Читать книгу Pike's Pyramid - Michael Tatlow - Страница 9

‘A triangle of treachery is polluting our network,’ Jack Sussoms, nearly seventy, growled like a gorilla with a sore throat. ‘There’s Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, controlled by the greedy crooks in my United States, godammit. We’re gonna bust their balls, Blarney.’

From across the small table in the saloon bar of the Norvoski Hotel in Prague, Blarney Pike was fascinated by his buddy from Lafayette, New Jersey. Sussoms had done some checking on the two Australians soon after Blarney and his bride Alexandra arrived in Prague six weeks ago. He knew about Blarney’s impressive boxing career. He was excited that his colleague from the land down under was a journalist with connections in newspapers and television in the US and Britain. An intimacy had flowered.

Pike sipped at his glass of beer. ‘I want to know all about this, Jack,’ he said. ‘If you’re right, people will want to silence you.’ He playfully pointed an index finger, like a pistol, at Jack’s belly as the old man took another gulp of bourbon.

Jack laughed. ‘Those cock sucker crooks are polluters, like piss in fine whiskey,’ he drawled. ‘Let ’em try. I’ve got a 32 mill revolver upstairs. Bought it cheap here in Prague. I keep it under a newspaper, on the table beside the bed. When the evidence is ready, I’m gonna go tell our master, Abe Harbek.’ If fellow American Harbek’s legendary team of heavies failed to fix the rot, Jack said, some stirring in the media by Pike would spur them to prune it. Bad publicity was the number one evil for Harbeck, the revered owner of Argo.

The dangled promise of serious money and Alex’s fair command of the Czech language, picked up at home from her Czech migrant parents, had lured the Pikes like honey bees to Argo’s assault on the Czechs.

With two hundred others from twenty countries, they had helped launch there the Czech branch of the world’s biggest network marketer. Czechs had been recruited to set up their own networks of people to buy from Argo for themselves and to retail two hundred products ranging from soap to suits to dresses and cosmetics to computers, television sets and jewellery, sometimes even cars. But, Jack had told them, Argo had become an ogre; to fight or flee from.

Sussoms tapped his right nostril. ‘I’ve got a tight lip,’ he said. ‘There are more things about this criminality than I’ve talked about. Things that would scream off the front pages and put a lot of unlikely people in jail. Drugs, weapons, bombs. It’s the horror of the world.’

Sussoms left about 9pm for his suite to make some phone calls and note down more evidence. He muttered, ‘You’ll have it all in the morning, Blarney. My completed papers’. He swaggered to the elevators like a prize fighter charging to the ring.

Pike remained in the lounge, drinking low alcohol Pilsen ale and writing postcards, so Alex could get needed sleep in their room upstairs. He called the correspondence gloat cards. The standard Argo stuff made him feel guilty. The cards would go to his and Alex’s marketing team home in Stanley, in Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania. On them were rapturous lies, mostly about Argo’s presence in the Czech Republic.

After an hour and a half he had drunk only three glasses of ale. The demander in his head, gullet and gut, who Pike had named Ned, craved more. Pike reckoned he was not a real alcoholic. He was just a bit dependent on it, like cigarettes. He did not wake in the morning with Ned insisting on more grog. More likely, he woke with sore regret over last night’s intake. He could stop any time now, couldn’t he? Grog had ruined his first marriage. It was not going to harm this one.

He and Alex had taken a room in the hotel for the night after an afternoon of Argo meetings, with more tomorrow, rather than take a taxi across the Vitava River and a train on the long trip to their modest rented apartment in suburban Palmovka. Staying at the hotel all the time would have shattered their budget.

Two hours after Jack Summons left the lounge, a barman told an inquiring man in a shabby suit that the man sitting alone over there had been drinking with the American.

The short and rotund man strolled from the bar and introduced himself as Captain Schmidt. In remarkably good English he said, ‘Please accompany me to the suite of your friend, Mr Sussoms’.

‘Sure. But why?’

The detective said nothing.

Slipping his postcards in the mail box by the elevators on the way, Pike had a rush of anxiety. What’s wrong with Jack? A robbery?

Schmidt opened the door to Sussoms’ suite and waved him inside. To be confronted by a bloody corpse on the floor. Old Jack’s mouth was open as if in a roar of protest. A blue eye stared accusingly above his slashed throat. Where the other had been was a socket of gore.

Jack was on his back, arms stretched as if crucified. He wore only a Cartier watch and green socks. A jelly of scarlet had set obscenely under grey hair on a carpet of golden silk. More blood stained a white towel draped over the corpse’s waist.