Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Jablonsky." Vyland smiled in a friendly fashion and put his hand out. "I'm the general's chief production engineer." Sure, he was the general's chief production engineer, that made me President of the United States. Vyland nodded at the man in the grey suit. "This is Mr. Royale, Mr. Jablonsky."

"Mr. Jablonsky! Mr. Jablonsky!" The words weren't spoken, they were hissed by the tall thin boy with the staring eyes. His hand dived under the lapel of his jacket and I had to admit he was fast. The gun trembled in his hand. He swore, three unprintable words in succession, and the eyes were glazed and mad. "I've waited two long years for this, you — Damn you, Royale! Why did—?"

"There's a young lady here, Larry." I could have sworn that Royale's hand hadn't reached under his coat, or for his hip pocket, but there had been no mistaking the flash of dulled metal in his hand, the sharp crack of the barrel on Larry's wrist and the clatter of the boy's gun bouncing off a brass-topped table. As an example of sleight-of-hand conjuring, I'd never seen anything to beat it.

"We know Mr. Jablonsky," Royale was continuing. His voice was curiously musical and soothing and soft. "At least, Larry and I know. Don't we, Larry? Larry did six months once on a narcotics charge. It was Jablonsky that sent him up."

"Jablonsky sent—" the general began.

"Jablonsky." Royale smiled and nodded at the big man. "Detective-Lieutenant Herman Jablonsky, of New York Homicide."

It was one of those silences. It went on and on and on.

Pregnant, they call it. It didn't worry me much, I was for the high jump anyway. It was the general who spoke first and his voice and face were stiff and cold as he looked at the man in the dinner suit.

"What is the explanation of this outrageous conduct, Vyland?" he demanded. "You bring into this house a man who is apparently not only a narcotics addict and carries a gun, but who has also served a prison sentence. As for the presence of a police officer, someone might care to inform

"Relax, General. You can drop the front." It was Royale who spoke, his voice quiet and soothing as before and curiously devoid of any trace of insolence. "I wasn't quite accurate. Ex-Detective-Lieutenant, I should have said. Brightest boy in the bureau in his day, first narcotics, then homicide, more arrests and more convictions for arrests than any other police officer in the eastern states. But your foot slipped, didn't it, Jablonsky?"

Jablonsky said nothing and his face showed nothing, but it didn't mean he wasn't thinking plenty. My face showed nothing, but I was thinking plenty. I was thinking how I could try to get away. The servants had vanished at a wave of the hand from the general and, for the moment, everyone seemed to have lost interest in me. I turned my head casually. I was wrong, there was someone who hadn't lost interest in me. Valentino, my court-room acquaintance, was standing in the passageway just outside the open door, and the interest he was taking in me more than made up for the lack of interest in the library. I was pleased to see that he was carrying his right arm in a sling. His left thumb was hooked in the side pocket of his coat, and although he might have had a big thumb it wasn't big enough to make all that bulge in his pocket. He would just love to see me trying to get away.

"Jablonsky here was the central figure in the biggest police scandal to hit New York since the war," Royale was saying. "All of a sudden there were a lot of murders — important murders — in his parish, and Jablonsky boobed on the lot. Everyone knew a protection gang was behind the killings. Everybody except Jablonsky. All Jablonsky knew was that he was getting ten grand a stiff to look in every direction but the right one. But he had even more enemies inside the force than outside, and they nailed him. Eighteen months ago it was, and he had the headlines to himself for an entire week. Don't you remember, Mr. Vyland?"

"Now I do," Vyland nodded. "Sixty thousand tucked away and they never laid a finger on a cent. Three years he got, wasn't it?"

"And out in eighteen months," Royale finished. "Jumped the wall, Jablonsky?"

"Good conduct remission," Jablonsky said calmly. "A respectable citizen again. Which is more than could be said for you, Royale. You employing this man, General?"

"I fail to see—"

"Because if you are, it'll cost you a hundred bucks more than you think. A hundred bucks is the price Royale usually charges his employers for a wreath for his victims. A very fancy wreath. Or has the price gone up, Royale? And who are you putting the ringer on this time?"

Nobody said anything. Jablonsky had the floor.

"Royale here is listed in the police files of half the states in the Union, General. Nobody's ever pinned anything on him yet, but they know all about him. No. 1 remover in the United States, not furniture but people. He charges high, but he's good and there's never any comeback. A free-lance, and his services are in terrific demand by all sorts of people you'd never dream of, not only because he never fails to give satisfaction but also because of the fact that it's a point of Royale's code that he'll never touch a man who has employed him. An awful lot of people sleep an awful lot easier, General, just because they know they're on Royale's list of untouchables." Jablonsky rubbed a bristly chin with a hand the size of a shovel. "I wonder who he could be after this time, General? Could it even be yourself, do you think?"

For the first time the general registered emotion. Not even the beard and moustache could hide a narrowing of the eyes, a tightening of the lips and a slight but perceptible draining of colour from the cheeks. He wet his lips, slowly, and looked at Vyland.

"Did you know anything of this? What truth is there "Jablonsky's just shooting off the top of his mouth," Vyland interjected smoothly. "Let's get them into another room, General. We must talk."

Ruthven nodded, his face still pale, and Vyland glanced at Royale. Royale smiled and said without inflection: "All right, you two, out. Leave that gun there, Jablonsky."

"And if I don't?"

"You haven't cashed that cheque yet," Royale said obliquely. They'd been listening, all right.

Jablonsky put his gun on the table. Royale himself didn't have a gun in his hand. With the speed he could move at it would have been quite superfluous anyway. The hophead, Larry, came up behind me and dug his pistol barrel in my kidney with a force that made me grunt in pain. Nobody said anything, so I said: "Do that again, hophead, and it'll take a dentist a whole day to repair your face." So he did it again, twice as painfully as before, and when I swung round he was too quick for me and caught me with the barrel of his gun high up on the face and raked the sight down my cheek. Then he stood off, four feet away, gun pointed at my lower stomach and those crazy eyes jumping all over the place, a wicked smile on his face inviting me to jump him. I mopped some of the blood off my face and turned and went out the door.

Valentino was waiting for me, gun in hand and heavy boots on his feet, and by the time Royale came leisurely out of the library, closed the door behind him and stopped Valentino with a single word, I couldn't walk. There's nothing wrong with my thigh, it's carried me around for years, but it's not made of oak and Valentino wore toe-plates on his boots. It just wasn't my lucky night. Jablonsky helped me off the floor into an adjacent room. I stopped at the doorway, looked back at the grinning Valentino and then at Larry, and I wrote them both down in my little black book.

We spent perhaps ten minutes in that room, Jablonsky and I sitting, the hophead pacing up and down with the gun in his hand and hoping I would twitch an eyebrow, Royale leaning negligently against a table, nobody saying anything, until by and by the butler came in and said the general wanted to see us. We all trooped out again. Valentino was still there, but I made it safely to the library. Maybe he'd hurt his toe, but I knew it wasn't that: Royale had told him once to lay off, and just once would be all that Royale would have to tell anybody anything.