The 9 Dark Hours

by Lenore Glen Offord

  “What would be the use?” he said. “Even if you thought it had been there, it isn’t now. They must have got it away without our knowledge, somehow. Maybe they picked it up from another hideout. I’ll have to wait and see.”

  I said, “More waiting?”

  “Yes. Can you take it? Jay and Fingers should be back here before long. At the very least, they have to pick up Gertie.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure I can take it,” and smiled. This was easier than I’d expected, and now I knew why. Not to show it when you’re hurt; that was the one Spartan principle my father had taught me.

  “I ought to know,” Barney said, and returned the smile. He did it so well! He looked so guiltless, his voice was so warm, that I was shaken by returning doubt. Ask him, the treacherous thing inside me urged. Who was that lady?

  He had turned and gone into the dressing room. “Hullo,” he said, and I imagined him stopping short, taking in the change between those narrowed eyelids. “You packed my things.”

  I remembered his hands, those big powerful hands, clenching and flexing. The question died on my tongue.

  “Yes,” I said, “just tumbled them in anyhow. I got my bags down right after you’d gone—just for something to do.”

  “Well,” he said, returning, “I’m glad you managed to keep from being bored. I’ll try not to leave you alone again.”

  “No?”

  “No. Until the crisis comes, you’ll be right under my eyes; and when it does come, I want you to stay right here. I want to know where you are—every minute from now till daylight.”

  ELEVEN

  Lady into Fox

  SHOULD I STOP HERE to point up a slight lesson? Maybe not. You can read it on the Kiddies’ Page of any reputable newspaper, in one of the stories about Bad Betsy Bantam who sneaked out of the barnyard although her mommy had warned her and warned her about the big fox.

  Those case histories generally end with Bad Betsy taking it on the lam back to mommy’s wings, and resolving never, never, never. It looked in this instance as if I might provide a new dénouement which would send the tots to bed shrieking. I could resolve myself black in the face, but how in tunket was I to get back to the barnyard?

  At that moment the shelter of somebody’s wings looked like heaven on earth, and just about as attainable. In order to get so much as a head start, Bad Betsy would be forced to pretend she was a fox herself.

  That’ll be all about Betsy, I’m sick of her. This was me. And, if I was trying inwardly to be funny about the situation, it was only for the sake of courage. It didn’t feel comic at all.

  It’s simply amazing how convincingly you can act when you’re faced with an acute danger. At school when called up to recite “The quality of mercy is not strained,” with gestures, I never rated more than a C; but I was getting away with this. My intuition felt as if it had been sandpapered, so that it was sensitive to the most delicate impression, and I knew that Barney did not know how much I could read into the innocent sound of his words.

  From now till daylight. Was that the length of my respite? And when the dawn did come, what would happen? He’d scarcely be willing to kill me here. Perhaps a ride would be suggested: “I’ll drive you to the girls’ club myself, Cameron”—delivered with a smiling intimacy of look; and I’d be supposed to go with him confidently—

  Maybe when the time came I could deal with that somehow. I sat down, feeling that after what had passed between us a shy reserve would be natural enough. I was even able to reflect, with a certain grim amusement, that this affair contained enough double-crosses for a game of tic-tac-toe.

  If it kept up, somebody would meet himself coming around a corner.

  “What happened to O’Shea?” I breathed.

  “That’s just the point. He’s still in the next apartment, waiting. It’s been a long strain, and by now he believes the worst of everybody.” Barney gave me a preoccupied grin. He was still on his feet, at times standing as quiet as a jungle cat poised for a spring, at times taking a short restless prowl across the room. He glanced for the tenth time at his watch. “I heard that woman say that Jay and Fingers should be able to get back here by four-thirty, if he didn’t meet them. Well, I believe he couldn’t.”

  Was that where Barney had meant to go when he started on his mission, and had something happened to prevent him? He was sitting pretty in either case.—Now he had halted with his back to me. “I wonder if we’re banking too much on getting those three, if they’ll be willing to talk after all. If I were they, I’d rather have the Cork for a friend than an enemy. There’d be nothing to lose if they said that there was no such person, that they’d used his name to throw people off the scent. Then we’d have to find adequate proof for what I only suspect now. It may not be easy.”

  I leaned back, gazing at the spread of his shoulders in the doorway. He thought of everything ahead of time. There was no doubt in my mind that Jay and Fingers and Gertie had been coached to say just that; and that, faced with their enemy O’Shea and Barney himself, they’d find that story to their advantage. I put my hands in my skirt pockets, and felt in one the smooth cylinder of my lipstick and in the other my only weapon—a big, old-fashioned key.

  Barney turned. “I want you to know this,” he began, “because—”

  A gentle buzz cut into his words; once more someone had pushed the bell downstairs. It sounded twice in rapid succession.

  “Garwood,” he said. “He’s back. I’d better go down and see what’s happened. You come with me.”

  Swiftly I weighed the two aspects of this command. Did he mean it was time for our little ride, and should I demur on the ground of weariness? No, that wouldn’t do. The Cameron of two hours ago would have jumped at the chance. Could I lag behind on the stair, on some pretext, and unlock the door of the broom closet?

  “I’ll get my coat,” I said, jumping up with an eager look. I’d found it and stuffed my arms into the sleeves before he could help me. All I could do was to go along, but to stay on the alert for any chance of escape or of summoning help.

  But what pretext could one use? I stumbled on one of the top steps, and he caught my arm in a firm grasp and did not relinquish it. I set my teeth in order to endure the impersonal touch, which a short while ago would have seemed comforting. We were past the second floor, and I had to wait while Barney stopped and laid his ear against the door of the closet, and gently tried the handle.

  “Still in there,” he murmured in my ear as we went on.

  “Did you hear him?”

  “No. If he’s conscious, he’s lying low. That sock on the head may not have laid him out for as long as I hoped; there’s no telling.”

  Bassett might be returning to consciousness, I thought. There was a light in the closet; you pulled a long string attached to its chain. If he recovered, bewildered to find himself imprisoned, the first thing he’d do would be to pull on that light; and then, if he were to see the key lying on the floor—

  There was a hundred-to-one chance in that. It might be the best I could do.

  The fog had shifted and was blowing gently northward. Its stinging particles touched my face as we hurried along the wet sidewalk, down the block and around the corner to a parked car, whose dark bulk was scarcely visible until we were almost upon it.

  The car window was down, and a voice spoke from within. “Hi, Barney. Here I am.”

  I was shoved into the front seat and wedged between the two men, and for an instant was sick with terror. The car didn’t move off, though. “Miss Ferris, ’s Mr. Garwood,” Barney said hurriedly, in an almost inaudible tone, as he got in beside me. “What happened, Jack?”

  “Washout,” Garwood said gruffly. Against the window I could just make out his profile, thin and hawk-nosed.

  “Where’s Walter?” Barney snapped.

  “Home. He wanted to come back with me, but I told him he might throw a monkey-wrench into the works; they’d recognize him too easily.”

  “What happened to
them?”

  “Gone. I didn’t see hide nor hair of them.”

  “They crossed him up, did they?”

  “Might have been expected, I guess,” said Garwood heavily.

  I sat hemmed in between the two of them, staring through the rain-streaked windshield into the thick grayed-black of the night. What did one do? Beside me, so close that I could hardly move, was Barney—playing his double role with all the finesse he had already so ably demonstrated. Anyone would have sworn that his baffled fury was genuine. He had Garwood fooled, too, and with a sinking heart I knew that my wild accusation would not stand up against his word, against the incredibly convincing perfection of his act.

  If I turned at this moment to the man on my left and blurted out, “The man you’re looking for is right here, in this car. He’s the Cork, he’s deceived everyone,” I knew what would happen. I’d be laughed at. I’d have wasted my only bit of information.

  But if Garwood could learn about it somehow when Barney wasn’t there, when he was dissociated, as I had been, from the spell of that personality? He might be able to think it over, to add up evidence in sober quiet, to see the truth without prejudice or argument. And how on earth was I to get him alone?

  “Well, what happened?” Barney asked presently.

  Garwood told us, in terse sentences that somehow managed to convey a full and vivid picture. So much lay behind his brief summary that he and this other man and I might ourselves have been riding with Walter Cleveland on his journey through the dark, feeling the very twist of his thoughts.

  I’d never laid eyes on Mr. Cleveland. It was queer that without being told I envisioned him as wearing a trench coat. That was accurate; later we knew that quite unconsciously he had taken from among his other garments this one shabby relic of World War I, tugging its belt tightly around him as he went out to face a new zero hour.

  (“He was early,” Garwood said, “he sat there in a side street, waiting.”) And we saw the baby’s father, behind the wheel of a long roadster, his eyes on the dashboard clock; we saw its hands crawl to a right angle. The car backed, swung around, and slid off with a soft rush of air.

  * * *

  ...He had been told to turn off San Pablo at a certain building, an eyeless structure which had once flourished as a night club. There it was at the end of the street, its green stucco walls wan under his headlights. To the left one block, then north again, on a boulevard roughly parallel to the Bay’s shoreline.

  At some moment within this hour he would be met on this road. The criminals would want, no doubt, to make sure that he had obeyed orders, that he was alone and that no one was following him. Well, damn them, he had obeyed! Let them watch from wherever they were concealed, they’d see him.—What if they wanted to make sure, let him go up and down the road for the full time, in doubt at every turn? And supposing that some stranger took a notion to drive along here during the half hour, quite unwittingly wrecking the negotiations?—Well, no use meeting those troubles until they arose.

  The big car crept along, its immense power making this slow crawl as quiet as a normal pace.—There had been stories of men sent to their death, forced to walk along an empty corridor without knowing when or from what point the executioner’s shot would come. Had those victims gone slowly, or had their nerves given way so that they ran, stumbling and sobbing, hoping to bring death more quickly? He had never known anything so racking as this tortoise-like pace.—Keep a close watch for the signal, a flashlight waved three times at the side of the road—

  His somber, heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on the road, yet everything on either hand came into his field of vision. He saw, without consciously taking them in, small frame and stucco houses, patches of open field, a few tottering shacks set far back from the road. He could even feel a vague surprise; he had never heard of this place, didn’t know it existed, and yet people actually lived here!

  The road led between flat fields of waving grass; as the headlights caught those tall sheaves of green, water glistened on the blades. The rain had slackened for a time.—Luck, he thought bitterly, for the man who was waiting, somewhere along here—

  A hill loomed in the way, and the road curved around it and straightened out once more. To the right, another street struck off sharply, back up the slight incline; and as he went slowly by, he thought he saw another car parked at the top of the hill. His heart began to pound unevenly. It was possible, of course, that the kidnappers were as impatient as he, that they also had been prompt at the rendezvous.

  He was sure of it, when, half a mile farther on, his windshield caught a sudden reflection; a pair of headlights on the hill behind him had been switched on, off, on again. Much of the length of Panhandle Boulevard would be visible from that rise. A cry stirred in him—let it be soon, let it be now!

  Here a low railroad embankment ran along the left of the road, with the faint gleam of bay water beyond it. From the right another set of tracks converged with this; he had passed the Pullman works, and a high culvert loomed up where the tracks were elevated above the pavement. Just on the other side was a great empty field. His heart gave one more dreadful leap; a light appeared, swinging up and down in the hand of a darkly muffled figure.

  He stopped the car at once; the light moved away, with a gesture to the right, and he followed it up a side street, once more pausing as the glow died. The beam flashed on and off; he gathered that he was to darken his headlights, and did so.

  Now, except for a dim illumination from the dashboard, there was darkness. He flicked off that light also, straining his eyes to see if the muffled shape were still in the field. There was something moving toward the car, and he twisted about in a vain attempt to follow its progress; but the figure had disappeared.

  His head was craned toward the right when a voice spoke behind him. “I’m holding a gun on you, so keep still and don’t turn around.”

  The tone was conversational, the voice an ordinary one. There were common intonations, but they were typical of a million half-educated men’s voices. The father, motionless, strove to fix that sound in his mind. He could not turn his eyes far enough to see anything; at the edge of his vision the blur of dark wrappings would barely take shape, but there was an ominous click of heavy metal on the roadster’s lowered window.

  “You can hand out the money,” the voice went on. “Soon’s my partner gets here, we’ll look it over.”

  Walter Cleveland groped beside him for the satchel, found it, and passed it over his left shoulder. A gloved hand came out and grasped the handle. “Fifty grand,” the voice asked, “in small bills? No serial numbers near each other?”

  “None,” the father said through set teeth.

  “The film’s there—just like it was found?”

  “Yes. Now, for God’s sake!—”

  “Take it easy,” said the man behind him derisively.

  A car, running without lights, slid up behind the Cleveland car. There was a muttered colloquy, the satchel’s fastening clicked. For another long minute he waited, without stirring; then, with a breathtaking flash of hope, he saw a man stumbling away from the car, through the grasses of the field, with a small bundle in his arms: laying it against a fence, far back in the meadow, coming back briskly.

  The first man spoke once more. “When I give the word, you get out of your car,” he commanded. “We’ll take it up the road a mile or so, so’s you can’t run after us too fast—not that that’d be any use. But we’ll leave it in an alley behind them buildings up there, on account a hot car ain’t going to help us none.”

  The engine of the other car started up, it swung out ahead of him—useless, in this darkness, to attempt a glimpse of the license, but the car looked like a Chevrolet sedan. “Now, okay!” the voice prodded him. “Out the far door, and keep your back turned.”

  His jaw clamped shut in helpless, bitter rage and shame, he obeyed, his eyes on the picket fence across the meadow. Both cars were far up the street in a moment, their lights going on a
t a safe distance. He was running, stumbling, threshing through wet tall grass, groping along the ground by the fence. His hands touched a soft bundle, and then, shaking, felt for a lighter and snapped on the tiny, wavering flame.

  There were Melissa’s bunny coat and hat, a few other pieces of baby’s clothing, wadded and wrapped up to simulate a small form: nothing else. The lighter dropped into the wet grass and was extinguished.

  After a time the father got up stiffly, gathered the garments in both hands, and plodded back across the field. For a merciful space he had felt entirely numb in body and mind; no anger at this ghastly trickery, no pain, no thought of what to do next, had made a way into his consciousness. At this minute, for some reason, only one thing seemed important; he had to know the time. There was a match pack in his coat pocket, and he began to strike matches methodically, trying to shield them from the wind long enough so that he could turn his watch to the light. That was how Garwood found him...

  * * *

  “Standing in the grass, striking matches,” Garwood said. “He looked up at the car lights, and his face—”

  Barney had neither spoken nor moved, but against my side I could feel his quick heavy breathing. Why did he keep his face averted, staring through the car window, unless he was afraid of showing triumph? His plan had come off, he was safe; no one would suspect him now.

  That was why he’d had to play it out, pretending he still wanted the film pack: because only he knew it was worthless. He must pretend caution to the end, because too easy an acceptance of terms would give him away—

  “We thought of it after they left, of course,” said Garwood, “when Jim told us the baby was still in the building. The film was the important thing. Those two men haven’t come back yet. You want to bet they’re looking at the negative right now, to make sure?”

  “That’s it,” said Barney harshly. “I should have foreseen it. The Cork wouldn’t leave anything to chance.”

  He wouldn’t, if he were a stranger. Play it in character, Barney, you’re doing fine. String us along until you’re sure you’ll be safe. You didn’t count on one thing, though—on a little trip I took over the rafters.