Severed Key (19 page)

“I hope you got everything clean this time,” he said. “My boss likes things done right!”

“I only deliver ‘em, I don’t wash ‘em,” the driver said.

“What about the uniforms?”

“Right here on the rod—”

Simon slid out of the way as the driver took down four of the clothes bags and followed the white coat into the two-storey building. Through the cellophane clothes bags he could see some freshly-done white waiters’ jackets. He whipped off his coat and got into one of them. He folded his coat over his arm, slapped a package of wrapped laundry over it and stepped out of the truck. Across the yard the workmen were still busy in the low building. The dog was back in the booth with the gateman and the service door stood open at the main building. He hurried inside. The first floor was a huge garage that was totally empty except for the black sedan he had followed from the airport. Near the doorway, a metal stairway led to the floor above. Hearing voices, he stepped behind the sedan and waited until the laundry man came back down the stairs and returned to his truck. Moments later, the motor started and the truck drove away. Simon was alone in the garage. He waited. After a few minutes the man in the white jacket came back down the stairs, took a bottle of soft drink from a dispenser at the bottom of the stairs and stood drinking it in the open doorway leading into the yard. From across the yard a man’s voice shouted a greeting. White coat laughed and stepped out into the sunlight. As soon as he was out of sight Simon tossed the laundry and his jacket into the sedan and hurried up the stairway.

There was a small vestibule at the top of the stairs and a door, open, leading into a thickly-carpeted entry hall. The walls of the hall were panelled in walnut and hung with elegantly framed prints of Spanish villas, seascapes and cathedrals. The abrupt change from the almost empty garage to carefully executed luxury was unexpected and intriguing. Simon moved forward cautiously. Several doors opened off the hall. The first opened into a large, well-equipped kitchen, one led to a bedroom with a huge bed and a tall, carved-wood headboard, the third, standing open, disclosed a formal dining room with tapestry-hung walls and, beyond it, through a pair of carved-oak double doors, a study where a huge desk and a massive leather swivel chair were placed before wide windows that looked out over the truck yard below. A pair of leather divans, separated by a long coffee table, framed the fireplace on one panelled wall. Above the mantel hung an oil portrait of a darkly handsome man posed arrogantly in a magnificently braided uniform complete with sash and sword. There was the smell of newness in the room: the carpets, the uncreased leather, the freshly oiled wood. Only the portrait was tinged with time. On the desk were three telephones. Simon lifted the receiver of one: it was connected. Near the desk was a metal filing cabinet, locked, a typewriter table and a duplicating machine. It was a study; it was an office. And it was new. Also, except for Simon, it was unoccupied.

Screened by the half-drawn velvet drapes, he stood at the window and watched the activity in the yard below. From this angle he could look directly into the one-storey building where the labourers were at work. He could see the outlines of two huge truck trailers where the newly-sprayed paint was being dried by electric heat-lamps. The activity was hurried but orderly. A timetable was being followed with precision. Simon watched the man in the white jacket come out of the building, the soft drink bottle still in his hand, and walk back towards the garage. Halfway across the yard he stopped to take note of the dog barking at the gate. Simon shifted position so that he could see what was happening. The gateman silenced the dog with a curt command and unlocked the gates. A black sedan drove into the yard and stopped just under the window. The driver—the same driver who had taken Hannah from the airport to the hotel—got out of the front seat and opened the rear door.

A man emerged from the back seat and looked about the truckyard as if trying to get his bearings. He wore black tortoise-rimmed glasses and a small black beard, and the nuisance wind that whipped in from the sea flapped the tails of a short raincoat about the narrow legs of his trousers. He was too close for mistaken identification. He was the man named Pridoux and the way his eyes sought the gateway behind him made it seem that only the guard dog restrained him from running back to the street. The gate was still open. Shifting his position at the window, Simon could see the reason. A second car was turning into the truckyard.

With a staccato burst of the exhaust, a topless silver Ferrari roared through the gateway and came to a brake-screeching stop behind the black sedan. Sandovar was at the wheel. He climbed out of the car and hurried towards Pridoux extending a black-gloved hand in greeting. The window was closed and Simon couldn’t risk discovery by opening it, but he watched the silent tableau as the driver of the sedan unlocked the boot and removed the third piece of blue luggage. Sandovar examined it excitedly. Resting the bag on the open car boot, he removed a set of keys from his pocket and tried to unlock the bag. Failing, he turned to the driver, who quickly broke the lock with a tool taken from the boot. The upraised lid partially shielded the transaction, but several packages of unwrapped bills were handed to Pridoux who, with no effort to count the sum, plunged the packages deep into the pockets of his raincoat. When the lid of the boot was closed again it was Sandovar who carried the blue suitcase. He spoke briefly to Pridoux. The man handed him a sheaf of folded paper and got back into the sedan. The driver closed the door, returned to his place behind the wheel and then, executing a wide U-turn in the truckyard, drove back through the gate and into the street. The black man locked the gate behind him.

Simon didn’t watch any longer. He had found the entrance to Sandovar’s headquarters; what he needed now was an exit. The kitchen seemed the likeliest place. He hurried back through the carpeted hall and entered the kitchen as the first footfalls sounded on the iron staircase. At the far side of the kitchen a service door opened on to a narrow stairway going upwards. Closing the door behind him he ascended the steps to a steel door which opened on to the roof. Temporarily blinded after the darkness of the stairway, he squinted across the sun-drenched asphalt, blinked at the glare of the metal fireplace flu and turned about slowly searching for a fire escape ladder. Luckily it was on the side of the building opposite the truckyard. He started towards it, glimpsed a moving shadow that wasn’t his own and whirled about in time to see the sunlight glint on the barrel of an upraised gun that was rapidly descending towards his skull. He shot out a fist and felt it sink into a bellyful of flesh slightly softer than a concrete wall. The gun clattered to the asphalt but the flesh kept on coming. Ducking his head to save his one good eye, he flailed at the attacker again but now he was off balance and backing towards the ladder at the edge of the roof. The ham-like fist that had held the gun was almost as lethal without it. The first blow caught his shoulder. The second spun him about so that the sky and the sea and the yard two storeys below whirled like a psychedelic light-show and then blacked out in the crusty oblivion of the asphalt roof.

SOMEBODY HAD LEFT the water running. Steady. Hard. A fine needle spray. It splashed against the tile and made an effervescent bubbling sound. Simon opened his good eye and turned his head painfully. The spray splashed one last time and stopped. The hissing bubbles continued for an instant and flattened to silence. He saw Sandovar’s hand, no longer gloved, place the siphon bottle on the top of the coffee table and then extend the aromatic glass towards him.

“Take it,” Sandovar said. “It’s as fine a Scotch as you’ll ever drink.”

Simon edged upwards against the back of the leather divan. He could tell that his head was still attached to his body by the pulsating pain that accompanied movement. He accepted the Scotch and drank it all without speaking. When he had finished the room was in focus and Sandovar was seated on the opposite divan with the blue suitcase beside him. Seeing that he had Simon’s attention, he took an object from his pocket and placed it on the coffee table. It was the half of the severed key with the tag attached.

“This was placed inside the small case you and your detective friend fished out of the sea last Saturday,” he said. “It was not in the case when it was taken from the marina depot later that night. What do you know about it?”

“Less than you do,” Simon answered.

“That is true—but not a good enough answer. I’ll try another tack. Where did you find Sigrid Thorsen?”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t. She’s dead.”

“That’s a lie! She delivered this half of a key to her contact at the rental garage. He saw her. He spoke with her. He drove her to the hotel.”

“Then why don’t you ask her?”

Sandovar smiled thinly. “It’s not likely I’ll get the opportunity. You’re a disappointment, Mr Drake. You have the reputation of being a clever man, but today’s bit of business won’t work. Obviously this suitcase was delivered so that you could follow the driver to this place. If that idiot in the rental garage had telephoned me when the call came through for a red Camaro I would have told him to ignore the bait. Unfortunately, he called a man who isn’t above liquidating a lovely young lady if she’s playing games with his profit.”

“Angelo Cerva?” Simon asked. “No, I don’t suppose he has a romantic side.”

“You seem to know a great deal, Mr Drake.”

“I’m clever. You said that yourself.”

“You know too much,” Sandovar added soberly, “to get out of this place alive.”

“Pridoux made it.”

“Pridoux? So you saw us together in the yard below.”

“I saw money passed.”

“That was merely a down payment. Pridoux is useful. As long as he’s useful he lives.”

“Every man has his price—is that it?”

“Not quite every man. Pridoux is a special case. His lovely young wife has a serious disease which is curable with proper treatment. The twenty thousand I paid him for information about truck routes will take care of the first six months. After that—well, he may be useful on another project.”

“Hijacking shipments of fissionable material,” Simon said. “Where are you taking them? To San Isobel?”

“Possibly.”

“And if you do succeed in making a bomb—what then? Do you terrorize all of Latin America—or do you have more ambitious goals?”

“Don’t belittle my country,” Sandovar said. “It’s small, but so is Switzerland and her bankers rule the world. A bomb gives a country prestige. There was a time when a miracle or two, cleverly arranged, was sufficient to sway masses of people. But people are sceptical of miracles today. Science is much more impressive. And some things are still basic. Wasn’t it Napoleon who said that God is on the side of the heaviest artillery?”

“The name of the game is still power,” Simon said.

“Exactly. A sensational
coup d’état
, a few world-wide headlines, and I will be back in control of my country—not as a prostitute of Washington or Moscow but on my own terms. Power belongs to those who have the imagination to grasp it, and I, frankly, have no desire to be lackey to anyone.”

“Somehow, I’ve just never thought of a multi-millionaire in terms of being a lackey,” Simon mused.

Sandovar smiled. “You’re a man of some means, Mr Drake. You know well enough that millions exist only on paper and can vanish overnight if power falls into the wrong hands. There are others besides myself who don’t like the direction in which the world seems to be moving. Some of your own countrymen have vast holdings in Latin America which your government seems to have lost the vigour to protect. Freedom is always relative. Whose freedom—and for what? Do you really think the life of a peasant or an aborigine is the ideal state of man? Of course not! If it were he would have remained there. Man dreams and his dream is always of bettering himself. That’s why he’s a man and not an animal.”

“With some men it’s a compliment to the animal,” Simon said wryly. “Angelo Cerva isn’t exactly aristocracy.”

“But he has a useful organization.”

“Why was Lundberg killed?”

Sandovar seemed disturbed by the blunt question. “Lundberg? Oh, yes. The broken-hearted fiancé of Sigrid Thorsen. I read in the newspapers that he drowned himself.”

“And I read in your face that it was no suicide the morning I met you at the hotel pool and told you he was dead. What was the problem? Did he know too much about Gerard Rentals?”

“That’s not a part of my organization.”

“But you’re here. This apartment may be new, but it looks permanent. It looks like the headquarters for a continuing operation. Handy for the shipyards. Not too far from airports. And that is a portrait of your father over the mantelpiece, isn’t it? It sure doesn’t resemble Angelo Cerva.”

“You shouldn’t have come here, Drake.”

“I had to come. How else could I find out who dumped a dead woman in my friend’s bed?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sandovar said.

“Possibly not. As you say, that’s not a part of your organization. But if you saw today’s newspapers you must have read about the search for Jack Keith. A murder charge is a neat way of taking a man out of circulation when he’s getting too close to the truth.”

“That’s nothing to me!”

“It should be. Somebody hired Keith to check on Lundberg and his associates days before that plane crashed into the sea. He received a letter from Stockholm supposedly sent by the girl’s father.”

“That’s impossible!” Sandovar exclaimed.

“Of course it is. Her father’s been dead for months. You were close enough to her in New York to know that.”

Sandovar was angry and confused. He came to his feet quickly as if to reassert his authority. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he said. “I think you’re lying!”

“No you don’t,” Simon answered. “You know damned well there was a letter from Stockholm because neither Keith nor I could have dreamed up a story like that. If you didn’t write it, if Sigrid didn’t write it—”

“Sigrid!” Sandovar shouted. “Why would she hire a detective? She knew nothing!”