Spy and the Thief (15 page)

Rita spoke up from the sidelines. “I can’t believe it. If Jimmy was working with them all the time, why would Peter kill him?”

Rand turned to the handcuffed man. “Want to tell us now?”

The dark-haired man touched his bandaged shoulder. “Why not? You know it all anyway. Rita told him about the place and brought him out here, not realizing that Jimmy was April. He went along with it, not wanting her to know the truth, but when he came in here he got the crazy idea of selling us out to the British. He was going to kill me with his sword cane, expose the message center, and become a hero. From the beginning he was only in it for the money, and suddenly the money on the other side looked better. We struggled and I killed him in self-defense.”

“We’ll let the courts decide that,” Stephens said. “Let’s go.”

Rita paused at the door and turned to Rand. “Did you know it all the time?” she asked.

“Not all the time, no. But ever since I talked to you I was wondering what Jimmy was doing in here for fifteen minutes before you heard his scream. The facts didn’t quite fit together the way you told it, but they did fit nicely if Jimmy was the spy, having a final confrontation with Jentor.”

“I lost them all, didn’t I?” she said. “Jimmy and Peter both.”

Rand took a final look at the clocks. “Come on,” he said, taking her arm. “It’s time we were going.”

N
ICK VELVET IS A
unique thief, a choosy crook who steals only the improbable, the bizarre, the baroque. He is never attracted to anything as mundane as money, as commonplace as jewels, bonds, or even objets d’art—that prosaic plunder is for prosaic pilferers. No, the fastidious Nick shuns everything of intrinsic value; for a minimum fee of $20,000 he guarantees to deliver only the worthless.

And believe it or not there is no scarcity of clients anxious to engage Nick’s services!

Here, now, is the

PERSONAL:
Born Nicholas Velvetta, March 24, 1932, New York City, of Italian parents living in Greenwich Village. Father was active in local politics. Nick shortened surname to Velvet during school years.

EDUCATION
: High school dropout, Manhattan, 1950. Enlisted in Army, served in Korea, saw action Battle of Chongchon River. Following discharge, studied to complete high school education; took night courses while working at marina in Westchester County.

CAREER
: After trying number of jobs, accidentally lured into life of crime. Found he can make more than comfortable living by stealing on assignment, charging $20,000 minimum per theft.

APPEARANCE
: Ruggedly handsome, black hair, brown eyes, slightly Italian features, over six feet tall, well built; though nearly 40, able to perform stunts and, acrobatics that would exhaust much younger man.

ASSOCIATES:
Always works alone, though may hire someone to divert attention or carry out routine part of scheme. Such people paid by the job, never hired twice. Generally uses own name, posing occasionally as reporter or writer; very few police departments have connected him with crimes he has committed.

PRIVATE LIFE:
Unmarried. Lives in small city on Long Island Sound with Gloria Merchant, a pretty girl in her mid-30’s; she believes Nick is industrial consultant who has to be away from home frequently to inspect sites for proposed plants. Gloria only one who calls him Nicky; shares his interest in boating. When not on assignment, likes to relax with beer on porch, watching workers from electronic plant on same street pass by.

Strictly as a thief, Nick Velvet is today’s heir apparent to the crown worn by such Napoleons of knavery as Grant Allen’s illustrious Colonel Clay (1897), E. W. Homung’s cricketer-cracksman A. J. Raffles (1899), O. Henry’s gentle Jeff Peters (1908), George Randolph Chester’s get-rich-quick Wallingford (1908), Frederick Irving Anderson’s infallible Godahl (1914) and notorious Sophie Lang (1925), Edgar Wallace’s forthright Four Square Jane (1929), Leslie Charteris’ saintly Simon Templar (1933), and Roy Vickers’ ethereal Fidelity Dove (1935).

But just as Rand is forced to double as a detective in order to succeed as a cryptanalyst, so Nick is forced to become a topnotch sleuth to succeed as a topnotch thief. This phenomenon, its miraculous unfolding, is in the golden tradition of Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman-cambrioleur Arsene Lupin (1907), the greatest thief-’tec of them all … until Nick Velvet?

No doubt about it, dear reader, Nick is as smooth as velvet, and (to borrow Joe Christopher’s phrase) Nick has the velvet touch. He is an ingenious fellow and an ingenuous felon—or should the adjectives be transposed?

E
LLERY QUEEN

M
OSTLY HE JUST LIKED
to sit on the front steps with a beer, watching the homebound workers from the electronics plant down the block, pleased that he wasn’t one of them. Sometimes, after supper, Gloria would join him on the steps to see the neighborhood fathers playing ball with their boys in the lot across the street, then watch them stroll down to the corner grocery for a forgotten loaf of bread or pack of smokes. It was a peaceful, settled neighborhood—that was why he liked it. No curious neighbors, no snooping.

“Nicky?”

“Huh?” He glanced up at Gloria, perched on the porch railing, swinging her long legs in graceful rhythm. She was a great girl, but she always wanted to talk.

“Nicky, what do you do when you go away?”

“Travel, like I told you. These companies hire me to pick new plant sites. There’s a lot of money in it.” He sipped his beer from the punctured can, wishing she’d quiet down for once and let him breathe in the evening air.

“When will they send you out again, Nicky?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think some day we’ll be able to get married and settle down?”

He’d often considered marrying Gloria. Sometimes he could even imagine himself spending the rest of his life on this little street, walking up to the corner for beer in the evening. He could imagine it, but not for too long. “Some day,” he said, because that was the answer to everything.

It was later, almost ten o’clock, when the telephone rang. She brushed his hand from her thigh and rose in the darkness to answer it. “For you,” she called out.

He took the telephone and heard an unfamiliar voice ask, “Is this Nick Velvet?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like to talk to you about a job.”

“Tonight?”

“If you can come over. Foster Hotel, Room 229.”

Nick smiled at the telephone. “I don’t meet people in hotel rooms. They’re only for sleeping and making love.”

“All right, where?”

“The park across from the hotel. By the fountain.”

“In the dark?” the voice asked, uncertain.

“I do my best work in the dark. Eleven o’clock—and come alone.”

“How will I know you?”

Nick smiled again. “I’ll know you,” he said and hung up. He always knew them. They always looked the same.

Gloria came in off the porch. “Who was it, Nicky?”

“A job. Be back around midnight.”

He picked up his jacket on the way out the door. Sometimes the nights were cool.

Nick Velvet was a product of New York’s Greenwich Village, in an era when the Italian-American population still dominated the section against the encroachment of the bohemians. He’d shortened his name from an original version that sounded like a cheese, and gone off to the wars with a good many other high school dropouts.

Somehow, over the years, his life’s work had begun to take shape, and now—nearing 40—he was an acknowledged expert. They phoned him now, and made trips to see him, because for certain jobs he had no equal in the world.

Nick Velvet was a thief. Of a special sort.

He never stole money as such, and never stole on his own. Rather, he stole on assignment, taking the things that were too big or too dangerous or too unusual for other thieves. He’d stolen from museums, from corporations, from governments. He’d stolen a statue of the Roman god Mercury from the top of a post office building, and a stained glass window from a museum of medieval art. Once he’d even stolen a complete baseball team, including manager, coaches, and equipment.

It wasn’t so much that he liked the work, or had planned it as a career. But when it happened he had voiced no complaints. The fees were substantial, and he worked only four or five times a year, for no more than a week or so at a time. He saw a good deal of the world, and he met some highly interesting people.

Harry Smith was not one of the most interesting.

He stood in the shadows by the fountain, looking for all the world like a gangster of the prohibition era waiting for the boat from Canada. Nick didn’t like his looks, and when he said his name was Smith, Nick didn’t like his name, either.

“A man in Chicago recommended you, Velvet,” Smith said, clipping off the words like an electric typewriter.

“Could be. What do you want?”

“Do we have to talk here? I have a hotel room.”

Nick Velvet smiled. “Hotel rooms can be bugged too easily. I don’t like tape recordings of my business deals.”

Harry Smith shrugged. “Hell, these days they can bug you anywhere. They could be aiming one of them long-range things at us right now.”

“That’s why we’re standing by the fountain. It’s quite effective for covering up conversations. Now get to the point.”

Harry Smith stepped into the circle of light cast by a tree-shrouded lamp overhead. He was a bulky man, built like a small gorilla, and both cheeks were pockmarked. “We want you to steal something,” he said.

“I assumed as much. My price is high.”

“How high?”

“Twenty thousand and up, depending on the job.”

Harry Smith took a step backward into the shadows. “We want you to steal a tiger from a zoo.”

Nick had learned long ago to control his reactions. He simply nodded and said, “Tell me about it.”

“It’s in the city—the Glen Park Zoo. Something called a ‘clouded’ tiger. Supposed to be rare.”

“How rare?”

The man shrugged, and Nick was somehow reminded of a gorilla again. “A Middle Eastern prince with a private zoo is willing to pay well for the beast. We can afford your twenty thousand.”

“Thirty for animals,” Nick told him. “There is more danger involved.”

“I’ll have to ask the others.”

“Do that. You know where to reach me.”

“Wait!” Harry Smith grabbed Nick’s shoulder. “We want to do this thing in three days—on Monday morning. We should decide tonight.”

“I’d have to look the zoo over first.”

“You’d have tomorrow and Sunday for that.”

“Thirty thousand?”

The man hesitated a moment longer. “All right. Five in advance.”

They shook hands on it, and Nick Velvet went back to Gloria’s to pack his bag. The night was hesitant with the beginnings of an overcast, and above his head the stars were gradually going out.

There were three of them—Harry Smith, and a tall slim Englishman named Cormick, and a youngish blonde girl who answered to Jeanie. The girl seemed to be with Cormick, and it was obvious that the Englishman was the brains of the operation. He ordered Harry Smith around in the flat monotone so often used for servants.

“I’ll need to look the place over,” Nick told them again.

Cormick shrugged his lean shoulders. “Look all you want.”

“Why does it have to be Monday morning?”

“You’re not paid to ask questions, Mr. Velvet.”

They’d left the hotel room and were sitting now in a little house trailer hooked on behind a new black convertible. The car and trailer, like the girl, belonged to Cormick.

“Tell me something about the tiger,” Nick said, sipping a glass of warm Scotch.

Cormick might have been lecturing a class in Zoology I. “Though the ordinary tiger is quite common in zoos, there are a number of rare specimens that are highly valued. The great heavy-coated Siberian tiger is an extremely rare zoo specimen, as is the albino tiger, and the blue-gray tiger known to parts of China. But the so-called ‘clouded’ tiger—a strangely mottled beast long thought to be legendary—is perhaps the rarest of all. This specimen was captured near the Sino-Indian border a few years ago and donated to the Glen Park Zoo. It may be the only one in captivity, and our prince will pay dearly for it.”

“I’ll need some equipment.”

The Englishman nodded. “We have a small closed pickup truck, and Jeanie can be your driver. The job is to get the tiger out of its cage and into the truck, and then to get the truck away from the zoo.”

Nick lit a cigarette. “Is the zoo guarded?”

Cormick nodded. “They’ve got a squad of private patrolmen, mainly to keep the teen-agers in line. I understand they had some trouble last year with the animals being annoyed.”

“Protecting the animals from the people.” Nick chuckled for the first time and began to relax. The old feeling of success was beginning to course through his veins. He never liked them to seem too easy. Then, as if he’d just thought of it, he said, “I’d better take Jeanie with me in the morning. A man alone at the zoo might look suspicious.”

Cormick hesitated only a moment before indicating his approval with a wave of his hand. “If you wish. It might be a good idea, since she’ll be with you Monday.”

“Where will you two be?” Nick asked.

“Here in the trailer, waiting for you. We have a plane waiting to fly the beast to Canada and then on to the Middle East.”

“You’ll have trouble getting a tiger out of the country,” Nick said. “How are you planning to do it?”

Cormick merely smiled. “Do I ask you how you plan to steal him in the first place?”

Nick took out another cigarette. “I’m glad you don’t. At this point I have no idea how I’m going to do it.”

Saturday morning was breezy, with high white clouds that glided swiftly across the sun in irregular formation. Nick helped Jeanie from her car and guided her around a puddle left over from an early morning shower. It was a day for the zoo, and even this early the parking lot was beginning to fill.

Nick dropped two quarters in the turnstile and they passed through. “I can remember when city zoos were free,” he commented.