Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

The butler was there too. He came down the steps of the porch carrying a huge golf umbrella out into the heavy rain. He didn't look like any butler I'd ever seen. His coat was far too tight round his upper arms, shoulders and chest in a fashion that used to be popular among prohibition gangsters and Ms face did nothing to dispel the impression. He looked first cousin to Valentino, the bodyguard back in the court-room. Or maybe even more closely related. He even had the same broken nose. The general had a weird taste in butlers, especially when you considered his choice of chauffeur.

But the butler seemed courteous enough. At least I thought he was until he saw who it was behind the driving-wheel and then he made a smart about turn, went round the front of the car and escorted Mary Ruthven to the shelter of the porch where she ran forward and threw her arms round her father's neck. Jablonsky and I had to make it alone. We got wet, but no one seemed worried.

By this time the girl had become disentangled from her father. I had a good look at him. He was an immensely tall old coot, thin but not too thin, in a silver-white linen suit. The colour of the suit was a perfect match for the hair. He had a long lean craggy Lincolnesque face, but just how craggy it was impossible to say for almost half of it was hidden behind a luxuriant white moustache and beard. He didn't look like any big business magnate I'd ever come across, but with 285 million dollars he didn't have to. He looked like the way I'd expected a Southern judge to look and didn't.

"Come in, gentlemen," he said courteously. I wondered if he included me among the three other men standing in the shadows in the porch. It seemed unlikely, but I went in all the same. I hadn't much option. Not only was Jablonsky's Mauser jammed into the small of my back but another man who'd just stepped out of the shadows also carried a gun. We trooped across a huge, wide, chandelier-lit, tessellated-tile floored hall, down a broad passage and into a large room. I'd been right about the room anyway. It was a library, it did have a blazing pine fire and the slightly oily smell of fine leather-bound books mingled very pleasantly with the aroma of expensive Coronas and a high-class Scotch. I noticed there was nobody there smoking cigars. The walls that weren't covered with book-shelves were panelled in polished elm. Chairs and settees were in dark gold leather and moquette, and the curtains of shot gold. A bronze-coloured carpet flowed over the floor from wall to wall and with a strong enough draught the nap on it would have waved and undulated like a wind-rippled field of summer corn. As it was, the chair castors were so deeply sunk in it as to be almost invisible.

"Scotch, Mr. — ah-? the general asked Jablonsky.

"Jablonsky. I don't mind, General. While I'm standing. And while I'm waiting."

"Waiting for what, Mr. Jablonsky?" General Ruthven had a quiet pleasant voice with very little inflection in it. With 285 bucks you don't have to shout to make yourself heard.

"Ain't you the little kidder, now?" Jablonsky was as quiet, as unruffled as the general. "For the little paper, General, with your name signed at the bottom. For the fifty thousand iron men."

"Of course." The general seemed faintly surprised that Jablonsky should think it necessary to remind him of the agreement. He crossed to the dressed-stone mantelpiece, pulled a yellow bank slip from under a paper-weight. "I have it here, just the payee's name to be filled in." I thought a slight smile touched his mouth but under all that foliage it was difficult to be sure. "And you needn't worry about my phoning the bank with instructions not to honour this cheque. Such is not my way of doing business."

"I know it's not, General."

"And my daughter is worth infinitely more to me than this. I must thank you, sir, for bringing her back."

"Yeah." Jablonsky took the cheque, glanced casually at it, then looked at the general, a speculative glint in his eye.

"Your pen slipped, General." he drawled. "I asked for fifty thousand. You got seventy thousand here."

"Correct." Ruthven inclined his head and glanced at me. "I had offered ten thousand dollars for information about this man here. I also feel that I'm morally bound to make good the five thousand offered by the authorities. It's so much easier to make out one lump-sum cheque to one person, don't you agree?"

"And the extra five thousand?"

"For your trouble and the pleasure it will give me to hand this man over to the authorities personally." Again I couldn't be sure whether or not he smiled. "I can afford to indulge those whims, you know."

"Your pleasure is my pleasure, General. I'll be on my way, then. Sure you can handle this fellow? He's tough, fast, tricky as they come."

"I have people who can handle him." It was plain that the general wasn't referring to the butler and another uniformed servant hovering in the background. He pressed a bell, and when some sort of footman came to the door, said: "Ask Mr. Vyland and Mr. Royale to come in, will you, Fletcher?"

"Why don't you ask them yourself, General?" To my way of thinking I was the central figure in that little group, but they hadn't even asked me to speak, so I thought it was time to say something. I bent down to the bowl of artificial flowers on the table by the fire, and pulled up a fine-meshed microphone. "This room's bugged. A hundred gets one your friends have heard every word that's been said. For a millionaire and high society flier, Ruthven, you have some strange habits." I broke off and looked at the trio who had just come through the doorway. "And even stranger friends."

Which wasn't quite an accurate statement. The first man in looked perfectly at home in that luxurious setting. He was of medium height, medium build, dressed in a perfectly cut dinner suit and smoking a cigar as long as your arm. That was the expensive smell I'd picked up as soon as I had come into the library. He was in his early fifties, with black hair touched by grey at the temples: his neat clipped moustache was jet black. His face was smooth and unlined and deeply sunburnt. He was Hollywood's ideal of a man to play the part of a top executive, smooth, urbane and competent to a degree. It was only when he came closer and you saw the eyes and the set of the planes of his face that you realised that here was a toughness, both physical and mental, and a hardness that you would never see around a movie set. A man to watch.

The second man was more off-beat. It was hard to put a finger on the quality that made him so. He was dressed in a soft grey flannel suit, white shirt and grey tie of the same shade as the suit. He was slightly below medium height, broadly built, with a pale face and smooth slicked hair almost the same colour as Mary Ruthven's. It wasn't until you looked again and again that you saw what made him off-beat, it wasn't anything he had, it was something he didn't have. He had the most expressionless face, the emptiest eyes I had ever seen in any man.

Off-beat was no description for the man who brought up the rear. He belonged in that library the way Mozart would have belonged in a rock and roll club. He was only twenty-one or two, tall, skinny, with a dead-white face and coal-black eyes. The eyes were never still, they moved restlessly from side to side as if it hurt them to be still, flickering from one face to another like a will-o'-the-wisp on an autumn evening. I didn't notice what he wore, all I saw was his face. The face of a hophead, a junky, an advanced dope addict. Take away his white powder for even twenty-four hours and he'd be screaming his head off as all the devils in hell closed in on him.

"Come in, Mr. Vyland." The general was speaking to the man with the cigar and I wished for the tenth time that old Ruthven's expression wasn't so hard to read. He nodded in my direction. "This is Talbot, the wanted man. And this is Mr. Jablonsky, the man who brought him back."