by Nick Carter
His drink came. Hakim threw back his head and swallowed.
"Now the message?" he asked, his shoulders hunching suggestively.
"Now the message," Nick agreed.
Hakim talked. His eyes flickered off in impossible directions and his evil-looking head bent low like a striking snake. Beyond him, in the cafe, the man with the froggy lids fidgeted impatiently. Hakim talked of his long friendship with Abe Jefferson and of the promising students in his course — all the while hissing and crooning in an astonishingly evil way that gave the impression of a grasping man acting as a go-between for two extremely important principals. It was a masterly performance.
Nick cut him off at last.
"That'll do it. Now I have a message for you. First, though — I gather you can handle a tail. Are you willing to do it now? I warn you, it may be dangerous."
The awful eyes rolled lasciviously. "Time now for feelthy pictures?"
"Enough, Hakim." Nick kept himself from grinning. "Keep 'em for Cairo. This one is a little green-faced man, watching us right now. He's inside going crazy because he couldn't listen. Five foot six, globs for eyes with shutters over them, slightly handsomer than you but somehow much more horrible…"
"Unbelievable," hissed Hakim.
"Yeah, you'd think so. Now he may want to follow me, but I don't think so because he knows where he can find me. I want to follow him. So I give myself an opportunity. You. And I give him a reason, in case he doesn't already think he has one. I give you a message to take back. Take back where, I don't care. Shake him as soon as you can."
Hakim cocked his head over one hunched shoulder while Nick reached into his pocket and drew out an envelope that contained nothing but a blank sheet of paper.
"Invisible writing?" Hakim suggested helpfully.
"Of course," Nick agreed. "A new, permanent process. I will now add something to it."
He wrote swiftly, inscribing a meaningless message in a meaningless cipher on the innocent sheet of paper.
"I feel something slimy on the back of my neck," Hakim murmured. "Is that the way it feels when he watches?"
Nick folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. He sealed it decisively and thrust it at Hakim.
"Be sure not to guard this with your life," he said. "Yes, that's the way it feels when he watches. And I thought I was being over-sensitive."
"Sickening," said Hakim, putting the envelope into his pocket. "I've felt this way only once before. And the fellow who was watching then turned out to be slightly more revolting than Jack the Ripper. He went for little boys."
Nick stared at him, surprised that anyone else could share his own inexplicable revulsion without even having seen the man they both meant.
"Well, we're not little boys. How long are you free from the University?"
"One week," Hakim answered. "If you're thinking of asking me to join you again in something like this, the answer is yes."
"Thanks," said Nick. "I was. I'll check with cousin Abe. Now get lost. Literally."
Hakim pushed back his chair. "You don't think you should give me money?
"I do not," Nick said firmly. "You might keep it, for one thing. For another, I don't want to get you mugged for money. Let's not cloud the issue. Go lose yourself. I have dates for this afternoon."
"A pox on you and all your dates," Hakim growled sullenly, pushing back his chair. "Thank you for your lousy drink."
He sidled away without a backward glance. Nick watched him for a moment with apparent distaste and then let himself sink deep into thought.
When the man who made snakes slither down Nick's spine sauntered on to the sidewalk and strolled off after Hakim, Nick was staring thoughtfully into space and drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Nick let him walk as far as the crosswalk before he placed a bill and some change on the table and slowly started after him.
Nick crossed to the far side of the street and paused for a moment at the window of a curio shop. Hakim's tall figure was two blocks away and moving with surprising speed in spite of the shambling gait. His follower stayed well behind him. But the man's short legs made sudden little toddling movements as if he had underestimated Hakim's walking pace and had to hurry to keep him in sight.
When Nick moved away from the curio shop window, a tall, coal-black man on the cafe side of the street matched his movements and glided along the opposite sidewalk with aloof dignity. Nick stopped on the corner to buy a paper from a newsboy. Hakim had gained a block and the short man was holding his distance behind him. The tall black man, in filmy cloak and full trousers pinched at the ankle, stopped on his corner and waited for nothing in particular. Nick walked on. So did the man in the cloak.
It could be coincidence.
Nick looked at his watch and increased his speed. Two minutes later he was crossing a small square only yards behind the green-faced man. He lost Hakim momentarily but saw him again beyond the trees. The man in the cloak was closing in.
Hakim sauntered into a narrow street and turned into one that was even narrower. Here were lowslung dwelling places with huge brass doorknobs that had once been a symbol of status but were now covered with grime and neglect. Narrow steps led down into dim little basement-level shops smelling of old leather and overripe fruit. The cobbled road curved crazily and Nick paused to let the man with the green face get ahead. The cloaked black man passed him and stopped to peer into a window that had nothing in it but a dying potted plant.
Nick moved. He moved. It was not coincidence.
Both Hakim and his follower were out of sight. Nick rounded the curve and walked rapidly down an uneven slope. Once-white steps led up on one side to houses that desperately needed a coat of paint and down on the other to ramshackle wooden buildings that looked like abandoned storehouses.
The man with the sick green face was standing in the middle of a narrow footpath with his hands dangling at his sides. Even from the back he looked puzzled and betrayed. Hakim was nowhere in sight.
His disappearance was as skillfully contrived as his appearance. And even more astonishing.
Nick shot a sideways glance at his own black shadow and decided that the time had come to say goodbye. And he was adept in the art of vanishing, himself. The cloaked man gave him just the fraction of time he needed by stopping like a statue and staring at Green Face, who obligingly gave him something to look at by stamping his foot down on the half-paved path and swaying like a man with fever. Nick glided quietly into a doorway and turned a knob that yielded to his touch. He was not worried about finding the battered building occupied; he knew with cynical certainty that in this forlorn part of town he would be able to buy his way in or out of anything.
The room smelled vile. A snoring man lay on a pile of newspapers in the corner and told the world through his nostrils that he didn't give a damn who came or went or lived or died. A rickety ladder led upstairs to a loft. Nick took the steps quickly, still ready with explanations and defenses. But the loft had long ago been abandoned to the mice.
He looked through the grimy broken window at the scene below. A donkey cart was making its thoughtful way down the lopsided slope, its driver nodding sleepily in the noonday sun. The man with the green face had recovered himself and was walking purposefully along the shack-lined footpath (where Hakim had somehow staged his disappearing act) looking into every impossible little nook and cranny. The black man with the cloak had walked back to the curve of the cobbled road and was looking around wildly as if his pocket had been picked. Then he came back down the slope and peered anxiously along Green Face's footpath. Green Face was temporarily out of sight, but Nick could predict where he would reappear. The Cloak started along the footpath.
Nick whistled shrilly. The Cloak froze in his tracks. Nick whistled again, urgently. The tall African swung around and started walking slowly toward Nick's hiding place. Nick kept on encouraging him with urgent little whistles. In the distance he watched Green Face emerge from an alley and walk on. Down below, the African am
bled cautiously up to the doorway Nick had entered moments before.
Now! thought Nick, and raised his cane. Damn, the angle was too sharp. The African disappeared from his view and the door below Nick opened.
He was waiting at the opening of the loft even before the African took his first cautious step into the room. When the flowing white cloak came into view, Nick aimed his unfamiliar new weapon and fired.
The man in the cloak gave a yelp of pain and clutched his shoulder. He swayed for a moment, his face contorted more with surprise than pain. And then he dropped.
Nick looked out of the broken window. Green Face was coming back.
Aunt Abigail and Others
The flowing clothes concealed nothing but a short stabbing knife, some crumpled Nyangese notes and a set of rather gaudy underwear. Nick left the tall man where he had fallen and peered out through the partly open door. Hakim's follower had left the footpath and was standing near the curve of the uneven roadway. His shuttered eyes roamed back and forth along the street and found nothing that pleased them. He could see Nick's open door, but he could not possibly know its significance. There were other open doors on that shabby little street.
Not once had he looked back while trailing Hakim. Probably he had relied on the second man to guard his rear, or else he had not even thought of being followed and had intended to use the cloaked man as a substitute shadow in case Hakim had spotted him. But whatever he'd intended hadn't worked. His face was a study in bafflement.
Nick watched him standing there looking impotent and angry and saw him purse his lips into a whistle. A fluting sound hung on the air and faded. He waited, tried again. Two small children and a mangy mongrel bounded down the slope to investigate. The dog barked. The children turned and ran.
The man stood there for another moment and then turned and walked slowly back in the direction from which the trailing procession had come.
Nick left the snoring stranger and the unconscious one, thinking to himself what a nice chat they could have when they woke up, and glided like a phantom after the man with the green face.
At first it was about as tricky as Nick had thought it would be. His quarry stopped at every shadow and started at every sound. Once in a while he would swing about and stare up the street behind him, his head darting about in little searching motions. Now and then he stopped on a corner and whistled hopefully, as though he thought the man in the cloak might have turned up the wrong narrow street and was waiting to be found. Nick cursed his conspicuously American clothes and the telltale cane, and dodged and hung back until he felt sure he would lose his man.
But then, unaccountably, the man quickened his pace and gave up his futile search. He walked rapidly into a street parallel to the one they had started from and cut briskly through the business section. Nick followed him easily, picking his way politely through the pedestrian traffic and waiting patiently at stop lights. He stopped at a flower stall to buy himself a boutonniere and decline the offer of a shoeshine, and watched his man turning into the Avenida Independencia.
The man slowed his pace and dawdled on the sidewalk opposite Nick's hotel until something seemed to decide him to move on. Nick glanced across the street. There was nothing out of the way, so far as he could see, and the Police Chiefs car hadn't yet arrived. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes to two. He hoped his man would go to cover soon.
He did.
His movement was so sudden that Nick almost missed it while concentrating on making his own movements seem appropriately casual. He was a roving diplomat, taking in the sights of the city while waiting for his touring car to…
The corner of his eye caught Green Face turning briskly into a doorway under a sign reading "Herbalist." Nick strolled slowly to within a few doors of the place and gazed entranced into an art store window. Five minutes was enough of that. The shop next door was a Beauty Parlor. He skipped it and spent some time looking into the window of an ultra-modern drug store. The shop next door was the herbalist's. His man had not come out. How like Africa, Nick thought, to put the drug store next to the herbalist's and let you take your choice. He ambled over to the next window, with a few minutes still to kill before meeting his car and with no intention of flushing out his quarry.
The window was a fascinating junkpile of suggestively shaped roots and small bottles filled with revolting fluids. An ancient elephant's foot served as a tray for an assortment of dried bones and tufts of hair, and a sunburned sign exhorted him to SHOP HERE FOR WONDER DRUGS AND MIRACLE CURES. It was dark inside the shop and the crammed window almost obscured the counter. But he could see enough to know that the man behind the crowded counter was old and wizened and that the man who faced the old one was the man he had been following.
He decided to go in and buy an amulet.
The door came open with a rusty jangle of bells. There was a swish and a slam at the rear of the shop, and as the door closed behind him he saw that he and the old man were alone in the store. He blinked dazedly as if to accustom himself to the gloom, but he saw every detail of the musty little shop and knew that there was a door behind a curtain that was still swaying. He could even hear the footsteps going up uncarpeted stairs.
"Help you, sir?" the proprietor crooned. "Souvenir? Love potion? Strength of elephant or heart of lion? Or do you wish to look around?"
"I'd love to look around," Nick said truthfully, "but right now I haven't got time. A good luck charm, that's all I need. Something to ward off evil."
"Ah! Many kinds of evil, many kinds of charms." The old man busied himself beneath the counter. "This one, against wicked men. This for illness. This, to bring success in business…"
"I'll take that," Nick said, noting that it was a relatively clean old coin while most of the other offerings were shapeless little bags or yellowed teeth, and also noting the brand new telephone that squatted so incongruously on the counter. He paid the man and slipped the charm around his neck while his eyes found the telephone wires that ran up one low wall and through the ceiling.
"I wonder if I might use your telephone?" he said suddenly. "I see that I am late for an appointment." He put some of his change back on the counter and lifted the receiver without waiting for an answer. The old man sucked in his breath sharply.
"Oh, no! I am sorry, Senhor… M'sieu! No, I am afraid you cannot." He anxiously pulled the phone away from Nick and pushed down the bar. "It does not work very well — I am afraid it is out of order."
Nick raised his eyebrows. "It seemed to be working very well," he said coldly. "I distinctly heard another voice on the line."
"That is the trouble," the old man panted, making what Nick thought was a rather good recovery. "There always seem to be other voices on the line. There are telephones across the street at the hotel. I am sure you will find better service there."
"All right. I'll try." Nick irritably took back his change and walked out of the shop. The bells clanged discordantly behind him.
He looked across the street at his hotel. Its main entrance was almost directly opposite. Some of its windows were straight across from the small window above the «Herbalist» sign. Very convenient, he thought, wondering how long the herbalist had had his telephone — or phones. He also wondered how he had been fortunate enough to draw a room in the rear overlooking the quiet square.
It was still a few minutes before two and there was no car waiting for him in front of the hotel. It suddenly struck him that there were very few cars on the streets at all; perhaps it was something to do with the long lunch hours he'd heard about. Two cars were parked just beyond the loading zone of the hotel, both empty, and another idled on a corner while its driver chatted with someone on the sidewalk. The atmosphere was so strangely quiet that it was somehow not peaceful at all.
Nick thought of the fragments of speech he had heard on the telephone. A deep voice had said in French: "…dangerous to wait." The second voice was a strange mixture of nasal whine and sibilance, and it had said plaintively: "But we mu
st find out what…"
And a little old man who sold herbs and charms had abruptly cut him off. A little old man who was about as unlikely a candidate for high-powered international intrigue as Nick had ever seen.
Nick stepped off the curb and felt that familiar, crawling tingle at the back of his neck. He almost turned, but he made himself walk on into the street. There was no sense tipping off Green Face too soon — he'd find out much more by stringing him along. And, by the same token, Green Face had no reason — yet — to put a bullet in the back of Nick's head.
The roar of the motor slammed through Nick's ears and ripped his thoughts apart. The idling car no longer idled; it threw itself at Nick like an angry elephant but with much greater speed. Tires screamed and a horn blared furiously and Nick threw himself forward to miss the monster by inches. He cartwheeled on to the sidewalk and drew himself up by a lightpole, reaching reflexively for Wilhelmina. A police whistle shrilled and something flew past his ear to slap into the wall behind him and roll back almost to his heels. Thoughts of grenades leapt into his mind but he saw instantaneously that it was a rough stone with a piece of paper wrapped around it. A motorcycle cop roared out of a side street and flung after the fleeing car. Wilhelmina stayed where she was.
Nick picked up his cane and the stone and peeled off the wrapping paper. The crudely scrawled message read: YANKEE MURDERER GO HOME!
Abe Jefferson's car was engaged for some time that afternoon before it was free to take Nick on the tour, and so was the Chief of Police. When they did meet briefly, it was only to exchange rapid bursts of information and arrange an evening meeting. In the end it was Tad Fergus who acted as guide while Uru lashed the big car into breathtaking feats and Stonewall sat stolidly beside him with his tremendous right hand resting on his gun butt.
"Look, keep your car," Nick had protested vigorously. "Let somebody from the Embassy take me."
Jefferson's refusal was emphatic. "Mr. Fergus will show you around, since I cannot, but I insist that you take my car. It is bulletproof, whereas the Embassy cars are not. And Vice-President Adebe is using the only other safe car in the city. No, please do not argue. I have my hands full as it is."
