Джон Пристли - The Doomsday Men

There were plenty of noisy groups, but now the problem was-and Dr. Hooker considered it carefully-how to attach himself to one of them. He was well acquainted with several delicate techniques, but the technique by means of which one young American scientist, hiding from the police, became an accepted member of a gang of Oxfordshire lads and lasses playing the fool at a fair was quite unknown to him. He cautiously descended from the switchback, but could not see the inspector. There was no blue helmet in sight anywhere. So far, so good. And now what? He stood hesitating at the entrance to another side-show ( Demo-the Electric Wonder Man ), among a little crowd who were being roared at by Demo’s showman, when he discovered that somebody was talking to him. It was a young man with a round red face, tousled fair hair, and a canary-coloured pull-over. He was arm-in-arm with two giggling young women, and he was genially but definitely drunk.

“Ol’ boy,” he was saying solemnly, “tha’s a hell of a nose you got there, ol’ boy. For moment, put wind up me that nose did, ol’ boy. Thought it was-real. Didn’d I, girls? Ab-so-lulely true, ol’ boy.” And he wagged his blond tousled head with great solemnity.

This was Hooker’s chance, and, feeling less shy than usual behind this nose, he snapped at it. He invited the trio to see Demo the Electric Wonder Man with him, hinting that he knew all about electricity and could see through fifty Wonder men. So in they went, with a warm, moist, giggly girl hanging on to Hooker’s arm. Demo’s tricks were stale stuff to the American, who explained them to his party. Unfortunately the blond young man insisted on repeating these explanations at the top of his voice, with the result that they were asked to leave, and the blond young man nearly had a fight, and both girls clung hotly and moistly to Hooker, and it looked like being unpleasant. But Hooker got the three of them safely out, brought them to a comparatively quiet dark place behind the show tent, and there they held a meeting. The girls, who had been scared, were rather indignant now with their friend, the blond young man, whose name was Ronnie. They now declared he had had too much.

“Properly over-stepped the mark, that’s what you’ve done, Ronnie,” cried one of them angrily. “And how you’re going to drive us home, I don’t know-what you say, kid?”

The other agreed, and would not accept Ronnie’s assurance that he was quite all right. “Quite all nothing!” she said emphatically.

Again, this was Hooker’s chance, and he took it. “Let me drive you all home,” he said. The girls instantly agreed, for now they had great confidence in the tall stranger with the false nose.

“But it’s Newbury,” they told him, doubtfully. “How’ll you get home?”

He waved this aside, made them all link arms again, and steered the party towards the entrance. They were a noisy little group all right, and looked no different from dozens of others. And they passed within two yards of a policeman at the entrance. Hooker never looked at the face under the helmet; he was taking no chances; so he never knew if it was the same policeman who had seen him at the Old Farm. Whether it was or not, the group system worked; and five minutes later they were rattling down the road in Ronnie’s little old open car, with Hooker at the wheel reminding himself to keep to the left; and during the next dozen miles they successfully passed several policemen. All the way to Newbury, Ronnie and the girl at the back with him flirted and quarrelled, slapped and kissed, while the girl at Hooker’s side talked without ceasing, telling him about her two sisters, her brother, her brother’s wife, her uncle in Australia, and all the people she worked with in the shop. At Newbury, which appeared to have gone to bed, Hooker removed his comic nose and hat, was suddenly and very tenderly embraced by the young woman who had sat by him, and was then shown where to wait for a late cross-country bus that would take him nearer to the coast. He sat there in the little waiting-room, wearing an old cloth cap that Ronnie had found at the back of the car and had insisted upon his taking. The only other people, a sleepy elderly country couple, sitting among a host of paper packages, did not seem to notice anything surprising about his appearance. No policeman came to disturb them. When the almost empty bus arrived, and he was able to stretch himself out on the back seat, with the cap almost covering his face, no questions were asked and there were no sudden halts. The bus rumbled steadily through the night towards the sea.

And Hooker, going again over the events of the evening, remembered now a last shout he had heard from the inspector, addressed to Engelfield’s brother Henry. The name he had heard then was one vaguely familiar to him at home, and he dozed off muttering it to himself: MacMichael.

Jimmy Edlin, who had been in many of the strange cities of this world, had now returned to the newest and strangest of them all, that vast conglomeration and gaily-coloured higgledy-piggledy of unending boulevards, vacant lots, oil derricks, cardboard bungalows, retired farmers, fortune-tellers, real estate dealers, film stars, false prophets, affluent pimps, women in pyjamas turning on victrolas, radio men lunching on aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, Middle-Western grandmothers, Chinese grandfathers, Mexican uncles, and Philippino cousins, known as Los Angeles. It was not Jimmy’s native city: he had no native city; he was the son of a wandering Irish-American father and an English mother; and since his late teens, thirty years ago, he had roamed the world trying this and that, and had prospected for gold, dredged for platinum, sold advertising space, imported watches and cheap bracelets and fountain-pens, exported rubber and ivory and Chinese pigtails, been a ship’s purser, newspaper proprietor (in Alaska), publicity man, general merchant, owner of a restaurant (Shanghai), made tidy fortunes and lost them, and had a roaring good time. For the last few years he had been in China, chiefly in Shanghai, but had cleared out when the Japanese came, after converting a great many Mexican dollars and similar currency into two respectable banking accounts, one in London, the other here in Los Angeles. He had not returned at once to California, however, but had gone down to Honolulu, to taste the first fruits of his temporary retirement, and would still have been there if he had not received startling and very bad news. His only brother, Phil, who for years had been on the staff of the Los Angeles Herald - Telegram , had been discovered in the back room of a small down-town cafe-murdered. Jimmy had caught the first boat-there was only the boat, for the Clipper was not available-but had landed days after the funeral, and now the story of the Phil Edlin murder had vanished from the front pages, there having been two more murders, a prominent suicide, one large and two small political scandals, a juicy film star divorce with “love-nest revelations,” since then to blacken those pages. Phil Edlin, in that back room with a great hole in his chest, was now old news, and was being rapidly forgotten. Yet there were some, of course, who remembered.

His wife, Florence, had taken it pretty hard. Jimmy had met her only once before, some years ago, and had not liked her much. One of these peevish thin blondes, slopping about the apartment all morning, eating candy and turning on the radio, then spending hours titivating herself up to go shopping or to the movies, never settling down properly to the job of being a wife, a stenographer without an office to go to, who thought the twin-bed just pensioned her off for life, and was always grumbling because the pension was not bigger every three months: that is how Jimmy had seen her then. But now, still in deep black, with the tears welling into her eyes as she told the damnable story all over again, her looks gone to hell, she seemed to him-as he was easy and rather sentimental in his judgment of women, like most men of his kind-a truer figure of a woman than he had thought she was. Indeed, he felt conscience-stricken, for not only had he probably misjudged Flo, but he felt too that he ought to have taken more time off to see poor old Phil. Too late now, but he was still angry about the murder; and, so far as he could judge, about the only person in Los Angeles who was still angry, for the enquiry appeared to have led to nothing, and even Flo here, who ought to have been an avenging fury, seemed to accept it woefully and to want to forget about it. But as Jimmy sat there, listening to her, his broad good-humoured face, with its impudent nose and Irish actor’s gash of a mouth, was sullen with resentment, and though his big shoulders were deep in the chair-he was a heavily-built man of no great height but square and thick-his fists were clenched and one bright brown shoe beat a tattoo on the carpet.