Smart Moves (17 page)

“The bomb,” I said.

Archer stopped pacing and Spade froze where he sat. Their faces went even paler than they already were.

“You know about the bomb?” Spade said.

“I know what I know,” I said.

“Let’s not be children here,” Archer said.

“You two fight about who got the sandwiches last and you tell me I’m childish?” I shouted.

“This is different,” said Archer. “A sandwich isn’t a bomb and don’t you forget it. Who told … what did Einstein say?”

“I don’t go around telling the FBI what my clients say. It wouldn’t be good for my reputation. Let me get this straight. Povey could have killed Einstein any time, but this Zeltz is holding him off because he’s trying to find out more about the bomb?”

“Something like that,” agreed Spade reluctantly. “But we have reason to believe that Povey isn’t listening to Zeltz anymore, that he’s gotten angry, that a visitor from California, a private detective who doesn’t shave very much and does things without thinking, has riled him up and he’s out for Einstein’s head now.”

It was my turn to sit down. I found an uncomfortable Louis the Somethingth chair and soiled it with the remaining dirt from the bottom of Einstein’s boat. “You mean that I’m responsible … You’re trying to say that Povey is trying to kill Einstein because of me?”

“Believe it,” Spade said with a big, false-toothed grin.

“And you want to know who Zeltz’s infiltrator is?” asked Archer with a less-than-pleasant grin of his own as he advanced on me.

“Walker,” I guessed.

“Now you get the cigar,” said Archer.

“He’s over there now with Einstein,” I said, jumping up.

“So,” cried Spade. “You think he’s suddenly going to bash his head in with a poker or throw a hand grenade? His job is to get information, he’s not a killer. We watch Walker. He leads up to Povey and to Zeltz. That’s the plan, Peters. You are making a disaster of that plan.”

“You are interfering with the defense of the United States,” added Archer.

“I’ll have the sandwich, salami or ham,” I said. “I say it’s your turn.” I pointed at Archer, not because I thought it was his turn, but because he was hovering over me like a D.A. digging for a confession.

“You’ll take what we’ve got,” he said, throwing a dirty look at Spade, who smirked. Then Archer stalked out of the room.

“Thanks,” said Spade.

“Fair is fair,” I said, standing up. “Why don’t you warn Einstein about Walker?”

Spade sat back, hands folded in his lap, and shook his head at my amateurishness. “Who knows if he can act? He might get angry, give it away, get himself killed. Or maybe we tell him and he doesn’t believe us and tells Walker. The whole thing is over and Zeltz has no reason to keep Einstein alive. Or Zeltz just panics and runs and we lose him. It gets complicated.”

Archer came loping back with three sandwiches on a plate and an open bottle of Pepsi. He handed me the Pepsi and I took the sandwich without the thumbhole. Archer offered the plate to Spade, who took his time making his choice. I drank and ate. It tasted like Spam and mayonnaise.

“What now?” I asked.

“Now,” said Archer, taking a bite of his sandwich and making a face at it. “Now we keep watching and you stay with Einstein. We try to take out Povey and let Walker lead us to Zeltz.”

“The trick,” I said, finishing off my sandwich, “is to keep Einstein alive while we do this. Einstein and Robeson.”

“Robeson,” Spade said scornfully, struggling through his sandwich with false teeth. “Robeson is a decoy, a false scent. If Povey gets them both, it looks like Nazi negro-hating—not that the Nazis will be displeased if Robeson gets killed.”

“Not displeased at all,” agreed Archer. “But the real goal here is to find out what Einstein knows and to get rid of him. Is all this finally sinking in, Peters?”

“It’s sinking,” I said.

“Good,” said Archer. “Goodbye. Don’t come back here. Don’t call us unless it is an emergency equal to Pearl Harbor. Just stay with Einstein and let us do our job.”

I finished off my Pepsi as Spade walked over to the window, pulled the curtain back, and resumed the vigil. Archer took the empty bottle and the plate. “The visit’s over,” said Archer over his shoulder, as he exited with the dishes. “You know your way out.”

I found the door and went across the street. I wasn’t worried about giving anything away to Walker, but I wasn’t as sure of the game plan as the FBI seemed to be. What if Zeltz or Walker or Ivan Shark or whoever the hell was trying to kill Einstein decided that things were getting a little too warm, that they might as well cut their losses, cut down Einstein, and head for the border? I had a feeling the FBI was more interested in catching spies than saving scientists and actors. Spade and Archer did not inspire confidence.

Walker was gone when Einstein let me in, and before we could talk the phone rang. With me following, he shuffled back to his study and picked up the phone. It was someone named Rudolf. They went on for about ten minutes about changes in an article, with Einstein repeating the changes over and over till he was sure Rudolf had them right. When he hung up, Einstein looked at me with large moist eyes.

“Rudolf is my son-in-law,” he explained, reaching for a cigar on his desk, then changing his mind. “He edits my work. My secretary, Helen, will come in later and retype the manuscript. It is hard to think of abstracts when one has possibly killed a man with an anchor.”

“Look …”

“Hard,” he said, picking up a pencil and checking to see if it was sharp, “but not impossible. Why do you suspect Mark Walker?” He had moved behind his desk, sat down, and fumbled for some papers. He hadn’t looked up at me.

“Where did you get the idea …” I started, but he was shaking his head sadly and pulling out a pad of paper and making it clear that whatever denial I might make would travel to infinity.

“I saw your irritation with him at the lake,” Einstein said, reaching for a glass of orange juice, which had probably been sitting there half a day. “Then you run away for fifteen minutes and come running back. Where did you go? Across the street to see the FBI. Why did you come back and look around with suspicion? Because you were looking for someone you suspected. There was no one here but me and Dr. Walker. I think I would not have noted such things if I myself were not carrying suspicion of my young colleague. But I just talked to him of such things and I am certain that he is not my enemy.”

“You’re a scientist,” I pointed out, “not a detective.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “I see something miraculous in my mind and then I attempt to prove or disprove it with logic, numbers. I bite at it, shout at it, challenge it, and hope that the questions will not erode the miracle. And you as a detective …”

“No miracles,” I said. “No big questions. Someone’s in trouble. I check everything out I can think of to get them out of trouble. I put my body on the line. You bite, shout, and challenge in your head. I do it on the streets, in alleys, hotel rooms, bars.”

“Yes,” said Einstein with a sigh, taking a pained gulp of orange juice, “I deal compassionately with people in the abstract. I love humanity but I do not feel greatly for individuals. I’m sure a talk to my first wife, who’s in Geneva, will confirm this. And you seem to have no feeling for humanity as a whole, but you touch individual people. The difference between a scientist and a detective?”

“Maybe just the difference between one scientist and one detective,” I said. “I hate to bring this up, but I’m out of cash. I’ve had to take cabs all over …”

Einstein held up his hand and I shut up. He opened the desk drawer, retrieved his checkbook, and made out another check.

“I give a full, detailed accounting at the end of the case,” I said, taking the check and pushing it into my jacket pocket.

“I do not usually talk this much,” Einstein said, looking up at me and then turning his chair to look out of the window at his garden.

“You probably don’t have many days like this one either,” I said.

“I find my physical powers decreasing,” he said, his back to me, his eyes on a pair of robins in a tree. “I require more sleep. I doubt if my mental capacity has diminished. My particular ability lies in visualizing the effects, consequences, possibilities, and bearings on present thought of the discoveries of others. I can no longer even do mathmatical calculations easily. I do these rough notes and others, like Walker, do the details later. It is not easy to lose the few friends a person like me has. I hope you are wrong. I hope we are wrong about Walker.”

I said goodbye, said I’d be in touch with him when I had something, or I’d see him the next day in New York for the Waldorf-Astoria benefit. Einstein waved over his shoulder, sipped orange juice, and watched the birds in his yard. I let myself out and met a woman in her forties coming up the steps. She wore round glasses and a black cloth coat and carried a briefcase. She looked at me suspiciously and hurried past me to open the door. I looked across the street at the moving curtain, behind which lurked Spade or Archer. There were still two ways to go. Either I stayed with Einstein and tried to protect him or I went with Povey—one defensive, the other offensive. I remembered something Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame coach, had once said: “You can protect the goal like a gladiator, but if you don’t go out there and kill a few Romans the best you can do is tie, and tying isn’t winning.”

I caught a bus back to Manhattan. I didn’t bother to look out of the window; I was getting used to the ride. Besides, I needed time to think. A woman and a two-year-old kid sitting next to me ate cheese sandwiches all the way. The kid’s nose was running. I told the woman, who informed me that it was what the noses of little kids tend to do. I suggested that she wipe it. She said she didn’t have anything to wipe it with. I suggested a cheese sandwich. She suggested I could have one of her cheese sandwiches and wipe myself with it. We went on like that, passing the time like the two seasoned travelers we obviously were, the troubles of the world forgotten in our sophisticated banter. The kid kept eating his sandwich, which got soggier mile by mile, and the woman kept talking to the kid about me.

“Some people don’t know how to mind their business, Ralph,” she said. Ralph opened his mouth to reveal an amalgam of cheese and bread. Ralph kept his mouth open most of the time, chewing or not. He remained openmouthed and unanswering through New Jersey.

“Some people who never had kids don’t know what it’s like to travel with kids, Ralph,” the mother said as we crossed the bridge into Manhattan.

Ralph whimpered or sniffled, his cheese hanging limply toward the floor.

“Want to see my gun, Ralph?” I said sweetly.

The woman snarled at me in disbelief and scorn, a snarl undoubtedly perfected by decades of living with some man more frightening than the mash-nosed grumbler riding next to her. She was a cloth-coated wreck, her hair a mess, skin papery, her banged-up suitcase scratched and coming apart.

“I was joking about the gun,” I said.

“Some people …” she began between clenched teeth.

“I apologize,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a rough century. You look like you’ve had one too.”

“My husband’s a soldier,” she said, glaring at me as if I had just insulted her. “He’s fighting Nazis, Japs, and Jews for people like you.”

When I was working at Warner Brothers back in 1935, a wild-eyed old guy spent a week trying to get in to tell Ann Sheridan that Christ had died for her sins. My job was to keep him from bothering her. One day he jumped out at her when she was getting into her car. I was about ten yards back and running.

“Christ died for your sins,” he screamed at her.

Sheridan raised an eyebrow, opened the door to her car, and said, “I wish he would have asked me first. I could have saved him a lot of grief.”

I saved myself a lot of grief, leaned back, closed my eyes, and wondered what kind of kid Ralphie would grow up to be. I never got around to thinking about spies, murder, and the FBI.

It was almost five when I hit the Taft. I walked from the bus station. I was spending Einstein’s money and my own too fast, and I figured I could think on the way. I was wrong. I checked the lobby for house detectives, killers, and telephone operators, spotted none and dashed for the elevator. I paused in front of 1234 and knocked, even though I had a key. There was no answer. I opened the door and went in.

The light was on, and Shelly, fully clothed, lay on his back in the bed, snoring. My bed was piled with pamphlets and brochures. Shelly’s glasses were twisted over his forehead, his hands folded on his rising and falling belly. Our landlord, Jeremy Butler back at the Farraday Building in Los Angeles, had once seen Shelly asleep in his dental chair. Jeremy, a former wrestler who had given it up for full-time poetry and acquisition of doubtful real estate, had referred to Shelly’s “undulating paunch.” We had stood over Shelly as Jeremy described the dozing dentist as a “beached whale, a sleek somnambulant mammal, capricious, unthinking, perhaps holding an unknown world in his navel, an unknown world in which a fraction of a second is a million times a million years. And when the whale wakes and turns and the roaring snore of the universe he controls stops, that unknown world will roll from his navel and tumble to the unclean floor destroyed, unnoticed.”

I didn’t remember all that. Jeremy had written it down before he left. He wrote most of his observations in neat notebooks and then turned them into poetry. He gave me a copy, and I remembered it as I looked down at Shelly. Jeremy’s “Notes on a Sleeping Dentist” had disturbed me for a while. Later it made me feel pretty good, I don’t know why. But philosophy could hold my attention for only brief periods of time.

I locked the door from inside, took off my jacket, removed my holster, and moved my right arm in a circle. Still no pain, though I could feel that the arm had been somewhere it didn’t belong. While I was circling my arm, my hand hit the corner of the dresser and knocked over a glass of some flat brown drink Shelly had left there. The glass started to fall and I tried to catch it. I backed into the second bed and a pile of brochures sloshed noisily to the floor. Shelly sat up in panic as I put the now empty glass back.