Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  She said nothing at first, her face was empty of colour, even her lips were pale.

  ‘Do you believe me?’ I asked softly.

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I’m going to call them,’ she said simply. ‘Maybe you’ll cripple me – but they’ll surely get you. And then you can never kill again. I have to do it.’

  ‘Your noble sentiments do you credit, Miss Ruthven.’ The jeer in my voice was no reflection of the thoughts in my mind. She was going to do what I wouldn’t have done.

  ‘Go and call them. Watch them die.’

  She stared at me. ‘What – what do you mean? You’ve only one bullet –’

  ‘And it’s no longer for you. First squawk out of you, lady, and that cop with the gun in his hand gets it. He gets it right through the middle of the chest. I’m pretty good with one of these Colts – you saw how I shot the gun out of the sheriff’s hands. But I’m taking no chances. Through the chest. Then I hold up the other cop – there’ll be no trouble about that, his own gun is still buttoned down, he knows I’m a killer and he doesn’t know my gun will be empty – take his gun, wing him with it and go off.’ I smiled. ‘I don’t think anyone will try to stop me.’

  ‘But – but I’ll tell him your gun’s empty. I’ll tell –’

  ‘You come first, lady. An elbow in the solar plexus and you won’t be able to tell anybody anything for the next five minutes.’

  There was a long silence, the cops were still there, then she said in a small voice: ‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘There’s only one way to find out the answer to that one.’

  ‘I hate you.’ There was no expression in her voice, the clear grey eyes were dark with despair and defeat. ‘I never thought I could hate anyone so much. It – it scares me.’

  ‘Stay scared and stay alive.’ I watched the policemen finish their tour of the parking-lot, walk slowly back to their motor bikes and ride away.

  The late afternoon wore slowly on. The dragliners growled and crunched and crawled their implacable way out towards the sea. The sidewalk superintendents came and went, but mostly went and soon there were only a couple of cars left in the parking-lot, ours and the Ford belonging to the man in the green coat. And then the steadily darkening cumulus sky reached its final ominous indigo colour and the rain came.

  It came with the violence of all sub-tropical storms, and before I could get the unaccustomed hood up my thin cotton shirt was wet as if I had been in the sea. When I’d wound up the side-screens and looked in the mirror, I saw that my face was streaked with black lines from temple to chin – the mascara on my hair had almost washed out. I scrubbed as clean as I could with my handkerchief, then looked at my watch. With the dark cloud obscuring the sky from horizon to horizon, evening had come before its time. Already the cars swishing by on the highway had their sidelights on, although it was still more day than night. I started the engine.

  ‘You were going to wait until it was dark.’ The girl sounded startled. Maybe she’d been expecting more cops, smarter cops to come along.

  ‘I was,’ I admitted. ‘But by this time Mr Chas Brooks is going to be doing a song and dance act a few miles back on the highway. His language will be colourful.’

  ‘Mr Chas Brooks?’ From her tone, I wondered if she really thought I was crazy.

  ‘Of Pittsburg, California.’ I tapped the licence tag on the steering column. ‘A long way to come to have your car hijacked.’ I lifted my eyes to the machine-gun symphony of the heavy rain drumming on the canvas roof. ‘You don’t think he’ll still be grilling and barbecuing down on the beach in this little lot, do you?’

  I pulled out through the makeshift archway and turned right on the highway. When she spoke this time I knew she really did think I was crazy.

  ‘Marble Springs.’ A pause, then: ‘You’re going back there?’ It was a question and statement both.

  ‘Right. To the motel – La Contessa. Where the cops picked me up. I left some stuff there and I want to collect it.’

  This time she said nothing. Maybe she thought ‘crazy’ a completely inadequate word.

  I pulled off the bandanna – in the deepening dusk that white gleam on my head was more conspicuous than my red hair – and went on: ‘Last place they’ll ever think to find me. I’m going to spend the night there, maybe several nights until I find me a boat out. So are you.’ I ignored the involuntary exclamation. ‘That’s the phone call I made back at the drug store. I asked if Room 14 was vacant, they said yes, so I said I’d take it, friends who’d passed through had recommended it as having the nicest view in the motel. In point of fact it has the nicest view. It’s also the most private room, at the seaward end of a long block, it’s right beside the closet where they put my case away when the cops pinched me and it has a nice private little garage where I can stow this machine away and no one will ever ask a question.’

  A mile passed, two miles, three and she said nothing. She’d put her green blouse back on, but it was a lacy scrap of nothing, she’d got just as wet as I had when I was trying to fix the roof, and she was having repeated bouts of shivering. The rain had made the air cool. We were approaching the outskirts of Marble Springs when she spoke.

  ‘You can’t do it. How can you? You’ve got to check in or sign a book or pick up keys or have to go to the restaurant. You can’t just –’

  ‘Yes, I can. I asked them to have the place opened up ready for us, keys in the garage and room doors, and that we’d check in later: I said we’d come a long way since dawn, that we were bushed and that we’d appreciate room service for meals and a little privacy.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I told the receptionist we were a honeymoon couple. She seemed to understand our request for privacy.’

  We were there before she could find an answer. I turned in through an ornate lilac-painted gateway and drew up near the reception hallway in the central block, parking the car directly under a powerful floodlamp which threw such black shadows that my red hair would be all but invisible under the car roof. Over by the entrance stood a negro dressed in a lilac, blue and gold-buttoned uniform that had been designed by a colour-blind man wearing smoked glasses. I called him across.

  ‘Room 14?’ I asked. ‘Which way, please?’

  ‘Mr Brooks?’ I nodded, and he went on: ‘I’ve left all the keys ready. Down this way.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I looked at him. Grey and bent and thin and the faded old eyes the clouded mirrors of a thousand sorrows and defeats. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Charles, sir.’

  ‘I want some whisky, Charles.’ I passed money across. ‘Scotch not bourbon. And some brandy. Can you?’

  ‘Right away, sir.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I let in the gear, drove down the block to No. 14. It was at the end of a narrow peninsula between the gulf to the left and a kidney-shaped swimming pool to the right. The garage door was open and I drove straight in, switched off the car lights, closed the sliding door in the near-darkness, then switched on the overhead light.

  At the inner end of the left-hand wall a single door led off the garage. We went through this, into a kitchenette, neat, hygienic and superbly equipped if all you wanted was a cup of coffee and had all night to make it. A door led off this into the bed-sitting-room. Lilac carpet, lilac drapes, lilac bedspread, lilac lamp-shades, lilac seatcovers, the same excruciating motif wherever you looked. Somebody had liked lilac. Two doors off this room: to the left, let into the same wall as the kitchen door, the door to the bathroom: at the far end, the door leading into the corridor.

  I was in the corridor within ten seconds of arriving in the room, dragging the girl after me. The closet was no more than six feet away, unlocked, and my bag still where it had been left. I carried it back to the room, unlocked it and was about to start throwing stuff on the bed when a knock came to the door.

  ‘That will be Charles,’ I murmured. ‘Open the door, stand well back, take the bottles, tell him to keep the change
. Don’t try to whisper, make signs or any clever little jumps out into the middle of the corridor. I’ll be watching you from the crack of the bathroom door and my gun will be lined up on your back.’

  She didn’t try any of those things. I think she was too cold, miserable and exhausted by the accumulated tension of the day to try anything. The old man handed over the bottles, took the change with a surprised murmur of thanks and closed the door softly behind him.

  ‘You’re frozen and shivering,’ I said abruptly. ‘I don’t want my insurance policy to go catching pneumonia.’ I fetched a couple of glasses. ‘Some brandy, Miss Ruthven, then a hot bath. Maybe you’ll find something dry in my case.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she said bitterly. ‘But I’ll take the brandy.’

  ‘No bath, huh?’

  ‘No.’ A hesitant pause, a glint in her eyes more imagined than seen, and I knew I’d been mistaken in imagining her to be too worn out to try anything. ‘Yes, that too.’

  ‘Right.’ I waited till she’d finished her glass, dumped my case on the bathroom floor and stood to let her pass. ‘Don’t be all night. I’m hungry.’

  The door closed and the key clicked in the lock. There came the sound of water running into the bath, then all the unmistakable soaping and splashing sounds of someone having a bath. All meant to lull any suspicions. Then came the sound of someone towelling themselves, and when, a minute or two later, there came the furious gurgling of water running out of the waste pipe, I eased myself off the door, passed through the two kitchen doors and outside garage door just in time to see the bathroom window open and a little cloud of steam come rushing out. I caught her arm as she lowered herself to the ground, stifled the frightened gasp with my free hand, and led her back inside.

  I closed the kitchen door and looked at her. She looked fresh and scrubbed and clean and had one of my white shirts tucked into the waistband of her dirndl. She had tears of mortification in her eyes and defeat in her face, but for all that it was a face worth looking at. Despite our long hours in the car together it was the first time I had really looked at it.

  She had wonderful hair, thick and gleaming and parted in the middle and of the same wheat colour and worn in the same braids as that often seen in girls from the East Baltic states or what used to be the Baltic states. But she would never win a Miss America contest, she had too much character in her face for that, she wouldn’t even have been in the running for Miss Marble Springs. The face was slightly Slavonic, the cheekbones too high and wide, the mouth too full, the still grey eyes set too far apart and the nose definitely retroussé. A mobile and intelligent face, a face, I guessed, that could move easily into sympathy and kindness and humour and laughter, when the weariness was gone and the fear taken away. In the days before I had given up the dream of my own slippers and my own fireside, this was the face that would have fitted the dream. She was the sort of person who would wear well, the sort of person who would still be part of you long after the synthetic chromium polished blondes from the production lines of the glamour factory had you climbing up the walls.

  I was just standing there, feeling a little sorry for her and feeling a little sorry for myself, when I felt a cold draught on the back of my neck. It came from the direction of the bathroom door and ten seconds ago that bathroom door had been closed and locked. But it wasn’t now.

  THREE

  It didn’t require the sudden widening of the girl’s eyes to tell me that I wasn’t imagining that cold draught on the back of my neck. A cloud of steam from the overheated bathroom drifted past my right ear, a little bit too much to have escaped through the keyhole of a locked door. About a thousand times too much. I turned slowly, keeping my hands well away from my sides. Maybe I would try something clever later. But not now.

  The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn’t the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.

  The second thing I noticed was that the bathroom doorway seemed to have shrunk since I’d seen it last. His shoulders didn’t quite touch both sides of the doorway, but that was only because it was a wide doorway. His hat certainly touched the lintel.

  The third thing I noticed was the kind of hat he wore and the colour of the jacket. A panama hat, a green jacket. It was our friend and neighbour from the Ford that had been parked beside us earlier that afternoon.

  He reached behind him with his left hand and softly closed the bathroom door.

  ‘You shouldn’t leave windows open. Let me have your gun.’ His voice was quiet and deep, but there was nothing stagy or menacing about it, you could see it was the way he normally spoke.

  ‘Gun?’ I tried to look baffled.

  ‘Look, Talbot,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I suspect we’re both what you might call professionals. I suggest we cut the unnecessary dialogue. Gun. The thing you’re carrying in your right coat pocket there. With the finger and thumb of the left hand. So. Now drop it on the carpet. Thank you.’

  I kicked the gun across to him without being told. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t a professional too.

  ‘Now sit down,’ he said. He smiled at me, and I could see now that his face wasn’t chubby, unless you could call a lump of rock chubby. It was just broad and looked as if you could bounce a two by four off it without achieving very much. The narrow black moustache and the thin, almost Grecian nose looked out of place, as incongruous, almost, as the laughter lines round the eyes and on either side of the mouth. I didn’t place much store on the laughter lines, maybe he only practised smiling when he was beating someone over the head with a gun.

  ‘You recognized me in the parking-lot?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He broke open the Colt with his left hand,

  ejected the remaining shell, closed the gun and with a careless flick of his wrist sent it spinning ten feet to land smack in the waste-paper basket. He looked as if he could do this sort of thing ten times out of ten, everything this man tried would always come off: if he was as good as this with his left hand, what could he do with his right? ‘I’d never seen you before this afternoon, I’d never even heard of you when first I saw you in the lot,’ he continued. ‘But I’d seen and heard of this young lady here a hundred times. You’re a Limey, or you’d have heard of her too. Maybe you have, but don’t know who you got there, you wouldn’t be the first person to be fooled by her. No make-up, no accent, hair in kid’s plaits. And you only look and behave like that either if you’ve given up competing – or there’s no one left to compete against.’ He looked at the girl and smiled again. ‘For Mary Blair Ruthven there’s no competition left. When you’re as socially acceptable as she is, and your old man is who he is, then you can dispense with your Bryn Mawr accent and the Antonio hairdo. That’s for those who need them.’

  ‘And her old man?’

  ‘Such ignorance. Blair Ruthven. General Blair Ruthven. You’ve heard of the Four Hundred – well, he’s the guy that keeps the register. You’ve heard of the Mayflower – it was old Ruthven’s ancestors who gave the Pilgrims permission to land. And, excepting maybe Paul Getty, he’s the richest oil man in the United States.’

  I made no comment, there didn’t seem to be any that would meet the case. I wondered what he’d say if I told him of my pipe-dream of slippers, a fire and a multimillion heiress. Instead I said: ‘And you had your radio switched on in the parking-lot. I hear it. And then a news flash.’

  ‘That’s it,’ he agreed cheerfully.

  ‘Who are you?’ It was Mary Blair speaking for the first time since he’d entered and that was what being in the top 1 per cent of the Four Hundred did for you. You didn’t swoon, you didn’t murmur ‘Thank God’ in a broken voice, you didn’t burst into tears and fling your arms round your rescuer’s neck, you just gave him a nice friendly smile which showed he was your equal even if you know quite well he wasn’t and said: ‘Who are you?’

  �
�Jablonsky, miss. Herman Jablonsky.’

  ‘I suppose you came over in the Mayflower too,’ I said sourly. I looked consideringly at the girl. ‘Millions and millions of dollars, eh? That’s a lot of money to be walking around. Anyway, that explains away Valentino.’

  ‘Valentino?’ You could see she still thought I was crazy.

  ‘The broken-faced gorilla behind you in the court-room. If your old man shows as much judgement in picking oil wells as he does in picking bodyguards, you’re going to be on relief pretty soon.’

  ‘He’s not my usual––’ She bit her lip, and something like a shadow of pain touched those clear grey eyes. ‘Mr Jablonsky, I owe you a great deal.’

  Jablonsky smiled again and said nothing. He fished out a pack of cigarettes, tapped the bottom, extracted one with his teeth, bent back a cardboard match in a paper folder, then threw cigarettes and matches across to me. That’s how the high-class boys operated today. Civilized, courteous, observing all the little niceties, they’d have made the hoodlums of the thirties feel slightly ill. Which made a man like Jablonsky all the more dangerous: like an iceberg, seven-eighths of his lethal menace was out of sight. The old-time hoodlums couldn’t even have begun to cope with him.

  ‘I take it you are prepared to use that gun,’ Mary Blair went on. She wasn’t as cool and composed as she appeared and sounded; I could see a pulse beating in her neck and it was going like a racing car. ‘I mean, this man can’t do anything to me now?’

  ‘Nary a thing,’ Jablonsky assured her.

  ‘Thank you.’ A little sigh escaped her, as if it wasn’t until that moment that she really believed her terror was over, that there was nothing more to fear. She moved across the room. ‘I’ll phone the police.’

  ‘No,’ Jablonsky said quietly.

  She broke step. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said “No”,’ Jablonsky murmured. ‘No phone, no police, I think we’ll leave the law out of it.’