The Man Who Stayed Alive

by John Creasey

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She got in. Whittaker closed the door, and then slid into his seat in front of the wheel. Before he started off, he handed her a gun; one of those he had ‘won’, with a silencer. She hesitated, then put in into her handbag, without a word.

  There were things Whittaker had to remember. He hadn’t driven a car with a left-hand drive for some time and hadn’t had to keep to the right for a long time, either; he mustn’t take any chances, and he had to re-orientate himself before he moved off. Eve still didn’t speak. Pirran was breathing heavily, and kept making sounds which suggested that he would like to speak but hadn’t the courage.

  Eve said, ‘Drive straight through to Tenth Avenue and turn right.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He had some luck; there was ample room to get out of the parking space, so he didn’t have much trouble. The unfamiliar gears handled easily, but when he put his foot on the accelerator he nearly stalled the engine. ‘Easy,’ he rebuked »himself. He tried again, and the car slid forward; it hardly needed driving. The lights were with him. There was little traffic, although on Fifth Avenue and then on Broadway, little bunches were waiting at the lights, engines growling. He beat the Broadway lights; soon, he turned right on to Tenth Avenue. From the luxury of Park and Fifth, the aloofness of Madison and the bustle of Sixth Avenue, this was another world; as different as the Church of the Gospel Truth was from the apartments on Riverside Drive.

  No one followed them as far as he could judge.

  ‘Take the third block on the left,’ said Eve.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Slow down for a drive-in, when I tell you.’

  He nodded.

  They were among old buildings, high walls, garages, small factories. He saw the masts of ocean-going liners just beyond the end of the street and knew that he wasn’t far from the Cunard docks. He fancied that he saw the bows of the Queen B. showing just above the roofs when Eve said:

  ‘There’s the drive-in, on your right.’

  He took it.

  They were in a yard, with a few wrecked automobiles standing about, much more wreckage piled up in a corner. The blank walls of a warehouse loomed up on two sides; on the fourth was the blank wall of a house.

  ‘We won’t be seen,’ she said. ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Listen, Whittaker,’ Pirran blurted out, ‘I’ve told you the truth; it won’t do any good to . . . ”

  Whittaker turned round in his seat, marvelling because there was room for him to move so freely in a car. He looked coldly at Pirran, whose colourless eyes were watering and who hadn’t much courage left. Eve was sitting away from the man, but not looking at him; she gave the impression that she was completely indifferent to anything that happened to Augustus Pirran.

  ‘Gus,’ Whittaker said, ‘it’s daylight. I have to go under cover. So have you. Later, we’ll have another little talk. If it doesn’t work out the way I want it to, the police will be investigating a further case of homicide.’

  The words came out flatly; he hoped that Pirran believed him, and he believed that Pirran would.

  Pirran gasped: ‘Who are you? Who do you really work for?’

  ‘You were employing me,’ Whittaker said. ‘Remember? Where is that packet?’

  ‘I don’t know. Gann must have stolen it from me!’

  ‘Prove that!’

  ‘Who else. . .?’

  Whittaker said: ‘A lot of other people could have stolen it. Where is it?’ He repeated harshly. The effort to blame had angered him.

  ‘I don’t know — I just don’t know!’ Pirran gabbled. ‘I can’t tell you any more than the truth.’ He turned to Eve, his skinny hands stretched out, and he touched her; she drew back, as if away from corruption, but she couldn’t draw right out of his reach. ‘You make him understand! I’ve told the truth, no man can do more than that.’

  ‘The trouble is that I don’t believe you,’ Whittaker said. ‘You’ll learn, in time.’

  He struck the little man on the nape of the neck with the side of his hand. The blow jerked Pirran’s head backwards, then sent it lolling forward. Eve stopped him from falling on her. Whittaker got out of the car and went to the back, unlocked the door of the trunk. It swung up smoothly of its own accord. It was huge with enough room for two men as large as Pirran. There were a few oddments in it, including a length of rope; that was all. He went round to the side of the car and lifted Pirran out, carried him to the trunk and put him inside. He used a handkerchief to gag him, and the rope to bind him. He went back for two cushions and put these under the man’s head.

  Then he locked the trunk.

  Eve was sitting next to the driver’s seat.

  ‘Would you like me to drive ?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d rather drive myself,’ he said, and she nodded. He started the engine and turned the car round. ‘When I said that I ought to go into hiding, I meant just that,’ he told her. ‘Would you recommend The First Church, or Rachel’s apartment, or where ? I was going to try Rachel for a start, but I had the silly notion that you wouldn’t be about for a while.’

  ‘I didn’t trust you to stay away from the Waldorf,’ Eve said. ‘I’ll think about the best place to go. How long do you want to stay under cover?’

  ‘Until dark.’

  ‘And then?’

  Whittaker said: ‘There might be a hue-and-cry for Pirran. Your friend Ricky will want to get him back. I think that Pirran’s got the key to all this, although I haven’t yet seen how or why. I don’t think he’s told the truth, and I imagine we can scare him enough to make him. So, with Pirran a prisoner, we have quite a situation. We have the police looking for me, Rickett looking for Pirran, and Pirran working himself up into a fine state of jitters as soon as he comes round. He isn’t sure any more that I’m working for him alone. He thinks I might be working for Scotland Yard, and he’s afraid that I might be working just for myself. It’s that which makes him really scared that I might kill him. That’s the kind of pressure that might make him crack, and that’s why I’d like to be able to hold him safely. I’d also like time for Ricky to show his hand. It seems as if Rickett thought it worth having a man to watch over Pirran, and if that’s true——’

  Eve said: ‘Neil, will you tell me what’s in your mind, instead of talking this way? I was never interested in words for words’ sake.’

  The grin he gave came quickly and spontaneously.

  ‘All right,5 he said, ‘but the preliminaries were necessary. I think that Pirran still has that packet, or at least knows where it is. I think he hi-jacked it. I think that Rickett needs it badly, and would like to keep Pirran alive until he’s got it. Having possession of that packet, or knowing where it is, is Pirran’s one trump card. I’m not saying all this is true — I’m just saying that’s how it could be. There’s another possibility: that Pirran found out something about Ricky and is putting the black on Ricky. That seems as good a bet as the other and squares with what Camponi told Olive Johns.’

  Whittaker paused to glance at Eve, who was staring straight ahead of her. He didn’t tell her what was in the packet, and she didn’t ask. The years must have taught her to repress her curiosity.

  ‘The best way to get results is to let them all wonder what I know,’ Whittaker went on. ‘If we can hold Pirran, we should have the others worried. And we can take it easy for a day — you were saying that I needed some rest!’

  ‘Yes,’ Eve said soberly, ‘you need rest.’ But she was smiling faintly. ‘We can borrow Rachel’s car: no one will be so interested in that as in mine,’ she pointed out shrewdly. ‘We can’t use this one much longer, anyway; there will be a search for it. In Rachel’s car we can just spend the day — idling. How does that sound? Central Park, maybe, or Rockefeller Centre, or in an hotel. On your own you’d be noticed, but two of us together won’t be. We need a quiet day. You need rest, and still more rest. Why, we could even drive out to Scarsdale! I could call a neighbour and make sure the police and new
spaper men aren’t there. If they’re not we would be all right, and you could talk to Pirran there.’

  Whittaker said slowly, ‘It’s an idea.’

  ‘No one need know, and I think we could get in without being seen,’ Eve said with quick enthusiasm. ‘Let’s drive to get Rachel’s car, first, shall we ? We can pull up alongside, I can raise the trunk, and it won’t take long to move Pirran from one car to another.’

  Whittaker nodded.

  ‘Then I can tell Rachel what we’re going to do,’ Eve said. ‘Or something of it.’

  He nodded again. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Eve said.

  As he drove out of the yard he glanced at her; and he marvelled. Bob Gann himself couldn’t have been cooler. No one could. As he had already judged, she had one thing in mind: finding out who killed her husband. Nothing else mattered; and she didn’t look right or left any more than she had to. She was as good as Gann would be, in a similar quest; no one could be better.

  He wondered what was going on in her mind, beneath all the calmness: what storms were raging, what turmoil seething. Did she think much of Bob, or had the objective of her desire driven the picture of him away, or at least dimmed it? Did she think of Mimi? Or the young Bob whom he hadn’t seen?

  He turned into Tenth Avenue again, needing no telling how to reach Riverside Drive or the corner with 59th Street.

  As he approached he looked about with quickening tension. He sensed that in Eve, too. He scanned the park and the trees, the seats where old people sat and a few nursemaids watched their children or rocked prams.

  He saw no one who seemed interested in the apartment house.

  He studied the parked cars. There were not so many as there had been by night, and no driver sat with feigned nonchalance, no passengers lounged in the back.

  Why not?

  If it had been worth watching for Eve last night, why not now? Did the broad daylight explain that?

  ‘There’s Rachel’s car,’ Eve said; ‘the blue Mercury.’

  Whittaker drew alongside the blue car. No one was about, but there was a possibility that they could be overlooked from the houses bordering the road. That was a grave danger, but he had to take the risk. Cool as a man or woman could be, Eve brought him a car rug, from the trunk of the Mercury, and he opened the back of the brown car, spread the rug over Pirran and lifted him bodily.

  In sixty seconds Pirran had changed resting places.

  ‘You sit in the Mercury,’ Eve said; ‘I’ll drive the Chrysler and park it a few blocks up. Just wait here. If anything makes you get away I’ll be at Scarsdale tonight, after dark.’

  ‘Don’t be long,’ Whittaker said.

  She smiled, took the wheel of the borrowed car and moved off, He watched her until she was out of sight. No one followed her. He felt quite sure that she would be back before long. He could breathe freely for a while — a little while.

  Even the thought made him feel guilty, careless and in secure.——’

  He wondered whether the man had been found in the bath; whether anyone yet suspected that Pirran had been kidnapped. He kept trying to make sense of the different things that Pirran had told him. He came back, time after time, to some simple facts. That Gann had been killed; he, Whittaker, and Eve nearly been killed. There was Pirran’s story of a vast wealth of diamonds; there was Camponi’s story, to Olive Johns, of killing Bob and trying to kill him because of what Pirran might have told them.

  That was on Whittaker’s mind all the time. What could it be? And had Pirran lied? Did he know some secret deadly to Ricky?

  If Pirran knew more than he had said, by nightfall he would be in a mood to talk. Hunger and fear did strange things to courage.

  There was the day to spend.

  With Eve Gann.

  The thought of that brought a kind of peace. From the time they had got into the brown Chrysler together, that peace had been upon them. When facts were facts, nothing could get in the way. There was the constant tension, the need for being on the look-out every moment, the continuing fear that they might be watched; that the police, on the one hand, or Ricky’s men on the other, might pounce. Yet there was a kind of peace when they were together.

  Eve had been gone ten minutes; not very long.

  She’d been gone fifteen minutes.

  She’d been gone for over twenty minutes, a hell of a time. He felt his heart pounding now; was much more afraid for her than for himself. He couldn’t sit here and wait much longer. If Ricky had had a man watching, one who had seen her, snatched her, killed . . .

  She was coming, walking calmly and superbly.

  The sight of her calmed him; and the new peace told him how frightened he had been.

  ‘I called Rachel,’ she said; ‘it’s all right about the car.’

  She got in beside him.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE QUIET HOUSE

  It was dusk.

  Here and there through the trees lights shone, yellow and inviting. There were no street lights in this part of Scarsdale. A car moved on a narrow road, not far off, swaying up and down, with the headlights making patterns upon the trees and the ground, now casting long shadows, now short ones; a silent, pirouetting ghost. It turned, at last, and the faint glow of its headlights vanished over a distant hill.

  ‘Turn right along here,’ Eve said, ‘and you’ll come to an empty plot.’

  She had telephoned a neighbour, saying she wanted to collect something from home but wouldn’t venture if newspapermen or the police were about. The neighbour had assured her that they had all gone; the last had left before dark. No one would expect Eve back here.

  Whittaker turned right. He was not using headlights, and the sidelights gave hardly any glow at all. The road was uneven, but the car so sprung that it was easy to forget that. Soon, Eve told him where to turn in, and he put the nose of the car between trees and turned off the engine. The silence which followed seemed unbroken, but soon he became aware of noises nearby and noises afar off; the universe had no true silence.

  Neither of them moved.

  Whittaker thought, ‘If I say anything about the day, there won’t be a day to remember.’

  He meant that it could be so easy to spoil. He meant that from now until the end of his life he wanted to remember this day.

  After leaving Riverside Drive they had driven to Central Park, taking it easily, pulling up within sight of the big lake, and watching the children sail their model boats, pushing with sticks, urging with boisterous breath, or sitting back snugly and watching their engines taking the craft across with an even chug-chug-chug. Out of the park, and then a drive round the whole of Manhattan, fast as Whittaker wanted to drive, with a touch of exhilaration which speed and the might of the city gave him.

  He had turned off the Roosevelt Drive near 106th Street and Eve had gone off, to buy sandwiches and pie, some chocolate, and some milk. They had sat overlooking the Bronx, to eat it. It had been a period of quiet in the middle of the storm, of relaxation in the middle of tension. Only now and again, when a policeman had appeared to look intently at him, had the tension grown taut.

  He hadn’t been stopped or questioned; his face might have been the face of a thousand men. He just wanted to remember the day without saying or doing a thing that would have given Eve cause for regret. She had none now. He believed that this day had helped her, and he would never quite know why.

  Yet they sat still.

  He stirred at last.

  ‘Are you sure we won’t be seen ?’

  ‘We can walk to the back of this plot,’ Eve said; ‘it hasn’t been properly cleared. Then through the gardens of Elise Gardner’s home and across into’ mine. The only risk is bumping into someone.

  No one seemed to be about.

  Eve got out. They closed the doors of the car quietly, and Eve led the way at first. Soon he found her hand resting lightly on his arm, the guide and the touch that he needed. It was very dark. They rustled through long grass, an
d the twigs of a previous year cracked underfoot, but nothing else stirred. Here and there the lights; here and there the sounds of cars; that was all.

  ‘Near here you’ll find a creek,’ she said; ‘it’s fenced both sides.’

  ‘Crik?’

  ‘Creek. Stream.’

  ‘Ah!’ They were whispering as if they were conspiring together. Whittaker walked with greater care, and made out the strands of wire, held up by posts several yards apart, and beyond it a narrow stream. The last of the afterglow shone on the surface, making it look like a narrow mirror in a dark room. The banks were steep and they could step across. He went first and turned to help Eve. She put both of her hands in his and he pulled her across, and for a split second of time they were close together. He released her, and they turned and walked as she directed, no longer arm-in-arm, until they came upon the darkness of her quiet house.

  She was taking keys out of her handbag.

  ‘Let’s be sure it’s as empty as it looks,’ Whittaker warned. ‘We’ll walk right round.’

  ‘If you like.’

  There was no glimmer of light from any room, yet he was not wholly satisfied. It had been too quiet all day, too free from fear. That couldn’t last.

  The neighbours couldn’t see in the dark; someone might have crept up here since darkness had fallen.

  Whittaker heard and saw nothing.

  ‘Have you a back-door key?’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s go that way,’ he said.

  ‘All right.’

  They still whispered.

  The key made little sound, and the door did not squeak. With a quiet stealth they went from room to room, making sure that no one was there. It was quite empty. There was an atmosphere of the day’s heat in the house, and Eve opened some windows to let in the coolness of the evening.

  ‘Now I’m going back for Pirran,’ Whittaker said.

  ‘Shall I come with you ?’

  ‘No,’ he decided. ‘Stay on the back steps without a light. Have that automatic handy.’