Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (45 page)

“I hope she finds one,” Manganelle grunted.

Oblivious, Pasover prattled on. “I have been here five weeks, imagine! My first time out of England.” This intrigued his listener; Beirut seemed a decidedly rum place to launch one's overseas vacations.

Lancelot Pasover was surprised. “It's not a holiday, Mr. Manganelle. I told you, my aunt died and left me her business. I'm just selling it, fixtures, fittings, and goodwill. Er, would you like to see the place?”

The upshot was that they agreed to meet at Auntie's place that afternoon. Given the address, Manganelle's driver shook his head. “Nothing there, all gone,” was his laconic verdict.

“Rubbish,” Manganelle boomed. “You're idle, Abu Droopydrawers, you want to sleep in your motor all day, eating your head off at my expense. Here's the street and the number, that little twit wrote them as plain as day. Take me there, instantly.”

Soon he saw what the driver was getting at. They went down to the port area past what had been the Middle East's largest, most modern Holiday Inn, by then the world's largest, most modern disused Holiday Inn. But that was in terrific shape compared to the streets down which the battered Merc began rolling. Civil war had turned whole blocks into something uncommonly like Hiroshima or Dresden after the bombing; derelict, abandoned cliff dwellings, blurred holes where windows, doors, or projectiles had been.

After two or three sharp arguments, the driver spotted an unsuspected alleyway, backed up, and there at the far end of the cul-de-sac was Lancelot Pasover's inheritance. The driver grumbled in liquid Arabic and curled up on the bench front seat; Manganelle waddled off for a closer look.

The closer he got, the more intense was his unkind amusement, so that by the time he reached the doorstep, Manganelle was wheezing and quivering helplessly.

The little building was only two floors high, facade tinted a defeated, long-faded amber from what had once been brave red. Over the door a signboard bore the ghost of block letters:
SOPHIE'S CAFF***TEA LIKE MOTHER MAKES***REAL FISH AND CHIPS***CLEAN BEDS UPSTAIRS
. Obviously it hadn't been active in years.

The door creaked open, a bell jangled pathetically. Lancelot Pasover, defensive at Manganelle's cruel mirth, mumbled, “Well, it's the off-season,” which made the reporter bray with laughter.

“It's not funny,” Pasover said reproachfully. Then he brightened. “Come on in, sir. I've been thinking, maybe you could put a bit in your paper about my looking for a buyer—”

“Do leave off,” Manganelle pleaded, “you'll do me a mischief. Lance, you must be short of a full deck, lights on but nobody in, that class of behavior. Nobody's going to buy your auntie's caff.”

“Don't say that.” Alarmingly, Pasover's eyes filled with tears. “I've come all this way, it's got to work out!” And he explained about his Aunt Sophie, who in 1945 had married a Lebanese entrepreneur who turned out to be a Lebanese hotel porter. The new Mrs. Sophie Habib had come to terms with the disaster, worked hard and saved harder, and set up her cafe.

No doubt it did well enough before Lebanon's nightmare began, when cruise ships still called and British crewmen and package tourists were in the market for a taste and sound of home, within sight of the quays. “It was doing very well,” Aunt Sophie's nephew kept saying, “and she always promised it would come to me when she, um, left us. Which she did, her heart, she was well into her eighties. I came straight here, war or no war. It's my birthright, Mr. Manganelle!”

Manganelle couldn't decide whether to giggle or weep when Lancelot patted the rusted urn, fount of Tea Like Mother Made, or declared that this was a prime site and must have value. Beirut was full of prime sites, primer by far. Walk in under the right flag or bearing a big enough gun, and the lease was yours.…

“I'm sure it will work out, Lance,” Manganelle lied, and fled to his car. He considered writing an ironic little feature piece on Lancelot Pasover and his doomed enterprise, but it would take too much explaining and the vision of an innocent dunce peddling a teashop went right against the grain of all the “I See Hell In World's Most Dangerous City” copy that Manganelle was filing.

Still, it was a cracker of an anecdote, something to dine out on—in his case, booze out on. He told it well, funny voice for Lancelot, vivid description, until Manganelle had only to show his hideous face in the Commodore's bar for somebody to groan, “No more caff, Mangy, okay?”

Probably Lancelot Pasover overheard one such recital, since he stopped his wistful patrols of the hotel lobby and dropped out of sight.

Manganelle resumed the half-serious quest for spooks. Harry Lamburn seemed promising. Lamburn wasn't staying at the Commodore; nobody seemed sure where he was based or exactly what he did. Harry Lamburn was one of those men who always knows first names, even before introduction, and who is good company without saying anything memorable.

“Business,” he replied vaguely, when Manganelle asked. “Passing through, bit of a hitch because of this siege nonsense, all be sorted out in a day or two. Between ourselves, I think the deal's cooked. Rightly, I should be in Abu Dhabi, selling some tugs. But you know how things can be.…” His gesture was equally vague.

Not a spook, Manganelle sensed, but Harry Lamburn was a touch bogus somehow. A crook, then? More than likely. Lebanon's national products being mayhem and drugs, the latter a thriving rural industry, it would figure.

Harry Lamburn knew of Palmcastle, hardly surprising since he was English and Palmcastle is both premier resort and a synonym for sedate retirement. So Manganelle tried the Lancelot Pasover tale on him, the saga of Palmcastle's wandering dabbler in real estate. Lamburn was flatteringly amused and attentive.

Too attentive, Manganelle considered, and was ready to snap, “Oi, this is
my
story!” before assuring himself that Lamburn was no journalist and therefore it didn't matter, he would not pinch the piece and pass it off under his byline.

Manganelle had met Lancelot Pasover on a Wednesday, and exactly eight days later was drowsing in the Commodore lobby when his driver scurried in and sleeve-twitched him awake. “What?” Manganelle exploded. “How d'you know, Abu Droopydrawers?”

The driver spread his hands in amused contempt at such naivete. Everyone in West Beirut knew everything as soon as it occurred—often before, since bustling streets like Hamra had a trick of clearing a minute or so before shelling or air raids.

“Take me there,” Manganelle ordered. Sophie's Caff was locked, there was no sign of Lancelot Pasover's body, and the local police in their smart, milky-coffee uniforms, were staying firmly on the southern side of the Green Line and out of the city's besieged half.

But with the driver translating, Manganelle got a story of sorts from neighbors—there were neighbors even in that wasteland, several refugee families sheltering in a gutted warehouse round the corner from the cafe—and men of a militia checkpoint in the main street.

That morning Lancelot Pasover had been found dead in the alley leading to Sophie's Caff. He had been bludgeoned, his pocket linings pulled out, his watch was missing. Eerily, civilians and militiamen alike were indignant over the crime and faintly suspicious and accusing as they answered the driver while staring at Manganelle. The victim was foreign, Inglesi, the fat man was foreign, Inglesi; no local could have done this, and a non-local had returned to the scene …

“We go now, I think,” the driver murmured, from inside the Merc. “'Nough said,” his master agreed, and they got the hell out of there. Manganelle found his original notes on the meet with Pasover, neatly filed on the back of an envelope screwed up and discarded under the bed in his shared room. That reminded him how the name was spelled and gave Pasover's age.

Manganelle phoned the story to his foreign desk, but it ended up as a single sentence, because on that day Arafat left Beirut and Fleet Street was intent on larger matters than a single violent robbery in a place notorious for sudden death in large amounts.

Months later, the following year in fact, Manganelle was back in London, and among mail awaiting him was a letter from a Foreign Office functionary, asking for details of Lancelot Pasover's demise. Also a letter from a firm of Palmcastle solicitors, seeking much the same information. He dictated one answer for both parties, telling everything as far as he knew. Mainly hearsay, Manganelle warned, though just before leaving Lebanon for good, he had been called to police headquarters in East Beirut, then taken to a mortuary where he'd identified Pasover's corpse.

Rather belated that, Manganelle felt. But the authorities were anxious to show law and order, or a semblance, returning to both sides of the Green Line. Motions had been gone through and that was that.

He wondered whether he might write to the widow—Anne, he remembered the name—but what he did was let the matter slide into the trinket box of memoirs, boasts, and tall stories at the back of his mind.

N
OW WE REACH
Eric Manganelle's role as catalyst and cardcarrying ill-bringer.

Banish carping doubts that it all depended on a whacking great coincidence, for the overt element of chance is delusive. He was a journalist, and many Fleet Street men go to Palmcastle in the conference season sooner or later. He liked women, and Mrs. Lamburn was a woman, no mistake. The Lamburns were invited to most civic receptions—he wealthy, she decorative—while Manganelle went to receptions regardless of official invitation, on the principle of receptions being where the booze was.

All that being so, the outcome was as near inevitable as makes no odds.

Manganelle fell out with his editor, no great challenge. The editor made him cover an ecology conference at Palmcastle by way of punishment. It wasn't so bad. Manganelle took a suite at the four-star Royal Courier Hotel and improved idle hours by ringing cronies in Australia, Africa, Malaysia to ask what the weather was like there. Bills went direct to his paper, no sordid money would be demanded from him. Punishment can cut both ways.

He even attended conference sessions, slumbering benignly if noisily before lounging back to tear the Press Association report from the machine in the Royal Courier's lobby and phone it in, not a word altered. Nothing was printed, he did not expect it to appear; the whole thing was a bit of a joke. Though the
Intelligencer
's shareholders might have missed the cream of the jest.

Gratifyingly, Palmcastle's city fathers threw a party on the final day. Manganelle trundled along on the promenade from his hotel to a yet larger, more opulent one, a seasoned campaigner marching toward the sound of the guns—champagne corks, anyway.

This was his sort of occasion. The Splendide's ballroom was a human sea dotted with white linen islands where waiters toiled to keep the alcohol flowing. And there was, in Eric Mariganelle's dewily romantic phrase, A Lot of Crumpet About. Women in the plural, delightfully diverse, birds of every species and plumage or lack of it.

Manganelle confesses to being a closet heterosexual. He guzzled champagne, he grew gently amorous, he feasted on flashes of rounded knee and bobbing bosom, he ogled and leered and his furry eyebrows bounced in yo-yo mode. Success with women, he believes, is akin to selling vacuum cleaners during the Great Depression. Prospects may be bleak, but knock at a hundred doors and you're bound to make one sale.…

Maybe it only works with vacuum cleaners. Manganelle had to settle for a toothy, gaunt maiden with a squint and a motor-mouth who knew everybody. It was her job, as social columnist for the weekly rag, the Palmcastle
Herald
. Ms. Potter, for it was she, was thrilled to hobnob with one of Fleet Street's finest.

Fresh from being snubbed, teased, or laughingly rejected by many of Palmcastle's pretty ladies, he was willing to settle for Mandy Potter's company. Her running commentary was fitfully witty, unless that was the champagne. Manganelle had been pumping her in an abstracted way when glancing up …

A magnificent creature, just his type: plenty of miles on the clock but bodywork in splendid condition, and a classic never ages. (Take the sexism up with Manganelle, please; he's the one telling it.) “I think,” he purred, “I have just fallen in love.”

“Anne Lamburn, Mr. Lamburn's wife,” Mandy whispered, making “Mr. Lamburn” sound a name that mattered. Adding cattily, “She's attractive if you like a blast from the past, all Hollywood B-pictures and Spirit of the Forties.” In truth, Anne Lamburn was wearing a strapless dress and black gloves to the elbow, auburn hair falling over one eye to foam on her ivory shoulders. Only the long cigarette holder was missing, and perhaps a few bars of Glenn Miller in the background.

Fair-mindedly, Mandy conceded, “It's ever so romantic about the Lamburns, a real fairy tale. They were sweethearts at school but somebody else cut him out, and Mr. Lamburn—a teenager at the time, wild—made terrible scenes and got in trouble and Lord knows what. But then he made his fortune and they found each other again in the twilight of their lives, so to speak.”

Manganelle choked on his drink. Mrs. Lamburn was forty years old, maximum, and thus a mere slip of a girl in his estimation.

“Enough frivolity,” he hissed, “duty calls,” and jostled away through thickets of guests. Mrs. Lamburn appeared to be without an escort for the moment, and he'd devised a thin yet just about tolerable pretext to pester her. Planting himself before Anne Lamburn, he took her hand (she started, focused on him out of a daydream, and was palpably displeased by the view) and made a fairly revolting kissing sound half an inch above her captive fingers. The slight bow involved in this courtliness enabled him to peer earnestly into her cleavage. “Eric Manganelle,
Daily Intelligencer
.”

“How nice for you.” Hand snatched back, she turned a shoulder, searching for rescue.