Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  He tried to work out the implications of this situation. Assume that both Manville and Pallifer are dead, because if one of them was alive somebody would know about it. Assume that one or both bodies would eventually turn up. Would anything lead back to Curtis? He said, “You and, er…”

  “Steve.”

  “Yes. You and Steve stay there until Thursday. If you hear nothing from anybody by then, you should just go home and consider the job finished, and I’ll get your money to you through what’s-her-name? Billie?”

  “Morgan’s girlfriend, yes, sir.”

  “I have her address. If anything at all happens between now and Thursday, let me know at once.”

  “Yes, sir, I will. Mr. Curtis, I’m sorry I took so long to get to you, but I figured maybe, Morgan’d been stuck here a while, he might just want the weekend to himself. It’s when he didn’t come back today I figured there might be something up.”

  “Well,” Curtis said, “keep me informed.”

  “I will, sir.”

  It’s out of control, Curtis thought, as he hung up.

  That was the one thing he wouldn’t be able to stand. He had to remain in control of the whole enterprise, he couldn’t let any part of it begin to spin away on its own.

  Where was Pallifer, dammit? Where was Manville? What was coming at him, from what unforeseen quarter?

  * * *

  The phone call from Bennett Monday afternoon was the last straw on the day. He’d finished with the architects at last and was back in his office, getting caught up on some other details, preparing for departure on Wednesday, when Margaret buzzed to say, “Mr. Bennett on the line, sir.”

  Curtis said, “Good,” as he reached for the phone, thinking, at last, perhaps, some good news.

  Not at all. “Still no change, Mr. Curtis,” Bennett said, by way of hello.

  The man was sounding hangdog again; Curtis didn’t like that. He said, “Colin, this doesn’t make any sense. They came here with a mission, they started on that mission, they arranged to meet this spy in my organization, this person named Mark, they didn’t meet him, and now they’re doing nothing. How did they spend the weekend?”

  “They went to the Botanic Gardens.”

  “For God’s sake, Colin, there must be something else going on, right under your eyes!”

  It was first the loss of the scuba diver, and second the double disappearance of Pallifer and Manville, and now Colin Bennett was still failing to learn anything at all of any use. Curtis felt all of his anger and frustration coming out in this last phone call, and he didn’t care.

  Defending himself, more hangdog than ever, Bennett said, “I swear, Mr. Curtis, they haven’t been out of my sight. There isn’t a thing they do that I don’t know about, and they’re just not doing anything at all about you and your business.”

  “You’ll have to search their rooms,” Curtis decided.

  “I already did that, sir. When they went to dinner Friday, I made sure they’d stay put a while, and I went and searched, and I didn’t find a thing. Mr. Curtis, could I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead,” Curtis said.

  “How many people named Mark work for you?”

  “Probably a hundred,” Curtis told him. “I employ thousands, Colin, a first name isn’t enough to go on. Now, I’m leaving Singapore for a while on Wednesday. If we don’t have any progress on the Jerry Diedrich front by then, we’ll just drop it. Come into the office Wednesday afternoon, see Margaret, she’ll have some money for you.”

  “Mr. Curtis, I’m doing—”

  “You know what I want,” Curtis snapped. “I want to know who the spy is. I want to know why Diedrich singles me out for all this attention. Those are the two questions. It really shouldn’t be impossible to answer them, Colin, it really shouldn’t.”

  Miserably, Bennett said, “No, sir, it shouldn’t.”

  “Thank you for your efforts, Colin,” Curtis said, and hung up.

  12

  He was always there. They caught only occasional glimpses of him, but he was nevertheless there, all the time, lurking. And they pretended not to notice.

  Jerry didn’t know what to think about it. The man always in their background, like something from a silent movie, a constant ominous presence, never getting any closer but also never going away. He hadn’t done anything other than follow them, but the threat he implied was serious, and the man he worked for was serious.

  If only they could find out what was going on. Every day at six, except on the weekend, Jerry had phoned Mark’s friend, and spoken with Mark, and every day Mark had absolutely nothing new to tell. Their visits to the Planetwatch offices had yielded nothing either, partly because Jerry didn’t feel he could tell them the whole story, but mostly, he believed, because Curtis was just too skilled at covering his tracks. Whatever he was up to, he was keeping it to himself—or doing a damn good job of hiding it in plain sight. Either way, no one had managed to dig anything up.

  Jerry longed to be back on Planetwatch III, doing work he understood and was good at. But Richard Curtis was planning something horrible, the man was evil and needed to be stopped, and who else was there to stop him?

  Not that they were stopping him. They’d been in Singapore a week, and were no closer to figuring things out than they’d been on arrival.

  And then, Monday, Mark had news. They’d stopped at an outdoor bar near a payphone. While Luther ordered beer for them all, Jerry went to make his call. “I still don’t know what’s going on,” Mark said, “but something is, for sure.”

  “Why?” Jerry asked, feeling suddenly breathless. “What’s happened?”

  “First thing this morning, a fax came in from that guy I told you about. Jackie Tian?”

  “A fax? From Hong Kong?”

  “I got a look at it,” Mark said, “and I wrote it down from memory, so I may have a word or two wrong, but I’ve certainly got the gist.”

  “Tell.”

  “It said, ‘Diver unavailable. Arrested for smuggling. No substitute.’ That’s all.”

  “Diver,” Jerry echoed. “A scuba diver, you think?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. If it has something to do with the soliton.”

  “In Hong Kong?” Jerry said. “Or off Hong Kong, I guess. Taiwan? That’s the nearest large island.”

  “Then maybe that’s where Curtis is going,” Mark said. “That’s my other news. He’s leaving Wednesday. The story is he’s going to Manila first, and then on to other places where we have projects, as a kind of inspection tour, but I think that’s a fake. He isn’t setting it up like a normal business trip. Usually, they’d have me phone people he knows in the various locations, give out his itinerary. He isn’t doing that this time.”

  “Then where is he going?”

  “Maybe Taiwan,” Mark said. “I’ll try to find out. Wherever he’s going…it certainly seems he’s going there to do whatever he’s going to do.”

  “Oh, god, Mark, and we still don’t know a thing!”

  Mark said, “What if you went to the police?”

  “And said what? In Singapore? Richard Curtis is one of their most respected businessmen. We don’t have any proof, we don’t even know what he plans to do.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow,” Mark said. “But it isn’t easy.”

  “Oh, I know it isn’t, Mark, you’re being wonderful, you really are.”

  “Not yet I’m not,” Mark said. “Let’s hope I can be.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Jerry said, and went back to the others to tell them Mark’s news. “If Mark can find out where Curtis is really going,” he finished, “maybe we could get there first, head him off somehow.”

  “If he can’t,” Luther said, “maybe we should just go to Hong Kong, try to find out more about this Tian person.”

  Kim said, “Do you know anybody in Hong Kong?”

  “No,” Jerry said. “But Kim, we do have to do something.” He gulped beer, felt it hit his n
ervous stomach. He gestured toward the restrooms. “I’ll be right back.”

  He rose from the table and headed for the gents’, a small and rather smelly room at the rear of the building with (thank god) a window open onto a back alley. Not much air came in, and not much smell went out, but Jerry hoped not to be in here long.

  He wasn’t. He finished in the stall and when he pushed open the stall door to step outside the follower was there, standing at the sink, Jerry was so startled he almost forgot to pretend he didn’t know who the man was. “Excuse me,” he murmured, and started around the man, who turned and swung the piece of iron pipe hard, smashing it into Jerry’s forehead.

  13

  “I don’t want any more beer,” Kim said.

  Luther said, “When Jerry comes back, I’ll settle up and go to the hotel.”

  “Where is Jerry?” Kim asked. “It’s been a while.”

  Luther looked at his watch. “See if you can get our bill, I’ll collect Jerry.”

  He went away, and Kim gestured to the waiter that they wanted the check. He nodded and went away inside and soon came out with a rectangular black plastic folder advertising American Express. Kim let it sit there.

  But now, where was Luther? This was becoming a long time. Were they having some sort of talk in the men’s room? A fight, maybe? Or had they just left without her?

  Twice the waiter passed, giving her a raised-eyebrow look, and twice she merely smiled blankly at him. She was about to dig out her own limited cash when Luther sat down, abruptly, across from her, as though he’d been dropped there. He had a very strange expression on his face, like someone who has heard an inexplicable but frightening noise. He said, “He isn’t there.”

  This made no sense. Kim looked toward the restrooms. “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s gone, Kim, he isn’t there.”

  Kim looked more closely at Luther, saw the sudden anxiety there beneath the disbelief. Instinctively she reached out to put a hand on his forearm as she said, “Luther! He can’t be gone.”

  “No one in the men’s room,” Luther said. “None of the staff remembers seeing him go in or come out.”

  “But— He went in there, we saw him go in. And he didn’t come out, Luther, we’d have seen him.”

  Luther abruptly stood, and stared hard at everything he could see up and down the street and around the tables. She thought he was looking for Jerry, but when he sat down again he said, “That man isn’t here. The one who’s been following us.”

  “Luther… What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know.” He had a stunned look. He said, “Did Jerry confront him? Jerry wouldn’t confront him.”

  “You think Jerry ran away? Or that man ran away and Jerry followed him? But still, how could he come out here past us?”

  “There’s a window,” Luther told her. “In the men’s room, rather small, but you could climb out it.”

  “But why would he?”

  “Maybe he saw something?” Luther shook his head. “If he suddenly saw something, no time to tell us, had to follow…” Another headshake. “Or did that man attack him? But why would he, after all this time, why change what he’s doing? And Jerry can handle himself, he’s no pushover.”

  She squeezed his forearm, saying, “He’s all right, we know that. There’s an explanation.”

  The waiter was hovering again, but Luther was too distracted to notice. “If he’d left a message, a note, but there’s nothing.”

  Kim said, “Luther,” and nodded at the waiter.

  “What?” Luther looked up, understood, and said, “Oh, yes, of course.”

  While Luther got his wallet out and fished out a card, Kim said, “Something urgent happened, and he had to hurry away. He’ll expect us to go back to the hotel.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “He’ll get a message to us there,” Kim went on, “as soon as he can. It could be there now, for all we know.”

  “Yes. You’re right, Kim. I’m sure you’re right.”

  * * *

  There was no message at the hotel, nor did they see the hulking follower anywhere, either outside or in the lobby. As they rode up together in the elevator, Kim said, “Do you think we should phone the police?”

  “Not yet,” Luther said.

  She followed him into his room, his and Jerry’s. It was very messy, as always. She sat in the one chair, by the window, while he paced.

  He said, “We could still hear from him.”

  “Of course we could. How long has he been gone? Half an hour?”

  “Closer to an hour,” he told her.

  “He’ll call. Or he’ll show up.”

  “What we’ll do, Kim, we’ll have dinner, we’ll spend the evening here, and in the morning—”

  “In the morning! Luther…”

  “If we haven’t heard from Jerry,” Luther went on, “then we’ll call the police.”

  “Jerry will be back long before then,” she said, but it sounded stupid even as she was saying it.

  14

  Bennett did not dare think about the future. All he could possibly do was concentrate on the present, on the difficult tasks that faced him right now. Hitting the Diedrich fellow in the face with the iron pipe had been the easy part, almost the pleasurable part. But immediately after that, the job got complicated.

  Quickly, before anybody else came into the men’s room, he had to stuff this suddenly heavy inert body through the narrow opening of the window into the narrow stone-floored alley outside. Not a dirty alley, though, a very clean alley. The Singapore authorities demanded cleanliness everywhere, and backed up their demands with fines: one thousand dollars Singapore for littering. So even the alleys are frequently swept, rubbish is never allowed to accumulate, and though Bennett’s victim was now bleeding from his cut forehead and his ears, and though he hit the alley stone hard, he didn’t get dirty.

  “That’s good, then,” Bennett told himself. “Well begun is half done.” He clambered out the window after Diedrich, touched his throat for a pulse to be sure he was still alive, “You’re not worth much dead, are you, not at this point,” then hurried away down the alley to the side street where, fortunately, he had parked his car.

  The alley was just barely wider than the Honda. Honking at the many pedestrians that jostled around him, muttering, “Can’t you see a man’s trying to do a piece of work here,” Bennett backed the little car into place, the rear of it filling the alley mouth. Just enough room left for him to squeeze by.

  The Honda was a hatchback. Raise the rear, and now the car almost completely blocked the view of anybody passing by on the street. Not that anybody cared. After one disapproving glare at this car stuck halfway into the sidewalk, everybody just kept on going by, concerned with their own affairs.

  Bennett loped like a gorilla back to the body, which hadn’t moved. “Hello, there, you still alive? Yes; good.”

  He picked Diedrich up like a sack of flour over his shoulder, and ran half-stumbling back to the car.

  At the Honda, he dropped Diedrich into the well, not gently, and pulled over him some of the old blankets and tarps he kept back there. “There you are, all tucked in, eh?” Then he shut the hatchback, squeezed around the car, got behind the wheel, and drove away from there. (He saw the other two, still at the same table, as he went by, and muttered a farewell.)

  Very well, what now? Richard Curtis had two questions that must be answered by Colin Bennett before Curtis would leave Singapore in two days’ time. Only Jerry Diedrich knew the answers to those questions, and in trailing him Bennett had come to be convinced that he wasn’t going to answer those questions, not willingly. It seemed to him, if he could at least find Mark, the elusive Mark, then he could go and lean very heavily on Mark, and force him to tell why Diedrich had such a very special antipathy toward Richard Curtis.

  But in a week, a full week, Bennett hadn’t even been able to accomplish step one. He could not fail Richard Curtis. Yet all he had le
ft was today and tomorrow.

  So the answer seemed obvious. He had to pluck Diedrich away from his friends, control him, and get the answers out of him directly, one way or another.

  So he’d started, he’d begun, he’d gone this far. He had Diedrich unconscious and under control in the back of the Honda. But he couldn’t keep him in the Honda indefinitely. There had to be somewhere Bennett could deal with him at leisure, ask the questions and take the time to get the answers.

  This was one of the crux points, when it was vital to concentrate exclusively on the present and think not at all about the future. There is no future, there is only this one step at a time, and the step now is to take this fellow home.

  Well, that was the choice, wasn’t it? Bennett had access to no other indoor area, not where he could keep a prisoner. Singapore is a nation and a city, but it’s also an island, narrowly contained, heavily populated and cultivated. There were no remote lakes with seasonal lodges he could break into, no desert ghost towns, nowhere on the island that he could reach that wasn’t already observed and occupied. So it was his own home, and nothing else to say about it.

  At last he turned off China Street into an alley, somewhat wider than the alley behind that bar. “Home sweet home, by God,” he announced, feeling grim.

  On both sides of the alley, recently built but old-fashioned three-story buildings rose, neat but uninviting. Back here, the ground floors were open, parking for the residents who lived in the apartments above.

  There was little pedestrian and no vehicular traffic back here. Bennett pulled Diedrich from the Honda, shouldered him with one blanket around him so that he was a bit less obviously a human body, and carried him up the two flights of narrow metal exterior stairs and along the outside concrete balcony to his door. It was hard to unlock the door, but Bennett didn’t want to have to put the body down and pick it up again, so he persevered, commenting to himself along the way, while Diedrich bobbed on his shoulder, and finally he succeeded.