Tightrope

by Amanda Quick

  Amalie had met him at the front door with a pistol in her hand. After he had recovered from the shock, he had noticed that she was dressed in a pair of flowing, wide-legged women’s trousers and a cream-colored sweater. Her hair was brushed back off her face and anchored with a couple of combs. She had not bothered with makeup. The lack of lipstick and mascara made her seem less cool and remote but it also underscored her vulnerability. She was a woman who had awakened to discover an intruder in her home. She had to have been terrified. She would probably have nightmares for a long time.

  She did not look terrified, however. She looked resolute and quite fierce. She had a very tight grip on the pistol. That worried him.

  “I told you pretty much everything when I spoke to you on the phone,” Amalie said. “I heard my aunt scream and then I heard a thud. I got my gun out of the drawer and went upstairs. The balcony doors at the end of the hall on that floor were open. I knew then that there was someone in the house. He must have been hiding in one of the rooms, because the next thing I knew he was running toward the balcony. I went after him but he managed to get away. I got off a few shots but I’m sure I didn’t hit him.”

  “How long have you owned that gun?” Matthias asked.

  “About six months. Why? Does it matter?”

  “No. I was just curious.”

  She gave him a cold look. “How long have you carried a gun?”

  So much for getting her to open up about her past.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs. I want to have a look around.”

  Without a word she turned and went up the stairs. He followed. When they reached the third level, he glanced at the wall sconce. It was illuminated.

  “You said it was dark up here?” he asked.

  “Yes. The bulb in that fixture had been partially unscrewed. I tightened it while I waited for the police and the ambulance.” Amalie pointed toward an open door. “That’s my aunt’s room. I found her in the hallway. I think she must have heard him and got up to see what was going on. He hit her with a vase that was on the console.”

  Matthias studied the French doors at the end of the hallway.

  “You said he went over the balcony?”

  “Yes.”

  “Long way down.”

  “He used a rope,” Amalie said. “It’s still hanging from the railing.”

  “He was obviously prepared for a quick exit. I wonder if he used the rope to enter the villa.”

  Amalie frowned. “Good question. I hadn’t thought about that. He must have climbed up the side of the house, moving from balcony to balcony.”

  “That would take a lot of strength and agility,” Matthias said. He went through the French doors, stepped out onto the balcony, and looked down. “He would have to be in very good shape. A skilled cat burglar could probably manage it, but there are other possibilities. I want to take a look at the conservatory.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you probably wouldn’t have heard him break in if he came from that end of the house. Why would he take the risk of climbing the wall if he could simply let himself in through a door?”

  Amalie sighed. “You’re right.”

  * * *

  One of the small panes of glass in the conservatory door had been shattered.

  “That answers that question,” Matthias said. “The intruder broke the glass, reached inside, and unlocked the door. But it’s interesting that he brought the rope along. It indicates he anticipated that he might have to leave from one of the higher floors.”

  “Not everyone knows how to tie off a secure knot, let alone climb down a rope,” Amalie said.

  She was looking increasingly uneasy, he decided. Well, she had every right to be anxious.

  “A professional cat burglar would be able to use a rope for scaling a wall or making a quick exit,” he said. “As soon as the sun comes up I’ll take a look around outside and see if I can find anything that might give us a lead. What did the police say?”

  “They asked me for a list of items that the burglar might have stolen, but beyond that, they weren’t much help.”

  “Let’s take a look at Pickwell’s room.”

  “All right, but I’m almost positive that he never got that far,” Amalie said. “Thanks to Hazel’s scream, I interrupted him before he made it to Pickwell’s room.”

  “How would he know the location of the room you gave to Pickwell?” Matthias said.

  That stopped her.

  “Good question,” she said after a moment’s thought. “I don’t know. I suppose he would have had to go room by room. Maybe that’s why he went up to the third floor first. He was planning to work his way down through the house and leave the same way he came in.”

  A short time later Matthias stood in the center of the room that Pickwell had used. Nothing appeared to have been touched since he had searched the place the previous night.

  “The question is, what the hell was he looking for?” Matthias said.

  He didn’t realize he had spoken aloud until Amalie gave him an odd look.

  “I think that, under the circumstances, you owe me a few answers,” she said. “This is my home as well as my place of business, and it was invaded tonight. My aunt is in the hospital because of the intruder. We seem to be in the middle of a dangerous situation. I need to know what we’re dealing with here.”

  He shoved his fingers through his hair and thought about the situation for a couple of seconds. She had a point. It was dangerous.

  “At the start of this thing, I thought that it was in your own best interests not to know too much,” he said.

  She swept out a hand. “As you can see, not knowing anything at all was clearly not in my best interests, or those of my aunt. There is a very good possibility that when news of what happened here tonight hits the Herald tomorrow, I really will be ruined.”

  That jolted him. “Why would the press take much notice? You said nothing was taken.”

  “You don’t seem to know how the press works, Mr. Jones. Allow me to explain a few of the facts of the innkeeper business to you. Maybe—just maybe—I could have survived the publicity surrounding Pickwell’s murder. After all, he wasn’t killed here at the inn and it’s the robot that has been getting all the attention. But now that there’s been another incident here at the Hidden Beach, one that landed an innocent woman in the hospital, it might be extremely difficult to attract paying customers after the news gets out. I definitely deserve some answers.”

  “You’re right. Give me some time to take another look around up here. When I’m finished, I’ll explain why I’m interested in Pickwell. But I’d better warn you, at the moment I’ve got more questions than answers.”

  Chapter 13

  He could have been killed. The bitch had shot at him, not once but several times. It was pure luck that he hadn’t been hit.

  Eugene Fenwick’s hand was shaking so badly it took him a couple of tries to raise the whiskey bottle to his mouth. When he finally did manage to reach his target, the glass rattled against his teeth.

  He took a couple of fortifying swallows and lowered the bottle. For a moment he just stood there, breathing hard and staring at the cot with its sagging springs and stained mattress.

  Amalie Vaughn was a cheap circus whore. What was she doing with a gun?

  When his heart stopped pounding, he put the bottle down and crossed the room to his battered grip. He opened the old suitcase and looked down at the bundles of newspaper clippings and circus posters. On top of each neatly tied package there was an envelope with a name written on it. Inside each envelope was a long wire necklace strung with shiny black glass beads.

  The envelope on top of the fourth bundle—the one marked Amalie Vaughn—was empty.

  Eugene reached into his jacket and took out the black necklace that he had intended to lea
ve in front of Amalie Vaughn’s bedroom door.

  There would be another opportunity, he vowed. She could not be allowed to defeat him. He would avenge Marcus. When her turn finally came, he would make her pay for the fright she had given him tonight. He would toy with her longer than he and Marcus had toyed with the others. Make her think that he would let her live if she did exactly as he told her. Make her beg for her life.

  Fury rose up inside him, threatening to choke him. Leaving the grip open, he went to the cot, sat down, and picked up the whiskey bottle again.

  Everything had gone wrong tonight. In the old days Marcus had been the one who worked out the plan. He had been good at that kind of thing. Marcus had been real smart. He’d always said that it was important to make certain that things were under control before he made a girl fly. The goal was to enjoy the final performance, after all, and you couldn’t do that if you had to worry about an interruption.

  Eugene still couldn’t believe what he’d seen that night in the tent. Marcus had gone down so hard and so fast he hadn’t even been able to scream. The sound of his body hitting the floor had stunned Eugene. It wasn’t supposed to end that way.

  He swallowed some whiskey, lowered the bottle, and contemplated how the Flying Princess would pay. She was going to beg, all right, the way Marcus had made the others beg.

  The problem tonight, Eugene decided, was that he hadn’t expected the older woman to hear him. Who knew she would do something stupid like rush out into the hall and start screaming? He’d silenced her with a handy vase but by then it was too late. Vaughn had come up the stairs shouting that she had a gun. He’d barely managed to escape.

  She had made him look stupid.

  The knock on the door of the cabin startled him so badly he almost dropped the bottle. He realized that although the shades were pulled, whoever was outside could see that there was a light on inside.

  “Go away,” he said. “I paid a week in advance for this place.”

  “I would like to talk to you. I believe we have a few things in common.”

  The voice was unexpectedly familiar. Whoever was outside the door sounded like an actor in one of those movies about rich people in London or New York. Cary Grant, maybe. But there was something off. The voice was muffled and indistinct.

  “You’ve got the wrong cabin,” Eugene said.

  “My calling card,” the muffled voice said.

  Eugene sat, frozen in panic, and watched two twenty-dollar bills slide under the bottom edge of the door.

  Bewildered, he rose from the bed, the whiskey bottle clutched in one fist. Forty bucks. It was a small fortune for a guy like him.

  He reached down and grabbed the bills.

  “Leave me alone,” he shouted.

  Another twenty appeared.

  Eugene snatched up the bill. He shoved all three into the pocket of his trousers. Gripping the whiskey bottle in one fist, preparing to use it as a weapon, he unlocked the door and opened it.

  There was no one on the front step.

  “What the hell?” Eugene started to close the door.

  A figure moved in the shadows on the right-hand side of the door. The light spilling through the doorway gleamed on a pistol.

  Dumbstruck, Eugene edged back into the cabin. The stranger followed, moving into the light. He was dressed in a classy-looking jacket and trousers and a crisp white shirt. There was something terribly wrong with his face. From the neck up he was swathed in bandages. There were holes in the wrappings where the eyes and nose and mouth should be.

  The man with the gun was wearing a mask that made him look like Boris Karloff in the movie The Mummy.

  Eugene told himself it should be funny, but he had never been so scared in his life. He retreated into the cabin.

  Mummy Mask followed and closed the door.

  “You can call me Smith,” he said in his muffled Cary Grant voice.

  Chapter 14

  Amalie had coffee ready when Matthias walked into the big kitchen. His grim expression told her that he had not found whatever it was that he was hoping to discover in Pickwell’s room.

  “Have a seat,” she said. She waved a hand to indicate one of the wooden chairs at the big table in the center of the kitchen. “I take it you didn’t have any luck in Pickwell’s room.”

  “No. It was a long shot because I had already searched the place, but I figured maybe I had missed something. I went through everything again. Nothing had been disturbed. I’m sure the intruder never got that far, assuming that was his objective.”

  She realized that she almost felt sorry for Matthias Jones. Almost.

  She put the cup and saucer down in front of him and added a small bowl of sugar and a little pitcher of cream. Then she took a seat on the other side of the table.

  “The first time you asked to search his room I got the impression that you were looking for a very specific item,” she said. “Care to explain?”

  “I was hoping to find a device that probably resembles a large, heavy typewriter.”

  “Probably resembles a typewriter?”

  “I’ve never seen the Ares machine.” Matthias drank some coffee and lowered the cup. “No one I know has seen it. I found some drawings, just early design sketches, but I am fairly certain that the final version of the machine looks a lot like a standard typewriter.”

  “What makes this particular typewriter so important?”

  Matthias drank some more coffee and then, slowly, he started to talk.

  “The Ares machine is a prototype of a new cipher machine, a device that can send and receive encrypted messages,” he said.

  She raised her brows. “I’m not an engineer or a cryptographer but I do know what the word cipher means.”

  “Sorry. Cipher machines that look a lot like typewriters have been around for a long time, ever since the end of the Great War, in fact. They are constantly being improved and redesigned to make the encryption more secure. As far as we know, the most advanced devices on the market today are those based on a design that was patented by Arthur Scherbius in Germany. They’re called Enigma machines.”

  “Machines, plural? You mean there are a lot of them out there?”

  “Sure. For years Enigmas were routinely marketed internationally to large businesses, as well as to various military organizations and governments. They were very expensive, however, so they didn’t show up in your local lawyer’s office or accounting firm.”

  “Businesses like that wouldn’t have a lot of reasons to send encrypted messages anyway,” she said.

  “No, but governments, intelligence agencies, and various military organizations do. A few years ago the German army took control of the licensing and production of the Enigma machines. After that, all sales had to be approved by the German army.”

  Amalie shuddered. “War is coming, isn’t it?”

  “To the heart of Europe, yes. And if England is drawn into the conflict, which is very likely, sooner or later we will become involved as well. The bottom line is that every government and every military in the world is now keenly interested in advanced cipher machine designs.”

  “And that’s where Dr. Norman Pickwell comes in, I suppose?”

  “He was in town to sell the prototype of the Ares cipher machine in a black market deal.”

  Amalie reflected briefly on the unusual education she had received growing up in the circus. That was what happened when your trapeze artist father married a well-educated teacher with a head for business.

  “Wasn’t Ares the Greek god of war?” she said.

  Matthias’s mouth quirked at one corner, but not with humor. “Appropriate, don’t you think? Codes and ciphers have always been critical factors in warfare.”

  “Did Dr. Pickwell invent this advanced cipher machine you’re looking for?”

  “No. He stole it. Pickwell
was, at best, an uninspired inventor whose goal was to perfect robots.”

  “What did his robot, Futuro, have to do with a cipher machine?”

  “The robot demonstration was meant to be both a cover and a distraction,” Matthias said. “Pickwell had been tinkering with mechanical men for years. Setting up a demonstration of Futuro gave him a plausible reason to be here in Burning Cove. This is where the sale of the Ares machine was supposed to take place.”

  “If Pickwell didn’t invent the cipher machine, how did he get his hands on it?”

  “From what I was able to tell when I examined the crime scene, Pickwell murdered the man who invented the Ares.”

  “What?” Amalie set her coffee mug down with considerable force. “Dr. Pickwell killed someone? That’s hard to believe. He was a very anxious, nervous person and I know that he was obsessed with the demonstration at the Palace, but it’s hard to imagine him as a murderer.”

  “Anyone can kill given the right motive,” Matthias said.

  He sounded so matter-of-fact she knew he’d had some practical experience in the matter. She thought about her last climb to the top of a trapeze six months earlier. The knowledge that she had been responsible for a man’s death—no matter how justified—still gave her nightmares. Until the night she’d been forced to fight for her life, she would have said that she was not capable of killing anyone.

  “You’re right,” she said. “So, what was Pickwell’s motive? Money?”

  “My read on Pickwell is that he was desperate for fame as a brilliant inventor.”

  “Your read?” she said.

  “It’s what I do,” Matthias explained. “I look at a situation and try to analyze the bedrock truth in it. If you go deep enough, there is always some truth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m an engineer by training but for the past few years I’ve been working as a consultant for a firm called Failure Analysis, Incorporated.”

  “When things break, you figure out what went wrong?”