and had been killed in the last war. His mother had sent him to Eton, where he had been a pretty fair athlete and had broken his nose in a soccer game. Then things had gone downhill. He was booted out of a place called Sandhurst for chasing girls and sent someplace in the Austrian mountains where he found more girls, learned German, French, and Russian, and took up skiing.
Then he moved on to a short shot at banking, gave up, became a reporter, and found his calling just when England went to war with Germany. He had been recruited by British Naval Intelligence and was now a Lieutenant in the Special Branch of the Royal Naval Volunteers. At present he was stationed someplace in Canada he couldn’t tell me about.
He pulled up next to the LaSalle. Before getting out, I struggled into my coat and looked around for a waiting car or suspicious face. I saw none. I opened the door and reached over to shake English’s hand.
“My name’s Peters,” I said, “Toby Peters.”
“Good to meet you, Toby Peters,” he said. “I’m staying at the Ambassador if you need someone to share any further adventures. My name’s Ian Fleming.”
6
There was no one in the LaSalle Hotel lobby except a drowsing bellhop whose uniform buttons needed polishing. Curtis Katz was at the desk looking just slightly wilted at the end of an all-night shift. He gave me the hint of a smile.
“I’m checking out,” I said. “Get my bill ready. I’ll be right down.”
“I hope it wasn’t-”
“No,” I said, hurrying to the elevator. “Urgent business back in Hollywood. Gable needs me. You know how it is.”
Katz knew how it was. The elevator boy put his newspaper down and brought me up to six. By the time I reached my door, the power of Ian Fleming’s elixir had just about worn off. I turned the key and kicked the door open with my foot. No one shot at me. I switched on the light, did a quick check of the bathroom and closet, put on my holster and.38, and snapped one of the locks of my suitcase (the other was broken when I bought it). Since I had never unpacked, the whole process took me about two minutes.
I paid Katz with a check when I got back to the lobby. My account in L.A. might just barely cover it, and I couldn’t afford to give up any cash. I was heading for the door when Katz called, “Wait.”
“Yes?” I said nervously, looking down through the pattern of scratches on my watch, to show I was in a hurry.
“You have a message.” He got the message while I watched the entrance doors for a familiar face with a machine gun under it.
“Mr. Marx called from Las Vegas,” preened Katz. “Said he and his brothers would arrive at Midway Airport here at noon. I presumed you’d know who Mr. Marx was.”
“I do know, Curtis,” I said, leaning over the counter confidentially. “I can call you Curtis, can’t I?”
“Certainly,” he smiled.
“Good,” I beamed back. “Mr. Marx is a producer. We’re thinking of shooting a movie with Gable here in Chicago. It’s important that no one know Mr. Marx is in town. So if anyone comes looking for me, don’t give them the information. Might be reporters or a rival studio. You know how those things are?”
He knew how those things were. I strongly suggested that his cooperation would be borne in mind when the decision was made to shoot the picture. There would be good jobs and small roles for friends.
There were no cabs around, and the morning sun was already high enough by now to keep the streets from having any good shadows to jump into. There were some people on the streets, probably hotel workers, pickpockets, and confused drunks who had lost their way. I didn’t think the presence of a few people would stop Nitti’s friends from gunning me down on LaSalle Street.
I ran across the street. My suitcase bounced as if it was about to split, and my holster and gun put a weight on my chest I didn’t like. I pushed through the nearest revolving door.
Stepping back into the lobby of an office building, I watched a familiar big black Cadillac pull up in front of the LaSalle. Two men jumped out. One was Costello, with his right arm in a sling. The other was the juke box man. Chaney was at the wheel of the car. He looked right at the building I was in, but I was sure the lobby was dark enough.
Two things had probably given me the time to get out of the LaSalle. I had hoped for one or both and had been rewarded. Costello was whatever brains the group of muscle had, and he didn’t have much. He didn’t want to call Nitti or Servi and tell them that I got away if he didn’t have to. He probably could have put in a call and had someone waiting for me when Fleming and I drove up at the LaSalle, but Costello was counting on getting me without help and without admitting a failure. He had also stopped to get his arm bandaged and put in a sling.
Costello ran into the LaSalle and came back out in less than two minutes. He didn’t look as if he had found out much if anything from Katz. Before he got back in the car, he looked around the street, but he didn’t see me or anything else of interest. I gave them three more minutes to get out of the neighborhood and made a dash for a taxi that pulled up in front of the LaSalle to let someone out.
“Midway Airport,” I told the cabbie. On the way, I considered the possibility that Costello might call Nitti and they might have a couple of people at airports and train stations to stop me from leaving. Then I figured that Nitti probably wouldn’t bother. He hadn’t been kicked around by a middle-aged detective and a stylish Englishman. Nitti would probably be happy to have me get out of town. Costello and his chums might think otherwise, but they’d have to report to Servi or Nitti before too much time passed, or risk their own heads on the train tracks.
The trip to Midway was long. I blew my nose a few times, dozed off a few more times, and ignored the driver. When we got to the airport, I paid him off and hurried inside. I found a washroom, shaved, and changed my shirt. Then I found a coffee shop, had some Wheaties with sliced bananas, and bought a newspaper.
I found the waiting room where the Marx Brothers flight would come in, but I was hours early. I took a seat in the middle of a group of guys who looked like businessmen and were talking about options.
The paper told me it was Saturday. It also told me that snow would fall, that five senators didn’t like some war bill, and that slot machines were running wide open in the northern suburbs of Cook County. I could have shown them a few in the western suburb of Cicero, too. I also found out that British raiders had bombed Nazi bases in Sicily. That wasn’t what I was looking for. I paused over a story of some kids in Sag Harbor, New York, at a place called Pierson High School. Some of the students had dressed up as storm troopers and started to bully others to show how it feels. There was a picture with the story, showing some girls scrubbing a sidewalk with the young storm troopers standing over them. J. Edgar Hoover was asking for seven hundred more FBI men to help curb Nazi spies. Then I found what I was looking for. Tony Zale had KO’d Mamkos in the fourteenth. Zale had gone down in the fifth, and the fight had been close up until the knockout.
Content, I fell asleep. My dream was about men with different mustaches, all leering and chasing me around a gym. There was a Groucho mustache, a Servi mustache, a Katz mustache, a Hitler mustache. I started throwing balls and gradually worked my way up through baseballs, basketballs and medicine balls. None of them stopped the attack, and my old pal Koko didn’t materialize to save me. I ran through a door and found myself in downtown Cincinnati. I woke up with a groan and a massive sneeze. No one was sitting next to me. I had just enough time to lug my suitcase to a newsstand, buy some aspirin, gulp down a half dozen, and make it back to the waiting room when the Las Vegas plane came in.
Nobody looking like Marx Brothers came off in the first batch. I was about to give up when I heard the familiar screen voice of Groucho saying,
“The least Perry Mason could have done was meet us here.”
The voice came out of a short, erect dark man with a decidedly Jewish face. He was flanked by two slightly older men his own size who looked like twins. I stepped in front of the three men and spoke to one of the twins.
“Chico Marx?” I tried.
“That’s Harpo,” said Groucho. “And it’s pronounced
