At a grand function that evening, in the main ballroom of the hotel, Henry Hallmark's peace tour of the world would open with an address to the British people. Tomorrow he would be on his way to Paris. The world was going to learn clearly exactly where the United States stood on atomic weapons, foreign policy, Red China, and Vietnam. It gave promise of being a success. Television cameras and batteries of newspapermen were already besieging the hotel. I had managed to wangle a small room on the third floor. It was all I really needed.
I placed a transatlantic telephone call to the United States, giving the number of the. red, white, and blue phone. Meanwhile, I unpacked my suitcases, took a shower, and revived what was left of my fading mental processes. I still hadn't made much headway with all the questions I had asked myself.
It took a half hour before I got a call back. Since I wasn't using the phone in my office, the security pattern was on. We had arranged sets of codes for this sort of thing, too.
The chief's voice came over the line, "Hello. How's the weather in London?"
"Foggy and lots of tourists," I said. "It's good to talk to you, Uncle Sam."
"Same here. Any developments on the greeting cards?"
He was getting better all the time. Hallmark. Greeting cards. Now, why hadn't I thought of that?
"They're in excellent shape. Beautiful designs, sure to be a popular item for the holiday season. I wanted to ask you before I met their head man—should I invest heavily?"
"By all means. Stick to him. Don't let him out of your sight until he agrees with the deal. You understand?"
"Perfectly. There's been trouble, though. The competition has been moving in, and they've sent out feelers. I've been able to block them so far, but I don't know how far to push my efforts."
"The limit." His voice was level and even and almost cold. "I don't want to lose this one. Is your sinus condition any better?"
He meant my arsenal and general health. "All fine," I said. "I had a spell there on the boat, but the fresh ocean air helped. I'll call you tomorrow."
"Good. Your aunt has been asking for you. You know how she worries."
"Give her my love. Soon as I hang up, I'll contact the greeting-card people. Wish me luck."
"Good-bye, son."
We hung up and I used the phone again, asking for the Hallmark suite. A polite voice answered. It wasn't Henry Hallmark or my old pal Richards.
"Who's calling?"
"May I speak to Mr. Hallmark, please?"
"Who's calling?" Now the voice sounded foreign and vague.
"Tell him it's Ed Noon. I came over with him on the Francesca. He asked me to call him."
"Mr. Hallmark is out. He is arranging his schedule for tonight's function. You can see him there—" The sound of the voice indicated a quick hang-up. I rushed in with, "Let me talk to Mrs. Hallmark, then—"
"Sorry. She is indisposed and talking to no one."
That time the polite voice did hang up. I frowned at the phone. That wasn't right, either. Unless Richards had issued instructions to give anyone called Noon the brushoff. But he couldn't have done that, wouldn't have done that, without the Hallmark seal of approval. Or would he?
There was a knock on the door of the room. I eased away from the phone, sliding for my .45. "Who is it?" I called out.
It was just a maid, tall and very pretty, with a bundle of white towels in her arms. I let her in and she smiled brightly.
"Fresh towels, sir. May I put them in the bathroom?"
"Be my guest."
I kept my eyes on her until she emerged once more, still with the cheerful smile and sincere English face. I took a chance.
"You English are so proper and formal I wonder if you'd allow me to be informal?"
"Sir?" She stopped, a mild uneasiness on her pretty face.
"Easy. I'm an American, as you've probably guessed, and I'm awfully interested in the Hallmarks—"
"Oh—" She relaxed. "He's ever so grand. So like Churchill, rest him. He's a fine man."
"That he is. I met him and his wife on the boat coming over. Even had dinner with them. Esme—that's his wife—wasn't feeling well, and I've been unable to get their room—"
She blinked. "Is your phone out of service?" She took a step toward the instrument. I checked her.
"Oh, it's fine. But every time I call their room some damn fool—excuse the expression—says they aren't in. Now, how do you account for that?"
"Oh," she said, her eyes puzzled. "Those Hindu chaps. Yes, they've been all over that floor this morning. I think Mrs. Hallmark hasn't been well. I was in the linen closet on that floor this morning when they came in. She looked poorly, so thin and pale. Hasn't she been well?"
"No," I said. "She hasn't. Poor Esme. She ought to be under a doctor's care."
"Rest your mind on that score." The informative maid smiled reassuringly. "She is under a doctor's care. They probably don't want her being excited. What with tonight and the excitement and all."
"You're probably right."
"You'll see I am." She paused at the door, prim, starchy, and very serviceable. "Hope you enjoy your stay with us, sir."
"Thanks. I will."
I was sure I would, but not before I found out what was going on with the Hallmarks.
And all.
After all, if Henry was in danger of being assassinated, so was Esme. Tired, faded Esme May Cody Hallmark.
There was a Hindu on guard at the door of the suite. He stood tall and imperious, his black beard jutting just as prominently as Surat Singh's. I walked up to him, swinging my black attaché case, as if I meant to walk right by him. He put out his arm and stopped me. No flicker of expression showed in his bleak eyes. I had checked with the registration desk in the lobby. Henry Hallmark had driven over to the House of Commons for a four o'clock appointment, accompanied by a Mr. Richards and a host of press people and interested parties. All of which had given me a cute hunch to work on. It was amazing that Henry Hallmark was openly associating with Hindus.
"Yes, please?" the guard said.
"Who are you?" I growled, flipping my wallet at him. "I am Dr. Withers. I came to see Mrs. Hallmark."
"Withers?" The Hindu seemed surprised.
"Yes, Withers, you idiot. Let me by."
I had nothing to lose. Even if he called somebody else, I could still get in. The main idea was to talk to Mrs. Hallmark.
"She already have doctor—"
"Then now she has another one, doesn't she? See here—let me by or I'll report you—"
"Wait." He seized my arm in a viselike hold. "Come in. We see her, I watch you—" That was fine with me. All I wanted was in. He opened the door and motioned me in ahead of him. I scurried across the threshold, snorting with irritation as I expected a doctor named Withers might. The Hindu followed. The door closed behind us; we stood in a large, elegant suite of rooms, complete with desk, paintings, and some extremely attractive chairs and lounges. A closed door beyond the French windows indicated the bedroom. "Follow," the Hindu commanded. I was well aware that he had locked the door behind us. It was perfect.
I let him get halfway across the room before I hit him. A judo slam across the back of his neck. He went down as if he had been poleaxed. his heels clattering on the parquet flooring. I didn't stop to count the whiskers in his beard. I reached the bedroom and swung the door open.
The room was deep in gloom, the shades drawn, a faint smell of medicines and antiseptics in the air. There was a small mound on the large, canopied, four-postered bed. I moved toward it, walking slowly, every sense alert.
The mound stirred, vague and indefinable.
"Richard—" a familiar voice moaned. It was a whimper from the grave. I knew the sound. "Is . . . that you, my baby—?" It was euphoria and depression all together. The heights and the depths. The miserable, unmistakable sound of drugs. Not the old drinking tenor of Esme May Cody Hallmark.
"Yes," I whispered, finding her clawlike hand and squeezing it. She squeezed back. T
he dreamy quality of her voice fluttered in the gloom. She stirred, trying to rise, her face turned toward the pillow.
"Rest," I whispered again, bending over her. "Easy now, Mother."
"Oh, Richard." It was a sigh. A short puff of life mixed in with a lot of death.
"Are you all right?" The tiny beam of my pocket flash found the needle marks on her thin arm. The punctures angered me. They looked so mute and ugly. The filmy shroud of a nightgown enveloped her frail body.
"Yes, Richard. Now that you're here—but your father, Richard. What has happened to your father—to a great American—"
"I don't know."
"He was so strong . . . so proud . . . so brave. So fine. I don't know him anymore— He is not what the world thinks he is . . . what he was once—"
"Father's all right," I mumbled. Her hand clawed into my palm, scratching. Her voice rose a notch.
"No Richard. . . . He sold out . . . to the Red Chinese . . . to Surat Singh . .. that terrible man— Pigs and cruel people, Richard. Don't be like them. Say you won't ever be like them—"
"I promise."
In the filtering shadows of that hotel room she rambled on, as if fighting the cobwebs and the darkness and the awful truth of her terrible secret. And I was Richard who had never died. Richard Hallmark who had come back to hear his mother condemn his father as a traitor to all that he had professed to stand for.
"It's not true what you're saying, Mother. It can't be."
"No, it's true . . . Richard. A sad thing to tell. Your father was a great man. Once. But he dreamed of power. He has dreamed of it all these years— Now Singh will give him power. Together they will combine to add their brains and their cunning to the cause of Red China. Oh, Richard . . . I loved your father . . . but I saw the change . . . and you were far away where I couldn't see you . . . so I drank. Richard—?"
"Yes," I whispered. "I'm here."
"Your father is planning to kill me. He pretended on the ship that he was the victim . . . so he could kill me later and say that I was accidentally disposed of by his enemies. Maybe they would even have killed me on the ship . . . but I met a young man like you. So bright and clever. He saved your father's life twice, but really, those accidents were faked. Meant to miss the mark. He ate some bad fish just to make it look good . . . just so Henry Hallmark could remind the world how he had been nearly killed twice before I was. . . . But then something went wrong. . . . A woman really tried to kill him this last time. A startling woman. . . . And that young man was again so very clever. . . .
Her voice drifted away, a dying sound. I squeezed her hand again. I could hear her faint breathing in the gloom. A wispy sound.
"But now . . . your father is drugging me . . . making me a hopeless addict . . . because I know too much. And tonight he will fly away with Singh to Paris. Oh, how they scheme. . . . Talk to him, Richard. It's so ugly this way. He loves you. Make him change his mind—"
"Proof," I muttered. "What proof have you. Mother?"
"Proof . . . Oh, Richard. . . . Would Henry Hallmark in his right mind ever have any dealings at all with men like Surat Singh?"
"That's nothing," I said. "He might be playing games—"
"Richard, Richard . . . there's a box under the bed. . . . I kept a diary . . . took pictures. You'd be surprised what your father has been doing these last few years. . . . Take them, dear— No one knows about them—" She laughed. A tired, desperate laugh that was close to madness. "I learned that much from Henry Hallmark. I was very, very clever about it."
"Sleep now," I said. "I'll talk to him. And I'll look at the box."
She sighed happily. "That's a good boy, Richard. You always were a good boy. And I am so tired. . . . "
I left her like that, tiptoeing out of the room. There was a box under the bed. A cardboard box no larger than a carton for business envelopes. I didn't stop to study it, save to take a quick glance. There was a leather-bound diary, a thick sheaf of photos, and some letters.
The Hindu was still unconscious on the floor.
When I reached the corridor outside the suite, it was empty. A hushed and reverent silence pervaded the passageway.
But back in my own room, my mind was a city dump. Esme May Cody Hallmark's collected mass of evidence against her own husband would have convicted him fifty times over. Not so much the diary, though that was poison enough. It was the pictures of him in secret conclave with the most notorious heads of the Red Chinese Government. Meetings the world had never known about.
It made me sick looking at them. Thinking about him. Henry Hallmark, ail-American.
All-American fink, first class.
21. A Traitor Flies Away
The grand function that night was a colorful one, all right. Henry Hallmark delivered a stirring, throbbing address to Great Britain and the world. Batteries of newsmen and diplomats and V.I.P.'s flooded the large square room. Hallmark had lost none of his oratorical magic. The big, impressive words flowed, rolled, and covered the place like a blanket. He machine-gunned the atmosphere, charged the minds of his audience, and uplifted the spirits of all present. America in action. The great humanitarian.
I'd had a very busy three hours. Three hours in which I took care of all the details that had to be accounted for. Esme May Cody Hallmark might be mysteriously ill, and I didn't care what the unconscious Hindu told his bosses when they got back. I had written a letter. After Henry Hallmark had taken his night plane to Paris, the American embassy would receive a letter by messenger, suggesting that Mrs. Hallmark was on drugs and needed medical attention. Let the great Hallmark cover that one up. The embassy officials would have to act on the information, no matter what they privately felt or thought. The important thing was that they would go look, and that was all that Esme May Cody Hallmark needed.
I didn't think any sinister plans had been intended for her in London. It was too soon to dispose of her. I didn't doubt for a moment that her drugged ravings were not fantasies. Everything that had happened on the Francesca, and all that she had said, had begun to fall into place. I should have seen it sooner. Of course the falling pipe had been a phony, prearranged thing. How could anyone have counted on Henry Hallmark standing directly beneath it at the precise moment it had fallen? If I hadn't saved him he would have jumped out of the way himself.
As for how the pipe had come loose in the first place, I assumed that one of Surat Singh's men had bribed a crewman to do it. I made a mental note to have Captain Donelli check his crew over.
And the poisoning at the dinner party. I remembered now how dark the room had been, with only the red candles for illumination. It would have been fairly easy for Hallmark to have planted some spoiled fish without being seen—and then to make sure that only he ate it. That would explain why no one else had suffered from the contaminated herring. He hadn't eaten enough to kill him, of course—just enough to make him dramatically ill at the right time.
Then there was Surat Singh. Hallmark must have changed his passage from the United States to the Francesca so he and his chum Singh could travel together. I didn't know much about politics, but it was obvious that any Red who latched onto a prize like Henry Hallmark was latching onto a fast way to power. And it was equally obvious that some of Singh's associates might have their own ideas about who was going to be top man among the Reds. So they had hired Tiger to assassinate Henry Hallmark, thus removing Surat Singh's bid for power.
Singh had probably saved my life only because he didn't wish attention drawn to Henry Hallmark by a murder in his vicinity, however nonpolitical the murder. Also, alive, I was a bother for Gilda Tiger. That fitted into the master plan, too.
I had learned from the officials at London Airport that Richards and several other agents had been sent on ahead to Paris, where they would meet the great Hallmark at Orly Airport. It seemed that Henry was going to fly his own Cessna to Paris. He liked to fly. Alone. No copilot. But I didn't doubt that the character with the winding sheets and beard was going to be secretl
y on that plane, too.
I saw the plane on the runway. A sleek, powerful little machine, with The Dove inscribed on its bright blue fuselage. Information about Henry Hallmark's flight wasn't too hard to come by. The airport people had a stack of printed streamers, in the form of publicity releases, which were handed out to all interested parties. Like newsmen, officials, and nosy private detectives. I told them I was from The New York Times on the world desk. It was a breeze. A lot of other people were making inquiries, too. But nobody suspicious-looking.
Henry Hallmark, the Lone Eagle of American politics, was flying on to Paris with all the ceremony that had attended Lindbergh's solo in 1927. The man had a genius and a flare for capturing the limelight.
Getting into the plane was the big problem. I solved that, too. With pince-nez, a hat pulled low on my skull, and the black attaché case. Posing as Tom Faulkner, Mr. Hallmark's secretary, and waving my faked letter of authorization bearing the Hallmark insignia and signature. The guards posted at the chicken-wire fence let me in, since they had no reason to doubt me. I only needed five minutes, anyway. The excuse I gave them was that I was storing some valuable papers in the plane before the scheduled takeoff that night.
The explosive device was no larger than a marble. I fitted it far back in the tail of the plane where no one would look for it. The timing contraption that I affixed around its sphere was slightly larger. The whole works disappeared conveniently into the folds of two parachutes stowed neatly on the floor of the cabin.
When that was done, I brushed my hands, thought out the whole messy business only a minute longer, and then left the plane. The guards nodded as I walked by them. Later on, if anyone asked them, I didn't think they would remember much about me; I had managed to create a pretty colorless impression. As I passed the bystanders ogling the ship from behind the chicken-wire fence, pointing and exclaiming, I heard one woman say in an awed contralto: "Can you imagine? Henry Hallmark—"
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