Doppelgangers (29 page)

The effect of this bright piece of deduction was surprising but quite hopeful—as the end was to gain time.

The young man burst into indignant protest. “No!” he shouted and in his excitement actually uncovered his victim. “No, she's not to blame. She never betrayed you. She couldn't. It isn't in her absolutely loyal nature. But you pushed her too far. If there has been any betrayal it is I who with a conflicting loyalty have sacrificed her.”

He paused and was evidently so taken up with his own romantic dream and sorrow as for a moment to disregard his prey. He had to justify himself.

“I'll tell you. I'll not have even you go out with a wrong impression of that woman, absolutely loyal even to such an object as you, and to me, just because she felt that in me she could see what you must have been, and, who knows, may, before you went to pieces, have been. Yes, you shall know.”

“Well,” his selected victim reflected, “we must be thankful for assassins' sense of the dramatic! Probably they would never take the considerable risks and ardors of their trade were they not always dramatizing themselves as statuesque tyrannicides. I suppose I felt like that once. How much position changes conviction! And, of course, when they have to carry out their crowning act as it were in private, naturally they may never be able to run through the scene again, even by themselves. Hence we have the epilogue before the last act.”

He was right, the young man was going to unburden himself and show the full height of his rectitude.

“You starved and exploited that woman. She was your chief victim. Out of a vast population she was on the summit of your holocausts.” As he spoke his words moved him more than they interested his listener. His voice began to tremble. “I don't know what I've done. I didn't know what I was doing. Here's the story, and you can go to your tomb with perhaps the first piece of straight truth you've heard for years. I was young and hotheaded, and, like the best of my class, I hated you with your debauching of the people with pleasure. We wanted a fine, hard generation, one that lived and grew tensile on contest, struggle, and war. And you were turning them into slops and drabs. Oh, yes, all prettily turned out like a beauty chorus in a low show. Well, when I'd been like that for some time, I heard that there were some people who hadn't gone over and who worked humbly, strongly, unremittingly.”

“You mean the Mole and Company?”

“Oh, I suppose you know what your chief of police tells you. But you can't know the spirit of the catacombs that burns deep down there, a true volcanic flame under all this ash and garbage. It will yet clean up all this dump!”

The boy's rhetorical prologue was giving him back his spirit. But a moment after he began again to waver.

“Well, I hadn't been long in, before we were electrified to hear that our chief—yes, the Mole—had at last made a perfect plan, so that he could insert, like a hypodermic needle under the hide of this great bull beast, one single germ and the monster would collapse. We were told that somehow he had been able to pick one of us and train him somehow so that he would be able to get through all the defenses and then, at the center, knock out the center pin. Then the whole wheel of oppression would fall in pieces and we could give back to mankind a clean, open, athletic, strong life.

“We were told that the training had been successful; we were told that the torpedo had been launched, that it was approaching undetected the giant hulk, that it had actually pierced its way through the torpedo nets, that the charge was now in contact with the central magazine. We waited with an expectancy that grew with the days—and then nothing happened.

“I was one of the first to dare ask, ‘Is success still expected?' Indeed, the first to make the question an open challenge. I was court-martialed. It was insubordination, of course, even to talk about the plans. We were told, not in order that we should comment, but could be ready to co-operate should we be needed at a moment's notice: to show us what sacrifice we could have to meet and could meet, and to keep up the morale in that dark where there is never any clear news, only rumors …”

How well his hearer knew! The boy sighed, and then squared his shoulders.

“I owned that I had done wrong and could be literally fired but said they had better make a last use of me. I said, I'm like what the brute Bull used to look like. I told them that everyone knew of his secretary's state of heart. Why couldn't they send me to my death that way? Why not let me try the oldest of all ways into a citadel, older than the Trojan horse, the way through the harlot's house that is upon the wall, the way through a hungry woman's bedroom? That's the real sop to Cerberus—”

He paused, tired of his literary showing off, and added, “I thought it led to death, but noble death. But perhaps it only leads to hell after all. Well, they condemned me to death for insubordination on active duty and when I was waiting in my cell I received the reprieve: that I was to try for six weeks if I could make that entry, after which I would be picked up and disposed of. Yes, I succeeded—” the thought of his success did not raise his tone—“I succeeded. I was well trained and a good learner. First, I found out some of her friends. I should just have time for that necessary circuity. I was able to interest one of them greatly in me—for she, too, was one of your super-fans and the likeness was what she wanted.

“Of course, as soon as we were really intimate, she had to boast of and commiserate about and so patronize her more successful friend. She told me at great length all about your secretary's hopeless passion. We sympathized together and she got so much enjoyment out of this absent patronizing of her powerful friend that, sure enough, in less than three weeks she actually thought she had suggested that I should see the great lady. We met, and again I saw that I held the card I hoped. She was hungry, right enough, poor kid, and she needed me. Then I had to play a part as difficult and dangerous as all the rest.”

He leaned against the back of the desk almost relaxed as he lived over again the old nervous tension; that ancient intimacy springing up in that odd corner, the age-old confidence of one man telling another of the time he has had when the woman he has made fall in love with him has still to be kept in ignorant attachment, while he goes on to make a further attachment to the woman who is his prize but perhaps also his captress.

“Well, the hand played itself out. Yes, my face was, if not my fortune, my fate. She had fallen, right enough, after the first interview. I kept the double game going and before the six weeks were over I was able to report back, ‘Can claim further reprieve of six weeks. Have now access.' Yes, I became her lover and shortly she was allowing me to be in her apartment here. I was dressed as one of the palace attendants. She found me a post, in one of the kitchens, as it happened. I used to bring her up her food and spend the evening with her. So I could say to the hyphen woman-friend that I was being kept by my work. But though she no doubt loved me because I was what her sane body knew you ought to be and had once possibly been, I—” he paused—“I began to love her for herself.”

Then he shook himself. “Oh, don't flatter yourself I'm getting soft. Maybe I shan't kill you for the old reason but I'll kill you for a better, because, as long as you live, she won't love me completely. That's the real male reaction and you'll get it, never fear. But I hated deceiving her and, heaven knows how she'll take what I am determined to do.

“She trusted me at the end completely. It was only a couple of nights ago when she was in my arms and she sighed with complete content. ‘This is perfect,' she told me, ‘for now I feel safe and I also know He is safe.' I had always spoken to her as if I, too, were a doting fan. ‘You must,' she added, ‘often have the same fears for Him that I have. He is so brave and I know that though all kinds of people come in to see him he will never have his automatic on his desk. He calls it a piece of unworn insignia that he hopes soon to discard even abroad. But,' and she put her face closer and whispered in my ear, ‘a few days ago he left me alone in his room. I couldn't resist. The throne was still warm where his arm had rested. I crept from my chair, went on my knees on the dais, and just laid my head for a moment where he had been sitting and, while I caressed the arm of the chair his hand had been on, I found that one of the small ivory horns of the symbolic bulls' heads was really a switch. I turned it and nothing happened. I left it on and stood up, looking round the room. I know it was wrong, but what woman is not curious about the secrets of the man she adores? As I gazed about, a large moth with purple-dusted wings suddenly sailed out from the great bouquet of flowers on the mantelpiece. It floated down through the air and lit on a corner of the outside of the dais which I could just see. There was a small flash and it was gone—utterly gone. I spun round, turned off the switch, and was back in my seat in a moment. But my heart was high in spite of the shock. I knew he had his defense and, thank heaven, he was wise enough to keep it from everyone.'

“Well, after that
I
knew the way was open. I just couldn't miss and mustn't wait. I'd have got you anyhow, had you been at your desk. But you see how fate rules and insists? At the moment I enter you choose to take a stroll and be ready to sit for your death mask in that convenient chair where you will be neatly executed.”

Sitting back in that chair, Alpha II imagined that he could feel with his back the exact place where the hole had been repaired through which he had sent the bullet that confirmed Alpha I's dispatch. The lad, too, had evidently almost finished his tale, when, of course, he would have nothing to do but shoot.

“Well, I had to drug her, drugged her tea as I brought it to her and sat with her, saw her sink away into stupor, and her last word was ‘Alpha wants …' Well,
you
shall want nothing more, I promise her that, and when she wakes the way will be open to a sane, rational, heroic love.”

He wound himself up with the winding up of his story, heaved himself onto his feet, and his fingers closed round the butt of the automatic.

“You are sure that you
are
killing Alpha?” his victim remarked quietly.

“Why, where's the doubt
there
!” the lad replied half in contempt but with almost as much question in his voice.

“Come here,” Alpha II commanded. “You know I am unarmed, and I will put my hands in any position you like provided that you will put your face close enough to mine for you to see precisely.”

“What are you up to?” the other asked, obviously nonplused.

“Well, it would be a pity if, after all your skill, sacrifice of feelings, and considerable courage, you killed the wrong man. If you went back to the Mole with the wrong extraction he would not thank you and might spoil your oncoming marriage. If Alpha has really got away you'd be the fool if you only killed the dummy put up to distract your fire!”

“But of course you're Alpha.
She
knows it. Nothing would deceive her!”

“Well, to some extent, you have.”

“That's different, quite different.”

“But did you, considering the way you went about to get in, considering the type of disguise, your looks, that got you in, did you never wonder what method was used to get in your predecessor on this deadly but hopeful route?”

The boy was evidently now mainly won over, and, to the second command, “Come over here,” he did obey. He held his automatic ready and his hand was more than half tensed round its stock. It was a tonic feeling to watch those muscles and wonder how far that thumb-tendon would have to rise before the neat little piece of mechanism his palm contained would cough out its deadly phlegm right into Alpha II's lungs. But the young fellow reached within two feet of the elderly looking man seated in the chair and the gun had not hiccuped.

The young face, which was the rough model of the face it scanned, looked up and down the lined and worn features. Sure enough, that must be Alpha; it was only a wish to gain time. And this was what time did, this was what he would be some day. It was high time to throw off that old husk, to finish his job, for now he'd never be safe with that old powerful parody alive. He must get through the formality of firing and get back to the poor drugged girl downstairs. He must be with her when she woke and all this must be in the fixed past. But the man who was, for all intents, dead and with his arms, as he'd been told, locked behind his head, did not seem blanched with fear or even shaking with any nervousness and he was speaking quietly:

“Now that you are close enough, look over my face, or
this
face, and see those fine lines, like very fine cobweb marks, fine, white, straight, very keen, cuts—for that is what they are; they are white because they are sharp, deep surgical scars. Now, for you can take any liberties with it you like, raise the upper lip.” Gingerly, the lad obeyed and hardly prevented a slight shudder.

“Yes, you see, the jaws have been cut in the same way and the teeth extracted. Go on, look well all round the inside of the mouth, and you can trace cuts and slashes and long incisions right down to the windpipe. The whole mouth cavity and throat are as scarred and mutilated as the outer surfaces of the face.”

As the boy kept the teeth exposed, the voice mouthed its words in disgusting accord with the exposed build-up. The boy let the lip fall from the grinning dental sets and the great, bulging, pink plastic mounts in which they were set. The mantle of lip fell over the sham frontage. He drew back; his fingers nervously wiped themselves as though he had had to handle a badly reconstructed, ill-preserved corpse that, as he touched it, might collapse upon him.

Filled with this uncanny sense of strangeness, he couldn't resist asking, “Who are you?”

“Your predecessor.”

“But …”