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“Be right back,” he said and left.
Fulmar walked into the bathroom, turned on the sink faucets, blending the water till the temperature was as hot as he could stand it. He began soaping and scrubbing the petroleum jelly from his hands and forearms.
After ten minutes, there was a knock at the door.
“Shit.”
With no clean towels, he shook his hands to try to dry them as he went to answer the door.
“Yeah?” he called.
“Housekeeping,” Canidy answered in a falsetto voice.
Fulmar turned the knob—getting on his hand the Cosmoline that Canidy had smeared there when he had gone out—and opened the door.
There stood Canidy with a Cheshire cat grin and holding a stack of five fat bath towels.
“Midnight requisition,” Canidy said in his normal voice.
He entered and tossed the stack on one of the armchairs.
Fulmar carefully pulled one from the middle, where Canidy’s oily hands had not touched.
“Ingrid thanks you,” Fulmar said.
“I can think of plenty of ways she can do that personally.”
“I’m sure you can.”
Fulmar took the towel back into the bathroom and started running the shower water.
Canidy walked over to the cans of ammunition, unlatched the lid of one, and popped it open. It was packed with shiny brass cartridges. He reached in, took a handful, then started feeding them round by round into one of the six magazines that came in each Johnny gun cardboard container.
When Fulmar came out of the bathroom, he was wearing his suit pants and was buttoning the top button of a clean white dress shirt and snugging up the knot of his blue-and-silver rep necktie.
He saw that Canidy was taking another towel—one of the clean ones he had just procured—to a Johnny gun and methodically rubbing off more Cosmoline. The magazines were all now full of ammunition, lined up neatly next to the ammo cans.
“This gun’s about as good as it’s going to get,” Canidy said. “That is, without sitting for a couple hours under a summer sun to melt out the remainder.”
“It looks nice.”
“Any need to take it with you tonight?”
Fulmar considered that a moment.
“Thanks, but that’s not practical. And not necessary. I have my .45”—he patted his lower back—“and”—he patted his left forearm—“my baby Fairbairn.”
Under the shirtsleeve, in a leather scabbard, was a stiletto-shaped knife that Fulmar used as the situation demanded—he pulled it out first if absolute silence was required or used it as a backup if making noise was not a factor.
Fulmar subscribed to Canidy’s hand-to-hand combat school of thought: If you were close enough to stick a blade in someone’s brain, you damned sure were close enough to put a bullet in it instead.
The Fairbairn had been invented by an Englishman named William Ewart Fairbairn, who ran the Shanghai police force. He developed the black, double-edged blade for close combat with street thugs. Lately, he could be found at The Farm in Virginia, teaching OSS agents how to silently kill using his knife, or a silenced .22 caliber pistol, or a number of other highly effective tools and methods—including a newspaper rolled into a cone.
The “regular” version of the Fairbairn was issued to all British commandos, its scabbard customarily sewn to the boot or trouser leg.
Fulmar’s smaller model, which he had bought from an English sergeant at SOE’s Station X, looked a lot like the big one but instead featured a six-inch-long, double-edged blade and a short handle just long enough for fingers to be wrapped around it. It was carried, hilt downward, in the scabbard hidden between the bottom of his left wrist and the inside bend of his elbow.
Canidy knew that Fulmar, as he had fled Germany with Professor Dyer and Dyer’s daughter, Gisella, had used the baby Fairbairn quite effectively to scramble the brains of a string of German SS officers who had had the misfortune of getting between them and safety.
