Curiosity Didn't Kill the Cat

by M. K. Wren

  Zimmerman and Marty had already left the shop when Miss Dobie returned, bearing a white paper sack which she surrendered to him as he pulled himself to his feet.

  “Roast beef,” she explained.

  “Thanks. How was lunch?”

  “The lunch special was salmon croquettes.”

  “Well, it could be worse.”

  She sighed. “I know. Tomorrow it’s meatloaf. Oh, I took care of your call. It’s arranged as you specified.”

  He smiled tightly. “Thank you, Miss Dobie.”

  “Shall I take over at the counter?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Okay. And the list? The books…etcetera?”

  “You may as well continue with that, but don’t—well, I mean, be discreet.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Flagg. Mine is not to wonder why—”

  “Miss Dobie—” He sighed. “Please. Just do, discreetly, and forget the ‘or die’ part.”

  *

  Again, he left the office door open a few inches. He poured some coffee, then put a cartridge on the stereo, turning the volume low. He chose the Brandenburg Concerti, finding their reasonable forms particularly satisfying.

  He sat down at the desk and consumed the sandwich Miss Dobie had brought him, his eyes straying constantly from the counter to his watch. He could feel the tension growing in him like the steady winding of a mainspring.

  It was nearly three. Normal closing time was five; if the message in the Dostoevsky had aroused no reaction by then, there was no use staying longer.

  Two hours.

  Two long hours to wonder if he shouldn’t be somewhere else, doing something else.

  He finished the sandwich, wadded the napkins and threw them at the wastebasket; then he lit a cigarette and watched as a pair of middle-aged tourists came into the shop, and a few minutes later, a giggling covey of girls just off the school bus. Finally, as he gazed aimlessly around the room, his eyes rested on the File.

  He pulled it toward him, and after a moment realized, even as he leafed through the cards, that it was only habit that motivated him. Whenever he was baffled by a consultation project, he always went to the File.

  Almost any subject within the realm of human knowledge was represented here, as well as the recognized experts in every field.

  But there was nothing—and no one—to help him now. This wasn’t an ordinary consultation project.

  He snapped the File shut abruptly and pushed it aside, then again looked at his watch. When he realized his hands were unconsciously balling into fists, he carefully relaxed them and turned his chair toward the door.

  Settle down, he admonished himself. Patience. There was nothing to do but wait—and hope.

  *

  But at four-thirty, his patience ran out. He’d smoked a full pack of cigarettes during the long afternoon, and in the last hour and a half watched an intermittent procession of people moving in and out the front door. Many were familiar to him; regular customers. More were strangers, obviously tourists, just passing through.

  But at no time did he see the small, red-jacketed Crime and Punishment crossing the counter. And a call to Charlie had similar negative results: neither Mrs. Leen, Anton Dominic, nor the Major’s partner had made a move.

  A call to Steve Travers had been equally fruitless. He was out of his office and couldn’t be reached.

  Conan looked at his watch again, then rose and went out to the counter. It was already beginning to get dark outside, and the shop was almost clear of customers. “Well. Quiet day, Miss Dobie.”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t say, since I haven’t the vaguest idea what’s going on around here.”

  He ignored her mildly accusing tone.

  “May I see that list you’ve been keeping?”

  “Of course.” She reached under the counter and handed him the sheet.

  He studied it carefully, but found nothing on it that aroused his suspicions. And that was ironic; the name of the third man might be on that list, if he weren’t a total stranger to both Miss Dobie and himself, and he considered that unlikely. Finally, he folded the sheet and put it in his back pocket.

  “You may as well start closing up, Miss Dobie. I’ll turn off the lights upstairs.”

  “I can do that. You look tired. Why don’t you go on home and let me—?”

  “I’ll get the lights.”

  She shrugged and went to the front door to hang up the CLOSED sign, glancing at him with a little bewilderment as he moved purposefully toward the stairway.

  Meg was at the top of the stairs, batting a hapless scrap of paper back and forth across the floor. He stopped long enough to give her a vigorous rub and a few words.

  The only customer was a man in the Fiction section;Ds a tourist; California, possibly. He was leaning against the sill of the gable window that overlooked the street, myopically engrossed in a Shellabarger historical novel.

  Conan studied him closely for a moment, then sent him on his way with the announcement that it was closing time. Then he went to the Reference room and began turning off the lights as he worked his way back to the stairway.

  The lone customer was gone when he returned to the Fiction section. He paused, listening to the scuffling sounds Meg made at her game, then crossed to the Ds.

  The Dostoevsky was still in place.

  He pulled the book off the shelf and started to open it, then hesitated, feeling a prickling chill. He wondered at that premonitory sensation; wondered at the cause of it. Nerves, perhaps.

  Still, he didn’t open the book, but stared at it intently, as if it would provide an answer itself.

  And in a sense, it did finally. There was nothing to explain that warning chill in its appearance; no marks, scratches, smudges—nothing.

  The weight.

  A perception born in his muscles and bones, translating itself into a wordless alarm. The weight. He’d handled this book and its twins too many times; his hands and arms recognized the difference, even if his mind didn’t on a conscious level.

  He stood silently, hefting the book. It was far too heavy; perhaps a full pound too heavy. And he wondered what gave this particular book that extra weight.

  It wasn’t hard to guess.

  *

  The office door was closed, but the quiet was more than the soundproofing. He’d sent Miss Dobie on her way fifteen minutes ago; the shop was closed, the silence that of solitude.

  He leaned back in his chair, easing his right elbow onto the arm, and took a slow drag on his cigarette, studying the results of ten minutes of nerve-wracking and cautiously painstaking effort.

  The book lay on the desk beside him, and he had opened it. But not in the usual sense. He’d opened it in a sort of surgical operation, with a narrow, sharply pointed knife, going through the front cover.

  And now he surveyed the results of his surgery with a black rage closing in on him.

  An exchange had been made sometime during the long afternoon. This wasn’t the copy of Crime and Punishment he’d put on the shelf this morning; this one had been carefully prepared.

  The pages had been cut out of the center of the book and the cavity filled with plastic explosive. A spring friction device was attached to it which would be activated by the opening of the book.

  The rage was a part of the inevitable reaction, but at the moment it had little to do with the threat to his own life. Perhaps that would come later.

  He’d set a mousetrap and had the favor returned—with interest. But this trap shared the deficiency of his own; it was nonspecific, and that was the cause of his rage.

  The odds were high that he would be the only one to open this particular book, but there was still a chance that someone else might have inadvertently picked it up. Another innocent bystander might have paid with his life for an interest in Dostoevsky.

  But this little bomb might still have achieved its purpose even in that event. The shop was an old building; the resulting explosion might have triggered its c
ollapse, burying everyone inside in a pile of rubble—including its proprietor.

  More innocent lives.

  The rage dissipated; another luxury. He considered the implications of this particularly lethal mousetrap.

  Some were obvious. For one, Mrs. Leen and her cohorts considered Conan Flagg a threat to themselves and their mission. It also implied that they didn’t need what he supposedly had to sell, and this meant they’d found the lost message, or had another source for the information now.

  And again, the almost desperate nature of this ploy implied a time limit.

  There was another implication that was vague and nearly irrational; another subliminal perception, perhaps. It had to do with the character of a man who could set a trap that might snuff out innocent lives.

  Conan knew who had set this trap; knew the identity of the third man—the courier. He could even produce some logical and reasonable facts to back up his conviction when he thought back over the last few days. But the conviction was rooted more in instinct than in logic.

  But that wasn’t the question that occupied his mind now. The important question still—the only important one—was Mrs. Leen’s purpose. Why was she here, and what was the mission that drove her and her fellow conspirators to such desperate measures.

  That it had been necessary to murder Jeffries and Mills might be attributable in part to bad luck, and to her hired man’s lack of finesse and his tendency to panic.

  But Rose hadn’t planted this bomb. This came from the prime movers of the conspiracy, and it was carefully premeditated.

  It seemed bitterly ironic that they considered him a threat to their mission. He was helpless to stop it—regarded with suspicion by the FBI, and totally ignorant of the purpose of the conspiracy. He wondered sickly if the FBI was actually aware of the existence of this conspiracy.

  But he knew it existed, and perhaps Mrs. Leen and her friends were justified in considering him a threat; he wouldn’t give up until he understood their purpose.

  He crushed out his cigarette and picked up the phone.

  *

  “Hello, Charlie. Any action there?”

  “Hell, no,” Duncan responded irritably. “You heard from Steve yet?”

  “No. What about Carl?”

  “Nothing. I checked with him about ten minutes ago. What about your…uh, mousetrap? Anybody take the bait?”

  Conan looked down at the book, his eyes going cold.

  “Yes. Charlie, I’m going to call Steve’s house and office and leave your number, in case he should happen to have anything to say to us. I have a little expedition of sorts lined up, and I’ll be out of touch for an hour or so.”

  “An expedition! Listen, Conan, if you—”

  “Relax. I’ll be there in ten minutes, and I’ll tell you all about it. And I think you’ll be interested in what I caught in my mousetrap.”

  “Okay. I’ll be waiting.”

  Conan cleared the line, then dialed Steve Travers’ home number, and while he waited for a response he opened the desk drawer and took out Charlie’s .32.

  It might, indeed, come in handy.

  CHAPTER 22

  As the clear light of a green-tinged sunset faded, the Josephine picked her way along the rocky coastline, riding dangerously close to the rough waters off Jefferson Heights. By the time she moved past the headland into the comparatively quiet waters off Holliday Beach, the sky was entirely dark except for a reddish glow on the horizon.

  But the calm in the open waters was only comparative. Conan clung to the starboard railing, bracing himself against the slow roll of the long sea swells. Those swells that looked like trivial wrinkles when viewed from the shore, loomed large from the deck of a small fishing boat.

  He shifted the strap of the binoculars case on his left shoulder, glancing toward the pilothouse, where Olaf Svensen was working intently at the wheel, his craggy features limned against the darkness by the glow of the binnacle light.

  Conan moved toward the bow a few paces, his gaze shifting from the scattered glitter of lights on the shore, to the single chain of lights gleaming on the horizon. But even as one part of his mind concentrated on the lights, another part was occupied with Olaf Svensen.

  Charlie had questioned him closely about Sven, in no way satisfied with the scant information Conan could offer. Duncan noted that a man with a fishing boat might be quite useful to Mrs. Leen, and he was particularly disturbed that Sven was another frequent visitor at the bookshop.

  Svensen had listened patiently to Conan’s instructions before they left the Bay, giving no indication that he thought it odd that Conan wanted to go out to sea at nightfall, staying as close to shore as possible, then stop at a certain point and wait with the lights and motor off. Sven’s only reaction was to draw his bristling brows together and state a price for this unusual excursion. Conan paid him, and they left the Bay with no further words.

  It was that apparent lack of curiosity that made Conan wonder now. But Sven had never been a man to ask questions.

  Conan turned his full attention to the lights, assessing the Josephine’s position in relation to the shore lights and those on the horizon. At times, all of them disappeared as the boat dipped into the troughs.

  He moved back to the pilothouse, glancing over Sven’s shoulder at the compass. After a few more minutes, he made another visual check, then turned to Sven, raising his voice against the roar of the motor.

  “All right, Sven. This looks about right.”

  The fisherman nodded, then shut off the engine, leaving the boat facing north, on a direct east-west line between the center of Holliday Beach and the trawlers. A few seconds later, the instrument panel went dark and the running lights blinked out.

  The silence and darkness were profound, and Conan felt a momentary fear; a fear engendered by the black and omnipotent sea. He smiled at this atavistic sensation, then edged his way forward, stopping a few feet short of the bow. He took the binoculars from the case, braced his left elbow against the railing, and focused on the shore.

  Before he left Holliday Beach, he’d stopped by his house and turned on certain lights. Now, he searched for that particular pattern of lighted windows, and at length found it, but only after three swells. The entire coastline disappeared every time the boat fell into a trough.

  But once he homed in on the lights, he could keep the binoculars aligned with the spot fairly well between swells. Impatiently, he pulled his arm out of the sling; he needed both hands to keep the glasses steady. He waited for the boat to rise on another swell, then counted north from his house; the sixth set of lights belonged to Mrs. Edwina Leen’s unassuming little beachfront cottage.

  He heard the heavy thud of booted feet moving along the railing toward him, but Sven stopped a few feet away, maintaining the conversational hiatus that had existed between them during the whole of this voyage.

  Assured that he could keep his objective in sight, Conan straightened and turned the binoculars toward the horizon.

  It was a paradoxically beautiful sight, that scintillant chain, with the delicate, golden crescent of a new moon hovering above it. He located a cluster of lights near the center of the chain; the mother ship, seagoing factory and focus of the fleet’s activities.

  And as he lowered the binoculars, he was remembering the first time he’d seen the Berlin Wall. But there was no wall here; only an imaginary line called the three-mile limit.

  Olaf Svensen’s voice rumbled out of the darkness.

  “Yust you look at them damn Rooskies,” he muttered, his voice vibrating with rancor.

  “Hell of a lot of them in this fleet,” Conan commented.

  Svensen lapsed into a few bitterly spoken words of Norwegian, then returned to English.

  “Factories!” he pronounced with profound disgust. “That’s all they be. Floatin’ factories. They don’ know what is, to be fishermen. And yust look how close they come in. They be runnin’ right on the line.”

  “Are they runn
ing closer than usual?”

  “You damn right, they closer!” Sven snorted. “They figure maybe nobody watch at night. They t’ink they yust sneak in close, and nobody know.”

  Conan made no response as Sven lapsed into mumbling Norwegian again. He turned and sighted in on Mrs. Leen’s house, watching it through several swells. Then he took a deep breath, disciplining his mind to wait.

  And it might be a long wait, he thought grimly. He might be too late, or in the wrong position, or the idea that brought him here might have no basis at all in fact.

  *

  A half hour later, he was still waiting. The moon had long ago slipped under the horizon, making the night even more oppressively black.

  He longed for a cigarette, but wouldn’t risk lighting one. He’d already stopped Sven from lighting his pipe. On the ocean, a small light could be seen a long way.

  And that was one reason he was here, shivering in the dark, waiting for something that might never happen.

  “Sven—”

  Svensen was still leaning against the railing next to him. He responded with a mumbled, “Ya?”

  “Do me a favor; keep your eyes on those…Rooskies, and if you see anything unusual, let me know.”

  “Okay. I keep my eyes open.”

  Conan heard him moving across the deck to the opposite railing, and again felt a vague uneasiness. Sven still showed no apparent surprise at his unusual requests.

  He braced his elbows against the railing and raised the binoculars, refocusing on Mrs. Leen’s house. The process had become routine by now. A large swell lifted the Josephine and dropped her into a trough, and he swore under his breath as the shore lights disappeared.

  When he had them in sight again, Edwina Leen’s house had gone dark.

  Conan tensed, unconsciously holding his breath. Another swell, but a relatively small one; he maintained his visual lock on Mrs. Leen’s house, oblivious to the tension-induced pain in his shoulder.

  Then a tight smile of satisfaction crossed his lips.

  From the darkened house, a tiny pinpoint of light appeared.

  He controlled the impulse to shout his jubilation, concentrating on that white point of light. It had to be a powerful, extremely tight beam; a beam so tight, that had he been a short distance north or south, he’d have missed it entirely. Even now, he wondered if the boat shouldn’t be a little farther north for him to catch the full brilliance of it.