London Bloody London Read online

  Poor Cursitor. Poor Noon. Poor tools of the System.

  We'd both been had by the Machinery that runs a country.

  Desmond Allan Cursitor spelled it all out in his statement, as taken down by one of Superintendent Gridley's police stenographers.

  The Statement of the Decade:

  ". . . the boy is a genius . . . perfect physical specimen . . . mental capacity equal to the R79 Computer . . . trained since the death of the Birds . . . knew him then . . . I was part of the program which developed him . . . you don't understand . . . none of you seem to . . . Morrow wants him . . . as everyone else does . . . because he has the photographic mind to the last equation . . . he only would have to see the most highly-complex technological machines and laboratories . . . say like a missile site . . . walk out . . . and then completely record, either by word or drawing, everything he had seen . . . you see now, don't you? . . . why he must be found . . . they sent me to bring him home . . . he'd been ordered to wait for me . . . he was going to pose as one of my children . . . completely natural you see . . . but O'Connell on the Queen . . . spotted me . . . pointed me out in London for Morrow to kidnap . . . the boy was at Maida Vale Road, waiting for me . . . the house with the mulberry tree in the garden . . . please . . . find him . . . it doesn't matter now . . . England will have to know . . . the United States will have to share the boy . . . what he has . . . what he can do . . . tired, now . . . so tired . . . Nan? . . . where are you? . . . the children . . . mustn't let anything happen to the children . . . Torin, I'm sorry . . . truly I am . . . such a foolish, cruel world . . . this adult one . . . Dieu et mon droit . . . Dieu et mon droit . . . God? . . . if there was a God in any of this . . . I couldn't find him . . . "

  Superintendent Gridley seemed almost apologetic when I handed the sheet back to him. He folded it slowly, his face very thoughtful.

  "He was delirious, of course. But what do you make of it, sir?"

  "Too many ellipses," I said. "And far too many gaps."

  "Mmmm." Superintendent Gridley let that ride. Suddenly a twinkle appeared in each frosty, foxy eye. "You won't be taking in the Black Museum then, will you, sir?"

  "No, Gridley. It's not necessary, now that you have a fairly good idea of who I am and what I am. I wonder who sicked old Badger onto me. Unless he was just a crackpot who likes to pose as a newsman and squirt ammonia into people's eyes."

  "We considered that too, sir. We have our fair share of eccentrics and loonies here in London too, you know. But no—considering all that has happened up to this point, it's fair to assume that someone who knew why you were coming to London alerted someone else here and made a stab at putting you under. Were it not for dear Miss Mitchum, they might have succeeded too. Worth thinking about, isn't it, sir?"

  "Yeah," I agreed, squinting sourly up at the clouds over Trafalgar. "It certainly is, as much as I don't like the implications. I hate to think about security leaks and finks in my own backyard." I sure didn't. Cursitor's gasping, snatches-of-phrases statement was giving me well-rounded but jagged and ugly second thoughts about everyone and everything. And now Torin Bird was missing and Desmond Allan Cursitor was back and the whole merry-go-round was about to start all over again. It didn't make sense. Nothing did. And Detective Allister was coming back with his fat man's roll and stride, his face inscrutable. Trafalgar Square was suddenly a way station in the middle of nowhere. Superintendent Gridley must have gotten the sense of my mood.

  "What will you do now, sir?"

  "Do? I have no choice, Superintendent. I stick around, I wait for further orders, and I try and help you find Torin Bird."

  Superintendent Gridley's leathery old face shone with official and perhaps personal joy. Or a manhunter's pride in his work.

  "That is good of you, sir. I was rather hoping you'd feel that way. Otherwise it would have been my unfortunate duty to have to order you to do so. You see how it is, sir? You're involved in all this, and we rather need you when the time comes for explanations and all that. The Yard can be pretty much put upon at times. The Home Office, Downing Street, the Buckingham Palace crowd—well, there will be no end of questions and we will need answers."

  "Moby Dick, Gridley," I said. "You've read it, of course?"

  "Haven't we all? Couldn't get through form without tackling old Melville. You see some analogy between all this mess and that book?"

  "Yes, I do. Remember Captain Ahab's first question to the crew of the Pequod?—'Men, what do you do when you see a whale?'"

  Superintendent Gridley's eyes narrowed under the brim of his slouch hat "Can't say that I do, Mr. Noon. What was the answer to Ahab's question? I take it there was one?"

  "There was," I said, taking one last look around picturesque Trafalgar Square before taking my leave of Superintendent Gridley and his watchdog, Detective Allister. "Melville put it a bit more biblically, but the essence of it was: you sing out for him, shout 'Thar she blows!' and then you track him down and kill him."

  "Oh," Superintendent Gridley said, not understanding at all.

  "So long, Gridley. See you around sometime."

  "Ciao, Sir," the Superintendent said, surprisingly enough. "Do take care."

  I took another cab, wheeling around the plaza, just as a thin light sprinkle of raindrops began to fall. Pigeons soared in a wide, banking arc, away from statuesque Lord Nelson, zooming for the protective eaves and recesses of the roof of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Tourists and idlers in the Square began to scatter, too. Umbrellas sprouted open, vehicles picked up speed, a horn squalled somewhere. The London scene was perpetual, slow-paced, almost painted in position.

  America never seemed further away.

  Dieu et mon droit. Desmond Allan Cursitor had said it twice in his ramblings before a police stenographer. God and my right. The rights of the grande seigneur. A famous motto you see all over London, inscribed on heraldic shields and coat-of-arms emblems. British lions clawing boldly around battle armor. Tea rooms, hotels, theatres, and department stores all held some representation of the Latin phrase.

  You even saw it in the Gents, sometimes.

  Those "conveniences" that are always convenient in London Town, no matter where you are, no matter where you go. You can always find one.

  Maybe that was where the phrase belonged.

  It had been abused terribly by too many people in high places.

  I had a feeling that that was what Desmond Allan Cursitor had meant, even in the tumbled-down, scrambled, topsy-turvy world of his delirium. Deep-rooted truths will out at times like that.

  The subconscious always speaks more honestly than the sophisticated, waking mind does. The one that has been taught how to lie, connive, deceive, play the game of musical codes and mores.

  Yes, the world can be a lousy place sometimes.

  Especially if you're in the wrong kind of business.

  Like the murder business.

  I hadn't exactly leveled with Superintendent Gridley of Scotland Yard. I had discovered something he obviously missed in the text of Desmond Allan Cursitor's delirious statement. I was a little surprised he hadn't seen it as readily as I had. That he hadn't seen it at all. But then, he didn't know all that I knew.

  Desmond Allan Cursitor had said it all. Most of it, anyway.

  I now knew who Troy O'Connell was.

  I also knew where Torin Bird was.

  Gridley would know too, when Cursitor came out of his half-dead state and straightened out a few points about his first words. And spilled some true beans about all that had happened once he had set foot in London. About why he had stopped writing his diary, and why he had finally given it to his wife Nan with instructions not to read it unless anything happened to him.

  Malvolio Morrow was in for the biggest surprise of all.

  That is, if he hadn't gotten it already.

  But then again, a man named for a minor Shakespearian character in a lesser-known play ought to expect just about anything out of life. He had surprises coming to him, righ
t from the start.

  I thought about all that and a lot of other things as the black, smoothly-running cab whipped across central London, taking me home to the Regent Palace. The driver must have taken me for a tourist, because we practically followed the sight-seeing bus route. Past Haymarket Street, around Regent Street, across St. James's Square, past Hyde Park to the Marble Arch where the Speaker's Corner is an open forum on Sundays, and then back along Piccadilly toward the Circus. It was the long way around and hiked the fare on the meter considerably, but I was feeling no pain. The view was picturesque, and the scenery was almost idyllic, especially in the lightly falling rain. Not even the confusion and bitterness of my mind could change things. Or make me angry with a driver who had acted more like a Manhattan cabbie than the English counterpart. I was a bloody mad Yank that day about far more important matters. The fate of my soul, maybe.

  You see, I loved London more that minute, that second.

  And liked the United States less.

  I had a pure case of Philip Nolan.

  And you know what happened to him.

  They took his country away from him.

  The same one that was making me feel so damn lousy.

  CONFESSION IS GOOD

  FOR THE CASSETTE

  □ I didn't go up to my room right away.

  I walked around the corner and strolled along Regent Street, heedless of the rain, until I found a music shop that had what I was looking for. When I got back to my tenth floor room, I owned a brand new portable tape recorder with cassette cartridges. Before opening the package and getting to work on what I had to do, I locked the door tight, drew the chain, and checked out my James Bond attache case. I'd lost my old .45 somewhere in Stoke-Newington, and I needed some equalizers. I palmed the .22 pistol that looked like a cigarette lighter, took a package of five sticks of the explosive chewing gum, and then made myself comfortable. The room was as I had left it. Nothing touched, no cross-hairs broken on the sills or threshold. Which didn't make too much sense. The maid should have disturbed some of them, but the room, oddly enough, had not been made up. The bed was still undone. It was a small nuisance, for which there were probably a dozen good explanations, so I let it pass.

  I'd already made up my mind what I had to do. There was nothing left for me in London except the leaving behind of a good clean slate, just in case of accidents, and I did owe Superintendent Gridley some kind of a story. He'd treated me decently, even if someone in the White House hadn't. Whatever happened, I wanted to put it all on tape for somebody to hear someday. Maybe anybody. In any event, it seemed like the most sensible thing to do. I wasn't worried about Malvolio Morrow anymore. He'd probably be shot for a bungler when he got back to his Iron Curtain pals. But that was his hard luck. Screw him for a murderous maniac who'd been in the business of killing people much too long. As for Torin Bird, well, in every war, the sparrows fall, as the pragmatists like to say. I felt sorry for the kid. I really did.

  As for Troy O'Connell. Another story entirely. He was It.

  The main reason why I wanted to put it all down on the record. In my own dulcet Yank tones, the scourge of all the Glee Clubs. There wasn't a laugh in me, though, as I took off my jacket and shoes, settled back on the bed, and set the little shining recorder into motion. I tested it first with four bars of Yankee Doodle, played it back, and when I got a faithful echo, I reset the recording button and started all over again. I had a lot of talking to do, and I wanted to talk it right.

  I'd come a long, long way from that first day in D.C. Standing in the White House, listening to a man I loved and trusted.

  Taking a deep breath, I began speaking into the cassette:

  ". . . this is Ed Noon. Not so free, not so white, and way over twenty one. I've been a private detective for more than twenty years. I've had a great many successes, some failures. Let me tell you about the case I'm working on now. In September of this year—in the White House in Washington, D. C., the capital of the United States still, I was in a closed conference, highly confidential, with the President of those United States. He asked me to go to London and use all the means in my power and at my discretion to locate Desmond Allan Cursitor, who as you probably know, had disappeared in London on his first morning after arriving at Southampton with his wife and children, traveling on the Queen Elizabeth Two. Cursitor, the retired physicist who, though born in England, had become one of the greatest names in American nuclear research. What I did not know was that Desmond Allan Cursitor had turned spy-without-portfolio. My President had sent him to London for the express purpose of escorting back to America, sub-rosa and completely on the sly, a boy named Torin Bird. The President neglected to tell me any of this. I have since learned, which I will go into later, that Torin Bird is a fifteen-year-old child prodigy, with an IBM mind, trained by a team of European scentists, including Cursitor sometime way back when the boy was younger, and is a highly-wanted commodity by every other government engaged in the cold wars, politics, and global oneupmanship. I know now that Torin Bird has a photographic mind, an intellect which can duplicate and transcribe anything visible—written or actual—which his eyes see. In plainer words, the boy is capable of wandering into a highly-complex missile station and then walking out and putting down everything he has seen, from the tiniest switch to the most seemingly insignificant dial. I don't think I have to explain how important and fabulous that might be to an espionage operation of any dimension. The only problem I can see in any of this is getting the boy in and out of these obviously top-security complexes . . . but . . . hold the phone . . ."

  I stopped the recorder, lit up a Camel, and then switched back on.

  I was perspiring a little, and my palms felt moist. Small wonder. It was a highly dangerous thing I was doing. Dynamite, really.

  ". . . . I repeat . . . my President did not tell me any of this. Find Cursitor, he ordered me, and bring him back. Was Cursitor a political defector, a kidnap victim, or had he merely taken off for no good reason? I didn't know, the President said he didn't know, so I flew to London on a BOAC jetliner, landed at Heathrow Airport, and was met there by a welcoming committee. A man named Badger, posing as a news-photographer, blinded me with a squirtgun trick, and I was sent to Tower Parkside Hospital. There, a nice doctor named Green-Jones informed me that my eyesight had been saved by Maralee Mitchum, a gorgeous returning-home-to-England movie star who had flooded my eyes with her own bottle of spring water. God bless the lady. I wasn't sure at the time that Badger's assault had anything to do with my assignment in London, but I know better now. Cursitor's diary, which he had kept up until the day of his disappearance, mentioned a man named O'Connell—whom he recalled from former days of questionable activity—and when the President told me there was no Blue International Circular on such a name, such a man—I had a part of a clue. A clue which later built into the truth it had to be. The leak about my arrival at Heathrow and my reasons for going there could only have come from Washington. The White House. I've been an agent extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, for the President for too many years. Cursitor recognized O'Connell but didn't think of him as an American agent—he thought of him as possibly a Russian one or a Red Chinese—and since Cursitor was picked up as soon as he hit London, it seems obvious that it was O'Connell's doing. In other words, Troy O'Connell, under another name of course, is working in the White House right now. Close enough to know something about me and to realize I couldn't go messing about in London. I had to be stopped because I might stumble onto Cursitor and find him. I have a great track record with missing persons. O'Connell would have known that, too. What he didn't know, and what the President did know that day he assigned me to London, was that Desmond Allan Cursitor had already succeeded in his mission. He had delivered Torin Bird and the boy had gone home with Nan Cursitor and Stevie and Stephanie. When a Communist agent named Malvolio Morrow and his accomplice, a hatchetman named Sebastian, kidnapped Cursitor on the ground floor of the Embassy Hotel, they too didn't know that Cursitor ha
d already picked up Torin Bird and left him with his wife in the hotel suite, Troy O'Connell—I got his first name from Scotland Yard, who kindly came around to my hospital room at Tower Parkside to grill me—slipped up too. In spite of his being right on top of things in the White House. At the President's elbow. Which suggests another possibility to me. The President not only wanted Cursitor back home safely. He perhaps wanted to see if I might stumble on the identity of the fink under his own roof."

  I took a deep breath, marshalling my thoughts, and hurried on.

  "How do I know all this? What proof do I have? A young boy who called himself Torin Bird called me at my hotel after I left the hospital. We met at the Albert Memorial. He told me about Morrow and Sebastian holding Cursitor in a boarding house in Stoke-Newington and how they were torturing him by inches to learn of the boy's whereabouts. The man Sebastian had put in an appearance at the Memorial. I subdued him, left him for the police, and Torin Bird and I rushed to the Tower of London. It was my idea we could lose ourselves in the crowd, talk things over, and decide on a plan of action to rescue Desmond Allan Cursitor. My hands were tied all the way. I had orders from my own government, I was acting like a spy, and though I knew the whole world should be interested in Cursitor's disappearance, I was amazed at how played down the whole thing was. Why not every available means to find such a man? Why was it so difficult to locate him? I didn't know. I only knew that my government, my President at least, was laying low, not even calling me, not even sending the Army, Navy, or Marines to help out, and I began to doubt. And when Torin Bird told me who he was and what he was and what old Cursitor meant to him, I was more confused than ever. But the boy and I went to Stoke-Newington to effect a rescue. I couldn't ask the Yard for help. I had to do it myself. Cursitor was my own responsibility. And that too didn't make sense. Morrow and I crossed swords, and he won. He left me alone with a girl who was working for him, a Christine Clearlake. He fled with the boy, back to his native land, presumably. He set a bomb to destroy the boarding house, myself, the girl, and the bag of tortured skin and bones lying in another room who was supposed to be Desmond Allan Cursitor. Are you following me? If you have been, then you will understand why I soon concluded, why I had to tell myself, without argument, you understand—that the man in the other room could not be Desmond Allan Cursitor. Just as the boy who said he was Torin Bird was not. It wasn't only a double-cross, it was a double-double-cross. I was fooled by my President, Malvolio Morrow was fooled by a man he assumed was Desmond Allan Cursitor, and he also accepted a boy who said he was Torin Bird. Neither of us had been smart enough, or maybe there just wasn't enough time—to test the so-called prodigy's mental ability. It didn't seem necessary, considering the circumstances and the mere fact that both boy and man were in the greatest possible physical danger."