by Inconnu(e)
Alfred the Great, alias the Good Nazi, acceded gracefully. At least on the surface. What went on underneath, Cassidy would have given a pretty penny to know. But Hugo Dorn gave very little away.
A long way down and around, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, and so forth and so on, as Cassidy liked to say. No words passed, but the atmosphere in the enclosed concrete space was explosive.
Down and around, down and around. Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen. The numbers were painted on the sides of the landings. Otherwise no landing was different from any other. Cassidy tried the doors at several landings. Locked. “Each resident has a key to his own floor and no other floor,” said Hugo Dorn without looking back. “A resident can get off only at his own floor.”
The obstruction was on the third floor, one landing beneath the private apartments. A solid concrete wall pierced by a triple plated steel door unmarred by anything so ordinary as a lock. “If they managed to breach the outer defenses,” murmured the Security Chief, “there must be an inner line to fall back on. You know that, Professor Cassidy, expert that you are on fortifications.”
“Open it,” said Cassidy.
Hugo hesitated, mouth slightly open, eyes unfathomable. Examining his options, thought Cassidy. He kept himself loose and above the man.
A long silence. Hugo Dorn neither acceded nor demurred. He did nothing.
“Hugo . . .” said Cassidy using the forbidden name like a whip.
Hugo’s body sagged as if hit. With infinite reluctance, he drew from his breast pocket a rectangle roughly the size of a deck of cards. On its top was a series of numbers like those on a telephone. He pressed three numbers quickly (but not so quickly that Cassidy didn’t note them; 8-6-2) and the device emitted three different bleeps.
The steel door sank silently into its concrete base.
“You go first . . .” Cassidy was turning Hugo into You go for the benefit of the listening devices “ . . . and I’ll precede. A genuine malapropism. Mrs. Malaprop actually said that one in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals.”
“A vastly overrated play,” said Hugo Dorn.
Down and around, down and around . . .
“This is the basement,” announced Hugo pleasantly. “We are back in the nineteenth century which in many ways was more ingenious than the twentieth.”
They were in a huge room filled with ancient red pumps with copper fittings. It was stiflingly hot. “These marvelous machines pump hot water to the tank on the fiftieth floor where it descends by gravity to the various apartments beneath it,” Hugo was saying. “This is a vacuum pump which pulls hot water up whenever the water cools up there so that in the Windletop you never have to run the water to get it hot. It’s always hot.”
He was preening himself on the Windletop as if he owned it. Now that the 1,000-year Reich had crumbled, what else was there? Hugo was showing off his sump pump, which operated mechanically when the water fell below a certain level—like a toilet bowl—as if electricity had never been invented. In the next room were the steam pipes from the New York Steam Company which heated the water for the radiators in the copper coils contained in great concrete tanks, machinery straight out of 1928 when the building went up.
Hugo was showing it all off too willingly. Cassidy was sure there was more.
“Where does that door lead?”
Hugo smiled his sad make-believe smile, sighed. He paused, thinking things over. After these preliminaries, the little rectangle came out of Hugo’s pocket, and trilled their message. The numbers were 4-7-5. The steel door slid sidewise into the wall.
Behind them lay a broad stone staircase, leading down.
“You go first,” said Hugo politely, “and I’ll precede.”
Cassidy stepped through the door just a second before his brain sent the Tilt message flashing though his skull. Never go down a staircase ahead of a Nazi, not even a Good Nazi! Do something! Cassidy stumbled—or pretended to—twisting his body around to face Hugo Dorn, both hands in front of his face, in the Dorrier Defense, the best he could come up with.
The switch blade snickered just an inch above his skull. Falling, Cassidy gripped the wrist that held the blade, pulling Hugo on down the stone steps with him, using the fall to pull Hugo into the Harrison hammerlock. Too old for these games! Not too old at all, the Principessa had said.
Down they tumbled, first Cassidy on top, then Hugo, the blade held outward until the weight of the two bodies wrenched it out of Hugo’s grasp.
It should have subdued the Good Nazi, but it didn’t. They had fallen now the full flight of stairs into an open space where Hugo knuckled Cassidy in the balls, slipping out of the Harrison hammerlock as the pain struck. Flat on his back, Cassidy, his knees cocked back on his chest, fired them against Hugo’s jaw, hurtling him against the wall. That stunned Hugo just enough for Cassidy to spin Hugo around and put a knee into his kidney.
“Whoof,” exclaimed Hugo, his muscles turning to water.
Cassidy kneeled on the man’s back, holding Hugo’s crossed awns by each wrist. For a half minute, no one spoke.
“It was forty years ago!” said Cassidy, unbelieving. “You must be in your late sixties.”
“Seventy-two,” said Hugo Dorn, snapping it out like a salute, preening himself on his age.
Slowly Cassidy removed his knees from Hugo’s kidneys. You couldn’t kneel on a man’s kidneys when he was seventy-two years old.
In place of the knee, he pulled out the silenced .22 and leveled it at Hugo’s face after rolling him over.
“You were going to kill me, Hugo,” said Cassidy, a flat statement, “a form of displeasure so extreme that I feel you’re trying to tell me something in your own Teutonic way. It’d be less painful for both of us if you just put it into words.”
Hugo smiled his tired European smile—and said nothing.
Cassidy searched him carefully from head to toe—feeling inside the shoes, under the armpits, in the crotch, behind the knees. Afterwards he poked him with the gun to get him to stand up.
“This time you go first, I’ll precede.”
“The joke is getting a little tired,” said Hugo. “It wasn’t ever a very good joke.”
Cassidy was inspecting the room he’d fallen into. Quite a change from the basement just above it. Each of the four walls was lined with electronic equipment. Dials flickered. Spools of tape slowly revolved in the very latest computers. On one wall was a large console with three blank TV-faced monitor screens. Buttons of all colors bearing numbers, letters and symbols, crawled the length of the console.
It was a control room, exactly duplicating the one outside Hugo’s second floor office. A second control room, which could probably supersede the first one, just in case terrorists overran the first one. Cassidy felt exhausted and enraged by the expense and elaborateness of all this electronic machinery which probably wouldn’t work. Oh, the futility of it all! Just for a second, he closed his eyes in exasperation.
That was time enough. Hugo’s boot caught him in the center of the wrist, a beautifully timed shot which sent the silenced .22 spinning lazily across the room. Cassidy went over backward swiftly to avoid the other boot, aimed at his face, which whistled after it, Hugo leaping like a high jumper rolling over the bar, landing crouched and ready. Cassidy came up hard against the gray console in sitting position as Hugo came for him, fingers outthrust in one of the nastiest sortileges in the book. Also one that took the quickest reflexes and, at seventy-two, Hugo wasn’t quite up to it. Cassidy took the thrusting fingers on the top of his skull rather than the eye sockets where they were aimed. At the same time he threw a knee into Hugo’s face and came up with his .38.
“You don’t think I’d go down a dark stairway with you with only one gun, do you, Hugo?”
Both men flat on the floor, panting like spent runners.
“You come very well armed, Professor.” Hugo smiled painfully. “But you haven’t the proper motivation to use that gun, have you?”
He sprang straight at the gun, testing. Cassidy clubbed him briskly on the temple with the muzzle of the gun. As he rolled over on his back, Hugo’s eyes glazed.
“Motivation, is it?” chattered Cassidy cheerfully. He felt marvelous, bruised but full of macho juices that made his eyes bright. “I can always summon up a little motivation when the need arises.” He was slipping out of his jacket, rolling up his sleeves. “Somebody has got hold of you, Hugo, and I aim to find out who. After that I’m going to turn you around.”
Hugo was in some pain but it was a matter of principle for him to voice defiance. “You haven’t the absence of scruple, Cassidy. Or the dedication.”
Cassidy had Hugo’s switchblade knife in his hand, testing the blade on the ball of his thumb. “Oh, haven’t I now? For dedication to the absence of scruple, there’s nothing like a lapsed Catholic, me boyo.”
He thrust Hugo into a chair and tied him there with his own shirt—an old Company trick.
“Don’t worry about your face lift, Hugo. I won’t leave any marks. Now what I want to know is: How do you get out of this place? You wouldn’t plan all this electronic wizardry unless you knew a way to get into it and a way to get out of it in a hurry.”
He opened with a Duvalier, that interesting little torment devised by the French in Algeria, and worked up slowly and with enormous reluctance to the Vivaldi.
He hated using the Vivaldi, even on old Nazis, because no one—neither torturer nor torturee—was ever quite the same afterwards.
• 19 •
“We are accustomed to thinking of Renaissance man as complete in that he was artist, thinker, philosopher, lover, swordsman, diplomat, architect, all that . . .” Cassidy was prowling back and forth, hands behind his back—his Austrian archduke act.
Lucia was standing on her head, a new wrinkle in Cassidy’s training. Brought oxygen to the head, Cassidy told her. Also forced concentration and relaxation.
“You have a nasty bruise on your cheek, Professor,” said Lucia, upside down but observant.
Cassidy ignored this: “However, the completeness of Renaissance man was not perceived except retroactively—about 200 years later. Now let us consider how future man—say, 200 years from today—will regard modern man.”
“To say nothing of modern woman,” said Lucia severely. “In retrospect we will be seen to be fully as versatile as Renaissance man—fighting our way through the jungle of modern cities while building shopping centers that will be seen in the light of 200 years as models of ingenuity and beauty, driving our cars, jogging, doing our own carpentry and plumbing because we can’t find people to do it for us—and at the same time engaging in endless political, social, psychological discourse on all manner of subjects. Oh, modern man is required to cope with more social problems of greater complexity than anything Renaissance man dreamt of in his philosophy.”
After the lecture came the fencing. Cassidy had insisted on thrusting both ballet and fencing down Lucia’s unwilling throat. “She has no natural skill at all,” said the fencing instructor, a small, thin, unsmiling man named Guiseppe Sforzi (whom Lucia called the Little Wop. “I can call him that because I’m a little Wop, too”). Cassidy would watch the two of them doing their highly formalized arabesques counting “One, two, three . . . point.” After each session, the Little Wop would shake his head and mutter that he’d never known anyone so devoid in natural aptitude.
“Why,” yelled Lucia, “must I do something I don’t like and do badly?”
“You can’t spend your life,” snarled Cassidy, “just doing things you do well. You must learn quickness of response—both physical and mental. It might save you from assassination.”
“I’m not important enough to be assassinated!” said Lucia glumly. “I’d just get killed.”
“My job is to prevent you from being killed. You will be only thirty-four when the twenty-first century arrives. Ahead of you lie upheavals and cataclysms unparalleled in the history of rich little girls. I want you to be ready. What is the square root of 79,865? Quickly! Quickly! Quickness of response is everything.”
Always there was combat between them. She wanted to know the why of everything, and he was secretly delighted that she wanted to know why. Meanwhile, the disciplines rained down—declensions, square roots, participles and gerunds, new math (and old math), past conditional as well as future derivative, hyperfunctional and post historical.
At supper Lorenzo said: “No tutor has ever treated the Contessa so harshly before, and none has lasted as long as you.”
Cassidy said: “Where is the Principessa?” He had not laid eyes on her since the night she’d slipped into bed with him.
“Italy, Signor.”
“Why?” Lorenzo laid the grilled sole before Cassidy like a priest laying a burnt offering before his deity. “Trustees. They make business.”
That night, after days of constant calls, Cassidy got through to Alison on the private line. Cassidy’s first words were: “Agent provocateur!”
“How can you say such a thing?” said Alison, aghast. “Especially on the phone!”
They were taping everything at Langley these days. It made a nice weapon against Alison, whose memory of conversations was unreliable.
“The Spumi,” said Cassidy. “Noon tomorrow.”
Alison would show up if only to prevent him blabbing any more on the telephone. He did—right on time.
“You shouldn’t have leaned on Hugo so hard, Horatio,” said Alison deeply aggrieved. “You’ve intimidated him.”
“A good timid Nazi,” said Cassidy, “is like fairies at the bottom of the garden.”
Alison was feeling under the table. “You sure this place is okay . . .”
“Nobody would bug the Spumi. I’m the most important person who’s ever eaten here, and you know how important that is.”
“It wasn’t a rattrap, Horatio. I promise you. Just a little fishing expedition. We’ve got to throw a little bread on the water to lure these cookies out into the open sea.”
“The little bread on the water is a twelve-year-old girl who is under my protection. Jefferson Lee now has the whole setup, the keys . . .”
“Change the locks.”
“I’ve already changed the locks—but he knows where everything is, the Contessa, the Principessa, me. He knows the building, the procedures. I ought to go to MacGregor with the whole story. In the present climate of opinion you’d get dumped on your capacious ass.”
Alison went cold as a dead fish. Cassidy didn’t like it. You could push Alison only so far. Then he got dangerous.
“What do you want, Horatio?” said Alison coldly.
Cassidy smiled his biggest Irish smile and turned on all the charm. His answer was was so unexpected Alison’s mouth fell open—just like in the movies. “I want an art expert—and I know you got some over there. I want an art expert dressed up as a locksmith delivered at my front door no later than next Tuesday.”
Cassidy walked to Flame Street, a longish walk from Thirteenth, down Sixth Avenue crossing Eighth Street, then kitty corner into the jumble of streets at Christopher. Very good exercise not only for himself but for his tail whoever that was. He’d picked up a tail when he left the Spumi. Or maybe had him all day and hadn’t spotted him.
Alison had jumped into a taxi, and Cassidy had walked down Sixth, window-shopping, trying to get a glimpse in the glass. Whoever it was, he was very good. Time and again Cassidy caught a movement, but that was all he caught—not a frame or a face. He tried all the tricks—stopping, ducking into arcades and out the other end, circling around the block. He didn’t want to lose the tail; he wanted to nail the tail—if only to belt him one for trashing his flat. (If it was the same guy.)
At Rucker Street, Cassidy ducked into a drugstore and jumped quickly into the phone booth. The sensible thing for the tail to do in these circumstances was to wait, if it took three days. But Cassidy counted on the man’s ignorance of the terrain. He’d have to come in to find out if there we
re a rear entrance.
It wasn’t a he, it was a she—a small, dark girl with huge black glasses. She saw his glance and shot out of the drugstore like a rabbit.
Titi.
“Don’t apologize,” said Fingertips, smiling his cherubic Peter Lorre smile when Cassidy arrived very late at Ariadne’s. “I have been sitting here quite pleasantly, wondering what it’s all about. I mean life itself. Do you ever wonder what it is all about, Cassidy?”
“Not unless I’m paid,” said Cassidy. “Have you got the stuff?”
“Yes, and very boring,” said Fingertips. He laid the envelope in Cassidy’s hand. It was so dark in the Ariadne people had to feel for each other even when they sat next to one another. “Elsa is the only contemporary Schoon to reproduce. The brother, no children; the sister, no children. Cousins, aunts, uncles—no kids. It looks like the end of the line for the Schoons.”
“Does Elsa ever see her brother—or sister?”
“Never.”
“Why?”
Fingertips smiled gently and sipped his wine: “They are a very conservative old Dutch family you know. I gather they find Elsa a bit gamey, a bit flashy.”
“Aaah,” said Cassidy.
“That’s why I like you, Cassidy, because you say Aaah like that. Nobody says Aaah any more. It’s very nineteenth century. That Aaah.”
“I’m a very nineteenth-century guy. How about your Rome man? Did he come up with anything?”
“Too much. It’s all in the envelope. Very, very entertaining—if you’re looking for entertainment. Also very unreliable.”
Cassidy tossed down his Wild Turkey: “I’ve got another small assignment for the Rome man. Elsa di Castiglione is in Rome. I want to know who she’s seeing there.”
“And what they’re talking about, I suppose.”
“It would be nice to know that too, but I’ll settle for just who.” He handed Fingertips the little package from his breast pocket. “A little present,” said Cassidy. “Don’t sniff it all at once. It’ll blow your head off.”
