Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 3, March 26, 1980

The Last Trump by Jeffry Scott

Bunting suspected he could buy and sell Trump before breakfast...

The devotion, love, and constant attention expended by Porter Bunting could never be described as selfless, because it was lavished upon himself. Of course, he was one of the Boston Buntings, but that had little to do with it; he simply knew of no other person more deserving and estimable.

Unlovely enough — obese, wattled, age-freckled, in his forties — Porter still suffered from terminal narcissism. Sometimes he woke in the night, amending Shakespeare slightly to marvel at what a piece of work was Porter Bunting. Even his hearing became oddly selective as the disease kindled and advanced. Accused by an exasperated hundred-dollar hooker in Miami of being “a first-class creep,” Bunting merely smirked and creased his belly in a bow that compounded the harlot’s fury. He had heard only the first three words.

Business took him to Liberville, that model Socialist Republic that simmers in brutal sunlight when it is not being soused by the rainy season. Porter Bunting stayed at the best hotel, the Tropique, and very bad it was. He just couldn’t understand how an entire nation could conspire to test and torment him to such a pitch.

At the Tropique, he encountered The Last Trump.

You may well have done the same. Ronnie Trump travels such a lot, selling things. A battered cherub, a knowing gnome, teasing flight attendants, forever bagging the last taxi at the terminal, the first sitting at the Captain’s table.

“Trump’s the name, and I am a bit of a card,” Ronnie always crows by way of introduction.

In a way, their foregathering on the veranda of the Tropique, a place of warped timbers and flaccid greenery more gloomy than shady, was a meeting of titans: first-class creep meets first-class pain.

To make it worse, Bunting had to acknowledge him. Trump’s parents had sent him overseas from England at the outbreak of World War II. He had spent a short, best forgotten time at Porter Bunting’s prep school and recognized Porter at once.

Porter Bunting, naturally, has trouble recollecting distant members of his own family. People who have been mere walk-on characters in the Bunting saga are forgotten not merely soon after but at the very moment of meeting. However, while he did not remember Ronnie Trump a shadow glided across the farthest horizon of his emotional landscape. Something about the fellow...

Trump was enthusiastic though. “Bit of luck for The Last Trump,” he chortled. “What’re you doing in dear old Liverville, old chap? Bad Liverville, you’ll soon discover. Trying to make your fortune, eh?”

Bunting suspected, as he did of everyone bar oil sheiks, that he could buy and sell Ronnie before breakfast. He snorted indignantly and huffed something about delicate negotiations. Trump whirled a card-index behind his knobbly forehead, winked, and said, “Aha — the new telephone system. You’ll have to grease a lot of palms, my lad. And you’ll hang around here until you’ve got whiskers past your knees. Boy! Two gin slings, chop chop!”

Bunting said shortly, “I never drink gin. Anyway, the waiters won’t come. I’ve been out here for hours” — it had been seven and a half minutes — “and they simply ignore one.”

Immediately a lithe servant materialized at Trump’s elbow, greeted him fawningly, and sped away. Trump, a moment later, was sipping at an ice-hazed tumbler while Bunting fumed.

“Damned country!” Bunting exploded. “Nothing but a living museum of graft and lethargy.” Rolling pettishly in his cane lounger, he gestured at the twilight street outside. “Nothing happens, nothing ever will happen.”

Trump put the drink aside, hugged his knees, and beamed. “Now there you’re wrong. If it’s action you’re after, old chap, you may get more than you like.” Head cocked on one side, he resembled a sponge-rubber gargoyle.

Something in his aura — that crass cheerfulness prevailing at funerals and among witnesses of traffic accidents — made Porter Bunting feel uneasy. He was not soothed when Ronnie Trump added, “My word, but I admire your spirit! Talk about true grit...”

Bunting grunted interrogatively. Trump clasped himself tighter. “Why, your little dispute with Lyfeldt over water rights this morning. Oh, I wasn’t eavesdropping, ’pon my soul! But everyone could hear you all over the second floor.”

Though he remained impassive, Porter Bunting bridled and smirked inwardly. That morning he had discovered that, like most of the Hotel Tropique’s fittings and staff, the shower would not work.

The bedroom next door had been vacant the previous night, so Bunting went in there. The thin, grey, whiny-voiced occupant — Lyfeldt, evidently — had come in from breakfast, while Bunting soaped and slopped and crooned, and demanded to know what was going on.

Bunting couldn’t repress a chuckle. He’d told Lyfeldt a thing or three! Sneaking in like that, little better than a peeping tom — some kind of degenerate! Feebly, Lyfeldt strove to point out that the room was his, slept in and paid for; that the towel covering the intruder’s paunch was Lyfeldt’s towel.

Progressively more choleric, Porter Bunting shouted him down before storming out, dripping water on Lyfeldt’s luggage. His anger had been genuine. He found it nigh impossible to accept that anyone could not understand that Bunting s comfort, convenience, and well being were matters of self-evident priority.

“Bit of a lark, eh?” Trump prompted, and Bunting, coming back to the present, compressed his chins in a grudging nod.

“The man looked like a sick rat by the time I was through with him,” he agreed. “People are incredibly selfish and stupid, I find.”

Trump made sympathetic noises. “All the same...” He rubbed his bulbous little nose. “I wouldn’t have the guts to do what you did. I mean, do you know who Lyfeldt is?” Here Ronnie Trump checked himself, became more conspiratorial and confiding. “Or, rather, what he is?”

Bunting stared at him.

“Lyfeldt is a hit man.” Trump seemed boyishly excited. “I was in Las Vegas — oh, ten years ago. Selling toilet installations to one of those new hotel-casinos. Not to put too fine a point on it, old man, my clients were gangsters. They pointed Lyfeldt out to me. He works for... um... organized crime, as they say. Kills people.”

A bubble of gas jumped into Porter Bunting’s gullet. The pain, sharp and unexpected, quite unmanned him. And it was so cold out on that veranda.

Trump drained his glass and smacked his lips. “Not to worry, old chap. He’s not a homicidal maniac, you know. He only kills for money.”

Clearing his throat, Bunting said, “Nonsense.” There was a note of pleading in his voice.

“You know best,” Trump countered, in a tone conveying the exact opposite. “Lyfeldt’s an assassin, sure enough. You must have seen his name in the papers when that — you know — when that truckers’ union official vanished, Lyfeldt’s name was raised.”

Lips trembling, Bunting mumbled, “I’m not afraid. I have a certain standing. One word to the embassy here and I could have him deported.”

Trump stiffened and tapped his friend’s arm. “Lower your voice,” he suggested dryly. “Lyfeldt just came in.”

Porter Bunting craned around, a rabbit at bay. Lyfeldt stood at the far corner of the veranda. His face was in shadow but his whole stance was a glare. Bunting tried to assemble a placating smile but his facial muscles were stiff with dread. Lyfeldt stepped back into deeper shadow, retreating to the dining room, white suit gleaming fitfully. Like something underwater. That shark Bunting had seen while cruising in the Gulf of Mexico had had the same implicit menace.

Reading his friend’s expression, Ronnie Trump whistled shrilly. “Golly, you didn’t know who he was when you tore him off a strip. Well, never mind. Those super-tough characters find it quite amusing when somebody bullies ’em.”

“He... he didn’t look amused just now. Should I call the police, get protection?”

Trump pondered the idea. “Bad notion, old man. You know the police here — corrupt as billy-o, every man Jack. Lyfeldt’s probably got them all on his payroll.” Trump snapped his fingers. “Come to think of it, when I was here last year there was some talk about him buying the Minister of the Interior, to stay safe from extradition for that triple murder in Brooklyn. He’s been here ever since.”

Porter Bunting sat transfixed, like a stone statue of a jelly. “Could you—?” he croaked before his throat dried to muteness.

For an instant Trump looked startled, even hostile. Then he shrugged, mopped his brow, and was beaming again. “All right, I’m a neutral between you Yanks! I’ll have a word with Lyfeldt — is that what you want?”

A fervent nod, a ghastly approving smirk.

Trump brushed his hands together. “Right. Tell him it was a rush of blood to the head, a fit of nerves, normally you’re the most amiable bloke in the world — that style of thing?”

“I was wrong,” Bunting whispered. “Very, very wrong. Unpardonably rude. It’s the heat here. I wasn’t myself, not at all myself. Tell him, Ronnie. I’ll be delighted to apologize, but only if you can smooth the way.”

Trump became gloomy. “It can’t be done. I haven’t been introduced to Lyfeldt.”

Porter Bunting wanted to throttle him. “Special circumstances,” he croaked imploringly. “No need to stand on ceremony, we’re all—” What? All what? he asked himself wildly. “All strangers in a strange land. We should stick together.”

“He might buy it, I suppose,” Ronnie Trump observed dubiously. “Very well, you beetle straight up to your room and stay there. I’ll report progress in the morning. Don’t open your door until I knock — oh, five times.”

“The morning?”

“Well, I can’t rush into this baldheaded,” Trump reminded him a trifle stiffly. “I only call myself The Last Trump. There’s my missus and the little Trumps, you know — reg’lar bridge hand. I’ll wait till Lyfeldt’s finished dinner, stand him a few drinks before he turns in. Gradual approach, d’ye see?”

And he bustled away, flicking cigarette ash off the lapels of his deplorable chain-store safari jacket.

Bunting spent a bad three hours. The room was stifling, its air conditioner a rusted monument to vanished ease. Outside, insects chirped the same three notes endlessly, or made noises like broken glass cascading down concrete ramps. Little creatures died noisily at the hands of unthinkable, invisible predators and Porter Bunting could empathize with them to the final nerve flicker of desperation and lethal agony. There were birds, sounding like giant fingernails scraping acre-wide blackboards, that he found especially trying.

At 1:00 A.M. he could bear it no longer, and after no more than twenty minutes on the bedside phone he contacted the front desk. Mr. Trump? Oh, he had departed. But certainly, Mr. Trump. We all love Mr. Trump. He departed by taximeter-cabriolet to catch the midnight flight to El Salvador.

Porter Bunting was stung by a chip of plastic in crashing the receiver down. Perfidious Albion, damned gutless limeys! Trump had run out on him.

That was when Bunting heard the footfall in the corridor. Just one, then a creaking, almost breathing, not-quite-sound of furtive steps which stopped outside his door.

He rolled off the bed and, soundless on shoeless feet, scuttled to the window. A balcony ran the width of the Tropique’s second floor, and Bunting fled to it. Presently it occurred to him that the balcony opened on either end of the long corridor passing the bedrooms up there.

He stole past window after window, turned sharp right, opened a door with care — requiring thirty seconds to move it a couple of feet ajar — and peered along the corridor.

Immediately he felt sick. Lyfeldt was outside his door. The man wore a terry-cloth robe ending just below the knees, and his limbs looked unpleasantly gaunt and pallid, like an allegorical figure of Death.

As Bunting watched, Lyfeldt’s left hand came out, hovered tentatively and spiderlike before deciding against a knock. The hand rested for a while against the door panel, spiderlike again, as if trying to catch vibrations from within. His right hand remained pressed against his flank, grasping something chunky, with a long, cylindrical snout.

Even in the extremity of fear, Bunting felt a spark of excitement. The man actually had a silenced pistol! His heart bumped, then relief jolted through him as Lyfeldt shrugged and turned away.

And then Porter Bunting sneezed.

Flinching back into hiding, he heard Lyfeldt padding toward him. To his horror, Lyfeldt paused at the end of the corridor, close enough to touch. Bunting could smell the dampness of the man’s freshly washed hair.

Lyfeldt was peering down the stairs. Next he would turn to retrace his steps and see Bunting cowering beside the door leading to the balcony.

A devout coward, Porter Bunting never knew how he did it. Lumbering forward, with a shriek of mingled terror and trapped rage, he shoved Lyfeldt down the stairs. The man gasped and hurtled the first ten treads without touching them, struck the wall at the angle of the flight, and rolled and crashed to the bottom.

There was a long silence. Wincing at the expected shot, or the sight of Lyfeldt climbing back, Bunting peeped over the rail.

Lyfeldt was a cross on the floor of the lobby, the mark of his own point of death, head bent at an impossible angle, gun flung a few feet from his flared fingers.

“Thank God,” sobbed Bunting.

Later he began to amend his reaction.

Detective Subur, British-trained and — accented, had courtesy he was deploying like a weapon. Beside him, pale and upset, Mokerjee, manager of the Tropique, kept darting glances at Porter Bunting as if unable to believe what he saw.

“Lyfeldt was a criminal,” Bunting repeated wearily. “What they call a hit man — a professional killer.”

Subur frowned in a good facsimile of puzzlement. “With great respect, sir, no. Mr. Lyfeldt was a salesman. He sold electrical goods. This I know, because until recently I was in our Immigration Department.

“Mr. Lyfeldt made several visits, and I personally checked his documents. He held full accreditation from our Board of Trade.”

Bunting sneered and shook his head. “Cover!”

“I doubt it, sir.” Subur might have been discussing cricket statistics. “Mr. Lyfeldt sold several consignments of radios to my uncle. They were shaped like fruits, as it might be — apples, bananas, oranges. Good radios. I assure you, the late lamented gentleman was a salesman.”

“But he had a gun!”

Subur’s smile was gleaming white, a positive sunburst. “Not exactly, sir. Not quite. It was a device for spraying the throat and bronchial passages and so forth. Mr. Lyfeldt suffered from breathing difficulties. It may have escaped your attention, but our climate is ever so very slightly humid. Poor Mr. Lyfeldt found it oppressive. Hence the sprayer. No known caliber — not a firearm of any form.”

Mokerjee blurted out, “Wicked lies! This man had arguments with Mr. Lyfeldt — burst into his bedroom and shouted at him.”

“Exactly,” Detective Subur murmured.

“I used his shower, that’s all!”

“But it was not your room.” Subur raised a languid, pink-palmed hand. “No matter. You were at odds with the deceased and, by your own admission, crept out at dead of night and in a stealthy, covert, one might say ambushing mode of conduct shoved him to perdition. Yes?”

“No! Well, in a way. No — he was hanging around outside my room!”

To Bunting’s surprise, Mokerjee nodded agreement. “Mr. Lyfeldt wanted to speak to you. He was terribly worried you might dismiss him — end his employment.”

Bunting mouthed feebly. “Fire him? I didn’t know the man!”

“Except for killing him,” Subur amended suavely.

“I’ve explained that.”

Frowning judiciously, Subur commented, “You have told me many things and explained nothing. What is this about ending the deceased’s employment?”

While Bunting gobbled helplessly, the manager burst out again. “Mr. Lyfeldt had a long chat with Mr. Trump, our nice English guest. After dinner.

“Then Mr. Trump went to catch his plane. Mr. Lyfeldt came to me, most agitated, asking if you were in your room, whether it was too late to disturb you. He had just learned that you had bought the Nadir Novelty Radio Company of New Orleans, and was anxious to apologize before you discharged him for arguing with you over his room.”

Head whirling, Bunting made a mosquito-shooing gesture. “This is lunacy! I wouldn’t buy a radio firm!”

He stopped with an audible gulp. Detective Subur noted a guilty tremor and leaned forward. Cases involving mercurial, ill-disciplined aliens were always good for local headlines. This madman Bunting was about to confess.

Porter Bunting was remembering why he hadn’t been pleased, right at the back of his mind, to meet Ronnie Trump. Itching powder, thumb-tacked chairs, short-sheeted beds...

The Last Trump had been a compulsive practical joker.