Keeping Secrets (53 page)

Some source of strength that comes when needed took me over then, and got me through the balance of the day. I went to the kitchen and picked up Scoop, who was shivering and nearly delirious. I found some food and gave it to him, and filled a water bowl, which he emptied three times. I wanted to take him back with me to my apartment, but I was already beginning to reason more clearly. Proving my presence in the house would implicate me. I opened a kitchen window about a quarter of the way and let him out the back. If the police were curious, they could satisfy themselves he'd jumped out.

On the way back to the bank it finally occurred to me that I held the gun which probably had killed Emory Cabot and, perhaps, Electra as well. Things that Nathan said the previous night could lead to only one conclusion: he'd killed them. Then he'd killed himself. I had been crouching in the bushes even as he climbed the stairs to commit the murders. Then, in between, I'd knocked on his door, expecting to save the day.…

By the time I arrived at the bank, Tetzel had learned of Cabot's death and left the office. There was a message I'd had a call from someone who left no name, but that the call would be replaced in the afternoon. That would be Edwin. Meantime I had to pretend to do my work as though I knew nothing except that a good bank customer had been found in the river, his body riddled with bullet holes. Everyone was talking about it, speculating, gossiping.

During one of my frequent trips to the percolator, I overheard a young man say he'd been to lunch with a buddy from the
Express
, and learned of the contents of Cabot's closed hand. “It was one of those Onderdonk miniatures … they had to break the guy's hand to get it out. Doesn't that beat all?”

I felt suddenly nauseated. I barely made it to an alcove in the ladies' room before vomiting. My body quaked so hard I had to sit back on my heels for several minutes, clasping my abdomen. I had the sensation that everything inside me was coming loose, and I started to weep, harder and harder until someone came in and noticed my crouched body beneath the alcove door. “Are you all right? Did you faint?” she asked. The unfamiliar voice served its purpose. I sniffed and got up, thinking, I've got to hold on.…

I numbly walked back to my desk and rearranged papers over and over again, trying to pass the longest day I had ever experienced. The only honest-to-goodness work I did was to give Tetzel's inkwell a good scrubbing in the lavatory and refill it with fresh ink. Emory would hardly have been holding on to Electra's portrait if he were in the company of someone else.…

Finally Edwin phoned from Washington. I took his number, told him to wait right where he was, left the bank, and went to a telephone a block away. I told him in detail what had passed the night before, and where we were at the moment. Finally, voice quivering, I added, “What do I do now?”

“Poor kid,” he said. “When you get home, hide the gun but don't get rid of it. Remember during that last meeting when Cabot gave Tetzel something to keep? It may have been the paper, or a box, or even a key. Check around.”

“Paper? Box? What are you talking about?”

“The signed confession by Hope. You might need it. You've done a lot of running around this morning, and may well have implicated yourself—I'm not complaining, but you've left a lot of holes. Look in Tetzel's safe for a key or an extra box or something.”

“Yes, all right. When will you be back?”

“I can't get away for a few days and Hubert's up here too. Things are popping right now over Zimmermann's telegram. I've got to sit in on a meeting tomorrow and I'll be tied up all the next day. Boy, what a time for a thing like this to happen.”

“No fooling,” I said, biting my lip.

“Tetzel's going to think there's some kind of plot to mess him up because of Cabot's death.”

“Oh Edwin, I can't even think straight. Why?”

“Because Cabot was carrying around the rest of those battle plans in his head, and Barrista is waiting for him in Mexico.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Be careful. I'd have Allan stick with you but he has to keep the telegraph covered. Oh, and one thing more—you can use my car if you need to. I wanted to tell you that before I left but I couldn't reach you.”

“But I don't know what I'd need with a car. I don't know how to drive.”

“Oh, swell … the first thing you look for when you're in a tight spot is a way to get the hell—I mean, get out of town. You've never been behind a wheel?”

“I drove my brother's car once but I don't remember anything—”

“It'll come back to you if you get behind the wheel again. You might not even need the car, but just in case, it's parked at my duplex on West Pecan, number 602. Got it? Tools are under the back-seat cushion. It's full of gasoline.”

“All right. Oh, Edwin, I wish you were here.”

“Me too, Camille, but the whole world's cratering up here.”

Down here, too, I thought.

Tetzel didn't come back for the whole afternoon. I stayed after everyone had gone so that I could look for whatever it was that Emory Cabot had left with Tetzel. I thought once it might have been a copy of the battle plans for the revolution, but then that wouldn't have done Tetzel much good at the time. When the floor was empty I went into his office and opened the big safe. There was no box, and no papers that I hadn't seen before. I pulled out the key to the secret compartment and shoved it in. At first I found nothing except the picture. Then my hand touched a small key near the back. I recognized it as one that fits a safe-deposit box. I put it into my pocket, and was about to close the secret compartment again when I heard a noise behind me.

“Were you looking for something, Camille?”

My hard-stretched luck had finally played out. It was Tetzel.

29

He locked the door behind him and said, “No need to hurry, my dear. I was just returning to pick up something myself. Give me both keys, please.”

I handed them over. I moved away from his desk and he took off his homburg and sat down. “I'll need the safe-deposit key, you see, as executor of the Cabot estate.”

“When I get through, you won't be executing anything—” I began, then realized the folly of my own words. What Michael Stobalt said about women who are single disappearing, never to be heard of again, came back to me then.

“Who do you work for? You might as well tell me, because it won't make any difference.” He paused before continuing, “To think I was so busy worrying about Electra Cabot while all the time …

“When she came to me and asked to borrow money to pay off some obligations Cabot knew nothing about, I was suspicious at once. Then she said forty thousand dollars! Quite an obligation, I'm sure you can see.

“Then she offered her collateral—do you know what it was?—no more than her word. She was coming into some money soon, she said, three to four months hence at the outside, she assured me. Did she have a document to prove it? She had nothing. She feigned to reason that if I trusted her husband's word, I surely could trust hers.

“What really took me aback though was her statement that she knew everything. How much did she know—how much was ‘everything'?

“I told her we had policies at the bank regarding loans, that I simply could not grant one without authority of the loan committee and this was highly irregular. Well as you know, Camille,” he said, his chest rising, “I answer to no one in this bank. I could have handed the money to her then.

“But I didn't dare risk it. Her story was just preposterous enough to worry me. Should she channel funds from this bank into the wrong hands, that would be the end for me.

“The more I questioned her, the more wary I became, and after our meeting I began a little investigation on her, but it led to nothing. I still don't know for certain about her motives, and now she's gone … or is she? Do you know?”

I shook my head, eyes wide.

“Was she mixed up with you, eh?”

I shook my head again.

He narrowed his eyes. “I was so certain Electra was up to something that I wouldn't listen to Giddy when she tried to convince me about you.”

“Giddy?”

“You are surprised? How odd a person so thorough could have overlooked her value to me.”

I thought then of all the files she carried back and forth for him, her long tenure on the bank staff, and the impediments standing in her way of promotion. Giddy, then, served as the channel for vouchers and other materials we were never able to uncover. And there was the night she'd caught me in the safe, and apparently had seen more than I realized. It made sense. Tetzel wouldn't have hired a secretary who would have been the least bit suspect, but a person working in Giddeon's position wouldn't be looked at with wary eyes. Giddy … on the phone with Tetzel that day I heard him discussing Electra.…

“I was at fault. I let one innocent modicum of sentimentality ruin everything for me.” He reached into the safe for the picture. “You reminded me just a little of Johanna, faintly of her spirit and vitality. Why else would I have been interested in hiring someone as young and inexperienced as you? Didn't you ever stop to wonder how you were so fortunate as to begin in the top clerical position in the bank?”

“What … happened to … Johanna?” I asked, stalling for time. There had to be some way to get out of that office.

“She was to be my wife. Her family and mine came over here together—she and I were intended for each other long before we left the fatherland. We had not been here long when our farms were raided by Indians. They massacred both my parents and hers, her brothers, my sisters, and Johanna. Last, before me, they took Johanna.

“Six renegades raped and tortured her to death before my very eyes.… I managed to get away from them and fled into the woods. They burned everything to the ground before they left. That is what we came all those miles over the ocean to find. We left all the social prejudice of Germany behind, so sure that over here we would get our chance for hard work and success … all we wanted was a chance. And that is what we got for our trouble.…”

He was lost in his story by that time, reliving his past as though it were happening all over again. “Sophie came much later along with a boatload of girls sent for domestic work. I married her. She has been a good wife, all these years, but she is not my Johanna.

“For a long time I have waited the chance to go back to Germany, not as someone oppressed and confined to a miserable class treated by the nobility like so much dirt and filth, but as one who holds his head high in the world. I was very close … had things worked as I had them planned, everything would have been so perfect. Had they only been more patient I could have had Fernando Barrista moving at the snap of my fingers.

“That idiotic group of people running the Foreign Office would have stepped down. I would have used them as a platform under my feet. Had Zimmermann himself not sided with them I could have saved us both; but he was stupid. Lately I thought his time would be over, but not necessarily mine. With or without him I would have gone back with dignity, obtained my position of authority, risen up as the whole monarchy crumbled. It is, you know. The time for crowning kings is over.”

He paused and narrowed his eyes at me, then asked, “Which of my enemies hired you to undermine me? You have been listening. You led them to Cabot so they could kill him, didn't you? Barrista will not rise without him. There is little hope for my situation now.”

I was shaking my head.

“No? Well then, who have you been dealing with, tell me? It hardly matters to you now because you won't be testifying. Tell me, Camille, you owe me that at least.”

With one swift motion I grabbed the inkwell from his desk and threw the ink into his face. I unlocked the door just as one of his hands caught at my sleeve, ripping it from the shoulder. I ran down the stairs, faster and faster, until I was outside the bank in the cold night. I needed time to hide the gun sitting on the kitchen ledge in my apartment. If the police got an idea I'd had anything to do with the murder of Cabot and caught on to my lies about Electra and Nathan, they could have the landlord open my apartment and search it. Still, to run there would be the obvious trap. Tetzel would go there first. I could not run for the police. I could not run home. I ran for Keith.

I made my way to the store, seeing no one behind me, frightened at every corner that Tetzel would jump out and grab me. Yet he didn't seem to be following. I got within two blocks of the store, though, when his car drew up alongside me and the door opened. An arm thrust out at me. His face, tinted by the ink, looked like that of the resurrected corpse of a man who had burned to death. I gasped and threw off his arm, and kept running. When I got in view of the store he turned the corner and waited.

Keith was cleaning up the meat counter, preparing to close the store. His parents were in the back office talking over accounts.

“Camille, you look like a ragamuffin. I've been worried all day. What's happened?”

He was wearing his good suit under the apron, and when I saw it I remembered the birthday party. “Keith, you have to come with me and hurry. Where's the truck? Can you take me to West Pecan Street?”

I suppose one good look at me was enough to answer all doubts. He threw his apron aside, picked up his coat, and called to his parents, “I'll be back.”

In the truck I asked him where Pecan Street was. “One block over and up Jefferson a block. What's there?”

“A car.”

“Listen, Camille, I don't know what you're mixed up in, but—what are you looking for?”

“We're being followed. We have to detour to throw him off. I can't answer any questions or involve you in this. Just get me to that car.”

He put his foot on the accelerator and began darting in and out of alleys so deftly you would have thought he was accustomed to covering his trail. “I haven't been delivering groceries all this time without learning a few shortcuts here and there,” he said, and in spite of everything I had to let go for a moment and smile in relief. Around and around we darted, backed up, cut to the left then to the right, until I could see no sign of Tetzel's car. By that time I had no idea where we were and how far away Pecan was, but we still had to get there.