Assignment — Stella Marni (19 page)

He watched with dulled eyes that no longer focused as the thin sliver of sunlight moved across the iron plates. It came from the east, he judged, and after a time it grew shorter and waned and withdrew. The heat continued. He tried to determine if it was growing worse, but he had gone beyond any fine distinction in the degree of his torture. He had never felt so utterly helpless in his life.

There were times when he dozed, succumbing to the feverish heat and the cramped position he was forced to maintain. Darkness washed over his mind in deeper and longer waves.

He was not sure when he heard the first distant, dim clang of metal striking metal. At first he thought it was another trace of his fevered imagination, another element in the distorted dreams that chased themselves across the heated mirror of his mind. He opened his eyes. He thought it was a little cooler in the cage. There was no sunlight in the crack between the plates now, only a little grayness, and he crawled over to it and tried to see through the riveted edges of the plates and glimpsed only a vague grayness that might have been the clouded November sky. No bright sunlight. If an overcast had come up over the city, it very possibly had saved his life.

Now a clanging came distinctly from under the floor plates and then a scraping noise and then the rasp of steel and the clink of bars being dropped. Durell swung around, crouching, to face the trap door.

It opened slowly.

A gun appeared, black against the strange burst of light that blinded him after the long hours he had endured in darkness. Then the face of the huge man who had struck him down appeared behind the small swinging door, followed by the giant's shoulders.

"Hello," the man rumbled. "Still with us,
tovarich?"

Durell stared hypnotized at the gun in the huge fist.

"You stay just like that, eh? You don't move closer to me. Or I shoot and you die quick up here, all alone. You like the room? Is nice? Is private enough?"

Durell licked his dry, cracked lips. His voice sounded harsh and croaking when he spoke. "Where is Krame? I want to talk to him."

"Is busy. You talk with me. I bring you water."

"Thanks for small favors."

"Eh? You no want water? Not thirsty?"

"I'll take whatever you can spare."

From his crouching position in the center of the acorn, Durell could see through the narrow opening, which was just wide enough to admit the giant's shoulders. There was bright space beyond, the under surfaces of the ceiling above Krame's studio, the arch of the walls, the huge porthole window on this side, the heavy cable from which the battery of fluorescent light tubes hung. He wondered how the big man had climbed up here. A ladder of some sort, but a tricky one, set up in the center of the studio floor because of the inward arch of the tower walls that ended in the floor of his cage.

The big man had a bullet-shaped head covered with a thick thatch of grizzled brindle hair, a prognathous jaw, big teeth, and a broken nose. He pushed a thermos of water into the cage with the hand that held the gun. For a moment Durell was tempted to grab at the thick hairy wrist, but the giant's pale eyes were too watchful and ready. He knew he could die very easily up here and never be found.

"Is there anything to eat?" Durell asked.

"Not now. Maybe later, when you feel like talking. I got some news for you, mister. Krame tells me to let you know. Albert Marni ain't in the hospital no more. We got him back again."

"You're lying," Durell said.

"Was easy. He look too sick to walk, but I make him feel better quick. I hit the nurse, I kill a cop, I pick him up like he a little child and we go down freight elevator and Krame meet us on street with a car. Last night, two o'clock, we did it. Is true. We got Albert Marni again. You a fool to take him from the
Boroslav
yesterday." The giant grinned. His teeth were big and yellow and crooked. "Is all for nothing, eh? All you suffer up here. We got him again, so we got Stella, too. Is nice woman, that Stella. Much woman. I like her. She like me, too. She tell me so."

"Where is she?" Durell asked.

"Is no matter now for you. She do what we want, we got her papa back, she obey orders like everybody else. She show up, we don't worry about her now. We put her on ship with papa and she go home. Tomorrow morning the
Boroslav
sails. Stella will be on it."

"Isn't she with Krame?"

"You sleep now," the giant said.

"Wait a minute. Wait. What's your name?"

"Karl."

"All right, listen to me, Karl. Help me. I'll make it worth while. Listen for a minute. Hold that door open."

The giant said: "What can you give me?"

"You name it. Money? Women?" Durell asked. He was panting. The open trap door was like a tantalizing mirage, just out of his reach. "I can get you whatever you want, Karl. The government will pay you to let me out of here. They'll give you whatever I tell them to give you, understand? It's important. You can believe me. Anything you ask for. You've got to let me out."

"You a fool," Karl said softly.

The door slammed shut again.

A steel cone, a hemisphere six feet in diameter at the bottom, the floor of his cage, and less than six feet high — this was his world. His legs ached with cramp. He felt the heat oozing away from the walls, evaporating like water under a hot sun. There was no more light coming through the crack, but he was not sure if it was night again or if it was because the sun had gone behind the thick overcast in the west. The air in the cage was growing foul. Now and then he twisted about and put his mouth to the rusty, tiny crack in the steel plates and tried to suck the cold, fresh November air into his lungs, and this revived him and he began to think a little more rationally, now that he had seen Karl and knew he was not abandoned here indefinitely, simply to die. They wanted something more from him, or they would have killed him at once. And this thought gave him hope and the will to live and a slow lessening of the nightmare panic that had roweled him through all the long hours past.

The heat left and a coolness came into the cage and he knew that presently the bitter cold would come again. He sipped some of the water from the thermos bottle, and then drank half of it all at once in an effort to maintain his strength and clarity of thought.

He wondered if Karl had told the truth about abducting Albert Marni from the hospital. It would be a daring and dangerous move, a sign of desperation, but it could have been done if Krame was really desperate enough, if he needed absolutely to regain control of Stella. He decided that Karl had had no real reason to lie to him about it.

And Karl would be back.

The thought gave him his first real glimmer of hope. A sense of cunning took over, and he went around the cage on hands and knees again, searching for something, anything to help him escape. The cage was totally bare. Then he found the thermos bottle Karl had left him, and he deliberately finished the pint of water in it and weighed the empty cylinder thoughtfully. Then he took off the leather belt around his waist.

He smashed the thermos bottle against the steel wall, heedless of the noise. He had hammered with the heel of his shoe often enough for the sound to raise no extra alarm, if anyone were below in the studio. When the thermos rattled with broken shards of glass, he used the prong of his belt buckle to extract several razor-sharp slivers from the outer cylinder. He scattered these with care on the floor just an inch or so inside the narrow metal hatchway. There was one longer piece of glass, about four inches in length, that he was lucky to find, and the end of this he wrapped in a strip of cloth torn from the tail of his shirt, so that when he gripped it in his fist, about two inches of the sharp, curved triangle was exposed as a crude hand knife. He checked the scattering of broken glass on the steel ledge inside the hatch, where Karl had rested his weight before, and then took his belt and coiled it with the buckle inside, the tip held between his clenched fingers.

It would do.

"Karl!" he yelled. "Help! Help, Karl!"

He slammed his shoe against the floor and yelled again. The clamor he raised inside the steel cage was deafening. After a moment or two he paused and listened. Nothing. He yelled again, hammered again. This time he heard very dim squealing noises of metal far below him. He called Karl's name once more and then waited.

It was about three minutes before he heard the clang of a bar being dropped away from the outside of the acorn, and then the door squealed faintly. Bright light flooded the inside of his cage. Durell was on his knees, his toes touching the edge of the arching sides of the cage behind him, his position a little to the left of the hatch opening. He remembered that Karl had looked to the right at first, when he had last appeared. After he had climbed up past the battery of lights, the inside of the acorn would appear to Karl like a black hole, until his eyes adjusted to it. Durell stared into the empty blackness. Then Karl's huge head and shoulders filled the opening for an instant; his face was in shadow, with the bright light streaming in from behind him.

Angrily, Karl said: "What is it, mister? What's all the yelling for, eh? You sick or something?"

"Yes, I'm sick," Durell said. "I'm sick of you."

He had the tongue end of the belt in his hand when he flicked it forward. It uncoiled with the speed of a striking snake, and the bright buckle slashed hard across the ugly, angry face that peered at him. Karl gasped and then roared in rage and pain and brought his gun slamming down hard on the floor inside the cage. The heel of his fist bit into the sharp slivers of glass Durell had sprinkled there and a queer scream of pain and fury burst from him. At the same moment Durell flung himself forward, the glass knife replacing the belt in his grip. The glass edge slashed across Karl's wrist and blood spurted in a great gout as vein and artery were cut as if by a razor. Karl's gun roared. The sound was enormous inside the cage, utterly deafening. The bullet slapped around the top of the cage like an angry hornet and then Durell slammed his fist into the giant's stunned face.

Apparently Karl's grip outside the cage was not too secure.

He screamed.

His head jerked backward, fell away from Durell's blow.

He disappeared.

There was a long ululating scream and then a far thud and then sudden silence, leaving only the bright light streaming in through the open steel hatch.

Durell lifted himself slowly to hands and knees, shaking his head to rid his ears of the intolerable ringing echo of the gunshot. He was panting, and his heart pounded crazily. He stared blinkingly at the open door. It remained open. Nothing more happened. And after a moment he stuck his head through the hatchway and looked down.

He saw the floor of Krame's studio, thirty feet below, beyond the banks of photographic lights. A portable steel scaffolding had been pushed into the center of the floor, tangled with the light fixtures and baby spots and drop nets used as photographic props. A ladder led up from the pipe scaffolding to a shaftlike entrance in the ceiling like that of a conning tower in a submarine, and this in turn yielded to the trap door.

Karl lay on his back on the floor below.

Even at the distance from which Durell looked down upon him, he could see that the man's neck was broken. Karl was dead.

According to the clock over Krame's desk, against the far wall of the studio, it was two o'clock in the afternoon. About thirty hours since he had left Stella in the beach cottage. He wondered if she was still there. She had promised faithfully to wait there until he returned, no matter what happened. But it would be trying her patience and trust beyond credulity if she had remained in hiding in the cottage for ail these long hours he had been imprisoned. A sense of desperate urgency filled him, but he didn't leave the studio at once.

He found the bar and pushed aside the sticky, unwashed glasses that still remained as a token of Krame's dalliance with Gerda Smith, and opened a bottle of brandy and took a long swallow, then another. The liquor burned and exploded with warmth in his stomach. He found a small refrigerator behind a Japanese silk screen and took from inside a half loaf of stale French bread, some butter and Bel Paese cheese. He ate hungrily, chafing the stiffness from his arms and legs while he studied the vast, empty spaces of the studio. There was no sign of John Krame or Gerda. He was not interested in Karl's broken body under the portable scaffold.

The brandy made him feel a little drunk, but the bread and cheese soon counteracted its effect. Except for the bruise on the back of his head and the muscular stiffness from his cramped imprisonment, he was not too much the worse for wear. He had slept, or at least dozed, through many of the hours that had just passed.

There was nothing in the studio to interest him except a heavy steel Mosler safe mounted on rollers near the desk. The safe had a solid combination lock that defied his brief efforts to open it. Giving it up, he went to the telephone and called Tom Markey's office.

Markey answered the first ring himself.

"This is Sam," Durell said. "Don't blow your stack before you listen to me, Tom. I've had a little trouble."

Markey was silent for a long moment. "You've got more trouble than you think," he said finally. "Don't call me your friend any more. I trusted you yesterday. I asked you to bring in Stella Marni."

"I'm going after her right now."

"No, you're not. You're off the case. McFee pulled you off last night when I complained to Washington. I raised the biggest stink I could about the way you've played footsie with me. and I don't apologize for it. For my money, you're out in left field and the ball game is over."

"I've been slugged," Durell said. "I've been a prisoner."

"Yeah, sure."