Аврам Дэвидсон: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 67, No. 3. Whole No. 388, March 1976

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” the man said.

“Do I know you?” she asked. “Or rather, should I know you, since I don’t know you?” She laughed.

“I’m Jason Dark,” he said, “which I’m sure doesn’t mean anything to you. You must be Elizabeth Stanton.”

“Everybody calls me Liz,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Jason.”

He had passed his fiftieth birthday but somehow she wasn’t fresh; she was just being very natural.

“What’s with your hand? I mean that black glove,” she said.

No adult would have asked that direct question. Jason Dark’s mouth tightened into a thin line for an instant, then it relaxed. “An accident,” he said.

“Is your hand scarred or something?” she asked.

“It isn’t really a hand,” he said. “It’s just a plastic substitute.”

“Oh, wow!” the girl said, interested but not shocked. “How did it happen?”

How it happened she wasn’t going to know, but the question sent unwanted images rushing across Jason Dark’s memory screen. He could see his hand strapped to the butcher’s block in the kitchen of the deserted restaurant; he could feel the agony as the man in the black ski-mask brought the flat side of the meat cleaver down on his hand, crushing the bones; he could hear his own unashamed screaming as ski-mask began to chop his hand to ribbons with the blade of the cleaver; he remembered being dumped in Central Park, in New York, and the tourniquet being applied to his arm by a shocked park policeman, who kept swearing under his breath; he could see the neat job the surgeon had done to finish the amputation.

“It got crushed in an accident,” Dark said to the girl.

“Were you right-handed?” she asked.

Damn her persistence, he thought, but not angrily. She was just a curious child. “Well, I’m having to learn to write again. And it’s hard to eat in public. In private, I can hold a steak down with this plastic hand and cut with my left. I can hold down a steak no matter how hot it is because there’s no feeling in this.” He held up the black gloved thing.

Her eyes clouded. “I don’t think I want to talk about it any more, Jason,” she said.

“I don’t want to talk about it, either,” he said. He smiled at her. “Tell me, where did they hold you, Liz?”

Her eyes widened with excitement. “It was in a little cottage by the ocean. I never saw how we got there so I don’t know—” She stopped, clapping a hand over her mouth. “Oh, gee, I promised Daddy not to talk to anybody about it. Not anybody! ”

“So we’ll forget you said anything,” Dark said.

A young man came out of the house and over to where Dark was sitting “The Senator will see you now, Mr. Dark. He’s sorry to have kept you waiting.”

“No sweat,” Dark said. He stood up. “See you around, Liz.”

“I’d like that, Jason.”

Dark followed the Senator’s aide toward the house.

“She’s very quick with first names,” the young man said.

“Rather nice, though,” Dark said. “It helps you to know right away whether she likes you or not.”

Senator Rufus Stanton was in his second term in the United States Senate, elected overwhelmingly by his Midwestern constituency. He was a young vigorous man with an attractive smile, light blue, rather shrewd eyes, and hair the color of his daughter’s.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Dark,” the Senator said. He looked up from the desk in his study, lined with calf-bound law books. He waved Dark to a chair. “I suppose you’re disappointed in me.”

“Astounded is more nearly the right word,” Dark said. He fished a cigarette out of his left-hand jacket pocket, put it between his lips, then produced a lighter from the same pocket. He narrowed his eyes against the smoke. He was just beginning to manage simple things, like lighting a cigarette with his left hand.

The young Senator’s voice sounded ragged with fatigue. “I thought about it and thought about it, Dark, and I finally decided not to make the speech in support of the new bill. I voted for it, of course.”

“And it lost by two votes,” Dark said. “A speech by you in support, with your eloquence, Senator, might have turned a dozen doubters into supporters. They were waiting for it. And so Quadrant International and a hundred other multinational corporations will continue to spread out over the globe like monstrous spiders!” Dark’s voice had risen slightly, but now it was low again. “Well, at least, thank God she wasn’t hurt.”

The Senator’s head jerked up, his eyes wide. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The sunlight streaming through the study windows glinted on Jason Dark’s tinted glasses. “You are a man whose integrity is beyond question, Senator. You are dedicated. You used information I supplied you with, plus the investigations of your personal staff, to build a case against multinational corporations in general and Quadrant International in particular. A speech from you on the Senate floor in support of the Wilson-Strohmeyer Bill would have put a crimp in the indecent profits and the actual anti-American operations. You backed off at the last minute. I tried to guess why, and I could come up with only one answer. Someone had kidnaped your daughter. To get her back you had to keep your mouth shut.”

“What nonsense!” Stanton said.

“They held her in a little cottage by the ocean,” Dark said. “She couldn’t see how they got there, so she can’t tell where it is.”

“Oh, my God!” Stanton said, his voice shaking.

“I’m sorry, Senator. I threw her a curve. She spoke a sentence and a half before she realized she was breaking her promise to you to say nothing to anyone about it.”

“You’ll never be able to guess what it was like,” Stanton said, turning his head from side to side, pain etched on his face. “Everything I believed in, everything I’d spent months working on was at stake. The Vice-President kept looking down at me, knowing I was going to make a speech in support of the bill, waiting for me to ask for the floor, to be recognized. And all the while I could hear that voice on the phone. ‘Make your speech, Senator, and you will never see your daughter alive again.’ What else could I do, Dark, knowing they had Liz? It was right, wasn’t it? She was returned, safe and sound, less than an hour after the Wilson-Strohmeyer Bill was defeated.”

“I guess I would have done the same thing,” Dark said. “She’s a lovely child.”

“She’s mine, my flesh and blood!”

Dark nodded. “So the milk is spilled, Senator. There’s no point in crying over it. I have to go on with the fight, even if you can’t.”

“How can I help?”

“You could turn over your files to me, the information collected by your staff. I think I know it all, but there might be something there I’ve missed.”

The Senator picked up his phone and gave an order to his secretary. He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve never asked you something that interests me, Dark. I know you were a policeman before you became a private investigator.”

“Twenty-two years as a cop and a detective,” Dark said. “Then five years on my own.”

“You gave all that up for a private crusade against Quadrant International,” the Senator said. “Why?”

The end of Dark’s cigarette glowed red as he took a deep drag on it. “You are a decent, liberal idealist, Senator,” he said. “You were for legislation that would curb the power of the multinational corporations. All of them, not just Quadrant International. You don’t like them because some of them buy elections in countries where there are elections, and even help arrange governments by assassinations in countries where the people have no voice. I have another reason. High up in the chain of command of Quadrant International is the man who gave the order for this!” Dark’s voice shook. He held out his black plastic hand.