Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

He took a restless turn around the room, came back again.

“Once you get on that plane, your troubles are over. Once you get on that plane, my troubles begin.”

“I still can be taken off at the last minute, even after the money s changed hands, even after I have my seatbelt on.”

“You’re protected twice over. First-off, other members of the force would have to know you’re on it, to do that. The tip-off would have to come from me, at the hotel, as I spot you leaving. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. They don’t get the tip-off, they won’t know. I’ll be the only one that knows. Now secondly, if I should turn on you and haul you off, you can pull me down right with you. I still have the twenty thousand on me, don’t forget. All you have to do is accuse me, they find it right on me then and there. How am I going to explain that much money? Or failing to tip them off from the beginning? It’ll make it sound like you’re telling the truth. That may not help you any, but it sure won’t do me too much good either.”

And he concluded: “Don’t you see? We’ve got each other backed up, we’ve got each other neutralized.”

The man didn’t answer any of it. He seemed to be thinking it out.

Finally Terry had to break the silence again himself. “We keep waltzing around and waltzing around, and we don’t get anywhere. What it boils down to is this. There’s one short stretch, one last step, that you’ll have to take on faith alone, where you’ll have to trust me. It’s that last couple minutes between the cab and the plane, those last few steps as you go up the ramp. You’re covered everywhere else but there. But if you don’t trust me there, then the whole thing goes to pieces, like I told you when I first came in the room.”

He let that sink in.

“This is your one and only chance. You better think about it. You can’t stay on here indefinitely, I’ve already explained why. That can only end one way. Like in the old Western movies, you’ll either come out shooting, or with your hands up. Or else with your arms half-nelsoned behind you in a straitjacket.

“One more thing. If you turn me down now, then change your mind and try to reach me later and take me up on it, you can’t, it’ll be too late by then. Mi — The man over me will be coming out of the hospital Wednesday morning at nine sharp, and the minute he does, the thing’ll close down tighter than a drum again. You won’t have a prayer from then on.”

He sat down slantwise on the arm of a chair, hands in pockets, one leg overslung, foot dangling idly and bobbing a little, as if keeping time to the hidden tick of the passing seconds, waiting for his answer. Debonnair, casual, sure of himself, holding the upper hand, waiting for his answer.

The man started to move toward him slowly, one step at a time, like someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, like someone walking in his sleep, like someone in the grip of a compulsion so strong he can’t break it. It was a terrible thing to watch. Moving one foot out, and then trying to hold back. Moving the other foot out, and then trying to hold back. Moving the first foot out again—

Finally, to hurry it up, Terry quirked his head and said, “Well how about it? Are you going to trust me? Or aren’t you going to trust me?”

He thought the man was never going to answer. Anyone else would have thought so too. He didn’t ask him a second time. He’d asked him once. Once was enough.

The man shot his hand out suddenly, so suddenly it almost took Terry by surprise. He looked at it first. Then he shook it.

“What’s your name?” the man asked him. Standing for yes, I’m going to trust you, God help me.

Now it was Tuesday, the last day of grace. About eight in the evening, Terry’s shift rapidly winding up.

The man was in the room, but he had his back to it. He was standing there with his nose pressed flat against the blinds on one of the windows. The interstices of the blinds, which were drawn closed, made straight lines across, all the way up and down. All except one, the one that ran past directly on a level with his eyes. That opened into an ellipse in the middle. At each end of it his thumb and index-finger were holding it spread open a little. The slats were flexible and could be bent.

He was as motionless as an upright corpse, and the room was completely static at the moment, completely still, and yet there was an air of excitement, of crackling electrical tension, overhanging everything. You just had to look around to tell something was up, or something was coming up. Fast and soon.

The overworked bottle of Courvoisier stood on a table. Next to it a hotel-bill stamped “Paid” in violet ink.

The closet-door was open, but the racks inside hung bare. The clothes were all on the outside of it, slung over chairs, with the hangers still left in them. A valise gaped open-mouthed on the bed, with heaps of inner linen piled all around it, shirts, shorts, pyjamas. The t. v. screen was alight in its bluish splendor, but the sound had been cut off. A girl kept silently spraying her hair, first on one side, then on the other. Then a man came up and kissed her, as a direct result of the spray-job.

(Terry’s admonition had been: “Leave your set turned on when you’re ready to leave. It shows up down in the street. I know, because I’ve seen it myself. Then if some cruise-car happens to go by, it’ll make it look like you’re still up there. It might be good for an extra hour or two, before they get wise.”)

The knock came on the door, and the charged tension in the room exploded once and for all; the build-up was over and the climax was on. He turned at the sound, and his face was the color of silver, both because it was so glistening and because it was so gray. He almost died a little right then and there. You could see his knees start to dip down, and his Adam’s apple to go up, like when the blood-supply has been cut off at both ends.

Then he pulled himself together and went over to it.

“Cleary,” a confidential voice said on the other side.

He opened it and he let him in.

Terry was the one to close it and to chain it up again. The man’s fingers were too discoordinated to be much good right then.

“I thought you ran out on me,” he said in a panting voice.

“When I make a deal, I deliver,” Terry said grimly.

He took a brown-paper bag out from inside his coat. It looked by its shape as though it had some kind of medium-sized bottle in it, Coke or club soda. He had the paper up by the open end twisted around to close it off. He held it slanted over the table, untwisted the paper, and shook a gun out of it.

The man recoiled in aversion, as if there were some huge black tarantula there on the table.

“This is what I told you I’d get for you.”

The man just looked the question at Terry, without voicing it.

“Never mind how I got it. I have ways of getting things I want. Maybe I took it off someone who had no right to have it in the first place — and then I didn’t turn it in. He’s not going to report it was taken away from him, you can make book on that. Just drop it in the drink on the way over — and nobody’ll be any the wiser.

“Pick it up,” he encouraged. “Get the feel of it.”

The man kept looking at it fixedly, almost as if he’d never seen one before that close.

“Do like I tell you,” Terry insisted. “Try it for size. Only, don’t touch the trigger, it’s loaded.”

The man took hold of it, timidly at first, then closed his fingers around it more firmly, angled it this way and that. He acted relieved when he’d put it down again, though.

Terry just nodded slightly; what that signified, only he could have said.

He took out a little unsealed envelope, about the size used to carry theatre-tickets in. “Here’s the plane seat you had them hold for you. I stopped by and picked it up on my way over just now. One-way to Zurich, non-stop. The night-flight, tonight. We got about an hour-twenty minutes yet—”