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A Fine and Private Place
By Ellery Queen MysterousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
Copyright © 1971 Ellery Queen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1712-1
CHAPTER 1
AUGUST 9, 1962
Wallace Ryerson Whyte stepped out into space with an astronaut's confidence that the laws of the universe would not let him fall. Faith sustained him: he remained suspended over the East River, hidden far below by the mists that had gathered after the soaking day at the dropping temperatures of twilight.
The narrow little penthouse balcony with its guardian stone gargoyles had been a conceit of its fin de siècle architect, venting his homosexual dislike for the giddy ladies of his era. The tall man never gave it a thought. He leaned on the parapet and settled himself to use what time he had.
He was puffing characteristically on a $250 Charatan pipe loaded with Medal of Honor tobacco at a dollar an ounce, and characteristically there was an ember burn on the brown velvet lapel of his Edwardian jacket. The ember was still daintily glowing. But he was trying to penetrate the murk stirring below to the reason for Importuna's summons and he did not notice the burn. He concentrated with his rather oriental eyes. They were squinty outdoors eyes deliberately trained to go with the saddle leather of his face, which had been weathered in his club. He was tall and contained, his elegance a touch raffish; not quite the man of distinction. He contrived to conceal his intelligence behind the façade of his lineage, which was overgrown with the dusty virtues of his class. His father had long ago disinherited him, making him the first male of his line in three generations to have to work for a living.
He puffed and mused.
It was a serious matter, obviously. He had had occasion to visit one or another of the three uppermost apartments at Number 99 East often enough, for private accountings or other confidential business connected with the Importuna Industries conglomerate, but Nino Importuna did not invite his executives to his penthouse after office hours for ordinary business. Or ordinary pleasure, either.
A small tremolo fluttered the smoker's spine.
Nino had found out.
God had found out.
Judgment Day ...
The tall man was tapping his pipe on the parapet, watching the sparks die away and reflecting on his options, when a nasty voice said from the drawing room, "Sir?" making the syllable sound as if it were composed of four letters. He turned with reflexively inquiring brows, covering up by habit. It was Nino's muttonchopped man, Crump, who had admitted him to the penthouse. Crump was one of the few hallmarked English butlers left on Manhattan Island, and he possessed the sixth sense of his breed. "Mr. Importuna will see you now. Sir. If you will follow me?"
He sauntered after the man, trying to ignore the spiteful flunky back, thinking how much better the mural ceiling, the pastry arabesquework of the walls, the grand marble fireplace, the quatrefoiled cathedral windows suited him than Importuna. But the thought was like the tobacco sparks. True, he had never entirely accommodated himself to the central fact of his existence, which was that he had no talent for making the Importuna kind of money — how many men had? — but he did not allow this failing to hobble his life style. Above all he was a practitioner of the possible.
Crump glided before him to the threshold of the holy of holies, stepped aside, and — between successive blinks, he could have sworn — departed through a solid wall.
In the sanctum, behind a pontifical Florentine table that had descended authentically from a Medici, sat its pontiff. Nino Importuna was a squat man whose broad and fleshy body had been built by the genes of peasants and a childhood of pasta — corporally a very ordinary-looking southern Italian type. But his massive head was far from ordinary. The nose jutted from his face like a bowsprit. The small mouth seemed womanishly soft, but this was a deception of nature: when he smiled and exhibited his very large white teeth, which was seldom, the softness turned into something terrifying. There was an olive-oil patina to the darkness of his barbered cheeks and jowls that toned well with the dull gloss of his black-dyed hair. But it was the eyes underneath the strong, still naturally black brows that gave his face its commanding character. The color of stale, muddy espresso, they were bitter and without warmth or love, almost without humanity ... the eyes of an enemy.
These eyes were fixed on the tall man. Their owner's hands were pressed together in the Dürer attitude, at his chin; lids half shut. But the industrial genius of the Importuna empire was not praying; and to the visitor the eyes were not half shut but half open — not drooping from fatigue but on the slitted qui vive.
It was bad, all right.
"Entrate pure." There was as usual nothing to be interpreted from the heavy Italian-American voice. Or perhaps it had been just a few decibels more resonant? He waved toward a chair.
The tall man came obediently in and sat down. The chair was dumpy, like Importuna, with protuberant carving in bumps and lumps that made sitting almost intentionally uncomfortable. Yes, very bad. ... Nino called this room, with semantic fidelity, his den. A den it was, windowless and dim, and foul with the stench of his crooked-stogy smoke, his $10-an-ounce after-shave, and whatever it was he rubbed into his coarse gray hair to blacken it; the only smell missing was of stale blood, from old kills.
The tall man smiled at his fancy.
"You're happy today?" Importuna said.
"Beg pardon?"
"You're smiling. Did you just enjoy a woman?"
"Hardly, Nino. I came directly here from the office when I got your message."
"Then what are you smiling at?"
The famous Importuna technique.
"Nothing, Nino." The famous employee defense. "Just something that passed through my mind."
"A joke?"
"No. Well, yes. In a way."
"What? Tell me, amico. Today I would like to hear something to make me smile, too."
The tall man found his shoes burrowing into the silk pile of the Kashan rug, which dated from the early 17th century and Shah Abbas and should have been hung reverently on a wall; he stopped shuffling with a feeling of desecration. He was no longer smiling; in fact, he was becoming angry. This would never do. Not with Nino. You had to match Nino's cool.
He made an effort and composed himself.
"It's nothing, really," he repeated. "Let's get on with it, Nino, shall we? Whatever it is. Whatever's on your mind." A mistake, he thought with a sinking feeling. It showed fear. You never showed fear to Nino, because then he had you.
"You don't know?"
"No, Nino, I don't."
This time it was Importuna who smiled. What big teeth you have, Grandpa.
"Superba Foods?" Importuna said suddenly. "L.M.T. Electronics? Harris-Fuller Farm Implements? Ultima Mining?"
"Yes?" The tall man was really proud of himself; his eyes had not so much as flickered. Even his breathing remained under control. "What about them, Nino?"
"Now you're being coy with me," Importuna said. "Or stupido. And you are not stupido; I don't employ controllers who are stupido. So my vice-president the controller is playing the game of innocence. To play the game of innocence is to admit your guilt. Bene?"
"I wish I knew what you were talking about, Nino."
"Guilt," Importuna repeated through the oversized teeth. The smile added stress to the word, like a written underlining. It tied little knots in the tall man's back. But he maintained his puzzled posture.
He shook his head carefully. "Guilt, Nino? Guilt about what?"
"L.M.T. Ultima. Superba. Harris-Fuller."
"I heard you the first time. I still don't understand."
"They're companies owned by the conglomerate?"
"Of course."
"You're controller in those companies?"
"What's the point, Nino?"
"You are stupido after all." Importuna gripped a fresh stogy in his teeth and leaned back in his tall swivel chair. "But then to think you could get away with your beautiful false bookkeeping without my finding out, Mr. Controller Vice-President Big Shot High Liver Whoremaster Gambler, is all by itself the sign of a fool. Not that you haven't been smart the way you manipulated the figures. You're a real magician with figures; I always said it. It looked too easy to you, hey? A little here, a little there, some from this company debited to that and from that company posted to a third — you thought you could pull this stuff for years under my nose. Maybe it was luck, amico — your bad luck, my good luck — that I found out at all?" He lit the stogy and, like a one-man firing squad, directed a burst of acrid smoke across the great table. "What do you think?"
"Oh, I agree," the tall man said. "A man would have to be a fool, Nino, as you say. He'd never have a China-man's chance against you."
The large head wagged.
"Now you insult me. You're still playing games. You think I'm guessing, trying to trap you when I don't really have the goods on you? Another of your mistakes, amico. I sent an expert to examine your books. Under cover, of course."
The controller said slowly, "That new man, Hartz."
"S'intende. He reports to me that my smart controller-vice-president has stolen from me and my brothers over the past three years over $300,000. What's more, he brought me the proofs. If I turn the proofs over to the district attorney and the Internal Revenue, Mr. Controller, you'll spend what is left of your life either in Sing Sing or the Danbury prison, depending on whether New York State or the federal government gets its hands on you first. You were going to say?"
"You might offer the condemned man a cigar."
Importuna looked surprised. He extended the box of stogies.
"Not those, if you don't mind," the tall man said. "The Havanas you keep for your peers are more to my taste."
"Your taste," the tycoon said, smiling for the third time. "Oh, yes." He picked up the antique Florentine dagger he used as a letter opener, and with it he nudged a tooled-leather humidor toward the other side of the table. The controller opened it, scooped out a handful of big fat fragrant green cigars, lit one, slipped the others carefully into his breast pocket, sat back, and puffed with enjoyment.
"I don't know what you paid the man who smuggled these in from Cuba for you, Nino, but they'd be a bargain at triple the price. How can you keep polluting the atmosphere with those ghastly black pretzels of yours when you've got these to smoke? But what I was about to say, Nino," he went on, "is that if you've called me up here this evening to talk about it, you've something other than policemen and income tax people in mind for me. That was clear from the start. Of course, I couldn't be altogether sure. I mean, if I seemed a bit nervous, I'll admit I was. But now I'm positive. Your so-called proofs are the lever with which you're trying to shove me into a deal. You want something for your money, and I've apparently got it."
"That," Importuna said with the soft smile, his fourth, "is not the saying of the stupido I took you for."
"I feel fairly safe in assuming that, with your usual efficiency and thoroughness, you've gone into my activities in depth. So you probably know where the allegedly borrowed funds went, and how, and you know as well that I haven't a dime of it left — that I'm additionally in debt, in fact, way over my head. So you can't be expecting restitution. At least not in kind. So what's the quid pro quo, Nino? What do I have that you could possibly want?"
"Virginia."
For a moment the tall man sat quite still. As he sat his eyes darkened to a deep sea blue. "Virginia," he said, as if it were a word he had never heard before.
"Virginia," the industrialist repeated, tasting it.
He took the Havana out of his mouth, peering at its smoke. "Well, I don't know, Nino. This isn't your mountainside Italy. Or the 19th century. By the way, you are proposing to marry my daughter, aren't you? Not just play some dirty bedroom game with her?"
"Maiale! E figlio d'un maiale!"
The tall man sat unmoved by the almost visible steam coming out of the espresso eyes. He was a little surprised at Importuna's wrath; the old cod must really like the girl.
The man behind the table sank back, fuming. "Yes, she's to be my wife," he said curtly. "Don't make me mad again. What I say to you is this: You talk Virginia into marrying me, and I not only won't prosecute you for embezzling Importuna money, I'll even pay your debts — $46,000, isn't it?"
"Forty-eight and some," the embezzler said delicately.
"— because then, you see, you'll be my father-in-law. My suocero, as they say in the old country. Family. You know how we take care of family ... suocero."
"I'm a bit young for the role," the controller murmured, "but unsuccessful thieves are like beggars, Nino, aren't they?" He stuck the cigar back between his teeth. "At that I'm not sure I understand. You say you want to marry Virginia. You've never struck me as an Italian Miles Standish. You usually speak right up when you want something. How come you haven't asked her? Or have you?"
"Many times."
"Then she's turned you down."
"Each time ..." Importuna was about to say more. Instead, he crushed his stogy out.
"Then how do you expect me to get her to change her mind? You've been an American long enough to know that dutiful daughters and arranged marriages went out with bundling and the bustle."
"You'll find an argument, suocero. For instance, you might mention to her certain funds you took that didn't belong to you? The hardness of the mattresses in Sing Sing and Danbury? The disgrace of your old family name? I leave the approach to you, amico. In view of your fate otherwise, I have confidence you won't fail."
"You talk like a damned soap opera, you know that?" the embezzler muttered; most of his mind was already occupied with tactics. "Look, Nino, it isn't going to be that easy. Virginia has a mind of her own —"
"But she loves you," Importuna said. "Though the good Jesus alone knows why."
"And that's another thing. There's the religious difference —"
"She will convert to the Church. That's to be understood."
"Just like that? Suppose she simply won't go along, Nino. There's no guarantee even with the prison argument."
"That's your problem. Always remembering," Importuna said, "that if you don't deliver I charge you with grand larceny."
The Havana went out. He took it out of his mouth, regarded it with regret, and set it down on Importuna's ashtray. "How much time are you giving me?"
"Ah," the swarthy man said briskly. "Today is August 9th. I'm allowing you one month to talk her into it. One month to the day. I want to marry Virginia on the 9th of September."
"I see." He was silent. Then some residue of decency made him say, "You know, Nino, rogue and peasant slave though I am, Virginia's my little girl still, and to think of playing on her feelings for me to force her into the arms of a man three times her age —"
"Shall I cry, amico?" Importuna said. "You're beginning to bore me. You'd sell her to an Arab if you could and there were enough money in it. Yes, I was born on September 9th, 1899, so I'll be 63 next month, and Virginia is 21, making me exactly three times her age, as you say. It would be a perfect day for a marriage; the numbers are very good, perfetto."
"But three times ..."
"I said no more!" Importuna shouted.
The tall man was startled. "All right, Nino," he said, "all right."
Importuna subsided, muttering in Italian. Finally he looked up. "Don't stand in the way of this. I want her. You understand? You can point out to her what she gets by marrying me. I give my promise, on my mother's memory, that she will have anything and everything she asks for. I offer her villas, chateaux, palaces — you know my properties. A private yacht, one of the biggest; bigger than Onassis's, than Niarchos's. A jet of her own. Jewels — by the pound, if she likes. Clothes designed just for her by any or all of the great designers. Anything. Everything."
"Everything but a young husband in her bed," the tall man said. He did not quite know why he said it. He regretted the taunt immediately. A kind of boiling began to take place in the depths of the coffee-colored eyes. But then the hands, which had tightened about the dagger, relaxed and went Dürer again.
"Is that so much to give up," Importuna asked icily, "when she gets so much? Spare me the fatherly sentiment, amico. I know you for what you are."
Maybe you do and maybe you don't, the tall man said silently. Aloud he said, "Then that's the deal?" When Importuna shook his head the tall man said, "There's more to it, of course."
"Sì davvero, caro mio. There will be a before-marriage paper — an agreement which Virginia will sign."
"What kind of agreement?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Fine and Private Place by Ellery Queen. Copyright © 1971 Ellery Queen. Excerpted by permission of MysterousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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