Fear is the Key

THREE

It didn’t require the sudden widening of the girl’s eyes to tell me that I wasn’t imagining that cold draught on the back of my neck. A cloud of steam from the overheated bathroom drifted past my right ear, a little bit too much to have escaped through the keyhole of a locked door. About a thousand times too much. I turned slowly, keeping my hands well away from my sides. Maybe I would try something clever later. But not now.

The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn’t the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.

The second thing I noticed was that the bathroom doorway seemed to have shrunk since I’d seen it last. His shoulders didn’t quite touch both sides of the doorway, but that was only because it was a wide doorway. His hat certainly touched the lintel.

The third thing I noticed was the kind of hat he wore and the colour of the jacket. A panama hat, a green jacket. It was our friend and neighbour from the Ford that had been parked beside us earlier that afternoon.

He reached behind him with his left hand and softly closed the bathroom door.

‘You shouldn’t leave windows open. Let me have your gun.’ His voice was quiet and deep, but there was nothing stagy or menacing about it, you could see it was the way he normally spoke.

‘Gun?’ I tried to look baffled.

‘Look, Talbot,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I suspect we’re both what you might call professionals. I suggest we cut the unnecessary dialogue. Gun. The thing you’re carrying in your right coat pocket there. With the finger and thumb of the left hand. So. Now drop it on the carpet. Thank you.’

I kicked the gun across to him without being told. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t a professional too.

‘Now sit down,’ he said. He smiled at me, and I could see now that his face wasn’t chubby, unless you could call a lump of rock chubby. It was just broad and looked as if you could bounce a two by four off it without achieving very much. The narrow black moustache and the thin, almost Grecian nose looked out of place, as incongruous, almost, as the laughter lines round the eyes and on either side of the mouth. I didn’t place much store on the laughter lines, maybe he only practised smiling when he was beating someone over the head with a gun.

‘You recognized me in the parking-lot?’ I asked.

‘No.’ He broke open the Colt with his left hand, ejected the remaining shell, closed the gun and with a careless flick of his wrist sent it spinning ten feet to land smack in the waste-paper basket. He looked as if he could do this sort of thing ten times out of ten, everything this man tried would always come off: if he was as good as this with his left hand, what could he do with his right? ‘I’d never seen you before this afternoon, I’d never even heard of you when first I saw you in the lot,’ he continued. ‘But I’d seen and heard of this young lady here a hundred times. You’re a Limey, or you’d have heard of her too. Maybe you have, but don’t know who you got there, you wouldn’t be the first person to be fooled by her. No make-up, no accent, hair in kid’s plaits. And you only look and behave like that either if you’ve given up competing — or there’s no one left to compete against.’ He looked at the girl and smiled again. ‘For Mary Blair Ruthven there’s no competition left. When you’re as socially acceptable as she is, and your old man is who he is, then you can dispense with your Bryn Mawr accent and the Antonio hairdo. That’s for those who need them.’

‘And her old man?’

‘Such ignorance. Blair Ruthven. General Blair Ruthven. You’ve heard of the Four Hundred — well, he’s the guy that keeps the register. You’ve heard of the Mayflower — it was old Ruthven’s ancestors who gave the Pilgrims permission to land. And, excepting maybe Paul Getty, he’s the richest oil man in the United States.’

I made no comment, there didn’t seem to be any that would meet the case. I wondered what he’d say if I told him of my pipe-dream of slippers, a fire and a multimillion heiress. Instead I said: ‘And you had your radio switched on in the parking-lot. I hear it. And then a news flash.’

‘That’s it,’ he agreed cheerfully.

‘Who are you?’ It was Mary Blair speaking for the first time since he’d entered and that was what being in the top 1 per cent of the Four Hundred did for you. You didn’t swoon, you didn’t murmur ‘Thank God’ in a broken voice, you didn’t burst into tears and fling your arms round your rescuer’s neck, you just gave him a nice friendly smile which showed he was your equal even if you know quite well he wasn’t and said: ‘Who are you?’

‘Jablonsky, miss. Herman Jablonsky.’

‘I suppose you came over in the Mayflower too,’ I said sourly. I looked consideringly at the girl. ‘Millions and millions of dollars, eh? That’s a lot of money to be walking around. Anyway, that explains away Valentino.’

‘Valentino?’ You could see she still thought I was crazy.

‘The broken-faced gorilla behind you in the court-room. If your old man shows as much judgement in picking oil wells as he does in picking bodyguards, you’re going to be on relief pretty soon.’

‘He’s not my usual—’ She bit her lip, and something like a shadow of pain touched those clear grey eyes. ‘Mr Jablonsky, I owe you a great deal.’

Jablonsky smiled again and said nothing. He fished out a pack of cigarettes, tapped the bottom, extracted one with his teeth, bent back a cardboard match in a paper folder, then threw cigarettes and matches across to me. That’s how the high-class boys operated today. Civilized, courteous, observing all the little niceties, they’d have made the hoodlums of the thirties feel slightly ill. Which made a man like Jablonsky all the more dangerous: like an iceberg, seven-eighths of his lethal menace was out of sight. The old-time hoodlums couldn’t even have begun to cope with him.

‘I take it you are prepared to use that gun,’ Mary Blair went on. She wasn’t as cool and composed as she appeared and sounded; I could see a pulse beating in her neck and it was going like a racing car. ‘I mean, this man can’t do anything to me now?’

‘Nary a thing,’ Jablonsky assured her.

‘Thank you.’ A little sigh escaped her, as if it wasn’t until that moment that she really believed her terror was over, that there was nothing more to fear. She moved across the room. ‘I’ll phone the police.’

‘No,’ Jablonsky said quietly.

She broke step. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said “No”,’ Jablonsky murmured. ‘No phone, no police, I think we’ll leave the law out of it.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ Again I could see a couple of red spots burning high up in her cheeks. The last time I’d seen those it had been fear that had put them there, this time it looked like the first stirrings of anger. When your old man had lost count of the number of oil wells he owned, people didn’t cross your path very often. ‘We must have the police,’ she went on, speaking slowly and patiently like someone explaining something to a child. This man is a criminal. A wanted criminal. And a murderer. He killed a man in London.’

‘And in Marble Springs,’ Jablonsky said quietly. ‘Patrolman Donnelly died at five-forty this afternoon.’

‘Donnelly — died?’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Six o’clock news-cast. Got it just before I tailed you out of the parking-lot. Surgeons, transfusion, the lot. He died.’

‘How horrible!’ She looked at me, but it was no more than a flickering glance, she couldn’t bear the sight of me. ‘And — and you say, “Don’t bring the police.” What do you mean?’

‘What I say,’ the big man said equably. ‘No law.’

‘Mr Jablonsky has ideas of his own, Miss Ruthven,’ I said dryly.

‘The result of your trial is a foregone conclusion,’ Jablonsky said to me tonelessly. ‘For a man with three weeks to live, you take things pretty coolly. Don’t touch that phone, miss!’

‘You wouldn’t shoot me.’ She was already across the room. ‘You’re no murderer.’

‘I wouldn’t shoot you,’ he agreed. ‘I don’t have to.’ He reached her in three long strides — he could move as quickly and softly as a cat — took the phone from her, caught her arm and led her back to the chair beside me. She tried to struggle free but Jablonsky didn’t even notice it.

‘You don’t want law, eh?’ I asked thoughtfully. ‘Kind of cramps your style a little bit, friend.’

‘Meaning I don’t want company?’ he murmured. ‘Meaning maybe I would be awful reluctant to fire this gun?’

‘Meaning just that.’

‘I wouldn’t gamble on it,’ he smiled.

I gambled on it. I had my feet gathered under me and my hands on the arms of the chair. The back of my chair was solidly against the wall and I took off in a dive that was almost parallel to the floor, arrowing on for a spot about six inches below his breastbone.

I never got there. I’d wondered what he could do with his right hand and now I found out. With his right hand he could change his gun over to his left, whip a sap from his coat pocket and hit a diving man over the head faster than anyone I’d ever known. He’d been expecting something like that from me, sure: but it was still quite a performance.

By and by someone threw cold water over me and I sat up with a groan and tried to clutch the top of my head. With both hands tied behind your back it’s impossible to clutch the top of your head. So I let my head look after itself, climbed shakily to my feet by pressing my bound hands against the wall at my back and staggered over to the nearest chair. I looked at Jablonsky, and he was busy screwing a perforated black metal cylinder on to the barrel of the Mauser. He looked at me and smiled. He was always smiling.

‘I might not be so lucky a second time,’ he said diffidently.

I scowled.

‘Miss Ruthven,’ he went on. ‘I’m going to use the phone.’

‘Why tell me?’ She was picking up my manners and they didn’t suit her at all.

‘Because I’m going to phone your father. I want you to tell me his number. It won’t be listed.’

‘Why should you phone him?’

‘There’s a reward out for our friend here,’ Jablonsky replied obliquely. ‘It was announced right after the news-cast of Donnelly’s death. The state will pay five thousand dollars for any information leading to the arrest of John Montague Talbot.’ He smiled at me. ‘Montague, eh? Well, I believe I prefer it to Cecil.’

‘Get on with it,’ I said coldly.

‘They must have declared open season on Mr Talbot,’ Jablonsky said. ‘They want him dead or alive and don’t much care which … And General Ruthven has offered to double that reward.’

‘Ten thousand dollars?’ I asked.

‘Ten thousand.’

‘Piker,’ I growled.

‘At the last count old man Ruthven was worth 285 million dollars. He might,’ Jablonsky agreed judiciously, ‘have offered more. A total of fifteen thousand. What’s fifteen thousand?’

‘Go on,’ said the girl. There was a glint in those grey eyes now.

‘He can have his daughter back for fifty thousand bucks,’ Jablonsky said coolly.

‘Fifty thousand!’ Her voice was almost a gasp. If she’d been as poor as me she would have gasped.

Jablonsky nodded. ‘Plus, of course, the fifteen thousand I’ll collect for turning Talbot in as any good citizen should.’

‘Who are you?’ the girl demanded shakily. She didn’t look as if she could take much more of this. ‘What are you?’

‘I’m a guy that wants, let me see — yes, sixty-five thousand bucks.’

‘But this is blackmail!’

‘Blackmail?’ Jablonsky lifted an eyebrow. ‘You want to read up on some law, girlie. In its strict legal sense, blackmail is hush-money — a tribute paid to buy immunity, money extorted by the threat of telling everyone what a heel the blackmailee is. Had General Ruthven anything to hide? I doubt it. Or you might just say that blackmail is demanding money with menaces. Where’s the menace? I’m not menacing you. If your old man doesn’t pay up I’ll just walk away and leave you to Talbot here. Who can blame me? I’m scared of Talbot. He’s a dangerous man. He’s a killer.’

‘But — but then you would get nothing.’

‘I’d get it,’ Jablonsky said comfortably. I tried to imagine this character flustered or unsure of himself: it was impossible. ‘Only a threat. Your old man wouldn’t dare gamble I wouldn’t do it. He’ll pay, all right.’

‘Kidnapping is a federal offence—’ the girl began slowly.

‘So it is,’ Jablonsky agreed cheerfully. ‘The hot chair or the gas chamber. That’s for Talbot. He kidnapped you. All I’m doing is talking about leaving you. No kidnapping there.’ His voice hardened. ‘What hotel is your father staying at?’

‘He’snot at any hotel.’ Her voice was flat and toneless and she’d given up. ‘He’s out on the X 13.’

‘Talk sense,’ Jablonsky said curtly.

‘X 13 is one of his oil rigs. It’s out in the gulf, twelve, maybe fifteen miles from here. I don’t know.’

‘Out in the gulf. You mean one of those floating platforms for drilling for oil? I thought they were all up off the bayou country off Louisiana.’

‘They’re all round now — off Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Dad’s got one right down near Key West. And they don’t float, they — oh, what does it matter? He’s on X 13.’

‘No phone, huh?’

‘Yes. A submarine cable. And a radio from the shore office.’

‘No radio. Too public. The phone — just ask the operator for the X 13, huh?’

She nodded without speaking, and Jablonsky crossed to the phone, asked the motel switchboard girl for the exchange, asked for the X 13 and stood there waiting, whistling in a peculiarly tuneless fashion until a sudden thought occurred to him.

‘How does your father commute between the rig and shore?’

‘Boat or helicopter. Usually helicopter.’

‘What hotel does he stay at when he’s ashore?’

‘Not a hotel. Just an ordinary family house. He’s got a permanent lease on a place about two miles south of Marble Springs.’

Jablonsky nodded and resumed his whistling. His eyes appeared to be gazing at a remote point in the ceiling, but when I moved a foot a couple of experimental inches those eyes were on me instantly. Mary Ruthven had seen both the movement of my foot and the immediate switch of Jablonsky’s glance, and for a fleeting moment her eyes caught mine. There was no sympathy in it, but I stretched my imagination a little and thought I detected a flicker of fellow-feeling. We were in the same boat and it was sinking fast.

The whistling had stopped. I could hear an indistinguishable crackle of sound then Jablonsky said: ‘I want to speak to General Ruthven. Urgently. It’s about — say that again? I see. I see.’

He depressed the receiver and looked at Mary Ruthven.

‘Your father left the X 13 at 4 p.m., and hasn’t returned. They say he won’t be back until they’ve found you. Blood, it would appear, is thicker than oil. Makes things all the easier for me.’ He got through to the new number he’d been given from the oil rig and asked for the general again. He got him almost at once and didn’t waste a word.

‘General Blair Ruthven … I’ve got news for you, General. Good news and bad. I’ve got your daughter here. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’ll cost you fifty thousand bucks to get her back.’ Jablonsky broke off and listened, spinning the Mauser gently round his forefinger, smiling as always. ‘No, General, I am not John Talbot. But Talbot’s with me right now. I’ve persuaded him that keeping father and daughter apart any longer is downright inhuman. You know Talbot, General, or you know of him. It took a lot of persuading. Fifty thousand bucks’ worth of persuading.’

The smile suddenly vanished from Jablonsky’s face leaving it bleak and cold and hard. The real Jablonsky. His voice, when he spoke, was softer and deeper than ever and gently reproving as to an erring child.

‘General, do you know what? I just heard a funny little click. The sort of funny little click you hear on a line when some smart-alec nosey picks up an extension and starts flapping his ears or when somebody cuts in a tape recorder. I don’t want any eavesdroppers. No records of private conversations. Neither do you. Not if you ever want to see your daughter again … ah, that’s better. And General, don’t get any funny ideas about telling someone to get through to the cops on another line to ask them to trace this call. We’ll be gone from wherever we are in exactly two minutes from now. What’s your answer? Make it quickly, now.’

Another brief pause, then Jablonsky laughed pleasantly.

‘Threatening you, General? Blackmail, General? Kidnapping, General? Don’t be so silly, General. There’s no law that says that a man can’t run away from a vicious killer, is there? Even if that vicious killer happens to have a kidnappee with him. I’ll just walk out and leave them together. Tell me, are you bargaining for your daughter’s life, General? Is she worth no more to you than less than one-fiftieth of one per cent of all you own? Is that all her value to a doting father? She’s listening in to all this, General. I wonder what she might think of you, eh? Willing to sacrifice her life for an old shoe-button — for that’s all fifty thousand bucks is to you … Sure, sure you can speak to her.’ He beckoned to the girl, who ran across the room and snatched the phone from his hand.

‘Daddy? Daddy! … Yes, yes, it’s me, of course it’s me. Oh, Daddy, I never thought—’

‘Right, that’ll do.’ Jablonsky laid his big square brown hand across the mouthpiece and took the phone from her. ‘Satisfied, General Blair? The genuine article, huh?’ There was a short silence, then Jablonsky smiled broadly. ‘Thank you, General Blair. I’m not worrying about any guarantee. The word of General Ruthven has always been guarantee enough.’ He listened a moment, and when he spoke again the sardonic glint in his eyes as he looked at Mary Ruthven gave the lie to the sincerity in his voice. ‘Besides, you know quite well that if you welshed on that money and had a house full of cops, your daughter would never speak to you again … No need to worry about my not coming. There’s every reason why I should. Fifty thousand, to be exact.’

He hung up. ‘On your feet, Talbot. We have an appointment with high society.’

‘Yes.’ I sat where I was. ‘And then you turn me over to the law and collect your fifteen thousand?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

‘I could give you twenty thousand reasons.’

‘Yeah?’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘Got ’em on you?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Give me a week, or perhaps—’

‘Bird-in-the-hand Jablonsky, pal, that’s me. Get going. Looks like being a nice night’s work.’

He cut my bonds and we went out through the garage. Jablonsky had a hand on the girl’s wrist and a gun about thirty inches from my back. I couldn’t see it, but I didn’t have to. I knew it was there.

Night had come. The wind was rising, from the north-west, and it carried with it the wild harsh smell of the sea and a cold slanting rain that splattered loudly against the rustling dripping fronds of the palms and bounced at an angle off the asphalt pavement at our feet. It was less than a hundred yards to where Jablonsky had left his Ford outside the central block of the motel, but that hundred yards made us good and wet. The parking-lot, in that rain, was deserted, but even Jablonsky had backed his car into the darkest corner. He would. He opened both offside doors of the Ford, then went and stood by the rear door.

‘You first, lady. Other side. You’re driving, Talbot.’ He banged my door shut as I got in behind the wheel, slid into the back seat and closed his own door. He let me feel the Mauser, hard, against the back of my neck in case my memory was failing me.

‘Turn south on the highway.’

I managed to press the proper buttons, eased through the deserted motel courtyard and turned right. Jablonsky said to the girl: ‘Your old man’s place is just off the main highway? Right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any other way of getting there? Back streets? Side roads?’

‘Yes, you can go round the town and—’

‘So. We’ll go straight through. I’m figuring the same way as Talbot figured when he came to the La Contessa — no one will be looking for him within fifty miles of Marble Springs.’

We drove through the town in silence. The roads were almost deserted and there weren’t half a dozen pedestrians to be seen. I caught the red both times at the only two sets of traffic lights in Marble Springs, and both times the Mauser came to rest on the back of my head. By and by we were clear of the town and the rain sheeting down in a torrential cascade that drummed thunderously on the roof and hood of the car. It was like driving under a waterfall and the windscreen-wipers weren’t built for driving under waterfalls. I had to slow down to twenty and even so I was all but blind whenever the headlights of an approaching car spread their whitely-diffused glare over the streaming glass of the windscreen, a blindness which became complete with the spraying wall of water that thudded solidly against screen and offside of the body as the approaching cars swept by with the sibilant whisper of wet rubber on wet roads and a bow-wave that a destroyer captain would have been proud to own.

Mary Ruthven peered into the alternating glare and gloom with her forehead pressed against the windscreen. She probably knew the road well, but she didn’t know it tonight. A north-bound truck growled by at the wrong moment and she almost missed the turn-off.

‘There it is!’ She grabbed my forearm so hard that the Ford skidded for a moment on to the shoulder of the road before I could bring it under control. I caught a glimpse through the rain of a dimly phosphorescent glow on the left and was fifty yards beyond before I stopped. The road was too narrow for a U-turn so I backed and filled until we were heading the other way, crawled up to the illuminated opening in first and turned in slowly. I should have hated to turn in there quickly. As it was, I managed to pull up a few feet short of a six-barred white-painted metal gate that would have stopped a bulldozer.

The gate appeared to be at the end of an almost flat-roofed tunnel. On the left was a seven-foot high white limestone wall, maybe twenty feet long. On the right was a white lodge with an oak door and chintz-covered windows looking out on to the tunnel. Lodge and wall were joined by a shallowly curved roof. I couldn’t see what the roof was made of. I wasn’t interested in it anyway: I was too busy looking at the man who had come through the lodge door even before I had braked to a stop.

He was the dowager’s dream of a chauffeur. He was perfect. He was immaculate. He was a poem in maroon. Even his gleaming riding boots looked maroon. The flaring Bedford cord breeches, the high-buttoned tunic, the gloves perfectly folded under one epaulette, even the peak of the cap were all of the same perfect shade. He took his cap off. His hair wasn’t maroon. It was thick and black and gleaming and parted on the right. He had a smooth brown face and dark eyes set well apart, just like his shoulders. A poem, but no pansy. He was as big as I was, and a whole lot better looking.

Mary Ruthven had the window wound down, and the chauffeur bent to look at her, one sinewy brown hand resting on the edge of the door. When he saw who it was the brown face broke into a wide smile and if the relief and gladness in his eyes weren’t genuine he was the best actor-chauffeur I’d ever known.

‘It is you, Miss Mary.’ The voice was deep, educated and unmistakably English: when you’d two hundred and eighty-five million bucks it didn’t cost but pennies extra to hire a home-grown shepherd to look after your flock of imported Rolls-Royces. English chauffeurs were class. ‘I’m delighted to see you back, ma’am. Are you all right?’

‘I’m delighted to be back, Simon.’ For a brief moment her hand lay over his and squeezed it. She let her breath go in what was half-sigh, half-shudder, and added: ‘I’m all right. How is Daddy?’

‘The general has been worried stiff, Miss Mary. But he’ll be all right now. They told me to expect you. I’ll let them know right away.’ He half-turned, wheeled, craned forward and peered into the back of the car. His body perceptibly stiffened.

‘Yeah, it’s a gun,’ Jablonsky said comfortably from the rear seat. ‘Just holding it, sonny — gets kinda uncomfortable sitting down with a gun in your hip pocket. Haven’t you found that yourself?’ I looked and, sure enough, I could see the slight bulge on the chauffeur’s right hip. ‘Spoils the cut of the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, don’t it, though?’ Jablonsky went on. ‘And don’t get any funny ideas about using yours. The time for that’s past. Besides, you might hit Talbot. That’s him behind the wheel. Fifteen thousand dollars on the hoof and I want to deliver him in prime condition.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’ The chauffeur’s face had darkened, his voice was barely civil. ‘I’ll ring the house.’ He turned away, went into the small lobby behind the door, lifted the phone and pressed a button, and as he did so the heavy gate swung open silently, smoothly, of its own accord.

‘All we need now is a moat and a portcullis,’ Jablonsky murmured as we began to move forward. ‘Looks after his 285 million, does the old general. Electrified fences, patrols, dogs, the lot, eh, lady?’

She didn’t answer. We were moving past a big four-car garage attached to the lodge. It was a carport-type garage without doors and I could see I had been right about the Rolls-Royces. There were two of them, one sand-brown and beige, the other gun-metal blue. There was also a Cadillac. That would be for the groceries. Jablonsky was speaking again.

‘Old Fancy-pants back there. The Limey. Where’d you pick that sissy up?’

‘I’d like to see you say that to him without that gun in your hand,’ the girl said quietly. ‘He’s been with us for three years now. Nine months ago three masked men crashed our car with only Kennedy and myself in it. They all carried guns. One’s dead, the other two are still in prison.’

‘A lucky sissy,’ Jablonsky grunted and relapsed into silence.

The asphalt drive-way up to the house was narrow, long, winding and thickly wooded on both sides. The small evergreen leaves of live oak and long dripping grey festoons of Spanish moss reached out and brushed the roof and sidescreens of the car. Suddenly the trees receded on both sides from the beams of the headlamps, giving way to strategically placed clumps of palms and palmettos, and there, behind a stepped granite balustrade wall and a gravel terrace, lay the general’s house.

Built as an ordinary family house, the girl had said. Built for a family of about fifty. It was enormous. It was an old white ante-bellum-type house, so Colonial that it creaked, with a huge pillared two-storey porch, a curiously double-angled roof of a type I’d never seen before and enough glass to keep an active window-cleaner in year-round employment. Over the entrance of the lower porch were two more lights, big old-fashioned coach lamps each with a powerful electric bulb inside. Below the lamps stood the reception committee.

I hadn’t expected the reception committee. Subconsciously, I suppose, I had expected the old high-class routine of being welcomed by the butler and deferentially and ceremoniously conducted to the library where the general would be sipping his Scotch before a crackling pine fire. Which was pretty silly, when you come to think of it. When you’re expecting a daughter back from the dead and the door-bell rings, you don’t just keep on sipping whisky. Not if you’re halfway human. The chauffeur had warned them: hence the committee.

The butler was there too. He came down the steps of the porch carrying a huge golf umbrella out into the heavy rain. He didn’t look like any butler I’d ever seen. His coat was far too tight round his upper arms, shoulders and chest in a fashion that used to be popular among prohibition gangsters and his face did nothing to dispel the impression. He looked first cousin to Valentino, the bodyguard back in the court-room. Or maybe even more closely related. He even had the same broken nose. The general had a weird taste in butlers, especially when you considered his choice of chauffeur.

But the butler seemed courteous enough. At least I thought he was until he saw who it was behind the driving-wheel and then he made a smart about turn, went round the front of the car and escorted Mary Ruthven to the shelter of the porch where she ran forward and threw her arms round her father’s neck. Jablonsky and I had to make it alone. We got wet, but no one seemed worried.

By this time the girl had become disentangled from her father. I had a good look at him. He was an immensely tall old coot, thin but not too thin, in a silver-white linen suit. The colour of the suit was a perfect match for the hair. He had a long lean craggy Lincolnesque face, but just how craggy it was impossible to say for almost half of it was hidden behind a luxuriant white moustache and beard. He didn’t look like any big business magnate I’d ever come across, but with 285 million dollars he didn’t have to. He looked like the way I’d expected a southern judge to look and didn’t.

‘Come in, gentlemen,’ he said courteously. I wondered if he included me among the three other men standing in the shadows in the porch. It seemed unlikely, but I went in all the same. I hadn’t much option. Not only was Jablonsky’s Mauser jammed into the small of my back but another man who’d just stepped out of the shadow also carried a gun. We trooped across a huge, wide, chandelier-lit, tessellated-tile floored hall, down a broad passage and into a large room. I’d been right about the room anyway. It was a library, it did have a blazing pine fire and the slightly oily smell of fine leather-bound books mingled very pleasantly with the aroma of expensive Coronas and a high-class Scotch. I noticed there was nobody there smoking cigars. The walls that weren’t covered with bookshelves were panelled in polished elm. Chairs and settees were in dark gold leather and moquette, and the curtains of shot gold. A bronze-coloured carpet flowed over the floor from wall to wall and with a strong enough draught the nap on it would have waved and undulated like a wind-rippled field of summer corn. As it was, the chair castors were so deeply sunk in it as to be almost invisible.

‘Scotch, Mr — ah—?’ the general asked Jablonsky.

‘Jablonsky. I don’t mind, General. While I’m standing. And while I’m waiting.’

‘Waiting for what, Mr Jablonsky?’ General Ruthven had a quiet pleasant voice with very little inflection in it. With 285 million bucks you don’t have to shout to make yourself heard.

‘Ain’t you the little kidder, now?’ Jablonsky was as quiet, as unruffled as the general. ‘For the little paper, General, with your name signed at the bottom. For the fifty thousand iron men.’

‘Of course.’ The general seemed faintly surprised that Jablonsky should think it necessary to remind him of the agreement. He crossed to the dressed-stone mantelpiece, pulled a yellow bank slip from under a paper-weight. ‘I have it here, just the payee’s name to be filled in.’ I thought a slight smile touched his mouth but under all that foliage it was difficult to be sure. ‘And you needn’t worry about my phoning the bank with instructions not to honour this cheque. Such is not my way of doing business.’

‘I know it’s not, General.’

‘And my daughter is worth infinitely more to me than this. I must thank you, sir, for bringing her back.’

‘Yeah.’ Jablonsky took the cheque, glanced casually at it, then looked at the general, a speculative glint in his eyes.

‘Your pen slipped, General,’ he drawled. ‘I asked for fifty thousand. You got seventy thousand here.’

‘Correct.’ Ruthven inclined his head and glanced at me. ‘I had offered ten thousand dollars for information about this man here. I also feel that I’m morally bound to make good the five thousand offered by the authorities. It’s so much easier to make out one lump-sum cheque to one person, don’t you agree?’

‘And the extra five thousand?’

‘For your trouble and the pleasure it will give me to hand this man over to the authorities personally.’ Again I couldn’t be sure whether or not he smiled. ‘I can afford to indulge those whims, you know.’

‘Your pleasure is my pleasure, General. I’ll be on my way, then. Sure you can handle this fellow? He’s tough, fast, tricky as they come.’

‘I have people who can handle him.’ It was plain that the general wasn’t referring to the butler and another uniformed servant hovering in the background. He pressed a bell, and when some sort of footman came to the door, said: ‘Ask Mr Vyland and Mr Royale to come in, will you, Fletcher?’

‘Why don’t you ask them yourself, General?’ To my way of thinking I was the central figure in that little group, but they hadn’t even asked me to speak, so I thought it was time to say something. I bent down to the bowl of artificial flowers on the table by the fire, and pulled up a fine-meshed microphone. ‘This room’s bugged. A hundred gets one your friends have heard every word that’s been said. For a millionaire and high society flier, Ruthven, you have some strange habits.’ I broke off and looked at the trio who had just come through the doorway. ‘And even stranger friends.’

Which wasn’t quite an accurate statement. The first man in looked perfectly at home in that luxurious setting. He was of medium height, medium build, dressed in a perfectly cut dinner suit and smoking a cigar as long as your arm. That was the expensive smell I’d picked up as soon as I had come into the library. He was in his early fifties, with black hair touched by grey at the temples: his neat clipped moustache was jet black. His face was smooth and unlined and deeply sunburnt. He was Hollywood’s ideal of a man to play the part of a top executive, smooth, urbane and competent to a degree. It was only when he came closer and you saw his eyes and the set of the planes of his face that you realized that here was a toughness, both physical and mental, and a hardness that you would never see around a movie set. A man to watch.

The second man was more off-beat. It was hard to put a finger on the quality that made him so. He was dressed in a soft grey flannel suit, white shirt, and grey tie of the same shade as the suit. He was slightly below medium height, broadly built, with a pale face and smooth slicked hair almost the same colour as Mary Ruthven’s. It wasn’t until you looked again and again that you saw what made him off-beat, it wasn’t anything he had, it was something he didn’t have. He had the most expressionless face, the emptiest eyes I had even seen in any man.

Off-beat was no description for the man who brought up the rear. He belonged in that library the way Mozart would have belonged in a rock and roll club. He was only twenty-one or — two, tall, skinny, with a dead-white face and coal-black eyes. The eyes were never still, they moved restlessly from side to side as if it hurt them to be still, flickering from one face to another like a will-o’-the-wisp on an autumn evening. I didn’t notice what he wore, all I saw was his face. The face of a hophead, a junky, an advanced dope addict. Take away his white powder for even twenty-four hours and he’d be screaming his head off as all the devils in hell closed in on him.

‘Come in, Mr Vyland.’ The general was speaking to the man with the cigar and I wished for the tenth time that old Ruthven’s expression wasn’t so hard to read. He nodded in my direction. ‘This is Talbot, the wanted man. And this is Mr Jablonsky, the man who brought him back.’

‘Glad to meet you, Mr Jablonsky.’ Vyland smiled in a friendly fashion and put his hand out. ‘I’m the general’s chief production engineer.’ Sure, he was the general’s chief production engineer, that made me President of the United States. Vyland nodded at the man in the grey suit. ‘This is Mr Royale, Mr Jablonsky.’

‘Mr Jablonsky! Mr Jablonsky!’ The words weren’t spoken, they were hissed by the tall thin boy with the staring eyes. His hand dived under the lapel of his jacket and I had to admit he was fast. The gun trembled in his hand. He swore, three unprintable words in succession, and the eyes were glazed and mad. ‘I’ve waited two long years for this, you — Damn you, Royale! Why did—?’

‘There’s a young lady here, Larry.’ I could have sworn that Royale’s hand hadn’t reached under his coat, or for his hip pocket, but there had been no mistaking the flash of dulled metal in his hand, the sharp crack of the barrel on Larry’s wrist and the clatter of the boy’s gun bouncing off a brass-topped table. As an example of sleight-of-hand conjuring, I’d never seen anything to beat it.

‘We know Mr Jablonsky,’ Royale was continuing. His voice was curiously musical and soothing and soft. ‘At least, Larry and I know. Don’t we, Larry? Larry did six months once on a narcotics charge. It was Jablonsky that sent him up.’

‘Jablonsky sent—’ the general began.

‘Jablonsky.’ Royale smiled and nodded at the big man. ‘Detective-Lieutenant Herman Jablonsky, of New York Homicide.’