101 Mystery Stories

44 Cloak and Digger John Jakes

Roger guessed that the opposite side had got on to his mission when a black Citroen roared into the street and three men armed with Sten guns leaped out and began shooting at him simultaneously.

Bullets lacerated the stones of the cafe wall. Roger’s head had been in front of this spot a moment before. As the slugs whined murderously in the twilight air, Roger crawled on hands and knees between the hems of the checked tablecloths.

He heard a great crashing above his own panicky breath. French curses, liquid and rapid, punctuated the bursts of gunfire. Spasmodically the shooting stopped twenty seconds after it had begun.

But by that time Roger had already crawled into the shadows of the cafe, bowled over the mustached proprietor and raced up rickety stairs to the second floor. He went out through a trapdoor to the slate roof.

Clinging dizzily to a chimneypot, he looked down. A flock of geese which had been strolling through the cobbled main street of the tiny village of St. Vign flew every which way, honking at the Citroen which nearly ran over them as it gathered speed and rolled away. Then, with a tightlipped gasp of relief, Roger located the source of the crash which had saved him — an overturned vintner’s cart. He vaguely remembered the can being unloaded before the shooting started, as he sat sipping Coca-Cola, reading the pamphlet in his pocket, A New Glossary of Interesting Americanisms, and trying to look like a tame philologist in horn-rimmed spectacles.

He had failed miserably, he thought. In the disguise, that is. But then, the opposite side always had first-rate intelligence. Lucky the vintner’s cart had gotten in the line of fire. The poor vintner was drawing a crowd of people as he sobbed over his dribbling and bullet-riddled casks and cursed off would-be drinkers. The whine of the Citroen had died altogether.

It was chilly, hanging on the chimneypot in the wind. Below in the street a nun in the crowd pointed up at Roger. Quickly he scrambled down the slates. He leaped to the adjoining roof in the amber dusk.

As he went skulking across the rooftops, one thought came up paramount in his mind after his shock and surprise had passed: his still-urgent need to get aboard The Silver Mistral Express which was scheduled to go through St. Vign on its way to Paris in — Roger consulted his shockproof watch while resting on the roof of a laundry — exactly forty-eight minutes.

His first task was to reach the railway station, hoping the assassins would be frightened off making another attempt on him because of the notoriety their first failure caused. Sliding. Roger dropped into an alley and began to run through the grape-fragrant French twilight.

As he ran he heard a number of whistles and saw several gendarmes pedalling frantically on bicycles. Good, he thought, puffing. Wonderful. If they keep the Citroen holed up in some garage for — again the watch — thirty-two minutes. I’ll make it.

Reaching the depot without incident, he paced restlessly along the platform, trying to read his pamphlet. At least, up the track, a light shone and an air horn cried out stridently.

When the crack train from the south of France pulled to a hissing halt in response to the ticket seller’s signal lantern. Roger leaped aboard with the pamphlet of Americanisms still clutched in one hand. The conductor badgered him in French for disturbing the schedule as the express began to roll. Roger ignored him. He held up the pamphlet in the vestibule light. On the inside front cover a car and compartment number had been noted in ballpoint. Roger turned to the right, stepped through a velvet padded door, then hastily backed out again. He had gone the wrong way. The private saloon car was filled with men and women in formal clothes, opera capes and evening gowns.

“What’s that?” Roger asked the trainman sourly. “A masked ball?”

“An opera troupe. Anglais. Returning from a triumphant engagement in the South.” replied the trainman, kissing his fingertips. Then he scowled.

“Let me see your ticket, please.”

Roger handed it over.

“How far is compartment seven, car eleven-twelve?”

“Four cars to the rear,” said the trainman without interest, turning his back on Roger and beginning to whistle an operatic aria. Roger kicked open the door on his left. He hurried, walking as fast as he dared. The cars were dimly lit, most of the doors closed. The wheels of the train clicked eerily from the shadows. Roger shivered. He felt for his automatic under his coat.

Finally he found the right car. Putting his pamphlet in his pocket, Roger knocked at compartment seven.

“Dozier? Open up.”

Mouth close to the wood, Roger whispered it again:

“Dozier! For God’s sake, man, open—”

With a start Roger realized the sliding door was unlocked.

He stepped quickly into the darkened carriage, blinked, and uttered a sigh of disgust. He might have known.

Wasn’t this precisely why he had been sent to board the train in such haste? Because the agent — some agent, Roger thought, staring at the compartment’s lone occupant — was one of the worst bunglers in the trade. An IBM machine had slipped a cog or something, dispensing the wrong punch card when the escort was being selected for the vital mission of accompanying Sir Stafford Runes from Cairo to Paris. At the last moment, higher-ups had caught the error and dispatched Roger by 707 to catch the train at St. Vign and see that no fatal damage had been done.

The agent in question, actually a coder from London who doubled in ladies’ ready-to-wear, and who had no business at all in the field, was a fat, pot-bellied bald man with the first name Herschel. At the moment he was snoring contentedly with his hands twined over his Harris-tweeded paunch. Roger shook him.

“Dozier, wake up. Do you hear me? What’s the matter with you, Dozier?”

Sniffing, Roger realized dismally that brandy had aided Herschel Dozier’s slumber. With each valuable minute spent attempting to wake the slumbering cow-like fellow, Sir Stafford Runes sat alone, undoubtedly in the next compartment. Disgusted, Roger slid back into the corridor.

Which compartment, right or left?

He tried the one on the right, tapping softly. A feminine giggle came back, together with some sounds which indicated that if an archaeologist was inside, he was a young, lively archaeologist, not the red-haired, vain, aging Runes.

Moving back along the carpeted corridor to the other door, Roger hesitated, his knuckles an inch from the panel.

The compartment door stood open perhaps a thirty-second of an inch, allowing a hairline of light to fall across Roger’s loafers.

Sweat came cold on his palm. He drew his automatic.

Was someone from the opposite side in there?

Runes, on an underground exploration in the vicinity of Nisapur, had unearthed what headquarters described only as a “vital plan” belonging to the opposite side. The plan, apparently, was so important that higher-ups had ordered Runes to discontinue his valuable roll as a double agent at once and return to home base as fast as he could while still avoiding danger. Now Roger smelled danger like burning insulation on a wire.

Drawing a tight breath, he cursed the faulty IBM machine, gripped the door handle, and yanked.

The first thing he saw was the corpse of Sir Stafford Runes.

It sprawled doll-fashion on the seat, an ivory knife-hilt poking from the waistcoat. Against the talcumed whiteness of the dead man’s puffy old features, the carrot brightness of his thick red hair looked gruesome.

Then Roger’s eyes were tom to the tall man who stood calmly in the center of the compartment, eyeing him with a stainless-steel gaze from under the rim of a shining top hat. From the man’s lean shoulders fell the shimmering folds of an opera cape, which showed a flashing hint of blood-red satin lining as he raised one white-gloved hand in a vicious little salute. Roger slammed the door shut as the man said:

“Is it really you, Roger?” His voice was clipped, educated. “I’d thought they took care of you in St. Vign.”

“No such luck.”

Covering the gaunt man with his automatic, Roger nodded down at the dead body. The express train’s horn howled in the night.

“So you did this, you rotten bastard. Just the way you ran over Jerry Pitts with the road-grader in Liberia and fed Mag Busby that lye soup in Soho.” A vein in Roger’s temple began to hammer. “You rotten bastard,” he repeated. “Someone should have squashed you a long time ago. But what are you doing in that get-up, Victor? Travelling with that opera company?”

“Of course, dear boy,” the other purred. “I’m representing them on this tour. I schedule performances wherever duty calls. Such as in Paris. Most convenient.” A white glove indicated the speeding motion of the train, but for all the man’s casualness there was glacial chill in his calculating eyes. “It appears that this time, however, with you as relief man, I’ve landed in a spot of trouble. I’d thought all I had to worry about was that fool asleep next door.”

“This time, Foxe-Craft,” Roger said quietly, “you’ve got a bullet to worry about.”

“A bullet?” The urbane man’s eyebrow lifted. “Oh, now, really, old chap, so brutal?”

“Did you think about brutality when you fed Mag the lye soup? Listen, mister, for ten years we’ve wanted you. You and your fancy gloves and your code name.” A line of derision twisted Roger’s wirelike mouth. “Elevenfingers. Proud of that name, aren’t you? One up on the rest of us, and all that. Well, tonight, I think I’ll take those fingers off. One at a time.”

With a stab of satisfaction Roger saw a dollop of sweat break out on Foxe-Craft’s upper lip. Roger made a sharp gesture with the automatic.

“All right, Elevenfingers—”

“Don’t make it sound cheap,” Foxe-Craft said, dangerously soft. “Not theatrical, I warn you.”

“Where’s the folio Runes was carrying?”

Hastily Roger searched the archaeologist’s corpse. He performed the same action on the person of his enemy, a shred of doubt beginning to worry him as he completed the task, unsuccessfully. Apart from the usual innocuous card cases, visas, anti-personnel fountain pen bombs and other personal effects, neither dead researcher nor live agent possessed a single item remotely resembling the flat, eight-and-a-half by eleven series of sheets, blank to the eye but inked invisibly, which Runes was carrying back from Nisapur. Roger raised the automatic again.

“Take a long look down the muzzle, friend. See the message? I can put some bullets in places that’ll hurt like hell. And I don’t care if I wake the whole damned train doing it. But you’re going to tell me where the folio is. You’re going to give it to me, or I’ll blow you into an assortment of pieces no doctor on the Continent can put together.” Desperate, angry, Roger added: “In five seconds.”

Foxe-Craft shrugged.

“Very well.”

As Foxe-Craft consulted a timetable card riveted to the compartment wall his eyes glinted maliciously for a moment. Then the toe of his dancing pump scraped a worn place in the carpeting. Looking at his wristwatch, the man who liked to call himself Elevenfingers said: “You’re an American. Look under the rug.”

“I’ll just do that.”

Carefully Roger knelt, keeping the automatic in a position to fire at the slightest sign of movement in the corner of his eyes. Roger probed at the frayed edges of the hole in the carpeting. And at that precise instant, the game turned against him; The Silver Mistral Express whipped around a curve and into a tunnel.

There was a scream of horn, a sudden roar of wheels racketing off walls. Roger swayed, off balance.

A tasselled pump caught him in the jaw, exploding roman candles behind his eyes a moment after he caught a fragmentary glimpse of traces of ash beneath the carpet.

Foxe-Craft couldn’t have burned the folio, Roger thought wildly as he fell backward, flailing. I didn’t smell anything — and that means Runes burned it because he knew they were on to us, but why did he burn the only copy in existence—?

No answer came except the roar of wheels and another brutal smash of a pump instep on his jaw, smacking Roger’s head against the side of the compartment, sending him to oblivion.

Through his pain he had dim recollections of the next hour — hands lifting him, a fall through space, a jolt, the clacka-clacka-clacka of wheels gathering speed, then the chirruping of night insects. And silence.

Bruised, disappointed, briar-scratched and burr-decorated, Roger woke sometime before dawn, lying in a ditch a few hundred yards south of another railway depot, this one bearing a signboard naming the town as St. Yar.

Roger picked himself up and tried to wipe the humiliation of failure from his mind. In another two hours Foxe-Craft — and the train — would be in Paris, doubtless with the vital material in his hands.

Roger felt, somehow, that it still existed; that Elevenfingers had tricked him. But how? Starting off, Roger noticed his ubiquitous pamphlet in the weeds. He stared at it dully, finally putting it back in his pocket as he passed a sign pointing the way to a French military aerodrome two kilometres away.

Trudging into the village, Roger located an inn and ordered a glass of wine. The proprietor treated him with the respect given by all Frenchmen to those who look like confirmed alcoholics — torn clothes and hangdog expression. Dispiritedly Roger sat at a street-side table as the sun rose. Bells chimed in the cathedral. A French jet lanced the sky overhead.

To kill the futility of it all, Roger bought a paper at a kiosk and sat by a fountain reading. At a town quite a distance south, the wet-inked lead story ran, an unidentified bald man had been found in a ditch by railway inspectors.

Poor Herschel Dozier, Roger thought. It would be just like Elevenfingers to finish the sleeping agent, just for amusement. Another knife in the guts from nothing...

When he had finished the paper, he dragged out the pamphlet to try to dull his mind.

“What the hell do I care about Interesting Americanisms?” he said, blinking in the sun. And then, as pigeons cooed around his feet and a postcard-seller passed by hawking indecent views, the depth of his blunder made itself known.

Foxe-Craft’s remark flashed like a bomb. With a whoop, Roger leaped up and ran to the cafe.

“Where can I get a taxi to the military aerodrome? I have to get a helicopter to Paris right away!”

The baffled proprietor gave him directions. Roger’s identification papers, concealed in his heels, served him well. Within an hour he stood on the noisy platform as The Silver Mistral Express chugged in along the arrival track.

Roger felt for the automatic in his pocket, grinning tensely. Of course Runes had burned the folio. Too obvious. But if Roger was right, there was another copy — had to be!

Down the platform trouped the formally-dressed opera company, Foxe-Craft in their midst. When he saw Roger he turned and tried to walk in the opposite direction. Roger raced after him. He gouged the automatic in the agent’s ribs.

“Really, old fellow—” Foxe-Craft began.

“Shut up,” Roger said. “You egotistical bastard. Think you’re so damn clever. One up. Well, you shouldn’t have opened your precise mouth, Elevenfingers, because now you’re going to be tagged with a killing. I thought it was Dozier in the ditch. But it wasn’t. It was Runes. Bald, vain Runes.”

Roger dug into the writing agent’s pocket, came up with his prize, carrot-red.

“First we’ll go wake up Dozier. Probably he’s still asleep.”

Roger turned his find over, noted minute markings which looked like ink on the inner, rather burlap-like surface.

“Then,” Roger added, gagging his captive, “we’ll have the lab blow up the stuff that’s written here. Inside old Sir Stafford’s—”

A crowd began to gather. The divas and tenors of Elevenfinger’s now-defunct opera troupe clucked curiously. Roger held up the carrot-colored wig and finished:

“—inside, or under — as we Americans say — his rug.”