Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘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?’