Spy and the Thief (24 page)

Nick was so intent on what he was saying that he didn’t hear the apartment door open behind him. When Ran gasped, he turned quickly and found that it was too late. Rumston and Frazier had come through the door from the hallway, and the bearded man had his gun out. Nick sighed and raised his hands.

“How did you get in?” Ran gasped.

Rumston smiled. “I still have a key from the old days. I never throw anything away. And a private plane that’s almost as fast as the one that brought Velvet here.” He turned to Nick. “Hello again, Mr. Velvet. I didn’t expect we’d meet again so soon.”

“My pleasure,” Nick said.

Frazier had circled behind them with the gun. “Don’t harm the girl,” Rumston cautioned. “But if Velvet moves, shoot him dead.”

“Right,” Frazier growled.

“Now just how much do you know, Velvet?”

“Enough. I know that some of the laughing lions at each of your clubs are rigged with a mike and radio transmitter. They don’t have to be very powerful—just enough to pick up conversations at a table and transmit them maybe a hundred feet to your taping equipment. State senators and legislators do a lot of talking, especially after dinner and with a few drinks in them. You make sure the important people are seated at tables with bugged lions, and by fitting together the information you’re able to sell it, or use it yourself to buy land and make investments.

“That’s what you feared worse than jail, Rumston—that this girl would expose your bugging operation. The first lion I stole for her wasn’t bugged, so she had to have another. Just the word of a disgruntled club manager wasn’t enough, but with one of the bugged lions as evidence she could put you out of business overnight.”

“But now I’ve got you two
and
the lions,” Rumston said.

“Take them!” Ran Brewster shouted defiantly. “I’ll still find a way to ruin you!”

He took a step forward, and perhaps she thought he was going to strike her. She grabbed one of the laughing lions and hurled it at his head. The whole thing was a blur in Nick’s eyes as the statue shattered against the wall.

Rumston made a move toward the girl and she turned, aiming the other lion at the bearded Frazier. Nick saw his finger whiten on the trigger of his gun, and Nick took a step to intervene.

But Rumston was faster. “No!” he shouted. “I told you not to hurt her!” He pushed Ran out of the way just as Frazier’s gun roared.

The bullet caught Phil Rumston in the chest, high up. He coughed and went down hard, spitting blood.

“Call an ambulance!” Nick told the girl, knocking the gun from Frazier’s hand.

“My God! I didn’t mean to shoot him! He got in the way!”

“Yeah,” Nick said. He bent over the fallen man and tried to stop the blood.

“He got in the way! He stepped right in front of the gun!”

Then Ran Brewster was on her knees by Rumston’s side, sobbing softly. “Will he live?” she asked.

“Damned if I know,” Nick Velvet answered.

Phil Rumston died at the hospital two hours later, while Ran pressed her head against Nick’s jacket and the police questioned Frazier. Finally, when it was over, Nick helped her down the long hospital corridor, passing little areas of light that broke the line of dimness.

“The police will have more questions,” he told her. “We forgot to take your apartment key out of his pocket.”

“Yes,” she answered. “Maybe I should tell them everything.”

Nick pushed the button for the elevator. “If he meant that much to you, why did you want to ruin him?”

“I guess you wouldn’t understand,” she said. “It was a long time ago, so long ago.”

“That’s what he said too.” And then Nick remembered something. He, remembered Rumston saying he didn’t like the water, and he remembered what Ran had said about her name. “He walked out on you?”

“Oh, he did that, all right. Way back. He walked out on my mother and me.” He lifted her shoulders and wiped her nose as they entered the elevator. “He was my father.”

F
OR NICK VELVET, A
most unusual thief, the unique was becoming commonplace and one assignment was becoming very much like another. It was a dull humid week toward the end of August—a week in which he’d already turned down an offer of $20,000 to steal a rare first edition from the Library of Congress. He’d been out on his boat with Gloria, sailing around the Sound, even venturing east toward Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape, and when he brought the little sloop into the dock he found a message waiting.

“Man wants to see you,” one of the fishermen said. “He’s waiting over at the marina shop.”

Gloria was immediately concerned. “Nicky, you’re not going to have to go away again, are you?”

He looked down at her wide pleading eyes. “Maybe not. I’ll set what it’s about. Wait for me in the car.”

He moved through the narrow aisles of the marina shop until he came upon a gray-haired man in a conservative business suit who stood examining a display of sea anchors. He knew at once that this was the man who sought him. “I’m Nick Velvet,” he said. “Are you looking for me?”

The man turned with a sigh of relief. “At last! I’ve been waiting here nearly two hours for you to get back.”

“You should have contacted me at home.”

“It’s urgent. My name is Croft—Samuel Croft. I have an assignment of the type I understand you specialize in.”

Nick glanced around, but there was no one within earshot. Ha picked up a drogue and pretended to examine it. “You should understand right from the beginning that I deal only in the valueless. I do not steal rare first editions, or precious gems, or money.”

Samuel Croft pursed his lips. “It’s nothing like that. You were recommended to me by someone you helped last year. I can assure you that the object you are to steal is quite valueless. It is, simply, a calendar.”

Nick’s interest came alive for the first time in weeks. “A calendar? You mean, with dates?”

The gray-haired man nodded. “With dates. A calendar of this year, of the type that is given out free every December. It has absolutely no value.”

“My fee is $20,000.”

“I know.”

“And you’ll pay $20,000 for the theft of a valueless calendar?”

“That is correct.”

“Where is it?”

“In the cell, of a man named John O’Donnell, who is presently in the Federal Penitentiary at Meadville. I understand the calendar hangs on his wall, and that he uses it in the time-honored manner of convicts—to cross off the days while he waits for the end of his sentence.”

“You want me to steal a calendar from a convict’s cell in a Federal prison?”

“That is correct. As you can see, you will be earning your $20,000.”

“All right,” Nick agreed. “I’ll do it.”

“Fine! A man will contact you with further instructions.”

Samuel Croft was in the act of turning away when Nick asked, “Just what is John O’Donnell serving time for? Murder? Arson? Kidnaping?”

“Nothing like that. His crime is not important to you.”

“I’d still like to know.”

Croft sighed, anxious to be gone. “He’s serving a five-to-ten-year sentence.”

“For what?” Nick asked again.

“Piracy.”

It was three days later, on a cloudy Sunday morning, when Nick Velvet sat in the crowded parking lot of the First Baptist Church and spoke to a man named Burma. “Odd place for a meeting,” he said, trying to get comfortable in the cramped quarters of Burma’s tiny imported car.

“I sing in the choir here on Sundays. Gotta keep up appearances.” He was a pale little man with a pleasant voice, whose clothes seemed oddly ill-fitting. The whole impression was one of an ex-convict trying unsuccessfully to hide his past—which was precisely the truth. “Croft said I should talk with you.”

Nick watched the front doors of the church as a few late arrivals straggled inside. “I understand you were John O’Donnell’s cellmate.”

“That’s right. Nearly a year. I was in on a bum rap. I slugged a postman in an alley. It was so dark I couldn’t even see his uniform. How the hell was I supposed to know who he was? I was just after some pocket money, and I get hit with a Federal rap! Two years I was in that place, the last eleven months with O’Donnell.”

“Tell me about the calendar.”

“It’s on the wall opposite the bunks. Here, I’ll draw you a little sketch. See, here are the two bunks, for O’Donnell and whoever took my place. Then a sink and toilet, and a little locker for our clothes. The calendar is here, about halfway along the wall. He puts an
X
through the date every night.”

“How big is the calendar?”

“Oh, maybe ten inches across by fifteen inches down—something like that. Just an advertising thing. A different page for every month, but he never tears them off, just flips them over the back.”

“An advertising calendar? From where?”

Burma chuckled at the memory. “That was sorta funny. It’s from the law firm that defended him at his trial. At least he got something-out of them.”

Nick’s mind was racing. Assignments like this always tickled his curiosity. “I suppose he made a lot of notes on the calendar, wrote things in the margins.”

“No. Never saw him do anything like that. Just the big
X
through the date every night. I told him once it was like prisoners in comic books do. I been in three times and never saw anybody really do that till O’Donnell.”

“If there’s nothing written on the calendar why is it so important to Samuel Croft?”

The ex-convict shrugged. “I guess you’d have to ask Croft that.”

It was not, Nick knew, the easiest job in the world breaking into a Federal prison. Perhaps it was almost as difficult as breaking out of one. He would have to get in
and
out—and not just into the prison itself but into one specific cell in that prison.

He began his planning with a visit to the library, where he dug through old newspaper files until he found an account of John O’Donnell’s crime and punishment. The newspapers were on microfilm, and he carefully focused the lens to sharpen the features of the faded face. O’Donnell appeared younger than he’d expected, and one shot showed him leaving the courthouse with his slim and scowling wife, who seemed younger still. The article confirmed that he was only 27, though he already had a lengthy criminal record which included armed robbery and assault.

The crime for which he’d been imprisoned was indeed piracy—“robbery committed on the high seas by force of arms”—and the uniqueness of the case had earned it a fair amount of space in the Boston papers. O’Donnell had apparently set out with two other men in a cabin cruiser from Boston harbor. They’d traveled northeast, and then, at a point some 40 miles off Portland, Maine, had intercepted and boarded the luxury yacht
Coco,
owned by the president of a leading television network. The loot from the robbery totaled $375,000, mainly in jewels from the women passengers. There was a boxed listing of the stolen gems a 50-carat star sapphire, a 35-carat cabochon emerald, several diamond rings, and some cash.

But the crime had been far from successful. As the; three pirates returned to their own craft, a security guard on board the yacht had opened fire, wounding two of the men. Both fell into the water and drowned before they could be pulled aboard the yacht. John O’Donnell, the third pirate, had escaped in the cabin cruiser, heading toward the Maine coast.

Apparently O’Donnell had wandered among the islands of that coast for two days before lack of food and an almost empty fuel tank brought him ashore. The Coast Guard spotted his boat, and he was arrested as he came ashore on Mt. Desert Island, near Bar Harbor. The missing jewels were not found on him, or in the boat, and he claimed they had gone overboard with his partners when they were shot.

Despite his record and the fact of the missing loot, O’Donnell had got off with 5-to-10 years, a short sentence. He’d started serving it a little over a year ago, which meant he still had a few years to go, even with time off for good behavior. Nick read it all through twice and then switched off the viewer. He returned the microfilm to the librarian and went in search of an atlas.

For ten minutes he pondered a map of the Maine coastline, but it told him nothing. There seemed to be hundreds of tiny islands with names like Bailey and Deer and Swans and St. Mark and Head Harbor. If O’Donnell had lied about the missing loot, he’d have had plenty of opportunity to bury it somewhere before he was caught. Just like the pirates of old.

Nick closed the atlas and decided it was time to visit Mrs. O’Donnell.

She opened the apartment door on his second knock and stood back to inspect him in the dim light of the hallway. “You’re Mr. Nicholas, the man who phoned?”

“That’s right,” he said. “May I come in?”

She was wearing a flowered house dress that was a size too small, and she’d made some hasty efforts to apply makeup, but it did little good. At the age of 26 she was tired and withdrawn, a woman spent and soiled. “Sure, come on in,” she said. As he passed, he caught the odor of gin on her breath.

“Mrs. O’Donnell—”

“You can call me Madge. Want a drink?”

“It’s still a bit early for me, thanks.”

“Early! What in hell time is it?”

“Two o’clock.” He glanced at the drawn drapes that covered all the windows. “In the afternoon.”

“Oh. Well, what’d you want?”

“It’s about your husband, Mrs. O’Donnell.”

“Madge.”

“Madge.”

“What about him? The creep’s sitting on a ton of diamonds and he won’t even tell me where they are! Afraid I’ll take them and run off with somebody else, I guess.” She smiled slyly. “And he might be right, at that.”

Nick cleared his throat. “Madge, I’m writing a book about crimes at sea. Perhaps you’ve seen my articles in
Life
and
The New York Times.
Anyway, I’d like to speak to your husband about his case. I want to include it in my book.”

“He won’t tell you any more than he’s told me.”

“Nevertheless—”

“How much?” she asked suddenly. “How much will you pay me if I get him to see you?”

“A hundred dollars?” Nick suggested tentatively.

“Two hundred. In advance.”