Trouble Follows Me

11

I LEFT her at the taxi-stand. She didn’t say good-bye. I checked my bag through to San Diego, and took a northbound train. The hundred-mile journey in a coach was not pleasant. I was sick of trains anyway, and conflicting feelings were churning inside me. I hated to leave Mary standing, but unfinished events were tugging at me. I couldn’t relax until I had done something, and the only feasible action I could think of was a visit to Laura Eaton, whoever she might be.

Between one and two in the morning I got off at the Santa Barbara station. The town had the salt smell of a seaport, but it was as dark and deserted as any prairie village in the middle of the night. I found a telephone book in a station booth and looked up Laura Eaton. There was a William Eaton at 2124 Bath Street.

I walked up the empty main street and finally captured a nocturnal taxi-driver dozing at the wheel. He took me out Bath Street. It was a quiet residential street of one-story stucco and frame houses nestling bone-white among palms and oleanders and flowering yews. To the right the mountains seemed to rise straight up behind them against the dim moonlit sky.

The mountains and the moonlight, the tropical trees and houses, the warm sea-laden wind which came in through the open windows of the cab reminded me of Oahu. I had a moment of false recognition as if I were riding to see the already seen, to find the already found: Sue Sholto hanging like a grotesque vine against a briefly moonlit wall. I had an intuition that I was completing an obscure and fearful cycle, but I had no sense of what the fulfilment would be.

Laura Eaton at least wore no rope around her neck. She greeted me at her door, which opened six inches on a chain, with a .38 revolver in her hand.

I said: “It looks as if they got here before I did.”

“Put up your hands,” she said in a voice which might have been pleasant under other circumstances. When I had done so, she unhooked the chain. “Now step inside while I call the police. If you make a false move I’ll shoot you in the stomach.”

She was a tall woman in her late twenties. Her tawny hair was down her back, matching the tan wool bathrobe which she wore. Holding her .38 steadily in her right hand she patted my pockets and armpits. She seemed surprised to find no gun, and looked at me for a moment without speaking.

“You’re Laura Eaton, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Sam Drake. My friends call me Sam and always pull a gun on me when I knock on their door. It’s a game we play.”

“My house was entered today. I don’t propose to have it entered again.”

“But I’ve already entered it. Look. Now call the police.”

She looked at me uncertainly. “Who are you anyway? Are you really in the Navy?”

“Do you know a man called Hatcher?”

“Rodney Hatcher?”

“I don’t know his first name. He comes from Kansas City.”

“That’s Rodney.”

“He died the night before last.”

“He died! Is that why you’ve come, to tell me?” She had forgotten her gun. I lowered my hands.

“That’s one reason. Point your gun away from my stomach, will you? It makes my stomach feel funny.”

She clicked the safety and dropped the gun on the chesterfield, where it fell with a soft thump that was soothing to my nerves. “Why did you come at this time of night?” she said.

“I just got here. I came as soon as I could.”

“Did Rodney send you? Tell me, what happened to Rodney?”

“He didn’t exactly send me. He wrote you a letter just before he died. I thought it might have some bearing on his death. I came to you to find out.”

“I haven’t had a letter from him for weeks. Not since he wrote me from Europe that he was coming home for reassignment. How did he die? Was he wounded?”

“Were you and he very close?”

“We were good friends. I’ve known him off and on for years. We went to school together in Kansas City. You needn’t pull any punches, if that’s what you mean.”

I told her briefly what had happened to Rodney Hatcher, not omitting my suspicions of Anderson and Gordon.

A few tears made shining tracks down her face, combining at the point of her chin to form a clinging drop of brine. She sat down on the edge of a chair and half turned away from me to use a handkerchief. “Poor Rodney,” she said in a deep soft voice. “It was a beastly way to die.”

“It was painless. You just go out like a light. I know from experience.”

“It was beastly for him.” She looked at me with fire and ice in her eyes. Her body was proud. I thought that Hatcher was lucky to have such a mourner. “He should have died in action. He should have died fighting.”

“Who broke into your house today?” I said after a pause. “There may be a connection between that and Rodney’s death.”

“Do you think so? Do you think perhaps he was looking for Rodney’s letter?”

“It seems very likely to me. Did you see what he looked like?”

“I didn’t see him very well. I’ll tell you what happened. This afternoon I ran over to Eva Raine’s for an hour or so – she’s a friend of mine who lives down the street.”

“Had your afternoon mail come yet?”

“No, it came when I was gone. I started home about three. When I was about half a block from home I saw this man come down off my verandah. I didn’t know then that he’d been in the house. I thought it was someone who had come to see me or father, so naturally I called to him and waved. He took one look at me over his shoulder and headed in the other direction, walking as fast as he could go.

“When I got home I found that the lock on my front door had been forced. The writing-desk had been ransacked and the bureaus and cupboards had been searched. I called the police and they said they’d hunt for him, but I haven’t heard from them since. As a matter of fact, nothing was missing. I left my purse in the house in plain sight, and nothing in it was taken.”

“You say your afternoon mail was there when you got home?”

“It was on the floor, right there.” She pointed to the front door, which opened directly on the living-room where we were sitting. I turned my head and noticed that the door had a letter-slot in it. I also noticed that she had left it ajar.

“From the fact that he searched the house it looks as if Rodney’s letter didn’t come in that mail,” I said. “It should be here tomorrow morning. It was mailed two days ago.”

“If that man comes back I’ll shoot him.” Her full defiant lips pushed out, and her wide eyes became tigerish.

“I believe you will. Did you get any idea at all of what he looked like?”

“He was tall. He looked quite broad. The very first moment I thought it was father, but then I realized that father couldn’t have gotten back from Phoenix so soon.”

“Did he have black hair?”

“I’m not sure–” In the midst of her sentence she suddenly became quite still. Even her mouth was immobilized half open.

“It wasn’t I, Mr. Drake, if that’s what you’re implying,” a man’s voice said from the direction of the door. I turned to see Gordon step quietly into the room with a contemptuously calm look in his black eyes.

I got up without haste and walked towards him. When I was near enough I dropped my right hand to the level of my knee and brought it up in an uppercut to the point of his long jaw. It was a sucker-punch, but he carried a gun. He went down with his back against the door, which slammed shut. Almost before he hit the floor there was a gun in his hand and I was looking into its round empty eye. The gun’s eye followed me as he rose to his feet.

“That was hardly a fair blow,” he said. His eyes were no longer calm. They were shining with malice. “I warned you to avoid violence, Mr. Drake.”

“I’ll show you a fair blow if you’ll lower that gun. Maybe I will anyway.”

“This gun is attuned to your aura, Mr. Drake. If you approach it it will go off.”

There was a slight click behind me and Laura Eaton said: “I have you covered. Drop that gun.”

Gordon’s eyes did not move from me but his whole body tightened.

“I’ll count to three before I shoot,” she said. “One.”

He turned the gun in his hand and handed it to me. “This is a ridiculous situation,” he said.

“Not as ridiculous as it’s going to be,” I said. “Miss Eaton, will you call the police.”

“You needn’t bother,” Gordon said. “I am the police.”

“You change identities with breath-taking rapidity. Go ahead, Miss Eaton. I’ve got him covered now.”

Gordon reached for his hip pocket.

“Keep your hands in sight,” I said sharply. “Put them on your head.”

“Very well, if that appeals to your boyish sense of fun.” He raised his hands, grinning at me sardonically. “Take my wallet out of my left hip pocket. You’ll find my identity card in it.”

I circled around him with his body at the hub of my line of fire and secured his wallet. It contained a card which identified him as Chester Gordon, Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I felt cheated, doubtful and angry. My melodrama had descended into farce, and all the wasted adrenalin turned sour in my veins.

“I’m sorry to have spoiled your game of cowboys and Indians,” Gordon said acidly. “Now put down that gun, or it may get you into trouble.”

“You could have stolen this FBI card,” I said uncertainly.

“Put down that gun,” he said with authority. “Hefler wouldn’t like it if you shot me by accident.”

I remembered the smooth-talking red-haired man in the FBI office on Lafayette Street. “Are you working for Hefler?”

“I could arrest you for assaulting me, Mr. Drake. You’ve acted like a damn fool.”

I lowered the gun. He took his hands from his head and stroked his bruised jaw.

“I’m not in a mood for apologizing,” I said bitterly. “If you had taken me into your confidence–”

“We don’t take the general public into our confidence when we’re working on a case.”

“God damn it, there wouldn’t be any case if it weren’t for me!”

“I’d be just as happy,” Laura Eaton said, “if you men wouldn’t stage another brawl in my living-room. We’re all three on the same side, aren’t we?”

Gordon said, “Excuse me.”

Further recriminations rose from my wounded feelings to my lips: If you had cooperated with me we might have been able to save Hatcher, we might have been able to trap Anderson. But I swallowed them and held my tongue. I could see his point. An investigator of murder and espionage had to work in secrecy, especially in the cramped intimacy of a train.

I said, “Excuse me,” to Laura Eaton. To Gordon: “What were you doing on the train? You weren’t checking up on me, by any chance?”

“I was there partly to protect you. Two deaths had coincided with your presence. It looked as if the trouble was following you. After Hatcher died I was certain of it.”

I couldn’t resist saying: “Your protection didn’t do me much good. Nor Hatcher.”

“I could hardly serve as your food-taster, Mr. Drake. Nor am I ubiquitous.”

“You’re ubiquitous enough to suit me. What brought you here tonight?”

“After Hatcher was killed, my suspicions narrowed on Anderson. I did my best to shadow him. When you jumped me at the door of the smoking-compartment last night I think he caught on. He got off the train at Gallup and I followed him, but not fast enough. He took the only available taxi to Albuquerque, and I had to wait for the train to leave. When I got to Albuquerque he had already gone.

“I traced him to the airfield and found that he had chartered a plane to Los Angeles. I took the first commercial flight but when I got to L.A. there was no trace of him there. Like you, I got the idea that he might have come to Santa Barbara to intercept Hatcher’s letter to Miss Eaton. I flew up here at noon and found that he had. He landed at the Santa Barbara airport this morning, and disappeared. Only Miss Eaton has seen him since. The local police informed me of the entry into her house this afternoon. Since then I’ve been watching this house. The local police are watching the roads in and out of town.”

“I didn’t realize I had a bodyguard,” Laura Eaton said. “It feels nice. I don’t know as much about handling a gun as I pretended to.”

“Our organization exists for the protection of the public,” Gordon said sententiously.

“I suppose you know all the circumstances of Bessie Land’s death?” I said.

Laura Eaton leaned forward in her seat and looked at me curiously, but had enough character to hold her tongue.

“I’ve been over the evidence with Hefler,” Gordon said. “As a matter of fact, I examined the cadaver.”

“Do you agree with the police that it was suicide?”

“No, I don’t. Some of those municipal police are textbook-ridden. They’ve learned that hesitation-marks are often associated with suicide, so whenever they see a hesitation-mark they jump to the conclusion that it’s suicide. In this case, a more likely hypothesis is that Bessie Land was murdered while in an alcoholic coma. The tissues of her brain were saturated with alcohol.”

“I saw her a couple of hours before she died. She was terribly drunk then.”

“Exactly. It’s quite likely that the killer hesitated in the act of murder and made a shallow cut in her throat before he could gather enough courage to complete the act. Alcohol is an anaesthetic, and Bessie wouldn’t necessarily be aroused. That’s one way of accounting for the hesitation-mark. Another way, and I consider this more probable, is that it was deliberately inflicted to make the murder look like suicide. That would call for almost surgical coolness, and for some knowledge of medico-legal doctrine. But I think the criminals we’re dealing with are cool enough and intelligent enough. Besides, murder arranged to look like suicide fits in with the previously established pattern.”

“You mean Sue Sholto’s murder?”

“Sue Sholto’s murder?” Laura Eaton said in a shocked whisper.

“There have been three murders,” Gordon said. “Your friend Hatcher was the third.”

Laura Eaton’s face became pale and her body seemed to grow smaller. She put her hands over her face.

“You spoke of criminals,” I said. “In the plural.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that we’re up against an organization–”

“Black Israel?”

“Black Israel is part of the organization, or associated with it. I got a wire when the train stopped in Kansas City. They’ve picked up the Negro who was sitting beside Bessie Land the night she was killed–”

“I knew he had something to do with it.”

“He didn’t kill her,” Gordon said. “He proved that he remained in the Paris Bar and Grill continuously until after 2 A.M., and she was dead long before that. But he is a member of Black Israel. He broke down and confessed.”

“Are the Japs behind it?”

“If they are, he doesn’t know, or won’t admit it. He did admit that Black Israel takes a passive-resistance stand on the war effort. As a matter of fact, his own draft status was not what it should be. That’s the charge we’re holding him on. He’s given us some leads, and we’re rounding up the leaders. Hector Land was a minor leader and a comparatively recent member, he said. And he mentioned a white man who supplied Black Israel with funds for propaganda purposes.”

“Anderson.”

Gordon leaned back and lit a cigarette. “I think so.” There was still tension between us, like an electric arc whose contact points were my sore knuckles and Gordon’s bruised jaw. I said sharply: “If you thought so, why didn’t you arrest him on the train?”

His black eyes gave me a cold superior stare. “For the simple reason that I had no legal evidence against him. You don’t seem to realize how the police must work in a democratic country, Drake. During this war, our Bureau has watched known criminals for as long as two or three years without acting to arrest them. Watched them every minute of every day for years, waiting for something to give them away. In the end, something always does. A slip of the tongue, an error in planning, a chance meeting–”

“It was the chance meeting with Hatcher that gave Anderson away,” I said. “Hatcher said he knew Anderson, or at least implied it.”

“That may be so. Perhaps his letter will give us the clue we need, the reason for his death.”

Laura Eaton said: “Goodness, I could do with a cup of coffee. My head’s amply spinning. What about you gentlemen?”

We said we would, and she started for the kitchen. Before she disappeared Gordon said: “What time is your morning mail delivery?”

“Usually about nine o’clock. Do you think he’ll be back?”

“I don’t know. He’s a tricky customer. He may be too wary to try it again. I’m going to wait and find out.”

“I’m going to wait, too,” I said. “If I may borrow Miss Eaton’s chesterfield and gun for the rest of the night.”

“You may,” she said from the kitchen door. In a minute there was the sound of water rushing from a faucet into a coffee percolator.

We waited in silence for a while. My anger had drained away leaving dregs of shame in my system, and some alarm at my temerity. I felt considerable awe of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I realized how easily he could have shot me.

My glance fell on an electric record-player beside a lamp in the corner. The albums of records in its cabinet switched my mind to a track that it had been following earlier that day. I said:

“I realize that you have a low opinion of my investigative talents. I realize that you’re somewhat justified, and that the smartest thing I’ve done was to go to the FBI. But I have an idea that I think you should hear.”

“It was partly my fault that we worked at crosspurposes,” he admitted. “But I don’t see how it could have been helped. What’s your idea?”

“It’s nothing better than a hunch. It may be completely screwy. Hefler must have told you that secret information was leaking out of Hawaii to the enemy. At least that’s what I was told.”

“I knew it before Hefler told me. We’ve known about it for a couple of months.”

“But you haven’t been able to put your finger on the leak. Teddy Trask, the magician who put on an act in the club car that first afternoon, told me about a code which he and his partner had developed–”

“I heard him talking about it. I was there.”

“That’s right, you were. The principle of that code could be used by an enemy agent working in a commercial broadcasting station. Sue Sholto, the girl who was hanged–”

“I know about her,” he said impatiently. “How could it be used?”

“Sue Sholto broadcast regularly from Honolulu, and there was nothing to prevent Japanese subs from picking up her broadcasts. She could have sent out information in the course of an apparently innocent program.”

“Commercial broadcasts are monitored. We would have caught it.”

“Not if she used a code like Teddy Trask’s. She could mark her records with a needle so that they’d give out a little click at prearranged intervals. The time elapsed between clicks would have a definite meaning. A monitor, if he noticed the sounds at all, would think it was nothing but a worn record.”

“I admit that’s possible. But you’ve got nothing to go on.”

“That’s why I’m telling you. I can’t check on it myself. But you can teletype your office in Honolulu and ask them to examine the record library in the radio station.”

“It’s worth trying, I suppose. It sounds outlandish. But their system must be outlandish, whatever it is, or we’d have gotten on to it long ago.”

Laura Eaton came back with coffee and sandwiches. Gordon drank his coffee in a hurry and got up to leave:

“I’m going over to the Marine Base and put that dispatch on the wires. It’s not likely that Anderson will come back before morning anyway.”

“I hope he does,” I said. “I’ve gone to target practice on the fantail every afternoon for a year.”

“When I come back I won’t come into the house. Lay low for an hour after the mailman gets here. Keep the doors and windows locked.”

Laura Eaton retired to her own room. After turning out the lights I lay down on the chesterfield with her revolver in my hand and waited for morning. I dozed intermittently, held on the edge of sleep by coffee and fear. Morning came very slowly, leaking between the slats of the Venetian blinds, pale and bluish like watered milk. By seven o’clock the coffee and fear had worn off and I fell into a light sleep. I awoke with a start at nine when three letters plopped through the slot in the door and slid across the waxed floor.

I crawled across the floor to the letters keeping my head below the level of the windows. Hatcher’s posthumous message was among them.

I returned to the chesterfield with it, ripped open the envelope, and read at the end of the letter:

12

I WAITED for another hour, ready to shoot Anderson if he appeared. Punctually at ten o’clock there was the sound of feet on the verandah and I looked through the Venetian blind and saw Gordon at the door. Before I opened it to him Laura Eaton came out of her bedroom fully dressed. She had the marks of sleeplessness on her face.

“I think we can assume that he won’t be back,” Gordon said. “But I’ll have the local police keep an eye on your house, Miss Eaton. Just in case.”

“Did Rodney’s letter come?” she said.

“I hope you don’t mind my opening it. There’s not much doubt that Anderson killed him. And dragged me under the train.”

I handed her the letter, and Gordon read it over her shoulder.

“May I have this letter?” Gordon said.

“Of course. Won’t you let me make you some more coffee?”

“Thank you. But I’ve got to get going.”

“Did you send your message to Honolulu?” I said.

“Yes. I told them to rush an answer. If you need to get in touch with me, call our central office in Los Angeles. I’ll give them your name. Where will you be?”

“I’ve got a reservation at the Grant in San Diego. I’m going to San Diego today.”

“I may see you there. I understand Hector Land’s ship is in San Diego, and I intend to go aboard her.”

“So do I.”

He shook hands with me and Laura Eaton and went out the door. I wondered when he slept.

I turned to Laura Eaton and asked if I could use her phone.

“Certainly. There in the hall. Is this Anderson a spy, or something like that?”

“Something like that. I’d tell you more, but the FBI asked me not to.”

“I know as much as I want to,” she said. “I’ll make you some coffee.”

I called the local airline office and added my name to their cancellation list. After breakfast with Laura Eaton I taxied out to the airfield on spec, and managed to get a seat on the next plane to Burbank. There I had a long wait for the San Diego plane. I called Mary’s hotel and was told that she had checked out, leaving me a message to meet her in San Diego.

The afternoon seemed to be holding its breath. I paced the waiting room, tried to read a newspaper, saw Anderson and murder between the lines, got up and paced again. I tried to call Gordon at the FBI office but he hadn’t been there. I watched the planes from the north and east drop down unarmed out of the sky like harmless hawks. From one a female movie star emerged and grinned starkly at a starkly grinning flashbulb.

I watched the soft-bodied stern-faced executives, the wealthy enameled women who commuted from coast to coast, the brass hats rubbing gold-heavy sleeves with casual soldiers and nonchalant seamen, sucked back from leave by the maelstrom in the Pacific. Parting couples embraced in the last agony of separation; reunited couples met and embraced in a similar agony of delight. I thought continuously of Anderson hustling somewhere across the southwestern states, sowing evil with jovial and expansive gestures.

A few minutes before my plane was due I called Gordon again and this time I got him.

“I’m glad you called,” he said. “But I thought you were going to San Diego.”

“I’m waiting for my plane now. Any trace of Anderson?”

“A man answering to his description registered at a motel near Delmar last night, under the name of Isaac Randall. He drove away in the direction of San Diego. Of course it may not be the man we want, but we’ll get Anderson. We’ve telegraphed his description all over the southwestern states, and the state police are on the lookout for him.”

“You haven’t heard from Honolulu yet?”

“No. I’m expecting to anytime. I’ll give them another hour or so, and then fly down to San Diego. I want to talk to Lieutenant Swann. His ship’s still there.”

“Are you going aboard tonight?”

“If I get away in time.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Right.” He hung up.

When I opened the door of the phone booth the loudspeaker system was announcing that the San Francisco plane was about to land. I went outside and watched it come in and taxi down the field.

The second man out of the door in the side of the plane, which was almost too narrow for his bulk, was Gene Halford. He had shed his correspondent’s uniform and was wearing bright new California clothes. But he had the same old face, and it gave me no pleasure to see it again.

I stepped back from the gate, intending to let him pass without speaking. But before he went by his glance fell on my face. I thought that his heavy body became a little awkward and self-conscious under his new clothes, and I didn’t go out of my way to put him at ease:

“You were only half a civilian before. I see you decided to go the limit.”

He flushed and said: “It’s not my own choice. My syndicate wants me to write background material for the big international conference that’s on its way. So that’s what I’m writing.” Then he remembered his sense of importance: “Not that it’s any pressing concern of yours.”

“I’d hate to feel it was.”

Halford moved toward me out of the line of passengers which he had been obstructing. There was a vague threat in the way he held his heavy shoulders. “Look here, whatever your name is,” he said. “I’ve had about enough of your gratuitous unpleasantness. I haven’t forgotten that you took a girl away from me that night in Honolulu.”

“Neither have I. It’s one of my pleasanter memories.”

“It is, is it? What would you think if I told you the girl was simply sorry for you?”

“I’d think you have more imagination than brains.”

“I don’t happen to be depending on my imagination. I spent an evening with Miss Thompson in San Francisco a week or so ago. A very pleasant evening.”

If I kept hurt surprise out of my face, it was because I’d played a lot of poker. “I expect to see her in an hour,” I said. “I’ll ask her about that evening and probably we’ll both have a good laugh.”

“Why, where is she?”

“Out of your reach. So long.”

I walked past him and up the ramp into the plane. The plane roared, sprinted and took flight. As we went up, the horizon spread out to include many mountains and wide blue meadows of ocean. But my whole mind was involved in a tight little knot of jealousy which wouldn’t come loose. Anderson and his nasty business dropped out of my thoughts. Throughout the short flight to San Diego and the long taxi ride from Lindbergh Field to the Grant Hotel, my mind stayed on Mary and Gene Halford.

I found her in her room. When she opened the door she said, “Darling! I’m so glad to see you,” and kissed me on the mouth.

After a minute the knot inside me loosened a little and I kissed her back. Then I held her away from me and looked into her eyes. They were transparent and bottomless, like deep water where men have drowned.

She laughed with charming girlishness. “You’re awfully solemn, Sam. Are you still thinking?”

“Look,” I said. “I take you seriously. Can you get that through your head? As seriously as hell.”

A warm emotion swam up from the shadowy depths of her eyes. But she said, “Really?” with smiling lips.

“I just said it. I didn’t say it before.”

“I wondered if you ever would.”

“But get this. If I take you seriously I expect to be taken seriously myself. I met Gene Halford for a minute at the Burbank airport.”

“So? I suppose he told you I went out with him in San Francisco.”

“That’s right. I didn’t like the idea. You told me in Pearl you barely knew him. And you didn’t tell me you saw him in Frisco. I don’t like him.”

“Neither do I,” she said demurely.

“You go out with him. And it’s important enough to you that you didn’t tell me about it.”

“Don’t be silly, Sam. I went out with him once. We just happened to meet the night our transport docked. I didn’t tell you because I was afraid you’d get irrational about it. Just like you are getting.”

“Sure I’m irrational. I’m irrational about anything with you in it.”

She touched my cheek with her fingers. I caught her hand and kissed its palm. She said, “Please look at it sensibly, Sam. When I came back from Honolulu I had no way of knowing I’d ever see you again. Gene Halford has a lot of important contacts in the radio business. He does a lot of broadcasting himself. Well, I’ll probably be going back into radio after the war. I’d be stupid if I didn’t make the most of my chances.”

“Do you think you can use Halford? Anything you get out of him you’ll pay for.”

“I know. I found that out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that anything I get out of Halford I’ll pay for. There aren’t many men that isn’t true about.”

“Is that a crack?”

“How could it be?” She smiled with deceptive sweetness. “I haven’t got anything out of you.”

I was taking a beating, and I knew it. I said unpleasantly: “Yeah, they pay the boys that write about it a hell of a lot more than the boys that do it.”

That broke her down. She moved in to me. “Let’s not quarrel, Sam. I detest the man. You and I got along so well from the beginning. At least, I thought we did.”

My arms accepted her. “I know. Better than with any girl I’ve known.”

“It’s these terrible things that happened that changed things. You’ve changed, darling.” Her face was against me and her voice was muffled. “We mustn’t let things like that break us up.”

“Breaking up is a long way from what I had in mind. I didn’t know you were planning to go back into radio after the war. I thought maybe you were starting to have other plans. I was starting.”

“Plans with you?” she said.

“Did you think I was playing?”

“I didn’t know. Sam, do you really mean what you just said?”

“What did I just say? You make me dizzy standing so close.”

“That we could have a postwar plan together?”

“I didn’t know whether I could ask you. It’s hard to look ahead very far. My survivor leave will be over in a few days. And maybe next time I won’t be a survivor.”

“Don’t say it. You couldn’t die.”

“Everybody can die. A good many have. You’d have to take a chance on waiting.”

She smiled very sweetly. “Maybe it’s worth a chance. You look pretty durable. You look pretty, period.”

“Pretty is a lousy word for a man. Get this straight, though. If we start waiting for each other, no playing around with anybody else. That goes for both of us. My last girl tried it, and she couldn’t hold out.”

“That hurt you, didn’t it?”

“It’s where the war hit me hardest.”

“I wouldn’t be catching you on the rebound, would I?”

“Maybe you would. Emotions are as strange as anything. Especially mine. If emotions weren’t so strange I think I’d want to marry you tomorrow.”

“I couldn’t.” She looked at me quickly.

“Why not?”

“Tomorrow’s my first day on my new job. I couldn’t take off my first day to get married, could I?”

“There isn’t anybody else, is there? Not Halford or anybody?”

“Can’t you see I’m mad about you, Sam?” Her body said the rest, and its language was irresistible.

After a time I told her about my night in Santa Barbara, and Hatcher’s letter.

“Sam, I told you you were playing with fire. Promise me you won’t risk it any more. I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“I’m extremely crazy about you,” I said. “But I’m even crazier about the idea of seeing Anderson again. Anyway, I never did like the idea of sitting and waiting for somebody else’s axe to fall.”

She looked at me with a drooping mouth. I kissed her mouth. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed to phone Eric Swann on his destroyer. She sat behind me and put her arms around me.

In the time between my dialling and the operator’s answer from the Naval Repair Base, I said: “The girl loves me.”

“Yes, I do. More than you love me.”

“That’s impossible. You’re much more loveable than I am.”

The operator answered and I asked for the appropriate extension.

Mary’s teeth closed lightly on the back of my neck. “Don’t argue or I’ll really bite. You know you don’t love me as much as I love you.”

The Officer of the Deck on the destroyer answered, and I asked for Lieutenant Swann.

“I’m not sure whether he’s aboard. Wait a minute, please.”

I turned to kiss Mary and her lips clung, parting over mine. The world narrowed to a small burning circle.

The receiver, which had dropped on the bed, said in a cracked remote voice: “Lieutenant Swann speaking.”

I swam up out of warm forgetful depths and talked back to him. “This is Sam. How about asking me out for dinner.”

“Sure. How are you? I thought you were still in Detroit.”

“Just got in today. Can I bring Mary aboard?”

“I’m sorry, Sam. No civilians allowed on the Repair Base. Do you still want to come?”

“Yes. We’ve got things to talk about. Hector Land hasn’t been picked up yet, has he?”

“No, he’s dropped clean out of sight. We eat at seven in port. Call the ship from the main gate and I’ll send a jeep for you.”

“Right.” I set the receiver down.

I stood up and said to Mary: “Well, here I go again.”

“Damn it. You were going to have dinner with me.” Her voice was quietly furious.

“I’m awfully sorry. I’ll get back as soon as I can. I should be able to make it between nine and ten o’clock.”

“I’ll be waiting for you, I suppose. Though you deserve to be stood up.”

I took a taxi out to the Repair Base. When it dropped me at the gate I saw Chester Gordon standing in the roadway by the guards’ kiosk talking to the Marine guard.

When I approached the guard looked at my I.D. card, saluted with characteristic Marine elegance and fervor, and moved away.

“What’s the word?” I said to Gordon.

He smiled less grimly than he had smiled before. “The pieces are falling into place. Your hunch was good, Drake. A number of the records in the radio station’s record library were marked as you thought they might be. It’s evident that those records were deliberately prepared for the purpose of sending out coded intelligence. I didn’t get the details, but they’ll send an amplifying report when they’ve made a more complete investigation. What do you know about this Sue Sholto?”

“Not very much. She was reticent. Even her best friend didn’t know much about her. Lieutenant Swann can tell you more than I can. He’d known her for a long time.”

“I was just talking to Swann on the phone. He promised to send over a jeep for me, but there seems to be a holdup.”

“I’ll ride with you if I may. I’m going aboard for dinner.”

“I don’t think I’ve eaten for twenty-four hours or more. Things have been popping so fast. We got a teletype from Chicago – I sent them Anderson’s description because that’s where he got on the train. A man approximating his description, Lorenz Jensen by name, was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor in Chicago in 1934. He served two years and four months of a five year sentence in Joliet.”

“Did he escape?”

“No, he was released on parole. But he violated his parole and disappeared. Presumably he left the country.”

“Anderson was in China in 1936. That tallies.”

“It’s pretty uncertain. You can never go by description alone, especially after a lapse of ten years. But fingerprints are another matter, and I’ve requested Chicago to send me photostats of Jensen’s prints by airmail. Jensen’s and Anderson’s prints are in the same classification, we know that much.”

“Did Anderson leave his prints in Laura Eaton’s house?”

“No, he must have worn gloves. We got them out of his luggage in the baggage room of the Los Angeles station. He left a beautiful set of the thumb and first three fingers of the right hand on a bottle of shaving lotion. That’s the only revealing thing he did leave in his luggage.”

“When you boys move,” I said, “you move fast and in all directions.”

“We’ve got the organization, and that’s something amateurs don’t have. I don’t mean that your help hasn’t been extremely useful. We’ve depended more on lay assistance in this war than we’ve ever admitted in the papers.”

“The word amateur carries no sting for me,” I said. “This looks like our transportation now.”

We rode in a jeep to the dock where the destroyer was berthed. Eric met us at the gangway, and I introduced him to Gordon:

“I think Mr. Gordon would appreciate an invitation to dinner. Though he seldom eats or sleeps.”

“I should warn you about pot-luck,” Eric said. “It’s always pot-luck on this can.”

“I’ve never been aboard a warship before,” Gordon said. “It’ll be very romantic to eat salt pork and hardtack, and drink a noggin of brackish water.”

We had a steak dinner which Gordon and I punished severely, then retired to the privacy of Eric’s stateroom. Gordon outlined the development of the case and concluded:

“I hope you won’t think we’re jumping to conclusions, because we’re not. But it’s in the cards for me to ask you what you know about Sue Sholto. Naturally a thorough investigation is being made in Honolulu. In the meantime it’s up to me to find out what I can at this end. Anderson is at this end, and Hector Land is, or was. Can you tell me anything that might link Sue Sholto with Hector Land, or with a man that might be Anderson, or with the apparently subversive activities of those two?”

I had been watching Eric’s face while he listened to Gordon’s careful lecture. The last month had changed him. When I met him in Honolulu on the day of the party, it had seemed to me that he was suspended between acceptance and rejection of the world. His eyes had been turned outward, but uncertainly. His face had begun to set in the closed, bound look of a neurotic egotism. But the process had seemed then to be susceptible of interruption. Now the process was complete.

His smiles were no longer spontaneous, his looks were not naïve. The center of his being had retired into a secret labyrinth where it sat like a spider, clutching its means with avarice and regarding its ends with narrow passion. In a word, grief and shock are not always ennobling. Eric thought of the death of Sue Sholto chiefly as a possible obstacle in his naval and postnaval career and a thorn in his comfort.

“I didn’t know her very well,” he said. “She was just a girl I dated a few times. Naturally if I had any reason to suspect her of illegal activities I’d have reported her. Certainly I’d have had nothing more to do with her.”

“There was no sign of a relationship between her and Hector Land?”

“Certainly not. And so far as I know she wasn’t acquainted with anyone who might have been Anderson.”

“Isn’t it true that she was politically suspect?” I said. “Mary described her as a fellow-traveller.”

“I wouldn’t know. We never discussed politics.”

Gordon put in: “Did she show curiosity about naval affairs?”

“The normal feminine curiosity, I suppose. She didn’t ever try to pump me that I can remember.”

“How long did you know the girl?”

“A few months. But I was at sea most of the time, and only dated her a few times when I was in port. She had other friends. I don’t see why I should be singled out merely because I was with her on the night she killed herself.” His voice was bitter.

“You aren’t being singled out, Lieutenant Swann. You simply happen to be available for questioning. Did you know any of her other friends?”

“No, I never met any of them. She just mentioned them occasionally. I don’t remember any names. And I very much hope that you’ll keep my name out of this when it breaks in the papers. I have a wife in Michigan and if–”

“I know what you mean. Let me assure you we have no desire to embarrass innocent parties.” As Eric became more reticent and cautious, Gordon became smoother and more glib, like a salesman who has lost a sale but wishes to retain the goodwill of the customer.

“Mary could tell you more than Eric,” I said to Gordon. “She worked with Sue Sholto and was friendly with her. One woman can find out things about another woman more easily than a man can, anyway.”

“I’ll get in touch with her tomorrow. Where is she staying?”

“At the Grant for the present. But I think you’ll have to depend on your Honolulu sources for the bulk of your evidence. I gather that Sue Sholto didn’t talk about herself.”

“I was about to come to this end of the affair,” Gordon said in a faintly patronizing tone. “Lieutenant Swann, can you round up two or three members of the crew who were intimate with Land?”

“I don’t think he was intimate with anybody. But I’ll see what I can do. Do you want to wait here?”

“If you don’t mind my using your room.”

“Not at all.” Eric went out.

He returned in about ten minutes with two Negroes. In the interval Gordon cross-questioned me about the circumstances of Sue Sholto’s death. He was particularly interested in the movements of the guests and of Hector Land, which I reconstructed from memory as well as I could.

The two Negroes who preceded Eric unwillingly through the hatch looked frightened. They exchanged furtive looks. Their mouths were closed and set. Gordon’s introduction of himself capitalized on their fear:

“My name is Gordon. I am an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My special field is subversive activities, that is, catching spies and traitors.”

“This is Joe Doss, the Captain’s steward,” Eric said. Joe Doss was a small fat man with an almost hairless head and the face of a dusky moon. “This is Albert Feathers, one of the mess-boys who shared a compartment with Land.” Albert Feathers was a lanky mulatto with large liquid eyes, a convulsive Adam’s apple, and hair that was forcibly straight.

“Hector Land,” Gordon continued, “is suspected of being a spy and a traitor. He was apparently a member of an illegal organization named Black Israel. Did he ever mention it to you?”

“No, sir. He never mentioned anything like that to me.” Joe Doss disowned Hector Land in the same spirit, almost the same words, that Eric had used in disowning Sue Sholto: “I didn’t know him very well. He worked down in the wardroom and I worked up in the Captain’s galley.”

“Feathers, you went on liberty with Land more than once,” Eric said.

“Yes, sir,” Feathers admitted in a dull voice. “But I wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with his lodge.”

“Did he try to get you to join Black Israel?” Gordon said.

“Yes, sir. He didn’t call it Black Israel, but that must be what he was talking about. He said it was to make the dark people strong.”

“By what methods?”

“He didn’t say. I told him he was just going to get himself into trouble, and when I told him that he just shut up like a clam. He said he’d get me if I said anything to anybody.”

“You should have told me or your division officer about that,” Eric said. “You might have saved a lot of trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” he said tonelessly. “I’ll know better next time.”

“Did Hector Land try to persuade you to spy for him?”

“Oh, no, sir, nothing like that. He didn’t say anything about me spying. He just told me about the secret society. I just thought it was like an ordinary secret society.” Feathers’ large eyes seemed ready to dissolve in tears. His feet were rooted to the floor but his long body moved restlessly under his blue dungarees.

“Where did Hector Land get his money?”

“I don’t know, sir. He got his pay.”

“I’m not talking about his pay. He had more money than the Navy ever paid him. Where did he get it?”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe he got it spying.”

“Why you making that up, Albert?” Joe Doss said. “You don’t know if he made his money spying.”

“No, sir. I thought that’s what you meant.”

“Hector Land made money gambling,” Joe Doss said.

“Yes, sir,” Feathers echoed. “He made money gambling. He ran a pool. He told me one time that back in Detroit he used to be overlook man for a policy wheel.”

Gordon turned to Doss, who seemed the more intelligent of the two: “What kind of a pool?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was some kind of a numbers game.”

“Did you ever buy a chance in it?”

“No, sir, I don’t gamble.”

“We’re not interested in checking up on gambling just now,” Eric said. “If you know anything, let’s have it. You won’t suffer for it. It may do you some good.”

A flicker of hopefulness passed over Feathers’ sullen brown face. “I know what kind of a pool it was, sir. It was a ship pool. All the dark boys bought chances in it. Not just on the ship. On the beach, too.”

“What is a ship pool?” Gordon said.

“Well, all the ships have numbers and if a ship came in with our number we won.”

Gordon straightened up in his chair as if someone had pressed a trigger in his spine. But his voice was almost casual when he said:

“I’m not sure I understand. You mean that Hector Land based his numbers game on the goings and comings of naval vessels in Pearl Harbor?”

“Yes, sir. When we were in Frisco he had the pool, too.”

“That’s impossible!” Eric said angrily. “Only officers have access to that information.”

“Where did Land get his information?” Gordon said.

“We could see the ships, sir,” Feathers said. “Everybody knows what ships are in. And he could always check up on the daily Ships Present list.”

“That’s a lie,” said Joe Doss, like the Chinaman who wrote on the wall where he had hidden his money that there was no money hidden there.

“I didn’t say anything about you, Joe,” said Albert Feathers, like the other Chinaman who wrote on the wall after he had stolen the money that he personally was innocent of the theft.

Eric turned on Joe Doss. “Have you been messing with the Captain’s Ships Present list?”

“No, sir, I don’t ever mess with anything on the Captain’s desk.” Drops of sweat came out on his high black forehead like globules of rendered fat. He swivelled a swift revengeful look at Albert Feathers.

“I want these men to make a deposition,” Gordon said to Eric. “This evidence is of first-rate importance.”

“You’re damned right it is. I’ll have to take the matter up with the Captain, but there’ll be no difficulty there.” He looked at Doss. “There’s another matter I’ll take up with the Captain at the same time. Doss, you’re coming with me to see the Master-at-Arms.”

Doss followed him out on hopeless legs. Feathers stood where he was, apparently occupied with intimations of disaster.

“You may go, Feathers,” Gordon said. “I’ll want to get in touch with you in the morning. If you’ve told a straight story and continue to tell one you have nothing to fear.” The faint trace of ham in his nature added with dramatic effectiveness: “The United States Government will appreciate your assistance.”

“Don’t talk this around,” I said before Feathers left the room.

Gordon turned to me with a tense smile. “By God, this case is breaking. Now to give the Mexican police a shot in the arm. We’ve got to get our hands on Land.”

“Land had a smooth way of gathering information. I wonder if he thought that up himself. He didn’t strike me as particularly bright.”

“I doubt it. There are real brains behind this business, Drake. With the possible exception of the Schneider case, this is the trickiest business I’ve worked on in this war. Schneider had the brains, but he was a piker compared with this outfit. This is nothing less than a conspiracy to give the Japs the whole outline of our naval movements in the Pacific.”

I said not without complacence: “I’ve suspected it for a hell of a long time.”

“The pattern is beginning to emerge,” Gordon said. “As I see it it’s something like this. Hector Land collected information which he passed on to another agent in Honolulu. It’s unlikely that he was the only one supplying information, but he’s the only one we know about so far. The second agent–”

“Sue Sholto?”

“Perhaps. We haven’t enough evidence to say certainly yet. The second agent sifted the information, encoded the significant items, and broadcast them via the marked records to be picked up by Nip submarines lying off the Islands. The information was then re-encoded and relayed to Tokyo, or it may have been taken to Wake Island for rebroadcast.”

“But where does Anderson come in?”

“Probably on the administrative end. He coordinated the whole thing from the mainland. There doesn’t seem much doubt that he used Black Israel to recruit, or develop, potential spies. I’d guess from what Hefler told me about Land’s background, that the race riot made him ripe for subversion, and then Black Israel sucked him in. Black Israel also made its contribution to psychological warfare, by stirring up interracial strife in an arsenal city like Detroit. The web has more than one strand, and it looks to me as if Anderson sat in the center of it.”

“You think he’s the head of the organization, then?”

“I can’t say. We’ve got so pitifully little to go on so far. I admit he didn’t strike me as particularly big, or particularly dangerous. But I gave up spot judgments long ago.”

Eric returned with a guarantee that Doss would be available when he was wanted. Gordon began to ask him questions about Land’s disappearance. I told them I had a date, and went ashore. The Officer of the Deck gave me a jeep to the main gate of the Repair Base, and I took a taxi from there. It was barely nine, and I had plenty of time to get to the hotel by ten.

On the way I decided to stop at the Santa Fe station for my bag. Eric had lent me the use of his razor, but I needed a change of linen. The taxi let me out at the side entrance of the station, and I asked the driver to wait.

The baggage room was crowded with sailors retrieving their sea-bags and foot-lockers, a few drunks there for the company, a few civilians in clothes that looked a little frivolous and a little pathetic among all the lean blues. The clothes of a woman at the counter caught my eye particularly. She was wearing a tall felt hat trimmed with long iridescent feathers, gold pendant earrings, and two silver foxes which curled amorously around her neck but stared with cold button eyes.

The counter was lined three deep but I moved towards it. A sailor said without looking at me: “Hey, quit your shoving!” – then turned and added, “Sir.”

The woman with the foxes looked around and caught my eye. She gave no sign of recognition, and quickly looked away again. But not before I had recognized the rouged and raddled face of Miss Green.

I said, “Miss Green,” but she didn’t look around. I pushed slowly towards her but before I reached her she left the counter. The sailors made way for her and she was at the door before I could work my way out of the crowd.

I caught her on the sidewalk and took her arm. “Miss Green, I’d like to talk to you.”

“Let me go, I don’t know you.” I looked closely into her face in the light of a streetlamp, and saw that her eyes were empty and hot. But it was not the evil look in her eyes which went through my brain like a knife and quivered there. It was the odor of ether on her breath.

13

SHE tore her arm from my grasp and ran laboriously on high heels to a long black sedan which was parked ahead of my taxi. A man in the front seat who seemed to be wearing a chauffeur’s cap opened the door for her. She climbed in, the door slammed behind her, the black car jumped forward with the long rising whoop of a powerful engine, and Miss Green was out of my life again. But not forever.

I jumped into my taxi and told the driver to follow that car.

“I will if I can,” he said as he shifted gears. “That’s a Cadillac.”

When we turned the corner the black car was out of sight. We took a chance on the next corner and saw it a block ahead at Broadway, held up by a red light.

“Slow up,” I said to the driver. “I don’t want them to know they’re being followed.”

“Say, what is this? Are you in Naval Intelligence?”

“I’m working on a case with the FBI.”

“No kiddin’? Wait till I tell the boys.”

“There won’t be anything to tell them if you lose sight of that car.”

“Brother, I’ll run this crate down to an oil spot before I lose ’em.”

Before we reached the intersection the light changed. As the black car leapt away I caught a glimpse of an old evil face at the rear window. I took off my hat and held it in my hands and crouched low in my seat. There was heavy traffic in downtown San Diego that night, and maneuverability was more important than speed. My driver took his cab through impossible openings which closed a foot from the rear fenders. He aimed nonchalantly into traffic snarls which opened up like the Red Sea just before we piled up in them. We curved and skidded across the southern half of San Diego, past the all-night movies, the seedy restaurants and mushroom hamburger stands, the penny arcades, the liquor stores and warehouses, the storefront churches and four-bit flophouses, past the fish factories and the junk yards. Out of San Diego and through National City we kept the black car in sight.

On the other side of National City it accelerated. Its taillight went away from us like a small red comet and was swallowed up by the night. Simultaneously I became aware that I was on the last lap of my long ride from Detroit to Tia Juana.

The driver drove hard for a few minutes, his motor vibrating like a donkey engine. I bounced around in the back seat as the cab climbed and descended the looping coastal hills. At Palm City he slowed down and said over his shoulder:

“I tore the guts out of this baby, but she’s out of her class trying to catch a Cadillac. God damn it.”

“This is the road to Tia Juana, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it looks like they’re going to Tia Juana.”

“Will you take me there?”

“You’re the boss. I’ll have to charge you special fare.”

“This is what I’ve been saving my money for.”

He accelerated to a steady fifty and drove for another ten minutes in silence. We topped a rise and saw the lights of Tia Juana below us. A few minutes later we stopped at the border.

“Did a black Cadillac sedan go through here a few minutes ago?” the cab-driver asked the border guard who looked at my I.D. card. Under the road lights I got my first good look at the driver’s face: fat and forty, pug-nosed, with black Irish eyes. According to the license which was pinned up in front of me, his name was Halloran.

“Yeah. The big time. Uniformed chauffeur and all.”

“You don’t know who she was?”

“Nope. She’s been through here before but I don’t know her. Why? They cut in on you?”

“No. I just thought I seen her before.”

“Some pan,” the guard said as Halloran pushed in the clutch. “She looked like she just crawled out of the woodwork and was just about ready to crawl back in.”

At the first corner in Tia Juana a barefoot boy with a flapping shirttail waved a pasteboard box and cried: “Gum! Chiclets!”

“Wait a minute,” I said to Halloran.

“You come down here to buy gum?” he said cynically. But he stopped the car. The hungry-eyed Mexican boy boarded the car like a buccaneer. “Chiclets – two for a nickel!” he cried.

I held a fifty-cent piece in the light between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. “Did you see a big black Cadillac sedan go past here a little while ago?”

“Yes, señor.”

“Where did it go?”

He pointed to the right, up the hill to the center of the town.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes, señor. That way.”

“Do you know who was in it?”

“No, señor. American lady.”

His eyes were on the coin with an intent and ageless gaze. His thin sallow face could have been anywhere between ten and sixteen. I dropped the coin in his box and he jumped from the running-board and ran away in the dust, his shoulderblades flapping through his shirt like vestigial wings.

We went up the little hill in the direction he had pointed, past weather-warped clapboard dwellings, tamale stands, the one-story establishments of cheapjack lawyers whose signs advertised quick and easy divorces. We stopped at a gas station at the top of the street, and I asked the Mexican attendant if he had seen my friend in the black Cadillac.

“Señora Toulouse?” he said, and widened his mouth with a leer which separated the hairs of his thin black moustache. “I think she has gone home. She is your friend?”

“I met her on the train. She asked me to come and see her in Tia Juana. But I don’t know where she lives.”

“You don’t know where she lives? Then you do not know Tia Juana.” He leered once more, as if there were curiously amusing secrets unknown to those who did not know Tia Juana.

“That’s right, I don’t.”

He turned to Halloran: “You know where the girls are?”

“Yeah.”

“Señora Toulouse has the biggest house in the street. You will see it. It is built of stone.”

I gave him a dollar, which he folded and tucked into his waistband. He stood back and leered us amiably out of sight.

“What the hell is this, anyway?” Halloran said.

We had turned into a noisy street which slanted down between brilliantly lighted houses into final darkness. There was a steady male traffic on the footpaths, and on the lighted porches girls like assorted fruit on display. Between the two, the men in the street and the waiting girls in the houses, there was a low tension which exploded continuously in wisecracks, obscene repartee, and invitations.

We stopped at the first corner and a lean dark youth in a white open-necked shirt appeared from nowhere. He said: “You want something very, very nice?”

“I’m looking for Señora Toulouse.”

“Señora Toulouse phooey,” he said ardently. “They are old stuff and also they supercharge. You come with me. I show you something.” He opened the back door of the cab, leaned forward with his hand on my knee, and whispered: “Virgin!”

I gave him a dollar and said: “Where is Señora Toulouse?”

“Si, señor,” he said courteously. “It is there. The big house in the middle of the block.” He leaned forward again: “Will you tell her Raoul sent you? Raoul?”

I almost closed the door on his narrow, hopeful face. We moved down the road and parked across the street from the big house. It was an imposing mansion of grey stone, not indigenous to the country but squarebuilt like old Ohio farmhouses. It had three stories, all of which were lit, but blinds were drawn over every window. The front door was shut and there were no girls on the porch, but there was the sound of music from inside.

“I’m going in,” I said. “If I don’t come out in half an hour go to the police.”

“No use going to the police. You know what this is, don’t you? These cathouses are protected by the local cops, that’s why they’re here.”

“Go to the police at the border. Then drive back to Diego and go to Mary Thompson at the Grant, got that? Tell her – wait a minute, I’ll write a note.”

I tore a page out of my address-book, wrote a note to Mary telling her to get in touch with Gordon, addressed it and gave it to Halloran. “This is if I don’t come out in half-an-hour. It’s ten now.”

I paid him his fare and some extra, and got out of the cab. I felt awkward and light as I walked up the steps with Halloran’s black eyes on my back, and knocked on the heavy carved door.

A rectangle of face containing two small eyes appeared at a Judas hole. The eyes gave me a once-over, the Judas hole snapped shut, and the door opened.

“What can we do for you?” the doorman said. He was pig-eyed and pig-bodied, shaped like a Japanese wrestler and as wide as the door. His accent was Minnesota Norska. I wondered automatically how deep my fist would sink in the swelling dough of his belly.

I said I would like to see Madame Toulouse.

“She ain’t home. Now if you want a good time we can do business with you. If you don’t want a good time we can’t do business with you.”

I said I was crazy for a good time, and he ushered me through swinging glass curtains into a high wide room where the music was. It came from a piano and a guitar at the far end of the room, played by two cadaverous young men with shining black hair. The walls of the room, which must have taken up nearly the whole first floor, were lined with tables at which men sat drinking, some with girls on their knees.

The center of the room was a dance-floor where the rest of the girls danced with each other or with whatever male partners they could get. The girls wore no clothes, except that some had colored plumes projecting from their powdered buttocks. One had a red feather. One had a blue feather. One had a green feather. These plumes wagged like languid tails as the girls jigged through the bored routine of dancing. The girls with male partners seemed less bored, if you did not look at their faces.

“You can see, we got variety,” the doorman said. “White, black, brown. Blonde, brunette, redhead, fat, skinny, Mexican, Chinese. Anything you want, we got it. You pay the waiter for your drinks and you pay the girl when you take her upstairs. You take your time and you take your pick. That’s the way it works out best.”

I sat down at an iron-legged table by the door and he retired ponderously through the glass curtains. They clicked behind him like unheeded admonitory tongues. The waiter, whose clean white coat insisted that the joint had class, came to my table and I ordered Mexican beer. The unattached girls began to converge on me like hens at feeding-time. Like figures in the dream of a naïve and hopeful hermit, they formed a half-circle about me, leaning forward and kissing the air with writhing carmine mouths and sliding pink tongues. In several languages they said the same thing, and their voices blended in an obscene cooing and twittering. Their breasts swung forward and the rouged tips looked at me like sullen eyes.

I got out of my chair and they gathered about me, making their eyes swoon and sparkle, their blackened lashes flutter in mechanical glee. I moved to the door, wondering if the body of a woman would ever seem good to me again, and escaped through the glass curtains. The doorman was sitting in an armchair across the hall. He looked up at me in surprise. Halfway down the wide staircase Miss Green turned and started back up.

I went after her. The doorman took me by the waist from behind, and before I could turn had locked my arms in a full Nelson which pressed painfully on the back of my neck. I struggled in his grip and got nowhere. My coat ripped at the shoulder seams.

“Let him have it, Jake,” Miss Green said from the top of the stairs.

He let go with his right hand but held me with his left. A small heavy object came down dully on the back of my head. My body reverted to protoplasm and my mind to darkness.

When consciousness returned it came slowly and laboriously like an ambitious chunk of sentient organic matter climbing the stages of evolution from the original warm mud. I pulled myself out of the sucking black slime, the whirling waters that covered the earth, and lay eventually in a dry light place with my cheek on grass. But I found when I opened my eyes that it wasn’t grass. It was a pastel-green rug lit not by the sun but by electric light. I heard voices and tried to sit up. I couldn’t sit up because my wrists and ankles were tied together behind me.

I raised my head from the rug and the blood beat at the base of my skull like an iron fist. What I could see of the room was bare, pleasant and strange. The only furniture I could see was the end of a chaise longue upholstered in bright rich silk, and a fragile table holding a slender vase of flowers. On the wall there was a wash-drawing of birds, with a conical white mountain in the background, done in faint and delicate colors. The rest of the wall was naked, except for a long curved sword in a gold-embossed scabbard which hung horizontally above my head.

A woman’s voice was saying in a sibilant birdlike chirp: “It would not be wise to kill him here. I forbid it.”

“I agree, Baroness,” Anderson said. “I absolutely agree. We’ll take him out to the ranch.”

I craned my neck and saw at the foot of the chaise longue a small black slipper which flipped up and down impatiently on the tip of a silk-clad toe. “It will be necessary to transfer him with great discretion,” the voice chirped. “Attention must not be attracted to this house. It is safe now because we have been very careful. We will continue to be careful.”

“We’ll put him to sleep again before we take him down,” Miss Green said. “I’ll go down and get Jake’s blackjack.”

“No you won’t,” Anderson said. “I don’t want him to be sapped again. I don’t want his skull damaged. I’ve got a use for his skull.”

“You are quite clever, Lorenz,” the bird-voice said.

“I try to find a use for everything,” Anderson said complacently. “I’m glad Drake dropped in, as a matter of fact. Hector is too big.”

“I am sorry you came here,” the bird-voice said. “At all costs we must avoid the serious attention of the police.”

“It’s my business that’ll be ruined if they come here,” Miss Green said. “But I had to bring him. Jensen wasn’t safe in San Diego.”

“You can say that again,” Anderson said. “I even spotted a plain clothes man at the border, but they don’t pay much attention to chauffeurs.”

“It is not only your business that will be ruined if the police come seriously, Miss Toulouse,” the bird-voice said. “More intimate values than the financial are at stake.”

“Don’t I know it,” Miss Green said. “Let’s get him out of here. And I still say sap him.”

“We won’t sap him again,” Anderson said firmly. “It might leave a dent on his skull. We’ll put him to sleep with ether.”

“Not my ether you won’t. I have a hard time getting that stuff. I damn near went nuts those last two days on the train.”

“Get your ether,” Anderson said.

“Like hell I will. You can gag him, can’t you?”

“Get your ether,” Anderson said. There was the sound of a blow on flesh and a low female sigh. A woman’s footsteps crossed the rug behind me and left the room.

“I don’t like to see you mistreat women,” the bird-voice said. “It is destructive of harmony. Perhaps one day you will be punished, Lorenz.” The speech left flat tinny echoes of menace in the room.

I thought it was time I entered the conversation. “You’re damn right he will.”

“Why, Ensign, it’s nice to have you with us again,” Anderson said. “Say, turn around and let me look at you. There’s nothing I like better than the face of an old friend.”

He took me by the hair and pulled me around so that I faced into the room.

“Don’t forget,” the bird-voice said. “You do not wish to damage his skull.”

“Hell, the hair and scalp don’t matter.” By way of illustration he took hold of my hair again, lifted my head and shoulder a foot or so from the floor, and let me drop. “It’s just the skull I’m worried about.”

The woman on the chaise longue whose voice was like a flat chirp had a tiny ivory-tinted face above which balanced carefully coiffed masses of dull black hair held in place by a tortoiseshell comb. There was something dainty and old-world about her, an air which was enhanced by her dress. This was a flowing robe of blue silk, full in the sleeve and skirt, gathered at the waist under a broad silk waistband. The ivory throat on which her head was poised was small and delicate. My attention was occupied by that pure throat. I was intensely interested in whether the Samurai sword on the wall could sever it in one stroke.

I said: “Before long you’ll be out of a job, Baroness. We’ll tell you ahead of time where our ships are going to strike, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Shall I tell you more?”

The small woman on the chaise longue did not smile. From where I lay I could not tell whether she was a young girl or an old woman. “Be careful not to injure his bones, Lorenz,” she said. “His other tissues are more or less beside the point.”

Anderson kicked me carefully below the ribs and below the pelvis. For a minute nothing was important to me but the fingers of pain which searched my body. Then I said, very carefully so as not to shout: “You will not be able to do anything about it because there will be no Japanese warships left. There will be no Japanese airforce left. Perhaps there will be no Japanese cities left. The Japanese islands will be a sad place.”

“Are you tired, Lorenz?” the little woman said. He kicked me carefully in the lower part of the abdomen.

I said: “How did you ever get into the big time, Jensen? I thought you were a small-time crook. You still have all the mannerisms of a pimp.”

He kicked me again, but without enthusiasm. I decided that I had contributed my share to the conversation, and fell silent. My stomach muscles were moving like injured worms.

Miss Green came into the room with a colorless glass bottle in her hand. There was a blue mark on her cheek under the red mark of the rouge, but she looked warm and excited. The hand which held the bottle trembled and the junk jewelry on her arm clinked merrily. Her step was quick and elastic.

“My God,” Anderson said. “She’s been at the ether again.”

“I just thought if you throw away this bottle like you did the last one,” said Miss Green. She executed several steps of an original pas seul. “Well, I just thought.”

“Give me that bottle,” Anderson said.

“Here it is, you fat stoat.” She tossed it to him. He caught it, took a single threatening step towards her, met the impassive gaze of the Baroness, and turned to me.

He poured some of the ether on a handkerchief and applied it to my face. It scalded my mouth like fire or ice. I moved my head quickly and bit his wrist. He tore it from my teeth but I tasted blood. Then he held my head by the ears while the Baroness held the cloth to my face. I retired again into a universe of turning wheels.

When I came to I was lying on the floor in the back of a car which was moving quickly over an uneven road. At least that was the hypothesis which fitted the facts that dirty fabric vibrated steadily under my face and bounced intermittently against my skull with explosive pain. I could hear the hum of the powerful motor. I could see no lights.

I tried to flex my arms and felt the strain on my legs. My wrists and ankles were still tied together behind me. I began to rotate my right wrist in a quarter-circle within the loop of rope which held it. The rope was tight and rough and wore away the skin. I continued to rotate my wrist, working the rope down past the base of my thumb. I could feel warm blood on my hand. Perhaps it helped to lubricate the rope, which slipped gradually down towards my knuckles, wearing away the skin as it went. My hand felt as if it had been thrust in boiling water. I continued to work it back and forth within the loop. The rope slid over the thickest part of my thumb, and I jerked my hand free.

With my right hand I went to work on the knots which held my other hand and my feet. The blood made the knots slippery and hard to open. I hoped that I was not losing a great deal of blood. I wanted to have enough blood left to kill Anderson.

The knots had not been tied by a man who knew anything about knots. Once I got them started they loosened easily. My left hand came free without losing the skin. That was encouraging, because I needed one good hand. Inch by inch, so as to make no noise, I turned over on my back. I reached to my bent legs and removed the rope from my ankles. My hand simmered, my head rattled, and my stomach screamed. But I had accomplished a great deal.

Supporting myself on my hands because my stomach would not bear the weight, I rose to a sitting position. From there I could see over the back of the front seat the upper half of a man’s head wearing a chauffeur’s cap. I knew that the head silhouetted against the reflection from the headlights must be Anderson’s because I hated it so much. I crouched forward and moved my arms, flexing and stretching them. When I was quite sure that they were able to do what I wanted them to, I flung my left arm over the back of the front seat and embraced Anderson’s neck.

My stranglehold went on so fast and hard that his exclamation of surprise died in a gasp. But he had enough presence of mind to jam on the brakes. The car slewed sideways on gravel which machine-gunned the chassis and fenders, and came to rest. Without deliberately looking I saw that the road passed among mountains along the edge of an arroyo, and that there was a moon.

I had Anderson’s throat in the angle of my left elbow and began to apply leverage with my right hand. But he had managed to get a gun in his hand, which he used to hammer my arms and my fingers. I let go with my left hand to grapple for the gun, but my injured right hand was not strong enough to hold him.

He twisted out of my grip and struck me with the muzzle of the gun on the side of the jaw. I fell over into the back seat and before I could reach him again he was out of the car.

He opened the back door and showed me the snout of his automatic. “You drive the rest of the way,” he said.

A .45 automatic at three feet was unanswerable. I climbed in behind the wheel and he got in beside me.

“If you go over fifteen I’ll shoot you in the base of the spine,” he said. “And stay in the center of the road. There won’t be any other traffic.”

The black sedan crawled up the moonlit road, purring like a stroked cat. Anderson’s gun was thrust hard into the base of my spine. We came to a single-track dirt road which looped off to the right and ascended out of sight among the hills. The entrance to it was barred by a wire gate on a wooden frame.

“We’ll get out and open the gate,” Anderson said. “If my gun loses contact with the small of your back, I’ll shoot. It will pay you to walk carefully.”

I walked carefully to the gate, opened it, and walked carefully back to the car. The high slopes of the mountains were very beautiful in the moonlight, as beautiful as the white mountain in the drawing of the pale birds. I drove the car through the gate, and then we closed it behind us. The black sedan crawled up the narrow road among the hills. In a high valley flanked by mountains we came over the brow of a hill to a long low ranchhouse. It had a dim yellow light in the window.

Anderson told me to stop the car and I stopped it. He told me to get out and I got out. He told me to walk towards the verandah and I walked towards the verandah. Hector Land was standing in the doorway waiting for us when we climbed the steps.

“This is the man that killed Bessie,” Anderson said. “I want you to choke him to death, but be careful not to break any bones in his neck.”

Hector Land’s right fist struck me in the face very quickly, twice before I fell.

“You’d kill Bessie,” Hector Land said as he stood over me. “You and the white people like you, you’d throw her out of a job and drive her to whoring and foul her bed and then kill her. You’d kill us off in Detroit, you’d drive us out of the factories, you’d drive us out of the streets. You’d call us the filth of the earth but you’d love our women. You’d love our women and you’d kill us. Why did you kill Bessie?”

He took me by the shoulder with his left hand and lifted me to my feet. There was a light foam on his lips. His right fist was cocked. I strained against his grip, but my shoulder was wedged in a vise.

“Don’t hit him again, Hector. If you do I’ll shoot you. I’ve got to have that body with no bones broken.”

Land blinked at him stupidly and said in a changed dull voice: “I’m goin’ to break all his bones, Mr. Anderson.”

“No you’re not. He’s about my size. We’ll dress his body in my clothes and put my ring on his finger. Then we’ll burn down the ranchhouse with his body in it. The police will think it’s me, and they’ll stop looking for me. But if any of the bones are broken they’ll be suspicous.”

“Do you know who killed Bessie?” I said. “Anderson did. He killed Bessie because she was–”

“Shut up,” Anderson said to me. His speech was clipped and low, but it had a raw edge of uncertainty. “One more word and I’ll shoot.” He took a backward step so that his face was in shadow. The outer rim of the circle of light from the doorway glinted dully on his automatic.

“I want him to say his piece,” Hector Land said.

Anderson’s gun moved slightly so that it included us both in its threat.

“You know a gun can’t stop me,” Hector said.

“Anderson killed Bessie because she was going to tell the police about Black Israel.” My words poured out so fast I almost babbled. I didn’t know when a bullet would put a period to them, but they were my only chance.

“It’s a lie,” Anderson said. “He killed Bessie, and he’s trying to lie out of it. Stand back, Hector. I’m going to shoot.”

Hector Land stayed where he was beside me. His face was blank and heavy, but his small black eyes shifted continually from Anderson to me and back to Anderson again.

“Why should I kill Bessie, Hector? Did I kill the others? Did I kill Sue Sholto?”

“I wasn’t even in Detroit,” Anderson said. His voice had risen a full octave as if fear had struck a tuning fork in his head. He still held the gun but it did not encourage him.

“This man tricked you into doing his dirty work for him,” I said. “He pretended he wanted to help your people but when Bessie got dangerous to him he killed her. Are you going to let him go on using you, Land?”

“Put down your gun,” Hector said softly to Anderson. “I want to talk to you.”

His large body slanted towards Anderson in a slight movement which was as terrible as the slight movement of a stone statue.

Anderson said: “Stay where you are or I’ll fire.” The automatic shifted in his hand, and I saw his fingers tighten on the trigger.

All this time Land had been holding my shoulder, which ached in his grip. In the same moment he let go of me and moved swiftly towards Anderson in a crouching leap. The gun fired six times before it was knocked away. I jumped to the ground and searched for it in the dust, but couldn’t find it. When I looked up Anderson was standing on the porch white and shaken. Land was stretched out at his feet. I rushed Anderson and hit him with my left because my right was injured.

He kicked at my groin but only grazed my thigh. I closed with him and hit him with my left. I felt his nose break under my fist. He turned to run and I caught him from behind by shoulder and crotch and threw him over the railing of the verandah. He fell heavily in the dust, lay still for a moment, and began to get up.

I went after him and waited over him till he got up. Then I hit him with my left. One of his teeth showed through his upper lip. He saw that I aimed to kill him and closed with me groping for a headlock. He caught my head in a thick arm and for a minute I teetered on his hip. I set all the strength I had left against his weight, which was greater than mine. Finally I slipped my head free. I put my knee in his back and dragged him backwards with my arm around his throat. He fell heavily with me on top of him.

When he got up I hit him again with my left. The lower half of his face was bright with blood. Now a flap came loose over his eye and hung down showing the white bone. I hit him again with my left and he went down moaning. I pulled him to his feet and hit him again with my left. He kicked at me but lost his balance and fell on his back. I helped him to his feet and hit him again. My fist caught him in the center of the throat and broke his larynx. I heard it snap. When he fell down I let him lie. I was very happy.

Hector Land came down off the verandah then. He walked slowly and the blood ran down one side of his face from a bullet track across his temple. But when he pushed me out of the way I staggered my own length and fell in the dust.

I lay there and watched him kick Anderson to death. Anderson’s head became shapeless and muddy. There was nothing I could do and nothing I wanted to do. I was afraid of Hector Land and I wanted to see Anderson die. When I had seen him die I crawled around the corner of the house and sat in the shadow nursing my broken left hand.

14

AFTER a long time, during which my body was stiffened and chilled by the mountain air, I moved from my seat in the shadowed dust and looked cautiously around the corner of the house. Anderson lay where he had fallen, his face in the moonlight half-returned to indistinguishable earth. There was no trace of Hector Land except the destruction which I had begun and he had ended.

I left my hiding place and crawled in the dust below the verandah, clawing through it square foot by square foot, searching for the gun which Anderson had dropped. Not even the war had been able to convince me, but I was convinced now, that a gun was more precious than anything else. In a world of violence and terror a gun was the staff of life. My nerves were so shaken that I should not have been astonished if the mountains had spoken and threatened me, or if armed men had sprung up out of the ground. I sifted the dust for the gun as a prospector sifts gold-bearing sand, but I couldn’t find it.

Then came the one remaining thing which had power to astonish me, and the mental horror was added to the physical horror. Far off among the mountains I heard the hum of an automobile engine like a drone of insects, which grew louder as the car climbed the road towards the valley. I could see the beam from its headlights, first like a small faint dawn working its way across the brow of the pass into the valley, then like a white flare of torches flung intermittently against the night. Before the car itself came into sight I went back to my lair and squatted down to watch. With my whole body weak and sore, and without a gun, I felt helpless and declassed, without rights or hopes in a world which struck unpredictably against anyone who did not have a weapon and the will to use it.

The car bounded casually over the last ridge as if it were on a familiar track. When it began to descend into the valley I saw that it was a light roadster with the top down. When it reached the bottom of the hill and stopped, I saw that a woman was driving. When she stepped out of the car I saw that it was Mary Thompson.

“Mary!” I shouted, and ran towards her on knees which were almost unhinged by relief and reaction from shock and fear. She walked quickly towards me. Her hair, ashy in the moonlight, was blown by the wind.

She said, “Sam! What’s happened?”

I pointed to the body in the dust.

“Who is that?”

“It’s Anderson. Lorenz Jensen.”

Her mouth opened to scream and the tendons of her neck came out like fingers in bas-relief. She made no sound.

“Don’t look,” I said, and put out my hand to her shoulder to turn her away. But when she turned to me she had a small revolver in her hand. A wave of nausea swept through the middle of my body. It was almost more than I could bear to stand in a line of fire again, and to be invaded by the thoughts which sprang up full-fledged in my mind after long repression.

“How did you get here?” I said.

She put the hand which held the gun in the pocket of her coat. “I drove here to find you. I got your message from the taxi driver.”

“How did you know where to come?”

“The police raided Miss Green’s house. She told them where you were.”

I was so grateful for her explanation that I almost wept. For a moment of terrible stillness, during which the mountains had seemed as unreal as cardboard and the moon a silver coin pasted to a low hollow ceiling, I had imagined that she was another enemy. The sky expanded again into infinite pure space and the mountains resumed their solidity.

Then the whole fabric collapsed, with a grinding like bone being crushed in my head. “Why didn’t the police come?” I said.

While she was still hesitating on the point of speech, I struck at her. She stepped back out of my way and brought the gun out of its pocket. “Raise your hands. Walk ahead of me slowly into the house. Where’s Hector Land?”

“He ran away,” I said. “He killed Anderson and ran away.”

“Land killed Anderson?”

“I told him Anderson murdered Bessie. But you killed her, didn’t you?”

A sudden Gestalt which must have been preparing in my unconscious for a long time, held down by the will to believe in Mary Thompson, illuminated the past month in bitter colors. “That was why you had a headache and had to go back to the hotel. So that you could catch Bessie Land when she came home from the bar, and quiet her for good.”

Her face groped for an attitude. It is terrible to see a human face empty of meaning. Her face was still beautiful, but I saw for the first time its essential lack of humanity. It was like a silver face cast on a screen, sustained in beauty by the desire of the onlooker who wishes away its unreality.

“Turn around and walk into the house as I told you. I want to talk to you, Sam.”

I had thought that I knew her intimately, but for the first time I saw into her mind. She could pull the trigger easily because she could not imagine the consequences of killing, because to her human bodies were organic matter to be disposed of when it became inconvenient. She could betray her country because she had no country to betray. She could kill me easily because lovers were easy to find. I did as I was told.

The front door of the ranchhouse opened directly on the living room, a wide low room, heavily furnished with thick black furniture. There was a cavernous stone fireplace at one end, and before it a refectory table flanked by chairs with carved backs. The room was dimly lit by a kerosene lamp on one end of the table. Facing the fireplace, at the other end of the room, was a door which opened on darkness.

“Sit down there,” she said, pointing the revolver towards a chair at the end of the table.

I sat down and she sat facing me, with her back to the dead fireplace. I began to plan to overturn the table on her.

“Keep your hands on the table,” she said. “If you don’t I’ll have to shoot you.”

That repeated threat was beginning to lose its terror for me, but I put my hands on the table. My left hand was swollen and blue and almost rigid. My right hand was crusted with blood where the rope had torn the flesh.

“You’re having a bad time of it, aren’t you?” she said.

I felt free from fear and extraordinarily light, but I was beginning to lose my interest in things. I saw everything clearly, without conscious emotion, with the wan objectivity of a cynicism which is reached at the bottom of despair.

I told her the truth: “This is the worst time now.”

“Look, Sam. I gave Sue Sholto her chance but she wouldn’t take it. She’d been suspicious of me for a long time, ever since she caught me marking the records one day in the record-library. When she heard about the leak of information that night at Honolulu House, she finally caught on. But I gave her a chance. I didn’t want to kill her. I went to her in the women’s room where she was lying down, I even offered her money to keep quiet. She said she wouldn’t keep quiet. So I had to kill her. Hector Land almost caught me at it when he came up to the powder room to talk to me.”

“You must be strong.”

“Yes, I’m strong for a woman. But I don’t want to kill you, Sam. I don’t have to kill you if you’ll keep quiet.”

It struck me suddenly that Mary was a strange name for her to have. Mary was an innocent and feminine name, the name of virgins and mothers. Then I thought of Bloody Mary.

I said: “Did you ever hear of Bloody Mary?”

Her eyes were very pale, almost white. My mind was working at top speed in a vacuum, quick to find allusions which would do me no good. I thought of Scott Fitzgerald’s description of a woman who had “white crook’s eyes.”

“You don’t seem to realize, Sam,” she said in a flat tone. “I have to kill you now if you don’t agree to keep quiet. This is your only chance.”

I told myself that I would play for time. I was too tired to face death just then. “What’s your offer?”

“Life. That’s the main thing.”

“Go on.”

“You know that we can get along. Now that Jensen’s dead we can marry.” She saw no irony in her distaste for bigamy. “It’s best that way, I’ve found.”

“Was he your husband? No wonder you tried to steal Hatcher’s letter.”

“The last few years he was. It cuts down on the passport problem and a lot of other things.”

“I told him he was a pimp,” I said. “I didn’t know how right I was. He let you bed with me so I wouldn’t catch him sneaking off the train at Gallup. Didn’t he?”

“He couldn’t have stopped me,” she said with a perverse pride. “I wanted you. I still do, if you don’t make me kill you.”

“What would we do together? Make love?”

“You needn’t be cynical about it. I know how you feel about me. I could have you now.”

“One of the dangers of getting out of touch with normal human values is this.” I forgot that I was playing for time. “You make ghastly mistakes. Like murder. Like that one.”

Her lips parted, her teeth showed, her eyelids crinkled, but the movements of her face did not convey the intent of a smile. All I could see there was the terrible blank naïveté of evil. “Maybe not right this minute. You look pretty tired.”

I said: “What would my other duties be?”

She said: “The Baroness is dead. She committed suicide before the police got to her. Jensen is dead. Toulouse is in jail, but she doesn’t count. She doesn’t know the business, she doesn’t even know where this ranch is. She’s nothing but a graduate of a Paris bordello, a woman we paid for the use of her house. We could make a lot of money, Sam.”

“How?”

“I’ve got the brains and the contacts. You’re in the Navy, and you used to be a newspaper man. If you could get yourself transferred to Public Relations. There’s a thing in New Mexico that Jensen has been working on. You may have heard of the Manhattan Project. We need an inside man, someone in the services, and we haven’t been able to get one. You told me you wanted to make money, Sam. We could make more money than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

“How much?”

“A hundred thousand dollars in six months.” Her eyes glittered like glass, and I saw what her central emotion was. She loved money so passionately that she couldn’t imagine how cold her numbers left me.

My emotions were coming to life again, forming a new configuration directed against her. I said in cold fury:

“I’d rather go into business with a hyena and make love to a corpse.”

Her mouth fell open as if my sentiments surprised and offended her. “Don’t you understand, Sam? I have to kill you if you won’t cooperate. I have to kill you now. And I don’t want to. Why do you think I took the job of watching you? Why do you think I didn’t kill you in Detroit? I could have killed you there. I could have killed you in Honolulu. After his own attempt failed, Jensen wanted me to kill you on the train but I didn’t want to. Even when you started figuring out our code I didn’t want to. I thought perhaps we could get along.”

I said nothing. I watched her face. I saw that like all true criminals she was abnormal. Part of her sensibility was missing and part of her mind was blank. She could not see herself as evil or depraved. Her ego stood between her and the rest of the world like a distorting lens.

My anger had died down into a kind of sick repulsion, but steady fear of the gun made my mind unnaturally active. I knew I had come to the end but I kept on talking. Talking had saved my life once. I did not see how it could save me again, but I went on talking, buying my life minute by minute with words. Perhaps the vigilance of the gun would relax, and I’d have a chance to move.

“How did you get into this kind of thing?” I said. There was a whine of insincerity in my voice which I couldn’t repress.

“I hate the life.” But she went on as if she had been waiting eagerly for such a question, as if perhaps she had not had a chance to explain herself for years: “But I’ve always been in it, and it buys me the things I want. I started lifting things in stores when I was eleven. There was a woman that pretended to be my mother when we went shopping. She was Jensen’s mistress then.”

“I thought your parents were in Cleveland.”

“My mother died in Cleveland when I was a baby. My father took me to Chicago when I was seven, and died two years later. I’ve been on my own ever since. Jensen got rid of the other woman when I was fourteen, and then we started to work into the real money. I’d pick up men on the Chicago streets and take them to our apartment. Jensen would come in and pretend to be my father. I was underage. They paid. But the last one was a detective. Jensen went to the penitentiary and I went to reform school. When he got out he helped me to escape, but we were on the rocks and the police were after him for breaking parole. We went west and travelled steerage from Seattle to Manila. From there we went to Shanghai. We made some good contacts in Shanghai. Since then we’ve been in the money.”

“Money is very important to you, isn’t it?”

“It’s very important to everybody, don’t let them kid you. Maybe it’s a little more important to me. For two years I slept in a box of excelsior behind a furnace in a cellar. I ate what people left on their plates in restaurants. Now I eat the best that money can buy.”

“Human flesh is a rich diet,” I said, “but it makes you deathly sick in the end.”

I had found words that reached her. As if I had pressed a button her face became convulsive. “I didn’t want to kill them,” she chanted in a high voice which rose to a scream. “I didn’t want to kill Sue Sholto! I didn’t want to kill Bessie Land! But she knew about Jensen and Black Israel, and she was getting ready to talk. I had to. It was hard for me. I did have a migraine that night.”

A blob of saliva dripped over her lower lip onto her chin. I tried to imagine myself ever kissing that wild mouth. She wiped the moisture away with the back of her left hand. Her right hand held the gun pointed steadily at my heart.

I knew that she was ready to kill me, and I had to act now. I tensed my muscles to overturn the table.

Before I moved Hector Land spoke behind me, from the other end of the room. His voice boomed under the low ceiling: “It was you that killed Bessie.”

Mary’s eyes shifted from my face. I heard three heavy footsteps drag across the floor behind me. I watched her gun. The muscles moved in her slender wrist and it was deflected from my heart.

There was an explosion behind me, and her gun fell to the table. With one hand clenched on the edge of the table she held herself upright. The other hand was at her breast. A little blood leaked between her fingers and sparkled on them like rubies.

She said: “My breast is a nasty mess. You liked it for a little while, didn’t you, Sam? You thought my breasts were beautiful.”

She was about to say more, but she coughed, and her voice bubbled in her throat. Bright streams of blood spilled from the corners of her mouth, and for a moment I had the illusion that she was grinning a shining red grin which stretched from side to side of her face.

“It’s just as well this way,” she said thickly. “I didn’t want to kill you.”

Her eyes were black with pain and stared at me so intently that I didn’t know she was dead till her body went loose. Her fair head, her mouth and breast, her fine weaving hips, her evil brain perched like an obscene bird on the edge of madness, fell to the floor like a sack. A sack of food for worms.

I picked up her gun from the table and turned to face Hector Land. He squeezed the gun in his hand three times rapidly, so hard that the muscles in his forearm writhed like a black snake. No fire came out of the muzzle.

“A Colt .45 clip holds seven rounds, Hector. You’ve used the seventh shot.”

He looked down at the gun in his hand as if unable to understand that a thing which had killed one could fail to kill another.

“You should be glad that you didn’t kill me. You’ll be better off if you’ll come with me, back to San Diego. You’ve killed two enemies of the country, you turned against them of your own free will, and that may help you. If they put you in front of a firing squad it’s a clean death, cleaner than the life you’ve led. A clean death is better than being hunted like a rat.”

“Give me that gun. I got a use for that gun.” He moved into the circle of lamplight, and I saw that there was death in his face. His skin was bluish and transparent, as if all his blood had run out. His eyes looked ready to die, lost and heavy with the sorrow and shame of his life.

“If you move again, I’ll give it to you in the breastbone.”

“A gun never stopped me yet.”

He came across the rest of the room, swift and tremendous like a black waterspout. I pressed the trigger and saw a round spreading splash on his shoulder where the bullet struck. He paused and came on, so tall and wide that he seemed to blot out the walls and ceiling like a shadow cast from a low lamp.

I fired again, but he kicked the gun out of my hand and the bullet flew up between us into the ceiling. His eyes were unfocused and blinking as if the flash had seared his eyeballs, but his hands found me and closed on my neck. I hit him with my left and the pain gushed up to my elbow. A flap of scar tissue came loose over his eye. I hit him again and again, but his head rolled with the punches and his fingers closed tighter on my breathing. I kneed him in the groin. He gasped but didn’t let go.

The blood was pounding in my head and face, my lungs were sucking for air and not getting any, my eyes seemed to be expanding in their sockets. Somewhere near a dark waterfall was roaring, flooding the fields of my consciousness with night, rolling my bones down in its torrent with all the bones of the dead. My tongue forced open my clenched teeth, my knees became pitiable and remote like disasters in another country. I rushed down the dark waterfall.

But the iron collar was gone from my neck and it was only the floor I fell to. I drew a whistling breath, and another, and another. The waterfall ran into a subterranean channel and its echoes faded.

When I sat up Hector Land had found the gun and stood up with it in his hand. He said:

“You shouldn’t try to fight me. I been in the ring.”

He opened his mouth, set the muzzle of the revolver between his gleaming teeth, and fired. His brains spat on the wall behind him. They were no darker than a white man’s. His body fell like a dark tower. The ruin was finished and the cycle was complete.

When the thunder of the final explosion ceased, the low room became very still. I had a feeling that I was in a cell hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth, weighed on by mountains. With something like panic scurrying in my nerves, I got to my feet and found the door.

There was a chilly dawn light in the sky. A withered grey mist hung on the forsaken mountains. The earth looked tired and unlovely, spent by its gross passions. I knew it would look that way to me for a long time wherever I was. I wanted to get to sea again.