Spy and the Thief (19 page)

It was a modern structure of glass and metal, the newest and tallest in Eastbridge. He’d noticed it on the plane coming in. On the river side there was a wide vertical band of ribbed aluminum, cutting across the layers of tinted windows from roof to basement, almost touching the waters below. The metal band was dark blue in color, and the only break in it came about three-quarters of the way up the building, where the single word
SATOMEX
appeared in block letters of gleaming brass.

Nick Velvet studied the letters carefully, using a slim pocket telescope that might have passed for a fountain pen. He focused on the thin metal struts by which each letter was attached to the building, glancing from time to time at the water directly below, and at the boats that occasionally passed. Finally, smiling slightly, he turned away. He knew how it could be done. The $20,000 was as good as in his pocket—unless something unexpected went wrong.

There was one more detail to dispose of at once. Nick leaned far over the edge of the railed embankment, as if studying the water, and waited until a gentle breeze pulled the straw hat from his head. Then he watched it drift in a slow spinning arc toward the water, making only a half-hearted grab as it passed beyond his reach. He wondered if Lieutenant Weston would enjoy listening to the fishes.

As a thief, Nick Velvet was unique. He had made his reputation by stealing the unusual, the seemingly worthless. He had taken objects as dangerous as a tiger from the zoo, as difficult as the water from a swimming pool, as small as a toy mouse, or as large as a supposed sea serpent. They’d had one thing in common—no other thief could possibly be interested in them. And yet, in each case someone had been willing to pay Nick $20,000, occasionally more, to steal the object. With only a few jobs each year, and obviously no income tax problem, it was enough to keep him living in comfort with a girl named Gloria in a little city on Long Island Sound. Gloria never questioned his occasional travels, or knew the real purpose of them. She wouldn’t have understood.

But Nick was never one to dwell on past triumphs. At the moment he was solely concerned with three brass letters that made up a portion of the word
SATOMEX
. It had been a simple matter to rent a workman’s outfit and supplies, and not much more difficult to reach the top of the Satomex building and lower himself over the side with the standard window-washer’s scaffolding.

Only one person challenged him, a plant guard who followed him to the roof and called out, “What you doing there?”

“The sign is tarnished. I have to polish it,” Nick explained.

“Tarnished! Building’s only a year old!”

“The excessive moisture from the river,” Nick explained, and lowered himself out of sight. The guard walked over to the edge of the roof to watch, but that didn’t bother Nick. He realized that Weston’s cops were probably watching him too, through binoculars.

He made a show of examining the letters when he reached them. Each of the seven was solid brass, about 18 inches high, attached directly to the building by the tubular metal struts which Nick had observed from the ground. He went to work with the brass polish he’d brought along, but he had the bottle of acid beneath his polishing cloth.

A few drops of the acid carefully placed and the tops of the tubular struts were quickly eaten away. Then, in the remaining U-shaped troughs, he placed tiny capsules of acid. It would take the acid a half hour to eat through the metal capsules, and another several minutes to finish off the supporting struts. By then Nick would be far away.

He worked on the X, and then the E, and then the S. Then he quickly finished his polishing job and hoisted himself back to the roof.

“Do a good job?” the guard asked.

“Sure.” He smiled and kept walking.

Forty-seven minutes later, the brazen X dropped into the Easton River. It was followed in three minutes by the E and then by the S. All that remained of the sign were the letters
ATOM
.

“All right,” Millings said over the telephone. “You did good work, but I want those letters here, not in the river.”

“I’m not finished yet,” Nick told him. “You’ll have them.”

“You didn’t scar the building, did you?”

“No.”

“And you got the right letters?”

“Yes.”

Millings let out a sigh. “Very good.”

Nick didn’t bother to ask what the letters were for. They were worth $20,000 to Joseph Millings, and the money was all that mattered.

The plan was a simple one, and Nick was out on the river in his hired boat before dark that night. He’d figured all the angles—all, that is, except those belonging to the suntanned girl who hopped aboard the cabin cruiser as it pulled away from the dock.

“Hi!” she said.

“Hi yourself.” He looked up from the wheel. She was wearing tight brown slacks and a tan, sleeveless pullover. Her hair was blonde and her eyes were blue. She reminded him of a college girl on vacation, which was exactly what she turned out to be.

“I’m Cindy Clark,” she told him. “Reporter for the
Eastbridge Times
during the summer months. You going after the letters?”

“What letters would those be?”

“The ones that fell off the Satomex building. I think it’s a great story. They think somebody tried to steal them.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“I don’t know—melt down the brass or something, I suppose. Are you going looking for them?”

“Maybe.”

“Can I come along?”

“You seem to have.”

“Thanks. It’s a great summer job on the paper. They let me write about whatever I want. I’m in college can you tell?”

“Sure.”

“You’ve got one of those frogmen suits like skindivers wear. Are you really going to dive for the missing letters?”

“I might.”

They rounded a bend in the river and came into view of the Satomex building. There were some men on the bridge watching him—Weston’s men. “Really, why do you think anybody would take those letters?”

“No idea.” He glanced up at the building. “The four letters that are left spell
ATOM
.”

She crinkled her nose at him. “Sure, but the three that dropped off spell
SEX
.”

Nick Velvet was underwater ten minutes before he finally broke the surface. He wasn’t really surprised to see the second boat alongside his rented cruiser, or to hear the voice of Lieutenant Weston bellowing, “That’s right, Velvet! Climb on board with them.”

Nick climbed over the side, pulled off his face mask, and smiled. “They’re not there,” he said.

“What? What are you talking about?” The big detective looked as if he might leap onto the cabin cruiser from his own launch, and Cindy Clark had backed away from the railing with a gasp of fright.

“Just what I said,” Nick told him. “Come over and search me if you want. Maybe they dissolved in the water.”

“You admit you were the one who caused them to fall in the water?”

“I don’t admit a thing,” Nick said. “I just figured if I found them the company would be grateful. I didn’t find them.”

Weston frowned and shouted an order to the skipper of the police launch. “We’ll just follow you in, Nick, to make sure there’s no funny business.” As an afterthought he added, “Who’s the girl?”

Nick Velvet glanced over at Cindy. “College kid, working on the local newspaper for the summer. Make sure she spells your name right.”

He turned the cruiser and headed in toward the dock. “Those were detectives!” Cindy Clark said in awe.

“That they were.”

“Did you take those letters off the sign?”

Nick Velvet smiled down at her. “Now, Cindy, do I look like a thief?”

Later, toward midnight, when a summer’s darkness had at last settled over the humid city, Nick stepped out of an alley and walked quickly to a waiting car. The man behind the wheel was dark and middle-aged, with a pair of wideset eyes that seemed to change focus as he spoke.

“You’re Velvet?” he asked, and Nick recognized the voice from the phone conversations.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Millings,” he said, shaking hands.

“You have the letters?”

Nick passed over a clanking bundle wrapped in oil-specked rags. “Three letters, S, E, and X, as ordered.”

Joseph Millings quickly unwrapped them. “Fine! How’d you get them out of the water?”

Nick smiled slightly. “These days you can rent anything. I got a powerful electromagnet and placed it in the hull of the cabin cruiser, below the water line. Then when I went over the side after turning on the electromagnet, I simply attached an iron clamp to each brass letter, swam up beneath the boat, and stuck the letters in place. When I took the cruiser back to the dock, the letters came back with me, held snugly to the bottom of the boat by the electromagnet. I went back tonight and retrieved them.”

“That was clever.”

“You pay me for it,” Nick said. “And speaking of that—”

“The money has been—well, delayed in transmittal. You will have it tomorrow evening.”

“That wasn’t the agreement.”

“You may keep the letters until then if you wish to show my good faith.” But something had caught at his wandering fingers. He struck a match and held up the brazen X. “A few nicks here—knife marks. You scraped the metal!”

Nick shrugged. “Just curious. At the price you’re paying, I wondered if they might be solid gold.”

“Only brass,” Millings said with a smile. “Here, keep them safely until tomorrow night. Then phone me at home and I’II decide where we’ll meet.”

“All right,” Nick agreed. He hated staying around Eastbridge another day, but there seemed no alternative. He took the brass letters back to his rented car, carefully rewrapped them in their rags, and stowed them in the trunk compartment behind the spare tire. Then he drove back to his hotel.

It was the knocking on his door that awakened him, and he rolled over to look at his watch. Nine o’clock—time to be up and about anyway. “Who is it?” he called.

“Weston,” the voice replied. “Open up, Nick.”

He unbolted the door and opened it. “This an arrest?”

“Not quite yet,” Weston said, stepping inside. He was carrying a large square box.

Nick sat down on the bed and reached for a cigarette. “What, then? Just a social call?”

“I know you stole those letters from the Satomex sign,” he said. “It’s your type of crime, Nick, and I’m going to put you behind bars for it. I almost brought a search warrant, but you wouldn’t be foolish enough to have them here.”

“I might be,” Nick said casually, “but look at it this way, Lieutenant. Those three letters can’t be worth more than a few dollars each. All you’d have me for would be petty larceny.”

“Then you admit stealing them!”

“Not at all. I’m just saying they’re worth very little.”

“I know the way you operate, Nick. They’re worth a lot to somebody. You’re being paid well for this.”

But Nick Velvet only shrugged. “If that’s all you wanted to say, I have to get dressed.”

Weston opened the square box. “Just one more thing. I hear you lost your hat in the river. Thought you might like another.” He produced a new straw hat with a jaunty band and passed it over to Nick.

“Thanks very much,” Nick said with a smile. They understood each other.

After he’d gone, Nick went over the hat carefully, but this time there was no hidden microphone. He hadn’t really expected one, because Charlie Weston was a smart cop.

The day was warm, with only occasional drifting clouds. Nick had walked a block in the direction of the river when the girl, Cindy Clark, appeared and fell into step beside him. “Great day, isn’t it?” she announced.

“Hello again. Out gathering news?”

“Sure. Man bites dog and stuff.” She brushed the hair from her eyes. “Going back to the river and search for those letters?”

“I doubt it. Your paper didn’t give it much of a play.”

“My editor didn’t think it was very important. He can’t believe somebody would steal anything so silly. I guess he thinks they just fell off the building by themselves.”

“What does the company think about it?”

“Satomex? They’re interested but not particularly concerned. After all, it won’t cost much to replace three letters. Maybe the whole thing was just some college boys’ prank. In the fall that
SEX
will turn up at some dorm or fraternity house, I suppose.”

They could see the building now, towering over the others along the river. And on the near bank Nick was startled to see Joseph Millings, his employer. The lawyer was shooting movies of the river and of the Satomex building, using an inexpensive 8 mm. camera A man stood by the bridge, in line with the building, waving occasionally at the camera. He was middle-aged and balding, and wore a buttoned beige raincoat, Nick wondered if this was Millings’ law partner, Mr. Mota.

“See!” the girl pointed. “Someone’s taking pictures of it.”

“Seems like it.” Nick guided her around Millings before they were noticed. If the man in the pictures was Millings’ partner, Nick wondered what the reason for it was. He wondered why the man was wearing a buttoned raincoat on a sunny day. Most of all, Nick wondered why he was wearing a girl’s raincoat.

He strolled a while with the girl, because it was pleasant to walk with her along the river. “There are so many boats,” she said.

“Almost everybody seems to have one now.”

“The affluent society.” She picked up a pebble and threw it toward the water, but it did not carry far enough. Nick glanced back at the Satomex building and saw that Millings had finished his photography. “People like that, maybe it’s all right to steal from,” she mused, half to herself.

“Still looking for a story, aren’t you?”

“You’re a strange person,” she said.

“So are you,” he replied.

They had rounded a corner in the road, where a faded brick warehouse butted up almost against the water’s edge. “Are you going to be here much longer?” she asked.

“Long enough,” he told her. “Just long enough. I’d like you to come with me tonight. I have to see a man.”

It was just after dark when Nick Velvet stepped through the French doors into Joseph Millings’ living room. Cindy Clark was waiting in the car, and he knew he did not have much time. Millings was seated in a chair opposite the balding man from the morning moviemaking.