The Good Old Stuff

They Let Me Live

The silly woman from the alphabetical agency kept trying to move in on me as I lay on top of the blue canvas of the hatch cover. The weary little ship chewed its way doggedly across the Pacific, and I thought I’d never be able to soak up enough sun. The doc in Calcutta had grinned like a well-fed cat when he told me that I had better just pretend that I had been dead for a year. There was a lot to think about, and the dumpy girl yawped at me until my head ached. I grunted at her for four days and finally told her that it was too bad she was a lady because that made it impossible for me to tell her what was wrong with me. She stiffened and then nearly went over the side trying to get off the boat deck.

It was queer. There was a war on and you were bustling around. They sent you on strange trips because you were a specialist. Then you crashed, and when they finally got you out of Tibet it was nineteen forty-six and the war was over and the big installations were deserted and the aircraft were gone and the East was drifting back into its usual dim variety of slow death.

I had lots of time to think on that slow trip back. They put me on a slow boat because they thought I’d mend better.

I soaked up the sun and remembered.

The crew chief had stuck his head through the door and told us to strap on the belts. It was the hump trip, early ’45. I rubbed the glass clear, and it scared me to look at the ice growing on the wings of the old crate. It was one of the few night trips that the China National Airways Corporation ever made. Those kids liked to take it on the bright days with just enough cloud to duck into one if necessary. The old Allergic to Combat had to fly it in any weather at any minute on the clock.

The motors had been churning away when we hit. I knew we hit, and that was all. A grinding continuing crash and I knew I was torn loose from the strap and was being hurled toward the opposite side of the plane. Then nothing.

When I came to, the sky was gray with dawn and the brown rocks stuck up out of the snow. The wind of the Himalayas needled the flying ice into my face. I hurt in a hundred places. The great plane lay silent and crumpled against the rocks. Snow had drifted high against the side of it. Bits of wing and tail surfaces were scattered around. I was cold. Almost too cold to stand. I tried to stand. My right ankle gave out, and I chipped my chin on a rock when I fell. I crawled around and felt the port motor. Cold. I crawled out of the wind and sat against the side of the ship and hugged my knees, waiting for it to get light enough to see.

They hadn’t had any luck. The pilot and co-pilot sat rigid and frozen in their seats, their heads at the same strange angle. The other two passengers had crushed skulls. I found the crew chief thirty feet from the plane, his blood frozen to one of the brown rocks.

I tried to build a fire outside and couldn’t. Then I tried to build it inside the plane. My hands were shaking too much. I spilled the little gas I had collected and the fire roared up. I had tried to haul the bodies out, but the fire was too fast and I was too weak. Besides, there was little point in it. I crawled through the hole in the side and sat in the snow and watched the whole thing blaze up. When it was half burned, the yellow sun climbed up and paled the flames. The sun was as cold as the snow.

I had warmed myself a little in the radiant heat of the burning plane. I had no food. I looked around at the weird wild hills. Blinding snow, though a hundred miles away white men were passing out from sunstroke. I imagined that it was some part of Tibet. That’s all I knew. I was so cold that I knew I’d have to move. We had hit on the side of a mountain. Only one way to go. Down the hill.

I died before I hit the bottom. That’s the way the doc told me to think about it. Stumbling and falling and rolling in the thin sharp air with my bare hands blue and my face numb. Feeling the slow, warming comfort, the driving desire for sleep, and remembering that you freeze to death that way. Crawling and rolling some more. The acid edges of the brown rock tearing my freezing flesh. I marveled stupidly at how little I bled. Then there wasn’t any more. Not until ’46.

A very solid little Britisher with a face like a wrinkled boot sat beside my hospital bed in Calcutta and told me how they got me out. That was before they found out who I was. News doesn’t travel very fast in the wild villages of the hills. He estimated that I had traveled about twelve miles. They must have found me at the edge of one of their trails across the high passes. They must have marveled and loaded me like a sack of grain across one of their shaggy ponies. Eventually they had heard in the outside world that there was a sick white man in one of the far villages.

I lay in the sun and remembered the fatuous nurse who had stood by the bed and tried to distract me while the doc changed bandages.

“My! You certainly’ll have a lot to tell about living in the wilds.”

I hadn’t bothered to argue with her. I could remember hot food being crammed into my mouth so I had to swallow it or strangle. I remembered the bitter smoke that hung in a small room and burned my eyes. Bulky people with wide heavy faces that grunted at me in strange tongues. Furs that stank. Somehow, they kept me alive.

Coming to life in the hospital was like being born again. My voice was dusty in my throat, and I couldn’t fit my mouth and tongue over the words. The white sheet on the bed had been the most wonderful thing in the world. I remembered running my left hand across it and noticing something odd about my hand.

I stared at my own hand for a long time, and my mind wouldn’t tell me what I had noticed. It didn’t look like my hand. It was thin, with the cords and bones showing clearly. Then I knew that the fingers were wrong. Not enough of them. The two on the end were gone, and the top of the middle one. But it wasn’t important. It was only important to feel the crisp soft texture of the sheet under my fingers. I know that I didn’t look to see how the other hand was.

It had been a time for sleeping. I know that I was mending then. Coming back from death. Growing into awareness and life. There was the day I realized that I was in a hospital.

I remembered the afternoon that the young doctor with the sharp face and the wise eyes sat beside the bed.

“Well, man from the hills, can you remember who you are yet?”

“Remember? Why not? Howard Garry. Captain. Engineers.”

“I’ve been asking you that question for three weeks.”

“I don’t remember you asking.”

“You seem pretty bright today, Garry. What was the date when you got lost in the hills?”

“Early April.”

“What year?”

“This year. Nineteen forty-five.”

“Sorry, Garry. This is nineteen forty-six. May. The war’s over. Most of your people have gone home.”

When I looked again, he was gone. I had to think it out. Thirteen months out of my life. The war was over. From that day on, I mended more rapidly.

I remember the nurse getting excited when I told her that there was nobody to notify. Just the War Department. No relatives, no wife, no children. I wanted to tell them to find Dan Christoff and tell him that I was okay. Then I realized that I could have more fun walking in on him.

They finally let me go in September. They loaded me on a boat. Howard Garry, back from the dead. Not quite all back. I usually run about one eighty. I was weighed out at one forty-two. Two and a fraction fingers missing. Top of the left ear gone. All the toes on the left foot gone. Fingers and toes were frozen. Slight limp. Big silver plate in my right ankle, replacing an area where infection had eaten away the bone. A big scar across my right cheek. And in each day there were long minutes when I couldn’t grasp where I was or what I was doing. Seconds of mental blindness. They told me that when the spells happened, I stood rigid and expressionless, staring straight ahead of me. Then the world would float slowly back.

I wanted to get back to the States and find Dan Christoff. We’ve always been as close as two citizens can get. Worked together, got drunk together, and had some beautiful battles.

I realized that I was one year older. Thirty-three. Dan would be thirty-four. We both worked as construction engineers for Saggerty and Hartshaw before the war. That’s the outfit that blankets the Midwest and grabs off more road stuff and bridge stuff than any other two you can name. They don’t do it so much by pressure as they do by sticking in very low bids on stiff penalty contracts. They have the equipment, and, as Dan and I always said, they hire the best brains.

Saggerty and Hartshaw realized that Dan and I could work well together. I’m tall, dark, lean, and nervous. I blow off the handle about once a week and ride the hell out of the guys who work for me and the guys I work for. I’ve always worked best under pressure. I used to be able to get along on four hours sleep and a dozen cups of coffee a day.

Dan is the other way. He’s middle height, but heavy in the chest and shoulders. A blondish reddish guy with freckles and a good grin. He moves slow and talks slow, and it takes him about ten minutes to load the pipe he smokes all the time. He’s smart — smarter than I am by a long way. He plays them close to the vest, but there’s nothing devious or hypocritical about him. In the old days, we drove the men and drove the equipment and sweated over the plans. We built stuff and it stayed built. The firm made dough on us and paid us back a nice little fraction of it.

Dan’s married. But when the board tapped us on the shoulder, we both got tapped at the same time. Same outfit for basic. Same group going through engineer’s OCS. Oh, we were sharp kids with those little gold bars. Big shots.

We had managed to stay together. At one point I was his company commander, and that burned him down to the ground.

Then we got the assignment to C.B.I., and for some strange reason we got shoved into staff work in Delhi. There were some decent guys around, but it suffered from the usual dry rot of any theater headquarters in a relatively inactive theater. We each objected in our own way. I stomped and stormed and beat on the walls, wrote nasty little formal notes through channels.

Don’t get the idea that we were being boy heroes, yearning for the sound of rockets and grenades. Far from it. We wanted to get away from the starched-shirt boys and go build something. That’s a hard fever to explain. I will never be able to understand what sort of satisfaction there is in working at a desk. Any kind of a desk. But if you’ve thrown a stinking little bridge over a dry creek, you can go and look at it in one year or twenty, and it will be there. You can step on it and touch it. Spit on it and jump off of it. It’s tangible. It exists.

Dan used his own system of objecting. He merely loaded his pipe and leaned on the wall in the colonel’s outer office. Whenever he saw the colonel, he smiled. The colonel knew what Dan was thinking. After a time he got tired of having his wall held up. He got tired of the pipe.

We were both called in on the same day at the same time.

“Garry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here’s your orders. You fly over the hump to Chengdu and join a Major Castle. It’s a little trip over a proposed route for the Trans-Iranian Highway into China. You come back with a complete report of all construction necessary.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Christoff. You’re going down to Ceylon and join Lord Louis Mountbatten’s staff. He wants a man for a survey of local materials for floating dock construction for an amphib invasion he’s cooking.”

That seemed to be all. We grinned at each other and then pulled our faces back into the right lines. We highballed him and started out.

He said, “Wait a minute, gentlemen.” We stopped and turned around. “I’ve got to consider the reputation of this office. Can’t send out experts unless they look like experts. I’ve requested captaincies for both of you. Ought to clear this afternoon. Pick up your orders for promotion and travel in the A.G.’s office. Get out of town tonight. You’re both driving me nuts. Good luck.”

We had joined hands in the hall and done a solemn circling dance. He slapped me on top of the head, and I nearly broke a knuckle on his shoulder. Outside of a quick beer in the room, that was the last I saw of him.

So I wanted to see him again, and we could drink beer and check on the year or so that had elapsed. I wouldn’t have much to tell.

I rolled over onto my back on the hatch cover. The long gray-blue swells raced by the ship, and she bobbed her bow in stately dance. The sun blazed down on me. I lifted my head and looked down at my legs. They were the worst part. Wasted muscles. Coat of tan on sagging flesh. Emaciated.

It was a forty-six-day trip. We coasted down the long channel of L.A. Port with the factories on either side. October in the States. I saw a blond dish in an aqua convertible steaming down the road that bordered the channel. She looked good.

Carter, an ex-accountant from Philadelphia, one of the boys they left behind to clean up the property accounting, came up beside me where I leaned on the rail. We had gotten fairly friendly on the trip back. He didn’t talk too much or try to ask questions or dish out the dripping sympathy.

“No bands out there for us, Garry. We’re too damn late coming home.”

“Band music gives me cramps.”

“Cheery today, hah? What’re you going to do now, go back to work? Build yourself a bridge or dig yourself a ditch someplace?”

“If the company wants me back. And you’ll go add up two and two on Market Street.”

“Nice clean work. By the way, are you in good enough shape so that they won’t stick you back into a hospital for a while?”

“Better not try it. Twenty-five pushups in a row now. Twenty slow deep knee bends. Less of a limp. Hundred and sixty-three now, according to the infirmary scales. Only seventeen to go.”

“You look good, Garry. I better get my stuff together. See you around.”

He walked off down the deck, a round little man with a tremendous store of calm and satisfaction. I envied him. Somehow I felt restless, felt a sense of impending trouble. I didn’t know what it could be. I judged that it was the aftereffects of a year of blackout. You can’t stop using your mind for a year without some very queer things happening to it. You let a field lie fallow, and it picks up chemicals you need to grow plants. The brain lies fallow and it seems to pick up a store of doubt, uncertainty, indecision. You imagine black catastrophe at every turn, and when you try to pin it down you get noplace. My dreams were an indication of that. On the average of every third night I would wake up, the sheets damp with sweat. It wouldn’t have been a specific dream, just a vague black nothingness that was about to close in on me or fall on me. Sometimes I would be on the edge of a sort of gray cliff. The path would get narrower as I stood still on it. A gray wall would move toward me, and I would know that it would force me off to fall blindly, tumbling, spinning in the moist air down and down into blackness. The little doc had been right. He had a trick of sticking the point of his pink tongue out and carefully wetting down the two halves of his thin black moustache. He told me that I had been dead for a year. I would have to think of it that way. Dead and in a cold hell where the furred demons grunted at me and forced food into my mouth.

The mechanics of discharge were a joke. The system was built for millions, and it was too unwieldy to use for hundreds. But they followed it. Each and every form, each and every lecture.

A bored sergeant counted out my fifty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of back pay. They told me that they’d mail me my discharge. Then they sent me off on a three months’ vacation with pay, which went under the alarming name of terminal leave. They gave me a life pension of fifty bucks a month. Money for cigarettes and beer. And a movie once in a while. I toyed with the idea of using the back pay to buy some place so far off in the woods that I could live on the fifty bucks. A year or two would give me a chance to heal. My body was healed, but inside my head it felt as though there were long open wounds which pulsed.

There was a little town of about two thousand named Bennetville only about five miles from the separation center in Ohio. It looked quiet and clean. I registered into the only hotel. Even with my baggage, they made me hand over a week in advance. That little town was used to the army. They must have learned the hard way.

Then I took a train down into the city. After four hours I had a meager wardrobe. I put one suit on and stuffed the monkey suit into a trash basket outside the dressing room. I held the little gold button with the eagle on it in my hand for a while and looked down at it. I wasn’t being bitter. I wasn’t being the hot novelist’s idea of the cynical soldier. I just didn’t want to wear the damn thing. I knew that they’d see the button and tie it up with the little limp and the missing fingers and the deep scar across my face. I didn’t want to be a professional veteran. I tossed it into the trash can after the suit.

Then I hunted around in the used-car lots. I finally found a little ’40 Plymouth convertible with a decent motor. I paid them their thousand and got it licensed. I got back to my hotel room in Bennetville by midnight. I was tired, but I felt like a civilian. I tossed out the rest of the brown clothes and went to bed. I didn’t dream.

In the morning I placed a person-to-person call to Dan Christoff in Youngstown, Ohio. I sat and drank my breakfast coffee and felt the chill butterflies of excitement as I waited for the call to go through.

The phone rang and I picked it up. “Mr. Garry? This is the operator. Mr. Daniel Christoff isn’t at that number, and they don’t expect him back. What do you wish me to do?”

“Let me talk to his wife, Dorothy Christoff.”

I waited a few seconds, and then the operator came on again. She sounded a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Garry, but Mrs. Christoff doesn’t wish to speak to you.”

“What the hell do you mean? This isn’t a collect call.”

“I know, sir, but she refuses to take the call.”

“Okay, cancel it.” I slammed the phone down onto the cradle. I jumped up and paced the room. I drew a cigarette down until it scorched my fingers. I threw it out the window with a full arm swing. I couldn’t understand it. It sounded as though Dan and Dorothy had broken up. That didn’t make sense. They were made for each other. I remembered her as a tall, fair girl with dusky red hair and a face with a warm pallor like old ivory, gray-green eyes, and a quick wide grin like a boy’s. It didn’t make sense. We had always liked each other. I threw the stuff I’d need into the new bag I’d bought and went down to the desk. I gave them another week’s rent and got into the car. I took the little automobile by the nape of the neck and yanked it out of town. It screamed in protest on the corners. It didn’t make sense, for her to refuse to talk to me.

I drove two hundred miles before I cooled off. I had to keep the speed down, because, if I felt one of those blank spells coming on, I’d only have a few seconds to stop the car. I carefully went over every possible answer I could think of. None of them seemed to make any sense. It wasn’t fair to me. I wanted to see her, and I wanted a look at Dan’s kid. He’d been three when we left. Billy Christoff. Round and grave and sturdy.

I didn’t stop for lunch. It was quarter after four when I rolled up in front of the small bungalow on the shaded street where Dan and I had thrown the party the week before we left for the Coast. I remembered the house as being larger. The paint had been whiter. The lawn had looked greener. A chill rain was falling as I walked to the steps and went up onto the porch.

I leaned on the bell and waited. After about thirty seconds, she opened the door. Her eyes widened a little when she saw me.

“I thought you’d come here, Howard, but I didn’t want you to. I didn’t expect you so soon. I suppose I better ask you in.” She turned and walked ahead of me. She was as slim as ever but not as straight, somehow. I wanted to ask all sorts of questions, but I realized that it would be more comfortable for her if I let her handle it her own way.

She led me into the familiar living room. The furniture had been changed around, but the walls and windows were the same. There was a large picture of Dan on the mantel. He wasn’t in uniform.

When she sat on the couch, the light from the windows fell harshly across her face. It shocked me. Her face had been thin. It looked gaunt. There was no life in her eyes. There were new lines across her neck, and puffy shadows under her eyes. She sat and examined her fingernails for a few seconds. Then she looked up at me.

“Dan’s dead, you know.”

I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even considered it. The guy had always seemed so indestructible. So durable, as though he and his pipe would be around forever. I glanced up at his picture and then I looked down at the pattern in the rug. I took out a cigarette and carefully examined the little pattern of brown grains of tobacco. The white paper had a small wrinkle near the end where the label was. I took out a packet of matches: WORT’S GARAGE. BODY AND FENDER WORK. Red and white and yellow. I struck one of the green-tipped matches on the scarred scratching surface and lit the cigarette. I drew the smoke deep into my lungs and exhaled it in a long gray column toward the far wall. It broke up in the still air. Dan was dead. You’re a long time dead. What did friend Hemingway say? When you laugh, laugh like hell — you’re a long time dead. Something like that. Dan dead. Alliteration. Both one-syllable words.

I had it under control. I looked over at her. Her eyes were still dead.

“Are you positive, Dorothy? Certain?”

“His body was recovered a few days later. Washed up on the beach.”

“Combat?”

“No. Not even line of duty, according to the army. They marked it NLD. I suppose that means not line of duty. They were going to punish him for it if he hadn’t been drowned by accident.”

“That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“I’ll get you the letter.” She stood up with a sigh and walked out of the room. I sat and waited. She was back in a few moments and handed it to me. Long stained envelope. Many times read. I opened it and pulled out the letter.

I folded it up and placed it in the envelope. I walked over and threw it into her lap. “I don’t believe it, Dorothy.”

She shrugged. “Why would the man write it, then?”

“He’s wrong. He’s got to be wrong. Dan wasn’t that type. Sure, he’s taken on a load at times, but he never mixed pleasure with business, civilian or military. He was a very sober guy about his work. That was a stupid trick. He couldn’t do it.”

“I thought the way you did. So did his father. And then we got the other letters.”

“More!”

“Not like that. Dan’s father called the right people in Washington, and somehow he got hold of a list of names and addresses of the crew of the boat. He wrote to them all. Asked them all to come clean with him.”

“What happened?”

“They were worse. A couple didn’t answer. A few didn’t want to talk about it. The rest said that Dan came onto the boat drunk at ten o’clock at night with a woman and a man, both civilians. They said that the next ranking officer tried to argue with Dan, but Dan wouldn’t listen. He insisted that they go on a ‘moonlight cruise.’ They went, and he was drowned. Now what can I believe?”

I sat and thought it over. It didn’t sound like Dan, but then again, you can’t tell. Sometimes the soberest people pull the damnedest stunts...

I smacked my fist into my left palm and said, “They’re wrong, Dorothy. I know they’re wrong. Dan couldn’t do it. There’s a mistake someplace. I’m going to find it.”

I didn’t feel quite as confident as I sounded. But the look in her eyes was worth it. She held her head high, and for a fraction of a second she was the girl I had known before. Her eyes were bright.

Then that slack mask seemed to slide down over her face. She smiled at me with immense politeness. “That’s very nice of you, Howard. I’m certain Dan would have appreciated it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some housework to do.”

She walked me to the door. I stood uncertainly, one foot still in the hall and one down on the brick porch. She put her hand on my arm and looked at me. “I know it’s hopeless, Howard, but I want you to try. For your sake. If you don’t you’ll always wish you had. But don’t let it get you. Please. It isn’t that I’ve lost faith in Dan. That isn’t it. Anybody can make a mistake. I think he did. I just hate the whole stigma of the thing. How will Billy like reading that letter when he grows up? What kind of a background does it give the boy? You see how it is? I hate it all.” She turned and leaned her face against the doorframe.

I didn’t have the guts to say a word. I half ran out to the car and drove down the street. The soft rain hissed against the windshield. I seemed to see Dan’s bulky, soaked body on a white sandy beach. The waves seemed to nudge and nibble at it as they rolled up against his shoulder...

Mr. and Mrs. Christoff sat across from me in the booth in the hotel coffee shop in Cleveland. They both looked much older and more frail than I had remembered. Mrs. Christoff’s eyes had a shadow of the same expression that Dorothy’s had worn. But they had another boy. Mr. Christoff sucked noisily at his coffee and then clattered the cup down into the thick saucer.

“Damn it, Howard, what’ll you get out of it? Why don’t we forget it? Let’s not tear the top of a cut that’s beginning to scab over.”

“I don’t want to be stubborn. I told you before, Mr. Christoff. I don’t believe it.”

He turned to his wife and spread his hands with a mock helpless gesture. “Eight or nine letters we got, saying that Danny got drunk and took out a boat he wasn’t supposed to. Eight or nine letters we got, and this fella doesn’t believe any of them.”

She stuck her small chin out and tilted her head up at his. “Now you leave him alone, Carl Christoff. He’s trying to help. Sometimes in the night I wake up and wonder if all those letters are wrong. Maybe he was drugged. You can’t tell. Give him that list of names and addresses. Let him try. He can’t hurt anything.” She turned to me and her voice softened. “What do you plan to do?”

“Go see all those fellows. Get a firsthand account. Then see if there’s anything in any of the stories that doesn’t add up. There’ll be something out of line.”

They sat and stared across the table at me, two seamed faces in which hope struggled with the habit of despair... and lost.

“There was a piece in the paper about it, you know,” she said. “The Cleveland paper. People know about it. They still tell us they’re sorry. And it was a year ago. They like to tell us they’re sorry.” She looked down into her coffee.

“I like you, Howard,” the man said. “Always have. I’m glad to know you’re loyal to Dan. But I don’t want you wearing yourself out on this thing. You’ve had a bad time.” He reached in his inside pocket and pulled out a list of names and addresses. It was a new typed list, clean and crisp. He slid it across the black marble top of the table. “Here’s the names. Take some time before you do anything. Think it over. Maybe it’d be better for you to keep that little germ of doubt... maybe it’d be worse to find out that Dan made that kind of mistake. Think it over.”

I didn’t look at the list. I slipped it into my own pocket.

Mrs. Christoff turned to her husband. “Maybe you ought to give him the letters the boys wrote to you.”

“Can’t, Mary. Tore ’em up. Didn’t want ’em around.” He looked down at his thick, twisted hands. Then he looked up with a quick smile. “No need to make this a wake, Howard. Tell us about yourself.”

We sat for an hour while I talked gently of the high wild mountains, the stinging cold of the Himalayas. It was the first time I spoke of it to anyone. I skipped the parts they wouldn’t want to hear. As I spoke, I remembered a part I had forgotten. A small dark room with the shifting light of a fire. Two stocky men pawing at my hand and speaking in low tones to each other. A heavy block of wood and the flash of a knife. No pain as the rotted fingers were pared away. Then a bright needle of pain and the smell of burnt flesh as something that glowed red in the dusky light was touched against my hand.

I was conscious of a great stillness, and the booth and the two pale faces across from me faded off into a blackness. I was lost on a high plateau, and there was no way to turn to get my face out of the burning wind, the flakes of driving ice. I stood silently for a time, and then I heard a muttering. The two faces came out of the gloom at me, slowly growing until I was again in the booth and the old man, his eyes wide and frightened, was fumbling with my rigid right hand, the hand that had closed down over the heavy tumbler of water, splintering the glass, the dark blood flowing out onto the black tabletop.

I was okay. We found a drugstore and the clerk bandaged the long slit in the palm of my hand. But they weren’t at ease with me after that. I took them back to their apartment and left them at the door. I promised to tell them what I discovered, no matter how damning to Dan it might be.

I walked back out to the car and drove slowly through the broad streets of night. Red neon screamed at me: Mick’s Bar and Grill. I stopped between two cars and went in. I sat at the bar and ordered brandy and water. I pulled the list out and looked at it. Rochester, Boston, Waterbury, Scranton, Harrisburg, Brooklyn, Jersey City, San Francisco, Seattle. Most of them in the East. Made it easier.

The bar was noisy. I sat and drank quietly, brushing off two drunks that tried to make conversation. As I sat there, the point of following it up seemed to fade away. Everybody makes a mistake sometime. Who was Dan to be different? Surely his family would have more faith in him than a friend. Blood is thick. They had been convinced. They were trying to forget, trying to readjust. I would be stirring up all the old pain. He was dead. Let it lie. Drop it. I ordered another brandy. I took the list out again. In a few motions I could tear it to ribbons and drop it into the spittoon underneath the red leather stool. I shoved it back into my pocket.

I drove back to Bennetville and checked out. The room clerk smiled in a superior fashion and said, “I’m very sorry, Mr. Garry, but we can’t refund the nine days’ rent you’ve paid. It’s impossible.”

I stood with both hands on the desk and looked at him. I stared at his small pale eyes, his gay necktie, his white hands. Slowly the smile faded.

“Surely you understand our position?”

Again I didn’t answer. I continued to stare. Then he smiled again, but I noticed he moved back a little way, to where he was certain I couldn’t reach him.

“I believe, Mr. Garry, that in this situation maybe we can make an adjustment. Maybe a return of one week’s rent.”

I nodded.

It bothered me. I wondered what there was in merely staring at him that had made him back down. I went into the men’s room and looked into the mirror. I really saw myself for the first time. I hadn’t wanted a refund particularly. I knew that I would be cheated. In the mirror I saw a long gaunt face with a scar that glowered in a reddish line across my cheek. My eyes looked sunken back into my head. They were dark and shadowed and much too bright. There were deep lines from my nostrils to the corners of my mouth. It was the face of a violent man. I stared at myself and understood. My face, in repose, carried the look of a man in whom slow anger is bubbling up, ready to break out in physical violence. I didn’t like it. It bothered me.

I drove to Chicago. I made an appointment with Saggerty. He sat behind his desk and studied me for long minutes. I remembered that he used to make me uncomfortable. I realized that it was a technique with him. I stared back at his wispy figure, his mop of iron-gray hair, thinking that it was a technique with him, a means of feeding his own self-esteem. I grinned inside when I saw it was working in reverse. I was making him uneasy. He picked up a pencil and tapped his nose with the eraser end.

“So you want to come back to work, Garry. You look fit, but pretty thin.”

“You looking for an engineer or a guy with a shovel?”

“Don’t be huffy, son. We want you back. We’ve got a million highway jobs, all hot. I was just remembering how you and Christoff used to work together.”

I didn’t answer.

“Strange thing about Christoff. I heard about it. Always seemed like a solid boy. Guess he came a little unwrapped.”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“You can report in the morning. I’ll have Boon pick the job for you. See him. How about pay?”

“How about it? I’m three years older, nearer four. I’m that much smarter. I’ll take what I had before, plus fifteen hundred.”

“Too much.”

I picked my hat off the corner of his desk and stood up. He stared up at me and I held his eye. I turned and walked toward the door. He didn’t break until I had it open. He coughed.

“Okay, Garry. Your price. Tomorrow morning.” I nodded and left.

Boon gave me an average one. Forty miles of two-lane concrete potholes to convert to four-lane divided blacktop. Grade elimination. Curve elimination. A big shortage of equipment and some very porky labor — guys who wanted the water brought in a sterling bucket and wanted a half hour to drink it. We had to clip off as much as we could before the blizzards shut us down. Then the rest of it could be handled in the spring.

For a couple of weeks I felt good. I spent every minute on the job and slept like sudden death. Then Dan came between me and the work. Something would come up, and I’d stand and look off toward the blue hills. How would Dan handle this? I’d see his blunt face and slow grin. Hear him say, “What makes Garry run? Slow down, kid. Relax. You got a chunk of hill over there you can use for fill. Save fifteen minutes on each truck.” Then maybe I’d stomp on his foot and we’d roll over and over in the dust, growling at each other, while the men stood around and grinned at each other, delighted with the damn fool engineers.

That’s the way it was. It happened oftener and oftener. I’d stand in the chill mornings and expect him to walk around the side of one of the cats. It wasn’t that I needed the guy so badly. The job was going okay. It seemed almost as though he hadn’t been buried, as though he couldn’t rest. I owed him something, and I knew it. I knew what he would have done for me.

I went back to Chicago and talked to Boon. Then I went in and saw Saggerty. He started to get tough with me.

I held up my hand and stopped him. “Now look. I like the outfit. I like to work for you. Don’t get me wrong. Let’s not do a lot of fencing and trying to break each other down. I’ve got something I have to do. It’s a favor for a friend. An obligation. I’ve tried to ignore it, but I can’t. If it keeps on, I won’t be any good to you. Let me go handle it. Give me a leave of absence. I’ll be back. I’ve talked to Boon. The job’s under control. He’s got a new guy named Brent that he can assign to it. I’ll help Brent for a few days and then shove off.”

For a while his face was as sour as spoiled milk. Then he grinned and stuck out his hand. I was surprised. But when I thought it over, I realized that he’d have to have a few qualities like that to get where he was. You can’t be petty all the way through and expect to hold anything but a petty job.

I got Brent established and gave him some advice about finishing it off. Then I went back to town. I packed my stuff and loaded it in the car. I sat and pulled the list out of my pocket. With a pencil, I marked the sequence.

The repair manager said, “Dosani? Yeah. You can talk to him. He’s over in the far right corner of the shop.”

I walked over. Dosani had a starter motor in the vise. He had just clipped one battery cable onto it. He started to hold the other against the housing. He saw me and waved me back with his hand. I stepped back. He was a tall slim boy with swarthy skin and black shining hair that fell down across his forehead. He held the other battery cable against the housing and the motor spun, throwing the fresh oil back in a fine mist. He unhooked the battery and then spun the heavy handle of the vise. He whistled. He laid the motor carefully on the bench and then turned to me.

“Which car is yours?”

“None of them. I want to talk about something else. The manager told me I could come back here and bother you.”

“Look, mister. I’m not paying that bill until the damn radio works. Understand?”

“Not that either. I want to talk about that crash boat business in Ceylon, where the skipper was drowned.”

He looked up at me, and he was angry. “I’ve given testimony on that thing till I’m blue in the face. I’m sick of it.”

I waited a few seconds, then I said, “Look, Dosani. I’m not official. The guy was a friend of mine. My best friend. I just want to know what happened. Just what is a crash boat?”

He relaxed. “Oh, sure. If that’s the way it is. A crash boat is a job with nearly a P. T. hull. Crew of thirteen. Two aircraft motors. Uses hundred octane. Not much armament. Couple of Browning fifties, maybe a forty millimeter, and sometimes an eighty-millimeter mortar mounted on the stern. Used to dash in and pick wounded guys off the shore. Pretty fast job. Uses an army crew. Quartermaster.”

“What did you do?”

“Down there nursing those damn motors. Seasick every minute we were out.”

“What happened that night?”

“I don’t know much about it. This Captain Christoff comes aboard about ten o’clock with these two people, a guy and a babe. We knew it wasn’t right, but he was in charge of the boat. Quinn, the warrant, tried to argue with him, I heard, but no soap. We bust up a poker game and take her out. We went straight out of Colombo harbor, and then he opened her up. Quinn was handling her. I hear the three of them, Christoff and two passengers, went out on the bow. About ten miles out, Quinn turned her around and for a few seconds we were parallel to the ground swell. Just at that minute, according to the passengers, Christoff tried to get back to the bridge. You have to walk along a narrow spot near the low rail. He went over, and by the time the passengers got Quinn’s attention, he was too far past the spot to find Christoff. We circled for a half hour or so. They say that Christoff was potted, and that he probably sank like a rock.”

“Hear anything else from the other guys? Anything that struck you as funny?”

He rubbed the side of his face, leaving a streak of grease. Then he shook his head. “Not a thing. He just stepped out of line and got caught. He seemed like a good joe, a teek hai sahib. It was just a technicality that they put him in charge of Betsy for a few days until the regular replacement showed up. He wasn’t supposed to take her out, because he didn’t know anything about her. But I guess he got tight and that skinny British bitch went to work on him. Joy ride.”

“What happened to the first skipper you had?”

“Silly damn thing. Went swimming outside of Trincomalee Harbor. He and another guy were fishing with plastic explosive. Fenner swam out just as the other guy tossed one in with a short fuse. He wasn’t watching Fenner. The concussion under water collapsed his lungs. We didn’t cry none when he got it. He was one of those guys with a rule book in each hand and a frosty look in his eye. Thought he was an admiral.”

Nothing else of consequence was said. I noticed that he was impatient to get back to work. I thanked him and shook hands with him and left. I crossed his name off the list.

Stenwitz was sitting on his front porch in a T-shirt and khaki pants as I went up the walk. I’d gotten his description from the clerk at the corner grocery. He was a fat boy with white freckled arms and a puffy face. He scowled at me.

“You’re Stenwitz, aren’t you?”

“Yah.”

“I’m Howard Garry, and I want to ask you a couple of questions about that time in Colombo when Captain Christoff was drowned.”

“What’s your angle?”

“I was a friend of Christoff’s.”

“Sure. You were a friend of Christoff’s.” He got up and walked to the railing. He spat down into the shrubbery. Then he turned toward the front door. “Write me a letter,” he said. “I’m busy.”

I took a quick step and caught him by the shoulder and spun him back just as he got inside the door. I grabbed his wrist and yanked hard. He came back out onto the porch and swung at me. I ducked it. He tried again, grunting as he swung. He missed again. He stood, breathing hard, his round head lowered, his eyes small in their puffs of flesh.

“Shove off, bud. I’ll call the cops. This is private property.”

I didn’t move and he tried again, a roundhouse blow. I stepped inside of it and let it wind around the back of my neck. I sunk my right hand deep into his stomach. He doubled over, his face greenish. I lugged him to the chair and sat him in it. I sat on the railing and lit a cigarette. I waited while he got his breath back. He made strangled sounds in his throat which finally died away.

“Now, Stenwitz, we’ll have a nice little talk. Okay?”

“I don’t tell you a thing.”

“You act like you must have been the guy who shoved Christoff overboard.”

“You’re nuts. The drunken jerk fell off.”

“Then why are you so nasty about it?”

“I just don’t like guys with questions. That’s all. Now get off the porch.”

“Not for a while. You talk nice or I’ll drop another one into your stomach. I got nothing to lose, Stenwitz. Where were you when it happened?”

He looked at me sullenly. I slid off the rail and stood up. “Port, stern. Coiling line,” he said quickly.

“Could you see Christoff and the two passengers up in the bow?”

“No. Couldn’t see a thing. Not a damn thing. Too dark. Bridge in the way.”

“When did you know Christoff was gone?”

“When Quinn brought her around and started whamming the bell.”

“Where were the passengers then?”

“I don’t know.”

There was nothing he could add. There was nothing else I could think to ask. I tried some pointless questions and he gave sullen direct answers. At last I left. As I climbed into my car at the curb, I looked back toward the porch. He was still in the chair, and he was smiling. I couldn’t read the smile.

Two days later I walked into a bar in Rochester, New York, and picked a spot at the end where I could lean my shoulder against the plaster wall.

I ordered a brandy and water, and when the thin pale bartender set it in front of me I said, “You’re Stan Benjamin, aren’t you? Cook on the Betsy when you were in Ceylon?”

The distant look faded, and he gave me a slow grin that turned him into a human being. “Yeah. But I don’t know you. Were you there?”

“No, but my best friend was. Captain Christoff.”

“Sure. I remember him. He was only with the boat a few days. Tough break for the guy. Did you look me up here?”

“If you can do it and still take care of the customers, I’d like to hear what happened.”

“It’s slow this time a day. I was sitting in on a poker game when your friend came aboard tight with a couple of guests, a thin British doll that he called Conny and a big red-faced guy named O’Dell. They come aboard by coming across the decks of some British boats that we were moored to. Quinn and Christoff had some kind of an argument that I didn’t hear, and then Quinn came down the ladder and told the guys to get to their stations, that we were taking a run. He was sore as hell.

“There wasn’t anything for me to do at first, and then Christoff and the two guests sat in the main cabin and they opened the door over the booth into the galley. Christoff slid a bottle of John Hague in and told me to fix up some drinks. That was against the rules too, but I got my orders so I did it. I took a little nip myself and fixed up three tall ones, using plain water. When I set them through the little door I could see that the babe and O’Dell were on one side of the booth and the captain was on the other side. He acted tight.”

“What did they talk about?”

“I couldn’t hear so good. They were talking about some club they’d just come from. Christoff had trouble talking straight. The other two didn’t seem so bad. They seemed a little tense about being out in Betsy. As soon as we got outside the harbor, the grounds well rocked us around. I made another round, and then the gal said that she’d like to go topside and get a look at the moon on the ocean. Only by that time there were clouds over it. They went on up.”

“Anything else?”

“You probably heard the rest. How we circled around for more than a half hour with the woman having hysterics. Couldn’t find the guy. When I went back down, I saw the big guy with the red face draining the last of the bottle. I stopped and looked at him. He set it down, empty, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and glared at me. I went back into the galley. Then we went in, and there were investigations that lasted for weeks. I understand Quinn was in for promotion, and that little tea party sort of screwed him out of it.”

He bought me my third brandy on the house and then I had the last one and bought him one. He ducked below the bar to polish it off. I liked the little guy. I made him take another one and he acted pretty jolly.

Then I said, “What’d you think of Stenwitz?”

“A moody jerk if there ever was one. Nobody liked him. He was the only guy on the weather deck when it happened. He didn’t see a thing. Used to get sore as hell when we asked him why not. Strange guy. Didn’t have a friend in the army. Not a one.”

While I was eating dinner at the hotel I checked Benjamin’s name off the list. Nothing yet. There didn’t seem to be much point in going on. Only three covered out of the seven left in the country. Four to go: Baker, Ruggerio, Janson, and Quinn.

Two weeks later I stopped in a gas station just outside of Seattle. Only one left: Quinn. Wilmert L. Quinn.

I paid for the gas and kept the gas pedal down near the floor until I got into town at four o’clock. I went to the address I had been given and found that the Quinns had moved. The woman didn’t know where they had moved to, but she thought that they were still in town. I stopped in a drugstore and tried the phone book. Then I called information and found that he had a new phone that had not been listed yet. She gave me the address. It was ten minutes to five when I pulled up in front of a new house on the edge of town. Standard stuff. White with a high peak to the roof. Green shutters and a tall red-brick chimney with a big Q in wrought iron fastened to it.

I rang the bell. A girl opened the door. She looked about eighteen. Average height, hair dyed the color of summer flax, wearing a cheap print dress that was too tight for her. Her mouth was moist and her eyes had the flat, automatic joy of a woman who steps out of a doorway at night on a dim street.

She giggled before I could open my mouth. “Whatever you got to sell, brother, maybe I could buy some.”

“I’m not selling today. I want to see Mr. Quinn. You his wife?”

“Yeah. I’m a brand-new wife, practically a bride. Come on in.” She stood aside, and as I stepped past her she swung her body so that I had to brush against her. I smelled the raw liquor on her breath.

The living room was small and perfectly square. The furniture was bright and ugly, the colors too raw, the lines without grace. I stood in the doorway and she minced past me, swinging her hips. She sat down on a green couch and patted the cushion beside her. “He ain’t here yet. Tell me about it.”

I crossed the room and sat in a gray chair with crimson buttons on the cushions. She gave me a mock pout and said, “Unfriendly, huh? I won’t eat you, mister.”

“When does he get home? Maybe I ought to go and then come back.”

“Don’t rush off. He’ll be along in maybe a half hour. Want a drink?”

I nodded and she flounced out. She paused at the door and said, “Come and help me.” I got up and followed her out to a cluttered kitchen. There was a tray of melting ice cubes on the enameled top of the table, along with a half bottle of cheap rye and four or five small bottles of ginger ale.

She jumped up onto the sink shelf and swung her legs. “Make your own, mister.”

I stepped over to the table and mixed a light rye. I opened one of the bottles of ginger ale. It was warm. It foamed up over the top of the bottle. I stepped over to the sink and let it run down my hand. She slid over so that her knees were against my side. I looked up at her in protest just as she launched herself at me, both arms tight around my neck, her loose mouth clamped on mine.

I dropped the bottle into the sink and tried to pry her hands loose. She giggled through the kiss. She didn’t smell clean. I got hold of her wrists and pulled her arms loose. She slid down to the floor and twisted her wrists away from me. She swung and slapped me so hard on the ear that my head buzzed. She stepped back and said, “Just who the hell do you think you are? What makes you think you can come in here and paw me?”

A tired voice behind me said, “Shut up, Janice. I saw more of that than you thought I saw.”

I turned around. A middle-sized man with a tight, disciplined face stepped by me. He slapped her with the hard heel of his open hand. She slammed back into the door to the back hall. A trickle of blood ran down her chin.

“You got no right to hit me, Will,” she gasped.

“All the right there is, baby. That’s the last time I touch you. Pack your stuff and get out of here.”

She opened her mouth to object. He stood and looked at her. She dashed by him and ran out of the kitchen. I heard the quick stomp of her heels as she went to the stairs.

He turned to me. I could see that he was about thirty, even though he looked nearer forty. “I’m sorry, friend. Always thought she was like that, but never had the proof before. A little tough on you, though. What’d you come here for, anyway?”

“This is a hell of a time to bother you with it, Quinn, but I wanted to get your story on the Captain Christoff drowning. He was my friend.”

He looked hard at me, and I returned the stare with as much candor as I could manage. “Sure you aren’t a slick customer trying to open it up again? I don’t want to do any more testifying. That business knocked me out of a promotion I could have used.”

“I understand it did. Sorry. But suppose I come back tomorrow when you aren’t all upset?”

“Never mind that. I’m okay. Who else have you talked to about this?”

I told him whom I had seen. He led me into the living room. I could hear a low wailing noise coming from upstairs. He seemed to ignore it.

“Then I should tell you what the others wouldn’t have had a chance to know, I suppose. Let’s see now. Best place to start is where he came aboard. I was sitting with my legs hanging over the side smoking a pipe. The harbor was quiet. I could hear a hot poker game belowdecks. There were footsteps behind me, and Captain Christoff walked up. I jumped up. I could see two people behind him.

“He introduced me. Miss Constance Severence and a Mr. O’Dell. The girl was in evening dress. O’Dell was in a white jacket with a maroon bow tie. A big guy. She looked slim and cool like most of those British babes do when they’re upper-class stuff.

“I knew that he wasn’t supposed to bring strangers on board. I told him that I had something to tell him in private. I thought maybe he didn’t know the rules. We went up forward, and the two visitors waited.

“I told him about the rule, and he said he wanted to take them out on a short trip. I told him that I was against it, and he said that I should trust him and take orders, that he knew what he was doing. I tried to argue, and after a while he made me stand at attention. Then he told me to shut up and prepare to cast off. There wasn’t a thing I could do. I did like he told me.”

“Did he act drunk?”

“Later, yes. Not when I talked to him.”

“What happened then?”

“They went below with a bottle. About six miles out, they came on deck and went forward. They sat on some life rafts that are strapped down there. I could see them by standing on my toes. I was at the wheel. It began to get rough. He’d told me to go out ten miles. At ten miles I made a sharp hundred and eighty to starboard and headed back. A couple of minutes later, O’Dell bellowed at me. I couldn’t catch it. He came up to the bridge and said that Christoff had gone overboard. I circled back, but we never found him.”

“Do you think there was anything fishy about it?”

He waited a few minutes before he answered. He stared down at the vile brown rug, his forehead wrinkled. “I’ve wondered and wondered about that. Of course, the turn could have caught him off guard. He wasn’t used to boats. I tried to tell the investigating officers that he didn’t act like a guy who was disobeying rules, but then I had only known him a few days. I guess it was just like they decided. He had too many strikes on him. Visitors, an unauthorized trip, and liquor on board. If he hadn’t drowned they’d have skinned him alive and broiled him.”

“Any of the other guys in the crew figure that something was fishy?”

“Not a one. If one of them had, maybe I’d have stuck to my guns a little longer.”

I waited, and he told the story again in more detail. But he kept glancing up at the ceiling as he spoke. When he started on it the third time, I interrupted him and told him that I had to be on my way, thank you very much, sorry about this trouble I caused, glad to hear your slant on it...

He saw me to the door. I got into the car, and I had gone about eight or nine blocks when I remembered that I had wanted to ask about Stenwitz. No specific question. I had just wanted to start him talking about the kid. Something about Stenwitz had bothered me.

I turned around and headed back for his house. I parked in front and walked up onto the porch. I had my finger an inch from the bell when I heard it. A dull smacking sound, as though someone were beating a featherbed with a slat. Through the noise of pounding, I could hear tired screams of pain.

I turned around and walked back out to the car. Mrs. Quinn wouldn’t be leaving home. She’d never leave home. She’d just hang around and collect an occasional beating for the next thirty years. I grinned as I drove off, my question forgotten.

It was a long jaunt back to Chicago. I didn’t let myself think too much. I drove along with tires droning on the concrete, the motor singing heavily in my ears. Dan was dead and I had collected a blank. Not a complete blank, but so close to it that it might as well have been a blank. A little glimmer of doubt in Quinn’s mind. Unexplained resistance by Stenwitz. Those two things plus the fact that the behavior pattern didn’t sound like Dan Christoff. Not at all.

I drove straight to Chicago, barely stopping to eat and sleep a little. In Chicago I noticed a cheap hotel and took a bottle of brandy up to my room. I planned to sleep all day and get back to work the next morning. To be able to sleep after driving seven hundred miles at one stretch the last leg of my trip, I had to get a little tanked. I sat on the edge of the bed in my underwear and drank raw brandy out of the bathroom tumbler while I thought over the talks I had had with the crew members. I didn’t blame Dan’s parents and Dorothy for getting discouraged. I was discouraged. There didn’t seem to be any crack I could get my fingers into and widen into a definite clue. Something wasn’t right about it all. I shrugged and tossed off some more brandy. No skin off me. On the following day I could go back to work and forget it — or try to forget it.

I remembered the time that Dan and I had sat in a duck blind and ignored the ducks while we drank half the brandy in the world to keep off the chill. He had been a great guy. Suddenly I stopped moving, almost stopped breathing. I snapped my fingers softly.

I waited for about ten minutes after I placed the call to Dorothy. At last she came on the line, misty with sleep, a yawn in her voice.

“Hello, Howard. What’s the matter?”

“Just thinking, Dorothy. Maybe I got something. I want to know something. You see Dan tight very often?”

“Couple of times. Why? You sound tight yourself, Howard.”

“Maybe I am, a little. Look, Dorothy, what happens to him when he gets tight? Physically, I mean. How does he react?”

“He never shows it — I mean showed it. Why do you have to use the present tense, Howard? It hurts.”

“How did he show it?”

“His legs just gave out on him. He’d sit looking as sober as a bishop, and the only thing would be that he couldn’t get up, couldn’t stand. Please tell me why you want to know.”

“Did that happen every time?”

“Every time I know of. Why can’t you forget it, Howard?”

“Not now, baby. I’ve got a lead and I’m going away and track it down, and look, Dorothy... uh”

“What is it?”

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck, Howard.” Her voice was soft, and the phone clicked in my ear as she hung up. I drank the rest of the brandy and went to bed.

The passport problem was cleaned up in a week. I wired for reservations on the Siam Express from Los Angeles. She was due out in six days for a twenty-eight-day run to Rangoon. That gave me time to get out to L.A. and sell the heap for fifty bucks more than I paid for it.

I loaded a big suitcase with clothes, brandy, cigarettes, and paperbacks. I walked up the gangplank in the morning and found my tourist-class stateroom. I met my roommate, a sly citizen named Duckwood, who claimed he was going to Rangoon to head a sales agency for one of the big motion picture studios. He had peppery hair, wattles under his thin chin, and a violent case of halitosis. I decided to leave him strictly alone for the rest of the trip. I bought a chair, forward and starboard, and settled down for twenty-eight days of boredom.

We hauled out in the afternoon. It took three days to settle into the routine of eating, sleeping, reading, and exercising. I didn’t avoid people, but neither did I enter into any casual conversations of my own accord. Thus I was left pretty well alone. It was a good ship, with a slight tendency to corkscrew in choppy weather. The food was good, and I ate my share of it. There were four at my table, myself, Duckwood, and two well-stuffed schoolteachers from Kansas who had been penned up in the States for five years by the war. They were taking a year off. They both had the fetching trait of chewing with their mouths open. I loved them both, dearly. I never did catch their names.

At the end of ten days I was bored. At the end of twenty days I was too lethargic to even be bored. I tried to nap as much as possible.

On the twenty-fifth day, in the morning, I found that we were going to be late getting into Rangoon. We were going to make a stop at Trincomalee on the northeast shore of Ceylon. I went to see the purser. He was difficult. He said that it would be impossible.

I went to the cabin and packed my bag. At two in the afternoon we floated slowly into the great British naval base of Trincomalee. Wooded hills sloped steeply down to the blue harbor. A trail wound up from the dock buildings, and a dusty truck rocked down it. I carried my bag out onto the deck. I set it down near the passenger gangplank on B deck. The sailor manning the unlowered gangplank looked at me oddly. I carefully ignored him. I had to take a chance on their nuzzling the big ship up to a dock. They did.

When the gangplank was lowered, I brushed by the man on the deck and hurried down it. Men on the dock and on the ship stared at me stupidly. Someone shouted, “Stop that man!” I guessed that it was my friend, the purser.

I walked along the dock toward the shore. I heard steps hurrying along behind me. I stopped and turned. It was the purser and a fat sailor. They stopped, too.

“Now listen to me,” I said, “I’ve got a visa for Ceylon, and if either of you monkeys lays a hand on me I’ll sue the line for a hundred thousand and you’ll both be out of a job.”

I stepped onto land while the two of them were still screaming at each other. I looked back. The purser was waving his arm toward me and the sailor was waving his arm toward the ship. Their noses were a half inch apart.

There was no American consular representative in Trincomalee. I wired the notification of my presence on the island to the American consul in Colombo. The British were very pleasant about searching my baggage and changing some dollars into Ceylonese rupees. I thanked them and they thanked me and I thanked them again. Small bows and brief handshakes, All very pleasant. They smiled and asked me what I was doing on the island. I smiled and told them that I was a tourist who was thinking of writing a book. When they smiled and asked me the title, I smiled and said, “British Spheres of Influence, or, the Mailed Fist Around the World.” They stopped smiling and bowing and I left.

I had to stay overnight in Trincomalee. It cost me a hundred rupees to hire a car to drive me to Kandy in the morning. It was a bone-shattering road, narrow, winding upward through the jungle. The asphalt was dotted with holes a foot wide and six inches deep. I sat on the leather back seat of the ancient touring car and bit my tongue by accident twice on the way down. The driver kept his bare brown foot on the gas and ignored the condition of the road. After every particularly bad bump, he would look around at me with a shy grin splitting his face. He wore a pale green European shirt and a flowered sarong. The road smoothed out just outside of Kandy. The driver let me off in front of the Queen’s Hotel. I had a curry lunch and took a taxi to the station to catch the Colombo train.

Before arriving on the island, everything had seemed simple. All I wanted was to contact O’Dell and Constance Severance and find out what had actually happened. During the long days on the ship I had imagined how the interviews would go. In my imagination they all seemed to take place in discreet hotel rooms, with the other persons putting me on the track of an answer to why Dan had died.

On the island, it was different. I sat in my compartment and looked out at the towering mountains as the little train screeched around the downhill curves. I hadn’t thought of the island and how it fitted into the picture. There was something warm and green and lush about the island that made intrigue and indirection a natural response. The clean-limbed natives were so different from the ones I had grown used to in India. It was an island of spice, gems, and color. My serious practical interviews with O’Dell and Severence faded out of my mind. I lost my certainty. All the old doubts came back. I wondered what I was doing back in the East.

I got into Colombo before the American consul’s office closed. I went up in the creaking elevator and sat beside a desk while a blond young man looked over my passport. I stared out the window, across the big harbor. Rows of ships rode at anchor, and dozens of little craft moved lazily to and from the long docks. The air in the office was warm and sticky. Fans turned slowly overhead. The young vice-consul had a rash of prickly heat on the undersides of his tanned arms. Heavy traffic thundered in the street outside the open window.

At last he pushed the passport back into my hand. “How long do you plan to stay, Mr. Garry?”

“Indefinite. Maybe a week. Maybe a month.”

“You have... ah... sufficient funds, I imagine.”

“Plenty.”

“There’s a lot of theft here. Do you want us to hold some of it for you in the safe? Even traveler’s checks aren’t safe.”

I counted out three thousand in cash on the corner of his desk. He entered it in a book and gave me a receipt. I asked him about hotels, and he recommended one called the Galle Face. I phoned from his office and got a room.

The Galle Face is located at one end of a mile expanse of white sand beach not far from the center of the city. A high wall borders the beach, and a promenade walk runs the length of the wall. Beyond the walk is a wide green expanse with the asphalt highway curving wide around it. The Colombo Club, refuge of the sedentary planter, sits majestically on the far side of the road, gazing out to sea.

My room was on the fourth floor on the seaward corner near the green. I could sit on the edge of the bed and stare up a mile of beach, watch the couples strolling along the promenade, follow the horses as they were galloped across the green.

My room boy introduced himself as Fernando. He promised to serve me faithfully and always run to me when I rang for him. I gave him a five-rupee note to clinch the bargain, and it would almost have been possible to tie his grin around the back of his neck like a bib.

After I stuck my things around in various drawers, I took a shower and changed to cooler clothes. I went down to the big lobby and wrestled with the telephone directory. It was alphabetical only in spots. It took me nearly ten minutes to find an O’Dell. The name was Clarence J. O’Dell, 31 Galle Road. I had a leisurely dinner in the vast dining room. The food was fair, and not plentiful.

When I was through eating, a small string group climbed solemnly onto a stand at the end of the dining room and started bravely on some sour Chopin. I walked out and stood for a moment on the front steps of the hotel. It was dusk, and the surf seemed to boom more loudly than it had during the day. The rickshaw bells tinkled with a better noise than the music inside. I waved the white-bearded doorman away when he asked me if I wanted a cab. I walked up to the corner and found that, as I had expected, the Galle Road ran right by the hotel.

I walked almost a block before I found two numbers: 18 and 20. I was headed in the right direction. It was a neighborhood of big bungalows set far back behind high hedges and green lawns. I crossed the road and found 31. The number was set into the gatepost of the driveway. I walked up the drive, feeling tense and expectant. I hadn’t imagined the O’Dell that I wanted to see in such luxurious surroundings. I threw away my cigarette, a red glow arching into the grass, exploding in a tiny fountain of sparks.

Ahead, golden oblongs shone out onto the grass from the wide windows. As I approached the porch, a man stepped from behind a pillar and stood waiting for me. I peered at him and saw that it was a Singhalese in a white uniform.

“What does the master wish to see?” he asked politely.

“O’Dell Clarence O’Dell. I’m Howard Garry, and he doesn’t know me.”

“Who in the bloody hell’re you mumbling at, Pereira?” a voice boomed so close to me that I jumped. A big man stood on the porch, silhouetted by one of the windows. He was enormous, a flabby giant of a man.

“I’m Howard Garry. I’d like to talk to you, Mr. O’Dell. If you’re busy I can come back.”

“Not busy,” he roared. “Never busy. Come on in. Come in and sit. Have a drink. Pereira! Get this man what he wants. Scotch, rye, beer, anything.”

I told the boy to get me some brandy and water. I stared at O’Dell. He was at least six five and I guessed his weight at about three hundred and a quarter. He was naked, except for a big blue turkish towel around his fat waist. His flesh sagged on him, but I could see that there were muscles left under the flab. His face and hands were burned red by the sun. The rest of him was dead white. His wide deep chest was hairless.

There was something odd about his face. I stared at him rudely until I had figured it out. He merely didn’t have the coarseness of feature that you would expect with a man of that size. His nose was surprisingly delicate, and his lips were molded like a woman’s. I guessed that the loud voice and gruff manner were his way of proving to himself that he was a man.

“What’s your business, boy. Come on! Let’s get it over with.”

“Are you alone here, Mr. O’Dell?”

“Completely, except for four or five servants. Never can keep track of them. Wife and daughters’re in South Africa. Wretched place to be. Rather be here, eh?”

“I want to talk to you about something that happened well over a year ago. You went on a pleasure ride on an American boat. A small one. A Captain Christoff went overboard and was drowned. I’d like your story of what happened.”

“Good Lord, boy, I’ve told that a dozen times to your officers. Told ’em all about it. Blasted nuisance, you coming here like this. Clumsy beggar caused me enough trouble. What do you care? Whom do you represent?”

“Nobody. Just myself. I was his friend.”

“Suppose I told you that I’d give my story again to somebody with an official interest, but not to any bloody Nosey Parker?”

“I’d say you were being rude and unpleasant. I’d ask you what you’d have to lose by telling me about it. You don’t look busy.”

He threw his head back and laughed, great resounding yelps that rattled the walls. He wiped his eyes and rubbed the spilled liquor off his thigh. “Direct chap, aren’t you? Don’t you know that retired planters never look busy? We retired so we wouldn’t have to look busy. What do you want me to do, tell the whole thing in detail?”

I relaxed as the boy handed me a thick brandy and water. I sipped it. It was light on the water. “Just run through it once and hit the high spots. If I have any questions, I’ll stop you.”

He drained his drink, and Pereira scurried over and took the glass on a silver tray. “I had a bridge date with Constance Severence at the January Club. She happened to know Christoff. He was there. I—”

“Wait a minute. Who is Constance Severence?”

“A girl who lives here. Does some kind of clerk work in the Royal Navy. Good family. She lives at the Princess Hotel.”

“What’s the January Club?”

“Bridge and tennis. A half mile away. Nice place. As I was saying, we met Christoff, and we all had a few drinks. Then he wanted to take us on the ride. I wasn’t too keen about going, but Conny liked the idea. I went along. Had a few drinks on the boat and then went up forward. The spray felt good. Hot night. Sat on some roundish yellow things up there.

“Christoff was pretty intoxicated. He started toward the stern just as the man at the wheel made a big turn to go back. Constance thought she heard something, ran over to where he had gone around the edge of the main superstructure. No sign of him. She ran back to me, and I shouted to the man at the wheel. Boat was too noisy. He couldn’t make out what I shouted. Then I had to go up and yell in the beggar’s ear. He turned again and ordered the boat searched. No sign of the captain. Circled forever and couldn’t find him. Went back in and spent two weeks answering bloody silly questions.”

“Where was Miss Severence when you went back to the bridge?”

“She followed along. Stayed down on the deck as I climbed up the few steps to where I could yell in the chap’s ear. Quinn, I think his name was.”

I had run out of questions. I sat silently, nursing the lost feeling of a man who has run down a dark alley and crashed into a blank wall.

He held up his drink and squinted through it. He was a great white monolith of a man. He spoke in a surprisingly gentle voice. “The bloody war is long gone, Yank, and you’re raking around in the ashes. Why not forget the whole thing. I’m guessing that you’re trying to clear him — trying to find some mysterious reason for someone to shove him into the water. It won’t wash. He got drunk and he drowned. As simple as that. Why not forget it? You’ll only wear yourself out. Remember, I was there. If anything odd had happened, I’d have seen it and raised a stink. I like to make a fuss. The people here expect it of me. I’ve been creating disturbances for over thirty years in this city.”

I sat for an hour, sipping brandies while he rambled on about his spotted career in Colombo. I gathered that he had, at one time or another, been thrown out of every club in the city. He talked and I sat and sulked. It seemed to be the end of the trail. Finally he began to yawn and mumble his words. His huge head fell forward, his chin on his hairless chest. I stood up and tiptoed out. I didn’t see the servant. I walked back down the Galle Road to my hotel, weary and dispirited.

I didn’t sleep well. In the morning I felt tired and dull. I phoned the Royal Naval Headquarters after breakfast and eventually located a Miss Constance Severence. I told her that I was an acquaintance of O’Dell’s and made an appointment for cocktails at five thirty at her hotel, the Princess.

She was late. I was on my second stinger when she walked into the small lounge. She was a tall woman, and from a distance she looked fragile and delicate. I jumped up and she noticed me and smiled. She walked over and I pulled the small table out for her. She looked cool and fresh, but not fragile. Her hair was silvery blond, very fine, her eyes pale gray and her skin faintly sallow. I guessed her age at about thirty-two. She was built well but wore clothes more designed to conceal the fact than to reveal it. There was a strange look of hidden coarseness, hidden sensuality, about her. It was caused by a few small things about her that didn’t match the rest of her appearance. Her cheekbones were too high and too wide, her fingers too plump and spatulate, her thin mouth too moist. I noticed, as I held the table out, that though her feet were rather short they were far too broad. I didn’t like her.

She asked for a sling, and I ordered it from the boy. When he left to get it, she turned to me and said, “Don’t you feel it? There seems to be something clandestine about this meeting — something that reeks of intrigue. Maybe it’s the way you look.”

That jolted me. “How do I look?”

“Now you’re looking offended and stuffy. I meant that you’re rather a dark and mysterious type. That scar might have come from a knife. Your eyes are wary.”

“Maybe it is intrigue, Miss Severence, but I—”

“Call me Conny like that hulking O’Dell, the mad Irishman, does. Surely if he can you have the right. What shall I call you?”

“Howard or Garry. Take your choice.”

“Garry it is. Now, Garry, my lad, what do you want?”

I turned so that I faced her. We were sitting side by side on a cushioned bench that ran along the wall. I looked hard into her eyes and said, “Who drowned Captain Christoff?”

It was a change from the technique I had used before. I had given O’Dell too much time to adjust, to prepare himself. If there was any guilty knowledge in her, I wanted to blast it out.

She looked back into my eyes. I had the impression that there was a lack of focus. They looked very slightly crossed. I remembered a trick from grade school days. If you wish to stare another person down, don’t look into their eyes. Look, instead, at the bridge of their nose. I realized that she was doing just that. Her eyes didn’t waver. There was no expression in them. I glanced down at her fingertips on the edge of the table. She had clear polish on her nails. She was holding the table just tightly enough to make whitish semicircles near the ends of her nails. As I glanced down she relaxed the pressure and the blood flowed back, turning them pink again. She laughed, a low musical note as phony as a singing commercial.

“Why are you laughing, Conny? What amuses you?”

“You do, Garry. You’ve sold yourself a plot for the flicks. True friend seeks inside story of chum’s disgrace. You’re trying to turn a clumsy bounder’s sticky death into straight Edgar Wallace.”

“You just made a mistake, my dear.” She looked at me blankly. “How did you know that he was a friend of mine? How did you know that I wasn’t investigating it in an official capacity?” Again I glanced down at her hand. The whiteness was back. She put her hand in her lap.

Again she laughed. “Don’t be so dull, Garry! I know official investigators. They have hundreds of beastly little forms and a wretched stub of a pencil which they keep licking. They start by asking you your name even when they already know it.”

“Not good enough. O’Dell must have phoned you. Why?”

The boy brought her drink. She picked it up without a tremor and sipped it. “Really, you know, I should tell you to buzz off. You’re being rude. I’m not a complicated type. I went on a boat trip with a drunken American officer, and he fell off the boat. I was very sorry about it, but it happened a long time ago. If you can consent to change the subject and stop acting so grim, I’ll forgive you and you can buy me another drink. Otherwise, it was most pleasant meeting you, Garry.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t make her talk. But for the first time I felt the inner sense of excitement. The trail was warmer. She did know something. But she was clever. I had to make the next move. I grinned as warmly as I could. “I’m sorry, Conny. Maybe I’ve got a fixation on this thing. Dan was my friend — maybe he was too good a friend. Maybe you shouldn’t get so close to another person. Forgive the melodrama, will you?”

“Drink on that,” she demanded. We clinked the glasses together, and she looked into my eyes as we drank. For all her slim coolness and composure, I could see something primal behind her eyes, a latent viciousness that was coiled like a sleeping cat.

We had another half hour before she had to leave to get ready for a dinner date. She made the time pleasant with small talk about the Colombo social group. I asked her about the January Club.

She curled her lip a bit. “Not the cream, Garry. There’re much finer clubs in the city. A very mixed group at the January. Whites and Burghers and Eurasians and a few Singhalese. High stakes bridge and sloppy tennis. They spice the food too much. Why do you ask?”

“O’Dell said that you and he and Christoff were there before you went down to the harbor. I wondered about the place.”

“Oh, yes. I’d met the captain at a party. He happened to be at the January. O’Dell and I had been playing a set partners game against another city bridge team there. As I remember, we won, and the ride was to celebrate the victory.”

I walked with her into the lobby, and she gave me her hand just before she got into the elevator. It was very warm and moist. I walked out onto the street, realizing that I liked her and disliked her. She was desirable in a faintly unclean way. I found a public bench in a shaded spot. I sat and thought. As far as the investigation was concerned, I was through. There was nothing else I could do, and yet I was more certain of something odd about Dan’s death than ever before. I knew that there’d be no point in talking to O’Dell again. I had sensed his cleverness. Constance wouldn’t tell me anything further. I realized that unless I could stir up trouble for either or both of them, I had best leave the island. I wanted proof. I wanted to clear Dan officially, somehow, and I didn’t know how it could be done. I felt dumb, stubborn, and bitter.

I was standing in my cool shower, still preoccupied with devising a plan of action, when I remembered her opening conversation about intrigue. Intrigue might be the answer. I toweled myself and walked out to the desk in my room. There was some hotel stationery in the drawer. I took a razor and cut out two small pieces a couple of inches square. I was careful to avoid the watermark. I sat down at the desk with a pencil stub. On the first one I wrote in block letters, YOU GAVE HIM TOO MUCH INFORMATION. On the second one, in smaller, back-hand printing, I wrote, HE KNOWS TOO MUCH. WHAT DID YOU TELL HIM?

I dressed quickly and took a rickshaw back to the Princess. It was growing dark rapidly. The sun had just finished its abrupt drop into the Western sea. I told the boy to stand and wait about fifty yards from the entrance to the Princess. I hoped that she hadn’t left, and that her date hadn’t planned dinner at her hotel. The lights flashed on over the hotel entrance. It was nearly a half hour before she came out. I recognized her slim tallness and her pale hair. The rickshaw coolie was smart. He grinned at me when I gave him his instructions and followed along a discreet distance behind her rickshaw. I suddenly realized that I had had stupid luck. If she had taken a taxi, I would have been lost. The night was quiet. The bare feet of the coolie slapped on the streets that were still warm from the sun. He ran easily, his shoulder muscles moving under the brown skin with the movement of the poles.

The trip lasted nearly fifteen minutes. Her rickshaw stopped on the Galle Road in front of a brightly lighted bungalow. I thought at first that it was a private home and that my plan would be spoiled. Then I saw the sign, China Sea Inn. There were numerous cars parked closely in the small lot beside the bungalow. I paid off my boy and walked carefully up the sidewalk. She was nowhere in sight. I knew that I was taking a risk in going up on the porch, as she might be just inside the door. I walked slowly up the steps and looked into a wide window. There were dozens of small tables in a large room. Only a few of the tables were unoccupied. Music blared from loudspeakers set high in the walls.

I stood in the door and looked quickly around. I couldn’t see her. Off to the left were stairs. A small sign hung over the stairs announcing additional space upstairs. That was disturbing. The place was too small and too brightly lighted. If the upstairs was one large room like the downstairs, I realized that she would surely see me the second I reached the top. I had to take the chance. If she did see me, it would have to be an accidental meeting and my plan could wait. I fingered the slip of paper in my jacket pocket — the one for her. I crossed my fingers and walked up the stairs. To my relief, I came out in a small hall. Apparently, little dining rooms opened off the hall on both sides. Waiters scurried along the hall carrying steaming trays of food.

I located her. She was sitting alone at the table for two just inside the door of the first room. By luck, she was looking at the menu when I saw her. I hurried across the hall and found a table in the opposite room. She couldn’t see me, but by leaning forward I could see her shoulder and the left side of her face. I had a good view of the empty chair across from her without having to lean forward.

A waiter came over to me and I ordered bean sprouts, bitter squash, and chicken with sweet and sour sauce. I had a plan for getting the note to her. It would depend a great deal on luck and timing. I saw her order. Again I crossed my fingers. Then she pushed her chair back and got up. She went out into the hall and I ducked far back into my corner. She passed my door and walked down the hall. I pulled a silver rupee out of my pocket and rolled it across into the next room, following behind it. It stopped under another table. I excused myself and fumbled for it. I dropped it on the floor and kicked it as I reached for it. It slid under her table. I put my hand near her plate as I reached for it. I walked back across into my own room. As I had placed my hand on the table, I had slid the note under the edge of her plate. I sat down and waited. She returned in a few minutes. Shortly after that, her food arrived, and so did mine. She didn’t notice the note. I realized that I had probably pushed it too far under her plate.

I glanced in at her table and nearly dropped my fork in surprise. There was a man with her. He had slipped in without my noticing it. I had half expected it to be O’Dell. This was a stranger. He was a small man with thinning black hair plastered firmly across an oval skull. His face was the color of very weak tea with too much cream. His eyes were imbedded in small pads of flesh. He talked to her, and he used his hands too much and with too much grace. The shoulders on his white linen suit were heavily padded.

I tried to eat without taking my eyes off him except when I could anticipate his glancing up. He seemed to do most of the talking. I couldn’t hear a word. When I leaned forward, I could see her head nodding. It was as though he were giving instructions. I wondered how I could find out his name. I realized that I might have been unintelligent about the way I had handled it. If I hadn’t seen her, then possibly I could have dared to sit near enough to her to overhear portions of the conversation. Then I remembered that talking to her had given me my first feeling of true confidence that there was more to Dan’s death than had been reported.

She was finished before I was. I watched her lay down her fork, and I waited for the waiter to pick up her plate. When he did, I saw her hands pick up the note and unfold it. She had been holding it down near the table. Suddenly she lifted it closer to her eyes. Her hands looked tense. She was reading YOU GAVE HIM TOO MUCH INFORMATION. She must have said something to the man with her. I saw his black marble eyes widen, and he snatched the note. He read it and crumpled it slowly in his fragile hand. He stared at her in the same way that a man might stare at a disfigured corpse. He pushed back his chair and stood up. He didn’t speak to her. He tossed some crumpled rupee notes onto the table and left. As he turned down the hall I heard her call, “Guy!” Her voice had a frightened note in it. He didn’t stop.

In a few moments she got up and left. I had a glimpse of her face as she turned into the hall. She was chewing her underlip.

I was sitting in her hotel lobby when she came in. I stood up, and she stopped. She didn’t look pleased to see me.

“Hi, Conny. Thought I’d have to wait longer than this. Short date?”

“What do you want?”

“No hidden motives this time. Just a normal male impulse. You’re the only gal I know in this town, and I want to make a date.”

She brushed by me and I caught her arm. She flung my hand off and spun around. Her eyes looked small. “Don’t touch me! Don’t talk to me! I don’t even want to be seen with you.” She turned and nearly ran toward the elevator. That was her second slip.

I walked over to the desk. There was a chocolate-colored smooth-shaven Pancho Villa standing behind it. I took a ten-rupee note out of my pocket and stood in front of him, folding it into a small square.

“Miss Severence has many admirers?” I said.

“A great many, master.”

“Could a jealous American learn their names?”

“There are a great many.”

I took another ten-rupee note out of my pocket and started to fold it around the first one. “I am only interested in one, a small man whom she calls Guy. A man with black hair which he is losing.”

“Possibly, master, you speak of a man called Guy Wend, who owns a small rubber plantation a dozen miles south of Colombo. I know little else about him.”

I slid the small fold of money across to him. His hand flicked at it and it was gone. “If Miss Severence should learn from you that I asked this question, I will break several bones in your face. That is a sincere promise.” He smiled and bowed. I left.

He didn’t get up when I walked into my room. He sat in the chair by the windows and smiled at me. He wore wrinkled whites with scores of faint stains down the front. He wore a small spade beard that looked as rigid as gray steel wire. His face was wide and red and shiny with sweat. His smiling red rosebud of a mouth looked silly above the bold beard. His eyes weren’t silly. They were light blue, frigid, unwinking.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked him.

“Van Hosen. I wanted to see you. Forgive the liberty. I bribed the boy to let me in.” His voice was high and sharp, with a faint accent.

“What do you want?”

“Just casual conversation, Mr. Garry. Nothing important. I write for the local papers. Features. You could call this an interview. I like to talk to visitors on the island. Get their impressions. Use them in my articles.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. I tried to keep all expression off my face. He might be what he claimed to be. He might be connected with O’Dell, Severence, and Wend. “Go ahead, but make it quick. I’m tired.”

“What are you doing on the island, Mr. Garry?”

“Tourist.”

“How do you like it?”

“Beautiful.”

“Haven’t you anything to add to that?”

“Nothing.”

He pulled at the spade beard. He stared at my bad hand. I covered it with the other. “Mr. Garry, we usually get more information than that. The tourist talk about the glamour, the air of mystery that seems to be a carryover from the days of the conquerors. You know, Ceylon was taken from the Veddas by the Singhalese. It has been ruled by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and now the English. Polynesians and Macronesians came here across thousands of miles of ocean in outrigger canoes. A Moslem pirate with an Abyssinian garrison held Colombo at one time. Intrigue and revolt and conquest. Plot and counterplot. Assassinations and assignations. Can’t you feel it in the air?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“Then, Mr. Garry, you’re an exception. You see, many of our visitors are carried by this strange feeling. They see bogies behind every bush. They imagine plots where none exist. We think them a little silly, yet in a way we’re proud of our heritage. You can consider this as a word of warning. The evil-faced man who glowers at you in a café isn’t plotting to steal your money or take your life. He’s probably wondering whether he can sell you a used automobile.”

“I don’t think about plots. Maybe I’m not imaginative.”

He grunted as he pulled himself to his feet. Standing, he was much less impressive. His legs were too short for his long torso. He looked tired and old and more than a little shabby. I held the door for him.

“No story here for me, then. Sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Garry.”

I shut the door and paced back and forth across the room. It was all too pat. A discreet warning. Tourists were a commonplace. No need to interview them. It was the same warning that O’Dell and Constance had given me — only it was more direct. The trail was growing too warm. Suppose I found out too much. They hadn’t hesitated to kill Dan. It was the first time that I was absolutely positive that he had been killed. I stopped pacing and went to the desk.

I scribbled a note to the American consul:

I signed it and sealed it.

I took it to the consul’s office in the morning. I had half expected them to make a fuss, to become official and difficult. They were very calm about the whole matter. I walked into a hotel near the office. Of all the people I had seen, Constance seemed to be the most vulnerable. It was time to make another date with her. I phoned Naval Headquarters and asked for her extension. A male voice answered and said, “Miss Severence didn’t report for work this morning.” He hung up before I could ask any more questions. I took a rickshaw to her hotel.

I walked down the narrow lobby and stopped in front of the desk. Pancho Villa smiled at me, the broad welcoming smile of the perfect host.

“What is Miss Severance’s room number?”

He rubbed his hands together and smiled more broadly. “It is regretted, master, that you won’t be able to speak with the lady.”

“She’s given instructions about me?”

“Not that, master. The lady has had a misfortune.”

“What do you mean?”

“Possibly, master, if you go through that door at the end of the lobby and turn to the right, you will find her in front of the bathhouses. She drowned this morning while taking an early swim. The police are even now examining her.”

I stared at him. He didn’t stop smiling. Maybe it was confusion that made him smile. He giggled. I turned and walked to the door he had indicated.

I turned right into the glare of sunshine on a white tile walk. Fifty feet ahead were the bathhouses. The wide white beach was at my left as I walked. The blue water rolled up into long ragged white crests that thudded against the sand with constant soft thunder. I saw a group ahead and quickened my step.

She was on her back on the hot tile in front of the bathhouses. Two Singhalese in police uniform stood staring down at her. A big man with a long white face was scribbling in a notebook. A slender British officer knelt on the white square of his pocket handkerchief and looked at her closely.

The pale blue bathing suit revealed the magnificent body that her dress had concealed. Long golden limbs and flowing curves. Her lips were swollen, bluish, protruding. Her eyes were wide. There was a thin green string of seaweed across her forehead. Part of it rested on her eyeball. Her shoulders were scraped. As I looked at her, her skin seemed more bluish. I noticed that the two police were soaked up to the knees. I guessed that they had stood in the surf to recover her body.

The one with the long white face looked at me. “A friend?”

“An acquaintance. How did it happen?”

“Caught by the undertow. The hotel doesn’t recommend swimming here at this time of year. Very foolish except for exceptional swimmers. She wasn’t.”

The slim British officer stood up and picked up his handkerchief. He used it to flick nonexistent dust off his spotless uniform. He carefully wiped his hands on it and then started to put it back in his pocket. On an impulse, he stooped over and spread it over her rigid face. The tall man kept writing. The officer stepped over to me and said, “Too bad. Conny was a pleasant type.”

“Oh, you knew her?”

“Quite. Breaks me up a bit. Let’s get a peg up at the hotel bar.”

I agreed gladly. They had removed the weak link in the chain. They had destroyed my starting point. Of that I had no doubt.

I liked the looks of the officer, except for the fact that he was a bit too pretty. A very fair man, with even bronze tan, regular delicate features, and eyelashes that any girl would have envied. I saw the minute wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and around his mouth and knew that he was older than he had at first appeared. I guessed his age at about thirty-three.

As we walked together up the walk, I stuck my hand out to him and said, “Howard Garry. I’m a tourist.”

“Right. Peter Kay mark here.”

We went into the bar, and I followed his lead in ordering a gin and tonic. We took them and carried them over to a table near a window. He sighed, as he sat down, and drank half of his drink in one long gulp.

“How’d you know Conny, Mr. Garry?”

“Oh, she knew a friend of mine that was stationed here during the war. A Captain Dan Christoff. You probably never heard of him.”

“Yes. I remember him. Chap who was drowned. Big stink about that here. Conny complained for weeks.”

I went over to the bar and brought back the second round. We drank it, and Lieutenant Kaymark became a bit flushed. We sat in silence. I was thinking those thoughts that every man has when he sees the body of an attractive woman. What a waste!

After half of the third round was gone, he looked up. “I guess I shouldn’t feel so badly about it. She’ll be off my list now. One less person to watch. Bloody Intelligence unit always loads you up with too many suspected agents.”

“You’re in Intelligence?”

“Five years of it out here. I suppose that if I’d told you that during wartime, they could have shot me for it. But now I’m so bloody sick of it, I wish they’d transfer me out of it. It’s too much of a piece of cake. Nothing to do. Dull.”

I thought it over. A man with the perfect qualifications. And he’d dropped into my lap. It was too good an opportunity to miss. I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table and lowered my voice. “How would you like to have it a lot less dull, lieutenant?”

He shrugged and smiled. “Of course, I’d like it.” He looked amused.

“Suppose I tell you that I think Captain Christoff was murdered? Suppose I tell you that I believe that Conny was murdered? Suppose the fact that she was a suspected agent ties in with it all?”

“Bit thick, what?” He grinned at me as if I was a case to be pitied.

“Don’t smirk at me, lieutenant.” I started with the interviews with the crew members. I gave him the entire story. I didn’t spare any details, and I tried to repeat the conversations as near word for word as I could remember. He sat there, indolent but interested, until I told of my interview with Constance Severence. Then he sat forward, alert and excited. His excitement grew as I told of the China Sea Inn, Guy Wend, and the note. When I finished telling him about the visit from Van Hosen, he leaned back and sighed.

“That tears it, Garry. It’s perfect. Van Hosen is on my list. Originally from Java. Got out somehow after the Japs moved in. Mysterious circumstances. Claimed to have escaped. He does odd-job journalism around the city. Wend is also on my list. Nasty type. Slippery. Always mixed up in radical island politics. A rebel. I’m surprised about O’Dell. Never figured him for that sort of thing. It ties in with Conny beautifully.”

“Then you think I’m right, Peter? You think it’s possible that Dan Christoff got mixed up in some kind of intrigue or spy stuff, learned too much, and was killed?”

He twirled his glass and looked judicious. “I’m certain that you’re right, Garry. You’ve gone about as far as you can go. Let me take it over from here. We’ll work as a team.”

I was delighted. It was the first backing I had received. I was no longer fighting alone and in the dark. “Where do we start?”

“At the January Club. They don’t open until noon. I’ve got some reports to make out on the Severence woman. Suppose I meet you at the club at twelve thirty for lunch. I’m a member there. I had to join. Too many of my suspects flocked around there during the war.”

As we left the hotel, he stopped by a full-length mirror in the hall and made a dozen minor adjustments to his uniform, tugging at the sleeves, straightening insignia, pulling down his blouse. He pulled a small brush and comb out of his side pocket. He brushed his uniform and then carefully combed his hair. He stepped back and took a last look at himself. He smiled at himself. And then we walked out and each took rickshaws in opposite directions.

I arrived at the January Club before Kaymark did. It was a low building with orange-yellow plaster walls and a red tile roof. It was set back from the road behind a screen of thick shrubs and flowering trees. As I walked up the steps, I could see a double row of tennis courts at the side. I estimated that there were twenty courts. A few of them were already in use.

A smiling native in a white uniform met me at the door and directed me to a small cool room to wait for Lieutenant Kaymark. On the small table were copies of the London Times and the New York Times. The latest copy of the New York Times was only nine days old. I was halfway through the front page when I looked up and saw Kaymark smiling down at me.

We went into the pleasant sunny dining room and ordered drinks at the table. I looked over the sprinkling of members at the other tables. I started when I saw the man named Guy eating alone in a corner. I jerked my head in his direction, and Peter looked around. He looked back at me and nodded. “The desk clerk was right, Garry. That’s Wend.”

The other faces were unfamiliar. After the excellent curry lunch we walked back to the cardroom. Two bridge games had started. As we walked in, an old man with a leathery face looked up from his cards and said, “Ho, Peter! Hear about Conny?”

“Saw her. Unhealthy business, this getting drowned, you know.”

“Good a way as any, they tell me.” He grinned and turned back to his cards. His partner had been glaring at him as he talked. We stood and watched the play for a time. I’ve always enjoyed bridge without knowing too much about the finer points of bidding. The table where Peter’s friend was sitting was playing slow, careful bridge. I glanced around at the other table. I saw into the hand of a Singhalese who sat with his back to me and noticed with a start that his cards were unsorted. A heart was played and he, with hearts scattered through his hand, played the king of clubs. The opponents picked up the trick. The man’s partner saw me staring and muttered something. The hand was lowered so that I couldn’t see it, and in a few seconds they all threw their hands in. On the next deal, the man with his back to me sorted his cards properly. I watched for a few minutes. The play was normal. I motioned to Peter, and he followed me out into the main lounge. No one was within earshot.

“Peter, have you ever paid much attention to the game in there?”

“How do you mean? I can afford to watch, but I can’t afford to play. Stakes are a rupee a hundred. Roughly thirty cents in your money. If you lose by two hundred points, which would be a very low score, that’s sixty of your dollars.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean have you ever seen anything odd about the way they play bridge?”

“No.”

I explained what I had seen. “Suppose this was the nucleus of a group of agents. Imagine the efficiency of it. A man has two thousand rupees to pay off. He has instructions to give. They memorize a simple code. There’s twenty-six letters in the alphabet and thirteen cards in a suit. Any red ace is A, and any black ace is B. Any red deuce is C, and any black deuce is D. Any red trey is E, and so on. It would come out even and be easy to remember. They deal new hands until the boy with the message can spell it out. At the end of the game, they fake the score so that he has to pay off. No danger of being overheard. No suspicion.”

“How about the casual person looking in on the game?”

“They were probably a hell of a lot more careful during the war, when they could get hung or shot for it, than they are now. Even if what I saw was out of line, how can I prove anything?”

“You know, Garry, that’s pretty shrewd. Never thought of it.” He dabbed at his upper lip with a clean handkerchief. “Could arrange somehow to get a peephole in the ceiling. Keep a record of the play and break the code. Hard to do that without tipping off the servants, who will tip off the people playing.”

“Why don’t you pull in one of the servants on some excuse and work him over?”

“That’s been done, but it isn’t good. My superior, Colonel Rith-Lee, doesn’t like it. He says that it shows our hand. Besides, they never talk. They’re too terrified. All we can threaten them with is imprisonment. These other people can promise to strip off their hide, a quarter inch at a time. More impressive.”

We talked in the lounge for nearly a half hour. He couldn’t think of any constructive plan. I had a few, but he showed me just how they were impractical. He stated that I hadn’t given him sufficient basis on which Van Hosen, Wend, and O’Dell could be picked up.

Finally I said, “Let me try one thing. It hadn’t ought to hurt you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve got some extra money, money that ought to look big to a servant. I’ll give the boy at the front desk a note to come and see me in the Galle Face on a matter that will mean money to him. If he comes, maybe I can offer him enough so that he’ll make a statement and then quit his job and leave town. Of course, he may know nothing worth buying, but it’s worth taking a chance.” He agreed. I went to a desk in the lounge and wrote my note. As we left, I shoved it into the brown palm of the boy on the door.

We stood out in the street. I’d written the boy to come after he was off duty, no matter how late. “Want me to come along and help you question him?” Peter asked.

“No, thanks. You’ve got a lot of official scruples. I may have to rough him up a little to encourage him. It might get you in trouble. You just sit tight, and I’ll come to you tomorrow morning to tell you what I’ve learned.”

We parted, and I went back to the Galle Face to begin the long wait. I began to expect him at one o’clock. He hadn’t arrived by three. I pinned a note to the outside of the door which read Knock loudly. I went to bed.

When I awoke the sun was bright on the ocean. The note on my door was undisturbed. I figured that he had been too scared to come see me. We’d have to dream up another approach, try another employee. Only we’d have to be more careful, because he might possibly have tipped off the proper people concerning what we were attempting to do.

I rang for the room boy, Fernando. I wanted to order breakfast in the room before taking my shower. He came in and his round face was grave, his eyes wide and bright. He made a little bow and said, “Much trouble in hotel, Garry master.”

“Trouble?”

He licked his lips and glowed with the pleasure of having information to impart. “Boy killed with knife in front of hotel last night, master. Maybe one o’clock, maybe two o’clock.” He slashed his chubby forefinger across his throat and made a gurgling noise.

I tried to act bored. “Police take him away already?”

“No, master. Police very modern. Have camera. Waiting for sun to come and then taking pictures. Man still out on grass near side of hotel.”

I didn’t order breakfast and I skipped the shower. I pulled my clothes on and hurried down to the lobby. Once in the lobby I walked slowly across to the front door. Off to one side were a hundred curious people standing in a wide circle, looking at something on the ground. They looked as though they had been standing a long time. Knowing the oriental indifference to death, I suspected that they were staring at something fairly juicy.

I pressed through the crowd and found that J was right on both counts. It was the boy to whom I had given the note. His throat had been slashed with such vicious strength that the cords and muscles had been parted all the way back to the spinal column. Without the support of the neck muscles, the shock of falling after the blow must have broken the neck. His head was strained back at right angles to the body, exposing the severed jugular. The grass was stained black red in a circle around his head, a circle of about the same circumference as a bushel basket. His lips were drawn back from his teeth.

I shoved my way back out of the circle. They had been too quick, too clever. I knew that there would be no point in trying to bribe another one. They had licked me again. Every time I thought of an opening, of a chance to get information, they stepped in first with a block that stopped me in my tracks.

I had poor coffee in the hotel and then went back up to my room and phoned Peter Kaymark at the number he had given me. A clerk told me that he wasn’t in and they didn’t know when to expect him. I tried three more times before noon, with the same result. At noon I had a small lunch sent up, and, after finishing it, I took a rickshaw to the January Club.

There was a new boy on the door. I looked at him carefully but could detect no change of expression when he admitted me, and I asked to see Lieutenant Kaymark or Mr. O’Dell, if either of them were in the club.

He showed me back to a small curtained room off the main lounge, a different room than I had waited in before. He told me that he would attempt to locate either of the two gentlemen and plug them in on the phone which stood on a small table in the room if they didn’t happen to be in the club. I thanked him and he left. The small room was hot and airless. It smelled of mold and dust.

I sat on the edge of a worn chair which faced the curtains. For some reason, I felt uneasy. I didn’t have long to wait. The room was poorly lighted. Suddenly figures burst through the curtains at me, moving so quickly that I received only a confused impression of several burly Singhalese. They fell on me and the chair went over backwards. I tried to kick at their heads, but one of them dropped heavily across my knees. I swung my right fist in a short arc and heard one of them grunt as it landed. I tried to buck and spin out of it, but they were too quick and too heavy. They rolled me over roughly and yanked my hands around behind me. Something rough and hard tightened over my wrists and drew them together. I started to shout as I felt the same substance around my ankles. They rolled me over, and as I opened my mouth to shout again, one of them crammed a thick cloth between my teeth. They tied another length of rope around my head to keep me from shoving the gag out with my tongue.

Two of them picked me up and the third peered cautiously through the curtains. Then he motioned to the others and they yanked me up off the floor and hurried out with me. One held me by the shoulder, the other by the knees.

Out in the brighter light of the lounge, I could see that they were all large men. They wore bright plaid sarongs, which had been tucked up to leave their legs free. They were naked from the waist up.

They hurried down the length of the lounge with me, and up a flight of narrow stairs. They bumped my head painfully when they rounded a corner of the stairs. They hurried down a dingy hall and opened the door of a small room. They dropped me heavily onto my face and cut the ropes on my neck, wrists, and ankles. The last one was backing out of the door as I jumped to my feet. The door slammed, and there was the sharp efficient click of a lock. I was alone in a bare room, about ten by ten, with one small barred window and not a scrap of furniture. I looked out the window, down into an enclosed court. I listened. I was so far from the road that I couldn’t hear the sound of traffic. There was no sound from the club. I sat by the door with my back against the wall.

I should have felt alarmed, at least disturbed. I didn’t. It was direct action, the first concrete thing that had happened. All the rest was supposition. Whatever happened, I would learn something. The gloves were off; the knife was out.

I waited an hour before I heard a sound at the door. When the lock clicked, I jumped up. My ankle hurt from where they had tightened the rope across the scar that hid the silver plate.

The door opened and O’Dell walked in, closely followed by one of the men who had carried me up the stairs. O’Dell grinned and the native shut the door and stood leaning against it, his arms folded.

“We meet again, Mr. Garry. Let me commend your persistence. You’ve been stubborn, but not particularly intelligent. We won’t keep you long. Just a little favor you can do us.” I didn’t answer. He reached into his white jacket pocket and brought out a piece of Galle Face Hotel stationery. He handed it to me and I took it. It was blank. “I see you have a pen there, Garry. I’m sorry there’s no table in this guest room. Just sit down there on the floor and write a note to the American consul authorizing them to turn over to the bearer the envelope you left there. One of the men on our payroll is a clerk there. He told me of the envelope.”

He stood, fat, smiling, and confident. He wore a white jacket, shorts, and high white wool socks. He acted like a man soliciting subscriptions for the Chamber of Commerce.

“And suppose that I don’t. Suppose I say that when you have the envelope I’ll be drowned or run over or have some other kind of accident.”

“My dear boy, I’m not underrating you. Of course you’ll have an accident, but I guarantee that you’ll die easily. It will inconvenience us if we have to force you to sign. You may be familiar with the water cure? We suspend you by your heels and fill your belly with water from a stirrup pump, under pressure. When you’re close to bursting, we stop pumping. Then a couple of husky men beat on your abdomen with broom handles. The odd thing about it is that people generally stay conscious. Then you’ll write the note.”

For the first time, I felt the chill gnawing of fear. I’m no dauntless character. I hate to be hurt. Pain frightens me. Pain in any form. He didn’t seem ill at ease or feel that he was speaking melodrama. He was as factual as a man describing with gusto how he had played the seventeenth hole.

“Give me a little time to think. An hour.” I lifted my hands a bit and made them shake. He glanced down, and I saw him smile as he saw the quiver.

“We can do that, Garry. And don’t feel too badly. This thing is bigger than you or me. You almost interfered with the New Co-Prosperity Sphere for Southeast Asia, if that’s any consolation. You and that weakling woman and that blabbering servant. And Christoff too, if that’s any help.”

He turned around and the native opened the door for him. Then, to my disappointment, the native closed the door again, remaining on the inside. Once again I heard the lock click.

I walked over to the far side of the small room and stared at the heavy brown chest of the man. He was a brute. I remembered the rough hands slapping my clothes, feeling for the outlines of a weapon which I didn’t have. I had to trick him in some way. The barred window offered the only possible escape. I stood near it and tried to think. I knew that my precious minutes were fading away.

I made my actions furtive. I reached a hand cautiously into my inside jacket pocket. I didn’t look at the man. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him move slightly. I brought my hand out of the jacket pocket with my fingers bunched as though I was holding something small like a pill. I popped the imaginary pill into my mouth and then fell back against the wall, clutching my throat. I slid down the wall as he started toward me, making a horrid bubbling noise in my throat. I rolled my eyes up and held my breath, stiffening my body. He hurried over and leaned over me, his eyes wide in his coarse face. I knew that in a matter of seconds he would turn and hammer on the door. With every ounce of power in my left leg, I kicked up hard against his poised jaw. The force of the kick numbed my toes. It lifted him off his feet and he went over backwards, his head thumping on the floor. I scrambled onto him and hit him twice before I realized that it was unnecessary. He was completely out, the heavy bone of his jaw crushed near the point of his chin.

I hurriedly inspected the window. The bars were about a half inch in diameter and about five inches apart. There were five of them set vertically across the window. The ends were imbedded in a wooden sill, but it looked as though they went on through the wooden sill and into the concrete. I braced my feet on the wall and yanked at one with all the power of my back. It gave a little, but not enough. I examined it from the side and saw that I’d bent the bar slightly. Untempered metal, possibly wrought iron. That gave me the idea I needed. I took off my heavy leather belt and fastened it so that it enclosed three of the bars. I needed something sturdy to use as a lever. There was no furniture in the room to break up. The only thing I could think of to use was my shoe. I wear a twelve A, and I like heavy soles. I slipped one off and inserted it into the belt. Then, with one hand on the heel and the other on the toe, I twisted it around, tightening it like a tourniquet. At first there was no result. The shoe merely became harder to turn. Then I noticed that the bar on the right seemed to be bending. I twisted harder. It bent over until it nearly touched the bar next to it. Then, with a splintering of wood, it pulled free from the frame on the bottom. Bending it had shortened its effective length, so that it had pulled out of the concrete until only the wood was holding it. I grabbed the bottom and pulled up. It pulled free at the top. The hole that it left looked big enough to slip through, but I couldn’t take a chance on getting stuck. By using the free bar as a lever, I bent the bars on either side of the orifice. I was lucky that the bars were the usual Colombo burglar insurance, rather than a special set for the purposes of the group that I had run into.

I slid through feet first and then grabbed the bars and let myself down until I was hanging full length against the side of the building. I nudged myself away from the rough plaster with my knee and let go. I dropped onto the ground so hard that I slammed my chin against my own knee.

I didn’t waste time looking around. I hobbled toward the high wall. It was at a level with the top of my head and made with broken glass set into the cement on top of it. I tore off my jacket and threw it over the glass. Then I caught the edge and drew myself up. I missed the extra leverage of the fingers I had lost. The glass bit through the jacket and into the flesh of my hands. I dropped over the wall and snatched the jacket. In front of me was a wide field with a house on the far side of it. To the right across another small field was the familiar road. I ran toward it as fast as I could. My bad ankle seemed to be getting more painful by the second.

I pulled the jacket on and hurried away from the club. I stood on the corner until an idling rickshaw coolie sauntered along. He speeded up when I shouted. A few seconds later he was running with me toward the Galle Face Hotel. I sat on the black leather seat, breathing heavily and inspecting the cuts on my hands. I made the promise that Mr. O’Dell would be paid back in the same coin with exorbitant interest.

My jacket was ragged and my hands were bloody when I walked through the lobby of the hotel. I went on up to my room and phoned Kaymark. After I told him two sentences, he told me that he’d come over immediately. I bandaged my hands clumsily and had the boy get me a deep basin of cold water in which I could soak my ankle.

Peter arrived in five minutes. After I finished the story, he sat, looking shaken, and said, “We’ll have to get back over there, Garry. Right away.”

“How about picking up a bunch of your people? I can charge them with enough to sew them up for years.”

He shook his head. “Not necessary. You don’t realize how the British Army rates out here. They wouldn’t dare try anything with me. Besides, I have this.” He slid the butt of a heavy automatic partway out of his tunic pocket and then let it drop back. “Any time you feel well enough to go...”

We were in a taxi headed for the January Club within a matter of minutes. As we pulled up in front, he said, “Now let me handle it. Don’t talk.”

We walked in, and again the boy was expressionless. Peter asked for O’Dell and was told that he could be found in the cocktail room. Peter walked ahead and I limped after him. I hadn’t seen the cocktail room before. It was in the rear of the building, beyond the dining room. It opened out into the garden. O’Dell was sitting hunched at a table near the open doors. He looked up with a wry smile when we walked in.

There were three extra chairs at his table. We were far enough from the bar so that low voices couldn’t be heard by the bartender.

“You’re off games, O’Dell,” Peter said as we sat down.

“Just a little joke, Peter. Afraid this American beggar might take it too seriously.”

“It’s more than that. You’re going to have to do a lot of talking. You’re all tied together. You and Van Hosen, Conny, Wend. Conny’s death and the death of the boy who used to be on the door. It’s all got to be explained.”

“Not by me, son. I’m just a bystander. Don’t know a thing.”

I interrupted. “One thing you should have known, O’Deil, is that I’m too stubborn to talk, no matter what you tried to do. You should have seen that.”

O’Deil looked at Peter, his mouth sullen. “Then what’s the bloody use of bringing—” I was looking at him. I saw his eyes widen. I turned toward Peter just as the heavy automatic banged. The noise of the shot was deafening in the still room. There was a crash of glassware from the direction of the bar.

I looked back at O’Deil. The slug had caught him flush in the center of his upper lip, turning his mouth into a bloody hole. I could see bits of his shattered teeth. He seemed to clutch the edge of the table for a second, then his eyes seemed to look far beyond us. He bent slowly over to the left and his huge body thumped onto the floor, overturning both his chair and the table. We got up. Peter looked older and very tired.

He turned to me and saw the question in my eyes. “Couldn’t take a chance, Garry. Saw him tighten up and knew he was going to try something.” I recalled the immense size and vitality of the man. Once under way, he would have been hard to stop. When the table had gone over, O’Dell’s drink had crashed to the floor. The spattering liquid had spotted Peter’s trousers. He slid the automatic back into the side pocket of his tunic and took out his handkerchief. He bent over and carefully blotted the spots. Attracted by the noise of the shot, half a dozen servants had hurried into the cocktail lounge. They stood ten feet away and gazed with wide eyes at the dead hulk of the retired planter.

The head boy stepped forward and said, “Kaymark master wishes me to call the police?”

“No, Ratmani. I’ll do it.” He turned to me. “Better stay by the body while I use the telephone. The boys might take his money if we both stayed away long enough.”

I upended the fallen chair as he strolled out. I pulled it over to one side and sat where I could see the corpse without having to turn my head. The room was very still. The man was dead, and yet there were small movements from the corpse — the crackle of starched whites as the body settled, the rumble of gases in the abdomen. Fresh corpses will sometimes give the impression of life, but after a few minutes they seem to settle more flatly against the floor, they take on that distinctive “sack of wheat” look which is unmistakable. Then they become substances instead of persons. A few dollars’ worth of chemicals that the clothes no longer fit. One by one the other servants backed out until only the head boy and the bartender were left. I ordered a double scotch. I felt uneasy. How many deaths? Christoff, Constance, the doorboy, O’Dell. It began to look as though there would be no one left to give me the proof of Christoff’s innocence. Wend and Van Hosen and the men who had been playing bridge.

Kaymark, the familiar man with the long white face, and three uniformed policemen came in as I was watching the door.

Peter was in the middle of a sentence. “... and I’ll turn my report in to my colonel. He’ll authorize a true copy to be sent to you. Purely a technicality, covered by our existing operating regulations. You understand.”

They stood by the body of O’Dell. I stood up. The white-faced man rubbed his chin. He turned to me. “And you were also sitting at the table? Can you give me a report?”

Peter interrupted. “Just a minute, Saxon. Let me send his in with mine with a copy to you later. Army business, you know.”

Saxon sighed. “Nothing else to do, I guess. You and your friend can go any time, lieutenant.”

“Wait a minute there,” I interrupted. “How about a charge of abduction or something? How about those other men that—”

“Hold it, Garry,” Peter demanded, his voice loud and sharp. “We’ll take care of that also.”

Saxon raised his thin black eyebrows. “Suppose you let me know about it now, Mr. Garry.”

“You don’t have to answer him, Garry,” Peter said quietly.

I looked from one to the other. Peter had a faint smile hidden around the corners of his mouth.

“I’d better follow the lieutenant’s advice. I’ll put it in the report.” Again the police official sighed. I looked back as we walked out and saw him stooping over the body.

As soon as we were far enough away, Peter said plaintively, “Damn it, Garry, you don’t want those beggars in on it. They’d foul it up for you. You’d never find out the truth once they got their heavy hands on it.”

I stopped walking and fished out a cigarette. He paused and waited for me. “Look, Peter. While you were phoning I was sitting in there thinking. I’ve got enough now so that I’m convinced in my own mind that Dan wasn’t out of line. And I think I’ve got enough to convince his wife and his people. What more do I need? Maybe I ought to give the whole thing up and go back to the States. Come on over to my hotel and let’s talk it over.”

He agreed, but added, “We’ll have to make it short. I’ve got to get that report in.”

I didn’t have much to say to him as we rode back to the Galle Face in the taxi. I was too busy with my own plans and problems.

We went up to my room, and I dug a bottle of brandy out of the suitcase. There were two glasses in the bathroom. I made two strong drinks and handed him one. I sat on the bed and he sat in the chair, his back to the windows, his elbows almost touching the high bureau.

“You’ve thought over what I said, Peter.”

“Yes, but I thought you wanted to stay around and prove that Christoff wasn’t to blame. I thought you wanted it to go on the records.”

“I did, but what are the odds? I’m more certain, yes, but what proof have I got? How do I know I’m going to get any more proof? How do I know I won’t be killed in the process myself? That crack O’Dell made about a Co-Prosperity Sphere sort of got me. I’m tangling with something big. It’s like an iceberg — I’ve only seen the little part that’s out of water.”

He sipped his drink and looked thoughtful. I marveled again at the long curled lashes. At last he said, “Maybe you’re right. At least I could carry on here, and once we break it up, I could arrange to have Christoff cleared officially. I’m sure we’ll break it up in time, whatever it is.”

“Let me show you something, Peter. It’s a letter that Dan’s wife got from the U.S. colonel out here. It’s what you’ve got to counteract.”

I got up and walked over to the bureau. He had to move his arm to give me room. I fumbled in the top drawer and cursed about not being able to find it. I looked in the bureau mirror and waited until I could see his head tilt back as he drained the last of the drink. I spun and chopped down hard with my right fist, swinging it like a hammer. It had to be good. It was. It hit him flush on the side of the jaw. My follow-through knocked the empty glass across the room. He was stunned but not completely out. I dropped my right fist and swung it up in an uppercut that straightened him out in the chair. He sagged back into it, completely limp.

I ran over to the door and locked it. Then I stripped the cover off my bed and took a sheet. I ripped it down the middle, the long way. Then I yanked him off the chair and tossed him on the floor, half in and half out of the bathroom. There was a transom over the high bathroom door. I tied one end of the half sheet firmly around his wrist and then lifted him up so that I could throw the other end over the transom. I caught it and pulled down with all my weight. It lifted him until his toes barely touched the floor. I knotted the sheet. Then I did the same with the other wrist. His head sagged forward.

Then I had to wait for him to regain consciousness. I had hit him a little harder than I had intended. I grew impatient. Finally I drew a glass of water and threw it into his face. He tried to lift his head. The second glass brought him around.

He stared at me, and then he craned his neck and looked up at the knots and the transom. He looked back at me, his eyes wide and startled. “Now look here, Garry, this better not be some kind of a joke.”

“It isn’t a joke. It’s the first smart thing I’ve done on this island.”

He smiled. He looked tender and forgiving. “I say, old man, this heat here is pretty grim. Now be a good chap and cut me down. This arrangement hurts my wrists. We’ll go see a doctor, right now.”

“You’re clever, Kaymark, but I can add two and two. You’ve made a few slips, you know.”

“Come on now, this is silly. Cut me down and I’ll forgive you the whole thing.”

“Wait a minute, Peter. You like mirrors, so you can watch that pretty face of yours. I think you ought to get a look at it now.”

I grabbed the heavy bureau and twisted it around so that it stood about eight feet away from him. I tilted the mirror until it was at the right angle. Then I walked forward and slugged him. I hit him high on the cheekbone, turning my fist as it hit so that I could be certain of splitting the skin.

Then I stepped back and waved at the mirror. “Take a look, Pretty Boy.”

His eyes widened and then narrowed. “That was cheap, Garry.”

“Sure! Cut-rate Garry. Cheap and practical. The working man’s thug. Now comes a little something that I happened to think of back in the January Club. I tell you this little something and, if you act dumb about it, I tap you again, in a new spot. Then I tell you something else. You understand?”

“I understand what you mean, but it’s senseless!”

“Maybe to you. You haven’t heard all. I’ll do work on that pretty face that no plastic surgery’ll ever fix. I’ll tell you when I come to the last point. If you don’t start talking then, I put my heart into one dilly that ought to spread your nose wide enough to touch the doorframes. Okay?”

“Please cut me down.” His composure was gone. His voice was getting high and thin. I knew that it wasn’t helping him any to be able to see the quick swelling of the spot on the cheek where I had nailed him.

“Now for point number one. Remember when I told you that I thought Constance had been drowned by someone? Your normal reaction would have been to go back out and check the body again to look for any signs of violence. You didn’t.”

“That’s absurd. I’d already checked the body.”

“But you claimed that you checked it thinking that it was an accidental drowning. Where’d you like the next one, sonny?” I didn’t give him a chance to answer. It made me feel faintly sick to hit a man who couldn’t hit back, but it had to be done. I swung hard and hit the other cheek. I made a better cut across the cheekbone. It began to bleed immediately. He tried to shake his head to clear it, but the sheets held his upper arms too tightly against his ears.

“Point number two is minor. If you don’t work with the police, how did you know Conny had drowned? Who’d inform you? Why would you be out there if swimming isn’t recommended this time of year? You popped up too quick. Ready to talk a little?”

“This is mad, Garry. Stop it now before you go too far.”

I had to mark him up badly and save the delicate nose for last. I planted a short choppy right on the corner of his mouth. It smacked hard enough to swing him back a little. He shut his eyes and groaned.

“The next pernt, dearie, is the charming way you decided that all my plans concerning the January Club were no good. Even I could see that the smart thing to do would be to gather up all those jokers and sweat something out of them.”

“But you can’t handle these people that way. They never talk. Damn you, stop all this, you’re cutting me.”

“Sure, I’m cutting you. And sure it’s a bloody shame it is, me fine bhoy.”

I slammed another one into his mouth. I felt teeth give under my knuckles and the blood spurted across the back of my hand. I saw him glance beyond me into the mirror. He was twisted around the eyes like a small boy trying not to cry.

“The next point, Peter. Who knew about my bribing the boy at the door? Only you. Certainly that boy looked too smart to let anybody else know. And he got it the same night. Very very peculiar.”

“Wait!” he screamed. “They must have found out some other way. They had to find out some other way.”

I ignored him. It made me ill, but it had to be done. I hit him hard over the right eye, hard enough to split the cartilage. I had to plan on his being too inexperienced to know that the marks I was making would be gone in a few months, leaving possibly a few tiny white scars.

“Another point. I don’t think that the American consulate employs any local help until their honesty and loyalty has been pretty well checked. O’Dell said that an employee of the consulate tipped him off about my note. Nuts! I told you about it, and you told O’Dell. Talking yet?”

He surprised me. He pulled himself up a little straighter and looked squarely into my eyes. His face was as firm as it could be in its mangled condition. A moment before I had thought he was going to crack. I leaned on the next one a little more. The meaty smack of my fist against his face was loud in the room. It jolted his head back. When he straightened up, the other eyebrow was streaming.

“Another little fact. I was watching O’Dell. He wasn’t going to try anything. He was completely relaxed. You gave it to him because he was going to say too much. He never stood a chance. Cold-blooded murder, and not the first one.”

His eyes widened as I pulled my fist back. He was too busy being brave to do any talking. I grinned as I let it go. I smacked it into the least damaged portion of his mouth.

“Another point. You didn’t want me to talk to the police. That Saxon looks smart. Maybe, if he got enough dope, he might see through you.”

Again on the mouth. He started to curse me. He cursed through swelling battered lips that distorted his words. I stood back and let him finish. His voice got hoarse and indistinct and finally faded away completely. The blood was dripping onto his tunic.

“Also, chum, when I brought up the point of my leaving this place and going back to the States, you didn’t do much discouraging. You wanted me to go. You put up no argument at all. Just gave me a song and dance about cleaning it up later. And look, I have one more point coming up, a conclusive point, old boy. We are now ready for the master stroke, the slam on the schnoz. Take a peek in the mirror. Take a look at that nose.”

He looked. The pointed delicate nose stood out in the midst of the carnage, shining like that good deed in a naughty world. I saw his face quiver as he looked and realized what would happen when I hit it. He was trying to brace himself.

I needed more psychology. I didn’t have any conclusive point. I’d made my last point. So I smacked my lips loudly and wound up like a bush league pitcher. “You don’t know how much I’m enjoying this, Pete. Guess I’m a sadist. Maybe I better take a couple of swings at it to make sure I get it hammered down nice and flat.”

That got him. He came apart at the seams. Every ounce of guts ran out of him and he sobbed as he talked. “No, Garry! No! I’ll tell you about it. All of it. Cut me down.”

“Not till you get through talking. I’m aching for a shot at that nose.”

“Van Hosen. He’s in charge. Subversive group. Money from Japs in Java. Gold and jewels they took from the Dutch. War’s over, but Van Hosen ordered to establish Jap-type sphere of influence down here. I’ve been working for him for three years. I’m perfect cover for them. Can direct suspicion away from them. Van Hosen in charge. O’Dell used to be second, but he’s resented Van Hosen for a long time. I had replaced O’Dell. O’Dell was the one who gave instructions to kill Christoff. Christoff stumbled on card code by accident one night. He came to British headquarters to report it as something suspicious. By luck, he came to me. The January Club has been the base.”

“How about that boat ride. Quick!”

“I asked Christoff to work with our headquarters in trapping these people. O’Dell’s orders. Introduced him to Conny and O’Dell and told him later that they were suspected agents. Told him that we had information that they wanted to get over to India. Asked him to invite them out on the boat and pretend to be drunk and see if they’d ask him to take them across to India. Short trip. Told him that I’d give him a letter later that would cover him in case of any criticism. I told him not to tell anyone else of the plan. He did as I asked him, and at the first opportunity, O’Dell shoved him over the side.”

“Why’d you shoot O’Dell?”

“Orders. I reported to Van Hosen that you couldn’t be purchased or intimidated. You blocked us when you sent the letter to the consulate. If you hadn’t done that, you’d be dead now. O’Dell thought he could torture you to write a letter to get the sealed note back. I knew you’d never write such a letter. Van Hosen told O’Dell not to chance it. O’Dell disobeyed orders, and I had to cover it all up. I thought I had.”

“Why is this organization so ruthless, anyway?”

“Thousands of weapons and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition have been stolen and hidden in the hills. We will lead the revolt of the Ceylonese against England. We were to get millions, and Van Hosen was going to get us estates in the interior of Java after it was over.”

“Why was the doorboy killed? Did he know anything?”

“Not a thing. He was killed to discourage you from trying any of the others.”

“Who killed him?”

“Wend. That’s his job.”

“Who killed Constance?”

“Wend again. Sent her a message to swim out to his small boat early in the morning. She did, and she was held under long enough to drown her without leaving a mark.”

“Was it necessary?”

“Yes. She was weak. She was a danger, particularly with you around. You frightened her. You sent her a note somehow, and she thought it was from Van Hosen. She didn’t know his writing.”

“Where does this Van Hosen live?”

“Right here. Two floors above you.”

“How did you get in on this?”

“I was in the Shanghai Police Department before the war. I was the only boy taken on locally. The rest were out from England. Boys of good family. I’m a quarter Japanese. I never let them know. My grandfather was in the Japanese army. So was my mother’s father. I was loyal until Van Hosen came here. He had the information about me. I realized that if my superiors ever found out, I’d be through. Why should I have loyalty for a country that would throw me out for an accident of blood? Do I look like a Japanese?”

His voice was proud. He forgot for a moment and glanced at the mirror. He groaned and hung his head. “Cut me down,” he said weakly.

“Not right now, Kaymark. I leave you right here while I go and get your colonel. Rith-Lee, wasn’t it? I’ll bring him along, and you can tell all this to him.”

I looked back at him just as I closed the door. He was too tired to continue bracing his toes against the floor. He slumped and hung with his entire weight on his wrists, his chin hanging against his chest. His blond hair was mussed and rumpled.

British Intelligence was located in a high gray bungalow set back behind a lawn banked with flowers. The creaking taxi took me up the semicircular drive and stopped in front of steep steps. I told the driver to wait for me in the small parking lot adjoining the building.

There is a character in British newspapers called Colonel Blimp. He’s a round man, a big man, with a bold bald head and a gray mustache which is one part grandeur and one part pathos. He wears shooting clothes and stout shorts, with a feather in the side of his gray wool socks. He blusters and belches and wheezes. He’s supposed to typify the “old boys.”

The enlisted man announced me to the colonel as coming on a matter of the utmost importance. He told me to go right in.

The colonel sat behind a massive desk in a room that was high, wide, and rugless. He was Colonel Blimp in person. He wheezed, coughed, belched, and waved me into a chair with a plump hand, tanned by years in the East.

“American, eh? What is it? Speak up!”

“It’s about Lieutenant Peter Kaymark. He—”

“Kaymark’s assigned to this staff. What about him?”

“I wanted to tell you—”

“For heaven’s sake, man. Get to the point!”

I stood up and leaned over his desk. I shouted down into his bright red face, “Shut up and listen for one minute, and I’ll tell you. Stop being so damn official.”

I sank slowly down into my chair again while he mumbled something about bloody rude Americans.

“I’m telling you that Kaymark’s a traitor. He’s part Jap. He’s been taking money from a Dutchman named Van Hosen for three years. He just killed a planter named O’Dell. Come with me and listen to him tell it to you.”

“That’s nonsense, man. Known the rascal for years. He’s not a Jap. The heat’s got you. Have some water. Go fan yourself.”

“Look, will you come with me or do I go and get a very smart apple on the local police force named Saxon? How would you like that, you overstuffed bottleneck?”

“Young man, if you were on this staff, I’d have you shot for that.”

“If I was on your staff, you wouldn’t have lived this long. Are you coming? I’ve got a taxi waiting. Just over to the Galle Face. Take you an hour maybe for the whole thing.”

He coughed again and cocked his eye at the ceiling. Then he fingered a paperweight. Then he picked up his hat and stick and said, “Move along, then! Let’s get done with it!”

The taxi driver popped out and opened the door for Colonel Rith-Lee. He hadn’t done that much for me. Privilege of the ruling class. I tried to tell him the story on the short ride to the hotel. He made derisive noises deep in his throat and moved a little farther away from me in furtive alarm.

We walked down the hall, and I pulled out my key. He tapped his leg impatiently with his stick while I unlocked the door. I let him go in first. He walked through the room until he could see Kaymark. Then he stopped so abruptly that I bumped into him. I stepped to the side to where I could also see the lieutenant.

My first thought was that he had lost an amazing amount of blood from the few cuts I had given him. The front of his tunic was drenched. He hung limply from his wrists, a gaudy motionless form. The colonel stepped forward and stooped over to where he could peer up into Kaymark’s face. He lifted his stick and nudged gently at the lieutenant’s forehead. The head tilted back a little. When he released the pressure, the head sagged forward again.

“Dead. Throat cut. Why’d you do it, man?”

“Me? When I left him he was okay. Somebody must have sneaked in here, but I don’t know how.”

He glared at me, and there was disgust and alarm in his narrow eyes. “All the room keys’re alike. Fit all the doors. No good. You did it. Better come along with me.”

I had been moving gradually toward the body. I jumped forward and clawed at the right-hand tunic pocket. The automatic was there. It stuck in the edge of the pocket. Before I could yank it free I felt a cold sharp object against the back of my neck.

“Step aside, man. Slowly now, or I’ll punch a hole in the back of your neck. Ought to do it anyway.” I let go of the gun and stepped to the side. He kept the sharp point against the back of my neck.

Finally he said, “Turn around, man.” He had recovered the automatic. He aimed it at my middle with his left hand. He held the hollow shell of the stick he carried in his left hand also; he fitted the slim blade of the long sword back into the stick. It chunked into place, and he gave the handle a half turn. During all this, he didn’t take his eyes off of me.

“You and I, we’ll go back to the bungalow. Damned nuisance. International murder. Have to get your government people in on it. Try it in the civil courts, I guess. Open-and-shut case. Nothing to it.”

Again they had used death to trump my ace. This time it looked like the end. I had a story to tell but it would have been easier to tell it to a deaf man than to the colonel. He stood in front of me and motioned me toward the door with the automatic. I didn’t move.

“Move along there. Don’t want to shoot you where you stand. You have to make out statements. Save me the trouble.”

“Colonel, will you tell me one thing? Why on earth would I kill Kaymark and then go and drag you here to look at the body?”

“Not much sense in it. Never imagined you American chaps had much sense. All gangsters and crooners. Move along now.” I could see why Kaymark had had such an easy time covering up the activities of the group which used the January Club as a headquarters. Again I didn’t move.

“Wait a minute. Suppose I take you to a man who knows who killed Kaymark. In fact, maybe he did it himself.”

“More nonsense.”

I had to get out of it. I knew that if they put me in a cell, I’d never be able to prove a thing. My story would sound like the purest fabrication. I didn’t want to deal with this man. I wanted Saxon, the tall man with the lean white face. He had appeared to be intelligent.

I needed a way to bluff the stupid, fast-moving colonel. I placed my right hand near the front of my white coat. I remembered that one of the large buttons was getting loose. With a minimum of motion, I found it and twisted it off. I started to move back toward the door to the hall. It was darker near the door. He followed along, staying a good six feet from me. I shifted the button in my hand until I was holding it the same way a small boy holds a marble that he is going to shoot. I flicked the button toward Kaymark’s body. At the same moment I glanced in that direction, my eyes widened. The colonel heard the small clatter on the bare floor. He took one hasty glance over his shoulder. Before he could glance back, my shoulder hit him low in the stomach. He went over backwards with a great gasp, the gun sliding across the rug. I rolled to my feet and snatched the stick out of his other hand. His face was a pale green color underneath the heavy tan. It was startling. Any fight or objection was completely gone. He was too concerned about his stomach.

I sat on the edge of the bed while he stared at the ceiling and gasped. Finally he sat up, moaning. “Sit over in that chair, Colonel Rith-Lee.” He wavered as he got to his feet. He stumbled over and fell into the chair.

“Unfair tactics. Took advantage of me. Ever heard of fair play?”

“Sure. Fair play while you railroad me off into some jail. You just sit tight while I make a little phone call.”

It took three or four minutes to get my party. When I did I said, “Saxon? This is Howard Garry. Met you over at the January Club today. Can you come over to my room right away? Good. I’m at the Galle Face. Three ten. There’s another body here.”

I hung up. His sane tired voice had sounded good. While Saxon was on his way over, I gave the colonel his instructions. Not a word. Not a murmur, or I’d stick my shoulder in his stomach a little harder than last time. That seemed to impress him. He folded his hands across his middle and I’d swear that he took a short nap, awakening finally when there was a sharp knock on the door.

I covered the colonel as I backed to the door. I opened it. Saxon stood there with two of the chocolate policemen behind him. I stood aside and he walked in. I pointed to the body and he walked over toward it. As he passed me, he spun quickly. I felt a sharp pain in my wrist and fingers, and the automatic was gone. He didn’t look at me as he handed it to one of the two policemen.

The colonel jumped up and said, “Arrest this man. Immediately. He killed Kaymark. He attacked me. Quickly!”

Saxon paused on his way toward the body. He looked at the colonel. “I’m most sorry, sir, but Mr. Garry telephoned me to come over. I’ll listen to his story first. I beg of you to sit down and remain quiet until I ask you for information.”

He took a long look at the hanging corpse. He pulled out the same notebook and scribbled a few notes with great care. He posted one of his men against the room door. At last he turned to me and said, “Your story, Mr. Garry? Please run through it quickly. I can question you about the details later.”

I told him the story. I made it short and to the point. I admitted that I had tied Kaymark up and worked him over, and I denied having killed him. I stressed the story Kaymark had told. Then I mentioned the colonel’s reaction.

The colonel started to sputter, but Saxon held up his hand imperiously and the sputtering ceased.

Saxon sat on the edge of my bed and fingered his long jaw. “This, Mr. Garry, is a jurisdictional matter. Supposedly, all such things are handled by Colonel Rith-Lee’s bureau. However, I feel that this is a time when I can afford to step in. I’m doing it because I believe you. If you have lied to me, this interference may cost me a great deal of local prestige. I know that I am going to make an enemy out of the colonel. I have a plan which I won’t bother to explain to you. You will be here to see it in operation.” He turned to the nearest policeman and issued some terse instructions in Singhalese. The man hurried to the bathroom door. He pulled out a knife and cut one of Kaymark’s hands free. The arm drooped heavily. Then he put his hand against the lieutenant’s shoulder and cut the other bond. As he slashed it through, he pushed the body toward the bathroom. The corpse thudded onto the tile floor. The man pulled it farther into the bathroom. Then, with a damp towel, he rubbed up the spots of blood on the hardwood floor of the main room. He threw the towel into the bathroom and closed the door.

Saxon picked up the phone. “Mr. Van Hosen’s room, please. Oh, he’s in the bar? Connect me with the bar, please.” He waited a few moments. “Mr. Van Hosen? This is Leslie Saxon of the Central Police Bureau. I’m in room three ten. Could you arrange to come up here for a few moments? Thank you.”

He hung up and turned to me. “When Van Hosen is here, I don’t want either of you to say a word. Let me talk without interruption.” He gave some more instructions in Singhalese and one of the policemen hurried out of the room.

We all remained quiet. The colonel appeared to sleep again. I fumbled with a cigarette. Saxon sat as motionless and grave as a statue.

The policeman opened the door at the first tap. Van Hosen blinked as he saw the group, and then he smiled. He stepped in timidly, his hat in his hand, a mild and meager man.

“Sit down, please, Mr. Van Hosen. Over here on the bed will be excellent. I have a few questions to ask you which will—” At that point the phone rang. Saxon picked it up and held his hand over the mouthpiece. “Pardon me a moment, I was expecting a call.” He removed his hand and spoke into the phone. “Saxon here. Oh, yes, Mr. Wend. You got my message.”

I happened to be looking at Van Hosen. His mouth twitched a bit when Saxon mentioned the name Wend.

“I have rather a strange story here, Mr. Wend. Very strange. You know a man named Van Hosen?... Slightly, eh. Well, Mr. Van Hosen wishes us to supply him with private transportation away from Ceylon. In return he has given us certain information. I have here a list of some sort of uprising. There is also a list of places where arms are supposed to be hidden, and some kind of an inventory. A great deal of equipment... I agree with you, Mr. Wend, it does sound fantastic.

“Also, he claims that you and he and a Mr. O’Dell, who died this afternoon, a Lieutenant Kaymark, who died within the hour, and a Miss Severence, who died recently, were the nucleus of some sort of weird organization planning a revolution in Ceylon.

“He claims to have come from Java during the war as a Japanese agent... What was that? What has it got to do with you? He states in this report of his, which I have in writing, that you killed Miss Severence, the doorboy of the January Club, and also Lieutenant Kaymark. He accuses Mr. O’Dell of having killed an American officer some time ago.”

He stopped talking and listened. I watched Van Hosen. The man was trying hard to keep all expression off his face. His hands were held rigidly against his thighs. The rosebud lips seemed much paler than they had been when he had first visited me.

Then Saxon spoke again into the phone. “Then you believe that the man is ill? You know nothing of such plots and murders? Suppose you stop in at the Bureau at your earliest convenience and give me your story about Van Hosen in person. What was that?... No, we have nothing to hold him on until we’ve made a detailed check of these reports of his... Certainly. Thank you very much, Mr. Wend.” He hung up the receiver gently and turned to Van Hosen. Saxon wore a small and very confident smile.

“What kind of a farce is this, Saxon?” Van Hosen demanded.

Saxon shrugged. “Checkmate, my friend. You do play chess, don’t you? Good. I believe that all the things which I told your employee, Wend, are correct. Assuming that is so, I’m perfectly willing to let you go. If it is correct, you well know that he’ll kill you before you can explain, and I don’t believe death comes easy in your group for those who inform. You have one small opening, but a very obvious one. You can give me the information which I told Wend you had already given. Then I can guarantee you police protection. If my basic assumption is wrong, you can stand and walk briskly out, smiling at my stupidity as you go.”

Van Hosen stood up and, with careful dignity, smoothed out his rumpled jacket. He stroked the small beard and stared at Saxon. “My good man, you must certainly be mad. All you people are mad.”

“You have the privilege of thinking us anything you please. We can’t alter your opinions. Only your life. I remember seeing a man once who informed on the patriots in the Burmese underground. He was a man of your build, Van Hosen. They bound a tight white sash around his naked belly and staked him out, back down, in the sun. The sash was very thin. Under the sash they placed several of those hard-shelled beetles that you find at night in the jungle. They hate the light. When the sun strikes them, they dig down into the jungle floor, dig deeply. That man didn’t die pleasantly, Mr. Van Hosen.”

“A story to frighten children.”

“You are free to leave.”

Van Hosen walked to the door. He placed his hand on the knob and opened it. Then he turned back and looked at Saxon. He licked his lips. “Suppose that I contend that you have endangered my life by telling lies to Wend. Suppose he is not well balanced. Shouldn’t I have the protection of the police?”

“I told you that I have nothing on which to hold you. I refuse to hold you.”

“Then imagine the absurd eventuality that these lies that you told were true. Suppose that I could provide you with the lists and the proof you demand. Suppose I were a criminal. What guarantees could you give such a man for turning over the information?”

“None whatsoever, except the one already stated. The protection of the Bureau from the revenge of your fellows.”

Again he turned toward the door. He asked a last question, his voice hoarse. “Where was Wend phoning from?”

“The January Club. He knew that you were here with me. That is about five minutes distant by taxi. You have talked for five minutes.”

I held my breath as Van Hosen stood with his hand on the doorknob. The phone rang again. Saxon picked it up. “Saxon here... Oh, Mr. Wend again... Yes, he’s just leaving. You wish to talk to him?... You wouldn’t?... I understand. You want him to go back to the club with you? I’ll tell him that you are waiting downstairs.”

He hung up. Van Hosen walked away from the door. He held his knees stiff like a man who is hurt and weak. His face was twisted. He walked over to Saxon, and his voice broke as he said, “You monster! Look what you’ve done to me! It’s all true and he knows that it’s true. I can’t leave this room. He’ll kill me before I can tell him. Maybe he’ll kill me when you try to take me away from here. Get more men! Get me strong guards!”

“If it’s true, Van Hosen, why shouldn’t I force you to go? Why shouldn’t I save Ceylon the expense of your trial?”

Van Hosen clutched the arm of Saxon’s chair. “I’ll give you what you want. I’ll give you the lists. I’ll tell you of everything, of the hidden supplies, of the men who will lead the people. How O’Dell killed the American who suspected us. How I came here with information from Tokyo about Kaymark’s ancestors. How Wend drowned the girl and cut Kaymark’s throat. We came in here together to see that fool.” He pointed at me. “We found Kaymark tied up. He swore that he hadn’t talked, but we knew how much he valued his pretty face. He hadn’t been badly hurt. We couldn’t chance it. Wend cut his throat — slowly. It wasn’t pretty to watch.”

Saxon pushed his hands off the arm of the chair. “Be quiet while I write.” Van Hosen sat on the bed and trembled while Saxon printed in block letters on one of the sheets in his notebook. There was no sound in the room except for Van Hosen’s hoarse breathing and scratching of the pencil.

“Now I’ll read this to you before you sign. It says: I, Van Hosen, confess that I operated as a Japanese agent in Ceylon during the war. I have arranged to smuggle arms and ammunition into Ceylon which is now stored at secret points which I will name. I will also name the leaders of the people in a planned revolution. My principal assistants were Clarence O’Dell, Guy Wend, Constance Severence, and Peter Kaymark. I ordered O’Dell to kill an American officer named Daniel Christoff. He did so, under circumstances planned to make Christoff subject to censure. I ordered Wend to drown Miss Severence. He did so. I saw Wend cut Kaymark’s throat.”

He handed the notebook to Van Hosen. He scribbled his name hurriedly and handed it back. Saxon took it over to Colonel Rith-Lee. The bulky man signed as a witness. So did I and so did Saxon.

“That should stand up until we can arrange a more detailed confession, Van Hosen. Now, every police officer enjoys telling of his own cleverness. What made you assume that I had Wend on the phone? I instructed one of my own men to call this room, and then to call back five minutes after I hung up. Your imagination betrayed you, Van Hosen.”

The little man gave Saxon one wild look and then leaped at him, his arms stretched forward as though to grasp Saxon’s throat. The tall man flapped one hand indolently at Van Hosen’s face. It hit with a sound like the crack of a pistol. It knocked Van Hosen back onto the bed. The native picked Van Hosen off the bed and shook him. The little man relaxed. He stood looking down at the floor, his shoulders sagging and the brave beard in disarray.

Colonel Rith-Lee hauled himself out of his chair and stuck his hand out to Saxon. Saxon took it shyly.

“Don’t be too hard on a stupid British officer, Saxon. Imagine I’ve been pretty blind. Wonder how many other things I’ve missed.” Then he turned to me. “You mean to say, Garry, that you kited all the way over here just to clear up a little criticism of a friend of yours?” I nodded. “Damn foolishness. Glad you did. Stirred up this mess. What do you want me to do, Saxon?”

“Just take over the Intelligence aspects from here, sir. I can handle the straight murder angles. We can take mutual credit for the arrest.”

“Very generous. How about you, Garry? Anything I can do for you after you finish making out the long bloody statements for my bureau and Saxon’s outfit?”

“Yes, sir. Write an official letter to the War Department, Washington, D.C., that will clear Christoff of any blame. Give me a copy, and give a copy to the consulate. Then I can go back home.”

Two weeks later I stood at the rail of a small freighter as we pulled away from the great wooden wharves of Melbourne Harbor, headed for the Golden Gate. I had the precious letter buried deeply in my jacket pocket. I knew what it was going to be like to tell his people, to tell his wife. I felt a small shiver of anticipation, and I reached my hand into my pocket and touched the edge of the letter. They had let me live, and I had cleared him. I thought of what would be in Dorothy’s eyes when I showed her the letter. I wondered if maybe, after she had another year alone, if... I stretched and decided that it wouldn’t hurt me any to try walking around the deck a couple of thousand times.