The Longest Second (18 page)

I urged her to tell me everything that she could ... not to bother about sequence ... just whatever came to her mind. This she did with little prompting. She had come to work one morning, and I had not appeared. After calling my apartment and receiving no answer, she began to be concerned. Because there was very little to be done around the office, she had not discovered until the afternoon that the check and bank books, ledgers, and other confidential business papers had been removed. At first she had intended to call the police, but then she had decided that I would not have wanted that.

“Why?” I asked.

She looked away from me. “Because of your business,” she said finally. “The police and then the government too much might discover.”

“What?”

“Truth, truth. Among my people is the proverb, ‘With only
one
eye, you are king among the blind.’” She continued with her story. That night when she left the office and returned to her one-room apartment, two men had been awaiting her —Amar and a great black man named Ghazi. “They asked me many questions to which I could give no answer,” she said and held out her right hand. I looked at her healed, scarred fingernails where they had been mashed and torn. “They threatened to kill me if I reported their visit,” she added, “and I knew their promise they would keep. So I ran away and hide.”

Why had she risked getting back in touch with me?

“Because,” she explained simply, “I need money. I want to go away. Far away. My hair, its color I change; I hide; I wait for you. I hope if I find you again, you will give me money.”

One of the clerks in the store had begun to hover around us, making it difficult to continue the conversation. Outside, the five o’clock traffic rush had subsided and it was now possible to find a taxi. We took one back to the Arena Hotel. There in my room, I continued to probe into the Arabian girl’s story.

What was she doing in the United States?

“At the first. I came to study as a student. When I am finish, I do not wish to return to my own country. To live here, I like. I take a job for you.”

What did she do for me? What was her job?

“Mostly I translate and write letters for you ... to Syria, and Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.”

What were the letters about?

“About provisions—oils, animals, wines,” she explained. “Always quantities of such things to Mecca, to Al-Suweika market in Mecca,” her voice trailed away.

What was wrong with that?

“Nothing wrong with that. Merchandise goes on dhows ... always on
bum
or
baghala
through Red Sea. Many times whole cargo lost because of British gunboats.” She turned her eyes away. “Gunboats never sink dhows, but merchandise lost anyway.”

That meant something was being smuggled. What? Drugs?

“No drugs,” Juahara replied. “I swear by God I do not
really
know. It is not of my business.”

I thought hard. Under the desert sands what was buried? What was buried that was so valuable, so precious that it would be worth smuggling? Not gold, because there was no gold there. Oil? Why smuggle it? However, I decided to ask Juahara, and she shook her head. “No oil,” she told me, rising to her feet. “Now I go.”

I wanted to detain her. What about the provisions—the oils, wines, and animals?

Juahara looked at me strangely. “In this country, there are many strange things: fruits which are made of glass, vegetables of wax, could not animals be made of metal?” She clutched her hands desperately, almost defiantly, and said, “Wainwright
_s
Khawaja,
many things I do not know, so I cannot tell!” She glanced down at her mutilated fingers, and continued, her voice pleading, “I have been afraid to work for a long time. I have so very little money. Perhaps your generosity will give me enough to go away?”

I told her I would give her the money, and then asked where I had done my usual banking. She named a bank near the office on Wall Street. I asked her to return to the hotel around noon the next day for her funds. I wasn’t positive that I could cash one of the ten-thousand-dollar bills the same day, and I did not want to lower my nearly exhausted cash fund.

She agreed to return.

The bank presented no problem when I cashed the bill. It was the National Security & Trust, and as Howard Wainwright, I had maintained my company account there. It was still there with a modest balance. Cashing it in, I deposited eight thousand in the account, took one thousand dollars in a single bill, and the balance in twenties and fifties. While I was at the bank, I made inquiries concerning the possibility of a safe deposit box in the name of Pacific, Wainwright, and O’Hanstrom. There was no box under any of the three names.

Juahara returned promptly at noon, the following day, and I gave her five hundred dollars. It was not through generosity, as she was prepared to believe, but I was anxious to have her out of the way. She could be dangerous in the hands of Santini, if he found her; I had run the risk of having her seen in my hotel, because I did not believe that Santini or any other detective following me would recognize her on sight. Now it was desirable that she disappear forever.

After accepting the money, Juahara thanked me and prepared to leave. I attempted to let her know that I was sorry for the trouble her job had caused her, and I asked her again if there was anything more she could tell me.

Her eyes, dark and black, regarded me impassively beneath her pitifully streaked hair. Behind her eyes, I thought I detected a fleeting moment of sympathy and then it was gone. She shook her head. “It is strange,” she spoke slowly, as if recalling thoughts she had long considered, “that around some men violence is carried like a cloak. It is the breath of their life, it is the music of their soul. They are indestructible, except to be destroyed by their own hands. After you had disappeared, I did not believe that you were dead, even after Amar and Ghazi, the Sudanese, to me swore that you were. The reason I did not betray you was not because you were my friend—for you were not my friend—but because, if I had betrayed you, I would have been killed. If, to those men, I had given information, so soon as my lips stopped their speaking, I would have died. As long as I denied them what they asked, there was a chance through God’s grace that I might live.”

What was the information they wanted?

“Where you kept your bank accounts, did you hold boxes of hidden safety?”

That was all?

“Not all. They asked of other things, of a woman named Rosemary Martin. And of keys, did you have keys hidden within the office. But always they would ask again of banks where you kept money.”

Had a man named Colonel Horstman ever called on me at my office?

Juahara was becoming impatient; perhaps recalling her torture had made her uneasy, and she was anxious to escape. She pulled her coat around her, and walked to the door. She stood there a moment, her hand on the knob before opening it. Finally she said, “Him I never met. Sometimes a letter would come addressed to you as Mr. Wainwright. When I opened it, another sealed envelope was held within. On this envelope would be the name Hans Horstman. This I to you would give unopened, and you would put it away, and tell me you would deliver it to the man.” She took a deep breath. “Perhaps? this man can help you.”

Had she ever heard from Horstman? Had he ever called on the phone?

“I know not. If he called, he did not say that was his name.”

She turned the knob on the door, pulling it gently. “Goodbye, Wainwright,
Khawaja,”
she said politely using the term of respect. “Perhaps someday your troubles will be over. However, I say to you, if you do not sleep at night, that often I have remembered, when I was a small girl, I hear what happens at the market of Al-Suweika in Mecca.” She bowed her head very slightly, and then the door closed behind her.

It was very quiet in the room after Juahara had gone. The dirty tan walls seemed to be listening. There was a tenseness, an air of expectation, the waiting for another voice— the voice of Colonel Horstman. An illumination filled my mind, and in a moment it seemed I would hear his voice, remember it as he had spoken to me, and then the feeling dimmed and died away. The moment was gone. After a while, I left the room and went back to Wall Street, and once again to the office of Howard Wainwright.

This time I searched the office very carefully looking for a lead ... a clue ... a hint ... anything to lead me to Horstman. I had nearly completed my search, without success, when the door opened and Santini walked in. “If you’ll tell me what you’re looking for,” he said, “I’ll help you look for it.”

At the bookcase, I removed the four volumes of
Rommel’s War in the Desert
and carried them over to the desk, placing them on top of it. Santini picked one volume up, and leafed through it carelessly, then replaced it. “Reminds you of old times, huh, Pacific?”

I shrugged.

Santini sat down in a leather chair and lit a cigarette. “I promised to look you up again,” he said.

I wrote on my pad, “ ‘One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.’ ” It was a quotation from Nietzsche.

After reading it, Santini said casually, “I wondered how long it would take you to remember conveniently you were Wainwright.”

It had been Santini, himself, who had tipped me off that I was Wainwright. The day he told me about Wainwright’s apartment being covered with my fingerprints. The night I had broken into the place, and been intercepted by Amar, I had been careful to wear gloves. I couldn’t have left prints, unless I had been there before. However, I did not feel it necessary to explain this to Santini, so I said nothing.

“I still can’t figure out your racket,” Santini continued. “So far I haven’t been able to dig up anything illegal about this joint. It wasn’t a bucket shop or anything like that.” He removed his cigarette and regarded the end of it, consideringly. “Of course I could always dig up a technicality under the state law about operating a business under an assumed name.” He replaced the cigarette in his mouth, and reaching inside his coat pocket withdrew a large heavy envelope. “I got all the dope on you here,” he said, running his thumb along the edge of the envelope. “You interest me, Pacific-Wainwright, and I’ve sort of been working along on you. My own time and expense. But I got an idea I’m not going to have to nail you with a technicality.”

I watched Santini carefully. Behind his mask of casualness there was a new threat, a new assurance which I had never sensed before. This time I did not believe that he was probing for information. He seemed to be waiting now for something, but what it was I didn’t know. He stared back at me, his eyes flat and cold, no longer hot and angry as I remembered from the first time I saw them at the hospital.

“Luck, Pacific,” Santini continued, “is only for crapshooters. In a man’s life, he doesn’t have luck—he has other things. He has the mistakes other people make, sometimes he can take advantage of a whole series of errors by people he’s never seen. Maybe it’s the time and the place and the human element of inefficiency which is on his side. These things work for a while, and he thinks he’s lucky but not forever.” He stood and carefully snubbed out his cigarette in a heavy bronze ashtray on my desk. Indifferently he touched the four stacked books. “Pleasant reading,” he said quietly. He walked out without looking back.

Carrying the books under my arm, I left the office a few minutes later and took a cab up Broadway to see Bozell. He was in and I asked him if he knew anyone who had contacts in Africa, Saudi Arabia in particular. Bozell knew another attorney who had handled a legal case for Maxwell Claussen, a former foreign correspondent for the New York
Daily Register.
Could Bozell, through his friend the attorney, call Claussen and arrange for me to meet him. Bozell told me that he would try. I gave him my address at the Arena Hotel, and paid him another small fee.

“I’ll call you as soon as I can arrange something,” Bozell told me.

“WELL,” said Jensen, hanging up the phone, “I just got some news about that grand bill. It was one of a series from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”

“Where was it delivered?”

“A hundred thousand dollars in thousand-dollar bills to the National Security & Trust Company right here in the city.”

“When?”

“Months ago.”

“Evidently they don’t do much business in thousand-dollar bills,” said Burrows.

“Who does? The National Security & Trust reports that they issued the bill, but as they are past the serial number now, they don’t know who picked it up.”

“Was it Pacific?”

“They have no account for Pacific, and they can’t identify him.”

“Was it passed as one of a series?”

“The bank can’t tell, but there’s a good possibility that it was. Grand bills don’t just float around. Usually they’re part of three or five or ten thousand dollars for big cash transactions.”

Burrows looked thoughtful. His eyes, red rimmed from lack of sleep, stared past Jensen, out the window on Mercer Street. He turned Jensen’s information over in his mind, and said slowly, “There’s another possibility, a good one that it was just a single bill. Suppose Pacific wants to beat it out of town, and he’s got a little money, a grand or so. He doesn’t want to carry all of it around in a roll, so he converts it into a single thousand-dollar bill.”

“That’s all right, except for one thing.”

“What?”

“Why doesn’t he tuck it away in his pocket or a billfold, any place but the sole of his shoe. A guy walking around on a bill like that would destroy it in a day or two.”

Burrows agreed. “Yes, that’s right.” After a pause, he continued, “You might figure then, that he didn’t intend to carry it around in his shoe very long ... just temporary, for a few hours. So, what was the reason for hiding it in his shoe, then?”

“Because,” replied Jensen, “he was planning to meet somebody. He' had a date set up to meet somebody he was afraid of; somebody who might frisk him. Pacific wanted that bill for emergency reasons, but he didn’t want it found on him and maybe taken away.”