Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen

“Do you believe in luck, Sam?” Billie asked.

“Luck? Well, I suppose some people have it.”

The sun was lowering in the sky as they finally made their way out of the rarified atmosphere of Georges Boucher Auction House, the lengthening shadows turning to cool semidark around them as they rounded the corner into the alley behind the sandstone building where Sam’s utility was parked.

The experience had not been without interest, but Billie did not consider herself much better informed about the case at hand, and the feeling of all that money clung stiflingly to her. Her quiet inquiries about Adin Brown with the staff after the auction had brought up precisely nothing. Lips were sealed, almost suspiciously so, and any attempt to slip behind the curtains had been thwarted with so many workers around. Somehow, Billie was unsettled by it all. She felt dirty, as if she needed to wash off the place. And she felt deeply, truly exhausted.

“I don’t think I believe in luck,” she said. “But some days . . .”

Perhaps the inky-hued dress had not been the bearer of bad luck, as her mother had suggested. Perhaps it was Billie herself who was bad luck. This had not been a fine day for B. Walker, Private Inquiries. And in a few short hours her assistant would have the unpleasant job of unpacking that heavily burdened travel trunk so poor Con Zervos could be found by the authorities

—but nowhere near the flat of Baroness von Hooft or that of her PI daughter. Billie hadn’t asked Sam where he’d stored the trunk while they were at the auction. Perhaps it was still in his mate’s car. Hopefully it was somewhere cool, she reflected darkly.

Her mind went to the extreme contrast between that poor doorman, treated little better than vermin and dumped on her rug, and all the wealthy people gathered inside the auction house, treated like royalty and offered refreshments on silver trays as they bid on fine art and sparkling jewels. She pondered their various reasons for wanting the paintings and sculptures and

glittering necklaces and rings on show. There were some beautiful things there, some masterpieces even, but also the strong scent of competition.

How else could one explain so many people eager to be seen buying?

“All that money . . .” Sam muttered under his breath, his mind clearly running over some of the same themes.

He had seemed struck by the immense wealth in the room. Coming from the country, he likely hadn’t seen wealth and privilege quite so concentrated before. Billie, on the other hand, had seen it before, albeit in a different setting, and had grown cynical. Where were all those “friends”

who had populated her mother’s social life before she’d had to sell the Potts Point mansion and move to a flat? Where were they when she lost her PI husband? Where were they now that she’d sold her baby grand to make ends meet? Ella maintained some impressive social contacts, but many had fallen away like rats from the proverbial sinking ship as her fortunes had gone down. And that’s what they were. Rats.

“Some people did rather well out of the war,” Billie mused. “And all those dead deserved better.” She shook her head sadly. The dead were almost invariably the poorest, the ones with the least political and social power. It had always been thus, with powerful men pulling men and boys from their communities and putting them on the front lines while they smoked cigars and made deals and decisions from a safe distance. “I suspect wars wouldn’t be nearly so common if no one made money from them,” she added, and Sam turned to look at her.

It was hard to know what Sam thought of such a brutally honest statement, considering his great sacrifice. But war could not be separated from the pursuit of power, wealth, and territory. Hitler had his lebensraum push for a Germanic takeover of foreign territory and the annihilation of populations he considered Untermenschen. The Allies would have lost everything had he not been defeated, and casualties were devastatingly high, but there were still those who did well out of the whole deadly debacle. Just who they were was not yet clear, but they were out there.

There was newfound wealth in America and Switzerland, she’d heard. And there was the rumor that the Australian government was going to call in all existing bank notes and reissue new notes, making the old ones worthless.

This would flush out cash that had been hoarded during the war—especially cash made by black-market racketeers. Some of the auction houses would

be doing very nicely with all that cash people were so desperate to part with. Just how well was Georges Boucher doing?

“Is that what you mean about luck?” Sam asked, puzzled.

Something caught Billie’s eye, distracting her from her thoughts. “Is that a Packard?” she remarked, recalling Shyla’s description of the foreign man’s car. She turned and stopped in her tracks. Sam was some paces ahead of her now, aiming to open the door of his car for her, when an arm grabbed her from behind, gripping her waist.

What the . . . A small gleaming knife appeared at her smooth right cheek. A switchblade, held by rough, masculine hands. The nails were dirty, the shirt cuff tattered. She could smell male sweat and feel a heart beating against her shoulder blades. Billie absorbed this sudden turn of events and took a slow, measured breath, shifting gears internally. The world slowed down. She bent forward carefully, tilting her head away from the sharp, shining blade, and pushed her buttocks into the man who held her tightly against him. Having expected her to struggle forward, away from his body and not toward it, the assailant loosened his grip on his blade a touch, his wrist slackening. Billie continued to bend forward and stretched out both hands as her head moved closer to the grubby footpath. Seizing the man’s left leg, she wrenched it forcefully off the ground, pulling up and forward, cradling his foot to her chest. She heard a seam of her carefully sewn dress tear, followed by the more satisfying sound of her attacker falling backward with an awkward thrashing movement. She leaped out of the way, letting go and momentarily free before a second assailant grabbed at her leg and she went down on one knee, feeling a stocking tear irreparably. Now she was cross. Very cross indeed.

“This is our way of saying lay off, ” a gruff voice said, and as Billie lifted her eyes she felt a kick in the ribs, a vicious blow. In that moment, punctuated by pain, she snatched a view of a flabby face, a flattened profile.

The two legs beside her were clothed in grubby chocolate-brown slacks with a slightly tattered hem. Not so unlike the pants of the man she’d yanked off balance, but those had been a tatty dark blue. Unremarkable leather shoes, low-end. The grabby man she’d toppled would be getting to his feet soon. And he would be cross, too. “Next time I cut your pretty face,” the close one with the flat nose added convincingly, as if he knew a thing or two about how that worked.

Billie elected to stay down, huddling protectively while the screaming in her kicked ribs subsided. She waited for the next move to reveal itself and from the corner of her eye saw Sam, next to his car, catch a strong punch in the kidneys by a second set of assailants. It had all happened so quickly, so unexpectedly. Sam went down swinging, but he went down.

“Four of you. Seems a fair fight,” Billie managed from her position on the ground, pulling a hatpin from her topper and swinging it at the closest man’s ankle, pushing all three inches of it through his unmended black sock into the soft space between his ankle bone and heel and out the other side.

He howled like a dingo and doubled over. She withdrew the hatpin and jumped to her feet, her raffia-and-silk tilt hat sliding off.

“You!” he shouted at her lamely, purple with humiliation and grabbing at his wounded ankle. He was so shocked that she had time to kick him roundly in the arse with one heeled foot, and he fell forward between two cars, letting out a string of expletives, trying unsuccessfully to regain his balance. It was one of her less elegant moves, but effective. If this wasn’t a time for dirty fighting, she didn’t know what was.

Billie turned and glared coldly at the other man, who was ready for his attempt at a comeback. She stood with her feet apart, the hatpin held in her hand like a dagger. While she waved it in front of a scarred face that looked like a piece of meat with two eyes in it, her other hand lifted her torn dress inch by inch. The eyes went from the hatpin to her knee, and then her thigh and the top of her stocking with its pretty lace-edge holster, and then the barrel of her mother-of-pearl-handled Colt, now neatly in her hand and pointed squarely at him. Just above that barrel were her piercing green-blue eyes. He knew better than to move, or even breathe.

“Look, lady, I don’t want any more trouble,” he managed after a moment.

“What an unfortunate choice of profession you’ve made in that case,”

she remarked, her hand still steady on the gun. She got the impression this was a young man, despite the head on him. His suit was shabby and threadbare at the elbows. Like the other one, he looked underfed and overbeaten. This was some nasty line of work he’d chosen. And he wasn’t very good at it.

The man who had kicked Billie was up now, standing on one leg like a cowardly flamingo and shuffling artlessly behind his small colleague. How considerate of them to stick together in a neat little cluster of stupidity for

her to point her Colt at. They’d picked her as an easy target, clearly, as these two men were thin and about as smart as a pair of spoons. The two boys who had gone to work on her strapping assistant were larger and possibly more capable, though. She didn’t want to take her eyes off either of the gormless goons at the end of her gun. From the corner of her eye, however, she saw something large that looked like a sack of potatoes in a bad suit sail through the air into a line of garbage bins with a thundering crash. There were groans and cries and none of them in Sam’s voice. Billie felt more than saw that he was now up and in control and could sense the rage coming off him. He was moving quickly, a blur of navy, and now he had someone by the throat, pinned to a brick wall. She risked a glance, her attackers also temporarily distracted by the action on the other side of the alley. Yes, Sam was holding a man up with his injured left hand. It seemed not to be slowing him down, Billie thought. Not one bit. Not in a dance hall or in an alley. His right hand was pulled back, ready to strike. She fancied her own assailants looked a touch awestruck. She watched them over her Colt and heard a crunch as Sam struck again. It must have looked grisly, for their eyes widened and they began backing away.

“How about you fellas tell us about your employer, hey?” Billie said loudly enough to grab their attention and for Sam to hear. They froze in place. Sam looked over his shoulder at her, seemed impressed by what he saw, and let his right hand relax a touch. It was then that she noticed that the man he was holding didn’t have his feet on the ground. The body lying among the garbage bins moved a little and there was a groan; then all was still again.

Billie took a step toward her two assailants. “Come on, now, gentlemen.

I want to hear some information, fast, or I might find my finger slips and one of you is relieved of something vital.” She lowered her gun to the closest man’s crotch and his eyes grew yet larger.

The four assailants remained silent in their respective positions.

“I don’t know, Sam,” Billie called. “I think I might have to—”

There was a terrible noise as the man amid the garbage managed to get up and flee, staggering and holding his injured body like a child holds a toy baby.

“That’s it, these two are going to get a bullet in the—”

“Moretti,” someone said in a small but clear voice. She didn’t catch who it was, though the one with the meat face looked guilty.

Vincenzo bloody Moretti. She’d half expected Boucher’s name, but Moretti? He was in this up to the part in his grubby hair. It figured.

“Where is the boy? Where is Adin Brown?” she pressed. “Come on, let’s hear it!”

The one with the meaty face shook his head.

“Where is he? ” She moved up the end of her pistol to sit right between his eyes.

“It’s too late for him,” came the small, guilty voice. His eyes were averted.

Too late?

Now he turned and ran, moving his body out of the line of sight of her little Colt, his cowardly companion behind him. She lined him up and for one heart-stopping moment watched the man over her little shining barrel, then dropped the gun to her side. She wasn’t going to shoot a man in the back. Billie shrugged. She looked across at Sam and gave him a look, one eyebrow raised.

“Where is the boy?” Sam asked the man he was holding off the ground.

“I . . .” came a strangled voice. He clearly couldn’t speak. As she watched, Sam slowly released his grip on the man he’d been holding up like a nail to be whacked into the brick, but that other hand of his stayed poised.

“Where is the boy?”

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” the man said, trembling. “They don’t tell me nothin’. They just paid me a few shillings to rough you up, tell you to leave it alone. I don’t know nothin’ about why.”

When Sam finally took a step back, the man bolted.

Moretti. Vincenzo Moretti sent them.

A group of people appeared at the mouth of the alley, perhaps also coming from the auction if their finery was anything to go by. They watched the man running away, puzzled. Sam walked over to Billie, his aquamarine eyes a bit wild. “Geez. I didn’t see them, Billie. I’m so sorry.”

He looked her up and down and seemed not to like what he saw. “Oh geez.”

“I didn’t, either. Never mind, it wasn’t a total loss. But let’s get out of here before those people wonder what we’ve been up to.”

Sam opened the car door for her and she slid inside, sore and disheveled. She’d sure feel that in the morning. And that stocking was beyond repair. A shame. “Unless you have good reason to protest, I’m taking you for a drink at my flat,” Billie said. “Frankly, I need one

desperately and I don’t drink alone. And I don’t feel in a fit state to be seen publicly in these clothes. Any protest?”

“That’s not a real question, is it?” Sam replied, and started his car.

What a day it has been, Billie thought as she sank back into the passenger seat and willed her heart to slow to a more normal pace. She had woken to unexpected deceased company, had a pair of her mother’s valuable earrings stolen, faked a party-girl persona for the benefit of a couple of police officers, spent an afternoon among Sydney’s most wealthy, and been set upon by thugs in an Eastern Suburbs back alley. The morgue would be next on her dance card, neatly bookending her Sunday with corpses. Even by Billie’s standards, this combination was something memorable, particularly now that there were no longer shells falling. And she’d thought the world had become less violent.

“Your flat is a real beaut,” Sam remarked, standing like a soldier at the window of Billie’s living room and looking down over the Moreton Bay fig trees toward the water. The sun was setting, and it gave him a soft golden halo and illuminated his silhouette down to his waist. They had reached Billie’s place without anyone else trying to kill them or warn them off, but the adrenaline from their encounter in the alley had not yet subsided.

“I’ve not seen that kind of excitement since . . .” Sam’s voice trailed off.

“Tobruk?” Billie suggested.

Sam nodded. “Yes. And they didn’t have anyone like you there.”

The encounter seemed to have affected them in a similar way: Their faces were flushed, their cheeks glowing, their eyes alight with excitement.

Billie felt acutely alive as she walked over to her walnut Art Deco bar cabinet and cast a look back at her assistant’s haloed form. Her breath caught in her throat. Sam had been very impressive in that alley. Very bloody impressive. He’d suggested that he should be the one to get the drinks for them, as seemed to be his way, but he was a guest and she couldn’t have that. This wasn’t the office. Sam had done quite enough already in the service of their professional work, and his day was not yet over. It was quite possible the worst was yet to come. The state of Con Zervos’s remains would not have improved over the last few hours.

A day of bad luck.

“What would you like?” she asked her assistant and bent to open the cabinet’s lower set of doors, one of which was sticking slightly. Yes, her

ribs were going to bruise; she could feel it. Masking a wince, she saw that she still had some port, a good scotch whisky, her mother’s favorite sherry, and a couple of bottles of wine.

“Whatever you’re having,” Sam said cautiously, still at the window.

“Perhaps just one drink . . .”

“Yes, you have a big night ahead. This will ease the way. Scotch on the rocks? I have a good Dewar’s White Label.”

“On the rocks? Certainly.” Sam thanked her, seeming impressed. He waited uncomfortably, looking at the glowing treetops, his large, scarred hands clasped behind his back. How bad was his left hand beneath that glove? Billie wondered. Even with prosthetic fingers, he’d managed those two men exceedingly well. She hoped the effort hadn’t damaged his hand further.

“Are you injured?” she inquired. He might have been masking discomfort even more than she was. “That kidney punch looked ugly. And your hand . . .”

He shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“Good. We’re both fine, then,” she declared, pulling the bottle of scotch up onto the bar. “My stocking was the only real casualty,” she added with a lighthearted smile, but when she looked down at her legs she frowned. She hadn’t the energy to take them off yet, nor her torn dress, and being thrust into this close proximity with Sam in her own place suddenly struck her as more intimate than intended. There was something in the air, some lack of ease that was not a usual mark of their time together. Maybe they shouldn’t have danced. And now this reminded her of how long it had been since she’d last entertained, and how long it had been since she’d had a man in her flat—well, one who was alive at the time. That last male visitor would likely have been her father, in fact. Yes. It had been him, before she’d left for Europe, before he’d fallen ill. Having her strapping young assistant here threw him into a different light, and perhaps he felt that unexpected shift, too, as he seemed uncharacteristically stiff. No, she reflected, now was not the time to announce that she was going to slip into something more comfortable. She wanted to get out of her torn things, but that could wait until after his departure. A drink was what was needed. A good, medicinal drink to get the taste of adrenaline out of her mouth and work the smell of death out of her nostrils.

“Please take a seat and relax,” Billie urged, grabbing a couple of her nicer crystal glasses from the cabinet and moving off to fetch some ice chips from the kitchen. “I know you have a date tonight. I promise I won’t keep you,” she called back, and when he turned toward her she thought she caught a slight blush on his cheeks.

She took her sharp ice pick from a drawer and chipped off enough ice to comfortably fill the two crystal glasses.

“Can I help?” Sam called from the next room, and she assured him she was fine. She returned to the living room and saw that he was sitting as instructed. The whisky poured beautifully over the fresh, clear ice and crackled as it settled into the glasses. She handed one to Sam and sat down, careful to leave distance between them.

“Thank you. I wouldn’t have liked to have come home alone after that,”

Billie said. She held up her glass. “Here’s to getting through this day. May it end soon and never be repeated.”

“Here’s to getting through today,” Sam returned, locking eyes with her.

They clinked glasses, looked away, and sipped. “And last night,” he added.

“Indeed.”

The whisky burned satisfyingly, with a hint of sweetness and peat smoke behind the fire. She had fancied she could taste her attackers’ sweat and smell it in her nostrils, and in one strong swig the sensation was blissfully obliterated. The burn settled all the way down into her stomach.

She took a deep breath and her shoulders seemed to drop a full two inches.

“You looked good out there, Sam,” Billie said. “I’m impressed. Hell, I think those thugs were impressed, too.” He seemed to blush again, cradling his drink. “Well done, good man,” she said, raising her glass and taking another sip. She didn’t need to ask him where he’d learned to fight like that.

He’d probably had plenty of opportunities to learn in New South Wales, and then in Tobruk. He was a man you wanted on your side in the trenches; that much was certain.

“It was nothing,” he said dismissively. “You were pretty impressive yourself.” He raised his glass to his lips and widened his eyes as if to punctuate his point.

“It wasn’t my first rodeo,” she explained a bit blithely, and her guest choked a little on his whisky. “Though I must say, Sydney has changed a lot since before I went away.”

When she was in Europe for all those years she’d fondly recalled Australia as peaceful and safe, and she supposed it was, relative to occupied territories and front lines. But then it might also have been the effect of the rose-colored glasses one classically dons when pining for a missed home.

What had Johannes Hofer called it? Nostalgia, or “severe homesickness considered as a disease,” from the Greek álgos—pain, grief—and nóstos—

homecoming. Nostalgia was thought to be a disease of soldiers fighting away from home, but it had proved a disease of young women war reporters, too, she’d found—if “disease” was really the right way to view it.

She’d missed Australia terribly in the end. After all her father had shown her of Sydney’s underworld when she was younger, she hadn’t been so naïve, and she wasn’t easily shocked, exactly, but some fundamental things seemed to have worsened with the war. There seemed to be a dangerous desperation about.

“I didn’t know about your Colt,” Sam remarked.

“I rarely leave the house without it these days,” Billie confided. “Can’t remember when I started doing that.”

It wasn’t right after she returned from Europe, where she’d seen enough of guns and their deadly effects to last several lifetimes, but as the business had become more intense she’d started keeping her sidearm with her with some frequency, and she didn’t feel the need to defend that decision, particularly after the day’s events. Her instincts had been right, after all.

That gun, unfired, had helped them in the alley. They were outnumbered four to two. If Sam asked for an explanation about why a “lady” packed heat, as some men tended to, she’d not like it. She doubted the male PIs were asked about such choices. Thankfully Sam seemed to accept her wisdom when it came to her own personal security. He didn’t say a word.

She sipped her drink and gazed toward the window. “You have a piece?” she asked him after a stretch of silence.

“I do,” he said to her. “It’s a .38. Has a long barrel, though. I’ve not been wearing it to work as a habit.”

“I think you might want to get into the habit of wearing it for the next little while, Sam, just until we find out what’s going on,” she said. “It’s licensed and in good working order?”

He nodded.

“A revolver. Good,” she added. If you happened to be wounded in the hand or arm, it would be a bugger to load a pistol. A revolver, like Sam had,

was safer to carry around loaded, and easier to load and fire with one good hand. A good choice for him, all things considered. “How long is the barrel?”

“Six inches,” he said.

A farm gun, not really for concealment, Billie thought. Guns like that were not usually aimed at humans, but at ill-fated animals. It would not be subtle under a jacket, but Sam was clearly comfortable with it and it was unwise to introduce new weapons just before battle. Four men had brought a knife fight to them in that alley, and you didn’t want to get caught bringing a knife to a gunfight, if that was where they took things next.

“Billie . . . I’m so sorry about what happened in the alley. I should have spotted them,” Sam said, his eyes wide with apology. “I hold myself responsible.”

“Sam, neither of us saw them,” she stressed. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Billie raised her glass, took a sip, felt it burn. She locked eyes with her assistant again for a moment. He was solid, that Sam. So solid. It wasn’t just his size or his ability to toss a man around like a rag doll, either. He appeared entirely unfazed by what she was asking him—to pack a gun. To dispose of a body. She was beginning to think he was one in a million. She looked away and sat back in the couch. “And it was the work of Vincenzo Moretti,” she mused.

Sam leaned forward, thinking, holding his glass tightly, frowning.

“Might explain why he was at The Dancers last night.”

Billie could not have been more shocked by this revelation. “What do you mean?” She put her glass down too suddenly on the side table, and the amber liquid nearly washed over the rim. “What do you mean: He was at The Dancers?”

“He was there. I told you.” Now the memory emerged, vaguely. Sam had said something about an Italian. They’d got tied up in some pointless conversation about prisoners of war and civilians and the like.

“It was Vincenzo Moretti you saw? Why didn’t you say so?”

“I did say so,” Sam protested.

“You said you saw an Italian. Not all Italians are Vincenzo Moretti.”

In Moretti’s case all distrust and animosity were certainly warranted. If the dealings of Georges Boucher Auction House were wrapped up with Vincenzo Moretti somehow, that brought it down several pegs, too, in Billie’s eyes. Something always smelled bad when he was around, and that

display in the alley was just the sort of shoddy parting committee he’d organize. If he was at The Dancers, he could have been the one who’d spiked her drink, come to think of it. If someone was fast enough and slimy enough they could have spiked it. And in a high-class joint like The Dancers. How galling. And the doorman had ended up staring at death in his own room after work. Beneath all that glitz, the place was rotten. Wasn’t that always the way.

Blasted Moretti. “He’s been tailing me. I didn’t figure it out until I saw him outside this morning. One of the cops who came, a Constable Dennison, knew he was there, I think. I think it was Moretti at the Strand Arcade, too. He’s been searching me out all over town,” she said, the realization hitting her.

“Bloody Moretti couldn’t find a grand piano in a one-room house,” Sam snipped.

“Yes, he is rather an idiot,” Billie agreed. “But a dangerous one.”

More dangerous to her than she’d reckoned. Moretti hadn’t faced them himself, of course. He’d sent some low-rent thugs for the job. She almost felt sorry for them. Almost. No, Moretti didn’t think much of her; that was evident. What would he make of the story his rent-a-beating boys returned with? Was Moretti behind the dead body switch? Were the two things related? Who was his client? And where was Georges Boucher in all this?

Was he the one giving orders, footing the bill? Or was this personal somehow? What would make Moretti go this far?

“I didn’t like that answer about the boy,” Billie added.

Sam looked up.

“It’s too late for him. I wonder what he meant by that.”

“You don’t think . . . ?”

“That Adin Brown is dead? Perhaps. I rather hope not.” Billie frowned deeply. “When’s your date?” she asked, breaking from her darker ruminations and looking at her wristwatch. Her assistant had the unpleasant task of disposing of Con Zervos beforehand. The sun had set and now the world outside her window was nearly dark. Soon it would be time.

“I’ll cancel,” he replied.

“No. Don’t. Please. I mean, if you can manage it. It would be better for you to go about things as normal after . . .” After disposing of the body.

“You should try to take your mind off things tonight. I really do appreciate

all you’ve done. I hope you aren’t too sore tomorrow.” He had a few reasons to feel that way.

“I’m fine. I’m worried about you, though.”

“Well, I can’t have that, Sam. I can take care of myself. You’ll have to trust me there.” The way he’d looked at her with her gun trained on two terrified men told her he was starting to get the idea. “Thanks for joining me for a drink. And thank you for what you’ll do tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow at the office, yes? You’re not thinking twice about the job, are you? I’d understand if you were.”

“What?” He looked almost hurt. “No way, Billie. You’ve got me. If you want me.”

She let that sink in.

“I’ll do what I have to, and then I’ll go out if that’s best. You watch your back, okay?” he added.

Billie thrust her whisky forward again and they clinked a second time.

They drained their glasses and, with a somewhat less awkward exchange, parted ways. She shut the door behind him and paused. What a day. Billie peeled off her stockings and dress. She should have been positively shattered by the day that was, she reflected, particularly following such a disturbed night, but that electricity seemed to be running over all of her nerves again. There were too many unanswered questions to simply leave it be for the evening, even for something as restoring as rest. Her body needed some tending to with soap and arnica and perhaps another restoring glass of that good scotch, even if she did have to drink it alone. It was medicinal after all. Then she had to go out, too.

Tonight she would visit the death house.