“No,” I replied soothingly. “You went up to see him. There was a gunshot. You were found holding a smoking gun. The dwarf was dead. Why would the police think you’re involved?”
At that moment there was a rattle as a key was turned in the lock and the door swung open. Herbert groaned. The man who had just come in didn’t look too happy either.
“Herbert Simple,” he said.
“Inspector Snape,” Herbert muttered in a strangled voice.
“Chief Inspector Snape,” the man growled. “No thanks to you.”
The chief inspector was blond-haired and built like a football player, with those slightly squashed shoulders that come from too many tackles. His skin was the color of raw bacon and he spoke with a northern accent. He was wearing an off-white shirt that had probably been pure white when he put it on, and a tie that had slipped over his collar in its struggle to get away from his bulging neck. He was followed by a smaller, squatter version of himself with black, permed hair, an open-neck shirt, and a gold medallion glittering in the forest of his chest. The assistant—if that’s what he was—stood there, pounding one fist into the palm of his hand, looking at us with unfriendly, muddy brown eyes. Well, if these are the cops, I thought, I’d hate to meet the robbers.
“Herbert Simple,” Snape repeated, drawing up a chair.
“Can I hit him?” the other policeman asked.
“No, Boyle.” The chief inspector smiled unpleasantly. “Herbert Simple.” He said the name a third time, chewing on the words like they were stuck in his teeth. “The worst police constable that ever served in my station. In two months you did more damage than the Kray brothers managed in twenty years. The day you left, I cried like a baby. Tears of pleasure. I never thought . . . I hoped, I prayed that I would never see you again.” His piglike eyes were turned on me. “And who are you, laddie?” he asked.
“His brother,” I said.
“Bad luck, son. Bad luck.”
“Can I hit
“Relax, Boyle.” The chief inspector took out a cigarette and lit it. “Now, the question I’m asking myself is, why should a luckless, hopeless, brainless ex-policeman like Herbert Simple be mixed up with a man like Johnny Naples?”
“I didn’t shoot him!” Herbert cried.
“I believe you.” Snape’s nostrils quivered as they blew out two streams of smoke. “If you’d wanted to shoot the dwarf, you’d have probably missed and shot yourself in the foot. After all, when we sent you for target practice, you managed to shoot the instructor. But the fact still remains that your fingerprints are on the gun—and nobody else’s. So perhaps you’d better tell me what you were doing there.”
“Naples was my client,” Herbert squeaked.
“Your client?”
“He’s a private detective,” I explained.
“A private detective?” Chief Inspector Snape began to laugh. He laughed until the tears trickled down his checks. At last he managed to calm himself down, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Boyle handed him a handkerchief and he blew his nose noisily. “Now I’ve heard everything!” he said. “A private detective. And your client’s dead. That makes sense. The moment he came to you he was a marked man. But what private detection did Naples want?”
“It’s private,” I said.
That wiped the smile off Snape’s face. At the same time, Boyle grunted and lumbered toward me. I’d seen prettier sights in the London Zoo. Fortunately for me, Snape held up a hand. “Forget it, Boyle,” he snapped.
“But, Chief . . .”
“He’s underage.”
Boyle grunted again and punched the air. But he hung back.
“You should watch yourself, son,” Snape said. “Boyle here is very into police brutality. He watches too much TV. The last suspect we had in here ended up in intensive care and he was just in for double parking.”
“It’s still private,” I said.
“All right,” Snape grumbled. “If you want to see your big brother arrested for murder . . .”
“Nick . . . !” Herbert whimpered.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “We don’t have to break a client’s confidence.”
“Your client’s dead,” Snape said.
“I noticed. But he’s still our client.” I gave him my friend liest smile. “Look, Chief Inspector,” I said. “You tell us what you know and we’ll tell you what we know. That seems fair to me.”
Snape looked at me thoughtfully. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirteen.”
“You’re smart for your age. If you go on as smart as this, maybe you won’t reach fourteen.”
“Just tell us.”
“Why should I? How do I know you know anything at all.”
“We know about the key,” I said. “And about the falcon.”
I admit they were two shots in the dark. The Fat Man had mentioned a key, and with his dying breath Johnny Naples had muttered something about a falcon. Neither of them made any sense to me, but I had gambled that they would mean something to this Snape character. And I was right. He had raised an eyebrow at the mention of the key. The other one joined it when I followed with the falcon.
He finished the cigarette, dropped the butt, and ground it out with his heel. “Okay,” he said. “But you’d better be on the level, Nick. Otherwise I’ll let Boyle spend a little time alone with you.”
Boyle looked at me like he was trying to work out a new pattern for my face.
“Johnny Naples flew in here from South America a month ago,” Snape began. “We picked him up when he came through passport control, then we lost him, then—just a few days ago—we found him again at the Hotel Splendide. We’ve had him under observation ever since. You and your brother were the first people to see him, as far as we know. He never went out—not while we were watching.”
“Why were you watching him?” Herbert asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Snape snapped. He lit himself another cigarette. He didn’t look like a chain-smoker, but that’s the sort of effect my big brother has on people. “Johnny Naples was a nobody,” Snape went on. “A quack doctor with a run-down practice in the backstreets of La Paz, Bolivia. But with his last patient he got lucky. You already know about the Falcon, but I wonder how much you know? His full name, for example—Henry von Falkenberg. I reckon he was out of your league. To be fair, von Falkenberg was in a league of his own.
“Look—every country has its big crooks. In England, the Fat Man is probably number one. America has its godfathers. In Italy, there are the Fettuccine brothers. But the Falcon—he’s an internationalist. He was half English and half German, loyal to neither country, and living, when we last heard of him, in Bolivia. There wasn’t a single criminal organization in the world that he wasn’t doing business with. You steal a truck-load of mink coats in Moscow? You sell it to the Falcon. You want to buy a kilo of cocaine in Canada? Just have a word with the Falcon. He was the number one, the top man, the king of crime. If there was a country in the world where the police didn’t want him, he’d have taken it as a personal insult.
“Now, like any big businessman, the Falcon needed funds—a financial platform on which to build his deals. But unlike most businessmen, he couldn’t just open an account at your local credit union. He didn’t trust the Swiss banks. He didn’t trust his own mother—which is probably why he had her rubbed out back in 1965. The only currency the Falcon would deal in was diamonds: uncut diamonds. The franc might fall, the ruble might rise—but diamonds held their own. In every major city he had his own little stash of diamonds: in Paris, Amsterdam, New York . . . and London. In fact, London was the center of his operations, so that’s where he had the biggest stash. We can’t be sure, but we believe that perhaps only a mile from here, he’d managed to conceal diamonds to the value of five million dollars.”
He paused for effect and he got it. I licked my lips. Herbert shook his head and whistled.
“The Falcon was a great criminal,” Snape continued. “But a month ago his luck ran out. He could have been arrested. He could have been machine-gunned by a rival gang. But in the end he was run over by a bus. It was a crazy end to a crazy life. It happened just outside La Paz airport as he crossed the road to catch a plane to England. We believe he was carrying the key to the diamonds with him. And the man who just happened to be on the scene, who traveled with him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, was Johnny Naples.
