The Judas Goat

by Robert B. Parker

  Walking up the Strand I passed a London cop walking peaceably along, hands behind his back, walkie-talkie in his hip pocket, the mike pinned to his lapel. His nightstick was artfully concealed in a deep and inconspicuous pocket. As I walked I could feel an excited tight feeling in my stomach. I kept thinking of Samuel Johnson, and Shakespeare. “The old country,” I thought. Which wasn’t quite so. My family was Irish. But it was the ancestral home, anyway, for people who spoke English and could read it. Simpson’s was on the right, just past the Savoy Hotel. I wondered if they played “Stompin‘ at the Savoy” over the music in the elevators. Probably the wrong Savoy.

  I turned into Simpson’s, which was oak paneled and high ceilinged, and spoke to the maitre d’. The maitre d‘ assigned a subordinate to take me to Flanders, who rose as I approached. So did the man with him. Very classy. “Mr. Spenser, Inspector Downes, of the police. I asked him to join us, if that’s all right with you.” I wondered what happened if it weren’t all right. Did Downes back away out of the restaurant, bowing apologetically?

  “Fine with me,” I said. We shook hands. The waiter pulled out my chair. We sat down.

  “A drink?” Flanders said.

  “Draught beer,” I said.

  “Whiskey,” Downes said. Flanders ordered Kir.

  “Inspector Downes worked on the Dixon case,” Flanders said, “and is a specialist in this kind of urban guerrilla crime that we see so much of these days.”

  Downes smiled modestly. “I’m not sure expert is appropriate, but I’ve dealt with a good many, you know.”

  The waiter returned with the drinks. The beer was cold, at least, but much flatter than American beer. I drank some. Flanders sipped at his Kir. Downes had his whiskey straight without ice or water, in a small tumbler, and sipped it like a cordial. He was fair-skinned with a big round face and shiny pink cheekbones. His body under the black civil-servicey-looking suit was heavy and sort of slack. Not fat, just quite relaxed. There was a sense of slow power about him.

  “Oh, before I forget,” Flanders said. He took an envelope from inside his coat and handed it to me. On the outside in red pen was written, “Spenser, 1400.”

  “The exchange rate is very good these days,” Flanders said. “Your gain and our loss, isn’t it.” I nodded and stuck the envelope in my jacket pocket. “Thank you,” I said. “What have you got to tell me?”

  “Let’s order first,” Flanders said. He had salmon, Downes had roast beef and I ordered mutton. Always try the native cuisine. The waiter looked like Barry Fitzgerald. He seemed delighted with our choices. “Faith and begorra,” I murmured. Flanders said, “I beg your pardon?” I shook my head. “Just an old American saying. What have you got?” Downes said, “Really not much, I’m afraid. A group called Liberty has claimed responsibility for the Dixon murders and we have no reason to doubt them.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Young people, apparently very conservative, recruited from all over western Europe. Headquarters might be in Amsterdam.”

  “How many?”

  “Oh, ten, twelve. The figure changes every day. Some join, others leave. It doesn’t seem a very well organized affair. More like a random group of juveniles larking about. ”

  “Goals?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What are the goals of their organization? Do they wish to save the great whales? Free Ireland? Smash apartheid? Restore Palestine? Discourage abortion?”

  “I think they are anticommunist.”

  “That doesn’t explain blowing Dixon up. Dixon industries aren’t practicing state socialism, are they?” Downes smiled and shook his head. “Hardly. The bombing was random violence. Urban guerrilla tactics. Disruption, terror, that sort of thing. It unravels the fabric of government, creates confusion, and allows the establishment of a new power structure. Or some such.”

  “How are they progressing?”

  “The government seems to be holding its own.”

  “They do much of this sort of thing?”

  “Hard to say,” Downes sipped at his Scotch some more and rolled it around over his tongue. “Damned fine. It’s hard to say because we get so bloody much of this sort of thing from so many corners. Gets difficult to know who is blowing up whom and why.” Flanders said, “But, as I understand it, Phil, this is not a major group. It doesn’t threaten the stability of the country.” Downes shook his head, “No, surely not. Western civilization is in no immediate danger. But they do hurt people.”

  “We all have reason to know that,” Flanders said. “Does any of this help?”

  “Not so far,” I said. “If anything it hurts. As Downes knows, the more amateurish and unorganized and sappy a group like this is, the harder it is to get a handle on them. The big well organized ones I’ll bet you people have infiltrated already.” Downes shrugged and sipped at his Scotch. “You’re certainly right about the first part anyway, Spenser. The random childishness of it makes them much more difficult to deal with. The same random childishness limits their effectiveness in terms of revolution or whatever in hell they want. But it makes them damned hard to catch.”

  “Have you anything?”

  “If you were from the papers,” Downes said, “I’d reply that we were developing several promising possibilities. Since you’re not from the papers I can be more brief. No. We haven’t anything.”

  “No names? No faces?”

  “Only the sketches we took from Mr. Dixon. We’ve circulated them. No one has surfaced.”

  “Informants?”

  “No one knows anything about it.”

  “How hard have you been looking?”

  “As hard as we can,” Downes said. “You’ve not been over here long, but as you may know, we are pressed. The Irish business occupies most of our counter-insurgency machinery. ”

  “You haven’t looked hard.” Downes looked at Flanders. “Not true. We have given it as much attention as we can.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I understand your kind of problems. I used to be a cop. I’m just saying it so Flanders will understand that you have not been able to conduct an exhaustive search. You’ve sifted the physical evidence. You’ve put out flyers, you’ve checked the urban guerrilla files and the case is still active. But you don’t have a lot of bodies out beating the bushes on Egdon Heath or whatever.” Downes shrugged and finished his Scotch.

  “True,” he said. Barry Fitzgerald came back with food. He brought with him a man in a white apron who pushed a large copperhooded steam table. At tableside he opened the hood, and carved to my specifications a large joint of mutton. When he was finished he stood back with a smile. I looked at Flanders. Flanders tipped him. While the carver was carving, Barry put out the rest oi the food. I ordered another beer. He seemed delighted to get it for me.

  6

  I rejected Flanders’s offer of a cab and strolled back up the Strand toward the Mayfair in the slowly gathering evening. It was a little after eight o’clock. I had nowhere to be till morning and I walked randomly. Where the Strand runs into Trafalgar Square I turned down Whitehall.

  I stopped halfway down and looked at the two mounted sentries in the sentry box outside the Horse Guards building. They had leather hip boots and metal breastplates and old-time British Empire helmets, like statues, except for the young and ordinary faces that stared out under the helmets and the eyes that moved. The faces were kind of a shock.

  At the end of Whitehall was Parliament and Westminster Bridge, and across Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey. I’d walked through it some years back with Brenda Loring and a stampede of tourists. I’d like to walk through it when it was empty sometime. I looked at my watch: 8:50. Subtract six hours, it was ten of three at home. I wondered if Susan was in her counseling class. It probably didn’t meet every day. But maybe in the summer. I walked a little way out into Westminster Bridge and looked down at the river. The Thames. Jesus Christ. It had flowed through this city when only Wampanoags were on the Charles. Bel
ow me to the left was a landing platform where excursion boats loaded and unloaded. Susan and I had gone the year before to Amsterdam and had a wine and cheese cruise by candlelight along the canals and looked at the high seventeenthcentury fronts of the canal houses.

  Shakespeare must have crossed this river. I had some vague recollection that the Globe Theatre was on the other side. Or had been. I also had the vague feeling that it no longer existed. I looked at the river for a long time and then turned and leaned on the bridge railing with my arms folded and watched the people for a while. I was striking, I thought, in blue blazer, gray slacks, white oxford button-down and blue and red rep striped tie. I’d opened the tie and let it hang down casually against the white shirt, a touch of informality, and it was only a matter of time until a swinging London bird in a leather miniskirt saw that I was lonely and stopped to perk me up. Miniskirts didn’t seem prevalent. I saw a lot of harem pants and a lot of the cigarette look with Levis tucked into the top of high boots. I would have accepted either substitute, but no one made a move on me. Probably had found out I was foreign. Xenophobic bastards. No one even noticed the brass touch on the tassels on my loafers. Suze noticed them the first time I had them on.

  I gave it up after a while. I hadn’t smoked in ten or twelve years, but I wished then I’d had a cigarette that I could have taken a final drag on and flipped still burning into the river as I turned and walked away. Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures. At the edge of St. James’s Park there was something called Birdcage Walk and I took it. Probably my Irish romanticism. It led me along the south side of St. James’s Park to Buckingham Palace. I stood outside awhile and stared in at the wide bare hard-paved courtyard. “How you doing, Queen,” I murmured. There was a way to tell if they were there or not but I’d forgotten what it was. Didn’t matter much. They probably wouldn’t make a move on me either.

  From the memorial statue in the circle in front of the palace a path led across Green Park toward Piccadilly and my hotel. I took it. I felt strange walking through a dark place of grass and trees an ocean away from home, alone. I thought about myself as a small boy and the circumstantial chain that connected that small boy with the middle-aging man who found himself alone in the night in a park in London. The little boy didn’t seem to be me very much. And neither did the middle-aging man. I was incomplete. I missed Susan and I’d never missed anyone before. I came out on Piccadilly again, turned right and then left onto Berkeley. I walked past the Mayfair and looked at Berkeley Square, long and narrow and very neat-looking. I didn’t hear a nightingale singing. Someday maybe I’d come back here with Susan, and I would. I went back to the hotel and had room service bring me four beers. “How many glasses, sir?”

  “None,” I said in a mean voice. When it came I overtipped the bellhop to make up for the mean voice, drank the four beers from the bottle and went to bed.

  In the morning I went out early and placed an ad in the Times. The ad said: “REWARD. One thousand pounds offered for information about organization called Liberty and death of three people in bombing of Steinlee’s Restaurant last August 21. Call Spenser, Hotel Mayfair, London.” Downes had promised the previous evening to have the file on Dixon sent over to my hotel and by the time I got back it was there, in a brown manila envelope, folded in half the long way and crammed in the mail box back of the front desk. I took it up to my room and read it. There were Xerox copies of the first officer’s report, statements taken from witnesses, Dixon’s statement from his hospital bed, copies of the Identikit sketches that had been made and regular reports of no progress submitted by various cops. There was also a Xerox of a note from Liberty claiming credit for the bombing and claiming victory over the “communist goons.” And there was a copy of a brief history of Liberty, presumably culled from the newspaper files.

  I lay on the bed in my hotel room with the airshaft window open and read it over three times, alert for clues the English cops had missed. There weren’t any. If they had overlooked anything, I had too. It was almost as if I weren’t any smarter than they were. I looked at my watch: 11:15. Almost time for lunch. If I went out and walked in leisurely fashion to a restaurant and ate slowly then I would have only four or five hours to kill till dinner. I looked at the material again. There was nothing in it. If my ad didn’t produce any action, I didn’t have any idea what to do next. I could drink a lot of beer and tour the country but Dixon might get restless about that after I’d gone through a couple of five grand advances.

  I went out, went to a pub in Shepherd’s Market near Curzon Street, had lunch, drank some beer, then walked up to Trafalgar Square and went into the National Gallery. I spent the afternoon there looking at the paintings, staring most of time at the portraits of people from another time and feeling the impact of their reality. The fifteenth-century woman in profile whose nose seemed to have been broken. Rembrandt’s portrait of himself. I found myself straining after them. It was after five when I left and walked in a kind of head-buzzing sense of separateness out into Trafalgar Square and the current reality of the pigeons. The ad would run in the morning, they had told me. I had nothing to do tonight. I didn’t feel like sitting alone in a restaurant and eating dinner, so I went back to my room, had a plateful of sandwiches sent up with some beer and ate in my room while I read my book.

  The next morning the ad was there, as promised. As far as I could tell I was the only one who’d seen it. No one called that day, nor the next. The ad kept running. I hung around the hotel waiting until I got crazy, and then I went out and hoped they’d leave a message.

  During the next five days I visited the British Museum and looked at the Elgin Marbles, and visited the Tower of London and looked at the initials scratched in the walls of tower cells. I observed the changing of the guard, and jogged regularly through Hyde Park along the Serpentine. I carne in six days after the ad was placed, my shirt wet with sweat, my blue sweat pants worn stylishly with the ankle zippers open, my Adidas Cross-Countries still newlooking. I asked as always were there any messages, and the clerk said “Yes” and took a white envelope out of the box and gave it to me. It was sealed and said on it only “Spenser.”

  “This was delivered?” I said. “Yes, sir. ”

  “Not phoned in? This isn’t your envelope?”

  “No, sir, that was delivered by a young gentleman, I believe, sir. Perhaps half an hour ago.”

  “Is he still here?” I said. “No, sir, I don’t believe I see him about. You might try the coffee shop.”

  “Thanks.” Why hadn’t they phoned it in? Because they wanted to see who I was, maybe, and they could do that by dropping off an envelope and posting someone to watch who opened it. Then they’d know who I was and I wouldn’t know who they were. I walked toward one of the armchairs in the lobby where every afternoon tea was served. There was glass paneling on the far wall and I sat in a chair facing it so I could look in the mirror. I had on my sunglasses and I peeked out from behind them at the mirror while I opened the envelope. It was thin and unsuspicious. I doubted a letter bomb. For all I knew it might be a note from Flanders inviting me to join him for high tea at the Connaught. But it wasn’t. It was what I wanted. The note said, “Be at the cafeteria end of the east tunnel near the north gate entrance to the London Zoo in Regent’s Park tomorrow at ten in the morning.”

  I pretended to read it again and surveyed the lobby from behind my shades as far as the mirror would let me. I didn’t see anything suspicious, but I didn’t expect to. I was trying to memorize all the faces in the place so if I saw one again I’d remember it. I put the letter back in the envelope and turned thoughtfully in my chair, tapping my teeth with a corner of the envelope. Pensive, deep in thought, looking hard as a bastard around the hotel lobby. No one was carrying a Sten gun. I went out the front door and strolled up toward Green Park. It is not easy to follow someone without being spotted, if the someone is trying to catch you doing it.

  I caught her cr
ossing Piccadilly. She’d been in the hotel lobby buying postcards, and now she was crossing Piccadilly toward Green Park half a block down the street. I was still in my sweat pants and I didn’t have a gun. They might want to burn me right now right quick once they had me spotted.

  In Green Park I stopped, did a few deep knee bends and stretching exercises for show and then started an easy jog down toward the Mall. If she wanted me she’d have to run to keep up. If she started running to keep up, I’d know she didn’t care about being spotted, which would mean she was probably going to shoot me, or point me out to someone else who would shoot me. In which case I would bang a U-turn and run like hell for Piccadilly and a cop. She didn’t run. She let me go, and by the time I reached the Mall she was gone.

  I walked back up to Piccadilly along Queen’s Walk, crossed the street and walked down to the Mayfair. I didn’t see her and she wasn’t in the lobby. I went up to my room and took a shower with my gun lying on the top of the toilet tank. I felt good. After a week of watching the sun set on the British Empire I was working again. And I was one up on somebody who thought they were one up on me. If she was from Liberty then they thought they had me spotted and I didn’t know them. If they weren’t, if they wanted just to see if they could screw me out of the thousand pounds and were taking a look at how hard I looked, I was still even. I knew them and they thought I didn’t, and moreover they thought that’s where they were. There were drawbacks. They knew all of me and I only knew one of them. On the other hand, I was a professional and they were amateurs. Of course, if one of them laid a bomb on me, the bomb might not know the difference between amateurs and professionals. I put on jeans, a white Levi shirt, and white Adidas Roms with blue stripes. I didn’t want the goddamned limeys to think an American sleuth didn’t know color coordination.