by Lester Dent
“Well, then, I guess there is no need for me to be scared and feel like a prisoner, is there, Walter?”
“Not a bit. Here, how about a kiss?”
“Okay. Just one kiss, though.”
He pushed his mouth against hers and presently she dug her teeth into his lip. The Benedictine slopped out of her glass on her hand and she threw glass and all in the air. Benedictine showered down on them. “Bite me back, Walter. But not too hard.” He found out that having only one hand was quite a handicap. She finally took off the gown herself lying on the bed and writhing and squirming out of the garment, then throwing the gown up in the air the way she had tossed the liquor. The gown swirled around above them and fell back to the floor, skating from side to side in the air the way a leaf falls. The light fell across her body giving it a glow like cream. Her nipples were like acorns and hurt his chest through his shirt. “Goddamn you, Walter, you still got your shoes on.”
When he was sure she was asleep he got out of bed. He leaned down and gave her shoulder a gentle push and she rolled over on her back, her heavy breathing changing to snoring. He grinned. That was what he wanted her to do, snore. It was not hard to get her to snore. She was a snoring machine, this babe, he thought. Now, if she stopped snoring he would know she had awakened and be warned.
Her purse had seven dollars in bills and some change. He took it. He had seen her hide her money too many times when she was tight to need to waste time hunting. He went directly to her best pair of slippers in the closet. It was there, in the toes of the slippers, divided about half and half. He counted it.
“Jesus!”
There was twenty-two dollars. He knew she had gotten five hundred from Brother for selling him the names of the references. Could she have blown it all? She must have. She had frittered away all but twenty-nine dollars and forty-four cents. He counted it carefully. Stupid bitch. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could she blow every cent she got her paws on?
Harsh lurched to the bed, where Vera Sue lay sleeping loudly, a succession of resonant snores coming from her lips. He reared back and socked her across the jaw with his fist. Her arms jerked and threw the covers askew. The snores stopped. He looked at his hand angrily. Skinned the hell out of his knuckles. On his way out the door, he began to suck on his knuckles.
TWELVE
Doctor Englaster came into Harsh’s room about ten the next morning dressed for the operation as is customary for surgery, white gown and skullcap, surgeon’s mask, rubber gloves. His large flexible hands looked like bunches of bananas in the yellow gloves. Mr. Hassam rolled in an operating table improvised from a massage table, and Miss Muirz pushed in a smaller service table bearing instruments and medicants and a bright light for the operation. Harsh watched the preparations with the feeling of being paralyzed. Doctor Englaster seized his face and began to pinch the skin on the left side, and Harsh lost the paralysis. He knocked the rubber-covered hands away from his face and sat up.
“Get away from me, goddamn it. The operation is off.”
“Indeed?”
“I’ve changed my mind about going through with it.”
Harsh could tell nothing from their faces. The masks gave all of them the poker faces to end all poker faces.
“Will the rest of you step outside a moment?” Brother’s voice was gentle. “Mr. Harsh and I will discuss this.”
“Goddamn it, don’t leave me in here with him!” Harsh was frightened.
No one offered to interfere. Miss Muirz, Doctor Englaster, and Mr. Hassam left the room. Brother came to the bed and looked down at Harsh. His voice was still placid. “Let me refresh your memory, Harsh.”
“I know I agreed to having my face scarred, anyway I think I did. But it’s off.”
“Harsh, do you recall I had you investigated? The detective agency from Kansas City? Do you also recall we learned a Mr. D. C. Roebuck, a photographic supply house drummer, met violent death while pursuing you to collect an unpaid account?”
“I didn’t kill the guy.”
“Don’t interrupt. A witness, a service station attendant, accepted a bribe to say you were not the man D. C. Roebuck pursued. I told you that. What I did not tell you is that the same witness, for the same bribe, if ordered to do so, will testify you were the man D. C. Roebuck pursued, and that he saw a large nickel-plated revolver in your hand. The same revolver, for your information, was found in D. C. Roebuck’s wrecked car. I need not tell you how it got there.”
Harsh eyed him, stunned. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“That I can have you tried and electrocuted for the murder of D. C. Roebuck just by going to a telephone.”
Harsh felt sick. “You think you’ve got me, don’t you?”
“I have got you, you idiot. You are right in my pocket where you belong, or you are right in the electric chair. That is your choice.” Brother went to the door and opened it and put his head out. “Harsh has chosen to go along with us.”
The time required for the operation was less than half an hour. Doctor Englaster used a local anesthetic and the most pain Harsh felt came when the needle pinked his cheek the first time. The left side of his face became numb, the knife did not hurt at all. Neither did the stuff that was sprinkled in the wound before the gauze was applied. Doctor Englaster, obviously pleased with his own work, indicated Harsh need not necessarily stay in bed, but he should keep the bandage in place. “You will like that scar, Harsh. It will be quite a distinguished scar.”
Harsh looked at him bitterly. “Distinguished my ass.” He pulled the liquor table to where he could reach it from his bed and poured bourbon into a glass.
Doctor Englaster watched him with satisfaction. “Harsh, you please me. We need a twenty-four-carat cur for this job, and you show every sign of qualifying.” He got his instruments together and pushed the instrument table to the door. “Miss Vera Sue Crosby has a badly bruised jaw this morning. I treated her.”
Harsh scowled at him. “I like you too, Doc.” The anesthetic in the side of his face made him lisp.
Mr. Hassam began language lessons that afternoon. He came into Harsh’s room carrying a book. Mr. Hassam’s sport shirt was purple with gold flowers and his slacks were pink linen, his sandals held to his feet by straps between his plump toes.
“Brother sort of got the best of you, didn’t he, Harsh?”
“Yeah, I guess. But my day will roll around.”
“Between you and I, Harsh, I hope I am on hand that day.”
“I’ll send you word.”
Mr. Hassam grinned and gave Harsh the book and asked him to read aloud from it. The book was not in Spanish, as Harsh expected, but in English. He began to read, but his efforts to pronounce the longer words caused Mr. Hassam’s expression to grow pained. Mr. Hassam took the book back.
“The truth is my cheeks are sore from that stuff this morning, and I can’t read real clear.”
“The truth is you are practically illiterate, Harsh. But no matter.”
“Well, I guess you might say I can’t read and write real good.” Harsh pointed at the book. “What’s your idea trying me out on an English book?”
“I was merely ascertaining how you put printed letters into sound. We had better stick to verbal instruction and forget the books.” Mr. Hassam pointed to the table. “La mesa.”
“Huh?”
“The Spanish word for the table. La mesa. Repeat after me. We will commence with the names of objects and things, then we will make them into simple sentences and go over and over them until they are fixed in your mind.”
“Say, couldn’t we put it off? My face hurts from that needle gunk, like I said.”
“Time is of the essence.”
“If that means it stinks, you’re so right.” Harsh lay back. “Well, shoot.”
His face continued to hurt from the scar operation, and he kept thinking the last thing he felt like doing today was learn some gook language. If he didn’t sort of like Mr. Hassam, he thought, he wouldn’t b
e going along with it. “El telefono en la mesa.” The concentration made his head ache, and he really did not give a hoot if he never learned to say the telephone was on the table.
“Hassam, I got it figured you folks are doctoring me up to double for somebody. What I can’t figure, is who.”
“Good grief. Hasn’t Brother told you any facts?”
“Brother tells me nothing. He hates my insides.”
“Well, I’m sure you should know.”
“How about telling me?”
“Telling you what?”
“Who am I going to double for?”
“Why, El Presidente. The president of our nation in South America.”
Harsh did not say another word on the subject. He had not believed Mr. Hassam. Sons of bitches were a bunch of kidders, he decided.
THIRTEEN
The following two days were filled with a peace which puzzled Harsh. He knew that Miss Muirz, Doctor Englaster, and Mr. Hassam must have gone away, basing this conclusion on the fact that he did not see them about. No one told him whether they had departed permanently. He thought of asking Brother about it, but he decided he would not give Brother the satisfaction of saying a damn word to him. He was cultivating a murderous dislike of Brother, and along with thinking about methods of getting into the wall safe, he was letting his mind take an excursion into ways of shutting Brother up permanently.
In the meantime Mr. Hassam reached New York and made the bank deposit. He presented the card with Harsh’s fingerprints along with the signature of El Presidente as forged by Miss Muirz. Mr. Hassam told the banker the fingerprints were part of a new policy El Presidente thought advisable in view of his troubled internal affairs. The thing went off with no more formality than a five-dollar savings deposit. The banker knew Mr. Hassam had been El Presidente’s financial courier for a number of years; indeed it was Mr. Hassam who had arranged a reception with El Presidente and a pleasant evening when the banker was touring South America with his wife two years previously. Mr. Hassam left whistling. No more sweat than a snake swallowing eggs, he thought.
He took his customary succession of taxicabs in a zig-zagging route uptown to a small shop on Seventh Avenue, near Macy’s. The Seventh Avenue shop was operated by a near countryman of Mr. Hassam’s, a Jordanian named Ghaset, who carried on a small plastics manufacturing business. The man was actually a wizard with plastics. He could do something that, so far as Mr. Hassam knew, no one else could or would do. He could furnish a mastic to be applied to a human hand, peeled off when dry, and from this he could fashion a glove which anyone with a hand of similar size could wear to duplicate the fingerprints of the original hand. The price for this was five thousand dollars. He and Mr. Hassam did business without delay.
Brother came in and took Harsh’s temperature once each six hours, but otherwise the two did not see each other. During the first twenty-four hours following the scar operation Harsh did not leave his room. He tried several times to get into the wall safe, succeeding as usual in opening nothing but the outer door to which he had the combination. The only progress he was making as far as he could see, he was getting so he could work the combination lock in nothing flat. That was something. He wedged a match head behind the painting that covered the safe, placing the match head in such a position that it would drop unnoticed to the floor if the painting was disturbed. Then he felt he could take a walk for some much-needed exercise.
The house seemed to be more castle than had been his first impression, a wedding cake castle under whipped cream clouds, the lawn tailored green velvet, each shrub placed with landscaper’s perfection. Half the jerk towns in the country did not have a schoolhouse so large, Harsh thought. The grounds were some ten acres enclosed in a high pink coral wall on three sides. On the fourth side the wall ran into the sea and enclosed a lime-white beach where there were two thatched cabanas resembling South Sea island huts as Hollywood would conceive them.
Harsh took a stroll to the iron gate. It looked solid, but it could be unfastened from the inside with a whack from a heavy rock, if he was any judge of padlocks. But it would be noisy. On the wall, starting about as high as a man could reach by jumping and extending over the top and probably down the outside of the wall, jagged broken glass was embedded. A man might have trouble getting out of the place.
He moved on to the beach and sprawled on a deck chair in front of one of the cabanas. He wondered if he should worry about getting out of the place. The hell with being scared, he thought, let him get hold of the fifty thousand dollars and he could jump the wall flatfooted. He watched the sea. The sunlight was as warm and relaxing as soft honey poured from a pitcher. Boats moved past on a rifle blue sea. A helicopter flailed along a hundred feet overhead following the beach, and later so did a couple of light planes. The chick-like outcries of bathers came intermittently from the unseen beaches to the north and to the south, never near enough for him to distinguish what they were so happy about.
For lunch the co-pilot/servant brought a tray on which was bouillon, garlic bread, an omelet, and sweetish black coffee.
“You fly the food around too, do you, buddy?”
The man kept a wooden face. “No habla, Señor.” He placed the tray on the sand beside Harsh and left. Harsh wondered what would have happened if he had sprung some of the Spanish he had learned on the man. What excuses would he have had then not to strike up a conversation?
There was a telephone on a small table in the cabana. Harsh noticed it through the cabana entrance. He stared at the telephone for some time and abruptly got up and went into the cabana and picked up the telephone directory on which the instrument was sitting.
If there’s one in the telephone book, he thought, it’ll be in the classified section. Under L. L for Locksmith. His hand was shaking until he had to wedge the telephone directory against the wall while he turned pages. Security Locksmithing Company. He threw back his head and showed all his teeth at the ceiling, wishing he could let out a howl of satisfaction. By God, there was a locksmith in Palm Beach. There really was.
As the fellow says, nothing gets results like action, he reflected, and he picked up the telephone.
“May I serve you?”
It was Brother’s voice.
Harsh froze. He had made a mistake here, he had made a real mistake. The damn line plugged into a private switchboard at the house, and Brother had been keeping an eye on it. What could he do about it? He did not want Brother to know he had even toyed with the idea of using the telephone. He held his breath, wondering whether he had gasped or anything earlier so that he could have been heard. Jesus, if he put the telephone back on the cradle now, Brother would know for sure something was screwy.
His eyes chanced on the luncheon tray sitting on the sand outside. I need a table to eat my lunch off of, don’t I? he thought. As quietly as he could he placed the telephone on the cabana floor where it might have fallen if dislodged from the table. Then he picked up the telephone table one-handed, carried it outside, and plunked the legs down in the sand beside his chair. He maneuvered the luncheon tray onto the table, bracing it against his cast. Then he sat down and picked up knife and fork. He ate two bites before Brother came running from the direction of the house.
Brother looked into the cabana. “That telephone is off its hook.”
“It is? Say, I guess it fell off the table when I moved the thing out here. Put it back, will you? If I bend over to do anything, this face of mine stabs me blind.”
Brother’s syrup-dipped eyes stayed on Harsh. His lips were compressed. His breath came and went through his nose rather audibly. Then Brother began to call Harsh things in Spanish, words too fast for Harsh to understand, but which had the tongue lash that profanity has in any language.
Harsh waved a forkful of food at Brother. “Cuss all you want to, you crazy bastard. You think I care?”
Brother became suddenly pale and silent. Then he wheeled and strode back to the house and went inside. Harsh was both surprised and
amused, and he was congratulating himself on having gotten rid of the man when Brother reappeared from the house. Now Brother had a shotgun. He came back to the cabana at a run.
Harsh got wildly to his feet, not knowing what he was going to do, feeling sure Brother was going to shoot him down. His skin felt like it was crawling with lice, so great was his nervous tension. Brother ran straight to him and jammed the muzzle of the shotgun against his chest. It was a double-barreled shotgun, a hammer model, and Harsh could see it was cocked. All right, I am going to die anyway, what is there to lose, Harsh thought. He fell back on his army training. It was no trick, the instructor had told them, to disarm a man who has a gun on you providing the gun is jammed against your body. You just grab the gun and knock it aside. It is a matter of the telegraphic speed of nerve impulses. If the gun is jammed against some part of your torso, you can make it, because it takes a split second for your brain to send the grab message to your muscles, and a split second for the other man’s brain to send the message that you are going to grab, pull the trigger. Your message gets the first start, and this is the difference. Enough difference.
Harsh was twisting when he struck the gun. It went off. Noise, a tubful of fire, powder stink. A hole appeared in the sand at their feet large enough to be a grave for a small pig. Jesus God, Harsh thought, it worked, that hairy-chested instructor wasn’t fly-specking us. Harsh got his usable arm over the barrel of the shotgun and spun his body completely around and the shotgun was torn from Brother’s grip. The gun sailed about twenty feet, landing in the foam where a wave was falling apart on the sand. Now Brother stood spraddle-legged and wide open for a kick, so Harsh let him have it. In the groin.
Brother fell backward when the kick got him, but instead of turning green and staying down, he got up again at once. Harsh ran for the shotgun. He tripped and fell face first into the wet sand, but got his good hand on the shotgun after what seemed forever, and sat up. A wave came in and broke and drenched him with salt water almost to the hip pockets. He watched Brother. “You want the other barrel?”
