The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel. Gordon Landsborough

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ done.

      That was something to think about, because when a girl is terrified there’s almost nothing in the world that will keep her voice free from the most ear-splitting screams. She had moaned, but had made no more noise than that.

      I looked at Benny and I was thinking. “She didn’t want to go with them, but she didn’t dare attract attention to herself.” And I couldn’t make it out, couldn’t understand it.

      Benny looked at me uneasily over the top of his paper. He had crinkly black hair, and it was well greased, and under that light it threw out highlights and made him look...cissyish.

      I stopped looking at Benny because I didn’t think it was going to do anyone any good. Instead I turned, intending to go up to see B.G.

      Something timid quivered at my elbow and asked: “Please, where can I get a guide book about the mosques in the old quarter?”

      I took one look at her. That dame didn’t rate for more than one look, and that not a lingering one. She wasn’t my type.

      She was English, and you know what that means. Full of inhibitions, and ready to run away from what they would like to enjoy. And she was older than she should have been. Which means if she wasn’t rising forty, she was trying to look more than her age.

      But there’s a heart of gold under the Heggy vest. I took time off to say: “Ask that rube. He’s got everything.” I looked coldly at Benny and added: “And he knows a whole lot more than he makes out.”

      Benny fidgeted and tried to smile but it made him look even more sick than usual. That boy sure had something on his mind right then!

      I left that teetering middle-aged dame to get what she could out of Benny. I reckon her mind never rose higher than getting brochures out of any man, anyway. Which, maybe, is why she looked turned forty.

      I went into the elevator, which again shows how distraught I was. After a couple of minutes I came out and climbed the stairs, and said vicious things with every stride I took. That old man who should have operated the elevator must have been having a session with a chambermaid somewhere,

      I passed my room and thumped on the door next to mine. That’s where B.G. was hibernating. And B.G., I might tell you, is my boss.

      Strictly speaking, B.G. is the boss’s son. The old man, back in Detroit, doesn’t get around much now, because he’ll never see seventy again. So he’s put his little boy in circulation, and B.G. goes around the world where they have contracts and in general gums up the works.

      He’s what Europe fondly conceives to be a typical American businessman, and he knows it and tries to live up to the part. He’s big and he’s shaped like an egg and he’s got about as much brain as an egg—one that’s thirty days addled. He wears rimless, octagonal-edged glasses perched on a stub of a nose set into a big flat pancake of a face. And he’s got a stomach that’s no concern of anybody else except himself. In fact, B.G. is mighty concerned about that stomach of his.

      I forget now whether at that moment, standing outside his door, I was on his payroll or fired. He changes his mind so quickly. He won’t get drunk, and sometimes we do, and then we get to forgetting that he’s the boss, and instead we think he’s the sap he really is, and we treat him like that. He’s got an unforgiving nature, and when we come out of the oil, we generally find ourselves with a month’s paycheck in our hand.

      Yet somehow we always get back on the payroll.

      This time we’d thought it funny to give B.G. a leg-up with his linguistic aspirations. B.G.’s the humourless, earnest, persevering type of man who tries to learn a few words of every language of the countries he visits. He trumpets that it makes the foreigner pleased to hear someone who’s taken the trouble to learn at least a few words.

      So we helped him. When he touched down at the airport he wanted to know what the Turkish equivalent was for “Thank you.” We tried to help him.

      After that he kept using the word and the Turks looked surprised but would politely take him and leave him outside the door in question. This happened about six times before he rumbled it. He didn’t accept our explanation easily, either—that we’d made some awful mistake and instead of giving him the word for “thank you” we’d given the word which is seen mostly on that door where the ladies go in to powder their noses.

      Call it rude humour if you like, but when the boys get together, that’s how they behave.

      So we were all in the doghouse, and, as I say, I didn’t even know whether I was on his payroll after that incident, or available to look for another job.

      I thumped on the door. To hell with B.G.; he’s only the boss, anyway.

      I heard the rattle of metal inside, and pricked up my ears. It sounded like—chains.

      And then I heard B.G. call out to me: “Who’s there?” and I had a feeling he was in trouble even as he called out.

      I shouted back: “The hell, it’s Heggy. What’ve you got in there—a dame at last?” And that was sarcasm, because B.G.’s got more inhibitions concerning the female sex than any man I’ve ever met.

      He didn’t rise to it this time, but his voice took on a note of quick concern, and he shouted: “For God’s sake, get the pass key and come in to me. My God, Heggy, I need you right now!”

      So I found the floor servant with his tarbosh and I got him to open up. He wanted to come in and there was a big grin on that Turk’s brown face, but I didn’t see that it was any business of his, so I politely kept him out in the corridor.

      I went into B.G.’s bedroom and B.G. was there.

      He was lying on his back, spread-eagled, and fastened by wrists and ankles with shining chains to the four corner-posts of his bed.

      CHAPTER TWO

      THE POLICE

      I was so startled I had to sit down on the edge of his bed and smoke a Camel. I looked at him, the big slob.

      He was wearing little trunks and a singlet such as athletes wear. Only, no athlete ever tried to shove a stomach as big as his into such a vest. He was without his glasses, but he could see me all right. Sometimes I used to think he didn’t need glasses at all, but wore them to impress people. There was a lot of chicken around the heart of that big man.

      B.G. got mad. That’s what I wanted. I like to get him mad. It’s a hobby of mine, getting bosses mad, and I’m expert at it, and perhaps that’s why I’ve had more bosses than most men.

      He shouted for me to get him out of those things, but I just looked dumb and went on smoking.

      I could see what it was. There were springs round those chains and it was one of these physical culture fads that grip men at times. That big stomach of B.G. had got him physical-culture conscious, and it seemed I had discovered his secret. He did exercises to reduce it, here in his bedroom.

      The idea was that you slipped your hands through a kind of handcuff, which was attached by springs and little chains round your bedposts. Your feet were thrust through similar footcuffs. And then you did exercises, like trying to sit up against the tension of those springs and trying to draw your knees up against the even more powerful springs, which fixed your ankles to those bedposts.

СКАЧАТЬ