Donald Hamilton: The Devastators

There was a sudden, sharp, echoing noise below. I heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet going into flesh, and the little yellow man sighed and collapsed on top of his long knife. Footsteps rushed up the stairs, and I heard the reassuring voice of Les Crowe-Barham,I guess I knew him well enough to call him Les despite his title. I'd saved his life once and now he'd saved mine.

I glanced toward Walling, above me. Something glittered in his hand as he hesitated; then he threw it aside and fled upwards. I started after him instinctively, but there was no real point in being heroic with a four-inch knife when there was a gun handy, and I threw myself down and sideways to clear the line of fire for Crowe-Barham. Briefly, the stairway was full of sound once more, and I heard the bullets go past. They sounded unpleasantly close. Any bullet you can hear sounds unpleasantly close.

Walling made it to the third-floor landing unhit. Les came charging past me, still wearing his chauffeur's cap, taking the stairs two at a time. I sat up, and saw the weapon Walling had thrown aside: a small hypodermic syringe. It wasn't exactly what I'd expected. I started to reach for it, but Les was calling me from above, and I let the hypo go and scrambled up there. The door marked Oriental Exports was open. I went through it, and through the outer office, and found Les, just beyond the next door, bending over a body face down on the floor. He turned it over and looked up at me. I shook my head.

"Wrong man," I said. "Besides, even if you'd hit the guy on the stairs, which you didn't, this one's been dead for hours."

Les drew a long breath and walked deliberately to the rear of the office and opened a door, revealing a small hallway and another door leading to a kind of fire escape or outside stairway, which in turn led down into a courtyard. There was no fugitive in sight. Les put his gun away in his hip pocket. Well, every man to his own taste. I've never believed in sitting on my armaments, but techniques do vary.

We returned to the body on the floor. It was that of a middle-aged man of medium height with stiff sandy hair and a narrow little moustache. The back of the head had been smashed in, perhaps by the blackjack I'd already encountered. The fingers of the right hand were pretty badly mangled. A pair of bloody pliers lay nearby, not the most original of torture implements, but reasonably effective. I wondered if the dead man had talked, and if so, what he had had to talk about.

"Anybody you know?" I asked Les.

"Permit me to introduce you, old fellow. Mr. Matthew Helm, Mr. Ernest Walling. We've been keeping an eye on him for, ah, various reasons." He glanced at me sharply as he said it.

I said only, "Some eye."

"Also an ear," Les said. He sighed. "Sometimes I think we were better off before the profession became so cluttered with electronics. Operatives tend to sit on their rear elevations and trust the machines to do the work, instead of using their legs and brains. But my present chief is a great believer in modern equipment." He shrugged. "Walling was heard to go out for lunch. He was heard to reenter his office on the floor above. At least our fellow assumed it was Walling. Obviously he was wrong."

"Sure. They grabbed him as he came up the stairs, got as much information out of him as they needed, and another man took his place to greet me. Who was the impostor?" Les didn't answer. I glanced at him and said, "In case you didn't get a good look at the guy over your sights, he was about five-nine, about one-fifty, I'd say in his middle forties. Sandy hair and moustache like our friend here, but that's subject to change, of course. His most distinctive feature was the eyes: gray and kind of slaty-looking. He was very good, whoever he was. A little on the cautious side-he wasn't much use in the hassle, and he lit right out when the shooting started-but as an actor he was very good indeed. He lectured me on genealogy as if it were the passion of his life. I bought him completely, I'll admit, until he trotted out an accomplice who was a little too sinister to be true."

Les hesitated. "Do you still claim you are in London merely for a honeymoon, old chap? Even after this attempt to kill you?"

I remembered the hypodermic on the stairs and started to say that I wasn't certain now that homicide had been intended, at least not immediately. The fact that there had been a hypo loaded and ready made it look more like kidnapping. There are easier ways of killing a man than sticking him with a needle, but it's a convenient method of keeping him asleep after you've sapped him down from behind. It depended on what the thing contained, of course, but I remembered that various other agents had disappeared for a while before they had reappeared dead. But this wasn't information I was supposed to have.

I grinned at my British colleague. "And do you still insist that you called me up just to congratulate me on my marriage and offer me a car, old chap?" He looked a little embarrassed and didn't answer right away. I said, "Come on, be a pal, tell me who the guy was."

Les said rather stiffly, "If you insist that you are not officially involved, then I must insist that I can't discuss-"

"Sure, sure," I said. "It doesn't matter. A man like that will be in the files. I'U have a list of the possibilities, and what they're working on currently, as soon I phone the description to Washington… Wait a minute." I'd been doing some heavy thinking about the impersonator. I said, "Take away the moustache and the nervous manner, give him short gray hair and about twenty pounds more weight, and who have you got? Do you remember a certain ingenious gent named Basil?"

"Basil is dead." Les didn't really mean it. He was just trying it out to hear how it sounded. He was always a little too tricky for his own good. "Basil was executed for party disloyalty about eighteen months ago, in Moscow."

I said, "Sure. Basil is supposed to have bet on the wrong political horse. He's supposed to have got himself purged or liquidated or whatever the current euphemism may be. That's what it says on the official record-and how many officially dead men have you seen come back to life? I don't ever cross them off unless I get to bury them myself, and then I want to dig them up every couple of years to make sure they're still there. Basil, eh?"

Les sighed. "Very well. From your description, it probably was Basil. He's certainly involved. You have a good memory, old chap."

"It may be good but it's too damn slow. I wasn't expecting to walk in on a masquerade, but I really should have spotted him. Of course, I've never met him before, but I've studied his dossier plenty of times. Were his supposed disgrace and death just a cover-up for something tricky? I mean, is he still doing business for the same old firm, or did he actually get into trouble, escape execution somehow, and take employment elsewhere?" I waited, got no answer, and glanced at Les irritably. "Oh, for God's sake, man, give your security a rest!"

He said reluctantly, "We have reason to believe that Basil has changed allegiance, but we do not know who his new employers are. Now you'd better stop trying to get something for nothing, old boy, and leave quickly, unless you want to spend several hours in a police station. I will take care of the official explanations. Use the back stairs. Sorry not to be able to drive you back to the hotel, but you can catch the underground just beyond the square."

"Sure," I said. I went to the door, remembered my manners, and looked back. "Oh, incidentally," I said, "thanks. They had me boxed. I never heard a Browning sound prettier."

His long horse face looked embarrassed. He said, "Be careful leaving, old boy. Basil may still be hanging around."

After battling treacherous impersonators and mysterious Asiatics, riding the subway seemed anticlimactic. So did my visit to a quiet library where I checked out the Scots Peerage reference Basil had given me, in his character of Walling. I found it quite genuine. I also, with the help of the librarian, checked on Ann McRue and learned that it was, as I'd been told, supposed to have died out-or been killed off-over two hundred years ago. I wondered if Basil was regretting having given me this much information. Apparently he'd played the Walling part straight, that being the easiest way. After all, I wasn't supposed to be going anywhere with what I'd learned.