Denny strained, could hear nothing but the traffic passing through the park, its sound rising and falling with the wind, like surf. He murmured, “What a talent you got, Grooley! What a team we’d make!”
“A team we certainly will not make!” the peer snorted. “But, as to your playing squire to my knight, hmm, well, we’ll consider it. I plan to take a brisk walk in the morning, down to the Battery and vicinage. We’ll see if you can stand the pace—no sinecure being gunbearer, as it were, to the man who out-walked The Man-Eater of Mysore. And another thing—” He thwacked the Dip across the feet with his swagger stick. “No more of this ‘Grooley’! Call me Sahib, Bwana, Kyrios, or M’lord.”
* * *
“HMM,” MURMURED LORD Grue and Groole, pausing and looking in the shop window. “I find that curious. Don’t you find that curious, Denny?”
Denny, panting and aching from the long trek down from Central Park, was finding nothing curious but his inability to break away and sink to rest. “Wuzzat, Gr—I mean Bwana?” he moaned. He was bearing, in lieu of gun, the Marquess’s swagger stick.
“Use your eyes, man! There, in the window. What do you see?”
The Dip wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “Leather goods?” he inquired. “Outboard motors? Canned crab-meat?” The Marquess clicked his tongue, and swore rapidly in Swahili (Up-Country dialect). “Seasoned Honduras mahogany?” the Dip continued hastily. “Flowered organdy? Blue rayon? Manila hemp?”
“Ahah! Just so, a great lovely coil of Manila hempen rope. Notice anything odd about it? No? You were pulling the wrong mendicant dodge, you should’ve used a tin cup. You really don’t see that scarlet thread running through it, so cleverly and closely intertwined that it cannot be picked out without spoiling the rope? You do see it; good. No use to ask if you know what it means; you don’t, so I’ll tell you. It means that rope was made by and for the Royal Navy. It is never sold, so it must have been stolen. No one would dare fence it in Blighty, so they’ve shipped it over here. Clever, I call that. Must look into this.”
He entered the shop, followed by Denny, who sank at once into a chair. The dog Guido, looking as cool and fresh as his master, stood motionless. Mrs. Goodeycoonce emerged from the back.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” said Lord Grue and Groole, touching the brim of his quasi-caracul cap, and giving her no chance to speak. “My name is Arthur Powisse, of the Powisse Exterminating Company. Allow me to offer you my card—dear me, I seem to have given the last one away; ah, well, it doesn’t signify. This is my chief assistant, Mr. Dennis, and the animal is one of our pack of trained Tyrolean Rat Hounds. We have just finished a rush job at one of the neighborhood warehouses, and, happening to pass by and being entranced by your very attractive window display, thought we would drop in and offer you an estimate on de-ratting your premises.”
Mrs. Goodeycoonce opened her mouth, but the Marquess swept on. “I anticipate your next comment, ma’am. You are about to say, ‘But I keep a clean house’—and so you do, so you obviously do. But do your neighbors? Aye, there’s the rub; they don’t, alas. Around the corner is an establishment of the type known as, if you will pardon the expression, a common flophouse—the sort of place where they throw fishbones in the corner and never sweep up. Three doors down is the manufactory of Gorman’s Glossy Glue Cakes, a purely animal product, on which Ratus ratus thrives, ma’am, simply thrives!”
Something flickered in Granny Goodeycoonce’s eyes which seemed to indicate she had long been aware of the proximity of Gorman’s Glossy Glue Cakes, particularly on very warm days, and found in it no refreshment of soul whatsoever.
“How often at night,” Lord Grue and Groole waxed almost lyrical, “when all should be quiet, must you not have heard Noises, eh?—and attributed them to the settling of the timbers, the expansion and contraction of the joists and beams. Not a bit of it! Rats!” His voice sank to a whisper. “Oh, the horror of it! First one grey shadow, then another—”
He took a step forward, she took one backward, he advanced, she retreated. “Then great grisly waves of them, first in the foundations, then in the cellar, then—does this door lead to the cellar? I had better examine it.”
* * *
LATER THAT EVENING found the Marquess and his bearer deep in the shadowy doorway of an empty warehouse. “It was the advent of that offensively wholesome-looking young chap, her grandson, that broke the spell,” the Marquess mused. “Said she’d consider it. No matter. I saw the cellar. Those crates and crates of Polish hams! Those bales of raw rubber! Turkish Sipahi cigarettes! That infinite variety of portable, seaborne merchandise!
“It can only mean one thing: the people are pukka river pirates. I know the signs—seen them on the Thames, the Nile, Hoogli, Brahmapootra, Whampoa, Pei-Ho—eheu fugaces. Nice set-up she’s got there—snug shop, tidy house, fine figger, and a widow woman, I’m sure—no sign of a husband and anyone can see she’s not the divorcing type. Hmm, well, question is: How does the lad get the stuff there? How do river pirates usually get the stuff there? Just so.”
And they had walked along the waterfront, the Marquess examining the water as intently as one of the inhabitants of the Sunda Straits peering for bêche-de-mer, the Dip plodding along to the rear of Guido, as sunken beneath the weight of the swagger stick as if it had been an elephant gun. He reflected on the day he might have spent, conning old ladies out of coins, and on a certain bat-cave he knew of, where an ounce and a quarter of Old Cordwainer retailed for the ridiculous sum of 31 cents. But there was that about the Marquess which said Hither to me, caitiff, and therein fail not, at your peril; therefore Denny plodded meekly.
“Ho,” said His Lordship, stopping, and pointing at the filthy waters of the East River, which, in a happier time, lined with forests and grassy meads, were thick with salmon, shad, cod, alewives, herring, sturgeon, and all fruits of the sea; now the waters were merely thick. “Observe,” said His Lordship. “You see how—there—the oil slick, orange peel, bad bananas, and other rubbish floats down with the tide. Whereas the flotsam rides more or less straight out from under us and joins the current at a right angle. The main current, that is. Let’s have a dekko,” he declared, and shinnied down the side of the wharf timbers almost to the water’s edge.
His enthusiasm, as he clambered up, almost communicated itself to the Dip. “Whuddaya see, Sahib?” he asked, craning.
“Enough. Tonight, when the eyes of the Blessed Houris in Paradise, yclept ‘stars’ in our rude Saxon Tongue, shine as clearly as this filthy air will allow them to, we shall follow young Mr. Goodeycoonce. Here are rupees, or whatever the juice they call them—‘quarters’? Just so. Go thou and eat, and return within the hour. As for me, a strip of biltong will do, and fortunately I took care to refill the flask. They make good whiskey in Belfast, I must say, cursed Orangemen though they be.” He raised his drink and waved it across a trickle in the gutter. “To the King over the water”—and drank. His glass eye glittered defiance to all the House of Hanover.
* * *
ALL WAS QUIET in the kitchen behind THE ALMOST ANYTHING SECOND-HAND GOODS AND OUTLET STORE. Granny Goodeycoonce was pasting in her scrapbook the latest letter she had received in reply to a message of congratulations sent on the birthday of one of the Princesses of the Netherlands. It read, as did all the others in the scrapbook: The Queen has read your letter with interest and directs me to thank you for your good wishes. And it was signed, as nearly as could be made out, Squiggle Van Squiggle, Secretary.
“Gee,” said Neely, looking up from a trade journal he was reading, “here’s a bait business for sale on Long Island, on the North Shore.” There was no answer. He tried again. “And a boat basin in Connecticut. ‘Must be sold at once,’ the ad says, ‘to settle estate.’ Gee.”
His grandmother capped the tube of library paste. “I suppose Princess Beatrix will be getting engaged pretty soon,” she observed. “I wonder who to. How old is the Crown Prince of Greece? No, that wouldn’t do, I suppose; he’ll be King of G
reece some day, and she’ll be Queen of Holland. Hmm.” She knit her brows, deep in the problems of dynasty.
“They could be combined,” Neely suggested.
Granny Goodeycoonce looked up, amazed. “What, Greece and Holland?”
“No, I mean a bait business and a boatyard. People,” he explained enthusiastically, “would buy bait to fish with from their boats. And—”
She clicked her tongue. “The idea! A Goodeycoonce becoming a fishmonger!”
“Better than being a river pirate,” he mumbled.
“Never let me hear you use that word again!” she snapped. “The very idea! Have you no respect for the traditions of the family? Why, it makes my blood boil! And don’t you forget for one minute, young man, that I am a Goodeycoonce by descent as well as by marriage; don’t you forget that!”
“Fat chance,” Neely muttered.
His grandmother opened her mouth to release a thunderbolt, but at that moment there came a thud from the cellar, followed by a clatter.
“Oh, my land,” Granny whispered, a hand at her throat. “Rats! I should’ve listened to that Limey. Is the door to the cellar locked?”
Answer was superfluous, for at that moment the door swung open and in stepped the Limey himself, more properly described as Arthur Marmaduke Roderick Lodowicke William Rufus de Powisse-Plunkert, Baron Bogle, Earl of Ballypatcoogan, Viscount Penhokey, Laird of Muckle Greet, Master of Snee, 11th Marquess of Grue and Groole in the Peerage of England, and Hereditary Lord High Keeper of the Queen’s Bears. “Good evening, all,” he said.
Neely went pale. “I knew it!” he cried. “I knew we couldn’t go on getting away with it forever, not after almost three hundred years! That exterminator story was just a dodge—he must be from the Harbor Patrol, or the Coast Guard!”
The Marquess took his swagger stick from the quivering Denny (who had made the underground voyage with his head under his coat, for fear of bats), and smacked it gently into the palm of his hand. “You know, I resent that very much,” he said, a touch of petulance in his voice. “I will have you know that I am no copper’s nark, common informer, or fink. I—”
“You get out of my house,” said Granny Goodeycoonce, “or I’ll—”
“Call the police? Oh, I doubt that, my good woman; I doubt that entirely. How would you explain all those cork fenders in the cellar? The copper cable, raw rubber, Turkish Sipahi cigarettes, Polish hams? To say nothing of enough sailcloth to supply a regatta, a ton of tinned caviar, five hundred oka of Syrian arrack, twenty canisters of ambergris, several score pods of prime Nepauli musk, and, oh, simply ever so many more goodies—all of which, I have no hesitation in declaring, are the fruits of, I say not ‘theft,’ but of, shall I say, impermissive acquisition. Eh?”
Granny Goodeycoonce, during the partial inventory, had recovered her aplomb. “Well, you simply couldn’t be more wrong,” she said, a smile of haughty amusement on her lips. “‘Impermissive’? Poo. We have the best permission anyone could ever want. Neely, show this foreign person our permission.”
Still pale, and muttering phrases like I’ll be an old man when I get out, Neely unlocked an antique cabinet in one corner of the room and removed a flat steel case, which he handed to his grandmother. She opened it with a key of her own, and reverently extracted a parchment document festooned with seals, which she displayed to the Marquess with the words: “Look, but don’t touch.”
He fixed his monocle firmly in his good eye and bent over. After a while he straightened up. “Mph. Well, I must confess that my knowledge of Seventeenth Century Dutch orthography is rather limited. But I can make out the name of Van Goedikoentse, as well as that of Petrus Stuyvesant. Perhaps you would be good enough to explain?”
Nothing could have pleased Granny more. “This,” she said in tones both hushed and haughty, “is a Patent from the Dutch West India Company, granting to my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Nicolaes Jacobus Van Goedikoentse, and ‘to his heirs forever,’ the right of collecting customs in the harbor port of Nieuw Amsterdam. It was granted in return for Myn Heer Van Goedikoentse’s valiant help in resisting the insolent British demand for surrender in 1662. Governor Stuyvesant promised he would never forget.”
For a moment no word broke the reverent silence. Then, slowly, Lord Grue and Groole removed his cap. “And naturally,” he said, “your family has never recognized that surrender. Madam, as an unreconstructed Jacobite, I honor them for it, in your person.” He gravely bowed. Equally gravely, Mrs. Goodeycoonce made a slight curtsy. “Under no circumstances,” he went on, “would I dream of betraying your confidence. As a small effort to amend for the sins of my country’s past I offer you my collaboration—my very, very experienced collaboration, if I do say so.”
Three hundred years (almost) of going it alone struggled in Mrs. Goodeycoonce’s bosom to say No. At the same time she was plainly impressed with Lord Grue and Groole’s offer—to say nothing of his manner. It took her a while to reply. “Well,” she said finally, “we’ll see.”
* * *
DON SYLVESTER FITZPATRICK, Second Vice-President of the Mafia (Lower Manhattan Branch), was nervous. The survey was almost finished, and the Grand Council still hadn’t made up its mind about blowing up the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In fact, it was even now debating the project in their Chamber, at the window of the anteroom to which Don Sylvester now sat. Elation at being at long last removed from the artichoke detail had gradually given way to uneasiness. Suppose they did decide to blow it up? Would the United States Government take the same broad view of this as the Dons did? Visions of being hanged from the yardarm of, say, the USS Missouri, danced like sugar plums in Sylvester’s head.
A flutter from the crates at his foot distracted his attention. In one was a black pigeon, in one was a white. Very soon the mysterious Mr. Tosci would appear with $87,000,000 in plain, sealed wrappers, and be told the Grand Council’s decision. Even now the Mafiosi bomb squads were standing by at the ready in Brooklyn. Informed only that morning that police had put the traditional, semiannual wire tap on the Mafiosi phones, the Mafiosi had brought out the traditional, semiannual pigeon post.
“Now, remember,” Don Lefty McGonigle had instructed his son-in-law, “d’ black boid has d’ message Bombs Away awready in d’ cap-sool fastened to its foot. And d’ white boid’s got d’ message Everyt’ing Off inscribed on d’ paper in d’ cap-sool on its foot. Ya got dat?”
“Yeah, Papa,” said Don Sylvester, wiping his face.
“So when ya get d’ woid, Yes, ya leddout d’ black pigeon. But if ya get d’ woid, No, den ya leddout d’ white pigeon. An’ nats all dere’s to it. Okay?”
“Okay, Papa.”
“Om depending on you. Philomena is depending on you. So don’t chew be noivous.”
“No, Papa,” said Don Sylvester.
* * *
WHEN FORRANCE TOLD Daisy that the “Nafia” was awaiting delivery of the first of its new fleet of trucks he was speaking optimistically. The new truck was “new” only in the sense that it was newer than the one it replaced, a 1924 Star, which had to be thawed out with boiling water in cold weather and cranked by hand before it would start, in all weather. The Nafia treasury had suffered a terrible blow when the Cherry Street Mob, in the mid-fifties, took over the distribution of birch beer south of Vesey Street—during the course of which epic struggle Guts had his ears boxed and Blood suffered a sympathetic nasal hemorrhage; as a result, the treasury could only afford to have the single word NAFIA painted on the side panels. Still it was something.
“Rides like a dream, don’t it,” Forrance said, as they headed along South Street one bright afternoon.
“No, it don’t,” said Blood. “It liss.”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘it liss’?”
“I mean, like it liss ta one side. Look—”
Guts said, “He’s right, boss. It does liss. Them new gumball machines ain’t equally distributed. They all slide to one side.”
Forrance halt
ed the truck with a grinding of gears. “All right,” he said resignedly; “then let’s take’m all out and put’m back in again, but evenly this time.”
So the smallest criminal organization in New York got out of its fleet of trucks to unload and reload its gumball machines.
* * *
TOSCI PAUSED ON the deck of the yacht to receive his superior’s final instructions. “I have counted the money,” he said. “Eighty-six million in negotiable bearer bonds, and one million in cash.”
“Very well. Perhaps they will have time to spend it all before we Take Over; perhaps not. I have instructed the Chief Engineer to test the engines in order that we can leave as soon as the decision is made. They say the bombs are set for four hours, but who knows if we can believe them?”
As if to confirm his fears, the Chief Engineer at this moment rushed on deck, grease and dismay, in equal parts, showing on his face.
“The engines won’t start!” he cried.
“They must start!” snapped the Project Supervisor. “Go below and see to it!” The Chief, with a shrug, obeyed. The Project Supervisor scowled. “An odd coincidence—if it is a coincidence,” he said. “Personally, I have never trusted sailors since the Kronstadt Mutiny.” To conceal his nervousness he lifted his binoculars to his eyes, ordering Tosci not to leave the ship for the time being. Scarcely had he looked through the glasses when an exclamation broke through his clenched lips.
“There is a truck on the waterfront,” he cried, “with the Mafia’s name on it! And three men are lifting something from it. Here—” he thrust the glasses at Tosci—“see what you can make of it.”
Tosci gazed in bewilderment. “Those machines,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like them. I don’t understand—why should the Mafia be unloading such strange devices so near our ship?”
Suspicion, never far below the surface of the Project Supervisor’s mind, and usually right on top of it, burst into flames. “They must be electronic devices to keep our engines from functioning!” he cried. “They think to leave us stuck here in the direct path of the explosions, thus destroying alien witnesses! Clever, even admirable—but we cannot allow it. Come—” he seized Tosci by the arm holding the portfolio in which the bonds and money were—“to the launch! We must see about this!” Together they rushed down the gangway ladder into the boat.
The Investigations of Avram Davidson Page 15
