The Malaspiga Exit (5 page)

‘He always comes and has a beer on a Friday at that little joint round the corner. Last two times I asked him he was busy. What's up with him?'

The younger man shrugged. ‘He's got a training programme. You know Frank, he never lets up. Try him now; he was round this morning seeing the old man.'

‘I have tried him,' Nathan said. ‘He gave me the thumbs down. Christ, he can put on a long face! What's he doing training rookies? He's way past all that stuff.'

‘Special rookie,' the other man said. ‘Pretty important mission on. I don't know much about it, but the word's out that we're on to something with Firelli's assignment.'

‘Italy?' Nathan asked. He smoked a chewed-up pipe, which he took out, stuffed untidily with tobacco and lit.

‘Could be,' was the answer. Nathan balanced on one buttock on the other man's desk.

‘First I've heard of it,' Nathan said. ‘So what's the special mission? Another undercover agent?'

‘I guess so.' The other man's telephone began to ring. He picked it up and gave his name. Nathan slid down to the floor, rubbing his bottom. A special mission, an undercover agent needing Frank's crash-course instruction. Nathan raised one eyebrow and sucked on his pipe. He looked at his watch: seven thirty-five. He waved to the man who was telephoning, then he went out of the office, down in the elevator and through the main hall, where he checked out. He was off duty till nine o'clock the next morning. Free. He wandered towards the bar where he and Frank Carpenter met for a beer, and had a drink by himself. He looked at his watch again. Firelli's assignment. He was posted missing, presumed dead. A statistic on the ledgers of the most lucrative business in the world. The old-time gangsters hadn't begun to realize the potential of drugs. They ran liquor, gambling, women, and made themselves millionaires. Then they discovered the labour unions and netted themselves new revenue. But a pound of heroin was worth half a million dollars. An ounce fetched sixty thousand dollars. He drew on his pipe and the ashes glowed. Millions and millions of dollars. Pounds, deutschmarks, franks, yen. Every currency in the world for the dust that brought dreams. A lot of his old associates had thought exactly the same thoughts as he was thinking, and the process had only led one way. The old Bureau had been amalgamated because it contained a hard core of corrupted officers, men who stole the impounded heroin and cocaine and re-sold it on the market. Men who took bribes, suppressed evidence, gave protection. He had known many of them. The Mafia had reached them all. He had never taken anything from them. They were the Wops; the scum. It was after eight o'clock. He checked his watch again and went to the telephone booth in the corner of the bar. He dialled a Brooklyn number.

‘Honey? Yeah, it's me. Okay—sure. I'm having a beer. I'll be home soon. You get something to eat. Be a good girl now.' He rang off, found some loose change and started another call. This time there was no answer. He waited, listening to the ringing. He said ‘Shit' under his breath and hung up. Eight-thirty. He'd have to try again, when he got home. He bought some more tobacco and left the bar.

Being a frugal man, he travelled by the subway; he read the paper, his reflexes tuned for trouble. Even in the early evening the trains were places where robbery and murder happened regularly. Nathan wasn't bothered. He could take care of himself. He would have welcomed some young mugger trying to take him on; he was in that sort of mood. He walked the block to his home, and stuffed the pipe in his pocket, because his wife didn't like the smell of the tobacco. They had been married three years. There had been another marriage, but it had ended years ago, and he never thought about it. He opened the front door, and went in. There was a smell of frying chicken. He sniffed it and smiled.

‘Marie? I'm home.' She came to meet him; she was thin and small, with dark hair tied back in a pony-tail. She looked like a teenager with an old face. He kissed her, slipping his arm round her waist. ‘How's my girl?' he asked.

‘I'm fine,' she said. ‘Just fine. We've got chicken. Hungry?'

‘Starving,' Nathan said. He kissed her again. Three years; three years of being married to the only human being he had loved in his life. He didn't use the word love except in connection with Marie. His family relationships hadn't been easy. They were a poor, immigrant Jewish family of Russian origin, struggling to make a living. He hadn't liked his parents, and his home had been very different from the sentimental myth about close-knit Jewish clans presided over by the mother. His father was poor, anxious and ill-tempered. He hit his children and bullied his wife. His three sons didn't like him, his only daughter liked him too much and ended up living with a buyer for one of the Park Avenue stores. Nathan didn't acknowledge her. He would have preferred a sister who was a whore rather than a self-confessed dyke. One brother was working in a Brooklyn supermarket, where he was manager; he was married with three children, and occasionally he and Nathan and the wives got together. The other brother had been killed in a road accident ten years earlier. His parents were dead and Marie had no family. They were on their own, and Nathan liked it. His private life was very private. He took a beer out of the ice box and drank it in the kitchen, watching his wife get the meal ready. At thirty-one she had a figure like a teenage girl; he was proud of it. He liked being seen out with her on a Sunday, when he went bowling; she looked so young. She was the most vulnerable woman he had ever met, and in the course of his career as a policeman, and then a specialist in narcotics, Nathan had met some pathetic specimens of humanity. Few had aroused him to pity; criminals filled him with hate, and it was a hate that was caused by self-knowledge. If he hadn't been a policeman, Nathan would have been a criminal. He sensed this without understanding it, and pursued the thieves and pimps, the blackmailers and murderers with brutal fanaticism because they were a mirror in which he saw himself. He had met his wife in a police raid; she was working as a waitress in a café which was a known meeting place for addicts in a hippy-dominated area of the Village.

It was decided to clean the place out, and Nathan led the squad. He remembered the wispy, hollow-eyed girl, trembling and mute with fear, standing backed up against a wall while the arrests were made. Something touched a sympathy in him which he didn't know existed. He felt sorry for the kid. Sorry enough to go and tell her there was nothing to be scared about. If she was clean. He'd known immediately that she wasn't. Only heroin gave that jaundice colour to the skin, the limpid brightness to the eyes. She was hopped up and the moment she was booked into the precinct station she was on the way to jail. Nathan hadn't arrested her.

And the next night he was back at the café, looking for her. He wasn't surprised to find that she had disappeared. Pursued by fear, by debt, by the police, people like Marie were always running. And equally she wasn't difficult to find. She had another job, cleaning up in a scruffy brothel, whose proprietor complained angrily to Nathan that the disciples of free love were ruining his business. Nathan didn't know himself what he wanted with her. He just knew that she worried him; it was like a toothache. He felt none of the disgust and contempt which most addicts inspired in him. He gave her a meal, which she didn't eat, and tried to get her to talk about herself. It wasn't successful. He was a cop, and she just sat and stared at him, her eyes seeming bigger than before and almost as frightened. It took a long time for Nathan to get through to her; in the next few weeks he made certain that the brothel-keeper and his wife paid her a decent wage and didn't let her get into trouble. Any attempt to escape responsibility, and he'd see their place was closed up. This was a departure from the free use of the whores or the money hand-outs usually extorted from people in their line of business, but they kept their bargain so carefully that they hardly allowed Marie outside. She had been seeing Nathan regularly for two months when she confessed that she was on heroin.

‘You can't go on seeing me,' she had said, quite without warning when they were walking through Central Park on his Sunday off duty. ‘I'm hooked on the stuff. I'm no good to you. So thanks for everything and goodbye.' She had turned and rushed in the opposite direction. It took Nathan a few seconds to catch her up. She was crying, and that was when he decided he would have to marry her. Someone had to help her kick the habit; someone had to take care of her. He looked at her tenderly as they ate their evening meal. She was the exception, the single statistic that meant success. She had taken a cure, under Nathan's direction, and she married him clean. And she had stayed clean. She was house-proud, frugal, a good cook, and he loved her so much that the emotion was a pain. She had offered to become a Jewess, which he rejected, having given up religion as a boy, but the suggestion made him cry. She owed him everything and she never stopped trying to say thank you. The beautifully cooked Kosher meal was another way. She had been three years without slipping, of showing any sign that she wanted to slip. She was safe.

He helped her clean the table and dried the dishes. They talked a lot while they worked; she made him laugh, telling him details about the day. It was almost ten o'clock when he went to the telephone.

‘Get me a cup of coffee, honey.' He sent her back to the kitchen and dialled the same number. This time it was answered after half a dozen rings.

‘Mr. Taylor?'

‘Yes,' said the voice. ‘This is he.'

Nathan lowered his voice. He glanced at the door; his wife couldn't hear anything in the kitchen. He didn't take time out to be polite.

‘This is Nathan,' he said. ‘There's another pigeon being trained up. Yeah—as soon as I know I will. But the heat is on. Let your end know.'

He hung up, just before the door opened and Marie came in with two cups. ‘Were you calling somebody?'

‘Just the office,' he smiled. In fifteen years they had never got to him, and they had tried, many times. Money, threats, cutting him in. But it was inevitable the moment he married Marie. They had the handle and they turned it. He hadn't even tried to fight; he almost admitted to himself that he had known it would happen and accepted it. Now he was bound to them, fighting on their side. If he didn't, as they had told him, he would come back home one night and find she'd had visitors. And the visitors had put the needle in her again. He was working for Eddie Taylor with the antique shop on Park Avenue. That was all he knew or wanted to find out.

He put his arm round his wife and sipped his coffee. ‘You want to see the Vince Patrick show, Jimmy?'

Nathan looked at the television set. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘We can catch the first half of it. Then maybe I'll take you to bed.' She reached up and kissed him. He smiled and squeezed her. To hell with Eddi Taylor. To hell with the Bureau. Nothing was going to happen to his wife.

Katherine was downstairs waiting in the hotel foyer by five minutes to one. She had taken a lot of trouble to get ready, choosing a light-weight dress in pale yellow, putting on the little signet ring she hated. She carried a large shoulder bag. Inside it was the set of tiny bugs and the recording device which Carpenter had given her in New York. It had been arranged that she could spend the afternoon alone, looking up her family records. And the records were in the library. The Duke had said it was his favourite room. There couldn't be a better place to set a recording device, and she would have time to do so as soon as he left her there. Alessandro called for her at one o'clock, driving a wicked-looking Ferrari, the ducal crest painted on its doors. He was casually dressed, wearing a canary-yellow sweater and a silk scarf. He kissed her hand and told her how charming she looked. They lunched at the Loggia Restaurant on the Piazzale Michelangelo, set high up in the Florentine hills, and dominated by the great master's statue of David, which stood in the centre of the Piazzale itself, looking down on the city.

If there was a single word that described Alessandro di Malaspiga, it was magnetism. Katharine had never met anyone who possessed it to such a degree. There was a drawing power about him which transcended the obvious star quality of being a duke with charm and money. He was a man who would have made an impression under any circumstances. When they came into the restaurant everybody stared at them; several people smiled and waved. He hadn't introduced her, he had taken her arm in his proprietary way and guided her straight to their table, preceded by the manager himself. ‘I have already ordered lunch,' he said. ‘Something very special. And some nice wine.' He looked across at her and smiled. ‘This is a celebration,' he said.

She thought, quite dispassionately, that a woman would have to be very brave or very foolish to become involved with him. One might admire the fearful beauty of the tiger, but you didn't take it in your arms.

‘What are you thinking about?'

‘You,' Katharine answered truthfully. ‘You're not at all what I expected.'

‘And what was that—some effete degenerate out of a Fellini film? I'm sorry if you're disappointed.'

‘How could I be?' she said. ‘You don't need me to flatter you. And I didn't expect you to be so friendly. I'm only a distant relative—very distant. A quick trip round the villa would have been enough for most people.'

‘Believe me,' Alessandro said, ‘that's exactly what most people would have got. But you don't need flattery any more than I do. A beautiful flower has blossomed on our family tree!' He laughed out loud. ‘You have the most delightfully expressive face—don't look so disgusted, it was only a joke. Do you know, Italian women don't make faces—they're so frightened of getting wrinkles! It always irritates me to sit opposite a mask. I love people who know what they feel.'

‘I can't help it,' she said. ‘Is that how your mother looks so incredibly young? I've never seen anything like her.'