The Floating Outfit 18

by J. T. Edson

  “Is something wrong?” Belle asked, still deliberately refraining from using the honorific that everybody else at the reception—even Darren, much to her amusement—had employed even more often than was required by convention when addressing the aristocratically imperious black-haired woman.

  “I can’t get the key in,” the Countess replied, always being one for stating the obvious in a way that implied she believed the explanation would not have occurred to the person to whom she was making it.

  “Let me try, Countess,” Darren offered, striding back swiftly.

  Following her companion, Belle wondered whether the incident might be turned to their advantage in any way. She had no idea why the key would not enter the hole, but hoped Darren could change the situation; she did not wish to employ her ability in such matters, as letting it be seen was sure to arouse suspicion if the black-haired woman was a Russian spy. There was no need for the Rebel Spy to feel any concern on the point. Having experimented briefly, remarking that it seemed somebody had left another key on the inside, Darren manipulated the one he was holding until it sank in deep enough for turning it to be operative. Although Belle concluded that the Countess was clearly perturbed by what she was told could have caused her failure to effect an entry, she made no comment as the door was pushed open and she was allowed to go through.

  The Rebel Spy had been correct about the way in which the Russian woman felt on hearing why her key could have failed to perform its function; she found good cause for alarm as she crossed the threshold. Taking in the gory sight of the dead man lying supine on the floor—although the worst effect of it was hidden, as he was facedown and the gaping wound in his throat was not in view—she let out a scream and could not help dropping her reticule. She was still standing rigid, frozen into horrified immobility by the discovery, when Darren stepped by her with his right hand going beneath his jacket. However, despite duplicating the surprise and repugnance she was displaying regardless of this not being his first encounter with violent death, he was sufficiently in control of himself to refrain from drawing the Remington Double Derringer he was carrying in the concealment offered by the carefully designed holster in his vest.

  Following the other two into the suite, Belle, too, was momentarily taken aback by what she found. However, having been forced on many occasions to come upon such terrible sights ever since circumstances compelled her to become an agent for the Confederate States Secret Service, she recovered even more swiftly than the other two. Looking down at the corpse, she noticed the reticule dropped by the Countess and decided she would take advantage of this, as no opportunity had been offered for her to examine its contents before.

  “Go fetch one of the hotel guards, B-Betty!” Darren ordered in a tone indicative of his tightly tensed emotions.

  Before Belle could do more than feel satisfied by the way in which her companion had retained sufficient control of himself to avoid employing her real name, the Countess gave another brief screeched-out comment in Russian and dashed across the sitting room. Instead of doing as Darren wanted, the Rebel Spy went after the black-haired woman. Entering the bedroom, the Countess gave another shriek. However, from close behind, the Rebel Spy noticed she did not devote more than a glance in passing at the corpse of the young woman—rendered even more horrific by its having fallen in a supine position that allowed the extent of the injury to be in sight—lying just inside. Instead, she dashed to the dressing table and glared into the open strongbox on its top.

  “What is it?” Belle asked as the Countess began to babble something rapidly and incomprehensibly in her native tongue.

  “My jewelry!” the black-haired woman replied, realizing she was not making herself understood and reverting to English. “My jewelry. It’s all gone!”

  “Has anything else been taken?” the Rebel Spy queried.

  “Some money,” the Countess answered in a surprisingly uninterested fashion and without showing any surprise at the calm way in which “Betty Hardin” was behaving. “But that isn’t important. It’s the jewelry I care about.”

  “Didn’t you keep it in the hotel’s strong room?” Belle inquired.

  “Of course not,” the black-haired woman denied vehemently. “I always want it where I can get whatever I need without having to wait for the box to be fetched. But we must do something!”

  “We had,” the Rebel Spy agreed. “You’d better go into the bathroom so you can’t see the—this and the other while I do as Horatio said.”

  Nodding, the Countess walked by the corpse of her maid without doing more than giving a shudder in passing.

  Following and waiting until her advice had been acted upon, being ready to claim she had made a mistake due to being so perturbed by what she had seen, Belle went to pick up the other woman’s reticule. Nothing happened to indicate that what she had done was noticed by the black-haired woman, and even Darren paid no attention to it. On leaving the suite to do as she had been told, she opened the dainty little bag and looked inside.

  “Well, now,” the Rebel Spy said quietly as she removed and studied an object her fingers had detected beneath the material. “If you aren’t using the hotel’s strong room, Countess, why do you have the key for a safe-deposit box?”

  Four – They Must Have Climbed to the Balcony

  “Southrons hear your country call you,” Belle Boyd said to the only other person in the small yet obviously flourishing shop she had entered.

  “Up, lest death or worse befall you,” Albert Higgins replied, instinctively giving the required response on hearing the words that were occasionally served to identify members of the Confederate States Secret Service to one another. As he realized what he was doing, he peered at the speaker as if shortsighted—although this was far from being the case—over the pince-nez he always wore far down his sharply pointed nose when in his place of business. Short, slender, and sharp-featured, he had always reminded his visitor of a weasel. Apart from his hair having grown thinner and turned gray, he had hardly changed since the last time they had met. Nevertheless, as recognition came, there was a genuine warmth in his voice and it still retained the suggestion of birth within the sound of Bow Bells in London regardless of all the years he had been absent from that area. “Well, bless me soul if it ain’t Miss Boyd. This is a pleasure and a ‘honor, ma’am. And can I be of service to you in any way?”

  “The Grand Republic Hotel, English,” the Rebel Spy answered, knowing there was no need for a more extensive explanation.

  Riding alone down in the elevator that had brought herself, Countess Olga Simonouski, and Horatio A. Darren to their floor at the hotel, the mechanism being equipped so it could be operated by a guest after the regular attendant had gone off duty for the night, Belle had examined the safe-deposit key without discovering anything to indicate from whence it had come. She had memorized the serial number on it and, arriving at the ground floor, had no difficulty in locating the house detective who was on duty.

  On hearing why “Miss Hardin” had come to the lobby and sought him out, the burly and Germanic-looking man had wasted no time before accompanying her to the suite, and, clearly having expected a member of the “weaker” sex to do everything possible to avoid seeing such things, seemed surprised when she followed him inside. However, even if he had wanted to, he had not been given a chance to raise the point. His eyes took in the sight of the body on the floor, then swung to Darren. Before the man could speak, the agent held out a card identifying himself by his official rank of captain in the Provost Branch of the Adjutant General’s Department. Although a couple of the house detective’s colleagues had served in the Army and might have felt antagonism toward an officer belonging to that far-from-liked branch of the service, the house detective was a retired policeman who had served in Washington, D.C., for long enough to have learned that its members could be of assistance under such conditions.

  Although Belle had been ready to apologize to the Countess—on the grounds of having become flus
tered by the horrors she had seen—if the exchange of the reticules had been discovered, the need did not arise, as its owner was still in the bathroom. Before doing anything else, the house detective—who introduced himself as Mueller—asked Belle to return to the lobby and have the night-duty clerk on the desk summon the police. His explanation after she had taken her departure—that he thought it best to remove such a nice and well-raised young lady who was unused to seeing such horrors from such a gruesome sight—was much to Darren’s concealed, albeit later expressed, amusement.

  As a result of the Rebel Spy carrying out the instructions from Mueller and being asked to return to her room by the sergeant of the city’s police department, who came with a patrolman in response to the series of blasts from the desk clerk’s whistle, which she sensed was adding further to her companion’s well-hidden, yet obvious to her, amusement, she had had to wait until after she and Darren had reported the incident to their superior that morning to discover what took place.

  It said much for the rapport General Philo Handiman as head of the Secret Service—although ostensibly holding the same office in the Adjutant General’s Department—had established with the local law-enforcement agency that Darren had been allowed to remain throughout the ensuing investigation. Reporting what had taken place in Belle’s “understandable” absence, the description having caused a frosty grin to briefly come to the generally unemotional face of their superior and caused her to silently promise reprisals at a later date, the male agent had said that the most important items to have come to light were the facts that the door to the suite had been locked from the inside and, going by appearances, whoever had carried out the robbery and two murders gained access then left through the French windows in the sitting room, which showed signs of having been forced open externally. Going onto the balcony, even with the assistance of bull’s-eye lanterns, the men had been unable to find any traces to suggest in which direction the perpetrators had made their escape. It had been decided that the gap between the balcony and its neighbors on either side was too great for this to offer a solution. Unlikely as it seemed, in consideration of the difficulties entailed due to the way the building was constructed, this meant they must have gone either up or down, and neither appeared to offer the solution.

  Asked by Handiman if the Countess might have had whatever she obtained stolen from wherever it was hidden, Belle had said she doubted whether this was the case. She based the assumption upon feeling sure a woman would always give priority to checking upon the thing valued most highly under such circumstances. Therefore, unless she had had sufficient strength of will and presence of mind to pretend she was solely interested in the jewelry which was stolen, whatever she had acquired was not part of the loot. The Rebel Spy had countered the suggestion from Darren that the safe-deposit box could have been taken merely to prevent the Count from seeing something his wife didn’t want him to see. She stated that what she had seen of their relationship while he was still staying at the hotel had led her to believe the Countess was by far the dominant one of the couple and would be most unlikely to care for her husband’s opinion on the subject.

  The moment Belle had returned to her suite, partly in the interests of making a start at the promised vengeance upon her companion, although her main reason was that she knew the task could prove of importance and what she meant to do must be carried out, she had accepted the suggestion made by the Countess that Darren should be assigned the task of discovering the location of the safe-deposit box. She pointed out that he would be helped to do this as she had committed the make and number of the key she had examined to paper. In the hope of thwarting whatever attempted retaliation she might be planning, sensing she was in something close to high dudgeon on account of having to accept being dismissed from the scene of the crimes on account of her being a mere “weak” woman, Darren had suggested the safe-deposit box might be at the Russian Embassy. The Rebel Spy had deftly countered this by pointing out the Countess would hardly have needed to take such a means of protecting whatever she had acquired if she had left it there.

  Looking as if butter would find great difficulty melting in her mouth and as if her sole desire was to be helpful, neither of which pose fooled the General or Darren, Belle had said she would try to find out how the escape from the hotel was carried out and who possessed the extremely high standard of skill needed to bring it off regardless of the means employed. Although Handiman had guessed where she would go to seek the information, neither he nor Darren raised the matter. The General had ruled on assuming his post that, unless it was a matter of the greatest urgency—as would become an established practice with most law-enforcement agencies in the not too distant future—the way in which the intelligence was acquired by an agent would never be questioned by anybody else in the organization.

  Belle had never asked what brought Albert Higgins from England to the United States, nor even whether he was using his own name. He had admitted to being a criminal and claimed to come from a street in London that was almost so entirely inhabited by “villains” that if one happened to walk along it late in the evening, one would hear mothers or wives seeing the male members of their families off to “graft” by saying, even if the man in question did not carry a cudgel or other means of defense or was unable to use skeleton keys, “Got your stick, jemmy, and twirls? Then off you go and have a nice tickle. I’ll have something to drink and a hot meal waiting for you when you come home.”

  Despite finding the story amusing, all the Rebel Spy had needed to know was that, although a successful housebreaker—and especially adept in the variety performed by a so-called cat burglar or second-story man in the United States, although he had always referred to it as being “on the climb”—and safecracker in those days, he had donated his specialized services to the Confederate States Secret Service. Furthermore, in addition to having taught her much that was to be of the greatest use throughout her career with that organization, he had willingly given her support upon the assignment to which Darren had jokingly referred the previous evening.

  With the War Between the States at an end, having been successful in keeping his activities against their best interests unknown to the Federal authorities, he had taken up the occupation of locksmith as a cover for his main occupation. Because the opportunities for acquiring worthwhile loot were better in the North than in the South, which was kept impoverished by Reconstruction, he had gravitated there. Settling in Washington, D.C., as offering the best chances for obtaining information of use and finding a steady flow of victims among the numerous people of means who came there for one purpose or another, he had opened a business in the trade at which he was so expert. It had prospered to such an extent that he had, or so he always insisted to Belle on their infrequent meetings, practically given up crime as a means of earning his livelihood. However, he still retained his numerous contacts and was in the know about much of the illegal activity that happened throughout the capital city and elsewhere in the East.

  Because of the nature of her business with Higgins, the Rebel Spy had decided against going to interview him as “Betty Hardin.” Instead, having all she needed for the transformation in her suite at the hotel, she had transformed herself into what appeared to be the kind of maid who came as attendants to wealthy female guests. Although she made no alterations to her face, other than leaving off the makeup worn as her alter ego, the clothing she donned and her demeanor were so different that she had walked by the Countess in the passage—giving a quick curtsy as she went by, as she had seen genuine servants do—without drawing more than a cursory and uninterested glance.

  Using the servants’ stairs to reach the ground floor, as was required of one of her supposed social status, Belle had become involved in a situation she would rather have avoided and yet proved to be of use later. There had been some of the housekeeping staff descending behind her, and just as she arrived on the ground floor, one—a dark-faced and Gallic-looking young man who was obviously all too c
onscious of his masculine charms—directed a lascivious leer at his companions and speeded up his advance until close enough to goose her. It was not, as anybody who knew the Rebel Spy could have warned, the wisest move to make against her even when she was playing a role. As soon as the hand left her rump, she had propelled her right elbow to the rear with all the force her slender yet superbly muscled body was capable of producing. Struck in the solar plexus, the man had gone reeling backward to alight sitting and winded on the lower steps. Nor had she allowed the lesson to end there.

  Pivoting around, although like many of her garments it was made so it could be discarded hurriedly in an emergency, Belle had refrained from making use of the facility and had instead only drawn up her skirt to a level that allowed her to send her left leg up with the same speed she had used to deliver the blow. The toe of her footwear—a high-heeled and sharp-toed black boot into which were tucked the legs of snugly fitting matching riding breeches, although this was not discernible—passed in front of the man’s face so close that it almost grazed his nose. Giving a warning that such a thing must never be done to her again as the foot returned to the ground, she had turned and walked away. Because her assailant remained seated with his mouth trailing open, she went uninterrupted and to the accompaniment of laughter and compliments—from the female onlookers, most of whom had been subjected to similar treatment, in particular.

  Knowing she could do so without appearing out of character, as genuine maids were frequently accorded the same privilege when doing errands for their employers, the Rebel Spy had hailed a cab from the rank near the hotel and was transported by it to her destination.