The Sweeney 02 Read online

  Regan was aware of the other two guys watching Broughton and shifting uncomfortably. It was obvious that this was one of the major outbursts of Broughton’s career.

  “I’ll be back at the hotel if you want me,” Regan said quietly, and turned and made for the door.

  “Inspector Regan. Hold it.”

  Regan turned.

  “Okay. You go to the hotel. You can pack, and go back to the U.K.” Broughton had gained control again. His voice was businesslike and decisive. “As I say, the whole thing is blown. You go home and send us a written statement.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Now it was a question of Regan containing his temper, and, unlike Broughton, he had a doubtful record on that score. “You’re not parceling me up and kicking me out of this town. I’m a cop. Some con merchants have stolen something from me. And I’m going to get those papers back. I don’t give a fuck where I am or who you are. I don’t care whether this is London, New York, or Timbuktu. Property that I was personally responsible for has been stolen from me, and I will remain in New York until I recover it.”

  He could see Broughton hesitate, trying to formulate the one sentence that would dismiss Regan forever from his presence, and from his memory. “Mr. Regan,” he said finally, icily, “let me put it this way. A simple confidence trick, which you should have seen through, deprived you of these papers. We would therefore have no confidence in you, in aiding you or in complicating any investigation we might carry out with your presence. I will be informing Superintendent Maynon in London that we will not be cooperating with you if you remain in New York—”

  Regan cut across Broughton again. “If you talk to him before I do, tell him I’ll be staying on in New York until I recover those papers.”

  Regan turned and walked out.

  Sleep moved him around the bed in the Alex Hotel room like driftwood on a storm shore. He was in bed early, ten o’clock. He was asleep by eleven. He woke a dozen times between then and five when his travel alarm blasted him out of the first hour of sound sleep. Too many times in Jack Regan’s police career he had gone to bed and slept toward an uncertain and dangerous tomorrow. But what made him toss and turn this night was contempt and disgust for himself. How could those phony FBI guys have pulled it off? No one in his entire career had ever taken him for that kind of ride.

  Three in the morning he was hot and sweating in a freezing room, slowly discovering the pillow was filled with rocks. For an hour he lay awake going back step by step over the day, from the moment the guy picked him up at the airport. At four he drifted into a dark sleep. At five the alarm machine gunned him with sound, and left him, dyspeptic, ill, and still jet-lagged, sitting on the edge of the bed, phone in shivering hand, trying to get some sense out of the switchboard. Regan had to get up at five o’clock in New York because he wanted to speak to his guv’nor in London, Mr. Maynon, who would be on his second cup of tea and reading the Daily Express, it being ten in the morning in the City of Westminster.

  The switchboard operator at the Alex Hotel sounded as if he’d come in on the same plane from Europe as Regan, but probably from some embarkation point like Croatia, and now at five this morning he was getting his first chance to practice the English he’d learned from phonograph records.

  It took him ten minutes to understand Regan and thirty minutes to get London.

  Then Maynon was identifying himself on the line. Regan decided to cut preliminaries. “Mr. Maynon, Regan. I’ve run into a problem here.”

  “Is that what you call it?” Maynon asked, his voice as cold as Regan’s room. “I had Broughton on the line. Let’s not waste taxpayers’ money on this call—you tell me your side when you come back. What plane are you taking?”

  Regan said nothing. He let Maynon’s question hang in the air. He was going for one final time over his own calculations. Yeah, he could do that, just shrug it off. This was a gringo foul-up, nothing to do with crime in Brittania—everyone entitled once in his life to really screw up—and thank God it had happened in America—and all those myriad thoughts. But none of them really convincing him.

  “Now I know what’s on your mind; Broughton mentioned it—some bloody idea of staying on there and finding those artists.”

  “Right,” Regan said gently.

  “You’re to come home immediately and that is final and that is an order.”

  Regan watched the beginnings of a light drizzle start to paint lacework down the gray windows. He felt suddenly lonely—Maynon’s voice sounded as if it were coming down the line from another world. “Look, sir, I’m staying on. I’m going to have a bash at finding the guys.”

  “Regan, I refuse to pick up your expenses...” Maynon made it sound like a death warrant.

  “I don’t expect you to pay for my fuck-ups. That’s something that’s neither here nor there. But you know me well, sir, and you must be already resigned to the fact that I’m not leaving this town. So let’s get on with the real discussion— are you prepared to help me? Not money—other help?”

  Maynon said it after a long pause. “What d’you want?”

  Regan told him he wanted a name. Maynon had been in New York half a dozen times and had entertained the U.S. East Coast police often enough in London. Regan had blown out on the FBI, and he needed police help. He was looking for two drivers and four guys in a city of eight million permanent or transient inhabitants. He would need help from some detectives bureau.

  Maynon gave him a name. And Regan knew, as he wrote down “Captain Seebohm, Fifty-ninth Precinct,” why. Maynon would want to keep tabs on him—Seebohm would do that for him. Maynon was proud of a lot of things in his life, like his son getting into Oxford, and his daughter’s marriage to a leading Harley Street specialist, but before family crap, he was proudest first of the team he worked with, the Flying Squad, the two hundred hand-picked detectives of the premier force in Scotland Yard. It was the best kind of pride, detached, aggressive, and yet somehow paradoxically tolerant. He could brook no stranger who knocked the Flying Squad, or who wouldn’t admit that it was the premier CID force in England. At the same time he could understand and be proud of a wild man like Regan, who was a great copper until now, who never had made a major mistake in his entire career, who continually battled with the Maynons in his life, but who must be listed, because of his unorthodoxy, always as a potential danger. “I’ll talk to Seebohm. I don’t promise anything. He’s not a close friend. He may say he’s not interested. And look, Jack Regan, don’t sit in New York wasting your time, and, more important, other people’s time, because some villains yesterday made you look a fool. The FBI case is wiped. But these are professional criminals and sooner or later the FBI will get other evidence on them.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Regan said curtly. “I’ll keep in touch.” He put the phone down on his chief.

  Regan had a bank manager with the engaging name of Friendly. He was. He came on the line cheerful. He liked and had helped Regan through many financial crises. But this time Regan was embarrassed. The fact was he didn’t have any bread—specifically, he had around eighty pounds in his account, and it just seemed a little awkward to be phoning from New York asking for an overdraft of two hundred. Mr. Friendly was the kind of bloke who would ask very gently what would he need an overdraft for when he would obviously be on expenses?

  “And what exactly do you need an overdraft for, Inspector? Obviously you’re on expenses, aren’t you?” the mellow voice inquired.

  “Mr. Friendly, I need two hundred. I can’t give you reasons at the moment. I want to know, is it yes or no?” Regan asked gruffly, hoping that it sounded as if he was in New York on secret work involving matters of state security.

  Friendly was persuaded. Regan read off an address near Forty-fourth Street which he’d culled from the Yellow Pages. It was the address of a New York Chemical Bank branch. Friendly said he would telex the money immediately.

  Regan went back to bed and pondered his decision. He had specifically aske
d for two hundred pounds, a sum of money that he knew would not last him more than a couple of weeks in this city. So that was the target that he’d given himself— two weeks—to get the guys who had grabbed the papers. He decided that the energy expended, and the problems he’d have, and the two-hundred-pound stake would likely end up as the worst investment in money and materials that he’d ever make in his life.

  “Let’s see if you’re a professional.” Regan silently addressed himself to the man in the black worsted coat. “Let’s identify your buddy, and see if you’re both professionals.”

  Regan paced through the prelunch crowds of office workers milling around the drafty corridor of Sixth Avenue where it opens up into Central Park. The clouds were dark and bloated, and might even be threatening snow. The Croat on the hotel switchboard had told him that Manhattan had been a deep freeze for two months, but so far no snow. Weather affected Regan’s work. Heavy rain was something that kept most professional burglars or villains in their homes or pubs. Boiling sun or high humidity caused bickering among a gang dumped together in a cell to overheat into sudden violence, to the advantage of the police. Facing the world on the morning after the Great Mistake of a Career, he almost expected a biblical turn to the weather, monsoon rain arced with lightning or a blizzard piling snowdrifts across Rockefeller Center and burying from view the traffic on Fifth Avenue. But the weather was calm and dour and cold enough to be uncomfortable but not impossible. There were three reasons Regan paced fast. First to check that the man was keeping up with him—and he was. Second to try and identify the man’s companion. And third, to keep the circulation going.

  He reached the park and turned right.

  Then he saw the front man’s mutt.

  He was tall, also in a dark wool coat, but gray-blue. Regan was pretty sure this was the stringer, or mutt, to the guy in back of him, because the guy came across an intersection at the approximate pace of Regan and the guy in back of him, which forced this stringer to two fairly near-misses with the upstream traffic, the only person to violate the pedestrian warning light.

  They are professionals, Regan decided. Probably they’re in contact with each other by breast-pocket two-way walkie-talkie and lapel mikes. That kind of equipment is more likely to be FBI than anyone else. So Broughton was having him followed. And Regan could understand that Broughton had a good reason to do so. The Galliano/Cohen frame or heist or whatever had been worth a cool $120 million. Broughton would have to consider the possibility that Regan had been bribed by them to go along with the fake FBI offices act. Regan refused to leave New York. Maybe he had to hang around to collect the balance of the payoff. If that was a theory that Broughton was following, Regan was going to get nowhere. How could he function efficiently, discreetly, with two goons on his tail? As Maynon had pointed out, Galliano and company were career criminals. The FBI would write off the cock-up perpetrated by the London cop and wait maybe years for the inevitable. Career criminals like Galliano and Cohen sooner or later make mistakes.

  The mutt on the opposite side of the street, pacing along the park wall, suddenly stepped onto a bus that had pulled into the curb alongside him and was gone. Regan was nonplussed. That shouldn’t have happened. He decided he’d gotten it wrong. If he had to assume that the guy in back of him didn’t have a mutt, then maybe he wasn’t FBI, but something unspecific and quite different and possibly more worrying. Or if he did have one, where in the crowd was he? He headed on down Fifty-ninth toward Fifth and climbed the steps into the Plaza Hotel. He pretended to get in the way of a good-looking girl on the arm of a small, fat industrialist who had come through the revolving doors, and maneuvered himself for a quick glance back to confirm that the black worsted coat was still following him. It was.

  Kate and he had been here four times for afternoon tea. He remembered the Plaza had multiple exits. He padded across deep carpet and headed up and around to the reception area, and then a left turn and back along a front corridor and left heading toward the Palm Court. The worsted coat was a dozen feet in front of him, back to him, just heading in toward the reception area.

  Regan was of two minds. Having reversed the role, he could now follow the guy, and obviously at some point the guy would return to his base, giving Regan the chance to positively identify the man as an FBI employee. Regan was sure the black worsted was FBI. The only thing wrong with that idea was an FBI guy on surveillance would definitely have a stringer—and the stringer would spot Regan.

  The guy was heading in through the opening into the Palm Court, which was mainly deserted, a few female octogenarians cocooned in silk and mink waiting out their sagas. Regan followed behind the guy, and suddenly made up his mind. All he wanted confirmed was that the man was FBI. So why not ask him? He increased his pace, reached him, tapped him on the shoulder, and said into his ear, “Boo!”

  The man turned and fell back about four paces, in one continuous movement, as if he’d been trained. That gave him room to rip open his coat, pull out his Smith & Wesson, and fire at Regan.

  The bullet hit Regan in the shoulder and spun him. The man’s last pace backward had ended in a slide or jerk; the bullet was high. There was no other reason the bastard could have missed killing him.

  Regan bent double and ran. Get out, he thought, hit the street, find a crowd, outrun the guy, outrun his gun, find a cop, find the FBI on Sixty-ninth Street—-because whatever this public murderer did for his career he certainly did not work for the FBI. The heirs of J. Edgar Hoover were not permitted to gun down tourists, or for that matter anyone else, in a place like the Plaza Hotel.

  Regan was hurling himself through the chandeliered corridors, out of the great doors, down the steps, past the clusters of Victorian globes, past three hansom cabs, and then was off and sprinting toward Fifth Avenue. No way was he going to look over his shoulder until he was at least four blocks down Fifth.

  Five minutes later he had passed the block of the St. Regis Hotel and had nearly been flattened by a yellow cab turning onto East Fifty-fourth Street. He ran in the front door of Air France. Then he stepped out and looked back. No sign of pursuit.

  He tried to pull himself together, didn’t succeed, and wandered back in, still clutching his shoulder, trying to erase the pain of the wound off his face.

  He didn’t know how badly he’d been hit. He could feel the blood running down the front and back of his shirt.

  He saw a discreet sign for rest rooms and headed downstairs into a basement. He found the men’s, pushed the door open, and took the risk of stripping to his shirt in front of the washbasin and mirror. No one disturbed him. It took a few minutes. His left arm was too painful to use.

  The bullet had ripped a strip of flesh, about two inches long and a third of an inch deep, clean out of the upper shoulder, but had only grazed the bone. The flesh was ripped right off, and stitching wouldn’t stem the blood. The pain was great but the wound was light. Two shocks caused the real discomfort: opening his ruined jacket and finding the whole of his shirt soaked in blood, and realizing that this case now involved a man who was out to kill him—he had missed once, but next time would be trying that little bit harder.

  There are people who drink, and people who drink too much, and others who are alcoholics. No alcoholic goes around with a notice pinned to his back, but there are signs, as clear as a notice, that separate him from the heavy drinker or the amateur.

  Regan walked into O’Hanlon’s bar on Eighth Street and spotted Lieutenant Cassidy and knew he was an alcoholic.

  The first thing about an alcoholic is his hair. It looks dead, but it isn’t. Because the second thing about an alcoholic is dandruff. An alcoholic, no matter how thinly thatched, has a snowstorrn of dandruff on each shoulder that drifts down his lapels.

  The third thing about an alcoholic is his skin, bleached and taut, but somehow clear. Regan saw a man with a fair complexion, face a little white and eyes ringed in red. Cassidy was wearing a fur-collared Canadian red plaid anorak. Chief Seebohm’s assis
tant had said, “Blond hair, open-collar shirt, good-looking guy.” He’d been wrong only about the shirt. Cassidy was wearing a polo neck decorated with cigar ash.

  Chief Seebohm’s assistant at the Fifty-ninth Precinct had given Cassidy’s height as six feet two. The fourth thing about an alcoholic is that he never quite straightens. Regan studied Cassidy as he approached. He was not fooled. Lieutenant Cassidy might be slumped in his cups over a table looking like a guy who had just cold-turkeyed a heroin trip—but that was on first sight. On closer inspection, Regan realized that this was a physically very powerful, spare-bodied guy—a strong and dangerous man.

  The fifth thing about an alcoholic is the smell of his clothes. Medical science says that when alcohol hits the bloodstream it stimulates the heart, increases circulation, raises body heat, and produces sweat; that the ooze that comes out of the pores is saltwater pure and simple. Medical science is wrong. The crap that comes out the sweat pores of an alcoholic is alcohol plus a fixative. And this is a very powerful fixative, because that alcohol smell will never again come out of those clothes whether boiled in carbon tetrachloride or beaten on wet stones by naked Indian girls on the River Hoogli deep and wide.