The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel Read online

  He looked at me in a way that bosses always look at employees who haven’t quite pleased them. His flat pancake face cracked open and I knew from the start that he was trying to show off before the little dame who was still hovering round him.

  He rapped: “Heggy, what have you been doing? Didn’t I hear you yelling up above just now?”

  I said: “I was yelling. So what?”

  That question floored him.

  He knew that if he tried to take the rise out of Joe P. Heggy, he was likely to end up squashed, and I could see that he didn’t want that, not in front of that export from austerity Britain.

  So he changed his tune a bit, and asked: “What were you doing? I mean, why were you reacting like that?”

  I looked coldly at him and told him: “I was taking my exercises inside the elevator shaft, and, the damn’ thing started to come down on me.”

  The sap started to shush me. He looked significantly at the timid little soul at his elbow and said quickly:

  “Not so much of the language, Heggy.”

  I looked into that timid dame’s face, and I said: “If a damn harms a lady, she oughtn’t to be on this earth.” I was in that kind of mood, you see. I’d been near to death, and a little thing like a damn didn’t rate high in my opinion of the sins of the world. What did rankle was a shove in the back, which had nearly put an end to a man I care for more than anyone else on earth. Me. Joe P. Heggy.

  B.G. didn’t know what I was talking about and didn’t believe me, anyway. He hadn’t even noticed my quick change of clothes, and he started to give orders to impress the little dame.

  He said: “Miss Dunkley is coming with us to the Gazino, Heggy.”

  I slapped my key on the desk for Benny to hook up for when I returned. I looked at B.G. and then at the bashful, mousy-haired little dame, and I said, archly: “Now, I wonder what’s taken her mind off ruins?”

  She fluttered in an excess of embarrassment. B.G. thought I was being rude, and he became excessively formal and polite.

  “Perhaps I should introduce you. Miss Dunkley, this is an assistant—”

  “—a nursemaid and bodyguard!” I interrupted sourly.

  “An assistant,” the fat slob said viciously, “called Heggy. Mr. Heggy, allow me to introduce you to—”

  “Okay, okay,” I interposed. “I know what comes next. Mr. Heggy meet Miss Dunkley.” I gave her a flick of the Heggy paw, and said: “Hyar, babe. How’s Miss Dunk?”

  It didn’t go down at all well with B.G. But right then I was still trying to take it out of someone for the shaking up I had gone through. B.G. was as good as anyone to rile, right at that moment.

  He yammered at me all the way out until we got a taxi. Then he stopped talking because no one can talk coherently in an Istanbul taxi. They’re driven by madmen possessed of the finest motoring skill in the world. The fittest only survive, and my theory is that even the best can’t live long as an Istanbul taxi-driver.

  We got thrown about a lot together in the back of that cab and I was the only one who did any bellyaching.

  When we got out at the Gazino, we sorted ourselves out and gave each other back the right arms and legs, which had got all tied up in the journey over the hill.

  The little dame went ahead. I saw her going towards the bright lights that marked the entrance to the Gazino, and then I noticed that B.G. was not going after her, but was standing there looking after her small, rather shrinking little form.

  I looked at B.G., and then said: “Give, brother, give. What’s biting you?”

  His big head turned and he looked at me through his glasses and then he turned his head again and looked after the little dame. And his expression was dazed, like a man who has suffered a shock.

  I grabbed him by the elbow, and dug in painfully through his fat. I don’t like my questions being ignored by bosses. I said: “I asked you a question?”

  That seemed to bring him out of his trance and he dragged his arm away from me and rubbed it painfully. But he seemed so astonished that he didn’t even appear to bear resentment towards me because of the pain of that grip which had been intentionally painful.

  He just looked at me, and then I heard him mutter:

  “I wouldn’t have believed it. My God, no, I wouldn’t!”

  I yammered: “For Pete’s sake, what wouldn’t you have believed?”

  But he didn’t answer that question; he went slowly towards that little dame, and it seemed to me almost that he went in a circling movement, as if to keep a yard or two distance from her, and he was staring at her all the time through his eight-sided glasses.

  Little Miss Dunkley turned and smiled at him, and she was all a-flutter and dropping her eyes and going pink with confusion. She looked painfully out of this world, and it was a pose—though unintentional, of course—which seemed to appeal to big, fat B.G. Me, I like ’em worldly.

  I saw B.G. start to pull himself together again. I even saw him pull his stomach in a couple of yards, and then he said, but not really to any audience but rather to himself: “It must have been an accident.” And then he was beaming on the little London woman and going flat out to impress her again.

  Right then, I saw a man and I went across to him and I said a few words in his ear. He was a complete stranger to me, but I knew he was the man whose ear I had been looking for.

  He was a Turk. He was dressed in the light suiting which the middle-class Turk adopts for summer wear, when he goes out nights. He was a rather stolid-looking, impassive man, approaching my own height—which means he was pretty big. I planted myself slap in front of him as he came out from a taxi just drawn up behind the one we’d quit. And I said to him: “Brother, you get word through to that boss of yours, and tell him they’ve tried to sort me out already.”

  The man looked at me. He didn’t say anything, and his rather heavy face didn’t register anything, either.

  So I went on: “You tell him that a couple of rubes tried to drop me down an elevator shaft. Tell him I’ve got an idea that some of the people we’re looking for are staying in that hotel.”

  That’s what I told him, and only when I finished did I realize what I had done....

  I hadn’t mentioned the girl who was passing off as Marie Konti.

  He looked at me, and then in not very good English he said: “Excuse? I do not understand, effendi?”

  I gave him a flip of my paw to show my contempt for the attempted bluff. When it comes to bluffing, you’ve got to go to a land where you’re brought up with a deck of poker cards in your hand.

  I was sure of myself. This was the guy who had been getting callouses on his backside on that visitors’ bench in the hotel foyer. I’d guessed there would be someone around after what the police officer had told me, and I’d been looking for him. I wanted to get a message through to that husky capable young officer.

  I think this Turk had been a little afraid that I, a touchy American national, might have been angry to have discovered a police agent following me. But now he must have gathered that I wasn’t. In fact, I was darned glad.

  I said: “Look, brother, you go off and phone that report through and get your chief to comb that hotel again, while I go in and get myself round a meal and a couple of bottles. I’ll be in there when you come back.”

  He got it at once that I was willing to play along with the police.

  He didn’t waste words, that fellow; he just nodded and went quickly into the Gazino and I knew he was on his way to find a phone.

  We never went into the Gazino. One minute later we were piling into a taxi again.

  I’d started to go after B.G. and his one-woman admiration-society when I saw that big pancake face of his come back round the entrance and I realized that he was heading out and bringing a bewildered little dame with him.

  His face was flushed, and his eyes uneasy, and I knew he’d seen something that had put a scare up him. So I stood across the sidewalk slap in front of him and demanded: “Where are you heading
, B.G.? I thought we were going to eat in the Gazino?”

  He said, quickly: “I’ve changed my mind. I’ve just remembered a place which will please Miss Dunkley more.”

  But he didn’t kid me. He was running out on something, and I wanted to know what it was. He wouldn’t tell me and I knew he was ashamed of his fear, and wasn’t going to reveal it in front of little Dunk. He was doing a lot of talking and extolling the virtues of the place he had it in mind to visit.

  He argued: “Miss Dunkley has seen places like the Gazino before.”

  Miss Dunkley looked astonished, as if in fact she had never been to a place like the Gazino. “I think she’d much prefer to see something more native.”

  Miss Dunkley nodded very quickly several times, as if to convey how clever he was in understanding her wishes. But I thought that when she looked over her shoulder at the bright lights of the Gazino she looked very wistful, as if she’d liked to have seen Istanbul’s No. 1 nightery.

  I did some wistful looking myself, too. Because the Gazino’s a place worth visiting any evening. It’s the biggest of Istanbul’s places of entertainment; and it is built on a steep hillside overlooking the Bosporus, so that in summer you dine out in the moonlight under a starry sky, on terraces brilliantly illuminated, while a good orchestra plays for dancing and the best cabaret acts in the Middle East are put on for the diners. I could hear a lilting Samba and it made my feet itch and I wanted to go inside and join the audience I knew to be there already—because it was there every night of the week.

  You see the loveliest of women at the Gazino. They dress superbly, and they are of every race under the sun. They look...exotic...alluring.

  Though you can’t go up and ask a dame to dance unless you know her family, but you can look at them and that’s something, anyway. It makes the lobster thermidor taste all the better.

  We went on to the street arguing, but for once the boss was in a mood to stand up to my argument, and I began to realize that something had scared the pants off him. I couldn’t make it out, but I had to do as I was told. So I got into that taxi with him, and heard him give an address to the driver. The only trouble was, without intending to I had ditched my police shadow, and I felt that mightn’t be a good thing, especially because the address that big slob had given the driver was in a rough quarter of Istanbul.

  However, there was nothing I could do about it. B.G. was running away from something, and he was in the mood to try to impress little Miss Dunk.

  I said, inside the taxi as it lurched away: “Maybe Achmet’s joint isn’t the kind of place to take Lavinia.” He looked at me, and I caught the expression on his face as we slid away from the bright lights in front of the Gazino. He said: “Lavinia?”

  Evidently the sap hadn’t got around to her first name yet. That was slow of the boss. I’d give him a few tips when I felt inclined.

  We slid into darkness and were all held together at a corner. I said, taking the dame’s elbow out of my ear: “That’s Miss Dunkley, B.G. Isn’t it, Lavinia?”

  She murmured something. I went on: “It’s a mouthful. We’ll call her Lav for short from now on.”

  I heard B.G.’s shocked exclamation in the darkness.

  “You’ll do no such thing. Dammit, Heggy, you go too far. That’s no way to talk to a lady.” I just took no notice of him. The hell, what was undignified about that?

  We went down the steep, cobbled hill through the business quarter to the Galata Bridge, which spanned the Golden Horn. We were tossed around more than considerably, which is what you expect from a Turkish driver. But we stayed alive long enough to reach our destination and for B.G. to get his fat hands into his hip pocket and find the exorbitant fee which every Turkish taxi driver demands of an American. He always gets it, too, because after a ride in a Turkish taxi no one is ever inclined .to argue with the man who has brought them so near to death so many times. I guess that’s the psychology of taxi-driving in Istanbul....

  We were down in the old quarter of the town now, where tourists usually come in groups because there is a sinister quality about this sector of old Istanbul.

  We got out of that taxi along with our bruises, and then I realized that B.G.’s hand was trembling so much he could hardly get out his money to pay that taxi-driver. We began to walk towards the nightery, and in the lights over the entrance I realized that B.G.’s big fat face was hot and flushed. I heard him exclaim: “It wasn’t an accident, Heggy!” And there was agony in his voice and horror.

  He didn’t say any more, because Lavinia Dunkley was demurely waiting for him on the sidewalk.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AMERICAN DEFILERS

  By now I was getting to such a state that I wanted to stand where I was and shout: “For God’s sake, someone explain some of these mysteries to me!”

  There was that shemozzle back at the hotel, and now there was B.G. starting up a mystery all of his own. No one would tell me anything, and it didn’t do my libido any good to be in this state of frustration.

  I know I was yammering, raising my voice and asking questions as we went into Achmet’s. But B.G. was ignoring me, and he even seemed to turn his fat shoulder towards me, as if he didn’t want to hear what I was saying. He was agitated and kept rubbing at those useless glasses of his, and I couldn’t understand it at all.

  Achmet’s is another of these ‘au plein air’ establishments which abound in this city of Istanbul. The only difference between it and the Gazino, in fact, was that the place was smaller, they got a more raffish type of patron, and the band, to my Western ears, was lousy. It was a show place for tourists, and a bit overdone at that. Especially they overdid it when they brought on their Turkish women singers.

  These belonged to the old school, and the fatter they were the more they went down with an audience just beginning to realize that Betty Grable had everything, though she weighed less than half these screaming dames.

  One was screaming now. It was hideous, but her compatriots were enraptured and gave her a big hand when she took her chins away from an unnecessary microphone. Even B.G. seemed to wince at the volume of sound, but the little woman smiled bravely and gave out she was enjoying the native singing.

  We got a table, and ordered supper. I ordered the drinks, and made it a rush order because I felt in need of them. I wasn’t too happy in this joint, anyway, because I thought that some of the types weren’t so much raffish as sinister, and I kept looking round at them and trying to spot any trouble if it was coming.

  Trouble blew in by the main entrance a few minutes later. I wasn’t looking that way, but B.G. was, and I saw his fleshy jaw drop almost onto his chest and an agonised look came into his little eyes. Almost I felt his fat hulk trembling, and I turned to see what was agitating the boss.

  Five men were threading their way through the tables towards us from the entrance. They were coming rather quickly, rather roughly, so that Achmet’s patrons looked up at them as they went by, and the waiters turned to watch them. They were men looking for trouble, and they were looking straight at the quivering B.G.

  I sighed, and massaged my fists. Trouble was where my job began. My function was a little different here, in Europe, but when trouble threatened the boss, that was where I had to step in. That’s why he gave me my monthly paycheck.

  That little London woman could feel that something was wrong, that something threatened, and her anxious little face turned from B.G.’s to mine. I tried to reassure her. I said: “If anyone gets killed, Lav”—I nodded towards the boss—“there’s the corpus delecti.”

  B.G. seemed to stiffen in an agonised manner when he heard my caustic humour, but this was no time to quarrel with his only friend. He said nothing, but his eyes lifted as the leader of that quintet came over to him.

  He was a big hairy ape, and ginger with it. He was American, like the other boys with him. His eyes were cold and contemptuous as he looked at B.G., and his voice was even colder, even more contemptuous. He said: “We saw you!”—wit
heringly. “You ducked away when you saw us at the Gazino, didn’t you? But we saw you, and came after you, for we reckon no boss should be ashamed to be in the same place as his men.”

  I was standing now. It paid to be on your feet when that quintet of huskies was around late enough at night for them to have had a skinful. And they had been drinking.

  That ginger ape was Marty Dooley. He was sometimes known as the Show Boss, because he managed and publicised every export project of Gissenheim’s. Behind him, slim, dark, smiling, was Dwight Laite, Gissenheim’s export sales chief, and with him was Gorby Tuhlman, who was Boss Engineer, whose duty it was to see that Gissenheim’s dirt-shifters shifted dirt at their peak of efficiency. Harry Sauer, his assistant, was with him and he looked pretty well gone, and so did Tony Geratta, our Middle East sales rep.

  They were a wild bunch, but there wasn’t any malice in them. They just had a queer sense of humour, and their idea of a night out was to get around a few bottles and then plague the hell out of the boss’s son. For a long time I’d wondered why even B.G. had let ’em get away with it, and then I’d found that they had a hold on him. They were quite cheerful about it and would tell you what that hold was if you asked—B.G. had made some damn-fool proviso in a contract which could have cost the firm a quarter of a million if Dwight Laite hadn’t spotted it and done some smart work to cover them. They could get away with murder after that, because if B.G. tried any tricks with them, they just up and threatened to tell the old man what a fool son he’d brought into the world.

  The others came up and swayed around the table and had a gawk at B.G.’s supreme effort towards dissipation. They were inclined to be crude in their humour.

  B.G. had begun to put on the ice and try to freeze them out, but it didn’t work. Marty kept yammering for an introduction to B.G.’s girlfriend. It made little Dunk blush, and it got B.G. all hot under the collar.

  I wasn’t watching these reactions very closely just then, because I was looking towards the entrance once more, and there was something there that was making me think. Another party had entered the nightery, and they looked as out of place in it as we did. They were big, solid-muscled men, rather sleekly dressed, and yet looking a bit out of place in their party suits. But I was thinking, as I looked at them, that any two of these boys could have been those apes down in the alley who had taken away the pyjama-clad girl.