Or the World Will Die

VII

She picked me up two blocks from the tourist house on Thursday morning at seven and we had coffee together on the edge of town.

After coffee, I drove, and I was conscious of her eyes on me. I smiled at her and said, “Glad to get away from the turmoil, Alice?”

“I was just thinking that in your own way, Tony, you’re an incredible type.”

“How so?”

“You look as though you were born in a neat dark suit with two fountain pens in the top pocket and a comptometer between your ears.”

“You’re only middle-aged once, I’ve heard.”

“I don’t mean that exactly. In the days of the Round Table you would have looked like you were the keeper of the castle accounts.”

“Is that bad?”

“You can tell better than I. On the inside you are the gallant youth with banners flying in the sun, and on the outside you look remarkably stuffy. What do you think when you look in the mirror?”

“I calculate the hours from the last time I shaved and wonder how soon I’ll have to shave again. Aren’t you getting a bit personal, my sweet?”

“Isn’t this trip a bit personal? Remember, dear, I am Mrs. Lewis Smithson and I have every right to make comments about my bus-band’s appearance, no matter how dull he looks. You do look like a proper husband, Tony. Too proper.”

That stung a little. I have no urge to be a figure of romance, a slim-waisted, hard-fisted character who is more whistled at than whistling, but maybe the wound of her refusal was a bit fresher than I had thought. I sulked, I believe.

She touched my arm. “Sorry, Tony. I’m just a little girl with a big mouth, I guess, and not too damn sure of myself. I know. I act as if Alice knows everything, but actually I find out every day how little Alice does know.”

She was silent for a long time, sitting over in her corner, looking out at the fresh green of Virginia in the spring. I drove over to Winchester and got onto Route 11 which would take us all the way to New Orleans.

“What are you doing in this rat-race, Alice?” I asked. “I could understand it during the war. You had every reason. But why now? You have some money, don’t you?”

“Not much. It’s the same old reason, Tony.”

“Karl?”

“Yep. Poor, dependable Karl. Nobody else. I’ve certainly looked for somebody else. But they just don’t exist.”

“Why haven’t you told him and asked him to make something of it?”

“I did. Lord, he was pathetic. A long line about how he was a Polack that just barely finished high school and my mother swam ahead of the Mayflower, and he didn’t have a dime except his pay and he was ugly besides. He told me it was just proximity and I would regret it later and all the usual sort of thing. I know he feels it too, that’s the damnable part of it. I’ve turned quickly a few times and seen the way he looks at me. It’s his squareheaded pride. So I hang around. Maybe from here on in I’ll go to seed and finally he’ll marry me out of pity or something, once he’s sure that nobody else will.”

“Maybe I can find a chance to talk to him.”

“And he’ll smile in that sweet way of his and tell you that he respects your judgment, but... Always that word... but. I hate it.”

We found a tourist court just beyond Johnson City, Tennessee, that first night and established the routine. I hauled one of the twin beds over into a far corner of the big room and went for a walk, coming back after she was in bed and the lights were out. I undressed in the dark and slid into bed.

“Asleep, Alice?” I whispered.

“Sure. Can’t you hear the loud mores,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking that we’re doubling the odds against us traveling together. The opposition undoubtedly knows the faces of the five of you who work for the Security Control. They may know me. If we’re seen together in New Orleans, we might just as well be wearing a sandwich sign labeled ‘Lessault Case’.”

“You’re always expecting disaster, Tony.”

“I’m alive, lady.”

“So you are. Thanks for reminding me.”

“You certainly are loaded with sweetness and light.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m nervous about this thing, Tony. Who are we after? Who’s doing this thing? Who killed Brinker? Who smashed Hurz up. Chicago, New York and New Orleans. That’s a lot of territory. That means a big organization, and a good one. Somebody with practise.”

She lit a cigarette, the match flaring suddenly in the dark room. She was propped up on one elbow, looking toward me.

I said, “Make an assumption. Assume that the deal is being handled by a man who has adequate funds and knows his way around in this country. Assume further that he has been in this sort of work before, during the war. We didn’t pick up all the agents that operated in this country. The F.B.I. grabbed every one of them who made mistakes. And a few who didn’t. My guess is that this arrangement is being handled by someone who escaped the net and has been taking it very easy until this opportunity came along to justify his presence here. If he is successful, he makes his country the most powerful one there is. The hell of it is that it could be a very small country. They’ve pretty much admitted that atomic bombs can be manufactured without the tremendous initial expense and manpower of the Manhattan Project. We poured most of our dough into the basic research. That’s been done now. The formulae exist. And somewhere a bunch of eager citizens are turning them out, or are ready to turn them out. Once they are made a part of the warheads of a swarm of radio controlled rockets, and the rockets are standing in prim rows in hidden launching pits, their owners can make an ultimatum to the world.”

“You sound like the March of Time. What country is it, Mr. Expert?”

“I can’t tell you exactly, but I can tell you that it is one which, through the peace treaties, was left with an inadequate base of raw materials and a crippled industrial setup. In other words, one of our new have-nots. History will tell you that. The nations with the potential to increase their standard of living without going outside their present borders will rest content and not sink energy and funds into an atomic offensive.”

She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on her bedside table. “Goodnight, Mr. Smithson, and the happiest of dreams to you.”

But I couldn’t get to sleep for a long, long time. I knew, from experience, that our hope of success lay in finding a pattern in the crimes that had been done. Patterns, no matter how carefully concealed, always exist. Patterns which indicate the mentality of the opposition, even the nationality of the opposition. If we could find or sense the pattern, we would know what to avoid and where to look.

On the second night we found a tourist court in Meridian, Mississippi. By a careful watch of the roads, I had made relatively certain that we weren’t being followed. We ate some meals together and others separately, much to Alice’s amusement, who thought it another example of my over-caution. She began to call me Old Lady Crews and told me that there was nothing wrong with me that a good psychiatrist wouldn’t throw up his hands at.

On the third morning we checked in at a suburban tourist trap just outside the city limits of New Orleans, and, leaving Alice there, I took the car down into town and parked fairly close to the Beaumont Hotel, a tall dark structure a half block from Canal Street. It was a hot moist day, the sidewalk and the buildings already heated by the sun, turning Canal Street into one long oven. The long lobby of the Beaumont was crowded and the revolving doors spun constantly. The people were red, sweating and irritable. I bought a newspaper from the stand in the lobby and walked beyond the desk to where a few bellhops were standing waiting for the desk bell.

A majestic woman in black was checking in with her anemic looking daughter. The bell sounded and the clerk called, “Front, boy!”

One of them muttered, “Here’s where I get a big dime,” and hurried off to the desk. I looked at the remaining two. One of them was adenoidal, with a sunken chin and dull eyes. The other was small, dark and trim in his hotel uniform. I looked at the small one and said, “Want to help me?”

He walked over, bored and unimpressed. I didn’t spell money in his pocket. I handed him the five dollar bill that I had ready, folded, in my hand. He glanced at it quickly and looked as bored as ever, but there was a new alertness in his posture.

“Now I got it,” he said in a low tone, “what do I do for it?”

“Can’t tell you here. Pick your spot and you make some more.”

“Ten minutes. Charlie’s Grill. One block down out the side entrance. Back booth.”

Fifteen minutes later he slid into the booth opposite me. We couldn’t be seen unless someone walked down the narrow aisle and looked directly into the booth. He lit a cigarette and eyed me, the cigarette dangling from the center of his mouth as he shook the match out.

“This is legal, mister?”

“Certainly. I just want some information and I want to make sure that I don’t attract any attention while I get it. How long have you got?”

“Till I get back. Hops are hard to get.”

“It’s about Dr. Wing. You were here then?”

“Sure, that’s only a few weeks ago. Eleven-o-eight. Walked out and never came back. Big play in the papers.”

“You boys keep your eyes open, usually. Got any theories?”

He snapped the ashes off his cigarette. “Who are you?”

“I paid five for answers, not questions.”

He shrugged. “Mrs. Wing is a very, very nice dish for a professor guy to have. We thought the pitch was different, but she turned out to be his wife, the same way they registered. She faked a big fuss.”

“How do you know she faked?”

“Next day one of the maids heard her singing in the room. She wouldn’t sing if she didn’t like it.”

“Where is she now?”

“We’re sending her mail over to a place in the French Quarter. The desk’s got the address. I can get it.”

“I’ll pay for it. What was your idea when it happened?”

“Well, I see the guy, in fact I’m the hop takes their stuff up to the room. He gave me two bits. He is a thin guy about fifty, with glasses, sort of shy and nervous. She is a chesty blonde on the lush side, maybe twenty-eight or nine. She talks to him nasty nice, you know what I mean. She told me it was a crummy room and he shushed her and she told him something like, ‘Darling, I’ll say what I please, my sweet,’ and went into the john and slammed the door. I figured when he walked out that maybe he was just sick of her. She’s the type that maybe a guy like him would get sick of, but it sure would be a lot of fun.”

“Then you think he did it on purpose?”

“Right. He was here two days before he walked out and she stayed another week before she moved over to the French Quarter. Told the desk that she wasn’t going back up North because this was the city where her honey faded and she wanted to be near the place in case... She blubbered a little over the last words Jake told me, but I bet this five bucks that her eyes were dry. I bet she’s having herself a time over there on the other side of the Canal.”

I gave him the second five and he left. I followed him in ten minutes and, as I passed him in the lobby, he said, “Two ten Bourbon Street.”

I drove slowly down Bourbon, a one way street, lined with dives that would look wonderful at night, but, during the daytime looked as cheering as a wreath on the door. I took it slow and located two ten. It was a doorway between two bars and the upstairs was over the bar called the Court of the Pirates. Balconies with iron grille work overlooked the street. All veddy quaint, my dear.

I had a quick lunch on Canal, drove back and turned over the car to Alice so that she could get lunch. She came back and we made plans for the early evening.

I took a bus down into town, and, at three thirty I walked into the entrance hall of two ten. A card thumbtacked to a wooden mailbox read, “Mrs. Janus C. Wing.” The Janus C. had been crossed out in pencil and Betty primed above. A crude three was lettered below the card on the mailbox. I went up the dark stairs, located three in the back of the building and thumped on the door. The hall was like the inside of a Dutch oven.

I banged on the door again and in a few seconds it opened. A blonde stared out at me. As the bellhop had said, she was admirably constructed, and not at all what you would expect as the wife of a distinguished scientist. The poets use phrases like ‘wheat in the sun’ to describe her hair. It was very straight, quite long, and tucked under at the ends. Her eyes were blue, her nose small, her chin a shade too pointed. She was just a touch too hefty to be a model. She had a flat, insolent look in her blue eyes.

I smiled at her vacantly and said, “Where’s Helen?”

“You’ve got the wrong apartment.”

“No, miss. This is the right apartment. Helen Frain.”

She frowned and said. “Never heard of her.” Her hand was on the edge of the door, ready to swing it shut.

I leaned against the inside frame and said, “That sure is a disappointment. Here I’d chiseled expense accounts for the last six months to save up a stake so Helen and I could really do the town.” I looked down at my hat and then grinned up at her suddenly, saying, “I don’t suppose you’d care to take her place, miss?”

She nibbled at her lower lip for a moment and her eyes were vague. She lifted her chin and said, “Thank you very much, but...”

“Even with the best wine in town along with dinner?”

“No, I don’t think...”

“Please don’t think, miss. That’s the way people get into trouble, thinking. I’m a harmless character with a big urge to eat, drink and be merry. And I can’t do it all by myself.”

She shrugged and held the door wide. “Come on in. You must be a salesman. My date is going to be sore, but he’s an idiot anyway.” She had a good smile, though it fitted a bit loosely on her pretty face.

Her apartment wasn’t as bad as the outside of the building had promised. She took me into the tiny kitchen and showed me the gin and vermouth. I made a shaker of Martinis while she did things to her face. I carried the drinks out to the little balcony that looked down over a shaded court with a fountain in the middle.

Her first drink was gone before I had two sips of mine, and I knew from the way she held her glass and the way her eyes shone as she looked at the shaker that she was going to crack wide open and tell me everything of interest that she might know.

“Betty Wing.” I said. “Nice name. Very nice.”

“I’d better call you Lew. That Lewis is a bit too formal don’t you think?”

I laughed loudly and said, “Just call me in time for the drinks.” I saw the look of pain cross her face and I smiled inwardly as she hastily gulped her second drink.

We went out together and I went through the business of getting something in my eve and stopping for a moment in front of the entrance to the building and dabbing at it with my handkerchief. We crossed the street diagonally, and I looked leisurely back toward her place just in time to catch a glimpse of Alice going in.

We walked up Bourbon and stopped in at a place called the Old Absinthe House for more cocktails. The bars were beginning to fill up with the afternoon crowd. Tourists and gamblers and cheap women. There were many very well dressed couples in the Old Absinthe House, drinking quietly, with eyes only for each other. It was dim and quiet, and the walls of the bar were covered with a half a million calling cards and membership cards tacked to the wall. The drinks were good.

She drained three more drinks rapidly, and still talked in a normal fashion. Ever watch a female alcoholic in action? They pretend to ignore a fresh drink set in front of them. They look around the room, but the eyes flick downward and quickly away. At last they decide that it is time to notice the drink. They look down, oh so casually, and take the glass in a languid hand. They are going to sip. They lift the glass slowly, and the wet crimson lips smear the rim. The fingers that were languid tighten on the glass, it tilts, the throat opens, and the liquor roars down in avid, deep swallows. Then the realization. She takes the glass slowly from her lips and looks around the room with steel in her eyes. No one has noticed. No one has commented. She sets the glass back on the table with a delicate click of glass against wood. The alcohol rises to her cheeks and her eyes. She is merry.

Betty Wing was like that. The disintegration was not slow. She remained perfect and cool, while inwardly she crumpled. At one moment she was a warm blonde with a distant manner, and the next moment she clutched my arm and leaned toward me as she giggled. “Better get me another drink, Lew. An ’en we can go eat, huh?”

I bought her two more and she leaned heavily on my arm, making a noble attempt to walk with dignity. But she giggled at nothing at all.

We ate at McCoy’s, out in the court, and the food was the best. It deserved reverent attention. Betty wolfed it, chewing with her wide red mouth open, her eyes glazed, her face loose as warm butter. It looked as though it would slide off. She talked to me in a chumbling monotone about what a ‘wonnerful’ guy I was and how New Orleans was full of characters which she prefixed with unmentionable adjectives. Her pert hat had slid off to one side and she had smeared her own lipstick on her chin. Her fingers shone with the grease from the food.

I leaned across the small table and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you’re married?”

She stiffened and peered at me as though I were swaying from side to side. “Who tole you ’at?”

“The card. The card on your mailbox. Mrs. Janus Wing.”

She seemed relieved. “That! Ha! That’s over. Hope never to see the ole goop again.”

“Did he leave you?”

“Guess so. Disappeared a month ago. Dirty damn trick. Can’t get the insurance for six years. ’Magine that? Six lousy years. Be the only money I ever got out of the old goop. Didn’t make enough to keep chickens alive. Tole him he had to make his lil Betty some more dough.” She rubbed her fingers together in an exaggerated gesture. “More dough. Yes sir. Need clothes and things. If the old goop is dead I gotta wait six lousy damn years. Hope he never comes back. ’F he does, it don’t do him any good. Old Betty throws him out. Yes sir. Right out on his—”

She straightened up suddenly and looked around the court. “Where’s that lousy waiter? Betty wants branny. Lotsa branny.”

She couldn’t do me any more good and I couldn’t feel right about leaving her in the condition she was in. She made one sudden lurch toward the bar as we left, but I recaptured her and took her along. It required a lot of strength to keep her walking a reasonably straight line, and nothing on earth could stop her from singing. She knew one unpleasant verse of one unpleasant song, and I hurried her along with the people on the sidewalk grinning at me.

It was a struggle to get her up the stairs, particularly when she sat down halfway up and announced that she was too tired to go any further and what kind of a guy was I anyway to cut off the liquor supply so soon and I needn’t think I was coming in her room with her, not for one crummy dinner and no drinks to speak of.

I got the key out of her bag and propped her up against the wall while I unlocked the door. I steered her in and she pulled away from me suddenly and turned around dizzily, one finger raised in a school teacher’s gesture of admonition.

“Waited table in a resseraunt for two years. Waited on the ole goop for a year an ’en he married me. Made him take down the pictures of his first wife. Hal I married him. Who’s a goop? Me or him?”

She dropped her arm and looked desperately uncertain. I caught her as she fell and put her on the studio couch. One arm dangled over the edge, the back of her hand resting on the floor. Her eyes were shut, her hair tangled. She breathed heavily through her mouth. I went through her purse, found nothing of interest, blew her a kiss and went out, quietly closing the door.

Alice was reading a magazine. She looked up in surprise as I walked in. “Back so soon? Goodness! You smell like all the bars in town.”

“You should see the other guv,” I said, and collapsed into a chair.

“I got one look at her. Very pretty.”

“Very pretty and very dipso. Find anything?”

“Three dozen sets of expensive underwear, fourteen pair of nylons, nine dresses, a half a case of gin, five bottles of rye, two of scotch, eleven hats, twenty pair of shoes, enough cosmetics to stock a small shop and four blonde hairs in the sink. Nothing else.”

“Nothing at all!”

“Oh, a few overdue bills, a check book without any balance kept, a couple of recent sappy letters from local swains, an album of pictures of herself and one book. A very unread copy of Shakespeare’s plays and in the front it says, ‘To Elizabeth Lannerly. First Prize — Dramatics Contest. William Walker High School. Arborton, Idaho. 1936’.”

“Poor little Elizabeth Lannerly Wing. She would have been about, let me see, fifteen. I bet when she won that she thought she had Hollywood firmly in hand.”

“But she didn’t, so it seems, and now when she thinks of Elizabeth Lannerly, the great dramatic actress, she has to go out and get stewed in order to forget it.”

I said. “A girl like Betty is very, very old at twenty-eight. Like a track star or a boxer.”

She looked at me oddly. “And how about Alice, the girl spy?”

“Alice will be an adolescent at eighty-three.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that Betty’s mental disorders result in her taking on a big load every chance she gets, while yours have their outlet in feeling sorry for yourself and trying to dig reassuring compliments out of me. Come on along and I’ll buy you a beer, and then you go to bed. In the morning we head for Texas, for your beloved, and for better answers than we got here, I hope.”

I lay in the blackness and listened to the soft breathing of Alice across the room. Outside the late traffic hurried along the boulevard, tires making a noise on the asphalt like the slow tearing of rich fabric. Their lights glanced in the window and climbed the far wall, darting across the ceiling with dizzy speed. I thought of Betty Wing, of the lines that showed in her face when she was drunk, of the way her thirsty lips clamped on the edge of the glass.

There was little point in digging around any further. The police were undoubtedly working on the local angles of the disappearance. They knew where the wife was. If they had anything to report, she would have heard it.

As yet, we had found no pattern, none of those little facts that fit together with a mental click that is almost audible.

And time was running out. Somewhere the rockets were pointing their lean noses at the stars.

Only the stars could laugh.