(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  Emily heard this out with smouldering anger. ‘Nothing—nothing on earth—would make him go back to you.’

  ‘I hope you are wrong, Miss Stratman. And I hope I am not wrong in judging that your good sense coincides with your uncle’s good sense.’

  ‘About what? I still don’t know what you’re trying to say.’

  ‘I’m only trying to say in my diplomat’s way—forgive the verbosity—that there just may be something on earth that might help Max Stratman make the change.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If not something, then someone. For someone, to save someone, perhaps Max Stratman might reconsider.’

  Emily’s mood of fearlessness, fanned by hatred and a feeling of unreality that isolated her from this improbable interview, persisted. ‘Am I the someone?’ she asked, suddenly. ‘Are you threatening to hold me, abduct me? Is that what?’

  Eckart removed his monocle, shaking his head as if genuinely offended. ‘My—my—Miss Stratman—America has spoilt you, too. I believe you are all victims of those glorifying gangster films on television and in the cinema. I promise you—we do not drop hostages in canals and such nonsense. We have more civilized means.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do to me to make me or my uncle—’

  ‘Nothing, Miss Stratman? No barter at all? Are you so certain?’

  Suddenly the self-righteous fury went out of her, and she was less certain. ‘I repeat it—nothing. You can kill me—’

  ‘Please, Miss Stratman, do not offend me again. I am a scientist and a scholar, not a savage. You are my guest, and I am your host. In the end, you shall see, we will both benefit from this brief meeting. You have someone I want—your uncle—and I have someone you want.’

  Eckart had been leaning forward, but now he was erect in the chair, adjusting his monocle to its place. Deliberately, he rose, pulled his short suit jacket straight, and slowly he came around the desk, ignoring Emily as he went to the door through which she had entered.

  Emily’s hands tightened on the arms of the chair, and the pulses of her wrists throbbed, as she turned to watch him.

  He opened the door to the reception room, and he was nodding to someone out of sight. ‘All right,’ he was saying, ‘she is ready to see you.’

  Eckart stepped aside, almost deferentially (how curious), like a chamberlain about to announce the entry of nobility, and at once the figure of an elderly man filled the doorway. The light of the reception room was behind him, and the office was darkened, so that momentarily he was only an outline in black.

  Slowly, he shuffled—was there a barely perceptible limp?—into the room, towards Emily, the colourless black of his outline giving way to human features and figure. He came past Emily, and then hesitantly around in front of her, and a few feet before her he halted, as if to inspect her and himself be inspected.

  Now, at last, he was clearly visible to her troubled eyes, a stocky old man, slightly bent beneath time, attired in a heavy dark grey unfashionable worsted suit, the suit wrinkled and rumpled as if he had travelled steadily in it and had had no time to send for the valet. She stared without embarrassment, not because he was unusual, but because he was so usual, so almost known and faintly familiar, like one whose face you cannot quite place or whose name is almost at the tip of your tongue.

  His head and face held her. The head was massive on a short thick column of neck. The hair was sparse but sufficient, shining white and carefully combed sideways from a wide part above one ear. The face was chapped rough red, all symmetrical and firm despite streaks of age, except for the prominently bulbous nose, which disconcerted her because it was known to her.

  Still mystified and curiously detached, Emily could see that the kindly red face—so familiar, so once-known—was alive with emotion, the eyes watery and blinking, the bulbous nose sniffling, the lips trembling.

  The familiar stranger swallowed and shook his head. ‘You do not recognize me, my little goose?’

  That instant she recognized him, or thought she did, and even as her knotted fists pulled her to the edge of the chair, looking up at him, she rejected the possibility. Yet the bulbous nose, the timbre of his voice, the intangible cord between them that was drawing her out of the chair and unsteadily to her feet, could not be dismissed. Above all, the phrase of endearment this stranger had used so easily, so naturally, as if this was homecoming and they had simply resumed again. My little goose. Where had she heard it before and from whom? Where . . . back and back and backward the years . . . when he had carried her round and round the old, oak-lined living-room, on his shoulders, aloft, propping her high, holding her, round and round, faster and faster, as she squealed and kicked, and he laughed and laughed . . . little goose, little goose . . . and again, again, leaving her, beribboned, groomed, starched, wide-eyed and pale, at the gymnasium with the frocked teacher . . . you are growing, a young lady now, my little goose . . . and once more, with pain, with wrenching . . . in the drizzle, at the door, down the steps to the street between the efficient, unsentimental brown-shirts . . . I will write, Rebecca, I will have you out, soon, soon . . . soon, Rebecca . . . soon, my little goose . . .

  His caress of love. Only his. No other.

  She stood before him now, clamped immobile by a paralysis of disbelief. The massive, venerable face blurred an instant and then an instant stood in bold relief, as if cut from granite and now weather-beaten: the matted white hair, the tear-filled brown eyes, the working stubbled jaw.

  Eckart’s brisk voice was behind her, engulfing the incredible seconds and dim years, captioning the moment. ‘Miss Stratman—you must know him, of course—Walther Stratman, your father—’

  ‘Papa.’ Her voice spoke, not she, to herself, not to the familiar stranger.

  ‘—missing, but not dead, it turns out,’ Eckart went on behind her. ‘He’s been alive all these years—in custody of the Russians after he helped your uncle escape—working for his captors. But now he is here in neutral Stockholm. It is a miracle I have managed for you—he is free at last.’

  The face of the old familiar stranger was nodding, nodding. ‘Yes, Emily, it is Walther—your papa. I know how you feel this minute—as I feel—the shock, the incredibility—but we are alive, my little goose—and together—the darkness gone, forgotten—from now on together, always. I am free, Emily.’

  ‘Papa,’ her voice said aloud.

  And suddenly his rough red face slipped away, sucked slowly into the gaping vortex of the spinning room, and she felt herself moving into the vortex, too. Desperately, she tried to keep her balance, hold on to the something inside, the upright thing you held to keep straight, but she felt it crack beneath her, and she let go and abandoned herself to the airiness of the spinning room. For the eternity of a second, she hung suspended and legless, and then the carpet floated up into vision, and the coarse nap of the carpet was on her cheeks and mouth, and after that, the far voices and enormous shoes, and after that only blackness, star-peppered, and then blackness and blackness. . . .

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Seated on the side of the double bed, in the unfamiliar single room on the fifth floor that he had moved into, Andrew Craig dropped the telephone receiver back on the cradle in despair. For an hour and a half, every fifteen or twenty minutes, he had been ringing Emily’s suite without getting a response. If she had been accidentally delayed, why had he not heard from her? The only answer was that she had regretted the message she had sent him, and was purposely avoiding the telephone.

  He rose, jittery with frustration, and decided that some activity would calm him down. His valise stood on the baggage table, still not unpacked. He loosened the straps, set the suitcase flat, unlocked it, and began to throw his effects into a cupboard drawer. He passed fifteen minutes in this way, and when the valise was empty, there was nothing more to do. There was, as a matter of fact, his acceptance speech to write, but he had no interest in it.

  He filled his pipe, and considered phoning Emil
y one last time. But it seemed pointless. She knew where he was, or could find out by asking the operator, and if she wanted to see him, she would ring.

  Then, as he paced, worrying about Emily, troubled about the speech that must be written, something else occurred to him.

  He strode to the telephone and asked to be connected with the portier’s desk in the lobby.

  ‘Yes? This is the portier.’

  ‘This is Andrew Craig. Tell me—the keys to the Stratman suite—Miss Emily Stratman—Professor Stratman—are both their keys in the box? I’m trying to find out if either one has returned to the hotel yet.’

  ‘One second, Mr. Craig.’

  Craig waited, holding the receiver to his ear, and then the portier was back on the line. ‘Both keys are missing, so they must both be in. I would—one second, please hold—’ Craig heard indistinct voices, and then the portier again. ‘My colleague behind the desk tells me that Professor Stratman took his key and went up to his suite no more than ten minutes ago. And he says he believes that Miss Stratman came for her key about—it was shortly after the noon hour. So—’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Craig.

  He hung up. That was it, then. Emily had been in her room all this while, and returned to answer his call, and had then had a change of heart and stayed away from the telephone. The important thing she had to tell him would not be told. Their reunion was not to take place.

  Suddenly Craig was weary of pursuit and disappointment. If she was this way, then it was this way she would always be, and there would be no making her over. He had not the energy for these ups and downs. He would forget her. That would be for the best.

  He decided that he would go downstairs, have a few drinks and a snack in the Winter Garden, and after that, there might be time enough to outline some sort of acceptance speech—a brief, conversational speech larded with the literary clichés and double-talk (where man became Man) expected on these occasions, and then, at last, it would be time to dress for the final Ceremony.

  But when Craig arrived at the elevator, and pressed the button, he knew that his destination was not the Winter Garden but the Stratman suite.

  Quickly traversing the red-striped corridor carpet of the third floor, he reached her front door with every intention of buzzing and knocking until Emily was forced to make an appearance and engage in a showdown, but then he found that the front door was ajar. This was better, he decided at once. He would simply walk in on her and corner her, before she could temporize and equivocate, and he then would have it out with her. As he reached for the knob, the door moved away from his touch.

  A stooped chambermaid, in clean but faded green, carrying a pail of suds and brushes, a mop clenched awkwardly, was opening the door to leave.

  Craig stepped aside for her, nodding politely. ‘Miss Stratman is expecting me,’ he explained, because he felt that an explanation was needed.

  The chambermaid muttered an incomprehensible phrase in Swedish, and waited for Craig to enter, and then she closed the door after him.

  In the entry hall, Craig hesitated on the frontier of propriety. One did not barge into other people’s private quarters unannounced, unless one was Leah, but then Craig justified his act by remembering that he had telephoned Emily often enough, and that she had wanted to see him. If she now suffered timidity or doubt, at least one of them should be the aggressor.

  Nevertheless, he felt uncertain of his position as he went into the sitting-room. He looked about. The room was vacant, and quiet except for the ticking of a clock. He moved past the sofa to what he recalled to be Emily’s bedroom door, intending to call her or rap, when he was arrested by the torn note held upright between the telephone and lamp. The upper half of the note had been crossed out. It read:

  Had to suddenly go out to a business lunch. See you soon. Room service says your gown will be back at 3. Love, UNCLE MAX.

  Beneath these crossed out sentences was a later communique:

  2.20. Liebchen—Have returned from lunch and want to rest. Do not let me oversleep. Wake me before 4 o’clock. UNCLE MAX.

  Craig straightened. Emily was not in after all. He felt ashamed for having mistrusted her, and equally ashamed at this intrusion on her privacy. Whatever had detained her, he told himself, was her own business, and if she intended to telephone him, she would do so before the Ceremony. He felt better now. To hell with the Winter Garden. He would return to his room and outline the speech and wait for her.

  Simultaneous with his decision came the sound of the front door buzzer. His first thought was: Emily, at last. Then his second thought corrected the first: she would not buzz, for she had a key. Well, he had no business here. He would see who it was—Emily’s gown being returned by the valet, no doubt—he would accept it, hang it up, allow old Stratman his nap, and then leave.

  When he hurried into the entry to answer the buzzer, he noticed that a single sheet of white typing paper had been slipped through the crack at the bottom of the front door. He stooped to pick it up, not intending to invade privacy further by reading the typewritten message, intending only to place the message on the table, when Emily’s name leaped out of the page at him.

  He read the typed words set down entirely in capital letters:

  PROF. STRATMAN: IF YOU WISH TO KNOW THE WHEREABOUTS OF YOUR NIECE EMILY STRATMAN THEN OPEN THE PARCEL IMMEDIATELY AND LISTEN TO A FRIEND.

  The cords in Craig’s throat constricted. The words on the sheet in his hands were bland and harmless words, but the effect was ominous. Like all Americans, so isolated from the everyday intrigues of the Old World, Craig was conditioned by lurid fiction and film, to believe that such skulduggery was as extinct as history. To even project the possibility of conspiracy, on a level lower than unreal high government circles, was to cast aside maturity and sophistication. Automatically, to one raised as he had been, all machination was the façade of what was more familiar and innocent—the practical joke.

  At once, Craig rejected menace and prepared for the unfolding of the joke. He opened the front door to admit the page with his parcel. But there was no one there, which tended to confirm the joke. He poked his head into the corridor and searched off right and then left. The corridor was empty. And then his shoe bumped the parcel on the corridor floor.

  Taking up the small, light parcel, meaning to place it with the ridiculous message on the entry table, he was nagged by an urgency to reread the message. Now he did so, and now he sensed jeopardy. What corroborated the threat of the message was Emily’s actual absence. She had said that she would be back in her suite at 12.30, but it was past 2.30. The thing to do, he knew, was to awaken Professor Stratman—message and parcel were directed to him—and be reproved for interrupting an old man’s rest with collegiate nonsense. His instinct was to obey the message himself, and, at worst, be accursed for a meddlesome fool. And if it was not a joke? His instinct was reinforced by a deep emotion: his stake in Emily was, by this time, as great as Stratman’s stake.

  Foregoing further vacillation, Craig tugged at the strand of twine around the grey parcel, tore it off, and then peeled away the paper.

  When he was finished, he held in his hand a miniature tape recorder, no more than four by five inches, constructed of black plastic. To the lower left, in white lettering, were the words ‘Record . . . Play . . . Stop’ with a tiny lever set at ‘Stop’. A slot above revealed the miniscule tape inside. And next to that was a knob with lettering beneath that read ‘Manual Rewind’. There was no trade name on the plastic machine. Craig turned it over. On the back, in a corner, imprinted black on black, were the words ‘Made in Stettin’. And then Craig saw that a coil of wire was attached to the device, and at its end, a plastic earplug, which was the speaker.

  Standing in the entry hall with this novelty, Craig decided that if it was a prank, it was an expensive prank. Somehow, he did not like this, whatever it was. Indecision had disappeared. He would follow the advice in the message. He would LISTEN TO A FRIEND.

  Careful
ly, he placed the miniature tape machine on the table, unwound the wiring, pushed the plastic earplug into his left ear, and then he switched the tiny lever from ‘Stop’ to ‘Play’.

  At first, there was the rubbing of the tape, and no other sound. Suddenly, piercing his eardrum, a disembodied male voice: ‘Max, this is your old friend, Hans Eckart, addressing you. I should have preferred communicating with you in person, and, in fact, tried to do so earlier today. Since I could not locate you, I took the liberty of arranging to meet your niece. She is beside me now. Do not be alarmed in any way. She is well and the recipient of some extremely good news, which she will convey to you in a moment. Forgive my use of this melodramatic instrument, Max, but circumstances made it necessary. I might have sent Emily in person with the news, or had her telephone you, but she could have revealed our whereabouts, and that would have been troublesome. I thought to have her write you a note, but she is too excited, and moreover you might not have believed her news unless you heard it from her own lips.’

  There was the briefest pause. The clipped voice spoke perfect English, yet the cadence and inflection were unmistakably Teutonic. Craig, first tense and worried when he had begun to listen, then gradually disarmed by the speaker’s informal reassurances to Max, tried to recall if he had ever heard the name of Hans Eckart. He could not remember, but before he could search his mind further, the same voice had resumed.