The Key to Irunium

III

“We’ll have to leave right away!” Macklin took Prestin’s arm and began to drag him toward the window.

Prestin shook the hand off. He felt even more bemused by the awful suggestion hurled at him by Macklin than by the man’s evident dislike and fear of the Contessa.

“Why?” Prestin demanded. “Why?”

“Because a locked door won’t keep her and her Trugs out! They’ll be in here and lasso you like a capon for the oven. Come on, boy!”

“I didn’t mean that! Why should Fritzy’s disappearance be my fault? Why? What did I do?”

“You know, Prestin! You know! And the Contessa will manipulate you for her own black ends! Come on, boy—you won’t stand a chance against her!”

Resentment, stubbornness and sheer bloody-mindedness jangled in Prestin. After his experiences he wanted to strike out and pay back some of his own guilt.

“Bob!” The Contessa’s voice purred from beyond the closed door. The handle turned and shook. “Bob! You said the door would be ajar! Open it up, there’s a good boy.”

Everyone was calling him “boy” all the time. That annoyed Prestin. It was a tiny focal point, but it was that. It showed him all too clearly how he was regarded by these two people: He was a pawn in their games.

“That door stays locked,” he told Macklin. “And you go out by the window—alone. I’m going to bed.”

“You idiot.” Macklin half lifted his cane. His dark eyes flashed toward the door. It shook now with far more than a polite young Contessa’s fragile hand butterflying the handle. Weight was being applied out there.

“Listen to that!” Macklin snapped. “If the Trugs get you, you’ll—”

“Trugs!” said Prestin, with a sarcastic bite. “And you can’t stop to tell me about them either, can you!”

“I could. But any minute they’ll be here to tell you themselves.”

A low groan shuddered from the door as the hinges and lock resisted the strain. The Contessa had not spoken again. Of course she knew by now that he had locked her out so the pressure being applied to open the door spoke more eloquently than words.

Suddenly, he felt afraid.

Trugs?

He looked at Macklin, now standing, leaning on his stick and regarding him with a saturnine scowl.

“Well, Bob? I’m not hanging around to welcome those monsters the Montevarchi keeps as house pets! If you won’t come with me, I must make sure you are of no use to the opposition.”

Prestin let out a shaky little laugh, the laugh of shock. “You mean—you’d kill me? Oh, come now, Macklin—”

“I wouldn’t kill you, Bob. You’re too valuable. I’d just freeze up some of your brain, denature your thinking apparatus. It’s a pretty trick—”

“Just a minute!” Prestin held out his hand appealingly. “Everything’s been happening so fast! You tell me this, half-tell me something else. I want to find Fritzy, and you make the horrible suggestion that it was my fault she disappeared. You tell me I have some power and that you and the Contessa are fighting for it—for me. What the blazes do you expect me to do about it all in a few seconds flat?”

“I would have thought it was all very simple and clear. If you’re going to stay alive and functioning usefully in this world, Bob, you have to think fast. Of course you have a power to make things disappear; you’ve had that all your life.”

The door shook and with a squeal the handle cocked up at an angle.

“They’ll be through in a minute. Those Trugs are hefty—and mean!”

“This power—?”

“Oh, yes. You know. My friend told me enough for me to recognize a Porteur in you at once. Just where do you think you have been sending your paper clips and your rubber bands and all the other little items you always lose?”

“What do you mean—where? I just lose them, that’s all.”

“Oh, no, Bob. They go somewhere. And now, because you must have gone through a nodal point at the right time, you Porteured Miss Upjohn across. You sent her, Bob. I’m willing to help you get her back, but not if you hand around here to fawn on the Montevarchi and deal with her Trugs. Oh, no. I’ll denature you first!”

Prestin’s first impressions of David Macklin returned with that hypnotic sparkle and that radiating good humor. Once having set his mind to a course of action, Macklin would enjoy it. That alone should have told enough, for Macklin, it seemed, would not enjoy a course of action that would harm anyone else. At least that’s what Prestin, undecided, worried, and dead-tired, tried to tell himself.

“Yes, well—” he said, fumbling for coherent thought.

A slashing slice of sound ripped from the door. Both men flinched around to look. A gleaming axehead grinned through a panel and, as they watched, it withdrew and then smashed loud and tearingly through again, splitting and splintering the wood. The axe wrenched around and, squealing, pulled back for another blow.

“Do Contessas usually,” David Macklin said softly, “come visiting in the middle of the night with an axe to open the door?”

“You must be right.” Prestin’s tiredness weighed on him now, pulling him down with indecision and fear. “All right. I’ll come with you. But I want to—”

“Sure, laddie, sure. You’ll want to know all manner of things and I’ll be telling you. But, right now, we scarper flo.”

Macklin slid the window blinds up and pushed the casement open. He hopped up with sparrow-agility onto the sill, then turned with a smile to Prestin. “The ladder’s in position. Come on.”

Up until that moment Prestin hadn’t considered how Macklin expected them to leave by the window. Poking his head out as the door resounded to more axe blows, he saw the long ladder reaching up from a balcony three stories below. A dark shape stood at its foot and Prestin caught a glimpse of a white wedge of face staring up. Macklin began to descend the ladder, his cloak and hat billowing in the night wind.

“Come on, Bob! The Trugs will be through soon!”

He put a foot on the top rung and then turned to look back into the room. The panel nearest the door’s handle had broken fully open now, splintered and gaping.

As he looked a hand reached in—a hand that glistened green and yellow with scales, that possessed two fingers and a stub thumb with long blood-red claws.

He stared, frozen, his mouth half open.

That blasphemous hand groped around for the bolt. As the hand turned the green and yellow scales caught the light and burned with a curious violet edging as though each scale were limned in radiation. The two fingers clicked against the thumb as the hand reached the bolt head.

Prestin felt sick. Macklin’s hand caught his calf.

“Come on, Bob! Hurry up! They’ll have us off this ladder!”

Prestin shut his mouth and swallowed hard. He wanted to see what came through the door; but Macklin was undoubtedly right. He began, stiffly and with a queasy sensation threatening to flood not only him but Macklin as well, to climb down the ladder.

Wind tore at him. He had to cling with a deliberate effort to each rung on the way down.

At last his foot was gripped and guided the last couple of rungs and he could stand on the stone of the balcony. He looked up, breathing hard, expecting to see—what?

“Don’t gawp, laddie! In with you!”

Macklin and the other man, so far not consciously identified by Prestin, bundled him through the window opening. With one foot stepping through and the other lifting up to follow, he felt a hand pull him urgently and he toppled forward. As he fell he heard a loud and authoritative crack. It sounded like a branch splitting in frost, or a whip licking across a naked back.

“Only just in time, thank God,” Macklin said.

The other man said in a firm, controlled voice, “I thought you were never going to make it, Dave.”

Macklin straightened up and smiled, helping Prestin to his feet. They were just in another hotel bedroom. The only object in the room to make Prestin look twice was the sawn-off shotgun on the bed.

He glanced at the stranger. “Aye, you can laugh,” the man said. “But you don’t know what we’re up against.”

“This is Alec,” said Macklin. “Further introductions later. Now we must decamp. They’ll be cramming the elevator down to this floor right now.”

“I saw a claw hand,” said Prestin.

The other two nodded.

“Well. Now you’ve some idea. Let’s go.”

They went out the door fast, Alec lifting the shotgun and stuffing it beneath the normal hacking jacket he wore. His open-necked shirt framed a tough bronzed throat and his face looked as though he had seen a few lifted corners on the problem-spots of the world. Evidently, he was the muscleman for Macklin.

The elevator lights indicated a car was on its way down.

“That’s them, the black-souled hellions,” growled Alec.

“We can take the other elevator. We’ll be out the front door fifteen seconds before them… If we’re lucky.”

Macklin slid the gates shut and punched the buttons. The car dropped. Prestin swallowed. Strange contessas, men who talked wildly of impossibles, a climb down a ladder from one hotel window to another in the middle of the night—it would all have been madness but for that single fleeting glimpse he’d gotten of that gruesome yellow and green scaled, two-finger and thumb hand with the blood-red claws.

The elevator stopped and the doors and gates slid back. Alec eased his bulky body out into the dimly-lit foyer. “All clear,” he said in his growly voice. He cocked an eye at the adjacent elevator indicator. “They’re almost here.”

“Let’s run!” snapped Macklin, and set off like a sprinter for the swinging doors.

Alec took off after him, and Prestin, thinking that they always seemed to leave him for last, tailed on.

Despite all that had happened—because of it, in all probability—Prestin had to keep forcing himself to take the affair seriously. He kept wanting to burst out laughing. Even that scaled claw could have been a plastic model from a tricks and jokes shop and in his heightened frame of mind, with excitement and fatigue addling his thinking, he had been taken in like a fool.

He halted stubbornly on the pavement. Rome lay breathing all about him, the air fresh but not cold, the wind only a minor breeze down at ground level. He caught hold of Macklin’s elbow, forcing the older man to stop.

“Now look here, Macklin. I—”

He did not go on.

A dark shape had appeared from the hotel doorway behind them. He could not see it clearly for it was wrapped in an enveloping raincoat, most unfashionably long, and with a down-drawn hat that might have doubled for Macklin’s own floppy one. Alec looked back and shouted, hard and high, “Get out of the way, Dave! It’s a Trug!”

Alec flung open his coat and dragged out the shotgun. Before Prestin could move or even shift his stance, Alec had lifted the sawn-off shotgun, aimed it, and pressed one of the triggers.

The explosion sounded like a house falling down.

The shotgun blast cut the dark form in two. Appalled, Prestin saw green ichor oozing from the falling body, saw the widespread green and yellow clawed hands, a deep and feral blood-red glitter from the place he expected eyes to be. He did not see the thing’s face. The body hit the pavement.

Then he was running away—running hard, feet slapping pavestone, head high, gasping for breath. He could hear Macklin running with him, then Alec, feet echoing his own. They ran and ran. One or two late-night passersby stared; Prestin ignored them. He wanted to get away and hide.

Walking normally some time later, flanked by the other two, he had calmed down sufficiently to say, “That was murder!”

“Sure,” said Alec, gruffly. “And we’d have been the victims if I hadn’t fired first.”

“What—” Prestin swallowed. “What will people say when they find that—that thing bleeding green blood all over the pavement?”

“They won’t find him. The Montevarchi will see to that.”

“You see, Bob,” put in Macklin, speaking with only the slightest panting after their flight. “Neither one of us wants to let knowledge of Irunium leak out.”

“That seems fair—” began Prestin. Then: “Irunium?”

“Irunium. That’s the name of the place. That’s probably where Fritzy’s gone.”

They had walked down to the corner of Via Due Macelli and Via del Tritone, the place very quiet after the narrow, crowded bustle of the day. Soon the noise and rush would start up again and the shops would be opening.

Prestin shook his head, feeling the tiredness like blotting paper sapping his energies. “Irunium. Well?”

“I intend to tell you everything you wish to know, everything you must know. But not here. You can’t go back to your hotel now—”

“But I’ll have to! All my gear is there—”

“I’ll arrange for it to be picked up. The Montevarchi just loves little boys like you to walk straight back into her webs.”

“Well. All right.” Prestin was thinking of the Trugs, and he felt no compunction to go near them again. “Where do we go from here?”

“Alec?”

The big bear-like man smiled, his broad face showing his delight in being able to be of service to Macklin.

“Out of Rome. That’s for sure. Margie has a car and we can hit the road south, the Autostrada del Sol. We can cut over to Foggia later, when we’ve thrown them.”

Alec called Foggia “Fozh”, Prestin noticed, remembering his father talking to him years ago.

“Just a minute,” he interrupted, walking briskly between the other two along the empty pavements. “I have an exposition tomorrow—that is, today. I can’t miss that.”

“Why not?” Macklin sounded amused.

“Why not? Well, hell’s bells, man! It’s my living!”

“And if you do go it’ll be your dying.”

A bass chuckle rumbled from Alec. “And follow that, if you can.”

“If I had a straw hat and a cane I’d do a song and dance routine for you!” said Prestin savagely. He felt the impotence of a leaf in the wind. “If it’s so all-fired important and deadly what are you two happy about now? What’s so funny?”

“You.”

He stood there, feeling like a fool, feeling annoyed, feeling so tired he could hardly stand.

“Thank you. That’s very nice—”

“Simmer down, Bob. I’ll explain it all. Right now you need a large cup of black coffee—and so do Alec and I.”

“Motion herewith adopted, nem con,” said Alec.

“You two are a real couple of clowns. But, yes—I could do with a drink of coffee, if there is no tea, and a sitdown. My legs are beginning to shake.”

At once Macklin took his arm. “Hold up, Bob. We’re nearly there.”

The house to which Macklin guided him at last looked no different from any of the other tall, narrow, golden-red bricked buildings of the street. The door opened to a touch and they went through to stand in shadow beneath a yellow lamp, with the arched opening to an inner courtyard before them. A tree sighed its leaves together and a fountain tinkled silver. The faintest of violet and pink and green flushings in the sky hinted at a dawn not too far off. The tiredness in his muscles dragged at Prestin now.

Presently an old woman wearing ragged carpet slippers and a shapeless shawl around her shoulders shuffled across, flicking the oval yellow spot from a hand flashlight ahead of her. She led them quietly into a small room off the entranceway, coughing a wet little cough, shuffling, saying hackingly, “Aspet” and again, weakly, “Aspet.”

They waited.

A light, quick step sounded on the flags outside and then the door opened and a girl muffled up in a long emerald cloak burst in. Prestin caught a vivid impression of impatience and laughter, of bright eyes and a mobile full-lipped mouth. She carried a silver-glitter handbag that strained at its fastenings. Her every action bubbled with a buoyant liveliness.

“Fit, Dave? Hi, Alec—so this is the Porteur.”

“Yes, this is Bob Prestin. Bob, this is Margie Lipton.”

“Pleased—” began Prestin.

“How about a cup of Java, Margie?” interrupted Alec.

“Can do. But if you want to be out of the city by dawn you’ll have to hurry.”

Macklin glanced at his watch. “It’s no go, Margie. I’m sorry to have dragged you away from your party, but time is running out on us. If you don’t mind, we’d better take off now. We can stop on the road and Bob can sleep in the car.”

Without a dissenting word she swung back to the door and they followed her out. At the curb waited a Jensen Interceptor FF. Prestin drew in his breath in a little whistle when he saw the car.

Margie smiled over her shoulder at him as they walked toward it. “Yes,” she said with that light confident voice. “It’s all car.”

They sat in the car whose comfort demanded that Prestin fall asleep at once. He forced himself to rouse up as they purred quietly through narrow roads, twisting and turning, rolling with a smooth motion as the big soft full-traction tires rumbled over cobbles’.

Alec sat in the back with him while Macklin, who must be as tired as anyone, sat up front with Margie.

“Why,” said Alec eagerly, “didn’t you get a white car, Margie? White convertibles are all the rage.”

She laughed, gently chiding. “Were all the rage, you mean, Alec. I like this primrose color, and I had that old has-been white painted over, alf. As for a convertible, they stand in the same position as a carriage and four.”

Remembering with a quick and bitter twinge that familiar “alf,” Prestin let his thoughts toll on; he too, knew what aristocracy thought of four horses to a carriage. This girl, this Margie Upton, promised to be quite a gal.

“I like it,” he said.

The car purred discreetly on through the outskirts of Rome, running on two-wheel drive. They turned at last to head south.

Before them, like a white unfolding promise of the sun, the autostrada led on to the scented lands of the south.

As the sun burst up over the hills away to their left and flooded down with its clear Renaissance-golden glow, Margie opened the Jensen up and they began to devour the miles.

Conversation in the car was held only desultorily at first and, without meaning to, Prestin let his head sag lower and lower. He jerked up, feeling a krink in the nape of his neck, a little off-balance mentally, yet determined not to fall asleep until these enigmatic people had answered a few questions.

Sunshine struck hard and brilliantly in from ahead. The car purred sweetly and all around lay the southern Italian countryside. Other cars passed, flashing by on the northern lanes; none passed them going south. Margie, Prestin saw as he looked over her shoulder, was keeping to a steady seventy. Sensible girl. Then he saw the time, realized the position of the sun, and felt the hollowness inside.

Eleven o’clock.

Never.

But, “Had a good sleep, Bob?” Macklin smiled back at him. “That’s good.”

Stiffness in his back made him stretch.

“Mind me, chum,” said Alec, stirring like a bear in the corner of a cage who’s been poked with a stick.

“Sorry.” Prestin had respect for the big man’s powers of sudden destruction; not that he was going to blow Prestin in half with a shotgun, but any man who could do that so—so casually—merited special caution.

“We’d better pull in soon.” Macklin’s smile held a small secret irony that for a moment baffled Prestin. “Should have done so before but we didn’t want to wake you, Bob.”

“Many thanks.” He thought of Fritzy. “I’ve been rushed around by you. Now I think you owe me some answers. You said you could help me find Fritzy from Iran—what was the name?”

“Irunium. Yes, we can. But it’s no good charging at it like a bull at a gate. Sit back and try to relax and enjoy the scenery. You’re hurtling along an autostrada in a primrose high-powered, ultra-expensive and most luxurious car, headed for the sun, and wine. Live a little.”

Only because Margie Lipton sat driving with nonchalant skill was Prestin’s foul language halted and his fist dropped. He swallowed. “By God, Macklin! You’d better have a good explanation or I’ll push your teeth down your throat!”

“That’s better, Bob.” Macklin was not in the least put out. “Work up a head of adrenalin. You’re going to need it.”

“There’s a place,” Margie said.

Looking out, fuming, wanting to say hard, hurtful words, Preston saw the neat white and green roadside ristorante, a modern place geared to handle tourists on their way to sample the sunshine of the south.

He slumped back in the seat. All his anger meant only that he felt his guilt. If he could make things disappear, instead of just mislaying them as he had always thought, well, then, that would explain Fritzy’s disappearance, wouldn’t it? Crazy, he told himself, crazy. You can’t just make people vanish.…

But Fritzy had gone somewhere and Macklin said it was to a place called Irunium.

Abruptly the car leaped forward, jerking him further into the upholstery. He pushed himself up. Margie was fairly spanking the car along the road and Alec, beside him, was reaching down to a long box beneath his legs and taking out an express rifle.

“What is it?” Prestin demanded.

Macklin had turned and was leaning over the back of the seat, his face grave.

“We have bullet-proof rear glass, and the seats have armor-plate backing; but he can always get the tires, even with the flaps down.”

“Flaps down,” Margie said crisply, pulling a lever on the dashboard.

“What is it?” shouted Prestin. He turned and looked through the rear window.

All he could see on the long, straight white road was another car, a blood-red Lancia, streaking along about five hundred yards or so behind.

“See the Lancia? That’s the Contessa di Montevarchi and she has her Trugs with her. They’re out to get us.”