Free Live Free

Blood Money

The older man behind the desk nodded. “So you have. It’s the truth.”

Illingworth asked, “Do you require anything further from me?”

“You mean you want to be paid.”

“I would not have put it so crudely.”

The older man chuckled. “You didn’t.”

“But since you yourself have raised the issue …”

“Did she say anything?”

“Very little.” Illingworth took a slender tape recorder from his coat pocket and handed it over.

“Wonderful gizmos,” the old man said. “Just amazing. You didn’t try to pump her?”

“I was instructed not to.”

“Uh huh.” The older man leaned back in his chair, his fingers making a steeple over his vest. (Illingworth noted with approval that he wore a watch chain.) “I’m afraid I’ll have to listen to this before you leave. But first your pay, right. If you want, we can see that the money is deposited in any account you want. Just give me the number.”

“If it is all the same to you, sir,” Illingworth said, “I should prefer cash.”

The older man smiled faintly. “Yes, the income tax.”

“Would cash be convenient?”

“Very.” The older man slid open a drawer and tossed a bundle of money onto his desk. “Count it,” he said. “Should be old bills, mixed numbers.”

“There is no need of that. I have confidence in you, sir.”

“Glad to hear it. Then I can make you a better deal, if you want. This’s five thousand, right?”

“That was the agreed-upon sum, yes.”

“Say the word and we’ll more than double it. You own those two little magazines. Well, it turns out an eccentric millionaire set up a five-thousand-dollar grant in trust, at interest, for them quite some time back. To be paid this year, if they were still being published. A grant to encourage your kind of science. Not taxable, of course. All you’ll have to do is use it for your operations and put the money you’d have used if you hadn’t got it into your pocket.”

“I see.”

“It’s all the same to us.”

“I see,” Illingworth said again. “The grant, I suppose.” He sighed. “There should be a good deal of prestige, too, in the grant.”

“You do have confidence in us. I’m glad to see that.”

“Not really. It’s just that throughout my life I’ve prided myself upon being a civilized man, and this would seem to be some sort of test of it.”

The older man (who was so much younger than Illingworth) chuckled. “You’re right, anyway. If we wanted to chisel you, we could chisel you a dozen different ways, whether we gave you cash or not. We could arrange for a stickup, for example, when you got home.”

“I’d prefer you not do that.”

“Well, chacon à son goût, Mr. Illingworth. Now you wait out there while I run the gizmo. I’ll phone and give somebody the word when you can go.”

Illingworth went out. The younger man was no longer at his desk, and there were noises from outside. The windows were white with frost, but the lights that flashed against them, vanished, then flashed again appeared to proceed from the headlights of automobiles.

The door to the inner office opened, and the older man came out, pulling on a duffel coat. Without nodding to Illingworth or so much as looking in his direction, he hurried out into the cold. For a moment, Illingworth was tempted to reenter his office and take the bundle of money from his desk. Caution and more than thirty years of petty journalism intervened. He went to a window instead and used the heel of his hand to melt a peephole in the frost.

There were several cars and several men with flashlights too. He tried to identify the older man by his duffel coat, but almost any of the crowding figures could have been his.

A car door opened. Rather surprisingly, Illingworth thought, the overhead light came on inside the car. A small man in a trenchcoat was pushed out and fell in the snow, his hands still clasped, as it seemed, behind his back. Two men lifted him to his feet again. Perhaps he said something—Illingworth could not be certain. One of the men struck him hard enough to twist his head around, the sound of the blow coming faintly through the frozen glass. A door in the building opposite opened, and a man led the small man inside.

Illingworth heard the rattle of the door at his elbow just in time to step back. The man in the duffel coat came in, followed by a big man in a black raincoat and a petite blonde in blue mink. All three went into the inner office, and someone shut the door.

Plainly the man in the duffel coat—whoever he was—was not listening to the tape. Illingworth speculated vaguely on what might occur should he attempt to leave. He looked through his peephole again. The cars that had brought the small man were gone; it might be possible for him to return to his own car, to back it from that alley between the buildings.

It might not, as well. He might be killed, he thought, if he tried. Almost certainly the grant in trust would be lost. He found he did not believe in that grant anyway. He believed in poltergeists and shapeshifters and all manner of impossible things, but he did not believe in the grant. He would never see a penny of it. He thought of going back and asking the older man for the cash instead, but the humiliation would be too great. If only he escaped, got out without being ruined, perhaps …

As a young man he had been a good judge of time, so good that once when his watch, his beautiful gold watch with the fine-china dial and the double lids, had failed him, he had carried no substitute while it was being repaired. Now time seemed to slip away. Time was running faster. “Time is, time was, time’s past.” He recalled many afternoons when he was twenty that had been longer than the longest days were now. He mused on them for a moment, how they had tied the Airedale to Dr. Cooper’s bulldog to make them fight, watching, later, from the white bench under the elm.

There was more noise outside. He rose to look, drawing his coat about him; it was cold in the outer room, so cold his peephole had frozen again.

Cars, one black, or gray, or perhaps green—in the headlights, the dancing flashlights, it was difficult to say. The prisoner was a slightly larger man this time, nude, Illingworth thought, under a blanket. His hands were tied in front of him, so he was able to hold the blanket around him, but he was blindfolded like the other. Illingworth wondered if they had blindfolded the Gypsy princess too, after they had led her away.

A big, handsome woman followed the blindfolded man carrying his clothes, or at least carrying a bundle of clothes that were presumably his. She talked for a moment with one of the men with flashlights while their prisoner did a little dance in the snow, lifting one bare foot, then the other. The man with the flashlight took the clothes from her, and she started toward Illingworth’s building.

He backed away from his peephole and lit a cigarette, but she seemed to pay no attention to him when she came in, though she paused to stamp the snow from her boots. He thought her extraordinarily attractive for a woman of her size—she must have been almost six feet—despite a complexion nearly as dark as the Gypsy’s. On her shining black hair she wore a little fur hat with a peacock’s feather, a hat made to match her sweeping coat; even the tops of her boots were trimmed in the same spotted fur. Their heels rattled like musketry as she marched into the older man’s office.

When she had gone, Illingworth went to his peephole again; almost at once he heard the click of the latch behind him. The big man in the black raincoat was coming out. Illingworth nodded to him in a way he hoped was reserved yet friendly.

The big man’s hand went to his shirt pocket, but came away empty. “You wouldn’t have another cigarette, would you?”

“Certainly.” Illingworth held out his silver case.

“Thanks a lot. I smoked all mine on the drive out here.” He took a cigarette and lit it with his own Zippo, then extended his hand. “I’m Cliff Rebic.”

“Cassius Illingworth.”

“Very pleased to meet you, sir. You a government man?”

“No,” Illingworth told him. “I’m a publisher.”

“Ah. Newspaper?”

“Magazines.”

“Ah,” Cliff said again. “I’m a private investigator—got my own agency.” He fumbled under the black raincoat and brought out a card. “You never know when you might need a competent team of investigators, Mr. Illingworth, and if Doyle & Rebic’s good enough for General Whitten’s bunch,” Cliff jerked his head toward the inner office, “it’s good enough for anybody.”

“I see. They employed you.”

“Yes, sir, they did.”

“They employed me as well.” Illingworth paused, studying the ceiling. “You might say they enlisted the very competent reportorial staffs of my magazines.”

“No kidding. How much they pay you?”

“That, I fear, must remain confidential.”

“Yeah, sure. I know how it is. It’s just that I thought knowing might be useful to me in my profession, you get me? Like maybe pretty soon they might want Doyle & Rebic again, and I’d like to know what the traffic will bear. Doyle’s dead, by the way. I’m president.”

“And similarly,” Illingworth said, “I should like to know just how much they paid you. Not for publication.”

“Then there’s no problem, right? Tell me, and I’ll tell you.”

“You would rely upon my veracity.”

“Sure.”

“And you would not modify your answer, based upon my own?”

“Hell, no.”

“Then this is what I propose.” Illingworth produced a pocket notebook and a pen. “We will each write the sum, each fold his slip of paper, and exchange them.”

“Got you. Here, I got my own notebook.”

For a moment there was silence except for the scratchings of the pens on paper and the faint sounds of an automobile on the road beyond the gates. Cold haunted the bare room like starlight.

“Okay, you ready?”

Illingworth nodded, and Cliff handed him a folded scrap of paper. He crumpled it without reading it and let it fall to the gritty floor as he gave Cliff his own.

“What the hell is this? ‘Thirty pieces of silver’?”

“You will not recognize the quotation,” Illingworth told him, “but quod scripsi, scripsi.”

He turned away, and as he did so, the sound of the automobile altered. Snow creaked and snapped under rubber wheels. John B. Sweet’s rented Cadillac was entering the compound. Nearby, the engines of a propeller-driven plane sputtered to life, one after another.