Highbinders

by Ross Thomas

  It wasn’t exactly a rhetorical question, but I didn’t get a nibble, not even a headshake. If I were going to ask damn fool questions, I was going to have to answer them, too, so I did.

  “Well, you carry him,” I said, “and if you’re half smart, you carry him at night, and that means before dawn, which comes at about five-thirty this time of year and that means that the dead man was already dead and tucked away in his marble piano by the time I got my call this morning.”

  I would have settled for anything—even a polite sneer or a raised eyebrow. I got nothing, so I talked some more.

  “Well, one man’s not going to carry one hundred eighty pounds of deadweight. At least not that far. I know I couldn’t. So he’s going to have some help—at least one other person and possibly two. That means that there were at least three to begin with and now there’re at least two, but possibly more.”

  I leaned back and waited. I don’t know what I was waiting for, possibly a way to go, St. Ives! What I got was a slow nod from Ned Nitry who said, “One hundred and eighty pounds. About thirteen stone, isn’t it?”

  “About that,” I said.

  Eddie Apex stretched his long legs out in front of him, folded his hands behind his head, stared at the ceiling, and said, “Why?”

  “Why what?” I said.

  “They could have had the money. We followed their instructions exactly. You were right on time. There weren’t any police. What the Christ more do they want?”

  “You asking me?” I said.

  “You’re the expert.”

  “Well, to use an expert’s bromide, thieves fall out. The ones we’re dealing with sure as hell have. Probably because a two-way split of a hundred thousand pounds is better than a three-way split. I still don’t know how many are involved, but as I said there were at least three to begin with. And as for why the stall this morning, maybe they remembered who they’re dealing with.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Apex said.

  “He means, darling,” Ceil Apex said, “that your reputation is still preceding you. You have been known to resort to the sly trick now and again. As for Dad and Uncle Bert, well, they’re not usually thought of as being particularly angelic either.”

  “You think that’s it, St. Ives?” Ned Nitry said.

  I nodded. “Possibly. It could have been a combination warning and dry run. I’ve known some who’ve gone through four or five dry runs before they finally got their nerve up.”

  “I somehow don’t think it’s a question of nerve or their lack of it,” Eddie Apex said.

  “Not with a dead man with his throat cut, it isn’t,” Uncle Bert said. “Never did like slicers. Never did like doing business with ’em.”

  “We haven’t got any choice though, have we?” his brother said.

  “You think that’s what it was, St. Ives?” Uncle Bert said. “That the dead bloke was sort of a fair warning?”

  “I think they might have been trying to tell us something,” I said.

  “So what do we do now, wait?” Eddie Apex said.

  I nodded again. “That’s about all that you can do.”

  “What do you mean, ‘you’?” Apex said.

  “I don’t like sliced throats and I like even less the people who go around doing it,” I said.

  Eddie Apex shot a glance at his father-in-law and then at Uncle Bert. If I hadn’t been watching both carefully, I wouldn’t have caught their almost imperceptible nods. “We’ll go up to fifteen percent, Phil,” Eddie Apex said. “Fifteen percent of one hundred thousand pounds. That’s nearly thirty-six thousand bucks.”

  “I’m not trying to jack up my price.”

  “Of course not,” Ceil Apex said. “It’s just that Eddie’s trying to provide you with a little incentive to carry on.”

  They were all staring at me now. I was the goose that was supposed to lay their golden egg and if I didn’t, well, they could always have roast goose for dinner. I tried to decide who I’d rather have mad at me—the Nitry brothers or the sword thieves. I wasn’t sure that it was much of a choice.

  “All right,” I said after a while. “One more time.”

  They all seemed to relax. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past eight. I stood up. “I’m going back to the hotel,” I said. “If they want to set it up again, they’ll call me there.”

  “Anything else?” Ned Nitry said.

  I looked at the laundry bag on the floor. “Yes,”I said. “Find something not quite so cute to put the money in.”

  Even go-betweens must sleep, even the ones who play poker all night and stumble over dead bodies in the morning. I went back to the Hilton and went to bed and nothing at all happened until I awoke at a quarter till two that afternoon feeling hungry. I was New York-hungry, not London-hungry, which gave me a couple of choices. I could either go to a place I knew off Leicester Square or I could try one of the Great American Disaster hamburger joints that had been touted to me by a couple of disenchanted tourists from Colorado Springs. Or I could be really adventurous and try a Wimpy Bar. I’d never eaten in a Wimpy Bar, but then I must be the sole remaining American who has never tried a McDonald’s hamburger either.

  A couple of reasons decided me on the place that I knew off Leicester Square and I decided to make a walk of it. I showered and shaved and dressed and then headed down Mount Street, because I happen to like it. I walked slowly, pausing now and then before the windows of the tony estate agent offices to admire photographs of some of the stately homes and country manor houses that I could steal for as little as a quarter of a million dollars.

  I skirted the north end of Berkeley Square and paused on Bruton Street to gaze up at the window of the office I had once occupied. It had been nothing more than a partitioned cubicle really, but it had been a fancy enough address and at the time, that’s what the paper thought I had needed. I hadn’t really because I had written the column at home and had gone down to the office only for the mail and whatever gossip there was.

  I went on, past the Westbury Hotel, down Bond Street, around Piccadilly Circus, over to Leicester Square, and down one of those small side streets that come out on Charing Cross Road. I wasn’t sure that the place I had in mind would still be there, but it was, and the neon sign still read Manny’s New York Delicatessen and Bar, Ltd.

  The firm’s managing director, principal shareholder, and chief bartender was Emanuel Kaplan, formerly of somewhere in the East End, Tel Aviv, Tangier, Marseille, San Francisco, and New York. After getting out of the British army in 1946, Manny Kaplan had led what has been described variously as an interesting life, a checkered career, and a villain’s existence.

  It is an establishable fact that he had helped Hank Greenspun run guns into Israel in 1948. It is equally provable that he smuggled cigarettes out of Tangier in 1949 and ’50. Not so easily proved—or disproved—is his claim that he had spent the early fifties in San Francisco as constant companion to an aging sugar heiress who kept him on a five-hundred-dollar-a-week retainer. In the late fifties it gets a little murky although he was in New York and he did work in a Second Avenue bar and also in a Sixth Avenue delicatessen. When I had done a column on him more than ten years before, he insisted that he had acquired the capital necessary to open his present establishment by knocking over six savings and loan banks in Jersey. But when I checked it out none of the amounts and half of the dates of the robberies were wrong, although most of the details were right, so I decided that he probably had won his stake in a crap game and picked up the information about the robberies from the people that he palled around with in New York, who were some of the ones I knew, and who, for lack of a better description, could be called the wrong crowd.

  When I walked into the place he was behind the bar and he hadn’t changed much although he was close to fifty now. He still wore the perpetual cigarette in the right corner of his mouth and he was fatter and grayer, but who isn’t. He looked up at me and said, “What the hell do you want, St. Ives?”

/>   I sat down on a stool at the bar and said, “A corned beef on rye with a slice of onion and a bottle of Lowenbrau and, gosh, it’s nice to see you, Manny.”

  “You know I don’t handle no Nazi beer.”

  “Make it a Heineken if you’re not mad at the Dutch.”

  Kaplan yelled my order at his sandwich man and served the beer himself. He spoke around his cigarette in a low, rapid tone that made almost everything he said sound private, perhaps even confidential, and he got his accent and his phrasing mixed up so that his speech was a curious blend of New Yorkese and Londonese, although neither was very far out of the gutter.

  “I hear that you’re in New York,” he said. “I hear that you’re back there and that you can’t get a job and that you’re doing something a little bent.”

  “Word gets around,” I said and looked the place over. It hadn’t changed. There was the long row of booths and some round stand-up tables and the bar and the refrigerated display case that was choked with all of the goodies that you’d find in any quality New York Jewish delicatessen. One wall was covered with autographed black and white photos of assorted actors, actresses, four playwrights, a couple of New York congressmen, three Members of Parliament, five bigtime gamblers, four pretty fair con men (including Eddie Apex), and about two dozen other photos of fox-faced men with wary eyes and strained smiles, a few of whom I recognized as being wanted by the police of at least two countries and possibly a third, if you counted Mexico.

  I pointed at one of the con men. “I heard he got dropped in the bay at Hong Kong.”

  “He swum out,” Kaplan said.

  “Huh.”

  “How’s your wife?”

  “We split,” I said.

  “I wondered when she was going to wise up.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Terrible. I’m trying to work a deal with Nathan’s, but they don’t seem much interested.”

  “You think hot dogs would go over here?”

  “How the hell should I know? McDonald’s is moving in. Colonel Sanders and his goddamned fried chicken is already all over the place. Why not genuine Nathan’s hot dogs? I could probably make a pile, except that Nathan’s don’t seem interested.”

  “I got an idea.”

  “What?”

  “Real old-fashioned English fish and chips.”

  “Jesus, you’re funny, St. Ives. You’re really funny.”

  Kaplan took my corned beef on rye from the sandwich man and placed it in front of me. “One salt beef, sir.”

  He watched while I took a bite. Manny Kaplan had been handsome at forty, probably pretty at twenty, and now he was distinguished at fifty or so with thickly waving gray hair, a trimmed, gray mustache, a dark, brooding face with cynical black eyes, straight nose, and a box chin that was growing flabby.

  “Well, how is it?” he said.

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s the best damned salt beef you’ll find between here and Sixth Avenue.”

  I nodded at his stomach. “You look as if you’ve been at the potato pancakes again.”

  Kaplan looked down at his stomach that was half-covered with a long white apron that reached to his shoe tops. It was another New York touch. “What the hell,” he said, “I’ll be fifty-two next September.” He looked at me. “You’re as skinny as ever.”

  “I eat my own cooking.”

  Kaplan leaned his elbows on the bar and slipped on his most confidential look. “No kidding, Phil, what’re you doing in town?”

  “This and that,” I said. “Last night a little gambling. Guess who I ran into?”

  Kaplan ran through his mental list of our mutual acquaintances. I decided that it was a long one. “Probably in Mayfair, weren’t you?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Shields?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then you ran into Wes Cagle, didn’t you? Now there’s a right bastard.”

  “How long has Wes been in town?”

  Kaplan thought about it. “A couple of years at least,” he said. “How much did you lose?”

  “I won a little.”

  “But you didn’t come over to play poker, did you?” He picked up a bar rag and gave the old polished wood a couple of swipes that it didn’t need. “You know, I keep up, I do. I hear it around that you’re in a queer sort of business where you don’t work too hard and where nobody gets too mad at you, not even the coppers, and you do all right for yourself, you do.”

  “That’s what you hear, huh?”

  “That’s what I hear. So what I’m wondering is, is this. Is there any way you might want to cut me in?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Manny. No way.”

  “So what the hell did you come down here for? Where you staying, the Hilton?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You would. You could’ve had ’em send you up a corned beef on rye.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Sure it is,” he said. “I supply ’em with a hundred pounds a week, although don’t tell anybody I said so. You’re not down here just for old times’ sake. Our old times weren’t that long or that good.”

  “I don’t know about you, Manny, but I treasure those memories.”

  “Sure you do,” he said, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the one that he took from his mouth. His hands would never touch the fresh one again until he used it to light yet another one.

  “You interested in making ten pounds?” I said.

  He looked up at the ceiling and spread his hands wide. “God, to think I should be reduced to this.” Then he looked at me. “What do you want, a broad?”

  “No, but I am looking for somebody. And it’s worth ten pounds if I can find him.”

  He looked me over. “You’re not suffering. Twenty.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Done. Who you looking for?”

  “Tick-Tock Tamil.”

  Kaplan’s face broke into a large, white smile. “Jesus, I haven’t even thought of Tick-Tock in years. I really mean in years.”

  “Is he still around?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “That’s what I’m going to pay you the fifteen pounds for. To find out.”

  Through his arms that rested on the bar, Kaplan looked down at the floor, as though he might find the missing Tick-Tock’s address written large at his feet. Then he looked up at me. “He was in the nick for a couple of years a while back, but I hear he got out. What do you want with Tick-Tock, a gold watch maybe that’s just been stolen from the Maharaja of Rangpur?”

  “Is he still working that?”

  “Was the last I heard.”

  “Is he still into gold?”

  If a man’s ears can really prick up, Kaplan’s did. “Be a good lad, Phil. If it’s gold you’re into, there’s got to be enough to go around.”

  “I don’t know what I’m into,” I said. “That’s why I want to talk to Tick-Tock. But if there is any way I can cut you in, I will. But don’t bank on it. Anyway, there’s fifteen pounds in it just for Tick-Tock’s address.”

  “How the hell should I know where he lives?”

  I sighed. “Make a phone call or two and find out.”

  Muttering something about snotty sonsofbitches who forget their old mates, Kaplan went through a door that must have led to his storeroom, whatever he used for an office, and the telephone. I looked at my watch, saw that it was five till three, and had the sandwich man bring me another beer before the law clamped down.

  I was just finishing the beer when Kaplan came back. He had a piece of white paper in his hand. “Where’s my fifteen quid?” he said.

  I took out my wallet. “With the sandwich, two beers, and tip,” he said, “that’ll come to an even twenty.”

  I nodded at the stick-up and held out two ten-pound notes. He took them and handed me the slip of paper which read, “13 Start Street, W.2.”

  “Where’s Start Street?” I said.


  “It’s in Paddington. Where the hell else do you think Tick-Tock would live?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I HAD BEEN IN no particular hurry to see Tick-Tock Tamil and I was back in my room at the Hilton, watching something about ants on BBC-2 and waiting for the phone to ring, when there was a knock on the door. It was a firm knock, even an authoritative one, and I wasn’t especially surprised when my caller turned out to be William Deskins of Bunco and Fraud, or whatever Scotland Yard calls it.

  “Twice in two days,” I said. “Not quite enough to be called harassment.”

  I opened the door wider and he came in, wearing the same dark brown suit. He had on a different shirt though, a white one, and his tie looked something like scrambled eggs with chopped chives sprinkled over them.

  “Do you mind?” he said, looking at the television set.

  “Not at all. I was learning more about ants than I really wanted to know.” I switched off the set.

  “Over here,” he said and moved over to the dresser. I followed him. “You ever gamble, Mr. St. Ives?”

  “Now and again.”

  He took three playing cards from his pocket and dealt them face up on the dresser. The cards were the jack of hearts, the jack of spades, and the queen of hearts.

  “Watch carefully,” he said. “Keep your eye on the queen.” He turned the cards face down and moved them about. His movements seemed to be neither tricky nor fast. “Now for five pounds, tell me which one’s the queen.”

  “Let’s make it for fifty,” I said.

  He moved the cards around some more, but this time his movements were a bit more flashy. “All right,” he said. “For fifty.”

  “No bet.”

  “You know the game, do you?”

  “Sure. It’s a variation on the shell game, except that they make a production out of it here. There’s usually a dealer, a couple of shills, and a lookout. They sucker you in and let you win a few times. Then they take you for everything you’ve got.”

  “There’s a way to win though,” he said.

  “If you don’t mind a broken jaw, there is. You can bet a couple of times and then try to walk off with your winnings, but I wouldn’t advise it.”