Once Departed

Chapter Five

Quint Jones was awakened from no deep dream of peace by the brutal ringing of the phone next to his bed. He tried manfully to ignore it. It wasn’t to be ignored.

He grabbed it and snarled, “Yes?”

Mike Woolman said cheerfully, “Come on, come on. I can tell from your voice, you’re not out of bed. It’s eleven o’clock.”

Quint grumbled, “It got very drunk out last night.”

“Where’s all that gung ho energy you had yesterday? All that impressive column writing ambition?”

“Shut up,” Quint said. “What’d you want?”

“Look Quint, this case is pyramiding. Rumors are beginning to get around amongst the boys. I got a call from Paris headquarters of World Wide Press. They’re thinking of sending a special man down here to handle the story.”

That wasn’t so good from Mike’s viewpoint. He ought to be able to wrap a story up on his own, not depend on outsiders to come in and do his work for him when it got inportant.

Quint said, “So?”

“So, what’s the dope that you have that you wouldn’t tell me yesterday? Maybe you can reword it a little so you won’t be betraying any confidence.”

Quint was silent, scowling to himself. He shook his head in an attempt to achieve complete clarity.

Mike said urgently, “Especially, what’s the jazz about Martin Bormann and Doktor Stahlecker?”

The columnist shifted in his bed, uncomfortably. “Well, I was told a bit more about this Doc Stahlecker last night. It seems as if this is the doctor who patched Hitler up when he was blown to smithereens by the German generals in 1944. Sewed an arm on him and that sort of thing.”

Mike said nothing. Obviously digesting.

Quint said impatiently. “Evidently Doktor Stahlecker is almost as big an authority on organ transplants and such as Professor Ferencsik. What do I have to do, draw you a blueprint?”

Mike said, “Jesus.”

Quint said sarcastically, “May I suggest you get your fanny over to wherever it is Nicolas Ferencsik is staying and interview him on the question of just why he’s come to Spain, of all places?”

Mike grunted, “Uh huh. Swell.”

“Well, what’s more obvious?”

“Nothing, except Ferencsik absolutely refuses to see all reporters.”

“Pull some wires. Get hold of Joe Garcia or somebody and make some hints. Put some pressure to bear on the guy. Lean on him. He obviously knows plenty.”

The reporter said, “I’ll let you in on a secret, chum. Nobody, but nobody, twists the arm of a guy with as big a name as Nobel Prize winning Professor Ferencsik. This is a nasty world we live in, but not even here in Spain would the public allow the authorities to give Nicolas Ferencsik a hard time. It’d be like lowering the boom on Einstein, or Albert Schweitzer. Any more bright ideas?”

Quint Jones scratched himself unhappily through his pajamas. His mouth tasted like last week’s crop of maggots. He said, “Listen, where is Ferencsik staying?”

“What do you mean, where is he staying? He’s staying at the Dempsey’s, of course.”

“The Dempsey’s. You mean Marty and Ferd’s? A man with an international name like that!”

“Friend, you must have come in late. How’d you think Marty and Ferd ever got him to come to a party at their place? He’s living with them. He’s old family friends of Marty’s people. Her old man, way back before the war, before Hungary went commie, financed some deal of Nicolas Ferencsik before he got famous. Staked him to a lot of dough for research materials and all. He’s got a soft spot for Marty, or something. Knew her when she was a girl.”

Quint pursed his lips, as though to whistle. He said, “Okay, Mike, I’ll see what I can do. Call you back later.”

Mike Woolman sneered. “Oh, you think you can get in to see him, where I can’t, hey? Let me tell you friend, when Ferencsik says he won’t see reporters, believe me, he won’t see reporters.”

“That’s because you reporters don’t bathe, don’t gargle your throats in the morning and are illiterate clods.” Quint told him earnestly. “Now a columnist is something else again.”

“Go marry your mother,” Mike told him and hung up.

Quint grinned at the phone for a minute before returning it to its place. He grunted and swung his legs over the side of bed and fumbled his feet around for his slippers. They weren’t in their usual place. He grunted again and made his way to the kitchen barefooted. At least he didn’t have a blockbuster hangover this time. Marylyn Worth must have spotted him right at the crucial time and got him there to Botin’s and some food into him.

Nice girl, if she wasn’t so square, he told himself as he fished a bitterly cold bottle of coke from his refrigerator. Coffee for others, but the morning after he’d been drinking, it was coke for him. As a matter of fact, he had read somewhere, in a consumer’s union report, or something, that there was three and half times as much caffeine in a bottle of coke as there was in a cup of coffee. Be that as it may, it settled his stomach and gave him a lift.

He finished the coke and started breakfast proper a-going. That was another bit of wisdom he’d accumulated over the years. To get over a binge, get hot food into your stomach as soon as possible. Once you’ve been able to hold two hot meals down, the hangover is through.

When he’d forced down two eggs and some Spanish bacon—which he despised—along with some toast, he felt moderately better. Bacon, he remembered all over again, was the one thing he wished he could get into the American PX for. Except for the Danes and British, the Europeans didn’t have the word on bacon.

Breakfast safely down, he went into the bathroom to shower, shave and brush his teeth. He wished the hell he knew more about Nicolas Ferencsik’s subject, organ transplants. He wondered if it would be possible—if he was able to get an interview with him at all—to bring Marylyn in on it. As a science teacher, she evidently kept up on all fields, including recent medical developments. He had her phone number out at the base, but, as he recalled, this was first day at school, and he doubted there was any way to get her away before evening.

Thinking of Marylyn brought back her conversation of the evening before. As he dressed, he thought about her. Who was he to call the girl a square?

Now that he thought of it, the very term irritated him. When he was a boy, the word square meant honest, a person of integrity. Now it had come to mean somebody who was stupid, not with it, old fashioned. What had happened to our civilization when a honest man was sneered at?

And maybe she was right about him. By modern criteria, he was a celebrity. He had it made. He earned more money than he knew what to do with. Could travel anywhere he wanted, or live anywhere he wished. He had made it.

Yeah?

He went back to the phone and rang the Dempsey phone number.

A maid answered. “Digame ?”

“For favor, senorita, deseo hablar con Senor Dempsey,” Quint told her.

“Un momento, por favor.”

Ferd Dempsey, his voice slurring, was on the line. “Hello, hello, hello. You must be selling something. Nobody I know’d be up this early.”

“Ferd,” Quint said. “This is Quint Jones.”

“Oh yeah, hi Quint. What’s the deal? Brother, it was rugged last night. A bunch of us were over the Hilton and guess who turned up? Remember that queer muscle man movie star, was here doing the lead in that show about Cortes and the Aztecs and all? Well, he’s back in town. Talmadge. Clark Talmadge. He’s going to do another movie with Clara Lucciola that wop star, with old Manny King directing. They were all there, and Bert Fix, the flack and Lonny Bait the photographer. Anyway, we started at the Hilton and then Manny said how about coming up to his place. He had some real Swiss absinthe. The real old stuff. So we took along a couple of bottles to last us till we got there. He’s got a hell of a big estate in Mirasierra. Big swimming pool and all. Christ did we laugh. We threw Clark in the pool and then we all stood around the edge and when he tried to get out, we’d give him a drink, but we wouldn’t let him out until he could prove he was too swacked to swim. It was a riot. Then about two o’clock in the morning, Marty decided what we needed was a weiner roast, but nobody had any weiners, so we all got back in the cars and…”

Quint listened for awhile, his face expressionless. He could have heard substantially the same report from Ferd Dempsey five days out of seven. Or from Marty, for that matter. Or from four out of five of his Madrid acquaintances.

He said, finally, when the other stopped for breath, “Listen, Ferd. What I wanted to ask you about. Professor Ferencsik is staying with you, right?”

The other’s voice went suddenly cautious. “The Professor? Oh, sure. Kind of keeps to himself, but the place is big enough, Lord knows.”

“Well, listen, I’d like to talk to him.”

There was a silence, then, “Damn it, Quint. He’s not giving out any interviews. He kind of wants to rest, or something. I don’t know what he came to Madrid for. Why’d’nt he go to some resort along the sea, or something? You can’t rest in Madrid. It’s always hopping.”

It’s not Madrid that’s always hopping, Quint protested inwardly, it’s the expatriate set, led by the Dempseys.

Quint said, “I’m not just a newspaperman, Ferd. This is a bit above the usual level.” He hated himself for trying to pull rank. In fact, he felt like a fool.

Ferd said, unhappily, “Gosh, Quint. There was a New York Times man around yesterday. The Professor wouldn’t even see him.”

Quint said, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea. I don’t want an interview. Tell him I was fascinated by what he said about World Government the other night, and wanted to talk to him about it.”

“Oh,” Ferd said dubiously.

“At least tell him, and call me back if he wouldn’t mind seeing me.” Quint hung up.

The return call, and invitation, came within fifteen minutes.

It was Marty who met him at the door of the penthouse. Marty looking distressed as Marty Dempsey always looked in the morning. Marty wearing a housecoat, bearing an enormous highball glass in her hand, and looking every year of her fifty odd years.

“Dahling,” she shrilled at him in her whisky tenor. “Whatever are you doing up and around at this time of day, you poor boy?”

“It’s practically noon.” He gave her a peck on the cheek. “I wanted to see Professor Ferencsik.”

“Oh, Uncle Nick. He’s an ogre. He won’t talk to anyone, dahling. It was all we could do to have him make an appearance at the party. And then he retired to his rooms and sulked before things hardly got going.”

“Ferd fixed it up for me,” Quint said easily. “What in the world’s Professor Ferencsik doing in Madrid, anyway? I’d expect him to wind up at UCLA, teaching. Or in Vienna, or Paris or someplace. Now that he’s left Hungary.”

Marty took a pull at her glass. “Oh, he came to see Ferd and me,” she said archly. “We’re old, old friends you know.” She frowned slightly, as though trying to remember something not especially important. “There was something else he wanted to do here, I don’t think I was listening very well. Have a quick one, Quint?”

He shook his head, “Recovering from last night,” he told her. “A hair of the dog doesn’t do me any good. I either have to take the whole dog, or nothing. And then I’ve started all over again.”

“Poor dahling,” she said vaguely, patting the side of his cheek. “I’ll take you to Uncle Nick. But don’t blame me if he throws you out.”

Ferd and Marty had done the Professor well. He had a small suite of his own. Room, bath and a sitting-room study. Possibly a bit on the garish side for a noted medical scientist whose clothes were a touch seedy and worn as though he couldn’t care less.

He shook hands hesitantly. “I recall you from the other night, young man,” he said. “You didn’t seem to have much to say at the time.”

Quint Jones liked the quality of the man’s handshake and also the quick penetrating manner he had of looking full into your face. It would be difficult to steer too far from the edge of truth with Professor Nicolas Ferencsik. Quint said, “I was listening rather than expressing my own ideas.”

“And you found my opinions of interest?”

“I found them all of interest,” Quint told him, guardedly. “But one of Marty’s cocktail parties was hardly the place to form views of my own.”

“Oh, you,” Marty giggled. “It was quite a soiree, wasn’t it?”

The Professor said to her, “Martha, my dear, why don’t you leave Mr. Jones and me and let us get to serious discussion? Perhaps we’ll join you later.”

She fluttered archly, as she went, “Now don’t you boys say anything my ears shouldn’t hear.”

They both looked after her, Quint thinking, what could it possibly be that Marty’s ears haven’t heard by this time in life ?

The professor said absently, “When I first met Martha, I thought of her as a child, though I can be only a few years her senior. I am afraid even then that it was difficult for her to take the world seriously.”

Quint wanted an opening. He said, making his own voice go musing, “I wonder if she and Ferd aren’t doing what a good many of the world’s population seems to be. That is, avoiding thinking of the problems that confront us all.”

The feisty little Hungarian scientist shot him a quick piercing look. “I have long since come to that conclusion, sir. Won’t you have a chair? Take that one there, I can speak for it’s comfort. It is so also in my own country. In Budapest, even in intellectual circles, it is all but bad manners to discuss the dangers of nuclear war and the almost certainty of complete destruction of the race if such conflict ever develops.”

They both took chairs, and Quint listened to the other as though with fascinated attention.

Ferencsik went on, in his voice an element of passion. “But when I left Hungary and traveled to the West, I was more shocked still. If one is invited to dinner in London and brings up such subjects as the continuing development of international missiles and ever larger H-bombs, it is considered such a faux pas as almost to have your hostess order you from her home. I am gratified, Mr. Jones, to have a man of your capabilities express interest in my beliefs in this field.”

So the old boy knew of Quint’s work as a columnist He was going to have to make this good, to get past the Hungarian’s defenses. If the man was leery of newspapermen, he’d be guarded against Quint. A bit of preliminary discussion was in order.

Quint said, “Frankly, some of the rebuttal at the party also interested me. The fellow named Bart Digby who pointed out the difficulties in ever uniting the world’s more than one hundred sovereign governments. Take my own country, the United States. Our earliest tradition was to remain aloof from foreign affairs. More recently, of course, modern developments have forced our government into world leadership of the West.” He twisted his mouth wryly. “What we like to call the free-world, although it includes everything from the absolute monarchy of Saudi-Arabia, to a half dozen South American military dictatorships.” He shrugged in deprecation. “But the point is, trying to unite the United States with—well, eventually Russia, would be a hard nut to crack. Offhand, I can’t think of a single Senator or Congressman who would vote for such a merger, no matter what the terms.”

But Ferencsik was shaking a finger at him negatively and already in some heat. “Your background in the history of your own country is faulty, sir. It was Benjamin Franklin, in the early days of the founding of your republic, who stated that one day he hoped to see every nation of the world represented with a star in the flag of the United States. It was his desire to work into the Constitution a method whereby all nations were free to admission.”

That was new to Quint, but it was the sort of thing that Old Ben would have advocated, he had to admit.

Ferencsik went on. “And I quite agree that today few Americans would vote to join a world state, and the same applies to most nations. However, this is a thing that shall come about only when and if the development of affairs forces the world into it. If we all, every living member of the race, came to see that it was the only alternative to destruction of us all, then perhaps the steps would be taken.”

Quint didn’t want to antagonize the man, at least not at this stage of the game, so he pulled in his horns somewhat. He said, turning on the charm gently, knowing better than to arouse the suspicions of the other by being too agreeable, “You were discussing with the Russian, Nuriyev, the need of developing a leader to point out the way, a super-man who…”

But at the mention of the former Soviet hachetman, Professor Ferencsik had made a grimace of distaste. Quint broke off his sentence in the middle and took advantage of the opening. He said, “I noticed the other night that you seemed to take particular exception to his opinions.”

The Hungarian flicked a hand in quick disgust. “A butcher. I have met him before. At the war’s end, I worked for a time with Russian scientists. We were attempting to rescue from the debacle some of the work of German researchers and, for that matter, some of the better German scientists themselves.”

Quint nodded, trying to look perceptive. “I understand the Americans, of course, did the same thing, in the areas we captured. In view of your own interests in surgery, you must have been particularly anxious to find if Doktor Stahlecker was still alive.”

Nicolas Ferencsik began to say, “Yes. One of the reasons…” But then he stopped. His eyes pierced the expression of the American columnist, finding that below the surface which had been meant to be hidden. He came to his feet.

His voice was cold. “I’m afraid, Mr. Jones, that my time is limited.”

Quint stood too. He made a gamble, knowing he was doing this wrong even as he spoke. “You don’t deny, do you Professor, that you have come to Madrid in an attempt to find the Nazi refugee, Doktor Stahlecker?”

The other was coming to a quick boil, but he snapped, “You are, so I understand, a friend of my host and hostess. I can hardly order you from the house. But I can request that you save me your presence, sir.”

Quint flushed, but made one last attempt. “There are some deaths involved in this, Professor, and some mystery that you might help clear up. For instance, does this mean anything to you? It was a note left near Ronald Brett-Home’s body. It read: Why was it necessary to burn H’s body ?”

The other hadn’t even heard him. Nicolas Ferencsik had spun on his heel and entered his bedroom, closing the door behind him.

At least he hadn’t slammed it.

Quint let himself out of the sitting room of the suite, and looked up Marty Dempsey, who was sitting in a sun chair on the terrace and looking vaguely out over the rooftops of Madrid. She was seldom quite completely alive this time of day.

Quint looked at his wristwatch, through force of habit. It was slightly past twelve. “I’ll take that drink now,” he said. I’ve just had brought home to me a defect or so in my character.”

“There’s the makin’s, dahling,” Marty waved in the general direction of a pushcart bar, on the top of which were several bottles, several glasses and a vacuum bottle of ice cubes. “You didn’t talk very long with Uncle Nick.”

“Uncle Nick threw me out,” Quint said sourly. He poured some bourbon into the bottom of a glass and added an ice cube. There was gingerale and soda available, but one of the few opportunities Quint had these days to drink American whiskey was at the Dempseys, and he considered it a treat to be taken straight. In actuality, he could have afforded it himself, easily enough, but he rebelled against the price in Spain.

Ferd came wandering out, evidently to replenish his glass. He was a square-set man going to pot. In his youth, when he had played college football, he must have been a beautiful specimen. Now he seldom played with anything but bottles and fast cars. The combination had turned out so incompatible that his series of accidents had recently terminated in the revoking of his license by the Spanish authorities.

He said, “Hello, hello, hi, Quint. Come to see the Professor eh? Hey, Marty, where’s Uncle Nick?”

“I’ve already seen him,” Quint said. He found a chair and took down half the bourbon. It burned pleasantly. He remembered unhappily that he was lousing up his formula of two hot meals on the stomach after a drinking binge, before you started again.

Marty was looking at Quint. “What do you mean he threw you out, Quint dahling? He seemed perfectly happy about talking to you.”

Quint shrugged. “I suppose he was right. I got in to see him under false pretenses. Told him I was interested in his World Government ideas, where actually I wanted to get a line on what it was that Ronald Brett-Home had set up for your party.”

Ferd, who had just finished making himself a stiff one at the little bar, turned and grumbled, “Let’s don’t get into that, damn it. There’s been cops all over the place. Asking lousy questions, bothering the maids. Everything. You’d think the guy was killed here.”

Marty said, “I’ll never forgive Ronald for causing us so much trouble. Oh, yes, I know, dahling, speak only well of the dead. But really, he and his Gestapo friend might have picked some other…”

“Who?” Quint snapped.

Marty blinked at him. “What did I say?”

“You said something about Ronald and his Gestapo friend. What Gestapo friend?”

She giggled. “Oh, dear, I’d forgotten all about that.” She put a finger to her mouth, as though in thought. “I didn’t listen very well when Ronald was telling us how it was that the party would be a great success, very controversial, if we’d have Uncle Nick as guest of honor and spread the word it was open house. He said he had cooked something with a friend of his, a former Gestapo man.” She looked at Quint archly. “Didn’t I tell you it was all cloak and dagger and all that.”

Ferd had dropped heavily into one of the deck chairs. “Stroehlein, or something, his name was. Some squarehead name.”

Quint’s eyes went from Ferd to Marty. “Over the phone you said you’d never heard of Albrecht Stroehlein.”

“Oh, did I, dahling? Well, I suppose I’d forgotten his name. I can’t remember foreign names. Why don’t they all have simple names like Smith and Dempsey and Jones? Do be a dahling and fill my glass. Scotch, with just a teeny weeny soda.”

Quint got up and got her drink, his mind racing. So the weepy eyed ex-Nazi, Stroehlein, had been in on Brett-Home’s scheme. That would suggest that Stroehlein was working for West Germany, rather than East—always assuming that he was working at his old game of espionage-counter-espionage at all.

He pulled himself to a halt suddenly. The hell with it. A few minutes ago he’d decided the whole thing was out of his realm. It wasn’t his business. Let Bart Digby handle it on the international politics level, or Mike Woolman on the news level, but let Quentin Jones leave it lay.

He gave Marty her new drink and said, “I think I’ll get on home and see if I can knock out a column.”

“See you later, dahling,” Marty told him vaguely. Her mind, such as it was, already off on some other tangent.

Ferd waved his glass in Quint’s general direction, and honored him with a quatrain from the Rubaiyat: “Some for the Glories of This World, and some Yearn for the Prophet’s Paradise to come. Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!”

“Man, you have said it,” Quint told him dryly. “So long Marty, thanks for the drink.”