The Golden Gate Read Free

Martinez. Was it recorded?'

'Yes, sir.' The clerk put his pen through the names.

'Now, we've left one or two - ah - naval things in our room that we really shouldn't have done. Will you make certain that no one goes near our room until we return? Three hours, about.'

'You can depend on me, sir.' The clerk made a note. The no disturb sign - '

'We've already done that'

They left and stopped at the first pay telephone on the street. Johnson went inside with the valise, fished inside and brought out a walkie-talkie. He was immediately through to Branson, waiting patiently in the dilapidated garage north of Daly City. He said: 'PI?'

'Yes?'

'Okay.'

'Good. Get down there.'

The sun was coming up as the six men filed out of their cabin in the hills above Sausalito in Marin County, north across the bay from San Francisco. They made up a nondescript and not particularly attractive group, four of them in overalls and two in faded raincoats that might have been lifted from some unsuspecting scarecrow. They all piled into a rather battered Chevrolet station wagon and headed down to the town. Before them stretched a stunning vista. To the south the Golden Gate and the staggering - if rather Manhattanized - skyline of San Francisco. To the south-east, lent a slightly spurious glamour by the early rays of the sun, Alcatraz Island, of unhappy 'history, lay to the north of the Fisherman's Wharf, in line of sight of Treasure Island, the Bay Bridge and Oakland on the far side of the bay. To the east lay Angel Island, the largest in the bay, while to the northeast lay Belvedere Island, Tiburon and, beyond that again, the wide reaches of San Pablo Bay vanishing into nothingness. There can be few more beautiful and spectacular vistas in the world - if such there so be - than that from Sausalito. On the basis that not to be moved by it would require a heart of stone, the six men hi the station wagon had between them, it was clear, the makings of a fair-sized quarry.

They reached the main street, travelled along past the immaculate rows of sailing craft and the far from immaculate hodge-podge of boathouses, until eventually the driver pulled off into a side-street, parked and stopped the engine. He and the man beside him got out and divested themselves of their coats, revealing themselves as clad in the uniforms of California State Patrolmen. The driver, a sergeant by the name of Giscard, was at least six feet three in height, burly, red faced, tight mouthed and, even to the cold, insolent eyes, was the conceptualized epitome of the dyed-in-the-wool tough cop. Policemen, admittedly, were part and parcel of Giscard's life but his frequent acquaintanceships with them he had kept to as limited a nature as possible on the numerous occasions when, 'hitherto without success, they had attempted to put him behind bars. The other, Parker, was tall, lean and of a nasty appearance and the best that could be said for him was that he might 'have passed for a cop if one were myopic or he were viewed at a considerable distance: his habitually wary bitter expression was probably attributable to the fact that he had experienced considerably less success than the sergeant in evading the long arm of the law.

They turned a corner and entered a local police precinct station. Two policemen were behind the counter, one very young, the other old enough to be his father. They looked rather tired and unenthusiastic as was natural for two men who were looking forward to some sleep, but they were polite, courteous.

'Good morning, good morning.' Giscard could be very brisk indeed as only befitted a man who had shown a clean pair of heels to half the police forces on the Coast 'Sergeant Giscard. Patrolman Parker.' He pulled from his pocket a paper with a long list of names. 'You must be Mahoney and Nimitz?'

'Indeed we are.' Mahoney, a guileless youth, would have found some difficulty in concealing his Hibernian ancestry. 'And how do you know?'

'Because I can read.'