Marlene wrote the name down on a pad she took from her bag. She smiled brightly. “That’s OK,” she said, “I’m an odd bird, too.”
“Butch, you’re still here! I was going to leave you a note.” The head sticking through the opening in Karp’s office doorway was large, square, and covered with orange fuzz, like industrial carpeting. The door opened wider and a big, cylindrical body pushed through. Fred Slocum dressed cheap and ugly. This evening his ensemble comprised pinkish-tan double-knit slacks and a baggy polyester sports coat in charcoal, red, blue, and orange nubbles, worn over a pale green shirt showing a clean crescent of T-shirt at the open neck.
Karp looked up from his work and rubbed his face. It had the rubbery feel you get after a Novocain session. His stomach was still sour and producing acrid gases that stung his throat. “Yeah, I’m still here. I got to go upstairs and get taped for TV at seven-thirty, so I figured I might as well stay here and get rid of some paper.” He glanced at his watch. “Shit. It’s quarter to seven.”
“You going on TV? What, this hijack thing?”
“Yeah, Carl Weber’s doing the interview.”
“That asshole,” Slocum sneered. “He’ll pull out a little piece of paper in the middle of it and say, ‘Mr. Karp, our investigation shows that in 1948 you took a copy of Dick and Jane Visit Grandma out of the New York Public Library. That book has never been returned. Do you deny it?’”
Slocum did an accurate imitation of Weber’s portentous drone, and Karp grinned. “Yeah, right, I better watch my ass. So what was the note going to be about?”
“Oh, yeah. Max Dorcas. Old guy, runs a little hole-in-the-wall joint in Grand Central, luggage sales and repairs. It’s right across from the locker where they left the bomb. He made the little guy, what’s his name … ?”
“Rukovina?”
“Right. He’s sure he saw him and another guy put a big pot in the locker last Thursday. He remembers it because he wondered why anybody would put a pot in a locker—a package, a bag maybe, but a pot?”
“What about the other guy?”
“Zilch. High collar, low hat. He thinks he had a mustache. But he’s sure on Rukovina.”
“Great, Fred, that’s enough. That’s the first piece of evidence tying any of the gang to the real bomb. Great work!”
Slocum shrugged. “You want me to set the lineup?”
“Yeah, let’s do it first thing tomorrow. And, Fred, I’d appreciate it if you went out to Riker’s and brought them in yourself.”
Slocum frowned slightly and shrugged again. “Sure, whatever.” He turned to go. “By the way, you ought to get some air. You look crummy.”
Karp wrinkled his nose. “I feel crummy. I had a shitty lunch, or something. Take care, Freddy.”
“Yeah, you too. Tell Weber to fuck himself.”
After the detective had gone, Karp bent to work again, but surrendered to his feelings of unease after a few minutes and threw his pencil down. He did need some air. He also needed to talk to Marlene. But her office was dark when he went by, so he trotted down the four flights of stairs and through the lobby into the darkening street.
Karp stood on the steps of the courthouse in his shirt-sleeves and filled his lungs with cool evening air. It helped, a little. Traffic had thinned out and the air was purifying itself, aided by a stiff breeze from the river, six blocks away. The sky was still slate blue over the west side of Foley Square, and the street lamps were coming on. Under one of them a dark young man in a red warm-up jacket leaned against a white van and combed his long, straight hair. He regarded Karp neutrally in the manner of New Yorkers. Karp looked away and watched Dirty Warren pulling his red wagon down Centre Street.
Two TV station vans were parked illegally in front of the courthouse, and Karp assumed they were connected with the taping. When a church clock called seven-fifteen from Little Italy, Karp went back into the building for his date with the millions. As he did so he wondered once again why Bloom was declining the same date, and even more, why the major late evening television news show had assigned its chief investigative reporter to do the interview. Did they know something he didn’t? Join the crowd, he thought.
In her apartment, Marlene examined herself in her long mirror. She had put on a full black wool skirt, a rose silk blouse, and her grandmother’s jet beads. She also wore knee-length black boots, her black eye-patch on her bad eye, and her black kid gloves on her bad hand. She wanted to look slightly military, conservative, no-nonsense, just right for a date with a seventy-two-year-old retired Brit soldier.
It had turned out that the famous G.F.S. Taylor did not live in London at all, but in New York (naughty Inspector Hanlon!). Not only that, he was at home when Marlene called and told him breathlessly why she simply had to see him (she always found it helpful to take ten years off her age and thirty points off her IQ when asking men for interviews over the phone). And not only was he home, but yes, he was free for the evening and would not at all mind if Miss Ciampi dropped by.
The Northumbria was an imposing apartment house on West 77th Street, just off Central Park West, with a liveried doorman and a slow, paneled elevator, the kind of place occupied by widows of wealthy garment magnates. It smelled of furniture polish, steam heat, and old paint.
She rang the bell of Taylor’s apartment and waited. A minute passed. She was about to ring again when the door was flung open, revealing a tall, spare figure in a gray cardigan and baggy tweed trousers. The man had a great beaked nose capped with bushy eyebrows above and a ragged, thick mustache below. His right cheek was a mass of twisted flesh, like the tallow at the bottom of a guttered candle, and he wore a patch on his right eye. After a moment of stunned silence, G.F.S. Taylor laughed, a set of barks like small-arms fire, and said in a loud voice, “You must be Miss Ciampi. I see, ha-ha! I see we can shop for spectacles together. Do come in.”
Marlene followed Taylor through a narrow hallway lit by dim wall sconces into a large, high-ceilinged living room. There was an odd smell to the place, strong tobacco, mostly, but with a medicinal overtone like a doctor’s office. She wondered if the old man were sick.
The room had a well-kept but impersonal feel to it, like the lobby of a good hotel in a provincial capital. A heavy mahogany sideboard, two Duncan Phyfe couches, and a chinoiserie end table set on a worn oriental rug. Art-deco lamps threw fuzzy circles of light against the ceiling.
Taylor bade her sit on the silk couch and offered her sherry. He poured from a crystal decanter and sat down on the couch opposite. “So how did it happen?”
“What, this?” she asked, touching her face.
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting. I thought the English were supposed to be deathly afraid of asking personal questions.”
He smiled broadly, a wolfish but not unpleasant smile. He had very large yellow teeth. “Well, I’m hardly English anymore, am I? I’ve been here since ’48 more or less. And besides that, my mother was a Serb, and Serbs love asking personal questions. And besides that, you’ve come here to pump me for some information, which on the phone you were not at all anxious to specify. And so one likes to know with whom one is dealing. Don’t you agree?”
Marlene shrugged. “All right. A bomb went off. A letter bomb.”
His one eye, shining in its nest of dark wrinkles, widened with interest. “Really? Spring or pull cord?”
“Pull cord, C-4 with a chemical primer. I was being a jerk; I had diagrams of the damn things in my desk.”
“Yes. Still, that kind is hard to spot. And hindsight is not something readily available in the bomb disposal business. But then you’re not in that business, are you? You said on the phone something about the district attorney? You have some identification, of course. I’m sorry, but …”
Marlene dug through her bag, found her wallet, and displayed her photo ID, which he studied briefly and returned. “You’d be surprised,” he said apologetically, “how many people nowadays want to cadge free advice about blowing things u
p. One has to be careful.”
“Speaking of which,” said Marlene, “how did you … ?”
He laughed, bark-bark-bark. “Yes, it’s not exactly a good advert for the firm. It was during the war, quite near the end, actually. I was training a group of partisans in bomb disposal techniques, defusing devices the Jerries and their friends left behind. We were billeted in a little mountain village near Jajce. That’s in Yugoslavia, you know. I was sleeping on the floor near the stove. It was bitter and the stove was roaring. Some big Montenegrins from one of Brkovic’s units stumbled in during the night. They were clumsy with cold and they crowded around the stove. Of course, it went right over and landed on a haversack of incendiary bombs. I woke up with my head on fire.”
“My God! What did you do?”
“Went right through the window and landed in a snowbank. Saved my life, with the results you observe. Remarkable, really. I spend two years taking apart bombs with the Royal Engineers in UXB work during the Blitz, then over to Jugland with McLean, ten months of antidemolition, defusing mines in the cold and dark, with an electric torch in my teeth and my fingers numb. Not a bloody scratch. Then I go off like a torch in the safety of my bed. Hilarious, when you think about it, but it does rather put one off—how shall I say—making firm plans.”
“I guess I know what you mean. Since I got blown up, life seems, I don’t know, unattached. You lose the smooth progress everybody else seems to expect. You’re sort of ready for whatever happens, but you can’t really take it seriously.
“I mean, I’d like to get my face fixed. Not the eye, the face. Just, ah, not to be gorgeous or anything, but just move back to neutral. I don’t like seeing what I see in people’s faces when they look at me. Sometimes, anyway. When I’m feeling bitchy, I use it, rub it in their faces. Afterward, I feel worse. Also, there’s the principle of it. If I was a cop injured in L.O.D. there’d be no question—full reconstruction, full medical. But DAs, forget it. Also, the letter I opened, it wasn’t for me. The state says they’re not responsible. I could sue, get a contingency lawyer, but I don’t just want an out-of-court, I want my—my rights!”
She stopped, startled by the flood of what she had said. He was observing her calmly, smoking some strong foreign cigarette. She felt her face flush with embarrassment.
“Whoosh! God, I didn’t mean to get into all that.”
“No, no. It’s quite all right, really. Sometimes one must … discuss. It even helps if the other person is an utter stranger. Or old. The old hear lots of secrets, you know, presumably because the silence of the tomb is relatively close …”
Now Taylor seemed embarrassed. He busied himself refilling their glasses and lit a cigarette for her. “So, Miss Ciampi,” he said brightly, “what is your puzzle?”
“Marlene, please.”
“Marlene, then. And I’m Goddy.”
“Short for Godfrey?”
“No, not at all. The G stands for Gilbert. It’s the initials, G.F.S. They called me Godforsaken at school, clever but long-winded, and you can’t go about calling someone ‘God,’ especially not me. So Goddy it was, and has been.”
Taylor barked and produced a toothy, ingenuous smile, and Marlene laughed. You could imagine him dressed in an Edwardian sailor suit at six. Then he leaned back and waited for the unfolding of the tale.
Marlene delivered it with her usual terse precision. Taylor sat placidly, hearing her out, occasionally massaging his face with a long, bony hand. His fingers were stained yellow from the powerful cigarettes.
“A solenoid, did you say?”
“Yes, to trigger the grenade cap. I thought it was peculiar at the time. I mean, why not just detonate electrically? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not our kind of sense, no. But suppose someone fancied the idea of producing a little delay between the sound of the solenoid firing the cap and the explosion. Anyone close enough to hear it couldn’t possibly get away. Someone trying to defuse a bomb, for example, who, of course, would know exactly what that sound meant. Someone might get an odd kind of pleasure out of imagining what went on in the minds of his victims during those five seconds.”
Taylor’s voice had slowed as he said this, as though he were dwelling in some precinct of old memory.
“Goddy,” Marlene said carefully, “you sound like you were talking about someone you know.”
He snapped to. “Was I? Well, one met all kinds in the war. There were a few who might have fit. I daresay they’re all dead now, of something slow and ghastly, one hopes. Now as to this mysterious timer—”
“I have it with me.”
“Do you? Splendid! Let’s have a look.”
She took the zip-lock plastic bag with the timer scraps out of her portfolio and handed it across the table. He held it up carefully and shook it. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a monocle, which he screwed into his good eye. “I hate this thing. It makes me look like a stage colonel.”
“Pip-pip, and all that.”
“Quite. Let’s see what we have here. This was what triggered the solenoid, eh?” Taylor manipulated the debris carefully through the plastic. He seemed fascinated by the little bits of metal. Finally he stopped and said peevishly, “Dammit, there’s no bloody light in this mausoleum.” He sprang to his feet. “Come with me. I’ll show you where I really live. But no smoking.”
She followed him down the hallway and through a side door into another room. The light was so much stronger here it made her blink. The peculiar odor was stronger as well, and Marlene realized with a shock that it was the heavy, headachey scent of nitroglycerin. The room was lit by a huge overhead industrial fluorescent fixture. Taylor had converted the apartment’s master bedroom into a study-cum-workshop. One wall was lined with bookshelves, another with steel shelving containing cartons and odd bits of equipment. One wall was taken up by a long, black-topped laboratory table that held a large illuminated magnifier, a binocular microscope, and various power tools: grinders, drills, a miniature lathe. There was a comfortable armchair and a neatly made-up cot in one corner of the room. Taylor actually did live here.
Marlene wandered around the room as he sat down on a stool by the lab table and began to remove the parts from the bag with a tweezers and place them delicately on an enamel tray. As he did so, she examined a framed coat of arms on the wall. There was a crown at the top, then a pick and shovel device, then the outline of a coffin with the top slanted to show it was empty. Underneath that was a scroll with a motto in Latin: Sepulchra multa non corpes habemus. A label said, “64th Bomb Disposal Detachment—Royal Engineers.”
“What’s this mean, Goddy?”
“What? Oh, that. Poor Latin, I’m afraid. It means ‘We have many graves, but no bodies.’ The brass didn’t like it, so it never became official. It was supposed to be bad for morale. What tripe! Probably had the highest morale of any bunch in the war. I mean, risking your life without having to kill anyone—who could ask for more? A marvelous bunch of men, that was, the poor bastards. All right, what have we here?”
He was peering through his magnifier, holding each piece of debris up and rotating it. He said, “Ah,
Marlene, would you be so good as to reach me down that little bottle with the blue label? Yes, that’s the ticket, thank you.”
Taylor placed a few drops of clear liquid on the broken shaft of metal. “This should bring up the serial numbers,” he explained.
“What do you think it is?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I know what it is. I just want to make certain.”
He brushed the dissolved charring from the pieces with a little swab. They gleamed dully in the strong light, like gunmetal. “Here, come have a look.” He backed away from the magnifier and let Marlene look through it. The pieces were lined up on the enamel tray just as they had been in Marino’s lab, but the markings were much clearer: kmf = DO 1.44 Ze er 15 M.
“What’s it mean? Is it Russian?”
“Hardly. It’s a Dozy, as we use
d to call them.”
“You’ve seen one before?”
“Bloody right, I have. The Jerries started using them on aerial mines in late 1940. Then after the Blitz was finished, they issued them to engineer units all over the Eastern Front and the Balkans. Clever shits, weren’t they? Look, there’s no bomb so dangerous as one that everybody thinks has been made harmless, right? So they build a time-delay fuse with its own power supply, which doesn’t start until the power leads to the main detonator have been cut. The UXB man pulls the fuse, clips it, gives the all clear, and the navvies start moving in with their tackle. Then, boom! Good for morale, eh?”
“Goddy, hold on a second. You’re telling me this is a Nazi timer?”
“Well, I don’t know about Nazi, but it’s a German Dozy timer, all right. Look at the markings. The ‘kmf-DO’ is missing the R in front. It stands for Reichskriegsmaterialfabrik Dortmund. The ‘I’ is for the Mark I model, the ‘44’ is the year of manufacture. The rest should say, ‘Zeitzünder,’ time-delay fuse. The ‘15’ is the time in minutes it takes to go off once triggered.
“It’s a marvelously simple and sturdy device. I understand the East German army still uses a variation. You see, if you even remotely suspect there’s one involved, you daren’t cut any wires at all. It’s even dicey removing anything metallic from the body of the bomb, because you never know where the cutoff trigger might be. That means—”
“Wait, Goddy. You said the East Germans were using it. That could mean it came with the Russian grenade. Maybe the same supplier.”
Taylor chuckled. “No, dear girl. Whatever the East Germans use or don’t use, this particular little bugger was made in Dortmund in 1944. It’s straight from the Wehrmacht to you, with love. Someone’s had it in their toy chest for nearly thirty years.”
9
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, the taping had gone rather well, Karp thought as he walked downtown the following morning. Being interviewed for television was a lot less of a strain when you kept in mind that TV—and all journalism for that matter—was a division of show business. At close range, Weber had struck Karp as a prematurely aging man of no particular intellect or distinction, what they called an empty suit around the courthouse. It was difficult to speak intelligently to someone who was not in the least interested in what you were saying, but merely in his own appearance of interest and perspicacity. Besides, he had a thin scum of pink pancake makeup on the collar of his shirt. You couldn’t take a guy wearing pancake makeup seriously.
Depraved Indifference Page 12
