Date: 1945-01-01 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery
Description: A murder draws a young woman into a Nazi conspiracy in this international thriller from a Grand Master Award–winning author. They were Monica Blane's dearest friends. Linda Chavon, Gibbs Brooke, Eric Weller, and John Basevi spent the summer of 1939 with her on the French Riviera—a last celebration of their carefree youth before the winds of war caught up to them. With news of the Nazi invasion of Poland, John, a Polish national, chose to remain in Europe and fight. Linda vowed to stay in France with her aunt. Monica returned to America, regretting never telling John she was in love with him, e
Publisher: Open Road Media

Wings of Fear

Mignon G. Eberhart

TO JANET FOLSOM

1

The night of March ninth had various guises. In Poland if was cold and raw, with fields and roads deep in mud, and scarcely a hint of spring in the air. In France, especially along the Côte d’Azur, it was warm, with, something almost tropical in the balmy wind from the ocean. In Mexico, in that high plateau surrounded by still higher and loftier mountains, it was clear and fine.

In New York, it was cold too and raw, as it was in Poland by that time in the morning of March tenth, but there was a note of spring in the air nevertheless. The stars shone in the dark sky; the store windows along Fifth Avenue were ablaze with color. In the Stork Club, dancing, Monica Blane wondered what quality exactly there was in an early, cold spring night that could permeate even the walls of a restaurant, infect the diners, touch the orchestra, certify itself so unmistakably with its own promise and enchantment (and its own special poignancy and longing) and yet forever elude touch and sight and sound. It seemed even to catch Eric so he danced better and with a gayer rhythm than usual.

But then Eric Weller always danced well; he did everything well, thought Monica, moving in the beautifully patterned rumba, in and out of his arms. She would miss him if he went away again on one of his frequent business trips. For the first time really, with the soft fights, the moving couples all around them and Eric’s hand barely touching her waist, a question thrust itself into her mind. How much would she miss him?

Five years was five years. Wasn’t it possible that, really and actually, he meant more to her than she realized? Wasn’t it possible that, in the end, he could take John’s place? There was a queer reluctant inevitability about that question; as if she had evaded it for a long time, yet known it had to come.

And it was exactly then that the soft beat of the rumba stopped. They moved through the moving couples, back to their small table near the wall, and the cachet lay on the table.

It lay beside Monicas small coffee cup and, as she sat down, she saw it. For an instant, struck by its incongruity, she only looked at it. Then as Eric moved around the table to sit beside her on the bench she thought brightly and sharply, why, that’s a French one.

A small French cachet—on the table, in New York, in the Stork Club, at midnight. She took it in her hand.

“What’s the matter?” said Eric, sliding onto the bench beside her. “What’s that?”

She opened her hand and showed him. He stared and frowned. “It’s a cachet.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“The kind of thing they give you medicine in, in France. Big enough to choke a horse.”

“Well, no. They go down quite easily.” She thought of Linda then, unexpectedly, almost as if someone had spoken Linda’s name. And John! “Remember when Linda had such a bad throat that summer? The doctor gave her some of these and we each took one to show her it could be done.”

“Look out! It’s coming apart.”

The edges of the papery little cachet looked battered as if it had been in somebody’s pocket. She glanced around, wonderingidly then who had dropped it on her table, thinking it was an accident. Later she was sure that there was no one near them whose, face was familiar. She listened, unconsciously seeking to hear French phrases floating out of the soft babble of words and music, but if anyone near was French, she heard or could distinguish no French words.

“It’s been opened,” said Eric suddenly.

The tiny thing did look battered. She said, “It’s probably been in somebody’s pocket. It’s likely full of headache powder and whoever dropped it …”

“Give if to me,” said Eric, in a voice that was all at once sharp and urgent. Involuntarily she drew her hand away, as if he might snatch it.

“No, it …”

“Give it to me.”

This time he reached for it definitely.

Eric was looking odd. In the soft light, with music and laughter and voices, perfume and furs and gaiety all around them, he seemed suddenly pale, and queer and very ungay. His eyes, set rather close together over his thin nose, were bright and intent upon her hand, now doubled over the cachet. His light-blond hair receded slightly from a long, usually rosy face which always looked very clean and scrubbed, but just now was not rosy. His mouth was never very friendly, in spite of his gift for much laughter, and now it looked particularly tight and unfriendly. He said, with a harsh, unfamiliar edge to his voice, “Look out! You’ll crumble it.”

It didn’t sound like Eric. Yet she had known him for so long and they so often went for a night’s dancing and tour of the night clubs. He was almost the only man she saw much of in New York. Everybody else was in uniform and, for most of the time, away.

Or was it because she still didn’t, couldn’t care about other men? Except Eric, who was a part of that lovely summer pattern of five years ago. When she was with him now it was possible to convince herself that the rest of it had actually happened, all of it. That she and Linda, Gibbs Brooke and Eric Weller and John Basevi really existed. Or rather had existed. What had happened since then? Where was Linda? Where was Gibbs? Where, was John—where was John? She had to. shut those questions, sharp and poignant and terrifying, out of her mind, out of her heart, out of her pulses and her nerves and her very body as she had at last learned to do. She started to say something and was caught by the beat of the music and the look of a couple dancing past—the man was about John’s height, taller than she, compactly and thickly built and yet not fat. It was queer how even a man’s shoulders or the way he walked or the look of the back of his neck could make you think it was somebody else. How many times had she hurried, heart pounding, to get a better view of some man, walking down Fifth Avenue or turning into the park, thinking, perhaps it’s John—perhaps it is John! That was before she had given up; before she had acknowledged that five years and the things it might have done to all of them. Five years is always five years, but five years in wartime … Eric was looking at her queerly and intently. She had started to say something, hadn’t she? Oh, yes, the cachet … The couple dancing turned, and of course the man wasn’t John. She opened her fingers. She had unconsciously tightened her hand upon the sugary, papery cachet so it had crumbled inward. And Eric cried sharply: “There’s something inside it!”

That was how she got the message from Linda.

Eric would have helped her but she extracted it herself.

It was a small paper rolled tightly, as if it had been rolled around a pin, and then doubled over in order to go inside the cachet. It was scarcely an inch across, a French version of a capsule, except it was flat and opaque and so large that when you started to swallow it you never thought you could do so and somehow always did. It was still tough, and as, in a kind of stubborn disbelief at the findings of her own eyes, she sought to unroll the tiny paper, Eric seized her hands and brought them down below the level of the table, between them—so no one could see.

She thought of that later too, but not then; she was intent only upon the incredible thing her own fingers were finding, shaking free from the brittle bits of the cachet, unrolling.

She had to hold it nearer the light. “Well, well, what is it?” cried Eric, but in a kind of savage whisper, his bright eyes darting around the pleasant, crowded room.

The handwriting wasn’t recognizable as Linda’s; it wasn’t recognizable as anybody’s. It was too small and cramped, obviously labored to fit the tiny ribbon of thin paper. But it was signed, Linda.

“Read it! Read it! Here, give it to me.”

“No. Listen. It’s hard to see—Oh, Eric, it’s Linda. She wants help.”

He took it from her; snatched it, really, but she couldn’t blame him for his anxiety. Linda—beautiful Linda with her limpid, deep-blue eyes and golden hair and delicate slender grace. Linda who had said good-bye that day in September and promised to take care of herself, to get home somehow, anyhow, to write—and had never been heard of since.

The strangeness of it pierced her stunned surprise. “Eric, do you understand?” she cried. “It’s from Linda.”

Eric’s face had suddenly lost all mobility. “Hush,” he said sharply, under his breath, staring at the wrinkled paper.

“But, Eric …”

“People will hear. Be careful….”

He looked up then and all around them. But no one was watching. No one was looking, no one—yet how had the capsule got there?

“Give it back to me.”

He did so, passing it below the edge of the table, surreptitiously. She read it again. “I am in a dreadful jam. Monica, come to me. Help me. Linda.”

It sounded like Linda, too. She didn’t say what the jam was. Yet there was a note of sincerity and appeal in its very directness and lack of explanation. Monica said, “But where isshe? I haven’t even heard from her in five years! She was in France…. Eric, where is she?” She paused and stared at Eric. “Who put the capsule here? Is Linda here? Is she in the room?” But there wasn’t anybody here she knew—hot anybody. Linda’s golden hair, Linda’s high gay voice … The girl in black, dancing? No; she turned her face and it wasn’t Linda. The woman in furs, preparing to leave? But she had dark hair.

Eric’s bright eyes, too, were darting all around the room, seeking. “Let’s dance,” he said.

“But, Eric …”

He got up. He was very graceful always and moved quickly. “Come along.” The bits of the cachet slipped from her lap to the obscurity below the table as she rose. Then they were on the floor, dancing, and all she was aware of was the message in her hand. Eric, still watching, still looking, eyes still everywhere among the dancing couples, around the room, exploring, hunting, seeking, said: “Do you see anybody you know, Monica? Look hard.”

There was nobody. The lights were soft; some people at the round tables were turned with their faces away from the dance floor. Still there was no one who was even faintly familiar. Eric, looking now at the men in the small orchestra, quickly, sharply, yet with something covert and hidden about that look, said abruptly, “Let’s go.”

“There’s nobody here. Eric, who could have put it there? Where is Linda?”

“We’ll talk later. There’s no use staying here. There’s not a soul I’ve ever seen before, except the waiters.”

“But she must be here. Or if she isn’t here I can’t go until I find out who knows about her. There isn’t any other way to find her. I can’t leave …”

“There’ll be something at your apartment.”

"Why, no. She doesn’t know where I live.”

“She knew you’d be here tonight. She or whoever left the cachet.”

“But …” she paused, bewildered and excited, feeling reluctant to leave the place where the only clue to Linda’s whereabouts had come to her, yet impressed, too, by Eric’s reasoning.

He said, “Your number and address are in the phone book. She’ll have to get in touch with you there, if anywhere. If there’s anybody here whom you know or knows you, stay by all means. But my advice is to go home where she can reach you herself, and quickly.”

“But, Eric, we’ve got to ask.”

“Ask whom? Pick somebody at random? Or ask everybody in the room, ‘Excuse me, madame, but did you just put a cachet on my table and, if so, where did it come from?’ Come on. We’d better go.”

There was something rather specious in his reasoning, but she couldn’t say exactly what it was and actually he must be right. No one had approached her to speak to her; there was no way to inquire about the cachet. In her own apartment she would be at least available to Linda; perhaps even now Linda was there, waiting for her. She was still in a kind of daze of disbelief. Things like that didn’t happen—not in New York, not on a quiet spring night exactly like other spring nights.

If Linda was alive, if she was near, why not John? John, alive! John in New York! Before she could tell herself not to hope, it was surging back, like, a flood, shaking her whole body and all her senses.

Her short white lynx coat was over her shoulders; she wasn’t aware of Eric’s having put it there. They had left the dance floor and passed the bar; Eric got his coat and hat and they were on the street. She turned, for it was only a short walk around to the great building of apartments where she lived, but Eric had a taxi and was putting her into it. All she could think of was John; if Linda was alive, why not John?

“Linda must be in New York,” said Monica.

“We’ll talk later,” said Eric. She had forgotten how stubborn he could be. Usually he was almost too friendly and amiable and agreeable to other people’s notions and wishes. It was a quality she had never quite liked about him—a kind of super-super-salesman air. They reached her own number and the doorman greeted her. They walked through the foyer and even in the elevator Eric wouldn’t say anything and his very silence warned her not to. Which, of course, was silly. You could say anything you wanted to, couldn’t you? In America. In New York.

There was no yellow telephone message in the door of her small apartment.

Her hands were unsteady, so when she tried to unlock the door Eric had to take the latchkey away from her. The lights were on and the curtains were drawn in the small living room; there was only that and a bedroom; an infinitesimal kitchen called a serving pantry, and a large dressing room which was probably accidental but gave a feeling of spaciousness to the apartment. Bill Fiske had found it for her when she started to work for him. His own apartment, very large, very high and very sunny, was in the same building and she had always rather suspected that her rent had been shaved a little because Bill had vouched for her, had said she was his friend and employee and one-time ward. He did things like that constantly for her. He had done them for John until John had vanished in the limbo of September, 1939.

As Linda had vanished. There were no letters or packages on the table in the tiny foyer.

Eric closed the door and came forward slowly, taking off his coat.

She slid back her fur coat and sat down, catching a glimpse of herself, slim and erect in her scarlet dress, her dark pompadour smooth and shining, her eyes blue too but darker, not the brilliant laughing blue of Linda’s eyes. She cried, “It must be Linda. She must be in New York. Eric, what are we going to do?”

He sat down and got out cigarettes, slowly, tapping one deliberately on the table. “You don’t know where she is?”

“No, of course not. I’ve heard nothing, not a word since I left France. I’ve tried to find her; I’ve inquired; I watched the lists of people that got sent back to America. She must be here and she’s in trouble. …”

After a pause, Eric said, with an effect of efficiency and, truth, “Well, I don’t see what you’re going to do about it.”

“We’ve got to do something. She needs help. She wouldn’t have written like that, Not Linda. You knew her. She was impulsive and quick but …”

“She was a lot of things,” said Eric. Suddenly his eyes were watching her now, rather narrowly. “I wouldn’t have thought that you’d forget what she did to you. So soon.”

It held her for a moment in silence. Linda with her golden hair. Linda with her charm and her laugh and her assuredness. Eric, of course, knew that whole story, or at least guessed at what he didn’t know. In its essence it was brief enough. She and Linda, roommates in school, had graduated the same year and had gone to France together. John had taken the same boat; they had planned it that way (she and John), and Gibbs Brooke was with him. She’d thought Gibbs would be nice for Linda; she’d dreamed of days on shipboard and weeks in France and the four of them swimming and riding and all going about together. As much of course as Linda’s French aunt (where was she now, too?) would think was comme it faut. Convenable, The French had a variety of words to suit the exigencies of proprieties. Madame Fae de Rissaud was to meet the girls and to travel with them. Both Linda and Monica had hooted at the idea of a chaperon, but Bill Fiske in his bluff, good-natured way, stood firm. He’d had his way too; he’d stood for years in the place of parents to Monica, and also to John. That was how she and John knew each other. Had known each other for years.

It was John’s first trip to Europe and her first trip too. But it was more exciting for John, for he was going to see his own birthplace and his father’s. His name was Basevi, John Basevi, and his father was a landed Polish gentleman. His mother had been American, a Kentuckian. John was rather like them both, Monica had thought, although they had both died when he was very young and left John some lands, vaguely situated in Poland, and a rather large trust fund in the care of his lawyer, Bill Fiske, who had been as good to John as he had been to Monica. John Basevi was rich. The small annuity and insurance which Monica had inherited had been barely enough to last throughout school and dental care and dancing lessons. It was always understood that she was to get a job, then, and support herself. She had to, for there was no one else to support her. She had always suspected that the little windfall that Uncle Bill claimed had been paid unexpectedly into her account by some insurance company, belatedly discovering a mistake somewhere that was in her favor, was actually a present from him. He had been convincing about it; he was an elderly bachelor, not rich, perhaps, but he had plenty of money. She had inquired and demurred but he had convinced her; probably she was easily convinced, she had so wanted to go to France. Especially when she knew that John was going.

So they had gone. Eric Weller had fallen in with them later; they’d picked him up somewhere along the Riviera, and liked him and he was soon one of the gay, fun-making little group.

Only it wasn’t really so gay. Not for her.

For John had taken one look at Linda. That was on the boat.

And there was nothing, really, she could do about it. She and John were not engaged; they had never talked of marriage; she had only known she loved him and had had a faith in the happy ending. Which was wrong. She—and many other people soon—were to learn that you can’t count on the happy ending.

Later she wondered many times why she hadn’t tried to do something. Had it happened too fast? Had she been stunned and childish and hurt? Or had she known it was no use?

Before they had been at Cannes a week she was sure that John and Linda were in love. By mid-August everybody was sure of it. The night of September first, when Hitler’s army thundered its murderous way into Poland, and the end of the world—so it seemed at the time—began, Linda told her that she and John were engaged.

“He wants to marry me now,” Linda had said. “Right away. He’s afraid we’ll be separated somehow. I don’t know. Everything’s so-so different all at once.” There was something feverish and bright and abstracted in Linda’s brilliant blue eyes.

They hadn’t married. John had left at dawn of September second. He had said good-bye to Linda and he came to say good-bye to Monica. She remembered it then clearly, every detail, every word; she had thought of it so much during those five years that it was as clear in every detail as the words of an often repeated prayer.

He’d knocked and she’d heard it at once; she hadn’t been asleep. She cried, “Who is it?” and, hearing John’s voice, got up quickly and snatched a dressing gown and unlocked the door. He came in. He was in a tweed suit and had a coat over his arm and a briefcase. His face was very white. “I’m leaving,” he said. “I can get a train. Monica …”

She had clung to him. She didn’t know she was doing it. She had never done that. She had been shy; she had wanted it to come slowly, richly. That was a mistake. Yet nothing could have stopped or checked the thing Linda had done to him. “John, where are you going?”

“Nevermind. I can’t tell you. I …”

“You’re going to fight.”

His eyes, direct and dark gray, suddenly avoided her own gaze. “I can’t tell you. Mona, I wanted to say good-bye.”

“John, you can’t go. You mustn’t. You’re an American.”

“We’ll be in it sooner or later. I’m Polish, too. But I’ve got to go now.”

“John …”

He took her in his arms then and kissed her. And said, “Good-bye, dear. I’ll see you sometime. Take care of yourself. Get home as quickly as you can. It’s going to be more or less hell. And Mona …”

“Yes, John.” Her own voice seemed lost and desolate and far away. Her arms were finked around his neck, her head against him. “Monica, take care of Linda. She’s—she’s such a child. Reckless.”

Here memory did fail; there was a kind of pause, a blankness; then he had kissed her again, on the mouth because she forgot herself and all her shyness and put her mouth up toward him. And then he went away, carrying only the lightly packed briefcase with him.

She had never seen him since. She had never heard from him. Uncle Bill had tried to find him. Nothing was any good. Hehad vanished completely into the hell and chaos that was Europe.

Take care of Linda, he’d said.

But Linda, of course, wouldn’t be taken care of. She could have come home with Monica; she wouldn’t. She said she’d have to stay and see that her aunt (Fae de Rissaud, pretty, unexpectedly young, entirely able to take care of herself) was safely at home. Then she’d return to America. “There’ll be a way,” Linda said. “I’ll be all right. Do go on, Monica.”

In the end, Monica had had to go. Uncle Bill had cabled every day and got her a place on a boat. She and Linda had said good-bye. They had stood on the pier at Villefranche with a great heap of oranges on a cargo boat just beside them, and the Mediterranean almost as blue and sparkling and bright as Linda’s eyes. The Maritime Alps rose in blue mist behind them; Linda had on a white sun suit which showed her lovely slender brown legs. How many hours had they sat in the sun, the five of them, on the sand, smoking, talking, romping, getting tanned! Swimming and coming out to lie on the sand again. Now John had gone. Eric had gone. Gibbs had left days before. The little group had disseminated like dust before a giant wind. Linda was going to Lyons soon with Madame de Rissaud. Monica was turning her back on everything and going home. Suddenly, passionately she wanted to stay at least on the same continent with John. Was that why Linda was staying?

She had hated Linda then, but she’d loved her too.

She had never seen or heard from her again. It had all happened with dizzying suddenness. Everybody had said for years, of course, that there would be a war. Some time.

Not then. Not that golden summer.

But it had happened.

Monica got home and Uncle Bill Fiske had given her a job in his own office. Eric Weller had turned up one day and asked her to lunch and they’d seen each other rather often since, except when business took him away. He’d had no news though from John or Linda. Gibbs, he told her, had gone straight into the army.

There had never been in all that five years of war and horror any news of John or of Linda until tonight.

Eric sat now, looking at the rug, smoking, frowning, thinking too, perhaps, of that summer. He put down his cigarette and looked at her. “Mona.”

It had been John’s name for her. She’d never since then liked anyone else to use it.

“Yes, Eric.”

“Look here, Mona. You forget about Linda. You’ll only get yourself into trouble.”

“But she needs help. She wouldn’t have written like that. She must have managed somehow to send that message. Somebody who didn’t want us to know him or …”

Eric got up rather slowly. He looked extraordinarily selfpossessed and as if he were in command of some situation which still didn’t make itself clear. He said again, ‘You’ll only get yourself into a mess. If Linda’s in trouble let her get herself out. I think it is a trap.”

“A trap! What do you mean? How could it be a trap? Who…?”

“Oh, never mind,” cut in Eric, shrugging. “I didn’t mean that exactly. I—don’t know what it means. But she’s not in New York. Believe me. Mona, listen. There’s something I’ve been wanting to—say to you. Something you’ve known, of course. We haven’t put it into words but …”

“She must be in New York,” said Monica.

Eric came across to her quickly and put his hands hard on her wrists. “She’s not in New York. Believe me, Monica,” he said. “I want to tell you I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time. You’ve known it. Haven’t you?” said Eric and leaned down to put his arms tight around her. “You might just as well admit it,” he said, smiling. “You love me, too.”

2

A strange wind seemed to creep from some chill and unknown limbo into the night and into the apartment, changing it. Changing everything, so familiar things became suddenly unfamiliar and strange.

The cachet and Linda’s name. The surging hope that John might be alive.

And now Eric telling her he loved her. Like that.

There wasn’t time to analyze what she meant by “like that.” Or why she knew instinctively but with complete certainty that Eric didn’t mean what he said and wasn’t in love with her and never had been. There wasn’t even time for her to analyze herself; a few minutes ago she had wondered almost in so many words if she did not, really, love Eric—and the sudden wave of hope about John (leaping into her heart merely because Linda was alive) had answered that halfuttered self-question about Eric. But she didn’t consciously think that. She said, “Eric, you don’t mean that. Linda …”

“Linda doesn’t matter. I do mean it.”

“But you—oh, Eric, this is impossible. Go on back to your chair and …”

“Monica.” He made her look up at him by putting one hand strongly under her chin. “Have you been playing with me, Monica?” he asked.

It was incredible, not only because there had never been the smallest hint of anything sentimental, certainly nothing romantic in their relationship, but also because it was exactly as if he were speaking lines in a bad play. People simply didn’t say things like that. Surely, she thought, he can’t be serious.

She tried to withdraw from him and his slender, bluntfingered hands were fike steel. She felt, however, not the smaEest alarm, merely discomfort and a strong sense of embarrassment, as if at any moment the audience would object violently to the banality of the scene. Uncle Bill Fiske had said, once, “Remember to laugh. A little, not too much, but laugh. It gets you through a lot of”—there’d been an oddly reminiscent look in his eyes as he’d finished—“a lot of bad moments.”

Laugh, then, not too much, only a little, lightly. She did, and Eric didn’t like it; his face darkened. She said, smiling, “Eric, you don’t mean all this. Let’s talk sensibly. And we’ve got to find Linda. She …”

“I tell you you can’t do anything about Linda. You’d better believe me. There’s just one thing for us to talk of, Mona, and that’s you and me. We’ve been together constantly….”

“Not constantly, Eric. Sometimes …”

“You’ve led me to believe you were in love with me….”

“But I didn’t. I never thought of it.” But she had thought of it, briefly, that very night. It lent a small sense of guilt to her embarrassment. She tried to explain, fumbling for words. “We were the two left out of the five of us—that summer….”

“You’ve let me come to your apartment. You let me come up tonight. It’s well after midnight. Girls don’t let men come to then apartments at this hour….”

Her hand slid out of his grasp as if at its own volition and slapped him. Hard and quick across the cheek so near her own face. She hadn’t known she was going to do it; she was suddenly appalled at her own action. Banal again. There were jokes about it. So I slapped his face! A bad play, again. Heroine repels villain. A wave of acute embarrassment caught her as if she’d been guilty of the most flagrant breach of taste. Well, she had, hadn’t she? The whole silly—but suddenly rather ugly—little scene wasn’t what anybody could call in good taste. She tried to sit upright, to rise, and was aware of Eric’s face, very white, except for the imprint of her hand in scarlet on his cheek and his blazing, narrow eyes and a man in uniform standing in the doorway, staring. An elevator boy.

Eric didn’t see him; he was looking down at Monica with a kind of deadly stillness in those dark eyes. She said, her voice uneven, embarrassment now a pool in which she could scarcely get her footing, “Pinky. I didn’t see you.”

Pinky was one of the several elevator boys and acted occasionally as a bellboy and messenger for the apartment-house tenants. He was red-haired, young and very quick on the uptake. He said, swallowing hard, “Sorry, Miss Blane. I knocked and thought you said to come in.” His eyes slid to Eric, who straightened up and turned, his face still cold with anger, the face suddenly of a stranger. The boy’s eyes skidded quickly away again. “Mr. Fiske gave me a message for you, Miss Blane. I didn’t see you come in. He said would you call him. I—that’s all, Miss Blane.”

The boy was caught in the spreading pool of embarrassment. He turned and was closing the door as Monica thanked him. The door came to with a bang. A long, unpleasant silence followed, and Eric said at last, “You should train your servants better.”

“Eric, don’t be absurd. He’s not my servant. He’s one of the elevator boys.”

“He’s impertinent.”

“He isn’t at all. He—you’re being very medieval. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Eric turned again to her, his eyebrows lifted. “Well, if you like the elevator boys to see you in”—he paused and said slowly—“remarkably compromising positions.”

Monica got up swiftly and then as swiftly told herself to hold onto her anger this time. Be warned. Take a light tone. And get rid of him.

“That wasn’t very compromising. I’m sorry, Eric. We are too good friends to quarrel like this. I didn’t like what you said. I didn’t stop to think that you couldn’t have meant it as it sounded. We’ve been good friends a long time and …”

“But I did mean it exactly like that,” said Eric.

“Then I think you’d better go at once. And never come back.”

“You’re thinking of John.”

“John …”

“It was that silly bit of paper with Linda’s name on it. It made you think that maybe John is still alive too.” He smiled. “Don’t you realize that even if he were alive he’d still be in love with Linda? It’s nothing to you whether he’s alive or dead if Linda’s around too. She’d never give him up.”

She turned and walked across the room to the little curved Victorian mantle she’d found, and bought, and then Eked so much that she had furnished the small apartment with its bright rose chintzes and moss-green carpet around it. She could see herself again in the long gilded mirror above. Two bright angry spots of color were in her cheeks and her eyes were angry and bright too. I must hold onto myself. I mustn’t let this thing go on like this; I’ll think later. “Eric, you’d better go now. We’re both saying things that we don’t mean….”

“But I do mean them,” said Eric. “I mean everything I’ve said. It’s all true.”

After a moment she faced him again. “The only thing that matters to either of us now is the fact that Linda, somehow, has appealed to me for help. We’ve got to do something about it.”

Eric smiled briefly again. “What?”

“Well, I don’t know. Find her first. Find the person who put the cachet on the table. Obviously it was—well, someone she had seen and trusted to deliver the message. Somebody who …” She was forcing herself to think, to shut out the new image of Eric with his handsome white face, standing the.re looking at her with something deadly and cold in his eyes. “Obviously it was somebody who knew me. Or at least recognized me.”

“How?”

“By her description, perhaps.”

He laughed shortly. “Darling, you are very sweet and pretty, but you overrate the unusualness of your beauty. There are a million young women who look, in a general way, like you.”

It would be fatally easy to bicker with Eric, like a child. “I don’t know how I was recognized, but there was no one in the room I knew. If somebody who didn’t know me put the cachet there at the table, he must have—well, inquired of a waiter or …

“How would anybody know that you’d be at the Stork Club tonight?”

For a moment again she forced herself to think and to ignore this strange Eric who had turned suddenly from a pleasant companion to a stranger of unknown (and rather frightening, in a curious way) potentiahties. “I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t remember saying to anybody that we were having dinner together. Did we plan to go to the Stork Club, or just drop in? I can’t remember.”

Eric always knew everything exactly. He lighted a cigarette ; his face was still stiff and unnatural like a mask. “I phoned to you at the office. I said let’s have dinner at the Maisonette and dance awhile and drop in at the Stork Club on our way home. Was anyone listening?”

“No, of course not.” She thought of the three office girls, one at the switchboard, two stenographers. “The girls at the office wouldn’t listen.”

Eric’s blond, thick eyebrows went up. “People do listen. People do the oddest things, really.”

“Well, they wouldn’t.”

“How about your switchboard here? The doorman? Your pet little elevator boy who comes in without knocking.”

“Eric, you …”

“I’m being insulting. Darling, it sounds trite, but if you only knew what men think of a girl who leads them on as you have and then …”

It was perfectly horrible to feel as she suddenly did. Anger really did make you see red, that blinding flash of impotent fury was terrifying. She steadied herself against the mantel. “You’ve got to go. Now.”

“I won’t,” said Eric calmly. He sat down, stretched out his legs on a little tufted, satin hassock and smiled.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you, Eric. We were friends, and I liked you and—you’re not yourself.”

Or, she thought, rather alarmingly, was he himself? Had she merely never seen the real Eric?

He hadn’t been drinking; she thought of that swiftly. He said, “And you won’t have me thrown out, darling, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I shouldn’t like to.” She could be calm and reasonable too. Only her voice was a little breathless. “But I can. I can phone down and have the …”

“The elevator boy?” Eric laughed.

“The doorman will do it.”

“Beautiful scene,” said Eric. “I can see it all in the papers.”

“Nonsense.” (Be sensible; use common sense; this is very silly!) “I’m not important enough to make the columns. Neither are you.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m staying. Right here. Until you come to your senses.” He settled himself more comfortably, and yawned—or pretended to.

“Eric, this is absurd! It’s late. Get up and leave …”

He got up but came toward her.

The door into the tiny hall between her bedroom and her dressing room was just beyond the fireplace where she stood and she moved back toward it, without intending to and said, “I’m going to phone Uncle Bill.”

Eric stopped. “To have him come down and throw me out!” He laughed again. “He won’t.”

“I’m not going to ask him any such thing. This is all too silly, Eric. You’re going to stop this—this nonsense. I’m going to phone Uncle Bill because he asked me to. I …”

He moved toward her, laughing as if he were really amused by her mention of Uncle Bill Fiske. She slid through the door into the small hall, backed into her dressing room, shut the door between them and bolted it. She leaned against it, feeling as if she’d made the most feeble and half-witted fool of herself.

She wasn’t afraid of Eric. He was behaving badly, stupidly—but then she hadn’t taken the right tone either. She ought to have been fight and casual about it—or very hard and definite and actually called the doorman. Or—well, or anything but what she’d done. What a poised young woman of the world she had turned out to be!

Everything had been wrong, queer, out of focus, since she’d found the message signed by Linda.

She moved away from the door and sat down on the small chaise longue.

There was no sound from the living room. Eric didn’t try the door; he didn’t call to her; he didn’t do anything. He’d leave, of course. The next morning he’d call and say he’d been joking, kidding her; tell her she oughtn’t to have taken it seriously. He’d slip back into the old Eric, the man she knew.

Or would he?

But the important thing was the note from Linda. Again a wave of anger caught her. Eric had been so very stupid to take just that moment for—well, for a practical joke. Not very funny; his idea of a joke. It suddenly occurred to her that Eric had never had the kind of glancing, light humor that John and Gibbs and she and Linda had had. Eric had laughed at their jokes but rather painstakingly, somehow; never as if he actually shared in them.

The telephone wasn’t in the dressing room. It was in the bedroom and she would have to open the door, enter the little hall, and go from there into her bedroom. Eric, of course, would see her. Probably he was standing in the doorway.

She suddenly discovered that she was tired. She couldn’t think; she hadn’t been thinking really since she found the cachet on the table.

She was listening, unconsciously, all the time; she heard no sound at all from the living room.

She decided that the sensible thing to do was to wait—just quietly wait. She slipped back on the chaise longue and unrolled the light satin cover at the foot of it and pulled it up over her. It was a small room, comfortably warm and fragrant, and the mirror reflected shaded lights and the crystal glitter of perfume bottles and her mother’s old-fashioned, goldframed hand mirror, and brushes, and bottles. She put her head back against the cushion.

Suppose John was alive too!

Suppose the years of heartbreak, of not knowing whether he was alive, dead, in the hands of the Nazis, were soon to be over.

She mustn’t let herself think it. But just suppose …

It was queer to remember that that day had been like every other day up to the moment when she found the cachet on the table. She had got up, made her own coffee, gone to the office. Her job wasn’t difficult, really. Bill Fiske’s law practice had always been more a matter of handling trust funds and estates than anything else. Five years ago when she returned from France she had suspected that he made a place for her in his office because he knew she must have a job and because of his affection for her. Now she knew she pulled her own weight. She scarcely ever, now, even had to telephone to him for instiuctions if he happened to be out of town. She had the combination of the safe; she had access to the records; she knew the small bits of routine too. Old Mrs. Kerrington liked to change her will; young Mrs. Fenway was never satisfied with the safe and sound investments of the money her husband left her; the young Jenssen child had to be forced to go to the dentist and possibly escorted there and held personally in the chair. She knew all those things.

But then she had been one of Uncle Bill’s charges as John had been—except John had had so much money. Uncle Bill still had John’s power of attorney and money; it was a bitter and sweet satisfaction for Monica to check that list of property and investments. The land, of course, was in Poland; there was no way of knowing anything about that. Uncle Bill had tried and failed. As he had tried to find John and failed. He had guessed how she felt about John; she knew that because, now, he rarely mentioned John.

But suppose—just suppose—John was alive. They had heard from Linda. So why not John?

But it wasn’t really logical; it was only a wish, sprung into being because the message from Linda made anything seem possible. She sat up suddenly and looked at her watch and it was two-thirty.

She’d been lost in thoughts of Linda and John that still made no sense and had no direction. Eric must have gone by now.

She got up and listened at the door. She again had the disconcerting feeling that she was acting in a bad play. Does the villain still pursue her or has he gone, she asked herself derisively. But she heard nothing and told herself that if he were still there she could control the situation, briskly and firmly, and unbolted the door and opened it.

It was rather an anti-climax to walk into the small living room all braced and prepared to deal with Eric and find it empty.

So he had gone.

The small, pretty living room with its pale-green wallpaper, its chintz roses, its curved Victorian mantle, was quiet and still. The tiny entrance hall was empty too, the lamp lighted on the small black-and-gold table. A sudden thought sent her whirling to the door of the bedroom—and then back into the living room with a laugh at her own imagining; which nevertheless sounded rather uneven. After a pause she went to the door which led to the main outside corridor, and turned the bolt.

And then stood for a moment again caught by something very still and almost strange in the apartment.

She had never been lonely there. But she wasn’t lonely now; it was rather as if someone or something was there—something hidden. That was because she was uneasy and tense; because of the note from Linda. If only Eric hadn’t chosen that time to be so stupid they could have planned something together.

She’d never be able to sleep. She turned abruptly into the little dressing room again, and slipped out of her crimson dress and into pajamas and a long, white-wool dressing gown and small gold mules; she took down her hair and brushed it and tied it back with a red ribbon.

It was funny how much better a girl felt after she’d brushed her hair! She went back through the living room and across the hall and into the serving pantry and put coffee on the small, shining stove. A drawer in the cabinet was standing open; she closed it. The fragrance of the coffee gave the glittering, tiny kitchen an air of domesticity. It was funny too how comforting that was.

After she’d had her coffee she’d think about Linda—really think, to some purpose and constructively. Not just in bewildered circles.

She poured the bubbling coffee into a small silver pot—that had been her mother’s too. She set it and a cup and saucer on a tray. She went back into the quiet, empty living room and put the tray on a table near the big sofa and sank down into it, shoving the green cushions cozily behind her.

She wasn’t comfortable. She drank a little coffee. She lighted a cigarette. She adjusted the pillows again.

If she’d stop arguing in her own mind about this and that and drink her coffee she’d stop listening. There wasn’t anything to hear.

She might turn on the radio.

Then she remembered the message Bill Fiske had sent her. She’d meant to telephone to him.

Well, it was definitely too late now. She looked up toward the old French clock fastened to the wall beside the mirror and the hands pointed to twenty minutes past three.

She couldn’t see herself in the mirror. But she could see an angle of the room reflected in it.

Eric hadn’t gone. Or, if he had, he’d left his hat and coat across a chair.

3

Everything in the room seemed to stop, her heart, her thoughts, even the little French clock.

Then she turned her body slowly.

How had she missed the coat and the hat?

She put down her cup; the clatter on the tray was loud and sharp.

She got up. There wasn’t any sound except the small rustle of her robe across the green carpet. The chair was highbacked and stood at a desk in the corner. She reached the chair and it was Eric’s coat and hat there on the arm. She could understand now why she hadn’t seen them; they were low and in the shadow and she’d been looking only for Eric. But why had he left them there?

Was he still somewhere in the apartment—waiting, smiling? He couldn’t be. It was too small. There wasn’t any place to hide. She’d been in the dressing room. The door to the bedroom and bathroom that opened off it was wide open and no one was there. And no one was in the tiny pantry.

She’d have to look.

But she wasn’t going to. She was going to phone Bill Fiske.

He’d know what to do.

Eric wouldn’t leave without his hat and coat. Yet Eric wasn’t in the apartment.

She made herself walk into the bedroom and fling open the closed door of a shallow,"scented clothes closet. Of course he wasn’t there.

There wasn’t any other place for him to be.

Her hands were shaking. A breath of air from the opened window behind the big, four-posted bed stirred the taffeta curtains and the whispered sound brought her heart pounding in her throat. There was a distant murmur of a taxi somewhere on Park Avenue; curiously it made her feel remote and far away from any help. Help? She questioned herself sharply. There was the telephone. By lifting it she could summon help. She’d say—well, what would she say? A man was here and he went away but he had left his coat and his hat and—and there was something horribly wrong somewhere.

That was hysterical.

Nothing was wrong.

She was alone and the door was bolted. She’d bolted it herself.

She was back in the living room, in the small hall, her hand on the door that led to the outside corridor and of course it was still bolted. She turned and looked all over the living room again. She’d missed the coat and hat. And they’d been there all along, hadn’t they? They had to have been, for she’d bolted the door before she went to her dressing room and changed. So she hadn’t seen them.

Was there anything else she hadn’t seen?

Yes.

Naturally she hadn’t thought of that.

She hadn’t thought that he might get down behind anything. He wouldn’t …

She was leaning across the wide sofa now.

And he wouldn’t lie like that—on his face with one arm doubled up.

With his hand covered with red.

With a knife that had red on it, too, beside him on the green carpet.

The cup clattered and fell, and smashed on the floor.

She was standing; she had moved around the end of the sofa. It wasn’t another joke of Eric’s, who had never joked until that night. He wouldn’t joke; he wouldn’t move; she cried, “Eric—Eric—” in a sharp whisper and he wouldn’t answer, and he’d never answer to anything ever again because nobody in the world, not even Eric, who was so proud of his body, nobody could live with his throat cut like that.

She remembered pulling her white trailing skirts sharply away. She must have bent over him. She ran for the bathroom, stumbling, groping blindly for the door; she was sick and dizzy and didn’t know what she was doing. She had to stop being sick; it was horrible; the medicine chest was open; the light was bright in her eyes and on the labels. Didn’t she have something—spirits of ammonia, what did one take? Aspirin and tooth powder and cologne. No medicine. If she got her head down things would stop whirling. She was huddled against the bed and the walls of the room were wavering, but there was the telephone beside the bed.

Uncle Bill.

She heard her own voice when the boy at the switchboard answered. “Ring Mr. Fiske—yes, yes, I know it’s late, but ring eighteen hundred … Keep on ringing….”

Bill Fiske answered at last; it seemed a long time; his voice was husky. “Hello …”

“Uncle Bill …”

“Monica?”

“Uncle Bill, something terrible has happened …” It was a jerky kind of whisper.

“What’s that? I can’t hear you. Wait a minute. I’m still half asleep. Is anything wrong…?”

“Eric …”

“Monica, I can’t hear you. Talk louder.”

Louder. In that horribly still and silent apartment where there was only Eric to hear. And he couldn’t hear.

She forced her voice out clear and flat: “Please come. Uncle Bill, please come.”

“Why, I—I’ll get myself awake in a minute. You mean …” he cleared his throat and seemed to force himself awake. “Of course I’ll come. Where are you?”

“In my apartment. Uncle Bill—Eric’s dead.”

“What?”

“Here, in my apartment. It’s horrible. Uncle Bill—hurry!”

“I’ll be right there.” His telephone clicked.

She fumbled, putting down the telephone; she couldn’t get it straight on its cradle. The boy who took night duty at the switchboard said, “Yes, Miss Blane. Number …”

“Nothing …” she adjusted the telephone at last. He couldn’t hear her half-spoken words. Blankness seemed to descend and then out of it she thought suddenly, I’ve got to open the door and let Uncle Bill in.

There wasn’t any other way for him to get into the place. That meant she had to go through the living room again, and into the tiny Rall and unbolt the door which she herself had bolted.

How long had Eric been lying like that?

It was the first clear and coherent thought she had but it was only a flash; the main thing was to get to the door.

Somehow she did. She wouldn’t look toward the sofa, yet had to, but mercifully it hid the dreadful thing behind it. As it had done for how long? Eric’s hat and coat on the chair; why hadn’t she seen them sooner?

She reached the door and nothing reached out from the silence in the apartment. Her hands made clumsy work of the bolt; at last it turned. Uncle Bill might already be coming down the broad corridor from the rank of elevators, three of them, not far from her apartment, as a matter of fact. She opened the door. And had to stop herself, for she wanted to run—hurry along that corridor, meet Uncle Bill, go to his penthouse—anywhere away from the terribly still apartment behind her with its softly shaded lamps, and bright rose chintzes—and the horror it contained.

She mustn’t run. But she could walk down as far as the elevators, because she heard very clearly the sound of the heavy sliding doors of an arriving elevator, and it would be Uncle Bill.

She left the open door and ran down the corridor, but the elevator was not arriving.

It was leaving; it was the third elevator in the rank and it was going down. But she had heard the doors slide open.

Or had heard them close.

But she hadn’t seen anyone enter the elevator.

The corridor was well lighted; she would have seen anyone in it and she had instantly looked toward the elevators when she opened her door because she was looking for Uncle Bill.

Elevators don’t move of their own accord; they can’t. So someone had to be in it.

She thought of that, but briefly; obviously someone had entered the elevator from one of the other apartments just before she opened her own door. She heard another elevator coming up swiftly; she waited and it went past her floor and swooped upward. It was going for Uncle Bill; she was sure of it. She waited and listened and there was no sound anywhere in the great apartment building and then all at once the elevator was swooping down again. It stopped. Pinky was running it. Uncle Bill, his hair awry, a bathrobe pulled over pajamas, and an overcoat over the bathrobe, and a package of cigarettes in his hand came out quickly.

“Monica …”

“Uncle Bill, he’s …”

He stopped her so adroitly that she didn’t realize for a moment that it was so Pinky wouldn’t hear. He said to him, “Thanks, Pinky. Be going up presently,” and Pinky, his red hair flaming, his eyes looking rather alert and curious, said, “Okay, sir.” The elevator doors slid together as Uncle Bill put his arm around her and turned her toward her own apartment.

“Now, now, my dear. Don’t talk. Wait till we get inside…. Here we are….” He closed the door behind them. “Where is he? Over there?” She must have pointed wordlessly. He walked to the sofa and around it. He said something and bent over.

He was a big man with a high forehead from which his hair was receding. She could see his face, lean, with high cheek bones and a long and aquiline nose; his rather narrow upper lip and unexpectedly full and red lower lip and the small narrow mustache he wore; he was big without being fat; he was actually rather slender for a man of his age, probably in the early fifties, and he had even then, with disheveled hair and his deep-set eyes puffy from sleep, a look of breeding and sophistication.

After a moment he rose. He had dropped his overcoat on the arm of the sofa and his red-and-black-striped satin robe fitted in with the Victorian room. He was holding his hands out, away from him, staring down. She said, in a whisper, “Is he dead?”

“Yes. What happened?”

‘I don’t know.” Her voice wavered.

Bill Fiske gave her a swift glance. “Stop that, Monica…! I’ve got to wash my hands.” He had been in her apartment many times; he went into the hall that led to the bathroom and bedroom and dressing room; she could hear running water and then he reappeared in the doorway with a towel, drying his hands. He looked at her and then around the room and saw the coffee. He dropped the towel, and went toward it and put his hand on the silver pot. “It’s still hot. You’d better have some.” He saw the shattered cup on the floor. “Get two cups—and some brandy.”

Brandy, of course. He had given her some from his own stock. Cognac, bottled for him, and his name, William Fiske, on the label. She got that and glasses and cups. He was standing beside the sofa again, looking down, but came toward her to take the tall bottle of brandy and then went himself to the pantry and found a corkscrew.

“Sit down, Monica. Hold everything—don’t faint. I’ll have this open in a second.”

She watched him tear off the lead foil. “There’s no better cognac in the world,” he said. “Why haven’t you opened this before now? Here. Drink this.”

He poured some for himself too, and then poured coffee into the cups and added sugar. “Now. then. Feehng better? What happened, Monica?”

“Shouldn’t we call a doctor? I never thought of it …”

“He’s dead. No. At least—just tell me quietly what happened.”

“But it’s—so horrible. Uncle Bill, why …”

“Listen, my dear and believe me. Have I ever let you down when you’ve needed me?”

“No.”

“Then trust me now. I don’t know what to do; I’ve got to think. But first I’ve got to know everything. And just as quickly and as exactly as you can tell me.” He paused and looked at her thoughtfully. “Think now, Monica. You went out with him tonight?”

“Yes. Yes, and then we came back here—I thought there’d be a message from her here, too, you see. Or she might phone, or something. But there wasn’t anything. And then Eric …”

“Message from whom?”

“From Linda, of course.”

“Linda! Linda Chavon?”

“But there wasn’t any. I left Eric here, and went into the dressing room and locked the door. It was silly—that is, I thought it was silly. And I thought he’d gone; I didn’t hear anything; I thought he’d gone and I came out and made coffee and …” Her hand went out to show him where Eric lay as if he didn’t know. Again she thought in a confused way that it was still like a bad play, except it wasn’t a play.

Bill Fiske lighted a cigarette and gave it to her and lighted one for himself. “Now then, if I’ve things straight it’s like this: Somewhere you heard from or of Linda …”

“Yes, of course. At the Stork Club. In a cachet. And we came back …”

“Wait, Monica. Tell me about the cachet and Linda. Quickly.”

She did. Trying not to look at the chintz-covered sofa, unable to avoid looking at it.

Bill Fiske was surprised; she knew that, in spite of his habitually cool and imperturbable look; his deep-set eyes were very keen.

“Where is the message?”

Where? It had been in her hand when she entered the apartment. She had removed her coat and put down her small suede-covered handbag on a chair.

She went to lift her coat and the small piece of paper fell from it.

“So …” said Bill Fiske. He picked it up, read it, examined it. “Is it Linda’s writing?”

“It’s like it. But—yes, I think so. I’ve got to try to help her, Uncle Bill. She wouldn’t have sent word like that unless she was really in trouble.”

Bill Fiske’s deep-set eyes traveled from the note to the sofa. “There’s trouble here first,” he said. He put the message from Linda on the table. “All right. So then you came back here. I gather Eric made himself objectionable. Wouldn’t he leave?” He shot her a questioning look and she nodded. “So you locked yourself in the dressing room …”

“Itwas silly. I felt like a fool. But …”

“And while you were there you heard nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nobody came into the apartment?”

“Why, I …” It wasn’t possible, but she hadn’t thought of that; and it wasn’t possible either but up to that instant another thought had not come into her whirling mind and that was the most important question of all. She leaned forward. “Was he murdered?”

Surprise was now definitely in his face, but it was a curious surprise—it flashed upon her with the oddest irrelevance that there was an element of admiration in it. And suddenly something was unuttered, and unspoken and yet lay like a demanding presence in the room. She leaned forward, her hand gripping the arm of her chair, her white woolen robe falling back from her white pajamas. She cried, “You think I murdered him!”

4

“Nonsense,” said Bill Fiske.

“You think I murdered him. We’d quarreled and I …”

He strode toward her and took the cup away from her and then took her hands tight in his own. “Of couse not, Monica. You’re being very silly. How could you murder a man as strong as Eric! How could you murder anybody?” He patted her hands. “I know you didn’t murder anybody. What made you think of such a thing?”

“Nobody else was here. I don’t think he’d kill himself.”

“It has to be either suicide or murder. Didn’t you think of that?”

“No, I—I couldn’t think. I didn’t …” She withdrew her hands and pushed them rather desperately over her eyes. “He couldn’t have been murdered. Nobody was here. He didn’t talk to anybody; there wasn’t any—any quarrel or any sounds at all. He couldn’t have been murdered. I only saw him like that. And knew he was dead with all that blood. I couldn’t think….”

“Stop that, Monica. Look at me.” She forced herself to do so. He said earnestly, “Don’t let yourself go like that. You can’t have hysterics. Not just now. You’ve got to keep control. You see, you’re going away.”

“What?”

“You’re going away. Now. Tonight.”

She shook her head slowly. “No! No, I’m not going away.”

“Drink some more coffee,” he said abruptly and moved, tall and strong in his red-and-black satin dressing gown, to bring the little silver pot to her. The stream of brown coffee poured into her cup, and he said approvingly, “Your hand is good and steady, Monica. You have courage. I’m going to call on it. But first I’d better explain.” He put down the silver pot and the light gleamed upon it. “If nobody murdered Eric then he committed suicide. If nobody was in the apartment then he couldn’t have been murdered. I never even thought that you killed him; that is absurd. The police can tell—or the medical examiner or whoever it is that passes on cases of violent death—exactly how he died. At least I imagine they can, by the angle of the Wound …”

She was horribly aware of the thing behind the sofa. She felt that she must look again, examine closely so she knew details—and she was afraid that she was going to do so. She wouldn’t; she couldn’t. She said, “How did he die, Uncle Bill? All that blood on his hands and everywhere …”

Bill Fiske said quietly, “You’d better not look again,” as if he guessed her thought. “It was done with a knife. It is there on the floor. His throat—perhaps he did it himself.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“Drink your coffee. I don’t know why. Was he tight? I never knew him to drink much.”

She shook her head and he went on, “It wasn’t-because you turned him down. Don’t even think that. He—there was either something else, something that had happened lately that you and I know nothing about, or he was, as they say, temporarily deranged. The point is—it is not a pleasant business.”

“Pleasant!”

“Not at all. Not anywhere, but especially here, Monica. In your apartment.”

Horror again caught her. Newspapers. Pictures. An inquest. Herself a marked woman for the rest of her life.

“Don’t, my dear,” said Bill Fiske suddenly. He came to her again. He didn’t take her hand but looked down and said very quietly, “You are going away. I left a message for you tonight and asked you to phone to me when you came in? Remember? Or did you get the message?”

She remembered as if from across a dim and dreadful abyss. Pinky and the message asking her to call Mr. Fiske.

“You didn’t phone.”

“No, I …” she moistened her lips. “Eric …”

“You were too upset. I’m going to give you another shock, but I think it’s good for you. I’d better say first that I’ve already arranged everything. I was going to keep on telephoning to you until you came in. I thought you might have gone dancing and would be in about three or so, and I dozed off. You’re going to Mexico City.”

“I am? What do you mean?”

“For me. It’s a job.”

There was something behind his words; something very urgent and unusual in the look in his eyes. Something she didn’t understand and that he was going to make her understand. She said, “What kind of job?” as if he had mesmerized her and drawn the words from her.

She caught a flash of satisfaction in his face. He said, “Monica, I said you were going to have another shock. But this is a good one. I’ve heard from John Basevi.”

She couldn’t speak. It was like that other moment in the apartment when everything in it, including her heart and the little French clock, had seemed to stop. He said, “I won’t tantalize you. He is well, I think, and apparently all right. I had a letter from him. You’d better read it. I brought it down.”

It was in his pocket. She couldn’t believe it even when she saw the envelope, with Mexican stamps, and then John’s handwriting, fine and vigorous, hard to read, if you didn’t know it. She took the letter and still didn’t believe it.

“Shall I take it out for you? Here …” He took out the letter and put it back in her hand. It was from John. There was no question of it now. Somehow, she read.

“Dear Uncle Bill: I couldn’t cable, as things were. But I’m here; just got here, in fact. I can’t get into the United States on the quota for God knows how long and I’ve got to see you. I’ve got to have some money. I can’t explain—I need a sub stantial amount. And I desperately need to see you. Will you come? I can’t say more here.”

“It’s from John, all right,” said Bill Fiske. “It is a guarded letter, probably for very good reasons; he as good as said because of the censors. I intended to go to him and take him money. But this changes things. You go to John. I’ll find Linda if she’s in New York. And I’ll see to that …” He nodded in the direction of the sofa.

“John,” said Monica with stiff lips. “In Mexico City—alive …”

“He needs money. He desperately needs help. Believe me, Monica, we must divide forces. You go to John; take him the money; I’ll see to—things here. It is the only thing for us to do. I don’t believe Linda is in New York. I think she’d have come to you at once. But tell me again everything you remember of the cachet. In detail, I mean. Quickly, Monica.”

She told it again, in detail, as he asked her to do; she was mainly aware of the letter in her hand.

“Well,” he said, “if she is here, I’ll find her. I promise you. But I think that message was brought by somebody. That she sent it—from France, perhaps. There could be a dozen—a hundred explanations. She stayed in France; we’ve heard nothing of her since, until now. I’ll investigate. I’ll watch for any attempt on her part to reach you here. John wouldn’t ask for help if he were not in a very serious—possibly a very dangerous-situation. We both know John and we can read between the lines in this letter. I’m going to do your thinking for you. I got the letter tonight when I got home: I phoned and I had a break about reservations. You are going to use my reservation and fly to Mexico City.”

He glanced at the little French clock. “In two hours you’ll leave LaGuardia airport. You’ll go to Chicago and then to St. Louis; you may have to stop over there; they weren’t at all sure when they could clear me out of St. Louis but they could get me that far. You’ll have to make the trip like that—ready to go whenever they tell you they can get you on a plane. Your birth certificate and an old passport are somewhere in my office. I’ll see you get your Mexican entry card; the mail is always fast; it’ll be waiting for you at Fort Worth in care of the customs office.”

“Eric …”

“I’ll see tQ that. It has to be either suicide or murder. In either case there’ll be an investigation. I’ll report it; I’ll give evidence. I’ll do everything according to the letter of the law. But I want you out of it.”

“You think they’ll say I murdered him. You think they’ll arrest me. Question me. You think …”

“Steady now, my dear. I don’t think they’d arrest you. They’d question you, yes. Especially if they say it is murder.”

“It can’t be murder! There was nobody here …”

“Steady, my dear,” he repeated. “Whatever the police decide or do is beside the point right now. You’ve got to pull yourself together. If not for your own sake or for mine, then for John’s. He needs you.”

Thoughts whirled around her as if they had beating black wings. “No. I can’t go.”

“Why?”

She made a blind gesture toward the sofa, and thought: Oughtn’t they get a sheet and cover him? Oughtn’t they go through the form of calling a doctor even though it was forever too late? Oughtn’t they go to another room, anywhere—to talk?

Bill Fiske said gently, ‘Tve told you to let me manage all this. You’ve always come to me with things, Monica. Let me see to this.”

“You’re trying to save me.”

“All right. Why not?”

“But it isn’t—the police—don’t you see I’ve got to stay…?”

“Got to get yourself involved in a mess that will make you a marked woman for the rest of your life? I think Eric killed himself; murder is—not very likely. But I’ve got to report it right away; minutes count in an investigation. Frankly, I do want to get you out of it. Why not? I don’t want you to wreck your own life and a life I—have had something to do with. I’ve been proud of you, Monica.”

“I can’t run away. I know how it sounds and I’m no heroine. I’m scared, I’m sick with fright. But I—can’t.”

“All right.” He glanced around the room. His voice was agreeable as always and gentle because he was talking to her. “Where’s your telephone?”

“In the bedroom. On the table …”

He went into the hall. Was he going to telephone the police? Well, naturally. That was the thing to do. Immediately., So they could start an inquiry at once. Suicide—or murder!

She got up, feeling drugged and indescribably tired. She picked up the message from Linda as she passed the table, idly, really, with no intention. When she reached the bedroom he was sitting on the bed, big and masculine-looking in the feminine room with its satin blanket cover and turned-down bed, and lacy pillows. He held the big gray Manhattan telephone book on his lap. He was aware of her coming into the room and turned toward her. “I don’t want to turn the police loose on you. I’ll do it if you say so, but it’s not a good idea. Unless …”

She sat down on the crimson-covered slipper chair. “Unless what?”.

“Unless you haven’t told me the whole truth, Monica.”

“I have, Uncle Bill. Surely, you believe me. If you doubt my word …”

“I don’t. That’s why I want you to go. If it were necessary for you to go through with this horror of police investigation it would be a different thing. I’d say, stay and do it. But it isn’t necessary. Unless there is something you know that you haven’t told me.”

“I’ve told you everything. But I can’t leave….”

“What about John?”

In the stillness of the room she could almost hear John’s voice, see his brown and laughing face instead of that of the man sitting on the bed, waiting.

Bill Fiske said slowly, “You can’t do much for John, if the police hold you for questioning, as they will almost certainly do.”

John alive, John needing her! She could think of nothing else and she ought to be able to think better and more quickly than she had ever had to do in her life before.

Bill Fiske said as if he knew it, too, “You’re not in a state to judge anything. I can’t let you ruin your life. That’s one thing. And I can’t permit you to let John down, either.” He put down the telephone book and got up. “Where’s your dressing case?” He opened the cupboard doors; her small array of luggage was on a shelf; he selected the little alligator dressing case he’d given her five years ago before she went to Europe. He pulled out a large case too. “Now, then …” He disappeared into the dressing room and presently came back. “You’ll have to pack. It’ll be chilly at night there. It’s very high, you know. Wear a suit and take your fur coat.”

“I can’t—Uncle Bill, I can’t …”

“Monica.” His voice was so stern and sharp it brought her head up with a jerk. “You’ve got to go. You owe it to John and you owe it to me.”

“But Eric …”

“Does anything about Eric mean more to you than I do? Or John?”

She shook her head dully, weighted with blank, dull weariness.

“Did you love Eric?”

“No!”

“Do you love John?”

“Yes. Oh, yes …”

Something wanner came into his face; it was like a glow of triumph. He todk her hands again and drew her up from the little chair. “Get some clothes on. I’ll pack for you. I refuse to be responsible for it if you get there and don’t have what you need. But it won’t matter; you can always buy something….”

But Eric was there in the next room.

“Uncle Bill, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know, Monica. But I’ll do something and it’ll be all right. Hurry now. Here …” He disappeared again and came back with clothes—stockings, brown alligator pumps, even a small lace girdle; a white blouse and a brown suit. She hadn’t moved and he said sharply and sternly again, “Dress. Hurry. There’s barely time for everything. I’ve got to get you …”

She was sure he was going to say, “Get you away before the police come.” But he never finished it, for just then the doorbell rang; it was low and polite. And demanding.

5

“God,” whispered Bill Fiske. His eyes met hers. A purple flush spread upward over his handsome face. “Who is that?”

“I don’t know. I … Police?”

“Did you call them? Before you called me?”

“No.”

The polite low buzz came again.

“I’ll see to it. Get dressed. Hurry.” He closed the bedroom door after his tall, black-and-crimson-clad figure. She felt that she must follow him; it crossed her mind that it might conceivably be Linda.

Instead she started to dress; it was again as if she were mesmerized. But not mesmerized enough; her fingers were slow and clumsy; she couldn’t get her stocking seams straight; it seemed to take minutes to fasten her garters; the buttons on her blouse, up the back, were impossible to reach. She was suddenly all dressed and her hair was still down and tied with a red ribbon. She took up an alligator handbag and then saw the twisted white paper that was the message from Linda on the floor where she had dropped it. She put it in her handbag. She opened the bedroom door. He’d said to pack. She remembered that and went back to get the big case. The door into the living room was closed and just as she entered the dressing room and looked at the glittering, mirrored little dressing table and fumbled for a brush and thought dimly, lipstick—I must put on lipstick—Uncle Bill opened the living-room door. He still looked purple and angry.

“That,” he said biting off the words, “was the elevator boy with the red hair. I’ve got rid of him.”

If only her hands were not so clumsy; she brushed her hair back and twisted it in a round little bun on the back of her neck; where were pins? The first one slid out of her fingers. Uncle Bill suddenly was packing; packing carefully, too, looking at her dresses on their little scented hangers; pushing one aside, taking down the next and folding it in the case. He said, “He’s a confounded little upstart. Curious, I expect, really. I got rid of him. I’m sure he didn’t see—anything.”

A small picture rose out of the dim kaleidoscope of the night. “He saw me slap Eric.”

Bill Fiske looked at her over the blue sports suit he was folding. “Slap Eric? You didn’t tell me. I thought you said you’d told me everything.”

“I thought I did.” There, her hair was done. Her hands moved slowly over the dressing table; the dressing case was fitted and its small gold jars and bottles were filled; still there were things she’d better pack.

“Tell me.”

“He came in with your message just as I lost my temper and slapped Eric.” Slapped Eric—that horrible sprawled thing in the next room. Bill Fiske said, “Well, I think it’s all right.” There was the look in his face, guarded, intent, that he wore when he was thinking very quickly and very anxiously. He looked at his watch. “I’ll ring down for a cab. That’ll give Pinky something to do.”

All at once she was ready. Uncle Bill had put on his coat over his dressing gown; he had her two bags in his hands; she had her short fur coat over her shoulders and wasn’t going to look around the living room and had to. Bill Fiske said brusquely, “Don’t look. I’ll fix everything,” and made her leave the apartment ahead of him. He tried the door after them; it opened and he turned the night latch and tried it again; this time it was locked. They walked to the elevator; it seemed very late. They passed one or two doors to other apartments; it was strange that so much could happen and yet all those other people were sleeping, peaceful, unaware of death, unaware of horror.

Pinky brought up the elevator.

“Just take us up to my apartment, Pinky,” said Bill Fiske. “I’ve got to get some things for Miss Blane. She’s making a business trip for me.”

That was so Pinky wouldn’t talk; elevator boys did, no matter how friendly they were.

They reached the penthouse entrance, which was private. “Wait here, Pinky,” said Bill Fiske. He crossed the foyer and opened the door that led directly into his living room. Pinky, waiting and whistling softly, broke off to say, “You going on a trip, Miss Blane? Wish I was going on a trip. Gee!”

She stared at the bags at her feet and thought, yet was unable to believe it, that John was at the other end of the trip. Journeys end in lovers’ meetings. How would that journey end?

Pinky said, as if continuing a conversation, “I wish I knew about that elevator, though. How it got up there! But it was a captain in the Army, I’m sure; saw his back just as he went out the door. Blond fellow with a captain’s bars. But how’d he get the elevator up? You’re sure he wasn’t with you, Miss Blane?”

She didn’t know what he was talking about; she was only dimly aware that he was talking. She said, “No. That is—what elevator?”

“Sounded as if it came down from near your floor. All alone. He must have known how to operate it and got in while I had this cage somewhere in the building, and nobody saw him. Till he left, I mean. I finally came up to—here’s Mr. Fiske.”

Bill Fiske had got into slacks and a jacket, and pulled his overcoat around him again. They swooped down to the street level and the taxi was waiting. And when she was in the taxi, with Pinky lounging in the lighted foyer behind them and watching idly, Uncle Bill leaned into the darkened cab and took her alligator handbag.

“I’ll put everything you’ll need here. Money—for your trip. And this package for John. Examine it when you’ve time. Carry it as seems best to you. This is an emergency—there isn’t time now to argue about it; you’ve got to hide it somewhere about you and don’t tell anyone you’ve got it. It is for John, remember. The end justifies the means.” He put a thick envelope in her hand. “It is”—he hesitated, glanced at the cab driver and said—‘It is the substantial amount he asked for. Take care of it—and yourself, my dear. Pick up your reservations at the airport; they’ll be there in my name. If you get a chance, phone to me from Chicago. Or—no. No, don’t phone. It’s better not to. Don’t wire. I’ll wire to you if—when I can. Go to the Blackstone if you. are held up in Chicago for a seat in the plane; the Park Plaza in St. Louis. Are you listening? I have John’s address. I’ll try to get a cable or a phone call through to him. If I fail, go to the Reforma in Mexico City. I’ll get in touch with you. I’ve put John’s fetter here too. His address is on it. Now then …” He closed the handbag, put it in her hand. “Good-bye my dear. Be a good girl and keep your head. Be very careful. No matter what happens admit nothing. You must understand that. Do you?”

She nodded. He said, with another glance at the cab driver, “Say nothing till you hear from me. And remember, John is waiting.” The taxi door closed between them. He said loudly to the driver, “LaGuardia.”

It was cold and dark and the street was deserted. Uncle Bill stood against the light from the foyer behind him and waved, and then abruptly moved away. They turned and the lighted foyer was gone; they turned again and were on Park Avenue—wide and empty and strange at that hour, with only the traffic lights and a few cars along it, and scattered lights in the great buildings that made a deserted cavern of the street.

The envelope in her hand was thick and heavy. She wondered briefly how much money Bill was sending. Hide it somewhere about you, he had said. Moving out of range of the little mirror above the driver’s eyes, she stuffed the envelope into her brassiere, making sure the tightness of the small garment would hold the envelope securely for the moment. Later, when she had a chance, she would look inside the envelope, and plan a way to carry it.

They went under a street light and in the small mirror above she caught a glimpse of her face, shadowy, with no hat on her dark hair. She had put lipstick on, for her mouth was clear and definite, but she had no memory of applying it.

Before it seemed possible they pulled up at LaGuardia. Lights streamed from the door. Bags were out of the taxi; she paid the driver and tipped him; when she opened her handbag for money she saw John’s letter and a roll of bills. It was as if she were two people. One girl spoke aloud and did what was expected; the second told the first what to do. It was better, said the second, to fix her mind on the letter; not on what was happening back there in her apartment.

A porter took her bags. They went inside and the lights seemed very bright and strong, so she felt suddenly as if she were spotlighted, as if any number of eyes must have been immediately drawn to her entrance.

Actually, of course, nobody looked at her. Her heels seemed to click on the floor; she had an impulse to walk softly, on tiptoe, so as not to attract attention to herself. Reservations—he’d told her to pick up reservations. She must have spoken to the porter and told him; all at once they were at a counter. Her own voice sounded perfectly clear and normal. A ticket to Chicago for Miss Blane. She waited and Bill had apparently telephoned and arranged to give her the reservation he had made for himself, for her ticket was there. It went all the way through to Mexico City.

“You understand we may have to ask you to stay over at any point in the trip. We’ll try to get you through as soon as possible. Check your reservations at Chicago. At St. Louis. At Fort Worth …”

She replied. She paid for the tickets from the thick roll of bills in her bag. (So far, said that inner, second person, she had behaved very well, very coolly, very calmly. Not as if she were running from the police.)

But she wasn’t. Not actually.

“Your weight please, Miss Blane.”

“A hundred and seventeen.”

The porter had weighed her bags; she paid for the slight excess baggage. That was because the bottles and jars in the extravagant dressing case Uncle Bill had given her were so heavy. A public-address system was roaring, asking for someone to come to some ticket window. Her calm gave way for a second; suppose it said Miss Monica Blane—come to ticket window nine; you are wanted by the police.

The porter said, “You’ve got half an hour to wait.”

She took the checks for the bags and went up to the restaurant. She made herself drink more coffee and eat a sandwich. She saw herself again in a mirror—a slender girl in a brown suit with a fur wrap flung over her shoulders. Her blouse and her face were white, her lips red. Her eyes had shadows under them and looked enormous. Otherwise from the tips of her afligator pumps to her smoothly parted hair she was just a yoimg woman, suitably dressed for traveling, perfectly calm and poised.

Not running from murder.

The public-address system was suddenly announcing the flight to Chicago. She hadn’t got her check yet from the waitress. It took a few moments to do so; more to go downstairs through the lighted building—where again she had a sensation of being too much in the open, unprotected, a focus for eyes that might be watching her.

She reached the gate and saw the plane sitting there, silver, with the runway down. The wind caught her and blew her brown, short skirt tight against her legs as she walked toward the plane. They were putting in the baggage.

It wasn’t real, any of it. (Blit it is, said that inward Monica. All of it is real.) A stewardess was smiling near the door of the plane. She balanced herself on the runway and then in the plane which, on the ground, was uneven and sloping. She wanted to sit alone but realized with a tinge of dismay that she couldn’t. The plane was nearly full and all the single seats taken. She sat in the nearest double seat. Again her muscles acted for her—she fastened the seat belt and waited. The thick envelope inside her brassiere pressed sharply against her. Her hand held tightly to the handbag within which was John’s letter.

The last few passengers got on. The man beside her folded his newspaper another way and kept on reading. Somebody in Army uniform, a captain, by his bars, brushed past her and went on to a seat up ahead. The door was being closed.

Motors beat louder, softer, louder again. The plane was moving; the curtains were pulled tightly across the windows, so her impulse to look out and make sure that no one had followed her had to be controlled. But no one had followed her. Why should they?

The motors were very loud, and then settled into a regular hum, and she realized that they were in the air. She leaned back. The little green message saying “No Smoking” and “Fasten Seat Belts” flashed out. The man beside her put down his paper and lighted a cigarette.

By this time they were high over the city. Away below her in the distance now, Uncle Bill would do whatever it was necessary to do.

Whether she was right or wrong, there was nothing now that she could do about it.

Sometime later she was dimly aware of the stewardess putting a light rug over her. Thinking of John and feeling that sense of security, she surrendered again to weariness and the drone of the engines.

It was not, as a matter of fact, until they left Chicago that she knew she was being followed but not by whom or why.

The plane arrived in Chicago on schedule. Drugged with weariness, she disentangled herself from the rug and was one of the first passengers off the plane and into the office building at the Chicago airport. It was a foggy, typically Chicago morning, cold and dark and raw and yet with something exciting in the air.

She went to the ticket counter and was told that she had a place on the plane leaving Chicago at six, arriving in St. Louis at seven-twenty-five.

That meant some hours in Chicago. She waited for the baggage to be brought in and went in the bus, with the other passengers, from the airport near Cicero to the Palmer House, and then by taxi to the Blackstone. There was no message for her. She registered and bought New York papers before she went up to her room.

She read the papers. There was, of course, nothing about Eric; there wouldn’t have been time. She slid the envelope from her brassiere and opened it. There were bills, flat, within it. She counted with a queer, growing dismay. Ten thousand dollars in bills lay on the table before her when she’d finished.

John had said a substantial amount and Bill had quoted his words, but she had not expected it to be so much.

She got out John’s letter and read it again. Bill had interpreted John’s “desperate” need to be very urgent. Bill was probably right, she concluded. But the large amount of money seemed to confirm her own deep uneasiness about John. What was wrong? Why could he conceivably need so much money? Obviously John had said everything he dared to say in his letter. He might be sick, he might be in danger, there were a hundred possible explanations. The only thing that was clear in his letter was its extreme urgency.

The bills were in thousands and five hundreds; after some thought she doubled them over once, wrapped a handkerchief around them and knotted it tightly, and then, making the packet as flat as possible, pinned it to the inside of her small girdle with a jeweled pin that had a safety clasp. It might be slightly uncomfortable but, at any rate, it would be safe. By then she was moving like an automaton. She took a hot bath and fell into a queerly heavy sleep—through which, however, still moved figures of the night just past. Uncle Bill in his crimson-and-black-satin dressing gown; Eric; Linda somewhere in the distance, with her bright blue eyes and blonde hair, smiling and altogether unafraid and not in trouble at all. Pinky was there, somehow, too.

And a tall man in the uniform of an Army captain.

She had left a call. When the telephone roused her she showered quickly and dressed—the brown suit again. She checked out and took a taxi to the Palmer House. The limousine to the airport was waiting and she got in. She glanced now at the people who were getting in the car and did not recognize any of them.

It was a long drive through wet streets with the lights haloed by the fog, out through Cicero and to the airport again. Her reservation was still good; the flight would leave on time.

And, as she turned away from the ticket counter the girl behind it said suddenly, “Miss Blane. Oh, someone was just now inquiring for you.”

It brought her around to the counter again, her heart suddenly in her throat.

“For me?”

“Yes. Just a minute ago. A man …” The girl looked out through the drifting, moving people. Monica looked too, and looked and looked and saw no one she knew; no one she had ever seen before.

The girl said again, “It was a man. I didn’t notice his face particularly. But he’s to be on your flight to St. Louis. You’ll see him.” She smiled brightly. Doing her duty by the customer. Trying to be helpful. Never dreaming what her casual, friendly words meant to Monica. Monica heard herself saying, “Thank you.”

But nobody would inquire for her. Nobody knew she was there, except Uncle Bill. ’

Or, by that time, the police.

She debated about taking the plane. If it was the policesummoned by the New York police to arrest her and send her back to New York (as what? a material witness; wasn’t that what they called it? Or as a suspect?)—if it was the police they would stop her whether or not she was on the plane. It was announced just then; she went out into the foggy dusk, looking now at everyone who came near her, searching every face.

She got on the plane. Several passengers were already there, in the choice seats ahead. No one looked familiar. She watched—covertly now—everyone who entered the plane, and still saw no one she knew.

The door was closed.

If she had not been able to think before, she now thought too much. She covered every contingency in her mind and still there was no explanation. If Uncle Bill had wired it would have reached her either at the hotel or in care of the Chicago and Southern Airlines. So it wasn’t that.

No one else knew she was to be in Chicago.

Someone had known that she was at the Stork Club the previous night and had left the cachet on the table. Someone had known she was in Chicago and he was to be on the flight. The girl at the counter had said so. Who then? Which one?

Commercial travelers, businessmen, a man up ahead in Army uniform. She could only see the faces of those behind her.

The man beside her slept. The man across the aisle, short and swarthy, with a round face and heavily lidded eyes, finished his supper, lighted a cigarette, folded his short hands across his small paunch and lapsed into dreamy meditation.

Which one? And why would anyone follow her? Suddenly the money she carried seemed an added danger, not so much because of the amount—although ten thousand dollars is no small sum—but because of John’s extreme need for it.

Through her thin blouse she could feel the little packet, pinned securely to the top of her girdle. It was perfectly safe as long as she was safe.

Besides, no one could know that she carried so much money and no one could know that she was taking it to John, who needed it.

She told herself that, over and over again. And watched the occasional lights away below.

It was a short trip through gathering darkness.

They were nearly into St. Louis when it occurred to her that she ought to have asked the name of the passenger who had asked for her.

That was stupid, incredibly stupid. The result of blind panic. They were suddenly above the St. Louis airport and she was cold with fright—an unreasoning, silly kind of fright. The way she had felt the previous night, locked in her dressing room.

It was not, however, until they reached St. Louis that the attempt was made to murder her.

There was no question about it. But a very unexpected thing happened first.

They were on time. It was exactly seven-twenty-seven when the signal “Fasten Seat Belts” was flashed on and the stewardess went from one seat to another, making sure the small curtains were pulled over the windows—a wartime rule. (Are there police down there at the airport? said that inward voice to Monica. Waiting for you? Tracking you down? As if you were a hit-and-run driver?)

They landed smoothly. In the last moment of landing Monica decided to let all the other passengers precede her. She dropped her handbag and fumbled for it and thus delayed herself.

So, when she rose, the only passenger remaining was the man in Army uniform.

And it was Gibbs Brooke.

Gibbs Brooke. John’s friend and hers. One of the little, intimate group who had danced and laughed and played together on the Riviera that golden August before the war—and who had separated like leaves blown before a hurricane.

“Gibbs!” she cried.

He was very natural-looking except he had put on some weight; that or his uniform made him seem bulkier and more matured. Then for a fractional instant she thought he was going to pretend he didn’t know her. It was a queer impression and fleeting, for he said, “Monica!” And paused. And added, “What a surprise!”

“Gibbs! I can’t believe it!”

“No, I—what a surprise! Where are you going?”

“Why, I—to Mexico City. Gibbs, I never dreamed that was you!”

“This is wonderful! We—that is, we’re holding things up. Let’s get out. We can talk then.”

“But—all right.” It was a dark night, in spite of distant lights. Wind caught her skirts again as she went down the runway with Gibbs—Gibbs!—behind her and started across the open, windswept space toward the lighted terminus. The other passengers had struggled on ahead toward the steps that led down, through a narrow tunnel, and up again into the building itself.

She had almost reached the steps when the shot came.

It was so violently out of place, so sudden, so wrong, that for an instant Monica did not know that it was a gunshot.

Down on the field amid eerie floodlights that made the resultant shadows sharp and black, an airplane was revving up its motors loudly. The thought flashed across her mind that there was an exceptionally loud backfire. It seemed much nearer than the sound of the motors; it sounded like a shot.

A shot! But it was a shot! It was unmistakable; there is nothing in the world that sounds like a gunshot except a gunshot.

She stopped, her head, bent against the wind, jerked upward. Wind swept past as if it had black banners. Three’ things happened simultaneously. A shadow seemed to flap out of sight beyond a baggage truck near; the doors ahead of her swung together and Gibbs came running toward her, his coat blowing.

“Monica …” he shouted above the furious gust of wind.

She’d thought he was beside her; instead he was then at least ten feet away. As she thought that he reached her.

“Gibbs …”

“What happened?” The door ahead had stopped swinging. The shadow made by the baggage truck was merely a shadow. Gibbs took her by the shoulder. “Monica, answer me! What happened? What was that?”

“I don’t know.” Wind caught her words and carried them away. Gibbs cried, “It sounded like a shot. Quick. This way …”

It was only a step to the doors; but there wasn’t anyone, anywhere, except Gibbs and herself and, away back at the plane, a few dark figures moving about. Gibbs thrust her inside the doors. Lights glared down upon them. Steps led downward to a lighted tunnel. No one was there.

“Monica, who was it? Didn’t you see? Are you hurt?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. …”

He opened her coat quickly, his face white. Brown suit, fur jacket, gloves, handbag; she looked down at herself bewildered, stunned, unbelieving.

“You’re all right. What was it? Didn’t you see anything?”

“I thought there was someone there—in the shadow …”

“Out there?” His face sharpened. “Go on down those steps and up into the building. I’ll look.”

“Gibbs, where are you going?” Suddenly Gibbs meant safety. Gibbs was a friend. Gibbs belonged in a sane and normal world, not in a nightmare. “Gibbs, don’t go out there. It’s not safe.” Eric, lying like that with his throat cut! A shot through the flying black shadows of the night—a shot aimed at her. There was no time to reason, no time to explain. It wasn’t possible; it wasn’t credible, but it had happened and the memory of Eric convinced her of it.

“What do you mean?” Gibbs whirled upon her again, his eyes bright and searching and cold under the visor of his cap.

She strove to steady herself. “Whoever did it is gone by now. The thing to do is report it to the police …” The word police was like a hand in her throat cutting off her voice and breath. The police would hold her there; they would keep her from taking John the money she carried. They would keep her from going to him. She could not go to the police. The police were her enemies just then. Because Eric Weller had been murdered.

She knew it then. She didn’t know why, she didn’t know who had killed him; in the confusion and turmoil of the moment she knew only one thing but, now, there was no doubt about that. Murder had crept on furtive feet into her small, gay apartment, while she sat behind a locked door and heard nothing.

Murder had followed her; it had reached out toward her from the flying black shadows of the night. There was no reason, no motive, but the sheer fact of it was inescapable. And if they called the police they would hold her there. They would talk to the New York police. They would uncover the facts of Eric Weller’s murder. They would send her back—while John waited for her in Mexico City.

Gibbs said, suddenly, “What nonsense!” and laughed.

It was an odd short laugh that had no mirth in it. She stared up at him and he laughed again, abruptly. “What nonsense to stand here talking of police! My dear Monica, we are both out of our senses. That wasn’t a shot. It was a motor backfiring.” He held her arm rather tightly for an instant and then drew her toward the steps. “Come on, Monica. Forget it. Didn’t you say you were going to Mexico City? I’m going to Mexico City, too. Let’s see about our reservations. Perhaps we can go on the same plane.”

6

“Gibbs, that was a shot.”

His hand was steady under her arm. He laughed again. “It was nothing of the kind! The wind and the darkness and everything confused both of us. Come on.”

“But, Gibbs …”

“Now, Monica, pull yourself together. Nobody’s out there taking pot shots at—at anybody. The whole idea’s absurd. Besides, why should anybody try to murder you?”

She shook her head, bewildered by his abrupt change and by the shot, the night, the fact of murder which was now undeniable. The steps seemed steep and uneven; the tunnel was deserted and Gibbs’ voice rang hollowly in it. Her knees were trembling and unsteady; she only half listened to Gibbs. “I can’t get over my surprise at seeing you, Mona. The last person in the world I’d have expected. When did you get on the plane? Of course, in Chicago, I suppose. Well, here we are. Now we’ll know whether we stay in St. Louis or go on through to Fort Worth. I believe that is the next stop.”

They emerged into the very middle of the busy, crowded airport. Gibbs’ eyes swept it, darting all around—the restaurant, the newsstand, the counters, the seats where clusters of people sat and waited. She looked, too, and found no one she knew, no one she had ever seen before except, here and there, the faces of several of the passengers on the Chicago planefaces she had already scrutinized and rejected. Had one of them shot at her? Someone had known she was to be on the Chicago plane. But why?

Gibbs turned her briskly toward the counter. “I hope we get on the same plane,” he said again. “It doesn’t seem possible—our meeting accidentally like this, and both going to Mexico City. Here’s the counter. You go ahead …”

Again she was ah automaton, going through motions previously set and planned for her by somebody else. There was a reservation for her for the morning flight to Fort Worth. She would be at the Park Plaza Hotel, she told the girl. “Wait for me,” said Gibbs, when she’d finished. “We’ll have dinner together.”

She waited, a little apart from the counter. It seemed only a few seconds before Gibbs came to her. “It’s all set. We’re on the same flight tomorrow to Fort Worth, and then to Mexico City early the next morning. Lucky, huh! The limousine into town is this way.”

It seemed, too, a short ride into the city and to the hotel; actually it was rather long. There yas no chance to talk to Gibbs, for there were several other passengers in the car. They reached the hotel and Gibbs got out and saw to their baggage. “I’ll stay here, too,” he said.

They entered a pleasant lobby, bright and quiet except for an orchestra coming from a bar somewhere off at their right. It was playing, but gaily and with a certain insouciance, “Speak low, when you speak love …” The gay, yet tender melody ran through the lobby; she felt herself putting the words to it.

“Miss Blane would like a suite, I expect,” said Gibbs to the desk clerk. “I want a room, too.”

Another passenger from the plane had followed them into the hotel—the little dark man who had sat opposite her on the plane and slept gently with his hands folded over his small paunch. He smiled politely and waited while the clerk registered both of them. “Is there a message for me?” asked Monica, finding her voice. Eric Weller murdered … What had they done back there in her bright apartment? Were they hunting the murderer? But he was there, in St. Louis, following her! He had to be there. She must tell them. She must tell the police. She must telephone to Bill Fiske, at once.

But they wouldn’t let her go on to meet John.

Her heart thudded while the clerk looked through a stack of telegrams and telephone calls and then shook his head.

She moved toward the elevator with Gibbs as the other passenger stepped up to register. “My name is Sproul,” she heard him say. “Joe Sproul. Is there a reservation for me…?”

“Where can we get a good dinner?” Gibbs asked the boy in the elevator.

“Right here, sir. Crystal Terrace, they call it. Downstairs. Twelve, Miss.”

“Im on eighteen,” said Gibbs. “How long will it take you to get ready for dinner?”

“Not long.”

“I’ll call you. See you then.”

The elevator went on. The boy who had her bags led her through a quiet cheery hall to a small suite, entered by way of the living room. It looked safe; it looked like heaven. She tipped the boy and asked him to bring her the New York papers.

When he had gone, she dropped her handbag and fur jacket on the bed and thought: this cannot have happened to me.

A shot coming from nowhere, coming from anywhere, aimed at her.

There was no motive, there was no rhyme or reason, in such an attack. If there were a motive, a reason, an answer, it had to lie somewhere in that dark well of circumstance of which Eric’s death, which she knew now had to be minder, and John’s letter and the message from Linda which apparently started it all, were mysterious and inexplicable parts. There was no visible connection between any of them; one had merely followed the other. Unless the reason for Johns letter provided such a connection.

It had not occurred to her before then. Immediately, as if someone had told her that it was true, she knew that she must act accordingly. If John had not been in a very serious situation of some kind, he wouldn’t have written as he had written.

She took out his letter and read it again—twice, three times. She noted the address, number and street. She returned it to her handbag, her mind made up. She had to go on; she had to take John the money he so urgently needed. She could feel the small packet pinned to her girdle. Ten thousand dollars. Why did Bill Fiske think John needed so much? After that, they would decide together what to do.

The boy returned with the newspapers and they were the same papers she had seen in Chicago—same date, same headlines.

There hadn’t been time, of course; to expect anything else. She put them down and looked at the telephone. It would be easy to take it down and ask for Uncle Bill’s number in New York and tell him the thing that had happened.

She couldn’t; he had said not to wire, not to telephone. Besides, she had already fixed upon her own course. And Gibbs Brooke would help; Gibbs was a friend in need. How incredibly lucky it was that Gibbs had been on the plane!

Gibbs could be trusted; she had known him almost as long as she had known John. He was a friend and classmate of John’s; the first time she had seen Gibbs, John had brought him down from school for an Easter holiday and Uncle Bill had given all three of them a small whirl of theatres and night clubs and dancing. She had liked John even then; she had always liked John; perhaps she had always loved him. But Gibbs, with his broad shoulders, his heavy but good-natured face, his steady if rather phlegmatic friendliness, had been a part of things. His family lived somewhere in the West—California, she thought. He had not had much money but he’d managed to go on the trip with John and Linda and herself; he’d intended to come back and get himself a job in a brokerage house. And then the war came to Europe and two years later to America. She’d only known that he was in the Army. She wondered why he was going to Mexico City. It struck her suddenly that he too might have heard from John. If John needed help he would turn to Gibbs; their friendship was like that. And Gibbs would go to John, as she was going.

She was thinking of that when the telephone rang and it was Gibbs. She told him she was ready, and hurried to brush her hair. He came down at once and waited a moment while she put on lipstick and touched her hands and hair with perfume.

He watched her from the living-room doorway. “Pretty as ever,” he said. “I still can’t believe it’s you. Ready?”

“Ready,” she said.

The dining room was below the lobby floor and across a cocktail lounge; both were gay with lights, music and people. The captain led them to a small table, above a railing. Gibbs ordered cocktails. “Martinis?” he inquired. “You used to like them.”

She nodded. Gibbs ordered dinner, watched her for a moment in silence and then said, quietly, “You’re not still thinking of that silly business out at the airport, are you, Monica?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose I am.”

“Don’t.”

But Gibbs didn’t know about Eric, and she couldn’t tell him. Not then. Keep quiet, Bill Fiske had said. Go to John. Take him the money he so desperately needs.

Gibbs said, rallyingly, “Calm down, Monica. Listen to reason. Who is going to shoot at you? Or at me, for that matter?”

“At you!” That had not occurred to her.

“Of course. I was not far from you.” He held cigarettes toward her and a match. “My cap had blown off. I stopped to pick it up. I was a little behind you, but not far. I could have been the target—if there’d been a shot!” He smiled at her above the little flame of the match and added, “But there wasn’t! Honestly, Monica.”

She tried to think back to that moment of wind and sound and confusion. When she stopped and turned Gibbs had been possibly ten feet away, running toward her. If anyone had fired from the shelter of the doorway, it was quite true that either she or Gibbs could have been the target, for Gibbs had been almost directly behind her. (But Gibbs, she thought again, had nothing to do with Eric.)

She said, “Why would anybody shoot at you?”

He shrugged. “No reason. That’s what I’m saying. Nobody did. It was some silly, freak kind of accident. There was a motor revving up like mad down the field. It backfired—or something. There was no gunshot, certainly not at you or me. Forget it.”

For a moment again she debated in her mind whether or not to tell him about Eric. Bill Fiske had said not to tell anyone, yet Gibbs was a friend of John’s and the thought of the relief it would be to tell him and enlist his aid was almost too strong a temptation to resist. Indecision held her silent for a moment. Gibbs, watching her, his eyes in the rim of shadow made by the small rose shade of the lamp which stood on the table, smiled a little. “Forget it,” he said again and lifted his glass. “Drink your drink. Here’s to old times.”

She lifted her glass. And Gibbs said, leaning his elbows on the table and looking very broad and efficient in his uniform, “Now, then. What is the news of John? And Linda? And Eric Weller?”

She had the glass at her Bps. She took a swallow or two deliberately, for her mind flashed back to Eric and that small, still apartment in New York. As she did so a small thing happened.

Gibbs leaned back to permit the waiter to place a glass of water beside him. The light from the small rosy lamp threw Gibbs’ neatly buttoned tunic into sharp relief, so the buttons were bright, the well-tailored seams, every wrinkle and every pocket flap was clear and sharp and he had a revolver in his breast pocket, or slung under his blouse somehow. She was perfectly sure of it. Gibbs was a big man. When he stood the bulge would not be so noticeable, but leaning backward like that so his tunic was tight across his chest, the bulge and shape of the revolver were definite. The waiter left and he leaned forward again, his elbows again on the table.

She held her glass at her lips.

Gibbs had been on the plane. Gibbs knew her. There hadn’t been anyone else she had ever seen before. When the shot came Gibbs had not been close beside her as she thought but some distance away. The sound had been inextricably confused with other sounds; the shot could have come from any direction. It could have come from that revolver.

Gibbs had said it wasn’t a shot; she had talked of police and Gibbs had laughed and changed and said it was not a shot.

And as she thought that, a small memory struck her with an impact that was like a sharp, hard blow, arousing all her senses.

Pinky had talked of an elevator going down, and of an Army captain. His puzzled, yet careless words came sharply, swiftly back to her. “I wish I knew about that elevator—how it got up there. But it was a captain in the Army—saw his back as he went out the door. Blond fellow with a captain’s bars. But how did he get the elevator up?” He’d said something else, too. “You’re sure he wasn’t with you, Miss Blane? Sounded as if it came down from near your floor. He must have known how to operate it and got in while I had this cage somewhere in the building, and nobody saw him—till he left, I mean.”

And she herself, standing in the hall, waiting for Uncle Bill had heard elevator doors close and the elevator start downward.

An Army officer, whose face she had not seen, had sat up ahead on the plane from New York to Chicago.

She looked over her glass at Gibbs. His blond hair, vigorous and curly, was shining; his captain’s bars were shining too. His heavy but rather handsome face was smiling; but his eyes were very bright.

Gibbs Brooke was an officer in the United States Army. Gibbs Brooke was an old and trusted friend, her friend and John’s. Gibbs wouldn’t have murdered Eric; Gibbs wouldn’t have taken a shot at her.

Yet it had been five years since she had seen him; people do change in five years—war alone makes them change.

He was still waiting for, her reply. He said, “What’s the matter, Monica? You look as if you’d seen a ghost. I only asked about the rest of the gang. Is anything wrong?”

Eric, murdered—since the shot at the airport there was no question in her mind about that. Linda in trouble, seeking help. John and his urgent letter. She thought of those things as steadily as she could, and said, “I was thinking of them all and how long it has been.” ’

Apparently there was nothing different in her voice or her look. Gibbs said easily, ‘Where is John? I’ve not heard from him at all. Or from any of them, for that matter. I’ve been in the Army, you see; got in as soon as I got home that summer, for I thought war was coming. Saw part of the African show and was invalided home. That is, I’m all right now. Going to Mexico for a leave. I always thought John must have gone straight to Poland to fight. I always wondered if he—what happened.”

All her senses were now sharp and alert, as if someone had slapped her, hard. Suddenly she knew she had to make sure. She had to prove or disprove the monstrous suspicion of Gibbs.

She held her glass at her lips again and thought swiftly. If Gibbs were going to Mexico City he would probably see John. There were not so many Americans in that great city but what old friends would meet. His statement showed that John had not sent for Gibbs as she had surmised, but Gibbs would certainly see John. There was no way to avoid that; so whether he were innocent or guilty that situation could hot be changed. He would see John inevitably the next day.

If her suspicions were all wrong—and they must be!—he would help her. He was, in the past, a good and loyal friend. As she remembered the years she had known him and John had known him, her suspicion became sheer and rather cruel fantasy. Yet there it was; she must know and make sure.

She said, “John is in Mexico City. I am going there to meet him.” And met his eyes steadily.

“John!” He put down his own glass and stared at her in astonishment—real astonishment, she thought, and real delight. “John, in Mexico City! How is he? Where has he been? Gosh, Monica!”

“He’s there. That’s about all I know.”

“When did you hear?” He was leaning forward eagerly—and sincerely, surely.

“Last—night before last.”

“But what did he say? What’s happened? Tell me.”

“He wrote to Uncle Bill. You remember Bill Fiske….”

He nodded. “Of course. Am I likely to forget the dinners and shows he used to stand us to, when we were kids? Go on.”

“He wanted Uncle Bill to come. He can’t come here, John, I mean, because of passport troubles. I mean, he’s not an American citizen, you remember. Uncle Bill …” The waiter came with food and she was glad for the slight diversion of Gibbs’ attention just then for she was thinking of Eric. She went on, “Uncle Bill couldn’t come. So he sent me. John asked him to send me, if he couldn’t come himself.”

“John!” cried Gibbs again. The pleasure in his face must be genuine. She watched him closely, and said, slowly, not sure she was right to say it, “You see, there was a message from Linda, too. It was—brought to me. I think that was a shot—out at the airport tonight, Gibbs.”

He gave her a quick, measuring look and said quietly, “You’d better tell me everything Monica. I knew there was something wrong.”

In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought rather wryly; yet it was the only thing to do. Tell him—but watch his face for any small, faint betrayal of guilt. (But don’t tell him about Eric, don’t tell him about the ten thousand dollars—wait.)

So she told him of Linda and the cachet, while they ate, slowly. She left Eric’s name out altogether. Except for that, she told him everything she knew, which was little enough, about the cachet. She told him of her feeling that Linda must be somewhere in New York, of Bill’s promise to try to find her, of his sending her to John. It was difficult to do so without telling, too, of Eric Weller, but she didn’t mention his name. Gibbs questioned her briefly. Hadn’t she seen who placed the cachet on the table? Who, had known she was to be at the Stork Club?

“But why do you think somebody shot at you?” said Gibbs finally. “Do you think anyone is trying to prevent you from going to John? And in that case, who, for God’s sake?”

There was nothing in his face, nothing in his words to indicate any knowledge of Eric. If he actually knew nothing of that (and Gibbs Brooke couldn’t have murdered him, she thought again, sharply) then the fact that Eric had been murdered was the fact that would have proved to Gibbs that somewhere in that shadowy and nebulous mesh of circumstance, there was a danger that was neither shadowy nor nebulous. But, as she hesitated again, Gibbs added, “Bill Fiske-is a sensible man, you know. He wouldn’t have sent you if there was danger.”

It was like a confirmation of her own strong feeling that Bill Fiske was right and it tipped the balance of her indecision. She wouldn’t tell him about Eric, not yet; not until they had reached Mexico City and she had talked to John and had heard from Bill Fiske. Besides, if she were met anywhere along the way by police and returned to New York, Gibbs would have known nothing about Eric. Gibbs would be in no sense involved in murder. And more important just then, Gibbs would then be free to go on and take the money to John.

Gibbs said, smiling at her, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to know that John’s alive. I’ll go along with you to Mexico City. I was going anyway and now wild horses wouldn’t keep me away. If he needs you, he can do with me, too. But don’t worry about shots and all that stuff. Just in case there is anything to it, I’ll stick with you. Now, then, eat your dinner. I’ve kept you talking. I suppose there’s no use in speculating what trouble Linda is in, or where? Or why John wanted Bill or you to come? Maybe it’s only business. Probably that’s it; Bill Fiske handles all his affairs and he’s been away for five years.” He looked at her plate and said firmly, “Eat. We’ll talk—in the morning.”

Gibbs was all right. She’d been hysterical, frightened, in a sharp tight mood of suspicion that attacked anything and everything. Feeling as if most of her burden had gone, she ate and listened to the music and listened to Gibbs who made light and friendly and perfectly natural conversation, and smoked and fingered over coffee.

He did not mention Eric Weller again. He speculated about John but only in the most natural and friendly way. He questioned her about Linda, where she had been, had she stayed in France or returned to America after that summer the war had begun and shook his head when Monica said she didn’t know. “Funny,” he said. “No word of either of them for five years and now both of them turn up at once. So Bill thinks he can find her.”

“He said he’d try. He doesn’t think she is in New York.”

At eleven or so they went upstairs. As the elevator passed the lobby floor and stopped briefly she caught a glimpse of the swarthy little man, Joe Sproul, who had sat opposite her on the plane from Chicago to St. Louis. He was sitting quietly beside a palm, his pudgy hands clasped peaceably over his stomach, watching the lobby sleepily. The elevator door closed again and went on upward. Gibbs took her to the door of her suite. And quite suddenly took her in his arms and held her for a moment. “You’re a good kid,” he said, and patted her shoulder. “Go to sleep. Don’t worry. See you in the morning.”

It was inexpressibly comforting and warm. Yet the very warmth and comfort of it threatened her head-held control. “Thanks,” she said unsteadily. “Good night, Gibbs.”

She entered the small suite and bolted the door behind her. She was glad she had told Gibbs as much as she had told him. She’d sleep now. She unpinned the packet of money and put it under her pillow.

But she didn’t sleep. An hour later she was still lying awake, staring wide-eyed into the darkness, trying to reach conclusions where there were too few facts upon which to base them; trying to meet contingencies in her mind, and there was no way to know what those contingencies might be. Another hour passed; she rose at last and pulled on a dark silk dressing gown, she thought of the money for John and, merely because she had promised to keep it with her at all times, she slid it into the pocket of her dressing gown. She went into the living room and smoked and prowled and looked down at the string of lights, twelve stories below, marking a road that wound westward, and sat down on the sofa and lighted another cigarette—and was suddenly sleepy. So sleepy that she stayed there, curled up in the soft depths of the sofa. She turned off the light beside her and slept, with one hand in her pocket, clasping ten thousand dollars, wrapped in a small, lace handkerchief.

At least she must have slept, for she knew it when she awakened sharply and suddenly, and someone was in the room.

7

The room was dark.

The darkness and the feeling of being in a strange and unfamiliar place confused her for an instant. The door into the corridor with its very faint line of light was in the wrong place. The windows, faintly outlined against the night sky, ought to be at her right, not at her left. Then she remembered. She was not in her apartment in New York. She was in a hotel in St. Louis—fleeing in, literal fact from the horror that had overtaken her in that distant apartment. No, not fleeing; she was going to John. Drugged with weariness and sleep she tried in a fumbling, sleepy way to comprehend that. And then all at once realized that someone was there, in the room, in the darkness near her. She knew it and did not know how she knew it. All at once all her body was rigid and listening.

There was nothing to hear. The dim line of light around the door into the corridor—the door she had bolted—became a little sharper. The rectangular outlines of faintly lighter dusk that marked the windows became a httle clearer as her eyes adjusted themselves to awakening and to the dark. But there was nothing to hear and nothing to see.

Yet that atavistic sense of another presence—near, hidden, listening, too—was like an evil and terrifying spell laid suddenly upon her so she couldn’t move, she couldn’t cry out, she couldn’t turn on the light beside her.

But she must do something; scream—with a paralyzed throat? Reach for the light—with a hand that could not move? Speak, demand—and let anyone who was there know where she was! The darkness concealed her as it did whatever was there. Well, then shrink into the sofa, don’t breathe, don’t let your heartbeats or your terror betray you. Wait …

There was a sound.

It was almost a relief for it came from across the room, as nearly as she could judge, from near the bedroom door. So there were no hands within inches of her—no hands with a knife nearing her as hands must have neared Eric so stealthily, so quietly and quickly that he’d had no chance to escape.

She had a chance then. She and the money John must have!

The sound was merely a sound—a motion, perhaps, of clothing or a hand against the wall; a footstep perhaps on the soft carpet.

Whoever had crept into her suite in the darkness would have expected her to be in bed, asleep, in the bedroom. Instead she was on the sofa, in the shadow of the table and the tall lamp which stood between the sofa and the windows along the wall at its left. Could she reach the telephone? The slightest motion would betray her presence there. She remembered that there was only one telephone in the suite and it was in the bedroom. And whoever was there, near the bedroom door, stood between her and the door to the corridor outside.

So she was completely cut off from help.

And she was suddenly, horribly sure that whatever moved with furtive footsteps across that soft carpet was nearer.

She pressed down into the sofa as a creature of the wild sinks close to the earth and could not scream, or breathe, and there was another soft motion nearer.

And two things happened. The door from the corridor opened and let in a band of light. Instantly there was a sharp flurry of motion, of shadows, of figures blocking out the light, of. heavy breathing, a kind of grunt and thrust in the darkness, of something striking against something else, and the muffled thud of a chair. Before she could move, even then, the path of light vanished. The sounds of struggle and movement were gone, too. Silence lay again in the darkness.

It lasted so long that she dared move at last and breathe. And then nerving herself to do it, she turned on the light. No one was there.

But whatever had happened, it had really happened. It was no nightmare. A small chair lay on its side.

She made herselfcross the room, her dark silk dressing gown rustling, and found the switch for the overhead light in the bedroom. It sprang up bright and glaring and no one was there either.

But someone had been there.

Her alligator handbag was open on the bed table where she’d left it. She saw that. Had whoever it was who had been there known of the ten thousand dollars she carried? But no one could know!

Suddenly aware of the danger of that door from the living room into the corridor she went back and, in the act of bolting it, remembered that she had bolted it that night, earlier, when she entered the room. The bolt now was off; so that was proof too that she’d not been dreaming. If she opened the door a bare inch or two, she would be able to see along the hall. She did, as quietly, as stealthily as the thing that had stalked her had moved, and no one was there. A lighted, wide corridor with a red carpet ran down past the elevators. The hotel slept around it; nothing moved or waited there.

She closed the door sharply, her throat stiff and paralyzed, as if those hands had actually reached her out of the darkness. She bolted the door. But the bolt hadn’t prevented someone from entering the room. Someone? Surely those sounds had meant that, actually, two people had been in the room!

She placed the small chair that had been knocked over on the floor, so it was braced under the doorknob. She stood for a second, looking at it, struck by the ugly incongruity of it—an attack by night in the middle of a civilized hotel, in a civilized city. But at her feet when she turned was a stranger and uglier incongruity, and that was a knife.

It lay barely in the rim of shadow below a small table. She had not seen it up to then.

It was a clasp knife, but very broad and thick and the blade was open.

Eric had lain, twisted and horrible, his throat cut.

Presently she stooped and touched the cold surface of the knife and it, too, was real. It was curious, said some dull, shocked part of her mind, how often she had been assuring herself of reality. Things like that didn’t happen—and yet happened. She looked over her shoulder and the small straight chair was still braced under the doorknob.

Still later—moments later, it occurred to her that she hadn’t really searched the two rooms and the bathroom and the closet or two that must be there. She did it and of course no one was in the suite now. But there had been two people; there had been a struggle; and the knife convinced her—again, if she had needed convincing—that the thing that had moved so silently, so stealthily there in the darkness had been lethal in intent.

Gibbs?

Who else?

She was cold. She got a blanket from the bed and wrapped herself in it. She stared at the knife, and huddled in the warmth of the blanket. Eventually she remembered her handbag-open, and she had left it closed. John’s money, of course, was safe in her pocket.

But it did not clarify anything when she looked in her handbag and found that the money Bill Fiske had given her was still there, intact. That the letter from John had been removed from its envelope but both envelope and letter were " still there. And that the crumpled small message from Linda was gone.

If whoever had been in the apartment when she awakened had removed John’s letter and read it he must have used a flashlight.

The disappearance of Linda’s message could mean anything.

And she knew, now, about Gibbs.

There was no way to know the substance or meaning of that mysterious, hidden duel into which she had been plunged, but whatever it was she was on John’s side.

And Gibbs was an enemy.

There was no one else connected in any way with John, or Linda, or Eric Weller or herself. No one else except Bill Fiske who knew she was there. No one else who had had a chance to look over the suite, know his way around in the darkness, somehow secure a key. It had to be Gibbs.

Dawn came and she still sat huddled in the blanket. It was gray and foggy outside and very still in the hotel; if anyone tried the door she did not hear it. At eight the telephone operator called to wake her.

There was nothing to do but go through with the day as she had planned to do; see Gibbs, talk to him naturally, take the plane to Fort Worth. But watch.

Closing it first, she put the clasp knife in her handbag. She told herself that she would be safe on the plane, in the company of others, under the observation of other people at every moment.

Dressing again in the brown travel suit, selecting a fresh white blouse, watching the girl in the mirror with the dark smooth hair, and the lipsticked red mouth and the dark smudges under her eyes, she thought of her journey.

Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.

Whatever the end of this journey might be, she would at any rate see John. He wanted her—but that didn’t mean he loved her. It was a strange and terrifying journey—the stranger and the more terrifying because it was through her home country; not a European country where ways were secret and tortuous, menaced by danger, but her own country. The cities that marked that journey were modern, hedged and protected by police and Federal agents, by law and order and safe, sane, comforting custom—all of which suddenly failed to operate. It was an odyssey of peril. It blocked itself off suddenly in her mind into periods. New York, with its sudden plunge from the everyday, matter-of-fact world into a new one, peopled with horror and unseen shapes. Chicago, with its saneness, its usualness, and suddenly, out of nowhere, out of the cool pretty lips of the uniformed girl behind a counter, a small, thin—and inexorable reminder of that new world. A tentacle, reaching for her.

And this was St. Louis.

She had to go on. There was one more stop to make before she could arrive at Mexico City and that was Fort Worth. If she could not escape Gibbs’ presence, she could and must guard herself against him.

The growing clearness of the gray day did not serve to clarify her memory of the night. It had seemed to her that there were two people in the darkness of the night, struggling there at the very doorway. She could not be sure of that, she only believed it from some indefinable quality of sound and motion and abruptness. One had taken Linda’s message and read John’s letter; one had come later and frightened away the other and then fled himself. It was the only hypothesis she could draw from that blurred and; chaotic moment of sound and motion and darkness and half-glimpsed and moving shadows. An argument against it was the fact that only Gibbs and Bill Fiske knew she was in St. Louis, in that hotel. Only one passenger, even, on the Chicago-to-St. Louis plane had come to the same hotel and that was the man calling himself Joe Sproul, and she knew nothing of him. But there was the knife to prove the purpose of one of those furtive visitors.

Once it occurred to her to wonder if Gibbs conceivably could have been watching; if Gibbs had intervened, discovering her danger, and had actually intervened and protected her—if Gibbs was the person who opened the door into the corridor and struggled with whoever was already in the room. Rather bleakly she dismissed that. If Gibbs had done that he would have returned, he would have reassured her, he would have made sure that she was uninjured, he would have come back or telephoned and told her all about it.

Gibbs was waiting for her when she came down to the lobby and checked out and he said nothing at all about the night past. He was reading a paper, smoking. He was freshly shaven and very solid and safe-looking in his uniform. He met her eyes directly. It was impossible to envisage him coming stealthily into her room in the night. With a knife in his hands and murder in his heart. Yet it had to be Gibbs.

As they walked the few hundred feet to the Chase Hotel next door and met the car that was to take them to the airport, she thought how queer it was that she had not even thought of telephoning down to the hotel desk, in the night, demanding help, calling the police. It is an extraordinary thing to find oneself suddenly on the other side of the barrier of civilized custom, so one cannot ask for police protection because the police are as bitter and inexorable an enemy as the thing one would be protected against.

There were one or two other passengers in the car. She had seen neither of the men before, to her knowledge, in her life. She looked for Joe Sproul and he was not there.

The flight to Fort Worth was uneventful, except that it was not good flying weather so they ran through rain and wind and rain again, which made it a bumpy flight and late. There was no incident that even hinted at danger. But she could not escape Gibbs.

He sat beside her all the way to Fort Worth. He was perfectly natural. They talked a little and there was nothing in any word or look of his that admitted anything. There was only the cool, stubborn tenacity of his constant presence and he had already explained that away by his offer to do that very thing, in order to protect her. I’ll stick with you, he had said; don’t worry.

So he was always there.

Once he talked of Linda again and John, and then rather at length, as it happened, of Eric Weller. She only hoped her own voice showed as little expression as Gibbs’.

“I was thinking about that summer,” he said above the roar of the engines. He folded his newspaper and offered her cigarettes. He sat between her and the aisle. Below them lay a fleecy cloud bank. He held a match for her. (She thought, looking at his rather heavy, square hand, is this the hand of a murderer?)

Gibbs lighted his own cigarette, and said, “I expect Linda stayed in France really to be on the same continent with John. He was crazy about her. Do you suppose they married?”

8

As many possibilities and contingencies as Monica had thought of, she had never thought of that.

She turned her face away so Gibbs would not see it and stared down at the clouds below. What would have been more reasonable, more in the pattern of things than for John and Linda to meet somewhere during that missing five years and to marry? Why had she let her own hope, her own love for John blind her so she had not even thought of that?

It would have made no difference in her course of action; she would have come on that journey, in any case. But she would not have let herself think of love and journey’s end!

Gibbs said suddenly, “What’s the matter, Monica? Did I say anything…?”

“No.”

“They—John and Linda—were engaged, you know.”

“Yes. Yes, I knew.” She looked steadily out at the light reflected brightly on the wing that stretched out beside her.

There was a pause. Then Gibbs said in a quietly conversational way, “It was queer how suddenly that developed. I always thought John was in love with you. There was something about Linda, of course …” He paused and smoked a moment and then said briskly, “But you are okay, too, my dear! Linda, I suppose, stayed on with her aunt. Wasn’t that her aunt, that pretty French woman who chaperoned you and Linda?”

“Yes. Madame de Rissaud. Aunt Fae, she called her.”

“Yes. She lived at Lyons,” said Gibbs, revealing an unexpectedly accurate memory. “I suppose Linda went to live with her. I wonder how they’ve made out during the last few years.”

“I wonder.”

“It seems to me that Linda must have got back somewhere into the United States. I mean, well, I was thinking about that message. She couldn’t expect you to get to France. I mean she must be somewhere within possible reach.” ’

“I suppose so.”

She felt him glance at her rather quickly. He leaned over to pull out the little ash tray between them and changed the subject, then, to Eric. “I was thinking about Eric Weller, too,” he said. “And do you know I can remember very little about him.”

She tried to drive her own too horrible, too clear memory from her mind.

He went on slowly, “We sort of joined forces there, on the Riviera. But I don’t remember how we met. Wasn’t he a friend of Linda’s?”

She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t see the ugly picture of Eric lying there, on the floor, and could see it all the clearer, and opened them again. But it was queer that she could remember very little about meeting him, too.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I can’t remember.” He was just there, all at once, one of them, an unquestioned member of the tight little group.

Gibbs smoked for a moment, narrowing his eyes against the drifting gray wisps that floated upward. “I can’t remember anything, really, about him. His school, or family or where he lived, or anything. Except, of course, what he looked like: tall, blond fellow, not bad to look at, except for a kind of fishy look around the eyes. I always thought he could be”—he paused and said without any expression at all—“a little mean, if he took a notion to be. Was he an American?”

“Why, I—yes, of course. I’m sure he was.”

“H’mm. Funny, I can’t even remember that. Did he join up when the war began?

“No, he—I’ve seen him in New York some and …”

He interrupted. “Oh, you’ve seen him! Somehow I got the idea you hadn’t.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, so carefully, so quietly, “I’ve seen him.” Gibbs waited. Gibbs, who might have murdered the man they talked of!

She mustn’t show her thought; she mustn’t even let it enter her mind. She said, “I’m going to sleep for awhile,” and put back her head. She was safe on the plane; there were people around. She listened and presently Gibbs opened his paper again. Gibbs had liked Linda, too; men always liked Linda, and women, too. Unexpectedly she wondered how much he had liked Linda. Could it possibly be that he too watched the situation develop between Linda and John with hopeless and helpless anguish in his heart? If so, he’d given no signs of it; but then she wouldn’t have seen it through the veil of her own misery. How young she had been, five years ago!

After awhile she thought again that it was odd how little she knew of Eric Weller. She had gone out with him often; she had seen him frequently on his visits to New York. She knew that he was connected with a brokerage house—wasn’t he? And had had to make many trips away from New York. But now that she came to think of it she could not actually remember his ever speaking of his home, his mother, father, sisters—any relatives. He had appeared out of the blue that summer on the Riviera. She didn’t remember how they had met and though she searched her memory she still could not remember. It must have been a casual meeting. Perhaps in a bar, perhaps along the beach or at a cocktail party. He was just there, and suddenly one of them. So when he had reappeared in New York and looked her up and asked her to dinner he was already an old friend, unquestioned, taken for granted.

It added to the ceaseless, weary argument going on in her mind. Once it struck her as the final touch to an already incredible nightmare that she was making a trip in the company of a man she had every reason to believe had tried, at least twice, to murder her.

Yet the only thing to do was to go on, meet John, tell him everything.

Luckily (or perhaps because the very incredibility of it protected her), she had no feeling of physical fear of Gibbs. That was because other people were with them.

The lateness of the flight gave her an excuse to avoid having dinner alone with Gibbs. She was tired, she told him—with a rather terrible irony of truth—she’d go to bed and have dinner sent up. Gibbs agreed. Both had seats on the morning’s flight to Mexico City and the plane took off before dawn. They were told to leave the hotel at three in the morning; it was a good idea to get some sleep. They went to the hotel recommended them by the airlines. Monica thought wearily again that Bill Fiske had given her no instructions about Fort Worth, but if he wished to get in touch with her he could easily do so through the airlines office.

This time when again Gibbs (being polite, being attentive, and watching her all the time) asked the hotel clerk for a suite for Miss Blane, she intervened firmly. A suite might have several doors opening onto a corridor. She wanted only one room and—that night—would see that it was not entered. She said she preferred a room. Gibbs said nothing, got her magazines, took her to the elevator.

“I’m turning in early, myself,” he said. “Three o’clock in the morning is a grim hour to be called. I suppose it is to allow time for customs. Well, by this time tomorrow we’ll be with John. Anything I can do for you, Monica? Newspapers?”

She let him get her the New York newspapers. As he strode across the lobby again toward her, a New York newspaper in his hand, she thought of saying, “I wonder if Eric’s murder is in the papers yet? Don’t you wonder too, Gibbs?”

She didn’t. He gave her the paper, told her he’d see her in the morning, and said good night.

He was again in the lobby, smoking, watching the elevator doors when at three in the morning she came down. The thought crossed her mind that, though she had seen him register for a room he had actually not used it but had sat there, keeping her only path of escape under surveillance.

Her only recourse and guard against Gibbs was the constant presence of other people. It was easy on the plane. It was a small space from which no one could possibly escape and where everybody in the plane was under more or less constant observation by everyone else. But three o’clock in the morning is a lonely, cold hour, and there was a bad moment when, perforce in Gibbs’ company, she left the lighted lobby of the Fort Worth hotel.

The taxi was waiting outside to take them to the airport. There was only the night clerk in the lobby, and a bellboy or two. The taxi driver whistled, putting their baggage in the back of the car; the rain was a chill drizzle; wind drove it along the dark street with the lights of the taxicab streaming dimly ahead and up the street the garish red and green sign of a small, all-night coffee shop. Gibbs, a lighted cigarette between his lips, his cap visor low over his handsome, heavy face stood waiting. Monica pulled her fur coat up to her chin and shivered. She was absurdly conscious of the small packet of money—so much money and so important to John—pinned again inside her girdle just at her waist. Up to then she had managed not to be, actually, alone with Gibbs, as she had been alone with him on the dark and windy and deserted field the previous night.

For the first time a desperation which had acted almost as a drug, enabling her to move, act, walk and talk with a semblance of naturalness, merely because she had to, failed her. She was suddenly just Monica Blane, a girl in brown, with a white face, shivering in a dark and rainy street of a strange city. Afraid. Doubly afraid; for herself and for John and the money he had to have.

Gibbs knew it. She saw the odd look that flashed into Gibbs’ face. And then another passenger carrying his own bag came waddling out of the hotel. “Is this the taxi for the airport?” he inquired, peering at them and at the driver with dark, heavily lidded eyes, and it was Joe Sproul. She got quickly into the taxi and Gibbs followed and then the little fat Mr. Sproul, who said cheerily, “Didn’t I see you in St. Louis? Weren’t you on the Chicago-St. Louis plane?”

Gibbs replied shortly, “Yes.”

“You weren’t on this afternoon’s plane here.”

“No,” said Gibbs. “We came on the plane that left St. Louis in the morning.”

“Oh,” said Joe Sproul. “Sure. Well, it’s hard to travel now. Hard to get reservations. But I expect you have a priority.” He glanced at Gibbs’ uniform. Gibbs said, “No.”

And the taxi driver whistled cheerfully as they drove through the rain and darkness with the faces of his passengers scarcely discernible to each other.

Her card of permission to enter Mexico was at the customs office. It was in an envelope directed to her in Uncle Bill’s handwriting. Her own trip had been quick, but the United States airmail had been quicker as Bill Fiske had expected it to be. Barely quicker, they told her when she asked; it had arrived by special delivery about midnight.

There was nothing else in the envelope; not a word from Bill Fiske. What had he done back there in her small, gay apartment with its rose chintzes and green carpet—and Eric?

The customs officer looked in her bags. She watched covertly when he examined Gibbs’ big leather bag, but saw nothing unsual, only shirts, extra uniform, shaving things. She didn’t know what she expected. A tommy-gun, she asked herself derisively, another knife? It was a cursory examination. Gibbs’ revolver was either still in a pocket or in that bag. Certainly the brief glance of the customs officer did not discover it. Joe Sproul, after Gibbs, opened his battered carryall freely and said he was going to Mexico on business. “To buy lily bulbs,” he told her cheerfully. “Since the war the easiest place to get Easter lily bulbs is in Mexico.” Her face must have shown a brief question in spite of her real, inner preoccupation, for dark-eyed, chummy little Joe Sproul volunteered an explanation, “We used to import them from Japan.”

There was time for steaming hot coffee before they went out to the big plane, silver gray in the first gray light of dawn. There were other passengers; not one of them had a familiar face. She had again an uneasiness; a fear that she would be stopped and not permitted to leave the United States, but no one stopped her. Again Gibbs sat beside her. The little Sproul had a single seat away ahead. Once they were high in the air and breakfast had been served, it was very cold. The stewardess brought rugs. Gibbs put his head back and went to sleep. His big body barricaded her; he would wake if she moved. He needed sleep, she thought wryly, if he had spent the early part of the night as she suspected, in the lobby watching the elevators. The big silver plane mounted higher and higher into the gray dawn sky.

She put back her head, too, and closed her eyes, and in her mind again traveled an already well-worn path. The only possible links that seemed to have any significance or basis of fact at all were those of simple chronology. She had had a message from Linda; Eric had died or been murdered; John had written saying that he needed money; someone had inquired for her on the Chicago-St. Louis plane; Gibbs had been on that plane; someone had tried twice to murder her; someone had presumably read John’s letter and taken the message from Linda.

There was, of course, another fink. She and Linda and Eric, John and Gibbs had been together that summer on the Riviera before the war. It was a superficial link, one that did not couple itself with other links and make any sort of chain.

The sky began to lighten. They climbed higher and higher and suddenly were in the full blaze of the morning sun with the clouds a fleecy, pearly bed below them. It was incredibly beautiful.

Gibbs slept—or pretended to sleep.

They landed briefly at Monterrey. Once in the air again they climbed still higher into the blazing sun. The cloud bed beneath them cleared and they drove ahead above the mountain peaks. It was spectacularly beautiful; it was strange and lovely; there was growing enchantment, as if they were adventuring into a strange and beautiful and unfamiliar world. A world where anything might happen. They swept around the pyramids, so low between mountains that they could see the timeless building of hands that had been dust for centuries. Not a new world then, she thought, but an old one. With all the knowledge, all the mystery and beauty, the fingering touch of cruelty, the glow and mutability that history leaves, lying there below and ahead of them.

Only a few minutes after that they swept down into the valley that is Mexico City. Gibbs roused to watch. It was not a valley so much as it was a plateau with mountains rising all around it. The great plane came lower and lower so its enormous wings seemed almost to brush the earth. Monica’s breath seemed to stop; her heart was loud in her ears. John was somewhere in that wide-flung city below them, waiting for her.

Journeys end in lovers’ meetings, she thought again, irresistibly. This journey was about to end.

The shadow of their wings moved over concrete; the enormous plane kissed the path below it, struck it lightly so there was scarcely a tremor, and ran along with new buildings beside them so they could look out and see them.

The airport was bright and white in the sun. And John was there.

She’d have known the tall, yet somehow hard and compact figure anywhere. He stood near the gate, his brown face inscrutable, watching the plane. Waiting for her.

Somehow she was disentangled from the rug. Somehow she was at the plane door and was the first passenger out when it opened. Gibbs was behind her. She ran down the runway and John saw her. His face broke into a smile and his hands were out and she was running toward him.

“Monica—Monica,” he cried, as she reached him and he took her in his arms.

He was real. She clung to him, feeling the rough material of his coat, the warmth and strength and reality of his arms. He held her tight and close as if he’d wanted to hold her for a long time. She was crying, for her face was wet, and still she didn’t sob, couldn’t speak even, could only feel the warmth of his body and strength of his arms. He lifted her face. The wind was cold on her wet cheeks. He kissed her.

Kissed her mouth long and full and warm—and looked down at her and kissed her again.

Gibbs’ voice spoke from somewhere beyond a magic ring.

“Hi, John!”

She heard the surprise in John’s voice. “Gibbs! Bill didn’t tell me you were coming with her. Gibbs …”

Gibbs was patting John’s shoulder; one of John’s arms withdrew so he and Gibbs could shake hands.

She lifted her head and wiped her eyes clumsily.

The men were talking. Other passengers were moving past them into the building. The little dark man, Joe Sproul, glanced at them. His friendly spaniel eyes glowed. He smiled and paused near them to hght a cigarette. “It was sheer accident,” Gibbs was saying. “We ran into each other on the plane. How are you, John? Gosh, it’s swell to see you.”

Monica, leaning against John’s arm, let herself look up into his face, and he was looking down at her. His face was brown and lean, with hollows under the cheek es and the lines of his jaw rather fine; she remembered every curve and line. But his eyes had a. soberness, a shadow that hadn’t been there five years before. His face had matured; there were streaks of gray in his black hair. He looked down at Monica and said, “You haven’t changed.”

Oh, but she had, she thought swiftly. Nights and tears and never knowing; reading the papers, listening to the news over the radio—war and more war, bombing planes, fighter planes, armies on the march and never knowing where in it all is the man you love.

She did not hear the light sharp tap of footsteps. She did hear Gibbs’ voice though when he said, “Linda!”

“Linda,” said Gibbs again loudly.

“Hello, Gibbs,” said Linda’s light and musical voice from out of the bright blazing sun and space. “Hello, Mona.”

Monica would have known that voice too, anywhere—the fight golden tinkle, high and musical, that was Linda’s voice.

9

Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.

The words now had an irony, almost as if Linda had spoken them. For a fraction of a second John’s eyes continued to hold her own; then, with a kind of wrench, Monica made herself turn.

Linda stood smiling, her blue eyes bright.

The sun beat down on her golden hair. She had changed a little. She was not so slim and girlish, her pink suit showed luxuriant curves. Her hair was braided in a coronet around her head; her face was fuller, she was white instead of being tanned. She looked older in a subtle way, more matured, but richly, beautifully matured. Her lipstick and her nails were deep crimson. Her eyes were just slightly made up with blue shadows on the velvety white eyelids. But it was the same Linda, the same voice, the same smile and assurance, the same charm and beauty. And for an instant Monica hated her.

It was so sharp and instinctive a sense of enmity that it was as if Linda Chavon had turned into something else, something hateful and reptilian and not Linda Chavon. Shocked at herself, ashamed, feeling disloyal, Monica dismissed that instant’s wave of enmity. Linda said, “Darling! But this is wonderful! Darling …”

John’s arm dropped away. Monica moved toward Linda and the sweet scent of roses made a cloud around them as Linda pressed her soft, full cheek against Monica’s. She cried, laughing, “Didn’t John tell you I was here? You look as if you were seeing a ghost! I’m very much alive, I assure you. Gibbs, where did you come from? We weren’t expecting you, too.”

So Linda had known that she was coming. And Linda was there—not in New York, not in France, but here, laughing, before her. Were they married, she and John? Her words implied knowledge, understanding, possession in the subtle way in which Linda could always imply possession. Monica had forgotten that. She had forgotten too much and now remembered it and the gold went out of the sunlight, the joy out of everything.

Gibbs and John were talking, Linda laughing and exclaiming. “But, how glorious! Gibbs, too. Fancy meeting like that in the plane. But then everyone comes to Mexico. We’ll have a real reunion. Come on, John, let’s get them quickly through the customs and take them home.”

Home. Monica heard that word. Whether they were married or not, then, they were together. But then what had she expected? That because of time, because of separation, John had ceased to love Linda!

She didn’t look at John. Indeed, it was only by exerting an effort of will and physical force that she moved along beside Linda and into the building ahead. It was full of strange sights and sounds and none of them seemed to make an impact upon her, for she was mainly concerned with holding her chin and shoulders up, keeping her face quiet and unrevealing. She must not let them see that it was as if her heart and all her hope and all her zest in life had gone straight out of her body. She was strongly aware of fatigue; that was sudden too; she had not known she could be so tired.

Linda in her pink suit, with her enormous white pocketbook thrust under one braceleted arm, her toenails showing scarlet through her open, white sandals, guided Gibbs to the counter for customs. John had Monica’s bag suddenly on the counter too and she was giving the official her keys. The beige-satin lining of the bags, her own silk and lace and perfumed lingerie cases, her own clothes even looked strangely unfamiliar. How many visions had she conjured up without knowing that she was doing so! Herself in that blue sport dress riding somewhere with John; herself in the long white dinner dress with its great fold of scarlet down the frontdancing in the moonlight with John.

“Cuantos?” said John to a uniformed attendant.

There was a babble of voices; there was a line where they had to show their cards of entry; French, Spanish, English rose everywhere; outside was the hum of a departing plane. John was beside her again. “All set now, Monica?”

There was so much she had to tell him and she must do it at once. Why did he need help? Why did he need so much money, so quickly? Linda’s white soft hand fell possessively upon John’s arm. That was different; Linda’s hands had always been brown and active-looking. “Ready?” said Linda, her eyes very bright and blue.

They moved together through crowds. Cars were waiting in the parking space outside; Gibbs and John had their baggage. “You’d better take off your fur coat,” said Linda. “It’s wonderful here. Hot in the daytime and cool at night. Here’s our car.”

John opened the door of a small coupe. “Monica and I will sit in back,” said Linda, and got in ahead of Monica. Her legs were bare and soft and white. Her white blouse had a deep V; she took off her pink jacket as she sat down. “Heavens, it’s hot,” she said. “Do get in, Monica.”

Monica felt drab and tired, like a winter-weary sparrow, beside Linda’s suddenly buxom, golden beauty. Their car—Linda’s and John’s car.

Gibbs and John got in, John in the driver’s seat.

Monica had thought of everything but that Linda might be there, in Mexico City, with John.

At any rate, Linda was not in danger. She was too gay, too open and bold in her loveliness, too self-possessed. She was not in danger.

Then what about the cachet on the table at the Stork Club? Why had Linda sent it to her? Why had she asked her to help her? Why had John said he needed Bill and needed money?

The men in front were talking, Linda listening eagerly. Her golden hair was parted in the middle below that coronet of golden braids and showed a broad white brow. Her thick, rather short and stubby lashes were touched with black. They were on a street, in traffic, leaving the airport. “So you’re in the Army, Gibbs,” John was saying. “Africa?”

“Yes. Invalided home. I’ll be sent out soon again. You’ve seen some service yourself, haven’t you, John? When did you get to Mexico?”

“Not long ago. I can’t get in to the United States yet; have to wait for the quota. I’m not an American citizen, you know. My father was Polish.”

“I remember. But you always seemed completely American. I remember the pictures of your place—those huge gates. Near Warsaw, wasn’t it?”

Linda was listening. The scent of her rose perfume was sweet and thick. Monica’s fur coat was suffocatingly hot across her knees; she moved it to the space between her and Linda.

“Yes,” said John, after a slight pause.

Gibbs’ blond head turned toward John again. “I suppose now …”

“Yes,” said John again. “It’s been in Nazi hands since the fall of 1939. The house was burned. They put some Austrians on it to till the land.”

He’d had a pride in his home—the great house and the wide lands his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had owned before him. “Oh, John,” said Monica, half under her breath. Linda’s eyelids flickered. Gibbs’ neck looked rigid ahead, his uniformed shoulders were stiff as if he wanted to turn and look at her but would only listen.

As Linda was listening, her blue eyes, Monica suddenly saw, were darting quick glances at Monica’s stockings and alligator pumps, at Gibbs, and his captain’s bars, at Monica’s coat and handbag. She was smiling calmly all the time, so there was something rather surreptitious in the activity of her bright blue eyes. John had heard Monica’s small, pitying exclamation. He said, over his shoulder, “It’s so long ago, it doesn’t seem to matter much. Everybody else is in the same boat. Houses, possessions don’t seem to mean anything.”

“Wasn’t there anything left?” asked Gibbs.

“A few chimneys, some walls, part of the”—he paused, turned a corner and said—“part of the gatehouse.”

Linda said, “Have you ever been in Mexico City, Monica? No? Well, look down the street we’ll cross at the corner ahead. There’s a flower market. …”

New sights, new sounds, all the hubbub and changing vistas of a city that is both old and new, where the modern and the primitive dwell in paradoxical harmony together, lay all around them. There was a crowded business street, cars, busses—a smartly uniformed policeman on the corner, a blazing sun, thin, clear air, the fragrance of food from a brazier where an Indian woman in a bright shawl cooked ears of corn. The flower market came into view, a mass of glowing color, yellow, red and blue; the path between the banks of flowers was thronged. Tourists in sport suits and print dresses; businessmen in dark clothing; Indians with bright serapes and sombreros; women (Spanish? Mexicans?) in dead black; children with round brown faces and twinkling black eyes; dogs. Gibbs said, “Where are we going? You said home …”

“You’re to stay with us,” said Linda quickly. “I hope you don’t think we’d let you go to a hotel.”

It was domestic, settled, a hostess’ voice. Gibbs said, “Why—well, thanks, Linda. Where is home?”

Linda told him, naming street and number. It was the street and number that were on John’s letter. “You’ll see,” she said. “There’s plenty of room. It’s really quite pleasant. But if you prefer a hotel …”

“Oh, no, no,” said Gibbs. “I’ll just cancel my reservation.” Suddenly Monica remembered Uncle Bill’s words. She said slowly, “I think I may have a reservation too. At the Reforma.”

“No, you haven’t,” said John over his shoulder. He braked to miss a small donkey with an Indian strolling beside him, both of whom just then ambled across the street ahead. “I phoned and told them not to hold it.”

“Were there …” Monica moistened her lips. “Were there any messages for me?”

“No.” John turned another corner. Gibbs said, “Gosh, I can’t believe it. All of us together again after all this time. Five years …”

“Reunion in Mexico,” said Linda gaily, and instantly, “Here’s the Cathedral, Monica. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

But Gibbs continued, “You must have a tale to tell, John. Where have you been exactly? When did you get to Mexico? Did you see a lot of the war?”

“Be careful, John!” cried Linda suddenly and sharply. “Look out for that car….” she broke off and laughed a little apologetically. “I still cannot get used to the hazards of city traffic. Let’s do our talking when we get home.”

They talked though all along the way, but of things that didn’t matter. Linda did most of it, pointing out this building or that monument or hotel. They passed the business section and turned into a broad, beautiful street which Linda said was the Paseo de la Reforma. Huge trees she identified as ahuehuete trees; she told them the whole story of the man to whom a monument was dedicated. Linda had brains, thought Monica suddenly: brains and beauty.

Why couldn’t she ask them pointblank if they were married? It would have been the most natural question in the world. (But she couldn’t say, pointblank: John, do you still love her?)

They turned and turned again; there were houses now; either set flush with the street line, and secretive behind great closed doors and shuttered windows, or almost concealed behind high walls and shrubbery and trees. They stopped before such a wall—high, and plastered, an old, mellowed pink. Great wooden doors were opened as John had sounded the horn; an Indian servant, a gardener apparently, in a white shirt open at the throat and blue jeans, his dark face incurious, stood aside to let the car pass him and then moved to close the gates. There was a short drive, pebbled, winding through thick glossy green shrubbery and all at once they were at the door of a house. It was a long, stucco-covered house, a dull, mellowed pink like the wall, with long windows, shuttered too, and many vines.

Gibbs roused. “A nice house,” he said. “When were you married, John? And where?”

Linda’s bright eyes went to Monica. John said, “Oh, we’re not married!”

“But you …” Gibbs stopped. John swung out of the car, grinning. “It’s okay, Gibbs. No love nest! This is Fae’s house. She’s living here. Married to Carlos Demuth. She took me in.”

“You remember Aunt Fae,” said Linda, smiling and watching Monica. “She was in France with us….”

Monica said, quite coolly, really, “Yes, I remember.” She didn’t sing or shout it. She got out of the car and walked across to the wide polished door with Linda and the others. Whether or not the situation between John and Linda was the same as that of five years ago, still they hadn’t married, and the sun quite literally shone with a warmer fight.

They entered a wide hall with high, stained-glass windows which let hazy golden and green lights in upon the tiled floor, so everything seemed drenched and shimmering with golden greens like an aquarium in the sun. A wide stairway of some polished dark wood went up at one side. There were French doors, too, at the end of the hall. They were open and beyond them Monica had a glimpse of a sun-drenched patio, bright with flowers and vines and fountains.

It was only a glimpse, for John took her bags. “I’ll take Monica to her room. You might take Gibbs out in the patio and give him a drink, Linda.” Linda said, “But wait, John—Z want to talk to Monica….”

John was going up the stairs. He laughed. “So do I. Come on, Mona. I did get your bags, didn’t I?”

Linda bit her lip. “Monica will want a drink, too.”

“Right,” said John agreeably. “We’ll be down.”

There was a difference there, thought Monica. Five years ago Linda would have won in the small clash of wills. Yet it was too small, too unimportant an incident to be of any real significance, and in five years all human relationships alter subtly.

The stairway turned around a landing. They reached the top step as they heard Linda’s voice below, “This way, Gibbs darling. Aunt Fae is gone today. She and Carlos drove down to Cuernavaca. They’ve a house there, too. Isn’t it like Aunt Fae to escape everything and get here and then marry Carlos? He’s terribly rich, you know.”

A narrow and unexpectedly dark hall ran along the front of the house. John led her to a long and rather narrow bedroom, bright with sun. The furniture was dark and heavily carved. Oak, she thought, and it looked very old and Spanish. The floor was tiled in red; there were a few thin, old, oriental rugs upon it. The open French door, pouring sun into the room, gave upon a balcony with a wrought-iron railing. John put down her bags, closed the door and took her hands.

“You haven’t changed,” he said again.

But he had changed. Especially the look, in his face was different, older, with lines of strain. His eyes too had a soberness and gravity, as if they had seen sad and terrible things.

“I’ve brought you the money,” she said. “Wait …”

Quick, tense anxiety leaped into his eyes. “How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars.” Her fingers trembled fumbling with her blouse and the pin that held the handkerchief. He needed the money then, as much as she and Bill had thought he needed it. When she turned to look at John again, the small packet in her hand, the relief in his face was almost as alarming as his anxiety had been. He reached for the money and untied the small handkerchief. “Thank God,” he said, under his breath.

“John, what is wrong? What has happened?”

.Oddly, her question seemed to wipe off the look of unguarded refief in his face.

He waited a moment, looking down at her with, again, a searching quality in his dark gray eyes as if he were measuring and plumbing something within her. Finally he put the money slowly in his inside pocket and gave her the small lace handkerchief. “There isn’t time now. I want to tell you a great deal. But I can’t even thank you now for bringing me this. It is important, Mona. Not just to me but to a lot of people. It means a lot of lives that in a—well, in a queer but real sense I am responsible for.” He paused and looked down into her face again. “You don’t understand, do you? I can’t explain now. I’ll fix it later so we can talk. I’ve got to tell you …”

he broke off. “First though. Bill Fiske phoned. He didn’t cable, as I said. He phoned day before yesterday; early in the morning—about eight. I heard it luckily and answered myself. He said he’d have to talk in double talk and I was to repeat it to you, exactly as he said it….”

“Oh, John, John, Eric was murdered!”

“Eric …”

“Eric Weller. You remember him. …”

“Of course. When? Where?”

“In my apartment. That night. Uncle Bill must have phoned just after I left New York. And Gibbs—John, I think Gibbs did it. …”

John’s hands were like brown, steel bands on her wrists “Mona, what do you mean? Tell me … Hurry, hurry … No, wait …” He went swiftly to the door to the corridor, opened it and glanced into the corridor and closed it again. He went to the French doors leading upon the balcony and very softly opened one and listened and closed it again too. “You can hear sometimes from the patio,” he said in a low voice and came back to her. “What about Gibbs? Quick, Mona, everything …”

She told him. Everything. Just as it happened. Remembering to keep her voice low, very swiftly but remembering to explain in exact terms. She’d been with Eric at the Stork Club; the message from Linda had been in a French cachet; it was as she left Chicago that she learned that someone had inquired for her; she had been about ten feet from Gibbs when the shot occurred at the airport in St. Louis; she had told Gibbs she was going to meet him, John, after Gibbs had already said that he, too, was going to Mexico City.

“Was that right, John? I thought I had to prove whether Gibbs was all right or—or not …”

“Quite right. Go on.”

But quickly, said his eyes and voice.

She did. She even remembered Joe Sproul, the only other traveler who had been on the Chicago-to-St. Louis plane and who had also come to Mexico City—to buy Easter lily bulbs. She remembered everything, she thought, and then forgot the clasp knife in her handbag, and remembered it and opened it at the last and showed it to him.

He took it in his hand. His face was set in lines that she didn’t recognize, that were not there five years ago and yet had an accustomed look in his face as if they were familiar to it.

“And you think it was Gibbs in your room at the hotel?”

“There wasn’t anybody else who knew I was there. There wasn’t anybody else who had any conceivable connection with me, or you or Eric. Or Linda. John, what is it? Why was Eric murdered? Why…?”

“I’m not sure that I know,” he said slowly. “I don’t see how Eric Weller comes into it at all. I don’t … Mona, we’ve got to talk more. Later. When it’s …” She thought he was going to say safer, instead he said, “when there’s a better chance. Linda and Gibbs are waiting. If Gibbs …” He broke off again. The mask of concentration made his grave face unreadable. He said, “I can’t help thinking Gibbs is all right. I’ve known him so long. You said there were two people in your hotel room?”

“I thought so. I couldn’t be sure. There was only a little light from the door….”

“Yes, I understand. You’ve never seen this Sproul anywhere except on the trip?”

“No. I’m sure.”

“Did anyone know you had this money?”

“No.”

He went to the French doors again, opened one cautiously, seemed to listen an instant and then came back. “Nobody is in the patio. We’d better … Look here, Mona, I told you it was important. Can you trust me?”

“Yes …”

“I can’t explain now. I’ve got to go slowly. I’ve got to think about—about all this. You see—well, it’s as I said. It is important to a lot of other people. Not just to me. I can’t see how what you have told me applies, or how it fits or—wait, though, I’d better tell you what Bill said. I understand more of it, now. He didn’t say that Eric had been murdered. He was talking over long distance, probably through a hotel switchboard. He was very guarded. He told me to tell you to sit tight. Just that. He said you’d hear from him. He told me that you were arriving on the plane at noon today because he couldn’t come. He said to say everything was all right except Pinky. He said he was having some difficulty with somebody named Pinky….”

“Pinky!”

“He said you’d understand. I see now, after what you’ve told me, that he meant everything was all right about Eric Weller’s death, that he’d done whatever was necessary to do. Covered it—I don’t know how. But Pinky …”

“Pinky was the elevator boy. He saw me slap Eric. I told you that. It was when Eric changed so all at once—began to make love. It was so silly. And so horrible then, later. But Pinky came in just then and saw me—well, slap Eric. He saw me leave the apartment building later. He came and rang while Eric lay there behind the sofa. I was getting ready to leave. Uncle Bill answered the door and said he’d got rid of him….”

She faltered as all the damning things that Pinky knew and had seen rose before her. John said, “Everything all right except Pinky doesn’t mean that Pinky’s going to tell the police anything.”

“John, I’ve got to go back. I felt like a hit-and-run driver. I felt like a criminal running from the scene of the crime. I’ve got to go back and face it.”

“You can’t go back. Not yet.” He put his arms around her as if to hold her there. “There’s something … I need you here. It isn’t just for me. It’s for a thousand men—and their wives and sweethearts and children—starving and dying and fighting. In Poland. My men. Do you understand, Mona? Men who joined me. Men who made me their leader.”

After a long moment she whispered, “That is where you’ve been. That is what you’ve been doing.”

“They came from everywhere. Over the hills, through the forests and fields. By night. They stole, they starved, they got arms. They did miracles. A guerrilla band—soldiers, farmers, artisans, the bravest men …”

Linda came into the room. Came so quickly, knocking and opening the door at the same instant that there was no time for either of them to move. Her blue eyes were suddenly very bright and fixed. John did not take his arms from around Monica. For an instant they made a warm wall around her. Linda laughed. “Dear me,” she said, “what’s all this?”

There was a short silence, then John laughed too. His face was perfectly smooth and calm. He laughed lightly and with an effect of complete casualness. “Caught,” he said and kissed Monica lightly on the cheek and took his arms away. “Where’s Gibbs? In the patio? See you girls later. Better let her rest, Linda. She’s tired. She got up at three this morning.”

He crossed the room. Linda did not move. He went out and closed the door behind him.

Monica’s knees were suddenly trembling and weak. Linda s eyes were still fixed and bright; her red lips were smiling. “You must rest, darling,” she said. “I’m going to unpack for you and make you lie down for awhile.” She waited. Monica said, “Thank you, Linda.”

But Linda made no move to unpack. She said, “Does Uncle Bill know that I’m here?”

“No. None of us knew. Linda, why didn’t you tell me? Where have you been? What is wrong?”

“Wrong?” said Linda. “Why, nothing is wrong. And I couldn’t let you know where I’ve been all this time because I was in France and under the circumstances it was impossible to get word out to you. Or to anyone.”

“You mean you were in occupied territory…?”

“I mean I’ve been working for the Underground, of course.”

Of course. The Underground. Naturally. Linda had beauty and brains and she also had courage. One had to have courage for that work, courage and intelligence and integrity of a high order.

Monica took off her brown jacket and sat down on the bed, her arm over the carved, thick arch of the footboard. Linda stood planted in the middle of the red-tiled floor, hands in her pockets, erect and rather solid in the pink suit. It was the slim delicacy that she missed about Linda, thought Monica in the back of her mind. It had been one of Linda’s charms, that delicate and impulsive grace. She said honestly, “You were very brave, Linda, to do that.”

“Brave?” Linda’s gaze was perfectly still, yet Monica felt that she was thinking many rapid, active thoughts. She said then with a shrug, “Oh, well, it had to be done. It’s over now. For me. But, Monica, there’s something I want you to do for me. I—well, never mind why, but I don’t want anyone to know I’m here. I mean—well, Bill Fiske, for instance. At least not—yet. Promise me not to tell him. Will you? I know I can count on you, darling, and …”

“But Linda, what is wrong? I got the cachet, but I didn’t know where to find you. I thought you must have got back to New York but Uncle Bill thought not. He said he’d try to find you while I came here …”

It was then that she saw that Linda’s face had a pasty look, that there were two deep, gray dents at the corners of her nose, that her eyes were two blue slits. She said in a queer whisper, “Monica, what are youtalking about? What cachet?”

Monica put tired, heavy hands up to push back her hair. “The cachet you sent me. The cachet at the Stork Club. The paper in it said you needed help. Linda …”

“I sent you no message,” said Linda hoarsely.

10

The sun filtered in through the French doors. It lay across the red-tiled floor and Linda’s white, open sandals, and the red polish on her toes, and across Monica’s brown pumps. It touched the dents at the corners of Linda’s nose to a sharper gray; curiously, it seemed to tighten her scarlet mouth and narrow the line of blue eyes. The two women looked at each other for a moment that seemed suspended in time and space.

Then Linda strode to Monica and put her hand so hard on her shoulder that the long nails felt sharp through Monica’s white blouse. “Tell me,” said Linda, “everything. Quick—what cachet…?”

Monica told it again. She felt as if she’d been telling the story all her life it had grown so familiar in her mind. Again, as with Gibbs, she omitted any mention of Eric.

But Linda, her hand still digging into Monica’s shoulder, her face so pointed with anxiety, eyes, nose, mouth, that suddenly it looked foxy and sharp, asked questions.

“Who else knew it? You weren’t at the Stork Club alone. Some man was with you.”

“Eric. Eric Weller.”

It was horrible, thought Monica parenthetically, how everything led back to Eric. The sun had changed a little, or Linda’s face was in a shadow above the sunlight in the room, for there were blue shadows on it. “Eric Weller! What did he say?”

“We looked around the Club for you. You weren’t there, of course. There wasn’t anybody we knew. We came back to my apartment, thinking you might get in touch with me there.”

“Then what…?”

“Then …” Monica paused. “Well, Uncle Bill came. Wi th John’s letter.”

Linda paused too for a moment; but her eyes were active and purposeful, full of secret rapid thoughts. “John’s letter,” she said. “Of course. I’d forgotten. So you came.”

“Yes.”

“What did Bill Fiske say about the cachet—the message?”

“He said that he didn’t think you were in New York. He said if you had been you’d have come to me directly.”

“Is that all?”

“No, I—there was something else we were—talking about. He couldn’t come here, so he sent me. It was all very quick and—and confused.”

Linda did not sense the ugly thing Monica skirted. She said impatiently, “But what else did Uncle Bill say about the message? Or me?”

“Just that I must come to Mexico City, and he would look out for any word from you. That’s all.”

“Oh,” said Linda, after a moment. “Oh …”

“Linda, if you didn’t send that message to me, who did?”

Linda moved away from her abruptly and went to stand at the French doors, for a moment, hands thrust in her pockets, back rigid and thick-looking below the pink skirt and white blouse. She said finally in a voice that was rather thick, too, “How should I know! Except it’s obvious that it was a trap.”

“Trap!” Eric, Monica remembered suddenly, had said that, too.

“Certainly. Someone wants to know where I am. Someone thought you might know. You were my best friend. Someone thought you would lead him to me.”

“But no one …” began Monica and stopped as Linda whirled around. “Gibbs! He said you met accidentally in St. Louis. Was that true?”

“Yes. But Gibbs …” She checked herself quickly, better not tell Linda too much of Gibbs until she could talk to John again. Linda was impulsive; Linda had moods. And just now Linda was frightened. And John, despite everything, had been unable to believe in Gibbs’ guilt. (As she had been unable to believe until there was nothing else to believe!) Linda cried, “Gibbs Brooke! It must be Gibbs. Only I don’t see why—or how …” She was again thinking rapidly, so the quickly darting thoughts were almost visible behind those bright (and frightened) eyes. “Gibbs is in the Army, isn’t he?” she demanded. “He’s in uniform. He said he was invalided home. Although he certainly looks well enough.”

“He’s in the Army,” said Monica. “That is, he says so. I didn’t ask to see any papers or anything like that, naturally.”

“That kind of masquerade has been done. Successfully, too. Is there anybody besides Gibbs who could be following you in order to find me?”

“No. That is, there was a man on the Chicago-to-St. Louis plane who also came to Mexico City, but he …”

Linda pounced on it. “Who is he? What’s his name? What’s his excuse for,coming here?”

“I don’t think he was following me.”

“Don’t be a child. Who is he?”

“His name is Joe Sproul. He’s coming here, to buy Easter lily bulbs.”

Linda considered it. “Joe Sproul doesn’t mean anything to me. Lily bulbs—it could be anything—silver, wool! What does he look like? Describe him.”

She did. Linda hung on every word. And then she shook her head slowly. “Dark, swarthy, small—big brown eyes—could be anybody.”

“Linda, if the message was a trap who would do it? I mean who is trying to find you?”

“Who?” Linda looked down at her for several long seconds and said, “Why, the Nazis of course. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Even to a child like you.”

Monica said slowly, “There aren’t many Nazis in the United States. The F.B.I. has done a magnificent job of rounding them up. Everybody knows that.”

Linda’s eyes flashed scornfully. “Do you believe it?”

“Yes, I do. There may be still a few hidden around, who have Nazi sympathies …”

“A few is enough,” said Linda sharply. “One is enough. It’s either this Joe Sproul or—Gibbs.”

“Gibbs is not a Nazi. He’s in the uniform of …”

“He’s in the uniform, all right,” said Linda. “That doesn’t make him what he says he is.”

It was queer that she could suspect Gibbs of murder, of attacks upon her, of almost anything and still could not believe that he could be a traitor. Monica said, “I don’t think Gibbs is a Nazi….”

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” snapped Linda. “You’ve got to help me, Monica. You were my dearest, best friend. We’ve been friends always. I’ve always been loyal to you and …”

“You took John,” said Monica, suddenly and unexpectedly.

It caught Linda in full flight. She stopped, blinked those short stubby eyelashes and said, “Nonsense. I didn’t take John. He fell in love with me. I couldn’t help it. You were not engaged to him. Were you?”

“No.”

“Well, then,” said Linda triumphantly, “what difference does it make! If you had been engaged to him, I shouldn’t have let him love me. But you weren’t and …”

Monica got up. “I always liked you, Linda. It was impossible not to like you. I think you knew, you must have known how I felt about John. But that’s in the past now, five years in the past. John can’t be blamed; neither can you, I suppose. Those things happen …”

“Of course they happen, Monica darling.” Linda’s voice was all softness and cajolery. She put her hand affectionately now on Monica’s arm. “I wouldn’t have had it happen …”

Monica moved her arm away. “I’m going to unpack and rest.”

“No, but …” Linda’s face was, briefly, puzzled. Then she said, “You do understand about the Nazis, don’t you? You see, I—well, I don’t want to boast but I really did rather a lot of work, you know, for the Underground. Naturally I’m a marked woman just now. They’d like to get me. … That’s why you mustn’t tell anybody where I am. I mean Bill Fiske or—or anybody like that, who might give me away to their agents. I mean without intending to. You do understand—don’t you?”

“You said that was over now, for you.”

“Yes, well, so it is. But how do the Nazis know that?” Again there was a scarcely identifiable flash of something like triumph in her face. “They expect me to go back to France, of course. And continue my work against them. They must have found out somehow that I’m here, in America, and they thought you knew exactly where and would lead them to me.” The triumph was gone. The blue shadows lay all over her face now, making it old, making it strange, making it ugly. She clutched Monica’s shoulder again and said, “Monica, for God’s sake, help me.”

The appeal was real, Linda was in terror. Whatever lay behind her cajolery and her flattery and her small tricks of affectionate gesture, the terror was real. Monica said slowly, “You know I will, if I can. You’d better tell John.”

Linda licked her lips. “Did you tell John about the message in the cachet?”

“Yes.”

There was a little pause. “What did he say?”

“There wasn’t time. He didn’t say anything….”

There was that swift impression of active, rapid thinking behind Linda’s blue eyes. She said finally, “Yes, of course. John. I’ll tell him. And I’ll warn him about Gibbs. I’ll …” She gave Monica a long thoughtful look and suddenly went to the door. “See you later,” she said over her shoulder. “Rest awhile. Aunt Fae and Carlos will be back soon. Come down to the patio when you’ve rested.”

Her pink suit and golden hair disappeared. The door closed and Monica could hear her high heels tap briefly along the hall and then she was gone.

After a long moment Monica went to the French doors and flung them wide. Sunshine and air poured into the room dispelling Linda’s rose perfume. Opposite her, against the dull pink walls of the patio, great purple clusters of bougainvillea flung themselves in gorgeous loops. From directly below she could hear men’s voices, dimly, and the tinkle of ice and glasses. All perfectly normal, she thought again, except that nothing was normal, nothing was right, nothing was as it should be, as you had every right to expect it to be, as things always had been. It was as if the whole of life as she knew it had suddenly been knocked strangely and curiously askew so nothing was in its right and true proportions. But in her heart she had always known that John was, somewhere, fighting. Leader of a guerrilla band, men who joined him—through the forests, over the fields by night. The bravest men …

That alone was natural; that alone was right; that was John.

She took a bath. She drank some soup brought by a Mexican maid, pretty with her dark face and shining black hair and brightly striped skirt, and scarlet and green beads.

She went to sleep as if she had been struck.

It was dusk when Monica awoke. The moment of bewilderment, of the reassembling of one’s self, and one’s life with which one always emerges from an exhausted, heavy sleep caught her. Gradually she knew it was evening, that the sun’s glow was gone, that there were more voices in the patio, and lights down there. She felt better; that was the rest and sleep.

John—Linda—Gibbs. Uncle Bill back in New York. Uncle Bill and Pinky!

In her talk with Linda she’d forgotten Pinky. What did Uncle Bill mean exactly by saying he was having trouble with Pinky? Did he mean that Pinky had seen too much—far too much—after all? Trouble in that case could only mean trouble for her, Monica.

She had to go back. She couldn’t go back if John needed her.

Someone down in the patio laughed loudly and someone replied. She got up and went out on the balcony and stood at the railing in her dark silk dressing gown with her hair down around her shoulders. They were all down there, around a table, in the tiled center of the green patio. There were a few candles glowing in the soft blue dusk. Linda in a pink evening dress was sitting in a chaise longue with John at her feet, a glass in his hand. Gibbs was talking to another woman—Fae de Rissaud (Fae Demuth now); foreshortened at that distance but handsome and soignee and well poised and slim as Monica remembered her. A man, short and dark with shining, brushed dark hair, wearing a white-linen suit, came out of the house, into Monica’s range of vision, carrying a tray with ice and glasses. Everyone hailed him with gay cries and John looked up and saw her standing there. He got up. “Here she is,” he cried. “Come on down, Monica.”

Fae looked up and cried, “Monica, darling …”Her lovely face showed no sign of the hardships of the years in France. She was a slender, graceful woman, of an age either so indefinite or so skillfully accepted that it never mattered. She was civilized, cosmopolitan, well-dressed, well-jeweled, perfectly poised and exquisitely knowledgeable. And—being of that breed and species of woman—completely enigmatic. Monica had always liked her and never known what she was thinking. Linda, beautiful and gay now, with no harsh blue shadows on her face, looked up too, and cried, “Darling, come down. We’re all going to Ciro’s to dinner.”

Again it was merely a social visit. There were no shadows of murder, of violent death, of horror below the charming, natural-seeming façade.

While she slept, the Mexican maid had pressed her clothes and returned them—silently, without waking her. Twenty minutes later she started downstairs and John was sitting on the top step, a glass in his hand, his white coat looming up ghostlike in the shadows.

“I was waiting,” he said. And then stopped and looked at her. She’d put on the long white dress with the crimson sash-thinking as she did so, of Bill packing it for her and the dreadful stillness in her small apartment. John looked and said, “You’re lovely, Monica. I’d forgotten …” he stopped again. And said rather quickly, “I—we’ll get together after dinner. We can’t get away from the others until then. I’ve got to talk to you alone.”

“All right. Did Linda téll you about the cachet?”

“Yes,” he said shortly. “Shall we go down? Look out for the steps. There ought to be a light …” He put his hand out toward her. And suddenly, deliberately, held her still, put his glass down on the floor, and took her very quietly into his arms and put his cheek against her hair and held her there.

It was like the moment at the airport that morning; yet it was different too. It was deliberate—not merely in greeting, but something else. “John,” she whispered, past some tight, hard throb in her throat, “you’re alive. You’re real …”

He held her closer against him, warm and hard and tight. And then gave a short laugh and released her. “Don’t mind me,” he said quickly. “It’s so damn good to see you. I—God, Mona, it’s been so long. … Well, we’d better go down.”

So they went down the stairs. At the landing there was a light like a lantern, cased in grilled iron. They went out through the wide hall, no longer shimmering in the green and gold of sunlight, and into the patio. A radio on a table was playing; it was a foreign broadcast in a foreign language. Monica heard a few words in, she thought, German, as Gibbs moved and tamed it off.

Fae, in a thin black gown with exquisite lines, with her gray-blonde hair done high and an emerald at her throat and others at her ears, met her, embraced her, kissed her. She brought Carlos Demuth, with a graceful motion of her jeweled hand, to meet her, and Carlos, Spanish apparently, dark and rotund but with very quick and observant dark eyes, kissed her hand and welcomed her in an unexpectedly stately manner to his house. Gibbs stood with a highball glass in his hand and his handsome, heavy face without expression and watched. Linda told John to pour her a drink.

They went to Ciro’s presently to dinner. They talked, they were gay—even Gibbs joined that gaiety as frankly, apparently, as anyone. The gray-satin cushions set off Linda’s blonde and sparkling beauty, and Fae Demuth’s exquisite charm and grace and emeralds. Nobody, watching them, would have dreamed the thing that at least four of them were thinking about under that surface gaiety. Once, though, Linda touched on it. She lifted a glass and said, “Well, here’s to our reunion after five years! Fae and Monica and Gibbs and, of course, darling John, you and me.” John met Linda’s look and smiled. (Lightly? thought Monica. Tenderly? Certainly with every semblance of understanding between them.) Linda said, “Everybody is here, in fact, but Eric. Carlos dear, you’ll have to take Eric’s place.”

It was as if a chill small wind had blown in through some invisible door—past other diners, through the gay and mirrored room, over their table chilling all it touched. No one else—except John—seemed aware of it. John’s eyes met Monica’s briefly. His face did not change. Carlos, the soul of politeness and hospitality and Latin grace made a little bow. “Delighted, dear Linda. Delighted,” he said. “Who is this Eric?” ’

Fae, his wife, replied, “Just a boy we picked up on the Riviera—that was the summer war began.”

There was no other mention of anything that even bordered upon Monica’s visit to Mexico and Gibbs’ unheralded, unexpected, unwanted presence there.

Eventually they started home and someone suggested another night club and then another. It was, however, only about two when John said firmly that they had to go home. “Monica and Gibbs are passing out on their feet,” he said, “and not from liquor. They got up a good twenty-four hours ago. Let’s go home.”

Back again through the strange and glittering and fascinating city.

“Our city,” said Carlos, looking out the window of the long, shining car he had asked John to drive—apparently the Demuth garage was as well stocked as the Demuth cellar. “Our city is like a woman—capricious, lovely, cruel and gracious. And never more so than at night.” The glowpf lights shone briefly on his dark, round and intelligent face. Not a face to be overlooked, thought Monica; not a face to be deceived.

That was all though, really, that she thought of Carlos Demuth. They reached the house and there were long cold drinks waiting for them on a tray in the patio. Fae de Rissaud Demuth ran the kind of house where every small detail is done as if by clockwork, behind the scenes. It was Fae who made them all go to bed. “It’s late,” she said. “There’s always tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow.” She put her slim hand on Carlos’ shoulder and smiled at him. “You see how Mexican I have become. I talk of mañana.” He kissed her hand, and then Monica’s and Linda’s. Linda lingered in the patio with Gibbs and John. Fae herself took Monica to her room, saw that everything had been done: the bed turned down, her night things laid out, fresh water in a thermos on the bed table. “It’s cold at night,” she said. “You’ll need that eiderdown. Good night, my dear. I’m glad you came.”

She went away, elegant, remote, gracious, asking no questions. Monica wondered briefly if Fae de Rissaud Demuth knew anything of the maze of threat and death and horror that lay below all that bright and gay façade.

John had said only a quiet good night. An hour must have passed, perhaps longer, for she was half asleep, when his voice roused her. “Mona—Mona …”

He was on the balcony. There was no moon but a brightly starry sky made it light enough to see him standing in the doorway. She sat up in bed. “John …”

He came in. His body was a black moving shadow, tall and strong against the starlight beyond the window. He came to the bed and sat down on the edge of it and took her hands tightly. “Listen, Mona, don’t … Oh, you’re not the screaming type but-do you know anything of first aid?”

“What!”

“Come down, will you? He’s in the patio….”

“He…?”

“At the foot of the trellis. I found him just now. Is this your dressing gown?”

It lay over the foot of the bed. He put it around her. He found her small mules beside the bed and held them for her bare feet. “We’ll go down the stairs,” he whispered. “I came up the trellis but—wait.” He opened the door; the hall outside was dark.

“Take my hand,” he whispered.

In the thick darkness they reached the stairs and groped for the top step; they went down cautiously and carefully, with the darkness of the sleeping house all around them—sleeping yet seeming to listen too, aware of their passage, aware of them as intruders, creeping down the darkened stairs through the wide hall. The door to the patio creaked a little as John opened it; starlight fell dimly on their faces. The night air was clear and cool; the fragrance of grass and sweet stock was all around. “This way,” he whispered again and led her across the patio, walking lightly along the cold grass, to stop just below the balcony of her room. A man lay there.

A man in a dark suit, half on his face, a thick, flaccid huddle in the starlight. John bent for a moment and then stood up.

“Its too late,” he said. “He’s dead. He was still breathing and I thought—but he’s dead now.”

Dead. A bmp ugly huddle, like Eric somehow—horrible. Monica could see the face, half of it, the eyes half-open.

But it wasn’t Carlos Demuth who had taken Eric’s place. It was the little man, the swarthy, sleepy, smiling little man with the spaniel eyes who had traveled with them, who had said his name was Joe Sproul.

The stars looked down upon the patio with a hundred eyes. The windows of the house, blank and shining in the starlight, looked down too.

It was very still; there was no wind. But somewhere near them the vines, the shrubbery, some thick loop of wisteria or bougainvillea rustled softly.

11

It was a starlight night with swiftly moving clouds. In the deep stillness and darkness of the night, the outline of the patio was mainly discernible by the shape of the night sky above and by the shadows. The patio was rectangular, enclosed completely by the walls and windows and balconies of the house—two and three stories, irregularly blocking themselves against the clouds and stars, except along the south where the kitchen wing lay. It was low and permitted the sun, in daytime, to flood the patio. The whole enclosed place seemed now alive and sentient, as if it—and the blank and shadowed windows of the house—were all aware and watching. A patch of clear light fell upon a group of chairs and tables in the middle of the patio; it made the obscurity beyond them deeper.

The bougainvillea rustled again somewhere in that thick shadow. Monica put her hand out and touched John’s arm, but he had heard it too and moved away. She could not hear his footsteps over the grass. She knew that he was avoiding the flagstones in the center of the patio, but the thick rim of shadow swallowed him. There was no sound, nothing but the mingled, moving chiaroscuro of starlight and deep shadow, as clouds moved over the rectangular bit of sky and changed the quality of the starlight, so it was no longer clear but evanescent and diffused.

She listened. She knew that there were several balconies besides her own; all of them had French doors; all of them conceivably could be reached by way of the thick trellises for supporting the vines which clung to the walls, all around the patio. There were many doors on the, ground floor. She tried to think where they were. She’d only been aware of them in a general way, as one is in a strange place. Had murder walked somewhere in that patio?

The clouds were heavier; there was scarcely any light upon the chairs and tables.

Suddenly someone was running. Pounding along through the shadow, on the grass, making some attempt at stealth, but running, and so near she could hear heavy, panting breaths. She couldn’t tell from what direction the sound came, except that it seemed to grow louder and then quite suddenly stopped altogether.

It had lasted perhaps ten swift seconds. Nothing happened for perhaps three more seconds and then she thought a door closed somewhere—very softly, very quietly..

And then nothing at all happened except the clouds moved above, and the shadows in the patio moved, and time passed, and time stood still, and there was no such thing as time. No time; no sounds; no one in the patio, she thought suddenly, except herself, huddled in her dark dressing gown, in the deep shadows of the balcony. And the man—Joe Sproul—who lay somewhere too in that shadow.

And then a door creaked a little again and John came back, looming dimly from the darkness near her. “Monica—Monica …”

His voice was so low it was a mere breath of sound. “I’m here, John,” she whispered and put out her hand. The clouds parted a little and she could see the pale oval of his face. He was breathing hard.

“Whoever it was got away. Into the house—outside—I don’t know. I’ve got to rouse everybody.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“John, is he—dead?”

“Yes. Yes, he’s dead.”

“John, he was Joe Sproul. I told you he was on the Chicago. St. Louis plane. And then again at Fort Worth …”

He was drawing her along, through the deep rim of shadow toward the door into the hall. He stopped as she said that. “That man!”

“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

His hand was hard and tight on her wrist. “Wait—I’ve got to think. If he was following you—Monica, had you ever seen him anywhere before?”

“No. Not before the plane.”

He paused for an instant. Then his voice came low and close to her ear. “Think hard, Monica. Have you ever heard his name before?Did Eric mention him or—anyone?”

“Eric. John, was Sproul murdered, too?”

“Yes. Quick, Monica …”

Joe Sproul. Joe Sproul. She sought frantically back in her mind and found no small spark of recognition other than the very recent one. “No, no, I’m certain—there was only the plane trip and we heard him speak his name at the hotel in St. Louis….”

“We? Then Gibbs heard it, too.”

“Yes. I suppose so—and again at Fort Worth …”

“Did Gibbs seem to recognize him? Or he Gibbs? Was there anything…?” Again she strove to remember and there was nothing to remember. No significant glance exchanged between them, no word, nothing. She told him. “Nothing, John. There wasn’t anything. …”

“He could have been the man in your suite that night. He could have been …” he broke off abruptly, thought for another quick moment and said, “Wait. I’ll be back.”

He vanished toward the thick shadow of balcony and vine which covered the body of Joe Sproul; in a moment he was back again. His face in the dim starlight looked somehow stern and very white. “All right,” he said. “Come on.”

The shadow was thick around the doorway. The shadows moved in the patio as clouds dimmed the starlight again in swiftly, moving patterns. They reached the door and John whispered hurriedly, urgently, close to her face, “The first thing the police will do is identify Sproul, so you’d better tell them what you know of him. They’ll find out that he arrived on the same plane with you, anyway. Dont tell them about Eric. Then, tonight, I came out to the patio for a smoke, found him, thought you might know something of first aid. I called you to help and that was all. Now then, I’ve got to give the alarm.”

The door clicked lightly as he opened it. Nothing reached from the dark cavern of the hall. John found a switch, and the wide, tiled hall was flooded with brightness. Nothing slipped out of sight into the rooms on either side of the hall; nothing fled before them up the stairs. John turned on lights as he went. The upper hall, narrow and long, was empty of human presence. They followed it in the opposite direction from Monica’s room, turned and stopped before a heavily carved, wide door. “Carlos’ room …” he said and knocked, and knocked again, thunderously, it seemed to Monica. Loud enough to rouse the sleeping, sprawling house. Loud enough perhaps to rouse the huddled mass that lay in the darkness in the patio.

Carlos called, “What is it? Un minuto.” The door opened. He had turned on the bedside light and was in yellow-silk pajamas. His swarthy, full face looked sleepy, his dark hair tousled, but his eyes were wide awake and alive. “John! What has happened?”

“Someone in the patio. He’s dead.”

Carlos’ eyes were lambent. “Who is it?”

“A man by the name of Sproul. It looks,” said John, “as if he’s been murdered.”

There was a long pause. Carlos Demuth’s face did not change in the slightest degree; only his dark eyes were alive. He said slowly, “I don’t know anybody by that name. How did he get in? The gates are locked at night. Who killed him?”

“You’d better come,” said John obliquely. “The house and grounds will have to be searched, and the police called …”

“Yes, certainly. I’ll get something on. Ring that bell, will you? It’ll rouse the gardener and the servants. Don’t wake Fae. She’s in the next room.” He moved toward a dressing room. John went inside the bedroom and touched the bell set into the wall. Carlos, from the dressing room, said, “How did you happen to find him?”

As John told him rapidly, Carlos emerged, with his bare feet thrust into slippers and a dressing gown wrapped around his thick figure. For so fat a man he moved rapidly.

“I’ll take a look at him,” he said.

Fae came through the dressing room. Her pretty slender face was pale; her glance caught them up swiftly in its bright net. “Carlos,” she cried. ‘What is it…?”

“An accident. Stay here, my darling.” Carlos made a gesture toward John and followed him into the hall.

Fae said, “What is it, Monica? You’d better tell me.”

Tell them what you know of him, John had said. She did so quickly, listening as she spoke to John’s and Carlos’ footsteps, rapid and hard along the corridor.

“Sproul!” said Fae on a sharply drawn breath. “I never heard of him.”

There was a pause while Fae, as Carlos had done, seemed to be thinking rapidly, questioning, arranging something in her mind. Then she went to the French doors, which, as in Monica’s room, led to a balcony. Her long, pale-green-chiffon negligee trailed and whispered along the floor. Monica followed her. Lights were springing up in the servants’ quarters along at the south. Lights from the hall streamed out now upon the patio, checkering its shadows with bright rectangles. The door flung open; suddenly lights which were arranged along the walls of the house, like miniature searchlights, were turned on and poured down upon the patio. Everything was in bold relief now: the vines, the bright chairs and tables, the two fountains, the flagstones. “There,” cried Fae under her breath, tautly, grasping the raffing with both her slim white hands, “is that it?”

Joe Sproul still lay just below the balcony, the lights bright now upon him. Monica could see the way his dark coat was wrinkled across the flaccid, thick body.

John and Carlos were hurrying toward him. From somewhere a Mexican, the gardener, shirt open and clutching at his blue jeans, came running; another Mexican, a house servant, ran out from the kitchen; a maid in a full, flowered kimono ran out too, her black hair streaming behind her. A bedroom opposite sprang into bright lights. Linda came upon a balcony directly across from Fae and Monica and looked down. The lights showed her as brightly as if she were on a stage. Her blonde, thick braids were hanging down over her shoulders. Something scarlet—a dressing gown—was clutched around her. She looked down and stared and then saw Fae and Monica and made some sort of gesture and disappeared. They could not hear what the men now grouped around the ugly huddle there on the grass were saying, although the mingled murmur of voices was distinct. Then Gibbs came running out of the house and joined them.

It was, Monica thought, like a stage set—the bright lights, the figures, the occasional words that came distinctly to their ears. She and Fae had balcony seats.

Linda joined them, running through Carlos’ room. She’d put on a thin white sweater and dark slacks. “What is it?” she cried. “Who is it?”

“A man by the name of Sproul.”

“Sproul!” cried Linda. “Sproul!” She whirled upon Monica. The terror that had dwelt in her eyes when Monica told her of the cachet and of Sproul now leaped into full being, caught her in its full possession. “Was that the man on the plane?” she cried and clutched Monica by the arm and shook it, in vehemence.

“Yes …”

Linda turned swiftly to Fae. “Fae, he was a Nazi. He was following Monica in the hope of finding me. The message in the cachet was a trap. I tell you they’ll kill me. They’ll do anything. They’ll …”

“What cachet? What message?” cut in Fae.

Linda, jerkily, almost hysterically, explained.

“He must have been a Nazi,” she cried. “Don’t you see, Fae? He followed Monica …”

Fae, her eyes very bright now in her white but unemotional face, said quickly, “We’ll tell Carlos. He’ll know what to do. Don’t be frightened, Linda.”

“Frightened!” cried Linda unevenly. “You don’t know the Nazis! Frightened …”

Fae said firmly and quickly, “Oh, don’t I? We’d better go downstairs.”

They did. As they reached the hall Carlos came in. He walked rapidly to a telephone, which was in a niche in the hall, on a carved kind of mantel built against the wall. “Fae,”

he said when he saw his wife, “see if you can get the servants to pull themselves together. Have Conchita make some coffee.”

“Carlos, Linda believes he was a Nazi. Tell him, Linda.”

Again unevenly, her face pasty and terrified, Linda told the brief story of the cachet and Joe Sproul. Carlos glanced at Monica. “Is that all you know of Sproul, Monica?”

“Yes.”

Carlos’ eyes were full of light and yet unfathomable. He said quietly to Fae, “See to the coffee, darling.”

“Of course.” Fae moved toward the patio as quietly as if he had asked her to order cocktails for a group of friends. Linda ran up to Carlos and put her white hand on his arm. “But I’m in danger! What are you going to do?”

He held the telephone at his ear. The lights in the hall were very bright and he looked sallow, greenish yellow, in spite of his calmness. His eyes were opaque, unfathomable, yet somehow purposeful. There was the faintest flicker of distaste in his face. So, Monica thought suddenly, he expects all women to behave as Fae behaves—no questions, no screams and hysteria; all poise and self-control and quiet grace. He said kindly however to Linda, “You are not in danger now. We will protect you.”

“Are you calling the police?” demanded Linda.

“No,” said Carlos flatly. A voice reverberated faintly into the telephone. He gave a number, rapidly, in Spanish. “Numero tres, nuevo, tres, nuevo, por favor.”

The connection was made promptly. They listened while Carlos spoke into the telephone rapidly, in English: “Ramos? Are you alone? Something rather difficult has happened here. Yes, quite. It is a police matter. Very serious. I thought you might come. Yes, immediately. That is very kind of you. Yes, at once. Thank you, my friend. Thank you.” He put down the telephone slowly.

Linda said, her eyes bright and narrow, “Ramos?”

Carlos turned and said in his usual, polite voice, “A friend. Now then …” He turned toward the patio. There was a silken command in the slightest gesture. Monica said, “Come on, Linda, we’ll help Fae….”

They moved together toward the patio while Carlos at the telephone watched them go.

12

Perhaps half an hour later Monica stood at her bedroom balcony and saw Señor Ramos Mendeno arrive. It had been a quick yet a confused half hour. The main fact that emerged from it was that no intruder had been found about the grounds or the house, and that everyone in the household (except Monica and Gibbs) had denied ever having seen or heard of Joe Sproul.

They’d had coffee, quickly, in the hall, while the three menservants on the place searched the grounds—together, with flashlights, and the gardener carrying a revolver Carlos gave him. They found no one and the only evidence of a possible intruder lay in the fact that the big gates, leading from the grounds onto the public highway had been found unbolted. This obviously had permitted Joe Sproul’s entrance; it could have permitted the hurried exit of his murderer.

Gibbs promptly and factually stated that Joe Sproul had been in St. Louis, and again at Fort Worth. He had heard his name at the hotel in St. Louis, as and when Monica had heard it. He told of their slight talk in the taxicab at Fort Worth. It varied in no small way from Monica’s own statement.

“But I’ve no idea who he was or why he came here or anything about him,” said Gibbs. His heavy, handsome mouth closed tightly, as if he’d made a declaration and intended to stick to it. John, glancing at Gibbs, had said, “Monica said he was on the plane from Chicago to St. Louis.”

“I don’t remember seeing him until we got into the limousine at the airport,” said Gibbs.

Fae, sitting at the coffee table, her green chiffons flowing around her slender figure like the cool froth of sea waves, said, “We’d better get dressed.”

Linda and Monica followed her lead. The men lingered in the hall, talking.

There was no further chance to talk to John alone. Once in her own room Monica dressed quickly—pale-blue skirt and jacket, white blouse. Again she remembered Bill Fiske packing them, making quick selections as adroitly as if he’d packed ladies’ clothes all his life. She must somehow let him know everything that had happened. Had he, in New York,, learned anything at all that would lead to Eric’s murderer?

It was as if they were surrounded by a secret and evil force; the only clues to its identity and purpose lay in its visible targets—Eric Weller, first; herself and Linda; and now Joe Sproul.

And somehow John and the men he led were in danger. That alone was clear. A thousand men, he’d said, starving and fighting and dying.

Men whose flaming, tenacious courage and fortitude and sacrifice were counting incalculably against the enemy.

She wished John would come. Their talk had been too short, too hurried, too inconclusive; the only thing she knew was that he was in danger.

The French doors were still open; she heard voices directly below her balcony and went out upon it. The sky above was paling; the floodlights still lighted the whole patio garishly, but they were not so bright in contrast to the darkness of the night.

One of the things that Monica was to grow accustomed to was the strategic place the patio took in the domestic life of the big, sprawling Demuth house. It was its hub and center; the house was like a wall all around it and a certain amount of living had to go on in the house, but mainly it flowed in and out of the patio. They ate in the patio often; they lounged there; they met for drinks; it was a center of communication. People came and went, talked over balconies and through windows. The patio was almost constantly occupied and certainly under constant observation. It was the life and heart of the lovely, half-ugly, half-graceful Spanish house. Now she thought, leaning over the railing, that it was again like a stage.

Carlos, dressed now in blue slacks and a yellow coat with a white scarf at his throat, was bending over the body. Gibbs and John stood and watched and listened. A stranger, Señor Ramos Mendeno, Monica supposed, stood beside Carlos, looking down at the body. He was gray-haired and slender, with a long, sharply featured, thin face; an elegant face somehow, and a very Spanish and civilized face which looked as if it ought to be above a ruff instead of above an ordinary white collar and beige coat. He smoked, using a long ivory cigarette holder, and listened to Carlos, who was speaking rapidly in Spanish, and then bent and looked carefully at Joe Sproul’s face. She could understand almost nothing of their conversation; a word or two was comprehensible. She thought neither John nor Gibbs understood it, for there was a guarded, listening, alert expression on both their faces which did not change until Carlos turned to them and spoke in English.

“Señor Mendeno feels it is murder, too. He himself will see to the police. There must be an investigation, naturally. Meantime the police will spread a net through the city.”

“I’ll use the telephone?” said Señor Mendeno also in English, but with a slight accent and a polite twist to the upward inflection of his voice which made it a question.

“Of course,” said Carlos. Someone had brought a sheet and covered Joe Sproul’s body. Carlos or Señor Mendeno had withdrawn it to look at the body; Carlos bent now to replace it. The men crossed again to the hall door; Gibbs and John following the other two. No one glanced up. Monica, on her balcony, was aware suddenly that there was another observer of that small scene, and it was Linda. She caught the flicker of motion as Linda, on her own balcony, withdrew. She glanced toward Fae’s balcony, diagonally across the patio; the doors were open but Fae was not there. Lights were growing still paler and more diffused. The huddle under the sheet was suddenly unreal and terribly out of place in that patio with its bright cushions and vines and the little murmur of the fountain.

She went back into her room and was there a moment later when John came.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. John, what are they going to do?”

“Question us. Inquire. Trace Sproul …” He glanced at the door to the corridor, which he had closed behind him and at the open windows, leading upon the balcony. There was something about the guardedness and wariness of the gesture which made it seem an accustomed one. The look of tenseness, of alertness, of listening seemed a familiar one, somehow, in his face. He said in so low a voice it was barely a whisper and yet clear, “There’s not much time. Monica, how many people knew that I had reached Mexico City? Yourself and Bill knew, but was there anyone else?”

“No. Except Gibbs. I told him in St. Louis.”

“I mean before you left New York. Did Eric Weller know?”

“No. It was after he was killed that I phoned for Bill and he toldme then about your letter.”

“Was there any way Sproul could have known that I was in Mexico City? Could he have overheard you and Gibbs talking, for instance?”

“No. We were at dinner. He was upstairs in the lobby. I’m sure I would have seen him in the dining room if he had been there.”

“You say you think two people were in your suite that night. Could one of them have been Sproul?”

“I suppose so. But—of course, John, whoever was in the bedroom had opened my handbag; your letter was there. He could have read it! He could have had a flashlight and read it before I awoke. He’d have known then where you are …”

“And that I needed money. It could have been Sproul. Monica …” He put his hands on her shoulders and looked deeply and searchingly into her eyes. He said gravely, and softly, “I’ve got to tell you something. It is very hard for me to do so. You see, I’ve got out of the habit of trusting people.”

“John …”

“For so long I’ve had to suspect everybody. It’s part of the life I’ve known. You suspect everybody and everything; you have to,” said John simply, “if you want to live. You have to test and plumb every word, every breath, every shadow. Every expression in a face, every change in a man’s eyes.” He took a long breath. “I have to suspect even you, Monica.”

“I know, John,” she said. “I know.”

He shook his head. “No. You understand with your mind. You believe me because I tell you. But you …” he broke off and looked at her and suddenly put his hands gently around her face, framing it. “Oh, my dear, forgive me. I—listen, my dear.” His voice was so low anyone three feet away could scarcely have heard his words. His eyes were dark and intent upon her own. “I came here to get money—my money. Every thing I had in Poland, of course, is gone. I needed it before now. I can’t use American money naturally in Poland. Anybody trying to use an American dollar there would be taken up by the Nazis instantly. But there may be ways—well, never mind that. The point is that I first sent someone else, a man, a friend; a man I loved and trusted completely; a man I’d fought with—his name was Paul Stanislawsky. He never came back.”

“You mean …”

“I mean he either turned rat, or was murdered by the Nazis. I knew Paul, and he didn’t turn rat. Somehow the Nazis got him. So I came myself. I traced him as far as Mexico City. I got here by devious ways—out of Poland into London; the British Intelligence helped me a bit; got me to Bermuda and then at last here. I was out of money; I had to have it; I’ve got to find out what happened to Paul. Somebody knew who he was; somebody knew why he came. If there’s a leak I’ve got to find out where it is. And who it is. So far as I know now the trail stops here.”

“If he was murdered …” she whispered.

“If he was murdered he was murdered here. I’ve got to stay here till I find out what happened, and how it happened. I had to have money. You need money—lots of it,” he said grimly, “for that kind of search.”

“Who knew he was to be here?”

“The Nazis did it; but I don’t know who their agent—or agents were. I don’t know how they knew he was to be here. I don’t know anything about it except that he was here, and then disappeared. Perhaps he went on; perhaps they caught up with him in St. Louis or Chicago or New York. I’ve got to talk to Bill. I couldn’t talk freely over the telephone; it is too dangerous. So far the tangible evidence, the clues that really seem to be clues are Eric’s murder; the attack upon you in St. Louis; Sproul—and now—wait a minute.” He was pulling a crumpled, khaki-colored handkerchief from his pocket. “It belongs to Gibbs. It’s regulation Army. I’m sure it belongs to Gibbs. I found it near Sproul’s body.”

Gibbs again. Gibbs who had been in St. Louis, who could have been in New York, who was certainly in Mexico City and had been in the house when Sproul was murdered.

Gibbs—in the uniform of a captain of the United States Army.

She said slowly, “I can’t believe that Gibbs is a Nazi agent.”

It was impossible to read John’s face. He said, “I’m not going to show it to the police. If I can I’ve got to keep my own affairs out of the hands of the police. I’ve got to work carefully; I’ve got to play a lone hand. And I’ve got to work fast. I’ve got to get back for the invasion. We have—plans.”

It was only then that she perceived the truth.

“John, if they knew of Paul Stanislawsky, they know of you! If they killed him they’ll try to kill you!”

He put his arms around her. “I’ve been warned. That makes a difference. And if we can find out anything about Sproul or who killed him it may be a break for me. It may give me a lead.”

He was in danger, every minute. And as clear was the fact that he quite simply and unself-consciously expected her to meet his own quality of courage—a courage that didn’t so name itself, a courage that was merely the order of the day.

John said, “I’m going to talk to Gibbs later. I can’t now. The police are here and are going to question us. I said I’d come and get you and Linda. Where can I hide this?”

“Give it to me.” As she reached for the handkerchief she saw the few brownish, already dried stains on it. John saw her flinch in spite of herself. He said, “Where shall I put it?”

“I don’t know. Will they search?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know how thoroughly. I just want to be sure it is safe because I may need it.” He moved one of the rugs, spread the crumpled, khaki-colored handkerchief with the dribble of brown spots across it upon the tiled floor and put the rug over it. “It is all right there for the time being. If you get a chance after they question you, do something with it, anything that is better.”

“All right.”

He looked down at her and a flicker of laughter came into his dark gray eyes. “Hers not to reason why; hers but to do or die,” he said. “You’re a game sort of person, Monica.”

“I’m not. I’ve been afraid of my own shadow ever since the night at the Stork Club. John, could a Nazi agent have left the cachet thinking I would lead them to Linda and that”—she fumbled through it awkwardly, unused to the devious way men have lately, pitiably, helplessly, had to leam—“and that might lead them to you?”

Something darkened in his face. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe. If whoever was in your suite in St. Louis took the message supposed to be from Linda it was for only two reasons: he had written it himself to set a trap for you and wanted to destroy it, so it could not be traced to him, or he hoped to find out who had written it! Sproul—or Gibbs—or somebody else. Somebody hidden and secret and stealthy. Somebody without a name,” he said, with bitterness in his eyes. “Somebody who’s merely an ugly, murderous tentacle of the enemy, striking out of the night. Striking even at you, because you were bringing money to me.”

It could, of course, explain the attack on her. She said slowly, “Then could Gibbs have come here to discover you or Linda and betray both of you to a Nazi agent?”

“I’ve got to find out myself where Gibbs stands.” The lines of soberness, of responsibility, of grave and dangerous tasks done and in the future, were back in his face again. He said, “Now then—the police are waiting. I’ll call Linda …”

He put his hands on her shoulders again and put his face for an instant against her own. It was a small, slight and infinitely tender gesture. Then he turned toward the hall. She followed him and waited a moment while he rounded the corner of the narrow corridor and came back immediately with Linda. She had not changed and still wore the rather tight white sweater and black slacks, with her yellow braids arranged like a coronet again.

The police waited in the hall below.

The inquiry was lengthy. Day came fully and someone turned out the floodlights in the patio. But it was so polite, so deliberate, so full of gracias, and por favors that it was curiously and paradoxically frightening.

The police made records; they questioned everyone in the house; they even brought in the servants, one by one, and questioned them.

As the inquiry continued three things began to emerge.

On the surface, politely, everyone appeared to accept a tacit agreement that someone unknown to any of them had followed Joe Sproul into the grounds, through the house, into the patio and there murdered him and escaped.

This in spite of the gardener’s firm declaration that he him. self had bolted the big gates. It was, that is, firm in the beginning. He weakened when Carlos himself suddenly stirred and questioned him.

“You are sure about this, Manuel?”

The gardener’s dark, bright eyes went straight to those of his master. He was a middle-aged man, dark, with thick, frowning black eyebrows, and a sturdy,, square figure. “Si, Señor. It is my habit to bolt the gates after I put the car away. I did so tonight.”

Carlos lighted a cigarette. “About what time was that, Manuel?”

“That was after two, Señor. When you returned. I was waiting for you to return. The sound of the car roused me….”

“Ah,” said Carlos, “you were sleeping?”

Manuel’s eyes flashed. “Si, Señor. Naturally. You have told me to rest. The sound of the car always wakes me and I then put it away and bolt the gate. Señor has told me …”

“Of course, Manuel. That is right. I intend you to sleep when we are out late.” The Mexican’s brow cleared. Carlos said to the police, “It is one of the rules. But the gates were open during that time.”

Señor Mendeno flicked ashes from his cigarette with a graceful gesture. “Therefore,” he said, “anyone could have entered the grounds. Anyone at all, during that time.”

“Certainly,” said Carlos. The police, soldierly in their bearing and their brown and beige uniforms, seemed to agree too, but they continued to question.

The second fact that emerged, and more clearly, was a tendency on their part and on the part of Señor Mendeno and Carlos to question Monica, John and Gibbs more closely than anyone else. This of course was to be expected. Only Monica and Gibbs knew (or admitted knowing) his name; only Monica and Gibbs admitted having seen him anywhere; the obvious question was whether or not he had followed them to the villa, and if so, why.

Had Sproul been actually on their side, thought Monica once; was it in any way conceivable that he too had been pursued by that hidden and treacherous enemy? Was it possible that he had fled to the villa for protection and there been murdered?

What was Sproul’s place in that concealed pattern? If a tentacle of the enemy—so distant, yet so near—had reached out and caught Joe Sproul in its murderous grip, then why?

She thought of that, and of Gibbs Brooke’s blood-stained handkerchief.

Gibbs’ story of Sproul and Monica’s agreed almost to the word, in every detail. In spite of the blood-stained, khakicolored handkerchief, there was nothing in Gibbs’ face or voice to indicate any further knowledge of Sproul than he admitted.

“And you, Señor,” said Mendeno suddenly joining in the inquiry, and addressing John, “you never saw the dead man until you found him tonight, dying?”

John said, “I had a glimpse of him at the airport when I met Miss Blane and Captain Brooke. I didn’t know him. I do remember his stopping near us to light a cigarette.”

“Did you see him, too, Linda?” inquired Carlos.

Linda shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. But I am sure he was a Nazi agent….” Carlos interrupted suavely and very, very definitely, “I have already explained your situation, my dear.” Linda bit her lip.

There was a slight pause, then one of the police said, “Did he show any special interest in you, Señorita Blane? Or you, Captain Brooke?”

Both Monica and Gibbs said no. And after another slight pause John was asked to tell again how he had happened to find the dying man, and if, before Sproul died, he had said anything. He had not, John told them; he had been unconscious.

The third impression that Monica began to be more and more strongly aware of as the inquiry continued was a rather odd one, and that was that Carlos was directing that interview. Not Señor Mendeno, not the police.

The police inquiry began to seem a polite form, a gracious and very formal following of a certain set pattern. Everything necessary was done; every inquiry that was a part of that form was made. Yet it seemed to her that in an intangible way, by a glance, by a slight and silken gesture, by nothing so tangible even as that, Carlos led and governed every small, intricate, prescribed figure in that pattern.

She wondered if her odd notion were shared by anyone else. She could not tell. John’s face was unfathomable. Gibbs’ heavy features were handsome, interested and unrevealing. Linda listened and smoked and listened, and replied as the others replied to their questions. Fae was completely in command of Fae; charming, shocked by the fact of murder but not too shocked—after all, her attitude seemed to say, this is nothing to us.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning before the police, dapper, neat in their uniforms, smiling below those dark, intelligent, observant eyes, went away. As they went Monica knew that if there were suspects, then she and John (who found the body) and she and Gibbs (who of them all admitted having previous knowledge, slight though it was, of Joe Sproul) were those suspects.

The first act of the police, if they suspected her, would be to communicate with the New York police in order to discover any available information concerning her; this would immediately bring out the fact of Eric Weller’s murder, in her apartment, shortly after he had been seen in her company.

An ugly trail of murder—begun in New York, following her to Mexico City! Except that if John’s theory was right, it had begun weeks ago with the disappearance of Paul Stanislawsky. Yet what possible connection could there be between Paul Stanislawsky’s disappearance in Mexico City and Eric Weller’s murder in her own apartment in New York City?

Drifting into the patio with the others, Monica discovered that, while they had talked, the body of Joe Sproul, mysterious, fat, little Joe Sproul, had been removed.

Fae ordered drinks. The sun was warm and bright upon the short-cropped grass and warm flagstones. Someone opened a gaily striped umbrella. The green vines hung heavy and languid in the heat. A cooking odor drifted out from the kitchen wing. Carlos came out of the house and sat down in a brightly cushioned chair and sighed heavily. Linda said, “But it doesn’t make sense, Carlos. That inquiry was like—like a stage inquiry. Did you really make them, see that the Nazis are trying to find me? The message in the cachet proves it! Sproul …”

Carlos said quietly, “I told Señor Mendeno the whole story. You see, my dear, if Sproul was an enemy agent then his murderer might conceivably have been”—he shrugged lightly—“a friend of ours, protecting himself; this is wartime. Yet murder is murder and must be so considered. And on the other hand Sproul might have been murdered by a Nazi. All this, that is, if your feeling about it is correct. It is also possible that his murder has nothing whatever to do with your affairs, Linda, or the war. You see?” He shrugged again and added suddenly, “There was nothing in his pockets to prove his identity. The police think the murderer removed any cards or papers.”

There was a blank silence. Then Linda said sharply, “But what are they going to do?”

Carlos replied, “Everything that is necessary.”

It reminded Monica of the handkerchief. She’d better make sure the police had not found it. She got up, went into the house and to her room. The handkerchief was still there. She was looking at it when John called her name and, as she replied, he entered the room.

“It’s still there. Good. I’m going to talk to Gibbs about it. But first—Bill Fiske just now phoned.”

“Bill!”

“He’s here. In Mexico City. He’s at the airport. We’re going to meet him.”

“He must know something about Eric!”

“He didn’t say much. He had taken the address from my letter, so he knew where to find me. He asked if you had arrived and if you were all right. I told him we’d come to meet him. He’ll wait out at the airport for us.”

“Didn’t he say anything about Eric?”

“No. It was better not to. Let’s try to get away without anyone seeing us. Better leave the handkerchief where it is.”

She folded back the rug. Suddenly, making sure the rug lay flat, the ugly reality of the thing caught at her as if it had fingers at her throat.

They went downstairs, quietly, together.

The one portion of the Demuth villa which the patio did not command was the front door and drive and the thick, glossy banks of green which lined it. So thick was the encircling wall of the house and so dully insistent the distant sound of traffic from the public highway beyond the pink stucco wall around the entire place, that,Monica, waiting at the steps for John to bring the car around did not hear it until it rounded the curve of the drive from the garage and stopped. But as she moved to get in the car, Linda came rapidly out of the door.

“Monica, where are you going?” Her eyes flashed to John. “You, too.”

John said, “Want something, Linda?”

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to you, John.” She had her. hand on the door of the car. John got out, on the other side, and walked around the car.

“All right,” he said. “What is it?”

“But—you didn’t answer me. Where are you going? Wliy are you going off secretly like this…?”

“Oh, nonsense, Linda,” said John. “We were simply driving into town. What do you want to talk to me about?”

“What do I …” Linda stopped and bit her hp. Her face from being rather sulky changed, and became sad and lovely and sweet. She slid her arms up around John’s neck and leaned her blonde head against his shoulder and said in her sweet, high voice, “John darling, I need you so.”

John’s face became blank and unreadable. After a second he put his arm around Linda’s waist. He did not look at Monica. Linda said, “I’m so afraid of them. I know it isn’t brave or courageous of me, but I’m so tired. I can’t be brave and courageous any longer. John, it must have been an attack really aimed at me last night. I don’t know who or what or—but they sent that cachet with a forged message to Monica in the hope she would know where I am and lead them to me. That’s certain. Perhaps I didn’t do much, I only did what I could do—but it was enough so they want to prevent me from ever returning, they …”

“But if Sproul himself was a Nazi agent, Linda, then what?”

Monica put her hand on the shining gray fender of the car; it was hot from the sun. The sun blazed down upon the pebbled drive too, and the glossy green leaves and upon Linda’s shining yellow hair. Linda said, “Oh, I don’t know, John. I don’t understand. I only know that—that I’m in danger. I know it. I feel it. That cachet—and Monica led them straight to me.”

“Monica didn’t know that you were in Mexico City.”

“I know, of course. But Sproul followed her. And you are in danger from the Nazis. They would give anything to get rid of you, anything! You’ve done too much. You are too important to them. You are trying now to raise money from your estate. You’ll get arms and supplies for the Poles. You’re preparing for the invasion. You are making plans to strike openly, unexpectedly, wherever you can, as soon as the invasion starts. You’ve men and power to damage the Nazis. They’ll try to get rid of you, John. Monica led them to us. Oh, I don’t mean that she knew what she was doing; she wouldn’t have done it if she’d known—the things we know, John. But—that cachet—and now murder.”

She turned her face toward Monica. “That was why I stayed in France in the beginning. Because of John. I couldn’t bear to put the ocean between us. I knew he was going to Poland. He didn’t tell me, but I guessed it. So I—I had to do my share too. I got into the Underground movement in France, mainly because I Knew he must be fighting in Poland and I wanted to do—well, what he was doing. It made me feel that I shared the only thing life had given us to share—work and danger and fighting for what we both thought was right. I tried to find him. Always. I never heard from him….”

“I wrote, you know,” said John. “I wrote as often as I dared.”

“I never got one letter, Monica! Not one. They were sent in care of Fae and were lost. I thought I’d never see him again. Yet always in my heart I knew we’d find each other. And we did. Didn’t we, John?”

After a second or two John said, “Yes, Linda.”

“Did he tell you how miraculous, really, it all was, Monica?” asked Linda. There were no tears and no shadow of them in her bright blue eyes. They were fixed upon Monica, observant, bright and purposeful. Monica, her hand hard on the hot fender as if it gave her support, said in a suffocated voice, “No.”

The little group made hard sharp shadows on the white driveway. From the patio there came the sound of a radio. Otherwise the long,pink house, with its vines and its windows, seemed silent and empty and unobservant. Everyone else in all probability was in the patio, listening to the news broadcast. Linda said, “I had given up my work; I’d had to. I was exhausted—you are of iio use when you reach a certain point of fatigue; you only endanger people working with you. I managed to get out—people do, once in a while—and came to live with Fae and Carlos. And one day only a week ago John telephoned. Just like that.”

“I remembered that Carlos lived here. I found his name in the telephone book,” said John.

“And I was here!” cried Linda. “Think of it, Monica. After five years. You cannot imagine how I felt during that timenever knowing whether he was alive or dead, always trying to find out.”

Can’t I, thought Monica, can’t I? She didn’t dare just then speak. Any word, any look, any tone of her voice would have given her away. She was glad she was facing away from the sun and Linda and John were looking into it. Then Linda went on, her musical voice wistful and very beautiful so it seemed to woo and persuade and comfort and promise all at the same time. What chance had any woman, thought Monica suddenly, against a voice like that!

“It is as if Fate gave in at last. As if we’d earned our happy ending.” She put her face up against John’s. John said very quietly, “We are going into town, Linda. Bill Fiske is here, at the airport. We’re going to meet him.”

Every line in Linda’s body changed and still she hadn’t moved. It was as if wax, warm and yielding and melted, had all at once hardened and changed its substance.

13

“Do you want to go?” said John.

“No,” said Linda after a pause. The loveliness was still in her voice. But when she moved from John there was a curious stiffness about her movements. She said, “No, I don’t want to go. I’ll wait here.” She walked a step or two toward the house, then she turned back to John, holding her arms up toward him. Monica moved abruptly as John’s dark head bent above Linda. She got blindly into the car; the sun was too hot; the light was too bright. She would not look at that embrace. When she closed the door though, Linda was crossing in front of the car toward the steps. The shadows of the house fell upon her, making her face look gray and older. Monica stared straight past her. Linda called from the steps, “Don’t be long …”

But as John got into the driver’s seat the door banged and Gibbs came quickly out of the house, came past Linda and stopped with his hand on the door of the car. And said, almost as Linda had done, “Going some place?”

He looked white and tired. Probably none of them looked fresh after the night they’d had. Monica reached automatically for her white handbag and lipstick. It was a sane, everyday little gesture, curiously reassuring as such gestures are. John muttered something, and Gibbs said, “If it is to town can I go along?” and got into the back seat. “Carlos,” he said, leaning back and surveying the leather, “certainly keeps good cars. You can drop me off any place in town. I’ve got a little errand to do.”

“But …” began John, and Gibbs said, “Besides, I want to get away from the house for awhile. Whole business is getting on my nerves.”

“I didn’t know you had any nerves,” said John rather wearily and started the car. The sun shone brightly on its hood and on the glossy green of the thickly massed shrubbery along the short winding driveway. They reached the huge, arched gates, set in the pink wall, and they were wide open.

“No police on guard,” said Gibbs, as they turned onto the public highway.

“Did it strike you there would be?” asked John.

There was an instant’s pause. Then Gibbs said, “Oh, see here, John? What is it all about? I’ve got eyes. Carlos manipulated the whole inquiry. Mendeno wasn’t Carlos’ influential friend, who could use his influence to spare the Demuths and the rest of us a lot of public trouble—maybe arrest and all the rest of it. It was just turned around; Carlos is Mendeno’s influential friend. Carlos directed the whole damn thing—through Mendeno.”

“Maybe,” said John after a moment.

“Maybe, my eye. Who exactly is Carlos?”

“Well, he’s Carlos Demuth. Mexican. Rich.”

“Is that all you know about him?”

“Just about. If he chooses to use his influence to make this Sproul business easier for all of us, that’s all right.”

“You don’t do things that way,” said Gibbs rather heavily. “Murder is murder. Mexico has laws the same as we do. Where did Fae and Carlos meet?”

It was an abrupt change of tack. John said, “He was on the Riviera that last summer. Rich as anything, spending a lot of money, but spending it, you know, all right. Not throwing it around. He’s got taste and dignity. He’s a nice guy. Smart as anything. Educated no end. Suave and polished and …”

“Deep,” said Gibbs. “I don’t remember seeing him around.”

“He was there.”

“Do you trust him?”

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

“Well, but do you?”

“I have no reason not to.”

“How long have you been staying at his house, John?”

“About a week. Since I got here.”

“How did you happen to go there?”

There was a slight pause before John replied. “Well, it’s a long story. I arrived in Mexico, intending to get into the United States, if I could. If not, see to some business there.”

“You mean some money, John? Isn’t that it? I’m only guessing but—you’re going back. For the invasion.”

John edged around a streetcar, a pushcart laden with bright flowers, blazing beautifully under the Mexican sun, and avoided a street peddler with a fifteen-foot pole laden with baskets. Gibbs said, “Don’t answer if you don’t want to. But I always thought you got to Poland somehow and got into the fight, maybe before Warsaw fell. Since then, I didn’t know. I thought of everything from a concentration camp to a coffin.”

“It wouldn’t have been a coffin,” said John. It wasn’t bitter. It was just a plain statement of fact but was nevertheless one of those small, terribly revealing phrases which bring the war very near.

The gay Mexican street scene, the colors, the clamor, the motion, the bright-blue sky, the sun, all seemed suddenly very bright and very gay, almost unearthly, almost like Shangri-la, another and a lovelier world than could actually exist anywhere. The real world was that in which John had been living.

Monica put her hand on his knee; he was there, John, alive, beside her.

Gibbs said quietly, “I thought you might have joined some guerrilla band. I understand a lot of them exist—and fight and starve and die and somehow rise up again and keep on fighting in spite of everything the Nazis can do. I thought that, John.”

“Did you?” said John after a moment. He took his hand from the wheel and put it briefly over Monica’s, as if he knew what she felt; as if he wanted to tell her that some time, some time all would be well.

It wouldn’t be. He’d go back.

The hardest part of the battle was to come. The usefulness of the men who worked with him would be a thousand times multiplied once the invasion was under way. There would be intricate detailed plans for organized attack in co-ordination with other guerrilla bands. He had already spoken of plans. There would be fighting and bloodshed. The big day was coming, the crucial battle, and John would be in it.

She thought of Linda, too, dully and with a sense of loss and desolation. Whether or not John still loved Linda, he could not deny her claim upon him.

Gibbs said, “I suppose there are always ways—troublesome, undercover ways, to translate money into—arms. Food. Clothes. Munitions. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know how or where. But that’s, I suppose, why you came. I won’t ask you how you got here; there are ways. Money again, I suppose. They say Nazi oflicials everywhere are very venal.”

“Right,” said John.

He paused to negotiate a corner already occupied by two streetcars, one bus, assorted automobiles, and a woman pushing two baby carriages, and a brown little boy chasing a dog. Then John went on, “What do you think about this thing last night?”

“Well,” said Gibbs slowly, “Sproul was on the plane; turned up at the place last night. The only obvious conclusion is that he was either following Monica in the hope that she’d lead him to you, or following me for the same purpose.” He was lighting a cigarette; Monica heard the small sputter of a match and the way his words blurred as he held the cigarette tightly in his lips.

“I found your handkerchief,” said John suddenly. “It’s got bloodstains on it. Why did you kill him, Gibbs?”

There was a short pause, then Gibbs laughed. “You’ve been living in violence, John. You expect violence everywhere. What do you mean, my handkerchief?”

“It’s an Army handkerchief, regulation. None of the rest of us is likely to be carrying one like it. I had none. It’s not exactly a feminine trifle, and Carlos wouldn’t be found dead with anything but the finest, whitest linen. Oh, it’s yours.”

“So you think I killed Sproul,” said Gibbs and laughed loudly again. “Why, for God’s sake?”

“That’s what I’m asking you,” said John. “Maybe he deserved it; I don’t know. I only want to know what you know of him.”

“Listen,” said Gibbs. “There’s obviously something going on here I don’t know anything about. And I don’t know who Joe Sproul was or why he came there. Look out! Wait a minute; I think I want to stop here.”

Monica turned and he was leaning forward, peering along the street, searching the signs of stores. His heavy, handsome face brightened. “There’s a place—I’ll get out here. Pick me up at this corner—how long will you be?”

“Not long.” John stopped the car and Gibbs got out. As he closed the door, John turned. “We’re just going to the airport to pick up Bill Fiske. It’ll be about twenty minutes, maybe longer. Okay?”

There was a suddenly startled, suddenly fixed and sharp expression on Gibbs’ usually phlegmatic face. He said, staring at John, “Okay.”

They left him standing there on the pavement still with that startled look on his face.

“He didn’t deny the handkerchief,” said Monica slowly.

John said abruptly, “He didn’t kill him.”

“But—that night in St. Louis.”

“I know. But you can’t always let reason be your guide. You can reason yourself into horrible, costly mistakes. You have to go by something else. I can’t call it instinct.” John was speaking very slowly and thoughtfully. “I can’t call it anything, really, unless it is a kind of atavistic sense of danger. As if you smelled it. As if you had tentacles that reached out and sensed danger and sent warnings to you. I don’t know what it is. I only know after these five years that it operates. It’s saved me and it has saved others. I suppose actually it’s a matter of—maybe chemistry. Your own pores, your own deep, inner animal sense recognizes danger and, if your nerves are strung to a high enough and sharp enough pitch, they can receive that danger warning. In the dark, in utter stillness—sometimes you know when somebody is there. I—well, the thing I’m trying to say is, I trust Gibbs.”

“But if Gibbs didn’t try to murder me—who was it? Who came into my suite that night? I was sure there were two people.”

“I don’t know,” said John. “The obvious answer is that it was Sproul and Gibbs, and that one frightened the other away. In spite of everything my feeling is that Gibbs is loyal and friendly. As to Sproul …” he paused again to turn a crowded corner. And then he went on, “Somebody could have followed Sproul to the villa last night. He may have been a Nazi and killed by an anti-Nazi; he may have been a Nazi and killed by another Nazi—they do have their little feuds, you know. Many a private and personal enemy has been simply disposed of that way—by claiming that he was actually murdered by the French, or the Poles, or the Czechs. The Nazis are not supermen; they’re a selfish, stinking lot—each one fighting first for himself and all his ugly, dirty, selfish little aims. Don’t forget that. Well, what I started to say is, somebody could have followed him to the villa and killed him there. Obviously Sproul came to the villa because one of four people were there, and he knew it; you and Gibbs and Linda and I.I don’t know what he intended to do but he was certainly murdered. Almost certainly whoever did it was still in the patio when we came down. I say almost certainly because the person who escaped through the house could also have been an innocent bystander—somebody, even, who saw the murder and is going around now knowing who did it, and not telling.”

“Why?”

John shrugged. “Any number of reasons, I suppose. The thing now is to identify Sproul. Logically, he was murdered either by an intruder or by someone already in the house. I say intruder; I really mean some Nazi emissary—thug, murderer, working invisibly, in the night—watching, listening, following. If it wasn’t an intruder, as Carlos and the police assume, then who was it? The servants are out, I’m pretty sure. That leaves in the house Gibbs and me, you and Linda and Fae and Carlos—suspects. I didn’t kill him. I would have killed him, I suppose, if I’d had to. War is war and there are a lot of battles that aren’t fought in uniform. But I didn’t. You didn’t. I don’t see how Fae or Linda could have done it. A woman, if she’d had the right weapon, could have struck such a blow, I suppose, but she’d have to know how. Carlos really seems in a fog about Sproul—a thinking, alert, selfpossessed fog, but a fog. And I trust Gibbs.”

“None of those people could be pro-Nazi. Carlos is the only one we don’t know and Fae is a loyal American. It isn’t possible to think that a Nazi agent can …” Monica stopped, shivering a little, in spite of the bright sunshine.

John guessed her thought and finished for her. “It isn’t possible to believe that a Nazi agent can hide behind the face of a friend,” he said. “Can smile and talk and secretly plot your death. I know how you feel. It is hard too to believe that a Nazi agent can exist somewhere near you—can manage to listen and pry and kill and still remain unidentifiable and invisible. And be able to strike in New York, in St. Louis, here. There may be more than one; there may be two Lines of endeavor, one directed against Paul Stanislawsky and, now, against me; one against Linda. I can’t see why Eric Weller was killed. I can’t understand why you were attacked, unless it was to prevent your reaching me with the money.”

They were almost through the crowded part of the city. The road stretched ahead toward the airport which now they could see glittering in the strong sunlight. John went on slowly, with a curious obliquity, “War makes people change. It’s like fire; it brings out good steel and burns out the other. That isn’t a true simile; at least it isn’t full enough. The thing I’m trying badly to say is that in circumstances such as our times, you change; you may become wary, you learn to grope your way slowly. To wait; to let things shape themselves until there is no doubt in your mind of their identity. To test—everybody.”

Cars passed them. A street peddler held up balloons; the smell of tamales came from a brazier burning along the roadside with an Indian woman squatting beside it, the sun hot on her black hair and bright shawl.

John said, “My whole organization may be in danger. I’ve got to find out who knew of Paul—who killed him.”

He swung into a parking space. He stopped, turned to her, and with his hands on the wheel, the sun blazing down upon the pavement and the car, a plane revving up loudly somewhere on the field and the sound and motion of cars and people all around them, he looked for a long moment into her eyes. He said—unexpectedly, as if he didn’t mean to say it, as if he hadn’t known he was going to say it—“I love you so much. I guess I’ve always loved you. But I didn’t know it till you got out of the plane yesterday and came running toward me with your arms out….” He seemed to hear his own words and stopped.

He looked deliberately away from her, out toward the field. His hands gripped the wheel hard. His face was suddenly remote and unreadable. He said, “I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t know I was going to. It’s true. I do love you. But I ought not to have told you. There’s … It’s no good, you see, Monica. There’s nothing I can do about it. I shouldn’t have said anything….” He took a long breath and said clearly, “Forget it.”

14

The sound of the plane away out on the field of the airport grew more regular, pulsing steadily with purpose and direction, and suddenly Monica could see the great silver plane taking wing, gleaming against the sky and in the sun. It was exactly as if she herself took wing, too, with sudden, pulsing strength, with purpose and clear direction. She put her hand on John’s hand.

“Why?”

John was watching the plane, too, his eyes level and dark. “I ought not to have said it. It isn’t fair to you. I don’t know how you feel. …”

Again strength pulsed through her, lifting her along its wave as steadily as the silver plane was lifting into the sun and sky. “Don’t you, John?” she said, her hand tight on his. “Don’t you?”

He looked at her again then. It was a. long, deep and strangely revealing look, as if for that instant there were no secrets between them, no retreat into human fastnesses, no possible division ever. “My darling—my darling,” he said. “I suppose I’ve loved you always. I didn’t know it. Yesterday when you got out of the plane and I saw you running toward me it was as if the whole world gave itself a shake and everything in it, all the pain and horror, all the nightmare and ugliness fell away from it; as if all the confusion and chaos, fell into place and everything was orderly and had a reason and motive and—and a truth about it. I’m not making sense. But that’s what happened. You came right into my arms and I never wanted to let you go. And I’ve got to.”

The sun was bright, too bright, so there was a mist over everything. “Why must you let me go?”

“Oh, my darling,” he said. “It’s too late.”

“Is it because of Linda?”

His face changed. It was a subtle, barely marked change,, but the honesty of the past moment was gone. He said, “I can’t let myself love you. I shouldn’t have told you. I want you to forgive me. And you’ll forget …”

Anger caught her. It was like a spur to the strength that had flooded her. “I won’t forget. You can’t make me forget. Whatever it is …”

Bill Fiske called out heartily, “There you are! Hi, John. This is great. …”

He was at the side of the car, bag in one hand, a smile on his face, a rakish hat on one side of his distinguished-looking head, beaming with pleasure. “God, it’s good to See you. And you, Monica …” He took John’s hands; he nodded across at Monica; he tossed his bags in the rear of the car and got in. “How’s everything?”

“Everything couldn’t very well be much worse,” said John, turning around in the seat to look at Bill.

The beaming expression gave way at once to the shrewd, thoughtful look Bill Fiske’s handsome, civilized face could wear. His bright tie, his light-tweed traveling suit, the top coat on the seat beside him—everything about him looked like New York, looked prosperous, looked safe.

Monica said, “Uncle Bill, what have you done? What about Eric?”

Bill’s eyes shifted to her. “Oh, so you told John about Eric?”

“Yes, of course …”

“Anyone else?”

“No, Uncle Bill, What happened?”

“Well,” he hesitated. “The fact is that’s not too good, either. That’s why I came. You’ve got to stay here for awhile, my dear….” He looked at John. “Have the police here been notified? Are they trying to send her back to New York? Is that what you mean?”

A car near them started. A party of tourists, laden with coats and baggage, were shepherded into a limousine beside them. A plane roared from the field. John said, “No. Do the New York police want her?”

Bill said quickly, “See here, can’t we get out of this infernal tumult and talk somewhere, quietly?”

“Okay.” John reached for the starter. “We’ll stop at a bar. Things have happened, Bill.” He paused as a car edged ahead of them. Bill, leaning forward, asked over their shoulders, “What kind of things? What are you talking about? Anything serious?”

“Well, yes. I told you over the phone that were staying at Linda’s aunt’s place. A man was murdered there last night.”

“Murdered! Who?”

“Name was Sproul. Joe Sproul. Nobody seems to know him. The catch is, he was on the plane with Monica.”

Bill said nothing, but knowing him so well Monica could see without looking the intent, calculating, reserved look his face always wore when he was confronted with surprise.

John went on, “What about Eric Weller, Bill? I couldn’t ask you over the phone. What did you do?”

There was a long moment before Bill replied. That too was’ like him. He always took time to survey a situation, measure it, map a course. He said, “I reported it, of course. Had to.”

“To the police?”

“Well, no, as a matter of fact. I went to the F.B.I.”

“The F.B.I.!” said John sharply. “Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know why exactly,” said Bill slowly. “It seemed to me a good move, that’s all. For one thing, of course, I thought it would probably keep the thing out of the papers, and it did. They are investigating and have the police working on it, too, but there’s been no newspaper publicity. So that’s good.”

“But did you suspect Eric Weller of being a Nazi?”

“I’m not sure what I suspect,” said Bill. “But it struck me, thinking of it after I’d got Monica out of the way, that there was something a little phony about Weller. I didn’t know him well, only through Monica. I couldn’t say just what I didn’t like about him. But it was enough to justify notifying the nearest F.B.I. office. I did and they took over at once. I said he’d been killed some time after Monica left on a business trip for me. Said I had gone to her apartment to pick up some files she had left in her desk, and found Weller. I waited long enough to confuse the time issue, so they couldn’t tell to the hour just when he’d really been killed. They did the usual things, photographs, fingerprints, all that. Made a lot of inquiries. They’ve been very decent about keeping the thing pretty quiet. It was murder, though, no doubt of that. The knife …” he hesitated, and then went on, “I’d better tell it all. The knife was a kitchen knife, a small one. They think it came from the little kitchen in your apartment, Monica.”

It brought back to her, vividly, the picture of the small apartment: the chintz, the green rugs, the tall chair with Eric’s coat and hat over it, Eric. And a knife, and blotches of red. And, suddenly, something else. She turned to meet Bill’s eyes. “The drawer was open! There’s a little cabinet in the pantry with a drawer for silver. The drawer was open when I thought he was gone and went to make some coffee.

It was open…. Uncle Bill, who could have got in and killed him?”

Bill said quickly, “Now, now, Monica, don’t get upset. I mean—well, you see you are in Mexico. There will be a question of extradition, all that. It’ll take time. Meantime the real truth about Eric may come out. They’re working on it and …”

“That’s why you sent me here,” she cried.

“I sent you to bring John money. I told you that, then. Are you…? What’s wrong, John? Are you in a jam?”

John said, “First, what about Eric? Have the F.B.I. uncovered anything?”

“If they have, I don’t know it. But these things take time.”

“They must have asked you why you sent for them and not the police.”

“Oh, naturally. I told them the simple truth—that I was about to send for the police when it occurred to me that I had had a queer kind of impression of phoniness about Weller. Nothing really I could put my finger on. But since I had it, in times like these, I thought it better to be on the safe side. I told them all I knew of him—little enough. The only thing I ducked was bringing Monica into the thing. Up to now she’s out of it. Eventually, I suppose, we’ll have to tell the whole thing. But by the time that is necessary I hope they’ll have got at the truth.” He sighed. “I don’t know whether I’ve done right or wrong, but that’s what I’ve done.”

“What about this elevator boy? Pinky? You told me he was making trouble.”

“Well, I think I’ve fixed him for the time being. He saw Eric and Monica arrive together when they came from the Stork Club. He took them up to her apartment in the elevator. And then he came in (the door was unlatched apparently) just as—well, Eric was being offensive and Monica slapped him and Pinky saw it. It was harmless enough, but naturally the first thing they did was to round up the elevator boys. I got to Pinky first. In fact, I did it before I reported the murder. I worked on his sympathies. He likes you, Monica. I got him to promise to keep his mouth shut about the whole thing. It worked till he got to thinking and, I regret to say, turned a little mean. I’ve—as I say, fixed him so far.”

“Paid him off,” said John.

“Nothing else to do. It may not work for long. He’s not really a bad kid; I’m only afraid he’s too good.” Bill sighed again. “I’d feel better if I could count on him not having a conscience. However, he’s all right for the time being. We’ll keep Monica here as long as possible; time will help. The F.B.I. or the police may turn up something about Eric’s past, probably his murderer, at any moment. We’re ahead with every hour that passes. So—now then, what about you, John? And what about this man Sproul? You say he was on the plane. Who was he?”

“Nobody knows who he was. The police are working on it.”

“You said over the phone that there were only a few people staying at the house. You and Monica, Gibbs Brooke, Linda’s aunt and her husband. Quite a gathering,” said Bill. “Must seem queer after all this time to get together again. But I don’t think any of those people are likely to have murdered anybody. Certainly none of them could have murdered Weller. Except Gibbs. I mean, you did say over the phone that he came on the plane with Monica, didn’t you? So he could have been in New York the night Weller was killed and, I take it, none of the others could have been. I don’t know this Demuth fellow. What’s he like?”

“He couldn’t have murdered Eric Weller. He was here in Mexico City the night Weller was killed.”

“Oh,” said Bill. “Well—there’s almost got to be some connection. Look here, you two. You were both on the Riviera just before the war began. Could there possibly be something dating back to that summer? Something you happened onto; something you overheard; something you saw; something that was told to you; something you’ve forgotten; something you don’t know you know; something that threatens somebody?”

“I’ll stop here,” said John; “There’s a parking place and the Ritz bar is around the corner.” ’

Something you don’t know you know, thought Monica, her white pumps keeping short pace with the two men. Something you overheard; something you saw.

The argument against it was the disappearance of Paul Stanislawsky.

The sun was warm on her bare, brown head. She was glad when they reached the bar and settled down around a table, in a corner, with tall, cool glasses in front of them. “It’s late,” said John. “We’d better have a quick lunch here.” He ordered it swiftly. “Gibbs will have to wait,” he added. “We’ll pick him up later.” He lighted Monica’s cigarette and Bill’s. The little flame touched Bill’s arrogant nose, his clipped mustache, his high cheekbones, his lined, shrewd, intelligent face with points of light. He leaned back and looked appraisingly at John. "You’re thinner, my boy.”

John held the light to his own cigarette. As so often with him now there was about him a quality of listening—in case alien footsteps drew near; of waiting—to test the significance of a question and its answer. War made you like that, she thought; war, and guerrilla fighting and the ever-present consciousness of danger in the very air you breathed. Bill said, “You weren’t wounded?”

“Once,” said John shortly. “In the leg.”

“Gunshot? Shrapnel?”

John suddenly grinned. “Matter of fact, I got too close to my own grenade. Handmade. Good stuff, too. Bill …” The grin that for a moment made his face youthful and gay and as Monica remembered it, vanished again. He leaned forward, glancing swiftly at the near-by tables. Even at that hour the Ritz bar, with its cheery red tones, its great vases of bright flowers, was full of people. His eyes, narrowed and intent, returned to Bill. He said, low, “I had to see you, Bill. That’s why I wrote.”

“I know. It’s another reason why I came. I thought you were in a hole. I didn’t know just how long the business about Eric Weller would hold me up. I wanted to get Monica out of the way, but I also thought I’d better send her to you with some money. What is it, really, John? More money?”

“Bill”—John’s Ups were barely moving—“did a man by the name of Stanislawsky ever reach you? Paul Stanislawsky?”

“Stanislawsky! Of course. Nearly three months ago. What do you mean? Didn’t he…? My God, John, I gave him the money! I was assured of his credentials. He had that letter from you asking me to give him money. So I did. I was sure he was all right. He never returned to Poland? Is that it?”

John nodded. Monica cried, “Uncle Bill, why didn’t you tell me you’d heard from John? Why…?”

He put his hand over hers. “There, now, Monica. I couldn’t tell anyone. And especially I couldn’t tell you and let you think John was alive and all right, when any day we might have heard that he’d been killed and you’d have all that—over again.”

He knew of course how she’d felt about John. He knew and had felt sorry for her. Yet she thought rather bitterly that he ought to have told her, nevertheless. Just the knowledge that John was alive would have been something. Men instinctively try to save women’s feelings, when, sometimes, women would rather not be saved.

The waiter brought their lunch—cold sandwiches and hot coffee. John waited until he’d gone. Then he said, his voice low against the murmur of other voices, and the light clatter of ice and glass, “Tell me everything, Bill. Had Paul had any trouble? Did he tell you anything at all that sounded as if he were in danger?”

“There’s not much to tell. He talked very little. Let me think, though …” He drank and put down his glass reflectively, his keen eyes alone betraying his anxiety. “He phoned first, told me he’d been sent to me by you, for money. He said he had proper credentials and asked me to have the money ready. Said he’d get in touch with me later but asked me to be ready for him. Said if I were not then satisfied with Iris credentials I needn’t give him the money. It was all very simple; he was smart and cagey. Told me enough to make me believe he was okay and there was not much question of his actually being your emissary. I did what he told me to do. It took a few days to liquidate some stock. He turned up one night, unannounced. I was alone. He showed me your letter. I liked his looks. One does go by instinct sometimes. I thought he was square.”

“You are sure it was Paul?” said John suddenly.

Bill’s eyebrows jerked upward. After a second or two he said, “No. Not now.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Dark fellow, rather stocky. I can’t remember anything special about him. We didn’t talk long. I was sure then, John. He showed me your letter. I hadn’t any doubt.”

“Sounds like Paul,” said John. He looked for a long moment into his glass and then said very quietly, “How much money did he take?”

“John, if he didn’t turn up, and I take it he didn’t …” Bill broke off, his face worried.

“Go on. I’m not cleaned out, am I?”

“No. There’s still some. But he took a lot, John. You said to give him …”

“I know. How much?”

“I—I’m sorry, John. I thought it was all right. I asked him how he was going to safeguard himself. He didn’t want to talk, but that very thing made me feel better about him. He … I gave him, roughly two hundred thousand, John. I … It was this way. I sold …”

“It’s okay, Bill.” John’s face had a gray look. He put out his cigarette too carefully, tamping it down until every tiny spark was extinguished. Extinguishing at the same time, Monica thought suddenly, the hope of the things that money might conceivably have bought. It is not often in life that sheer money can buy a segment of freedom, a segment of faith and hope and goodness, money to buy weapons with which to fight a mortal enemy.

He took his hand from the ash tray leaving the gray-black little heap of a cigarette—and hope—within it. “It’s okay, Bill,” he said again, meeting Bill’s anxious eyes. “Now then. How soon can you get me some more money? There still is some, isn’t there?”

“Yes. You’re going back?”

“When I can get more money.”

“Are you going to try to find Stanislawsky?”

“I don’t know.”

‘What do you think happened to him?”

“I think he was traced by German agents. Somewhere along the fine they got him. And the money. Bill, did Eric Weller have any way of finding out about Stanislawsky?”

“None. I didn’t tell anyone about him, naturally. And if I’d told anyone it wouldn’t have been Eric Weller. You didn’t tell the police here anything about Eric?”

“No. It seemed to me a bad move. It tied up too closely to Monica. They have already made it clear that if there are any suspects they are. Gibbs, me and Monica. Simply because he was on the plane with Monica and Gibbs, and I found him. Nobody else knew anything about him, so naturally they questioned us more than anyone eke. But I didn’t want them to concentrate on Monica.”

“You were very smart to take that line, John. It is sheerly a matter of protecting Monica. What about Linda? Why did she send you the message, Monica?”

“She says she didn’t,” said Monica, and told him Linda’s story. His shrewd eyes narrowed again. “Who did then? How’d she get here?” John told him briefly.

“So she worked for the Underground,” said Bill soberly. “Well, that might explain the message. If some Nazi agent were trying to find her, knew somehow that she’d left France and assumed Monica might know something of her whereabouts …” He looked at John. “You and Linda married yet?”

“No.”

“Hi,” said Gibbs from the door. His face was flushed as if he’d been a long time in the sun. He waved at Bill. “I thought I saw you come in here. Hello, Bill. It’s been years since I’ve seen you.”

It ended their talk, although Gibbs sat down and, saying it was too hot to eat, had coffee with them while John went to the telephone and talked to Fae and came back saying that Bill was invited to stay at the villa.

Bill Fiske didn’t demur. He was always practical, always sensible. On the way out to the car, Gibbs said, “I’ve got a package to pick up down the street. Can you hold everything for a second?”

He returned in a few minutes with a large square package done up in corrugated paper, heavy, by the way he carried it, and dropped it into the back of the car.

“What did you buy?” asked John. “Books?”

Gibbs smiled briefly. “Sure. I’m learning to speak Spanish.” He got into the back seat beside Bill. Again there were the changing, never quiet, never dull, always fascinating street scenes of Mexico City. When they drew away from the center of the town and toward Chapultepec Park Bill exclaimed, “Beautiful! I’ve not been here in years. I’d forgotten how beautiful. We must drive over on Sunday and watch the riding.”

Again for an instant everything seemed normal and natural. Strangers in a strange land being shown the sights. The impression underlined itself when Fae and Carlos met them hospitably at the door of the sprawling, gracious, pink villa, welcomed Bill Fiske, saw that everyone was comfortable in the cool patio and had drinks. And somehow saw that the talk was merely of known facts. It was difficult to believe, looking around the sun-and-shadowed loveliness of the patio that so ugly a thing had walked there the night before.

Linda was not there; she was sleeping, Fae said, and would come down later. But when Monica went to her room Linda was there. The French doors were open and Linda was sitting near them smoking. The thought flashed through Monica’s mind that Linda had stationed herself there in order to hear and see what went on in the patio below.

If so Linda showed no self-consciousness about it. She put out her cigarette, her white fingers definite and strong. She said, lifting those bright, active blue eyes to Monica, “I was waiting for you. Darling, I’ve been thinking that the time for John and me to marry has come. Tomorrow—no, that’s Sunday—Monday it would be nice to drive down to Cuernavaca and be married at the little church there. I want you to come too.” She smiled and leaned her head back against the cushions of her chair and said dreamily, “I had planned it that way, five years ago, when John and I first became engaged. You were always my best friend. It would be wonderful for you to be with us. I planned that summer on the Riviera to ask you to be my maid-of-honor when John and I were married.” She sighed. “I never dreamed it would be like this—hurried, secretive, in the shadow of danger. Will you go?”

15

The strength that John’s words had given her still sustained Monica like the great silver wings and beating heart of the airplane they had watched as they talked. It was as if a new woman, one possessed of courage to fight for her own had been born in her during that short moment or two, in the blazing sun, with all the tumult and sounds around her. No romantic moonlighted moment, nothing that had glamour. It had more than that, she thought swiftly; it was truth and reality and was her own. And something she had to fight for—something that meant her whole life would have meaning and reality—or it would be like a shadow passing aimlessly across a screen.

She sat down opposite Linda and reached for a cigarette. “Do you mean that you and John have talked this over and decided it?”

Something became very still about Linda, something seemed to listen and mark and try to measure with a kind of wariness. She replied, after a moment, “John and I have been engaged for five years. We’ve been separated far too long. We both, naturally, wish.to marry.”

“Does he think it a good idea to go to Cuernavaca so soon?”

“He-yes.”

“Oh, then you’ve planned it together?”

“I—yes, naturally. One doesn’t plan a wedding alone.”

“He didn’t mention it to me, just now.”

“Why should he? Darling, this is between John and me!”

Her assurance was convincing; more than anything, Monica remembered John’s own words. Forget it, John had said. Yet that new woman with strength and courage and determination to fight for her own, said, “I’ll go if John asks me to go, too.”

She hadn’t known she was going to say just that. The implication was unmistakable; it was a gauntlet thrown, a flat declaration of war. Linda got to her feet and stood there, arms akimbo, face flushed. She said, “You still want John yourself. You’ve always been in love with John. You were in love with him when we went to France five years ago. But you didn’t have the courage to do anything about it. It wouldn’t have mattered if you had tried to do something about it, though, because I took him away from you. Like that!” She lifted her white plump hand and snapped her fingers and said, “I took him away from you then and I’ve still got him and I’m going to keep him. I need him now. I’m in danger. He couldn’t deny my claims even if he wanted to. As he doesn’t. He’s going to marry me.”

“Is he?” Monica began to say and bit back the small words, for she suddenly saw herself and Linda squabbling like two little girls. She said, instead, “There’s no point to this, Linda. You’d better go.”

Linda’s whole fair face was suffused in angry color. She looked all at once curiously disheveled and blowzy. It was an odd effect, as if her emotion were a wind, sweeping away her usual look of almost phlegmatic composure. She went away, however, angrily, without saying any more. The scent of the heavy rose perfume she used lay like a cloud in the air. Monica went to the windows and pulled them wider open and took a long breath.

That was, then, Linda’s plan. Marry John on Monday. Quickly. And secretly. From where she stood she could see a strip of the patio. She could hear the murmur of men’s voices. Bill Fiske’s voice said suddenly and clearly, “You should have some kind of report from the police soon, I suppose.” Carlos replied, “By night, I fancy, Mr. Fiske. They work very swiftly on occasion.”

The air was fresher in the room. She turned back into it. And suddenly was caught by a wave of fatigue and sat down on the bed, and—thinking of John, thinking of the thing he had said to her—she fell asleep. Not knowing she was going to, caught like a leaf in a whirlpool with so many conflicting currents that for the moment it is still and perfectly motionless. It was almost twilight when she awoke.

She sat up, bewildered at first, her face warm with sleep, her skirt wrinkled. The sun had gone and a cool blue twilight sky was beyond the open windows. From somewhere in the distance, probably from the street outside the high pink wall surrounding the villa, came the sound of a guitar and several men’s voices singing. The words, Spanish, and very far away, were unintelligible to her. The rhythm and lilt of the song blended romantically and beautifully with the night.

Until she remembered John’s words: The Nazi agent who had murdered Paul Stanislawsky could be anywhere.

It could be anyone.

It could be, even, one of those street singers.

She got up, walked out upon the tiny balcony. No one was in the patio. The sun umbrella had been folded away; chairs and tables looked freshly arranged and tidy. There were lights directly across in the kitchen wing, and lights in the various bedrooms around the patio. As she looked, a houseman, hair glittering and black above his white jacket, came out of the kitchen wing with a tray of glasses and ice and bottles which made a clear, soft tinkle as he set the tray on a table. Everybody, probably, was changing for dinner.

A small lemon-colored star shone above the house. And John had told her he loved her.

It changed everything. The sky was beautiful, the star made a promise; the dark and ugly web of murder and death and hidden meanings was only a web to be broken, to be swept aside, to be fought through because love and life and everything that was good lay beyond it. She put out her hand involuntarily in a kind of small gesture of reciprocal agreement and promise to the star, smiled ruefully at her own childishness and went back into her room.

Hot water, the scent of lilac bath salts and soap and cologne; the familiar, everyday, small routine of dressing made everything seem for a few moments quite normal and safe. As if murder had not entered that gracious house only the night before. As if murder had not entered her own green and chintz apartment back in New York. She was putting on scarlet lipstick when she began to hear voices in the patio, and the faint clink of glasses. She paused to scrutinize herself in the mirror. Somehow that night it seemed important how she looked. She touched her hair, making sure the part was smooth and clear, the soft waves of hair smooth, back to the thick knot on her neck. She brushed up her dark eyelashes, she touched her ears and wrists with perfume; every small gesture in her woman’s ritual seemed significant and purposeful. She wore again the long white dress, with her shoulders bare, and a scarlet fold which fell to the floor. Scarlet sandals went with it. She smiled a little at the girl in the mirror whose eyes were so dark and yet so bright, and went to the door.

She did not look down into the patio before leaving. She went instead directly into the hall and, as she did so, had a sudden impulse. She did not know whether or not John was in the patio; instead of turning toward the stairs she went along the hall to the right. His room must be along that corridor somewhere for, in her rather hurried and sketchy impression of that floor of the rambling house, it seemed that the wing to the west was almost entirely occupied by Carlos’ rooms and Fae’s; therefore the string of bedrooms along the mid-section and the south wing of the house must be those used by their guests. Perhaps there would be a chance for a minute or two with John; there was so much to be said and so little time to say it.

But the bedroom doors were blank and uncommunicative and she did not know which one led to John’s room. She reached the end of the narrow corridor with its few, narrow windows overlooking the now dusky grounds at the front of the house on one side, and the wall, with its occasional dark, wood doors, on the other side. She must have passed two or three rooms before she reached the corner where the corridor turned right. She followed that for a minute or two. Linda’s room was there, she was sure, for she had seen Linda on her bedroom balcony and it was directly opposite Fae’s room. No one came out of any of the doors; she met no one in the corridor; it appeared to end in a rather narrow and steep flight of steps going down, probably to somewhere in the kitchen wing. It was rather dark and shadowy with only an occasional light in a wrought-iron bracket along the wall. She turned and went slowly back along it. The patio seemed suddenly remote and far away, and she felt for the first time the sentience and the sense of knowing observation that an old house may acquire—an old house whose walls have seen much living, whose floors have felt the tread of many feet, whose very heart seems to retain and remember and make live again the pulses that have beaten within it.

Caught by that sense she walked rather slowly, her own heels making light little sounds against the red tiles, her own skirt whispering gently against the walls. She still saw no one; probably everyone was already in the patio. There was no way to discover John’s room. She’d better go on downstairs.

It was as she thought that that Linda began to talk.

Monica stopped involuntarily.

It was Linda—and yet it was not Linda.

The high musical sound came clearly, yet eerily disembodied, from behind the dark door Monica was passing.

It was not Linda’s room; it was the last door before the corridor turned again and passed Monica’s room and then reached the stairs. John’s room? Gibbs’? Bill Fiske’s?

She raised her hand to knock. It was curious really how clear and high and sweet Linda’s voice was, coming from behind that door, yet she heard no words. She could distinguish only the rise and fall of phrases. And no one replied or interrupted or seemed to try to do so, for Linda’s voice went on and on and on and suddenly Monica did not knock but turned and almost ran along the corridor toward her own door.

She stopped there. Her heart was pounding. Actually she had done only a bit of eavesdropping—not anything to be proud of and not very successful eavesdropping, if it came to that, but certainly there was nothing about it to make her heart pound like that and her breath come quickly. As if it had frightened her.

That was nonsense.

No one was in the hall and no one came around the corner beyond which lay the room where Linda talked. Yet for a queer, sharp instant it was as if someone, or something incredibly ugly and evil might come into view, outlined against the light in the iron bracket, creeping furtively along that narrow, red-tiled, half-lighted corridor.

Nothing moved, of course. And at that distance she could not hear the high sweet metallic sound of Linda’s voice. But she picked up her white skirt and ran to the stairway and down into the hall. The door was open into the patio. She stopped to smooth her hair and catch her breath, and then walked out into the patio.

It was again rather frightening in a strange way to see Linda there.

John was there too, and rose from a chair to meet her. Carlos was sitting at ease in a deep chair, a highball glass in his hand. Bill Fiske was there, standing beside Fae and smiling down at her. Everybody had glasses, she saw. And Linda’s glass was half empty.

John’s tall figure in its white dinner jacket blocked off her view of the patio, the candles shielded by glass, Fae’s slender figure in its thin black chiffons, her charming slender face and the great emerald on a chain at her throat.

John took her hands. The evening star was very bright now, over his shoulder, in the dark-blue sky. Against the background of voices from the group gathered around the table, John said in a low voice, “I came to your room to talk to you. You were asleep. You looked about twelve. The way you looked when I first knew you. Remember? Uncle Bill took us to Rumpelmayer’s and gave us chocolate.”

She hadn’t remembered exactly that. Her mind suddenly flashed back and showed her as through a casement, in a kind of segment, a boy laughing, with dark hair; a girl in a bluevelvet coat with a round ermine collar; Uncle Bill looking very much as he did now, his eyes shrewd and remote but smiling, ordering whipped cream on the chocolate.

“It was spring,” she said. “Uncle Bill bought violets on the street corner.”

“I pinned them on your coat,” said John. “We’d been to see the Golden Cockerel. It was your first ballet and your eyes were like stars.”

Linda came up beside them. Her glass was in one hand. She slid the other through John’s arm and smiled at Monica and her eyes were bright and hard and determined. “Come, darlings,” she said. “Fae is trying to get us in to dinner.”

They dined inside the house, in a long, low-ceilinged room around a narrow, long Spanish table, with chairs that had high backs, carved like miniature thrones, each of them. Fae, at the end, looked lovely, her emerald sparkling in the fight from the great candelabra. Gibbs came down the stairs as they moved through the hall and joined them. (Was it Gibbs then, thought Monica, quickly, who had been talking to Linda? Or, rather, listening to Linda? But then how had Linda got to the patio so swiftly? Linda, with her half-empty glass on the table beside her, and her look of composure as if she had been sitting there without moving for some time!)

Carlos at the head of the table was a charming, gracious host. Uncle Bill met the façade of graciousness, of small talk, of smiling courtesy presented by Fae and Carlos with equal poise. Linda alone was sulky, saying little, drinking rather freely of the red wine. She wore pink again, with knots of ribbon and blue-silk roses at the deep V at her breast. She didn’t say much but, again, under those white eyelids, Linda’s eyes kept up a kind of secret, bright activity of their own.

The talk was of travel, mainly, and of Mexico City. It might have been any dinner table, anywhere. But as they went out into the patio again and had coffee by candlelight, with the stars now bright above them in the night sky and the air cool, and the shadows of the candles wavering lightly across the thick clumps of shrubbery and the dark banners of vines around the walls, a messenger arrived to speak to Carlos.

He went away, carrying his coffee cup in his hand. He was gone for rather a long time. Monica was suddenly sure that all of them—Linda sitting in the chaise longue in her pink dress, Gibbs standing at the edge of the pool of light, his coffee cup in his hand, his uniform making him look very big and erect, John and Bill beside Fae, replying to her light talk—everybody in the patio was listening for Carlos’ return.

He came at last. Señor Mendeno was with him. Carlos’ swarthy face was very grave. His dark eyes went first to Fae. He walked over to her, and standing beside her put down his coffee cup and put one hand upon his wife’s shoulder. “You all know Señor Mendeno,” he said. “Oh, Ramos, I believe you’ve not met Mr. Fiske. Mr. Fiske, this is my friend, Señor Mendeno.”

There was a flash of something like recognition in Señor Mendeno’s face. He bowed. Carlos said, “I like frankness. I’d better be frank and—thereby permit explanations. Mr. Fiske”—he turned his large body toward Bill Fiske—“Mr. Fiske, you did arrive by plane this morning, did you not? No, wait.” Carlos put up a quick hand on which a ruby glimmered. “I said I wished to be frank. I’d better tell you then, that our police find that you actually arrived here early yesterday morning. I wonder,” said Carlos silkily, “if you would mind talking to Señor Mendeno. The police wish to question you, but Señor Mendeno and I thought it would be pleasanter if you tell him, first, anything you can tell him.”

There was complete and utter silence. A light breeze from somewhere touched the candles. The flames swayed lightly and the points of light on Bill Fiske’s high cheekbones and shrewd narrowed eyes moved slightly too. For an instant he did not speak but only looked thoughtfully at Carlos. And then Linda sprang up from her chair. Both hands were at her breast with its knot of pink ribbons and blue-silk roses. Her face was very white in the wavering lights. She cried, “If you mean the police think he came here and murdered that man last night, you are wrong. I know who killed him.”

“Linda!” cried someone sharply—a man’s voice. John’s. Gibbs put his coffee down, slowly, eyes on Linda. Carlos said, “What do you mean, Linda?”

“I …” Linda’s eyes slid quickly around the circle of faces. She said, “I saw it. I wasn’t going to tell if I—but I saw it I was on my balcony. Gibbs did it. Gibbs Brooke.”

“No…!” cried Fae and stopped sharply as if Carlos’ hand had pressed her shoulder.

John said, “Linda, be careful! This is murder….”

Gibbs interrupted. “It’s all right, John,” he said wearily, and came forward to stand beside the lighted table. The candles flared up at him. He looked very pale and very tired. “It’s all right. She was here. I didn’t know it was Linda but …” he paused, straightened up as if with an effort and looked straight into Carlos’ dark, lambent eyes. “Suppose I did kill him. What do we do about it?”

Linda cried, “I hate to do this, but I have to tell the truth, the whole truth, I mean. Ask Monica why he was murdered. Ask Monica why she hid Gibbs’ handkerchief.” Her bright eyes went to John. “But then she’ll not tell you the truth. She’ll not tell you why she and Gibbs came here together, pretending it was only accident that they met. She’ll not tell you why Sproul followed them here and why they killed him,” said Linda, watching John, her head and eyes and voice triumphant, her hands at the knot of ribbon and blue-silk roses at her breast.

Gibbs said, “I killed him. It wasn’t Monica. She had nothing to do with …” His voice broke off. He looked a little puzzled and caught at the table with one hand and swayed. He fell sideways across a chair and clung to that for another puzzled instant. John sprang forward as Gibbs’ eyes closed and he slid down On the flagstones, half against the brightly cushioned chair.

A night wind swooped upon the candles, the lights wavered and the shadows danced closer to the little group. John tried to hold Gibbs, Carlos ran to them, and Bill helped John lift Gibbg, onto the chaise longue. Fae cried, “He’s sick. He looked sick. I knew it …” Other people were talking. Fae said sharply to Monica, her eyes bright and imperative in the wavering lights, her chiffon dress swept by the sudden wind, “Get brandy. In there—in the kitchen. They’ll tell you. Quick …” She gave Monica a little push toward the kitchen wing across the patio and ran toward the cluster around John. Linda stood still. Señor Mendeno stood very quietly too, the eerie lights and shadows across his face making it long and sharp and rather cruel. Monica ran toward the kitchen wing. Her sandaled feet were light across the flagstones, the sudden night wind ruffled her hair. She reached the door toward which Fae had pointed. There were no lights beyond it. She opened it upon a short narrow passage; a light and sounds of dishes were at the end of it. She reached a pantry, very bright and white and glittering with a houseman washing silver at the sink. He got her the brandy at once, his bright eyes gleaming with alertness and curiosity. She took the bottle and a glass which he gave her and hurried away from the small, brightly lighted pantry. The passage was darker when she left the pantry. The only light in it came from the open pantry door behind her. Her own shadow ahead of her diminished and was lost in darkness. She stopped, bewildered. As she did so the houseman—or the sudden wind—closed the pantry door with a bang.

Then she realized that the rectangle of light which ought to outline the patio door was not there. Was not anywhere. There was nothing but sheer blackness around her.

Her hand felt the wall and then the screened door. There were no lights at all in the patio. There were voices, an indistinguishable murmur, and she thought that the wind must have blown out all the candles. She opened the door.

As she stepped into the dark, cool night she knew that something moved near her and she flung out her hand. She began to scream—yet something happened; something was wrong. There was something tight and hard at her throat, so she couldn’t scream, so no one could hear it, so the night rocked around her. Yet somewhere in that blank, black chaos someone screamed. She knew that; then the scream and the night and the blackness faded into nothing.

16

Lights were pouring down against her eyelids. There was a jumble of voices, none of them distinct, seeming to drift away and then return. Out of the jumble suddenly someone shouted, “But there’s nobody there!” as if defiantly, expecting a contradiction. She felt something touching her lips and opened her eyes. Fae was leaning over her holding a glass. Lights were everywhere, illuminating the whole patio, the vine-hung walls of the house, the doors and windows and chairs all around, sharply and brightly. Fae said, “Are you hurt? Drink this. You fell …”

“No …” said Monica.

“Drink this.”

“Someone was here….” Her throat hurt and she put her hands to it. Fae held the glass tightly at her mouth and she swallowed. It was brandy and stung her throat.

She was lying back in a bright-canvas steamer chair. Fae was kneeling beside her, her pretty face white in the glare from the miniature floodlights. Linda was standing beside her, looking down. Somebody shouted again and came out of the house, banging the door loudly after him. It was Carlos and he crossed toward them rapidly so his big, unwieldy figure in its white coat seemed to plunge ahead.

“They’ve not found anybody.” He put his hand on Fae s slim shoulder and looked down at Monica. “What happened, Monica? Did you trip over the flagstones and fall?”

“No. No. There was someone …” Her voice came in a whisper.

Carlos said quickly, “Who was it?”

“I don’t know. The patio was dark….”

Someone was walking quickly over the flagstones behind them. Bill and John came up together, hurrying. John’s eyes were very dark and bright in the blazing lights from the floodlights. He said to Fae, “Is she all right?”

“I think so.” Fae rose so John could kneel down beside Monica. He put his hand on Monica’s wrist, looking anxiously into her face. “Feel okay now?”

“Yes….”

Carlos said quickly, “She thinks someone was there. She thinks she didn’t fall.”

“Tell me,” said John.

“The patio was dark,” began Monica again. “I reached the door—over there.” Lights now showed the screened door leading to the narrow passage that went back to the pantry and kitchen. Nothing was there—no signs of any struggle. She looked up at John. “Someone was there….” Her voice was still husky; her throat felt bruised and sore. She touched it again, and John saw the gesture and took her hand away and tilted her head back to look. His face hardened; his eyes were two points of light.

“Someone was there, all right.” He got up and turned to Carlos. “I suggest you have the place searched.”

Carlos spread out his hands in a deprecating gesture, although his broad bland face was as usual unfathomable. “I have sent men to search the grounds. The servants, the gardener, are searching now. Señor Mendeno and I searched the house. At once. The lights were turned on scarcely more than a minute after we heard Monica scream.”

She had screamed then, thought Monica. She had thought her scream was choked off in her throat; she had thought no one could hear it. John’s tall body seemed to tower above her, square and solid and uncompromising. He said, “Someone was here. Someone tried to kill her. If nobody from outside did it, then it has to be somebody here in the patio. Somebody blew out the candle and knew she was coming back from the kitchen with the brandy Fae had sent her for, and …”

“Steady now,” said Carlos, a very peculiar expression in his face, putting one ringed hand on John’s. “Steady—only a handful of people were here. Do you suspect one of us, or one of our guests of trying to injure her?”

There was a slight pause. She could not see, but she had an impression of a long look between Carlos and John. John said finally, with less anger in his voice, but with a coldness and grimness that suggested fury controlled, “She didn’t imagine it, Carlos. There are marks on her throat.”

Carlos said, “Someone got into the place last night and murdered this unfortunate Sproul. Someone could have been concealed in the vines of the patio, watching his chance tonight. He could have escaped during that moment of confusion after the candle had been blown out and when we heard Monica’s scream. He could easily have escaped then, for all of us were in confusion, trying to strike matches, shouting for lights, trying first to find out what had happened.” He paused and said very gently, “Remember, John, after last night, we are all somewhat nervous and on edge.”

John’s body still looked stubborn, somehow, and determined. Linda moved nearer with a rustle of pink satin. “John, couldn’t she have fallen? She was carrying the brandy. The flagstones are uneven …”

Bill Fiske who’d been watching, listening, his face inscrutable, put his hand on Monica’s wrist. “She didn’t even break the bottle of brandy,” he said, smiling down at Monica. “It was lying on the grass. Her pulse is all right. Brace up, child. You’ve had a bad scare. But it won’t happen again. We’ll take better care of you.”

Linda said, “Monica, are you sure someone was there? Are you sure you didn’t—imagine it?”

It took John from what Monica felt was another long wordless exchange of thought with Carlos. He said brusquely, “She couldn’t imagine the marks on her throat.”

“But …” began Linda and stopped and then said, in her lovely, musical voice, “Then if there really was someone there—don’t think I am a coward but I’ve lived and seen things that—well, never mind that. What I’m trying to say is it was actually an attack upon me! I mean, intended as such. The big candle had blown out. I was starting for the kitchen to tell the houseman to turn on the floodlights; it was so windy there wasn’t much point in lighting the candle again. Fae, I remember, was standing beside Gibbs. Somebody was striking matches. …”

“I was,” said Bill. “They kept going out.”

“I was not far from Monica when I heard her scream,” said Linda, “then it stopped and I screamed too.”

She’d heard that, thought Monica; heard it and been briefly puzzled and then had been caught up by black waves of nothing.

Linda put her hand on John’s arm. “I’m not a coward,” she said, looking up into his face. “Perhaps I’m only nervous and silly, and fancy that every shadow is a Nazi agent. But I—that cachet, John, proves that someone tried to find me. Secretly …”

Carlos said, “Here are Captain Brooke and Ramos,” then started across the patio toward the door from the main hall. The chair in which Monica sat was not far from the kitchen door, close to the small fountain, so its soft bubble was clear in her ears. The group of chairs around the table were at a little distance, nearer the hall door. They looked bright and empty and deserted. Gibbs, she remembered suddenly, had been lying back in one of those chairs, apparently unconscious, so Fae had sent her for brandy. She turned to look and he came now to meet Carlos, Señor Mendeno with him. They reached the group of chairs and Gibbs sat down.

Had he been faking? she thought suddenly. Had he purposely created a diversion thus? She remembered only that Gibbs had confessed to killing Sproul!

She sat up and the slight dizziness was gone. She touched her throat again; there was a soreness but that was all. Linda, her hand linked through John’s arm, glanced down at her, her eyes bright and somehow triumphant. She said softly, “I’m afraid they are going to question you, Monica. Is your throat so you can talk—after all?”

John had turned to watch Gibbs and Mendeno. He whirled back at Linda’s question and took Monica’s hand. “Don’t move unless you feel like it,” he said. His eyes seemed to be saying something else, something urgent and important, but she could not translate it into words. She rose, and he put his arm around her. Linda stood aside. Her face was blank for a moment, then she smiled and said to Monica, “I’m sorry I said what I did. I mean about you knowing about Gibbs. I was—nervous. Beside myself. But I didn’t really mean anything. And all you have to do is—well—” she shrugged her white shoulders with their pink-satin folds—“all you have to do is explain to them how and why you met Gibbs and that you really didn’t know anything about Sproul. And about this murder. I’m sorry I said so much. I didn’t mean it, really.” Her eyes were very bright. She said to John, “Monica was always my best friend. I couldn’t suspect her of anything.”

It was a curious apology; the kind of apology that underlines the offense. Purposely? thought Monica swiftly. Because Linda was clever? Because she wanted John to believe that she was actually Monica’s friend—and at the same time to emphasize in that negative way the very accusations she had hurled at Monica before Gibbs had confessed to killing Sproul? Would John see that?

She couldn’t tell what he saw. He said merely, “You’d better take that chair, Monica. Now then …” he led her to the chaise longue, saw that she was comfortable. The message was still, it seemed to her, in his look and still it was nothing she could read and decipher. Fae had followed them without speaking. Carlos and Mendeno were talking. No one had been found in the house, no one, so far, on the grounds. Señor Mendeno turned to Monica. “Do you feel quite recovered? May I ask you a question? What exactly happened, Miss Blane?”

She told it briefly; there was not much to tell. She kept her eyes off his pointed, Spanish grandee face, but she was strongly aware of the others, listening too. His face, like Carlos’, showed no expression at all, not even incredulity.

“You are very sure you were attacked? You could not have fallen in the darkness?”

“Yes …”

John said, “There are the marks on her throat.”

Carlos’ dark eyes flickered toward Mendeno, who started to speak and then stopped. Carlos said, “My dear, think. Was there anything you—recognized about whoever did this? Anything at all familiar? Are you sure you don’t know who it was? Think.”

There had been sharp fear in the darkness, an instinctive knowledge of danger—then nothing except the pressure at her throat. It was curious though how quiet everything was. How white that ring of faces, how still! Almost as if everyone there was holding his breath, listening, watching, waiting for her reply.

“Nothing,” she said. “There was nothing. I don’t know who it was.”

Someone sighed rather sharply; Carlos shrugged and lifted his eyebrows, with another glance at Mendeno.

Fae slipped into a chair near the table, resting her white arms upon it. The bright lights caught green fires from the emerald at her throat; her eyes were bright with question. Linda still stood. Bill Fiske drew out cigarettes and offered them to Linda near him, and to Gibbs who sat slumped down wearily, arms resting on the arms of the chair, shoulders sunk a little, face very pale. All the faces were queerly white, in those bright lights, all the shadows sharp and clear. Was it because under the balcony directly opposite her a man had been murdered only the night before?

Gibbs had said he’d murdered him; Linda had said she had seen it. Bit by bit the whole scene before she had been sent by Fae to the kitchen came back to Monica. The police—or rather Carlos—had said that Bill had arrived in Mexico City actually as soon as she had, or nearly. Certainly he had not been on the same plane. But they had meant of course that Bill Fiske was a suspect, too. Hadn’t they?

Suspect. It seemed to her, in her mood of remembered terror, of fear, of a kind of incredulous horror that such things could happen, that the word suspect was a strange one. For it meant, just now, people she knew; people who had been in that house when Sproul was killed, people who had been in the patio when a dark thing moved in darkness and sought for her throat.

She would not think of that. John, Gibbs, Bill, Carlos and Fae, Linda and Mendeno—would one of them have tried to kill her?

Yet someone had tried—twice, counting St. Louis. That had happened, though, when she was carrying money to John; money he needed to investigate the disappearance of Paul Stanislawsky. Suddenly that seemed important. The money itself would not be a goal for murder under normal circumstances, for she had not enough of it. But the purpose for which the money was intended was important—terribly important to whoever had murdered Stanislawsky. (If he were actually murdered, as John believed.) Therefore perhaps the person who had killed Stanislawsky knew that John was in Mexico City, knew his purpose there and was afraid of being discovered. It was logical—or seemed so to her then.

Carlos was speaking to Mendeno, “… am sure Captain Gibbs will explain his statement,” he was saying.

Gibbs looked up. “All right,” he said. “I—guess I’m your man. I think I did kill him.”

Carlos sat down, astride a small chair, his arms resting on the back of it. “Will you tell Señor Mendeno about it?”

“All right,” said Gibbs. “I …” He straightened up, with a small, involuntary wince as he did so, as if his muscles were sore. His face looked drawn and stern. He said, “I’ll tell you as exactly as I can. But I—guess I did kill him. I didn’t exactly mean to. It …” With an odd gesture he passed one hand across his forehead which looked damp. “It was silly of me to faint just then. I’m all right now. I’ve not been well, and the heat and—but the thing happened like this. I couldn’t sleep last night. I was restless and thought I’d come down here to the patio for a smoke. It was very dark. There were clouds and, after I’d got downstairs, very quietly because I didn’t want to rouse anyone, I stopped for a moment in the door—over there …” He jerked his head toward the door from the main hall into the patio. “I thought I heard something; I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem to matter, really. I came on into the patio. The clouds were heavy across the sky. I didn’t see anything for a moment. Then I realized”—he wiped his forehead again, and went on—“then I realized that someone was over there, under the balcony and seemed to be attempting to climb the trellis. He hadn’t heard me. I could barely see him. Naturally I went over, quietly. I didn’t know who it was. It was so dark I still could barely make out his figure; there was only the rustle of the vines. I got right up to him before he knew I was there. Then—well, things happened all at once,”

“Go on,” said Carlos gently, his lighted eyes never wavering from Gibbs.

“He must have heard me. Before I knew it he’d whirled around like a—like a cat and jumped down upon me. I”—Gibbs swallowed and" looked rather defiant—“I had my service revolver. I’d shoved it in my shirt front. It was a free-for-all there for a minute or two. He meant business, and he was tough; neither of us said anything. It all happened very quickly. I managed to drag out my revolver and hit him with it. And I guess that was it,” said Gibbs.

There was a short silence. Then Carlos said, “And what happened then?”

“Well—I’m not sure. It was dark, you know, and I was kind of—dizzy, I guess. That’s all I remember. He sagged down and I remember thinking I had to get to my bedroom and …”

“Gibbs,” said John. “Will you let us get a doctor?”

Carlos said quickly, “Did he wound you, Captain Brooke? Where …”

John said, “You were bleeding and … Where did he get you?”

Gibbs lifted his eyes briefly to John. “Along the ribs. It’s only a scratch. Bled some. Made me a little dizzy for the moment. It’s all right now. I got to my bathroom and washed it and made a bandage and—lay down on the bed for a minute. I’m a little vague about all that. Next thing I knew the lights were on in the patio and voices and everybody was around and I knew he’d been found.”

Another silence followed that statement. Finally Carlos said softly, “Captain Brooke, were you sure he was dead when you left him?”

“No. I wasn’t sure of anything. I—didn’t realize I’d hit that hard. It all happened very quickly and I may have passed out for a minute or two. I never thought of having killed him. All I could think of was to get to my room and bandage up my side. I suppose I vaguely intended to come back, do something about it—I don’t know. I realize it sounds pretty dopey, but that’s what happened.”

“I have to ask you, Captain Brooke,” said Carlos, “why you didn’t tell this sooner. It was, it seems, self-defense. You did not intend to kill him. We are not unreasonable. Besides, there is your wound—if the courts should doubt your word. You say you had no knowledge of Sproul and doubtless can prove it….” He paused there, silkily, giving Gibbs a chance to speak.

Gibbs said, “It is as I told you. I don’t know who he was. I don’t know why he came here. I saw him as Monica and I left the St. Louis airport; he was in the limousine. I saw him again in the hotel at St. Louis. He stepped up to the desk as we left it and gave his name. I had a glimpse of him sitting in the lobby of the hotel later, as the elevator doors opened, after we’d left the dining room. Then he turned up in Fort Worth.”

John was looking steadily at Monica; so steadily that his gaze seemed to draw her own; again she thought he wants to tell me something and suddenly realized what it was. He made a slight negative motion of his head. It meant, she was suddenly sure, don’t tell them about the shot at the airport; don’t tell them about what happened that night in your suite; don’t tell them about Eric Weller. Not yet, not yet.

She hadn’t needed the warning. She let him see that she understood—if that was actually what his look meant. Carlos said, still very quietly, very politely, “But Captain Brooke, the fact remains that you did not come, forward and say what had happened. Why?”

Gibbs’ face had queer grim Lines around the mouth; his eyes looked strained and uneasy. He said, “Well, I have told you now.”

“Why didn’t you tell us sooner, Captain Brooke?” insisted Carlos softly.

Gibbs’ mouth set itself stubbornly. After a long moment Carlos said, “Whom are you shielding. Captain Brooke? And why?”

Fae made a little sudden movement, unlike her usual poise and grace. Her black chiffons moved as if a breeze had swept the patio again. It was odd, thought Monica parenthetically, that the wind had sprung up so suddenly, so violently as to blow out the candle—and then had gone.

Or had someone among them blown out the candle—swiftly, adroitly, taking advantage of the preoccupation with Gibbs, taking advantage of the suggestion the previous breeze wavering the candlelight had offered?

If so, then again who?

Gibbs was shaking his head, returning Carlos’ look eye for eye. “It is exactly as I’ve told it to you. If you want to take me into custody I suppose it is the thing to do. I must have killed him.”

John said, “We’d better get a doctor.”

Carlos said, “I don’t know just what to do, Captain Brooke. You are a captain in the United States Army. According to your story you killed this man in self-defense.”

“You don’t believe me,” said Gibbs wearily.

Carlos said suddenly, “Fae, my dear, will you phone to Dr. Cantu? Thank you….” Fae rose and moved like a slender, graceful shadow across the lighted patio toward the house. Carlos frowned and called after her, “Wait, my dear. Ramos will go with you.”

He’s afraid for her to go into the house alone, thought Monica swiftly. He’s afraid—so are we all. Murder and attempted murder. An unseen, incredibly furtive and stealthy enemy, striking with swiftness out of the night.

Señor Mendeno, unperturbed, picked up his cue instantly and crossed to accompany Fae. Carlos watched them go, and kept his eyes on the doorway and the lighted hall visible through it. He said, however, “Mr. Fiske, you were about to explain your trip here, when …” His ringed hand described a graceful but pungent gesture. “Will you continue?”

“My …” Bill looked startled. Then he put down his cigarette, carefully putting it out in the ash tray on the round glass-topped table. “Yes, of course. My trip. Well …” He glanced around the circle of faces. His eyes lingered for a moment on Monica’s and he gave her a queer, small smile, half-rueful, half-encouraging. “Perhaps Monica can explain it for me,” he said. “But I—don’t wish to distress her by asking her to do so.”

“But I—I don’t …” she began in perplexity. Bill said, “I’ll have to admit the truth, I suppose. Very well. I did not arrive in Mexico City today. Your police were quite right. I arrived the same day that Monica arrived. I left New York after she left but happened to have the good fortune to get a passage straight through on a different line. Monica had to stop over for a night in St. Louis, I believe, and for some hours in Fort Worth. Consequently I reached here sooner. I …” His peaked eyebrows went up; he looked both rueful and embarrassed, but went on, “This is really not a very pleasant thing to have to admit. I’ll make it short. Monica, I expect knows. The truth is—I was tight. Sorry, but—it happens to be rather a weakness of mine. Nothing much, and I’ve managed it well enough. Occasionally, though, it—shall I say—catches up with me. I was under a certain amount of nervous strain with”—he hesitated and said—“with one thing and another before I left New York. I—well, had a few drinks. One leads to another and then to another and—to make a long story short, I reached Mexico City in a rosy daze, went to a small hotel—where doubtless your police traced me, and remember going out that night and visiting several—er—night spots, restaurants, bars. I remember talking to various people whose faces I could not possibly remember and thus cannot possibly substantiate my story. One of them, however, or perhaps it was a taxi driver, kindly restored me to my hotel where I spent some time sleeping. When I roused I naturally was not exactly proud of my little adventure, so I phoned here, told John I had just arrived, asked him to meet me and went back to the airport. I—realize how this sounds. I suppose I have a certain small pride. I …” He went to Monica, looked down at her, and said, “I’m sorry, my dear. I suppose you’ve guessed many times why I disappeared from the office for a day or two at a time. But if you did you always pretended not to. I—thank you, my dear.”

He looked at Carlos. “You can easily substantiate my story. Obviously the police, have already reported the time of my arrival, and the little tale of my activities since then.”

John said abruptly, “You’d better go up to your room, Gibbs, and lie down. The doctor will be along soon to dress your wound.”

Gibbs glanced at Carlos. “I may be under arrest.”

“My dear Captain Brooke,” said Carlos with a gracious wave of his hand, “you are in pain. My own doctor will soon be here. He is very fine, very discreet and a good friend of mine. You may put yourself unreservedly in his hands.”

“But the police?” insisted Gibbs.

“They are not here now,” said Carlos. “In any case, you must have your wound properly attended to. Go with him, John, will you?”

Carlos, then, was putting a guard on Gibbs.

Gibbs staggered slightly as he rose. John took his arm. They met Fae and Señor Mendeno at the door. “He’ll be here in a few minutes,” said Fae. She put her hand on Gibbs’ arm and looked up at him anxiously. “Can I do anything for you?”

“I’m taking him to his room,” said John.

“Thank you,” said Gibbs. John had his arm as they entered the house. John, thought Monica, knew about knife wounds; he knew about man-to-man warfare in the dark, secret, quiet ways by which one kills or is killed. It was what war taught a man.

Carlos held a chair for Fae. He said courteously to Bill Fiske, “Thank you, Mr. Fiske. You understand that our police have to investigate anything that they find which seems—inconsistent. They will have to check on your explanation, I’m afraid.”

Bill smiled a little ruefully and took out cigarettes, as if the small gesture of selecting a cigarette and lighting it covered a certain embarrassment. “Of course,” he said. “And I’m afraid they’ll find it only too easy to check the truth of it. However …” He shrugged. “I’m sorry I chose such an unfortunate time. And I”—he blew a trail of gray smoke into the air—“I do assure you that it is a very rare occurrence with me.”

Carlos, all silken grace—and watchful alertness—waved his hand. “My dear sir,” he said, as if accepting and dismissing the apology in the emphasis of one word.

And Señor Mendeno, as polished, as courteous, said, “I believe, Carlos—may I have a word with you?” He made a slight gesture toward the other side of the patio.

“Certainly. Will you excuse us?” Carlos linked his arm through Mendeno’s. They strolled, arm in arm, as if there were all the time in the world, to the fountain across the patio, where they stood, two elegant figures in their fight dinner clothes talking in voices so low that the words were not distinguishable. The one moment lengthened to two and four and five. It was again like a stage set, for the three women and one man who were the audience did not move, except for Linda’s hand lifting her cigarette now and again. But it was a pantomime, thought Monica suddenly, entitled Two Gentlemen in Private Conversation.

They finished and came more briskly back. Carlos said, “Mr. Fiske, Ramos tells me that the police have given him certain details which tend to confirm your story—the name of the hotel, several of the bars…. Naturally, however, they are obliged to check on your explanation of the true time of your arrival. Now then”—he turned to Linda—“Linda, my dear, you made certain statements….”

She broke in. “I’m so sorry. I was nervous and upset. I’m afraid I said too much.”

“You said that you saw Captain Brooke’s encounter with Sproul?” asked Carlos.

“I—yes.”

“You recognized Captain Brooke?”

Linda sat down and crossed her legs in a leisurely way. She linked her white hands around one knee. “Darling,” she said, turning to Fae, “I’m so sorry to seem so—well, odd. I’ve explained it to Monica—I’m still nervous as a witch from those years in France. I didn’t do much, perhaps, but I did enough to make myself definitely persona non grata with the Germans. I spoke too quickly perhaps, but it did seem to me extraordinary that Monica,” her bright eyes, shining in the lights, went briefly to Monica, and she said in that lovely golden voice, apologetically, “that you and Gibbs had met in that way.”

Carlos said sharply, “You’d better tell us the whole story, Linda. What about the handkerchief you said Monica was concealing?”

“Oh, that.” Linda’s eyes widened. “Carlos dear, that—well, that was why I spoke too quickly. I’m sure there’s some good reason.”

“Reason?”

“For Monica’s concealing it, I mean. Under the rug. In her room. I went in there to see her this afternoon and there was part of a handkerchief extending from under the rug. Khaki-colored, so I knew it must belong to Gibbs. It was bloodstained and I suppose I leaped to conclusions. I’m sure Monica can explain it.”

Carlos glanced at Monica, a question in his eyes. Bill Fiske said quickly, “Linda, it is not my place to question, but I can’t help wondering why you didn’t tell the police earlier about what you saw. If you knew all along that Gibbs Brooke killed Sproul …”

Linda interrupted, “But how could I? Gibbs is an old friend. Like Monica. One can’t do things like that….”

She stopped as John came out of the house. The bright floodlights made every leaf on the vines, every flagstone, every blade of grass sharply clear. John looked around the circle and then like a lash his voice whipped out, “Where is Gibbs?”

17

Gibbs was gone. There was no question about that. He had slipped away into the night as quietly, as skillfully, leaving no trace of the manner of his going, as the nameless and formless intruder who had murdered Sproul had vanished.

Unless Gibbs was that man and his story of having killed Sproul accidentally, not even knowing that he had done so, was true.

Gibbs also had disappeared very simply and in a short moment’s time. John explained it. They had started up the stairway to Gibbs’ room to wait there for the doctor, but Gibbs had been faint and had sat down on the lower step, leaning his head on his hands. John had waited a moment, thinking he’d be better. Instead, Gibbs had grown worse so John had gone into the dining room to find something to give him to drink. It had been dark in the dining room; he’d gone the length of it to the enormous buffet. There he had found candles. As he lighted them he thought he heard Gibbs move or call to him. He had hurried out but Gibbs was not on the stairway, was not in the hall anywhere—and he was not in his room, for John had looked. John had run downstairs again, and had glanced out of the front door into the driveway. It was dark and he had no flashlight, but he went down the drive as far as the gate, calling to Gibbs. There was no answer so he had come back to the house, through the hall and into the patio.

Lights again sprang up all around the patio, all over the house, in every room, and they looked for him, but Gibbs was gone. It was obvipus from the first that Gibbs Brooke had escaped—deliberately and intentionally, using a perfectly simple ruse to do so.

The gate was open. Even if it hadn’t been, it would have been a simple matter for him to unbolt it and open it in spite of his wound.

If, that is, he actually had been wounded in the struggle he said he’d had with Sproul.

Linda said, triumphantly, “You see—he escaped.” She tinned to Mendeno and Carlos, “I was wrong. I ought to have told you at once. It was so hard to accuse an old friend. But this proves he did it.”

Mendeno touched the ends of his pointed mustache. Bill Fiske said, to no one in particular, “What are you going to do?”

John said, before Bill could be answered, “He looked sick. I think he was sick.”

Fae said nothing. And Carlos, turning away from the front door, stood and looked at them for an instant, his round face a mask, his eyes brilliant and, Monica thought, angry. So angry that Fae went to him and put her slender white hand gently on his arm. For the first time in Monica’s knowledge he did not look down at his wife with love and gentleness—he did not, as a matter of fact, even appear to know that she was there. They had all come from their search into the greenand-gold-and-red-tiled hall, gleaming darkly in the lights from the wrought-iron wall brackets, with the telephone on a shelf against one wall, and from which led the stairs where Gibbs had pretended to collapse.

Carlos was breathing heavily. He ignored the light, restraining pressure of Fae’s hand and glanced slowly around the circle of faces, ending with Mendeno. He had just entered from the outside driveway where he had been talking to the gardener and the houseman. There was a glimpse of their swarthy faces and shining, curious dark eyes through the screened door. Carlos said, “Ramos, I was in error. I thought it would be better to manage this softly. I see I was wrong. Get the police to find Captain Brooke; it should not be hard, for he must still be in uniform. Arrest him. Now then,” he moved away from Fae’s hand with, it suddenly seemed to Monica, a kind of deliberation as if he wished to remove himself from its gentle yet powerful pressure. He rested the fingertips of one of his thick, jeweled hands upon a tiled, Spanish table top and said, still panting a little, “You are all under what I intend to call protective custody and will actually be under arrest. I had hoped to arrange this affair in a less painful manner. I see now that plan is too dangerous. Not only dangerous to some of you but mainly to myself and to my country. To my—work. Anything that touches my house, that touches me, threatens my country because”—Carlos paused an instant and said with simple dignity—“because I am her representative. I love my country. I know her needs and her problems and it is my duty to protect her interests with my very life.”

It was a different Carlos, all the silken ease, the smiling adroitness were gone, and the never-failing courtesy all at once became that of a dignitary rather than of a friend.

John said, “You are, then, an official? You said representative …”

Carlos’ lambent, now angry eyes swerved directly to John. “I am my country’s representative. I am what you call a diplomat without portfolio. I am—never mind that. I only want you to understand that I have authority and I now must exercise it. That I have a task which makes myself, my wife, my house and all that happens within it important to my country’s welfare. As I say, I had hoped to handle this murder of Sproul quietly. I had hoped to find out who the man was, to discover who murdered him and why he was murdered, quickly and without publicity. Without …” He broke off with a wave of his hand—no longer a negligent, deprecatory wave. It was the kind of gesture, thought Monica suddenly, with which in other days men were sent to the guillotine. Carlos said, “Call the police captain, Ramos. I’ll make the arrangements. I do not intend any of you, if possible, to be taken to jail or placed under official arrest. Not at least until I know more than I now do. It is obvious that there are things here beyond an ordinary attempted burglary. What Captain Brooke knows of this, why he is here, what he has attempted to do and whether or not he told the truth about having killed Sproul accidentally, in self-defense, I don’t know. There are many things here I do not perceive fully. Ramos …”

Señor Mendeno, his slender, Spanish grandee’s face, so sharp and clear and yet impassive it was like a brown mask, went to the telephone. Then all the faces there were suddenly like masks, showing only features and shadows and colorhiding all thoughts behind them. Fae’s lips were tight. Her eyes were on Carlos, following him, never wavering, as if he were a magnet. Carlos still did not look at her. One of the men outside, the gardener, pressed his face up against the screen so his nose looked white and his black eyes roved from one to another. Monica, sitting on a carved wooden bench along the wall, the long crimson sash looking very red, almost like blood against her white gown, leaned her head back against the plastered wall. Her hands were cold and felt weighted and strange; her whole body had a kind of numbness and stillness. She wondered if everyone else felt the same way. Protective custody—the same as arrest.

But it would be safe. Perhaps it might stop the death that walked by night.

Was that why Carlos was doing it? Carlos who had so skillfully and so adroitly concealed his true feelings of anxiety, and dismay—and fear, perhaps. All patriots must be conscious of a certain anxiety and consciousness of personal hazards, not so much because of themselves but because of the secrets they know and of the trust put in them.

Señor Mendeno’s hand went toward the telephone. Nobody moved and the Mexican gardener’s nose grew whiter and whiter as he pressed it, like a child, against the screen. Then, before Mendeno could pick up the instrument, the telephone rang sharply.

It was so unexpected a sound in the stillness that Linda gave a little gasp. Carlos said, “Answer it.”

Señor Mendeno took up the receiver. He answered in Spanish but suddenly shifted to English. Everyone frankly listened. Mendeno said, “Yes, certainly …” and waited for an instant. Then, unconsciously, his face broke into a very polite and formal smile. “Yes, Excellency. Ah, yes. This is Ramos Mendeno. Ah, yes. Señor, he is here.”

He turned to Carlos, “It is the American …” He stopped at a brief motion of Carlos’ hand on which a ruby gleamed. Carlos said, “I’ll take it,” and went to the telephone. Mendeno stood aside, his face a mask again. Carlos’ look was still stiff with anger and concentration. He did not smile as Mendeno had done; his replies were polite and gracious yet formal as if some hidden protocol existed.

“Yes, Excellency. Yes …” He listened. Only a metallic rattle was audible. Carlos said, “I see. How long will that be? No, I quite understand. Yes, this changes it. Very well then, at your request, Excellency.” The look of concentration deepened. He listened again, said, “Yes, yes,” and finally, “It seems to be advisable then. Very well. Yes, quite. Tomorrow. Good night, Señor, good night.”

The telephone clicked as the receiver went back into its cradle.

He turned slowly. So deep was his concentration that he seemed only gradually aware of the others—Bill and John and Monica in one group, Linda standing under the light which shone on her hair, Fae watching him closely and anxiously from near the doorway. Carlos said, “It is late. I suggest we retire.”

Linda’s face slowly crimsoned. “But Carlos, you can’t leave us like this. Who was that? What are you going to do?”

“Come, my dear,” said Fae. Suddenly, with a lightning change, she became again merely the gracious hostess. “It is rather late. Shall we go? Mr. Fiske, you know the way to your room, of course. Carlos darling, when your business is finished, will you see to the bolts? I’ll telephone Dr. Cantu not to come.”

John looked down at Monica and said, very low, ‘"Later …”

There was an authority about Carlos which one couldn’t question. He did not explain. He merely stood there, frowning a little, thoughtful. Linda moved rather sullenly toward the stairway. Mendeno stood beside Carlos, obviously Waiting to talk to him when they were alone. Fae beckoned to Monica—pleasantly yet with something of Carlos’ authority. Bill Fiske took a step toward the stairway and then stopped, facing Carlos.

“Mr. Demuth,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ll have to question you. Now mind you”—he put up his hand with decision—“mind you, this is none of my business. I realize that perfectly. I am your guest. Nevertheless I—I am an American citizen. Miss—that is, Monica and Linda are American citizens also. Monica is in my employ and neither of us has any real connection with this affair—whatever it is. I do not in the least mind being placed in what you have called protective custody-providing it is no more than that.”

Carlos’ voice was cold. “If you should mind, what do you propose to do about it, Mr. Fiske?”

The shrewd, calculating look Monica knew well came into Bill Fiske’s long face with its high cheekbones and small clipped mustache. He said pleasantly and easily, “I’m not sure I’m going to do anything. But I very much doubt your authority to keep any of us here if we choose to leave. On the other hand, I see no reason why any of us should wish to leave as our sole wish is, naturally, to be of any possible assistance to you. Not only because that is right but it seems important to me to make sure that this attack tonight upon Monica is not repeated. Obviously it is to our interests to do whatever you ask us to do but I felt our position must be clear.”

“Thank you,” said Carlos curtly. “Is there anything else you wish to say, Mr. Fiske?”

“Yes. What exactly does protective custody mean?”

Something cold and angry gleamed in Carlos’ eyes. He said, “It means, Mr. Fiske, exactly what I choose it to mean. I shall see to it that there will be no more attempts at murder in this house and that everyone here is safe and well guarded. Do I make myself clear?”

Bill Fiske lifted his shoulders and eyebrows good-naturedly. His eyes, however, had cold points of light in them and there were two red spots over his high cheekbones. “You do indeed, Mr. Demuth.” He glanced at John. “We seem to be prisoners, John, in our friend’s household.”

John said, “Carlos, is that what you mean?”

Carlos’ patience was apparently at an end. He said, “I bave stated my position. Whether you wish to call yourselves prisoners or to accept the fact that I am taking measures for your safety and mine is your privilege. Good night, sir.” He bowed briefly to Bill Fiske, bpwed in the general direction of Linda and Monica and Fae and walked across the hall toward the library, his heels hard on the tiled floor, his thick shoulders bent forward. He passed Fae without looking at her and her slender, fine face seemed to draw inward tightly. She said, with a quality of steel in her own charming voice, “Good night, Señor Mendeno….” She slipped one arm around Lindas waist and put her cold, slim hand upon Monica’s wrist.

It was curious, really, walking up that lovely stairway, feeling at the same time the propulsion exerted by Fae. Bill said, from below, “I’d like a cigarette in the patio. Any objections?”

Carlos had already disappeared. Fae said, “Not at all, Mr. Fiske. Please ask for anything you wish. Good night.”

A gleam of admiration crossed Bill’s face—admiration mingled, however, with exasperation. He said to John, “Come along with me. …”

In the upper hall Fae did not hesitate. “This is a very unfortunate affair,” she said, “but you can trust Carlos’ discretion completely. Monica, my dear, you must not be unhappy. Whatever it was that happened to you tonight—whether it was accident or a deliberate attempt to—hurt you—will not be repeated. Good night, my dear. Good night, Linda.”

She dismissed them with the self-possession of a head mistress whose lightest word will be obeyed and stood in the hall as Linda and Monica walked along it.

When they reached Monica’s door, Linda said in a half whisper, “What did happen tonight, Monica? Who was it? You must know.”

“But I don’t.”

Linda’s bright blue eyes searched her own. "Is that true?” “Yes,” said Monica wearily. Fae standing down by the stairs, watching them, called, “Good night….”

So Linda whirled away. Monica felt she was. angry.

Protective custody, thought Monica slowly, slipping the white and crimson dress over her head, unbuckling her crimson sandals—protective custody. It could mean anything. The only thing that was clear was that Carlos had taken matters into his own ringed and powerful hands.

But-as she pulled off her stockings and rinsed them out, she amended that. There were three things that were clear. Carlos had taken things into his own hands but he had done so in the beginning when he had called the police. It was only when his diplomatic and adroit methods failed that he had shown the strength he actually held in those jeweled fingers. Gibbs had either told the truth about the murder of Sproul and had escaped for fear of arrest—or he had not been telling the truth but instead had attempted to shield someone and had thus escaped in order still to shield that person, whoever it was.

The attack upon her had been real. It was another in the series of attacks—incredible, without any purpose that she could see, stealthy and murderously swift. In her sheer nightgown she shivered a little. Carlos had said protective custody; she hoped that it meant exactly that. The French doors were half open. She turned out her fight, put her dark silk dressing gown over her shoulders and went out on the balcony. The floodlights in the patio had been turned off but down below were the dim figures of several men and the red dots made by cigarettes. They were talking in low voices; perhaps it was John and Bill. A lighted rectangle showed against the grass and flagstones; that was coming from the library.

John had said, “Later.”

She fumbled her way across her darkened room and went to bed but lay there listening to the distant murmur of voices from the patio. The light fragrance of cigarette smoke drifted through the open windows.

She didn’t know how long it was before John came—perhaps an hour or longer. She had, however, reached a complete impasse in her thinking. One thing contradicted another so blankly that nothing seemed to open any pathway of progress. Gibbs had confessed; Gibbs had deceived John and escaped; Gibbs was to be found and arrested and they were all placed in protective custody. Nothing else was clear.

John knocked very softly on the door and came in quickly.

“Better not turn on the light,” he whispered. “Monica Sproul killed Stanislawsky. I’ve got proof.”

18

Suddenly she realized that it must be very late. The house was so quiet that even John’s whisper seemed loud and the little click of the doorknob as he touched it as if to make sure it had closed was very sharp in the darkness. He said, still whispering, “Over here …” His hand touched her arm and he guided her across the room, away from the door, toward the still open French doors. The light seemed to be gone now from the patio; the whole encircling house was blank and dark and quiet. He said, “Be very quiet. Carlos meant what he said; he’s got policemen all around the house. It’s a good idea. I only hope it works. Listen, Monica, I’ve got to talk quickly. First, that attack tonight—who was it?”

“John, it’s exactly as I’ve told it to everyone. I simply don’t know! I felt someone near me in the dark as I came out the door. Then—my throat …”

He said something under his breath. She could not hear the words, only the grim, cold anger in the tone. His arms went tight around her, holding her close to him, his warm hard face against her own. He held her like that for an instant, then as suddenly released her. “The police are here, as I told you. Nothing will happen. But I wanted to be sure. So I’ve brought you something.”

There was more in his words than the words themselves. In the darkness she could barely see the shape of his face, dimly white in the gloom, near her. She whispered. “You think whoever it was down there in the patio tonight might try again? Despite Carlos and his police?”

There was a little pause. Then he said, “It happened in St. Louis when you were bringing money to me—money I needed to find out what I’ve found about Paul Stanislawsky. I thought that was the reason. But tonight that reason no longer existed; yet there was another attack upon you. An extraordinarily bold and ugly attack. Carlos—everybody—has tried to gloss it over, pretend someone else was here—pretend you fellGod knows they’d pretend it didn’t happen at all if they could. Monica, is there any reason you can think of—any explanation at all for it? Eric’s death doesn’t, I think, tie up with all this. We can leave that out for now. Is there anything else?”

“No …”

“Nothing you know? Nobody you have dangerous knowledge of? Nothing …”

“No.”

“Yet tonight, almost under everybody’s eyes, someone tried to kill you. Don’t you see, my darling, there must be a terribly strong and urgent motive to induce anybody to take such a risk of discovery. I don’t think it was anyone from outside. Gibbs and Sproul were the only people you knew in St. Louis at that time—or at least who knew that you were there. Yet tonight Gibbs was sitting on the chaise longue, lying back with all of us near him. If he had made a move somebody would have seen it. Fae was leaning over him. Yet”—said John slowly, softly so his voice drifted out of the darkness above her—“yet Fae sent you for the brandy. And suddenly the patio was dark and we were all striking matches, hunting for a light switch—and then you began to scream and stopped and almost instantly someone else screamed. A woman …”

“Linda. She said she was near me. …”

“Monica, could it have been Linda?”

“Linda! But she …”

“I know, I know. Linda says the attack was actually aimed at her. Perhaps it was, but I don’t think so. Linda knows nothing of the shot at the airport, or of the entering of your suite in St. Louis. I’m only trying to find a clue, Monica. But couldn’t it have been Linda here tonight?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She tried to analyze her own instantaneous conviction. “I think I’d have known somehow. But there was no touch of silk—Linda was wearing silk. And”—she hesitated and then whispered quickly—“and no perfume. I remember that. I think I would have remembered if there’d been any perfume at all. Linda wears a heavy rose scent.”

“What about Fae?”

“I’m not sure. I imagine she uses perfume. Somehow I don’t think it was Fae. There was too much strength for a woman.”

His arm went around her again. “Then you think it was a, man?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so.”

“Was it Carlos?”

Again she strove to think back to something definite, something identifiable, something real and material no matter how small. She found only blank darkness and a memory of terror and hands at her throat.

She pressed closer against John, seeking the warmth and protection of his arms. “No, I don’t know. It may have been. It might have been anyone, John.”

He said, low against her face, “My darling, if only things were different. If I could take you away and …” He checked himself. And again but very gently released her. “Perhaps soon you can go,” he said, “and go in safety. It’s true—what I told you when I came in. Sproul killed Stanislawsky. I—it’s my first proof. God knows I’d rather it proved something else.”

“John, how do you know? Are you sure Stanislawsky is dead?”

There was a pause. Then he said so low that the whisper drifted from the darkness as if it had not physical body and impetus but had merely an ethereal brief existence of its own. “You must never tell this, Monica. I—found something. It was in Sproul’s pocket. He had no right to have it. It—wait …” There was a slight sound of motion. Then he groped for her hand, found it and closed her fingers on something small, and cold and round—a coin, it felt like, about the size of a quarter. He whispered, “It’s a Polish coin.”

“But …”

“You can’t see. And I can’t light a match and show you. But it’s got a date—never mind what date. I can’t tell even you, my darling, for it means too many lives. But any man who carries a coin with that date on it and with a nick in the edge, just below the date—can you feel it?—it’s the sign and symbol of our work. We chose it; it happens to be a date that is old and rarely seen on that particular coin, yet if found it would mean nothing to the Germans.” He paused while her fingers touched the smooth hard roundness of the coin and found the small, identifying (and betraying) nick in the edge of it. He said, “It sounds like a child’s game, doesn’t it? Children in a peaceful world, playing at being spies. Well, it was not a game. It meant life and death. It now means death. It was in Sproul’s pocket—the wrong pocket—but that didn’t matter. I know my men. Sproul was not one of them and was not Polish. That coin belonged to Paul Stanislawsky. Sproul’s possession of it means that Sproul murdered him.

Paul would never have given it up. It could not have been taken from him. There is only one reasonable conclusion; there is only one way for it to have come into Sproul’s possession. He killed Paul and took the money—my money—the money Bill gave him to get us food and guns and ammunition—and with it he took everything Paul had. I don’t think he knew the significance of the coin. I think he merely took it because he cleaned out Paul’s pockets—probably in the hope of keeping the police from identifying Paul. This was kept, I imagine, accidentally, merely because it was a small piece of money, because it meant nothing to Sproul. But it means—I’m afraid … Oh, I know it; there’s no use in trying to tell myself Paul may still be alive. He’d have come to me. He’d have died before he let himself be robbed of that money—or of this little coin in your hand. He did die for that reason. And Sproul had the coin.”

So small a thing, thought Monica, so little; something you could grasp in your fingers, could toss away, could govern and control. Yet so fluid, so powerful a clue to a man’s murderer.

Suddenly she remembered the night Sproul had been killed and John leaving her for an instant and returning to the deep shadow under the balcony where Sproul’s body lay—and then after a moment or two returning to her. She said, “Did you find anything else in Sproul’s pockets? Anything, I mean, that would identify him as a German?”

John did not reply for an instant or. two and there was suddenly something thoughtful and calculating in that pause. Then he said, “When I searched Sproul’s pockets I found nothing. This—came to me in another way. I—well, never mind that now. The important thing is that I know it was in Sproul’s possession. And the only thing I can do now is wait until”—he paused again for an instant and said—“until Sproul is identified. Then perhaps we’ll know. Whether or not anyone is behind him. Any organization, or any person.”

The little coin that meant life and death, safety and danger in faraway Poland and in Mexico City, in that house, in the silent patio below, had grown warm in her hand. She slid her fingernail over the nick that was so small and yet so important. Who had given it to John? Gibbs had not mentioned searching Sproul’s pockets. Had he actually done so? Or was it someone else? And if Sproul had traced Stanislawsky and killed him, then who was Sproul’s murderer and was Gibbs’ story really true?

John didn’t want her to question him; not then—not about that. She was as sure of it suddenly as she was sure of the hard warm pressure of the coin in her fingers. And, as if he sensed her questions and her reason for not uttering them, he said suddenly, “I can’t tell you now about this. But it isn’t because I don’t trust you. It’s—something else. Believe me, Monica.”

He took her hand and slipped the coin out of it. “I can’t tell you. Sproul’s murderer may be our friend or may be our enemy. I believe Gibbs was telling the truth. I’ve got to go now. I told you I brought something for you.” Again he felt for her hand and put something into it. This time, however, it was heavy and hard and unmistakable for what it was. “Do you know how to shoot?”

“I—yes, I suppose so.” Her hand closed on the little automatic.

“Be careful. I’ve taken off the safety catch. Look here, let me put it on the table, away from you.”

“It’s all right. I’ll be careful.”

“If anything frightens you, if anyone—anybody at all, no matter who it is—comes to your room, don’t let him in. Keep the-door locked. Don’t even let Fae in or Linda. Don’t open the door at all. And if anyone tries to force an entrance shoot Into the air. Don’t try to aim the gun. And, for God’s sake, don’t hurt yourself.”

It was curious, she thought, in an odd instant of abstraction, as if she were someone else looking on, surveying herself and John—and everyone in that long, still, night-shadowed villa—it was curious how one adjusted one’s self to danger, to violence, to things that normally were beyond the realm of one’s thought or plan or, by any possible stretch of fancy, one’s experience. She took the gun herself, firmly, feeling a perfectly matter-of-fact reassurance in its solidity. She moved carefully, pointing the revolver away from her, and found the table near the bed and put it down upon it. John had followed her. He said, “Bill and I had a long talk. He thinks that no matter what Carlos does or says or who he is, it is better not to let anyone here know yet about Eric Weller. I agree with him.”

“All right, if you think so, John. But what are you going to do?”

Again there was a slight pause, as if he were arranging words. Then he said, “Just now, wait. The police are at work. Carlos is determined to stir up something. They’ll do everything they can to identify Sproul. When they do we may have something to go on.”

“John, did you know about Carlos’ position here?”

“No, and yes. There were things that made me think he was pretty powerful, one way or another. His handling of the police, for one thing, ostensibly by way of Mendeno. But I didn’t know really. Carlos is deep, as Gibbs said.”

“Then you feel that Carlos was telling the truth. I mean that he is loyal and patriotic and …”

“It is very difiicult to tell an honest man from a spy. I wish I knew rules that would never fail. But I—yes, I think Carlos is honest, according to his lights. If he has a game I don’t know what it is.”

“Who was it who telephoned to him tonight?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I think it was the American Ambassador himself, from what Mendeno said before he turned over the phone. Bill and I talked of that. Whatever it was, he changed his mind about something—yet I don’t know exactly what that something was, for he sent for the police just the same. I saw them come. There are at least ten of them stationed around the house. Now then …” He held up his wrist and she could see the faint glow from the luminous dial of his wrist watch. “I’ve got things to do. You’ll do what I told you to do. My dear—my dear …” The sudden, small unsteadiness of his voice made her think of the morning, the blazing sun and the things he had told her. Yet Linda had said she and John would be married, that they had been planning to marry since that summer on the Riviera and the time had come to do so. Quietly, down in Cuernavaca, Monday.

Certainly in no way had John seemed to do anything but acquiesce with Linda; certainly he had given no sign of a break with Linda.

Yet he had said—as if he couldn’t help it, as if he didn’t mean to, yet he had said it—that he loved her, Monica.

He had also said that she must forget his own words; that it was too late.

Because of Linda?

A wave of something almost like hatred for Linda caught at her. And immediately and as poignantly a wave of shame followed it. She said, fumbling for words, trying to say what was in her heart and unable to tell him all of it, “John, I don’t know why you said the things you said this morning. I mean, that it was—well, too late. That I must forget. Everything. I don’t know whether it is because of Linda, or because of something else. But I—I do realize how unimportant we are. Now. I—oh, I’m saying it badly. All I mean to say, John, is that I—I love you. And I trust you.”

For a moment he stood in silence, so near her in the darkness she could hear his breathing. Then he reached into the darkness and felt for her face and cupped his hands gently around it and kissed her—very quietly, very gently on the mouth. “I’d like to take you along,” he said. “All the long road.”

He held her for a moment.

Then he said, “I’ve got to go now—oh, yes. Where’s Gibbs’ handkerchief?” He moved away. She could hear a slight motion as if he had stooped and folded back the rug. Then he came back to her.

“I’ve got it. Good night. My darling …”

He was gone. The door barely whispered in the darkness. There was the faint click of the closing latch. She stood for a moment, still listening, scarcely able to believe that he could have moved so silently, like a shadow. But he had learned to move like that when it meant his life and the lives of others.

After a moment she remembered his words: “Lock your door. Don’t let anyone come in. There are policemen everywhere. Shoot, don’t aim, just shoot if anything frightens you.”

She locked the door again; the sliding sound of the small bolt sounded very loud in the velvet darkness.

She went to the French doors and looked down and saw—or fancied she saw—a solid, stocky figure near the fountain below; one of the ten policemen probably; it was again a cloudy night with a light rustling of vines and foliage. She stood there for a long time, thinking in a circle that had already yielded no outlet, turning back always upon itself.

But if Gibbs were actually the murderer, if Gibbs were a traitor, if Gibbs had disguised himself in the uniform of an Army officer, if Gibbs were trading on his old-time knowledge and friendship to gain his own ugly, treacherous aims, if Gibbs had tried to kill her in St. Louis and again—somehow—in the darkened patio that night after dinner—then she was safe. For they were looking for Gibbs; they would arrest him as a self-confessed murderer; he would not dare enter the grounds of the Demuth villa that night. Or ever again.

No one would dare enter.

Not with ten policemen on guard, all around the place.

After awhile she went to bed again, touching the revolver to be sure she could reach it, thinking again how odd and yet how matter-of-fact it was that the comfort of its presence had so instantly made itself felt.

It was that night that someone tried and very nearly succeeded in killing Bill Fiske as he lay asleep in the pleasant guest room Fae had assigned to him. That was much later, about three o’clock in the morning, when the deep thick darkness just before the dawn fell like a mantle over the city and over the villa and.the encircling high walls and thick vines.

The weapon used was a peculiar one; peculiar in a very definite and special sense because it so much resembled the weapon which had. been used in the murder of Eric Weller. It was, in fact, an ordinary, sharp, kitchen knife.

He did not raise an alarm. He told Monica about it the next morning—Sunday morning with the sun bright and warm in the patio, the air clear and fine, the sky blue, the gay chairs, the pattern of the vines green and lovely against the pink walls and not a policeman in sight.

There was, in fact, nothing to distinguish it from any other day, nothing to show that it had already set itself into the macabre pattern of the days preceding it—a pattern begun for Monica in faraway New York—in the familiar setting of the Stork Club. Except, she thought, that wasn’t really true. It was a pattern actually begun long before that, only its threads and colors were hidden—woven by unseen hands.

Bill came out into the sunshine, blinked, saw her and came toward her. No one else was there. She had awakened, looked out at the sunshine, looked at the revolver still on her bedside table, felt the quiet of the house around her, dressed and come down to the patio without meeting anyone in the halls. It was about ten and a normal Sunday-morning quiet lay apparently over everything. She saw no policemen anywhere, although a houseman was brushing up what looked like a rather large heap of cigarette ends when she came into the patio. He gave her a quick glance, said buenas dias when she spoke to him and scurried away to the kitchen, whence he presently returned with breakfast on a tray. He put it on the table, asked her if there was anything else she wanted and went away again. The coffee was hot and fragrant. The windows of the house looked down, but no one came until Bill appeared.

The house, geared by Fae, seemed to operate automatically. Bill had scarcely sat down in a chair opposite her when his own breakfast arrived in the hands of the same polite houseman. He looked at it gratefully.

“I need this. How are you, Monica? Have a good night? Because I definitely didn’t. Listen, I want to get out of here. I don’t like anything about it and I don’t trust Carlos and I’m”—he glanced around at the house, the blank shuttered windows, the vine-hung balconies and lowered his voice—“I’m scared,” he said. “I don’t know why anybody should try to murder me. I gave Stanislawsky the money, but that’s all I know. I don’t know what happened to him, I don’t know anything and—look here, somebody came into my room last night and damned near killed me.” He lifted his coffee and looked at her over it. His face was intent, and angry.

“But there were policemen …” began Monica.

“The hell with them. They were asleep, if there were any. Oh, I know they were around. I saw them. Carlos’ trained policemen. Listen.” He touched his lips with his napkin and his shrewd, angry eyes shot another quick look around. “Let me tell you what happened.”

It was a short enough story. Sometime in the night he had awakened suddenly, thinking someone was in the room. He had listened, then moved to turn on the bedroom light. As he did so he distinctly heard a clatter and a rapid movement somewhere in the room and then he found the light. The door had closed; the knife was on the tiled floor.

“It was that that clattered. I’m sure of it. I was sleepy and wasn’t thinking too quickly. I stared at it and picked it up and then ran to the door. By that time whoever was there had got away; nobody was in the hall; I knew that there was no way of finding out who it was.” He sipped more coffee slowly. Somewhere a bird sang softly. The liquid, tranquil sound, the sunshine, the warmth of the morning made an incongruous background for the ugly thing Bill was saying. He said, “I didn’t call the police; no sense in it. I had only this knife to show them. I thought of fingerprints, but by that time I’d handled it myself. And besides …” He broke toast, eying it thoughtfully, his mouth tight.

“Besides …”

“Besides,” said Bill, “for one thing, I don’t trust Carlos. The police are his men. He may be what he says he is—and he may not be. We can find out, of course. But there’s just one thing I know and that is that we’d both be safer somewhere else. I don’t know why anybody would try to minder me, unless it has something to do with Stanislawsky and the money of John’s that I gave him. As a matter of fact it seems to me more likely that it was actually an attempt to frighten me, rather than to murder me. Murder, as things were, would have been too damned dangerous. Possibly that is really why I’m not yelling for the police. But there was nothing phony about the attack on you. I don’t know why anybody would try to murder you, but somebody certainly did and we’re going to leave. I don’t know just how. But Carlos may not be quite the little tin god he claims to be. And he can’t keep us here without some more substantial grounds than he has …” He broke off as Fae came out the door.

It struck Monica almost instantly that Fae had received instructions. Perhaps her air of casualness, of politeness, of nonchalance, was, this time, too studied. She smiled and came toward them. She wore a thin, cool-looking skirt and jacket of beige shantung, and carried a wide-brimmed straw hat and gloves, and a large green bag. “Good morning,” she said. “Did you sleep?” She seemed to feel herself that her manner was overdone, the polite question a little absurd, considering the circumstances. She recovered quickly and said more soberly, “Carlos says that things are going along very well. He told me to tell you. He said that it is not at all necessary for—for our guests to consider themselves”—she hesitated again and a faint flush came into her cheeks—“to consider themselves prisoners,” she finished. “He said it would be nice to take you to see some of our city. This is Sunday, you know—our hobday. I’ve ordered the car around. I thought it would be nice to drive through the city and then try to arrive at Chapultepec Park about noon.” She took a long breath. Her eyes were bright and thoughtful; she turned the hat in her hand and said, “I think I’ll have some more coffee before we go.”

Bill Fiske rose. His manner was as suave and poised as her own. He said, two angry points of fight in his eyes, “Is that an order?”

Fae lifted her charming head and met his look. “I’m afraid it is, Mr. Fiske.”

There was an instant’s silence. Then Bill said, “May I ask if everyone is going on this personally conducted tour? And why are you inviting us to get out of the house for a few hours?”

Fae’s eyebrows lifted, then she bit her lip and said with an effect of sincerity, “I’m sorry, Mr. Fiske. We can only do what we are asked. I realize how this must seem to you but …” She shrugged and turned to Monica. “Will you call John? His room is along that wing—the third door beyond the turn in the corridor.”

She nodded toward the guest-room wing of the house and sat down, crossing her knees and putting down her hat and gloves and green handbag. Bill sat down slowly too.

Monica went inside and up the stairs and along the corridor to the turn. She passed the door where she had stood the previous night and heard Linda’s voice—and then had gone directly down to the patio and found Linda had preceded her, and was sitting there in leisure, drinking—with a half-empty glass beside her as if she had been there for some time. Whose room was there, she wondered—Gibbs’?

On an impulse she paused and knocked, and, as no one answered she turned the doorknob and looked in.

It was Gibbs’ room. She recognized his bag which lay open on the luggage rack at the foot of the bed. There were khaki shirts and handkerchiefs, and an extra uniform hung in the half-open closet. It was Gibbs then to whom Linda had been talking. In a voice that was her own and yet not quite her own.

She closed the door without entering and went on. The next door must be Linda’s, the room with the balcony that was midway in that wing. She passed it and came to the third door which was John’s and, precisely as she had done the night before, she stopped. For Linda’s voice was speaking rapidly, goldenly, beautifully—and not quite naturally—behind it.

She was sure it was John’s room. She knocked.

The voice stopped sharply.

There was the sound of motion, then footsteps on the tiled floor. The bolt clicked and John opened the door. “Monica!” he cried.

The room behind him, however, was empty. It had no balcony, and the windows upon the patio were closed—which even then struck her as odd, on such a warm and glowing morning. Linda was not there; no one was there.

Yet she had heard Linda speaking. Again a wave of anger, of something like hatred of Linda with her blonde braids and her bright-blue eyes, and her claim upon John, caught her as if it had hands on her heart.

She said, faltering, bewildered, “But I thought … Where is Linda?”

A strange expression came into John’s face. He stood looking at her in silence for a moment, very soberly, somehow sadly. He said finally, “Linda is not here.”

“But I—I thought I heard her voice….” She stopped because of the look in his eyes, although she could not have said what it was, or why it stopped her. Yet it reminded her that, only the night before, she had told him that she loved him and trusted him. She said, “Fae wants us to go with her to Chapultepec Park.”

An hour later they did so. All of them, except Carlos. Linda came down dressed in a street dress, and without more than a glance at any of them got in the car—in the back seat with Monica and Fae. If she had been in Johns room talking to him, where was she when John opened the door?

If she had not been there, who was it?

There was no answer to that. There was no answer to anything. Monica sat back between Fae and Linda, with John and Bill on the folding seats ahead, in a kind of dream—a frightened, horrible dream, covered over with bright pictures and chatter and sunshine. They drove in a long glittering car with two chauffeurs, one of whom looked remarkably soldierly and like a policeman.

19

Nothing happened during that long and colorful drive through the lovely and historic city in elear sunlight, with a blue sky blazing above and the lofty heights of mountain peaks rimming the plateau. The only possible excuse and reason for it seemed to be, as Bill had said, to get them all away from the house. Fae talked constantly and charmingly, although as time went on she began to show the strain of keeping up that continual, light chatter. No one but Monica helped her. She pointed out all the sights; they drove to the castle and looked at the lofty pile of stone and arches; they looked at the view; they drove down the winding roadway again. They lunched at Sanborn’s and she told them to look at the tiles and that the coffee particularly was considered excellent. She showed them the outside of the enormous placarded ring where that afternoon, as every Sunday afternoon, six bulls would be fought and killed; she described the spectacle and the colors and told them that Bizet was wrong, and that toreador was, really, torero. Linda at that point frankly yawned.

They drove through Chapultepec Park in time for the Sunday-noon spectacle of the charros, gaily appointed riders, wearing the old Spanish costume of tight, spangled trousers, short, spangled jacket, wide, spangled sombrero—and sitting their horses as if they were a part of them. They drove in the long double parade of slowly moving cars, bowing occasionally to friends in cars moving along in the opposite direction. “It’s like Rotten Row in the old days,” said Fae rather wistfully, “or like the treadmill at the Paris opera.” She sighed faintly. Linda brightened up and bowed and nodded vivaciously toward a car full of young Mexican Army officers. Linda, wearing pale-blue silk with a red rose in her hair, seemed more vivacious, less sulky during that part of the ride and seemed to know a rather astonishing number of people, ranging from elderly Spanish ladies clad in dignified black, to several young United States Naval officers (Naval attaches at the Embassy, Monica supposed), riding in a car that paused for a moment at an intersection beside them. But then the Demuths must be rather widely known and Linda was their niece and obviously had been introduced into the hard-to-know inner circles of Mexican society.

But nothing happened. The Park was crowded, the riding was beautiful, the color, the motion, the gaiety were—or would have been under other circumstances—enchanting—and nothing at all happened.

Fae insisted upon their seeing everything—flowers, great avenues of ahuehuete trees—Spanish grandes dames and middle-class families complete with bright shawls and babies and picnic baskets, buying balloons from the great scarlet and blue and orange clusters bobbing from strings at the hands of the balloon venders.

It seemed to Monica that Fae glanced surreptitiously now and then at her watch. Yet surely the only reason Carlos could have had for getting them all away from the house was to search their possessions minutely.

Eventually they turned homeward, and Fae at last let down and sank back wearily in a corner of the tonneau. There was almost no talk. John smoked and seemed lost in thought. Bill watched the never-ending spectacle of a Mexican Sunday and said exactly nothing. Linda withdrew into silence also.

And if anything drastic had been done or if anything important had been accomplished during their absence then there was no sign of it as they drove through the wide gate and along the green embanked driveway to the house. The dull, pink villa lay as if slumbering in the late afternoon sun. There was no sign of any activity at all. Certainly there were no policemen in sight.

They got out of the car and Carlos came from the patio to meet them. Monica scrutinized his face for some clue as to what if anything he had discovered or what he planned, and there was nothing. Yet actually, just then Carlos must have known that he faced the most difficult decision of his life. If he did not look directly at his wife no one noticed it. He asked politely about their ride.

The villa seemed dark after the drenching bright sunlight of the day. Even the patio looked uninviting and too rigidly enclosed. Again as she entered the hall with its red-tiled floor and winding, polished stairs, Monica was strongly and uncomfortably aware of a sense of waiting, of knowledge, of sentience in the old house itself. John gave her no look and no word but drifted out into the patio for a smoke, apparently, with Bill and Carlos. Señor Mendeno was not to be seen. Linda, still looking rather sulky, went upstairs at once and Monica had started to follow her when the telephone rang sharply below, in the hall. She waited, thinking she ought to answer it, yet pausing because in Fae’s house you knew that telephone calls and telephone messages were probably instantly and promptly seen to by her houseman. As it continued to ring though, she went down the few steps, crossed to the telephone and took down the receiver.

She took it down, however, apparently, as someone else did at an extension somewhere in the villa. A man’s voice said,“… and what about the jecords?”

“It’s difficult. The stores were closed. I don’t know exactly what to get. But so far the status quo is maintained.”

It was John’s voice. The other voice said, “I’ve got to see you. Can you manage…?”

She hung up the receiver. The other voice was familiar yet too disguised either purposely or by the telephone to make sure of. She considered whether or not it was Gibbs’ voice, yet Gibbs (fleeing, hiding, trying to escape the police) would not be likely to telephone boldly to the villa where the wires might be tapped. She went to the door into the patio. Bill Fiske was sitting near the table talking to Carlos who leaned back at ease, listening, his face without expression. John was not there and she waited, standing in the doorway until John appeared at the doorway directly across the patio—the doorway which led along the narrow passage to the kitchen. A few feet from that door, in the darkness of the previous night, a living and ugly thing had stretched out its predatory hands and caught her.

John swung out of the door and it banged lightly behind him. He had a metal tray from the refrigerator in his hand. He carried it to the table and carefully scooped out the cubes of ice into a silver pitcher standing on a tray with some glasses.

• Obviously he had made the ice an excuse to go to the kitchen. Had he had an appointment then to talk to someone—Gibbson the telephone at that time?

His dark head bent as intently over the small, homely chore as if it was his only thought. “I have to test everybody,” he had said. “Even you …” She could understand that; she could understand the reasons for it. Yet he must have known when he saw her, when she brought him the money, when he told her as much as he had told her, when he said he loved her, that she was to be trusted.

If it was Gibbs on the telephone, what had he meant? What records? What was it John found difficult? Why—if it was Gibbs—did he have to see John? Why couldn’t they wait?

Bill’s voice drifted across the patio as he lifted it sharply. “… the knife was there. On the floor. I think it was only meant for a threat. But I don’t know why. And I don’t like it. I want your permission to leave and to take Monica with me. We’ll go anywhere you say, but …”

He was, then, telling John and Carlos of the attack upon him in the night—with policemen all around. John put down the empty ice tray slowly, looking down at Bill. Carlos did not move. Carlos said, “My dear sir, you will be safe here….”

His voice sank and she could not distinguish further words. But if John remained in that house, she would stay, too. She turned and went to her room.

In a few minutes she was sure that it had been painstakingly searched during their enforced absence. A silk and scented handkerchief case lay on top of the dressing table rather than in a drawer where she’d left it; lipstick had rolled under the bed. She stood for awhile at the French doors, thinking of the ugly similarity between the murder of Eric Weller and the attempt upon Bill. A sharp-bladed kitchen knife. Bill had pretended to believe it was only an attempt to frighten him. But did it really mean that the same person who had killed Eric—so dreadfully, so quietly, while she sat in the next room—had attempted to kill Bill in exactly the same way, hoping for the same success? In a house that was guarded, with policemen all about. And if so, then who?

Could anyone have entered the villa somehow—anyhow—during the night?

The sky was gradually darkening; someone came from the kitchen door with a new tray of glasses and she realized that, as she had lost herself in thoughts that again found no conclusion, others had come into the patio and there was an augmented hum of voices. She’d better change and go down. No one would be dressing that night for dinner. She put on one of the dresses Uncle Bill had packed for her, a thin cream wool dress with, again, a scarlet belt. It seemed a long time since she had watched him slip that dress off its padded silk hanger and fold it quickly and pack it. John came as she was putting on lipstick. He carried a long dark coat over his arm and at the first glimpse of his face in the mirror, as she sat at the dressing table, she got up and whirled around. ‘What is it?”

“You’re coming with me. Quick. I don’t want anyone to know. I’ve got a coat for you. It may be cold….”

At the door he said, whispering, “Be very quiet….”

No one was in the passage, no one on the stairs. He went ahead, motioning to her to wait. There was a light in the patio and the murmur of voices. From the big front door, his figure half obscured by the gloom in the hall he beckoned to her and she went as quietly as she could down the remaining steps and crossed the hall. He held open the front door. It was definitely darker; the green banks along the driveway had lost their glow; the sun was down and the shadows already growing heavy. John took her hand and they walked rapidly along the grass at the edge of the driveway, rather than on the pebbles, toward the gate. No one was there, either. John glanced up and down the street, said in a low voice, “There it is …” and started toward a taxi parked at the corner of the street. The taxi driver looked up as they came and flashed his white teeth in a grin, as if he were expecting them. John glanced behind him along the pink wall of the Demuth grounds. The gate still stood wide open. So far as Monica could see, no one stood there watching them leave. She got in and John followed.

“Okay,” he said to the driver. “Go straight ahead. I’ll tell you where to turn.”

“Si, Señor.”

John put the coat he carried around her shoulders. It was black silk—faille, she thought—cut smartly and well. He said, “I got it from the coat room. I think it’s Fae’s. Now then”—he leaned forward—“turn left here. Then left again.”

The streets were unwontedly crowded. John said briefly, glancing through the window at the back, “The bull fight is over. The streets will be like this for awhile. If I’m lucky we can lose ourselves in the traffic—and lose anybody who’s followed us from the villa.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Xochimilco.”

“Xochimilco?”

“The floating gardens. It’s a—oh, it’s like a fair. Canoes,’ boats, stalls. You’ll see.” He leaned forward again to direct the driver. By this time they had woven in and out of the thick lanes of traffic, spotted so constantly with taxicabs that anyone—a policeman for instance, hidden somewhere at the Demuth place and ready to follow anyone leaving it—must by that time have been thrown off the scent, confused as to which taxicab to follow. John said, “I think it’s safe now..All right, driver. We’ll go, now, out to Xochimilco.”

The driver sent a flashing, smiling glance over his shoulder.

“Si, Señor.”

John settled back although he kept a more or less constant watch on the highway which presently unrolled behind them.

“I’ve got to see somebody out there,” he said. “And I had to take you with me. I can’t leave you alone in that house. It’s too dangerous. Carlos says things are taken care of. I don’t know what he means. I do know he searched my room and he or his policemen took”—he paused and said—“at least someone took it.”

“Took what, John?”

He glanced at the driver. “Something I got from Gibbs.” His tone and his quick look at the driver was guarded. As before, it reminded her of the world in which he had livedin which all of them lived just then—where anyone, anywhere, in the most innocent guise, might be an enemy, listening. She did not question further.

The driver turned on lights. The glow of the last sunlight lingered in the sky. John got out cigarettes and gave her one and, above the flame of the match he held, he gave her a quick, searching look. “I ought to give you a chance to go back,” he said suddenly. “I think it’s safe. I think it’s all right. But …”

“I’ll go with you, John. All the way.”

He blew out the match and threw it away. And suddenly took her in his arms and held her like that, against his shoulder, tenderly, as one would hold a child.

He would tell her, she told herself, when he was ready to tell her. She’d said she would trust him. She had told him that she realized the relative unimportance of one man and one woman. The trouble was it was a man she loved, and this might be the only time that he would ever hold her like that, close and warm. She had a sudden, frightening vista of years, blank, cold, empty years to come. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to store up something of the present moments, something to remember, something to hold like a little flame to warm her heart during that blank time to come. It means that, she suddenly saw, to women. Memories of tenderness, memories of the warmth and strength of a man’s arms, memories of love—and a hard and lonely road ahead. “I’d like you to go along with me,” John had said, “all the long road.”

Perhaps he knew something of her thoughts, for he pressed his face down against her hair and she thought he kissed it.

The minutes—so few minutes out of a> lifetime, so quickly vanishing—passed. Lights began to show, people in laughing, shouting groups, couples holding hands, were walking along the edges of the road. They turned and turned again, passing other cars and presently parked along the winding, crowded roadside. “Wait,” said John to the driver. He smiled a little as he helped her out of the car. “Okay?” She smiled back at him, not very brightly and not very bravely, but it was a smile. “Okay,” she said. And meant, if that is all that life holds for me, then I still say it is good. I’ll take it and keep it and that at least is mine.

Lights and noise and music were ahead; before she knew it they had reached the fair and were plunged in the middle of it. Mexicans, Spanish tourists—stalls gay with brightly striped serapes, and pottery, and beads, and embroidery, and lace work, were everywhere. Strolling bands of musicians, singing, playing guitars and smiling, wove among the tourists. It was not fully dark; there were lights everywhere but there was still light in the sky. A little Indian boy stopped them, selling horn ash trays; another selling flowers. Their eyes were soft and big and dark, their small faces eager. John said, “It should be this way. I think I see the bridge.”

He guided her through the moving, pushing, but always good-natured and always gay crowds. It would be easy, she thought, to lose one’s self for a moment or two. The paths, the crowded, gaily blanketed stalls, the many lanes leading here and there among them and always the people everywhere were incredibly confusing. They came to a bridge and she saw a calm stream of water, crowded with flower-laden boats,, and reflecting spaces of twilight sky. Music floated from what seemed to be an open restaurant on the other side of the stream. An Indian woman squatting beside an open brazier extended a flat pan of tortillas toward them, smiling, offering to sell. John said, “Come this way.”

They went down to a kind of platform-like pier. Boats were drawn up along it—boats decorated with brilliant, fresh flowers. Arches massed with flowers spelled the names of the boats: Sarita, Conchita, Carmen, Lupita. She caught John’s arm. “It’s beautiful.”

“Wait,” he said, searching the boats. “Ah—here it is! Prospera.” He guided her toward a boat with an arch made of white and red carnations spelling, as they followed the curve of the arch, the letters amazingly regular and clear, the name, Prospera. The boatman looked up as they approached it. John said, “This is the Prospera?”

The boatman smiled. “Si, Señor. Will you seats take?”

John helped Monica into the boat. It was flat-bottomed and there were low, comfortable chairs. In the darkening blue sky above them the first evening star was shining again, pale now and lemon yellow. John said to the boatman, “You know where to go?”

The boatman nodded. “Como no, si, si, Señor.” He leaned against his pole. They moved out into the water, passing other boats, gay with flowers, with picnic parties, with laughter and singing. As they went slowly along the canal and left the pier behind, the boats became fewer. John said, “It is an institution, this fair. Fae was telling me about it. Originally the islands along the canals were literally floating gardens—gardens anchored to rafts. Eventually they rooted themselves and became actually islands, fixed in one place. The canals wind in and out among them for miles.” He was looking from side to side, scrutinizing the slowly moving boats they passed or met. He broke off to speak to the boatman. “What is the name of the boat we are to meet?”

“The Cherita, Señor,” said the boatman. “I know the way….” He nodded and smiled reassuringly. A boatload of troubadours came up beside them. Its striped awning was still bright with color, although the shadow beneath it was so deep that Monica had only a glimpse of the serapes over the shoulders of the men sitting there, with guitars and mandolins. The five men in the boat and their boatman all began to sing and John tossed them a coin. “They’ll stay along beside us,” he said.

As the singers burst into the lilting rhythm of a Mexican street song with a loud although rather discordant accompaniment, John said low, under cover of the music, “Monica, Gibbs is here, somewhere. I’d better tell you now. I couldn’t run the risk of the taxicab driver hearing, in case he was—well, I couldn’t.” There were only a few boats now, drifting along toward them now and then, like lazy, tranquil wayfarers pleasantly belated, moving slowly homeward, toward the pier. Nowhere did Monica see a familiar face. John nevertheless watched ceaselessly as he talked, his voice low against the song of the troubadours moving with them, accompanying their boat. “We had time for five minutes’ talk last night, Gibbs and I. We couldn’t say much. He had to get away then and I had to help him.”

“You know …”

“Gibbs is working for the F.B.I. There was something they had to know. They sent Gibbs—he was on sick leave—to find out. They gave him instructions. It was Gibbs in your suite in St. Louis—Gibbs and Sproul. Sproul had got in, somehow. Gibbs scared him away. It was dark. He never saw him but that’s what he thinks. He thinks it was Sproul that shot at you at the airport. He caught Sproul trying to get up to your balcony. His story of that was exactly as it happened, except, thinking Sproul was merely knocked out, he searched him quickly. He didn’t get much in the way of identification, but he did find that coin among the odds and ends in Sproul’s pockets. He showed the things to me and of course I knew the coin—and I knew what it meant. Well, Gibbs went to the American Ambassador’s last night. He phoned me awhile ago …”

“I heard …”

“Oh. That was you.” John breathed a sigh. “I heard the click. I didn’t know. That’s all right, then. Well, we had to meet without anyone knowing it. He gave me some other evidence he had and told me to do what I could. There was”—John took a long breath, his eye ever seeking among the boats—“there was nothing I could do. Look out!” cried John.

They rounded a curve suddenly and shot into a deserted and very narrow canal—so suddenly that the singing troubadours went on along the main canal. It was darker in the side canal, trees overhung it closely and it was very narrow, twisting between high green banks, through the thick shadows of the trees. The boatman grinned back over his shoulder and nodded. They moved around another curve in the narrow, almost deserted canal. And then several things happened at once.

Another boat burst out from around a bend. Its arch of lavender and white flowers spelled the name Cherita. It came straight toward them hard. The Prospera wavered; John sprang to his feet and,shouted, “Stop! Look out! Turn, damn you!” He leaped for the boatman and there was the sound of crashing and splintering wood.

There was another sound too, sharp and hard and loud. Then the two boats crashed together. John crumpled and slid to the bottom of the boat. As the Prospera slowly turned over, the boatman leaped into the canal. John’s body was slipping toward the water. As Monica tried to reach him, clutch at his coat, she was herself caught under the arms and pulled over the edge of the overturning boat. She was all at once, incredibly, in the other boat.

It was the Cherita. In a sharp, queer flash she remembered its name. It had an awning and-it was almost dark under it. The person holding her in a steel-like embrace called to the Prospera boatman as he splashed to shore, “Good! I will tell your leader that you have served your Fatherland well.”

Monica gasped, “John!”

“Quietly does it, my dear Monica. In another moment you will be safe. So that pretty little mouth of yours will never talk again. You’ll be safe. As John is safe and Eric Weller is safe.”

But John was somewhere in that water, unconscious, struck, wounded. Monica could swim. She wriggled out of the hands holding her and was grasping for the railing when she was seized again. “Oh, no you don’t! John’s dead by now. I’m a good shot. Shooting is easier than a knife, if noisier. But, if anyone in the main canal heard it, they’d pay no attention to it. He’s dead and can’t help you now. It really is a pity, but my own life means more to me than John or you or anything else in the world.”

The canal was deserted. The trees hung low. The edge of the Prospera stuck up from the Water dimly. There was no sign of John anywhere and the hands upon her were cruel.

“Uncle Bill!” Monica’s cry was uncomprehending.

“Yes, my dear,” his voice was strange and yet familiar, “John—and then you. And then I’m safe.”

Her hands fought and fought and then dropped.

20

It was a strange and curious thing that in that world of darkness and horror there could be the sound of music. It throbbed and throbbed and grew louder and louder. Then some small faint voice, far away and distant, in the middle of black chaos said, “The troubadours—the troubadours are returning. …”

She was lying in a huddle against wooden boards and something hard and cold pressed against her arm. The throbbing, of the guitar was closer and closer and then it stopped abruptly. She struggled and tried to move and could only gasp for air. It seemed to be quite dark, and out there, somewhere in the darkness, were other sounds, voices and shouts and splashing—and then shots. Hard and heavy, revolver shots that muffled themselves strangely amid trees and shrubbery and water.

She couldn’t think; she couldn’t move; she could only breathe and breathe as if there were nothing in the world but air. Something jarred her; something struck hard against wood. She was in a boat, of course. She could feel it rock gently and another boat had struck it. She began then to remember and, as she did so, there were heavy feet scrambling about near her on wooden flooring. She looked up and thought dimly, it is the troubadours again.

Then she remembered John and sat up. Somebody was standing under the awning looking down at her, fanning her with a sombrero. It was one of the troubadours, yet, amazingly, it was Pinky—Pinky, a red-haired elevator boy who ought to be in New York, not in Mexico. Then his face broke into a wide grin and he shouted to someone else, someone outof sight, someone across the water, “Hey, Captain Brooke. She’s okay. She just opened her eyes.”

“John …” whispered Monica hoarsely to that incredible, that unbelievable face, freckled and grinning and crowned with red hair. “John!” Pinky said, “He’s okay, Miss Blane. They’ve got him in the other boat. Hold everything….” He disappeared. There were more scrambling footsteps, someone was lifting her and it was another troubadour. Only he had Gibbs’ face.

“Monica—Monica …”

“Where is John?”

“He’s all right. Listen, are you hurt?”

“He was shot. The boat turned over….”

“I know, I know. John’s safe. He was hurt, but not much. We got him out and into our boat. He was floating. He had sense enough to do that, and to hang onto the boat. Monica …”

She pushed back her hair. Gibbs’ eyes were very bright in the shadow; the other boat was directly beside them now, almost touching. She cried, “It was Bill! It was Uncle Bill!” She stopped on a queer sobbing breath and whispered unevenly, “Oh, no—no—no …”

Gibbs patted her shoulder awkwardly, yet comfortingly. “You’ve got to take it, Monica. It’s true. It was Bill Fiske. I know how you feel about him, but it’s true. You’ve got to, well, bite on the bullet. You’ve got to …”

He left her and presently came back. She lifted her face to say, “When can I see John?”

“We’ll get back to the pier as fast as we can. You’ll see him then. Sure you’re all right, Monica?”

Another face, a strange face—one pf the troubadours again, a bright shawl over his shoulder, a wide hat on—was peering at her from the other boat. The face wasn’t Mexican. It belonged behind a desk. It was a thin, intelligent, fine-drawn face with remarkably keen and steady eyes. Gibbs said, “I thought you saw us. We were under the awning. Then your boatman lost us. We got back as fast as we could. Monica, this is Mr.”—she did not hear the name; perhaps because the other man coughed rather loudly just then—“of the F.B.I.,” finished Gibbs. The man from the F.B.I. smiled and said, ‘We’ll get a doctor as soon as we can. Mr. Basevi is really all right, we’ve got him safe here. He’s weak and lost some blood but he’s conscious.”

There was something she felt she had to tell them, something terribly important.

“Bill Fiske …” she began.

“Yes, yes, we know,” said the F.B.I. man. And Gibbs said, “You have to bite on the bullet, Monica.” He’d said that before; but then he knew. Everyone would know. Bill Fiske …

Monica’s head turned dizzily. A third boat had come up on the other side of them now—in her distress she had not been aware of its approach. It was another flower-bedecked craft, whose arch bore the name Lupita. Looking at it, Monica looked straight into the face of Carlos. Fae was there, too, and Linda.

Linda stood full in the light from a torch, staring past Monica with hard and brilliant eyes—eyes that were fixed upon Bill Fiske. Bill had risen from his place in the troubadours’ boat, he stood there erect and tense, and the unwavering look between the two was like a dark and glittering chain between them.

Suddenly there was a movement at Bill’s feet. John’s hands took hold of the gunwales of the boat and slowly he pulled himself to a sitting position. Monica watched him, unable to speak.

“It’s okay, Monica,” he said. “Everything’s all right.” He leaned over and grasped the gunwale of the Cherita. “Help me, Gibbs.”

Pinky steadied the boat; Gibbs half-lifted John into the Cherita; he lay, white and exhausted but alive, his head in Monica’s lap. “It’s okay,” he said again, his hand holding hard to her hand. His eyes, though, went to Carlos’ boat and Monica looked too.

And Linda’s blonde face looked strange under the flaring light. She cried abruptly, shrilly, “There he is! Bill Fiske. He’s a Nazi spy. I’ll tell you everything.”

Bill Fiske’s lips moved under his mustache. His eyes were like cold black daggers. Fae, behind Linda, put her hands over her face and sat there for an instant, shrunken, stricken, small—and then with a gesture of great resolution and pride, put down her slender hands and rose, her chin high, and went to stand beside Carlos. The water was so calm, the night so still, the voices so suddenly quiet that Fae’s voice was perfectly audible. “You were right, Carlos.” She turned to Linda. “You are my niece,” she said in a voice like an icicle, as chill and as hard, “but you are a traitor. I heard your voice. I heard the records. Carlos found them today. He let me hear them tonight. I knew it was your voice. I thought you were working for the Underground and you were working for our enemies—for the Nazis—all the time.” Then she looked up at Carlos. “Do as you think best, my dear.”

“But I’ll confess,” screamed Linda, suddenly violent, suddenly beating at the air with her white hands. “I’ll tell you about the Nazis. Just wait—just listen! They are going to lose. I’m not on their side. Not now. I tell you they’re losing. I’m an American. I’m a United States citizen. I know things. They trusted me. I’ll tell …”

It was a strange and eldritch scene. The three boats were almost locked together, the water under the trees in that small and narrow canal as still as a pool. The torches burned brightly and Linda’s frenzied voice went on: “He did it. He taught me to be a Nazi. When we went to Europe he gave me things to read—five years ago. He said I was an Aryan—my mother was German; only my father was French. I’d been born in America but my blood was pure Aryan. I disowned my father.”

Fae said in a voice like a knife, “Go on.”

“Of course I went to the Germans. You thought”—her eyes flashed toward Fae—“you thought my sympathies were French. They weren’t. I went straight to Berlin and eventually, when they knew they could trust me, they let me have a part in their glorious …” She stopped, choked, bit back the words. She cried, “But I was wrong. I—I’ll tell anything. I’ll tell you about him.” She pointed at Bill Biske. “He’s a Prussian and an agent for Hitler. He has been for years. For years he’s been planning for the day when war would come again.”

Bill Fiske?

The F.B.I. man put a hand on Pinky’s shoulder. “Is that the man?” he said, pointing at Bill Fiske.

The torches wavered and flared and cast dancing red lights upon the banks, upon the water, upon the faces—upon Bill Fiske’s face with its high cheekbones and clipped mustache. A Prussian face … How curious it was, thought Monica briefly, that she had never seen that. A face she had known so long—yet all the time, she knew it now, he’d been fulfilling his appointed place, under the guise of legal business, under various guises perhaps, waiting, as Linda said, for the new war. Pinky said, “Sure, that’s the man. That’s Mr. Fiske. J saw him leave Miss Blane’s apartment and he had two men carrying away a trunk, and it looked heavy. That’s the man….”

The F.B.I. agent said to Gibbs, “All right. We’ve got them both.” Then he spoke to Carlos. “I think, Señor, we’d better get these people back to shore.” Carlos spoke quietly to the minstrels and all at once there was something soldierly in their bearing, and policemanlike.

Their boat drew away from the Cherita and in a silent, skillful sweep came around, alongside the Lupita. Linda, a policeman on either side, her blonde braids gleaming in the light from the torches, was helped over into the troubadours’ boat.

Bill Fiske, sitting opposite her now, watched her steadily. Linda’s stocky figure was unmoving; her face blank and white.

Someone put out the torches as the boats moved away, poled by the policemen. In the first, the Lupita, were Fae and Carlos (who watched everything closely but particularly his wife who had acted so loyally). Linda and the handcuffed Bill Fiske were in the second boat, the troubadours’ boat, with the F.B.I. man and another Mexican policeman.

It was curious, watching the two boats glide away along the narrow canal, through the shadows. There was by this time only a faint glow in the sky and the sounds of merrymaking and music had died gradually away.

And Monica heard the story from John and Gibbs and Pinky—in pieces, as it occurred to them, riding back slowly over the still and tranquil water, with the awning of the boat Bill Fiske had rented, the Cherita, folded back, and the night sky and stars above, and the fragrance of the flowers that trimmed it all around them.

Gibbs said, “So that’s that. It was Linda’s voice. I couldn’t be sure. Did you play the records, John?”

“Yes, I thought it was Linda, but no one could be certain until the voices were closely compared. She was called Constance Henderson and claimed to come from Des Moines. I’d never heard her broadcast from Germany. Her broadcasts were beamed toward the United States in order to tell them what a fine country Germany was and to describe the glowing benefits of being a colony of Germany’s. I’d heard of some woman—some American woman—who was doing that. But I never dreamed it was Linda.”

“Linda …” said Monica.

John said slowly, “It’s not a very pretty story. Tell Monica.” In the twilight his face was very white.

Gibbs said slowly, “Well, you see, Monica, they made me do it. The F.B.I., I mean. That is, when they explained, of course I knew I had to. They—well, it was like this. An American woman, a traitor, had been broadcasting over short wave for the Germans. She did it for a long time and the F.B.I. couldn’t identify her. The name Constance Henderson couldn’t be traced. They sifted it down one way and another, for they can do magic things, almost. Then all at once she stopped broadcasting, and they had some reason to think it possible that she had managed to return to the United States or Mexico. If so, they wanted to nab her. By that time they’d got it down so they thought she might conceivably be Linda Chavon. Don’t ask me how but somehow they do it. Well, they knew that the five of us had gone to Europe together and Linda and John had not returned. They sent for me. They had me listen to the records. It sounded like Linda’s voice, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure. Time had passed and, anyway, a record especially when made from a radio short-wave broadcast differs from the actual physical voice. I couldn’t be sure. So they asked me to take over the job of trying to find and identify her if she were in the United States. God knows I didn’t want the assignment. We’d been friends. And John that summer …” He stopped.

John reached up and touched Monica’s face. When he spoke it was to Gibbs. “I was a fool,” he said. “I knew it long ago. Even before … Go on, Gibbs.”

“I couldn’t tell at first, whether or not you were still in love with her. I wanted to tell you everything. I couldn’t until I was sure. Last night when Monica was attacked I knew the truth. I could see it in your eyes. I knew it was Monica for you—not Linda. I knew then I could tell you what I’d been sent to do.”

Gibbs lit a cigarette. “They—the F.B.I., I mean—coached me. I didn’t know a thing about F.B.I. work. I was pretty dumb and I made my blunders, God knows. I thought though—they asked me about all Linda’s old friends—that if anyone in this country knew of Linda’s whereabouts (providing she were actually in America) it would be you, Monica. I thought she’d come straight to you. So, I couldn’t ask you outright because Linda would have told you some story to account for keeping her presence a secret.”

“So it was you who put the cachet on the table,” said Monica suddenly.

“Yes. And I felt damn silly too,” said Gibbs. “But I—they’d said to trick you into leading me to Linda—if you knew where she was. So I thought of the cachet—its being French would lend credence to the message I wrote. I followed you and Weller to the Stork Club and put it on the table when you were dancing and got the hell out of there. I stood on the street in the doorway of that pet shop not far from the Stork Club. You didn’t see me. I taxied after you when you went to your apartment house and didn’t come,out. I waited and waited and felt sillier and dumber every minute and wished to God they’d asked somebody else to do it. Well, anyhow, after a long time I saw the lobby was empty and I went in. I got into an empty elevator and went up to your floor and hung around there for a. long time. Then you came out and I thought you were going downstairs. I figured I’d better get out before you saw me. So I took the elevator down again. Pinky was in the lobby and he must have seen me. I went outside and hung around. Just as I’d decided you weren’t going to do anything and you didn’t know anything about Linda you came out with Bill Fiske. I remember now I thought it was funny I hadn’t seen Weller leave but, dumb as I am, I thought no more about it then. I followed you to the airport. They’d given me a top travel priority and I demanded a seat on the plane with you. You were already seated and didn’t recognize me. I pulled my rank on them and made them let you keep your seat. You didn’t see me in Chicago either. By that time I’d decided you were going to Linda as fast as you could go and maybe the ruse the F.B.I. had suggested was going to work. I wired them and kept after you. It was in Chicago that Sproul picked us up, but I didn’t notice him at first.”

“He shot at me …” began Monica. Now they had come to the main canal and the lights of the fair were diminishing. The gaily decorated boats had all apparently returned to the pier until another Sunday. The sky was quite dark.

Gibbs went on, “Yes. But I thought it was somebody shooting at me. By this time I was sure you were going to Linda. I couldn’t call the police or do anything about it. I had to stick with you. But that night—they’d told me to search your stuff and how to do it. The hotel manager, when I showed hifn my credentials, let me have a key. When I got into your suite, I was pretty clumsy…. Anyway, I didn’t know that Sproul was there. He had already searched …”

“He took the fake message from Linda. Why did he do that?”

Gibbs shrugged. “I don’t know. To examine it, I suppose. He—his job was to get rid of you, Monica.”

John said suddenly, “Bill sent him, Monica. Wait, though … Go on, Gibbs.”

“Well, to go back to St. Louis. It was just lucky that Monica wasn’t in her bedroom. Sproul was out to kill her when I barged in. I thought I was being quiet, but I probably sounded like an invading army. Anyway, after a brief scrap inside the suite Sproul got away before I had a good look at him. I didn’t know who he was or what he was up to and couldn’t investigate because my job was to stick to Monica. When we got here, we found Linda. When I heard her voice again I was pretty sure she was the woman who’d been broadcasting.”

“Poor Gibbs,” said Monica softly, and tightened her hand on his knee.

“The F.B.I. had given me some records that were made just like plain Victor records. I came in to town and got a machine and ran through the records—and the things she said,” said Gibbs grimly, “made me want to get my hands on her treacherous, lying throat.”

Water swished quietly against the side of the boat. They were going very slowly. Monica said, after a moment, “I heard her voice in your room, Gibbs. And in your room, John …”

‘When I had to make my quick exit, I told John to get the records and listen to them and see what he thought. The F.B.I. had said if I found Linda to try and get a transcription of her voice for comparison, but things, broke too quickly. I had to get out. I’ve told you about Sproul. It really happened that way, except I’m not sure he was actually dead when I left him. The F.B.I. told me to stay out of anything that happened, only find Linda, try to identify her as Constance Henderson and let them know. I went from Carlos’ place to the American Embassy. They phoned Carlos to lay off the search for me. Then they put me on a wire to the F.B.I. in Washington and in New York. John had told me—we had about ten minutes’ talk and we talked fast—John hadtold me that Bill said he’d called the F.B.I. and notified them about Eric Weller. That was the first I knew of Eric Weller’s murder. I talked to the F.B.I. and Bill hadn’t notified them. It immediately pointed to Bill. They went straight to the apartment house, got hold of Pinky and questioned him. They found that Pinky had seen a big trunk that looked”—again there was a grim tone in Gibbs’ voice as he quoted Pinky’s word—“that looked “heavy’ being carried out of Monica’s apartment the morning after she went away. So the F.B.I. man picked up Pinky to identify Bill….”

“Mr. Bill Fiske,” said Pinky. “I flew down, Miss Blane, with an F.B.I. man in an Army plane. I’m going to be an F.B.I. agent. He said I had good aptitude for observation.”

Ahead of them were the lights of the bridge and the restaurants and they could see outlined against the halo of lights the black shapes of the two preceding boats—carrying Bill, carrying Linda, carrying Carlos and Fae and the Mexican police and the man from the F.B.I. whom Gibbs had asked to come.

John said to Gibbs, “What about Weller? What did you find out?”

“He was one of Fiske’s henchmen,” said Gibbs. “They opened his safe-deposit box. He’d left records there showing his connection with it. He’d also apparently tried to scare Fiske. What they think is that he got nervous and scared. He seems to have been a weak man, under Fiske’s thumb. He began to see that in choosing the Nazis he’d chosen the losing side. Rats desert a sinking ship….”

He paused. Perhaps all of them, against that dark, moving water, against the halo of lights ahead saw the same picture of Linda—beautiful and blonde and terrified, promising to turn against the Nazis, to tell everything, to do anything to save herself, to place herself on the winning side. John said soberly, “Had he threatened Fiske?”

“They think so. For there was one piece of paper in the box that said just this: ‘If anything happens to me tell the F.B.I. to investigate Bill Fiske’; it gave his name and address fully. Obviously he had tried to shake down Bill Fiske and Fiske wasn’t having any. Weller got scared. Fiske must have threatened him, so Weller put that piece of paper in his safe-deposit box and told Fiske about it. Fiske knew he had to get rid of Eric. Perhaps he didn’t intend to do it so soon, but they think Weller got scared. Did he see the message in the cachet, Monica?”

“Yes.”

“How did it affect him?”

“He was frightened. He changed. He was like a different person.”

John said slowly, “He made love to Monica. I told you….”

“He thought Monica, working in Fiske’s office, would have something on Fiske. And he could induce her to tell him. It’s the kind of reasoning and methods they are taught. Fiske must have come in. He was on the lookout, perhaps, found Eric Weller in a hysterical mood, scared to death by my message, and had to kill him then and there. Weller was a weak man. The F.B.I. man said the weak men were always dangerous—in a gangster setup or anything. But the important thing was that once having got rid of Eric he had to keep the fact of his death a secret.”

“Why?” asked John.

“The F.B.I. said as long as no one knew that Eric Weller was dead the contents of the safe-deposit box were perfectly safe. Bill Fiske himself couldn’t get into it, but nobody else would, either, so long as the rental was paid regularly. But if the fact of Weller’s death were known, then eventually the box would be opened. He was safe so long as nobody knew Weller was dead. But—well, that’s why he set Sproul after Monica. Sproul was Fiske’s man. John thinks, and they do too, that Sproul killed Stanislawsky. The men in New York are working on it now but they work like lightning. They know just what to do and how to do it,” said Gibbs rather wistfully as if he felt he hadn’t covered himself with glory in his own excursion in F.B.I. fields.

Pinky said, “Gosh! We got here only about an hour ago and landed and came straight out here to meet you, Mr.Mr. …”

“John Basevi,” said John with a faint grin.

“And look what’s happened! How’d Mr. Fiske know we would be here?”

John said slowly, “I imagine Linda listened over the extension when I talked to you, Gibbs, and you told me to take a boat called the Prospera….”

“It was the only name I could think of quick,” said Gibbs. “I knew we’d find one called that. There’s always a Prospera. I thought we’d string along with you until we got away from most of the people. Linda must have told Fiske. There was plenty of time. He got out here and brought his man. He got rid of the real boatman, chartered the boat or something, and put a man on it….”

Monica remembered Bill Fiskes words to the Prospera boatman. She told the men. “That,” said Gibbs, “is what Fiske must really have been doing the night he got here—hunting around for Sproul, of course, and not being able to find out what happened to him. That’s probably why he actually made the rounds of the bars. Then he got in touch with a fellow here who was sent to work for the Germans—maybe by Fiske himself, so far as that goes. That was the motive for everything, John. He used your money for Nazi activities. He was smart. He’d established himself over a period of years. He thought you were dead in Poland—he counted on it—then he heard from you and that you were sending a man for money. Stanislawsky must have got in touch with him, somehow, but I doubt very much whether Fiske ever gave him any money.”

John said, “Stanislawsky’s trail, so far as I could find it, ended here. The first thing for me to do was to establish Fiske’s good faith—ask him to bring me money and to come to meet me. He was the only point of contact Stanislawsky had in America.”

“You suspected him from the first?” asked Gibbs, sharply.

John moved his head. “No, I couldn’t. I only had to prove something definite for or against him. When he sent Monica with money right away, when he tried apparently to cover for her in order to protect her from any trouble about Weller’s death, I put that on the credit side for him. When he said Stanislawsky had reached him in New York, I questioned again.”

“As soon as he knew you were in America he knew he had to get rid of you, John,” said Gibbs. “He was smart. He intended to bluff it through until he had a good chance at you.”

“Monica told me about Weller,” said John. “Only the two of us knew about that; that was urgent to him, too.”

Pinky stood up and cried excitedly, “Something’s happening in the boat ahead!”

Something was happening in the boat directly ahead. In the dim twilight they could see violent movement, something that looked like arms coming up and quickly down again and all at once the boat was overturned, there were figures splashing in the water, shouts, screams—then very high, reaching to the pale sky a thin, terrible scream.

The boat that carried Fae and Carlos got there first.

Linda was dead.

She did not drown. She and Bill Fiske were both alive when they were pulled out of the shallow water. He had risen unexpectedly, suddenly, strongly, and struck at her with his handcuffed hands and pulled her with him into the water. But Linda had collapsed, and had almost instantly, quietly died. It was a heart attack, they said later. The cold water, the excitement, the fear of Bill Fiske had done it. It was curious, said Gibbs later, rubbing his hands wearily over his pale face, how in a strange way she had brought about her own death.

It was an attempt, said the F.B.I. man briefly, on Bill Fiske’s part, to keep Linda from carrying out her threat to expose everything she knew of the Nazis. He had shouted something, as he struck her, in German.

“She was ready to rat,” said the F.B.I. man. “A lot of them do when they see they’re going to lose. Weller wanted to.”

They were, by then, in the patio again. The sky was faintly gray. An excited, curious houseman had brought them coffee. Fae sat straight and dignified, restraining grief and shame as Carlos expected her to do. He sat beside her, proud of her own pride and, Monica thought, inwardly relieved. For Linda had been sent there, purposely, by the Nazis. Her job had been to take full advantage of the Demuths’ position, to be a contact woman, to gather and relay information.

Monica had little memory of the chaotic trip back from the fair—with the lights all gone, the hurrying cars, the ambulance. John, though, insisted on sitting near her and insisted on Gibbs accompanying them. Yet Gibbs had said. “Thank God,” low, under his breath, when they reached the struggling figures and the overturned boat and he had seen Linda. She did remember that.

She had sat and listened. She was aware of the talk, of the telephone calls, of the arrival and departure of the Ambassador himself (gracious, wise, and very kind to her and to John, and to Fae and Carlos), of the dry, terse statements of the F.B.I. man—even of Pinky hovering admiringly over him like a red-headed freckled shadow. Some of the telephone calls were to and from New York and Washington. The case against Bill Fiske was already amazingly complete, for they had, in that short time, got into his secret files, his safe-deposit box, his records. All of it confirmed their early theories.

“We’d have come out here and taken him anyway by morning,” said the F.B.I. man looking as fresh and unwearied as the dawn itself. “As it was, Fiske had a talk with Linda obviously, who apparently decided to convince him of her friendliness. What we think she hoped to do”—his voice was as cool and impersonal as if he were talking of merely names and places, and not human emotion—“we think she hoped to play both ends against the middle. She wanted to be on the Nazi side if there was a chance of their winning. When even her twisted and hysterical mind decided they will inevitably lose, I think she decided to make good some kind of position here.” His eyes flickered to John. “She was once engaged to you, was she not, Mr. Basevi?”

John said, “Yes.”

Fae said suddenly, “Before we went to Xochimilco we—Carlos and I—had a talk with Linda. I’d better tell you. We—that is, Carlos—while the rest of us were driving, found and played the records of Linda’s voice. In the early evening he played them to me. I knew it must be Linda. She had not been with me, you know, in France, but I had never questioned her loyalty and, when she said she was working for the Underground, I believed her. But tonight I—I knew. I told my husband we had to act as we would act if she were not my niece. We called her; we played the records. She broke down. She said she would tell us everything. We explained that we could do nothing to save her but she—she insisted. She told us then that Fiske had got away. That she had told him to go to Xochimilco, that she had helped him escape by showing him a small door in the wall, unguarded, because we thought no one knew of it except the servants. She said—well,” Fae drew herself up and steadied her voice, “so we went at once. My husband brought policemen.”

Carlos, his face full of love and pride laid his jeweled hand upon his wife’s.

The F.B.I. man said, “I expect Weller had been told by Fiske that you”—he looked at John—“were alive and in Mexico. I expect it scared Weller pretty badly. They had gone on the theory that you were dead or as good as dead.” He glanced at his watch. “It was a question of knowing where to look. One man among millions of men …”

“What about his claim that somebody tried to murder him? Has he talked yet?” asked Carlos.

The F.B.I. man shook his head. “No, he won’t talk. But only Linda Chavon would have threatened him and, while she didn’t want him to know that she was trying to marry John Basevi in order to get standing and money on the right side when the Nazis lose, still I don’t think she’d have killed him. That seems to me an attempt on his part to divert any possible suspicion from himself and also to give him some sort of talking point to get himself and Miss Blane out of the house. No, he hasn’t talked. But it doesn’t matter. We’ll have all the main facts sewed up.” He put away his watch and held out his hand toward John. “Good-bye …”

John said as quietly, “I hope we meet again….”

It seemed to Monica strangely simple, and economic. Actually the whole force of a great organization was back of that power and swiftness of action and decision. Carlos and Fae and Gibbs went to the door with him. Pinky said, “Goodbye,” and went too, his boy’s face beginning to show pale but his eyes bright and excited to the end. It was very quiet in the patio. John, lying back in the chaise longue said, “Come here, Monica….”

She went and knelt beside him, putting her head against him. He laid his hand on it and stroked her hair as he talked—low and brokenly, in phrases. “It was always you. Only I didn’t know it. But I used to think of you—nights—in Poland.”

“John, John,” she-whispered, pressing her head closer.

His hand touched her hair lightly. “My darling, we can have a week—two weeks—but I’ve got to go back. That’s what I meant when I said it was too late. That’s my job—over there. I haven’t the right to take a wife—or to leave a wife….”

She put her face against his lips. She said slowly, “I can’t find the words to argue. But I want to be your wife—for a day or for all my life. I …” she lifted her head and looked at the sky. “John, dawn, is coming. It’s a new day. One day peace will come, like that. With the end of night, and the sun. And you’ll be back.”

He held her closer as a small rim of golden fight touched the sky. Together they watched the day approach.

About the Author

Mignon G. Eberhart (1899–1996) wrote dozens of mystery novels over nearly sixty years. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, she began writing in high school, swapping English essays with her fellow students in exchange for math homework. She attended Nebraska Wesleyan University, and in the 1920s began writing fiction in her spare time, publishing her first novel, The Patient in Room 18, in 1929. With the follow-up, While the Patient Slept (1931), she won a $5,000 Scotland Yard Prize, and by the end of the 1930s she was one of the most popular female mystery writers on the planet.

Before Agatha Christie ever published a Miss Marple novel, Eberhart wrote romantic crime fiction with female leads. Eight of her books, including While the Patient Slept and Hasty Wedding (1938), were adapted for film. Elected a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master in 1971, Eberhart continued publishing roughly a book a year until the 1980s. Her final novel, Three Days for Emeralds, was published in 1988.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1945 Mignon G. Eberhart

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 979-8-3372-0490-1

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Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- About the Author
- Copyright