Fear is the Key (8 page)

The asphalt drive-way up to the house was
narrow, long, winding and thickly wooded on
both sides. The small evergreen leaves of live oak
and long dripping grey festoons of Spanish moss
reached out and brushed the roof and sidescreens
of the car. Suddenly the trees receded on both sides
from the beams of the headlamps, giving way to
strategically placed clumps of palms and palmettos,
and there, behind a stepped granite balustrade wall
and a gravel terrace, lay the general's house.

Built as an ordinary family house, the girl had
said. Built for a family of about fifty. It was enormous.
It was an old white ante-bellum-type house,
so Colonial that it creaked, with a huge pillared
two-storey porch, a curiously double-angled roof
of a type I'd never seen before and enough glass
to keep an active window-cleaner in year-round
employment. Over the entrance of the lower porch
were two more lights, big old-fashioned coach
lamps each with a powerful electric bulb inside.
Below the lamps stood the reception committee.

I hadn't expected the reception committee. Subconsciously,
I suppose, I had expected the old
high-class routine of being welcomed by the butler
and deferentially and ceremoniously conducted to
the library where the general would be sipping
his Scotch before a crackling pine fire. Which
was pretty silly, when you come to think of it.
When you're expecting a daughter back from the
dead and the door-bell rings, you don't just keep
on sipping whisky. Not if you're halfway human.
The chauffeur had warned them: hence the committee.

The butler was there too. He came down the
steps of the porch carrying a huge golf umbrella out
into the heavy rain. He didn't look like any butler
I'd ever seen. His coat was far too tight round his
upper arms, shoulders and chest in a fashion that
used to be popular among prohibition gangsters
and his face did nothing to dispel the impression.
He looked first cousin to Valentino, the bodyguard
back in the court-room. Or maybe even more
closely related. He even had the same broken nose.
The general had a weird taste in butlers, especially
when you considered his choice of chauffeur.

But the butler seemed courteous enough. At
least I thought he was until he saw who it was
behind the driving-wheel and then he made a
smart about turn, went round the front of the
car and escorted Mary Ruthven to the shelter of
the porch where she ran forward and threw her
arms round her father's neck. Jablonsky and I had
to make it alone. We got wet, but no one seemed
worried.

By this time the girl had become disentangled
from her father. I had a good look at him. He
was an immensely tall old coot, thin but not too
thin, in a silver-white linen suit. The colour of the
suit was a perfect match for the hair. He had a
long lean craggy Lincolnesque face, but just how
craggy it was impossible to say for almost half of it
was hidden behind a luxuriant white moustache
and beard. He didn't look like any big business
magnate I'd ever come across, but with 285 million
dollars he didn't have to. He looked like the way
I'd expected a southern judge to look and didn't.

‘Come in, gentlemen,' he said courteously. I
wondered if he included me among the three
other men standing in the shadows in the porch.
It seemed unlikely, but I went in all the same.
I hadn't much option. Not only was Jablonsky's
Mauser jammed into the small of my back but
another man who'd just stepped out of the shadow
also carried a gun. We trooped across a huge, wide,
chandelier-lit, tessellated-tile floored hall, down a
broad passage and into a large room. I'd been right
about the room anyway. It was a library, it did have
a blazing pine fire and the slightly oily smell of fine
leather-bound books mingled very pleasantly with
the aroma of expensive Coronas and a high-class
Scotch. I noticed there was nobody there smoking
cigars. The walls that weren't covered with bookshelves
were panelled in polished elm. Chairs and
settees were in dark gold leather and moquette,
and the curtains of shot gold. A bronze-coloured
carpet flowed over the floor from wall to wall and
with a strong enough draught the nap on it would
have waved and undulated like a wind-rippled
field of summer corn. As it was, the chair castors
were so deeply sunk in it as to be almost invisible.

‘Scotch, Mr – ah –?' the general asked Jablonsky.

‘Jablonsky. I don't mind, General. While I'm
standing. And while I'm waiting.'

‘Waiting for what, Mr Jablonsky?' General
Ruthven had a quiet pleasant voice with very
little inflection in it. With 285 million bucks you
don't have to shout to make yourself heard.

‘Ain't you the little kidder, now?' Jablonsky
was as quiet, as unruffled as the general. ‘For
the little paper, General, with your name signed
at the bottom. For the fifty thousand iron men.'

‘Of course.' The general seemed faintly surprised
that Jablonsky should think it necessary to remind
him of the agreement. He crossed to the dressed-
stone mantelpiece, pulled a yellow bank slip from
under a paper-weight. ‘I have it here, just the
payee's name to be filled in.' I thought a slight
smile touched his mouth but under all that foliage
it was difficult to be sure. ‘And you needn't worry
about my phoning the bank with instructions not
to honour this cheque. Such is not my way of doing
business.'

‘I know it's not, General.'

‘And my daughter is worth infinitely more to
me than this. I must thank you, sir, for bringing
her back.'

‘Yeah.' Jablonsky took the cheque, glanced casually
at it, then looked at the general, a speculative
glint in his eyes.

‘Your pen slipped, General,' he drawled. ‘I asked
for fifty thousand. You got seventy thousand here.'

‘Correct.' Ruthven inclined his head and glanced
at me. ‘I had offered ten thousand dollars for
information about this man here. I also feel that
I'm morally bound to make good the five thousand
offered by the authorities. It's so much easier to
make out one lump-sum cheque to one person,
don't you agree?'

‘And the extra five thousand?'

‘For your trouble and the pleasure it will give me
to hand this man over to the authorities personally.'
Again I couldn't be sure whether or not he
smiled. ‘I can afford to indulge those whims, you
know.'

‘Your pleasure is my pleasure, General. I'll be on
my way, then. Sure you can handle this fellow?
He's tough, fast, tricky as they come.'

‘I have people who can handle him.' It was plain
that the general wasn't referring to the butler and
another uniformed servant hovering in the background.
He pressed a bell, and when some sort of
footman came to the door, said: ‘Ask Mr Vyland
and Mr Royale to come in, will you, Fletcher?'

‘Why don't you ask them yourself, General?'
To my way of thinking I was the central figure
in that little group, but they hadn't even asked
me to speak, so I thought it was time to say
something. I bent down to the bowl of artificial
flowers on the table by the fire, and pulled up a
fine-meshed microphone. ‘This room's bugged. A
hundred gets one your friends have heard every
word that's been said. For a millionaire and high
society flier, Ruthven, you have some strange habits.'
I broke off and looked at the trio who had just
come through the doorway. ‘And even stranger
friends.'

Which wasn't quite an accurate statement. The
first man in looked perfectly at home in that luxurious
setting. He was of medium height, medium
build, dressed in a perfectly cut dinner suit and
smoking a cigar as long as your arm. That was
the expensive smell I'd picked up as soon as I had
come into the library. He was in his early fifties,
with black hair touched by grey at the temples: his
neat clipped moustache was jet black. His face was
smooth and unlined and deeply sunburnt. He was
Hollywood's ideal of a man to play the part of a
top executive, smooth, urbane and competent to
a degree. It was only when he came closer and
you saw his eyes and the set of the planes of his
face that you realized that here was a toughness,
both physical and mental, and a hardness that
you would never see around a movie set. A man
to watch.

The second man was more off-beat. It was hard
to put a finger on the quality that made him so. He
was dressed in a soft grey flannel suit, white shirt,
and grey tie of the same shade as the suit. He was
slightly below medium height, broadly built, with
a pale face and smooth slicked hair almost the
same colour as Mary Ruthven's. It wasn't until
you looked again and again that you saw what
made him off-beat, it wasn't anything he had, it
was something he didn't have. He had the most
expressionless face, the emptiest eyes I had even
seen in any man.

Off-beat was no description for the man who
brought up the rear. He belonged in that library the
way Mozart would have belonged in a rock and roll
club. He was only twenty-one or -two, tall, skinny,
with a dead-white face and coal-black eyes. The
eyes were never still, they moved restlessly from
side to side as if it hurt them to be still, flickering
from one face to another like a will-o'-the-wisp on
an autumn evening. I didn't notice what he wore,
all I saw was his face. The face of a hophead, a
junky, an advanced dope addict. Take away his
white powder for even twenty-four hours and
he'd be screaming his head off as all the devils
in hell closed in on him.

‘Come in, Mr Vyland.' The general was speaking
to the man with the cigar and I wished for the tenth
time that old Ruthven's expression wasn't so hard
to read. He nodded in my direction. ‘This is Talbot,
the wanted man. And this is Mr Jablonsky, the
man who brought him back.'

‘Glad to meet you, Mr Jablonsky.' Vyland smiled
in a friendly fashion and put his hand out. ‘I'm the
general's chief production engineer.' Sure, he was
the general's chief production engineer, that made
me President of the United States. Vyland nodded
at the man in the grey suit. ‘This is Mr Royale, Mr
Jablonsky.'

‘Mr Jablonsky! Mr Jablonsky!' The words weren't
spoken, they were hissed by the tall thin boy with
the staring eyes. His hand dived under the lapel of
his jacket and I had to admit he was fast. The gun
trembled in his hand. He swore, three unprintable
words in succession, and the eyes were glazed and
mad. ‘I've waited two long years for this, you –
Damn you, Royale! Why did –?'

‘There's a young lady here, Larry.' I could have
sworn that Royale's hand hadn't reached under his
coat, or for his hip pocket, but there had been no
mistaking the flash of dulled metal in his hand, the
sharp crack of the barrel on Larry's wrist and the
clatter of the boy's gun bouncing off a brass-topped
table. As an example of sleight-of-hand conjuring,
I'd never seen anything to beat it.

‘We know Mr Jablonsky,' Royale was continuing.
His voice was curiously musical and soothing
and soft. ‘At least, Larry and I know. Don't we,
Larry? Larry did six months once on a narcotics
charge. It was Jablonsky that sent him up.'

‘Jablonsky sent––' the general began.

‘Jablonsky.' Royale smiled and nodded at the big
man. ‘Detective-Lieutenant Herman Jablonsky, of
New York Homicide.'

It was one of those silences. It went on and on
and on. Pregnant, they call it. It didn't worry me
much, I was for the high jump anyway. It was
the general who spoke first and his voice and face
were stiff and cold as he looked at the man in the
dinner suit.

‘What is the explanation of this outrageous
conduct, Vyland?' he demanded. ‘You bring into
this house a man who is apparently not only
a narcotics addict and carries a gun, but who
also served a prison sentence. As for the presence
of a police officer, someone might care to
inform me –'

‘Relax, General. You can drop the front.' It was
Royale who spoke, his voice quiet and soothing
as before and curiously devoid of any trace of
insolence. ‘I wasn't quite accurate. Ex-Detective-
Lieutenant, I should have said. Brightest boy in the
bureau in his day, first narcotics, then homicide,
more arrests and more convictions for arrests than
any other police officer in the eastern states. But
your foot slipped, didn't it, Jablonsky?'

Jablonsky said nothing and his face showed
nothing, but it didn't mean he wasn't thinking
plenty. My face showed nothing, but I was thinking
plenty. I was thinking how I could try to get
away. The servants had vanished at a wave of
the hand from the general and, for the moment,
everyone seemed to have lost interest in me. I
turned my head casually. I was wrong, there was
someone who hadn't lost interest in me. Valentino,
my court-room acquaintance, was standing in the
passageway just outside the open door, and the
interest he was taking in me more than made up
for the lack of interest in the library. I was pleased
to see that he was carrying his right arm in a sling.
His left thumb was hooked in the side pocket of
his coat, and although he might have had a big
thumb it wasn't big enough to make all that bulge
in his pocket. He would just love to see me trying
to get away.

‘Jablonsky here was the central figure in the
biggest police scandal to hit New York since the
war,' Royale was saying. ‘All of a sudden there
were a lot of murders – important murders – in his
parish, and Jablonsky boobed on the lot. Everyone
knew a protection gang was behind the killings.
Everybody except Jablonsky. All Jablonsky knew
was that he was getting ten grand a stiff to look
in every direction but the right one. But he had
even more enemies inside the force than outside,
and they nailed him. Eighteen months ago it was,
and he had the headlines to himself for an entire
week. Don't you remember, Mr Vyland?'

‘Now I do,' Vyland nodded. ‘Sixty thousand
tucked away and they never laid a finger on a
cent. Three years he got, wasn't it?'

‘And out in eighteen months,' Royale finished.
‘Jumped the wall; Jablonsky?'

‘Good conduct remission,' Jablonsky said calmly.
‘A respectable citizen again. Which is more than
could be said for you, Royale. You employing this
man, General?'

‘I fail to see –'

‘Because if you are, it'll cost you a hundred
bucks more than you think. A hundred bucks is
the price Royale usually charges his employers for
a wreath for his victims. A very fancy wreath. Or
has the price gone up, Royale? And who are you
putting the finger on this time?'

Nobody said anything. Jablonsky had the floor.

‘Royale here is listed in the police files of half the
states in the Union, General. Nobody's ever pinned
anything on him yet, but they know all about him.
No.1 remover in the United States, not furniture
but people. He charges high, but he's good and
there's never any comeback. A freelance, and his
services are in terrific demand by all sorts of people
you'd never dream of, not only because he never
fails to give satisfaction but also because of the fact
that it's a point of Royale's code that he'll never
touch a man who has employed him. An awful
lot of people sleep an awful lot easier, General,
just because they know they're on Royale's list
of untouchables.' Jablonsky rubbed a bristly chin
with a hand the size of a shovel. ‘I wonder who
he could be after this time, General? Could it even
be yourself, do you think?'

For the first time the general registered emotion.
Not even the beard and moustache could hide a
narrowing of the eyes, a tightening of the lips and
a slight but perceptible draining of colour from
the cheeks. He wet his lips, slowly, and looked at
Vyland.

‘Did you know anything of this? What truth is
there –?'

‘Jablonsky's just shooting off the top of his
mouth,' Vyland interjected smoothly. ‘Let's get
them into another room, General. We must talk.'

Ruthven nodded, his face still pale, and Vyland
glanced at Royale. Royale smiled and said without
inflection: ‘All right, you two, out. Leave that gun
there, Jablonsky.'

‘And if I don't?'

‘You haven't cashed that cheque yet,' Royale
said obliquely. They'd been listening, all right.

Jablonsky put his gun on the table. Royale
himself didn't have a gun in his hand. With the
speed he could move at it would have been quite
superfluous anyway. The hophead, Larry, came up
behind me and dug his pistol barrel in my kidney
with a force that made me grunt in pain. Nobody
said anything, so I said: ‘Do that again, hophead,
and it'll take a dentist a whole day to repair your
face.' So he did it again, twice as painfully as before,
and when I swung round he was too quick for me
and caught me with the barrel of his gun high up
on the face and raked the sight down my cheek.
Then he stood off, four feet away, gun pointed at
my lower stomach and those crazy eyes jumping all
over the place, a wicked smile on his face inviting
me to jump him. I mopped some of the blood off
my face and turned and went out the door.

Valentino was waiting for me, gun in hand and
heavy boots on his feet, and by the time Royale
came leisurely out of the library, closed the door
behind him and stopped Valentino with a single
word, I couldn't walk. There's nothing wrong with
my thigh, it's carried me around for years, but it's
not made of oak and Valentino wore toe-plates on
his boots. It just wasn't my lucky night. Jablonsky
helped me off the floor into an adjacent room.
I stopped at the doorway, looked back at the
grinning Valentino and then at Larry, and I wrote
them both down in my little black book.

We spent perhaps ten minutes in that room,
Jablonsky and I sitting, the hophead pacing up
and down with the gun in his hand and hoping
I would twitch an eyebrow, Royale leaning negligently
against a table, nobody saying anything,
until by and by the butler came in and said the
general wanted to see us. We all trooped out again.
Valentino was still there, but I made it safely to
the library. Maybe he'd hurt his toe, but I knew
it wasn't that: Royale had told him once to lay off,
and just once would be all that Royale would have
to tell anybody anything.

A far from subtle change had taken place in the
atmosphere since we'd left. The girl was sitting on
a stool by the fire, head bent and the flickering
light gleaming off her wheat-coloured braids, but
Vyland and the general seemed easy and relaxed
and confident and the latter was even smiling. A
couple of newspapers were lying on the library
table and I wondered sourly if those, with their big
black banner headlines ‘Wanted Killer Slays Constable,
Wounds Sheriff' and the far from flattering
pictures of myself had anything to do with their
confidence. To emphasize the change in atmosphere,
a footman came in with a tray of glasses,
decanter and soda siphon. He was a young man,
but moved with a peculiarly stiff leaden-footed
gait and he laid the tray down on the table with
so laborious a difficulty that you could almost hear
his joints creak. His colour didn't look too good
either. I looked away, glanced at him again and
then indifferently away once more, hoping that
the knowledge of what I suddenly knew didn't
show in my face.

They'd read all the right books on etiquette,
the footman and the butler knew exactly what
to do. The footman brought in the drinks, the
butler carried them around. He gave a sherry
to the girl, whisky to each of the four men –
Hophead was pointedly bypassed – and planted
himself in front of me. My gaze travelled from his
hairy wrists to his broken nose to the general in
the background. The general nodded, so I looked
back at the silver tray again. Pride said no, the
magnificent aroma of the amber liquid that had
been poured from the triangular dimpled bottle
said yes, but pride carried the heavy handicap of
my hunger, soaked clothes and the beating I'd just
had and the aroma won looking round. I took the
glass and eyed the general over the rim. ‘A last
drink for the condemned man, eh, General?'

‘Not condemned yet.' He lifted his glass. ‘Your
health, Talbot.'

‘Very witty,' I sneered. ‘What do they do in the
state of Florida, General? Strap you over a cyanide
bucket or just fry you in the hot seat?'

‘Your health,' he repeated. ‘You're not condemned,
maybe you'll never be condemned. I
have a proposition to put before you, Talbot.'

I lowered myself carefully into a chair. Valentino's
boot must have mangled up one of the nerves in
my leg, a thigh muscle was jumping uncontrollably.
I waved at the papers lying on the library
table.

‘I take it you've read those, General. I take it you
know all about what happened today, all about my
record. What kind of proposition can a man like
you possibly have to put to a man like me?'

‘A very attractive one.' I imagined I saw a touch
of red touch the high cheekbones but he spoke
steadily enough. ‘In exchange for a little service
I wish you to perform for me I offer you your
life.'

‘A fair offer. And the nature of this little service,
General?'

‘I am not at liberty to tell you at present. In
about, perhaps – thirty-six hours, would you say,
Vyland?'

‘We should hear by then,' Vyland agreed. He was
less and less like an engineer every time I looked at
him. He took a puff at his Corona and looked at me.
‘You agree to the general's proposition, then?'

‘Don't be silly. What else can I do? And after the
job, whatever it is?'

‘You will be provided with papers and passport
and sent to a certain South American country
where you will have nothing to fear,' the general
answered. ‘I have the connections.' Like hell I
would be given papers and a trip to South America:
I would be given a pair of concrete socks and a
vertical trip to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

‘And if I don't agree, then of course –'

‘If you don't agree then they will all be overcome
by a high sense of civic responsibility and turn you
over to the cops,' Jablonsky interrupted sardonically.
‘The whole set-up stinks to high heaven.
Why should the general want you? – he can hire
practically any man in the nation. Why, especially,
should he hire a killer on the lam? What earthly
use can you be to him? Why should he help a
wanted murderer to evade justice?' He sipped
his drink thoughtfully. ‘General Blair Ruthven,
the moral pillar of New England society, best-
known and highest-minded do-gooder after the
Rockefellers. It stinks. You're paddling in some
dark and dirty water, General. Very dark, very
dirty. And paddling right up to your neck. Lord
knows what stakes
you
must be playing for. They
must be fantastic.' He shook his head. ‘This I would
never have believed.'

‘I have never willingly or knowingly done
a dishonest thing in my life,' the general said
steadily.

‘Jeez!' Jablonsky ejaculated. For a few seconds
he was silent, then said suddenly: ‘Well, thanks
for the drink, General. Don't forget to sup with a
long spoon. I'll take my hat and my cheque and
be on my way. The Jablonsky retirement fund is
in your debt.'

I didn't see who made the signal. Probably it
came from Vyland. Again I didn't see how the gun
got into Royale's hand. But I saw it there. So did
Jablonsky. It was a tiny gun, a very flat automatic
with a snub barrel, even smaller than the Lilliput
the sheriff had taken from me. But Royale probably
had the eye and the aim of a squirrel-hunter, and it
was all he needed: a great big hole in the heart from
a heavy Colt makes you no deader than a tiny little
hole from a .22.

Jablonsky looked thoughtfully at the gun. ‘You
would rather I stayed, General?'

‘Put that damn gun away,' the general snapped.
‘Jablonsky's on our side. At least, I hope he's going
to be. Yes, I'd rather you stayed. But no one's going
to make you if you don't want to.'

‘And what's going to make me want to?' Jablonsky
inquired of the company at large. ‘Could it be
that the general, who has never willingly done a
dishonest thing in his life, is planning to hold up
payment on that cheque? Or maybe just planning
to tear it up altogether?'

It didn't need the general's suddenly averted
eyes to confirm Jablonsky's guess. Vyland cut in
smoothly: ‘It'll only be for two days, Jablonsky,
three at the most. After all, you are getting a great
deal of money for very little. All we're asking you
to do is to ride herd on Talbot here until he's done
what we want him to do.'

Jablonsky nodded slowly. ‘I see. Royale here
wouldn't stoop to bodyguarding – he takes care
of people in a rather more permanent way. The
thug out in the passage there, the butler, our
little friend Larry here – Talbot could eat 'em
all before breakfast. You must need Talbot pretty
badly, eh?'