by Gavin Scott
“If you’ve come about the bloody Sumerian demon,” said Forrester wearily, “I’ll tell you now he didn’t do it and neither did I.”
To Forrester’s surprise Tolling actually smiled. It was a wan smile, but a smile nevertheless.
“Well, I wouldn’t know old Narak,” he said. “It’s hard to predict what happens when you Brits start doing black magic. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to get you to look at some pictures.”
“Pictures?” said Forrester.
Tolling nodded towards the bed, upon which lay a thick folder.
“And not of ghosts and ghoulies, either. These are characters we think are mixed up with illegal arms exports to the Middle East,” he said. “Apparently you had an encounter with one of them and I’d very much appreciate you going through that folder and telling me whether you recognise him.”
“You talking about the chap I met in the Automat?”
“You got it,” said Tolling. “Take a look.”
Forrester took the folder over to the writing bureau. It was packed with images based on passport photos, army ID pictures, mugshots and stolen snapshots, much like the one that had been taken of him in the street by the press photographer. He went through each one conscientiously and after about fifteen minutes found a face he was fairly certain was that of the man he had met in the Automat. But his name wasn’t given here as Matt Hausen: the label described him as Al Goldberg.
“Ah, our friend Al,” said Tolling with satisfaction. “I had a suspicion it was him.”
“He’s an arms dealer?” said Forrester, but Tolling shook his head.
“Worse – an idealist,” he said dismissively. “One of those people who have a mission to change the world.”
“Change the world how?”
“By creating an air force for a country that doesn’t even exist,” said Tolling.
“Palestine?” said Forrester.
“Well, he’d call it Israel,” said Tolling. “Our friend Al is a passionate Zionist and he and his pals have been secretly buying up and renovating war surplus planes. Supposedly they’re doing it on behalf of some cockamamie civilian airline in Panama, but it’s really to send them out to the Middle East in case they ever get their own country and it happens to need an air force.”
“Which since the UN General Assembly meeting seems much more likely.”
“Problem is there’s an arms embargo. No one is allowed to send war planes to the Middle East, or anything else. But these guys are in it up to their necks.”
“How so?” said Forrester.
“You know there’s two million Jews in New York, and a lot of Jewish money. Ever since 1945 the Haganah has been using that money to set up dummy corporations and create a whole national network of operatives buying high explosives, rifles, ammunition and enough machine tools to set up an entire arms manufacturing industry. We don’t want war in the Middle East any more than you Brits do, so we’re trying to clamp down on it.”
This time Forrester’s question was guided by a combination of instinct and the reaction he had got in the hotel bar from Thornham and Priestley.
“Has I.I. been trying to stop them?”
“Industrialists International?” said Tolling. “How did you hear about them?”
Forrester described his encounter in Lumley’s bookstore and his meeting with Alexander Samson.
“Yeah, he’d probably be involved. He was a great pal of Henry Ford and no friend to the Jews. On the face of it I.I. is just a bunch of rich guys from oil and industry who campaign against the spread of international communism, but I’ve got a strong suspicion they’ve been taking direct action against the Zionists.”
“How do you mean, direct action?”
“I’ll give you an example. A few weeks ago, a ship was being loaded with agricultural machinery headed for Palestine. There was a mysterious accident with the crane that was shifting the crates from the dock on to the ship and one of the crates broke free and smashed open. It turned out to be full of rifles, tommy guns and ammunition, and as a result the entire ship was searched and the rest of the cargo turned out to be the same thing. We’re pretty certain the Zionists were behind the shipment and Industrialists International were behind the sabotage.”
“Has anybody been arrested?”
“Not yet. And the truth is, pal, as far as I.I. is concerned it’s very hard to put the finger on someone like Alexander Samson. He just has too many friends in high places. And besides, if he and his pals are just taking direct action to make sure a bunch of fanatics don’t go against US policy, we’re not going to use up a lot of our energy trying to prosecute them.”
“What’ll happen to Al Goldberg?”
“Nothing right now. He hasn’t broken any laws yet as far as we know. But I’ll get you to write out a statement and at some point it may help us build a case against him.”
“What about the man Goldberg approached, Jack Casement? Are you watching him too?”
“Word has come down to leave well alone,” said Tolling. “Apparently he has friends in high places too, including your Alexander Samson. Besides, he didn’t do anything wrong, did he? Just sent Mr. Goldberg away with a flea in his ear.” He got up from the chair, searched through a briefcase and brought out a pile of forms.
“By the way,” said Forrester, “Goldberg didn’t call himself that when we met in the Automat. He said his name was Matt Hausen.”
“Matt Hausen?” said Tolling, interested.
“He said to remind Jack Casement of Matt Hausen.”
Suddenly Tolling was looking at him, eyes narrowed.
“I don’t think he was telling you his name,” he said, and quickly Forrester understood that for the second time that day he was hearing the same syllables in two entirely different ways. Matt Hausen.
Mauthausen.
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, upper Austria, where at least three hundred thousand people had died after being used as slave labour and prisoners had been forced to carry massive boulders up the 186 steps of the Stairway of Death. Known within the Reich as The Bone Grinder, Mauthausen had forced its prisoners to produce munitions, weapons and even the Messerschmitt 262.
The Messerschmitt 262: the world’s first jet-engined war plane.
Jets, the future of aviation.
Sir Jack Casement, the star of the British aviation industry.
With possible links to Industrialists International, an organisation of rich Americans dedicated to preventing the spread of communism and the derailing of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Israel.
When Tolling finally left Forrester lay back on his bed with his arms behind his head staring up at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of New York from the street below. He let the events of the past few hours drift through his mind and made no particular effort to arrange them into a pattern. If there was a pattern, he knew, it would emerge of its own accord. And then, without intending to, he closed his eyes and within minutes was sound asleep.
* * *
He had no idea what time it was when he woke, except that it was pitch black and there was enough residual traffic noise from the street to tell him it was still evening. It was several seconds before he realised that what had awoken him was urgent knocking on his door, and several moments more before he got off the bed and went blearily over to the door to open it.
A bellboy was waiting outside with an envelope.
“Urgent message for you, Dr. Forrester,” he said. “The switchboard told me to bring it right up.” Still blinking away the sleep, Forrester opened the envelope and took out the note.
“Agent Tolling of the FBI called,” it said, “asking you to meet him as soon as possible at the main entrance, Brennan’s Wharf, Pier 751, Brooklyn.”
“Thank you,” said Forrester, handing the boy a quarter. “Can you go tell the doorman to get me a cab?”
“You got it, sir,” said the boy.
* * *
It was during Wor
ld War Two that New York had become the busiest harbour in the world. At its peak in March 1943 there had been over five hundred ships either docking, departing or waiting to be assigned to a convoy. And yet more being built every day across the East River. All through the war the seventy thousand men of the Brooklyn dockyards turned out every kind of ship from patrol boats to battle cruisers, working twenty-four hours a day and spurred on by the rhythms of the big bands pouring out of their own dedicated radio station.
Now, however, great stretches of once busy docks and shipyards were abandoned and derelict. Indeed, many of the ships which had been built in these yards to ferry troops across the Atlantic to bring down Hitler’s empire had come back here to be broken up for scrap. As Forrester’s cab approached Pier 751 shortly before midnight he saw more and more of these forlorn vessels looming up above dilapidated warehouses flanked by vacant, weed-filled lots and crumbling hotels with half-dead neon signs. He saw too that the driver was becoming increasingly nervous.
“You sure this is where you wanna go?” the man said, several times, as they entered a warren of narrow streets. “People get killed round here, you know that? There’s four unions control the docks and the boss of every one of them is a made man.”
“Is that so?” said Forrester.
“See that pier there?” said the cabbie, pointing to his right. “Just last month they found the hiring foreman with a knife in his eye. And the guy who replaced him is on parole for armed robbery.” Suddenly there was a loud explosion and the driver jammed on the brakes.
“Shit!” he said. “I knew I never should have come down here,” and he put the car into reverse.
“What’s happening?” said Forrester.
“Somebody put broken glass in the road and blew out the front tyre, and if you think I’m stopping here to change the wheel, have another think.”
As they juddered backwards up the street Forrester pushed a handful of notes across to the driver and told him to let him out.
“It’s your funeral, pal,” said the cabbie, taking the money and slowing down just enough for Forrester to open the door, before spinning the car around and disappearing into the night.
Suddenly it was very quiet. As Forrester listened he could hear the distant noise of city traffic, the sound of ships’ whistles in the harbour and, somewhere not far away the sounds of drunken singing coming from a bar. Little breezes lifted the trash that filled the gutters and, on the edge of hearing, chains clanked as the abandoned ships rose and fell with the tide.
For a moment Forrester wondered if he had been a fool not to stay with the cab as it limped back to civilisation, but on the other hand he was already at Pier 749 and his destination could not be more than a few hundred yards away. He looked around to make sure there was no one in the shadows and began to walk.
Five minutes later he had passed the bar from which the singing was coming, above which blinked a sign promising iskey and eer. The interior heaved with customers packed as tightly as peanuts in the jar, and though most of them seemed to be drunk the simple presence of other humans in this bleak landscape was somehow comforting.
But when he reached Pier 751 the gates were chained and locked and Tolling was nowhere to be seen. It was only when he leant closer to test the lock that he saw the little square paper tucked through one of the rusting chain links. It said: Side gate. Left-hand warehouse. Third floor. T.
Sure enough, the small side gate creaked open when he pushed at it and he found himself right on the waterfront. To his left a tall crane was silhouetted against the sky, its hoist dangling like a gibbet. Beside it was a four-storey warehouse. He looked up at the windows of the third floor: they were as black as all the others. He glanced over at the water. As far as the eye could see were dead and dying ships packed together against the wharfs. He took a deep breath, walked across the paving stones and opened the warehouse door.
It had clearly been disused for some years: the ground floor stretched away into the darkness, punctuated by the dim shapes of supporting pillars. There was a faint smell of copra and damp stone. To his right was another door; when he opened it, he saw worn wooden steps leading steeply up into pitch-blackness. When he let the staircase door go it closed behind him with an audible click. He began to climb, and a voice came gruffly down the stairwell.
“Hey, Forrester, get your Limey ass up here. I was expecting you half an hour ago.”
Forrester felt a wave of relief wash over him. “Coming,” he said. “Hold your horses.” He continued to climb the stairs. “I don’t mind telling you I was beginning to worry this might be an ambush,” he said as he stepped out of the stairwell and through the door giving on to the third floor. This time there was a slightly sweet, spicy scent in the air, as if the place had once been used for storing cloves. Then the light went on, dazzling him, and in its beam, twelve feet high on the raw brick of the warehouse wall, was Narak, Lord of the Seals, its wings stretched high above its head and almost down to its clawed feet.
All the rational parts of his brain told him this creature could not be real, that no such creature could exist or had ever existed, but there it was: a vast, fearsome shape that had come for him from the depths of hell.
And then a pair of massive arms folded themselves around his chest and began to crush him so hard he could feel his ribs beginning to crack. On the periphery of his vision he caught a glimpse of the same burlap-hidden head he had seen aboard the Queen Mary and the image fused with that of the demon. Helpless in the man’s grip, all Forrester could manage, by swinging his legs from side to side, was to make his attacker turn around so that they were both facing the door he had come through instead of the length of the room.
Which brought Forrester just close enough to it so he could jam his feet against the wood and thrust backwards, forcing his assailant into one of the pillars. As he hit it, Forrester felt the grip momentarily loosened – and, in that split second, he squirmed free.
Only to see a second man appearing from the darkness – holding a gun. With the hooded man behind him and the gunman in front of him, Forrester knew this was a fight he could not win.
Unless—
His rational mind was working again now, and he knew that Narak was merely an image projected on the wall from a light source somewhere to his right. Before the gunman could squeeze the trigger, Forrester threw himself sideways, colliding, as he had hoped, with the machine that was projecting the image.
There was a crash, the light went out and Narak vanished.
In the second this gave him, Forrester sprinted across the warehouse floor towards the dockside windows, weaving from side to side in the darkness as bullets began to ricochet off the pillars.
The beam came on again just as he reached the windows and caught him as he kicked through the glass.
In other circumstances Forrester would have decided that the crane was probably too far away, that he had almost no hope of making the leap from the warehouse window on to its long, steel latticed neck, and by jumping he would simply be exchanging a death from gunfire for a messy end on the paving stones below. But the darkness made it hard to judge the distance and the adrenaline that had been pumping through him since he came up the stairs made it impossible to stop and accept his fate.
Without calculation, he leapt into the darkness.
Absurdly, as he flew through the air, he was aware that one of the derelict ships down below was coming to life, that people were moving around on its decks and steam was coming out of its funnel. Then his face hit the crane and even as the pain of the impact jarred through his cheekbones he flung his arms around the metal latticework and gripped it for dear life.
The man with the gun appeared at the window and almost instantly he heard the ping of bullets hitting the crane’s jib. Any minute now, he knew, one of them was going to find its mark. And then the damned light came on again, as somebody manhandled the projector to the window, and he knew the next shot would not be blind.
So he le
apt from the relative solidity of the crane itself, towards the dangling hoist. As his fingers closed around the rusting links and the chain absorbed the impact of his weight and it began to swing, he realised what he had to do. Doubling his body to exaggerate the movement he swung again and again, and with each swing he thrust harder, until the arc was huge, and instead of the stones of the wharf, what lay beneath him were the greasy waters of the dock.
And when the next bullet zinged past his head like an angry bee, he simply let go.
And fell, it seemed, forever.
Until the filthy water closed over him and down, down, down he went, keeping his eyes and mouth as tightly closed as he could, and then as he came up there was the ship sliding past, and the rope trailing in the water, and faces up on deck looking down at him as he surfaced, urging him to grab the rope, and then he was climbing, and more bullets were smacking into the water around him, and as he came over the rail the blood spurted from his head and he knew no more.
16
PRESIDENT GARFIELD
For a long time something massive pounded against Forrester’s head with the regularity of a steam piston and he felt his skull reverberate like a bell. Then he was inside the bell and the piston was leaking steam from every joint. And then somebody spoke.
“Do you know who he is?”
The pain above his left ear shot agonisingly down into the back of his eye and he regained consciousness.
“Could he be Marks? He’s the only one unaccounted for.”
Forrester listened, trying to ignore the pain and gradually realising that the pounding in his head was the sound of a ship’s engines. There was a bandage round his temple and he was naked under the rough blanket. He kept his eyes closed.
