The Tide Can't Wait

by Louis Trimble

  A young woman who came within scant inches of being as tall as he opened the door. “Miss Lenore Corey?”

  “Yes. You’re …”

  “That’s right.” He showed her the card he took from his wallet, a card showing the seal of the United States. She took the card and examined it carefully, turning it over, comparing the picture on it with the face of the man in the doorway.

  She smiled rather stiffly. “According to this, I’m going to be questioned about my income tax.”

  “That will do,” the Chief agreed. He put the card away. She’s cool, he thought, but she’s frightened, too.

  She stepped back rather awkwardly. “Come in, please.”

  The Chief entered, looking around quickly and thoroughly, but with an air that did not make a point of it. He nodded toward the couch, suggesting that she sit there, and took an easy chair for himself. She sat quite primly, almost on the edge of the couch, and tugged her skirt down over her knees. She had very nicely shaped legs, although a little too long for the Chief’s taste.

  He sat silently for some moments. He had never had a case quite like Lenore Corey—Lenny, he remembered she was usually called. He said suddenly, “Shall we begin, Miss Corey? You know why you were summoned here. You know why I’m here.”

  He could see her stiffen up. The abrupt approach was definitely not the one—yet.

  Before she had formed an answer, he said, “Or perhaps you really don’t know.” Now he lounged back, appearing relaxed, almost negligent. He could feel her relax, too.

  “I’m really not sure,” she admitted. “I thought I was in New York because I have a plane to catch tomorrow.” She tried smiling again; it was still stiff and awkward. “Then, after your telephone call, I—well, I don’t know.”

  “But you have an idea,” he said. “You couldn’t help thinking about Leon Roget.”

  Her voice was very low. “No, I couldn’t help thinking about him.”

  “You’re going to meet Roget when you go to England.”

  “I had hoped so, yes.” She did not seem to realize that he had made a statement rather than a question of the words.

  “You will—definitely,” he informed her. He smiled blandly. “And, of course, you will do everything exactly as we wish you to do it.”

  He had chosen the words carefully, hoping for a certain kind of reaction from her. And he was pleased when he got that reaction.

  “I don’t know who ‘we’ is,” she said with quick anger, “nor what it is ‘we’ expect me to do. But I’m going to England because I received a study grant. I intend to use my time for that purpose—study.”

  “Partly, of course,” he said in an agreeable tone.

  She rose to the bait again. “I presume that you’re a Government official. That doesn’t give you the right to bully a citizen. And I am a citizen.”

  He said with deadly quietness, “That’s true—at the moment, Miss Corey. It may not be true for long, however.” He chose a cigar from the case in his pocket and sat looking at it.

  It took a moment before she could speak. She said, “It’s blackmail,” in a remarkably controlled voice.

  She was doing very well, he thought. He was glad that she had this much backbone. He had been afraid she wouldn’t, considering the way she had let Roget handle her. But this was good; this meant that she might be able to hand Roget back as good as he had given her. And she was pretty. Perhaps “attractive” would be a better word. To the Chief “pretty” designated a certain softness, and there was little of that softness visible at the moment about Lenore Corey.

  He studied her from partly closed eyes. She was tall for a woman, long-legged. Her face was broad, with well-balanced if not outstanding features—the gray eyes longish, hinting at a tilt in the corners, the nose straight and the mouth large and full, but without any looseness. The kind of mouth men liked to think of as indicating passion. And the kind of mouth, he thought, that would smile beautifully when the smile was not forced but came from down inside her.

  She had hair that reminded him of wheat ripening in the summertime. Very nice. She wore it in natural, easy-to-care-for curls so that he could see the fine shape of her head and ears. Nice hair, nice features, nice figure. Even in the somewhat prim green dress she wore, with lace at the collar and cuffs, she showed a slender waist, good woman’s hips, and well-molded if slightly large breasts.

  Her personality struck him as rather reserved, prim, but he doubted the truth of the impression. He was not seeing her under normal circumstances, and if the dossier he had memorized had any meaning, she was anything but reserved or prim.

  He said, “Miss Corey, blackmail is a word usually applied to an illegal situation. This is hardly in that category.”

  “Aren’t we splitting hairs? To me, blackmail is forcing a person to do something against his will on threat of reprisal.”

  He shrugged, letting her see how unimportant her opinion was to him. “The point remains that you are to do as we ask.”

  “I can’t accept that,” she said firmly. “Not just out of thin air. I’m sorry.”

  The Chief took out his lighter. “May I smoke?”

  She nodded, taking a cigarette for herself from the pack on the arm of the couch.

  He said, “Please don’t interrupt for a few moments, Miss Corey. Just listen.”

  She listened. He talked for ten minutes, carefully, telling her no more than was necessary but enough to make his points clear. And as he spoke, he saw the stiffness go from her expression and the first true emotion she had displayed come through. There was a minimum of the reactions he would normally get in a situation of this kind—fear and terror and finally a sort of dull resignation. The thing that struck him most forcibly about Lenore Corey was her indignation. Before he was through, she was on her feet, taking long strides to the window and back.

  He said finally, “So you see.”

  She stopped and faced him. “I see that I’ve been made a fool of.” Her voice rose. “I see that my private life has become something for a lot of so-called Intelligence experts to snicker over and get a vicarious thrill from. I see that because I chose Leon Roget to fall in love with, I’m being made to pay for it!”

  He shut his eyes.

  She burst out, “Did I win my study fellowship honestly, or did you arrange that, too—like you’ve arranged the rest of my life for me?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her again, and now his eyes were like blue chips of cold stone.

  “Miss Corey, you won the fellowship. I simply took advantage of your winning it. You made what you call a mistake by falling in love with Leon Roget. I’ve taken advantage of that, too. As for your being made to pay—again that’s a matter of terminology. Would you rather I weren’t so blunt? I could appeal to your patriotism, instead.”

  “Do you think I have any?” she flung at him. “You’ve as good as accused me of spying against my country.”

  “No, only of helping someone else spy against it.”

  “The help I gave Leon had nothing to do with this country. It was all for—his own.”

  “Leon Roget has no country, not in the sense that we have,” he said. He waved his cigar, brushing the matter aside as irrelevant. “Come, Miss Corey, let’s be honest. You placed yourself in a position where I could use you. Up until yesterday I wasn’t sure that I would need to. But now I’m forced into it. I have no other choice at the moment.” He let his voice lash at her. “Do you think I would choose an inexperienced person, no matter how attractive, how levelheaded, no matter how qualified otherwise? And you are all of these things. But you are still a complete novice in the work facing you. Do you think I would choose you for such a job if I could use anyone else?”

  Lenore Corey sat down. She took another cigarette and lighted it, this time smoking more calmly. “I’m sorry. Let’s not shout at each other.”

  He said, “Miss Corey, what I’m asking you to do can be as dangerous as what I’m asking my regular men to do.
It may be that at this very moment I am condemning you to death by violence. Yet I have no other choice than to order you to do as I ask.”

  “Why?” she asked reasonably.

  “Because I would prefer one death—or a half-dozen deaths—to the possible slaughter of thousands, or to a war which could involve this country.”

  “Bluntly put,” she admitted. “I risk my life, degrade myself at the very least, or I face prosecution for treason against my country.”

  He said dryly, “The answer is ‘yes’”

  “And it makes no difference that I swear I did not know what you’ve just told me about Leon?”

  “It makes no difference.” He took his cigar from his mouth and worked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue with a finger.

  “How did you come to meet Roget?”

  “Isn’t that in your record on me?”

  He said equably, “I know that you’re twenty-five years old, unmarried, that you were raised to money, and that you studied in New York and Toronto, as well as in San Francisco. I know that now you have no money and so you’re teaching in a junior college near San Francisco and studying nights to improve your situation. I know that you are genuinely interested in the history of architecture and that you plan to go to England to finish a book that you’ve been writing on early Norman churches.

  “I know that you prefer strong tea to coffee for breakfast, that you like steak medium-well-done and that you swim and play tennis and perform other sports very well, just as most people in California seem to do. I know the size of your shoes and hose, of your slips and brassieres, Miss Corey. I can even tell you what kind of bath soap you prefer. But I don’t know precisely how you met Leon Roget.” He took another puff at his cigar. “I don’t mean when you first saw him. I have that information. You went to San Francisco and enrolled in his night-school French class. I mean how you met in the sense that you found one another attractive, how you got to know him well.”

  She said without hesitation, “Perhaps we became interested in each other because I was the only person in the class who made any pretense of being really interested.” She flushed a little, uncomfortable because she was thinking that if he knew so many petty but intimate details about her, he might know even more intimate ones, far less petty to her mind. “I had a French governess when I was a child and I still spoke some French when I joined his class and spoke it with a fair accent. But I wanted more fluency.”

  “And you think that’s why he chose to display his interest toward you rather than toward any of the bored, giggling females who went there to sigh over him?”

  She had to smile. “I didn’t sigh over Leon for some time, I assure you.”

  “No,” he agreed frankly. “It was over six months before you became his mistress.”

  “I suppose it was.” She was fighting him with indifference.

  “Was he the first man with whom you had that kind of relation?”

  Anger heightened the color in her cheeks. “Is that your business?”

  “Everything about you is my business.” He made himself sound bored, implying that he didn’t give a hang about her private life except as it related to his work. And, actually, he didn’t. The peccadilloes of humanity had ceased either to surprise him or, for the most part, interest him. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

  She looked at him with her gray eyes contemptuous. “When I was thirteen I received my first kiss. It was a boy who lived in the same apartment building. Then when I was sixteen, I had my first experience at walking home. I—”

  “That will do, Miss Corey!” The lash in his voice made her wince. He scarcely softened his tone as he continued, “I’ll be more specific. Have you ever had an affair with a man—any man—the consequences of which might endanger the work you’re going to do for us?”

  “No. My few experiences were all minor, college-girl things. Before Leon,” she added pointedly.

  He seemed relieved. “And it was after your relationship with Leon began that you started helping him?”

  “I helped him,“ she admitted. He could feel her defiance again. “I wasn’t going against my country. You know that as well as you know all these other things about me. I was helping Leon help his country.

  “Because you loved him?”

  She met his gaze squarely. “Because I love him,” she corrected.

  He sighed. This was what he had feared. He said, “Leon Roget is a dangerous man, Miss Corey. He is not only personally dangerous, but he is politically dangerous—not just to us but to a number of other countries.”

  She thought, Leon told me that he would be persecuted in the future as he had been in the past. And here was evidence of that persecution. She resented this man.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said calmly.

  He shrugged. “Roget is a contradiction,” he said. “He is a political fanatic—and in that he is sincere. He is also a greedy man, and there are times when his greed overcomes his patriotism. That is the case at present. The information you helped him gather is of vital interest to the exiled political party he represents. If he gets it to them and they act on it, then they have a very good chance of getting back into power. Because of the nature of what may happen, other countries will help those opposing Roget’s party. A Latin-American revolution is one thing; war is another.”

  “Leon’s country needs something,” she said.

  He said coldly, “You require a good deal of convincing, don’t you, Miss Corey?”

  “Yes,” she answered boldly. “Especially if you expect me to believe that my helping Leon gather news stories from various sources could help bring about a major war.”

  “I expect you to believe exactly that,” he said grimly. “I’ll be as open as I can, Miss Corey. The information Roget compiled—partly with your help, partly on his own—integrated with Roget’s knowledge of the world situation and the situation in his country is as dangerous to the peace of the world as anything put on paper in many years.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I simply cannot see that.”

  He held up a hand and ticked down one finger. “First, Roget now has a complete file of every commerical ship’s captain who runs to Latin-American ports. Out of this list he has taken the names of those skippers who are willing to look the other way so far as their cargo is concerned—provided they’re paid enough. He has, in other words, a rogues’ gallery of freighter captains.

  “Two,” he went on, lowering another finger, “Roget has compiled a file of every place where he can obtain guns and ammunition—in quantity and illegally. Three, with your help Roget charted the courses of certain international stocks. He and his friends in Europe followed that information as far as they could and came up with another list of names, those financiers who work on the edge of the law—and usually outside it.

  “In other words, Miss Corey, Roget’s information tells where to get guns and ammunition, who will finance their purchase, and who will carry them to his country. Through a study of Latin-American sources, he also knows who are the weak men in the present government, not only of his own country but of neighboring countries. That means he knows which men will—for gain or other reasons—help him get the guns and ammunition across borders and into the hands of the men who will use them.”

  “There have been Latin-American revolutions before,” Lenny said. “I never heard that any threatened to shake the world to its roots.”

  “No,” he admitted. He looked steadily at her. Finally, he said, “You know, of course, that there is a good deal of atomic research going on all over the world today.”

  “I know.”

  “Roget never had you gather information on any aspect of that research?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Miss Corey, the most important information Roget has in his possession concerns venal men whom those financing Roget’s party can buy. Britain and the United States are not alone in atomic research. Enough countries are doing
work in the field so that Roget’s backers are going to be able to buy parts and ingredients for small bombs—here and there. And be able not only to buy the men to sell them this material but men to put them together.”

  Lenny stared at him open-mouthed. It seemed so absurd, so impossible … yet he was wholly serious. And she had to fight to keep from believing him.

  “Do you really care if his country blows itself up?” It was a poor defense but the best she could muster at the moment.

  “I care that thousands of innocents will suffer and be maimed—women and children among them. I care,” he went on with sudden, frightening savagery, “that Roget’s party claims pieces of neighboring countries. And that part of their plan of revolt is not simply to take over their own country but with the use of the bombs, dropped without warning, to force other countries to give them what they claim is rightfully theirs.”

  He made an abrupt move as though to drain some of the tension from his body. “Can you see now? If that were to happen, the whole of Latin America would rise up in protest and self-defense. We would have to act. European nations with a stake in Latin America would have to act as well.”

  “I should think the parties opposing Leon would have done something by now,” Lenny said.

  “You’ll just have to take my word for it that they are in no position to realize the seriousness of this. And I’m not here to go into the political merits of one party over another. I’ll say just this: the present government is a party that put itself in by force. It receives no sympathy from us. Of the two out parties, one would be favorable to a policy of progress and peace—that party we would help. Unofficially,” he added dryly. “The other party, together, is antithetical to our interests and to the interests of the countries surrounding Roget’s. We cannot support either the party in power or Roget’s party. Especially now, we cannot support Roget’s party.”

  “You ask me to believe a group of financiers would go to such trouble and expense to gain control of a small country such as Leon’s?”

  “With the natural resources from surrounding areas—it would no longer be just a small country, Miss Corey…. So, you see, we must stop Roget. But it is not such a simple matter as that, or we could merely have him shot. We must know the details of his information and, especially, his contacts. We must know who his contacts are.”