Highbinders

by Ross Thomas

  I looked at my watch again. It was nearly two-thirty. “Well, I suppose I’d better go back and get to work.”

  “Doing what?” Uncle Norbert asked.

  “Waiting for the phone to ring.”

  “What if the thieves call before you’ve seen Styles?”

  “I’ll stall them until after I talk to him.”

  “We don’t want any slips,” Ned Nitry said.

  “There won’t be any.”

  “I’ll have Tom run you back,” Apex said.

  I shook my head. “I’d rather walk.” I rose. “By the way, Eddie. Where do you fit into the family business?”

  He smiled. “I’m the customers man. We go after much of our business, you know. My job is to make ever so discreet calls on the stately homes of England. You’d be surprised at how many fake old masters are hanging on those stately walls. Shocking, really.”

  “Eddie’s a wonderful salesman,” his wife said.

  “That’s because he probably believes in what he’s dealing in,” I said.

  “I deal in what I’ve always dealt in.”

  “Greed?” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Greed.”

  Chapter Nine

  BACK AT THE HILTON I made three phone calls, set up two appointments for later that afternoon, and then called down and asked room service to send up some hot chocolate.

  While I waited I went over to the window and gazed out at Hyde Park. It looked green and inviting in the May sunshine as did the rest of what I could see of the city from my tenth-story room and I wondered why I had never grown fond of London. I decided that it may have been the language. If they had spoken something incomprehensible such as Bulgarian, I probably would have found it to be all very quaint and charming. But because they spoke English, they should know better, and what would have been quaint in Sofia was only inconvenient in London.

  There was a knock at the door and when I opened it, it wasn’t the waiter with the chocolate, it was a man of about thirty-five dressed in a dark brown suit with blue shirt, striped tie, brown shoes, and cop written right across his thin, still face.

  “Mr. St. Ives?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “My name’s Deskins.”

  He was about to say something else, but I said, “Not Deskins of Scotland Yard?”

  Something started across his face, surprise perhaps, but he caught it and brought it back before it got too far. “It shows, does it?”

  “A little. Come in.”

  He came in and looked around the way that all cops look around in hotel rooms, as if they knew that they could get the goods on you if they could just take a peek under the bed. After that he seemed to make a mental estimate of how much the room cost and then glanced at me as if trying to decide whether I could afford it.

  “Would you like to see some identification?” he said.

  “No.”

  “I watch some of the Yank programs on the telly. ‘The FBI.’ I watch that sometimes. They’re always whipping out their identification.”

  “It’s a rule they have,” I said.

  There was another knock on the door. Deskins almost looked pleased. “Expecting someone?”

  “That’s right.” I opened the door and the waiter wheeled in the hot chocolate in a silver pot that looked as though it held enough for four. Next to it was a plate of those cute little sandwiches with all of the crust sliced off.

  “I didn’t order the sandwiches,” I said.

  “No charge, sir. Compliments of the house.”

  “Thank the house for me,” I said and signed the bill, adding enough tip to produce what sounded like a sincere thank you very much, sir, from the waiter.

  “Like a cup?” I said to Deskins.

  “Tea?”

  “Hot chocolate.”

  “Is it now? I haven’t had a cup of chocolate in years.”

  “Neither have I.”

  I poured two cups and handed him one. “Have a sandwich,” I said, prying up the bread on one to make sure it wasn’t tomato. It was ham. Deskins shrugged, picked up one, and took a bite of it. I hoped he had got the tomato. “Missed my lunch,” he said.

  I took another sandwich, sat down in a chair, and waited. Deskins also took another one and sat down on the bed.

  “Well, I’m glad to see you’re off the booze, Mr. St. Ives.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Strange thing, coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was just pulling up to the Magistrates’ Court this morning on Marylebone when you came out and hopped into that gray Rolls.”

  “That’s pretty strange, all right.”

  “So I said to myself, what would an American gentleman be doing coming out of Magistrates’ Court at ten in the morning and hopping into Eddie Apex’s Rolls?”

  “How’d you know I was an American gentleman?”

  “It shows.”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “So I went in and found out who you were and where you were staying and why you’d been in court. Drunk, you were, they said.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “You don’t look like a boozer.”

  “We come in all shapes.”

  “Well, I’m a bit interested in Eddie Apex and his friends. Have been for years. So I called a colleague of mine in New York.”

  “You must have a loose budget.”

  “Not really. He and I’ve worked together before. I had another matter to talk with him about anyway.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Lieutenant Dontano.”

  “Fraud squad.”

  “That’s right. You know him, don’t you?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “Lieutenant Dontano told me what line of work you’re in. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a go-between before—not a professional type who makes a living at it.”

  “There’re a few of us around. Not many, but a few. There’s been some talking of forming a union, but so far it’s only talk.”

  He looked at me narrowly with those cop blue eyes of his. “That must be a joke.”

  “A small one.”

  He sighed. “I like a good giggle as well as the next, but I’m not much on American humor. I watched that program of yours a time or two on the telly—‘Laugh-In,’ I think it’s called. I had to ask the wife why the people were laughing. She tried to explain it to me, but I still didn’t see anything to laugh at.”

  “I think it’s gone off the air.”

  “No great loss, I’d say.”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, Mr. St. Ives, I was wondering if you might tell me what brings you to London and into the company of Eddie Apex?”

  “Why don’t you ask Eddie?”

  “Eddie doesn’t talk much, especially to me.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can be too cooperative either.”

  “May I assume that you’re working?”

  “You can assume anything you want.”

  “You know Eddie rather well, don’t you?”

  “I once interviewed him for a paper that I worked for.”

  “Then you know what he is.”

  “I know what he was. He was a confidence man.”

  “Was?”

  “He retired.”

  “Did he now?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  Deskins finished his hot chocolate. “Well, I suppose you met the missus?”

  “Whose?”

  “Eddie’s.”

  “I met her.”

  “I see old Tom’s still driving for Eddie. Did you meet Jack?”

  “The butler?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw him.”

  “Still getting about, is he?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “I suppose old Jack would be long before your time, unless you made a study of such things,”

  “What things?” />
  “Famous thieves, for example. Know much about them?”

  “A little.”

  “Ever hear of a Gentleman Jack Brooks?”

  “You’re kidding. That old man?”

  Deskins nodded. “That’s him. Worked the Riviera before the first war. New York in the twenties. Mayfair any time. Probably the best jewel thief who ever lived. Slowed down when he got to be fifty. They caught him coming out of Brown’s in the summer of forty-three dressed up in a general’s uniform and his pockets stuffed with some Indian nabob’s jewel case. A fortune in diamonds, I’m told. They also tell me that old Jack certainly looked the part. Of a general, I mean.”

  “What happened?”

  “To Jack? He did ten straight without remission at Wormwood Scrubs. When he got out he went to work as a butler for the Nitry brothers. Have you met Eddie’s father-in-law, Ned Nitry?”

  “We met.”

  “And Uncle Bert?”

  I nodded.

  “They’re a pair,” he said. “Bent out of shape if ever I saw. Know how they got started?”

  “No.”

  “They damn near ran the black market in the East End during the war. Those two and a couple of American captains who supplied them. Sugar, tea, coffee, beef, stockings, chocolate—they had the lot. Sold it by the ton, I’m told, and made a fortune.”

  “They ever get caught?”

  “Never. They spread it around too thick to get caught, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think so,” I said. “What happened after the war?”

  “To the Nitrys? It went a treat after the war. For them, at least. They invested everything in West End property, moved to Knightsbridge, and even hired old Tom when he got out of the nick.”

  “Tom,” I said. “You mean Eddie’s chauffeur.”

  “Back in the late twenties and early thirties he was a race driver. Raced anything—bikes, cars, what have you. He raced in Europe mostly. Then in the late thirties, I’d have to say that old Tom fell among evil companions. A smash-and-grab gang working out of Soho. He was their driver, their wheelman, I think you’d call him, and probably the best ever.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got caught one night when a tire went. He spent the war and then some in the Scrubs, too. When he got out, who should hire old Tom Bates but Ned and Norbert Nitry.”

  “They sound like real humanitarians.”

  “Mmm,” Deskins said and rose from the bed. He looked at me with his frosty blue eyes that somehow went with that still, thin face and its tight mouth, worried frown, fox nose, and a chin that I could hang my hat on. “I’m not here to tell you who you should be keeping company with, Mr. St. Ives. But I don’t mind telling you that the Nitry brothers are a nasty lot.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  He reached into a pocket and handed me a card. “If you think of something interesting that you’d like to tell me, ring this number.” I looked at the card. There was nothing on it but his name, William Deskins, and a telephone number.

  “All right,” I said. “If I think of something interesting.”

  He moved to the door and opened it. “Good-bye, Mr. St. Ives. And thank you very much for the chocolate.”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  When he was gone I went over to the phone and called the number that was on the card. There were two double rings and when a voice answered, a man’s voice, with a snappy, “Fifth Division, Constable Akers,” I hung up.

  Chapter Ten

  WHEN MY FORMER WIFE and I had lived in London that year at the very beginning of the 1960s, when all fine things had seemed possible, even my becoming sort of a wisecracking Walter Lippmann, I had grown knowledgeable and even authoritative on a number of things English such as clotted cream, Parliament, the Royal Family, Lyons Corner Houses, and the London Underground. Having got the underground down cold, I had set out to master the city’s bus system only to fall back in utter confusion after a couple of weeks.

  But the underground had remained my specialty and I had delighted in giving detailed, even painstaking instructions to visiting Americans on how they could best go down to Kew in lilac time, or east to Upminster on the District Line, or west to Uxbridge on the Piccadilly, or even the Metropolitan.

  The first appointment that I had made for that afternoon was at an address that I vaguely recalled as being on the dingier outskirts of Maida Vale. So just to kill time and determine whether I still retained my London tube lore I strolled through Mayfair to Oxford Circus and caught the Bakerloo Line to the Maida Vale station where a news vendor told me that 99 Ashworth Road wasn’t far at all, just a couple of streets down Elgin Avenue and to my right.

  As a neighborhood, Elgin Avenue was on the skids. There was a two-block stretch of funky-looking shops and then, to the west, row after row of red brick flats that seemed bent on nudging each other toward slum status although it might be another ten years before they all got there.

  Ashworth Road was a little better. It was a short street lined with trees and well-tended gardens and prim-looking semidetached houses that probably were built just before the first world war. It was a quiet neighborhood, for some reason too quiet, until I realized that there was none of the stuff that normally serves to gauge a residential neighborhood’s vitality. There were no abandoned tricycles on the walk, or forgotten teddy bears, or waiting prams. It was a street without children, a street of drawn curtains, bolted doors, and aging but well-dusted cars, including a small Bentley that I guessed to be at least forty years old.

  I decided that it was a street from which the young had fled while the old stayed on. I was its lone pedestrian that afternoon as I walked down the cracked sidewalk, the leather heels of my black loafers banging out into that quiet that belonged in a small town, not a big city. As I walked I thought I could detect the rustle of a drawn curtain here and there and I assumed that suspicious old eyes were watching to see what house I stopped at. I may have been that month’s excitement on Ashworth Road.

  Roses were the flowers there. Dark red roses that nodded in the warm May afternoon from behind chest-high brick walls and iron fences. They were the only friendly thing in sight and the front yard of the house at 99 Ashworth Road had its full share of them.

  It was hard to tell how old he was, the man who answered my knock. He could have been a desiccated fifty or a not bad seventy. His was a dried, pinched face, tight and somehow unforgiving, and so deeply wrinkled that I wondered how he shaved.

  “St. Ives,” he said, as if calling some long forgotten roll. And then after a pause, “Philip.”

  “That’s right,” I said instead of present. “Doctor Christenberry?”

  He nodded and started to open the door wider, but thought better of it. “You understand about the consultation fee?”

  “Ten guineas.”

  “Yes. That’s correct. Ten guineas.” He opened the door just wide enough for me to slip past him. He wore old, stained gray flannel trousers, carpet slippers, a gray coat sweater that was buttoned up wrong, and a tieless shirt that may have been white at one time, but which was now a sort of grayish yellow. He said, “How do you do?” as I came in and I noticed that he smelled.

  The man whom the smell belonged to was Julian Christenberry and he had his doctorate from Heidelberg plus an M.A. and a F.S.A. from somewhere else, and according to the Assistant to the Master of the Armouries at the Tower of London, Doctor Julian Christenberry knew more than anyone else in the world about medieval armor and weaponry, unless I went to Oakeshott, who unfortunately was no longer available.

  The small foyer that I found myself in was furnished with two stiff chairs, three awful paintings, and four suits of plate armor that stood stiffly about not doing much of anything other than collecting dust, except for the one whose right mailed fist held an old black hat, a gray scarf, and an umbrella.

  “I think we’ll be more comfortable in here,” Christenberry said and pushed through a door that le
d to a sitting room that turned out to be a dim place with drawn curtains, one lighted floor lamp, and the kind of furniture that you would expect to find on Ashworth Road. Two lumpy-looking, overstuffed chairs hunched toward a fireplace that contained an electric heater. There was a couch slipcovered in a faded, flowery print. A dull brown rug covered most of the floor. A massive desk faced the curtained windows and was littered with pieces of paper that looked like bills. Here and there, rickety tables held big vases choked with roses.

  Except for the walls, the room and its furniture seemed to be much like the man who lived there, worn and used up, not quite good enough to sell but not bad enough to throw out. The walls, however, were covered with items designed to bash heads, break bones, sever limbs, and knock out teeth. There were swords of all kinds, long ones and short ones, wide and thin, curved, straight, and wiggly. There were wicked daggers and stout war axes. There were harpins and catchpoles and partizans and halberds and poleaxes. There were maces and spiked flails and cudgels and even a caltrop or two.

  It was quite a collection and I told Christenberry so. He nodded and smiled with yellow teeth. “And all designed with a single purpose,” he said. “To hurt. To maim. To kill.” The idea seemed to please him momentarily—until he thought of something less cheerful. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I’ve had to sell off the really good pieces. One by one I’ve sold them off to provide a bit of bread and meat for my table.”

  I felt that I could take a hint as well as anyone so I brought out my wallet and handed him two five-pound notes along with a fifty-pence piece. “Ten guineas,” I said.

  He pocketed the money hurriedly, apparently afraid that I might change my mind. “I suppose you’ll take tea?” he said, as if trying to be gracious, but knowing that he wasn’t very good at it.

  “If it’s no bother.”

  There were some tea things and an electric kettle on a table next to one of the lumpy armchairs and he started fooling around with them. On a plate by the kettle were four vanilla cookies, one of which had pink icing. The kettle was already starting to whistle and he gestured me to the chair opposite him. He took a single tea bag, dropped it into the pot, and then poured in what seemed to be about four cups of water. We sat there and waited for it to steep. He had his eyes half closed and his mouth half open and I wasn’t sure whether he was about to say something or doze off.