“You think the crew of the Polaris will try to destroy the evidence?” said Simon, alarmed at the thought.
“Their cargo,” said Hawkes.
“People,” said Albert.
“Good point,” said Hawkes, reluctantly. “What we need to do is get him in our confidence somehow.”
“I have an idea,” said Albert, whose uvula had never vibrated to that combination of sounds before and, as it did so now, tickled with their strangeness. “To all intents and purposes, he’s already under house arrest at Mr. Sweetman’s. He just doesn’t know it.”
There was only one person, Albert knew, who could approach Bindy with a request of this kind: Sergeant Jeffreys. This meant taking him into their confidence, of course, but the character he’d revealed during recent events had proven him worthy.
“You mean, you want me to spy!?” said Bindy. The suggestion, especially coming from Sergeant Jeffreys, set up vibrations in her hinterlands. “’Course I will!”
“But you have to understand, Bindy,” said Jeffreys, assuming his most official manner, “this is a very dangerous assignment. And this is most important: you can’t say anything about it to anyone. Not a soul.”
“I swear,” said the girl, crossing her heart. “I won’t breathe a word!”
“Good. It’s very important that you don’t.”
“Except to Gran, of course.”
“Gran? No, Bindy, you can’t tell anyone. Not even your Gran. No one on earth. Your life could depend on it.”
“Well, yes, but, I’ve got to tell Gran. I tell Gran everything, and she’d never repeat it to anyone.”
Jeffreys stationed himself squarely in front of the girl and, taking firm hold of her shoulders with both hands, shook her. “No one, Bindy! If you can’t promise me that—and I mean a real promise—I’ll have to find someone else to . . .”
“No! No!” the girl cried. “I’ll do it. Double-cross my heart.” She double crossed her heart. “Not a soul. Not even Gran. Not if it kills me.”
“You’re sure?” said Jeffreys, staring into her eyes, trying to read her soul. “Positive?”
“I promise.”
“Very well, then. We’re all counting on you.”
The tingles that the proposal had set up in Bindy’s interior suburbs swelled in waves toward the graffiti-covered inner city of her mind, where—as the reality of what lay before her hit home—they grew to palpitations. She swallowed deeply. “What do you want me to do?”
Jeffreys laid out Albert’s plan.
“That’s the plan?” she said, clearly not what she had in mind.
“That’s it.”
“Awfully simple, I should think,” she said. “What if I’m caught?” she added, as if that were a foregone conclusion.
“Like I said, it could be dangerous,” said Jeffreys.
“You know what happened last time I played hide-and-seek?” said Bindy, adding, without waiting for an answer. “I peed myself.”
“I’m sure it won’t come to that,” said Jeffreys. “Still. . .”
“Still what?”
“As long as you pee quietly. . .”
Bindy burst out laughing. “Too right! I’ll make a note: Pee quietly!”
And so it was that Bindy found herself under Pyle’s bed that night. She’d let herself into his room about 8:30 to make sure she had plenty of time to situate herself comfortably before he retired for the night. It was now nearly 10:30. She had fallen asleep, and was awakened by the sound of the key in the lock. She started, choking down the sudden knot in her throat, stole a glance at her watch, and clamped her hand over her mouth.
From her vantage point, the room was reduced to an elongated horizontal slot through which she watched Pyle’s feet—distinctive in their beige leather loafers—approach as the door closed behind him. He sat on the edge of the bed, within easy reach of the bedside table, kicked off his shoes, and wiggled his toes in his argyle socks. He cleaned,filled, and lit his pipe, tapping his toes nervously. From time to time he made noises, suggesting, to Bindy, thinking sounds.
Twice he reached for the phone, lifted it from the cradle, then replaced it. “Walls have ears,” he whispered after the second time. It was all Bindy could do to keep from crying: ‘Not these walls!’
She clamped her other hand over her mouth.
Pyle deliberated.
“Please don’t look under the bed! Please don’t look under the bed!” Bindy projected telepathically into the springs that sagged under Pyle’s weight not an inch from her nose.
Pyle got up and tip-toed to the wardrobe door, which he seized by the handle and flung open, as if to surprise any unauthorized occupant. ‘Please don’t look under the bed! Please don’t look under the bed!’
Having satisfied himself that the wardrobe was empty, he gently closed the door and returned to the bed, where he stopped, his toes facing Bindy. Still with her hands clamped over her mouth, she shut her eyes as tightly as possible. What was he doing? Any second, she knew, he'd get down on his hands and knees and discover her hiding there. What would he do? What would he say? What would she say when he said it? Her heart was beating so hard she felt the elastic in her bra expand and contract, making the noise that, in her oversensitive condition, was that of a particularly malicious clown making balloon animals.
What was he doing, just standing there? She opened her eyes, half expecting to find him on his hands and knees, looking back at her. Instead, it was just his toes. Somehow, though, they seemed to be staring at her, asking her what she was doing under the bed; accusing her of spying, threatening to expose her to other members of his body!
At last, he turned, took a couple of steps to the chair beside the beside table and sat. Once more he picked up the phone. He didn’t dial, didn’t say anything. He seemed to be listening.
“Hello?” he said at last.
He waited a few seconds, then put the phone back in the cradle.
Bindy’s bowels suddenly reminded her of that long-ago hide-and-seek. “Oh, no!’ she thought. ‘Please, God! Not that!’ There was no room for her to cross her legs. She removed one of her hands from her mouth and clamped it where it might do the most good. Already she began to feel like an explosive device, one end or the other was apt to blow at any moment; she didn’t know how long she and her biology could take the strain.
Pyle stood up and paced around the room as—moving her head as little as possible—she followed with her eyes. Finally, he came back to the chair by the bedside table and picked up the phone and dialed the number for an outside line. The dial tone was loud enough for Bindy to hear. Pyle, too, listened to it for a moment then, at last, he committed, saying the numbers out loud as he did so: 0-3-7-3-1-2-6-9.
Someone knocked softly on the door. Pyle slammed the receiver down. Bindy wet herself, quietly.
“Mr. Pyle?” said James Simon. “We’re having drinks in the lounge. Care to join us? Whisky-and-soda, is it?”
Pyle’s voice fairly shook as he replied. “Yes! Yes! In a minute. I’ll . . . I just have to . . . Yes. I’ll be down in a . . . in a . . . whiskey-and-water. A double,” he said. “No, a triple!”
“Triple it is, as soon as . . .” said Simon through the door.
Bindy watched wide-eyed as Pyle, cursing under his breath in a way he certainly wouldn’t have had he known there was a lady present, pulled on his slippers and shuffled from the room, not locking the door behind him. Bindy scarcely breathed until she heard his foot land on the squeaky tread midway down the stairs. She crawled out of her hiding place, struggled to her feet, threw open the door and, with both hands strategically placed to staunch the flow, ran to the bathroom at the bottom of the back stairs.
Jeffreys, who had been nervously waiting events—positioned to bound to the second floor at the slightest suggestion of a scream—saw her pass the door and ran after her. The door slammed in his face. “Bindy!” he said in a loud whisper. “Bin? Are you okay? What happened?”
“A minut
e!” she called. “I’m okay. Give me a minute!”
He heard her throw up in the toilet.
“Bin!? What happened?”
“Shut up, can’t you!” she snapped between breaths. “Can’t you tell I’m puking my guts up?”
He could. He shut up. She was alive and, apparently, unharmed. A wave of relief swept over him. He, too, had been waiting a long time, but he’d at least had the advantage of knowing when Pyle went upstairs. The last few minutes, though—after he had done so—had been an emotional root-canal.
He leaned his head against the door. “I’m so sorry, Bin’,” he said. “We shouldn’t have put you through it. I shouldn’t have let them . . . I just . . . if anything happened to you.”
The sound of water running followed by a significant amount of splashing, followed. At last the door opened a bit and Bindy, looking surprisingly fresh and pink all over with scrubbing—though he was not to know that—studied him through the crack. “If anything happened to me, what?”
“What?” said Jeffreys, flushing brightly. “Oh, well, I’d . . . I mean, I would have felt, it was, that is, you were, are my resp . . . that is to say, I’m pretty sure I’ve fallen in love with you.”
He hadn’t meant to say that, but the harpoon was thrown and there was no calling it back. It went straight to Bindy’s heart and, in a single motion, she threw open the door and flew into his arms, compressing him against the doorpost and denting his chest with her charms. For the moment, it was his turn to be breathless as she smothered him in kisses.
Finally he gathered his wits sufficiently to push her away, holding her by her elbows. “We can tend to that later,” he said in the most official tone he could manage.
“Too right we can!” said Bindy, stretching her lips toward his face, which withdrew professionally. “Not now. Not now,” he said, as much to quiet his own biological response as her ardor. “What happened? Did he make a call? What did he say?”
“He didn’t get a chance!” said Bindy. “The vicar called him down for drinks just as he was dialing! I couldn’t believe the timing.”
“We were worried,” said Jeffreys. “You’d been up there so long; things were too quiet after he went up.”
“So, it was your idea, that drinks business?”
“Well, yes. I suggested . . . I thought . . .”
She threw herself against him with such force that it nearly broke his thumbs. “Oh, Sergeant!”
“Andrew,” he said, when at last his lips were free. “Call me Andrew.”
She drew back. “Andrew. What a lovely name!” She made a mental note that their first son would be Sergeant Andrew Jeffreys, Jr. “Serge, for short,” she said aloud.
“Pardon?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Well, too bad. It’s one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time.”
“What was?” said Bindy, her lips still scintillating.
“That about you eavesdropping. Seems we butted in at just the wrong moment, but we had . . . I had . . . no way of knowing you were all right. And you’d been in there a long time, and that.”
“But it was a good idea,” Bindy protested, calling her lips to order. “I got the phone number he was calling.”
Jeffreys looked at her deeply. “You what?”
“You heard me.”
“Yes, but I can’t believe my ears. You heard the phone number?”
Bindy explained about Pyle saying the numbers aloud as he dialed. “Lots of folks do that,” she said in summary. “I do myself, sometimes.”
“And . . . you remember it?”
“‘Course I do. 0-3-7-3-1-2-6-8. 0-3 is same as Gran’s phone number. 7 is twice 3 plus 1—those are the next numbers—2-6, 26, that’s my waist size.” She twinkled at him.
“And the last?” said Jeffreys, focusing with all his might to think about anything but Bindy’s waist size.
“Eight. That’s the size of my ring finger, should you ever need to know. 0-3-7-3-1-2-6-8. That’s the lot!”
Chapter TwentyEight
“The number is an answering machine, located an office leased to an outfit called Callandra, Limited, in a building downtown,” said Hawkes when he convened with Albert and James Simon at the church the next morning.
“What do you know about them?” asked Simon.
“That they don’t exist,” said Hawkes. “Rather than storming in half-cocked, we interviewed one of the building’s custodial staff, who called it a would-be company. Says there are any number of them in the building. One- or two-man offices for little companies wanting the legitimacy of a good address for one reason or another. Callandra, Limited does these one better, though—or one less, as the case may be. It has no employees.”
“None?”
“Not one. Never has been since their name appeared on the door, according to the custodian.”
“Two years ago,” said Albert.
Hawkes, realizing he had been addressing his remarks to the vicar, was startled not only by Albert’s interjection, but that he pin-pointed the opening of the offices of Callandra, Limited, so precisely. “Exactly,” he said. “Two years ago.”
“That’s when Mrs. Sweetman died,” said Albert. “She was the first.”
“Harvested,” said Hawkes, hanging his head.
“Yes.” said Albert.
The brief requiem of silence that followed did so naturally, respectfully, as befitting the acknowledgment of the tragic, premature loss of one human being by other human beings, albeit strangers.
The vicar was the first to speak. “No one there?”
“Just the answering machine,” said Hawkes. “Stuck in a closet. It’s one of those that lets you both record and check messages remotely. That’s how the outfit gets its instructions. The way I figure it, each member of the Caduceus club or whatever you’d like to name it, call in at a preset time or times each day to see if our spider. . .”
“Pyle,” said Simon.
“Well, yes, but they don’t know who it is. That’s the beauty of the setup. Pyle runs it all from Pitt—where they don’t even have phones!”
“Then how does he. . .?”
“When he wants to send them their marching orders, he runs over to Chatham, books a room at the inn, makes the call to the answering machine at his leisure—knowing they’ll all call in at say, six in the afternoon, or whatever. . .”
“Could they do that?” said Simon. “All call in at the same time?”
Hawkes hadn’t thought that far. “Well, no. The machine can only take one call at a time, so they must call in on a staggered schedule. Be that as it may, once he’s delivered his message, Pyle beetles back to Pitt the next day, with none the wiser the wheels he’s set in motion.”
“So,” said Simon, “Venice Regent number one was a tramp streamer, ferrying would-be recipients around the South Pacific, ostensibly on holiday, until a donor becomes available. . .”
“New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, and Auckland was its customary circuit, according to the manifest it registered with marine authorities,” said Hawkes, reading from a matchbook on which he’d written his notes.
“Meanwhile, Venice Regent number two—basically a hospital ship where the donors. . . or their parts . . . are kept,” said Simon, “skulks around the back of beyond . . . making port of obscure places like South East Island?”
“So it would seem,” said Hawkes. “Until the time’s ripe for a rendezvous.”
Simon splayed his fingers on the coffee table. “Then Phuong jumps ship within sight of New Zealand and upsets the apple cart.”
“We’ve brought the answering machine in for forensics—fingerprints, what have you. But the tape has already been erased, remotely. I don’t hold much hope that it’ll give us anything to go on.”
Albert had been trying to listen, but his ears were full of an unsettled voice in his head, or his heart, or wherever unsettled voices settled. “Put it back!” he said, with a force that alarmed even him.
&n
bsp; “Say again?”
“Put it back,” Albert repeated. Somewhere in his brain an analogy was trying to form that would explain his outburst. “Like that horse and the woman.”
Hawkes looked meaningfully at Simon who, with a bit more experience of Albert, had a better idea the kind of leading questions to ask. “Horse and woman?” he said gently. “What horse, in particular?”
Albert suddenly remembered an identifying characteristic about the horse he had in mind. “It was made of wood.”
“A wooden horse?” said Hawkes. “You mean a rocking horse?”
Simon smiled. “He means the Trojan horse, I think.”
Albert, who had buried his head in his hands, trying to massage the metaphor from the nest of nettles in his brain, stood abruptly, the back of his knees, as his legs straightened, pushing the wooden pew back with a loud squeak that shook the figures in the shadows from their sleep, and made them look around and wonder what was going on. “Yes! The Trojan horse!”
“Helen of Troy,” said Hawkes, somewhat to himself. “The horse and the woman.”
“Yes,” said Albert. “Soldiers used the horse to play a trick on the people in the city.”
It was Hawkes turn to smile. “And we should use the answering machine to play a trick on the unsuspecting members of Caduceus.”
“Leave them a message,” said Albert, “as if you were Pyle. Tell them to meet at a certain place and time, and. . .”
Hawkes and Simon looked at each other. “Bingo!” they said simultaneously.
When recalling that conversation, and its denouement in years to come—which was often—Hawkes would generally conclude with “Only a mind that simple could come up with such a simple solution. Here we are, studying the machinery, examining it for fingerprints, trying to resurrect voices from the hiss of erased tape, applying all the technology at our disposal, and he says, ‘put it back where it was, and use it to trick them into turning themselves in. Worked a charm! We auditioned a few of our people until we found someone who Albert felt sounded most like Pyle—he’s got an ear for that. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Sound’s his business, you might say.
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