Hostage Tower Read Online Free PDF Page A

through the pedestrian precinct to the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square.
    At the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange, the Deputy Director and the security manager were comparing notes with the police.
    â€˜I make it probably four hundred thousand dollars’ worth in the unlocked boxes,’ the Deputy Director said, ruefully. ‘Thank God it was a slack weekend, and there wasn’t more there.’
    â€˜It was enough,’ the security manager intoned. ‘My, oh my, it was enough.’ He breathed out noisily, and shook his head in tragi-comic weariness. ‘Roller skates. I ask you – roller skates.’
    â€˜What about my client’s gold?’ demanded the agent of Kees van der Goes.
    â€˜Nothing leaves here,’ interjected a stern-faced and harassed policeman. ‘Those are the orders.’
    â€˜But the seals,’ the agent bleated, ‘they are untouched. The crates are as they were on Friday evening.’
    And they were. With the sole exception of the wine bottles – which she left on the floor out of sheer devilment – Sabrina had stowed everything carefully away in the crates, and repaired the end panels. With luck, they would pass scrutiny.
    â€˜So where, then,’ the policeman inquired icily, ‘did the guy in black spring from? Hey? And where did these bloody bottles come from? Huh?’
    For once, the agent had no ready answer.

THREE
    Enter the Black Spider-man.
    There are times, even at night, when New York City – and particularly the canyons of the great avenues – seems to be made of glass.
    Curtain walls of opaque smoothness, rising hundreds of feet into the air, suddenly, from different angles, come on like Christmas Trees, and reflect the whole exotic panorama of skyscraper and strip-bar, cathedral and cat-house.
    Generally speaking, the bigger buildings are where the bigger people live, or work, or occasionally love, when they are not too preoccupied with living and working.
    The big people like to have the trophies, the spoils, of their rich and rewarding lives around them, if only to remind them how richly rewarded they are. Then they pay other, more talented, people to arrange the trophies in the most aesthetically pleasing ways, and invite yet more people, who are less richly rewarded than they are, to come totheir palaces and admire both them and their gewgaws.
    The process serves two useful purposes: it teaches the visitors that the deadly sin of envy is a magnificent driving force; and it provides the means for the Pollocks, the Ming jars and the Mayan masks to get the occasional dusting.
    There is, though, one drawback: certain small-minded persons are importunate enough to wish to steal the spoils of the moguls. Thus, the trophies have to be guarded with such fanatical zeal that the pretty penthouse palaces become fortresses, or, worse, virtually prisons.
    Happily, most of the lairs of the truly rich are well-nigh impregnable, and it must be a source of comfort to the criminal classes that these good citizens can sleep easily in their beds at night. So euphoric do the big people sometimes feel, that they will gladly lend out their treasures for public exhibition so that a great many people may see them, and slaver at the unostentatious plaque that makes it perfectly plain who is doing the lending.
    If anything, these public displays are protected with even greater care and devotion than the private gloatings, for while the truly rich may not sincerely appreciate their treasures, they are the very devil when it comes to collecting insurance pay-offs.
    When the Black Spider-man gets bored with stealing from the millionaires’ palaces, he willpenetrate the public exhibition places with equally contemptuous ease.
    In Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue there are many glass mansions, as a latter-day prophet might put it. One stands in the block between 5th and 58th and 59th. A poster tastefully mounted on an easel outside the building