Black Alibi (27 page)

Manning’s position had changed slightly when she had first come into view. The one alteration was: his forearm was up now, holding his gun motionless at belt-buckle level, butt against his body. His head kept swiveling slowly from side to side, covering every inch of ground within a i8odegree arc.

Suddenly he heard the horse, unseen up there on the driveway and motionless until now, whinny uneasily. Its hoofs shifted about a little within the confines of the traces.

His head was instantly pulled tautly around the other way—toward her. The swans were streaking out away from her like so many black rays across the silvery lake surface. In a moment more she was standing there alone at the water’s edge, hand extended uselessly with offered crumbs.

Manning drew the gun up higher, to the level of his bottom rib, froze it there.

She was standing still, facing the receding swans. A shimmering line of brightness coursed down her motionless back. Was she trembling at the imminence of danger, or was it just the moonlight rippling on the beads sewn to her dress? He couldn’t tell.

The horse’s forelegs struck the ground sharply, as though its full weight were behind the impact, and the carriage joints groaned and strained protestingly. It must have reared and then dropped down again, Manning realized. It neighed rebelliously. He started his own leg downward out of the tree socket, let it dangle to within a foot of the ground in readiness, on the water side, where the trunk hid it.

And still the space between, from up there where the carriage was to down below where she was, remained blankly inscrutable.

She didn’t look around, although she must have heard the telltale sounds from the driveway as plainly as he had. She was bending slightly forward above the waist now, pretending to try to coax the recalcitrant swans back within range. They refused to come. Finally, with a studied gesture of impatience, she flung the napkin holding the remainder of the rejected crumbs away from her, as if disappointed at their lack of interest.

She fumbled in the small bag looped to her wrist, he heard the crackle of wax paper, and a match flare glowed before her face as she lit the test cigarette he had told her to. All without turning her head.

It was the height of courage; he had never seen anything like it before. For, for all she knew, something might be creeping up behind her at that very moment. He was in a position to see that nothing was, but she wasn’t.

The horse took an abortive two or three rapid steps forward, as if about to break into a headlong run, then was quickly reined in, backed up again, with further creaking protests of the carriage joints and a jiggling of the wheel rims.

A halo of cigarette haze about her head in the moonlight, she was following his instructions to the letter. She began to saunter aimlessly still further along the lake margin, well out of sight of carriage and driver—but fortunately over toward the side on which the reeds lay, although she could not have known that there was a safeguard in their midst. She stopped about halfway to them, well out of sight of the carriage, and stood there as if idly contemplating the lake, arms folded tight across her chest. The red mote of her cigarette made an occasional spiral Out from them and up to her mouth and down again. Manning could barely see her any more at this distance, she was just a white blur in the gloom over there, for she had stepped out of open moonlight into the shadow of some trees. It was up to Belmonte now to guard her, over on the side where he was.

There wasn’t a sound, except for an occasional pawing or clump from the horse up above, whose restlessness had become chronic by now but apparently was being kept under strict control by the driver. The animal’s whole demeanor showed there was some unseen danger close at hand in the shadows of the Bosque, but it stubbornly remained concealed. failed to materialize. The tableau of palpitant tension protracted itself almost unbearably; the two hidden men and the visible girl, the magnet midway between them, smoking down by the water’s edge as if lost in thought.

At last she finished it. Its red dot described an arc and went out in the water. She turned and began to make her way back. Once she stumbled slightly, and he knew it was in sheer terror, but to someone else it might only have seemed as if her toe had caught in a root.

She came out into the open moonlight again and started up the slope. She passed the tree where Manning was, as unseeing as the first time, and went on up the rest of the way, over the lip of the declivity, onto the level where the roadway was, and out of his direct line of vision.

He let his tentatively suspended leg reach down the remaining foot or two to solid ground, and let the other one trail down after it. The blood came rushing back into them in excruciating repossession.

Her voice carried clearly to him as she reached the carriage once more. “All right, now you can take me back.” The footrest creaked as she mounted it. The coachman didn’t even have to click his tongue or use the whip to start the horse, Manning could tell. At the first slackening of the reins he had been pulling in so tightly until now, the terrified horse instantly broke into a rapid trot that soon became a headlong gallop, so anxious was it to get away from the threatening spot.

Manning sidled noiselessly out from under the tree and stood waiting for his companion-in-hiding to break cover and join him. The reeds failed to part at his whistle. When he had repeated it a second time and still no sign of Belmonte, he made his way over to them himself, a strange sort of foreboding beginning to chill him.

“Raul!” he whispered urgently, picking his way into their midst across the waterlogged stones. The reeds were empty. He could see some of them bent flat, around where his companion had been crouched, but there was no one in them any more.

He emerged, went back, and started up the slope alone.

The road was empty in the moonlight when he reached it. He had hardly taken a preliminary step or two along it than he became aware of some sort of disturbance, offside to him. On the side away from the lake, that is. He stood rigid, listening. It came again, a muffled scuffling or threshing sound, as of a large animal caught in a trap or incapacitated in some way and trying to free itself.

He veered toward it, moving warily. It came a third time, unmistakable now: a violent, frantic agitation against leaves or plants, an attempt at extrication. He drew his gun, plunged in off the road toward it, warding off branches and briars as he went.

The thrashing accelerated, as though driven to a frenzy of haste by his very approach.

A moment later he went down flat and his gun crashed deafeningly, set off by the fall itself. Something or somebody lying tied up in his path had tripped him.

He groveled around rearward, wiping a smarting powder smudge off his cheek, found his light, and thumbed it on. It revealed a huddled human form lying face down, hands bound behind it with a knitted necktie evidently taken from its own attire.

Manning turned him over and it was a grizzled man of fifty, with bedraggled walrus mustaches. A mass of rumpled linen had been compressed into his mouth to gag him. Manning pulled it out, and it seemed to keep coming endlessly. It turned pinkish toward the end. He’d been badly bludgeoned about the head; thin but numerous streams of blood were crisscrossed all down his face.

He was only barely conscious, the whites of his eyes rolled expiringly as Manning propped him up. He shook him urgently.

“Who are you? What happened? Who did this to you?”

“I don’t know,” the dying man said faintly. “Somebody—from behind—down off the box—” He went limp, with a sort of convulsive spasm.

Manning let go of him, jumped to his feet with a hoarse cry of horror that went crackling through the trees. This must be Marjorie’s coachman, who had brought her here. And if he had been struck down, left trussed up here like this, it could only mean one thing—!

The very Thing he was out to trap had hold of her at this moment, had driven oil with her to finish her at his leisure!

He burst out through the underbrush, sprinted down the road, pocketing his gun as he went. When he veered offside into the small treesurrounded clearing in which Belmonte had left his car, hoping against hope, almost praying— he found what he’d dreaded to find all along; the place was empty, the car was gone. And no one could have taken it but its owner; Manning himself had seen him pocket the keys when they both got out.

He emerged again, went staggering down the long desolate tube of silver and black that was the road, forced to go on afoot now. The odds were hopeless this way, he could never hope to overtake her in time.

Just before the desolate road turned in to unite with the main driveway once more, something came sidling toward him along its surface. Something that glinted as he approached. He recognized it as he stooped to pick it up. It was the revolver that he himself had handed her at the Inglaterra only a few hours earlier. He put it to his face. Odorless. She’d never had a chance to use it. His chin was puckered into a weazened expression as he went trotting on.

Didn’t this road ever end? And while he asked himself that, it did. The main driveway was empty under its lights. No one was leaving the Bosque now any more; they all had, long ago. He padded on. Ahead a wan glow began to brighten, fan out. The Puerta Mayor, the entrance to the city.

Suddenly lights gushed up like illuminated oil seeping out of the ground, and the periphery of the city lay spread before him. He stopped with sudden hopelessness; partly because of his pounding lungs, mostly because he didn’t know where to go any more from here on. He was confronted by six radiating avenues that branched Out from the Puerta Mayor like spokes of a half wheel. To follow one through to the end was to slight the other five. She was lost for good now, buried alive somewhere in that wilderness of stones and buildings that stretched before him as far as the eye could reach.

The expression on his face was that of someone trying to retch. The third largest city of South America. Three quarters of a million people. Minutes to find her.

Finally, still breathing heavily, he cut across the
glorieta
. Sweat was running down his forehead. He was still unable to make up his mind which street to choose. The odds were too heavy, the stake was too high. Six to one, a girl’s life. He felt as helpless as when he had first come here, in the days when he didn’t know his way around town yet. When it was just a blur of strange streets with strange names, all leading in strange directions.

He passed one of those direction finders that he used to have to rely on. He hadn’t paid any attention to them in years. City maps with an adjustable indicator, that you found at some of the busier corners. Copied from Europe, they weren’t known up in the States. He remembered how they used to straighten him out each time he got balled up. You set the indicator for where you wanted to go, and also for where you were, and it would show the straightest line between the two points.

Suddenly he flung around, went back to the one he had just passed, as a thought struck him. It was set at chest level for the convenience of passers-by. He reared one leg up and rammed into it. The glass protecting the map trickled off. He wanted. it to be able to take pencil marks for what he had in mind; the indicator wasn’t enough.

He poised his pencil over the denuded chart, began marking off the locations of the attacks, mumbling to himself as he did so.

“One, Teresa Delgado—Pasaje del Diablo.” He ground Out a black sworl of penciling to mark it clearly. “Two, Conchita Contreras—All Saints. Three, Clo-Clo—at the corner of San Marco and the Calle de Justicia.” He moistened the pencil tip. “Four, Sally O’Keefe—beside the lagoon in the Bosque.” Tonight’s didn’t count, it was simply a repetition at the same spot as the one before.

He had four black marks on the map now. He drew a line from each across to its opposite. They made a slightly irregular X, one arm a little longer than the other.

He peered closely at the finely printed diagram, to see where the two axes crossed, to determine where the focus was. He drew an arbitrary circle around it, to identify it still more plainly. It encompassed the Alameda district; roughly the section between there and the Plaza de los Mártires. And dead center through this ran an almost indistinguishable thread, marked minutely on the map—Callejón de las Sombras.

In other words, the place where it had originally disappeared was still the one locale in the city equidistant from all four of the attacks. Somewhere around in there was the base of operations. Somewhere around in there was the lair.

True, that alley had been thoroughly searched once already. True, there was no guarantee that he necessarily covered an equal distance away from his starting point each time. But it was all Manning had, it was the best he could do. And it was still a whole lot better and quicker than having the whole sprawling city to comb over. At least he knew which one of those six radiating avenues to take from here, now. The stake was still as high as ever, but the odds had come down a lot.

He sighted a cab in the distance and bayed to it at the top of his lungs. Five minutes later he had alighted at the mouth of the Callejón. The cab drove off, left him there alone. It was black as the mouth of hell; not a light showed along its entire tortuous length, from where he was through to the other end.

He plunged in, to begin a one-man search from doorway to doorway.

Half an hour later he had dead-ended in the roofless chapel. His torch moved up and down the walls in a series of scallops as he clambered up and down the varying mounds of debris. His face looked gray in the pallid reflection of its small glow, and there was the shine of sweat, the sweat of failure, in the pinched indentations at the corners of his eyes and mouth. After his third time around, he turned and moved back toward the entrance.

There was a small click, and his light went out, just as his hopes had long before this. He let the door flap idly to and fro behind him on the slight current of his egress, sat soddenly down on the worn steps outside, his spine a bow of dejection. There was no place else to go from here.