The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel

by Gordon Landsborough

  We gave them our dust, and I settled back in my seat and I thought about the waste of human life in these countries.

  I wasn’t given long to ruminate and become philosophical, because all at once we were running with a smack of broad tyres along the cobbled street which led to my hotel—we were in the most crowded part of the city, and in danger of death from the clumsy, low-decker tramcars, which were a source of menace to every one of the fashionable shoppers along that congested street.

  I was a sensation again when I reached my hotel. The taxi driver got alarmed when he saw me streak out from the cab without paying him, and he came after me. People on the sidewalk stared in astonishment when they saw a smartly-dressed man, muddied all over his head and hands, come rushing to where the revolving doors of the hotel were. But I was through the crowd before they had time to do more than look astonished.

  I was inside that hotel and thumping the desk to get Benny’s attention. Because Benny was back on duty again, and I was beginning to wonder if he ever went off.

  Benny looked horrified when he saw the muddied apparition before him. He didn’t recognize me until he heard my voice. And then he looked so sick, I knew that he had been told that Joe P. Heggy wasn’t a man to worry about any more.

  I glared through my mud at him, because there was nothing else I could do. And I rapped: “Benny, I’ve got no money. Give this cab driver what I owe him, and a tip besides.”

  And then I asked for my room key...and it wasn’t there.

  Benny was plainly puzzled, too, and when he said: “Maybe you left it in your room,” I was inclined to agree with him. I couldn’t remember handing it in when I went out with B.G. and little Lav the previous evening.

  I went up to my room. At my call, the Turk who looked after the third floor shuffled forward in his heavy slippers and grinned at me through the scrub on his face. He fished out his bundle of keys. He opened the door. He was waiting for a tip. I waved him away, and said:

  “Some other time, brother. Just now you’ve got more dough on you than I have.”

  I closed the door in his smiling, supplicating face, and tramped into my apartment.

  I saw a chair.

  I saw some things on it.

  They were women’s things.

  I didn’t need to look closely at them to know what they were, either. For one awful moment I had a feeling that the Turk had let me into the wrong apartment, and then I spotted a familiar slipper under the bed—the slipper that had hammered the life out of that cockroach the previous evening in the bathroom. I knew I was at home then.

  I looked at the bed. Someone was in it. I saw hair—just a little, touching the pillow.

  I don’t do things by halves, and I took a handful of bedclothes and I dragged them right back.

  Someone sat up and screamed. It was Miss Dunkley.

  Eighty-five per cent of Miss Dunkley was revealed by that sudden withdrawal of bedclothes. That other fifteen percent was covered by the briefest of slips. I stared at her, and I thought: “My god, with a face like that....” And then my eyes dropped a little and I began to change my mind. Miss Dunkley had a trim, shapely little torso when you got down to seeing it. And for a second I was seeing it. Her face first thing in the morning wasn’t anything to get excited about, and I was left wondering where the youthfulness had gone that had begun to glow in her cheeks at Achmet’s, the night before.

  Then Lavinia scooped up the bedclothes and pulled them up round her neck and looked at me as though I was the devil himself.

  At which moment there was a knock on the door.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SABOTAGE

  I let that knock go unattended. I was just realizing that my appearance must have been a shock to a late sleeper after the previous night’s events. I mean it isn’t every day that a spinster woman has the bedclothes dragged back by a man with the remains of a mudpack on his head.

  I blinked at her, because she was the last person I had expected to find in Joe P. Heggy’s bed.

  But it was my bed and I felt entitled to gripe about it.

  I said: “For heaven’s sake, Lav, what’re you doing in there? Why aren’t you in your own bed?”

  She seemed relieved when she recognized my voice, but she didn’t abate her grip on those tightly-held bedclothes at all. She sat huddled there, her eyes staring at me in horror. Then I heard her voice whisper: “Oh, my goodness, Mr. Heggy, what will you think of me?”

  I started to strip off my jacket. I wanted to get out of this mud. So I told her I didn’t have any thought about her at all, so she could take a vacation from holding onto those clothes. But I did ask again: “For land’s sake, don’t you know your own bed by mow?”

  A flush came to those trembling cheeks, and her eyes grew a little moist. I heard her tremulous voice whisper: “It was Mr. Gissenheim.”

  I was taking off my shirt, but I stopped at that and turned on her: “You mean B.G. stuck you in this room?” What was wrong with her own room in the same hotel?”

  She nodded. She was so awfully ashamed that she confessed to me before she knew what words were coming from her chaste lips.

  “He—he put me in here, and said it was his room, and he would come in just as soon as he got himself a drink.”

  Enlightenment dawned on me then. B.G, still Saving Himself Up for the Right Woman, had played a low-down cunning trick on poor Lav. He’d ditched her neatly. He must have asked for my key and stuck her in my room, while he went and locked himself in his own apartment. No doubt he had gone to sleep quivering with fear, because of the threat to his chastity. And Lav, tired by an unusual night’s dissipation, must have gone to sleep waiting for B.G. to come to her.

  I said: “Lav, you’re a naughty girl, and you should be ashamed of yourself!”

  She hung her head, the blush deepening on her cheeks, and I heard her say: “I am!” And then she lifted her eyes to mine and they looked bewildered, and she said her voice rising into a little wail: “I don’t know what’s come over me since I came to this country! I—I think it’s something in the atmosphere.”

  She lifted her hand to push back a wisp of hair and she was trembling. Her eyes were big and wondering, and I could sense the emotions that gripped her.

  “I must have been mad last night,” she whispered. Then her eyes lifted to mine and as quickly dropped away from them.

  For I was shaking my finger at her and being very severe. I said: “Come off it, Lav. You know darned well last night you went hunting for a man and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

  I could tell her story right away. A little sex-starved spinster back in England, brought up to think what the neighbours would say and missing all the fun in consequence. Then, when it was almost too late, she had come, for her own reasons, to this distant, romantic country and the atmosphere had been like alcohol to her. She had recklessly tried to make up for lost time, here in Istanbul. She’d decided to have a fling before it was too late, and she’d suddenly gone with determination into it.

  I thought: “That B.G....” B.G. was not the kind of man she should have picked on. It was just her luck that she had picked on an inhibited guy who was no use to any woman. I told her so.

  And then I asked: “Why did you pick on B.G.?”

  She whispered: “I heard that all Americans were—”

  I nodded. I said, without bitterness: “You’re right—except for one man, B.G. And we like being that way, instead of you poor suppressed Britishers, who’d like to be like we are, only you don’t dare.”

  I couldn’t stand that knocking on the door any longer, so I went across and opened up from the inside. Three men were standing in the corridor—Marty, Dwight, and Tony Geratta. They were all spruced up and clean and fresh-looking, and you wouldn’t have believed they’d been in any drunken brawl the previous night.

  When they saw me, their faces registered horror. I said tiredly: “ Come on in. I’ll tell you about this facial later.”

  They cam
e in. I didn’t even mention Lavinia. But Dwight saw the feminine duds, and then he turned and saw the huddle under the bedclothes, for Lavinia had taken cover again.

  Dwight said: “Aren’t we in the way, kind of?”

  He jerked his head towards the bed. I was getting out of my pants. I said: “The hell, no, that’s not mine—that’s B.G.’s.”

  I slung my pants across a chair and gave Lavinia’s virginal underwear a treat. The boys knew by the way I talked that I wasn’t stringing them, and they went to the bed to have a look. Dwight got roguish, and started saying bitty-witty things, such as: “Peep-bo, let uncle see your bright blue peepers.”

  Uncle was disappointed. Lavinia refused to rise to the blandishment.

  I got under the shower. I could see what was going on when I stuck my head round the corner, but Lavinia’s modest eyes couldn’t have been shocked by sight of my undressed form.

  They got the clothes back a bit and saw her frightened little face underneath, and they recognized it, and then they all sat on the bed and talked to her. They were getting one hellofa kick out of it, and they were doing a lot of finger wagging and being reproving and poor little Lavinia went through hell. She’d never had so many men around her bedside before.

  From the shower I gave them a brief explanation. “B.G. stood her down. He’s still Saving Himself Up for the Right Woman, I guess, and Lav isn’t it. So he ditched her in my bedroom, saying it was his.”

  Marty looked at the other boys, and said: “That was an ungentlemanly thing for B.G. to do. He’s a slob, Lav. We’ll take him apart for treating you like this.” He looked at his companions, virtuously. “We wouldn’t ever do a thing like that, now would we, boys?”

  There was an embarrassing hesitation, as the boys looked upon that not-too-young, early-morning face of an ageing woman. Before they had time to lie, I growled through the streaming mud that was coming out of my hair: “If you’d seen what I’d seen, you wouldn’t be so slow in agreeing with Marty, boys.”

  I got out of the shower. The curtain still protected Lavinia’s maidenly eyes from sight of my wet torso. I said, calling through it: “What brought you boys up here so early? And how did you know I was back at the hotel?”

  Dwight wandered over. He had had all the fun he wanted out of Lavinia. He leaned against the wall and lit himself a cigarette—one of mine. He said: “The hell, Joe, we got kind of worried about you last night. We even went and saw the police when you didn’t turn up, and I guess they’re combing the town for you right now.”

  But then Marty came pushing up, remembering.

  “Quit beefing, Dwight,” he said quickly. “This—” his hand swept round to indicate the terrified Lavinia huddling back among the bedclothes again—“took our minds off the reason for our visit to your apartment, Joe.”

  I stopped rubbing my hair. I felt apprehensive. “Come on, out with it. What happened in the night?” As if enough hadn’t happened to Joe P. Heggy!

  Marty said: “A mob got itself loose on our equipment, and they’ve torn it apart. It’s not working today and Gorby isn’t sure whether he can get it working in weeks.”

  I didn’t think of anything except that equipment after that. I strode out, still wet from the shower, and started to get into another suit. I didn’t even look to see if Lavinia was taking a peek at me. My job with Gissenheim’s was just beginning.

  Trouble had broken out, and when I wasn’t nursemaiding B.G., I was the firm’s trouble-buster.

  I said, as I got into a shirt: “What happened? Tell me all you know.”

  We were on a big job, a few miles out of Istanbul. It was all part of United Nations’ work of course—just another airfield being laid down. The only trouble was that this airfield was to have one of those super-long runways, and there was a super-high hill in the way just where they didn’t want it, and then a ditch the size of the Pentagon sitting right next to that hill.

  Gissenheim’s had got the contract to dig out that hill and level it, and in the process fill in that gulch.

  It was a mighty job, but it wasn’t exceptional for Gissenheim’s. We brought in all our dirt-shifters from Beirut, where we’d been doing other work, and we’d been tearing into that hill for a few days.

  We had the finest equipment in the world for the job—I’ll say that of Gissenheim’s. Everything was mechanical, and things stabbed into that hillside and clawed at it and gouged out tons of earth at a time and slung it all backward on to moving belts, which took it to where it was wanted. It was such a spectacle that daily thousands of people tramped out to watch the mighty Gissenheim earth-shifters at work.

  Now I was being told that the equipment had been sabotaged.

  Dwight said: “I’ve been out and seen it, Joe. I spoke with some of the men who were guarding the place during the night. They said they had a terrific fight with hundreds of attackers who suddenly, quite silently, sprang out at them. My guess is there weren’t more than a dozen, and those watchmen got the hell out of it when they realized there was trouble coming up.

  “The saboteurs, whoever they were, did things I wouldn’t have believed possible. They tossed every conveyor onto its side—though that didn’t do them any harm; they can soon be put into position again. But they went to work on the cutters and the grabbers, and they smashed up everything they could smash. Gorby is inclined to be pessimistic because he’s got a hangover, but he sure has got a job ahead of him, and I don’t know whether we carry enough spares.”

  I got on my jacket and began to lace up my shoes.

  I said: “We’ll fly spares in from the States rather than fall behind on this job. You keep your fingers crossed, Dwight—Gorby moans, but he works miracles.” I stood up and hitched a tie around my neck. I said: “Let’s have your suspicions—now.”

  Marty shrugged. He said: “It could be political.”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Could be,” I agreed.

  Dwight said: “We bust a few friendships when we got this contract. Could be some rivals don’t want us to make a shine on this job.”

  I was walking towards the door. I agreed again.

  “Could be.” We’d tendered in the face of severe competition, and some rivals—American outfits—hadn’t risen to their size by kid-glove methods. Trouble could have come from them, easily.

  I looked at Tony Geratta, handsome and smiling. He was a good boy, that Tony. I said: “You got any theories to contribute?”

  Tony shook his head.

  I said: “So it seems we’re reduced to two.” I was suddenly reminded of Lav, huddled in my bed.

  I halted and looked at her and caught a frantic eye peering at me between hair and blanket. I was kind. I said: “We’ll get that big slob, B.G., and send him up to you, Lav.”

  She came out of her blankets at that, terror gripping her. She exclaimed with horror: “Oh, please, Mr. Heggy, don’t do that: I—I don’t ever want to see him again!”

  I inclined my head. I said: “I never did see what you saw in that guy. Except that he was American.”

  She whispered miserably: “I’ll go as soon as you’ve gone, Mr. Heggy. I’m sorry I used your bed. I didn’t know....”

  I said kindly: “That’s all right. Anytime I’m not using it, you climb in.”

  Which was perhaps a departure from the usual Heggy code of gallantry.

  We went out. The elevator wasn’t working again.

  We walked down. When I got to the foyer I saw something magnificent walking towards me.

  And she was magnificent.

  It was Marie Konti. And it wasn’t the bogus Marie Konti—the girl who had lured me into Room 102 yesterday.

  This was the real Marie Konti. I knew it at once.

  For this girl’s face was that face that I had looked down upon from my bedroom window—it was the face I had seen in that intense moonlight the previous evening.

  It was the face of the girl who had been abducted by those apes....

  She came straight up to me, and
her cheeks were burning, and she said: “Are you Mr. Heggy?”

  I nodded.

  She exclaimed loudly, angrily: “Then will you please stop making a nuisance of yourself!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  KIDNAPPED AGAIN

  That hotel foyer was pretty small, for it had been designed before the era of air transport and travel on an international scale. And all at once it seemed to be the most crowded place in Istanbul. More than that, it seemed the most zany.

  Because right at that moment B.G. decided to join us and immediately the boys set onto him.

  Perhaps they hadn’t noticed the way in which Marie Konti had addressed me—or perhaps it was just their idea of adding to the jollity of the moment. They were three gents of distorted humour, those buddies of mine.

  Behind Marie Konti I was suddenly aware of a sleek man. He was a Turk in the modern style. Obviously an intelligent man, and as sharp as they’re made. Rather big, just going fleshy, and so dapper we knew at once that he did his shopping in Rome or Paris.

  I saw this rube, and I said to myself, right away: “Watch your mouth, fellow. This is a lawyer.”

  And I was right.

  But I also saw Benny’s face over the reception desk, and if I’d ever seen malicious triumph in my life, it was on Benny’s mug. I thought: “You sonovabitch, you’ve been telephoning again!”

  And I noticed someone else, in the background behind this sleek, confident lawyer man....

  I heard that lawyer man speaking, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I was looking into that lovely face of Marie Konti’s. I was noticing the flush that made her look so attractive, and the shining brightness of her eyes.

  I was also noticing that those shining bright eyes looked keyed up to the point of desperation, and I tucked that thought into my brain to be looked at later. Marie Konti plainly was in a dither.

  I didn’t hear what that lawyer man was saying, because Marty and the boys were taking the pants off their employer. They were giving him hell in public, and they were enjoying it.

  There was Marty, trumpeting indignantly: “You should be ashamed of yourself. I never knew a man like you. You get a girl crazy over you and then you stand her up.”