Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  I didn’t smile. I said quietly: ‘How do they know this? The tail hasn’t turned up, has he?’

  ‘They had three tails on Jablonsky. He didn’t catch on to the other two.’

  I nodded wearily. ‘And then?’

  ‘Jablonsky went to the post office. I saw him going in myself when we – Daddy and I – were on our way to tell the police the story Daddy insisted I tell, about how you’d dumped me and I’d thumbed a lift home. Well, it seems Jablonsky picked up a pad of telegraph forms, went into the booth, wrote out and sent off a message. One of Vyland’s men waited till he’d left then got the pad and took off the top message sheet – the one under the sheet Jablonsky had written on – and brought it back here. From what I could hear Vyland seemed to be working on this with some powder and lamps.’

  So even Jablonsky could slip up. But in his place I would have done the same. Exactly the same. I would have assumed that if I’d disposed of a shadower that would be the lot. Vyland was clever, maybe he was going to be too clever for me. I said to the girl: ‘Hear anything more?’

  ‘A little, not much. I gather they made out most of what was written on the form, but they couldn’t understand it, I think it must have been in code.’ She broke off, wet her lips then went on gravely: ‘But the address was in plain language, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ I crossed the room and stared down at her. I knew the answer to my next question, but I had to ask her. ‘And the address?’

  ‘A Mr J. C. Curtin, Federal Bureau of Investigation. That – that was really why I came. I knew I had to warn Mr Jablonsky. I didn’t hear any more, somebody came along the passage and I slipped out a side door, but I think he’s in danger. I think he’s in great danger, Mr Talbot.’

  For the past fifteen minutes I’d been looking for a way to break the news to her, but now I gave up.

  ‘You’re too late.’ I hadn’t meant my voice to sound harsh and cold but that’s the way it sounded. ‘Jablonsky’s dead. Murdered.’

  They came for me at eight o’clock next morning, Royale and Valentino.

  I was fully dressed except for my coat and I was fastened to the bed-head by a single set of handcuffs – I’d thrown the key away together with Jablonsky’s three duplicate keys after I’d locked all the doors.

  There was no reason why they should search me and I hoped as I never hoped before that they wouldn’t. After Mary had left, tear-stained, forlorn and having unwillingly promised me that no word of what had passed should be repeated to anyone, not even her father, I’d sat down and thought. All my thinking so far had been in a never-ending circle and I’d got so deep in the rut that I could hardly see daylight any more and just when my mental processes had been about to vanish completely into the darkness I’d had the first illuminating flash, in the dark gloom of my thinking a blindingly bright flash of intuition or common sense, that I’d had since I’d come to that house. I’d thought about it for another half-hour, then I’d got a sheet of thin paper and written a long message on one side, folded it twice until it was only a couple of inches wide, sealed it with tape and addressed it to Judge Mollison at his home address. Then I’d folded it in half lengthwise, slid it over the neck-band of my tie and turned my collar down over it until it was completely hidden. When they came for me I’d had less than an hour in bed and I hadn’t slept at all.

  But I pretended to be sound asleep when they came in. Somebody shook me roughly by the shoulder. I ignored it. He shook me again. I stirred. He gave up the shaking as unprofitable and used the back of his hand across my face, not lightly. Enough was enough. I groaned, blinked my eyes painfully and propped myself up in bed, rubbing my forehead with my free hand.

  ‘On your feet, Talbot.’ Apart from the upper left-hand side of his face, a miniature sunset viewed through an indigo haze, Royale looked calm and smooth as ever, and fully rested: another dead man on his conscience wasn’t going to rob him of much sleep. Valentino’s arm, I was glad to see, was still in a sling: that was going to make my task of turning him into an ex-bodyguard all the easier.

  ‘On your feet,’ Royale repeated. ‘How come only one handcuff?’

  ‘Eh?’ I shook my head from side to side and made a great play of being dazed and half-doped. ‘What in hell’s name did I have for dinner last night?’

  ‘Dinner?’ Royale smiled his pale quiet smile. ‘You and your gaoler emptied that bottle between you. That’s what you had for dinner.’

  I nodded slowly. He was on safe ground as far as he knew his ground; if I’d been doped I’d have only the haziest recollection of what had happened immediately before I’d passed out. I scowled at him and nodded at the handcuffs: ‘Unlock this damn thing, will you?’

  ‘Why only one cuff?’ Royale repeated gently.

  ‘What does it matter if it’s one cuff or twenty,’ I said irritably. ‘I can’t remember. I seem to think Jablonsky shoved me in here in a great hurry and could only find one. I think perhaps he didn’t feel too good either.’ I buried my face in my hands and drew them down hard as if to clear my head and eyes. Between my fingers I glimpsed Royale’s slow nod of understanding and I knew I had it made: it was exactly what Jablonsky would have done; he’d have felt something coming over him and rushed in to secure me before he collapsed.

  The cuff was unlocked and on the way through Jablonsky’s room I glanced casually at the table. The whisky bottle was still there. Empty. Royale – or Vyland – didn’t miss much.

  We went out into the passage with Royale leading and Valentino bringing up the rear. I shortened my step abruptly and Valentino dug his gun into the small of my back. Nothing Valentino would do would ever be gently, but, for him, it was a comparatively gentle prod and my sharp exclamation of pain might have been justified if it had been about ten times as hard. I stopped in my tracks, Valentino bumped into me and Royale swung round. He’d done his conjuring act again and his deadly little toy gun was sitting snugly in the palm of his hand.

  ‘What gives?’ he asked coldly. No inflection, not the slightest raising of the pitch of voice. I hoped I lived to see the day when Royale was good and worried.

  ‘This gives,’ I said tightly. ‘Keep your trained ape out of my hair, Royale, or I’ll take him apart. Gun or no guns.’

  ‘Lay off him, Gunther,’ Royale said quietly.

  ‘Jeez, boss, I didn’t hardly touch him.’ Discounting the anthropoid brow, broken nose, pock-marks and scars, there wasn’t much room left on Valentino’s face for the shift and play of expression, but what little area remained appeared to indicate astonishment and a sharp sense of injustice. ‘I just gave him a little tap –’

  ‘Sure, I know.’ Royale had already turned and was on his way. ‘Just lay off him.’

  Royale reached the head of the stairs first and was half a dozen steps down by the time I got there. Again I slowed abruptly, again Valentino bumped into me. I swung round, chopped the side of my hand against his gun-wrist and knocked the automatic to the ground. Valentino dived to pick it up with his left hand then roared in anguish as the heel of my right shoe stamped down and crushed his fingers between leather and metal. I didn’t hear any bones break, but nothing so drastic was necessary – with both his hands out of commission Mary Ruthven was going to need a new bodyguard.

  I made no attempt to stoop and pick up the gun. I made no attempt to move. I could hear Royale coming slowly up the stairs.

  ‘Move well back from that gun,’ he ordered. ‘Both of you.’

  We moved. Royale picked up the gun, stood to one side and waved me down the stairs in front of him. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking; for all the expression on his face he might just as well have been watching a leaf falling. He said nothing more, he didn’t even bother to glance at Valentino’s hand.

  They were waiting for us in the library, the general, Vyland and Larry the junky. The general’s expression, as usual, was hidden behind moustache and beard but there was a tinge of blood to his eyes and he seemed greyer than thirty-six hours ag
o: maybe it was just my imagination, everything looked bad to me that morning. Vyland was urbane and polished and smiling and tough as ever, freshly shaven, eyes clear, dressed in a beautifully cut charcoal-grey suit, white soft shirt and red tie. He was a dream. Larry was just Larry, white-faced, with the junky’s staring eyes, pacing up and down behind the desk. But he didn’t look quite so jerky as usual; he too, was smiling, so I concluded that he’d had a good breakfast, chiefly of heroin.

  ‘Morning, Talbot.’ It was Vyland speaking; the big-time crooks today find it just as easy to be civil to you as to snarl and beat you over the head and it pays off better. ‘What was the noise, Royale?’

  ‘Gunther.’ Royale nodded indifferently at Valentino, who had just come in, left hand tucked tightly under his disabled right arm and moaning in pain. ‘He rode Talbot too hard and Talbot didn’t like it.’

  ‘Go off and make a noise somewhere else,’ Vyland said coldly. The Good Samaritan touch. ‘Feeling tough and tetchy this morning, hey, Talbot?’ There was no longer even an attempt at keeping up the pretence that the general was the boss, or even had an equal say in what went on in his own house: he just stood quietly in the background, remote and dignified and in some way tragic. But maybe the tragedy was only in my own mind; I could be guessing wrongly about the general. I could be terribly wrong about him. Fatally wrong.

  ‘Where’s Jablonsky?’ I demanded.

  ‘Jablonsky?’ Vyland raised a lazy eyebrow: George Raft couldn’t have done it any better. ‘What’s Jablonsky to you, Talbot?’

  ‘My gaoler,’ I said briefly. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘You appear very anxious to know, Talbot?’ He looked at me long and consideringly and I didn’t like it at all. ‘I’ve seen you before, Talbot. So has the general. I wish I could remember who it is you remind me of.’

  ‘Donald Duck.’ This was perilous ground indeed. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s left. Lammed out. With his seventy thousand bucks.’

  ‘Lammed out’ was a slip, but I let it pass. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘You are becoming boringly repetitious, my friend.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Larry, the cables.’

  Larry picked up some papers from the desk, handed them to Vyland, grinned at me wolfishly and resumed his pacing.

  ‘The general and I are very careful people, Talbot,’ Vyland went on. ‘Some people might say highly suspicious. Same thing. We checked up on you. We checked in England, Holland and Venezuela.’ He waved the papers. ‘These came in this morning. They say you’re all you claim to be, one of Europe’s top salvage experts. So now we can go ahead and use you. So now we don’t need Jablonsky any more. So we let him go this morning. With his cheque. He said he fancied a trip to Europe.’

  Vyland was quiet, convincing, utterly sincere and could have talked his way past St Peter. I looked as I thought St Peter might have looked as he was in the process of being convinced, then I said a lot of things St Peter would never have said and finished up by snarling: ‘The dirty lying double-crosser!’

  ‘Jablonsky?’ Again the George Raft touch with the eyebrows.

  ‘Yes, Jablonsky. To think that I listened to that lying two-timer. To think I even spent five seconds listening to him. He promised me –’

  ‘Well, what did he promise you?’ Vyland asked softly.

  ‘No harm now,’ I scowled. ‘He reckoned I was for the high jump here – and he reckoned that the charges that had had him dismissed from the New York police had been rigged. He thinks – or said he thought – he could prove it, if he was given the chance to investigate certain policemen and certain police files.’ I swore again. ‘And to think that I believed –’

  ‘You’re wandering, Talbot,’ Vyland interrupted sharply. He was watching me very closely indeed. ‘Get on.’

  ‘He thought he could buy this chance – and at the same time have me help him while he helped me. He spent a couple of hours in our room trying to remember an old federal code and then he wrote a telegram to some agency offering to supply some very interesting information about General Ruthven in exchange for a chance to examine certain files. And I was mug enough to think he meant it!’

  ‘You don’t by any chance happen to remember the name of the man to whom this telegram was addressed?’

  ‘No. I forget.’

  ‘You better remember, Talbot. You may be buying yourself something very important to you – your life.’

  I looked at him without expression, then stared at the floor. Finally I said without looking up: ‘Catin, Cartin, Curtin – yes, that was it. Curtin. J. C. Curtin.’

  ‘And all he offered was to give information if his own conditions were met. Is that it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Talbot, you’ve just bought yourself your life.’

  Sure, I’d bought myself my life. I noticed Vyland didn’t specify how long I would be allowed to hang on to my purchase. Twenty-four hours, if that. It all depended how the job went. But I didn’t care. The satisfaction it had given me to stamp on Valentino’s hand upstairs was nothing compared to the glow I felt now. They’d fallen for my story, they’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker. In the circumstances, with the cards dealt the right way, it had been inevitable that they should. And I’d dealt my cards just right. Judged from the standpoint of their limited awareness of the extent of my knowledge, it would have been impossible for me to have concocted such a story. They didn’t and couldn’t know that I knew Jablonsky to be dead, that they had him tailed yesterday and deciphered the telegram’s address: for they didn’t know that I had been in the kitchen garden during the previous night, that Mary had overheard their conversation in the library and that she had been to see me. Had they thought I had been an accomplice of Jablonsky’s throughout, they’d have shot me out of hand. As it was, they wouldn’t shoot me for some time yet. Not a long time. But perhaps long enough.

  I saw Vyland and Royale exchange glances, a mere flicker, and the faint shrug of Vyland’s shoulders. They were tough all right, those two, tough and cool and ruthless and calculating and dangerous. For the past twelve hours they must have lived with the knowledge or the possibility that Federal agents would be around their necks any moment but they had shown no awareness of pressure, no signs of strain. I wondered what they would have thought, how they would have reacted, had they known that Federal agents could have been on to them all of three months ago. But the time had not then been ripe. Nor was it yet.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, is there any need for further delay?’ It was the first time the general had spoken, and for all his calmness there was a harsh burred edge of strain beneath. ‘Let’s get it over with. The weather is deteriorating rapidly and there’s a hurricane warning out. We should leave as soon as possible.’

  He was right about the weather, except in the tense he used. It had deteriorated. Period. The wind was no longer a moan, it was a high sustained keening howl through the swaying oaks, accompanied by intermittent squally showers of brief duration but extraordinary intensity. There was much low cloud in the sky, steadily thickening. I’d glanced at the barometer in the hall, and it was creeping down towards 27, which promised something very unpleasant indeed. Whether the centre of the storm was going to hit or pass by us I didn’t know: but if we stood in its path we’d have it in less than twelve hours. Probably much less.

  ‘We’re just leaving, General. Everything’s set. Petersen is waiting for us down in the bay.’ Petersen, I guessed, would be the helicopter pilot. ‘A couple of fast trips and we should all be out there in an hour or so. Then Talbot here can get to work.’

  ‘All?’ asked the general. ‘Who?’

  ‘Yourself, myself, Royale, Talbot, Larry and, of course, your daughter.’

  ‘Mary. Is it necessary?’

  Vyland said nothing, he didn’t even use the eyebrow routine again, he just looked steadily at the general. Five seconds, perhaps more, then the general’s hands unclenched and his shoulders drooped a fraction of an inch. Picture witho
ut words.

  There came the quick light tap of feminine footsteps from the passage inside and Mary Ruthven walked in through the open door. She was dressed in a lime-coloured two-piece costume with an open-necked green blouse beneath. She had shadows under her eyes, she looked pale and tired and I thought she was wonderful. Kennedy was behind her, but he remained respectfully in the passage, hat in hand, a rhapsody of maroon and shining high leather boots, his face set in the remote unseeing, unhearing expression of the perfectly trained family chauffeur. I started to move aimlessly towards the door, waiting for Mary to do what I’d told her less than two hours previously, just before she’d gone back to her own room.

  ‘I’m going in to Marble Springs with Kennedy, Father,’ Mary began without preamble. It was phrased as a statement of fact, but was in effect a request for permission.

  ‘But – well, we’re going to the rig, my dear,’ her father said unhappily. ‘You said last night –’

  ‘I’m coming,’ she said with a touch of impatience. ‘But we can’t all go to once. I’ll come on the second trip. We won’t be more than twenty minutes. Do you mind, Mr Vyland?’ she asked sweetly.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s rather difficult, Miss Ruthven,’ Vyland said urbanely. ‘You see, Gunther has hurt himself –’

  ‘Good!’

  He worked his eyebrow again. ‘Not so good for you, Miss Ruthven. You know how your father likes you to have protection when –’

  ‘Kennedy used to be all the protection I ever needed,’ she said coldly. ‘He still is. What is more, I’m not going out to the rig with you and Royale and that – that creature there’ – she left no doubt but that she meant Larry – ‘unless Kennedy comes with me. And that’s final. And I must go into Marble Springs. Now.’

  I wondered when anyone had last talked to Vyland like that. But the veneer never even cracked.