Eric Ambler: The light of day

In my experience, most people are extraordinarily careless about the way they look after traveler’s checks. Just because their counter-signature is required before a check 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 traveler’s checks. What you see, if and when you look, is a blue folder with checks inside. How often do you count the checks to make sure that they are all there? Supposing someone were to remove the bottom check 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 checks 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 traveling, you probably would not even know where. If you did not know when or where, how could you possibly guess who? In any case you would be too late to stop its being cashed.

People who leave traveler’s checks about deserve to lose them.

I took just six checks, 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 checks right in my hands, when Harper walked into the room.

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 like 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 from getting all over my clothes, and felt about among the checks 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 check folder and was putting it back in the suitcase. The checks I had torn out, however, were lying on the bed. He gathered them up and motioned me towards the sitting room.

“In there.”

As I went in, he moved past me to the door and bolted it.

There was a marble-topped commode against the side wall. On the commode was a tray with an ice bucket, a bottle of brandy, and some glasses. He picked up a glass, then looked at me.

“Sit down right there,” he said.

The chair he motioned to was by a writing table under the window. I obeyed orders; there did not seem to be anything else to do. My nose was still bleeding, and I had a headache.

He slopped some brandy into the glass and put it on the table beside me. For a moment or two I felt encouraged. If you are going to have a man arrested you don’t sit him down first and give him a drink. Perhaps it was just going to be a man-to-man chat in which I told him a hard-luck story and said how sorry I was, while he got dewy-eyed over his own magnanimity and decided to give me another chance.

That one did not last long.

He poured himself a drink and then glanced across at me as he put ice in the glass.

“First time you’ve been caught at it, Arthur?”

I blew my nose a little to keep the blood running before I answered. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been tempted, sir. I don’t know what came over me. Perhaps it was the brandy I had with you. I’m not really used to it.”

He turned and stared at me. All at once his face was neither old-young nor young-old. It was white and pinched and his mouth worked in an odd way. I have seen faces go like that before and I braced myself. There was a metal lamp on the writing table beside me. I wondered if I could possibly hit him with it before he got to me.

But he did not move. His eyes flickered towards the bedroom and then back to me.

“You’d better get something straight, Arthur,” he said slowly. “That was just a little roughing up you had in there. If I really start giving you a going over, you’ll leave here on a stretcher. Nobody’s going to mind about that except you. I came back and caught you stealing. You tried to strong-arm your way out of it and I had to defend myself. That’s how it’ll be. So cut out the bull, and the lies. Right?”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Empty your pockets. On this table here.”

I did as I was told.

He looked at everything, my driving license, my permis de sejour, and he touched everything. Finally, of course, he found the pass key in the change purse. I had sawn off the shank of it and cut a slot in the end so that I could use a small coin to turn it, but it was still over two inches long, and heavy. The weight gave it away. He looked at it curiously.

“You make this?”

“Not the key part. I just cut it down.” There seemed no point in trying to lie about that.

He nodded. “That’s better. Okay, we’ll start over. We know you’re a two-bit ponce and we know you heist traveler’s checks from hotel rooms when you get the chance. Do you write the counter-signature yourself?”