Vigilantes & Biscuits Read online

  “What measures have you in hand at the moment to protect Mr. Orsini?”

  Lemaitre produced a typewritten report from an inside pocket, and put it on Gideon’s desk.

  “They are all spelt out in detail there. Basically, I’ve done three things. Mr. Orsini’s car – a dark green Volvo – has been down at a garage in Islington all night, being discreetly bullet-proofed by a couple of boys I know who are expert at that sort of job.”

  Gideon raised an eyebrow, but made no comment. He was fairly sure that the “boys” referred to were normally employed for less respectable purposes; probably the garage was a place where stolen cars were worked on all night, and given face-lifts that made them unrecognisable. But Lem worked in a tough area, and often had to get results by unorthodox means. The results were what mattered.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “I’ve got the Finchley C.I.D. on the move. They’ve taken over the first floor of an empty shop opposite Orsini’s restaurant, and are all set to turn it into a stake-out. If Rocco attempts any sort of a raid there, he’ll get quite a surprise. Also, the Finchley Inspector is going to have six men on standby for the next twenty-four hours, ready to follow Dino on foot or by car. It’s there, of course, that the problems start.”

  “What problems?” asked Dino innocently.

  “Let me spell them out for you, Mr. Orsini,” Gideon snapped. “A bodyguard, to be effective, would have to remain within five feet of you at all times. But to be unnoticed, he’d have to follow twenty or even thirty feet behind you – and what use would he be then? Or suppose you were in a car. Even a bullet-proof car can be ambushed or rammed. For real protection, a police car ought to keep right on your tail. But for the Rocco men not to spot it, it would have to be all of fifty yards behind. I’ve got to confess that I simply don’t see – ”

  He broke off as the door opened, and a tall, military-looking man strode into the room. He was wearing a raincoat that had seen better days, and carrying the regulation black case that no businessman, from executive to tax collector, is ever seen without.

  There was no room for doubt that this was Major Davison, thought Gideon. Only a member of Commander Ryan’s staff could behave with such high-handed arrogance. It was evident that he had been standing outside the door, eavesdropping, for some time before he had come in.

  “An interesting summary. Commander,” he told Gideon, “but at least two years out of date. With a new technique the Israelis have developed, the bodyguard can be anything up to a hundred yards away.”

  14

  Iron Raincoat

  There was a sudden, startled silence, broken finally by Lemaitre.

  “Then what the hell does he do when someone attacks the body he’s guarding? Pole-vault?” he asked.

  Major Davison laughed, with the casual indulgence of a film star.

  There was, in fact, a lot about this Davison that reminded Gideon of a film actor of the David Niven-Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. era. He had the handsome, bronzed face, the trim moustache, the nonchalant air of elegance. Gideon guessed that his age was somewhere between the late fifties or early sixties, and that he’d gone to Special Branch after retirement from Military Intelligence. The romantic spy in person, he thought sourly. In other words, an overgrown glamour-boy who went through life imagining he was taking part in a James Bond film.

  “We’ll probably have to find a new name for ‘bodyguard’,” Davison was saying. “This new technique eliminates a lot of the need for physical guarding. Let me show you.”

  He whipped out a flick-knife, and preferred it handle first.

  “Take this and try to stab me through the chest.”

  Gideon complied to the request with speed and vehemence. On touching the Major’s raincoat, the knife simply glanced off, falling harmlessly from Gideon’s hand.

  Davison smiled sardonically, as if he’d guessed Gideon’s summing up, and was amused.

  “This coat is made of a new material, a spin-off from the

  American space programme. They’ve found a way of reinforcing polystyrene with steel filaments, on something of the same principle that’s used for reinforcing concrete. The result is a lightweight garment that can protect against razors, knives, bullets, anything up to – and including – a burst from a Sten. An ‘iron raincoat’, the Israelis call it. Try it on, Mr. Orsini. I gathered you were a big man, so brought one that I thought would be your size.”

  As the Major slipped off the raincoat, Orsini jumped up, and once again his chair went flying. This time, however, it was the clumsiness of enthusiasm, not nerves. It was obvious to Gideon that the plump, would-be victim had been secretly despairing of his life. Now that hope of survival was beginning to dawn, he was a changed personality. He handled the “iron raincoat” as reverently as though it was an instrument of salvation straight from Heaven: his mouth opened and closed as though he were sending up silent prayers of thanksgiving.

  “Feel the lining,” the Major said. “It’s got an inch of padding over the chest and stomach. It doesn’t give a hundred per cent cushioning against bullets – nothing could. You might end up with a cracked rib, or body bruises. But one thing I can guarantee. Whatever the calibre of the bullet or the velocity of the gun, there’ll be no penetration.”

  “Unless,” said Lemaitre grimly, “they aim for the head.”

  The Major was not in the least put out.

  “They seldom do, you know. Except in the case of highly trained political assassins gunmen instinctively go for the body first. Their later shots – say, the third, fourth and fifth – may be aimed higher. But by that time the subject will have dropped flat on the ground (which we recommend) or there will be what the text book calls ‘distracting action’ by the bodyguard.”

  “From a hundred yards away?” said Lem derisively. “He’ll be lucky if he even hears the shots!”

  “He’ll hear them all right,” said Davison, with nonchalant confidence. “He’s only physically at a distance from his subject. Electronically, he’s never more than a whisper away.” He turned down the right lapel of the raincoat and pointed to a slight bulge in the lining. “There’s a microphone-transmitter built in here. It has a range of between a hundred and a hundred and fifty yards, and the signal it gives is so powerful that a bodyguard can home in on it through the walls of a building, or even if he’s in a following car.”

  “Now just a minute,” Gideon said. “Let’s suppose the bodyguard is on foot, tailing the subject through the streets. We know he’s got to remain inconspicuous – but how can he? Surely, if he’s listening to some walkie-talkie contraption as he goes along, he’ll be the most conspicuous tail in history.”

  The Major shrugged.

  “Don’t fret, Commander. We have the answer to that, too.”

  He picked up the slim executive case which he had been carrying on his arrival.

  “All the bodyguard has to do is carry this. Not a very noticeable item, I think even you would agree. You’ll see thousands of businessmen with cases just like it at every mainline station, in every rush hour. Inside, though, it’s just a little – unusual.”

  He snapped the case open, revealing a mass of electronic equipment.

  “Essentially, this is a high-powered short-wave receiver, with built-in tape recording facilities. It can pick up the faintest signal from the bug in the subject’s lapel; magnify it, and retransmit it to a miniature receiver, no bigger than a pea, which fits right inside the bodyguard’s ear. The miniature receiver is finely adjusted so that no sound escapes from the ear. So if the bodyguard happens to be in close proximity to other people – in a crowded bus, say, or a jam-packed pub – he can still switch on and listen-in to his subject, without anyone around suspecting what he is doing. Ingenious, don’t you think?”

  “That’s just about the word,” said Lemaitre softly. The Superintendent’s normal expression – alert, cocky, sceptical – had subtly altered; it had begun to register a touch of schoolboy awe. There was a side of
Lem that had never really grown up – that seldom, in any man, grows up; and to this side, all this gimmickry was having an irresistible appeal.

  Gideon himself was hardly less deeply impressed. He found his exasperation with Davison ebbing away, replaced by an awareness that he was in the presence of a supreme professional. Off-hand they might be – but Ryan’s men knew their stuff.

  “You mentioned tape-recording, Major.”

  “Ah, we’re coming to that. Supposing someone steps up to the subject, and says something threatening or suspicious. The distant bodyguard will not merely hear it; by pressing a catch by the handle of the case, he can tape it on the spot. In fact, he can tape everything that happens to the subject, if he chooses.”

  “Just like a recording angel, eh, Major?” Dino said. He was the new, transformed Dino, grinning, laughing, bouncy as a balloon in a skittish wind. “With a bodyguard like that behind me, and this ‘iron raincoat’ around me, I’ll feel as safe as houses, safe as a hundred houses! Must I wait for tonight to deliver my ultimatum? It is past twelve. The Rocco place will be open. Why shouldn’t I get it over and done with now?”

  “I’ll tell you why,” said Gideon sharply. “We haven’t had a chance to select, let alone train, a – er – recording angel to follow you.”

  In this new, excited mood, Dino brooked no discouragement.

  “Couldn’t Mr. Lemaitre do it, just for now?”

  Gideon struggled to control his outrage. Mr. Lemaitre, he was going to point out, was a Chief Detective Superintendent who had left guarding and shadowing jobs behind him thirty years ago. But before he could even form the sentence in his mind, Lemaitre had taken the executive case from the Major, and was being shown how to fit the miniature receiver in his ear.

  “It’ll be like old times, doing a bit of tailing,” he remarked wistfully.

  Like old times …

  The years fell away, and Gideon suddenly saw Lem as a young fellow-sergeant, bursting to try any and every new approach, but always being trapped by that fatal impulsiveness, always ending up with an unfair black mark against his name. Equipment might have become electronic, radio receivers miniaturised, raincoats given a space-age bullet-proofing, but the Lemaitres of this world remained eternally unchanged.

  Gideon was not going to discourage him again. He turned to Dino.

  “Well, if you must go through with this lunatic business, good luck to you.”

  For Lemaitre, he had only a half-rueful grin, but its message was exactly the same.

  An hour later, Lemaitre was taking the strangest stroll of his life.

  He was wandering around Soho in the grey light of a lunch time drizzle – a light to which the neon signs above a dozen strip clubs were imparting a blowsily erotic tinge.

  Outwardly the stroll was perfectly normal. One moment he was pausing to inspect the window of a luxury sex-aid boutique. The next, he was asking the owner of a Hungarian restaurant what business was like these days.

  Yet he had not noticed a single item in the boutique window. He had not heard a word of the Hungarian restaurant owner’s answers to his questions.

  All the time, his head had been filled with a stream of voluble Italian: the sound of Dino Orsini delivering his ultimatum at the bar of a public house called Punchinello’s, about a hundred yards away round the corner to his left.

  Punchinello’s. Lemaitre smiled wryly at the aptness of the name. Dino was committing his act of mad bravado in a place called after the world’s most tragic clown …

  Not that Dino’s performance sounded tragic. Lemaitre knew little or no Italian, so could not understand what was said, but the words were pouring out with the force – and ferocity – of bullets. So much so, that suddenly they seemed to be splitting his eardrums.

  Glancing up, Lemaitre realised what had happened. Almost subconsciously, he had started strolling towards Punchinello’s. He had already rounded the corner, and the pub’s entrance – a slit-like doorway sandwiched between a Greek delicatessen and a cinema showing decidedly indelicate continental films – was now directly ahead, about fifty paces farther along the pavement. This meant, of course, that the executive-case receiver he was carrying was getting uncomfortably near the source of its signal. He turned it down. At the same time, he slowed his pace. Shouldn’t he go by the Major’s rules, and keep a hundred – or at any rate – fifty yards away?

  Or didn’t rule books apply when one’s subject was deep in enemy territory, and deliberately goading that enemy into planning an attempt on his life?

  It was an uneasy thought; and an uneasier one followed it.

  Why were Rocco’s men allowing Dino to go on so long? He had been speaking, almost without interruption, for nearly twenty minutes. And whatever he was saying, it wasn’t likely to make enjoyable listening for a Rocco henchman. Perhaps they were egging him on, deliberately keeping him talking, while one of them slipped out and contacted –

  At that moment, Dino’s stream of Italian was interrupted by a soft, smooth voice, speaking English with a slight American accent.

  “Mr. Orsini? I am Ron Curtis, manager of Punchinello’s. I understand you had a message a while back for Mr. Rocco.”

  Lemaitre abruptly remembered his role as “recording angel”. He pressed the catch by the handle of the executive case which started the built-in cassette recorder, and was just in time to tape one of the most chilling invitations he had ever heard.

  Still in the same soft voice, Ron Curtis was saying: “Well, your message has been delivered, Mr. Orsini. And if you’ll be kind enough to step upstairs, Mr. Rocco is waiting to give you his reply – in person.”

  15

  Between the Eyes

  There was silence, followed – to Lemaitre’s horror – by the sound of a door opening, and at least two persons’ footsteps going upstairs. So the fool was walking straight into the death trap. Why? He hadn’t had to. He’d been in a public bar. He’d been wearing a raincoat that, on Major Davison’s assurance, was a seventh wonder of the universe. It should have protected him long enough for a quick dash to the street.. .

  Most likely, Orsini was once again being fuddled by his own peculiar streak of obstinacy. The prospect of meeting Rocco face to face and openly accusing him of his brothers’ murders … with the knowledge that every word was being taped by Scotland Yard … must have seemed an opportunity more important than life itself.

  In an obscure way, Lem still felt a kind of admiration for the man; but that didn’t alter the fact that Orsini had landed him with one of the trickiest problems of his career.

  He needed to contact a police station, or better still, an area car, fast. But he had no walkie-talkie on him. His car – which was equipped with a police radio – was parked near Soho Square, two hundred yards behind him. A dash towards it would take him clean out of range of Orsini’s microphone … and God knew what might have happened by the time he was back in contact.

  Orsini had climbed the stairs now. The man who was with him – presumably the soft-voiced Ron Curtis – tapped on a door.

  A new voice – high-pitched for a man, yet too harsh and grating for a woman – called out: “Ah, Mr. Orsini, come in.”

  Lemaitre remembered that Jack Rocco talked like that. It had given rise to rumours that he was some kind of sexual pervert, but no one knew for sure. The next remarks left no doubt about the speaker’s identity.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the privilege of meeting you before. But I remember both your brothers very well indeed …” The voice became both higher-pitched and harsher. “They made a great impression on me. And as I think you know, I finished up by having quite an impact on them.”

  The following moment was one of the eeriest Lemaitre had ever known. He heard a heart thumping, and a heavy, strangled attempt at breathing; and both sounds seemed as close, as intimate, as though the heart and the lungs to which he was listening were his own. But they weren’t, of course. The highly-sensitive lapel microphone was simply picking up the s
ounds of Orsini himself, in the grip of a near-pathological fury.

  What happened next was almost foreseeable.

  A roar of anger from Dino’s throat erupted in Lemaitre’s eardrum. There were more heavy footsteps, obviously caused by Dino rushing forward, making, from the sound of it, a bull-like charge straight at Rocco. There were other footsteps: Rocco’s men, presumably, hustling to intervene. There were blows, shouts, screams – but Lem suddenly wasn’t listening to them; he was making a bull-like charge of his own along the pavement.

  Less than five seconds later, he was inside Punchinello’s main bar. This was a long, narrow room with a poorly-lit bar running down the whole length of one side. The rest of the room was almost totally unlit, apart from three or four candles in the necks of Chianti bottles, adorning the tops of the upended wine barrels which served as tables.

  Four or five men were standing at the bar, being attended to by a pert Italian girl. At one of the wine-barrel tables, a youth and his girl were kissing in a pool of darkness which they had created by blowing out their candle. Otherwise, the place was empty.

  Lemaitre went straight up to the bar. The sounds of the fight going on upstairs were still – literally – ringing in his ears. It sounded as if Dino – helped, no doubt, by the raincoat – was holding his own; but his stentorian breathing showed that there was no way in which that situation could last for long.

  The men at the bar glanced up. None of them spoke, but Lem hadn’t much doubt that they recognised him. He certainly knew two of them: Spike Graham and Jack Riley, two of the toughest hoods around Soho.

  “Right, boys, I’m going upstairs,” Lem stated flatly. “If no one tries to stop me, no one gets booked. Simple as that. Okay?”

  There was a door to the right of the counter. It stood ajar. Lem thought he could glimpse stairs leading up beyond. He started to walk towards it.