One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  Which made me suddenly remember Bly, still asleep at my house. I absolutely didn’t want Ross and his business associates to know she was there and would miss me. I didn’t want them deciding she knew too much. I said, “Ross, how long am I going to be here?”

  “Until next week. I can tell you now, since you can’t do anything about it. The whole thing will be over next Tuesday, that’s when the minister’s coming and they’ll grab him.”

  “Minister?” I hadn’t thought Islamic religious figures were called “minister.”

  They aren’t. “Oil minister,” Ross explained, “from one of the Trucial States. He’s the guy they’re gonna get.”

  A Trucial State; would that be Dharak, the oil minister an associate of Hassan Tabari’s? But if I asked, it would turn out I was showing too much knowledge again, so I just said, “On Tuesday. So I’m here until then.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Sam,” he said, “but you honest-to-God did bring it on yourself. I’ll make you as comfortable as I can, but this is gonna be your home for the next six days.”

  “Then do me a favor.”

  “Anything. Something to read? I don’t think they’d let me give you a TV.”

  “Nothing like that. But I’m supposed to see Bly tomorrow afternoon, and she’ll worry if I don’t show up.”

  “You want me to call her? Sure.”

  “No, Ross, I do not want you to call Bly.” I was very tensed up and scared with all these guns around, but I made myself sound as sarcastic as possible under the circumstances, to make him do what I wanted without thinking about it too much. “If you call her,” I said, “what’s she going to think? You're supposed to be the plot genius around here.”

  He didn’t like that. Face stiffening, he said, “So what do you want?”

  “Call my house first thing in the morning. Before eight o’clock, so Robinson won’t have gone out anywhere.” And Bly won’t have started to panic yet, with luck. “Tell Robinson I’m going out on the boat with you for a few days and I asked you to call him while I made my business calls. Tell him I’m supposed to see Bly, and ask him to phone her and make my excuses and say I’ll explain next week. All right?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Consider it done.”

  “Good.”

  I was counting on Rohinson’s having quick reactions here, not blurting out on the phone that Bly was already in the house. But I had to hope for something to fall my way. And wouldn’t Robinson and Bly then put their heads together and decide it was time to phone Deputy Ken? And wouldn’t that be enough to get them onto this property before some of these guns around here started going off?

  Six days of this. Good God.

  42

  Dynamite.

  No, I don’t have six days.

  Is Ross lying to me, or are they lying to him? And what difference does it make?

  I had fallen into a very uneasy sleep on the sofa, the recessed fluorescent ceiling light still on, and had abruptly awakened with a mind clustered and confused, but understanding more than when they’d locked me in here.

  A truckload of dynamite had been caught on its way to Al-Gazel.

  Some Islamic fundamentalist leader had urged the faithful to destroy that mosque.

  The pool-company van was filled with metal-banded cardboard cartons of dynamite.

  I’d been too distracted by thoughts of Bly when Ross told me the story about the oil minister from the Trucial State, or I would have realized at once that it didn’t make any sense. If this small army of people, this Barq group, were really interested only in kidnapping some Middle Eastern country’s oil minister, there had to be better places to do it than the Al-Gazel mosque. Of course such a man would have tight security around him all the time, but people who travel a lot—and Middle Eastern oil ministers travel all the time—are constantly vulnerable, particularly to a concerted semi-military action by a large, well-equipped group of men. An airport, a hotel, a limousine on the freeway; almost anywhere at all would have fewer security problems for the attackers than Al-Gazel.

  Did Ross believe the story? It was so hard to tell, but his enthusiasm led me to believe the answer was yes. Could he be enthusiastic about a project with real mass murder in it? On the other hand, his working title suggested he knew the truth: Fire Over Beverly Hills.

  When the van full of dynamite explodes, taking Al-Gazel with it.

  On Friday.

  That was the other lie, that they weren’t going to make their move until next Tuesday. Again, it was impossible to tell if Barq had lied to Ross to keep him controllable or he had lied to me for the same reason, but the lie was still the same. They were not out to kidnap one oil minister next Tuesday; they were out to destroy the entire place. Friday is the Islamic holy day, when the faithful must say noon prayers in the mosque, and this Friday was to be the official opening of Al-Gazel, with major ceremonies. The building would never again be so full. When better for Barq to attack than when Al-Gazel would be packed solid with their political and religious and financial enemies?

  I looked at my watch, but of course it was gone. They’d taken that, and my belt, and my shoes, and everything in my pockets, when they’d locked me in here. There were no windows, only the overhead fluorescent as a light source, and so no way to tell what time it was, whether it was day or night.

  It had been quarter to four Thursday morning when Doreen had phoned, just a few minutes after four when I’d reached this house, probably no more than quarter past the hour when I was put into this room. Then I’d moped and paced in here for a while, considering flushing all Ross’s manuscripts down the toilet in revenge, before groggily passing out on the sofa. I was hungry now, but that didn’t mean anything in particular. It seemed to me the time could be anywhere between eight in the morning and noon, but how could I be sure?

  In The Prisoner, 1955, Alec Guinness played a Cardinal Mindszenty-type priest, brainwashed in a Communist prison, in which one of the techniques was to keep him in a windowless room where he would never know the time, or day from night. There’s a strong scene where, in his efforts to invent a clock, he’s shown failing to make a pendulum out of a button and a piece of string. His intensity there is so complete, and so apparently natural, and so understated, that I’ve always used that as my model when I’ve had a scene to play involving tight attention on a difficult or muddled or futile task. And now I had another use for that scene: It told me not to think about time, not to worry about it. There’s nothing to be done. Think about something else.

  Like getting out of here.

  Like, before that, getting my wits about me.

  There was soap in the tiny lavatory, and a small facecloth, but no toothpaste or any way to shave. I stripped, gave myself a rudimentary sponge bath, put my shorts and socks back on, and went out to the other room to exercise. The pale gray industrial carpeting was just soft enough for the purpose. I did my running in place and my arm swings and my knee bends, and was on my back doing my sit-ups when I heard the door being unlocked.

  The original purpose of this door, of course, was to keep people out, not in, so it opened inward and was equipped on this side with dead bolts top and bottom. On the other side there was only a simple lock and key, but with this door it was sufficient. The hinge joint showed in here, and with a pair of ordinary hinges I might have been able to remove the pins and get out that way, but this heavy weight was held up and in balance by an entire length of piano hinge, impossible to do anything about.

  I was on my feet, trying to take controlled deep breaths, when the door opened. Two men came in, one bearing a tray. Both had revolvers stuck under their belts. One or more other men stayed out in the hall, and with the door open I could hear some sort of twangy plucked music, with a dragging rhythm. Rather loud too.

  My visitors glanced at my shorts and socks, but showed no reaction. The one put the tray on the coffee table and stepped back, while the other closed the door (which shut off the music), turned to me, and said, “Eat.
”

  A pretty efficient system. They would both stay until I was finished. Breakfast was finger food—overcooked hamburger on an English muffin, and a pear, so no need for knives and forks. Lukewarm unsweetened black coffee was in a plastic cup.

  I forced myself to eat, though it wasn’t easy with two armed men standing over me. But at least if they were feeding me, it meant I still had time, they weren’t planning to kill me just yet.

  I couldn’t keep from wondering what the time was right now, but I wouldn’t ask. They might have answered—they weren’t out to brainwash me, like Alec Guinness’s cardinal, merely store me until I could be conveniently killed—but what good would it do to know that right now was eight forty-three or ten-seventeen?

  I finished eating, and dropped the pear core into the plastic cup. They watched me, standing over by the door, silent and impassive, and when I was done, they picked up the tray and left. The music twanged, then was silent. I heard the key in the lock.

  I washed again. For some reason this room made me feel dusty, a little smudged. I don’t like being afraid; the emotion itself can make you feel dirty, abused.

  I will break out of here, I promised myself. But there’s no point trying anything during the day. Two meals from now, I’ll have to be ready. I breathed deep, standing in the middle of the room, commanding my nerves to stop jittering. An actor knows how to deal with nerves, doesn’t he? So deal with them.

  Where to start? What to do? I looked at the shelves of Ross’s old scripts, lined up in their folders, their titles in red magic marker on white Mystic tape on their spines.

  Would one of those contain some clever way to get out of a locked room?

  43

  Here’s what was in the room:

  Two old unpainted wooden bookcases, six feet high by under three feet wide, next to each other, containing scripts in folders, boxed manuscripts, videotapes labeled on tape and box, and one shelf of scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about shows or movies Ross had been connected with.

  One fireproof metal four-door filing cabinet, not quite six feet tall, with several show posters on top of it, rolled up and secured with rubber bands.

  The sagging sofa and the small square Parsons-style wooden coffee table.

  Two posters for television series, both about twelve by eighteen, in glass-fronted metal-sided assemble-it-yourself frames, stored in the space between the side of the filing cabinet and the wall.

  Thin wood-veneer paneling nailed to vertical furring strips presumably nailed to the concrete block wall. A Sheetrock ceiling with a two-by-four-foot rectangle in which the fluorescent light was set, and a foot-square metal grid where air was drawn out. Industrial carpeting glued to the concrete floor, with an air-inlet grid against the wall opposite the door. Sheetrock-and-stud construction of the lavatory cubicle in one comer.

  An old-fashioned premodular telephone jack—without the telephone—close to the floor on the wall behind the door.

  The steel door leading out, and the simple flush door leading to the bathroom, the latter with an ordinary brass lockset with a locking mechanism on the inside knob.

  The bathroom itself contained a simple toilet, a small corner sink, a small rectangular pale blue plastic wastebasket, a round fluorescent ceiling fixture, and a small wood-framed mirror hung on a hook on one of the Sheetrock walls. The industrial carpeting continued into this room.

  And myself, wearing pullover polo shirt, slacks without belt, shorts, and socks. All pockets empty.

  That was what I had to work with.

  I was mad, and I was scared. Another man’s stupidity had gotten me into this mess, his stupidity and my own dumb efforts to be his friend. I did not want to die here in this room. No matter how undeserved my sweet life was, no matter how much it was a result of luck and chance, it was still a sweet life and the only life I had, and I was not ready yet to give it up.

  I was mad, and I was scared, and I was mad because

  I was scared. I didn’t like it that these people, nothing to me and me nothing to them, could come out of the blue and frighten me. I didn’t like it at all.

  I have been half-trained in a lot of things: acting, police work, soldiering, basketball, writing. Nobody is actually trained for the kind of position I found myself in now, but still I could have wished I was better at something useful. Karate, for instance. I know just enough to make the moves look good for the camera, but not anywhere near enough to deal with two armed men in a small closed room with a lot of their friends waiting outside.

  People had tried to kill me twice in the past, before this crowd here. Both times I was on duty, and the result was that I have killed two men, but none of that trained me for anything. It only showed me I don’t have a taste for it, and I don’t like the aftertaste. The first time was in Germany when I was on patrol in my MP persona, walking with my partner down a cobbled street in the raunchy part of Kaiserslautern at two in the morning, and a very drunk black GI came reeling out of a bar with a stained bayonet in his hand. Later it turned out he’d just killed his German girlfriend in there. All we knew was that he saw us and, instead of running away, ran at us, flailing with the bayonet.

  We tried to subdue him, which was a mistake. My partner got cut on the face and the left shoulder, I got nicked along the forearm—I still have the scar, though very faint—and when I tried to whack the fellow with my nightstick, he grabbed it out of my hand, snapping the leather thong around my wrist, astonishing me. Still astonished, I backpedaled, using both hands to unsnap my holster as he pursued me, my partner now on his knees, holding his face. From the bars around, the street was filling up with people who weren’t going to be any help. I took the .45 out of its holster, said not a word, and shot him three times. Later, they told me any one of the three would have done, but I’d wanted to be sure. Also, later, I claimed to have yelled, “Stop in the name of the law!’’ and no one came forward to contradict me.

  The other time was on the Meadowbrook Parkway in Mineola, when I was a cop there. I’d stopped a speeder at about four in the morning. Afterward, we found out the car contained a shipment of cocaine, from a smugglers’ landing place out near the Hamptons, on its way to Manhattan, which was why, as I approached the car, people in it started shooting at me, and all at once the car leaped forward. (I’ll never know why they stopped in the first place, since they were going to shoot and run anyway. Belated panic, maybe.) None of the shots hit me. I drew out my own .38 and shot at the tires, but I was shooting in haste, recoil drew the barrel up, and one of my shots hit the front seat passenger in the back of the head, killing him instantly. The driver went off the road, the car rolled onto its side, and I radioed for help, keeping my distance from those people until a lot of help arrived.

  Neither of those experiences could exactly be called training in dealing with violence. And both of those times I’d been at least as well-armed as the other guy.

  Well, I could wish I knew more things by now, and had more equipment, but this was it. This man and this room. Knowing I would have only a few seconds warning before someone came in—the scratch of the key in the lock would tell me—I went to work.

  Two screws held the phone jack to the paneling and the furring strip behind it. I had no idea what harm I could do, if any, but it seemed worth the effort, so I worked the jack loose, then turned it over and rewired it so all four wires came together. With any luck I was now causing some sort of short-circuit somewhere in the telephone company’s system, and they would have to send a repair crew to fix it.

  Next I turned to one of the framed posters. The frame was held together with loosely set screws, which I removed, reducing the thing to its components. The poster I rolled up and slid inside one of the other rolled-up posters on top of the filing cabinet. The glass and mounting board and all but one of the frame pieces I put back in the space between filing cabinet and wall, to be used after lunch, when I’d probably have more time.

  There were six rolled-up posters,
each held with two red rubber bands. I removed the rubber bands from two of them, and put the posters inside the others. The rubber bands went into my pocket.

  I searched under the sofa cushions, and under the sofa itself, but found nothing.

  I was slowly and with great difficulty using the metal edge of the poster frame to pry open the filing cabinet, when I heard that scratch sound at the door. By the time the door opened, announced by that twangy music, I was on the sofa, reading an unproduced movie script of Ross’s called Half a League.

  That was lunch; a turkey and cheese and mayonnaise sandwich on rye bread, another pear, another cup of lukewarm black unsweetened coffee. The same two men maintained the same routine, except that one of them looked briefly into the bathroom. I hadn’t spoken to them at breakfast, nor did I speak to them at lunch. I acted—I tried to act—as though I were merely resigned and patient.

  After lunch I finished breaking into the filing cabinet, which was a disappointment. Notebooks about story ideas. Old checks, year by year, in shoeboxes. Income-tax supporting documents. More videotapes, these marked only with a woman’s name. Nothing sharp, nothing heavy, nothing useful.

  The next work had to be done in the bathroom, where I began by removing the mirror from its hook on the wall, tapping the wall with a piece of poster frame until I knew exactly where the vertical stud was—right behind the hook, unfortunately—then beating with my elbow a small hole into the Sheetrock next to the stud. The piece of frame helped me enlarge the hole to about three inches square, and then I moved the hook to a spot just above the hole, so that when I put the mirror back on—it was a bit shakier here, without the stud support for the hook, but no matter—the mirror covered both the hole I’d made and the hole from which I’d removed the hook.

  My problem was, I was going to make something of a mess in my preparations, and I didn’t want trash left around to alert my guards. What couldn’t be flushed down the toilet would be pushed into the narrow space inside the wall.