Delicate Ape (9 page)

“We already passed it,” the eyes in the mirror reported.

“I know. I wanted to be certain we’d lose that man.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know.” He’d never seen the moon face before. “I’m carrying some important papers. I’m with the Peace Department. How do you feel about peace?”

The brows scowled. “If they take the army out of Germany we’ll have war again in ten years. You can’t trust them Dutchies. They’re as bad as the Japs. You don’t see China letting Japan get any ideas of speaking out of turn, do you?”

Piers shook his head. “They are wise enough to be forceful for the preservation of peace.”

If Germany could have been eliminated entirely as a political unit as Japan had been. But there was only one strong voice in Eastern Asia. China. In Europe there were too many.

They were approaching 42nd now. “Any door?” the driver asked.

Piers said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll get off on Broadway. Lindy’s.” It would be as safe as taking the shuttle across town. The fat man might be watching Grand Central, expecting that maneuver. Broadway would be at its brightest, theaters opening their doors, taxis clustered, the police standing tall at every intersection.

He paid off the driver at the restaurant.

“Hope you don’t have no more trouble,” the man said. He purred away.

Piers didn’t go inside the restaurant. He swung into the down stream towards the Astor. He was only mildly surprised to see Cassidy leaning against the newsstand.

Cassidy asked, “Where you been?”

“To the theater.” Piers gathered the early morning papers.

“You give me the slip,” the detective said without rancor.

Piers grinned at him.

“If there’s been any murders tonight, you’ll be hauled in.”

“I’ll produce an alibi,” Piers assured him. He glanced at the bar. But he was too fatigued to risk an encounter with Bianca Anstruther tonight. Or with von Eynar. Or even Gordon. He said, “I’m going to bed. Don’t you ever sleep?”

“It’s nothing but a habit,” Cassidy proclaimed. He was half asleep on his tired feet.

“I’m not going out again,” Piers told him. “You’d better turn in. Good night.” He went to the elevators, up to fifth, said “Good night” absently to the attendant. He walked the few paces to his door, set the key. He wondered what the squat man was doing now. He opened his room, closed the door after him.

“Do not make a light.” The voice from the shadows was deep and it was cold. “What you see in my hand is a gun.”

T
HE SHADOW WAS GIGANTIC
, dark against the room dark. The blinking sign across Broadway lighted again and Piers could see the man. He said softly, tentatively, “Fabian?”

“I am David. I am from Fabian.” He wasn’t giant. He was small and quiet and black as the night. “It is better we speak without lighting the room, Piers Hunt. Better we do not call attention to your room.”

“Yes.” Piers flung the papers on the bed freeing his hands. But he had no intention of moving against a man with a gun. “Won’t you sit down?”

“No.” The flickering light described him. The close-cropped graying head, the whiteness of teeth, the conservative English-tailored suit.

“May I? I’m tired.”

“As you will. But where you are please.”

Piers sat on the bed. He pushed back his hat. Weariness crept over him, bone weariness. This man came from the man he wished to seek as friend, came as enemy. “You might as well put down the gun,” he said. “I’m not armed. I haven’t been armed since the day of peace.”

David said, “I could take no chance of not obtaining what I came for.” He didn’t put away the gun. It gleamed, now dull, now bright, in the whim of Broadway. It was like a toy in the black hand.

“How did you get into my room?” Piers asked.

“Through a ruse,” David said.

“And you knew I was stopping here?”

“You have been followed.”

“Yes.” He began to laugh, weakly, silently. “God, yes.” He forced a hold on himself. “Yours are better. I didn’t know about yours.” Africans from the bush. They would track a man and he would never know. He would die not knowing. “What do you want?” Piers asked suddenly.

“Secretary Anstruther’s dispatch case.”

“Why not go to him? Mind if I smoke?”

“I do not mind,” David said. But the gun was steady until Piers had lighted and extinguished the match. The African said then, “Anstruther is dead.”

Piers spoke with slow deliberation. “That information—if true—would be above value to many.”

“Anstruther is dead.” He was like a statue of carved ebony. Piers could see his eyes, dark and fathomless. “He died on the Nubian desert. He and the unknown.”

Piers remembered then. Fabian was of Nubian stock. It accounted for a drum beating a message from ancient Nubia to modern Equatorial Africa.

“You know this?” Piers asked.

“I know this.”

Piers spoke out in dull anger. “Fabian sent him to his death.”

“Fabian?” There was measure of surprise, incredulous surprise, in the question.

“Fabian wired asking him to come at once to the Lake of the Crocodiles.”

“Fabian sent no wire,” the dark man stated.

“I saw it. Anstruther had planned to leave for the States. The wire came. He left instead for Equatorial with an unknown pilot, a German.”

“This wire—what did it say?”

“It said that Fabian wished to see him. We knew it was the border incidents. Anstruther would do anything for Fabian. He left at once.”

David said, “Fabian was in Tibet. He could send no wire from the Lake of the Crocodiles. Show me the wire.”

“I haven’t it.” It was safe. “Fabian’s name signed it.”

“Fabian sent no wire,” he repeated steadily.

Piers rose from the bed. The gun moved to cover him. “I want to talk with Fabian. I don’t know why he sent it. He hadn’t answered my request for an audience; he hadn’t reported the incidents to the Commission.”

“He did not need help; he preferred to handle the incidents himself. They were not important unless made so. Making them so would threaten peace.” David paused. “Someone made use of his name. The plan was successful. Anstruther is dead. Why else was there a wire—if there was a wire—” His look was steady on Piers. “You have the dispatch case. You were seen with it in Alexandria. In it are the Secretary’s final decisions for this conference. It was on these he worked in Alexandria. We wish to see them before the conference opens.”

Piers breathed deeply. He knew now what he had actually known since last night. It was the Anstruther memoranda. His supposition, based on what he had believed at the time was rational, that anyone noting the case in his possession would take for granted he carried it to the Secretary, was not valid longer. Because Anstruther’s disappearance had become established. “Secretary Anstruther carried his dispatch case on the flight. I may have been seen with my own, a similar one.”

“Show me this similar one.”

“I can’t.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I lost it. Last night.”

The man’s smile was ironic.

“I lost it on Broadway last night. There was an accident in front of the Paramount. A man named Johann Schmidt was struck by a taxicab. In the hubbub my case disappeared. I reported it to the police today.” He lifted his voice. “You can use that gun on me if you choose but I can’t show you either Anstruther’s dispatch case or my own. I have neither.”

David put the gun into his pocket. “I did not come here to kill you, Mr. Hunt. I came to see certain papers. If you refuse to show them to me—”

“You can search my room,” Piers said.

“It has been searched.”

“Search me if you like.” He remembered only then the letters he had taken.

“You could not carry that many papers on you. No.” The head moved. “If you refuse now, we will wait. You will eventually lead us to where they are.”

Piers’ mouth thinned. He would lead and the bushmen, even in tailored clothes, would follow without so much as a faint footfall heard. He wouldn’t lead Fabian to the papers. He had been forewarned.

He asked, “You’re going?”

“Yes. There is nothing more I can do tonight.” The telegram had muted the lion’s roar. For tonight.

“Before you go—” He must know. “How will Fabian vote?”

David’s voice was soft. “Only Fabian knows that. Only one man would he tell that. That man is dead.”

Piers put out his hand. It couldn’t halt this man but he put out his hand. He pleaded, “If Anstruther is dead, if you know this—” He didn’t know how to say it. “Have you informed Gordon? The President?”

The eyes lidded. “We have told no one. We are wiser than that, Mr. Hunt. We will tell no one until Fabian has seen the Anstruther papers.”

“Let me talk to Fabian. You can arrange it.” His voice was on its knees.

“With the Anstruther papers?”

If he dared, but he didn’t. Not until he knew where Fabian stood. Not with that wire engraved on his brain, not with a gun in David’s hand. He said, “I don’t have them. If I could talk with Fabian—”

“It is impossible.”

Piers watched helpless as the man, soft-footed, jungle-footed, went away. He hadn’t known, there distorted by shadows, how very small this man was, slight as a child if his hair was worn with gray. When he had gone Piers turned the night lock in the closed door and he went to the window, threw it wide. He leaned out over the moving segment that was below. He watched for a long time.

The black man had come not in peace. He had come with a weapon of death in his hand. Yet Fabian was a man of peace. He must be that or the world tottered. The world was in peace. It remained in peace by force alone. Was there no way to insure peace among nations save at the point of a gun? A nation was men, many men, the minds and hands and spirits of many men. Couldn’t man, all men, want peace enough that peace would be? An inevitability as once war had seemed an inevitability?

Slowly he drew himself back into the shadows of the room. It was too soon for despair. The world had made strides to the stars. Incredible as it seemed there had been no Secretary of Peace in any national cabinet until after the Last War. Always a Secretary of War, and a Secretary of the Army and the Navy, but no voice for peace until twelve years ago. Always the threat, always the expectancy of war. And the residue remained.

Through centuries of peace, peace must become as rooted as was war, only when that state was achieved could force be discarded. Was that Utopia? Was it too much to hope?

Too soon to get discouraged, too soon even if he were being hunted through the streets of New York, even if Anstruther lay dead in Africa, even if Fabian, his hope, had sent a man with a gun in his hand. Peace must not be threatened. He too could take up arms. He would fight for its preservation without Fabian if that was how it must be. But his heart was sick within him. He knew how small he was, one infinitesimal man fighting alone. Courage and creed were not enough.

The lights were a golden haze, reflected in the golden furniture, in the mirrors and their golden frames. A uniformed attendant took Gordon’s tall silk hat, his white gloves, his ebony stick. Gordon didn’t need to touch his white tie but he regarded its perfection and his handsome face, his glossy hair in the mirror. Piers was faded, someone who was reflected in the glass dimly, from afar.

Gordon said, “Don’t worry about not dressing. I’ll say you’ve only come over.” His faint disdain touched Piers’ grays.

Piers didn’t care. Unreasonably he hadn’t thought white tie or black when he dressed tonight. More tumultuous affairs had occupied his mind. Gordon would never have been that engrossed; it was part of his perfection and his attainment.

The manservant announced them softly at the door of the parlors. His voice couldn’t have carried across the room but Evanhurst turned and loped forward. Piers knew the face, hammered leanly of aristocratic coin; he knew the tall form, aged to emaciation, the mustache, white now, which sheltered an unknown mouth. Piers stood behind Gordon, but it was he to whom Evanhurst extended his first hand.

“Piers. Piers Hunt. I’m delighted, my boy. What more can I say?” His left hand reached for Gordon. “Witt, you’re looking splendid, of course. Always splendid. And how good of you to find Piers.” His voice rose and fell out of his high-bridged nose. He was an old man, Anstruther’s generation. The criss-crosses of skin had been etched for many years in that same pattern. His eyes had faded, what once had been blue pigment was almost colorless. But he wasn’t tired, as Anstruther had been tired. He was still a man who could fight with delicate fine-tooled weapons. He put a narrow hand under the arm of Piers on his right, of Gordon on his left. “It will make our evening more important. I’ve known Piers a long time, Witt, did he tell you? Since he was a small boy. In this very room.”

Gordon thrust his head at Piers. Lord Evanhurst’s high-pitched laughter enjoyed its moment.

Piers said in explanation, “This was my grandmother’s apartment. I was brought up here.”

Then the room had been somberly beautiful, dark oiled furniture, heavy raspberry brocades looped back from the windows. Now it was all white and gold. It was the Plaza’s royal suite. It had been their royal suite then too, when Cornelia Piers reigned here. Gordon didn’t know. He didn’t know much about Piers and this information pleased him if it left envy. Piers’ lack of dress wouldn’t bother him now.

Lord Evanhurst shook his head. “She was a wonderful woman, Piers; I remember her in London when she was young. The toast of the King. That was George the Fifth—before your time.”

He had led them across the room and the heavy man with the heavy porcine face rose from his white chair. He took the scented black cigar from his lips, thin lips in a heavy face. He thrust a manicured ham at Gordon. “Good-evening, Witt,” he said. “How did you come out at the races today?” There was little accent; retention of foreign inflection alone.

“Rather nicely,” Gordon responded. They were men of good humor, evenly met, not the American Undersecretary who might in a few days be the American Secretary of Peace, and the German envoy humbling himself for a favor.

“You know Ernst Brecklein, I believe?” Evanhurst asked.