The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Two

I stood up slowly, feeling every ache and pain and savoring it at my leisure. My head was killing me; my chest felt like somebody had dropped an anvil on it from the roof of the Grand-Bretagne. My back was full of a variety of exquisite little cricks and twitches. Even my hands hurt; slugging Walter Corbin — pardon me, the late Walter Corbin — had been a little like picking a fistfight with, oh, Mont Blanc or something.

But the real pain was knowing that little reel was gone. Because if it wasn’t on Walter Corbin, I didn’t have the slightest idea in the world where it was.

It had been an unusual assignment. I’d come in, fresh from a job, ready to have David Hawk rake me over the coals for not having done it exactly as planned, only to have him look up, scowl, and hand me a plane ticket in an envelope, muttering something through one of those evil cigars of his.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t catch that, sir.”

“Saigon,” he said. “I thought we’d have a little more time, but it looks like the city won’t last long now. You have—” He glanced down at his watch, then reversed his wrist to look at the calendar on the band. “Damn it, you don’t have any time at all. You’d better get moving.”

“But...” I said. I looked down at him; when he looked up at me there was more than annoyance in his eyes. He was under severe pressure today. “Okay. I go to Saigon. What do I do there?”

“Man named Walter Corbin. The tickets are for the Coast There’ll be a San Francisco contact waiting for you who can let you have a look at the file on Corbin between planes... or at least as much of the file as you’ll need. That won’t be much. All you have to do is identify him, eliminate him, and bring back what he’s carrying.”

“Which will be...” I began. Hawk rushed on in that gruff cigar-smoker’s voice.

“Roll of microfilm. Saigon’s falling. The only thing worse than having Corbin deliver the film to the people we suspect him of working for is for the Cong to intercept him and beat you to the reel.” He snorted. “Hell, Corbin’s quite capable of selling out the people he works for and making his own deal with the Cong.”

At least he’d told me something. Corbin was a double agent, and an independent, a man you had to deal with on a one-on-one basis. He wasn’t one of your dedicated agent types and he wasn’t one of your hire-’em-by-the-hour flunkies, either. Moderately big cheese. I wondered if I knew him, perhaps under some other name. “What’s on the film?”

He gave me another annoyed scowl. “Just get him. Bring it back. Don’t let it get away.” I rolled my eyes to heaven and sighed. Okay, it was going to be one of those days.

And here I was. Corbin was dead. The reel was gone. The Cong were right outside of town. I didn’t have a lead in the world. And, not knowing what information I was looking for, I was in one hell of a bind.

A little dizziness made me lean against the wall of the stairwell. Think, Carter, think. I straighted up. The girl. Grab the girl, Carter, before she gets away. She ought to be just coming out from under that little slug on the brows you gave her. It’ll take her a minute to get some clothes on, and then she’ll be hightailing it for the boulevards and you’ll never see her again. And God help you if she decides to change clothes and go native.

Ignoring the aches and pains, I made for the upper landing as fast as I could go and was doing forty by the time I hit the door to the stairway. Nevertheless, this time I stopped and took my time about opening that door and looking both ways before pounding down the hall. Once bitten, twice shy.

Look left. Now look right. And... but there she went, out the door and away from me. My hand automatically went to Wilhelmina, but I had a quick insight into how much lovely Phuong would be able to tell me with a 9mm slug in her back, and decided instead to put a dent in the Olympic 50-meter record.

She looked back, saw me, and broke into a run, very agile in those floppy rubber slides she wore now. Her legs were nice and loose in the black pajamas, and I didn’t nail her until she was on about the two-yard line, an ace away from the door of the other airshaft. Then my flying tackle brought her down in a heap.

She was the same sort of wildcat as before. There are a few things brute strength is good for and I got her under control the best way I could.

“W-Walter,” she said. “Is he...?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But somebody else got him, not me, and somebody else has what he was carrying. I want to know what you know that would help me find it.”

“No,” she said. “Please, Mr. Carter, let me go. I... I know nothing. I can’t help you. And if... if they find me...”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. I was kneeling on top of her. Straddling her waist, holding her hands — with those razor-sharp little nails — down with both of my own. “I’ll let you go in time... if you give me a hand.”

“B-but...” She tried struggling a little more. Then, when this didn’t seem to be working, she closed her eyes and tried to make herself cry. That didn’t work either. For one thing, she was too afraid to be able to work up much in the way of any other emotion.

“Goddamit,” I said, “I don’t have much time. You don’t have much time either. You’d better tell me.” Tell you what, Carter? I was thinking. When you don’t even know what questions to ask? “Where was Corbin going after he came to the room for you?”

“I... I don’t know,” she said. I looked her hard in the eye. I couldn’t tell if she was lying or not.

“I’ll let that pass,” I said. “For now, anyhow. Where was he coming from?”

That got a slightly different response. Her eyes flicked up — up, at the ceiling — and then went back to my face. “I... I don’t...”

“The hell you don’t,” I said. “Come on, goddamit.” She struggled again; I subdued her again. “He was somewhere up top, wasn’t he? Here in this hotel? What room?”

“You... you’re hurting me.”

“Damn right I am. And you haven’t seen anything yet. If you don’t...”

“Oh, stop!” she pleaded. “Room... room four-seventeen.”

“Okay,” I said. “So far so good. It’d better be the right answer, too, because you’re going there with me.”

“N-no...”

“Right you are, you’re going with me. And you’re going in the door first. And if anybody has an itchy trigger finger in there...”

“No, please, Mr. Carter. The information... I’m giving you is... is correct. He... Walter had an appointment there... with a man named Meyer, I think. A man who claimed to be an import-export merchant, but... well, Walter laughed at the cover identity...”

“Meyer, huh?” I said. “Go on. What was he going to do there?”

“He was... going to discuss a price for the merchandise... the material you are looking for. It was Meyer, I think, who alerted Walter about your being in Saigon...”

Meyer, I didn’t know anything about any Meyer. He wouldn’t have used his own name, though. “Go on.”

“Walter... was thinking of the various ways he could make money with the... the material, in a hurry. He was thinking of getting out of his present...” She stifled a sudden sob. “Of... of his business. He and I... we were going to Hong Kong, where Meyer had offered him... ah, some, work, in his business...”

Oh, great, I thought. Mr. Meyer, import-export man from! Hong Kong. That was a little like Mr. Johnson, coal dealer from Newcastle. Everybody in Hong Kong who can speak good English is in the import-export business. “Go on,” I said with a deep sigh. My ribs were hurting like hell.

“This would... have meant betraying the people for whom he was working,” she said. Her voice had a panicky edge on it; she had gotten the message that I wasn’t going to let her go until she’d spilled her guts, and she was in something of a hurry to get away. She wanted to say it all fast and disappear into the mess in Saigon. “He said it was very dangerous. It was... it was quite an important package, he said, and he’d be a marked man after he’d... ah, changed sides.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I understand. But Meyer. Who’s he with? Did he say?”

“He... he wouldn’t tell me. He thought the less I knew about these matters, the better. I...”

“Okay,” I said. I sat back lightly on her pelvis and held both her hands in mine. “You and I are going up there. If you’ve been telling me the truth, you can go. If you’re lying, you’re in trouble. If you haven’t been telling me the truth, I’ll tie your hands behind your back, write ‘Collaborator’ on your forehead in ballpoint pen and release you in the middle of town. You’d better pray you’ve been...”

“No,” she said. “I’m not lying. I... come. I’ll show you.” I looked her in the eye, then got up, still holding her wrist, and helped her to her feet. “Come,” she said, looking at me, a strange, different look in her dark eyes. It was... it was fear and something else...

The fourth floor — we would have called it the fifth, Stateside style — was one flight up. Four-seventeen was halfway down the hall. It was almost completely quiet in the all but deserted hotel, but it was getting louder outside. There was still sporadic gunfire, only more of it. And there was the dull roar of heavier weapons far down the road. Out of habit, I tiptoed to the door. She didn’t have to. She’d lost her slippers in the scuffle, and her bare soles made no sound on the rug.

I put my ear to the door. Not a sound. I let go of her hand, stood back, drew Wilhelmina, and took a deep breath. Then, my weight back on one foot, I lashed out with the other at the lock. The door shook, but held.

“Mr. Carter,” she whispered. “Mr. Carter, the room’s on fire.” Her tiny hand pointed at the crack under the door. Little tendrils of acrid-smelling smoke were curling up from under the thick barrier that kept us out of the room. I reared back and kicked again. The door gave this time, and smoke rushed out. Coughing, I stepped back. Then I reached inside my jacket for the little gas mask that I use sometimes in connection with my little friend Pierre — the tiny, deadly gas bomb strapped now inside my upper thigh. I had it on in a moment, and motioned the girl aside.

The mask kept out enough of the smoke to let me breathe a little, but it was hard to see anything. I could make out that it was a two-room unit, probably not a regular suite, but a pair of connecting rooms that had been rented together and unlocked for the occasion.

The flames were apparently in the other room. This one was mainly full of smoke. And the fire wasn’t a quick one; the suddenly open door had apparently done very little to fan it. It had a stuffy smell, as if something slow and difficult to ignite was smoldering away. I moved through the first room, my eyes scanning it through the thick smoke.

There was a couch and a desk. The desk was covered with scattered papers — scattered in haste, it appeared, and some of them dumped unceremoniously on the floor. I made for these in a hurry and they turned out, for the most part, to be business correspondence. The letterhead jumped out and hit me in the eye:

Okay, I thought, so far so good. I grabbed a page of it at random. It was covered with penciled notes, scrawled at great speed in an almost unreadable Germanic hand, and there were columns of meaningless figures at the bottom. I stashed it in my pocket for future reference, then shuffled through the rest of the junk on the floor for a bit before deciding that there was nothing much there that looked useful; it’d been picked over pretty well already.

The couch — there was an open briefcase down there beside it; I dipped inside, found nothing much there but a few things rattling around in the bottom. I upended it and dumped the contents on the floor. There wasn’t much there to pick through, either. The only thing more personal than folded handkerchiefs and socks was a single photo of an elderly German type, the stuffy burgher sort of man, with a dazzling, dyed-blonde girl on his arm. She was sporting a full-length mink, if I knew my furs, and I gave her a quick second look. She was something special: the kind born for expensive furs. They set off, and nicly too, those wide cheekbones and almond eyes and that full-lipped wide mouth. The gorgeous smile was for the camera, not for her escort in the picture; nevertheless, when I flipped the picture, the handwriting on the back — in pale green ink — said “To Hermann with love, Tatiana.” I stuck this in a pocket too; maybe it would help me identify Meyer if I ever caught up with him.

But then I got up — slowly, still full of aches and pains — and went into the other room. And there was Meyer, all-right, stretched out on the floor in a puddle of red. He wouldn’t be doing any running from me or anyone else, ever again. There were patches of dark red blood, fresh and wet, in several very vulnerable places on his body, and you could see that he was very, very dead. He’d been playing in some very tough, very sanguinary company, it seemed.

I looked away for a moment, turning my eyes to the corner, where black clouds were billowing out of a slowly burning pile of clothes somebody had yanked out of the closet and dumped on the floor for fuel. No, for primer. They’d been soaked in something, and I couldn’t recognize the smell. The idea had been to start a fire that would burn up the evidence, all right — but one that would go so slowly at first that the killers would be able to get away undetected in the half-deserted hotel.

My eyes went back to the body, scanning the area immediately around it as well. There wasn’t much doubt how Hermann Meyer had died. His throat had been cut, very nearly from ear to ear, with what appeared to be two deft, practiced slashes of a very sharp knife — a razor, perhaps. The area around his head and shoulders was stained through with his own red blood, easily visible even through the smoke.

There was another wound just below his waist. I could see blood on his shirttails, which had been pulled out from his pants. I squatted down beside him, reaching inside his bloodstained jacket to search for his wallet. It was gone, of course; the killers would have wanted to look through it at their leisure. I wiped my hand on a sleeve of his mutilated coat, in one of the few dry spots. And once again my eyes went to the blood stains on his shirt and on the front of his trousers.

I opened his clothing, exposed his abdomen, and gasped. There, etched deeply in the skin above his groin — and the bloody job looked as if it had been done by a rusty nail — was a six-pointed star. The Star of David.