by Walter Wager
Undaunted, he blew another.
7
It was seventeen o’clock when P.T. Carstairs stepped off the Eastern shuttle plane at National Airport across the Potomac from Washington, and some forty minutes later Mr. Philip Collins paid a bellboy half a dollar to leave Room 515 at the Hay-Adams. There are a number of hotels where employees will leave a room for a smaller sum, but the Hay-Adams is a superior establishment where standards of service still prevail. By the time the man who called himself Philip Thomas Collins had unpacked, it was nearly 1800. That was the way he’d been trained to think. Six P.M. was 1800 and use a simple alias whose initials match those on your luggage. There were no markings at all on the small green trunk that sat beside the now empty leather suitcase. It had been illegal to move the contents of the metal foot locker across state lines, but that had not troubled P.T. Carstairs, who had broken so many laws so many times that he had long since stopped counting.
The room was cool, a pleasant contrast to the clotted miasmic heat of the steaming city outside the building. June in the District of Columbia is never a comfortable experience. It is nothing like April in Paris or Autumn in New York or Springtime in the Rockies—or any other hit tune. It will never make the charts. It is much too hot and clammy to be romantic, and the beat is simply terrible. It is actually a depressing soggy plop unsuitable even for a waltz, and only those with a good deal of verve or a permanent Civil Service position are likely to endure it.
Full of verve, Carstairs washed his hands and face before he ordered a bottle of cold Carlsberg beer and sat down to think. Despite his playboy demeanor, he was an excellent thinker—which was one reason that he was still alive with all his limbs and organs intact. Another reason was the fact that he was an incredible shot with the police and military hand guns of eleven nations. In the 1970s, this is a survival skill as important as the ability to lie to the press, tell obscene jokes or drive in heavy traffic.
When the beer arrived, Carstairs bribed another employee of the Hay-Adams to go away and then sat in single splendor sipping the excellent Danish brew. This wasn’t as potent as the “18-B” that the Carlsberg people sold in Europe, but it was very good and it helped the time pass. At fourteen minutes after 1800, he checked his weapons—the metal touchstones that proved it was starting again. Both guns—the heavy Magnum .357 in the quickdraw belly holster and the little .32 with the stubby silencer that rested in the canvas sling under his left arm—were loaded. Each had a round in its chamber, so he could now leave for the farm. The millionaire walked out of the hotel at 1821, precisely on schedule.
The rented car was waiting. As he drove through the humid metropolis toward the bridge that would take him to Virginia, he speculated as to what the trouble might be. He was sure that it was trouble, for otherwise Marie Antoinette would not have called about the pen. He flicked the car radio on as he guided the Rambler across Constitution Avenue with its long low row of “temporary” buildings housing parts of the Navy Department, and he hoped that the trouble would be interesting. Grand Prix races and Swedish ballerinas were fine as a regular diet, but after all these years a little real excitement—some challenge—seemed terribly appealing.
It was going to be dangerous, he told himself smugly.
It had to be.
At 1900 minus ten, he turned the Rambler off the main highway and he smiled in recognition. He still remembered the route, the area—every bit of it. Four minutes later, he grinned again when he saw the familiar stone posts that still bracketed the driveway to the farm. It hadn’t been a working farm even then but a fashionable girls’ finishing school with stables and a big barn behind the main residence hall. He halted the vehicle just off the back road, decided that the rendezvous point would probably be the barn. They had planned so many raids from barns, but this was the one that had been their first headquarters. Carstairs stepped out of the Rambler and started walking—warily.
It was still twilight, but the thick stand of trees blocked out most of the rays of the disappearing sun. Carstairs advanced some two hundred yards through the gray-blackness with his linen jacket unbuttoned and one hand resting lightly on the butt of the .32; he heard the whistle. Recognition and reaction were instantaneous.
“Sur le Pont d’Avignon.” He nearly shivered.
The old French folk song did that to the jaded jet-setter; he couldn’t help it. He crouched instinctively in a reflex reaction as automatic as those of Pavlov’s conditioned dogs, and he softly whistled back the next two bars of the simple melody.
He was at war again.
Squinting into the growing darkness, he watched a tall figure emerge from the thicket of trees and shadows—a figure that was almost a shadow itself. The stranger beckoned, and Carstairs followed without question. They kept to the dark places until they were a few yards from the barn, still large and redolent of hay and needing a coat of paint. It was only then that the second most eligible bachelor in the United States saw the face of his guide clearly. It was Andrew F. Williston, who sometimes called himself Marie Antoinette.
Still silent, they entered the barn and Williston closed the door before switching on a rectangular electric “lantern” which he placed on the cement floor. They looked at each other with open curiosity for several seconds, gauging and judging and wondering, before each sighed and they shook hands. Suddenly the tall thin teacher flipped open Carstairs’ jacket and saw the two guns.
“Still heavy,” Williston muttered.
“And they’re loaded, Sonny.”
The psychology professor shook his head.
“They ought to lock you up,” he announced. “Have you a license for this hardware?”
The wealthy gun collector arched his eyebrows.
“Andy, you know I have. I’ve got licenses that you never even dreamt of—to carry trench mortars, fly jets, conduct puberty rites and teach modern dance in the State of California. Dog licenses, fishing licenses, an international driving license and even one from Liberia that authorizes me to carry a blowgun on religious holidays.”
Seeing that Williston was unimpressed, the millionaire extracted his own wallet to show the New York City Police Department gun permit for the Magnum. The teacher’s eyes moved to the smaller .32, which Carstairs cooperatively half drew from its shoulder holster.
“That’s an assassin’s gun,” Williston observed grimly. The meaning of the silencer left no doubts. “They don’t give any goddamned license to carry any goddamned assassin’s gun, not even to well-connected rich boys who went to Yale with the mayor.”
Carstairs shrugged, flashed those fine teeth boyishly.
“You’re right. It is an unlicensed weapon, and it is an assassin’s tool,” he confessed with no visible remorse. “I brought it along in case there was somebody we had to assassinate.”
The humor of the “sportsman” had not changed.
Violence, crime and killing were still all jokes.
“Did you bring any machine guns?” Williston demanded sarcastically.
“A couple, but I left them in the hotel. Don’t look so hysterical, Andy,” his former comrade urged. “I only brought the machine guns because I thought we might need them. I didn’t know what you had in mind.”
You could write an entire textbook about this man, the psychology teacher reckoned.
“If I follow your logic,” Williston reasoned aloud, “you brought the machine guns in case there were some people we had to machine-gun, right? Just like the assassin’s pistol, right?”
Carstairs nodded. It all made, perfect sense to him, so why was the lean, boyish Vermonter so bitter? Weapons had never affected Andy Williston like this in the Good Old Days. The second most eligible bachelor in America was about to point this out when the two men heard the sound.
Somebody was approaching the barn.
“Nineteen hundred—on the dot,” the professor announced after a quick glance at his watch. Carstairs didn’t answer, but drew his Magnum—the .357 blooming in his fist as i
n some conjurer’s trick.
It had to be Sammy Gilman. He’d always been on time, on schedule—to the second. You could always count on him for mathematical precision and pure logic.
“Cover the door—but no shooting,” Williston ordered crisply as he extinguished the light. “If it isn’t Sammy, or Tony, just slug him. That’s all.”
In the blackness, the millionaire smiled at the way Williston had taken charge again just as if the years had never passed—just as he had in the Good Old Days when the five of them were hunted day and night. The simple fact was that in any crisis the Vermonter was an instinctive leader, naturally quick, sure and cunning. It was a gift, like Carstairs’ talent for handling guns and women.
With a slight squeak, the door opened to admit a shaft of fading sunlight and Samuel Mordecai Gilman. Williston closed the portal, relit the lantern—and the three men shook hands solemnly. It was almost as if each of them was surprised that the others were still alive. Statistically—on the basis of actuarial tables—they should all have died a long time ago, and they knew it. But they didn’t know what the others had been doing in the past few years, so the next few minutes were consumed in these exchanges. The psychology professor watched and waited, curious as to who would ask the other question first.
It was not cool cool P.T. Carstairs.
“Well…the telegram…what is it?” Gilman finally wondered aloud.
“I don’t want to go through it twice,” Williston explained, “so let’s wait until Tony arrives.”
“Don’t wait any longer,” boomed a strong voice from the darkness of the hayloft behind them.
The three men spun to see the muscular stunt man drop to the floor with the easy resilient spring of an acrobat. “I’ve been up there for an hour,” Arbolino confessed. “Came in over the roof from the back to look things over—just in case. Just in case the wire didn’t come from Andy after all.”
The smiles, handshakes, appraising glances, warm greetings were repeated. “Now that the paisan is here the only one to wait for is the little guy,” Gilman pointed out—but Williston shook his head.
“Eddie isn’t coming. He’s dead,” the teacher explained in a harsh, hurt voice. “Somebody put a bomb in his car last week.”
The gun collector’s eyes gleamed.
Yes, it was starting all over again.
“Who did it?” Carstairs asked softly.
“I don’t know—yet.”
“Where?” Gilman pressed.
“Paradise City, on the Georgia-Florida line.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Maybe we ought to ask them?” Arbolino proposed in a voice edged with stainless steel.
The teacher nodded.
“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” he replied. “That’s why I called you here.” He lit another cigarette, wondering what he’d do if they wouldn’t help.
“Not one of us would be alive today if it hadn’t been for Eddie Barringer,” Williston began grimly. “We were hot stuff back in 1943, OSS ‘Jeds’ who chuted into Occupied France to organize Maquis groups for guerrilla warfare. We blew bridges, knocked off armored cars, wrecked troop trains—we even grabbed a Wehrmacht payroll. We were big wheels in France ten months before Normandy, until something went wrong and the Nazis caught Eddie. He took it all for forty-seven hours, the whips and the pincers and the soldering irons and the electric shocks and the water treatment. Forty-seven hours, and he didn’t break. He didn’t tell them where to find us.”
Williston didn’t have to finish the ugly story. They all remembered how they had slipped through the German checkpoint in the ambulance, shot their way into the police station, cut down eight—or was it nine?—Gestapo men, and rescued what was left of Eddie Barringer. Five weeks later, Carstairs had slain the informer who’d betrayed Barringer, and nine weeks after that the massive Allied Expeditionary Force fought its way ashore in Normandy. It was September before Barringer reached Walter Reed, but the Army hospital’s best doctors couldn’t give back his left eye and his teeth and his toes. Then the war ended and they were no longer ‘Jedburghs,” the code term for the OSS teams dropped into Hitler’s Europe. Before long, the Office of Strategic Services itself had been carved up by Army Intelligence and the State Department—and the “Jeds” scattered as they returned to civilian life. But these “Jeds”—this team—was alive only because one man had endured forty-seven hours of endless agony.
There were no words to describe their debt to Barringer, but the four men in the barn had no need for words.
The debt must be paid.
The teacher studied the others’ faces, waiting.
“Paradise City—that’s a mob town,” the man from Las Vegas thought aloud.
“Sure…sure, the Senate Rackets Committee gave it a big splash a couple of years ago,” the stunt man recalled. “It was in all the papers.”
Williston nodded.
“Eddie worked on the morning paper in Paradise City,” he announced, “and maybe the mob boys didn’t appreciate what he was writing.”
Carstairs was smiling now. He knew what was coming.
But what about the others?
“We’re not senators and we’re not the FBI and we don’t control any newspapers or television networks,” the tense teacher continued. “And it wouldn’t do much good if we did because Paradise City has been exposed more times than Ursula Andress’ cleavage—and with less result.”
The awful debt to the little man had been eating at him for a long time, and now it was a sharp-toothed animal whose mother was guilt and whose father was vengeance. He paced up and down as he spoke, not quite certain how to tell them.
“What are you selling, Andy?” Gilman asked.
“We can only do what we know how to do,” Williston replied as the yellow-haired millionaire flashed him a mocking “V” for victory signal with the fingers of his left hand.
“You’d better say it straight out, Professor,” Carstairs advised.
“All right. We were trained to infiltrate enemy-occupied territory, organize resistance movements and wage a dirty secret war of sabotage, guerrilla attacks and subversive propaganda.”
Samuel Mordecai Gilman blinked, frowned.
“If you’re thinking what I’m thinking you’re thinking, I think you’re foux—crazy,” the mathematician interrupted in a voice that was only half jesting.
“We know how to crack safes, tap phones, dope drinks, forge papers and steal secrets,” Williston pressed on grimly. “We’ve got to do what we know how to do.”
“Then you’re saying—”
“I’m saying, Tony, that we should consider Paradise City to be enemy-occupied territory—that we should assume false identities and infiltrate it, that we should collect or steal evidence and organize a Resistance movement to bust the whole city and the gang that runs it wide open.”
“The full OSS treatment?” the stunt man wondered.
“The whole bit. We’ll be a self-contained unit, just as we were in Nazi-held France.”
It was hardly necessary to calculate the odds, the man from Las Vegas thought. The odds were all wrong.
“Crazy…it’s crazy. You really think that you can get away with this in the States?” Gilman demanded bluntly. “Four angry men, practically stark naked, without equipment, money, guns or anything resembling a Maquis or an Underground? Without any organization or government behind them? It was one thing to have the whole damned OSS to arrange air-drops, weapons, funds, reinforcements. This will be a very different deal. I don’t think that even Errol Flynn or Lee Marvin would buy it.”
Williston dropped his glowing cigarette on the cement floor, ground the embers out under his heel. Gilman was right, but the teacher couldn’t help that.
“It just doesn’t add up, Andy,” the mathematician insisted.
“We’ve got to pay our bills. I don’t know any other way. Are you with me, Sammy?”
“We’d never get away
with it, Andy. We’d end up dog meat.”
“Are you with me?” Williston repeated.
Gilman shrugged.
“I’m with you…you maniac.”
Arbolino thought of his wife, his two dark-eyed daughters and his home. Then he remembered what Barringer had looked like when they carried his unconscious body out of the Gestapo headquarters.
“I’m with Sam,” the stunt man announced slowly.
The three turned to Carstairs, who smiled again but said nothing.
“Speak up, Petie,” Arbolino urged impatiently.
“What for? Ask the professor. He knows where I stand.”
“He’s in,” Williston confirmed coldly. “He can’t help it. He enjoys this sort of thing.”
They were committed. They didn’t shake hands or take any oaths, but they were unequivocally and totally committed.
“I don’t suppose that I have to point out that we’ve got to avoid all unnecessary violence,” Williston said a moment later with his eyes fixed on the gun collector. “As Sammy mentioned, we’re in the States and this is what passes for peacetime. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely, Professor,” Carstairs answered in a voice so earnestly sincere that he had to be mocking.
It was time to go, to disperse, to reassemble elsewhere, to start the planning and training and collection of equipment. It all had to be done so carefully, so wisely, so professionally. There would be no second chances, no OSS or Maquis to rescue them.
“We begin ‘security’ right now,” the tall teacher announced. “Let’s not leave any traces here. Police up the cigarette butts, matches, everything.”
They picked up anything that might reveal their unauthorized meeting in this barn, the place where their OSS careers had begun when the farm was a clandestine training area so many years ago. It was a girls’ school again, but somehow the intervening years had vanished.
They were at war once more.
It had started.
As they started toward the door, Arbolino paused abruptly and turned to face the man from Las Vegas.
