James Chase: Mission to Siena

Police constable Elliott stood in a shop doorway and surveyed the east side of the square with placid indifference.

It was a dark, wet November night; the time was a few minutes after eleven o’clock, and because of the rain and the hour, the square was deserted.

It had been raining steadily for the past three hours. Water gurgled in the gutters and dripped from the street lamps that made yellow pools on the glistening pavement. A cold wind added to the misery of the wet, and Elliott thought longingly of his comfortable sitting-room, the bright fire that would be burning, and of his wife who he hoped would be thinking of him. He scowled up at the dark sky, looking for a break in the clouds.

A woman’s voice said, “Can you please direct me to Polsen’s hotel?”

Elliott lowered his gaze and regarded the girl who stood before him. Her back was to the street lamp and he wasn’t able to see much of her. She was wearing a white mackintosh and a close-fitting black hat, and she carried in her right hand a canvas and leather hold-all.

She spoke with a foreign accent that could have been Spanish or Italian. Elliott, who was no language scholar, couldn’t decide which it was.

“Polsen’s hotel, miss?”

“Yes.”

“A hundred yards up on the right.”

He stepped out of the shelter of the doorway and pointed. The girl turned to look in the direction he indicated, and the light from the street lamp fell on her face.

Elliott decided she would be twenty-five or six. The first thing he noticed was her red gold hair that showed just below her hat: a tone of colour he had never seen before. Her eyes were set wide apart, and as far as he could judge in the uncertain light, appeared to be as green as emeralds. There was a sensual quality in her beauty that aroused the male in him, something that hadn’t happened to him in years.

“Thank you,” the girl said and made to move on.

“Just a moment, miss,” Elliott said. “If you are a stranger to London, I ought to tell you that Polsen’s hotel isn’t much.”

The girl looked away across the wet square. He wasn’t sure if she were listening to what he was saying.

“It’s got a bad reputation, miss,” Elliott went on. “It’s not the sort of place a young lady like you should stay at.”

The girl looked at him.

“Thank you. I am not staying there,” she said. “Good night.”

She turned and walked quickly away into the rain and darkness, leaving Elliott looking after her, frowning.

He lifted his massive shoulders under his glistening cape. Well, he had warned her, he told himself. He couldn’t do more than that. He wondered who she was and where she had come from. He wondered too why she was going to Polsen’s hotel. Polsen’s was one of the many room-by-the-hour-and-no-questions-asked hotels in the district: no worse than the others, but distinctly unsavoury and sordid.

He shook his head. You wouldn’t have thought a girl like that… Then because he had been on the same beat for fifteen years and was utterly bored with the routine, he ceased to ponder why she should be going to the hotel. If he worried about the actions of everyone who asked him the way, he told himself, his life would become a burden.

He moved on, carrying the image of the girl’s beauty with him on his lonely, wet patrol.

Jack Dale, the night clerk of Polsen’s hotel, watched the fat, elderly man hurry across the dingy hall to the revolving door and disappear into the rain.

He shrugged his thin shoulders. He supposed the fat man had a train to catch. He grinned cynically, wondering what tale he would tell his wife to account for his lateness. It was the elderly and the married who came to Polsen’s.

A girl, her shabby cloth coat showing large damp catches, came down the stairs. Any claim she had to prettiness was marred by granite-hard eyes and a thin, bitter mouth.

She came over to Dale and tossed a key on the ink-stained blotter. She dropped a crumpled pound note beside the key.

“Going out again?” Dale asked as he picked up the note and slid it into a drawer. “It’s raining like hell.”

“Of course I’m going out again,” the girl said crossly. “I haven’t made enough this week to pay the rent. If this rain goes on much longer, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Dale grinned.

“The same old story,” he said, turning to hang the key on the key rack behind him. “If it’s not the rain, it’s something else.”

“You can talk,” the girl said bitterly. “You don’t have to stand in the rain hour after hour.”

“Go away,” Dale said. “You’re breaking my heart.”

He watched her walk down the steps into the wet darkness, shrugged his shoulders and reached for the Evening Standard. He was reading the football news when the girl in the white mackintosh came in.

He looked up, wondering what she wanted. She was a new one to him, and what a looker! He straightened and showed his discoloured teeth in a leering grin.

“Is Mr Crantor in?” the girl asked, her green eyes looking straight at him.

Dale stared at her.

“Yes, he’s in. Room 26, on the first floor. He said for you to go up.”

The girl turned away, crossed the hall and walked briskly up the stairs.

Dale whistled silently.

What in the world did a piece like that’ want with Crantor? he asked himself. Crantor of all people. She had a hold-all with her. Was she staying? If she didn’t come down in an hour, he’d better telephone Crantor.

The girl walked down the dimly lit corridor until she reached room No. 26. She paused outside the door and listened for a moment. Hearing no sound from within the room, she knocked with a gloved hand.

The door opened and Crantor stood in the doorway.

“There you are,” he said, and his single eye moved over her. “I was beginning to wonder if you were coming.”

She followed him into the large bed-sitting-room.

A shaded reading lamp made a pool of light on the large table on which lay a litter of papers. The rest of the room was in heavy shadows. Neither Crantor nor the girl could see much of each other.

“It’s a filthy night,” Crantor said. “Take off your mac. I’ll hang it in the bathroom.”

The girl took off the white mackintosh and her hat and gave them to him. She shook out her hair and crossed over to the mirror above the gas fire.

As Crantor carried the wet things into the bathroom that led off the bed-sitting-room, he thumbed down the light switch, lighting up the big shabby room.

He took his time hanging the wet mackintosh over a chair, then he came back and stood in the bathroom door and looked over at her.

Go on, he said to himself, take a good look at me. Let’s see how strong your stomach is, you red-headed beauty.

The girl was wanning the back of her slim legs before the gas fire. She was fumbling for a cigarette as she glanced up and saw him in the full light from the overhead lamp.

It was during the battle for Cassino that Crantor received his face wounds. Redhot splinters of a mortar shell had mangled his features almost beyond repair. Plastic surgeons had worked patiently on him, and considering what he had looked like before he passed through their hands, they succeeded in achieving a minor miracle in giving him some resemblance to a human being. His left eye was covered with a black patch; his thin, cruel mouth was twisted down, and showed some of his lower teeth, fixing his face in a ferocious snarl. The rest of his features looked as if they had been moulded by someone doodling in putty.

The surgeons had told him to let the scars heal and then come back for another series of operations. They assured him in a year or so they would make him a passable-looking guy.