The Light of Day (3 page)

I happened to know about one of the charter yachts, an eighteen-metre ketch with twin
diesels,
and told him the rate—one hundred and forty dollars U.S. per day, including a crew of two, fuel for eight hours' steaming a day
and
everything except charterers' and passengers' food. The real rate was a hundred and thirty, but I thought that, if by any chance he was serious, I could get the difference as commission from the broker. I also wanted to see how he felt about that kind of money; whether he would laugh as an ordinary salaried man would, or begin asking about the number of persons it would sleep. He just nodded, and then asked about fast, sea-going motor-boats without crew.

In the light-of what happened I think that point is specially significant.

I said that I would find out. He asked me about the yacht-brokers. I gave him the name of the one I knew personally, and told him the rest were no good. I also said that I did not think that the owners of the bigger boats liked chartering them without their own crewmen on board. He did not comment on that. Later, he asked me if I knew whether yacht charter parties out of Tourcolimano or the Piraeus covered Greek waters only, or whether you could 'go foreign', say across the Adriatic to Italy. Significant again. I told him I did not know, which was true.

When the bill came, he asked if he could change an American Express traveller's cheque for fifty dollars. That was more to the point. I told him that he could, and he tore the fifty-dollar cheque out of a book of ten. It was the best thing I had seen that day.

Just before eleven o'clock we left and I drove him to the Club.

The Club is practically a copy of the Lido night-club in Paris, only smaller. I introduced
him
to John, who owns the place, and tried to leave
him
there for a while. He was still absolutely sober, and I thought that if he were by himself he would drink more; but it was no good. I had to go in and sit and drink with him. He was as possessive as a woman. I was puzzled. If I had been a fresh-looking young man instead of, well, frankly, a pot-bellied journalist, I would have understood it—not approved, of course, but understood. But he was at least ten to fifteen years younger than me.

They have candles on the tables at the Club and you can see faces. When the floor-show came on, I watched him watch it. He looked at the girls,
Nicki
among them, as if they were
nies
on the other side of a window. I asked him how he liked the third from the left—that was
Nicki.

'Legs too short,' he said. 'I like them with longer legs. Is that the one you had in mind?*

'In mind? I don't understand, sir.' I was beginning to dislike him intensely.

He eyed me. 'Shove it,' he said unpleasantly.

We were drinking Greek brandy. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another. I could see the muscles in his jaw twitching as if with anger. Evidently something I had said, or which he thought I had said, had annoyed him. It was on the tip of my tongue to mention that
Nicki
was my wife, but I didn't. I remembered, just in time, that I had only told him about Annette, and about her being killed by a bomb.

He drank the brandy down quickly and told me to get the bill.

'You don't like it here, sir?'

"What more is there to see? Do they start stripping later?'

I smiled. It is the only possible response to that sort of boorishness. In any case, I had no objection to speeding up my programme for the evening.

There is another place,' I said.

‘Like this?'

The entertainment, sir, is a little more individual and private.' I picked the words carefully.

'You mean a cat-house?'

'I wouldn't put it quite like that, sir.'

He smirked. ’
I’ll
bet you wouldn't. How about
"maison
de
rendezvous"!
Does that cover it?'

'Madame Irma's is very discreet and everything is in the best of taste, sir.'

He shook with amusement. 'Know something, Arthur?' he said. 'If you shaved a bit closer and had yourself a good haircut, you could hire out as a butler any time.'

From his expression I could not
teu
whether he was being deliberately insulting or making a clumsy joke. It seemed advisable to assume the latter.

'Is that what Americans call "ribbing", sir?' I asked politely.

This seemed to amuse him even more. He chuckled fatuously. 'Okay, Arthur,' he said at last, 'okay. We'll play it your way. Let's go to see your Madame
Irma.'

I didn't like the
'your
Madame
Irma'
way of putting it, but I pretended not to notice.

Irma
has a very nice house standing in its own grounds just off the road out to Kifissia. She never has more than six girls at any one time and changes them every few months. Her prices are high, of course, but everything is very well arranged. Clients enter and leave by different doors to avoid embarrassing encounters. The only persons the client sees are
Irma
herself, Kira, the manageress who takes care of the financial side, and, naturally, the lady of his choice.

Harper seemed to be impressed. I say 'seemed' because he was very polite to
Irma
when I introduced them, and complimented her on the decorations.
Irma
is not unattractive herself and likes presentable-looking clients. As I had expected, there was no nonsense about my joining him at
that
table. As soon as
Irma
offered him a drink, he glanced at me and made a gesture of dismissal

'See you later,' he said.

I was sure then that everything was all right. I went in to Kira's room to collect my commission and tell her how much money he had on him. It was after midnight then. I said that I had had no dinner and would go and get some. She told me that they were not particularly busy that night and that there need be no hurry.

I drove immediately to the Grande
Bretagne,
parked the car at the side, walked round to the bar, and went in and ordered a drink. If anyone happened to notice me and remember later, I had a simple explanation for being there.

I finished the drink, gave the waiter a good tip and walked through across the foyer to the lifts. They are fully automatic; you work them yourself with push-buttons. I went up to the third floor.

Harper'« suite was on the inner court, away from
aie
noise of Syntagmaios Square, and the doors to it were out of sight of the landing. The floor servants had gone off duty for the night. It was all quite easy. As usual, I had my pass-key hidden inside an old change purse; but, as usual, I did not need it. Quite a number of the sitting-room doors to suites in the older part of the hotel can be opened from outside without a key, unless they have been specially locked, that is; it makes it easier for room-service waiters carrying trays. Quite often the maid who turns down the beds last thing can't be bothered to lock up after her. Why should she? The Greeks are a particularly honest people and they trust one another.

His luggage was all in the bedroom. I had already handled it once that day, stowing it in the car at the airport, so I did not have to worry about leaving fingerprints.

I went to his briefcase first. There were a lot of business papers in it—something to do with a Swiss company named Tekelek, who made accounting machines—I did not pay much attention to them. There was also a wallet with money in it—Swiss francs, American dollars and West German marks—together with the yellow number slips of over two thousand dollars' worth of traveller's cheques. The number slips are for record purposes in case the cheques are lost and you want to stop payment on them. I left the money where it was and took the slips. The cheques themselves I found in the side pocket of a suitcase. There were thirty-five of them, each for fifty dollars. His first name was Walter, middle initial K.

In my experience, most people are extraordinarily careless about the way they look after traveller's cheques. Just because their counter-signature is required before a cheque can be cashed they assume that only they can negotiate it. Yet anyone with eyes in his head can copy the original signature. No particular skill is required; haste, heat, a different pen, a counter of an awkward height, writing standing up instead of sitting—a dozen things can account for small variations in the second signature. It .is not going to be examined by a handwriting expert, not at the time that it is cashed anyway, and usually it is only at banks that the cashier asks to see a passport..

Another thing: if you have ordinary money in your pocket, you usually know, at least approximately, how much you have. Every time you pay for something, you receive a reminder you can see and feel what you have. Not so with traveller's cheques. What you see, if and when you look, is a blue folder with cheques inside. How often do you count the cheques to make sure that they are all there? Supposing someone were to remove the
bottom
cheque in a folder. When would you find out that it had gone? A hundred to one it would not be until you had used up all the cheques which had been on top of it. Therefore, you would not know exactly
when
it had been taken and, if you had been doing any travelling, you probably would not even know
where.
If you did not know when or where, how could you possibly guess
whol
In any case you would be too late to stop its being cashed.

People who leave traveller's cheques about
deserve
to lose them.

I took just six cheques, the bottom ones from the folder. That made three hundred dollars, and left him fifteen hundred or so. It is a mistake, I always think, to be greedy, but unfortunately I hesitated. For a moment I wondered if he would miss them all that much sooner if I took two more.

So I was standing there like a fool, with the cheques right in my hands, when Harper walked into the room.

CHAPTER TWO

I was in the bedroom and he came through from the sitting-room. All the same he must have opened the outer door very quietly indeed or I
would certainly have heard the latch. I think he expected to find me there. In that case, the whole thing was just a cunningly planned trap.

I was standing at the foot of one of the beds, so I couldn't move away from him. For a moment he just stood there grinning at me, as if he were enjoying himself.

‘Well now, Arthur,' he said, 'you ought to have waited for me, oughtn't you?'

'I was going back.' It was a stupid thing to say, I suppose; but almost anything I had said would have sounded stupid at that point.

And then, suddenly, he hit me across the face with the back of his hand.

It was like being kicked. My glasses fell off and I lurched back against the bed. As I raised my arms to protect myself he hit me again with the other hand. When I started to fall to my knees, he dragged me up and kept on hitting me. He was
hice
a savage.

I fell down again and this time he let me be. My ears were singing, my head felt like bursting and I could not see properly. My nose began to bleed. I got my handkerchief out to stop the blood getting all over my clothes, and felt about among the cheques lying on the carpet for my glasses. I found them eventually. They were bent a bit but not broken. When I put them on, I saw the soles of his shoes about a yard from my face.

He was sitting in the armchair, leaning back, watching me.

'Get up,' he said, 'and watch that blood. Keep it off the rug.'

As I got to my feet, he stood up quickly himself. I thought he was going to start hitting me again. Instead, he caught hold of one lapel of my jacket, "Do you have a gun?' I shook my head.

He slapped my pockets, to make sure, I suppose, then shoved me away.

There are some tissues in the bathroom,' he said. 'Go clean your face. But leave the door open.'

I did as I was told. There was a window in the bathroom; but even if it had been possible to escape that way without breaking my neck, I don't suppose I would have tried it. He would have heard me. Besides, where could I have escaped to? All he would have had to do was call down to the night concierge, and the police would have been there in five minutes. The fact that he had not called down already was at least something. Perhaps, as a foreigner, he did not want to get involved as a witness in a court case. After all, he had not actually lost anything; and if I were to eat enough humble pie, perhaps even cry a bit, he might decide to forget the whole thing; especially after the brutal way in which he had attacked me. That was my reasoning. I should have known better. You cannot expect common decency from a man like Harper.

When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that he had picked up the cheque folder and was putting it back in the suitcase. The cheques I had torn out, however, were lying on the bed. He gathered them up and motioned me towards the sitting-room.