‘Yes.’

  A soft explosion of laughter as the lights changed and she hit the gear shift and took the Mazda away. ‘You real, real cool cat!’

  Very annoyed cool cat. ‘So why didn’t you just flash your badge and call the police and get me put into protective custody?’

  ‘Huh? Well see, it’s this way. I thought you were a rival dealer horning in on his operation, or maybe you’d stashed away a little bit of Toufexis’s merchandise when someone wasn’t looking, and normally I don’t give a shit if one of those mothers gets in the way of a spray gun, it lightens the load for us and it saves all that bullshit in the courts when we work our ass off for months on end and bring a bunch of those suckers into the court and see some bleeding-heart jury give them an acquittal on all counts and send them whistling on their way, happens all the time. But like I say, the execution thing gets under my skin a little, I mean I like to sleep nights, so I put in my bit for you and tried to cool Nicko off, but that was all I could do because you know what? I flash my badge and he’d have shipped me out there with you on that boat, you better believe me, and if he hadn’t done that I’d have blown my cover, and I’ve been working more than six months getting closer and closer to Toufexis and I would’ve thrown the whole thing out the window for the sake of one little waterfront dealer, which like I say is what I thought you were, didn’t know you were a real live dude in the British Foreign Bureau - sure, Office, right. But then, gee, big deal, you didn’t need my help anyway.’

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘it was civil of you.’

  ‘Hey, any time.’ White flash of her smile in the windscreen.

  She turned again and headed south and started slowing along a street full of waterfront apartment houses.

  ‘That was a Mafia hit?’ she asked me. ‘Cambridge?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh. That’s a shame.’

  We ran into an alley behind the houses and hit two speed bumps and she swung the Mazda alongside a broken-down fence and switched off the engine. ‘I was kind of hoping you’d be able to tell me about that. You seemed to know her pretty well, the way you were talking to her at the party. See, narcotics are okay but she was a big time gal and that was a big time hit, and if I could get a handle on that operation I might take it straight to the FBI and who knows, they could offer me a job with them, change of pace, little more prestige, you know?’

  She locked the car and we went across a concrete yard and into the rear of the nearest house and took the lift to the fourth floor, a broken strand of one of the cables twanging through the pulleys. At the third door along a dim-lit passage she got out her keys and opened up and went inside and I followed.

  ‘You want some eggs?’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  ‘Make yourself at home. Bathroom’s through there, you want to clean up. Boy, you got legs, you know that?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Throwing her gold bag on to a chair, checking her hair in a mirror, ‘I saw you get out of that limo so fast I thought you were going to mash your head all over the sidewalk. Then you were up and running and I figured you were going to keep on flat out right to the end of that alleyway, and I had to burn rubber through a red light and get the whole of that block behind me and make another turn and get my ass all the way down to where you were in time to catch you, is what I mean, I only just made it, you got legs.’ Turning away from the mirror and facing me with her hands on her hips in her black leather skirt with her moist skin glowing in the light and her eyes half-hidden in her long dark lashes, ‘I’m real glad I made it, you know? I don’t have a man now Proctor’s taken off, you go for black gals?’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Lieutenant,’ I said, ‘we’ve got business to do.’

  A flash of laughter - ‘And just dig that accent - leff-tenant, wow! You want them boiled, fried, Benedict, sunny side up, over easy, two, three, four?’

  ‘Whatever you’re having,’ I said and went into the bathroom, and when I came back she’d started frying them, the top half of her body visible above the counter dividing the big cathedral-ceilinged room from the kitchen.

  ‘Like a drink?’

  ‘I’m fine as I am.’

  ‘Take a look around. That’s my own art work on the walls.’

  She meant the photographs, rows of them, black and white and most of them taken by flash, Lt. Lacroix with incident-number 3546, Lt. Lacroix with incident-number 1170, the positions mostly the same, a man stooping or leaning face to the wall or prone on the floor, a cop frisking him or putting the handcuffs on or keeping a locked arm-hold or pushing him into a squad car, Lt. Lacroix looking on, got up in short pants and a tank top or jeans and a tee shirt or a torn leather jacket, the same expression on her face in every shot, very alert, her eyes wide and missing nothing, giving me the impression that if the cop fumbled with the handcuffs or lost the arm hold or let the man slip away from the car she’d be there with a force of her own, because she hadn’t spent the amount of time she had in nailing these people just to see them evade arrest.

  ‘Kinda toast?’ she asked me, ‘rye, whole wheat, French?’

  ‘Whatever you’re having. So what would you do if one of these people tried to get away, Monique?’

  ‘I do what it takes. I’ve been up three times this year on a police brutality rap, you beat that? Thing is, they’re all in the slammer and I guess that’s the name of the game.’

  ‘How tall are you?’

  ‘Five two, hundred and ten pounds, call me a fucking midget, but listen, the bottom line is just how hard you kick them in the nuts, because it really gets their attention.’

  We sat at a black lacquered table under one of those hanging mirrored globes, with its reflections floating across the walls and the black net curtains as she flashed me a smile and passed me the ketchup and said in her light, husky voice, ‘See, I don’t personally give a shit if people decide to go to hell in their own handcart by smoking crack or shooting snow, they don’t wanna live and they know how to die, it’s their business. I just find it’s a good game to play, it’s fast and it’s risky and I go into these houses and make a purchase and flash my badge and bring the rest of the guys in from the cars, scare the shit out of everybody and maybe sometimes shake a guy down for a couple of grand, I like nice things, look at this room, I like a nice watch and nice shoes, you know? And who do I steal from, the public? Shit, I steal from the dealers, see, I’m not like those fancy congressmen, charge the public for their plane trips and women and cruises and all that stuff, they’re the real crooks but of course for them it’s legal. They okay?’

  The eggs. Said yes.

  ‘Thing is, it triggers so much crime, and there’s not much we can do to keep it down, the numbers are just too big. In this town there’s maybe a thousand armed robberies and auto thefts and breakins every day, and a big percentage of those are drug-related, those poor slobs sucking on the devil’s dick and having to net a hundred grand or two hundred grand to support the habit - that’s where the public pays. So I do my thing and like I say it’s fast and risky but there’s no way, there is no way we can stop the biggest growth industry in Miami - the stuff just comes dropping out of the sky in bales and canvas bags from the low-flying planes while the power boats are out there picking them up, same time as, the body-packers in from Columbia are dying in the hotel rooms, found one of them today with a pound of cocaine in his stomach stashed away in eighty-two condoms, had to give him emergency surgery because, see, those things can burst and the coke paralyses the colon and this poor son of a bitch had been out and bought himself an enema and two packets of prunes and a box of Exlax, didn’t do him any good, see, near dying when we got to him, went to Jesus two hours later in the post-operative room, things going on like that all over this town, the stuff comes in every way there is, planes and boats and pickup trucks and people’s stomachs, you like some more?’

  Coffee. Said yes.

  ‘Anyway, Toufexis is my assignment, I mean my personal assignment, they wouldn’t put just one little lieutenant to work on the head of the Miami Mafia, we’ve got a whole special unit on his ass, but that’s why I moved in on George Proctor, see.’

  ‘What caught your interest?’

  ‘I saw him with Toufexis himself, talking in the lobby of the Gold Hibiscus, shaking hands and everything like real good friends, I took it from there. Had to get Cambridge off the stage but he liked the cut of my whoops or something and it only took a few days. Then I began working on him, you know? I mean once I’d copied the key of the apartment and he wasn’t there. Diaries, phone-numbers, the regular routine, and one time I followed him to a place he often went to, and the next day I got myself invited inside, flashed my badge, nice and polite.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘House on West Riverside Way, 1330, you know the place?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and put my coffee down, ‘but tell me about it.’

  Chapter 21 : FINIS

  ‘… And the last time he went there was two days ago, but it’s a dead end because I can’t go in there myself a second time without an official backup and like I say, that place sure is no crack house.’

  She was sitting on a black leather bean bag, one arm held straight out and resting on her knee, her hand hanging, the gold nails glinting sometimes as the light from the mirror-lamp floated across them.

  ‘How many of the rooms did you see?’

  ‘Maybe three or four, the big hall with the staircase and a couple of rooms either side and a small kind of den. See, you can’t have just one cop go into a house and take the whole place apart, this was just a drop-by kind of thing, like I explained to them, they could have asked for a warrant if I’d tried muscling them. You okay there?’

  On the floor. Said yes.

  ‘The way it was, see, they should have told me to keep my ass in the street, a great big house like that and the guys got up in pin-stripe duds and everything, and it got me thinking a little bit, why they were so ready to show me around, but maybe I was just over-suspicious because Proctor went there.’

  ‘You didn’t see a Japanese?’

  ‘No. Just these three guys, two of them American and one with a French accent - he was on the phone to someone. I took it to the point, see, where I could back out and leave there with my nose clean, said my despatcher had obviously sent me to the wrong address. I wanted them to forget the whole thing as soon as they could because I was taking a risk, they could mention a cute little black cop in Proctor’s hearing and he could ask them to describe her and bing-go. But anyway he’s gone to ground and unless he shows up again there isn’t anything more I can do. But there’s a couple of little things that’ve got my antennae quivering, see, though they’re nothing to do with drugs, things like him calling the Soviet Embassy, that get your attention?’

  ‘Somewhat,’ I said.

  ‘Somewhat, sure, you being in the intelligence game. But listen, this is a two-way street, you know? I show you mine, you show me yours. If there’s anything you’ve got on Proctor I can take to the FBI, I want it.’

  I got off the cushion and walked about, rolling the right shoulder to ease the stiffness. ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘Shit.’ A bright, frozen smile.

  ‘I can ask my superiors to give you anything they’re able to. That might be nothing at all.’

  ‘He’s into something that big? Proctor?’

  ‘Something rather sensitive.’

  ‘The way you understate things,’ she said, ‘it sounds like an international spectacular.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘It’s the things you don’t say, Richard, that I listen to the most.’ The slim hand hanging from the wrist was moving a little, circling, restless. ‘You can’t show me yours, gee, why should I flash mine around?’

  ‘Try this,’ I said, but the telephone on the black lacquered cabinet began ringing and she went over there.

  ‘Yeah. A half hour back.’ She lifted her free hand towards the ceiling, very slowly, and as it reached as high as it would go she spread her fingers out, and the gold nails looked like fruit glowing on a tree. Then get him,’ she said. ‘I don’t give a shit. Go get him. Bring him in.’ Her hand was turning slowly, the gold vanishing and reappearing from behind her fingers as the floating lights passed over them. Her bare arm, stretched like this, looked like a slim dark vine, the muscle lit and shadowed. ‘Okay, Maloney, can you hear me all right? Okay, I don’t give a shit he’s connected to Washington. Go get that mother-fucker and bring him in and I mean right now or I’ll have your badge first thing in the morning, now move your fucking ass, man, those are my fucking orders.’

  She dropped the phone and brought her other hand down slowly, watching it, turning it into a black and gold fan, spreading it across the shadows.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘I know. I’m into dance, nights off. Those guys,’ she said, ‘they think just because some dude got a pass into the State Capitol they can’t arrest him. You give me enough on a guy and I’ll go and arrest him inside the State Capitol. Try what?’

  ‘I’ll give you as much as I can.’ Told her, throwing in details, that Proctor was persona grata on board the motor-yacht Contessa and was involved in Senator Mathieson Judd’s campaign for the presidency. That there was, yes, a Soviet connection and Proctor had already been reported as having telephoned their embassy. ‘That’s as far as I can go, Monique. It’s practically all I know about his operation, except that it has got international dimensions. Now that Proctor’s gone to ground, you should use the time to get as close as you can to the Cambridge hit, and work from there.’

  She dropped onto the floor, facing me in the lotus position, her thigh muscles carved out of ebony, wrists across her knees and both hands hanging with the fingers wide, making a black and gold screen. ‘You’re taking a risk,’ she said.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I go blabber-mouthing that to the FBI, trying to look good, trying to get in there?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be very intelligent, would it, at this stage? The FBI are going to be working on the Cambridge hit in any case, and I shouldn’t think it’ll take them terribly long to find the helicopter and start from there. Tell them if you like that it could be a Mafia hit. It’s only my supposition.’

  She watched me from the shadows of her lashes. ‘Not too many people outside the Mafia go and make a hit like that. Takes money, and it’s very exposed. Shows how cool they are, giving us guys the finger, part of Toufexis’s personality, he’s like that, always keeps just out of reach. So that’s all you got to show me?’

  ‘It’s dynamite, and you know that. Because of the Judd connection. And the Soviet.’

  ‘Jeeze,’ she said in a minute, ‘you seen the FBI badge?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s real pretty.’ Looking down, frowning a little, ‘Okay, show you mine. I knew he was calling the Soviet Embassy because once when we got in from the Black Flamingo Club there was a message on his machine and I was near enough to watch the numbers he touched on his phone, next day I checked them out and it was the embassy.’

  ‘He was on coke at that time?’

  ‘Sure, he was riding right along.’

  Or he would have waited until he was alone before he made that call. He was still slipping, getting cocky in the coke fumes, some of the Mafia braggadocio rubbing off on him, perhaps it’d give me a chance, take him when he was high, if I could do it before he or the mob had another go and brought it off.

  ‘What did he say on the phone?’ I asked her.

  ‘Nothing too much, no names or anything, he was just making a rendezvous.’

  ‘Did you surveille it?’

  ‘The timing was wrong - I was on duty.’

  ‘You didn’t sent someone else to cover it?’

  ‘Send someone else and I’m giving the whole deal away, you don’t watch your ass in this service you get kicked.’

  ‘That was the only time you heard him phoning the Soviet Embassy?’

  ‘Right. But there were other things.’

  She told me she’d followed Proctor once to Quay 19 and saw him board the cutter, nothing new, and told me he’d been going with a girl named Harvester before Cambridge had moved in, nothing new, and then she began talking about the canisters.

  ‘He used to bring them back from the Newsbreak studios, couple of times a week, and a guy came for them and returned them later. He —’

  ‘Do you know what was in them?’

  ‘Sure, I checked a couple for drugs, but they were just video tapes. It could be the guy that came for them took them to Riverside Way, because I saw one of them there that time I checked the place out. It seemed —’

  ‘Did you put them into a VCR?’

  ‘I couldn’t do that. They were sealed, besides which, I was looking for a big stash of merchandise and tapes didn’t turn me on too much. Anyway they were just commercials.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘They’d got labels. Honi-du, Syn —’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Uh? Skin cream. Syncrest, that’s an earphone unit, Pizzarita, that’s a chain of chic pizza stops. Discreet, that’s pads for gals.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘What’s so big?’

  I was dead-pan, but it must be showing in my eyes. ‘It might be nothing,’ I said. I didn’t think so.

  ‘Okay, there was Orange Sunset, Yummies, and Tuxedo Junction, that’s a soft drink and a junk bar and a cologne for men. They’re all I can remember.’

  ‘They’re all you saw.’

  ‘You got it.’

  In a moment I asked her, ‘Where is Proctor now?’

  ‘Last time I saw him he was climbing up your ass in a Corvette.’

  ‘If you know where he is,’ I said carefully, ‘and don’t want to tell me, I could understand that. But if you know, and choose to tell me, I could give you much more —’

  ‘I ain’t lying.’