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  Kirby’s Last Circus

  Ross H. Spencer

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1987 by Ross H. Spencer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition March 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-613-8

  Also by Ross H. Spencer

  Death Wore Gloves

  The Chance Purdue Series

  The Dada Caper

  The Reggis Arms Caper

  The Stranger City Caper

  The Abu Wahab Caper

  The Radish River Caper

  The Lacey Lockington Series

  The Fifth Script

  The Devereaux File

  The Fedorovich File

  To Sam Blake

  for twenty-five years of unswerving friendship…

  And to Shirley Spencer

  for all that devotion.

  As Time’s inexorable gray tides sweep us to the vortex of Eternity we become given to looking back and, in the shade of retrospect, the things once perceived as small appear smaller, those recalled as large grow larger still, youth’s sadnesses seem infinitely sadder, its light moments lighter, bright-hued balloons of carnival-past, for nostalgia is a dewy-eyed old teller of tall tales, and memory warps as does the faulted mirror, enabling us to see with astonishing clarity that which never was…

  Monroe D. Underwood

  Prologue

  They sat on an enormous black leather couch in front of the white stone fireplace in the Social Room of the Diplomat Club on Markham Avenue in Washington, D.C.—two big men, sports-shirted, tweed-jacketed, graying—war-dogs home from the rocky fields of international intrigue. Brigadier General Lacey B. Dawes, tall, lean, leathery, alert bright-blue eyes set deep in a craggy, time-etched face, munching the stump of a seventy-five cent cigar, and nodding to his companion, a jut-jawed, heavy-shouldered man known to many people by many names, at least half of them unprintable—this pair, drinking double Christian Brothers brandies and staring into the yesterdays in the leaping flames of the fireplace. Between them, they’d worked every corner of the globe, every continent, every country, but it was behind them now, all of it, and now there was nothing but reminiscences and lengthening shadows and flickering firelight and brandy and tobacco smoke curling blue-gray against the mahogany-beamed ceiling.

  The big room was quiet, a dignified mausoleum of tattered memories and busted dreams where no longer important people discussed no-longer-important matters, gilding the edges just a bit, in the time-honored manner of men who’ve been there and know damned well that the other fellow hasn’t. In a dim, distant corner of the room, Commander Gus Belleau played cribbage with Rear Admiral Stuffy Whitehill. They’d been classmates at Annapolis: Belleau had finished thirty-ninth in his class, Whitehall sixty-third, and both had seen action at Midway, but Belleau’s father had owned a book store in Norfolk, Virginia, and Whitehill’s had been a Congressman from Pennsylvania. In an overstuffed chair against the east wall, Colonel Busby Rankles paged listlessly through a sports magazine. Busby Rankles had done his war years attached to San Francisco Port Authority but he relished telling of his infantry platoon’s stand against a Japanese advance across Guadalcanal’s bloody Matanikau River, which was why Busby Rankles spent his Diplomat Club evenings paging listlessly through sports magazines. There were cliques within these hallowed mahogany walls—Navy southwest pacific veterans ganged up with other Navy southwest Pacific veterans, shunning the likes of Army ETO men; old Marines clustered in corners to talk about Iwo and stare balefully at the air Corps end of the bar where Ploesti was being critiqued. The Shadow Service was no exception. These men had worn mufti to fight their war, an unending conflict that had escalated since the cessation of global hostilities; they conversed in a language understood by few, and they spoke of affairs understood by fewer.

  Lacey Dawes was saying, “Yeah, Jayjee, word got around on that one. I was tied up in Pakistan most of that year, but I caught wind of it, even over there. This guy you jerked out of your hat, your mystery operative—he was an outsider—not one of our people?”

  Jayjee’s smile was a brandy-mellowed, almost gentle thing, hailing from the mossy well of memory. “That’s right, he was an outsider, but he was the finest I’ve ever seen, on either side of The Curtain—an absolute ringtailed wonder! God, if I had a dozen like him I’d steal the fucking Kremlin, brick by brick, at high noon on May Day!”

  Lacey Dawes whistled, low and long. “That good?”

  “That good? Lacey, he was so God damned good that I get goose-bumps just thinking about him!”

  “But he worked only one case for you?”

  “Just one, the big one. You see, I felt compelled to field an unknown in this one because, after we’d nabbed Boris Chekov in Chicago, I was afraid that the Soviets might be hep to my starting lineup. Benton was slated to head up the team but I wanted a fresh face to go in with Benton, someone the KGB couldn’t possibly be familiar with. I was running preliminary background checks on a few possibles picked at random, and this fellow hit me right between the eyes—I mean, he stuck out like a carbuncle on a virgin’s ass!”

  Dawes frowned. “You recruited him for a matter of such import simply on the strength of a routine security check?”

  Jayjee shook his head impatiently. “Oh, hell, no, but it was the original screening that hooked me! I ran him through the grinder a dozen times, and I was amazed!”

  “Hard to believe—there’s always a loose rivet somewhere—a childhood misdemeanor, a shady business deal, some damned thing, regardless of how good they look!”

  “It wasn’t how good he looked, Lacey, it was how bad! This guy was just too damned incompetent to be true! If he’d ever accomplished anything, anywhere, in any field of endeavor, I’d have put him down as mediocre and scratched him. On one occasion or another, every one of us has managed to do something right, no matter how trivial, but my man’s box score came up all errors, and that was the tip-off!”

  “You’re saying that he faked his failures?”

  “Precisely! The bust-out role was a facade, and I’m here to tell you that he played it convincingly and to the hilt! To the casual observer he was just one more ne’er-do-well private investigator, working the shady edge of the ridge—sleazy little divorce cases and the like. He was behind on his rent, his beat-up old Ford wasn’t paid for, he hung around a fourth-rate gin-mill, he shacked with fifth-rate floozies one of which was a scrawny, bargain-basement prostitute, he smoked too much, he drank too much, he dressed like a hobo, and his fly was open most of the time! I checked this guy ass-backwards and upside-down with nothing to show for it, so I took it a step further. I worked my way into a position where I could observe him at close range, and I came up empty again! Jesus, he was one smooth customer! He couldn’t possibly have been pegged as anything other than a grand and glorious flop, the exact impression he wanted to convey! He fooled everybody!”

  “Everybody but you!”

  “Right! In this business you get a gut-feeling about people—you sense the difference between a sham and the real McCoy—and I knew God damned well that I was looking at a bona fide genius, a truly exceptional talent, lurking
behind an iron-clad front of bewildered sub-stupidity, and that was when I arranged to procure his services. Lacey, it was the best move I ever made—just ask the fucking KGB!”

  “But didn’t he realize that you were onto him—the real him?”

  “Of course, he did—he knew that we wouldn’t have touched him if he’d been just half as dumb as he appeared to be, and that was another indication of his quality. He kept a poker-face throughout, never letting on that he knew. He was the ultimate professional!”

  “What sort of fellow was he—what did he look like? Jesus, from here I see a man fourteen feet tall who walked on water with lightning flashing out of his ass!”

  Jayjee grinned sharkishly. “No, sir, not at all—he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a quiet, unassuming chap, thirty-five or thereabouts. He stood six feet or so, weighed maybe one eighty-five, the whipcord and steel cable type—dark-haired, cool gray-eyed, his nose had been busted a couple of times, he had a chipped front tooth, and he was a real bastard in a tavern brawl. If I was casting a film, he’d be a dock-worker or a forest ranger. Does that help?”

  Lacey Dawes nodded. “One of twenty-five million just like him.”

  “One of twenty-five million just like him and the only one of his kind on the face of this rotten old globe—a genuine man-eater! He had a dozen aliases, I’m sure, and I never did learn his true identity or what game he was mixed up in. An educated guess would be that he was some sort of hotshot industrial espionage specialist—General Motors or United States Steel, possibly AT&T, but whatever he was, when his country needed him, he dropped his cock and grabbed his socks! He rallied to the colors like the thoroughbred he was! Lacey, take it from me, they just don’t make men like him nowadays!”

  “All right, what happened to him—where is he—what’s he doing?”

  Jayjee shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. We gave him three grand for twisting the Russian bear’s balls—twice what we’d promised him, but less than a fraction of what he was worth to us. Hell, he probably earned five times that figure playing dominoes on rainy Sunday afternoons, but he never quibbled. He knew the stakes.” Jayjee shook his head. “I could have used him on a dozen occasions after that, but he’d disappeared.”

  Lacey Dawes grunted an affirmative grunt. “They’ll do that, especially the top-flighters—they soak up a bellyful of danger and they pull a vanishing act while there’s still time. Take Paulishen, for example—you remember Paulishen?”

  “Oh, sure—worked Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in the ’sixties—philosopher type—analytical.”

  “Yeah, well, Paulishen owns a garlic farm in Ohio—saw him a couple of years back. He had a premonition, he told me—quit stone cold the next morning.”

  “Uh-huh—they come and they go—enough is plenty.”

  Lacey Dawes stretched and yawned. “You don’t suppose that the KGB took this fellow out, do you?”

  Jayjee’s eyelids shot up like runaway window-blinds and he guffawed. “This one? My God, no, never! He was just too damned clever!” He was silent for a few moments. “But, y’know, tough and canny as he was, he had a sentimental streak a yard wide. He had a story about his childhood—something about his mother and Christmas Eve and the Star of Bethlehem—well, what the hell, Lacey, it doesn’t matter.” Jayjee spotted their white-jacketed waiter and waved to him. “Lacey, you want another brandy?”

  Dawes nodded. “Guess so—there’s nothing else to do, is there?”

  Jayjee frowned. “Nothing that comes to mind—nothing at all.”

  One

  It was June in Chicago. In Chicago Junes are pretty much the same—robins chirp from tree-tops, pigeons crap on windshields, White Sox stumble, Cubs collapse, mayors and city councils exchange epithets they’d be hard-pressed to spell, school teachers go on strike from jobs they can’t handle, potholes riddle the streets, fat women hold up banks, rapists and child molesters lurk in every alley, murder is an everyday fact of life, the weather is oppressively warm, and there are tornado warnings two times a week, sometimes three. Birch Kirby never questioned these things—he had no just cause to do so. He’d been born and raised in Chicago and they’d always been there, like fog in London or coffee in Brazil, but the tornado warnings were a trifle puzzling, even to Kirby. He wasn’t a weather freak—he didn’t much give a damn if it rained, snowed, froze, or boiled the hell over, but he’d never heard of a tornado warning until he’d reached his teens. Now they came thick and fast, April through October, year in, year out. Something to do with the atomic bomb, he’d been told, a local theory that Kirby hadn’t placed a lot of faith in, knowing that when Chicagoans run astraddle of something they can’t explain, they blame it on something they don’t understand.

  Kirby had been living on Diversey Avenue for nearly a year. His lodgings in Stone Park had become untenable for a number of reasons, all of them female, and he’d stumbled onto a likely thing on the north side of Diversey, a three-room apartment, one of two vacant flats located above a quartet of small business accommodations, three of the four occupied—Jolli-Day Travel Services, Sam Anzivino, D.D.S., and Solly Hyman’s Fresh Fish Market. Kirby had chosen the flat on the east side of the narrow hallway because its big front room had been converted to combination office quarters and parlor by an aging chiropractor who’d been forced into retirement when he’d slipped two discs while enthusiastically massaging a plump lady’s derriere, presumably in the line of duty. Never having had office space, Kirby had signed a lease and fared forth on a shopping safari. At a second-hand furniture store in Franklin Park he’d scrounged up a spavined desk and a battered swivel-chair with one caster missing, the pair coming considerably cheaper than the crosseyed sign-painter who’d lettered KIRBY PRIVATE INVISTEGETIONS on the Diversey Avenue window. Noting that an H and an S were missing from INVESTIGATIONS and remembering that sign-painters are notoriously poor spellers, Kirby had shrugged a philosophical shrug, jammed the chiropractor’s abandoned anatomy charts under the swivel-chair’s casterless leg, opened a can of Hickory Barrel Ale, turned on the baseball game, and settled into residence.

  Perfection is the child of Time, and there’d been early annoyances—the flush-box float hadn’t floated, the bathtub had been too small to accommodate more than half of Kirby at one time, the refrigeration had gone on the fritz in Solly Hyman’s Fresh Fish Market while Solly Hyman was in Resurrection Hospital having his hemorrhoids removed and the resultant stench had forced Kirby into the backseat of his automobile for three consecutive nights. However, the weather had been reasonably moderate and, all factors taken into consideration, Kirby was convinced that he had the world by the testicles on a downhill pull—his very first office and a passable apartment for less money than he’d been paying for third-floor lodgings in rapidly deteriorating Stone Park.

  Kirby didn’t know a soul at Jolli-Day Travel Services, his associations with Sam Anzivino and Solly Hyman limited to perfunctory nods and waves, but then Jim Gallagher had occupied the vacant ground-floor office and a month or so later Tizzie Bonkowski had taken the empty flat across the hall, and Kirby had hit it off swimmingly with both. Jim Gallagher had taken a shine to Kirby because Kirby could carry an acceptable barroom tenor to several Irish songs, including Gallagher’s favorite, “Where the River Shannon Flows,” a number they’d performed with gusto when in their cups, a frequent artistic presentation because Jim Gallagher was in his cups as often as not, and so was Birch Kirby. Kirby wasn’t Chicago’s busiest private investigator and Gallagher hadn’t finalized a real estate transaction in a coon’s age, or so he’d told Kirby one evening at Lulu’s Jungle Tap, this shortly before they’d ripped full-tilt into “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?” and Lulu had been polite but firm in her request that they either shut the fuck up or get the fuck out before somebody called the fucking police, and they’d hiked around the corner to Ed Berserkski’s Polski Inn where they’d sung “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” and somebody had called the fucking police.

  On a
muggy morning of that particular typical Chicago June, Birch Kirby wandered into Lulu’s Jungle Tap. Kirby didn’t really wander into Lulu’s but he looked like he was wandering in, because his distant, often blank stare and his seemingly directionless amble served to convey the distinct impression that Kirby didn’t know where the hell he was going, or what the hell he was going to do if he ever got there, and there were times when he didn’t, but this time he did.

  Lulu’s Jungle Tap was owned and operated on a rather catch-as-catch-can basis by Lulu O’Doul, a dark-haired, blue-eyed, terrible-tempered Irish female of some forty-five tempestuous years, the only daughter of Terence “Terrier” O’Doul who’d tried his hand at several trades—gun-running, hijacking, and counterfeiting, to mention a few—enterprises that had dispatched him to many places—Fort Leavenworth and Alcatraz, for example. Lulu O’Doul stood behind the bar of her establishment, arms akimbo, frowning, shaking her head, watching Birch Kirby straddle a bar-stool. She said, “Oh, laddie, laddie, ye’ve had a rough night!”

  Kirby said, “Why?”

  “Your fly’s open.”

  “The zipper’s busted—my other pants are in the cleaners.”

  “You only got two pairs of pants?”

  “Hell, how many can I wear at one time?”

  “Jim Gallagher was in earlier, looking for you.”

  “What’s with Gallagher?”

  “He had some sort of real estate appointment on Armitage Avenue and he wanted you to ride shotgun.”

  “On Armitage Avenue he may need more than a shotgun! Have you seen Moss Hallahan around?”

  “Not since Decoration Day. Why?”

  “He owes me fifteen bucks.”

  “When did he borrow it?”