The Corpse Without a Country (10 page)

“No,” she said, “but I think I found another one of the same thing.” She turned and went into the studio. I followed and watched her take something from a desk drawer. She came back.

“I went to the Rock after they’d gone,” she said, “and I found this blown down in a crevass between some boulders.”

I took what she held out to me. It was a strip of paper, perhaps two inches wide and eight inches long. There were sharp creases to show where the paper had once been wrapped around something rectangular. The ends of the strip showed traces of glue and had obviously once been overlapped and joined. On the outside of the paper was printed
Anglo-Southeast African Bank, Ltd
., and beneath that the figures 1,000 with the sign for “pound” in front of them.

I said, “This is a wrapper for a thousand pounds’ worth of bank notes. That’s nearly thirty thousand American clams, Jodi.”

We looked blankly at one another. I said, “You didn’t mention this to Arne?”

“Just because he was there and I found this the same day doesn’t mean there’s any connection between it and him.”

That was pretty sad reasoning, considering that Ilona had been there too. I said, “Of course not,” folded the wrapped and put in my pocket. I didn’t know what it meant, if anything, but I was going to try to find out.

I said, “Did you put my clothes in the spare bedroom?”

“There weren’t any clothes,” Jodi said.

I could hear my voice rising to a squeak. “No clothes?”

She said, “Your apartment was torn up worse than my studio. And all your suits and shoes, even your overcoat, were ripped to shreds.”

Jodi handed me an envelope. I took it, feeling slightly numb. The envelope had my name on the outside in a neat, feminine handwriting. Inside were five one hundred dollar bills and a note. I read the note and then handed it to Jodi. It read:

“Please use this money to replace your wardrobe. You do not wear blue well at all. May I suggest more browns? Ilona.”

I was too far gone even to swear.

J
ODI HADN’T TOLD THE EXACT
truth. There were some clothes, the outfit Arne had lent me the night before. She had tossed it on the bed in the guest bedroom. I went in there and put it on.

We went into town in her car and I used part of Ilona’s five hundred dollars to buy a sport coat, a pair of slacks, and shoes. Jodi thought it was very funny that the outfit I liked best leaned heavily toward brown.

I climbed back into her car, dressed in my new clothes. “Shut up,” I said. “You saw how little choice I had.”

Jodi gurgled a while longer. Then she said, “Now where, Peter?”

I touched my wallet where the bank note wrapper was folded away. “I want to talk to Arne first,” I said.

We drove to his yard on the Canal. The
Norway Queen
was where she had been the night before, and the
Flyer
occupied the dock opposite. She had apparently come in during the night and was now waiting for Reese to begin repairing the fire damage. From where I stood, I could see the black streaks by her engine room hatch.

Jodi and I walked down the dock to the
Queen
. She stopped at the foot of the gangplank and called, “Coming aboard.”

There was no answer. Jodi gave me a surprised glance and went up on deck. I followed. She trotted ahead, going into the pilot house. When I got there, she was standing at the entrance to the forward cabin, her eyes clouded with worry.

“He’s gone, Peter. So is his seabag, the big one he always takes when he goes away for any length of time.”

I looked around the pilot house. The litter of papers looked no different from the way it had last night. The odor of cooked salmon hung on the air. A half filled bottle of scotch was the most prominently displayed article in sight. It stood precariously on top of a pile of papers. I rescued it and sampled it before I put it in the liquor rack.

I said, “It isn’t like Arne to go charging off, away from his precious
Queen.”

Jodi was pawing aimlessly at the papers on his desk. I went to help her. I don’t know what I expected to find, nor was I sure there was anything worth finding. But it seemed the logical thing to do.

And I did find something. I opened the bottom drawer of his desk. The other two drawers had been crammed full of invoices and receipts; this one was nearly empty. Nearly but not quite. It contained three articles: two photographs, copies of those in Jodi’s studio, and a familiar-looking brown paper wrapper. On the outside it read:
Anglo-Southeast Africa Bank, Ltd. Pounds: 1,000
.

Only this wrapper had its ends glued together and inside it, neatly stacked, were one hundred brightly printed ten-pound notes.

I pushed the door shut and turned to Jodi. She was right beside me; she had seen the same thing I had. Her eyes were wide, stricken, and her soft olive complexion had a puttyish cast to it.

I said, “Take it easy. There could be a perfectly logical explanation.”

I thought, this could be the break I’ve been looking for. I hoped it wasn’t because of the way it made Arne look bad. But I had that feeling an investigator gets when he stumbles onto something valuable.

I said, “Let’s go see if Reese knows where Arne went.”

We walked over to the building where Reese Fuller had his office. It was Saturday, and there were no workers on the docks and none in the small group of second-floor offices. There was not even Reese. We knocked on the door bearing his name for some time before Jodi took a key from her purse and put it in the lock.

She turned the key and then the knob. The door refused to budge. She turned the key back and twisted the knob and the door opened. She said, “It wasn’t locked! And Reese never leaves anything unlocked!”

I pushed the door open and for the third time that day looked at a mess. Someone had raised particular hell with Reese’s private office. The desk was gutted. File drawers lay on their sides with their contents spilled out. Even the rug had been rolled back as if someone was looking for a secret hiding place.

I went quickly through the rooms that adjoined the office: his secretary’s cubbyhole, the john, a closet. I half expected to find Reese somewhere, his head laid open. I almost hoped I would.

But he was as gone as Arne Rasmussen.

Jodi whispered, “What in heaven’s name could they be looking for?”

“By ‘they’ do you mean Ilona and Mr. Ghatt?”

“Who else?” she said.

“Do you think they put the photos in your studio?”

Jodi made a shrugging motion. “Who else?” she asked again.

Frankly, I had no answer. I started pawing through the mess lying beside Reese’s desk, as if I might find the answer there.

Jodi attacked the spilled files almost frantically.

I was the one who found it. The desk yielded nothing and I joined her by the files. I was going through a sheaf of work orders, running back to three years before, when my eye caught a single word peeping out from under a paper stapled above it.

The word was Zwahili.”

I shut my eyes, trying to recall where I had heard it. And then as if I were watching a movie film, I saw Tom Harbin lying in the cockpit of the little runabout. His lips moved, and he said, one word before he went into his coma.

He said, “Zwahili.”

I lifted the top paper and looked at what was written on the one beneath. “Zwahili” was part of an address. The paper was headed: Anglo-Southeast African Bank, Ltd., Zwahili, Southeast Africa. And beneath it was an acknowledgment of a query by Reese Fuller concerning the value of Southeast African pounds in terms of American dollars. At that time, two years before, each pound had been worth two dollars and fifty cents.

Unless that value had changed radically recently, that packet of notes in Arne’s desk was worth twenty-five hundred dollars.

I said, “I wonder what Reese was doing selling Southeast African pounds.”

Jodi had her back to me; she was bent over a pile of file folders. She swung around, using her heels for a pivot, nearly lost her balance, and caught my arm for support.

“Selling what?”

I showed her the paper. The puzzled expression on her face cleared. She said, “Of course. This was about the time he was in England. The salvage job he worked on was for the Southeast African government. They paid him in their pounds.”

Her eyes were bright. “Doesn’t that explain those notes Arne has?”

I was looking at another sheaf of papers with “Zwahili” on them. These were letters from the government maritime commission and had to do with Reese’s accepted bid on the salvage job. I said in answer to Jodi’s question, “That’s probably it.” But something was nagging me, a vague remembrance of having heard the name Zwahili before. The whole memory was triggered by seeing it written here.

I tossed the papers aside and dug into the litter until I located Reese’s telephone. It seemed to be intact. I called his home. His manservant informed me that Mr. Fuller had not been in all night, that he was still not in, and that he, the servant, had no idea of the master’s whereabouts.

I relayed this information to Jodi and called my office. The boss answered the phone himself. I said, “Seen little Emily?”

“No, and I want her!” he snapped at me. “There’s work to do here.”

I said, “The cops can’t find her either.” Before he could demand an explanation of that, I asked, “How’s Tom this morning?”

“No change.” He sounded less unhappy. “But no worse. These comas sometimes last a while. If the patient doesn’t begin to get worse, there’s a good deal of hope.”

I said, “You have a guard on Tom still?” When he left, he had made arrangements for a twenty-four hour guard to be posted in Tom’s room.

“Naturally.” He was so pleased that Tom had not worsened that he jumped right down my throat. “And where in the patented hell have you been?”

I said stiffly, “Working.”

“On whom?” he asked crudely.

I said, “It’ll all be in my report. And speaking of reports, why would anyone want Tom’s badly enough to kill for it?”

“Nonsense,” he said briskly. “I have the carbon copy right here. There’s nothing in it but routine.”

I gawped into the phone, feeling like seven and a half kinds of jackass. The carbon copy! When any of us made out a report, he made three copies, filing two in the office. With being chased and finding Fenney’s body and getting to know Jodi, the carbons had completely slipped my sometimes not too agile mind.

I said, “I’ll be down to pick up the copy.” And, to salvage a little of my ego, I added, “Meanwhile, figure out what ‘Zwahili’ means.”

Before he could answer, I hung up. I said to Jodi, “Let’s go.”

When we were in the car heading for the office, I told her about the carbon copies. She said, “But surely Emily would have known that there were copies in the office.”

I said, “Hell, yes! And she’d have tipped Ridley off to that effect, wouldn’t she?” And now Ilona chasing me for the report made no sense at all. It made less sense than did Ilona ripping my clothes.

Jodi said, “How is Tom, Peter?”

“No worse,” I said. I didn’t want to talk; I wanted to think. Jodi was bright enough to be quiet and leave me to it. I was wasting my time. When we reached the office, I still had no answers.

The boss was waiting, a carbon of the report on his desk. I gave it to Jodi and planted her in the outer office. I left her reading through it.

The boss looked as if he’d been studying. He had an encyclopedia open to the “Z’s,” and a file of newspapers spread out. Before he could ask questions, I told him what had been happening to me. He got a fine belly laugh out of my clothes being ripped. I let him enjoy himself.

Then I said, “Now about this Zwahili business.”

He looked down at the encyclopedia. “Zwahili,” he read, “population 31,342, cit, capital Southeast Africa. A member of the British Commonwealth of nations.” He skipped a few lines. “Monetary unit is the Southeast African pound, often referred to as the Zwahili pound for the city where the government bank is located.” He stabbed a finger at one of the newspapers. “Said pound is now worth close to three dollars due to the discovery of uranium deposits about three years ago. They will be exploited soon with British and American capital.”

I said, “Thanks for the geography and economics lesson.”

He said, “Where’s your memory? Two years ago this summer, two hundred thousand pounds in Zwahili bank notes were stolen from a London banknote printer.”

My memory was there. It had just needed activating. I didn’t have to look at the newspapers on his desk to recall that robbery. The Southeast African government had their bank notes printed in England as many Commonwealth countries do, as we print bank notes for Mexico and other places in the Americas.

And two years ago, two hundred thousand pounds—now worth almost six hundred thousand green U.S. dollars—had been lifted, all in five, and ten-pound notes, all hot off the presses.”

I said, “By now, those notes won’t worth be worth paper. The Zwahili government probably changed their currency.”

“Nope,” he said. “They figured they were solvent enough to stand the loss, if they had to. But they don’t figure on having to. Someday they expect those bills to start appearing.”

“But none have yet?” I was beginning to get excited now.

“I just called the Consulate,” he said. “So far, no soap. But Scotland Yard is on the case. So are private detectives. So is the Zwahili government. Give them time.”

They’d had two years already, I thought. I said, “If some smart moneyman has those bills, he can feed them into the various free markets all over the world—Switzerland, Tangier, Portugal—and probably net two-fifty on each pound, and be gone before anyone can put the finger on him.”

The boss nodded. “If,” he said, “this smart boy has a big enough organization.”

When he said “organization” I thought of Reese Fuller and of Arne and Ilona and Mr. Ghatt.

And of the packet of Zwahili bank notes in Arne’s desk.

I
SAID
, “T
ODAY
J
ODI
R
ASMUSSEN
and I ran across some correspondence between Reese Fuller and the Zwahili government.”