I opened the envelope and, when the phone rang, had been sitting there for maybe five minutes, staring at Dr. Harrin's handwritten words to me, which included today's date and the time and pier number for the big shipment's delivery in the form of apparently harmless ceramic molds.
"Michael Hammer," I said.
"The shit hit the fan, kid."
"Hello to you, too, Pat. What shit hit what fan?"
"Looks like Evello clipped the Snowbird's wings, big-time. It's the worst mob bloodbath since St. Valentine's Day."
"No kidding. Capone missed Bugs Moran, though—you saying Wren wasn't there?"
Pat chuckled harshly. "Oh, he was there, all right, Wren, four bodyguards, and that society girl who found out the hard way slumming with scum has its risks."
"When was this?"
"Yesterday afternoon, at that discotheque of Wren's, which was closed at the time. We've reconstructed the action, at least in a preliminary fashion."
"Yeah?"
"Looks like Wren was having a sit-down with Evello and his boys, and Evello turned the tables. Would've taken at least three or four men to do this kind of damage, and nasty customers, at that."
"Takes all kinds to make a world."
"Yeah, but what a world. Anyway, this may make your life easier—we traced those two freaks who tried to hit you and took out Doc Harrin instead, and they were in the Snowbird's flock, all right. So you can safely say that Wren was the source of the attempts on your life, and the Snowbird won't be giving anybody a hard time anymore, except maybe the devil."
Nope, I thought. The devil was on Wren's side—I saw him there, yesterday....
"I appreciate you sharing the lowdown, old buddy," I said. "Anything on the supposed big shipment?"
"There's thinking that the stuff is coming in this week, maybe even today. The T-men are blanketing the harbor."
"That would take a lot of T-men. That's a thousand miles of shoreline and maybe a dozen active ports."
"It's more narrowed down than that, Mike. Agents Radley and Dawson are checking every ship coming in from France—from passenger liners to container carriers. That's still a good number of vessels, but it can be done."
"Just because the Syndicate buys its product in France doesn't mean they shipped from there."
"No. But it's a start. Narrows down the needle hunt from the whole damn farm to a haystack."
I grunted. "Good luck to them."
He laughed in a world-weary way exclusive to longtime cops. "Why do we bother, Mike? So we find and stop the super shipment, what then? There'll be another, and another. You can't stop a vicious circle."
"If a snake is eating its tail, chum, you can still cut it in half."
"Yeah. You ought to sew that on a sampler and hang it in your office."
He didn't know how close he was.
The Port of New York's piers have one thing in common: they stink. All that salt air gets swamped in grease and oil and dead fish and the heady bouquet of workingman body odor. Add to that the cacophony of man over nature, squawking of seagulls and lazy lapping tide drowned out by grinding machinery and cargo pallets slamming to the cement, while the toots of tugboats vainly fight the throaty whistles of steamships. Anybody confusing the New York waterfront for a beach has never seen sand.
The S.S. Paloma out of Marseilles docked at 1:04 P.M. on a chilly afternoon that made its nasty point that summer was over and fall was here, and live with it. Even with the canopy, women held down their skirts and men clamped their hats on, rattling down the gangplank, eight-hundred-some passengers disembarking into the waiting arms of U.S. Customs.
The Customs officers looked a little like porters only with badges on their caps and, in some cases, guns on their hips. This all took place dockside in a big brick open-sided shed, where the officers inspected every bag, looking for all the smuggler's tricks, and they knew a few.
After the passengers, the cargo—fairly limited, as this was a luxury liner not a container carrier—began its unloading process, stevedores swinging down nets of boxed and crated material and dropping them with impressive precision onto the dock. A number of trucks and vans were waiting, but so were the Customs officers, who did not turn anything over until crates had been opened and checked and weighed on a big ungainly scale that looked a little like a medieval torture rig.
This was standard procedure, but what wasn't standard procedure was the assembly off to one side within the brick shed of about a dozen officers in the same caps with badges, only otherwise in denim, the backs of their jackets emblazoned U.S. CUSTOMS SEARCHERS. The denim, I supposed, was for the rough, dirty work of actually having to search ships, including holds and engine rooms. But right now these guys, roughneck-looking for feds, were just milling in smoke-'em-if-you-got-'em mode.
I was milling myself, on the fringes, having moved in close to that shed and the offloading ship, after watching from behind the picket fence where people meeting passengers gathered. Despite all the T-men of various stripes—with something big obviously in the wind, beside the usual dock smells—security was nothing special, as far as getting onto the dock itself was concerned.
That was when I saw him—looking as innocuous as a ceramics mold, Mr. Elmain, the plump little guy whose gray hair had a monk's spot of baldness, wearing an off-white jumpsuit whose back said VILLAGE CERAMICS SHOPPE. Three other guys were with him, in similar jumpsuits, and they didn't look so innocuous—they might have been hoods. Or they might have been teamsters. A rose by any other thorn.
"Mr. Hammer?"
I turned and saw Agent Radley, slender, flint-eyed, and typically impeccable in yet another gray suit, with his dark blue tie flapping like a flag in the breeze. Dawson wasn't with him—probably covering another pier.
"Agent Radley. Kind of a chilly one."
He nodded, skipping the small talk. "What are you doing here?"
"Thought I might find you. Captain Chambers said you fellas were checking every ship in from Marseilles this week. Kind of tedious work."
"We're used to it. How can I help you?"
From where I stood, I could see a Customs officer walking Mr. Elmain toward the open-walled brick shed, glancing at the bill of lading, and affixing it to a clipboard.
Radley was frowning at me. "Mr. Hammer? Why are you here?"
I cleared my throat. "I wanted you to know I got a package from Dr. Harrin."
His eyes and nostrils flared. "What kind of package, Mr. Hammer?"
Now the Customs officer was prying open the lid of a wooden crate while Mr. Elmain looked on with serene innocence. The officer stared in at the carefully stacked and excelsior-packed ceramic molds, each of which was two facing pieces strapped or rubber-banded together, varying in size and shape from as big as a medium pizza to as small as a transistor radio. The officer slipped the rubber band off one about the size of a football, only square, and I was pretty sure that mold was of a standing Santa with a bag of goodies over his shoulder.
Christmas underwrites the rest of our year, Shirley Vought had said.
"Mr. Hammer—what kind of package?"
"Oh, the doc sent me a framed saying—maybe you're aware, he had a bunch of those on his office walls, over at Dorchester Medical College?"
"Actually, no. Why? Is it significant?"
"I don't know. You tell me. It says, 'At the darkest moment comes the light.'"
He shrugged, shook his head. "No. That has no special significance, as far as I can tell."
The Customs officer was having Elmain sign some papers on the clipboard.
Radley sighed, and he looked ten years older than when I'd met him, just days ago.