Dead Letter Drop

by James, Peter

  ‘But that wasn’t the year for the Bruins.’

  ‘Sure to hell wasn’t. Remember when the Maple Leafs came down?’

  ‘Sure I remember –’ The proprietor broke off for a moment and turned to me. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do you have any English cigarettes?’

  ‘Sorry, what d’yer say?’

  ‘Do you have –’ I broke off in mid-sentence. There was a vivid flash outside, followed by a sharp, deep explosion not more than a hundred yards away and in the direction from which I’d come.

  ‘English, did yer say?’

  The proprietor hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Holy Jesus – you see that?’ The customer, a short fat man in a battered flying jacket, spun round. Even without his cab parked at the kerbside, one could have guessed his profession.

  ‘See what?’ said the proprietor.

  ‘Great damn flash!’ He ran out the door.

  ‘Got Players – you want tipped?’

  I gave him the money and followed the cabby out. There was a column of flame rising from the parking lot; cars were stopping in the road and people were sprinting towards the flames; there were smaller balls of fire all around, as if blown from a huge firework. It didn’t take me more than a second glance to know for sure that the car that was burning was mine.

  With people converging onto the parking lot it would have been difficult to have slipped away at this moment, so I moved over too, playing the part of an amazed onlooker; I didn’t have to act too hard to look amazed.

  ‘Stop a bus – they got fire extinguishers,’ said a voice.

  ‘Little late for that, I reckon,’ said another.

  ‘Anyone in there?’

  ‘I sure hope not.’

  ‘What the hell happened to that?’ There were voices everywhere.

  ‘Must have been a short in the wiring.’

  ‘Buick isn’t it? I had a Buick caught fire once. Damnedest car I ever had.’

  ‘That was no short in the wiring.’

  ‘Hell no – you hear the explosion?’

  The car was literally ripped to shreds; the doors had been blown away and the roof was torn from the front pillars and was swaying up and down on the rear pillars like a grotesque drawbridge. The flames roared, vividly illuminating the parking lot.

  The fire engines turned up and then the ambulances. Ambulance men rushed around and seemed distressed that there weren’t any bodies, mutilated or otherwise, to be found; they spread out and searched the vicinity, like some bizarre game of hunt-the-thimble.

  Eventually the crowd started to disperse, and I dispersed with them. I walked and kept on walking. I was feeling very sick indeed, at the thought of the near miss, at not having checked the car, at the knowledge that somehow, someone had followed me here to Boston and I hadn’t noticed. I walked into a bar and ordered a large bourbon, straight up.

  I leaned against the counter, took a gulp and lit one of my new cigarettes. The bomb must have been attached to the exhaust or part of the engine; with a heat trigger device. I thought hard. I had hired the car on one of my false licences, so no one would be able to trace it back to me. How the hell did anyone know I was in Boston? Nobody knew where I was going – except Sumpy; and no, it just wasn’t possible – there was no way she could be involved. And yet. . . nobody could have tailed me, so someone knew, unless by a million to one shot someone had spotted me in Boston. Possible, but unlikely, and then they wouldn’t have known my car, unless they’d actually seen me drive into the parking lot. No. It wasn’t possible; and yet, equally, it wasn’t Sumpy. But someone knew. In Belfast a mistake could have been made, a bomb put under the wrong car; but car bombs weren’t a feature of American life and the coincidence was just too much to swallow. No way.

  Someone was going to an awful lot of long lengths to get rid of me and I wanted to know who, because when I found out who, then I might be able to find out why, and when I had found out why, I figured I might be able to cure them of this unpleasant craving.

  Right now it was ten o’clock at night; I had no change of clothes and I was in an even stranger than usual city; I felt pretty damn uncomfortable. I left the bar and hailed a cab to the airport, and watched out the back window for a long way before I could be sure we weren’t being trailed and I could relax a little.

  The bourbon began to give me an agreeable lift, and at the airport I discovered that the last flight to La Guardia, New York, had been delayed due to engine trouble and there was a seat available.

  12

  As we taxied down the runway I churned over every detail I could remember about Sumpy, from the time I had first met her. I wondered whether that first encounter could have been a set-up: it was at a preview drinks party at the Frick Gallery, to which I had been invited by an old schoolfriend who was working for Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York.

  The exhibition was of erotic surrealism; in my view it was the art world’s way of having an exhibition of hardcore pornography and calling it respectable. Sumpy had felt much the same way, as we both found ourselves staring at the same set of very overgrown organs. ‘Jealousy will get you nowhere,’ she had said.

  Unless the numerical puzzle of my little plastic friend contained a king’s ransom in the form of a computer program for producing perfect original Cezannes, I couldn’t think of any reason Sumpy could have for wanting to get rid of me. Right now, as I wondered idly whether the plane would succeed in lifting off the ground and up into the sky, or whether it would plummet into the two-storey housing estates beyond, and as I wondered idly about my myriad of other problems, the one and only certainty I had was that Sumpy was for real.

  The seat belt and no smoking sign went off, and the air started filling with cigarette smoke. The plane was full of tired and fed-up-looking businessmen, a few of whom knew each other and held murmured conversations, but most were either reading or sleeping.

  I retraced yesterday’s procedure of renting the Buick, driving back to the Travelodge, collecting Sumpy and then dropping her off to meet Lynn, and then I realised: it was her goddam lipstick. I’d forgotten all about it. On the way to Lynn, Sumpy was putting on her lipstick; I’d swerved hard to avoid a cab driver who thought he was in a one-way street, and the lipstick had rolled onto the floor and vanished out of sight. She said not to bother after I’d groped under the seats for a couple of minutes, she didn’t care for the shade too much anyway.

  Whoever was after me had obviously figured that by bugging her, they’d keep a tab on me, since they figured I wouldn’t be too far away. It must have been a damn powerful bug for them to have tracked me to Boston, since sure as hell no one had tailed me from New York to there. The lipstick would have been the ideal hiding place for a bug, and the bug could have been planted in it at any time without her knowledge; equally, she could have known all about it, and dropped it deliberately. I didn’t know what to believe; in my heart of hearts I didn’t believe Sumpy could be involved, but at the same time I was sufficiently long in the tooth to know that in my game anything could be, and frequently was, possible.

  ‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’

  She was gorgeous. She could have got me anything in the world. It was clear from her disapproving stare that she didn’t feel the same way about me. I had no idea what I must have looked like, but I was pretty damn sure that it wasn’t too hot. I ordered another bourbon; she even took my money in advance.

  I lowered my tray, then pushed the button in the armrest to recline the seat-back. A white plastic label in front of me told me I was sitting in seat 8B. The empty seat next to me, by the window, was 8 A. The other side of the aisle, the seats were 8C and 8D. I was in a Boeing 737, one of the smaller of the passenger jets in general commercial use. I idled some minutes away working out the number of passengers the plane could seat. But my reckoning it was 114, plus a few jump-seats for the crew. And then the penny dropped.

  It dropped making about the same noise as a truck loaded with plate glass colliding with a nitrogly
cerine tanker, during which time the gorgeous iceberg had come and put my drink down and gone away again and I hadn’t even noticed. 14B. Airline seats? Rows of four seats; rows of six seats; rows of eight seats. Small airliners had four seats, like this and the Douglas DC9. Larger ones, like the DC8 and the Boeing 707 had six seats across – three and three – and the Jumbos – the Boeing 747, Tristar, DC10 and Airbus – had ten seats across – three by each window and four in the middle. It did fit but it still didn’t make any sense. I wanted to check further and summoned the iceberg back. ‘How many seats are there in this plane?’

  ‘One hundred and fifteen, sir.’ She was off again down the aisle before I could say anything else. I’d been one out. Not bad.

  The iceberg’s team-mate wasn’t so pretty, but at least she was human. She took my list of questions to the flight deck and came back with the answers. The numbers of seats on every commercial airliner in current service corresponded exactly with the information from my plastic chum.

  I took a walk down the aisle and found seat 14B. Its occupant looked like an ex-Harvard law student who was rapidly on his way to becoming a partner in a Manhattan firm. About 32, square tortoiseshell glasses, hair short and neat, good-looking with strong Jewish features, he was talking earnestly and seriously to an awkward-looking man on his left, either a colleague or a client. They were wading their way through a thick pile of photocopies, which, as I walked back past them again, I could see to be a real estate transaction. The man in 14B looked tough enough to take on any other lawyer, but not tough enough to have killed someone for the seat he was sitting in.

  I sat down again. What, I wanted to know, was the significance of airline seats? What, in particular, was significant about 14B? Why had 14B been missing from every set of seats? From Orchnev’s brief letter it was apparent that Fifeshire knew the answer.

  I began to feel very cold as a chill started to run up and down inside me. Maybe those people who had gone to such lengths to kill me in the last few days had also tried to stop Fifeshire from being able to tell; maybe Battanga, who had been killed in the car, hadn’t been the target at all; maybe the Mwoaban Government were right and there was no such thing as the Mwoaban Liberation Army, and it was Fifeshire and not Battanga who had been the target.

  I greatly envied Sherlock Holmes his Watson: the sheer comfort of having someone around with whom to talk things over, if only to get it off one’s chest and have a good night’s sleep, and be rested and have a clear mind for the morning. Holmes also had a clear brief before embarking on each case; I’d had virtually nothing.

  I wondered if already I had gone too far; perhaps after Orchnev’s suicide I should have reported the facts back to Scatliffe and then awaited his instructions. But, to be fair to myself, I hadn’t had much of a chance. I knew now that the sensible thing to do would be to get off this plane in New York and get on the first one out to London. But I had a feeling I had latched onto something important, something that maybe, just maybe, no one except me knew, and I had to follow it through alone. My main problem was going to be to remain alive.

  We touched down in La Guardia at half eleven, and I took a cab straight into Manhattan. I got out a couple of blocks from the Intercontinental building and made straight for the car park ramp. I didn’t want to go in the front entrance and have to sign the night book, so I settled in the shadows in the hope that someone would drive out soon. The offices operated around the clock, although on a thin shift at night.

  I had to wait longer than I thought, and it was a full two hours before the electrically operated door ground up, and a weary computer technician drove out; I ducked under the door just as it started closing again, and walked through the almost deserted parking lot to the service stairway. I climbed fourteen flights, running into no one, and emerged into the dark corridor of the personnel floor. There was little likelihood of anyone being around on this floor at this hour – it was now after 2.00 – but I didn’t turn any lights on to be on the safe side.

  I went into the file room, shut the door, and switched on the lamp that was built into my watch. I quickly found the file I was looking for. It had the name Charles Harrison neatly typed on a plastic strip on the top, and I started to read the story of his life, as told by the Personnel Officer of Intercontinental Plastics Corporation – not one of the world’s most sensational narrators.

  Charlie Harrison was born in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, educated there at secondary school, graduated to Princeton and gained a first in computer science. He went to IBM, stayed there five years, did a further two years with Honeywell, and joined Intercontinental as head of the computer department six years ago. For someone of his background it seemed odd to me that he should have joined a company like Intercontinental; his leaning was obviously computers, and whilst the company had two massive computers, it only used them for its day-to-day business requirements; it didn’t build and develop computers – Harrison’s speciality – only their plastic cabinets.

  I switched on the photocopier and waited while it warmed up. All was still quiet. I photocopied all Harrison’s records, switched the machine off, replaced the file, and left the building again via the car park, this time going out the fire escape door which opened from the inside.

  I walked a safe distance from the building and hailed a cab to the Statler Hilton, a suitably anonymous giant of a hotel, where I figured they were unlikely to be bothered by someone checking in at 3.00 in the morning without any luggage, because people did that all the time. The American Express card is a great substitute for a trunk load of baggage.

  13

  I slept through until 8.30, when I was awoken by a bellhop, bringing me a beautifully cleaned full-length Lurex evening gown. I asked him to try and exchange it for an electric razor, which was something I felt more in need of. But he’d given me an idea.

  After a hot bath, a long slow shave and a long slow breakfast, I began to feel a lot more human again.

  My first visit was to the Birth and Death register offices in The Health Department on Worth Street. It took me less time than I had expected to find out what I wanted.

  My second call was to an army surplus store, to buy some image intensifier field-glasses. My third call was to a medical supply outfit, to buy several pairs of surgical gloves. My fourth call was to Budget Rent-A-Car; I didn’t think that Avis would have been too pleased to see me again. I parked the car, a reasonably anonymous Ford, in a lot off 42nd Street, and walked around the Times Square area, until I found a suitable hairdressing salon.

  I emerged an hour and a half later, a peroxide blonde, with a back-combed bouffon hairdo. Less than a block away, I acquired an outfit to match: Chocolate leather trousers, a beige blouson jumper, and a full-length wolf overcoat; all courtesy of the British taxpayer. The first pass was made at me not 15 feet from the shop.

  I climbed back into the car with some difficulty, and practised my smile on the car park attendant; he replied with a stare that I interpreted to be a mixture of curiosity and pity. Still, I figured that if I was going to a gay paradise, sticking out like a sore thumb would probably be the best way to pass unnoticed. More important, I felt some sort of a disguise was necessary right now; I wouldn’t pass scrutiny from someone who knew me well, but it should put sufficient doubt in most people’s minds to give me the advantage of a few valuable seconds in a tight spot. I had a feeling there might be a reception committee waiting on Fire Island, and I wanted at least to go in with a sporting chance.

  I drove out of Manhattan over the 59th Street Bridge, to the sound of tyres whining on the gridding, the traffic above on the overhead section thundering like an express train. After the bridge there was a massive concrete viaduct to the left, then a seemingly endless sprawl of gas stations, tyre depots, hamburger drive-ins, diners, punctuated by the eternal barrage of cigarette hoardings booming out the message that it’s virile to smoke low tar, and each brand vying with the others as to which will kill you the slowest. I passed the massive b
lue-and-grey Queens Centre, then a battery of brownstone high-rises, and then the scenery gradually began to change, with massive areas of green appearing, and the towering blocks and sprawl of buildings becoming less frequent.

  Past Kennedy Airport the constructions suddenly dropped completely away and we were out in the open countryside of Long Island, with smart wooden crash-barriers and elegant stone bridges, with lush greenery and elegant white timbered houses tucked away behind the trees. I could smell the strong, exhilarating, reassuring cologne of fresh air, wet trees and money.

  Most of the snowfall of the night before last had missed this area, although there were a few patches of white here and there. I had that great feeling of relief one has when one leaves any city behind, and the quiet calm of this scenery against the towering, sprawling claws of New York made that feeling all the stronger.

  The man in the ticket office at the Fire Island ferry looked me up and down a dozen times, then shrugged; he stood in his fleecy parka, hands wrapped in thick sheepskin mitts which he clapped continuously together, cursing that the stove had run out of heating oil, and looking dubiously at the darkening sky. Yes, the ferry was running; how often it was running, he had no idea; it was off-season now, and the boat was not as regular as in summer time, he informed me. It had last departed over an hour ago, and to his knowledge it hadn’t sunk; when it would return was anybody’s guess. All he could do was to give me a reasonable degree of hope that, provided the weather did not worsen, I could expect to find myself on Fire Island within the next two to three hours, and he pointed out a white-painted shack, with two windows and a door, and the words Porky’s Clam Bar sticking out above its sloping tiled roof, where he suggested I wait.