Page 94 - Brokenclaw - John Gardner

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gold ID bracelet, two gold rings on his fingers. I was only joking. I said,

“Business must be good,” and he just laughed. So I told him maybe I would
have to go to the police and inform on him if business was that good. I was
teasing him. He slapped me, beat me up, but before he left we made it up. He
James Bond OO7 - printing disabled but he did say that I should be careful talking like that otherwise James Bond OO7 - printing disabled
apologised,
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I’d end up like my old friend Jenny Mo.’
‘You follow up on that?’
‘I asked him what he meant, and he said he wasn’t being serious, only, as I
hadn’t heard from Jenny in a long time, she must have disappeared. It worried

me. Then I had the instructions about you. They simply said that a man called
Peter Argentbright, who would identify himself as Peter Abelard, would call
and then come with his wife, who would be called Héloise, but was really
Jenny Mo. I thought . . . I thought, well, I thought it must be Jenny. It’s been so
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long, and I had been very worried. Then, when you came, it was as though she
were truly dead.’
‘So.’ Bond walked over to the telephone, then decided against it.
‘Am I in trouble?’ Myra asked.

‘You mean police? No, but I think some other friends of ours will probably
want to see you, maybe keep you in a reasonable place – a house somewhere –
and ask you a lot of questions. If you go along with them, you’ll be safe, but I
believe if you stay here you’ll probably be dead inside a week.

‘You manage if I go out for a while?’ he asked Chi-Chi.
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‘Telephone?’
‘Yes, I don’t fancy this one after the last call. I might have screwed things up
as it is. Shouldn’t be long. Only open up to me – or Indexer of course.’

There was still plenty of traffic on the street even at this time in the morning,
and Bond cursed for not having put on a warmer jacket for there was a rising
cold wind.
He turned left out of the apartment building and walked a block down to the

Parker Meridien. Across the street, Ed Rushia, in a chauffeur’s cap, nodded at
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the wheel of a stretch limo. Bond smiled to himself. Ed was certainly an
operator. They had told him to hire a car and back up. He had obviously done
just that and hired a stretch limo.

The night porter was on duty outside the 56th Street entrance to the imposing
hotel, and as Bond approached him, he stepped forward.
‘I help you, buddy?’

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