Run Before the Wind

by Stuart Woods

  He made the bed, then stepped into his parlor/office, pulling the curtains that separated it from the bedroom. The large oak desk was neatly arranged, and the leather furniture was dusted; the cleaning lady had been in the day before. He opened the curtains and peered out. He could see South Kensington tube station just down the street. An occasional ring of the cash register could be heard from the wine shop downstairs.

  He was open for business promptly at nine, though the morning passed without a ring of the doorbell or the telephone. He checked in with his answering service; not much, some debt collections to do and an anxious husband wondering if his wife had been caught with the boyfriend yet. He would attend to those later in the day. He spent the morning reading a new paperback about making a killing in the stock market. He was conservative with most of what he had tucked away, but now and again he took a flyer. He hadn’t done badly.

  The letter arrived by messenger precisely at noon. Alfred Mac-Adam, who had permitted himself to be called “Blackie,” but not “Tar,” in his days on the force, was unaccustomed to receiving assignments in such a fashion, his clients preferring not to commit their problems to writing. Mind you, this client didn’t give away much. There were £120 sterling in twenty-pound notes, an airline ticket, and a brief note, typed, but not signed:

  “Sir, with apologies for the brief notice and awkward arrangements, I would like to discuss with you a matter that might require several days of your services. If you can make yourself available under the circumstances please come to the above address at 10.30 P.M. this evening for a meeting of perhaps 30 minutes duration. I enclose an air ticket, 100 pounds to be applied to a mutually agreed-upon fee, and 20 pounds for incidental expenses.”

  There was an address and flat number. No mention of what to do with the money and ticket if he should decide not to come. Whoever had sent the note had been pretty confident of his interest. He could simply pocket the money, cash in the ticket and be nearly £200 to the good; still, he was intrigued. Whoever could afford to send £120 to a stranger had more to put behind it.

  On the airplane he declined a drink, though, God knew, he could have used it. If this client were as important as he might be, booze on the breath would not be good. Then the stewardess came back with complimentary champagne, and he accepted. What the hell, it was New Year’s Eve after all. The client would probably have had a few himself. He had a second glass.

  Traffic was light, and he was early. He walked about for a few minutes, found a bar, and had a large whisky. At 10:29 he entered the building, took the lift to the top floor, and found the flat. He rang the bell; there was a delay, and he thought he heard voices before the door was opened by a short, swarthy, rather handsome man in evening clothes. Greek? Arab? Jew?

  “Good evening, Mr. MacAdam,” the man said blandly. He would have preferred to be called “inspector,” though the circumstances of his leaving the force might have cast doubt on his right to that rank. “Please come and sit down.” The accent, the intonation were upper-class English. The man did not offer to shake hands, and no drink was forthcoming. MacAdam glanced briefly about. A woman’s place, no doubt about it. There were photographs on the piano; he wished he were close enough to see them better. The door to the darkened bedroom was ajar. Somebody in there listening, probably.

  The man sat on the sofa and motioned MacAdam to an armchair. “I wish to engage your services for a period of, perhaps, five days.”

  MacAdam crossed his legs and smoothed the trousers of his tweed suit. “May I ask who brought me to your attention?”

  “Suffice it to say that you come well recommended, and that I am aware of the nature of your service with the London police.”

  “Just what services do you require, Mr…?”

  “I wish to know everything about a certain man. I can tell you his name, his nationality, and his most recent address in Greater London. I wish to know everything else you can find out about him in five days. I must ask you to accept or reject the assignment now, before going any further. If you reject the assignment, you may keep the funds advanced you and return to London. If you accept, I shall give you such information as I have about the man, and you may begin immediately. I shall require a report from you at noon on January fifth. The assignment will pay a hundred pounds a day, plus twenty pounds for expenses. You have been paid for one day; I shall pay you for another before you leave, and the remainder will be sent to you by messenger after you have made your report.”

  MacAdam shifted in his seat. “I don’t ordinarily accept assignments with so little information about the client.”

  “Then I shan’t keep you any longer,” the man said, rising.

  MacAdam motioned him to sit. “All right, all right,” he chuckled, “I’m just a bit curious, that’s all. Just one thing; will this require any action on my part that might be other than kosh … ah, cricket?”

  The man sat again. “You may not construe anything I may say to you as a proposal to break the law, Mr. MacAdam; however, I would not presume to tell you how to go about your work.”

  “Very well, I accept.”

  “Good.” The man handed him a buff envelope. “This contains what I know about the man. His name is Patrick Pearce; he is an Irish national; until recently, he was employed as an auditor for Avondale Enterprises, a registered company, with offices in London. A copy of his employment application is in the envelope, along with a photograph taken on the occasion of his joining the company some months ago. You are not to inquire of Avondale about the man; everything they know is in the envelope.”

  “Might I not speak to some of his co-workers?”

  “He apparently kept much to himself. No one at Avondale is to be contacted.”

  “Is there anything in particular you’d like to know about Pearce?”

  The man looked thoughtful for a moment. “He is Irish; I’d like to know if he has any … political … ah, associations; also, if he holds any great grudges—political or personal.”

  “You’d like me to interview him, then?”

  “Not unless you can conduct such a meeting without his being aware that he is being interviewed.”

  “I see.”

  “Good.” The man got to his feet.

  MacAdam rose, as well. “How may I contact you?”

  “You may not. I shall contact you at noon on the fifth. Please be in your office at that time.”

  “Right.” MacAdam did not attempt to shake hands again, having once been rebuffed. He had the distinct impression that his client disapproved of him either personally or socially. The man had eyed his tweed suit in a manner that did not indicate admiration; and it from a fellow who had once worked at one of Saville Row’s great tailors. He had kept the fellow out of the nick once, and now he got his clothes done for the cost of the material. MacAdam didn’t mind. The money was right. He wondered who the man was, though. Perhaps he might do some checking into that while checking into Pearce. He wondered who might have been in the bedroom listening.

  He went back to the bar and had another large whisky. Christ, these Frogs knew how to charge for it. He checked his airline ticket; there was just time to make his plane. The hell with it; one didn’t get to Paris every day and get paid for it. He telephoned the airline and rebooked for a flight the next morning, then walked to the Champs-Élysées, almost immediately found an acceptable whore, and spent the night with her in a hotel. On reaching Heathrow the following morning, he barely had cab fare home.

  31

  “YOU’VE BEEN IN TOUCH with Derek all along, haven’t you?” I tried not to make it sound like an accusation.

  She smiled slightly and sipped her beer. “This is a favorite place of mine. Wait’ll you taste the choucroute.”

  We were at Brasserie Lipp, in St. Germain des Prés, for lunch, at a prime table. A chauffeured Citroen waited for us at the curb. Paris with Jane was interesting. “Well, we did get the money on time; thanks for that. I just hope he doesn’t scare the pants off us a
gain next time.”

  “Derek is very reliable. He didn’t need reminding by me.”

  “Is that his place upstairs?”

  “It’s Nicky’s.”

  “It just looked like Derek, somehow.”

  “They have similar tastes; they’ve known each other since they were seven. They were at Eton together.”

  The choucroute arrived. I wouldn’t have ordered it if I had known it was going to be sauerkraut, but she was right; it was delicious, as were the sausages and ham piled on top. “That’s where Nicky got the accent, then. Was he born in England?”

  She shook her head, swinging a dangling bit of kraut across her chin. “Nicky was born in a tent in the desert. It was a very nice tent, mind you. Nicky is an actual prince of his country.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. His grandfather ruled mostly over camels and goats until the oil changed things in the late thirties.”

  “Is Nicky going to be king some day?”

  She shook her head again. “He has thirty-odd brothers. No chance. But he’s probably the most important of them, because of his business skills.”

  “He and Derek do a lot of business together, do they?”

  “If it weren’t for Nicky, Derek would probably be a successful stockbroker, nothing more. Nicky … ” She paused and put down her fork. “Almost no one knows this, Will.”

  I nodded. “Okay, sealed lips.” I couldn’t wait to pass this on to Mark and Annie, and to my parents.

  “Derek’s family were well-placed enough to send him to Eton; he went to Oxford on a scholarship. He had no money. His future in business would have been to work for somebody else. But Nicky—once his family understood how bright he was—had access to virtually unlimited capital. Derek was even brighter, and with Nicky behind him, there was no stopping him. Just out of Oxford they invested about fifty thousand pounds in some houses in Islington and Camden Town—just workmen’s houses, really. They fixed them up and resold them at a handsome profit, then repeated the process, reinvesting their profits in still more property.”

  “I’d heard something about winkling old ladies out of their homes.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way; they were paid good prices at a time when there was no market. Derek found cheap flats for them and they were resettled with a nice little nest egg. It was a good arrangement for everybody.”

  I wondered.

  “When Nicky’s family saw how astonishingly well they were doing, they made much larger amounts of capital available, and everybody was happy. Derek grew very wealthy very quickly, in a lot of different sorts of ventures, and Nicky was able to stay out of the limelight. That’s important to him. Few people are aware that he is the financial brain in his family. He lives the part of the playboy in Europe—and enjoys it immensely, by the way—and the family’s fortune grows. People think of him as nothing more than Derek’s sidekick, like those characters in your American westerns.”

  “So Nicky is Walter Brennan to Derek’s John Wayne.”

  “For purposes of appearances, yes. But each of them shields the other in important ways. Derek’s reputation preserves Nicky’s anonymity as a financier, and Nicky can protect Derek by acting for him, seeming to be only a flunky, when Derek is anxious to preserve his privacy.

  “Which is the dominant of the two?”

  “Neither. Oh, Derek often seems to be in charge, because that suits them both, but they are, in fact, the most perfectly equal partners I have ever known.” There was admiration, even sensuality in the way she said that.

  I regretted my next question almost before I asked it; it began as a joke, but before it was out of my mouth it was serious. “And which one of them do you fuck?” I asked, stuffing my last bite of choucroute into my mouth.

  She never missed a beat. “Both,” she said evenly, gazing calmly across the table at me. “Sometimes together.”

  The sauerkraut turned dry in my mouth. I chewed it valiantly, to keep from having to speak.

  “I particularly enjoy them together,” she said, motioning to a waiter for the bill.

  I swallowed hard, chasing the food with some beer. I was shocked to the bone.

  “Are you shocked?” she asked.

  “Certainly not,” I replied.

  I felt her hand on my thigh under the table. “Are you excited?”

  “Yes,” I replied, and I was astonished that it was the truth.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, signing the check and pushing the table away. I followed her out of the restaurant and to the car, where the chauffeur was waiting, braced, with the door opened. He handed her a fresh Paris Herald Tribune. In the car she handed me the newspaper, then turned, reached down and unzipped my fly. “Le Louvre, “ she said to the chauffeur.

  “Oui, Ma’amselle,” he replied, starting the engine.

  As her head came down to my lap, I flung up the newspaper to shield us from the chauffeur’s eyes in the rearview mirror. A headline at the bottom of the front page said, “INEPT BUT LUCKY GUNMEN ROB CORK BANK AND ARMORED CAR,” but my vision blurred before I could read the story.

  32

  I STUMBLED off the plane in Cork, a shell of my former self, after two almost sleepless days of gorging myself on French food and wine, while myself being gorged on by Jane Berkeley. I had not before, nor have I since known any woman so voracious in all her appetites, and I reached the cottage slaked, sated, drained and shattered. The telephone began ringing as I was unlocking the door. I got it on the fifth ring, not really caring if the caller hung up.

  “Hello.”

  “To whom am I speaking, please?” It was a man’s voice, one I did not recognize.

  “To whom do you wish to speak?” I replied, annoyed.

  “To either a Captain Pemberton-Robinson or a Mr. Lee, please.” The voice maintained a businesslike courtesy.

  “This is Will Lee.” There was something terribly official-sounding about the man’s voice; I wondered if he were a policeman.

  “Mr. Lee, my name is Primrose, Major Primrose. I believe you may be expecting my call.”

  I drew a blank; he guessed that from my silence.

  “I’ve been asked … is this a secure line?”

  I laughed aloud. “What?”

  “May we safely speak on this line?”

  “Well, sure, I guess so … I … “

  “This is the number of the cottage, is it not?”

  “Yes … look, I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Are you suggesting this phone might be tapped, or something?”

  “I’m merely being careful, Mr. Lee. I believe you had a discussion with a gentleman in Paris about a potential problem.”

  The penny finally dropped; this was Derek Thrasher’s security man. “Oh, yes, I’m sorry, I just didn’t make the connection.”

  “I’ve just rung to tell you that all is in place. You may scrub your other arrangements as of this time.”

  “Ah … oh, yes, I’ll tell Mark … Captain Pemberton-Robinson.”

  “Let me give you a number to call if you should experience any difficulties or need further assistance from us.” I jotted down the number. “Please call any time, day or night; leave a message for me, personally—Major Primrose—or if your problem is … of a pressing nature, just tell the man who answers that you have a Code Four situation, and what help you think you may need.”

  “Code Four.”

  “Right. Don’t telephone us from the place in question unless it’s absolutely necessary; that will be difficult to keep secure. The cottage line should be all right, but we’ll check it periodically to be certain.”

  “Yes, fine.” All this seemed a little preposterous to me, but it was also curiously comforting. I hung up; it was just noon, Mark would be at the yard and Annie was out someplace. I undressed and collapsed into my bed.

  Sometime later I woke, groggy and disoriented. I looked at my watch: nearly four o’clock. I got into the shower a
nd let the hot water run. Dried and dressed I still felt fuzzy around the edges; I picked up Mark’s sheepskin coat and walked out into the chilly January late afternoon. Perhaps a walk would clear my head.

  I trudged back along the road toward the main house, walking fast to get my circulation going. The tide had turned in the river and was going out fast, now. A cloud passed over the sun, and I noticed for the first time that it was looking like rain. This happened so often in Ireland that I hardly paid attention. I turned and started back for the cottage, hurrying to beat the weather. From a distance I heard the baying of hounds; the hunt was in full cry over the hill to my left. As I half-walked, half-ran toward the cottage the pack crested the hill, and I thought I saw the fox dart into the woods behind the cottage. The hunt was close behind. A hundred yards up the hill horses were clearing one of the many stone walls that crisscrossed the countryside that made Irish hunting so exciting and so dangerous. I could see Lord Coolmore in the lead, riding hell for leather. A few drops of rain fell, now. I hurried on.

  As I approached the cottage I could see that two of the hounds had broken from the pack and were worrying something on the foreshore of the river, just in front of the cottage. A sickly odor wrinkled my nose. Things were always washing up with the tide; once there had been a dead dog, another time, a sheep. I would have to push whatever it was back into the water or, so close to the cottage, it would stink up the place for hours until the tide came back in and floated it away. I didn’t relish the job, but I jumped down from the stone wall before the cottage and walked along the foreshore, shouting at the dogs, trying to run them off. Foxhounds are not the cute little beagles non-hunting people imagine them to be. They are big, brawny animals, half-wild. I threw a stone toward them. One backed off a few feet, then resumed tearing at the carcass. It was big; a sheep, or maybe even a small cow.

  I threw more stones, and this time both dogs reluctantly retreated a few yards and stood, waiting for a chance to get back at their disgusting meal. I avoided looking at the thing and cast about for a stick to move it with. The stench was awful, now. There was an old mop we had used on Toscana lying on the wall; I picked it up and started toward the carcass. Once I had it back in the water I didn’t think the hounds would swim after it. Approaching the water’s edge I finally had to look at it. I stopped, frozen in my tracks. It was not a sheep, not a cow. I was looking at the bloated, discolored corpse of a man, lying face down on the foreshore, its legs still in the water. The flesh of its back and an arm was torn where the dogs had been at it. Heavy raindrops splashed on its filthy skin.