I Spy Page 3

  Rooted to the spot, Trey watched the seething pool of speckled grey birds, the woman carelessly waving her arms and laughing as the birds flew up and around her in a fluttering, feathered cloud. He was so transfixed by the sight that he forgot, for a moment, that he was lost and alone...then the hopelessness of his situation returned, and like a wave crashing onto a beach it washed away his moment of happiness, leaving him feeling desolate.

  Straightening himself up, Trey took a deep breath: this was not the way a private eye would act! Doing something – anything, really – would be far better than moping around and doing nothing. He was sure he could find some boat to take him back to the Excelsior (the place was full of them), so all he had to do was work out how to pay for his ride. It was as he was wondering how he could successfully mime “I have money back at my hotel!” that he got the distinct impression, like at the train station in Paris, that he was being watched.

  The boy, older than him, was wearing a threadbare, faded red shirt, baggy sailcloth trousers and leather sandals; he was sallow-skinned, with a dark, wispy smudge on his upper lip and badly pockmarked skin, and he was staring right at him through narrowed eyes. This time, unlike in Paris, Trey knew in his gut that he hadn’t got the wrong end of the stick, especially when the boy didn’t look away the moment he’d been noticed, instead making it obvious he didn’t care that he’d been caught out. A half smile, half sneer curled the boy’s lip as he glanced to his left and nodded to someone else. A signal, Trey realized, that it was time for the someone else to make their move.

  Heart in his mouth, Trey searched the crowds for the person the boy might have been signalling to, at the same time trying to move away and lose himself in the forest of people. He’d been targeted. They thought he looked like an easy mark (he’d show them!) and they were going to rob him, or worse, once they discovered he had no money – and for all he knew there were enough of them to already have every escape route sewn up tight. On top of which he did not have a whole heap of options open to him. He could stand his ground and fight, hoping that someone would step in and help him, or he could run.

  Trey caught the glint of polished, sharpened steel in the boy’s hand, and he ran.

  Head down and heart thumping he dived into the crowds and pushed blindly past whoever was in his way, aware that this was not winning him any friends, but in no mood to care. He wanted to look behind him to see if he was being followed, but he was too worried that there might be someone in front of him that he really needed to avoid. Then, out of the corner of his eye, to his right, he saw a flash of red and realized the boy with the knife had somehow manage to snake his way through the crush and was closing in on him like a fox on a chicken.

  Trey veered left, wondering if now was the time he should begin squawking “HELP!” at the top of his voice, and then found that he’d broken clear of the crowds (which, although they’d slowed him down, had also provided some protection) and was now out in the open. A snap to catch. Spotting a narrow street that kind of looked vaguely familiar, Trey pelted for it, cursing the fact that getting his penknife out of his pocket and running as fast as he could over these ancient and very uneven flagstones was just not possible.

  He was fast, but his pursuers were faster, hungrier, more desperate...and, as it turned out, there were three of them, and they knew their way round Venice a whole lot better than he did. Trey had figured he’d at least two people right on his tail, but he had no idea there would be a third waiting for him halfway down the almost passage-like street he’d run into.

  He was trapped!

  Skidding to a halt the moment he saw the third figure barring his way, Trey glanced over his shoulder to see Red Shirt and his friend sauntering towards him. No need to run now that their quarry had nowhere to go. And then there he was, surrounded, with Red Shirt right in front of him, a thin, humourless smile drawn across his face; up close Trey could see that the boy’s teeth were bad, his clothes worn, his hands dirty and fingernails bitten. He was just some street-poor kid, like the ones back home in Chicago, from round Maxwell Street and Addams, parts of town he knew only by reputation. But before Trey could start to feel sorry for the boy he jabbed a finger hard in his chest.

  “Dammi tuoi i soldi.” The boy rubbed two fingers against a thumb. “Dollari, ragazzo – ora!”

  The boy wanted money, that much was obvious, and he was demanding it – with menace – which Trey did not appreciate one bit. He jabbed back.

  “Beat it, palooka!”

  Silence, as a slightly confused look passed across Red Shirt’s face...and then, as the boy sneered, the silence was broken by a metallic TCH-KK! and Trey found himself going cross-eyed as he stared at the needle-sharp point of a switchblade. He had, in his anger, forgotten about the knife.

  “Cretino...”

  Trent Gripp would not have stood for this kind of treatment, but like he always said, there were times when acting brave was the height of foolishness, and to his mind this was beginning to look like one of them. The trouble was, having already acted the hard-boiled tough guy, no matter what he did now he was going to be in deep trouble because when this joker started to cut up rough, things were going to get bloody. And the blood was going to be his...

  “E’scuse me, you have trouble, kid?”

  Trey whirled round without thinking and was amazed to see a man in a dark suit and grey fedora, standing a few feet away with both hands in his trouser pockets...a man with a heavy accent, a pencil mustache and smoking a yellow cigarette. Signor Giovedi! Before he had a moment to say anything, like “Watch out – he’s got a knife!”, Trey saw Signor Giovedi slowly unbutton his double-breasted suit jacket and let it swing open to reveal...the butt of a pistol.

  “Lasciatelo anddre, ragazzi.” Signor Giovedi jerked his thumb for Red Shirt and his friends to leave, and be quick about it.

  “Perché, che dice?”

  “Why? Ho una pistola – va bene?”

  Trey felt like a pawn in a very dangerous game of chess, stuck in the middle of the board and unable to move because there was a knife still hovering far too close to his face for comfort.

  “I thin’ you should be ready to move, my small fren’.”

  “Me?” Trey hated the fact that his voice had sounded like a mouse’s squeak.

  Signor Giovedi didn’t answer, instead he took his right hand out of his suit pocket and let go a fistful of copper and silver coins. They went everywhere, bouncing off the ground like metal rain, flashing as they spun like miniature tops. The sudden gesture, the noise, the fact that this man had thrown away money as if it was rubbish, distracted Red Shirt and his friends long enough for Signor Giovedi to grab Trey’s arm, hauling him away and back out into the piazza.

  Trey was lost for words as he stared at Signor Giovedi, taking a moment to realize that his beautiful companion was standing next to him. She was observing him with an unnerving Mona Lisa smile on her face (although he had to say the rest of her looked nothing like the picture his father had dragged him to the Louvre in Paris to see). What on earth was going on? Had he been right all along and this man really had been following him and his father...and if so, why take such a risk, even if he had got a gun (and exactly why did he have a gun?). Questions tumbled around his head, unable to find a way out of his mouth.

  “You hunky-dory now?” Signor Giovedi lit a cigarette.

  “You ask me, this kid is the picture of lost, César.”

  The possible Signora Giovedi was chewing gum and spoke with a raw Brooklyn accent, pronouncing the name as Say-zar; she did not, Trey thought, talk anything like the way she looked, but after what he’d been through any American accent was posi-lutely fine by him.

  “You lost, kid?” she queried. “Not that I’m surprised in a place like this...they got streets here narrower than a Mexican gunslinger’s tie, right, César?”

  César nodded. “E’zactly, amore mio...narrow streets. Where you got to be, amico? Where you stay?”

  “The Excelsior
.”

  “Very chi-chi.” The woman raised one finely-plucked eyebrow.

  “Molto,” agreed César. “Less go, ragazzo, we take you there...”

  Trey hung back, torn between having no idea what to do and really wanting to be taken back to the hotel. Any of the private eyes in Black Ace would, no doubt about it, trust their instincts...but those instincts would also be backed up by the fact that those PIs were packing heat, just like Signor Giovedi was. And what kind of person wandered round on holiday with a gun in a shoulder holster?

  “You coming or what, kid?” the woman asked, blowing a large, bright pink bubble.

  Quite why the sight convinced Trey it would be okay to go with them he didn’t know, but it did.

  Which was how, after being treated to a large vanilla ice cream, covered in real milk chocolate shavings, and an orange fizzy drink, Trey found himself in a water taxi, being delivered back to the Hotel Excelsior by César and Isabella Giovedi – as unlikely a pair of rescuers as it was possible to imagine.

  César was in business (and although he never specified the business of what, Trey thought he had a pretty good idea that it was probably as legit as a nine dollar note), and Izzy, as she liked to be called, offered that she had been in the business of show, as she put it, before the two of them had met and married. César did say that he came from Naples, and he was taking his wife on a grand European tour, explaining in great detail that although Izzy was also Italian she had been born in New York. But he never said one word about what Trey thought of as The Incident, and neither did he explain how come they’d just happened to be there or why he’d stepped in to help. While Trey was desperate to ask, he thought that maybe it would be better if he just accepted what had taken place and left it at that; frankly, he was so glad to still be in one piece that he was prepared to believe whatever he was told.

  César and Izzy had waltzed into the Excelsior and taken him right up to the manager’s office, where César explained about Trey getting lost and he and his wife finding him; he did not, to Trey’s great relief, go into too much detail. The manager, acting as if this sort of thing was a daily occurrence, replied that he would make sure every effort was made to contact Mr. MacIntyre and inform him of his son’s safe return. All the while Trey stood in the middle of the proceedings feeling like he had to be asleep and dreaming as it was all so weird.

  After saying a loud and quite embarrassing Arriverderci! – Izzy planting a kiss on both his cheeks – Trey went up to the suite to wait for his father. Who, if Trey was any judge, was not going to be best pleased with how the day had turned out. Once he’d washed off Izzy’s lipstick he went out onto the balcony; the red Macchi M.52 had gone, as he’d feared it would have, and a boat was now moored where it had been when he’d left the hotel in the morning.

  It had been a strange day – a lot more exciting than he’d ever imagined it would be – plus, in the process of getting lost and being found, the story of The Man With the Pencil Mustache had gotten even more mysterious. He didn’t want to believe his rescuers had been lying to him, but wasn’t it really a bit too much of a coincidence that they should be right there when he needed them? If that kind of thing ever happened in one of his stories he always thought the writer was taking the easy way out and not being very original. There was now no doubt in his mind that there was definitely more to this than met the eye. But exactly what was completely beyond him.

  6 “WHERE EAST MEETS WEST, SON!”

  The next day Trey’s punishment for getting himself lost turned out to be going back with The Formidable Aurelia to every single one of the places he’d missed seeing the previous day. All on his own, while his father stayed at the hotel. No doubt working.

  He was beginning to wonder why on earth his pop had ever brought him on this trip if all he was going to do was act like he was in the office all the time; while none of his friends ever spent that much time with their fathers, except Morty Sorgenson, because Mr. Sorgenson was a lot older and had retired, he had thought that, being as how they were on holiday, it might have been different. It would be nice to get to know each other better, like he felt he knew his gramps. But then he did spend a lot of time with Gramps – or, more correctly, his gramps found the time to spend a lot of time with him. Trey often spent some of his holidays on the ranch Gramps had outside Topeka.

  Trey’s trip turned out to be more torture than punishment as he spent the whole, entire day being bludgeoned at high-volume with a continuous barrage of “information of interest to the touristic person”, followed by questions to see that he’d been paying attention.

  It seemed to Trey as if Signorina Sanpietro hardly paused for breath from the moment they left the hotel until she delivered him to the station at 15.30 precisely, where his father was waiting to get back on board the Orient Express. Next major stop Belgrade, capital city of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which Trey thought had to be the longest name for a country ever, and with the added attraction of being somewhere The Formidable Aurelia wasn’t.

  Thankfully the stop was too short and too late in the day to actually do anything remotely cultural, but long enough for Trey’s father to send a telegram back to the Chicago office and give him a lecture about the city and its environs (“Belgrade lies on the Danube, son – which is, at over 1,700 miles from start to finish, Europe’s second longest river”) and for him to write his mother a postcard. Then, according to Trey’s pocket compass – the one that had been in his other jacket the day before, when he’d really needed it – the train began to travel in a more south-easterly direction as it made its way towards the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.

  The fact that this happened to be one of the oldest cities in Europe was somewhat less fascinating to Trey than that it was also his mother’s name, except she spelled it Sophia. On the other hand, the news that the country’s Tsar, Boris III, had escaped assassination not once but twice in the last couple of years – and that the Tsar’s actual name was Boris Klemens Robert Maria Pius Ludwig Stanislaus Xaver Saxe-Coburg Gotha – was the kind of information that you could call enlightening and well worth knowing.

  It was, though, a pretty dull journey as his father had made it quite clear that he must not, under any circumstances, bother anyone. Which meant that he was banned from investigating who and what was on the train (you never knew, the Giovedis might be on board...). People, his father pointed out, did not want the company of an over-imaginative boy. Trey did not believe this was true, but the veto had been imposed and he could tell by the look on his father’s face that it was not about to be lifted any time soon...

  It was at seven o’clock in the morning, two boring days after they’d left Venice, when the train finally pulled into Constantinople’s Sirkeci Terminal. The station was on the western side of the city (“...where the Orient casts its eye at Europe across the straits of the Bosphorus, son!”). It all sounded mighty romantic, as his gramps would put it, but the reality came as something of a shock.

  Stations were – by the very nature of their being full of trains, luggage and people attempting to get themselves somewhere or other in a hurry – very noisy, dirty and somewhat chaotic places. This one was chaotic, dusty and very hot, but, Trey had to admit, it was also pretty grand, with what looked like a fancy restaurant and a lobby that was the size of a small church.

  But once they were finally on their way to the hotel – there had been something of a scene at the station when it looked like a piece of their luggage might have gone missing – it became clear to father and son that everywhere in Constantinople was generally a heck of a lot noisier and hugely more chaotic than the station had been. And not as grand, it had to be said.

  The taxi which their porter had hired for them was a dusty old Studebaker “Big Six” that had, much like its unshaven, fly-blown driver, definitely seen better days. The canvas of the landau top was ripped, crudely mended and full of holes which Trey thought looked like they’d been made by bullets; it would, his fa
ther commented, be about as useful as a colander if the weather should decide to turn rainy.

  And the rest of the car was not in much better shape: the leather seats were split, spilling out coarse stuffing; what wood veneer was left in the car had lost its varnish; and the yellowing windscreen was sporting a couple of large cracks. Parts of the car were actually being held together by string and the whole contraption gave every impression that it would fall apart if the driver attempted to go faster than a slow trot – luckily something the crowded streets were never going to allow to happen. But at least it was a car. Most of the traffic on the streets seemed to be either horse-drawn or pulled by a mangy donkey.

  The Hotel Pera Palas, which was where people who had travelled down to Constantinople on the Orient Express stayed, was some way from the station and getting there turned out to be more of an adventure than a mere taxi ride. The driver, who shouted, swore and spat his way through the traffic, finally negotiated them onto the Galata Bridge, which Trey knew, from his cursory perusal of his father’s guidebook, was going to take them across a stretch of water called the Golden Horn.

  Because he knew this was a somewhat legendary and historic geographical feature Trey readied himself for yet another of his father’s lecturettes, but it failed to arrive, a fact Trey put down to the disconcerted, not to say stunned expression on his father’s face; he really did not much like spitting, or shouting, for that matter. Left to his own devices Trey was free to stare out at life in Constantinople.

  This did not look like a place that was big on the kind of culture he’d recently been subjected to, which was fine by him, and the journey across the low, wide, slatted wooden bridge, while unbelievably slow because of all the pedestrians, was fascinating. People were fishing off the sides, and everywhere he looked there were sail boats of all sizes, steamboats and tiny skiffs zipping about like water bugs on a pond.