She left me outside the restaurant and took a cab back uptown to see her friends on the Park. And it was then, just afterwards, that I saw the man on the other side of the Avenue trying too eagerly to hail a cab going in the same direction. He had stepped a yard off the pavement by the cross street, with the lights green behind his back. The cab driver, crossing town with his foot down, didn’t give him a chance. The near-side fender hit the man in the legs, spinning him over like a ninepin.
I ran across to the accident, the taxi stalled in the middle of the crossroads, the body lying at the corner a few yards from the gutter — a tall fellow in a dark mackintosh, hatless, fair-haired. And that was the first thing I saw, before I’d even noticed the twisted leg tucked in behind him — the moustache, the fair-haired Pancho Villa whiskers. It was the man who had bumped into us two hours before, forty blocks uptown outside the church.
Coincidence? I hardly considered this after my conversation with Helen Jackson ten minutes before. The man had been following us all morning. And there must almost certainly be two men involved, I thought, if it was a proper surveillance — one for each of us in case we separated, or just a second man to relieve the first. We’d been about the city now for nearly five hours.
I could have lost him in the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. But I wanted to see if I could identify any second pursuer. He’d surely come, if he existed, to help his colleague, I thought. Or would he have tried to follow Helen Jackson uptown? A difficult decision. But I thought he’d have realised it was too late to go after her. If there was a second man, he’d soon be here, somewhere in the crowd.
I hadn’t long. I bent over the figure in the road, pulled his wallet out and emptied the contents over his chest. Then I started to pick all the pieces of paper up again and put them back. Half-way through, I found his card: James Moloney, with the address and phone number of a New York private detective agency. I pushed it up my sleeve just as another man joined me with tufts of white hair sticking out from beneath a small black homburg, carrying a pack of sandwiches. And then the cab driver arrived. The three of us leant over the body. Pancho Villa was unconscious. There was a graze on the side of his head, but no bleeding. No more than a broken leg perhaps.
‘Jesus, that guy is lucky to be alive,’ the cab driver said. ‘Don’t move him. What are you doing?’ The homburg had seen the half-filled wallet on his chest and was looking through it. ‘Just checking his name and address — and his Blue Shield card. He’s going to need it. Go phone a hospital. Where’s the nearest?’
‘Hell, I don’t know,’ the driver said. ‘St Luke’s I guess, up on Morningside Drive. OK, you stay with him.’
A police car had stopped over by the restaurant and two patrolmen walked casually across the Avenue towards us. The cab was still in the middle of the crossroads.
‘Where’s the driver of that cab?’ the first patrolman shouted. ‘Let’s get it the hell out of here.’
‘He’s gone to phone the hospital,’ the homburg said. The first patrolman went to move the cab while the second bent over the body. ‘Who is he? What’s his name?’ He took his wallet and started shuffling through the papers and a few folded bills inside.
I eased my way out of the crowd, hurried across the Avenue and went back inside the restaurant. There was a piece of clear glass in the centre of the door and through it I saw the homburg in a moment, clear of the bunch of people now, sandwiches still gripped in his hand, looking wildly about for me. He was the second tail.
‘Yes, sir?’ The head waiter came up behind me. ‘Did you leave something?’
I patted my pockets. ‘Yes — I think I had a pack of cigarettes, I wonder if …’ I turned back and saw the man with white tufts of hair and a homburg running across the flow of cars on the Avenue, coming towards the restaurant.
But one of the patrolmen had seen him too and now he was yelling across the Avenue at him, waving a notebook. He followed him and stopped him just in front of the restaurant door. ‘Hey, fella — you a friend of his?’ The two men started to argue about the accident. ‘You know anything about him? They say you and another fellow saw it all happen — you were there from the start, the cabbie says The two men recrossed the Avenue. I let them get back to the crush of people before going to the telephone booth at the back of the restaurant. ‘Moloney here,’ I said, when I got through. ‘There’s been some trouble on the Jackson job. The fella who ordered the surveillance, the husband isn’t it, what’s his name? tall British fella —’ ‘Yeah, it’s the husband, sure it is,’ the other voice broke in. ‘Get on with it Moloney, what’s up?’ I started talking again but almost immediately cut myself off, letting a finger dance rapidly on the handset cradle.
5
‘Who are they then — if you say that our British SIS people over here aren’t tailing me?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have one of our men try and check the man out at St Luke’s Hospital if you like.’
Guy Jackson fiddled with his expansive, brassy wedding ring. I could hardly keep my eyes off the nervous performance in a man otherwise so bland and cool. His office was immediately above mine, on the floor above, the thirty-fourth, of the UN Secretariat building. Jackson — so carefully dressed, like a judge in mufti — gave the impression of a very meaningful worker for the organisation — of dedication to the ideals of the charter and competency in carrying them out. It was almost impossible to see this tired-faced, disdainful, lanky aristocrat in his pin-stripes and waistcoat as a British SIS officer. Still, I suppose it was as good a disguise as any — anything to get out of the old trench-coat image. I think he overdid it, though.
‘They may have someone following you,’ he said. ‘On orders from London, direct. But I’ve heard nothing about it. My instructions were simply to liaise with you, wait for information — if and when this ‘stayer’ chap made contact with the names of the KGB men Moscow wants to check on.’
‘But you know all about me as well, don’t you? Not George Graham — but Peter Marlow. I’ve just been let out of Durham Jail.’
‘Yes. I know. Of course.’ He seemed puzzled for a moment, looking at me carefully as though the implications of this double identity had only struck him for the first time now.
‘Had you ever heard of George Graham before?’ I asked. ‘The George Graham. He spent a lot of time in East Africa. In Nairobi and round about.’
‘No. Why should I have? Why do you ask? It’s a big place — East Africa.’
‘Small enough, too, for white people now. He was working over there quite a lot. Radio programmes, documentary films, for the COI. A government department. You were in the Foreign Office. I thought you might easily have run across him.’
‘I was on an attachment in Nairobi — to the Kenyan Government. I wasn’t with the FO then.’
‘Yes, of course.’ The charade had gone far enough. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I know who was tailing us this morning. Some New York private eye business. I phoned them after the accident, found the card on the man. Now governments don’t hire private detective agencies to do their surveillance for them.’ I paused. Jackson had stopped fiddling with his wedding ring. ‘But husbands do. Why don’t you tell me? What were you having us tailed for?’
Guy Jackson smiled. He seemed as inappropriately suited to the role of jealous husband as to that of spy — his self-assurance so visible, like a silver spoon in his mouth.
‘Jealousy is a terrible thing,’ he said flatly. He might have been describing the British weather.