deep as they come, a couple of years back. He and Donna showed me some real kindness. That’s why I’m trying to help them out best I can. And why you’ve got me as your chauffeur.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Upstate.”
“Where upstate?”
“Albany. About a hundred and forty miles. I’m putting you on the train there tonight to Chicago. Donna’s orders. You could have caught the train in New York, but we’re going to take an after-dark cruise round the back roads to shake off anybody who might be following you.”
“Nobody’s following me.”
Hackensack studied the rear-view mirror for a moment. “I’d say you’re right, but Donna doesn’t take any chances.”
“She’s in Chicago?”
“Will be tomorrow.”
“Is that where they’re hiding?”
“Could be. I wouldn’t know. I’m just a mailbox. I pass messages, same as you. And, incidentally, I don’t want to know what your message is. Keep it to yourself. It must be important as hell to run these risks for, though.”
“What makes you think we’re running any risks?”
“Torben sounded twitchy as a Broadway debutante on the phone, so risks I reckon there have to be.”
“There’s something I have to explain,” said Harry as they plunged into the dark mouth of an underpass. Several long black seconds elapsed before he added: “Torben’s dead.” Silence followed again, broken at intervals by a double thwack of the tyres as they crossed the seams in the road surface. “He was killed the night before last.”
“Jesus,” murmured Hackensack, raising one hand from the wheel to cross himself. “I never thought they’d get him.”
“You knew him well?”
“No, but How’d it happen?”
“I’m honestly not sure.”
“Like before, then.”
“How much do you know about this?”
“Hardly a thing. When I heard about David, I assumed it was just an accident. You must have too. You’ve got my sympathy, Harry, you really do. David’s got a fine mind. How’s his mother bearing up?”
Clearly Hackensack had no idea how ambiguous Harry’s paternal status was. “She’s coping.”
“It can’t be easy.”
“When did you learn it wasn’t an accident?” They emerged from the tunnel and climbed back into the Manhattan twilight.
“When Donna came to me six weeks back and told me about Kersey and the Frenchman. She asked me to act as a line of communication between her and Torben. Between all of them and the outside world, come to that. Nobody at Globescope was aware she and David had made friends with me. That’s why I was the ideal choice, I guess. I’m just an over-the-hill old magic-man nobody gives a damn about. Cover doesn’t come any better than my kind of obscurity.”
“How did they meet you?”
“Long story, Harry. But since we’ve got a long drive ahead of us…” Hackensack gave the rear-view mirror a hard stare and nodded to himself in evident satisfaction. “You may as well hear it. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it from David. But maybe that just goes to show what you probably already know.”
“Which is?”
That you’ve got a son to be proud of.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Woodrow Hackensack apparently considered an autobiographical preamble essential to his account. A couple of attempts to urge him on having failed, Harry resigned himself to learning more than he really wanted to about the former illusionist’s childhood in a southern Vermont village where his parents ran the general store; his frustrated intellectual yearnings; his adolescent rebellions; his friendship with a cantankerous old vaudevillian who taught him some conjuring and card tricks; his short-lived career as an insurance clerk in Boston; his tentative forays into show business; his love affair with the daughter of a Polish acrobat; their marriage and peripatetic life together; his precarious prime as “Mr. Nemo, Man of Magic’; his wife’s death in a trapeze accident; and his subsequent decline into drink-sodden drug-sapped un employ-ability.
They had been on the road more than an hour before Hackensack mentioned a name Harry recognized. By then they had left New York far behind, the sun had set and their promised back-road tour had begun: a serpentine cruise along pot-holed rou
tes between nowhere much and nowhere else. Hackensack’s story had rambled with it into the limbo of his recent past: a roach-ridden apartment on New York’s Lower East Side; subway rides to Coney Island with his wife’s ghost; drugged days and drunken nights lived on the crumbling brink of vagrancy; a twilit spiral of self-pity and self-destruction. And then, one evening, in a Bowery bar, he picked up a discarded newspaper and read about the latest Off-Broadway sensation: English magician Adam Slade.
“I can’t recall whether it was his grinning photograph or his horse shit claims about higher dimensions that made me angry. Maybe it was both. Or maybe it was his lack of respect for fellow professionals. Magicians deal in tricks and illusions. They should admit that. They should claim credit for it. But Slade wants the dime and the doughnut. He wants people to admire his talents and believe he’s got inherited powers. That’s probably what got my goat. So, I tidied myself up and went along to one of his Friday night shows, at a theatre in Greenwich Village, just to see for myself. And d’you know what I saw? A lot of gullible people. And a few clever tricks.”
“I saw Slade in London recently,” put in Harry. “He was impressive.”
“So was I in my day. Without resorting to hyper-dimensional hog swill We’re magicians, not messiahs. We’re entitled to applause, not worship. We don’t need it. We’re too good to need it. Or we should be.”
“You don’t think Slade is?”
“Matter of fact, I do. The guy’s a natural. Slick and dexterous. But that only makes it worse. He adds these higher powers onto his act as a come-on, as a way of saying he’s better than the rest of us without having to prove it.”
“Doesn’t the act prove it?”
Hackensack grunted dismissively. The act proves nothing. Hoops round table legs and those other stunts? Jesus, I could do them in my sleep.” He paused. “Well, maybe not. But I could do them, with enough practice. I don’t exactly know how he does them. But there’ll be a way. There always is. With time and patience, I could work it out.”
That’s easy to say.”
“Don’t believe me, Harry? Healthily sceptical, are you? Good. Tell me this, then. When you saw Slade in London, did he do any mind-reading?”
Out of the Sun Page 13
