Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters [36]
III
I had breakfast in my room next mornmg. From what I had heard, room service was not usual on tour boats, but Ali was now my best friend in the whole world and would – he earnestly assured me – lay down his life for me anytime I wanted. I told him I’d settle for a couple of boiled eggs and coffee. He was back in record time, with an array of food that looked like samples of the entire breakfast menu. I had to push him out of the door. Then I took food, coffee, and a pad and pencil out onto the balcony.
The views were pastoral – green fields, water buffalo knee-deep in the shallows, black-garbed women washing clothes and keeping a watchful eye on the children in their bright brief garments. I waved back at a group of kids who were lined up along the bank waving and calling.
I didn’t want to think about crime. Why the hell should I? I had done what I was supposed to do. All I was supposed to do. Maybe the flowerpot had been an unfortunate accident. Maybe John didn’t have a confederate on board. Even if both those comfortable assumptions were wrong, there was no reason to suppose I would recognize any of his henchmen.
I had met more crooks than I would have liked, but one is more than I would have liked. I made a list.
Some of the names on that list were out of the picture – dead, or in jail. The people in Rome who had been happily selling fake jewellery until I so rudely interrupted them were neither of the above. They had pinned the blame for that caper on John and were still leading la dolce vita, which just goes to prove that crime often does pay and that justice frequently doesn’t triumph. However, that had been a purely local operation, run by amateurs; it was most unlikely that they had extended their activities abroad.
The group I’d encountered in Sweden were another kettle of fish. They were all professionals and cold-blooded as sharks: big stupid Hans, who wasn’t really bad, just awfully good at obeying orders; Rudi, who was built like a ferret and had the same mind-set (kill things, kill lots of things); Max, who cut silhouettes as a relaxing hobby after a day of bumping people off; and their boss, Leif, the man who had been slashing at me with a long sharp knife before John removed him forcibly from my vicinity. No doubt about Leif’s death; I had identified the body.
I had a couple of Max’s silhouettes – souvenirs, presented to me by the artist himself. Mine had been fashioned of the traditional black paper, and very fine likenesses they were. Occasionally Max used red paper – for ‘a particular collection.’ He was a soft-spoken, harmless-looking little man, and he’d always been very pleasant to me up to and including the moment when I waved bye-bye to him just before they carted him off to the prison. He had even . . . Well, he hadn’t actually thanked me for helping to get rid of his boss, not in so many words, but he had implied that Leif’s death opened up new and interesting possibilities of advancement for him ‘If I can ever do you a favour, Dr Bliss,’ he had said . . .
I had never met anybody who scared me more than Max. I hoped and believed he was still in prison. But in any case, Max wouldn’t have collaborated with John if John had been the only other crook on earth. The antipathy was personal as well as professional. Max had absolutely no sense of humour and John drove him up the wall even when John wasn’t trying to, and he often was trying to.
The Trojan gold affair . . . I could forget about that one. All the villains were dead. Very, very unmistakably dead, including the head villain, who had fallen fifty feet onto a pile of rocks. John had been indirectly responsible for his demise, which had occurred in the course of one of John’s nerve-racking, impromptu rescues.
For the first time I found myself wondering how John had felt about killing those two men. Neither had been deliberate, premeditated murders; he could reasonably claim self-defence or maybe justifiable homicide.