The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel. Gordon Landsborough

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СКАЧАТЬ and I just enjoy feeling out of condition. Maybe I’m not much out of condition, at that, and I don’t have any bothers about a belly like the boss.

      I looked at him coldly when he shouted at me, and in time he got around to it that I didn’t like being shouted at. So he became persuasive, and I like bosses better that way,

      After a time I said: “How do you get out of those things?”

      He was exasperated but tried not to show it. He had also a confession to make, and he didn’t like making it and he mumbled over it. He was a man, in any event, feeling the indignity of his position. It seemed that you simply slid your hands through the cuffs but B.G. had thick wrists and big fleshy paws, and the exercising had caused them to swell and he couldn’t get the cuffs over his hand. I felt inclined to leave the slob there, but that isn’t the Heggy way. Joe P. Heggy is always a guy to give a man a hand in trouble, even if it is the boss.

      Anyway, this was a good time to make profit out of the situation.

      I said to him quite nicely: “I don’t know whether I can help you. I mean, I’m not working for you any longer, why should I dig you out of those damn bracelets?”

      B.G. spoke earnestly. He said: “Joe, what are you talking about? Who says you’re not working for me? You get this into your mind, Joe, that you’ll always be working for me. Only, doggone it, dig me out of these bracelets, can’t you!”

      Well, that was good enough for me. I was still on the payroll. I dug him out. It took a lot of hair oil over his fat wrists, and he lost some of the skin in the process, but I didn’t feel it, and I didn’t smell like a nice boy afterwards.

      He was ashamed of himself, as fat men always are ashamed when they’ve been caught out. I said: “It’s a good thing I came when I did.”

      He stopped washing himself under a tap labelled: ‘Chaud’ but it wasn’t. Like the elevator, the hot water system never worked in this hotel, either. He looked at me and said, suspiciously: “What did you want of me at this time of night, anyway?”

      I said: “If anything happens to me, B.G., I want you to remember what I’m telling you now.”

      I saw that big, flat pancake face come round quickly, apprehensively, the electric light reflecting greasily upon his featureless face. That B.G. got in a panic quicker than any man I’ve ever known, and him with all his millions.

      “What d’you mean, Joe? Don’t tell me you’ve got into more trouble?”

      Now, that’s good, coming from the man who employs me. Back in the States my job was trouble-buster. If there was trouble anywhere within the Gissenheim empire, I was the boy who was sent down to eliminate it. You know what sort of trouble you can get—rival firms sabotaging your supply trucks; trouble among two-timing salesmen who are selling out to rivals; and some labour disputes, though I don’t like them. I even had to go and take part in a revolution once, in the Central Americas, when a lot of Gissenheim property was at stake.

      Well, here I’m employed as a trouble-buster, and the man who employs me suddenly turns round and asks sharply if I’ve been getting into trouble! I shut him up with a flip of my paw. You could always shut up that big fat slob if you knew how to flip confidently and contemptuously enough. You should try it on the boss someday. You’ll probably be surprised at the result.

      I said: “Listen.” And then I told him what I had seen out in the alley, and then what had happened down at the police station—though, come to think of it, just nothing had happened there.

      “But I want you to know this, B.G.—there’s something very deep and very nasty afoot, and I’ve got myself mixed up in it.” I lifted my hand when I saw his fat mush splitting to make some heavy statement. “And you can forget what you were just about to say. Any time I see a girl in trouble like that, I feel I’ve just got to jump in with both feet.”

      “But now you’re in with both feet—?”

      “Things might happen to me.” I brooded over my Camel. I’d got a hunch that things were going to happen to me, and B.G. was something in the nature of an insurance policy. I looked at him. He was scared. He didn’t like foreign parts, because he was far out of his depth in dealing with people beyond his own family circle. That’s how I always looked at it, anyway.

      “I’ve got a hunch that I might get slung into a sedan like that dame. Okay, B.G., if you don’t see me around for a while, you go down to the American Embassy and bellyache to high heaven about me. Get the dragnet out and find me. I’ll be somewhere around, though my guess is I won’t be wanting to be where I am.”

      That was a good sentence, and it made B.G. think a bit. It made me think a bit, too. I didn’t want to be where I didn’t want to be. B.G. wasn’t much of an insurance policy, but I couldn’t think of anything better to do right then. I tell you, I’m a timid kind of guy, always running away from trouble. But I can take care of myself if trouble comes running after me.

      B.G. put his glasses on, as if that helped him to think better. His thinking didn’t seem to do him any good because he finally took them off and went in for a shower without saying so much as a word to me. Perhaps he would have liked to have made cutting comments, but he must have been remembering the undignified position I’d found him in a few moments ago. And he knew by now that Joe P. Heggy could hold his own when it came to making cutting remarks.

      He closed the door of his bathroom, and locked it. That’s the kind of sap B.G. is. He doesn’t like to be seen, not even by his own sex, when he’s in the nude. I don’t go that way myself at all, but that’s the way some men are built, I guess.

      So I shouted through the keyhole. “Hey, are you plannin’ to go out?”

      Because one of my jobs was to keep the boss’s son out of trouble. He was such a sap that his father knew he needed a nursemaid, and so he’d picked on me.

      B.G. yelped back: “I think I’ll go to the Gazino for supper.”

      I shrugged. That meant I had to go, too. So I went back to my room to get changed. Anyway, there was nothing for me to hang around this hotel for, and the Gazino was a pleasant place for supper, anyway.

      It was only when my hand was feeling for the door key that I remembered that body in the bathroom. I felt sick inside. I just naturally hated what I’d just done.

      But there was nothing else for it. I had to go in and face it.

      And then I found I had no key.

      And then I found Benny standing by my side and he had a key in his hand. Benny had anticipated this moment and had come up the stairs or the elevator to help me in distress.

      He spoke quickly. “I guessed you’d have locked yourself out.” My key was inside my room. He was a good guesser.

      I took the key and looked hard at Benny. I thought: “You slimy so-and-so, you’re trying to get around me, aren’t you?”

      But I didn’t say anything aloud to Benny; I just let him read what I was thinking in my face. Benny mustn’t have liked what he read there, and he quit trying to be nice. He went away, and I heard him say something that sounded suspiciously like: “The hell, you can get yourself out of trouble in future.”

      I didn’t beef after him. I don’t give a damn if hotel servants do stand on a level with СКАЧАТЬ