Billy Boyle (10 page)

“Guilt has its own special look and sound.”

“Sound? What do you mean?”

“A catch in the voice, an uplift in tone. You can hear it all the time if you listen. It doesn’t even have to do with crime. It can be emotional.”

“How so?” Kaz asked, not quite believing me.

I stopped and looked at him. Well, he asked. “I heard it in your voice the other night. About your parents, and the suite at the Dorchester.”

“What? Am I guilty of a crime?” I could hear the defensiveness creep into his voice.

“You’re there, and they’re not. It was their place, and now it’s yours. Any normal person would feel guilty, can’t be helped. I’m sorry, Kaz.”

Sorry for his parents, sorry for telling him. He was silent for a minute, then turned and started walking again, watching the ground.

“No, no, you are right. Sometimes I feel like an impostor there. But it is all I have left.” He shrugged sadly. “I just never thought of it as guilt.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, gave a little squeeze, and let it drop.

“People don’t usually think about these things, Kaz. They feel them, act on them, but hardly ever think about them. There’s no reason to; it’s a part of you. A wife will stab her husband one day and honestly think that he said something that made her mad, so she knifed him. Maybe he’s been screwing around and it finally got to her, but she never admitted it to herself. She never thought through the little clues that she found, but they were there, eating at her. So one day he complains that the roast is burnt, and she puts the carving knife in his back.”

“Are these the things a Boston detective thinks about on a case? Self-deception, guilt, the knife in the back?”

“Cops always look for things that are out of place. Very little things, which sometimes lead to bigger things, like
why
a knife in the back.”

“So how do you look for these little things?”

It was like asking how you breathed or woke up in the morning. It was what a cop learned to do first thing, at least in my family. To look, really look, at every little thing.

“What do you look for when you walk into a room?” I asked him.

“A beautiful woman,” he smiled. “Books on the shelf, artwork… anything else would not be very interesting. Although a bar would attract my attention.”

“I like your approach, Kaz; it’s better than most. A cop will check the exits, look to see if anyone is carrying a hidden weapon, and sniff out any tension in the air automatically, just like you would scan the bookshelf for a rare book. Without even thinking about it.”

Kaz nodded thoughtfully. I could see him taking this in, comparing it with his experience.

“Sometimes you can feel something under the surface, something wrong. You can’t be sure what it is. Everything looks normal, but you just get a feeling that something is out of place, that all the little things don’t add up.”

“What do you do when you feel that?”

An obvious question. It was easy for me to talk about Kaz’s family, tell him what was going on inside his head. But it wasn’t that easy to even think about the first time I came up against that question, saw just what Dad had always told me about. One night, just after I got home off duty, Basher McGee came by the house, tipped his hat to Mom, and headed upstairs with Dad to the den. They shut the door, just like always, but their talk was loud, angry, and not contained by the thin plasterboard walls. Nothing understandable, except that the undercurrent of brewing trouble that Basher always brought with him had boiled over, and neither man was giving an inch.

Then there was silence. The house seemed empty, waiting for the sound of their anger to fill it again. I could hear Mom turn the faucet off in the kitchen as she stood in front of the sink, worried more by the quiet than the yelling. The upstairs door slammed open, bouncing off the wall and almost smacking Basher on the rebound as he crossed the threshold.

“You take it, you’re one of us, no better!” he yelled as he clomped down the stairs, tipped his cap again to Mom just as nice as you please, and let himself out the back door. I started to walk upstairs, but Mom put her hand on my arm. I shook it off, and didn’t look at her, embarrassed at how Basher had behaved toward Dad in his own house, embarrassed at shaking off the hand of my own mother. I gripped the banister and headed up toward the den.

The door was still open. Dad held a small box in his hand, the lamplight just behind him lighting one side of his face and leaving the other in shadow. The box was wrapped in plain paper, tied by twine tightly knotted. His hand fell to his side, and he tossed the box into the wastebasket next to his desk. I didn’t move a muscle. He sat down at his desk, didn’t say a thing, just stared at the wall. I tried to move, to walk up to him, to go through that doorway and tell him I’d do anything he needed me to do.

I didn’t. I just stood there. He never looked over at me, and finally I walked to my room, shut the door, flopped down on my bed, picked up the latest issue of
True Detective
from my nightstand, and lost myself in the fiction, dreaming of blazing away at bad guys and watching them roll down the stairs.

“Billy? What do you do when guilt shows itself?” Kaz asked, reframing the question as if I hadn’t understood it properly.

“Run. Duck. Draw your piece, do something, anything. But don’t just stand there.”

A stray stone had found its way out of the flower beds and onto the soft grass path. I kicked at it, sending it back where it belonged, with a clump of grass and torn roots for company.

“Billy, you must teach me how to see and understand these things, to help you find the spy.”

I could see Kaz was all worked up. He was almost like a kid brother, jumping up and down and begging his older brother to take him wherever he was going. Like Danny always did, and I had hardly ever said no to him.

“Why do you want to know all this? Aren’t you already involved in looking for the spy? You know all about everything at HQ.”

Kaz took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. “All I do is read and translate reports and talk to other officers who read and translate other reports. I am sure it is very important work, but it is not getting us any closer to finding this spy. And it is not very exciting,” he added a little sheepishly as he put his glasses back on.

“Asking a lot of dumb questions isn’t very exciting, Kaz. Ask questions, rile people up, watch things, think about things, then go back and ask more questions. That’s it. Not really exciting at all.”

“I do find my work not very stimulating, Billy, but it is not really excitement I am seeking. It is… revenge. If I could fight, I would, but with my heart, this is as close as I can get. If I can help to uncover a spy, that would be enough. I would feel as if I had done the right thing for the memory of my family.”

I didn’t get this little guy. He had bad health, good money, a great hotel room and a beautiful girlfriend. If I had that deal, the last thing I’d be doing would be hunting around for a German needle in a Norwegian haystack. But he was probably going to try on his own anyway, so I figured I might as well take him on and make sure he didn’t mess things up for me.

“OK, Kaz. You’re on. Just watch what I do and keep your eyes open.”

“Excellent! What do we do first?”

I looked at him and wondered how much I could trust him. Was he really an eager beaver? Or was he watching me for somebody else? The thought had even occurred to me that I couldn’t rule out Kaz as a suspect. How did we know he was really who he said he was? Maybe the Nazis were holding his family hostage? Maybe
he
was the “Prodigal Son?” Maybe I was Sam Spade, but I doubted it. Occupational hazard of being a cop. Everyone’s a suspect.

“Go find out where Knut Birkeland is, then come get me. We’ll have a chat with him. I’ll be out here.”

Kaz threw me a mock salute and went off to find Birkeland. I kept walking through the gardens as the sun tried to break through the steel gray clouds. I was thinking about little things and trying to add them up so they made sense. I decided I was a couple of sums short of an equation and stopped to smell the roses, just like they always said you should. I reached out to pull a flower closer to sniff it. It smelled like raspberries and perfume on a beautiful woman’s neck. I let go and a thorn caught my fingertip, leaving a slit on my right index finger, and spraying tiny flecks of blood on the blooms beneath it.

About a half hour later Kaz and I were sitting in Knut Birkeland’s office on the third floor, where most of the government offices were. There were stacks of papers everywhere. Birkeland looked as disheveled as his room. He pushed aside the open books and folders in front of him, leaned his heavy frame back in his chair, and raised his bushy black eyebrows.

“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” There was gruff suspicion in his voice.

“I just wanted to apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to upset people at lunch by asking about the gold.” I put on my meekest voice and enjoyed the look on Kaz’s face. He’d obviously hoped I’d pull out some brass knuckles.

“Well, it doesn’t bother me, but I don’t like it being brought up in front of the king. This is a very delicate time.” He stared at me with those dark eyes, and didn’t even try to hide the fact that it really did bother him.

“You mean because of the pending appointment of a senior adviser?”

“You ask a lot of questions, young man, especially for someone who just apologized for it.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that I was a policeman before the war, and it seems that asking questions is a hard habit to break. I don’t even realize I’m doing it.” He seemed to accept my humble apology, and relaxed a bit.

“Well, no matter. I have nothing to hide. I didn’t take any gold, and I do want the position of senior adviser. If only to keep it from Skak!” He punctuated that statement by pounding his fist on the desk. I could tell he wouldn’t mind the next question at all.

“What’s wrong with Vidar Skak?”

“He’s a coward and a liar! He claims two cases of gold coins went missing while they were in my possession, with no other proof than his own books! He never spent a night standing guard in the snow over that gold or bent his back loading case after case onboard a ship with German planes dropping bombs all around!”

“Why would he blame you for the missing gold? What has he to gain?” asked Kaz, taking on some of the questioning himself.

“Gain? Why the senior adviser job, that’s all! Can’t you see that? If he discredits me in the king’s eyes, then the job is his, and the worse for Norway.” Birkeland’s eyes slid sideways, as if envisioning a dark future with Vidar Skak whispering in the king’s ear.

“Seems to me he just wants to fight back against the Germans.” I congratulated myself on avoiding a direct question.

“Neither of you strike me as fools,” Birkeland said. “You can see that Skak wants to use the Underground Army to support his own aims. The more glory for him, the better. He can be a hero in Norway after the war, when we lay wreaths on the monuments to the dead.”

“There’ll be plenty of death to go around before this war is over. Sacrifice can’t be avoided.” Geez, I sounded like Harding.

“Skak is willing to accept the sacrifices of others. He has lost nothing himself. I’ve had to watch newsreels of my own fishing boats being destroyed by the commandos, some of them Norwegian! I have a fishing fleet in Nordland, and when the commandos destroy one of those fish oil-processing plants to keep the Germans from producing nitroglycerin, my boats go up in flames. I’m watching my own business, which I’ve built for twenty years with my bare hands, go up in smoke. But, by God, I’ll put the torch to the whole damn thing myself if it will keep the underground from going into battle! We would gain nothing, and the reprisals would be terrible.”

The wind went out of him and he sank back into his chair. “Terrible,” he repeated quietly. “Let the British destroy our industry if it will hurt the Nazis. But let our people live.”

We left soon after that. On the theory that a guy who would rather see his own property destroyed than lose innocent lives would make a lousy candidate for a thief or traitor, I decided it was time to move on to greener pastures. I said as much to Kaz as we walked to our rooms, and to my surprise he responded like a cynical desk sergeant.

“How do we know he really owns a fishing fleet, and that it’s being destroyed in commando raids?” Ah, cynicism, the first dawning sign of a rookie cop learning the ropes.

“All right, let’s think it through. Skak and the king would know. Hard to believe he could be lying about it.”

“Yes, but the key point is his willingness to sacrifice his fortune. We have no confirmation of that.”

I thought about that for a minute. It seemed harmless enough, and who knew what the little guy might find out?

“OK, Kaz, here’s your first assignment. Ask around and see if anybody else knows about it. Ask the Three Musketeers. That Rolf guy is with the commandos; he might know. Just act like you’re interested.”

“I will be the soul of unoffending curiosity.”

“Just remember the cat. He didn’t offend anyone either.”

I left Kaz to his junior G-man investigation and went up to my room on the top floor. I was tired, the alcohol drifting through my system and weighing down my eyelids, making me think about catching a few z’s before the evening festivities. The king had invited our group to some sort of state dinner he was throwing in the main ballroom. It sounded boring, and I knew I needed my beauty sleep so I wouldn’t nod off during the third speech.

Evidently, all the big rooms were taken. Mine had a double bed, a bureau, one straight-back chair, and an armoire, with just enough space to walk around the bed if you kept your elbows tucked in. The furniture looked a little worse for wear, the kind of stuff that was too sturdy to throw out but too scruffy to show off. The room did have its own bathroom, and I liked that, a step up from the attic of the Dorchester. Kaz had told me a lot of these old castles and mansions never got around to upgrading the plumbing, but that the Beardsleys were very modern for their day, and each room had hot and cold running water and the usual facilities. I kicked off my shoes, tossed my jacket onto the chair, loosened my tie, and closed my eyes for about a half hour. Catnaps and spy chasing are my specialties.