The Black Ice Score

by Richard Stark

  Gonor looked at him in surprise. “Wouldn't you care to study it for a period of time?”

  “Yes, but I don't want the people in it to be studying me.”

  “Oh. I'm sorry; that hadn't occurred to me.”

  “That's why you hired me,” Parer said. “Where is it?”

  “Just ahead, on the left,” Gonor said.

  Parker looked out the window and saw it as they drove by. A narrow building of gray stone, it was set back from the sidewalk and separated from its neighbors by narrow alleys on both sides. A black wrought-iron fence, waist high, ran across the front of the property, with carefully tended grass and trees behind it, flanking the walk up to the building itself, which was four stories high. The windows on the first two floors were barred. The front door was massive dark wood, and on the stone wall beside it was a square plaque, unreadable from here. The place looked well cared for but empty. The rest of the buildings on the block were either quiet residential hotels or old town houses converted to discreet offices.

  “All right,” Parker said. “Turn right on Lexington.”

  “Why not go back?” Gonor said.

  “In traffic like this,” Parker told him, “there's no way to be sure you're not being followed. You've been followed in the past, sometimes by Hoskins, sometimes by General Goma's people. So maybe you're being followed now, and if you are we don't want them to know we're interested in that museum.”

  “Good,” said Gonor.

  The light at the corner was green. Manado made the turn. Parker told him, “When you get to Twenty-third Street make the left. Go over to Third Avenue and then south. When you get to Twelfth Street circle the block to the east and keep an eye on the rearview mirror, see if anybody follows you around.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Manado.

  Parker said to Gonor, “Tell me about this building.”

  “It's a museum,” Gonor said. “Three floors of African artifacts, from shields and spears to wooden dolls. And a fully-equipped apartment on the top floor.”

  “That nobody's ever lived in?”

  “It was planned to have a full-time curator,” Gonor said, “but there was never any need for it. And lately, since Dhaba became independent, the museum has been virtually closed. We have a notice on the front door saying the museum is open by appointment only and giving my office phone number to call. There are still occasionally scholars of one sort or another interested in having a look. When one of them calls, either I or one of my staff will come by, unlock the place, and show the visitor around.”

  “That's the only time anybody goes in there?”

  “We have a commercial cleaning service, which goes through the display rooms once a week. Also a grounds-keeping service, but they don't actually enter the building.”

  Formutesca twisted around again to say to Parker, “The museum isn't exactly the liveliest place in town.”

  “It was a bad idea to begin with,” Gonor said, “and is now outdated as well.”

  “But Patrick Kasempa is living there.”

  “Yes. I discovered them almost by accident over a month ago. An anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania had asked to see some items in our musical instrument department. He spent most of the afternoon. It was getting dark when we left, and that evening I realized I'd left a pipe behind. I went back for it, and there were lights in the top-floor windows. We had been looking for the Kasempas for two or three weeks before that, ever since our friends at home had let us know about the plot, so I waited around to see if anyone appeared. Within half an hour Lucille Kasempa came walking down the street, apparently returning from shopping.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “No.”

  “It's just the two of them in there?”

  “Not at all,” Gonor said. “Patrick Kasempa is one of four brothers, all of whom disappeared at the same time. My guess is the other three are in there with him. On guard duty, you might say.”

  Parker nodded. “How many ways into the building?” he asked.

  “Well, the front door,” Gonor said. “And a back door, of course; the Fire Department insisted. But it is metal and very securely fastened on the inside. There was a fear of burglaries, the building being empty so much of the time.”

  “What's in back?”

  “Not much of anything. At one time it was arranged as a small garden back there with some outdoor sculpture. But it wasn't authentic; the sculpture was metal casts from wood originals, the flora was wrong and so on, so it was given up.”

  “How do you get out there? Just through the house?”

  “Yes.”

  Formutesca said, “There's a fence at the back, a wooden fence about eight feet high. If you wanted to, you could come through a building on Thirty-ninth Street and over that fence.”

  Manado said, “Sir?”

  Gonor said, “What?”

  Manado was looking at Parker in the rearview mirror. “We are being followed,” he said, “by a white Chevrolet Corvair containing two men. I can't make them out clearly.”

  “Go around a few blocks,” Parker said. “Lose them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  To Gonor Parker said, “What about the side alleys? Can you get to the back through them?”

  “There are iron gates at the rear corners of the building,” Gonor said. “They are usually kept locked.”

  “Can you get me blueprints of the building?”

  “Naturally.”

  “And floor plans showing where the displays are.”

  “We have those, yes.”

  “Good.” Parker frowned out the window a minute, then turned back to Gonor and said, “You know you're going to have to kill.”

  “Not necessarily,” Gonor said.

  “Yes,” Parker said. “There are four brothers up there.

  You won't get in without killing at least one, and that means you have to kill all four. And the wife.”

  Smiling bleakly from the front seat, Formutesca said, “We already knew that, Mr Parker. We weren't sure you knew it. Or what your attitude would be.”

  “It just means you've got to look out for the local law too,” Parker said.

  “Anything that occurs,” Gonor said, “will occur in our building. We are unlikely to make a complaint.”

  “Then noise is a problem too,” said Parker.

  Formutesca, smiling, said, “We can be quiet.”

  Manado said, “The white Corvair is no longer following us.” He sounded proud of himself.

  “Good,” Parker said. “Take me back to my hotel.”

  3

  Lying on his back on the floor, Parker fixed the holster to the underside of the bed. A .22-caliber High Standard Sentinel fit in there snugly, but would slide out without trouble. With the pistol in place, Parker got to his feet and saw Claire frowning at him. She said, “You've never done that before.”

  “I do it when I'm working.” He hadn't told her about the Corvair.

  “We're at a different hotel,” she said. “We're using a different name.”

  “I like to be careful,” Parker said. His other gun, a Browning .380 automatic, was on the bed. He picked it up and put it on the shelf in the closet, under the extra blanket. The Terrier he'd bought the last time he was in New York he'd gotten rid of as soon as he'd left the city. It was cheaper and safer in the long run to buy your guns as you needed them and get rid of them as soon as they were no longer necessary.

  Watching him, Claire said, “Are they back again?”

  Parker carried a chair over to the hall door and leaned it so it would fall over if the door was opened. “Who?” he said.

  “Those three men. The ones we saw first.”

  “I haven't seen them,” he said. He went into the bathroom, came out with a glass, put it on the windowsill, and leaned against the window.

  Claire had lit a cigarette. She was moving nervously around the room, studying Parker and shaking her head. “There's something,” she said. “You don't
do all this every time. You think they might come after us.”

  Parker turned and looked at her. “Sure they might,” he said. “There's a country they used to run and now they don't.

  They want to run it again, and to run it they need to put their front man Goma in power, and to do that they need money, and that means the diamonds, and that means they don't want me involved. So they might come around.”

  She bit her lip. “You want me to leave,” she said.

  “Yes. I was going to tell you in the morning.”

  “You want me to go back to Miami?”

  “No. In the morning you take a cab out to Kennedy Airport. Then you take another cab back, and you take a room at a different hotel under some other name. We'll work out what hotel, what name.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Your shopping trip. You can go on—”

  “No,” she said. “You don't give a damn about my shopping trip.”

  He hesitated, then said, “All right. I don't want them to lean on me through you.”

  “All you had to do was say so,” she said. “I guessed it a long time ago.”

  He shrugged. “What hotel do you want to stay at?”

  “The thing is,” she said, smiling at him now, “you worry about me, and you don't like it that you worry about me. You don't want me to see it.”

  Parker shrugged again, irritated. “Whatever you say.”

  “So why don't I shop in Boston?” she said. “Do you know the Herridge House there?”

  “No.”

  “It's a nice hotel, very small. I'll be Miss Carol Bowen.”

  “Mrs,” he said.

  “Oh, of course. Because you'll be coming along later.” She stepped forward and put her hand on his arm. “Not much later, will you?”

  “I don't know how long it will take,” he said. “A week, maybe a month.”

  “Then we should start saying goodbye now,” she said.

  4

  It was like an art gallery: blueprints, floor plans, and photos all along the walls. Parker moved slowly from one to the next, an interested patron of the arts.

  Gonor had set up this one room of his apartment as a kind of headquarters or war room. He'd stripped it to a table and four chairs under the central light fixture, he'd put the blueprints and other material along the walls, and on the table he'd put pads and pencils. He moved with Parker now, pointing out specific items of interest on the different floor plans.

  “The fire escape,” he said at one point, tapping the paper.

  “On the rear of the building.”

  “Can we use it?” Manado and Formutesca were sitting at the table, watching and waiting.

  Gonor shook his head. “No. The windows opening on to it are protected by metal gates on the inside.”

  Parker nodded and kept looking. A minute later he tapped the blueprint he was looking at and said, “Elevator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mm.” Parker moved on. “Basement,” he said. “Any exterior way in?”

  “No. There was at one time a coal chute on the left side of the building near the front, but that was removed and the window covered when the building was converted to the museum.”

  “Window covered how?”

  “With masonry.”

  “All right.”

  There were photos of the building, front and back. The front showed him nothing he didn't already know, and the back looked like a prison with its barred windows and black metal door. There were some photos of the interior, various display rooms.

  “Those are stock photos,” Gonor said. “We've had them on file for some time; they're to be used in publicity and news releases.”

  “They're out of date?”

  Gonor shook his head. “Nothing changes inside the museum,” he said. “It still looks like that today.”

  Parker studied the pictures, then nodded and turned away and sat down at the table. Gonor sat at his left, with Formutesca opposite and Manado on the right.

  Parker said, “About the elevator. What's at the top of the shaft?”

  Gonor had no idea what he was talking about. “The roof,” he said, surprised.

  “There's got to be the motor housing,” Parker told him.

  “Or is that in the basement?”

  “Oh, I see, yes. Yes, it's in the basement. But there is some machinery at the top.” He twisted around and pointed to the picture of the rear of the building. “You see that black shape on top of the building there?”

  “How do you get into it?”

  Gonor frowned, studying the picture from his seat. “I don't remember. But I'm sure there's some way.”

  “I think the top is hinged,” Formutesca said. “It's only about three feet by four.”

  “Kept locked?”

  Gonor said, “Oh, certainly.”

  “But you have a key.”

  Gonor frowned. “I suppose so. I'm sure we must.”

  “What's the problem?”

  “In my desk drawer at the mission,” Gonor said. “I have a yellow envelope marked Museum Keys, with a dozen or more keys inside. Which key is which I have no idea.”

  “We'll have to find out,” Parker said.

  Formutesca said, “You can't get to the roof without going through the fourth floor. They'll never let us do it.”

  “That's right,” Gonor said. “We could go there, and so long as we stayed in the museum area the Kasempas would leave us alone. In fact, they'd be silent; they'd hide the fact of their existence. But if we went to the fourth floor they wouldn't be able to hide any more. And they know I am one of those opposed to Colonel Lubudi.”

  Parker said, “How far would they go?”

  “They would kill us,” Gonor said. “Kill us and bury the bodies in the basement. So the Negro head of the mission of an obscure and tiny African state disappears in New York. We might be in the local papers for two or three days, some of the more rabid Communist nations might get a little propaganda value out of American lawlessness, but that would be all.”

  “All right,” Parker said. “But we have to know about the elevator shaft first.”

  “But why?”

  “We can't get in at the front,” Parker told him. “And we can't get in at the back or the sides. With the coal-chute window sealed off, we can't get in at the bottom. That leaves the top.”

  Formutesca laughed, a sudden bark of delight. “That's the kind of thinking we want!” he said.

  Gonor smiled at Formutesca, then said to Parker, “Several years ago I read a detective story, English or American, I'm not sure which. In it, the detective advocated eliminating all impossibilities. Whatever was left, he said, however improbable, was the truth. Now I find the other side of the law has a similar dictum. The only problem is, how do we get to the top?”

  “From next door,” Parker said. He got to his feet and went over to the picture showing the front of the house. “You've got about four feet here,” he said, pointing to the alley to the left of the house. “And the same on the other side. The buildings on both sides are taller than this one. We go out a window from one of those buildings and over to the roof.”

  Gonor said, “How?”

  “It depends on the position of the window in relation to the roof. If we can, we'll just put a one-by-twelve across from the sill to the roof. If the angle's too steep, we'll have to do it with ropes and grappling irons.”

  Formutesca said, “What about the people over there? We'd rather not cause trouble with innocent bystanders.”

  “We'll be going at night,” Parker said. “We'll have to find a place that's empty at night. That's no problem.”

  Formutesca grinned. “If you say so,” he said.

  Parker went back to the table and sat down. “The next thing is armaments,” he said. “Can we get whatever we need?”

  “Within reason,” Gonor said. “I couldn't get us a tank or a helicopter, for instance. But I can get guns, rifles, machine guns.”

  “Gas?�
�

  “What kind of gas?”

  “Knockout. Stuff that works fast and disperses fast.”

  Gonor smiled bitterly. “I'm not sure that's among the items the big boys will let us play with,” he said. When Parker frowned at him, he explained, “All our armaments come from the major nations, of course. And Israel, which in some ways is also a major nation. But there are agreements among the arms-producing nations about which armaments will be sold in which part of the world. We, for instance, may purchase jet fighters from anyone, and so we have an air force of seven MIG-fifteens and five F-ninety-fours, all purchased used, but no one will sell us a jet bomber.”

  Parker said, “Whatever we want you're going to have to have shipped from Dhaba?”

  “Not at all,” Gonor said. “Mr Formutesca is our military attache. He will make the purchases in this country for shipment to our warehouse space in Newark, and after that whatever items we need just won't go on to Dhaba.” Gonor shrugged. “Simplicity,” he said.

  Parker said to Formutesca, “Can you get the gas?”

  “I'll have to check,” Formutesca said. “I doubt they'll let us have that kind of lethal gas.”

  “It doesn't have to be lethal. All it has to do is knock a man out in one or two breaths.”

  “Non-lethal? I'm sure we can get that.”

  “Good. We'll also need some sort of explosive. One that won't cause much damage but makes a big bang.”

  Formutesca nodded. “I know something good for that.”

  To Gonor Parker said, “Can you get more pictures of the outside of the house without being seen?”

  “I think so,” Gonor said.

  “I want angle shots,” Parker said. “So I can see the sides of the flanking buildings.”

  “All right.”

  “If you can't get them without tipping yourself to the people inside, let it go.”

  “I'll be careful,” Gonor said.

  “Good. Formutesca, have you got old clothes? Very sloppy old clothes.”

  “I have the things I play touch football in.”

  “They have to look like work clothes. Like a janitor.”

  “Oh! Yes, of course. I have a pair of trousers so smeared with paint they'd pass for a Pollock.”