by David Garth
He said nothing. She knew he still was standing there, looking down at her and waiting. Then she heard him move away. There was the sound of a door closing. Berkeley listened tensely. She thought she heard it, the soft turn of a key, but she was not sure.
Slowly she opened her eyes again. Something did not add up right here. She had been in a motor accident that had left her with no ill effects except that soreness in her right arm; yet to all intents and purposes it had put her out ever since late yesterday afternoon.
It had been late yesterday afternoon that she had left in a taxi for the Five Mile Inn. Berkeley pressed a hand tightly across her eyes, thinking swiftly. She remembered that the interior of the taxi had been very warm. A heater at her feet had been blowing a steady soft stream up into her face and gradually she had found herself becoming drowsy in the closeness of the taxi. Yes, that came back to her now. She had felt the need of air and she had tried to open a window, but found it stuck, apparently. She had rapped on the glass partition ahead to get tie driver’s attention, but he had not seemed to hear her. And ne feeling of closeness had been almost overpowering.
She could not remember any more than that. The blowing heater and the feeling of closeness and her cranking at a window that would not come down—that was all. No wonder she could not recall an accident. Of course.
And yet still something did not add up right. What was it? Why hadn’t that taxi driver heard her sharp rap on the glass partition? Why had all the taxi windows been stuck? She ran a hand gingerly, absently, over her forearm. A strange soreness—as if she had just been vaccinated.
Her eyes widened suddenly. She pushed back her sleeve and regarded her slim white forearm intently. No bruise or contusion—nothing, but a small puncture edged with redness.
Berkeley let her sleeve fall back again. That was no motor accident injury. That looked like a hypodermic of some kind, if anything. When had she received that? At this hospital, most likely.
But, then, this was not called a hospital. It was a nursing home. A nursing home on the Five Mile Turnpike.
“Nursing home,” she repeated, and came to her feet.
Striding quickly to a window, she parted the heavy curtains and stole an eager glance. And instantly she knew that this most certainly was not the Five Mile Turnpike in Maryland or anything even approaching it. She found herself looking out over the broad stone ledge of a window high above a court and from where she stood she could gaze over a vista of roofs and chimney pots. Wherever this big old-fashioned house was, it would appear to be in the residential section of some city.
She spun around from the window, feeling a tinge of terror before the conclusion instantly fused from her thoughts. If this was not a nursing home on the Five Mile Turnpike—then, neither had there been any motor accident!
A lot of things began to emerge into clarity. The stupefying fumes of that unobtrusive and treacherous heater must have been doctored for her especial benefit so as to render her helplessly groggy in the taxi. But why the hypodermic? There seemed but one reason—to make certain that she would not regain consciousness until a certain definite time.
The girl ran a hand shakily over her forehead. No wonder that voice on the phone had not sounded like Robert Luce. She had been decoyed, rendered helpless by a doctored heater, and abducted under a hypodermic, and while she was still alive for some purpose, her abductors had made certain that she had no idea where she had been taken.
“Where in God’s name am I?” she murmured mechanically.
That tinge of terror, however, mounted no farther. She was a different person from the girl who had first sailed for Europe to join the International Red Cross. She had been through a gun-fight and flight in the maze of New Orleans’ Vieux Carré. She had known the horror of having her very life assailed and, ever since she had left Valleron in Spain, the ruthless, enigmatic danger of the thing called the Ivory Tiger had crouched in her mind. Some keenly intuitive sense had been sharpened within her—some highly attuned alertness, that had caught the jarring note of “nursing home” when, by all rights, her mind should have been pliant enough in those first few waking moments to swallow that motor accident story.
Even as she stood, trying to see her next step, the strains of the violin again reached her ears. The music seemed to come from the adjoining room behind that connecting door near the mantel. As she listened intently she heard the music cease and a cultured masculine voice say, “Go back over those last ten bars. And, please—please—adagio!”
It sounded like a music lesson. Berkeley shook her head slightly. Someone practicing the Meditation from “Thais” in that adjoining room? What kind of people were there in this place, besides the distinguished-looking man who had been so anxious to locate somebody for her? She slipped across the room to the door, listened momentarily, with her hand on the knob, then gently turned it and cautiously applied pressure. It opened and through the slight crack she could see no one. Berkeley pushed the door a little bit more. She could distinguish a good deal of the room now, hear the violin plainly, yet still she could discern nobody. She made another cautious try, then suddenly slipped into the room and closed the door behind her.
There was nobody in the room!
A music lesson was going on, but she alone stood in that room—another of those old-fashioned, high-ceilinged chambers, this one furnished like a studio, with a piano on a dais at one end, pictures of famous composers lining the walls, a small desk and a comfortable lounge. But there was no sign of either teacher or pupil working on the Meditation from “Thais.”
Then she saw the reason. On a small cabinet victrola in a corner a record with repeater attached was whirling on the turntable. A recorded music lesson! Berkeley looked at it incredulously. That did not make sense.
But there was no time to be concerned with that now. She must get out of here, somehow, out of this big old-fashioned house and, failing that, at least try to find a telephone. As if suggested by the thought of a phone her glance rested hopefully on the small writing desk. Her eyes swept over it briefly and then her whole being suddenly recoiled with a shock that stiffened her as though she had been jerked by a chain.
There was no telephone on the desk—just a pen set, a memo pad, a ticking clock in a traveling case—and a small ivory image of a crouching tiger!
It was there, before her eyes—that small, exquisitely carved image of a tiger about to spring, ears flat to the side of the savage head, the great shoulders hunched forward—that ivory tiger, that same cold thing that had appeared and disappeared so strangely in her hotel room in Horta.
Suddenly her head came up. The knob of the studio door was turning. Berkeley’s hand clenched on the back of the chair so tightly that her knuckles were white. She could not stir, she could only wait and fight down an impulse to scream.
The door was opening now and somebody stepping swiftly and lightly into the room. Berkeley stared thunderstruck. For closing the door and leaning back against it with a direct, unsmiling glance was Linda Baker.
Until then, that tiger carved of ivory had dominated not only the studio, but her entire consciousness. Now, abruptly, it was completely forgotten—an insensate curio, really, its cold hard quality invested instead in the living and breathing personality at the studio door.
Linda—she was standing there, attractively dressed, as always, in a smartly tailored tweed suit of deep sea green, her dark hair brushed smoothly back from her low white forehead—the companionable person who had flown across the Atlantic with her—and yet she seemed curiously, terribly different.
The first move she made was to shut off the victrola with its recorded music lesson.
“Linda!” said Berkeley. “Why, Linda—”
“Yes, Berkeley.” She walked deliberately over to the desk and stood there, regarding the girl evenly. “You were too smart for Dr. Bittner,” she said casually. “I thought you would be, but it was worth trying that nursing home and motor accident idea to find what we wanted to k
now as simply as possible.”
“Linda,” said the girl numbly, “I don’t understand—where in heaven’s name am I and what do you want of me?”
“You’re in the Mayhew Foundation of Philadelphia,” said Linda. “In my suite on the third floor, to be exact. And as for what we want, we wish to locate the man you know as Robert Luce.”
Berkeley sat down slowly on the arm of a chair. It was impossible to grasp this, too incredible in all the implications that were aroused by this woman’s manner and voice. And yet, there was no use thinking of Linda Baker as the person who had dropped by her Connecticut home, taken tea with her, and turbulently damned all Nazis for driving her from her studies in Paris.
This woman was older, yes. She looked what her age really was—about thirty-five instead of several years younger—and there was a metallic ring to her whole personality. Berkeley, sitting there, her mind shaking off its whirling bewilderment, suddenly realized she was looking at one of the most dangerous persons on the face of the earth.
Perhaps it was that little ivory tiger with its mystery and its menace. But, just then, this striking woman seemed its very embodiment, the deep green color of her attire bringing out that quality in her eyes and her voice low and sibilant. A person felt it, then, a balefulness close to the surface, like the idle tentative switching of a great cat’s tail.
All of a sudden, a whole train of events rushed through Berkeley’s mind.
“You had me kidnapped and brought here,” she said in a low voice. She paused, then rushed on. “You tried to poison me on the plane. Why, it was you who poisoned Tresh in Valleron. And you know all about—about that.” She pointed at the little ivory tiger on the desk.
“Know about it?” repeated Linda softly. “Know about it?
She sat down behind the desk and picked up the image in her hands and held it in both her palms.
“It’s my luck,” she said. “Given to me from his own hands. It is so much nicer than being a number—K4872, or something like that. So much more dignified, don’t you think? To be known by one’s talisman?”
Berkeley could recall Tresh’s words. “They are sending something called the Ivory Tiger to America and they have a lot of faith in it.” Information that had hovered on the rim of truth. Not something, but somebody!
“It’s impossible!” she said, wondering. “The Mayhew Foundation—this fine old music institution—”
“It was,” corrected Linda. “But that was in the past, my dear, before Dr. Bittner took it over. You have heard of Dr. Bittner, surely—a well-known critic and authority on Wagnerian opera. Oh, genuine, I assure you. But he has many relatives in the Reich.”
The last statement had the soft sinuous strength of a great paw stretching forth to pin some struggling, pitiful little existence.
“We have pupils,” went on Linda Baker. “But most carefully chosen, I assure you, and to applicants we are always unfortunately full at present. To heighten the atmosphere we run off the bulk of our lessons on the victrola.” She nodded toward the one in the corner. “Dr. Bittner is a most respected and respectable front. But I am in charge of the—curriculum, shall we say?” She put the little ivory image back on the desk.
“And so we meet here, Berkeley,” she went on. “At the last. Well, perhaps it was to be expected. An amateur like you is sometimes more troublesome than the best intelligence service in the world. For ingenuousness is the hardest to fight. For example,” she said, clasping her hands before her on the desk, “you told me you were going west for several weeks with your parents. I was glad to know, for I was interested in your plans. And I believed you and let you go your way, thinking you had been made harmless through our man, Winters.”
She shook her head. “If it had not been for your devoted admirer, Philip Courtney, I would not have known you were not west, but becoming troublesome again. He told me you were becoming interested in politics. That meant our friend, Buckthorne, to me.”
Berkeley bent forward slightly.
“You’re talking to a person you tried to have killed,” she said. “I suppose you call it fighting for your country.”
“You fool!” said Linda Baker measuredly. “You and your life—when the greatest gamble in the history of the world is in the balance. Do you know how close war is to this country? No? It’s as close as I wish to make it.”
“So I’m a fool,” said Berkeley satirically.
“War,” repeated Linda Baker, ignoring her. She looked straight at Berkeley. “There is always an irreducible minimum to every great international move, just as some great engine is started basically by a spark. My work is that spark, the survey I make, the report I send.”
She was silent a moment, her hands clenched before her on the desk and her greenish eyes leveled with fierce intentness. “Yes, right from this room comes the signal for the die to be cast. For we are going to hit England hard and when we do we want America in the Pacific. We want America so fully occupied that there will be no possibility of a lifeline to England. We are going to catch America between the pincers of a move in the Pacific and uprisings in Latin-America—when the moment is right.”
She laughed. “Bombing planes and navies—let America put on her armor, as long as she bends double from an attack of the colic. And I know when America will be ready to get the colic. You and your absurd life.”
Berkeley could not speak. She could look at Linda Baker and hand her a prize for the most fanatical pipe dream of the age—except that there was a terrible burning conviction in her words. And behind those amber eyes was a shrewd and deadly mind, the great agent footloose in America, working behind the shelter of an old music foundation, working a terrible clashing disharmony behind the very screen of great harmonies, themselves.
“Do not think I’ve told you any state secrets,” Linda Baker advised her coolly. “Your government knows that such a gamble is within the realm of possibility. It does not know When or How or How Much. That is the key.”
Berkeley stood up. She ran her long straight fingers through her chestnut hair in sheer desperation.
“For God’s sake tell me you’re not an American!” she exclaimed.
“I am, but by blood, definitely not,” said Linda. “My name is Gretta Von Kels. Linda Baker was a name taken for professional reasons—in the old days when I thought I would be a concert pianist. Although,” she said lazily, “I did have a maternal grandmother here in Philadelphia named Baker.”
She flirted a hand briefly.
“Now, let’s get down to it. I’ve told you some of these things so that you will know exactly how little fooling you face. I want Luce. And I want a leather music roll. I have an idea they both go together. Where is he, Berkeley?”
The girl fought for time. Because the path was getting narrower now and the claws would unsheathe any moment.
“You’re going to do all this yourself, Linda?”
“I don’t claim credit for the groundwork,” said Linda Baker. “That has been going on for years. I only develop and coordinate. “Where is Luce?” she snapped out.
Berkeley paused in her stride and flung around to face her.
“Do you think that quieting Luce or myself is all there is to it?” she asked curiously. “You’ve never heard of the Department of Justice?”
Linda’s straight lips quivered. “I am well acquainted with them. Didn’t I even send one of them to you recently?” Again that swift hand moved. “I know that the Department of Justice knows nothing of me or the Mayhew Foundation. I staked out a fool-spy, a decoy, a sacrificial lamb, that they most certainly would have arrested if they had been set on my trail. I would have been warned. That is one reason why Luce has been so dangerous. I had no way of knowing whether he was on my track or not. I did not even know who he really was until recently.”
Berkeley bit her lip savagely. Luce had said that the clue to the great Nazi agent’s identity lay in the reason for the appearance of the little ivory tiger in her hotel room in Horta. He
had been that close!
“I would advise you to tell me where he is,” she heard that soft voice say. “Or, perhaps, I will find it easier to reach your father.”
Berkeley said nothing. It was impossible to help him, her fine father. There was no warning him. No matter whether this dangerous Mayhew Foundation reached Robert Luce, she and her father knew too much and they had to stand together even though they were three thousand miles apart. The road was narrowing for them both and only the God of Battles would ever know. She stood there, dry-eyed, pale, with a sickening feeling around her heart.
Linda Baker did not change her expression. She waited in silence and glanced speculatively at the clock on her desk. Then, as she started to speak, there was a soft buzzing sound. Linda opened a desk drawer and lifted the transmitter of a house phone. She listened a moment, murmured something terse, and dropped the transmitter back into the drawer.
Berkeley was astounded to see the change that had come over her. She was standing behind the desk, her hands gripping the edge, her body bent forward slightly.
“A building inspector has just entered the Foundation,” she said in a soft voice. “A most interesting building inspector, Berkeley.”
Suddenly her green tiger eyes narrowed. “Either he is the greatest fool alive—or the game is getting close.”
Berkeley drew a sharp breath. It was impossible to believe—and yet, without hearing it in words, she had a racing, instinctive feeling that Robert Luce must have entered the Mayhew Foundation.
CHAPTER 22
A soft knock at the door had the same effect as a nerve-wracking steam whistle to Berkeley. There was such an ominous feeling of living from moment to moment, a sensation of sudden imminent movement. She could not get away from the queer lifelike crouch of that little ivory tiger on the desk that seemed to reflect the same sinuous menace as the woman whose luck it was.
A youngish blond man entered the studio and walked quickly to Linda. He murmured something in her ear. Linda looked at Berkeley. She appeared to consider something for several moments. Then she nodded, and the man withdrew.
