“Well, let’s go see if life imitates art,” Cassidy said.
“Oh, hell, the movies, that’s just entertainment.”
They walked up Joy Street and stopped in front of a brownstone town house. “See,” Harry Madrid said. “It’s not dark. Fella standing in the window looking for us. He’s the killer—”
“Harry, he’s Mr. Brenneman, for God’s sake.”
They climbed the steps and didn’t have to knock. The door swung open and a tall man in a worn corduroy jacket and crepe-soled shoes asked them to come in, come in.
Cassidy stood in the dim hallway with the tile floor and iron boot-scraper. Two more narrow glass-paneled doors led into the foyer. “Good of you to meet us, Mr. Brenneman.”
“Please excuse me—is it Cassidy?”
“And this is Mr. Madrid,” Cassidy said.
“I see. Well, I’m not Mr. Brenneman. My name is Andrew Folger, Mr. Brenneman’s assistant. I was spending the evening at Henry’s, going over some inventory lists and—well, listen to me, what am I going on about?” He smiled self-consciously. He had a bushy head of hair and a straggly mustache that was damp at the tip from being chewed on. He had a way of speaking with his chin tucked down so that he was always peering out and slightly up when he looked at you. You couldn’t see his eyes behind round glasses. The shy academic, the perfect assistant. “So,” he said, clasping his hands almost daintily. “Mr. Brenneman is downstairs in our secret storage room.” He turned back, smiling at the idea of such secrecy in such a gentlemanly profession, then led the way down the hall toward the rear of the house, Victorian splendor on view in the parlors, glorious Boston ferns on pedestals everywhere. “We keep the most valuable pieces there. Fireproof. Like a room-size vault. Oh, Mr. Brenneman takes great pains. Mind the step.”
Folger led the way down to the kitchen level, opened another door down a flight of unfinished wooden stairs with brooms and mops hanging in clips on the wall. At the bottom in the dim basement with the cement floor and dusty basement smell, Folger said, “Right over here, gentlemen.”
A wedge of light fell across the cement floor from a heavy vaultlike door. The special room seemed to have been hewn out of Beacon Hill itself. “Mr. Brenneman,” Folger called. “They’re here.” In a low voice Folger said: “He asked me to show you in and leave you alone with him.” He added fussily: “He gets that way sometimes.”
Cassidy smiled at the old-maidishness.
Folger pulled the heavy door open, out into the cellar. It swung soundlessly, well oiled. “Go right ahead.”
Cassidy went in first, followed by Harry Madrid.
Brenneman was sitting in the shadow, a pool of light from a gooseneck lamp illuminating a ledger on the desk. He didn’t look up or speak and Cassidy felt like an intruder.
With a faint movement of air the door closed behind them.
Harry Madrid said: “Lew, I don’t like—”
Unmistakably there was the sound of bolts being shot.
Cassidy was behind the desk in a flash, shaking the figure of Henry Brenneman.
Harry Madrid turned and rammed his whole two hundred and thirty pounds at the heavy door and knew they’d been had.
Henry Brenneman slid forward in the chair, his head striking the wooden desk smartly. He didn’t say a word. Cassidy turned the gooseneck back, lay the hot bright light across Brenneman’s face.
The eyes were wide open. The gold-rimmed spectacles were awkwardly skewed. His shirtfront and tan cardigan sweater were soaked with blood. His throat had been cut none too cleanly. The weapon, a heavy scissors worn smooth by handling, had been driven with considerable force into his chest.
Harry Madrid observed the scene with a certain calm detachment.
“Just like the goddamn movies,” he said at last.
Cassidy felt good about being up the creek with a guy like Harry Madrid. The old bastard just unwrapped another cheap cigar, lit it, and sat in a slipcovered armchair, puffing. Cassidy wondered how long he could survive without a change of air. Harry Madrid looked like a man waiting for an idea to come to him.
The room was paneled in what seemed to be dark oak, a most civilized room considering its location just off a normally shabby cellar. Obviously it had been put to the use described by the perfidious Andrew Folger, who had just taken over the top spot on Cassidy’s list. Cassidy sat on the edge of the desk, swinging his good leg. He was twirling his walking stick like a big loser in the drum majorette sweepstakes. He contemplated how much he would enjoy unsheathing the sword and sinking it into Andrew Folger.
“I don’t suppose anyone could hear us yell,” he said.
“You gotta doubt it, Lew.”
“Somebody might smell us if you’ve got enough cigars.”
“Naw. They’d just think some old cat crawled in somewhere and croaked.”
Cassidy nodded.
“That Folger the fella I think he was?”
“I don’t know. Spent some time in England—”
“He did?”
“He said ‘mind the step.’ Never heard an American say that.”
“No German accent, though.”
“Well, his brother Rolf doesn’t have a German accent either. Or not much of one.”
“So Folger could have been Manfred Moller. …”
“It figures.” Cassidy shrugged. “Maybe he was stopping in to check on his minotaur. Damn. I can’t begin to figure it out. But Folger knew we were coming. Brenneman obviously knew him, there’s been no struggle here. Brenneman came down here to get the minotaur—either for us to steal or for Folger/Moller to reclaim or inspect. With us coming, Folger/Moller knew somebody had traced the minotaur. … Well, he wouldn’t have to know who to know he damn well wanted to keep it for himself.” Cassidy sighed. “Harry, you don’t seem very worried, and I’m glad about that. So, how the hell are we gonna get out of here?”
Harry Madrid leaned forward, eased himself up out of the chair. It was getting hot in the tightly closed room. Beads of perspiration dotted his forehead. He squinted through the smoke, eyes deep and dark beneath the brim of the bowler. “Think of it, Lew. This Manfred Moller, he’s sort of captured my imagination. Here, give me your stick a minute.” He took it, tapped it against his chin, his eyes far away for the moment. “SS man, the fella Göring picked for the secret mission to set up his escape route, probably knew Hitler personally … storybook stuff, Lew. It’s all a part of history. Now, cross your fingers, son, ’cause I’m just about to play the only card I’ve got.” He took Cassidy’s stick and went to the wood-paneled wall behind the desk, opposite the bolted-from-the-outside door, and began tapping the heavy head against the oak.
Cassidy watched, mopping his face with his handkerchief. Harry’s turning out to be a movie fan had taken him by surprise and now he’d started thinking along the same lines. He wasn’t thinking about Nazis. He was thinking about those goddamn submarine pictures, everybody cooped up in a tiny space, drowning in their own sweat, either depth charges going off all the time or some nitwit yelling Up periscope! Up periscope! or Mayday! Mayday! and Crash dive! Crash dive! The more he thought the hotter he got and the smaller the room seemed and he felt like he was trying to get inside the Tokyo sub pens and end the war for Warner Brothers and the gang in the second balcony back at the Orpheum.
Harry Madrid was still tapping the wall, his ear cocked, listening. He stopped and looked back at Cassidy, crooked a finger, beckoning him. “C’mere. Listen along here.” He resumed tapping.
“You’re looking for a secret compartment?”
“Secret passage, you mean. Tunnel. This sound hollow to you, Lew? Your ears are younger than mine.”
“Shot in the dark, Harry?”
“Never take a shot in the dark, son. Might hit a friendly, then where the dickens would you be? Shit, wish I hadn’t said dickens; I’m thirsty as hell. Sound hollow there, Lew?”
“I don’t know.” He listened. “Tap again, Harry, tap again.”
“I’
d say it sounds hollow,” Harry Madrid said. “It better sound hollow. How d’you get the sword out of this thing?”
Cassidy released the knob, felt the heavy pressure leap into his palm. He handed the sword to Harry Madrid, who looked at it with overt disapproval. “A queer’s weapon. Thin cold steel.”
“Bullshit, Harry.”
Harry Madrid tested the sword tip with a blunt fingertip, snorted. “Pig sticker.” He then began to wedge it in between the molding and the sheet of paneling proper. “This blade ain’t gonna snap on me, is it?”
“Finest Sheffield, Harry.”
“Finest, finest,” he muttered, prying at the molding, chipping at the fine oak. “What we’re looking for here is your subterranean passageway. You’ll find them hither and yon and thither all over Beacon Hill. Fairly honeycombed with ’em. You may ask yourself, what does Harry Madrid know about such things?”
“Crossed my mind, Harry.”
“Goes back to the old bootlegging days. I came up here on an investigation or two, some of my mick colleagues showed me the ins and outs of Beacon Hill. The leggers used to make regular deliveries in the middle of the night. Pull their big Pierces or Maxwells up a block away, in some alley, disappear down a hole and—Bob’s your uncle!—there’s good booze on old Joy Street tonight.” A strip of molding tore loose and Harry Madrid leaned against the panel, shoved. It gave, flopped to and fro in its frame.
There was a squeaking, the flash of a tooth, the glitter of an eye, a fat rat clumsily tripping in the light, falling onto the floor. It limped hastily under the cover of the desk.
“Smells like the grave.” Cassidy peered into the darkness.
“Won’t be a Cakewalk,” Harry Madrid said. “It’s like one of those penny dreadfuls of my boyhood. Lots of spiders and slugs and stink and webs and the rest of that rat’s kinfolk.”
“Christ. You go first. It’s dark in there.”
Cassidy made another check of the room where Henry Brenneman still sat in his desk chair.
No wondrous minotaur.
The walk to freedom was more of a crouch and it was far worse than Harry Madrid’s prediction. But in the end, ten minutes later, they emerged through an ancient wooden door into an alleyway with a streetlamp at the end and Beacon Street cresting twenty yards away. The bootleggers had known what they were doing, all right.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HARRY MADRID WAS LAUGHING SOFTLY to himself when Cassidy walked into the coffee shop at nine thirty the next morning. He was soaking up egg yolk with a piece of toast from a silver toast rack. His Parker House linen napkin was carefully tucked inside his shirt collar and hung like a semaphore flag across his chest. His dark blue suit had been brushed but a bit of cobweb from the night before clung to the back of one sleeve. He mulched the egg and toast around in his mouth and told Lew to take a chair.
“What finds you in such good humor this dark and dreary morning?” Cassidy had slept fitfully, coping with Harry’s snoring from the other bed. But it was his own overburdened mind that had held sleep at bay. The questions just kept multiplying but they never came with any answers to match.
“Well, son,” Harry Madrid said, shifting his bulk in the chair and arranging three more slices of crisp bacon on his plate, “it’s like this. I’ve been a copper a long time, now I’m a private copper, and I seen a lot of dead crazy situations—things you just couldn’t explain. Ever. Things that just wouldn’t yield to investigation. Or to imagination.” He picked up a piece of bacon and daintily placed it in his mouth. A forkful of fried potatoes followed, then a half of a broiled tomato. “And I got to thinking about the Boston coppers, they’re gonna get around to this thing up there on Joy Street and, well,” he chortled, “they’ve got the beginnings of a legend on their hands. They’re eventually gonna find a dead guy, prominent art dealer, behind a bolted door in a basement vault … and an old bootlegger’s tunnel used for an escape route—but who by? The murderer? Why wouldn’t the murderer have left the vault and bolted the door behind him? He would have! So who was locked in the vault with the stiff? Who bolted the door? And what’s been stolen? There’s no way they’re gonna know about the minotaur thing. … You get it, Lew? They’re lost on this one and that’s why I’m laughing and in such good humor. They’re gonna have to call on Dr. Fell to figure this one out. Remember the old rhyme, Lew?
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know and know full well,
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.”
Harry Madrid shook his head, his broad chest quaking. Cassidy got a fresh cup of coffee, ordered pancakes and Canadian bacon, and wished he could share Harry Madrid’s outlook. Instead, he felt like a man trying to battle his way out of a room full of cotton wadding. He didn’t seem to be landing any punches but he was getting tired and losing every round on points. He couldn’t even keep his metaphors under control.
While he waited for breakfast he began working his way through the morning newspapers. Two of them carried the story of the murders at Dauner’s Long Island estate. They were long on Dauner-as-Patriot but otherwise botched, sketchy accounts, reflecting the kind of uncertainty Harry Madrid had seen in the future of the Boston police force. The New York papers that had reached the Parker House weren’t much more in the know. The connection between the dead assassins on the grounds of Dauner’s home and the dead men on the road was mentioned only as a possibility, one theory among several. The pianist Harkavy was properly identified but there was no mention of Gypsies. It was going to take them forever to straighten out the angles and when it came to explaining why a bunch of Gypsies—if they were ever identified as such—should conduct the massacre of an American superpatriot like Karl Dauner, his wife, their guests, well, the law was going to wind up sitting on its collective thumb.
Cassidy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
After breakfast he called New York and got Terry Leary out of bed. To satisfy Cassidy he went and checked on Karin. He came back to the telephone yawning, lighting a cigarette. Karin was sound asleep. She hadn’t been too lively ever since the Long Island business, but then Cassidy knew all that. Something he didn’t know was that Rolf Moller had decided he could not, would not, allow his patient, for whom he continued to feel the responsibility of both a doctor and a brother-in-law, to be removed from his care. Therefore, Dr. Moller was moving in on Leary. He didn’t sound overjoyed at the prospect. “There’s something about the kraut bastard,” he said. “Gives me the creeps. I don’t trust him.”
Cassidy wanted some maneuverability for whatever lay ahead of them in Maine. He had left the Ford convertible in the garage back in New York. It had a clutch problem and a certain eccentricity in the brakes. And now they needed a car.
“Well,” Harry Madrid said, “this is just the sort of eventuality MacMurdo had in mind for the twenty Gs. Special transport. We simply lay it on.”
“Buy a car?”
“Why not, son?”
It took less than an hour for Cassidy to find a dealer with precisely what he had in mind. The Packard man had a mint-condition 1936 gunmetal gray Packard convertible. With a rumble seat, a separate trunk box fixed to the rear end, a radio in first-rate working order, ditto the heater. Balloon white sidewalls, set of snow chains, tool kit, the works. Been in drydock all through the war and the owner had died on Bataan in the Philippines. He’d been a Boston lawyer and his mother had held on to the hope that he might return. Now there was no more hope. The dealer said she didn’t really need a car anymore but she was keeping the ’31 Cord and the ’36 Cord.
In the end Cassidy peeled off twelve hundred bucks and the Packard was his. “Pretty penny,” Harry Madrid said, stroking the gray leather seat.
“Pretty car,” Cassidy said.
“That, my boy, you can say again.”
They were on the road, heading north from Boston, a dirty wet sky pushing down on them. The wind gathering strength from its trip across the oce
an whipped at the Packard, looking for a chink in the fit of the fabric top. It couldn’t quite find one and whined like a motherless child about it. It was cold, much colder than when Cassidy had left New York. Up here, north of Boston, summer was a faded memory of lost youth and it was going to be a long winter.
The heater was trying to cope. The man on the radio between the afternoon serials said there was a winter storm that was carrying snow but it might stay up in Canada, then swirl on out to Nova Scotia and beyond. Then again it might slip down as far south as Boston. Of course, it might not happen at all. “This,” Harry Madrid said, biting his cigar, “has more suspense than ‘Helen Trent.’ Crazy weather, Lew. They say it’s all the bomb, this crazy weather. I don’t know, I guess I’m a relic of another age, like a dinosaur. I belong to a simpler time. The crossbow and vats of boiling oil.”
“You, my friend,” Cassidy said, “exist outside of time. Like … oh, I don’t know, like General Patton. You’re a warrior, Harry.”
“That’s a very nice thing of you to say, Lew.”
“This fucked-up world always needs a Harry Madrid,” he said. “There’s never enough of ’em to go around.”
Rain began picking at the windshield.
“So where the hell is Tuggle?”
Harry Madrid began struggling with the cleverly folded map from the gas station. “It’s up northwest of Bangor, over that way, toward the Blue Mountains. I’m here to tell ya, Lew, it’s winter up there. Colder’n a witch’s tit, right now and right on through mid-June. My, my, I’d love to get hold of the fella designed this map. I’d have his manhood for your aerial, Lew. It’d be a pleasure. You just take a left at some place called Abner. That’s right, town called Abner. I’ll bet it’s a little place, too. Left for Tuggle. Lew, what are we doin’ up here, rootin’ around for Nazis in Tuggle, Maine?”
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