The men, when they came to visit Raoul Levy, were four in number; big, heavy men who arrived in two cars. The first car cruised to a halt outside Levy’s bungalow on the Molenstraat, while the second halted a hundred yards up the street.
The first car disgorged two of the men, who walked briskly but quietly up the short path to the front door. The two drivers waited, lights doused, engines running. It was a bitter night, just after 7:00 p.m., pitch-dark. No one walked the Molenstraat that evening of January 15.
The men who knocked on the front door were brisk and businesslike, men with little time to waste, a job to do, and the opinion that the sooner it was over, the better. They did not introduce themselves when Levy answered the door. They just stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind them. Levy’s protest was hardly out of his mouth when it was cut off by four rigid fingers jabbing into his solar plexus.
The big men pulled Levy’s overcoat around his shoulders, clapped his hat on his head, left the front door unlocked, and walked him expertly down the path to the car, whose rear door opened as they approached. When they drove off with Levy sandwiched between them in the rear seat, only twenty seconds had elapsed.
They took him to the Kesseise Heide, a big public park just northwest of Nijlen, whose fifty acres of heather, grass, oaks, and mixed conifers were completely deserted. Well off the road, in the heart of the heath, the two cars stopped. The driver of the second vehicle, who was to be the interrogator, slipped into the front passenger seat.
He turned toward the rear of the car and nodded to his two colleagues. The man on Levy’s right swept two arms around the small diamond polisher to hold him still, and the gloved hand of one arm went across Levy’s mouth. The other man produced a pair of heavy pliers, took Levy’s left hand, and deftly crushed three knuckles, one after the other.
What frightened Levy even more than the shattering pain was that they did not ask him any questions. They seemed uninterested. When his fourth knuckle pulped in the pliers, Levy was screaming to be asked questions.
The interrogator in the front nodded casually and said, “Want to talk?”
Behind the glove Levy nodded furiously. The glove was removed. Levy let out a long, bubbling scream. When he had finished, the interrogator said, “The diamonds. From London. Where are they?” He spoke Flemish but with a marked foreign accent.
Levy told him without delay. No amount of money could compensate him for the loss of his hands and therefore his livelihood.
The interrogator considered the information soberly. “Keys,” he said.
They were in Levy’s trouser pocket. The interrogator took them and left the car. Seconds later, his sedan crunched away across the crackling grass toward the road. It was gone for fifty minutes.
During that time Levy whimpered and held his ruined hand. The men on either side of him seemed uninterested in him. The driver sat and stared ahead, gloved hands on the wheel.
When the interrogator rejoined them, he made no mention of the four gems that by now were in his pocket. He said only, “One last question. The man who brought them.”
Levy shook his head. The interrogator sighed at the waste of time and nodded to the man on Levy’s right. The heavy men reversed roles. The one on the right took the pliers and Levy’s right hand. After the crushing of two knuckles on that hand, Levy told them. The interrogator had a couple of short supplementary questions and then he seemed satisfied. He left the car and went back to his own vehicle. In convoy the two sedans bumped back toward the road. They drove back to Nijlen.
As they went past his house, Levy saw that it was dark. He hoped they would drop him off there, but they did not. They drove through the center of the town and out to the east. The lights of the cafés, warm and snug against the freezing winter air, went past the car windows, but no one came running out. Levy could even see the blue neon word POLITIE above the police station across from the church, but no one came out.
Two miles to the east of Nijlen the Looy Straat crosses the rail lines at a point where the Lier-Herentals tracks run straight as an arrow, and the big diesel-electric locomotives go through at more than seventy miles an hour. On either side of the level crossing are farm buildings. Both cars stopped short of the level crossing and doused lights and engines.
Without a word the driver opened the glove compartment, produced a bottle, and handed it back to his two colleagues. One held Levy’s nose closed and the other poured the white grain spirit of a local brand down the gagging throat. When three quarters of it was gone, they stopped and left him alone. Raoul Levy began to drift away in an alcoholic daze. Even the pain eased a bit. The three men in the car, and the one in the sedan ahead of them, waited.
At 11:15 the interrogator came from the first car and muttered something through the window. Levy was unconscious by then but moving fitfully. The men beside him hauled him out of the car and half carried him toward the tracks. At 11:20 one of them hit him hard on the head with an iron bar, and he died. They laid him on the tracks with his shattered hands on one of the rails and his broken head near it.
Hans Grobbelaar has taken the last express of the night out of Lier at 11:09 exactly, as always. It was a routine run and he would be home in his warm bed in Herentals by 1:00 a.m. It was a nonstop freight and he went through Nijlen on time at 11:19. After the crossings there, he piled on the power and went down the straight toward the Looy Straat crossing at close to seventy miles an hour, the spotlight of the big 6268 lighting up the track for a hundred yards ahead.
Just short of the Looy Straat he saw the huddled figure lying on the track and slammed on his brakes. Sheets of sparks flew out from his wheels. The freight train began to slow, but nowhere near enough. Mouth open, be watched through the windshield as the headlight flew toward the crumpled figure. Two men in the yard had had it happen to them before; whether the victims had been suicides or drunks, no one ever knew. Not afterward. With this kind of rig you don’t even feel the thud, they had said. He didn’t. The screaming locomotive flashed over the spot at thirty miles an hour.
When he finally stopped he could not even look. He ran to one of the farms and raised the alarm. When the police came with lanterns, the mess under his wheels looked like strawberry jam. Hans Grobbelaar did not reach home until dawn.
That same morning, John Preston entered the lobby of the Ministry of Defense in Whitehall, approached the desk, and used his universal pass to identify himself. After the inevitable check call to the man he had come to see, he was escorted into the elevator and down several corridors to the office of the ministry’s head of internal security, a room high at the back of the building and overlooking the Thames.
Brigadier Bertie Capstick had changed little since Preston had last seen him, years before, in Ulster. Big, florid, and genial, with apple cheeks that made him look more like a farmer than a soldier, he came forward with a roar of “Johnny, my boy, as I live and breathe. Come in, come in.”
Although only ten years older than Preston, Bertie Capstick had a habit of calling almost anyone his junior “my boy,” which gave him an avuncular air, matched by his appearance. But he had been a tough soldier once, moving deep into terrorist country during the Malay campaign and later commanding a group of infiltration experts in the jungles of Borneo during what was now called the Indonesian emergency.
Capstick sat Preston down and produced a bottle of single malt from a filing cabinet. “Fancy a snort?”
“Bit early,” protested Preston. It was just past eleven o’clock.
“Nonsense. For old times’ sake. Anyway, the coffee they bring you here is abysmal.”
Capstick sat himself down and pushed the glass toward Preston across his desk. “So, what have they done with you, my boy?”
Preston grimaced. “I told you on the phone what they’ve given me,” he said. “Bloody policeman’s job. No disrespect to you, Bertie.”
“Well, same with me, Johnny. Out to grass. Of course I’m retired from the Army now, so I’m not too bad. Took my pension at fifty-five and managed to get this slot. Not too bad. Potter up on the train every day, check up on all the security routines, make sure no one’s being a bad lad, and go home to the little woman. Could be worse. Anyway, here’s to the old days.”
“Cheers,” said Preston. They drank.
The old days had not been quite so genial as that, thought Preston. When last he had seen Bertie Capstick, then a full colonel, almost six years before, the deceptively extroverted officer had been Deputy Director of Military Intelligence in Northern Ireland, working out of that complex of buildings at Lisburn whose data banks can tell the inquirer which IRA man has scratched his backside recently.
Preston had been one of Capstick’s “boys,” working in civilian clothes and undercover, moving through hard-line Provo ghettos to talk with informers or pick up packages from dead drops. It was Bertie Capstick who had loyally stuck by him in the face of the wittering civil servants from Holyrood House when Preston was “burned” and nearly killed while on a mission for Capstick.
That was May 28, 1981, and the papers carried a few sparse details the following day. Preston had been in an unmarked car and had entered the Bogside district in Londonderry on his way to a meet with an informer. Whether there had been a leak higher up, whether the car he was driving had been used once too often, or whether his face had been “made” by the Provo intelligence people was never later established. Whatever, there was a foul-up. Just as he entered the Republican stronghold, a car containing four armed Provos had pulled out from a side street and followed him.
He had spotted them quickly in his rearview mirror and called off the rendezvous at once. But the Provos wanted more than that. Deep inside the ghetto they swerved across his front and came tumbling out of their own car, two with Armalites and one with a pistol.
With nowhere to go but heaven or hell, Preston had taken the initiative. Against the odds and to the consternation of his attackers, he came out of his own door in a fast roll, just as the Armalites riddled his vehicle. He had his Browning thirteen-shot nine-millimeter in his hand, set to Automatic. From the cobblestones he let them have it. They had expected him to die decently, and they were too close together.
On rapid fire, he had dropped two dead in their tracks and blown a chunk out of the neck of the third. The Provo driver let in his clutch and disappeared in a plume of burning tires. Preston made his way to a safe house staffed by four SAS troopers, who kept him until Capstick arrived to bring him home.
Of course, there had been the devil to pay—inquiries, interrogations, worried questions from on high. There was no question of Preston’s going on. He had been well and truly burned, to use the term-of-art—that is, identified. His usefulness was over. The surviving Provo would know his face again anywhere. They would not even let him go back to his old regiment, the Paras, at Aldershot. Who knew how many Provos hung around Aldershot?
They had offered him Hong Kong or the exit door. Then Bertie Capstick had had a talk with a friend. There was a third choice. Leave the Army as a forty-one-year-old major and become a late entrant into MI5. He had gone for that one.
“Anything particular?” Capstick was asking.
Preston shook his head. “Just a round of getting-to-know-you visits,” he said.
“Don’t worry, Johnny. Now I know you’re on the seat, I’ll call if anything crops up here that looks bigger than swiping the Christmas fund. How’s Julia, by the way?”
“I’m afraid she’s left me. Three years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Bertie Capstick’s face puckered in genuine concern. “Another fella?”
“No. Not then. There’s someone now, I think. Just the job ... you know.”
Capstick nodded grimly. “My Betty’s always been very good like that,” he ruminated. “Been away from home half my life. She always stuck by. Kept the fire burning. Still, no life for a woman. Seen it happen before. Many times. Still, bad luck. See the boy?”
“Now, and again,” admitted Preston.
Capstick could not have struck a rawer nerve. In his small and lonely South Kensington flat, Preston kept two photographs. One showed him and Julia on their wedding day—he at twenty-six, trim in his Parachute Regiment uniform; she at twenty, beautiful in white. The other was of his son, Tommy, who meant more to him than life itself.
They had lived a normal Army Üfe in a succession of married quarters, and Tommy had been born eight years after their wedding. His arrival had fulfilled John Preston, but not his wife. Soon after, Julia had begun to get bored by the chores of motherhood, compounded by the loneliness of his absences, and had begun to complain; of the lack of money. She chivied him to leave the Army and earn more in civilian life, refusing to understand that he loved his job and that the boredom of a desk in commerce or industry would have driven him to distraction.
He transferred to the Intelligence Corps, but that made it worse. They sent him to Ulster, where wives could not follow. Then he went underground and all contact was broken. After the Bogside incident she really made her feelings plain. They gave it one more try, living in the suburbs while he worked at Five. He was able to return almost every evening to Sydenham, and that had solved the separation question, but the marriage had gone sour. Julia wanted more than his salary as a late entrant in Five could provide.
She had taken a job as a receptionist at a fashion house in the West End when Tommy, aged eight, had gone, at her insistence, to a local private school near their small home. That had strained the finances even more. A year later she had left completely, taking Tommy with her. Now, he knew, she was living with her boss, a man old enough to be her father but able to keep her in style and Tommy at a boarding preparatory school at Tonbridge. Now Preston hardly ever saw the twelve-year-old lad.
He had offered her a divorce, but she did not want one. After a three-year separation he could have got the divorce anyway, but she had threatened that, as he could not provide for the boy and pay maintenance, she would settle for Tommy. He was cornered and he knew it. She allowed him to have Tommy for one week in each holiday and for one Sunday each term.
“Well, I must be going, Bertie. You know where I am if anything big blows up.”
“Of course, of course.” Capstick lumbered to the door to see him out. “Take care of yourself, Johnny. There aren’t many of us good guys left anymore.”
They parted on a jocular note and Preston went back to Gordon Street.
Louis Zablonsky knew the men who arrived in a van and knocked on his front door late on Saturday night. He was alone in the house, as usual on Saturdays; Beryl was out and would not return until the small hours. He supposed they knew that.
He had been watching the late film on television when the knock came, and when he answered the door, they bulled straight into the hallway, closing the door behind them. There were three of them. Unlike the four who had visited Raoul Levy two days earlier (an incident of which Zablonsky knew nothing, since he did not read the Belgian papers), these were hired muscle from London’s East End—“slags,” in underworld parlance.
Two were brutes, simple steak-faced thugs who would do anything they were told and would obey the orders of the third; he was slight, pocked, mean, with dirty-blond hair. Zablonsky did not know them personally; he just “knew” them; he had seen them in the camps, in uniform. Recognition sapped his will to resist. He understood there was no point. Men like these always did what they wanted to people like him. There was no point in resisting or appealing.
They pushed him back into the sitting room and threw him into his own armchair. One of the big men stood behind the chair, leaned forward, and pinned Zablonsky into it. The other stood by, caressing one fist with the palm of the other hand. The blond man drew up a stool in front of the chair, squatted on it, and stared at the jeweler’s face. “ ’It ’im,” he said.
The slag to Zablonsky’s right swung a heavy fist straight into his mouth. The man was wearing brass knuckles. The jeweler’s mouth dissolved in a welter of teeth, lips, blood, and gum.
Blondie smiled. “Not there,” he chided gently. “ ’E’s supposed to talk, ain’t ’e? Lower down.”
The thug slammed two more haymakers into Zablonsky’s chest. Several ribs cracked. From Zablonsky’s mouth came a high-pitched keening. Blondie smiled. He liked it when they made noise.
Zablonsky struggled feebly but he might as well not have bothered. The muscled arms from behind the chair held him fast, as the other arms had held him down on that stone table so long ago in southern Poland while the blond doctor smiled down at him.
“You been bad, Louis,” crooned Blondie. “You upset a friend of mine. ’E reckons you’ve got something of his and ’e wants it back.” He told the jeweler what it was.
Zablonsky choked back some of the blood that filled his mouth. “Not here,” he croaked.
Blondie considered. “Search the place,” he told his companions. “ ’E won’t give no trouble. Take it apart.”
The two slags searched the house, leaving Blondie with the jeweler in the sitting room. They were thorough and it took an hour. When they had finished, every closet, drawer, nook, and cranny had been turned out. Blondie contented himself with poking the old man in his broken ribs. Just after midnight the slags returned from the attic.
“Nuffink,” said one.
“So who’s got it, Louis?” asked Blondie. Zablonsky tried not to tell him, so they hit him again and again until he did. When the one behind the chair released him, he fell forward onto the carpet and rolled onto one side. He was going blue around the lips, his eyes starting and his breath coming in short, labored gasps. The three men looked down at him.
“ ’E’s ’aving a ’eart attack,” said one curiously. “ ’E’s croaking.”
“ ’It ’im too ’ard, then, dint ya?” said Blondie sarcastically. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got the name.”
“You reckon ’e was telling us straight?” asked one of the slags.
“Yeah, ’e was telling us straight an hour ago,” said Blondie.
The three left the house, clambered into their van, and drove off. On the road south from Golders Green, one of the slags asked Blondie, “So what we going to do now, then?”
“Shut up, I’m thinking,” said Blondie. The little sadist liked to think of himself as a commander of criminals. In fact, he was of limited intelligence and now he was in a quandary. On the other hand, the contract had been to visit just one man and recover some stolen property. On the other, they had not recovered it. Near Regent’s Park he saw a telephone booth. “Pull over,” he said. “I got to make a phone call.”
The man who had hired him had given him a telephone number, the location of a phone booth, and three specific hours at which to call. The first of them was only a few minutes ahead.
Beryl Zablonsky returned from her Saturday-evening treat just before two in the morning. She parked her Metro across the street and, surprised to see the lights still on, let herself in.
Louis Zablonsky’s wife was a nice Jewish girl of working-class origins who had early learned that to expect everything in life is stupid and selfish. Ten years earlier, when she was twenty-five, Zablonsky had plucked her from the second-row chorus line of a no-hope musical and asked her to marry him. He had told her about his disability but she had accepted him nevertheless.
Strangely, it had been a good marriage. Louis had been immeasurably kind and treated her as if he were a too-indulgent father. She doted on him, almost as if she had been his daughter. He had given her everything he could—a fine house, clothes, trinkets, pocket money, security—and she was grateful.
There was one thing he could not give her, of course, but he was understanding and tolerant. All he asked was that he never know who, or be asked to meet any of them. At thirty-five, Beryl was a trifle overripe, a little obvious, earthy and attractive in that kind of way that appeals to younger men, a sentiment she heartily reciprocated. She maintained a small studio flat in the West End for her trysts and unashamedly enjoyed her Saturday-night treats.
Two minutes after entering the house, Beryl Zablonsky was crying and giving her address on the telephone to the ambulance service. They were there six minutes later, put the dying man on a stretcher, and tried to hold him in this life all the way to the Hampstead Free Hospital. Beryl went with him in the ambulance.
On the way he had one brief period of lucidity and beckoned her close to his bleeding mouth. Craning an ear, she caught his few words, and her brow wrinkled in puzzlement. It was all he was able to say. By the time they got to Hampstead, Louis Zablonsky was another of the night’s dead-on-arrival cases.
Beryl Zablonsky still retained a soft spot for Jim Rawlings. She had had a brief affair with him seven years earlier, before his marriage. She knew his marriage had now broken up and that he was again living alone in the top-floor apartment in Wandsworth whose telephone number she had called often enough to have memorized it.
When she came on the line she was still crying, and at first Rawlings had some trouble, dazed with sleep as he was, in making out who was calling. She was ringing from a public booth in emergency admissions and the pips kept going as she put in fresh coins. When he understood who it was, Rawlings listened to the message with increasing puzzlement.
“That’s all he said? Just that? All right, love. Look, I’m sorry, really very sorry. I’ll come up when the fuzz have cleared out. See if there’s anything I can do. Oh, and Beryl ... thanks.”
Rawlings replaced the receiver, thought for a moment, and placed two calls, one after the other. Ronnie, from the scrapyard, reached him first, and Syd was there ten minutes later. Both, as instructed, were tooled up, and they were just in time. The visiting party tramped up the eight flights of stairs fifteen minutes later.
Blondie had not wanted to take the second contract, but the extra money the voice on the phone had guaranteed was too much to turn down. He and his mates were East Enders and hated to go south of the river. The animus between the gangs of the East End and the mobs of South London is legendary in the capital’s underworld, and for a southerner to go “up East” uninvited, or the reverse, can be a ticket to a lot of trouble. Still, Blondie reckoned that at three-thirty in the morning things should be quiet enough and he could be back in his own manor with the job done before he was spotted.
When Jim Rawlings opened his door, a heavy hand shoved him straight back down the hallway leading to his sitting room. The two slags came in first, with Blondie bringing up the rear. Rawlings backed fast down the hallway to let them all in. When Blondie slammed the door behind him, Ronnie came out of the kitchen and leveled the first slag with a pickax handle. Syd came out of the coat closet in a rush and used a nailbar on the cranium of the second man. Both went down like felled oxen.
Blondie was scrabbling at the doorknob, trying to get back out to the safety of the landing, when Rawlings, stepping over the bodies, caught him by the scruff and slammed him face-first into a glass-fronted portrait of the Madonna, ownership of which was the nearest the little man had ever come to organized religion. The glass broke and Blondie collected several small shards in his cheeks.
Ronnie and Syd tied up the two heavies while Rawlings hauled Blondie into the sitting room. Minutes later, held at the feet by Ronnie and around the waist by Syd, Blondie was protruding several feet out of the window, eight floors above the ground.
“See that parking lot down there?” Rawlings asked him. Even in the blackness of a winter night, the man could just make out the glint of streetlights on cars a long way down. He nodded.
“Well, in twenty minutes that parking lot’s going to be full of fuzz. Standing around a plastic sheet. And guess who’s going to be under it, all squashed and nasty?”
Blondie, aware that his life expectancy was now measurable in seconds, called from his extremity, “All right, I’ll cough.”
They brought him in and sat him down. He tried to be ingratiating. “Look, we know the score, squire. I was just ’ired to do a job, right? Recover something what got nicked. ...”
“That old man in Golders Green,” said Rawlings.
“Yeah, well, ’e said you’d got it, so I come ’ere.”
“He was a mate of mine. He’s dead.”
“Well, I’m sorry, squire. I didn’t know ’e ’ad an ’eart condition. The boys only tapped ’im a couple of times.”
“You crap-eater. His mouth was all over the parish and all his ribs cracked. So what did you come for?”
Blondie told him.
“The what?” asked Rawlings incredulously.
Blondie told him again. “Don’t ask me, squire. I was just paid to get it back. Or find out what ’appened to it.”
“Well,” said Rawlings, “I’m very close to having you and your mates in the Thames before sunup, wearing a nice new line in concrete underpants. Only I don’t need the aggro. So I’m letting you go. You tell your punter it was empty. Completely empty. And I burned it ... to a cinder. There’s nothing left of it. You don’t really think I’d keep something taken from a job? I’m not a complete fool. Now get out.”
At the doorway Rawlings called Ronnie back. “See them back across the river. And give the little rat a present from me, for the old man. Okay?”
Ronnie nodded. Minutes later, down in the parking lot, the more damaged of the East Enders went into the back of his own van, still trussed up. The half-conscious one was put behind the steering wheel with hands untied and told to drive. Blondie was thrown in the front passenger seat, his broken arms in his lap. Ronnie and Syd followed them to Waterloo Bridge, then turned back and went home.
Jim Rawlings was perplexed. He made himself a cup of espresso and thought things over.
He had indeed intended to burn the attaché case amid the rubble. But it was so beautifully hand-tooled; the dull, burnished leather glowed in the light of the flames like metal. He had examined it for any sign of an identification mark. There was none. Against his better judgment and despite Zablonsky’s warning, he had decided to risk keeping it.
He went to a closet and brought it down from a high shelf. This time he went over it like a professional cracksman. It took him ten minutes to find the stud on the hinge side of the case that slid sideways when pushed hard with the ball of the thumb. From inside the case he heard a sound. When he reopened the case the base had risen half an inch at one side. With a paper knife he eased up the base and glanced inside the flat compartment between the case’s real base and the false one. With tweezers he extracted the ten sheets of paper that lay within.
Rawlings was no expert on government documents, but he could understand the rubric of the Ministry of Defense, and the words TOP SECRET are understandable in any man’s language. He sat back and whistled softly.
Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone “trash” his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional “faces,” if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts.
Rawlings knew whose apartment he had burgled, but the robbery had not yet been reported, and he suspected, for reasons he could only now fathom, that it might never be. So he did not need to draw attention to it. On the other hand, with Zablonsky dead, the diamonds were probably gone forever, and his cut of their value with them. He began to hate the man who owned that apartment.
He had already handled the papers without gloves, and he knew his own prints were on file. He dared not identify himself, so he had to wipe the papers clean with a cloth, erasing the traitor’s fingerprints as well.
The next afternoon, Sunday, he mailed a plain brown envelope, well sealed and with an excess of stamps, from a post box in the Elephant and Castle. There was no collection until Monday morning and the package did not arrive at its destination until Tuesday.
That day, January 20, Brigadier Bertie Capstick called John Preston at Gordon. The bluff geniality was gone from his voice. “Johnny, remember what we were talking about the other day? If anything cropped up ...? Well, it has. And it’s not the Christmas fund. It’s big, Johnny. Someone has mailed me something in the post. ... No, not a bomb, though it might turn out worse. It looks as if we have a leak here, Johnny. And he has to be very, very high. That means it comes under your department. I think you’d better come down and take a look.”
That morning also, in the owner’s absence, but by appointment and letting themselves in with provided keys, two workmen arrived at an eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House. During the day they chipped the damaged Hamber safe out of the masonry of the wall and replaced it with an identical model. By nightfall they had redecorated that wall as it had been before. Then they left.