been.
Better Scotch, of course, the same as the better suits, better offices, better car, and almost everything else.
But not better service.
I savoured the Scotch and was deciding whether or not to take a second drink, when the intercom buzzed and a voice came from the speaker.
‘Mike?’
‘Yes?’
‘Heard that you’d come in.’ Berson sounded tired. ‘I’ve just reported back from L.A. Want I should see you?’
I thought about it, smiling a little as I stared down at my glass. Good old Berson, always reliable—to do the wrong thing. I’d sent him out to chase a missing husband and he’d probably frightened the guy to death or straight back to his wife, which wasn’t what she’d wanted. She wanted a divorce and big alimony.
‘Not tonight, Pug. Check in tomorrow.’
‘But this is important, Mike. That guy ran like a rabbit and I think he headed straight back to his wife.’
‘He did,’ I said. ‘Forget it. We found him for her, didn’t we?’
‘That’s right.’ Pug sounded pleased. ‘Smart work, eh? I handled that one well, didn’t I?’
‘You did.’ Useless to tell him that on every job he went on I had to send a man to cover him. Pug was all muscle and little brain, but what he lacked in intelligence he made up for in loyalty. I’d saved him from a frame and he followed me like a dog. ‘Get some rest now and check in tomorrow. ’Night.’
I switched off and stared down at my desk. There was some mail, an airmail letter marked personal, and I opened it to stare at a shiny photograph of a man and woman with a couple of kids. I turned it over, but it wasn’t necessary for me to read the inscription.
Sight of the letter made me remember the past, way back to where, almost, it had all begun. Outside, the wind hammered against the windows and that reminded me too. Years ago now, way back when I rented a cheap room and lived on the thin edge of debt, which is the penalty of any man who tries to make his own way in an overcrowded racket.
I stared at the photograph and sipped the Scotch. I felt tense, expectant, all keyed up, as if something was about to happen but I didn’t know what. I’d felt like that before, and I didn’t like it.
I rose and stared out of the windows again: still rain, still winds, still the red light making the gutters full of blood. I shivered. Different place, different building, but the same weather.
I crossed to the desk, and the faces of the couple smiled up at me.
Susan and Marvin. Boy and girl. Married now and with a couple of kids. I wondered whether the Colonel was still alive.
Thinking of him triggered something in my mind, and I crossed to a green metal filing cabinet set against one wall. It was filled with neat, bound, typed pages. Some thick, some thin, but all with one thing in common. They were cases, some clean, some dirty, some, a very few, marked as unsolved. I let my finger run over them until I found the one I wanted. It was among the first, and I took it out and carried it back to my desk.
I was still tense, still expectant, but I just couldn’t sit there and wait. So I opened the case and began to read, and as I read I went back...back...back to another night in another office where I sat waiting—and alone.
CHAPTER TWO
From where I sat at the desk, I could see the black marks of my name lettered on the frosted glass panel of the door. They were peeling flaked, but even in reverse I could figure out what they said and what the smaller lettering beneath them was supposed to say. Private Investigator. Me. An agency of one man in a crummy office, ready and willing to take care of all the troubles of the world.
Sight of the lettering reminded me of the rent I hadn’t paid and the money I hoped to earn that night.
Midnight, the Colonel had said. Midnight to discuss a matter of the utmost privacy and desperate urgency. I discounted them both; trouble, no matter of what kind, is always desperate and urgent to the one who has it.
I rose and looked out of the window. Through the dirt I could see the rain and through the rain the lights looked fuzzy, as if they had lost their form and shape. A gust of wind pressed against the dirty panes, cold wind, bitter, heavy, with a hint of the coming snow.
It was a night to be indoors.
I thought so, and the sight of a few late pedestrians hurrying along the sidewalk, their collars turned high against the rain and hats low against the wind, made me certain of it. I stood staring at the snaggle-toothed skyline of New York, and the too-bright neon of Broadway shone from the low clouds as if half the city was burning.
An illuminated clock on a warehouse had both hands together as it pointed upwards in mechanical prayer.
Midnight.
The Colonel was late.
I sighed and lit a cigarette, sucking the smoke deep into my lungs and letting it plume against the glass of the window in swirling clouds of blue and grey. The smoke clouded the pane and I rubbed it, wiping a patch clear, then paused to stare at my reflection.
A face, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin. Just a face topped with thick, slightly curly black hair. A face that had looked at the world with grey eyes for thirty years now, not a handsome one, not an ugly one, just a face, a mask for what went on within my skull. A thin scar puckered the cheek on the left side. One ear had a slight notch, a relic of my early days when the bullets fired had been with Government licence, and my lips seemed to have thinned a little and tended towards a downward curve.
I wondered if my mother would still have known me had she been alive.
I knew my father wouldn’t have.
I shrugged and dragged at the cigarette, trying to find in the smoke some anodyne for the pressure I could feel building up inside of me. I had been idle too long and, unless I got a case soon, I’d join the ranks of those who accepted discipline for a steady wage.
So I stood and smoked and thought, and the flashing lights of the city painted the wet streets with changing tides of red and orange, green and amber, while the dim shapes beneath me hurried through the bitter wind.
I was still standing there when the limousine drew to a halt at the kerb below.
It was a long, smoothly-finished job, glittering with chromium and polish, looking like some huge, hard-shelled beetle as it rested on the street ten storeys below. A man slipped from the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind him as, head down, he ran towards the building. Almost at once the harsh sound of the buzzer echoed around my ears.
I pressed the button releasing the night lock on the street door and, sitting down at my desk, waited for whoever it was to enter the office.
He was young, neatly dressed in chauffeur’s black, his peaked cap throwing his eyes in shadow, and the close-fitting uniform didn’t hurt his chest and shoulders one little bit.
‘Mr. Lantry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mr.
