The wind was now cold on his face and the motor was running smooth. For all the strains he’d put it through, the de Haviland was showing the kind of toughness that made it a popular plane for training. He set his controls again and opened the throttle full to take advantage of a tailwind. At that he hit a downdraft. The small craft dropped sharply and the plane was soon tangling to right itself. Kitaj strained with all the strength of his hand to steady the stick. With that, the scratching burst up again from the floorboards and another stream of gray shapes shot out from beneath the seat.
This time they overwhelmed him, climbing up the walls of the cockpit and biting his face and chest as well as his legs. He battered at them with his dead hand but only succeeded in knocking a few out of the cockpit. The others clung to his bloodied glove as he struck them, biting deep into the senseless flesh.
The animals were relentless, driven by the scent of his fresh wounds. They hopped and leaped at him at will. The plane was shuddering, and Kitaj knew he was rapidly losing control. Now he looked up to see the wings and struts crawling with the crazed animals. Just then he felt a horrendous tear in his thigh just below the groin.
My God, they’ve opened my leg, he thought in cold realization of his danger. He looked down to see the red spurts of arterial blood shoot out of the gaping wound. They’d severed his femoral artery!
Just before he passed out a second time he caught sight of the valley, tranquil far below in the afternoon sun.
Phibes watched the plane spin all the way down. It whirred like a compass needle without the true poles or a bird whose broken wings could no longer support it as it fought to find the air.
Vulnavia, his assistant, stood at the very edge of the promontory playing a white violin that was pressed clean and sterile under her jet hair. Had Phibes turned—of course, he didn’t turn away from his observation—he would have seen her as he always enjoyed her: inchoate and pure of outline. She was a mannequin cut out against the long horizon.
But her presence and the music was enough for his purposes. She played a Glazunoff concerto, quite new. He’d taken a liking to the current music ever since he’d journeyed to Paris especially to hear a new piece by another Russian. “Le Sacre du Printemps” was not well received; the papers even said the audience was unruly, some used the word “riotous.” But Phibes was ever to recall it as savage and exhilarating.
He bought whatever he could of Igor Stravinsky and of the Frenchman, Edgard Varèse. He wouldn’t permit his orchestra to play the pieces and hardly attempted them himself. He preferred, rather, to have Vulnavia perform on the violin or piano. Initially his habit was to spend an hour or two a day in the music room where she would present a collection of pieces. Later on he enjoyed having her accompany him while he worked in his laboratory. He found the music appropriate. He permitted himself the thought that it enabled him to keep up with things “modern.”
That day the Glazunoff violin concerto was eminently appropriate. It fed on the ripeness of the Russian soil and so blended well with the green-and-gold afternoon valley. It did not fit, however, with the spiraling aircraft now out of control. And Vulnavia stopped as soon as the orange-black plume announced the end of the deadfall.
Phibes turned from his telescope, his hands elevated in the triumph of some great field commander at the flush of victory. He hissed in his characteristic sardonic excess and his eyes darted and gleamed evil in the daylight. Vulnavia, always sensitive to his mood, stood at his side offering a champagne glass on a silver server. He lifted the crystal and, pouring the entire contents into the aperture in his neck with relish, bowed to the girl and repaired to the car.
The closed rear curtains of the saloon car signaled the end of its mission. It sped away from that place as silently as it had come.
The next morning Harry Trout’s office was a maelstrom of activity. Sir John had been in first off to receive the report of Kitaj’s death. Trout was surprised when Sir John didn’t blow up. Rather, he admonished him that they would have to exert maximum security with the remaining members of the surgical team and told Trout to take whatever men he could find for the purpose. When he left, Trout confirmed a particularly resigned note in his chief’s attitude, an observation which disturbed him greatly.
But he had little time to brood about it. Just after Sir John, Tom Schenley called to say he was bringing in a Miss Audrey Basehart. The young lady had called the dispatcher near midnight on the evening before to inquire about her fiancee’s strange “accident.” The call had been routed to Homicide where Schenley, who was just then completing his report, asked her to come in the next morning.
Trout was notably surprised by the girl’s looks, but something in her reserve and the hollow patches about her eyes told him not to press the point. He kept the conversation polite and subdued to a fault, which fact drew a note of praise from Schenley who’d instantly observed upon introducing the two, that Miss Basehart and Mr. Trout would make a very fine couple indeed. Mercifully the interview was short, shorter even than Sir John’s, and she left with a not objectionably lingering handshake and Trout’s sincere condolences.
As soon as the door closed, Trout signaled Schenley to remain. “We’re on the last lap, Tom. It’s going to be all footslogging from here on in.”
“You mean we’re done playing catch up, sir?”
“Emphatically.”
“I wish Sir John could have sounded a bit more affirmative.”
“I thought it was a morale problem too and then thought better of it. What really happened is that he’s giving us carte blanche.”
“I’m afraid you read a bit too much latitude into the director’s remarks, sir. What he did say was‘to take whatever men we could find,’ if I may quote him, precisely. D’you know how that reads?”
Trout stared at him.
“Ten men from this division and thirty from the district stations, most of the lot on restricted leave.”
“Forty men to provide security for three active professional people!” Trout was incredulous. “So that’s what’s behind that half-hearted pep talk. He’s putting us in a box with the hope of crying poor mouth later. Does he think he can get away with that? The press will shoot it full of holes.”
“He had no choice. There are at least two major cases on the docket right now. And the disarmament sessions are taking all the reserves.”
“But our people are going to need around-the-clock surveillance, stakeouts and personal guards as well as the tracking team. We can’t produce them out of our hats. And surely by now it must be common knowledge that we’re not dealing with an amateur!”
“What I saw at Northolt yesterday only confirmed the caliber of the man. Kitaj was dead before the plane crashed. The rats—and there must’ve been over a hundred parked in the fusellage, I don’t know how the trainer got off the ground —had been starved for at least a week prior to their use, A dousing with fresh blood did the rest.”
“But wharf rats aren’t killers,” Trout said.
“The blighters’ll eat anything. It’s the only way they can survive; and they’ve been known to attack infants in prams and winos that don’t watch where they’re sleeping.”
“Well enough of that. You say Kitaj was dead before the plane crashed?”
“Quite! The rats disabled his right hand. Tore his wrist to shreds. He had all he could do to handle the plane. He’d only gotten about ten kilometers from the aerodrome when the first attack came. He knocked a few of the beasts off and then turned around for home. Cunningham, the instructor, says he could’ve made it: he was that good a student. But the rats went to him again. This time they got a deep artery too far up in his leg for him to put a tourniquet on even if he could have manipulated one. He lost consciousness just before he reached the aerodrome. They saw him crash.”
“The filthy bastard!”
“The man’s a demon. Probably feels he can’t be stopped. But he’s also a logical and quite conservative fellow. He hasn’t veered from
the timetable yet.”
“That G’tach formula from Rabbi Ben Gabirol. Vesalius was puzzling on that one last night. The last curse—darkness —is a cropper.” Trout pondered for a minute and then asked impishly: “D’you think our killer is going to pull off an eclipse?”
“I know he’s pretty well set on pulling off these three remaining murders. You’d think he’d also be up on the odds he’s going against. A professional would surely know that the more exposure he risks, the less his chances are of going undetected.”
“Turn that around, Tom. They also get better for his getting caught, which is precisely what our Dr. Phibes wants.”
Schenley started. “So you think the doctor put his ashes together?”
“We have almost no other choice. At least no other possible suspect who’s currently viable unless some maiden aunt is stuck somewhere in the woodwork. But I’ll have to go with the man who had a motive. And that man was the good doctor—which reminds me Tom, did you know he wasn’t a medical doctor?”
“No!” Schenley’s mouth gaped in surprise.
“He took his doctorate in physics at Cambridge, then went on to Vienna for further studies in music. His disertation there consisted of a concise but detailed discussion of the impact of music and musicians on the feudal courts of medieval Europe.”
“The man was a scholar, I’d say.”
“And you’d be partly right,” Trout agreed. “He also was a polished performer and was known on the concert circuit.”
“With the Philharmonic?”
“That would be out of character. The doctor was a soloist. He played the organ.”
“And the Foreign Service?”
“Phibes was already forty when he met Victoria who was seventeen years his junior. He loved her instantly and lavishly in a passion not uncommon to a man of his stature and position. However, he appeared to be sincere, and quite honorable in his intentions. So much so that he did not want to drive her away with the apparent aimlessness of his life.”
“He was a profligate.”
“Not really, but his family, Austrian originally, and well landed, placed no compunction on its scions about careers and the like. Other than his recitals and an occasional lecture to library groups, Phibes had done nothing in the way of work since leaving Vienna fifteen years earlier. His parents had both died since and, save for a few maiden aunts and an odd cousin or two on the continent, Phibes was quite free to drift. The only reason he remained in London is that he’d grown accustomed to it during his schooling.”
“A diffident bastard, I’d say,” Schenley replied.
“But Victoria changed all that, Tom. Two weeks after he met her he broke into foreign service, strictly on the force of his personality.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a family connection, sir?”
The foreign secretary still remembers their first interview. He performed diligently, ably and absolutely brilliantly, showing a facility for‘handling difficult negotiations with dispatch,’ or so was written in his evaluation. For her part, Victoria was the perfect match for this strange older man who seemed bent on courting her. He was quite handsome and, of course, quite well off. But the Devereaux family was wealthy in its own right; this plus Victoria’s obvious qualities could have brought her any one of a dozen young eligibles who’d already paid her formal homage.”
“She must’ve been a perverse girl. If she were my daughter I’d cane her for chasing the likes of Phibes.”
“There’s where you err, Tom, and not on the side of the angels. Victoria loved her doctor. She had the good sense not to let him know it too quickly. It was on her devotion that his career as well as their courtship thrived. Almost a year from the date they met, they were married at Canterbury by the Archbishop himself. The wedding was greeted with favorable, even glowing reactions in the press. And all doubts, even those of her family who’d resisted to the last, about the propriety of this union were dispelled.”
“Sounds like a storybook finish. What went wrong?” Schenley asked.
“Nothing. If anything, Phibes’ work improved. Reluctantly, he accepted assignments on the continent where his knowledge of history and economics could be put to good use in a research capacity. Phibes surprised everyone when he was principally responsible for the negotiation of a series of highly favorable trade agreements with the Russians and French.”
“And their marriage?”
“It flourished, even swelled. Phibes’ tastes brought him in constant touch with the literary and musical lights of the day. He especially seemed to gravitate to the American expatriate writers who were just then making a name. Dos Passos, the Steins, T. S. Eliot were all known to him as was Ernest Hemingway. The couple was, in turn, idolized, with Victoria’s wit and perception making them favorites at the popular‘salons’.”
“It’s almost sad to hear it. A storybook courtship, a popular marriage, ending too abruptly.”
“It sounds like the classical tragedy.”
“And as such must have its final act of—if we can borrow the word again from the G’tach—retribution.”
“Phibes couldn’t accept that he’d lost it all. The best part of his life had been taken from him. He demanded payment.”
“On a godly scale. And he’s damn well going to pull it off. He’s got enough bitterness to see him through worse than we’ve seen yet. Now where do we stand on our lineup?”
“Nurse Allan is most heavily covered because of the accessibility of the hospital. I’ve had staff in plainclothes both on the grounds and in the park across the street for the past two days, plus double guards on her floor of the Resident Quarters, as well as the floors immediately above and below.”
“Good. I’ve been on Vesalius, although I must admit that the man is ornery enough to call himself‘resentful’ of the imposition on his schedule. And Whitcomb?”
“We’re taking him out of the country—that’s if he’ll come along.”
“If he’ll come along!”
“We’ve had trouble persuading him; claims his practice will suffer. Personally, I think it’s that Danish girl. He’s been spending his nights—and most of his days—over there.”
Trout exploded: “Listen, Tom, you get him away from that little bitch if you have to threaten to deport her. He must think he’s playing cops and robbers. Now you convince that fool of what he’s into and tell him that I want him on the train tonight or I will personally see to it that he’s placed in protective custody! Clear?”
“Clear as day. I’ll get right on that now, sir.”
Sergeant Schenley seemed particularly happy to accept that assignment.
Chapter 14
“ULLA!” Whitcomb called.
“Yes, Dana?”
“Don’t call me that! I am your king. Say that. Or better still,‘My liege.’”
“But we aren’t ready yet, Dana!”
“No matter. You must learn the value of the royal imperative. The king commands; his followers obey. If you are to be my queen, then you must always do as I say. You want to be a queen, don’t you, Ulla?”
The girl hesitated, blushed and looked down at her long legs which were quite bare.
“Well, don’t you?” he demanded.
Her plump hands twisted and knotted the lace handkerchief. She wore a gold filigree chemise and sat regally, if a bit forlornly, on a low white boudoir stool. Whitcomb was amused at the way she kept her eyes lowered. It was almot shy, adding to the poignance of the girl who’d positioned herself before the uncovered dressing table. The little wench. Doesn’t she realize the chemise scarcely covers the small of her back? She’s trying to throw me off! Whitcomb thought, marveling still at the girl’s voluminous posterior.
“Yes,” she murmured.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, my liege.”
“Again. Say it again so you’ll have it perfect.”
“My liege.”
She was beginning to make a good pupil. “That’s better, Ulla,
” he said.
“Sir!” she said, playing the game now.
“That’s better, my queen! Of course the royal imperative must be served. Now tell me, who am I?”
“Edmund Ironsides.”
“Perfect. And you are Ealdgyth. Ealdgyth, Queen of Mer-cia.”
She lifted her eyes a bit.
“And of Anglia and Cambria as well,” he added. “And if we can secure Gruffyd’s fealty our suzerainty will extend into Northumbria.”
“Oh, Edmund, I’m so excited. Think of it! Danelaw will become Mercian power!” She crossed her legs and Whitcomb could breathe the freshness of her thighs. The girl was better than the others, really “appreciating” her history. He would use her next week in the House of York ascension. And many times after that. But now they must perform the coronation, the final setting of his seduction.
“A strong and united England, ours to command. But there’s still the question of Gruffyd. He came into East Anglia last winter and rumors have it that he’s provisioned his army again against another season’s activities.”
She finished dressing and stood up, now clad in a short maroon bodice trimmed in lace and framed behind by an elegant red velvet train. Although she was but twenty, Ulla looked every bit a queen . . .
Whitcomb had met her at a gallery opening a few weeks earlier. He was impressed not only by her transparent spiritual beauty but by her appreciation for history as well. At the time he could not ascertain whether she was a schoolgirl who was caught up in the romance of history, or rather a discrete and highly sophisticated whore who, with a discerning eye, was able to sense the specific and rather elaborate predilections professionals tended to and was pursuing a career in their service.
During their acquaintance Whitcomb was never so gauche as to question the girl directly, much preferring to enjoy the stimulus of an extended doubt. He had little trouble in obtaining her key, considerably more in obtaining her favors. And when he did, his surmise of her virtue was instantly confirmed: she wept, pleaded, cringed and finally yielded to his sexual onslaught which Whitcomb, as he gloated afterward, did not have to feign for the first time in a decade.
Dr. Phibes Page 14
