One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (14 page)

He looked at the calendar on the wall. “Durn it,” he drawled. “Seem to have used up all my own leave.”

He walked through the muster room and glanced at the notice board. He looked around, furtively. With his felt-tipped pen, he drew a moustache and spectacles on a wanted notice. Then he climbed the stairs to the detectives’ division.

The Chief of Detectives inherited, briefly, the museum robbery--and the wrath of the City Fathers.

“You got a soft precinct,” they blared at him. “Just automobile thefts, occasional muggings, routine jobs. No trouble ... and what happens? Suddenly everyone goes to sleep and you end up with the craziest robbery of the century. The mayor’s running a temperature of 110. And wants action, now.”

The mayor’s temperature was infectious. The 20th Precinct, as the sergeant had predicted, became extremely uncomfortable. Detectives rushed everywhere. Most of them didn’t need to rush, but they knew the penalty of being seen stationary when this sort of a panic was on.

Matters were made worse by the second phone call of that afternoon from City Hall.

“Okay,” the official bellowed. “Cool it at your end. We’re handing everything over to Hooligan’s Mob.”

When news of this spread through the Precinct Station House, the detectives moved faster than before. The mere mention of Hooligan’s name gave the Chief Detective paranoia. The old sergeant suddenly wondered if he’d got enough money to manage a kodiak bear hunt in Alaska.

The local radio station scooped the story--tipped off by the pretzel salesman outside the museum. But the robbery made headline news in the evening papers. The museum offered a 10,000 dollar reward.

The robbery caught the imagination of the American public.

By late afternoon, the Museum of Natural History was having record attendances. New Yorkers who had never been to the museum to see the dinosaur queued in the hopes of seeing the spot where it had stood. By nightfall, palaeontology was the ‘in’ thing.

The New York office of the Federal Assignments Research Team is in a new skyscraper on the East Side. The building has no name, and little to distinguish it from any other, except that its thick glass doors are medicine-bottle green. Behind these, shielded from outside eyes, stand armed guards.

Upstairs, the Federal Assignments Research Team go about their work. Their duties generally hover between internal security and counter-espionage. Sometimes, they take over the protection of the more accident-prone of the visiting Heads of State. And, occasionally, they’re called in to solve a major crime that has baffled the police. Boss of the New York branch is Jumbo Hooligan.

Outside his office building, there gathers every day a crowd of newspaper-vendors, ice cream salesmen, shoeshine boys, loafing roadsweepers and Chinese laundrymen. From time to time they join the queue at the telephone kiosk to phone in their reports. These men are spies. Russian spies. Cuban spies. French spies. Arab spies. Chinese spies, and even American spies who spy on the other spies.

Jumbo Hooligan’s bureau is no more important than its four sister offices in other cities. The foreign spies keep tabs on them all. And Hooligan makes a point of knowing his share of foreign spies, personally. So long as they are following him and his men, gleaning small scraps of spurious information--just enough to keep their bosses happy--Hooligan is happy, too. It keeps the spies out of mischief. And it means he always knows where to find them. He’d be a worried man if they weren’t around.

Hooligan put down his telephone. He lifted the metal wastebin from its nest beneath his desk and placed it tidily on the carpet by his side. He stepped back, took a short run and booted the container against the wall. It clanged and rebounded. He leaped on it savagely and stamped it flat.

In the outer office, his secretary typed on, unperturbed. Downstairs, in the street, the spies looked up, murmured, and prepared themselves for the inevitable next step--Jumbo Hooligan’s harassed appearance outside.

They looked at their watches. It normally took forty-five seconds from the sound of the wastebin destruction to Hooligan’s arrival at the door. Once again, the spies noted, he was punctual. His heavy, six-foot, four-inch frame burst through the plate-glass doors. His grey crew cut bristled between its twin partings--the one on the left was the usual parting. He was proud of the one on the right, because it looked like a bullet furrow. In fact, it was a spectator injury, caused by the propeller of his son’s model aircraft. It made him look like a Mohawk Brave.

The spies knew immediately that today’s problem was serious, because Hooligan dispensed with the usual inquiries and pleasantries. He passed through them with a brief series of nods and a curt, “Hi, Fidel, Petrov, Carl, Pierre, Isaac, Ahmed.” He ignored Pi Wun Tun.

A police car waiting at the curbside whisked him toward Yorkville. The spies followed at handbook distance. Hooligan took the steps of the New York mayor’s home three at a time, flashed his pass at the guard, and disappeared inside. The news-vendors, icecream salesmen, shoeshine boys, roadsweepers and laundrymen set up their new pitches on nearby Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, and prepared for a long wait They were good at waiting.

Hooligan stood in the hallway and showed his identification card again. The girl smiled and pressed the button of her intercom. “Mr. Hooligan’s here, F.A.R.T.” She smiled at him again, innocently. Hooligan glowered. He hated the abbreviation of his department’s title.

“Send him in,” said the intercom.

Inside the suite, overlooking the trees and the East River, were two men. Hooligan’s chief sat at the head of a leather-covered desk, tapping his teeth with a pencil. Hooligan’s keen ear picked out the dental strains of Dixie. The second man stood facing the window, his back to Hooligan. He turned round, dramatically. It was the mayor.

“Hi, Evelyn,” he said.

Evelyn “Jumbo” Hooligan blushed.

The scar on Hooligan’s scalp pulsated like an agitated mealworm. His left foot was resting heavily on the new wastebin in his office. He frowned at the bewildered faces of his team.

“It’s the mayor,” he thundered. “He says he wants us to find the dinosaur. And fast ... damn fast. He says the world’s laughing at America. We’re getting digs in every newscast. The President’s been riding him. Boys, we’re right in the track of the tornado. This ain’t shoplifting. This one is one bastard we’ve gotta solve. And, as the mayor says, fast.”

Jumbo Hooligan walked over to the sleek mahogany door, locked it, and dropped the key into his pocket. “So none of us leaves until we’ve thrashed our brains on why someone would want to pull a weird heist like this. Then we’ll mosey along to the museum.”

He shrugged his jacket casually off his shoulders and hung it on the rapier nose of a large, stuffed sailfish on his wall. Its conceited expression annoyed everyone. It seemed to know that it was only two pounds short of the American record.

Jumbo reached for his shoulder holster. There was a nervous, automatic reaction from the tuned reflexes of his team. They relaxed as he drew a sinister-looking seven-inch aluminium tube from the spring clip. He unscrewed the cap and shook out the splintered half of a cigar. The men knew better than to interrupt him during this performance. It was Jumbo Hooligan’s thinking space. He groped in his hip pocket and produced a stubby corncob pipe. He stuffed the cigar end firmly into the bowl, and snapped it off level with the rim. The remainder he put back in the canister, and the canister back in his shoulder holster.

He wedged the pipe between his teeth. He didn’t light it. Hooligan was a non-smoker.

“So ... The President, the mayor, and me, we want that dinosaur.”

“Sure, Chief, instantly,” said Willie Halfinch.

Jumbo gave him the nothing look that he reserved for stupid remarks. The new boy’s six-foot-ten-inch body squirmed. Willie was finding the height that gave him his All-American basketball stardom an embarrassment.

Jumbo Hooligan thumbed the switch of his intercom. “We’re in conference,” he snapped. “No telephone calls, no messages. Knock with a fresh pot of coffee every hour. And sandwiches. And, Sheba, make mine hot pastrami and cucumber, on pumpernickel.”

“I gotta idea, Chief.”

“What is it, Halfinch?”

“Shouldn’t we get some hot dogs, too?”

The robbery was a lulu of a problem.

“It has to be the Cubans,” mumbled Boots McGraw. “But bronts don’t fly,” said Willie Halfinch. “If it’d been a pterodactyl, it would most certainly be in Cuba. They’ve hijacked just about everything else.”

“Okay, cut the humor,” glowered Jumbo Hooligan.

“Say, boss,” said Huw Schwartz. “Maybe one of the local small-time gangs stole it.”

“For what? They could have rolled a bank for the time and trouble they put in knocking off a dinosaur. And for what? Where d’you fence a fossil? What do you do with it? Cut it into cubes and sell it to tourists? Nope ...” Jumbo poked his ear with his pipe stem.

“I’ve heard of art collectors who buy stolen paintings, just so’s they can look at them. Keep ‘em in a safe for years and only take them out for a gloat when they’re alone. Maybe the dinosaur?” said Ivor Schwartz, hopefully.

“So what sort of safe do you keep that many tons of bones in? Would you like to haul ‘em out every night just to take a looksee? Nope, whoever heisted this lot had another reason. They can’t sell them. And they don’t mean anything unless they’re assembled to look like a dinosaur. I’m thinking of maybe ransom.” Jumbo leant his backside against the desk and looked up at the ceiling. “More ideas?”

The third coffee jug was empty. Ulysses Pilgrim picked it up and walked over to the door, opened it and strolled out, and returned a moment later with a copy of the New York
Daily News
. He closed the door behind him and went back to his seat.

Willie Halfinch reached over and tried the door. He’d watched Jumbo lock it again after each fresh delivery of coffee. It was still locked.

“Hey! How d’you do that?” he asked Pilgrim.

The long-haired, hippy Ulysses looked at him.

“Do what, man?”

“It’s still locked. The door,” said Willie.

“Oh ... is it?”

“Go easy on Houdini, Willie,” said Jumbo Hooligan’s black deputy, Adam Gallows. “It’s taken us eight years to train the guy. He’s forgotten keys exist There ain’t a lock in the world he can’t open.”

It was a further ten minutes before anyone spoke. It was Willie Halfinch again. “How about the glue factory?”

“Willie,” said Jumbo, patiently, “these are fossils, not bones. I’m going to tell you one thing.” Jumbo’s tone became quiet and menacing. “If you open your mouth just one more time with some stupid suggestion, I’ll have you taxidermified and stood outside my door with a handful of cigars for visitors.”

“Students are a good bet. They’ve usually got a protest of some sort lined up,” volunteered Huw Schwartz. He hiccupped, then belched loudly.

“I wish you’d lay off the chillis,” said Huw to his twin brother, Ivor.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Ivor. “I forgot.”

“I always get your goddammed indigestion. You ought to be more considerate.”

Ivor blushed.

Being identical twins had advantages in their work. But there were also drawbacks. The Schwartz twins’ emotions stabbed between them like radio waves. They experienced each other’s feelings, regardless of distance.

“I’m waiting...” said Jumbo.

“For what, boss?” asked Huw.

“You’ve done everything else, I’m waiting for you to break wind.”

“Sorry, boss ... chilli pickle.”

“I’ll check out the students,” said Ulysses. “But don’t expect a lead from them. They’re my scene, and I haven’t heard a murmur.”

“I think we’re wasting our time here,” said Jumbo Hooligan. “We’re overlooking the obvious. We’re all looking for a big motive. I think we’ve got a nut, or a couple of nuts, or maybe half a dozen nuts. Let’s not be panicked into illogical conclusions. The only way we’re going to get the answer to this is by nosing around. Grab your hats, boys. We’re going to the museum.”

Jumbo Hooligan liked to picture himself as Master of Foxhounds when he and his team worked together. He stood now, legs straddled, looking into the twilight of the Early Dinosaur Hall, his pack assembled behind him.

A museum official eyed Hooligan nervously. He stifled a brief, imaginary picture of a stuffed Hooligan, on a small wooden plinth alongside the gorilla in the Hall of African Mammals. The men with Hooligan looked ugly--either hoods themselves, or yippies who would carve their initials on all the museum’s most valuable exhibits. He decided to put an extra guard on the elephant display.

He particularly resented Willie Halfinch--because he was so tall. Tall men were invariably graffiti addicts, and they wrote their coarse poetry so high on the walls it was difficult for him to read. Perhaps this human sunflower had been responsible for the slogans that had begun all the trouble.

He looked at the two men who were obviously twins. Short and black-eyed, they showed some sort of Mediterranean ancestry--and, as a blond, Nordic type himself, he hated short, dark, Mediterranean people.

He didn’t trust the other members of the team, either. The black-skinned Adam was too quiet, and hadn’t said a word since their introduction. He didn’t like the hippy in overalls. And the other man, Boots McGraw, was clearly an Irishman. He couldn’t stand Irishmen.

“Please take care of the exhibits,” he said, nervously.

“We’d better. You obviously can’t.” Jumbo Hooligan tossed the next sentence over his shoulder. “Right. Not a man in there until Pilgrim’s given it the sniff.” He turned back to the museum official. “You kept the public out?”

“We didn’t let them in the hall. They just filed past the door.”

Jumbo Hooligan glowered. “I suppose everyone on your staff’s had a good scout around here?”

The man was eager to appear helpful. “Yes, of course. We had a very careful look round.”

“Screw me,” exploded Jumbo. “Why does everyone think he’s a private eye? Okay, so you’ve made life a little harder for us.” He glanced at the woodwork by the door. “You got a guard about five-foot eleven? Longish hair, sleeked back with hair oil?”