A Dandy in Aspic

by Derek Marlowe

  “Let’s get out of this bloody place before Greiser returns,” Gatiss growled, and then added scornfully, “Greiser!”

  Reluctantly Eberlin drew back the curtains and walked heavily to the door, flicking his eyes vainly about the now overfamiliar room. Then he saw it. At first it seemed just a curious oddity, a slight deformity, until he studied it more.

  “Wait a minute,” he said quickly. Gatiss stopped and looked back.

  “That filing cabinet,” Eberlin said. “Do you notice anything odd about it?”

  Gatiss glanced at it apathetically and shook his head.

  “No, look at it,” said Eberlin, crouching before it. “Look at the gap between the bottom drawer and the floor. It’s about nine inches.”

  “What of it?”

  “I’ve never seen a cabinet like that. It’s as if it’s been deliberately propped up.”

  Gatiss raised his eyes to the ceiling in despair. “It’s just the design,” he said. “Let’s go before–”

  But Eberlin was on his knees pulling at the lower drawer. “Look, six inches of metal have been bolted on,” he said and heaved again at the drawer. On reaching its maximum extension, it stopped. “Help me get the drawer out,” he urged Gatiss. “Take that end.”

  Caught by Eberlin’s interest, Gatiss took one end of the drawer and began to pull.

  “No,” said Eberlin. “I think it’s best if we lift it slightly off its runners, then pull.”

  “All right,” Gatiss said. “Try it now.”

  The drawer jerked suddenly out of its moorings and crashed to the floor, throwing the whisky bottle spinning against its tin side. Both men held their breath and listened for any sound from below. None came.

  Then Eberlin, pretending to concentrate on moving the drawer clear, allowed Gatiss to feel in the now exposed depths of the cabinet. He saw him freeze slightly, his eyes fixed on the floor, then his hand reappeared holding a green folder tied with string. Gatiss glanced at Eberlin.

  “Draw the curtains again,” he said.

  Quickly Eberlin did so and turned to see Gatiss already undoing the string and laying the folder on the desk. Released from its binding, the file flopped open as if exhausted from the tension, and the two men simultaneously saw the single word scrawled on the cover. ELSTER.

  “Look outside,” Gatiss said anxiously. “See if you can hear anything.”

  Quietly Eberlin crept to the door, opened it slightly and listened for a moment, then shut it, shook his head and returned to the desk. He stood watching the other man open the file, his heart racing, conscious of sweat forming on his forehead.

  The first object among the small pile of papers that Gatiss pulled out of the file was a photograph. The story behind it was selfevident, and the reason for the hiding place sickeningly clear. The photograph, taken hurriedly by a flashbulb, depicted a man and a woman in bed. Both had obviously been surprised by the intruder and were gaping in horror into the camera. The woman, apparently quicker in her reactions, had attempted to put her hand over her face but had mistimed, so that only a blur beneath her chin betrayed the intention. The faces were clear and distinct but anonymous to both men.

  “Blackmailer,” Gatiss swore and threw the picture aside. “Bloody blackmailer.”

  Six more photographs in similar vein followed. All were of couples caught by some grub of a photographer in wretchedly obvious situations. At each one, Gatiss swore fiercely, but on the eighth picture he stopped openmouthed. Here was no illicit couple frozen in undignified postures. Instead, a man’s handsome face smiled out at the two men, a face openly posing as if for a passport. But it was not only the innocence of the picture that surprised both Eberlin and Gatiss. It was the face itself. It was Oriental.

  Eberlin stared closely as Gatiss passed it over to him with the words: “Recognize him?” Eberlin identified the man without hesitation. It was Lo Jui-ching, probably the most dangerous man in Red China, second only to Mao Tse-tung in the Politburo. Eberlin had heard a great deal of Lo’s fantastic rise to power in the past ten years, and knew it was widely felt that Lo, and Lo alone, was the controlling force behind Red China’s Secret Service, and worse, behind its Army. While in London, he had amassed a giant file on Hai-Wai Tiao Cha Pu, China’s International Espionage Department, and the names of Lo Jui-ching and Li Hsien-nien, Lo’s right-hand man, had appeared again and again. As far as Eberlin knew, Hai-Wai was split into two sections: Ching Pao, or the passive, fact-collating department, and Teh Wu, the actual operations branch. It was Teh Wu the British worried about. Worse, off-base doubles working for Peking couldn’t be Chinese, for obvious reasons, and thus were usually nationals of the country in which they worked. It was disguising the needle in the haystack to look like a straw. “Lo?” Eberlin asked.

  “Yes,” replied Gatiss with a frown, and looked at Eberlin in puzzlement. “Greiser can hardly be blackmailing him?”

  “Hardly. What’s underneath?”

  “More of them. Li Hsien-nien, Lin Piao–oh, and him. He’s one of the Old Guard. King Sheng.” Gatiss tapped the picture, then rifled through the remaining pictures. “Look at them. He’s got pictures of almost the whole bloody Peking Intelligence.”

  “Yes, but they’re not unknown. There’s nothing here that’s–”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What?” said Eberlin.

  Gatiss was standing dead still, staring at a photograph he had just picked from the file. For thirty seconds he said nothing as he studied the picture, his eyes wide, his mouth drawn tight.

  “What is it?” Eberlin whispered anxiously.

  Slowly, Gatiss turned toward him, his face tense and his eyes assuming an almost maniacal quality. Then suddenly he dashed the picture to the floor, strode to the mantelpiece and stared blindly into the fireplace. His body seemed frozen in a state of repressed anger and the room went cold.

  “The bastard,” Gatiss said finally to the air, and then fell silent.

  Slowly Eberlin bent down, picked up the photograph and looked at it. It was an ordinary group picture of some of the Hai-Wai hierarchy. He recognized Lo in the foreground, and some of his grinning associates behind him. And then Eberlin’s mouth gaped open and he had to turn away to prevent Gatiss seeing his reaction. Rotopkin had been right. On the phone, he had been right. His agony of the past fortnight was frighteningly over. Prominent in the back row of the picture, a neighbor’s shoulder obscuring a part of the chin but little more, was a smirking familiar face. Younger perhaps but none the less recognizable.

  Eberlin studied it for a long time, and found that all he could say was, “Why?”

  Gatiss didn’t answer. He seemed almost in a trance. Then, sluggishly bringing himself out of the catatonic state, he walked slowly to the desk and turned over the remaining objects in the file. One and all told the same pathetic story. A photostat of the man’s bank account in a Swiss bank, the total touching five figures and indicating a regular withdrawal on the first of each month. Another photostat. Suddenly, Gatiss picked up the file, threw it violently across the room, and stood, breathing heavily, staring at the scattered papers.

  “You know what all this means, don’t you?” Gatiss said quietly. “It means that Copperfield is Krasnevin.”

  Eberlin didn’t reply, remaining suitably silent for the occasion.

  Gatiss scooped up the pictures.

  “Do you think he is?” he demanded.

  Looking at the floor, Eberlin shook his head. Beneath the room, doors banged as light sleepers were disturbed by the noise.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But?” prompted Gatiss.

  “I’m trying desperately to think of an innocent answer to all this.”

  “Don’t try. It’s Copperfield, isn’t it? That’s what it says.” Eberlin nodded.

  “It’s Copperfield,” he replied, and a girl on the floor below began to giggle.

  * * *

  Snatching up the file, the two men hurried downstairs, past the gauping faces of the whor
es and out into the sunlit street.

  Neither said a word until they reached the hotel and the photographs were laid out once more on Eberlin’s bed.

  “He was in Gibraltar just before Nightingale was killed.”

  “I know …” Eberlin said quietly.

  “He even attended his funeral.”

  Gatiss spoke now without emotion, coldly analyzing the facts like a surgeon before an operation. “He’s married isn’t he?”

  “Copperfield?” Eberlin asked. “Yes.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “How long I wonder has he been …”

  Eberlin sighed. He suddenly realized he hadn’t slept for the past thirty-six hours. It was beginning to tell on him. He lay on the bed wearily, beside the pictures, and lit a cigarette. Gatiss slowly collected all the evidence together, leveling it neatly against the mantel top, and walked to the door. Eberlin looked up.

  “I’ll contact Frazer. Tell him we found him,” Gatiss said, and stood staring morosely into space for a moment. Eberlin noticed that it was seven thirty.

  “Better pack your bag,” Gatiss said finally. “We’ll fly back tonight.”

  Then he was gone, rushing out of the room, slamming the door. For a while Eberlin heard Gatiss moving around noisily in the next room, and then, mercifully, he fell asleep.

  15

  Formula One (Zero G)

  Who must die, must die in the dark, even though he sells candles.

  –COLUMBIAN PROVERB

  Life to me is like boardinghouse wallpaper. It takes a long time to get used to it, but when you finally do, you never notice that it’s there. And then you hear that the decorators are arriving.

  –ALEXANDER EBERLIN

  WHEN he awoke, it was afternoon, and the room was like an oven. Starting up out of his fully dressed sleep, he staggered to the washbasin and submerged his face in three inches of cold water. Then, not caring to change, he left the room and stopped suddenly in the corridor. He was safe, he realized. The pressure was off, and there was nothing more he could do.

  Gatiss’s room was empty. The bed was stripped and only a small packed valise gave evidence of its inmate. Eberlin turned away and hurried downstairs where Prentiss was waiting with a scraggy young fräulein who ran away at the first opportunity.

  “Afternoon, Eberlin,” Prentiss said with a smile. “I heard all about it. Fantastic.” And then, “I would never have guessed. Frazer’s sure to get you a promotion now.”

  “Where’s Gatiss?”

  “Gatiss? Oh, he was here about an hour ago. Then suddenly he rushed off somewhere. You know Gatiss. Her name’s Francesca by the way.”

  “Whose?”

  “Oh, she’s gone. Well, never mind.”

  “You don’t know where Gatiss went?”

  “No idea. But he’s been running about all morning. Are you going to eat?”

  “No.”

  Eberlin walked out onto the steps of the hotel, screwing up his eyes against the sun. Putting on a pair of dark glasses, Prentiss joined him and stood, hands behind his back, whistling the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto.

  “Oh he did say something about the Grand Prix,” Prentiss said suddenly, splitting an octave.

  Eberlin glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I think he was going to go there later. I’m not sure why.” Eberlin did and ran quickly down the steps toward the Mistrale. “Hey, don’t forget we’re leaving tonight,” cried Prentiss, but Eberlin was already starting the car and roaring away toward the west of the city, cursing the sun, which he loathed in any city, and heading fast toward the Havel.

  * * *

  The Avus had been built by Hitler and ran for a distance of ten thousand meters as straight as an arrow, then banked into a curve at an angle near enough ninety degrees, to be bearable, and rejoined itself, so that from the air it looked like a sealed shepherd’s crook. Along the length of the straight were trees, mostly poplars and elms which broke only when the road angled into that tight sharp bank, so that from the island inside the bank, the cars were hidden by trees until they suddenly appeared from nowhere and splattered themselves onto the banked turn like tomatoes hurled from a catapult, and hung static for a second before they roared off the curve and onto the level and out of sight once more.

  It was without doubt the warmest day yet of the season and the attraction of the Formula One meeting and the sun had brought hundreds to the track where they were now sitting in style with bottles of beer in the concrete stands, or packed as best they could on the grass island surrounded completely by track and approached only by a single tunnel under the road. Standing here among the jostling Berliners and tourists and ice-cream stalls, one came closer to a race than on any other track in Europe, since the cars, traveling well over a hundred miles an hour, roared around one; only by revolving constantly could a spectator follow an individual car, and then dizziness would soon take one. And always there was that incredible brown banking of the track, like an immense Cinerama screen on which the blues, greens, reds and whites of the racing cars exhibited themselves for a second, seemingly hovering in the air, burning tires, top of driver’s head, accelerator at maximum, only to be wiped clean by an invisible hand, leaving only a roaring in the ears and a nagging distrust for the law of gravity.

  Eberlin stood on the grass of the island, smoking a cigarette and peering intently into the crowd for the familiar face. He had been there over an hour now, and three races were over, the last being won hands down by a British Lotus, much to the consternation of the crowd since it was the only foreign entry in that event. As a result there was only sparse applause when the dwarf green car sallied smugly over the finishing line. Eberlin didn’t care either way. His only interests were Emmanuel Gatiss and an ice-cold Coca-Cola from the stall in the middle of the grass plot.

  He sauntered toward it, pushing through the sweating crowd, his jacket over his shoulder now, and waited idly by the scarlet stand; listening abstractedly to the continual verbal Muzak of the loud speaker. Cars roared around him incessantly, throwing up a high-pitched whine as they hit the banking, then careened back onto the horizontal to his right. He drank the Coca-Cola thirstily from the bottle, and glancing up, noted the dozens of polizei in the Mercedes Tower watching the race with rapt attention. The whole place seemed crawling with police. Eberlin sighed, threw the bottle away and decided to find an empty foot of grass, lie down, put a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail over his face and forget everything. And then, for the second time, he saw Sobakevich.

  There was no mistake about it. The crop-haired Russian was standing near the tunnel, staring intently into the crowd, one hand clasped tightly in his jacket pocket, the other picking at a spot behind his ear. He was watching someone, and it wasn’t Eberlin. The crowd had grown now and the whole grass expanse seemed filled with restless, gauping spectators, oblivious of anything but the race. Three men nearby were filming the event with a camera lens longer than their arm, a couple were making polite love under a candy-colored sun-shade, and at Eberlin’s feet a small boy, without any trousers on, was crying his head off. Eberlin glanced around anxiously, seeking to find the subject of Sobakevich’s scrutiny.

  At first all the faces seemed identical, but focusing his eyes in the direction of Sobackevich’s gaze, he discerned Gatiss himself, sunglasses on his nose, standing like an emperor stag, arms folded, staring up toward the grandstand. The man seemed momentarily frozen, etched clearly against the smudge of the cars behind him, then he was gone, mingling in the crowd, lost from sight. To Eberlin it all seemed like a macabre duel, for he was suddenly alienated from the two men who were acting out their parts alone. Then Sobakevich was gone too, hidden in the sea of faces, and Eberlin began to push toward the tunnel, vainly trying to see either of the two men before it was too late. But it was. A sudden scream hit the air, rising strangely over the screech of tires and hanging coldly in the air long after the sound had faded. People began to push towar
d the middle, and voices were raised as the crowd, attracted almost telepathically by a huddle in the center, treading on each other and collapsing under each other, and then halting in a swelling throng in the middle of the green dried grass. The race was ignored and a man died.

  Eberlin, drawn relentlessly to the new, unexpected and yet inevitable cynosure, pushed his way through the spectators, elbowing them aside, until he was within a few feet of the focal point of the crowd. He tried to peer over the heads but saw nothing but strained, curious faces, and then the police were jostling him aside and a gap appeared between the legs of the people and he saw him, lying on the grass, his face open to the sky, his crew cut standing out sharply on the pink scalp. It was Sobakevich and he was as dead as Queen Anne.

  The wretched figure in the pseudo-American clothes was prodded and searched by the police, and then the body disfigured by a bullet fired to synchronize with the roar of a car, was covered with a length of yellow canvas advertising Lucky Strike cigarettes. Eberlin knew Gatiss had killed him, here in the crowd, in full view of all, and was probably standing a few yards away from the spot cleaning his sunglasses or admiring the view. He hurried away.

  Suddenly, a voice behind him snapped in his ear, “Come on. Let’s get out of here,” and he saw Gatiss pushing past him and hurrying toward the tunnel. But the police were already there, blocking the only exit and pushing fleeing sightseers back onto the island.

  Eberlin stopped, feeling himself being shoved and kicked by the excited crowd, and then, turning slightly, he caught a brief glimpse of Gatiss as two of the polizei moved toward him, searching all those about him. Then Gatiss had gone and Eberlin was seized by other polizei, searched and thrust aside. Then it happened, like an absurd farce.

  Another tussle had broken out a few yards away and a man ran out onto the track. He was actually rushing up the banking, slipping for a second, then mounting the banking and scrambled to the top. Then Gatiss was running along the rim of the curve, toward the safety of the fields beyond. The spectators were in a panic and the grandstand as one man leaped to its feet. Eberlin stopped awe-struck and confused by Gatiss’s action, but then he saw one of the polizei running out of the crowd too, his eyes set only on his prey. Oblivious of the race, the policeman clambered up the banking, one hand reacning for a gun, the other clutching desperately at the crumbling surface of the gradient. Then he stopped, ridiculously stopped halfway up the steep slope, and raised his gun to fire. Eberlin was being thrust forward by the crowd as he saw a red Ferrari hit the embankment from out of the trees and hurtle straight at the unsuspecting policeman. Someone shouted a name, obviously the policeman’s, in warning, and he looked back. But it was already too late. The car hit him, hit him and gored him and tossed him in the air, and he landed, his back broken, in the gully of the bank. At the same time, as if in a macabre ballet, the Ferrari spun lazily upward, taking its time, hovered for a second on the rim of the slope in a farewell salute (tomato red car, large black number 7 on the side, driver watching the last few seconds of his life with amused curiosity) and then fell gently over the brim and exploded in private.