Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

His foot caught my gun-hand and the gun landed twenty feet away. I launched myself for his legs but he moved to one side with the speed of a fly-weight, lifted his knee and sent me crashing against the open door. And then it was too late, for he had the Mauser in his hand and it was pointing between my eyes.

I climbed slowly to my feet, not trying anything. The general and Vyland, the latter with a gun in his hand, came crowding through the open door, then relaxed when they saw Jablonsky with the gun on me. Vyland bent down and helped a now-moaning Royale to a sitting position. Royale had a long, heavily bleeding cut above his left eye and tomorrow he’d have a duck’s egg bruise there. After maybe half a minute he shook his head to clear it, wiped blood away with the back of his hand and looked slowly round till his eyes found mine. I’d been mistaken. I’d thought his the emptiest, the most expressionless eyes I’d ever seen, but I’d been mistaken. I looked in them and I could almost smell the moist freshly-turned earth of an open grave.

‘I can see that you gents really do need me around,’ Jablonsky said jovially. ‘I never thought anyone would try that stuff with Royale and live to talk about it. But we learn.’ He dug into a side pocket and brought out a set of very slender blued-steel cuffs and slipped them expertly on my wrists. ‘A souvenir of the bad old days,’ he explained apologetically. ‘Would there happen to be another pair and some wire or chain round the house?’

‘It might be arranged,’ Vyland said almost mechanically. He still couldn’t credit what had happened to his infallible hatchet-man.

‘Fine.’ Jablonsky grinned down at Royale. ‘You don’t need to lock your door tonight. I’ll keep Talbot out of your hair.’ Royale transferred his sombre, evil stare from my face to Jablonsky’s and his expression didn’t alter any that I could see. I fancied perhaps Royale was beginning to have ideas about a double grave.

The butler took us upstairs and along a narrow passage to the back of the big house, took a key from his pocket, unlocked the door and ushered us in. It was just another bedroom, sparsely but expensively furnished, with a wash-basin in one corner and a modern mahogany bed in the middle of the right wall. To the left was a communicating door to another bedroom. The butler took a second key from his pocket and unlocked this door also. It gave on to another room, the mirror image of the first, except for the bed, which was an old-fashioned iron-railed effort. It looked as if it had been made with girders left over from the Key West bridge. It looked solid. It looked as if it were going to be my bed.

We went back into the other room. Jablonsky stretched out his hand. ‘The keys, please.’

The butler hesitated, peered uncertainly at him, then shrugged, handed over the keys and turned to leave. Jablonsky said pleasantly: ‘This Mauser I’m holding here, friend – want that I should bounce it off your head two three times?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.’

‘ “Sir”, hey? That’s good. I wouldn’t have expected them to have books on buttling in Alcatraz. The other key, my friend. The one leading to the passage from Talbot’s room.’

The butler scowled, handed over a third key, and left. Whatever buttling book he’d read he’d skipped the section on closing doors, but it was a stout door and it stood up to it. Jablonsky grinned, locked the door with an ostentatious click, pulled the curtains, checked rapidly that there were no peep-holes in the walls and crossed back to where I stood. Five or six times he smacked a massive fist into a massive palm, kicked the wall and knocked over an armchair with a thud that shook the room. Then he said, not too softly, not too loudly: ‘Get up when you’re ready, friend. That’s just a little warning, shall we say, not to try any further tricks like you tried on Royale. Just move one finger and you’ll think the Chrysler building fell on top of you.’

I didn’t move a finger. Neither did Jablonsky. There was a complete silence inside the room. We listened hard. The silence in the passageway outside was not complete. With his flat feet and adenoidal, broken-nosed breathing, the butler was completely miscast as the Last of the Mohicans and he was a good twenty feet away by the time the thick carpet absorbed the last of his creaking footfalls.

Jablonsky took out a key, softly opened the handcuffs, pocketed them and shook my hand as if he meant to break every finger I had. I felt like it, too, but for all that my grin was as big, as delighted as his own. We lit cigarettes and started on the two rooms with toothpicks, looking for bugs and listening devices.

The place was loaded with them.

Exactly twenty-four hours later I climbed into the sports car that had been left empty, but with the ignition key in the lock, four hundred yards away from the entrance lodge to the general’s house. It was a Chevrolet Corvette – the same car that I’d stolen the previous afternoon when I’d been holding Mary Ruthven hostage.

The rain yesterday had vanished, completely. The sky had been blue and cloudless all day long – and for me it had been a very long day indeed. Lying fully dressed and handcuffed to the rails of an iron bed for twelve hours while the temperature in a closed-window south-facing room rises to a hundred in the shade – well, the heat and the somnolent inactivity would have been just right for a Galapagos tortoise. It left me as limp as a shot rabbit. They’d kept me there all day, Jablonsky bringing me food and parading me shortly after dinner before the general, Vyland and Royale to let them see how good a watch-dog he was and that I was still relatively intact. Relatively was the word: to increase the effect I’d redoubled my limp and had sticking plaster crossed over cheek and chin.

Royale needed no such adventitious aids to advertise the fact that he had been in the wars. I doubt if they made sticking plaster wide enough to cover the enormous bruise he had on his forehead. His right eye was the same bluish-purple as the bruise, and completely shut. I’d done a good job on Royale: and I knew, for all the empty remote expression that was back in his face and one good eye, that he’d never rest until he’d done a better job on me. A permanent job.

The night air was cool and sweet and full of the smell of the salt air. I had the hood down and as I travelled south I leaned far back and to one side to let the freshness drive away the last of the cobwebs from my dopy mind. It wasn’t just the heat that had made my mind sluggish, I had slept so long during that sticky afternoon that I was overslept and paying for it: but then, I wasn’t going to get much sleep that coming night. Once or twice I thought of Jablonsky, that big black smiling man with the engaging grin, sitting back in his upstairs room diligently and solemnly guarding my empty bedroom with all three keys in his pocket. I felt in my own pocket and they were still there, the duplicates that Jablonsky had had cut that morning when he had taken the air in the direction of Marble Springs. Jablonsky had been busy that morning.

I forgot about Jablonsky. He could take better care of himself than any man I’d ever known. I had enough troubles of my own coming up that night.

The last traces of the brilliant red sunset had just vanished over the wine-dark gulf to the west and the stars were standing clear in the high and windless sky when I saw a green-shaded lantern on the right of the road. I passed it, then a second, then at the third I turned sharp right and ran the Corvette down on to a little stone jetty, switching off my headlights even before I coasted to a standstill beside a tall, bulky man with a tiny pencil flash in his hand.

He took my arm – he had to, I was blind from staring into the glaring white pool of light cast by the Corvette’s headlamps – and led me wordlessly down a flight of wooden steps to a floating landing jetty and across this to a long dark shape that lay rocking gently by the side of the jetty. I was seeing better already, and I managed to grab a stay and jump down into the boat without a helping hand. A squat, short man rose to greet me.