“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Bertie Capstick’s face puckered in genuine concern.
“Another fella?”
“No. Not then. There’s someone now, I think. Just the job ... you know.”
Capstick nodded grimly. “My Betty’s always been very good like that,” he ruminated.
“Been away from home half my life. She always stuck by. Kept the fire burning. Still, no life for a woman. Seen it happen before. Many times. Still, bad luck. See the boy?”
“Now, and again,” admitted Preston.
Capstick could not have struck a rawer nerve. In his small and lonely South Kensington flat, Preston kept two photographs. One showed him and Julia on their wedding day—he at twenty-six, trim in his Parachute Regiment uniform; she at twenty, beautiful in white.
The other was of his son, Tommy, who meant more to him than life itself.
They had lived a normal Army Ufe in a succession of married quarters, and Tommy had been born eight years after their wedding. His arrival had fulfilled John Preston, but not his wife. Soon after, Julia had begun to get bored by the chores of motherhood, compounded by the loneliness of his absences, and had begun to complain; of the lack of money. She chivied him to leave the Army and earn more in civilian life, refusing to understand that he loved his job and that the boredom of a desk in commerce or industry would have driven him to distraction.
He transferred to the Intelligence Corps, but that made it worse. They sent him to Ulster, where wives could not follow. Then he went underground and all contact was broken. After the Bogside incident she really made her feelings plain. They gave it one more try, living in the suburbs while he worked at Five. He was able to return almost every evening to Sydenham, and that had solved the separation question, but the marriage had gone sour. Julia wanted more than his salary as a late entrant in Five could provide.
She had taken a job as a receptionist at a fashion house in the West End when Tommy, aged eight, had gone, at her insistence, to a local private school near their small home.
That had strained the finances even more. A year later she had left completely, taking Tommy with her. Now, he knew, she was living with her boss, a man old enough to be her father but able to keep her in style and Tommy at a boarding preparatory school at Tonbridge. Now Preston hardly ever saw the twelve-year-old lad.
He had offered her a divorce, but she did not want one. After a three-year separation he could have got the divorce anyway, but she had threatened that, as he could not provide for the boy and pay maintenance, she would settle for Tommy. He was cornered and he knew it. She allowed him to have Tommy for one week in each holiday and for one Sunday each term.
“Well, I must be going, Bertie. You know where I am if anything big blows up.”
“Of course, of course.” Capstick lumbered to the door to see him out. “Take care of yourself, Johnny. There aren’t many of us good guys left anymore.”
They parted on a jocular note and Preston went back to Gordon Street.
Louis Zablonsky knew the men who arrived in a van and knocked on his front door late on Saturday night. He was alone in the house, as usual on Saturdays; Beryl was out and would not return until the small hours. He supposed they knew that.
He had been watching the late film on television when the knock came, and when he answered the door, they bulled straight into the hallway, closing the door behind them.
There were three of them. Unlike the four who had visited Raoul Levy two days earlier (an incident of which Zablonsky knew nothing, since he did not read the Belgian papers), these were hired muscle from London’s East End—“slags,” in underworld parlance.
Two were brutes, simple steak-faced thugs who would do anything they were told and would obey the orders of the third; he was slight, pocked, mean, with dirty-blond hair.
Zablonsky did not know them personally; he just “knew” them; he had seen them in the camps, in uniform. Recognition sapped his will to resist. He understood there was no point. Men like these always did what they wanted to people like him. There was no point in resisting or appealing.
They pushed him back into the sitting room and threw him into his own armchair. One of the big men stood behind the chair, leaned forward, and pinned Zablonsky into it. The other stood by, caressing one fist with the palm of the other hand. The blond man drew up a stool in front of the chair, squatted on it, and stared at the jeweler’s face. “ ’It ’im,” he said.
The slag to Zablonsky’s right swung a heavy fist straight into his mouth. The man was wearing brass knuckles. The jeweler’s mouth dissolved in a welter of teeth, lips, blood, and gum.
Blondie smiled. “Not there,” he chided gently. “ ’E’s supposed to talk, ain’t ’e? Lower down.”
The thug slammed two more haymakers into Zablonsky’s chest. Several ribs cracked.
From Zablonsky’s mouth came a high-pitched keening. Blondie smiled. He liked it when they made noise.
Zablonsky struggled feebly but he might as well not have bothered. The muscled arms from behind the chair held him fast, as the other arms had held him down on that stone table so long ago in southern Poland while the blond doctor smiled down at him.
“You been bad, Louis,” crooned Blondie. “You upset a friend of mine. ’E reckons you’ve got something of his and ’e wants it back.” He told the jeweler what it was.
Zablonsky choked back some of the blood that filled his mouth. “Not here,” he croaked.
Blondie considered. “Search the place,” he told his companions. “ ’E won’t give no trouble. Take it apart.”
The two slags searched the house, leaving Blondie with the jeweler in the sitting room.
They were thorough and it took an hour. When they had finished, every closet, drawer, nook, and cranny had been turned out. Blondie contented himself with poking the old man in his broken ribs. Just after midnight the slags returned from the attic.
“Nuffink,” said one.
“So who’s got it, Louis?” asked Blondie. Zablonsky tried not to tell him, so they hit him again and again until he did. When the one behind the chair released him, he fell forward onto the carpet and rolled onto one side. He was going blue around the lips, his eyes starting and his breath coming in short, labored gasps. The three men looked down at him.
“ ’E’s ’aving a ’eart attack,” said one curiously. “ ’E’s croaking.”
“ ’It ’im too ’ard, then, dint ya?” said Blondie sarcastically. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got the name.”
“You reckon ’e was telling us straight?” asked one of the slags.
“Yeah, ’e was telling us straight an hour ago,” said Blondie.
The three left the house, clambered into their van, and drove off. On the road south from Golders Green, one of the slags asked Blondie, “So what we going to do now, then?”
“Shut up, I’m thinking,” said Blondie. The little sadist liked to think of himself as a commander of criminals. In fact, he was of limited intelligence and now he was in a quandary. On the other hand, the contract had been to visit just one man and recover some stolen property. On the other, they had not recovered it. Near Regent’s Park he saw a telephone booth. “Pull over,” he said. “I got to make a phone call.”
The man who had hired him had given him a telephone number, the location of a phone booth, and three specific hours at which to call. The first of them was only a few minutes ahead.
Beryl Zablonsky returned from her Saturday-evening treat just before two in the morning.
She parked her Metro across the street and, surprised to see the lights still on, let herself in.
Louis Zablonsky’s wife was a nice Jewish girl of working-class origins who had early learned that to expect everything in life is stupid and selfish. Ten years earlier, when she was twenty-five, Zablonsky had plucked her from the second-row chorus line of a no-hope musical and asked her to marry him. He had told her about his disability but she had accepted him nevertheless.
Strangely, it had been a good marriage. Louis had been immeasurably kind and treated her as if he were a too-indulgent father. She doted on him, almost as if she had been his daughter. He had given her everything he could—a fine house, clothes, trinkets, pocket money, security—and she was grateful.
There was one thing he could not give her, of course, but he was understanding and tolerant. All he asked was that he never know who, or be asked to meet any of them. At thirty-five, Beryl was a trifle overripe, a little
