My smile broadened as the chicken breast parted obediently under the affectionate stroke of my knife. Martin Rice was alive, the Rhys-Eccles Report was completed, and Colonel Kaspir was a false prophet. He had predicted trouble. It had failed to materialize. No shots from ambush, not even a hellish attempt to sabotage my typewriter ribbon.
I would prick him with that one tomorrow. “No,” I would say sweetly, “not even an attempt to sabotage my typewriter ribbon.” And he would squirm.
Kaspir had hinted, through chocolate-stained teeth, of possible action by one Maria Hencken, who, I had gathered, was a sort of Gestapo superwoman. Description of Maria Hencken? “None available,” Kaspir had muttered, twiddling pudgy fingers and wagging his fat head dramatically.
Maria Hencken indeed! My lip curled as I surveyed the dining-hall for perhaps the fiftieth time in three days.
* * *
—
Take Professor Davis and his little girl, for instance, who had been on our train and ridden up in the station wagon with Rice and me Friday afternoon. A hawk-nosed man in his late thirties, Davis was a widower, and his fortified black eyes softened only when he addressed his daughter. His eyes were soft now as he cut up a piece of chicken for the child, and his mid-Western voice was a caressing murmur as he said something to her across their table. The child, a pallid little thing of ten or eleven small for her age and shy almost to mutism, watched her father with large, luminous eyes. Her right arm, recently fractured in some playground mishap, was in sling, and the triangle of black silk that narrowed to her chin intensified her pallor.
Then there were the Misses Alicia and Alethea Ogilvie, gaunt, gray-haired twins nearing sixty, addicted to long khaki skirts, mannish coats, and floppy straw hats. They came up from Norfolk each year at this time (it was May) to paint the laurel blossoms which lay like snow over the spur hills about the camp. Of forbidding aspect in the mornings, the Misses Ogilvie, I had noted, mellowed amazingly by dinner time. Annie, the rawboned mountain woman who cleaned the rooms, ascribed this mellowness to bottles of gin which, she informed me resentfully, the Misses Ogilvie kept locked in their trunks.
And, finally, there were the Hinkles, John and Martha, as thoroughly anesthetized by love as any bride and groom I have ever seen. Their assault on the chicken was punctuated by long ineffable looks. John Hinkle, big, blond, serious, was a telephone company official from somewhere in Delaware. Martha was dark, sleepy-eyed, exotic. Her figure, as outlined by a sweater suit, was something a man might die for, and Hinkle was obviously ready to make the supreme sacrifice at a moment’s notice.
And that was all our company, aside from the servants and Oliver Sparklet, the owner, manager, desk-clerk, social secretary of Camp Greenwood, pink of cheek and oppressive with innkeeper’s charm.
* * *
—
My eyes returned to Martin Rice, now scowling at his plate. A tiny gamecock of a man, white hair rising from his narrow skull like an angry crest. A face ever ridden by the memory of that night in London when a stray bomb, whistling down through the clouds like a satanic judgment, had taken his wife, his daughter, and his left arm.
A shadow at my shoulder, a whiff of eau-de-cologne introduced Oliver Sparklet. He treated Rice and me to a heavenly smile. Rice grunted in pure, unadulterated ill-humor. I raised an eyebrow.
“You’ll join the picnic, of course,” Sparklet beamed.
“Not interested.” This from Rice in clipped accents of disapproval.
I said, “Picnic?”
“We go each Sunday afternoon to Lichened Rock,” explained Sparklet alluringly. “I cook the steaks myself.”
“Who’s going?” I made it offhand.
“Everyone.” Sparklet included the whole dining-hall in a womanish wave of his plump hands.
“You go,” snapped Rice at me. “I have work—”
“In that case,” I cut in, disappointed, “I’d better—”
“I said you were to go, Potts.” It was a command. I flushed. But I was—for Camp Greenwood’s benefit—Rice’s secretary, so what could I say? I nodded to Sparklet. He passed on to the Ogilvies, who accepted with old-maidenish squeals of delight.
Rice stuck out his single, blue-veined hand. “Give me the report.” He had sense enough to keep his voice down.
I shook my head. His eyes flamed.
“Give me that report.” His voice rose. I glanced quickly around the dining-hall. No one was watching. I whipped out the master copy as surreptitiously as possible, thrust it at him under the table. He got up, stuffing the dozen typewritten sheets into his coat pocket. I jumped up and followed him outside, boiling.
On the flagstoned veranda he faced me, peppering me with short, hot words before I could tell him what I thought of his idiotic action in the dining-room. He made it very clear that he looked upon Kaspir and me as imbeciles—that our fears concerning the Gestapo were childish—that he, Mortimer Rhys-Eccles, resented this three-day seclusion under the name of Martin Rice, and that his opinion of our Government Intelligence and Counter-Espionage services was—
I interrupted angrily, reminding him that future British policy would be vitally affected by the report—that any Axis agent would give his ears for a five-minute perusal of it. “Furthermore,” I threw at him, “that report may eventually affect my country as well as yours. I can’t permit you to take chances.”
He subsided to a tone of quiet contempt. With exaggerated deference he told me that he simply intended to sit in his room and review it in detail—that my presence would only distract him—that if there were any last-minute changes we could make them together that night.
I agreed to join the picnic on two conditions. The first: that everyone else in camp went. The second: that he would promise to lock both the hall door of our two-room suite and the French window giving on our private porch.
He exploded into an exasperated affirmative and stalked off to the big guest cabin.
I rejoined the others in the lounge of the main lodge, and at three thirty we all went down to the guest cabin for blankets and wraps. Rhys-Eccles had been as good as his word. The door was locked. He unlocked it peevishly, returned to his big chair and lost himself immediately in the report. On my way out I closed the door and rattled the knob suggestively until I heard him stamp across the floor and turn the key.
* * *
—
We straggled lazily up to Lichened Rock, only half a mile from camp. From the rock the forest dropped away beneath us to Wheat’s Valley, and the valley stretched like a toy panorama into the warm afternoon haze.
We loafed in the ripe sunlight. Little Effie Davis climbed around the rock, followed by her father’s anxious eyes. The Ogilvies sketched. The Hinkles disappeared hand-in-hand up a leafy side trail, returning while Sparklet and I were laying a fire under a grill set into a cleft of the rock. In the dying rays of the sun we ate our excellent meal.
Two incidents marred the party.
Little Effie Davis complained, in her semi-audible whisper, of a tummy pain. Miss Alethea Ogilvie solicitously insisted upon accompanying the child back to camp, ordering Professor Davis to stay and enjoy himself. Overwhelmed, Professor Davis gave in.
The other incident came about three-quarters of an hour later, just as a golden moon-rim showed in Gunstock Gorge. Heavy feet crashed along the trail. Someone was running, gasping. The raw-boned Annie burst into the circle of firelight, an apparition of disheveled hair and wild eyes. Her first dozen words sent Davis and me streaking back to camp, plunging recklessly ahead by the wavering beam of a flashlight I had snatched from Sparklet.
Annie’s words sent us first to Davis’s suite on the second floor of the guest cabin. Miss Alethea Ogilvie hovered distractedly over the bed. On the bed lay little Effie Davis, cheeks like skimmed milk, a great purple bruise down one side of her small face.
Davis bent over t
he child. Miss Ogilvie, almost incoherent from terror and gin, blurted out her tale.
She had brought Effie back, laid her on the bed. The child, already better, had sipped water, declined medicine, quickly dozed off. Miss Ogilvie had gone to her own room, next to the Davis suite, and sat there with the door open, in case Effie should awake and call out. Downstairs she could hear “Mr. Rice” moving about.
Some fifteen minutes later Effie had appeared at Miss Ogilvie’s door, a handkerchief tied peasant-fashion around her head, a doll in her good arm. She said she was all right and was going downstairs and play on the front veranda. Miss Ogilvie heard her go down the steps. Almost immediately there was a cry, a rustling noise, another cry, then the sound of running feet. Rushing down, Miss Ogilvie had found Effie lying unconscious near the foot of the stairs, the handkerchief torn from her head and exposing the great bruise. Her assailant was nowhere to be seen, nor could Miss Ogilvie tell which way he ran out.
Miss Ogilvie had run down the hall to our suite to seek help from “Mr. Rice.” The door was open. “Mr. Rice” was in the big chair, apparently asleep. She had shaken him by the shoulder several times, until she realized…
Then she had screamed until Annie ran down from the main lodge. Together they got Effie, now mumbling something about a “big man” who had struck her, upstairs again, and Annie had run for Lichened Rock.
I left Miss Ogilvie, dived downstairs to our suite. Rhys-Eccles was quite dead, his scrawny throat rasped reddish-brown by whatever had strangled him. Three minutes of frantic searching convinced me that the Rhys-Eccles Report was gone. Not that I didn’t have a carbon copy in the money-belt around my waist, but what good, now?
I left Rhys-Eccles to his calm contemplation of the ceiling and tore for the main lodge and its telephone. It took me five dancing, cursing minutes to get through to Kaspir in Washington. He mumbled something about a military plane and said he’d be at the Lynchburg airport in less than three hours. I ran to the servants’ quarters and snatched Joe, the Negro handyman-chauffeur away from his supper with the rotund black cook, ordering him to get out the station wagon at once. Fortunately he knew the airport. As I hurried back to the guest cabin the station wagon whizzed past me and its tail light sank away down the mountain-side like a falling star.
Circling Rhys-Eccles’s still figure in a second and more thorough search of our rooms, I found nothing of importance. In his steamer trunk, insolently undisturbed, were the three-hundred-odd typewritten reports which his fine machine of a mind had condensed, in three days and nights, into the Rhys-Eccles Report, for which His Majesty’s Government was waiting impatiently.
I dropped helplessly into a chair and lit a cigarette. It seemed impossible that I had known Rhys-Eccles—and Colonel Kaspir, too—for only four days. It seemed more like years.
* * *
—
My West Coast assignment had ended in a blaze of glory the previous Tuesday when Weber had walked into my arms in the lobby of a San Francisco movie theater, a stroke of dumb luck. That afternoon I was ordered back to Washington. I boarded the plane determined to ask for a transfer to Propaganda the minute I hit the capital. I’d done enough in Frisco to convince me that Counter-Espionage was not my racket.
Captain Ed Bell, my immediate superior, met the plane at the Washington airport Thursday morning. He stuck out his hand. “Nice going, Kettle. Thought you told me you’d never make an Intelligence man?”
“Pure dumb luck.” I said it wearily, knowing he wouldn’t believe me.
“Horsefeathers!” He clapped me on the shoulder. He looked around. The other passengers were almost to the gate.
“Kaspir wants you,” he said, half under his breath. “I’ve got your orders here.” He shook his head as I extended my hand. “Verbal orders.”
“Who’s Kaspir?” I’d never heard the name before. “What does he want me for?”
“I don’t know.” Bell was embarrassed. “As near as I can find out, it’s a new department, hush-hush as hell—kind of a bastard by Treasury out of State. Some sort of liaison tie-up with the British. Overlaps into C.E. work now and then. I know one thing though.”
“Go on,” I said grimly.
“Kaspir’s the white-haired boy around Washington just now,” said Bell, with inter-departmental jealousy. “What he asks for, he gets. Took Williams and McCreary off us last week.”
“What are they doing now?” I was startled. They were top men in our line.
Bell blushed. “I don’t know.” He looked around again. “At least, I’m not supposed to.”
He bent even closer to me. “I did think I saw Williams this morning,” he said darkly. “Driving a cab. What do you think of that?”
“How’re my chances of getting into Propaganda?” I said hastily.
Bell stiffened officially. “Here are your orders, Kettle.”
When he finished his spiel I just looked at him. His mouth twitched. “No kidding,” he said, and walked off.
So I took a cab downtown and caught a bus. When I reached a certain corner I got off and ambled along a row of old, tall, brownstone houses until I found the number Bell had given me. A colored houseboy in a white coat answered my ring. It seemed to be a boarding house. But as the boy led me up to the second floor I noticed a bulge on his right hip. At the foot of the dark wood stairway leading to the third floor he stopped, jerked his thumb upward.
“Last door down, boss.” His accent was that of an uneducated Virginia Negro, but—
“New York University,” I said on impulse.
His puzzled look made me feel like a fool. Then he smiled and shook his head. The puzzled look had been an act.
“Columbia Law School,” he said, smiling, and turned away.
Still following Bell’s instructions, I mounted to the third floor, entered the door at the end without knocking, to find myself in a crudely equipped office that obviously had once been a bedroom. There was an inner door. It was shut. I was reaching for its knob when a man’s voice, high, neighing, gusty with passion, cut through its flimsy panels.
“Where did you put ’em?” demanded this neighing voice. I stopped dead.
A woman’s voice, low, angry, answered: “Where you won’t find ’em. And you know why.”
Brief silence, during which I could visualize the antagonists glaring at one another.
The man’s voice went up a quarter-octave. “I order you to tell me—”
“Fiddlesticks!” High heels clicked across the inner room. I jumped back and to one side. The door flew open and a tall woman flounced out. A second glance showed her to be a superb blonde, beautifully turned out, probably thirty. Under her plentiful but skillfully-applied make-up her face was scarlet with anger. To my amazement she flung herself down at a typewriter desk and began to pound the keys of an old Underwood. I coughed introductively. She looked around quickly.
“Who’re you?” she demanded pettishly.
This was too much. “I’m beginning to wonder,” I barked.
“Then you must be Mike Kettle,” she retorted. “What’re you waiting for? He’s in there.” She shrugged a shapely shoulder toward the half-open door. Whereupon she ignored me and the Underwood began to chatter like a mad thing.
* * *
—
The doorway filled slowly with a man. From a small, precise mouth set in a great moon face the same neighing voice, now controlled and courteous as a politician’s, said: “Welcome to Section Five, Lieutenant.”
Momentarily speechless, I bowed.
“Come in.” The figure turned on its heel, showing a back broad as a barn door.
I paused irresolutely in the doorway, hand on the knob. A swivel chair squealed in agony as the owner of the neighing voice dropped into it.
“Don’t bother to close the door,” said Colonel Kaspir, with some bitterness. “She’ll only lis
ten at the keyhole.”
The typewriter had stopped. Behind me the blond woman snorted contemptuously.
Kaspir waved a fat hand toward a straight wooden chair, and, as I sat down, lost himself in thought, eyes closed. I seized the opportunity to take stock of my new boss.
Weight about two-eighty, but the fat hands and round face make him look tubbier than he really is, I decided. Suit of good tweeds, expensive shirt, grotesque tie. But untidy. Looks as if he’d been held down and clothes put on him by force.
“Nursemaid job,” said Kaspir suddenly, eyes opening full on mine. “You can typewrite, can’t you?”
“I was an editorial writer on the Sun,” I replied with dignity. Then a forlorn hope. “That is why Propaganda is really my—”
“Lot o’ reports,” said Kaspir. “Took ’em months. Their men, our men, working together.” This meant nothing. I noticed his teeth were stained, as though with tobacco juice.
“This feller Rhys-Eccles’ll do it, though,” continued Kaspir, nodding solemnly in admiration of Rhys-Eccles. “All brain, no brawn.” He smacked his lips. “Put ’em all together. That’s where you come in.”
His voice trailed off. I realized incredulously that he believed he had told me everything, that my instructions were now complete, and that the interview was over.
“Oh!” Kaspir’s face lighted up, his middle finger snapped against his pulpy palm like a small firecracker. He had remembered something. “Hencken.”
“Hencken?” I don’t know why I bothered to ask. I suspected that the answer would mean nothing, and it did.
“Yep, Hencken.” Kaspir was impatient now. He jiggled in the swivel chair which cursed him. “People over there”—he waved in the direction of the rising sun—“give a good deal for Rhys-Eccles’s results, o’ course. We’ve heard some woman named Hencken is due to try for ’em—you’ll have to watch out—”
The Big Book of Espionage Page 50
