The Deadly Embrace (21 page)

“Yeah?” Taggart replied from the couch.

“I found out where Lieutenant Barnes spent at least part of the night she died, sir,” he said.

Taggart stood up and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk. “Where was she?” he asked.

A day earlier, Taggart had given him a list of London hotels along with an enlarged copy of J.P. ’s prewar photograph, and told him to interview the desk clerks, bellboys, doormen, and any other hotel employees who might have remembered seeing her on the night of the murder.

“She was at the Dorchester,” he said, pulling out a small notebook to review his notes. “The headwaiter in the restaurant remembers seating her with an officer that night as a guest for dinner. He isn’t familiar with all the different American military uniforms but he thinks it was green.”

“Army,” said Taggart, and the young officer nodded.

“And he remembered something else,” said Rusty Courtemanche with a satisfied grin. “He said the officer had a star on his collar.”

“A brigadier general,” said Taggart.

“The reservation was made in the name of someone called Gramm. I’ve never heard of an army brigadier with that name.”

“They’re thicker than fleas over here,” said Taggart. “Anything else?”

Courtemanche nodded again.

“One of the doormen thinks he saw her…. He couldn’t be sure, but he said a woman that looked like her left the hotel alone at around three o‘clock. He remembers because he said she wasn’t wearing a coat and it was bitter cold outside.”

“Did you ask him what she was wearing?”

“A white dress.”

“I think you might need a promotion, Lieutenant,” said Taggart.

“Thank you, sir,” said Courtemanche, grinning broadly.

As soon as he left, Taggart walked downstairs to the personnel office and checked by grade the names of all those ranked above colonel currently serving in the European and North African theaters. He found the name on the active roster. Brigadier Philip Gramm served in the Supply Corps, and was stationed at the quartermaster detachment in Southampton. Taggart wrote down his office designations and contact information.

He requested General Gramm’s service folder, and a clerk brought it out to him a few minutes later. A small black-and-white photograph of the man was attached to the cover page. To Taggart, he looked like a life-insurance salesman pretending to be Black Jack Pershing.

He saw that Gramm had graduated from West Point in 1940. The date sparked another flash of recognition. J.P.’s husband, Lloyd, had graduated from the Point in 1940, too. They had to have known one another. Yet he had taken his brother officer’s wife.

Shaking his head, he gave the service record back to the clerk, and returned to his office. It was almost five o’clock. He called Rusty Courtemanche and brought him up to date on what he had learned about Brigadier General Gramm.

“Try to find out if he spent the whole night in that hotel,” he said.

Putting on his uniform coat, he went back up to Kilgore’s office. The blonde was typing at her desk in the front reception room. Though she looked up at Taggart, her fingers continued to strike the keys for several seconds. When she looked back down at the typewriter, a scowl contorted her face.

“Shit,” she muttered, yanking the page out and tossing it in the wastebasket.

“I need to see General Kilgore,” he said.

“I awreddy told you over the phone, Major. The general isn’t here.”

Taggart looked past her to the inner office door, which was wide open. He could see Kilgore’s desk. It was unoccupied.

“Give him a message for me when he checks in, sweetheart. Tell him that Lieutenant Barnes was murdered, and he is now a material witness in my investigation.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, as if whispering in church.

Leaving SHAEF, Taggart started back to his Jermyn Street apartment on foot. That night, General Manigault was hosting a dinner at Claridge’s in honor of his British counterpart in the security command, and he had ordered Taggart and the rest of the senior staff to attend in dress uniform. The evening sky was already black when he unlocked the door next to the saddlery shop and headed upstairs to change.

The light fixture was out at the top of the stairs. If he hadn’t been tired, Taggart might have considered the possibility that someone had intentionally unscrewed the bulbs. Not doing so was his first mistake.

The man came out of the darkness behind the railing of the second-floor stairwell. Taggart heard a harsh groan in the old floor-boards and instinctively ducked to the left. He felt the hard blow glance off his left shoulder. As it went numb, he realized the man must be wearing brass knuckles.

Circling back toward the stairwell, Taggart could barely discern the man’s outline in the faint light coming up from the street. Still down low, he locked his elbows in front of him and lunged forward at the dark mass.

The brass knuckles slammed into his rib cage as Taggart drove at the man’s thighs, knocking him off balance. The man went back several steps and plummeted headfirst down the long staircase. A few moments later, his body crashed into the door at the bottom of the steps. He moaned once and was still.

As Taggart regained his balance and turned around, another man came at him from the alcove just beyond his apartment door. Again, he heard rather than saw him coming across the creaky plank flooring.

Stepping out of the murky glow near the stairwell, he waited blindly for the next attack. The first punch landed on the edge of his jaw, but it was ill-timed and grazed past him. Taggart sensed that this man was shorter, no more than five ten, but squat and very strong. He smelled the man’s stale sweat as they grappled at one another in the darkness. The attacker hit him twice in the belly—short, hard punches that rocked him backward as he waited for an opening.

The heel of the man’s left hand was suddenly lodged under his chin. It was callused and hard. He slowly forced Taggart’s head back, exposing his Adam’s apple to what Taggart was sure would come next—a sharp, powerful blow using the base of his right hand. This one has commando training, he thought as he pinioned the attacker’s right wrist and they silently continued to circle one another in the darkness.

Releasing the man’s wrist, Taggart struck at the side of his head with a straight right hook. The man didn’t go down, but he staggered backward a step, and Taggart brought his knee up hard between the man’s legs. As his head came forward, Taggart chopped down on the back of his neck, and he dropped to the floor with a raspy grunt.

This time he was prepared for another attacker, but the corridor remained silent. Taggart could hear nothing except the automobile traffic going by in the street below. The pain in his left shoulder was aching like a gunshot wound, and he felt blood running down his neck. He reached into the pocket of his trench coat for the flashlight he always carried.

The third man must have been standing right behind him. A white blossom of pain erupted behind his eyes as something smashed into the back of his head. He felt himself starting to fall. A second blow detonated inside his brain, and he hit the floor face-first.

Tiny fragments of memory hurtled through his brain in quick succession—images of his mother from when he was a little boy, the sight of his dog after she had just been run over in the street—a jumble of images that made no sense at all.

He could hear voices. They came from way off as if in a liquid fog. He thought that one of the voices was somehow familiar, but he didn’t know why. His brain felt like pork suet—good for feeding birds. He was suddenly sick to his stomach, and began to vomit. After a while, he slept.

He came awake again to the kick of a boot being driven into his left side. He heard a voice cry out. The sound was utterly strange, like a cawing bird. He realized that the voice was his. His rib cage ached as if it had been cracked wide open.

He was very cold and realized he wasn’t wearing his uniform any longer. Someone pried his mouth open. He felt liquid going down his throat and gagged, spewing it out. They forced his mouth open again. This time he swallowed some of it. The fluid filled his mouth and burned his sinus passages as it came back up. He knew the smell of it. He knew what it was. He gagged again. They left him alone.

He heard voices. Someone was lying next to him. She was cooing at him, as if the whole affair had been a wonderful idyll. At one point, he reached up to touch the back of his head. He felt soft, hot stickiness and was sick to his stomach again.

Someone laughed.

“Be sure to remove the lens cover,” said a familiar voice.

He felt tiny spikes of light behind his closed eyelids. It was quiet again. He slept.

Someone began hauling on his shoulder.

“Wake up, buddy,” came a rough voice.

“He’s out for the count,” said another voice. “Let’s haul him in.”

CHAPTER 19

C
harlie Wainwright lay almost supine in his office chair with his feet splayed across the desktop, reading the Times and smoking his favorite Dr. Watson briar pipe. He had just come back from the lair after spending most of the night analyzing a long, desperate message to the high command in Berlin from a major general commanding a German SS panzer division in Russia. His troops were being overrun near Kharkov, and he was requesting orders to retreat before they were wiped out.

Charlie had written a detailed analysis of the tactical implications and sent his report upstairs to the supreme commander’s office. With the incredible advantage of the ULTRA code-breaking intercepts, Eisenhower and Churchill often knew what was happening on the Eastern Front before Hitler did.

Still half asleep, Charlie took a sip of strong tea and said, “Looks like the war on our front is entering a critical new phase.”

Liza glanced up from the revised postmortem report she was typing and glanced over at him. He was wearing a ratty blue bathrobe over his favorite orange Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and desert boots.

“The new German bombing campaign?” she asked.

“No,” he said with a cynical grin. “Our vaunted security command has decided to crack down on the evils of prostitution here in the London den of Sodom.”

She smiled.

“How are they going to do that?” she asked.

“Last night they made a sweep of the most notorious houses of ill repute and arrested all the unlucky patrons,” he said, yawning. “Thank God, I was otherwise occupied.”

Liza returned to J.P.’s postmortem report. She wanted to get it up to Sam before leaving for Cambridge, where she had arranged an interview with a history don to explore the possible origins of the notes written in blood between Joss and the mysterious “Noel.”

She was removing the last page from the typewriter when the door banged open and three men swept into the office. Two of them were wearing American uniforms. The third was English. One of the Americans was a captain. His arm patch identified him as a member of the Joint Security Command.

“Stand away from your desk,” he said, coming to a halt in front of her.

“What the hell is going on here?” Charlie demanded, getting to his feet.

“Just stay out of it, pal,” said the American captain.

His two subordinates were carrying empty cardboard boxes in each hand. As soon as Liza stepped away from the desk, one of them sat down in her chair. Opening the top desk drawer, he began emptying its contents into the first box. The second man went straight to the file cabinet that contained her case files. She wondered how he knew which one was hers. There were six cabinets lined up against the wall. He left the others alone.

“I demand to know on whose authority you are doing this,” said Liza.

The captain removed an order from his uniform coat and handed it to her.

It was on security-command letterhead, and ordered the confiscation of “all pending case materials in the possession of Lieutenant Elizabeth Marantz, currently assigned to the Office of the Joint Security Command, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.”

It was signed by Colonel Lyman Baird. Underneath his signature, the order was endorsed by General Ernest Manigault. By the time she finished reading it, the two enlisted men were already heading for the door with full cartons. She looked back at her desk. The drawers stood empty.

“You’re being reassigned, Lieutenant,” said the captain, taking back the written order before turning to leave. “You will remain at this duty station until your new orders are cut.”

As soon as he was gone, she headed upstairs to find Sam. The two guards at the head of his corridor were checking each person who attempted to pass. Without slowing down, she smiled at the first one and held up her identity card. The young guard grinned back, letting her through.

Sam’s door was shut. Opening it, she stepped inside his office and stopped short. The room was bare. Sam’s desk was gone, along with his file cabinets and the big Atlas safe that had stood in the corner. They had even taken his old leather couch. She glanced back at the door. Someone had removed the nameplate that read “Maj. Samuel Taggart.”

The young guard from the security post appeared in the open doorway.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but this office is off limits to everyone.”

“Where is Major Taggart?” she asked.

Under her direct gaze, the young man’s cheeks flushed. He could not have been more than eighteen.

“I ain’t supposed to say, ma‘am,” he said. “We was ordered not to.” The look of concern on her face seemed to soften his resolve. Quickly glancing up and down the corridor, he whispered, “He was arrested last night, ma’am. They got him over in the military stockade.”

A mile away, in North London, Taggart slowly came alive to the loud clanging of steam pipes. Each jarring clang was like another sharp blow to the back of his head. His eyes felt glued shut.

As he raised his fingers to clear them, the right side of his chest erupted in a jolt of fiery pain. From his boxing days in the Golden Gloves, he knew that one of his ribs was cracked or broken.

He rubbed away the mucus like material that covered his eyes and opened them warily. Nothing was in focus at first. He found that he couldn’t look at anything straight on. Images were clearer off to the side. It was like trying to see around a corner.