The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel. Gordon Landsborough
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the electric light reflecting greasily upon his featureless face. That B.G. got in a panic quicker than any man I’ve ever known, and him with all his millions.
“What d’you mean, Joe? Don’t tell me you’ve got into more trouble?”
Now, that’s good, coming from the man who employs me. Back in the States my job was trouble-buster. If there was trouble anywhere within the Gissenheim empire, I was the boy who was sent down to eliminate it. You know what sort of trouble you can get—rival firms sabotaging your supply trucks; trouble among two-timing salesmen who are selling out to rivals; and some labour disputes, though I don’t like them. I even had to go and take part in a revolution once, in the Central Americas, when a lot of Gissenheim property was at stake.
Well, here I’m employed as a trouble-buster, and the man who employs me suddenly turns round and asks sharply if I’ve been getting into trouble! I shut him up with a flip of my paw. You could always shut up that big fat slob if you knew how to flip confidently and contemptuously enough. You should try it on the boss someday. You’ll probably be surprised at the result.
I said: “Listen.” And then I told him what I had seen out in the alley, and then what had happened down at the police station—though, come to think of it, just nothing had happened there.
“But I want you to know this, B.G.—there’s something very deep and very nasty afoot, and I’ve got myself mixed up in it.” I lifted my hand when I saw his fat mush splitting to make some heavy statement. “And you can forget what you were just about to say. Any time I see a girl in trouble like that, I feel I’ve just got to jump in with both feet.”
“But now you’re in with both feet—?”
“Things might happen to me.” I brooded over my Camel. I’d got a hunch that things were going to happen to me, and B.G. was something in the nature of an insurance policy. I looked at him. He was scared. He didn’t like foreign parts, because he was far out of his depth in dealing with people beyond his own family circle. That’s how I always looked at it, anyway.
“I’ve got a hunch that I might get slung into a sedan like that dame. Okay, B.G., if you don’t see me around for a while, you go down to the American Embassy and bellyache to high heaven about me. Get the dragnet out and find me. I’ll be somewhere around, though my guess is I won’t be wanting to be where I am.”
That was a good sentence, and it made B.G. think a bit. It made me think a bit, too. I didn’t want to be where I didn’t want to be. B.G. wasn’t much of an insurance policy, but I couldn’t think of anything better to do right then. I tell you, I’m a timid kind of guy, always running away from trouble. But I can take care of myself if trouble comes running after me.
B.G. put his glasses on, as if that helped him to think better. His thinking didn’t seem to do him any good because he finally took them off and went in for a shower without saying so much as a word to me. Perhaps he would have liked to have made cutting comments, but he must have been remembering the undignified position I’d found him in a few moments ago. And he knew by now that Joe P. Heggy could hold his own when it came to making cutting remarks.
He closed the door of his bathroom, and locked it. That’s the kind of sap B.G. is. He doesn’t like to be seen, not even by his own sex, when he’s in the nude. I don’t go that way myself at all, but that’s the way some men are built, I guess.
So I shouted through the keyhole. “Hey, are you plannin’ to go out?”
Because one of my jobs was to keep the boss’s son out of trouble. He was such a sap that his father knew he needed a nursemaid, and so he’d picked on me.
B.G. yelped back: “I think I’ll go to the Gazino for supper.”
I shrugged. That meant I had to go, too. So I went back to my room to get changed. Anyway, there was nothing for me to hang around this hotel for, and the Gazino was a pleasant place for supper, anyway.
It was only when my hand was feeling for the door key that I remembered that body in the bathroom. I felt sick inside. I just naturally hated what I’d just done.
But there was nothing else for it. I had to go in and face it.
And then I found I had no key.
And then I found Benny standing by my side and he had a key in his hand. Benny had anticipated this moment and had come up the stairs or the elevator to help me in distress.
He spoke quickly. “I guessed you’d have locked yourself out.” My key was inside my room. He was a good guesser.
I took the key and looked hard at Benny. I thought: “You slimy so-and-so, you’re trying to get around me, aren’t you?”
But I didn’t say anything aloud to Benny; I just let him read what I was thinking in my face. Benny mustn’t have liked what he read there, and he quit trying to be nice. He went away, and I heard him say something that sounded suspiciously like: “The hell, you can get yourself out of trouble in future.”
I didn’t beef after him. I don’t give a damn if hotel servants do stand on a level with their patrons. After all, aren’t we supposed to be democratic?
I went into my apartment. I turned to go into the bathroom, because there was something I had to get over. I’d got to dispose of that body.
There was something moving on the floor, just inside. I reckon it was its mate. It was about four inches long, and brick red, and it ran around in quick frantic circles when I switched the light on. A kind of cockroach, you’d say, only the granddaddy of all cockroaches if it was. Anyway, I don’t know if cockroaches ever go brick red, as these Turkish crawlers do. I jumped on it. That made two bodies to dispose of. And, boy, how my stomach turned as I felt my heel go crashing through that shelly body. That’s the worst of some of these Middle East hotels. You’ve got to share your room with things which shouldn’t be there.
I scooped up the remains and put them in the marble pan which had been made in Victoria’s time by some firm at Gateshead, England. Then I flushed them away.
I’d just finished my shower and was climbing into my natty white suiting, when there was a polite tap on the door.
I went across, fastening my shirt. When I opened the door I saw the corridor was filled with uniforms.
That’s how it looked to me, anyway. There was a big guy, some sort of officer I guessed, in the Istanbul police. He was built on mighty lines, though young, A really powerful man, smooth-shaven, red-faced, rather good-looking, but tough, boy. Mighty tough.
Back of him I saw several other cops. Maybe there were only two or three, but right then my mind kind of exaggerated everything. That corridor looked lousy with police.
I said, firmly: “I don’t want to buy anything,” and tried to shut the door.
One of the cops had his foot against it, and it didn’t move. So I looked sourly at that big, young officer and said: “I’ve got my passport. It’s in order. The best in the world. American.” I wanted him to know what he was up against if he was looking for trouble...Uncle Sam.
For I was expecting trouble. I’d got this hunch in my mind that trouble was going to come dropping down on me because I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to see...and kicked up a fuss about it afterwards. Now it looked as though that hunch was correct. Cops don’t fill a corridor for nothing.
He gave a little deprecating wave of his gloved hand, and said: “I’m quite sure your passport is in order, Mr. Heggy.” He said it politely, too, and that added to the surprises of the night.
He spoke with an American accent that was assured and told of residence in the States rather than tuition in our language at the American College along the Bosphorus. Clearly he had received his education in America.
I looked at him suspiciously, all the same. I just didn’t trust these monkeys at all.
He went on to say, still so politely: “Your visit to the police station was reported to me.