Mack Reynolds - Once Departed

“He wasn’t robbed,” Mike said disgustedly, coming to his own feet. “You’re lucky you’re a damned columnist instead of a reporter. You wouldn’t see a story if you stubbed your toe on it. Not only wasn’t he robbed, but he was all torn up as though he’d been finished off by a Bengal tiger.” He gave his leg a double bang with his paper club.

Quint scowled. “Well… some kind of a nut got to him. A psycho…”

Mike grunted his disgust at the other’s lack of perception. “I should’ve known better than to talk to you while you’re working. You obviously turn off your thinking machine when you work. Didn’t it get through to you? Ronald Brett-Home was a top MI6 man. Where was it you first met him?”

“At Hideka’s karate classes over on Calle San Bernardo,” Quint said thoughtfully. “We used to work out together, from time to time.”

“And was he any good?”

“He held a third Dan Black Belt, now that you mention it.” Quint was scowling again.

Mike Woolman headed for the door. “Then how the hell could some psycho take him?” he growled. “Drunk or sober, a third Dan Black Belt could take on any two or three crooks or fugitives from a nut factory, that ever lived. Shall I see you for lunch at the Hoger Gallego ?”

Quint’s scowl had deepened. He said absently, “I don’t know. I’m getting tired of sea food. Besides, I’m getting a slow start on the column. Maybe I’ll just open a can of soup here at the apartment.”

Mike opened the door to leave. “Damn Americans,” he said. “Do all their cooking out of cans. Barbarians.”

“You’ve been over here too long,” Quint snarled after him, but the other was gone. He looked at the door for a long moment, digesting some of the things the newspaperman had said.

Foul it, Mike was right. Ronald Brett-Home, no matter what his air of easy goingness might be, was a top judo and karate man. Quint had thought the other followed the sport simply for exercise and fun—as Quint did himself. He hadn’t known the man was connected with British espionage. But whatever his connections, he was superbly capable of protecting himself.

The columnist shrugged in irritation and resumed his chair before the typewriter. Confound Mike. Now he’d lost his thread of inspiration. He’d had some idea for a series of three columns. What in the devil was it?

He stared at the paper for a moment, unseeingly.

Then, as though not of his own volition got up again and crossed the room to his combination bar and telephone stand. It was a heavy piece of converted pseudo-Castilian furniture, its wood half a foot thick, its wrought ironwork deliberately rusted as though with centuries of age.

He dialed absently, waited while the phone rang over and over again. He looked at his watch. It was nearly noon.

Finally the voice came. “Good heavens, dahling , whoever you are, what possibly could you want this time of night?”

Quint said, “Pet, it’s Quint Jones. Listen, remember last evening?”

Her voice went wary. “Just a minute, while I take a sip of this to clear the cobwebs. Last evening, dahling? Of course—at least the early part.” She hesitated. “I think I do.”

He made a face, but turned on oral charm. “Listen, Pet. You told me that Ronald Brett-Home had suggested the party to you. That he, more or less, set it up. Said there’d be a lot of fun. Just what kind of fun?”

Marty Dempsey had evidently bolted back a quick one. Her voice came through more clearly. “Did I say that, dahling? Well, the wretch never even turned up.” She giggled in remembrance. “You must have left early with that nice Marylyn girl. You missed the climax of the party.”

“Oh? What happened?” Quint grew tense.

“Well, my dear, you know that swivel hipped Joanne Cotton girl—the one who came up from Torremolinos with the Conte…”

Quint didn’t know who she was talking about, but he said, “Yeah, yeah, of course.”

“Well, dahling. She was evidently looking for the little girl’s room, and walked in on Dave Shepherd and this new boy friend of…”

Quint said wearily, “Listen, Marty, about Ronald Brett-Home and his idea for a controversial party. It was his idea that you invite Nicolas Ferencsik, wasn’t it? Why did he think that would start fireworks?”

Even over the phone, he could detect the fact that she was pouting. But Marty wasn’t the stuffy type, especially with one of what she called her special boy friends and Quentin Jones was one of her special boy friends, usually to his dismay.

But her voice went vague. “I… I don’t exactly know. I suppose I could ask Ferd. Ronald was awfully mysterious about it. Merely told me to throw a party with Nicolas Ferencsik as guest of honor, and then spread it around that the party was to be open house. I even had that pretty Jean Allen girl put it in the Guidepost.”

The Guidepost was the little English language weekly magazine read by all Americans and British in Madrid. Jean Allen was its society editor. Quint pursed his lips. Obviously, the Englishman had been trying to lure someone to the party. Someone who ordinarily wouldn’t have come to an expatriate drunken party—hadn’t it been for the fact that the controversial Hungarian was going to be there.

He said thoughtfully, “That German, Stroehlein. Was he invited?”

“Who?”

In the background, even over the phone, Quint could hear a bottle gurgle. He shook his head, wondering how the woman ever got all the way through the day. He repeated his question.

“Never heard of him, dahling.”

“How about Vladimir Nuriyev?”

“Was he at the party too? Oh dear, I’m afraid I didn’t know half the people who wandered in. You know our soirees, dahling…”

Soiree was a good word. But alcoholic blowout was more like it.

He said softly, “Then not only Bart Digby, but Stroehlein and Nuriyev were party crashers as well, eh?”

“I beg your pardon, dahling?”

“Nothing,” he said. He had half a mind to ask her if any Frenchmen had been present—someone who might have been connected with the Surete. What was the French term? A mouchard . The whole thing sounded like a convention of secret agents. Mike Woolman was right, something funny had been expected to happen there at the Dempsey party. Not so funny at that The British representative of international espionage had wound up very dead.

Marty Dempsey was giggling something into the phone that he didn’t catch, and suddenly he was weary of her meaningless voice. He said, rather abruptly, “Look Marty, the reason I called. You might read the morning papers. I suppose it’s in the papers…”

“What’s in the papers? You mean about the party? But, dahling, they never report our…”

“Ronald Brett-Home didn’t make it to your party, pet, because somebody killed him.”

She gasped, and he hung up the phone. It wasn’t a matter of being either nasty, or impolite. He simply didn’t want to spend the next half hour chattering with Martha Dempsey. He stood and looked down at the instrument for a moment, then turned and looked at the bottle of Fundador which stood a foot or so to the right. He shook his head. The hell with it. He had to get to work. One drink and he’d be off. Any excuse to get out of actually sitting down to that typewriter and trying to be cynically witty for the sake of yea many millions of readers.

When the phone started ringing, he let it ring and returned to chair and typewriter. He stared at the single line he had typed. It was obviously meant to be a title, since it was in caps. It read: It’s a Small World and I Want Off .

He looked at it blankly. Obviously, when he had written it, he’d had something in mind. What? He couldn’t remember what he’d been doodling with when Mike Woolman’s ring at the door had come. He stared at it for a while, but nothing would evolve. He couldn’t keep his mind from Ronald Brett-Home and from the strange party at the Dempsey’s.