Severed Key

by Nielsen, Helen

  “It’s groovy. I mean, hasn’t it been just groovy all summer? I don’t want anything to change—ever.”

  “Everything changes,” the boy said. “I got to find someplace steady where I can make some bread.”

  The storm had washed a tangled pile of seaweed ashore. When they reached it, the girl dug at it with her toes, popping the bulbous pods in squealing delight. The boy’s arm slid loosely about her waist and rested on her thigh. Teasingly, she pulled away and darted backward—but the seaweed was slippery footing and she fell. Her laughter broke off in a sharp cry of pain.

  “What is it?” Bob cried. “Are you hurt?”

  “It’s hard under there,” she explained. “Look, I cut my leg.” She rolled sideways exposing one white calf on which an ugly gash was oozing blood. The boy reached down and pulled her to her feet.

  “There must be a rock under that seaweed.”

  “No, Bob, look. It’s a box. No, it’s a suitcase. I cut my leg on the lock.”

  The boy knelt in the sand and scooped away at the seaweed until the suitcase was dislodged from the tangled mass. It was a quality piece of luggage about twenty-four inches long. Airline type luggage pale blue in colour. The boy brushed away the sand that was caked on the initials and read aloud:

  “S.T.” He picked it up by the handle. “It’s heavy,” he said.

  “How do you suppose it got here?” Sunny asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a guest from one of the hotels took it down to the beach for some reason and forgot it.”

  “Is it locked?”

  Bob tried the catch and nodded. “Tight as a drum.”

  “I’ll bet everything inside is all soggy.”

  “Maybe not. It’s one of those waterproof deals they advertise on TV. Say, maybe it washed off a yacht in that storm we had yesterday. That was some heavy sea!”

  “I’ll bet it did.”

  “And now whoever it belongs to is maybe a hundred miles away and doesn’t know where it was lost.”

  “S.T.,” Sunny agreed. “What shall we do with it?”

  The boy looked quickly up and down the beach. They had come across the patch of seaweed in a secluded cove and there was no one in sight in any direction. “I could break the lock with a rock,” he suggested.

  “Oh, don’t! The case is scratched a little—that’s all. I’ll bet Tray could get it open without breaking the lock and then we could sell it at the second-hand store.”

  “I could get it open myself,” Bob said defensively.

  “Honey, I know you could. But Trav has all those groovy tools in his VW and, oh wow, I’ll bet you could get five or six dollars for this if the lock isn’t broken.”

  “Ten!” Bob declared. “And you know what else? I’ll bet the rich bitch who lost this off the yacht has some goodies inside. Maybe one of those fancy lace peng-wahrs—”

  “Oh, Bob, you’re so funny!”

  “—and some fancy little panties and bras.”

  “Silk, satin and bows,” Sunny added.

  “Or jewellery. Do you like diamonds or poils?”

  By this time the girl was almost hysterical with laughter. “Let’s take it back to the pad,” she declared. “Finders keepers.”

  “And losers weepers,” Bob added. “Look, Sunny, we’re just like the shore birds. We get our bread from the sea. That rich bitch on the yacht won’t miss it.”

  Bearing their cache, Bob and Sunny walked towards the cement steps that led up from the beach. They were young, they were in love, and they never wasted money on newspapers or wasted time listening to anything but disc jockeys on the radio. They hadn’t heard anything about the jet airliner that had crashed into the sea, and the lovely face of Sigrid Thorsen staring out at them from the front pages on the newspaper vending machines meant nothing at all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AS THE DAY cleared, a few hardy Sunday sailors took out their boats to get the feel of the sea, found it rougher than they had bargained for and scurried back to harbour. The slips were well occupied by the time Simon rounded the breakwater and brought the small cruiser into port. Approaching the dock, he could see Chester, Hannah’s cook-turned-athletic director, waiting in Simon’s black XKE. Chester was a handsome black with a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain, a ready wit and a pair of strong arms ready to make fast the boat as soon as he saw Simon at the wheel.

  Hannah’s been up on the tower with a pair of binoculars most of the day,” he reported. “She sent me down here to meet you about an hour ago.”

  Simon got his gear and the Meechum report out of the cabin and began to lock up. “Sorry to cause so much trouble,” he said. “Hannah shouldn’t have worried. I could take a cab up to the heights.”

  He glanced up at the bluff rising high above the marina. The late sun glinted on the three-storeyed tower of The Mansion that was visible to the initiated who knew where to look. For all he knew, Hannah might have the glasses focused on him now.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Chester said. “She didn’t spend all that time looking for you. Somebody’s building a house just below yours and Hannah’s fascinated. It’s a man—a bachelor with grey hair and a yellow Porsche. There’s romance in the air.”

  “I’m jealous,” Simon said.

  “You should be. Ready to go? Don’t take that oilskin jacket off. I put the top down when the sun came out and the wind’s a little chilly in the highlands.”

  Simon tossed his bag and the zipper case into the jump seat and climbed in next to the wheel. Chester could do the driving. After fighting the sea all afternoon, he was happy to relax.

  “When did all this romancing start?” Simon demanded.

  “Right after Hannah came back from Las Vegas. She went for the night of Wanda’s opening, remember? Then she came back because she’s got this little theatre thing going. Getting Wanda started turned her on, I guess. Well, to get to the hall she’s using for the group to practise in, she passes that view lot that’s been vacant all this time—only now it’s being built upon. Wild, Simon. This cat’s building something that looks like a flying saucer launching pad with stained glass windows.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Nobody knows yet. We’re still at the rumoursville stage. But the house will run into many pennies.”

  “He must have a name.”

  “It doesn’t show up with binoculars.”

  Simon owned a Jaguar for the speed factor, and Chester wasn’t shy about using the accelerator. They left the marina behind, sped past the new Civic Centre with its new city offices designed to impress the tourists and depress the taxpayers, and then nosed up into the area called The Heights where Simon’s restored mansion dominated a sprawl of modern cliff dwellers. Chester gestured briefly at a building site where a structure in Early Martian seemed to be mushrooming from an open wound in the hill and then, at the next corner, took a sharp right into a driveway where the high, wrought-iron gates stood open in welcome. Hannah’s bright red Rolls, vintage of 1926, an era when she was a reigning queen of stage and screen, was parked in the open garage. Chester pulled in alongside and cut the motor.

  “Delivered—one Simon Drake as per instructions,” he said.

  Chester grabbed Simon’s bag as he got out of the car. Simon took the zipper case and started towards the house. Within steps of the side entrance, he glimpsed something hurtling towards his head. He ducked and saw a round, white object drop into the soft earth of a newly prepared flower bed. Stooping, he picked it up.

  “A baseball?” he said aloud.

  The oral question was immediately followed by a familiar sound that could be only that of bat meeting ball, and the second missile slashed into a wisteria vine over the portico never to be seen again. When Simon turned about, Hannah, wearing a Dodgers baseball cap, sweatshirt and black leotards, rounded the corner of the house swinging a bat.

  “Oh, it’s only you,” she said calmly. “Chester set up a batting practice machine for me before he went down to the mar
ina. The exercise is wonderful for my back.”

  “It gave mine quite a work-out, too,” Simon said—ducking. Why don’t you stick to your sauna bath?”

  “It’s inside,” Chester remarked. “Nobody down on the new building site can see her if anybody happens to look up.”

  Hannah glared at Chester. “Ignore him,” she ordered. “He’s only trying to overthrow the government. Simon, you look hoary! You look—frosted!”

  Simon ran an exploratory hand over his face. He had neglected to shave in Cappy Anderson’s lavishly appointed bathroom and a two day’s growth of beard was encrusted with salt from the rough sea.

  “Nothing that a shower and a shave won’t handle,” he said. “And while I’m doing that, Chester can mix up a jug of fresh martinis and fix me an early dinner. I’m starved.”

  Simon opened the door and allowed Hannah to enter the kitchen before him. Chester was close behind. “You know Chester can’t cook,” Hannah remarked. “He told me that when I hired him. But cook’s are a dime a dozen, and where can one find intelligent conversation any more? How would you like your roast turkey?”

  “Turkey?” Simon echoed.

  “We got tired of eggs benedict, which, as you know, is my speciality, so I called the caterers and ordered the biggest amount of prepared food we could get at one time—which happened to be a roast turkey. You can have it sliced cold, hashed, heated—”

  “There’s about a gallon of giblet gravy,” Chester said.

  Simon crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the giant-sized refrigerator. At least three-quarters of the fowl was still intact on the serving platter. Without comment, he tore off one leg and took a huge bite. When he’d finished chewing and swallowing it he explained: “That’s the first food I’ve had since I boarded the boat this morning. It was really rough out there today.”

  “And yesterday, I’ll bet,” Chester added.

  “And you’d win if you did. Jack Keith went out with me. I was proud of him. He weathered it like an old salt.”

  “We’ve been reading about the crash in the Times,” Hannah said, waving one hand towards the dinette table. Informal dining at The Mansion took place on a rosewood table polished to a mirror-like lustre, but at the moment the table was spread with sections of newspaper turned to stories and pictures of the airline tragedy. Simon moved closer and studied the now-familiar shot of Arne Lundberg discovering his fiancée’s cosmetic case.

  “I fished that case out of the sea,” Simon said. “We were standing a few feet away when this shot was taken. That poor devil—”

  “It’s the other face that fascinates me,” Hannah said. “Who is he?”

  “Which face do you mean?”

  Hannah indicated the likeness of the man called Johnny Sands. “I know him from somewhere,” she mused.

  “That’s peculiar. Keith said the same thing.”

  “Really? No, I don’t think he would remember.” Hannah took a pencil from the kitchen telephone desk and proceeded to draw a fine, neatly-shaped moustache on Sands’s photo. “There, that’s the way I remember him—exactly. If only he were in uniform.”

  “What uniform?”

  “Oh, he had hundreds of uniforms. The one I remember was the dress uniform of the Santa Isobel Air Force, which was non-existent, by the way. The Air Force, I mean—not Santa Isobel.”

  “One of those banana republics in the Caribbean, isn’t it?” Chester asked.

  “You know perfectly well that it is. And the man in the uniform was Raul Sandovar who ruled Santa Isobel with an iron hand for almost twenty years.”

  “Sandovar!” Simon repeated. “You never told me that you knew him.”

  “I haven’t told you everything about myself, Simon, dear. Not nearly everything. And I didn’t know him well. It was after Max, that jealous director, took a shot at me and left me partially crippled for life—unless Chester’s batting practice machine does the trick—that I met Raul Sandovar. I was in a sanitorium at the time. He visited me—in full uniform, bearing gifts, flowers and cheer. He was charming!”

  “I heard he was a bloody butcher who climbed to power over the corpses of his opposition,” Chester remarked, “and stayed in power as long as he did by using the same methods.”

  Hannah smiled. “Nobody’s perfect,” she said. “Sandovar only did unto others first what they were about to do unto him. And in those days, my friend, beautiful actresses weren’t political scientists. When an attentive male showered us with loot, we demurely accepted.”

  “Demure! I can’t picture you ever having been demure!”

  “Thank you,” Hannah said. “And remember, I told you that I was an actress. But you can take my word for it. This face in the news photo, with the moustache added, is the face of Raul Sandovar. Look at those equine nostrils!”

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” Simon remarked, over the last fragments of the chicken leg. “—Raul Sandovar was assassinated over fifteen years ago.”

  The observation brought a moment of quiet contemplation, and then Hannah, as if having won a silent argument with herself, began to reminisce aloud. “It was in nineteen twenty-eight—in the autumn of the year—when Max stormed into my house waving that ugly Luger. It was in the spring when Raul visited me at the sanitorium. He was a bachelor then and he remained a bachelor for about five more years before they held that fantastic state wedding in Santa Isobel. I think one of the Roosevelt boys attended as an official emissary and squirted the seltzer bottle on some general. No, that was a mayor in France. Well, anyway, Raul was married in nineteen thirty-four. It was years before he had a legitimate heir. There was even gossip that he would divorce his wife and marry a Spanish noblewoman. After the Spanish Civil War there were a lot of them available. Then—yes, it was the year Hitler invaded Denmark and Prince Valdemar fell fighting off the Nazi vandals with his sword that Raul finally had a son. That would make him just about the right age to fit this handsome male in the photograph. The Sandovars held their age beautifully. I was told that Raul didn’t look a day over thirty-five the day he was shot.”

  Chester shook his head in awe. “Fantastic!” he said. “Hannah, you didn’t even draw a breath!”

  Fascinated, Simon asked: “What was the son’s name?”

  “Juan,” Hannah recalled. “Juan Sebastian Maria—oh, you know how those things go. The poor child’s half-grown before they get through the christening ceremony.”

  “Say, I remember something about that,” Chester said. “When Sandovar was shot in a junta coup, his widow and son fled to Switzerland with about a hundred million dollars.”

  “At least that,” Hannah said dryly, “and by this time it’s probably tripled. The Spanish are good at money matters. Only we Americans give everything away—as if our resources were unlimited and the corrupt governments we’ve supported on a global scale would rise to our defence in an hour of need. Naivety is a national characteristic—like tea-drinking among the English—but much worse on the nervous system.”

  “Johnny Sands,” Simon murmured half-aloud.

  “What did you say?” Hannah demanded.

  He didn’t want to explain. Hannah would be too quick to see the natural derivation of Johnny Sands from Juan Sandovar, and then she would wring out of him the story of Angie Cerva coming in on the Las Vegas flight to meet Sands and her vivid imagination would take him off to fantasy land. All Simon really cared about at the moment was the shower, the shave and the Meechum report which he must analyse before the ten o’clock board meeting in San Diego in the morning.

  “I said they were booked up at the Sands,” he remarked. “Booked up everywhere in Vegas—”

  “Well, it’s the Sahara that counts. That’s where Wanda’s appearing.”

  “Right! And because my wife-to-be is going to be fabulously successful, I don’t want to let her down and become a pauper. I’m taking this report Keith got for me upstairs to my room, and I don’t want to be disturbed by anything less soul-satisfying than a fr
esh martini or a pot of coffee.” Simon paused and yanked at the zipper fastener on his waterproof jacket. Like his beard, it was salt-encrusted and better off left in the kitchen than carried through the carpeted halls. He took it off and tossed it on the kitchen bar. Something fell out of one pocket and clattered to the floor. Chester picked it up.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  It was the manicure set that Jack Keith had taken from Sigrid Thorsen’s case. Simon reached out his hand but Hannah’s was faster. Before he could answer the question in her eyes she asked: “Where did you get this?”

  Simon had to explain, and once Hannah knew the source of the set it became all the more interesting. She opened the case and studied the contents. Because there was no angry sea to fight, she now saw what Simon and Keith had missed on the boat. One instrument was missing. From its place in the small case she withdrew a short metal object.

  “Look,” she said. “This is peculiar. It’s a broken key.”

  Simon took it from her hand. It was definitely a key, but an unusual one. There was no manufacturer’s name stamped on the wide end which was covered with hard black rubber. The unusually wide metal extension was neatly severed at a forty-five degree angle.

  “It’s not broken,” Simon said. “It’s been cut.”

  “What’s that looped through the hole?” Chester asked.

  It was a narrow strip of adhesive tape on which had been lettered two words: “Red Camarrow.” Chester read the words aloud over Simon’s shoulder. “Whoever wrote that can’t spell,” he said, “and it sure doesn’t look like a General Motors key to me.”

  “It’s a keepsake,” Hannah said. “A romantic souvenir.”

  “How do you know?” Simon challenged.

  “Because I’m a woman and Sigrid Thorsen was a woman. What good is a broken key if not as a keepsake?”

  “Then I’ll just put it back inside the case,” Simon said, putting action to his words, “and see that it gets back to Arne Lundberg. If it’s a romantic memento he’s the one to have it.”

  Simon picked up the Meechum report and started upstairs. At the first landing he paused to look out over the sea through the tall window that enclosed all three floors of the winding central staircase. Hannah had been there before him. Her binoculars were still on the wide window-sill. He took them up and focused on the wide shoreline beyond the marina. He thought the beach was deserted until the glasses picked up a pair of figures struggling with a pile of twisted seaweed on the beach. He watched them wrench something loose from the heap and examine it for a few moments, and then he saw them walk away together—the boy carrying what appeared to be a light suitcase and the girl (he could see the late sun glinting in her waist-length hair) possessively holding his other hand. Lovers. Simon smiled, remembering Wanda’s reluctance to let him go. And then he thought of young Arne Lundberg and wondered how he was weathering the day after the crash.