The Big Stiffs Read online

  Again, I had to marvel at his chutzpah, his genius for improvisational reversal of fortune. At being able to write me off, too.

  "Nobody, probably," I admitted. "But what about Flood's murder? And the Embassy. Aren't they up in arms about a dead member of the club? How do you get around that?"

  "It is curious," Santini said, shaking his head. "They were very much upset, as one might expect. To have a man murdered on the city streets. What is not expected, is that they would be so dismissive about the matter. They seem to be satisfied that the lady murdered Signor Flood and no political inference is being made. At least, in so far as I can make out. Your Embassy has been most sympathetic, from what I have learned through my office, and is not shouting at the Italian government for gross negligence. It is all very strange."

  "Strange?" I echoed. "It's unheard of. There must be more to it than we both know. Especially since I was sent here to get some very important documents. Which everybody is not clammed up about. I don't like it, Santini. It smells lousy. Molto stinko."

  "Como?" His eyebrows rose again. He didn't understand me.

  "Forget it. My problem. Not yours. Now that you've given up your dreams of getting-rich-quick. Rest on your laurels, Captain. I won't give away our little secret. My lips are sealed. No one will ever know how the great Santini nearly stepped over the line. I didn't thank you for dropping Arizona for me. Grazia. Tante grazia."

  A beam lit up his whole face. As if he were seeing the True Cross.

  "Prego. A pleasure, Signor Noon. But the documents? What do you think of them, now, eh? Will you still pursue the matter?"

  "I have to. It's my job. But you forget about them, okay. Now, it's between me, the Embassy and my Uncle Sam. I'll think of something."

  "I am convinced of that, Signor. Never fear. You are a man who is thinking all the time. When others are not thinking."

  "Why, Captain. That's the nicest thing any cop ever said to me. You make me humble. Almost."

  "It is true, all the same. You are of the Renaissance, my friend, no matter where you were born. There is that simpatico of yours---the bleeding heart, I think it is called. You have great humanity, Signor Noon. It is no small thing. It never will be."

  The little yellow-walled room was abruptly filled with an embarrassed, uneasy silence. Santini took his cigarette from his mouth, brushed at his bandit moustaches and exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. All at once, I was aware of the stiffness and slow flow of blood throughout my racked body. The drug might be wearing off a little I stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think about Kate Arizona or what I was going to have to do about the United States Embassy mess. Flood was dead but the documents were still around. Where? And how could I get my hands on them now if he hadn't confided in anyone else at the Embassy? I couldn't call the Chief. That was a no-no at all times when the special red-white-and-blue phone back at my office wasn't available. I was the secret operator to end all secret operators. Nobody knew I was alive except the Man. One of the prices we had to pay for exclusivity was that he could never bail me out or send me a CARE package. I was on my own.

  From here to the graveyard. And back.

  Santini must have read my mind a little bit. He wasn't that far off target when he spoke up again. Almost wistfully.

  "Forget about the woman, Signor. I know how you must feel about all people. Even the bad ones. But she was no one to bother about now. No family---there was no husband or sweetheart in her dossier. Or any known lover. In all her thirty years, she was of no man. Not that one. Not truly. She was born in your Arizona of Indian parents. The Apaches? Is that how they are called? And when she came of age, she seems to have run away. To all those countries I spoke of. A wanderer, you see. Homeless, rootless, with no loyalty to any country. Least of all, your America. And her cruelties, this streak of barbarism in her nature. You should see the dossier! Her recorded acts of sadism are very brutal. She was arrested in '67, in Berlin, because she had tied a young college student to a chair in her hotel room and placed lighted matched all over his body."

  "You can skip the rest," I said. "I get the picture. A perfect lady for hire for any country who needed a dirty job done."

  "Exactly." His voice hummed with agreement. "The exact sort all totalitarians and Fascists and Communists employ to further their plans for world conquest. An evil soul made use of--"

  "Santini," I said. "What about those three women in the fountains? Joy Deveau and the other two---do you think---or are you trying to tell me in your own oblique way,"

  Captain Michele Santini favored me with an incredulous frown. His eyebrows didn't climb that time, they nose-dived in a fierce V of bewilderment. His dark eyes snapped and his moustaches bristled.

  "Signor, you astound me. But what have we been talking about? Surely, your own native intelligence does not fail you now? Ah---I see that it does---there is something in your face that refuses to accept the cold fact staring you in the eye---"

  "Santini, for Christ's sakes---" The room was too warm, now.

  "No, amico mio. Don't run away from the truth. It will not go away as you would like it to, perhaps. Si--Signorina Arizona murdered the three young women. I did not realize as much at the time but it is all too apparent now. She sought to implicate you, since you were in her plans. She was following you all about the city, she knew of your daybook records. At the Pantheon, she saw you with that povero cieco--Joy Deveau. Poor child! She saw at once an opportunity to make false charges against you hold up. So she killed. And killed twice more. The sexual assaults in each case simply justify and reinforce the brutal personality and mind of the woman. Her perversions added to her profit motive. You do understand, do you not? Rather like a blood lust--the coroner's examinations do not reveal evidence of rape so much as they show the hand and heart and mind of a depraved person---"

  "Great Christ," I whispered, "and Mother of God."

  Santini crossed himself, fervently and hurriedly, as if I had blasphemed instead of revealing my back-sliding Catholic origins. A sense of awe filled the room. Raw and terrifying.

  Both of us said nothing more. For a long time.

  It wasn't necessary. Captain Michele Santini took off on me.

  I never did tell Santini to give my regards to Hugo, Alfredo and Gino. That didn't matter, either. Not anymore.

  He must have left sometime after I had fallen asleep. The cracked ribs, the bruised femur and the egg-sized lump on my knee, all combined to put me under. I never saw Santini leave the little room. The pain killing drug worked its points, too.

  It must have knocked me out.

  Dope will do that.

  Dope as well as fatigue and all those other things.

  As well as all the brutality there is in the world.

  As well as the cruelty.

  And the sickness.

  And the meaningless insanity.

  Of people.

  Of governments.

  Of documents too important to be sent Air Mail. Or Special Delivery on microfilm.

  Of the whole dirty business of Espionage and double-dealing.

  I slept. The sleep of the troubled, the guilty and the uneasy.

  Somewhere deep in that terrible mind of mine was the vague and unshakeable feeling that I had just lived through a scene with the Claude Rains of Casablanca and Bogart.

  The 'poor corrupt official.'

  Be still my brain.

  Remembering old movies wasn't going to get me out of Roma with those all important documents that the President wanted so badly.

  Bad.

  Maybe, nothing would.

  Que sera, sera.

  Sing it, Doris baby.

  "….ah, the cunning! The sorcery of that

  fine Italian hand of his…."

  In praise of Niccolo Macchiavelli

  THE STONE PIZZA

  It was a morgue like any other morgue.

  Being located in Rome, Italy, didn't change a thing.

  The dead who come under the heading of of
ficial police business are always handled pretty much the same way. Another language, a different country, can never change the eternal, world-wide universality of a state of rigor mortis. Death is death.

  Italian, French, German, Russian, African, what-have-you, Mr. Flood, late of the United States Embassy, was cold like everyone else in the morgue. His Dead-On-Arrival last stop in Captain Michele Santini's jurisdictional care was the same old story. Be it Bellevue Hosptial, Manhattan, New York or a Rome basement beneath an ancient police station, the face is familiar. The condition is certified. There were the same tiers of air-cooled drawers which keep the cadaver on ice, the impersonal oak-tag identification markers on the big toe of the right foot. Or left. It really doesn't matter.

  A morgue is a morgue is a morgue.

  I'd seen it all so many times, smelled that peculiar smell-less smell so often, I moved through the whole affair like a sleep-walker. Or a veteran Medical Examiner who can't let his own heart bleed anymore if he wants to keep on working.

  I had a rough idea of what I was looking for.

  I wasn't that interested in the personal remains of Mr. Flood. What Flood might have been carrying when he died was a statues of a different king of marble. It had to be. Or else we're all crazy and I don't know my own trade. Maybe I don't.

  In line with the new leaf he had turned over, Santini had given me an official pass to review the remains. And the contents of his person when Mr. Flood was delivered to the morgue. It seemed the Embassy would bury him with official pomp and ceremony the next day. Friday. Bad Friday for Flood. Maybe a good Friday for everybody else in Holy Rome. Again, nothing mattered so much anymore except the simple, far-out possibility that there might be some clue in Flood's effects that would lead the way to the documents. Maybe Kate Arizona had called the shot. Maybe Flood had not been sure of me and come to the meeting with an attaché case filled with only the Roma telephone directory but maybe, just maybe, once convinced he was seeing the real Noon, he might have handed over something else. Something that would point to the grand prize.

  The documents. The dingus. The gizmo that the President had sent me across an ocean to fetch and carry. Like a mere gofer.

  Hospitale Maggiore's doctors had released me about eighteen hours after they admitted me. I wasn't that much in need of one of their valuable cots and there had to be a lot of sicker folks in happy Roma. I didn't argue and returned to the Villa Del Parco for the good night's sleep I needed before tackling Santini early on Thursday morning for the permit to inspect Flood. The good Captain, hamming an aria from The Barber of Seville was only too glad to comply. It seemed the bombing and shooting mix-up at the Colosseum augured grand things for his coming years with the carabinieri.

  As for the hated Arcangeli, there were a few leads that might land all the explosive rascals in the police net soon. I told Santini I hoped so and tottered out of his small office on the rather fashionable black cane I had bought on the Via del Corso that same morning to help me get around town. I was limping very badly, thanks to the bruised thigh-bone, taped ribs and stiff knee. No thanks.

  Like a Richard Wentworth out of Satan's Death Blast by Grant Stockbridge when I was a dreamy kid reading pulp mags by the yard.

  "Caio, Eduardo," was Santini's jovial parting shot.

  "Caio, Michele," was all I had left in me. It wasn't Goodbye.

  I navigated on the cane down the winding, corkscrew stone steps toward the basement below the street level of the building. To the gray, grim door that said MORGUE in big black letters and under that the typical Roma No-No---Vietato, which was plastered all over the city no matter where you turned. Almost as many times as the symbol SPQR and that is stamped in marble, on manhole covers and building cornices.

  SPQR. Senatus polulusque Romanus.

  The Senate and People of Rome.

  VEITATO. Sort of a Forbidden, Prohibited and Keep out.

  There was a morgue attendant. Just one. There always is.

  A thin, bald, dull-eyed Paisano with a semblance of white uniform covering his scarecrow physique, a crooked, withered cheroot clamped between his store-bought teeth and a copy of something called Il Mondo dangling from one hand. He took Santini's official pass from me, scanned it unenthusiastically and then walked me back among the tiers of air-cooled drawers, which always resemble so many filing cabinets, stacked like logs. I didn't look for Kate Arizona's private coffin. I didn't even want to look at Flood. I only wanted to see and examine the leftovers of a man's life. The things he had been wearing and carrying when his body became the temporary property of a police department. The sad fate of all DOA's. All over this tired globe.

  The attendant halted mid-way down the line, grunted and pulled back a long drawer by its curved handle. About as high as our ribs. He indicated the large, clear, plastic envelope at the very bottom of the tray. There, next to Flood's bared, tagged toes was the sum total of the personal possessions he had brought with him to the Trinita dei Monti when Kate Arizona machinegunned him into eternity.

  I was able to show the attendant I wanted to examine the big plastic envelope and he waved me to a nearby white metal table and matching chair which was placed for just such usage in the aisle between the banks of drawers. Nodding at me and closing the door on Mr. Flood once more, he returned to his post at the entrance of the room, to the left of the grim gray doors. The cheroot was a dead cigar.

  It didn't take long to inventory Flood's valuables.

  As I emptied the envelope slowly and carefully, part of the story of his life and personality and times emerged as well.

  There was an Omega wrist watch so new it might have been bought only last week. Like a birthday present or something.

  There was a pack of Embassy cigarettes, the English brand, and that pointed to a quixotic nature that might think it cute to work in an Embassy building and smoke a weed with the same name.

  There was a small ring with six keys clinched to the circle of metal. Keys seeming like the things for a car, doors, cabinets, files and safe deposit boxes. It was hard to tell.

  His billfold was a top grain cowhide maroon beauty and it held roughly twenty thousand lire which is actually only about forty five buck, American. The billfold contained nothing else. Only the cash.

  Loose lire, all in coin, amounted to no more than carfare and cigarette money. About three dollar's worth all told.

  There was an Eisenhower 1971 silver dollar which somehow seemed like a good luck piece. Or a souvenir. Not for spending.

  A single red admission stub to the Giardino Zoologico, dirty and well-word from not being thrown away, again showed a rather lonely man who didn't go in much for company. Like girls and things. When a guy like a Flood goes to the Zoo all by his lonesome, what else can you make of it? Of course, it was just his ticket and the other person could have kept their own but it's been my experience when you treat somebody to something, you hang on to the stubs. Not the other way around. Either way, it was meaningless. Worthless, really.

  I probed through the pile. There wasn't much left.

  A black comb in a leather case. The material was frayed a bit.

  A signet ring which showed a University of Iowa graduate, Class of '47. And a nail clipper. Meticulous. Fastidious. Kept clean.

  And a small, gold-leaf address book containing far too many names and addresses to make anything of, in a conclusive way, unless I went right down the line and took all of them by the numbers.

  There was one last thing in the plastic envelope.

  Somehow, as I picked it up in anxious fingers, I knew I had what I was looking for. The item was so bizarre, so unique, so unlikely, if you operated from the premise, why would a man like Mr. Flood bring it to a secret rendezvous with a man he had never met, with whom he is going to exchange black leather attaché cases? He couldn't have brought it by mistake. It couldn't be an oversight. It was too large to carry by accident. It was too specific a thing not to be the needle in the haystack. The gimmick.

  The final
item of Flood's inventory of personal possessions was a book. And maybe the best book there was.

  Or more appropriately, a pamphlet.

  A brochure.

  No more than 5x8 in oblong size, as thin as barely sixty pages could make it, with a slick white vellum cover whose front bore a reproduced drawing of an ancient ornamental vase. The picture bore the signature of the artist. A very famous name who was not famous for being an artist in the illustration league. By John Keats, the sketch declared. For all admirers of poetry everywhere.

  The brochure was A ROOM IN ROME. The vase was the Grecian Urn.