Читать книгу Violent Ward - Len Deighton - Страница 9

That was some bash, that party for Petrovitch. The little girl who organized it for Petrovitch Enterprises International was a professional party fixer. I didn’t know there were such jobs, even in Los Angeles. She’d rented the Snake Pit for the whole evening, and that takes money. Alternating with the Portable PCs, who had an album at number three that week, there was a band playing all that corny Hawaiian music. The waitresses were dressed in grass skirts, leis, and flesh-colored bras, and one wall was almost covered with orchids flown in from Hawaii. There were dozens of miniature palm trees standing in huge decorative faience pots. The ceiling was obscured by hundreds of colored balloons; from each one dangled a silver or gold cord, the end supporting an orchid bloom, to make a shimmering ceiling of orchids just above head height.

The place was packed. I had trouble parking my Caddie. I can’t get the old battle wagon into the spaces they paint for lousy little imported compacts. So I left it in a slot marked RESERVED FOR SECURITY and wrote Mr Petrovitch on a slip of paper that I propped behind the windshield. I didn’t want my new boss screaming for his fix of special-brand tequila and me blamed for his deprivation. I heaved it out of the car, put the crate on my shoulder, and staggered across the underground parking garage to where the entrance was located. It was so crowded there were guests talking and drinking and dancing right out there on the concrete. They were waltzing around on the red carpet and through the crushed flowers that had been strewn around, and I had to push my way past them to get inside the place. I gave the crate of tequila to the bar man, got a Powers whisky with soda and ice, and started to circulate. The last thing they needed was more booze. Most of them seemed tanked up to the gills. I was frightened to strike a match in case the air exploded.

‘Mickey Murphy! I saw you were on the guest list.’

The deep, lazy voice came booming from a corpulent individual named Goldie Arnez. He’d been watching two video monitors from cameras trained on the lobby to show the guests as they arrived.

‘What are we tuned to, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?’

‘That’s about it,’ he said, taking his eyes from the screen to scrutinize me carefully.

When I first met Goldie he was slim – a movie stuntman, can you imagine? We used to work out together at Gold’s Gym, when there was only one Gold’s Gym and it was on Second Street in Santa Monica. That was where Goldie had acquired his nickname. The stuntwork dwindled as he wrestled with the scales, and the last time I met him he was a 250-pound bail bondsman with a reputation for playing rough with the fugitives he brought in. Now he looked like he’d gone to seed: where he used to have muscles, he had flab, and there were dark rings under his eyes. Maybe I wouldn’t have recognized him, except for that full head of brown wavy hair. He still had his hair – or was it a rug? In this light I couldn’t decide. ‘What are you doing nowadays, Goldie?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘No, I don’t know. Would I be asking you if I knew already?’

‘That’s my Mickey,’ he said. ‘You say good morning to the guy, and you get maimed in a riot.’

‘Cut it out, Goldie.’

‘I’m muscle for Mr Petrovitch.’

‘You’re what?’

‘Don’t be that way. You might need a buddy who can put in a good word with the man at the top.’

‘Muscle?’ I could see it wasn’t all flab; the bulge under his armpit had square edges.

‘I run a team of twenty.’

‘Does Petrovitch need twenty bodyguards?’

‘I’m not a bodyguard. I have guys to do the day-to-day work. I’m head of security for Petrovitch Enterprises International. I’m responsible for the vice presidents and everything in the continental U.S. It’s a big job.’ He gave me one of his business cards.

I looked at it and put it in my pocket. ‘Is that why you’re drinking Pepsi?’

‘Mr Petrovitch cracks down on drinking by staff on duty. He’ll tell you that.’

‘I might find that a little difficult to adjust to,’ I said.

‘Not after Mr Petrovitch has talked to you, you won’t.’ Goldie took a sip of his cola and looked me over. ‘It’s the cost. When he takes over a company he strips all the surplus fat from it and makes it into a lean and trim earnings machine.’ Goldie looked at me as he said it with relish. It sounded like something he’d read in a prospectus, and I didn’t like it. And what kind of lean and trim earnings machine was Goldie?

‘You want to lend me your phone, Goldie?’ I said, eyeing the cellular clipped to his belt. ‘I need to get hold of my partner in Phoenix. I’ll call collect.’

‘Haven’t you got a phone in your car?’ said Goldie.

‘Are you crazy? I drive a beautiful ’fifty-nine Caddie with the original interior and paintwork. I don’t want some guy drilling holes in her and bolting phones and batteries into the bodywork.’

‘There’s a phone upstairs,’ said Goldie. ‘Come with me, or you won’t get past my security guys.’

Goldie led the way to a messy little office with a fax machine and word processors and a bulletin board displaying half a dozen bounced checks, a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Pizza Hut, and a signed photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He lingered out in the hallway for a moment. I thought he was being discreet and allowing me a little privacy, but I should have known better. He came right in.

‘Make your call and let’s get out of here.’ He seemed to disapprove of my looking around the place, but that was just my natural curiosity.

I sat down behind the desk, picked up the phone, and was about to start hitting the buttons when I noticed there was an extra wire coming from the phone and going into a hole freshly drilled in the desktop, a hole marked by a trace of sawdust. ‘Goldie,’ I said, ‘you got a scrambler on this phone or something? What’s this wiring deal? Are you bugging someone’s calls?’

‘Don’t hit that button!’ he barked, showing an alarm in sharp contrast to his previous doleful demeanor. ‘Stay where you are. Put the phone down on the desk and let me come round there.’ He grabbed me by the shoulder as I got to my feet. Then he grabbed the scissors from the desk and cut all wires leading to the phone.

‘What is it?’

‘Jesus!’ said Goldie, talking to himself as if he’d not heard me. ‘The bastards!’

‘Is it a bomb?’

‘You bet it is,’ said Goldie. He followed the wires that went through the desk and kneeled down on the floor under it. I crouched down to see it too. He tapped a brown paper package that had been fixed to the underside of the desk. ‘See that? There’s enough plastic there to blow us both into hamburger,’ said Goldie. Carefully he stripped the sticky tape from the woodwork and revealed the detonators. It looked as if he had done such things before. ‘Maybe it was set to make a circuit when triggered by the buttons, or maybe it was one of those tricky ones that detonate with an incoming call.’

‘What’s it all about, Goldie?’

‘Say an extra prayer when you go to mass tomorrow morning,’ said Goldie. He was still under the desk fiddling with the bomb. ‘Go back downstairs and circulate. I can deal with this.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want the bomb squad?’

His glowering face appeared above the desktop. ‘Not a word about this to anyone, Mickey. If a story like this got into the papers, the shares would take a beating and I’d pay for it with my job.’

‘Whatever you say.’ I decided to leave my call to Phoenix for some other time and went back to the party for another drink. I could see why Goldie was so jumpy about publicity. The media crowd was well in evidence. Some of them I recognized, including two local TV announcers: the guy with the neat mustachio who does the morning show and the little girl with the elaborate hairdo who stands in for the weatherman on the local segment of the network news. They were standing near their cameras, paper napkins tucked into their collars like ruffs and their faces caked with makeup.

The one I was looking around for was Mrs Petrovitch. When I knew her we were both at Alhambra High, struggling with high school mathematics and preparing for college. High school friends are special, right? More special than any other kind of friends. In those days she was Ingrid Ibsen. I was in love with her. Half the other kids were in love with her too, but I dated her on account of the way she lived near me and I could always walk her home, and her dad knew my dad and did his accounts.

She lived only a block from me on Grenada. We used to walk down Main Street together, get a Coke and fries, and I’d think of something I had to buy in the five-and-dime just to make it last longer.

In my last year Ingrid was the lead in the senior play and I had a tap dance solo in the all-school production of The Music Man. I remember that final night: I danced real well. It was my last day of high school. It was a clear night with lots of stars and a big moon so you could see the San Gabriel Mountains. Dad let me have the new Buick. We were parked outside her house. I’d got my scholarship and a place at USC. I told her that as soon as I graduated I was going to come back and marry her. She laughed and said, ‘Don’t promise’ and put her finger on my lips. I always remembered the way she said that: ‘Don’t promise.’

Ingrid spent only one semester at college. She was smarter than I was at most subjects, and she could have got a B.A. easily, but her folks packed up and went to live in Chicago and she went with them. I never did get the full story, but the night she told me she was going, we walked around the neighborhood and I didn’t go home to bed until it was getting light. Then I had a fight with my folks, and the following day I stormed off and joined the Marine Corps. Kidlike, I figured I’d have to go to ’Nam eventually and it was better to get it over with. Now I’ve learned to put the bad ones at the bottom of the pile and hope they never show up. It was a crazy move because I was looking forward to going to college and almost never had arguments with my folks. And anyway, what does joining the service do to solve anything? It just gives you a million new and terrible problems to add to your old ones.

The next I heard of Ingrid was when her photo was in the paper. Budd Byron, who’d known us both at Alhambra, sent me an article that had been clipped from some small-town paper. It was a photo of Ingrid getting married. That was her first husband, some jerk from the sticks, long before she got hitched to Zachary Petrovitch. It said they’d met at a country dancing class. I ask you! I kept the clipping in my billfold for months. They were going to Cape Cod for their honeymoon, it said. Can you imagine anything more corny? Every time I looked at that picture it made me feel sorry for myself.

Soon after I met Betty, I ceremonially burned that clipping. As the ashes curled over and shimmered in the flames I felt liberated. The next day I went down to Saturn and Sun, the alternative medicine pharmacy where Betty worked, and asked her to marry me. As a futile exercise in self-punishment it sure beat joining the Marine Corps.

Then in the eighties I heard about Ingrid again when she upped and married Petrovitch. I knew the Petrovitch family by name; I’d even met Zach Petrovitch a few times. His father had made money from Honda dealerships in the Northwest, getting into them when they were giving them away, a time when everyone was saying the Japanese can maybe make cheap transistor radios, and motor bikes even, but cars?

The first time I met Petrovitch Junior he was with his father, who was guest of honor at an Irish orphanage’s charity dinner in New York. I guess that was before he knew Ingrid. At the end of the evening a few of us, including Zach, cut away to a bar in the Village. The music was great, and we all sank a lot of Irish whiskey. Petrovitch passed out in the toilet and we had a lot of trouble getting him back to the Stanhope, where he was staying. Cabs are leery of stopping for a group of men carrying a ‘corpse,’ and the ones that do stop, argue. I got into a fist fight with a cabbie from County Cork; it wasn’t serious, just an amiable bout with an overweight driver who wanted to stretch his legs. When I told him we were coming from the Irish orphanage benefit, he took us to the hotel and wouldn’t accept the fare money. The crazy thing was that when Petrovitch recovered someone told him I’d strong-armed the cabbie to take him that night. I suppose Petrovitch felt he owed me something. I never did explain it to him.

I moved over to the bar to sneak a look at Ingrid. She was standing with her husband at the end of the red carpet, welcoming guests as they arrived. I studied her through the palm tree fronds, making sure she didn’t see me. She looked as beautiful as ever. Her hair was still very blonde, almost white, but cut shorter now. She had on a long black moiré dress with black embroidery on the bodice and around the hem. With it she wore a gold necklace and a fancy little wrist-watch. I watched her laughing with an eager group of sharp-suited yuppies who were shaking paws with her husband. Seeing her laugh reawakened every terrible pang of losing her. It brought back that night sitting in the Buick when the idea of being married was something I didn’t have to promise. To hear that laugh every day; I would have sold my soul for that. So you can see why I didn’t go across to say hello to them. I didn’t want to be shoulder to shoulder with those jerks when talking with her. It was better to see her from a distance and shuffle through my memories.

‘Hello, Mickey. I thought you might be here,’ chirruped the kind of British accent that sounds like running your fingernails across a blackboard. I turned to see a little British lawyer named Victor Crichton. He was about forty, with the cultivated look that comes with having a company that picks up the tab for everything. His suit was perfect, his face was tanned, and his hair wavy and long enough to hide the tops of his ears.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said, in my usual suave and sophisticated way. Vic Crichton’s boss was Sir Jeremy Westbridge, the client who was giving me ulcers. His affairs were in such desperate disarray that I could hardly bear to open my mail in the morning.

‘Did I make you jump, old chap? Awfully sorry.’ He’d caught me off guard; I suppose I looked startled. He gave a big smile and then reached out for the arm of the woman at his side. ‘This is Dorothy, the light of my life, the woman who holds the keys to my confidential files.’ He hiccuped softly. ‘Figuratively speaking.’

I said, ‘That’s okay, Victor. Hi there, Dorothy. I was just thinking.’

‘Wow! Don’t let me interrupt anything like that!’ He winked at the woman he was with and said, ‘Mickey is Sir Jeremy’s attorney on the West Coast.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said. His wife was British too.

‘It sounds good the way you say it, Vic. But we’ve got to talk.’ I was hoping to make him realize the danger he was in. It wasn’t just a matter of business acumen, they were going to be facing charges of fraud and God knows what else.

‘He’s really an Irish stand-up comic,’ Vic explained to the woman, ‘but you have to set a comic to catch a comic in this part of the world. Right, Mickey?’

‘I’ve got to talk to you, Vic,’ I said quietly. ‘Is Sir Jeremy here? We’ve got to do something urgently.’

He made no response to this warning. ‘Always together. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Vic Crichton and Sir Jeremy. Partners.’

‘They all broke up,’ I said.

‘I wondered if you’d spot that,’ said Vic. ‘Split up or dead. But not us; not yet, anyway. Look for yourself.’

He waved a hand in the direction of the bar, where I spotted the lean and hungry-looking Sir Jeremy. He was a noticeable figure: very tall, well over six feet, with white hair and a pinched face. He was engaged in earnest conversation with a famous local character called the Reverend Dr Rainbow Stojil, a high-profile do-gooder for vagrants who liked to be seen on TV and at parties like this. I guessed that Stojil was trying to get a donation from him. Stojil was famous for his money-raising activities.

‘Don’t interrupt them,’ advised Vic.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We’ve got to have a meeting.’ Vic didn’t reply. He was drunk. I wasn’t really expecting a sensible answer.

Vic and his master were well matched. They were as crooked as you can get without ski masks and sawed-off shotguns. They called themselves property developers. Their cemeteries became golf courses; their golf courses became leisure centers, and leisure centers became shopping malls and offices. They had moved slowly and legally at first but success seemed to affect their brains, because lately they just didn’t care what laws they broke as long as the cash came rolling in.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘The game’s up with all this shit. I know for a fact that an investigation has begun. It’s just a matter of time before Sir Jeremy is arrested. I can’t hold them off forever.’

‘How long can you hold them off, old boy?’

He wasn’t taking me seriously. ‘I don’t know, not long. One, two, three weeks … it’s difficult to say.’

He prodded me in the chest. ‘Make it three weeks, old buddy.’ He laughed.

‘Look, Vic, either we sit down and talk and make a plan that I can offer to them—’

‘Or what?’ he said threateningly.

I took a deep breath. ‘Or you can get yourselves a new lawyer.’

He blinked. ‘Now, now, Mickey. Calm down.’

‘I mean it. You find yourself a new boy. Some guy who likes fighting the feds and the whole slew of people you’ve crossed. A trial lawyer.’

‘If that’s the way you feel, old boy,’ he said and touched me on the shoulder in that confident way that trainers pat a rottweiler.

Maybe he thought I was going to retract, but he was wrong. With that decision made, I already felt a lot better. ‘I’ll get all the papers and everything together. You tell me who to pass it to. How long are you staying in town?’

‘Not long.’ He held up his champagne and inspected it as if for the Food and Drug Administration. ‘We’ve come to hold hands with Petrovitch about a joint company we’re forming in Peru. Then I’m off for a dodgy little argument with some bankers in Nassau and back to London for Friday. Around the world in eight hotel beds: it’s all go, isn’t it, Dot?’

‘What about Sir Jeremy?’

‘Good question, old man. Let’s just say he has a date with Destiny. He’s modeling extra-large shrouds for Old Nick.’ He held out a hand to the wall to steady himself. Any minute now he was going to fall over.

‘What do you mean?’ I said, watching his attempt to regain equilibrium.

‘Don’t overdo it, old sport.’ He put his arm around my shoulder and leaned his head close to whisper. ‘You don’t have to play the innocent with me. I’m the next one to go.’

‘Go where?’

‘You are the one arranging it, aren’t you?’ His amiable mood was changing to irritation, as is the way with drunks when they become incoherent. ‘You buggers are being paid to fix it.’ He closed his eyes as if concentrating his thoughts. His lips moved but the promised words never came.

‘I think we’re boring your wife, Victor,’ I said, in response to the flamboyant way she was patting her open mouth with her little white hand.

‘Victor always gets drunk,’ she said philosophically. She didn’t look so sober herself. She’d drained her champagne and experimentally pushed the empty glass into a palm tree and left it balanced miraculously between the fronds.

Victor didn’t deny his condition. ‘Banjaxed, bombed, bug-eyed, and bingoed,’ he said without slurring his words. ‘Wonderful town, lavish hospitality, and vintage champagne. Very rare nowadays …’ He drawled to a stop like a clockwork toy that needed rewinding.

‘Better if you don’t drive,’ I advised him. At least he didn’t call it Tinseltown, the way some of them did.

‘Dot will drive,’ said Vic. ‘She’s wonderful in the driving seat, aren’t you, Dotty? Unless we can find a motel, that is.’ He slapped her rear gently, and she bared her teeth in an angry smile. He finished his champagne. ‘I think I need another drink, a real drink this time.’

‘You’ve had enough, Vic. We’ve got to go,’ she said.

She took him by the arm, and he allowed himself to be guided away. ‘When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Right, Mickey, my old lovely?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘See you around, Victor. ’Bye, Dot.’ He turned and, with one hand on her buttocks, shepherded her toward the bar. I wondered if he knew that Petrovitch had put a partner into my law business. If not, this didn’t seem to be the right time to discuss it. Victor waved a splay-fingered hand in the air. He didn’t look back. He seemed to know I’d be watching him go and calculating how much I was going to lose in fees next year. Oh, well, I hate crooks. I should never have become a lawyer.

The reception line was still going, but people were no longer coming through the door. This was a celebration for employees and associates, and these guests didn’t come late to a Petrovitch bash if they knew what was good for them. I decided to get a closer look at Peter the Great, whom someone seemed so keen to murder, and inched my way across the room to where the bright lights and TV cameras had been arranged just in case Petrovitch deigned to step over and tell the hushed American public the secret of making untold millions of dollars while still looking young and beautiful enough to run for President. He was dressed in a dark blue silk tuxedo with a frilly blue shirt, floppy bow tie, and patent shoes with gold buckles. He had a loose gold bracelet and lots of gold rings and a thin gold watch on a thin gold bracelet: more jewelry than his wife, in fact. He was tall and well-built and didn’t look as if he’d need the help of Goldie or any of his muscle men to look after himself. His face was bronzed and clear, almost like the skin of a young woman, and his eyes were blue and active, moving as if he was expecting physical attack. Maybe Goldie had told him about the bomb in the phone.

As I got near the people thronging around him, the thin elderly man at his side said, ‘And this is Mr Murphy of the law partnership downtown.’

‘Mickey!’ said Petrovitch. ‘It’s a long time.’ He extended his hand and gave me a firm pumping shake while grabbing my elbow in his other hand. It was another of those Hollywood handshakes, and with it he gave me a Hollywood smile and that very very sincere Hollywood stare too. I wonder if he did it the same way in New York. ‘How are tricks, buddy?’

‘What a memory you’ve got,’ I said.

‘You fighting the taxi driver, to make him take me to the hotel? How could I forget?’ Another big smile. ‘You drank me under the table. It doesn’t happen often.’ The thin elderly sidekick smiled too, both men operated by the same machinery.

‘Just hold it like that!’ It was a photographer crouching down low to sight up one of those shots that make tycoons look statuesque.

‘It’s okay,’ Petrovitch told me, indicating the photographer. ‘He’s one of our people.’ With that comforting reassurance, he grabbed my hand again and held it still so it didn’t blur, while turning his head away from me to give the camera a big smile. A flash captured this contrived moment for history.

‘Murphy,’ I heard the elderly man tell the photographer. ‘Mickey: business associate and old Marine Corps friend.’ The photographer wrote it down.

The thin elderly man smiled, and a gentle pressure upon the small of my back propelled me out of the shot as another business associate and old friend of Mr Petrovitch was given the handshake and smile treatment.

With the benediction still ringing in my ears, I shuffled off through the crush. I saw Goldie standing guard just a few paces away. He met my eyes and grinned. That guy really earned his salary, judging by the matter-of-fact way he defused bombs. Wondering how often such things happened to them, I went to the bar and got another whisky. ‘Old Marine Corps friend.’ What was that guy talking about? I looked around. This wasn’t really a party, it was a press call with drinks and music. Petrovitch had the clean-cut film-star image and the rags-to-riches story that America loves. Tonight he was showing once again that he knew exactly how to turn a few thousand dollars’ worth of tax-deductible entertaining into a message to his stockholders that sent his prices soaring when the rest of the market was struggling to keep afloat.

‘Did you get your press kit?’ A pretty girl in a striped leotard tried to hand me a bulky packet while her companion offered me a pink-colored flute of champagne.

I declined both. ‘I’m drinking,’ I said, holding my whisky aloft.

‘Everyone has to have champagne,’ said the girl, pushing the glass into my free hand. ‘It’s to toast Mr Petrovitch’s health and prosperity.’

‘Oh, in that case …’ I said. I took it, held it up, and poured it into a pot where miniature palms were growing.

The girls gulped, smiled, and moved on. Dealing with folks who don’t want to drink to the health and prosperity of Mr Petrovitch had not been part of the training schedule.

‘I saw you do that, Mickey.’

I looked up; it was Ingrid Petrovitch, née Ibsen, standing on the rostrum behind me. She looked ravishingly beautiful, just the way she’d been in my fevered high school dreams. She gave me a jokey scowl and waved a finger, the way she’d done back in those long-ago days when I’d pulled up at night in my father’s car and suggested we climb into the back seat.

‘Hello, Ingrid,’ I said. It sounded dumb and I felt stupid, the way some people do feel when confronted by someone they love too much. I’d always been a klutz like that when I was with her: I never did figure out why.

‘Hello, Mickey,’ she said, very softly. ‘It’s lovely to think that some things never change.’ She turned away and kept moving to where a line had formed to get a smile from her husband.

‘Ingrid …’

She stopped. ‘Yes, Mickey?’

‘It’s good to see you again.’

She smiled sweetly and moved on. I guess she was telling me I’d had my chance with her and blew it. And that was long ago. It was nice of her not to say it.