Fear is the Key. Alistair MacLean
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a thousand times too much. I turned slowly, keeping my hands well away from my sides. Maybe I would try something clever later. But not now.
The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn’t the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once.
The second thing I noticed was that the bathroom doorway seemed to have shrunk since I’d seen it last. His shoulders didn’t quite touch both sides of the doorway, but that was only because it was a wide doorway. His hat certainly touched the lintel.
The third thing I noticed was the kind of hat he wore and the colour of the jacket. A panama hat, a green jacket. It was our friend and neighbour from the Ford that had been parked beside us earlier that afternoon.
He reached behind him with his left hand and softly closed the bathroom door.
‘You shouldn’t leave windows open. Let me have your gun.’ His voice was quiet and deep, but there was nothing stagy or menacing about it, you could see it was the way he normally spoke.
‘Gun?’ I tried to look baffled.
‘Look, Talbot,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I suspect we’re both what you might call professionals. I suggest we cut the unnecessary dialogue. Gun. The thing you’re carrying in your right coat pocket there. With the finger and thumb of the left hand. So. Now drop it on the carpet. Thank you.’
I kicked the gun across to him without being told. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t a professional too.
‘Now sit down,’ he said. He smiled at me, and I could see now that his face wasn’t chubby, unless you could call a lump of rock chubby. It was just broad and looked as if you could bounce a two by four off it without achieving very much. The narrow black moustache and the thin, almost Grecian nose looked out of place, as incongruous, almost, as the laughter lines round the eyes and on either side of the mouth. I didn’t place much store on the laughter lines, maybe he only practised smiling when he was beating someone over the head with a gun.
‘You recognized me in the parking-lot?’ I asked.
‘No.’ He broke open the Colt with his left hand, ejected the remaining shell, closed the gun and with a careless flick of his wrist sent it spinning ten feet to land smack in the waste-paper basket. He looked as if he could do this sort of thing ten times out of ten, everything this man tried would always come off: if he was as good as this with his left hand, what could he do with his right? ‘I’d never seen you before this afternoon, I’d never even heard of you when first I saw you in the lot,’ he continued. ‘But I’d seen and heard of this young lady here a hundred times. You’re a Limey, or you’d have heard of her too. Maybe you have, but don’t know who you got there, you wouldn’t be the first person to be fooled by her. No make-up, no accent, hair in kid’s plaits. And you only look and behave like that either if you’ve given up competing – or there’s no one left to compete against.’ He looked at the girl and smiled again. ‘For Mary Blair Ruthven there’s no competition left. When you’re as socially acceptable as she is, and your old man is who he is, then you can dispense with your Bryn Mawr accent and the Antonio hairdo. That’s for those who need them.’
‘And her old man?’
‘Such ignorance. Blair Ruthven. General Blair Ruthven. You’ve heard of the Four Hundred – well, he’s the guy that keeps the register. You’ve heard of the Mayflower – it was old Ruthven’s ancestors who gave the Pilgrims permission to land. And, excepting maybe Paul Getty, he’s the richest oil man in the United States.’
I made no comment, there didn’t seem to be any that would meet the case. I wondered what he’d say if I told him of my pipe-dream of slippers, a fire and a multimillion heiress. Instead I said: ‘And you had your radio switched on in the parking-lot. I hear it. And then a news flash.’
‘That’s it,’ he agreed cheerfully.
‘Who are you?’ It was Mary Blair speaking for the first time since he’d entered and that was what being in the top 1 per cent of the Four Hundred did for you. You didn’t swoon, you didn’t murmur ‘Thank God’ in a broken voice, you didn’t burst into tears and fling your arms round your rescuer’s neck, you just gave him a nice friendly smile which showed he was your equal even if you know quite well he wasn’t and said: ‘Who are you?’
‘Jablonsky, miss. Herman Jablonsky.’
‘I suppose you came over in the Mayflower too,’ I said sourly. I looked consideringly at the girl. ‘Millions and millions of dollars, eh? That’s a lot of money to be walking around. Anyway, that explains away Valentino.’
‘Valentino?’ You could see she still thought I was crazy.
‘The broken-faced gorilla behind you in the court-room. If your old man shows as much judgement in picking oil wells as he does in picking bodyguards, you’re going to be on relief pretty soon.’
‘He’s not my usual––’ She bit her lip, and something like a shadow of pain touched those clear grey eyes. ‘Mr Jablonsky, I owe you a great deal.’
Jablonsky smiled again and said nothing. He fished out a pack of cigarettes, tapped the bottom, extracted one with his teeth, bent back a cardboard match in a paper folder, then threw cigarettes and matches across to me. That’s how the high-class boys operated today. Civilized, courteous, observing all the little niceties, they’d have made the hoodlums of the thirties feel slightly ill. Which made a man like Jablonsky all the more dangerous: like an iceberg, seven-eighths of his lethal menace was out of sight. The old-time hoodlums couldn’t even have begun to cope with him.
‘I take it you are prepared to use that gun,’ Mary Blair went on. She wasn’t as cool and composed as she appeared and sounded; I could see a pulse beating in her neck and it was going like a racing car. ‘I mean, this man can’t do anything to me now?’
‘Nary a thing,’ Jablonsky assured her.
‘Thank you.’ A little sigh escaped her, as if it wasn’t until that moment that she really believed her terror was over, that there was nothing more to fear. She moved across the room. ‘I’ll phone the police.’
‘No,’ Jablonsky said quietly.
She broke step. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said “No”,’ Jablonsky murmured. ‘No phone, no police, I think we’ll leave the law out of it.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ Again I could see a couple of red spots burning high up in her cheeks. The last time I’d seen those it had been fear that had put them there, this time it looked like the first stirrings of anger. When your old man had lost count of the number of oil wells he owned, people didn’t cross your path very often. ‘We must have the police,’ she went on, speaking slowly and patiently like someone explaining something to a child. This man is a criminal. A wanted criminal. And a murderer. He killed a man in London.’
‘And in Marble Springs,’ Jablonsky said quietly. ‘Patrolman Donnelly died at five-forty this afternoon.’
‘Donnelly – died?’ Her voice was a whisper. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Six o’clock news-cast. Got it just before I tailed you out of the parking-lot. Surgeons, transfusion, the lot. He died.’
‘How horrible!’ She looked at me, but it was no more than a flickering glance, she couldn’t bear the sight of me. ‘And – and you say, “Don’t bring the police.” What do you mean?’
‘What I say,’ the big man said equably. ‘No law.’
‘Mr Jablonsky has ideas of his own, Miss Ruthven,’ I said dryly.
‘The result of your trial is a foregone conclusion,’ Jablonsky said to me tonelessly. ‘For a man with three weeks to live, you take things pretty coolly. Don’t touch that phone, miss!’
‘You