by Nick Carter
"Come on, Carter, let me in." Abe Jefferson sounded plaintive. "I have a man going after him. Open up!"
Nick opened the door, still holding the wicked spear.
"You sure there aren't any more? I thought it was your calling card."
Abe Jefferson gave him a curdling look and closed the door behind him.
"It is not my calling card. Miss Ashton, I am so very sorry."
Liz came out of her corner with the fight gone out of her.
"Abe, you look as though you haven't slept for weeks. Sit down and have a drink."
Jefferson sat down with a groan of exhaustion. "Thank you, but I do not drink on duty."
"You're not on duty in my house," Liz said decisively, and poured him a healthy dose of imported Bourbon on the rocks. Nick fingered the still-warm assegai and told himself that incidents not of his own making had gone far enough.
Jefferson gulped his drink gratefully and sighed.
"I see there was no message attached to that," he said. "But it was not aimed exclusively at you. Every American in town has had one of those tonight. Dick Webb of the Embassy caught one in the shoulder. The Patricks put out a fire in their living room. And Tad Fergus came home to find his bedroom smoldering. The others were like this — they fortunately did no damage. Some of them came with a message. The message said: 'Yankee murderers go home. It is obvious that this town is at fever pitch. This is misguided retaliation." He drained his glass and added, "At least, I hope it is misguided."
"It's misguided," Nick said quietly, "but I don't think it's retaliation. Like the bombing of the Embassy. Did you know that the same bombs were used in the bombing of the Russian Embassy and ours?"
Jefferson stared at him. "We do not have facilities for comparing that sort of evidence," he said stiffly. "That is not the report we had from Moscow."
"No, perhaps not. But that's the report we had from Moscow and our own laboratories. What's happening is a calculated double-play. First put Americans in a bad light, then try to scare them off with this phony retaliation stuff. But we don't scare off. And we don't fall easily for put-up jobs. I was hoping you don't, either. In the light of all that's happened today… Oh, by the way, did Hakim get home safely?"
Abe Jefferson's strained face broke into a smile. "Yes, thank God; at least that one thing went right. He spoke most highly of you. We put a watch on that herbalist's shop, as you suggested. There are two little rooms upstairs and the old man lives in one of them, or so they tell us at the Beauty Shop. The crone who runs it, who calls herself Helene, knows practically everything that goes on in her neighborhood. She says that a man named Laszlo, whom she describes as being turtle-faced and snaky, has been occupying the other room on and off for the last six months. Sometimes she doesn't see him for weeks, and then he comes and stays for several days. He returned yesterday, after an absence of a week or so, and then he must have gone out during the night since he came back twice again today — first quite early, soon after she opened, and then again between one-thirty and two. She also saw you, and described you as being very handsome and distinguished but rather high-nosed. 'Thinks he's bloody important, is what she said." He grinned. His tiredness seemed to have peeled off him and his humorous eyes were alert.
"Very perceptive old bag," Nick observed without rancor. "And since then?"
"Laszlo went out once, to eat. For the rest he seems to have been clinging to that room. As you know, we have no right or reason to search it or question him. Nor to tap the old man's telephone, which we find has an extension upstairs. As for the various eavesdropping devices in your room, we found their source in the room above yours. Though we were ready to catch any hasty departures after we ripped the wires out, nobody left. And nobody was there. There was a tripping device to work a tape recorder when you used your telephone, and another slow-running recorder listening into your room. Obviously, whoever placed them there need only return at a convenient time to play back the tapes. So naturally we staked out the room and the corridors with subtly concealed individuals, and waited. Oh, we were most clever." His tone dripped self-contempt. "The only person who came near the room was the electrician with a neat little tale of checking a short in the landing wires. He went about his business and left. It was not until hours later, when Stonewall came back to check on his men, that we realized an electrician was the very man for the job. By that time he had vanished. We have a description, but we have lost him completely."
"Was anyone registered for that room? Were any outgoing calls made from it?"
Jefferson looked at Nick with a certain respect. "I'm afraid that is something that took us some time to think of, too. No, the room was supposed to be empty. This is not a busy time of year for the Hotel Independence — even though that is where everybody who is anybody at all stays when they come to Abimako. No calls have been made from it since it was last officially occupied. But the desk clerk — also something of a gossip, like the impossible Helene — saw the hotel's electrician use the public phone booth in the lobby twice this morning. The first time was apparently while we were at the hospital. He is very vague about the second time; around lunchtime, he thinks."
"So the chances are he was reporting to someone," said Nick.
Liz glided about quietly, refilling the glasses and flashing approving looks alternately at Nick and Jefferson.
"It's not that I want to drag myself into your exclusively male conversation," she said at last, "but might not our knifer-with-the-embarrassed behind be able to shed some light on that? His orders surely must have come from whomever the electrician reported to."
The Chief's look was bitter. "He is as innocent as the day is long. He just happened to be passing by, broke and hungry, and he nipped in to look for money. We can't shake him. Not yet, that is. We're trying. Same with the characters we caught in the car that tried to run you down, Carter. They wanted to scare you off because they hate Americans, they said. And that's all we've managed to get out of them."
"How about the fellow with the cloak? The one I put to sleep?"
"Picked him up to keep him from reporting back. He's cooling off until he talks, but he might as well have bitten his tongue out…"
It was the same story over and over again. The dead couldn't talk and the live ones wouldn't. The pattern was repeated when Stonewall arrived with Nick's baggage and a report on the throwers of the flaming spears.
"Found one, killed one," he reported glumly. "The live one is as silent as the dead. Glassy-eyed with hemp when we picked him up and now does nothing but shiver and moan."
The last cheerful bulletin of the evening was that the President was hovering on the brink of death and that the news of his condition would have to be made public if there was no improvement within the next two hours or so.
Abe Jefferson stumbled off to bed and said he'd call as soon as he heard anything new. Nick showered, kissed Liz very tenderly and lay beside her until she drifted into sleep. Then he rose silently and put on his working clothes.
It took time to ease himself out of a rear window silently enough to avoid Abe's watchers. Even then he scrunched on the gravel when he thought he was clear and had to wait for nearly half an hour in the shadows before he was sure of himself. After that it was easy going under the intensely black African sky, and he reached the corner of the Avenida Independencia without encountering anyone.
The Avenue itself was more of a challenge. He waited on his corner until he could distinguish the watchdogs in the gloom, and he began to wish that Abe hadn't been so thorough. There were at least three men watching the front of the herbalist's shop from various angles. The lane at the back was a different proposition. It was open at one end only, and there was a solitary watcher across from it, pacing back and forth like a leopard in a cage. Abe must have been running short of qualified men; the fellow was not a clever watcher. He was obvious, and he was bored. He was so obvious that Nick was not the first one to get past him.
Nick flitted silently into t
he lane and clung like a slowly moving shadow to the rear walls of the low buildings fronting on the Avenue. Surely, he thought, there should have been another watcher in the lane.
He was right. There had been. He lay at the far end of the lane with his face in a dark, sticky pool, the back of his head dented hideously and matted with drying blood. Nick paused long enough to be sure that nothing could be done for him and to draw on the special fingerprintless, skin-thin gloves made for him by AXE's Editing Department.
He counted back doors until he knew he was behind the herbalist's shop. There were no lights showing from within, and the lock gave without a struggle against Nick's Lockpickers' Helper. His pencil beam swept the shop and found it empty of everything but the junk he'd noticed earlier. He retraced his steps to the back stairway and started climbing stealthily, one hand lightly on the rail and the other holding the lethal Wilhelmina. A sagging stairboard complained like a startled cat and he froze for moments, waiting. Nothing stirred. There were two doors on the tiny landing, both closed but neither of them locked. He fingered one open, very quietly, and sidled in. Still there was no sound. His small flashlight flicked on and probed around a tiny, filthy room with shuttered windows, an unmade bed and several rickety sticks of furniture, including a battered old armchair. The beam caught the chair and held it.
The room's occupant sat slumped in the chair at a curiously awkward angle. The clothes it wore were those of an upperclass workman, a foreman of some kind or possibly an electrician. The shirtfront was dreadfully stained. Nick catfooted over and raised the head.
It grinned horribly at him. The grin was under the chin, and it stretched from ear to ear in hideous welcome. Nick let the head fall onto the bloodstained chest and swiftly scanned the rest of the room. Empty food cans and a grimy spoon in the closet. Thick dust under the bed. Nothing in the open bureau drawers but little scraps of trash.
He doused the light and crept quietly across the tiny landing to the other room. It was very much the same as the first one, except that it was cleaner and the bed was occupied.
His flashlight beam shone down on the dark face, against the pillow. Two eyes stared back at him. Two old, stone-cold dead eyes.
Pierre Gets the Creeps
The old herbalist had not been dead for very long. About as long as the plainclothesman in the lane, maybe, but not as long as the man with the permanent grin. And he had not died easily.
His legs were halfway out of the bed and the bedclothes were thrown back as if he had been getting up when someone had stopped him with two downward slashes of a knife and then left him for dead.
That was their mistake. The old man had bled copiously, and the still-wet blood made a pattern on the pathetic old nightshirt that showed that he had struggled to an awkward half-lying, half-sitting position and twisted to one side. Nick's light slid from his body to the small table at the bedside. Its single drawer was open and revealed a typical old man's collection of pills and cures obtained from the nearby modern drug store and some loose papers. Most of them were bills and receipts and some were blank notesheets. A couple of them had fluttered down to the floor. Nick turned the light on them and saw that they were also blank. Near them, almost under the bed, lay a chewed, blunt stub of pencil.
The light flickered back across the bed and the agonized face stared up at Nick accusingly. After trying to sit up the old man had fallen back on the bed and his scrawny arms lay limply by his sides. But the right hand was loosely open and the left was clenched into a fist. An edge of paper protruded from the gnarled black hand. Nick forced back the clutching fingers and withdrew it.
It was a pitiful attempt at a message. Nick stared at it for moments before he managed to decipher the painfully formed words. There were only two of them, and they seemed to be: Eyes Dakar.
Eyes… Dakar. He burned the words into his mind while he stuffed the paper into his pocket and made a lightning inspection of the room. There was nothing there but an old man's carelessly kept clothes and few personal things. The single window looked down on the dark, back lane. Nothing stirred.
Nick left the one dead man and went back across the tiny landing to the other. He had left no messages, but Nick found a card identifying him as Alfred Gore, Electrician, Hotel Independence. The room smelled of blood, alcohol, and something else that Nick could not identify. An empty glass beside Gore's chair reeked of the local whiskey, and so did the man's horribly stained shirtfront. Laszlo of the Green Face and bulging eyes had evidently entertained him well before saying goodbye. There was no sign of the bottle or anything else… Bulging eyes. Eyes, Dakar. 'Eyes' had gone to Dakar?
And had covered his tracks behind him. Covered them with blood.
He had also taken with him anything that could possibly have been of any value to Nick, barring the scrawled note he had not known about. And of course the telephone extension that had been so handy for relaying information received from the Hotel Independence.
Maybe there was something of interest in the shop.
The watchers on the Avenida Independencia were still at their posts, blobs of thick darkness in the thinner darkness. Nick left them at their fruitless vigil and quickly made his way downstairs. He double-checked the backdoor latch to make sure that no one could steal in while he was in the front room, and then opened the door to the shop.
Something small and somehow rather horrible scrunched beneath his feet as he drew back the curtain and stepped into the musty little room. Beetle or roach, he thought, without dwelling on it, and moved silently toward the dim light at the front of the shop so that he could both use its faint glow behind him to look around and also shield his flashlight beam with his own body. Something scuttled across his feet as he reached the front door. Suddenly he was conscious of other sounds in the room — slithering, scurrying, fluttering sounds — as his passage through the room awakened something and annoyed it. Like the something that had scuttled softly across his feet.
The pencil beam of his flashlight swung low around the room, picking at the dusty shelves and searching for the eerie presence. He was the only human being in the room, unless…
His light jabbed at the floor. Something made one of those infinitesimal little movements and stopped a yard away from him. The probing flashlight sought and found it. The thing looked back at him. It had a reddish brown body slightly larger than a silver dollar, and eight long, reddish furry legs. A slight chill touched Nick's spine. He saw a menace in miniature, a creature called "Red Devil" by the bush natives because its vicious spider's bite stabbed like a pitchfork, burned like the flames of hell, paralyzed and killed.
It moved thoughtfully towards him, eyes glinting balefully in the pencil lightbeam.
Nick's first thought was to crush it underfoot. Then he remembered the incredible speed with which these horrors could move when aroused, and how Hank Todd had died, writhing, after he had tried to step on one in the Uganda bush. It also occurred to him, in that same instant, that there were other things slithering around the room.
Jump over it and run like hell? Can't get out of the front door — curse those useless watchers of Abe's. And God knows what other lurking things were waiting to sink their fangs into him while he fumbled with the curtained back door.
The creature stopped and looked at him. A soft hissing sound came from the rear of the room. Nick played the beam of the flashlight quickly over the floor, praying that Red Devil wouldn't take a flying leap at him in the darkness.
His first thought was one of amazement that he had managed to cross the room without stepping on anything more than a beetle. But it was probably his footsteps that had snapped them all horrifyingly to attention.
A second red devil was emerging from behind the counter, followed by a lizardlike creature Nick had never seen before. Red devil number two scuttled under the rear door curtain and stayed there, an armed guard covering the only possible exit. The floor between it and the first spider seemed to be twitching with strange life — spiders, be
etles, lizards, scorpions of enormous size, and snakes. Jesus Christ, what snakes! Two — no, three, four — tiny, squirming, spitting bundles of death. Gaboon vipers, was it? The hell with the name. They were vipers, and they were murder.
A bat swooshed above his head. Nick started very slightly, and the devil near his feet zigzagged closer to him. The whole floor rippled and shuddered. It seemed to be converging on him like one vast, wallowing monster.
The flashlight, in its travels round the room, had found the shelves and counter and the tiny beasts and one straight-backed grimy chair that must have been used by clients waiting for some weird prescription of dead herbs and living venom. It might yet be Nick's salvation.
He moved his feet cautiously and let the thin-beamed light play over the floor. The floor between him and the curtained door was writhing and hissing with strange life. He had time to curse himself for reacting too slowly to the slithering, shuffling sounds — yet it was only seconds since he had come into the room. Then the creatures closest to his feet — the first red spider, and a vicious little fork of lightning that he knew to be a viper — were moving in with horrible swiftness. He heard the hiss, and then he jumped.
The ancient chair teetered, fell back against the nearby wall, and straightened, creaking ominously. Even before it stopped its wild staggerings Nick had found his balance and was reaching into his pocket for the only tool that could possibly help him. As he found its reassuring, smooth, round shape he thought with grim humor of his own predicament. Ridiculous, he told himself, as he clamped the light between his teeth and his strong fingers twisted the small shape of Pierre. Like a woman scared of mice, leaping on the nearest chair.
But the things that shuffled and hissed around the chair legs were more monster than mice, and some of them could climb. Red devil number-something was already reconnoitering the left front leg and showing every sign of getting ready to climb it.
