Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (30 page)

“It’s going pretty well,” she told him, pointing to the litter of notes and diagrams on her desk. “Tomorrow, I’ll be ready for some field work at the Metropolitan and the Frick. Then you and Harry and I can get together and really start the job moving.” She unfolded the sandwich from its neat waxed-paper wrapping, spread the paper napkins on the radiator cover, and laid out the cardboard container of coffee, the wooden spoon and the cubes of sugar. “Have a pickle?” She offered him the last item in the paper bag.

“Give it to the pigeons,” Arnim suggested. “Well, glad everything’s under control. Don’t work too late.” He gave her a cheery grin and left.

Silence began to fall over the floor of offices. A few solitary noises—a single typewriter, a fit of sneezing, someone whistling off-key, occasional hurried footsteps—told Rona that others were working late too. She finished the sandwich quickly for she was hungry, wished she had ordered two, and then lighted a cigarette while she sipped the coffee. She picked up the newspaper. Something called the
Amerasia
case was going to be reopened. Strange, she thought, I was here in New York when it all happened and I don’t remember a thing about it. What does that make me—too preoccupied with my own life or just plain stupid? Or perhaps that’s the same thing... I bet I’m not the only one who’s a little bewildered by the newspaper tonight, and most of us will say, “I can’t believe this, surely it’s all exaggerated!” and we’ll throw the paper aside and try to forget it.

She folded the newspaper and put it away, persuading herself that she had indeed her own problems and she couldn’t even worry about them or she’d never get this job done. She rose and began clearing the napkins and container and pickle into the brown bag, keeping herself from thinking about Scott by making her movements brisk and decided, by feeling business-like and ready to face another couple of hours of work. It was six o’clock now. She sharpened her batch of pencils afresh, found some more paper, and settled at the desk once again. She began reading and making notes.

Footsteps came down the corridor and entered the main office. Then they stopped. The silence seemed to deepen. Rona, looking up from her work, listening in spite of herself, called, “Hello, there!”

Paul Haydn answered, “Hello, yourself!” He dropped the magazine that had caught his attention back on Phil Arnim’s desk, and came toward Rona’s room. He was as surprised and as embarrassed as she was. “Hello,” he repeated. He held out a manuscript. “I came along to leave this with Burnett. It’s a good article, I think, but it’s more in your line than mine. Would you have a look at it?” Then he saw the books on her desk. “No, I guess this is the wrong time to ask you,” he added with a smile.

“I’ll have a look at it tomorrow,” Rona said. She took the typescript and saw the neat memo clipped on its title page:
Would Miss Metford please check on the facts in this
?
Many thanks. P.H.
She smiled, too.

He turned to leave. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“About what?”

“About June. I hear you are getting married then.”

“Oh,” Rona said, and the smile left her face. “That’s just another false rumour. Now.”

He noticed then that the ring on her left hand was missing. He didn’t know what to say.

The telephone rang. Rona glanced at her watch. Six-thirty. Scott. It was probably Scott, calling to see why she hadn’t reached home yet.

Paul Haydn stretched out his hand to answer it.

“No!” she said. “No, Paul. Please don’t.”

He looked at her, making his own guesses. She turned her head away from him, pretending to look out the window at the roofs and penthouses and water towers. The ’phone kept on ringing, as demanding and insistent as Scott’s own voice. It is true, she was thinking, Scott only belongs to himself. His way is the only way, his decisions are the right decisions. There is something almost ruthless, terrifying and ruthless, in his single-mindedness. Even when he hesitates, even when he seems to be arguing with himself, there’s never any real doubt in his mind about what he will choose to do. It’s odd, she was thinking, that I must have felt this all along, that I must have smothered all these fears because they seemed so disloyal; it’s odd that, suddenly, during this last week-end, they couldn’t be smothered any more. What happened in these last few days to let my fears all take shape in my mind at last? Or has this hideous climax been a personal crisis for Scott, and I’ve felt it? Oh, ridiculous, stupid... Perhaps I’m a fool.

She looked at the ’phone. She almost reached out to take it. But she drew back.

Paul Haydn said, “Whoever is calling you wants to reach you. Are you sure you ought to let—let whoever it is keep ringing?” His voice was expressionless, his eyes pitying. She is still in love with Ettley, he thought.

“Yes,” she said unhappily, “yes. I’m sure.” How can you marry a man you’re afraid of? The telephone stopped ringing. She took a deep breath.

“Well,” Haydn said, glancing at his watch, “I’ll get going, now. I’m meeting someone at half-past seven.” He looked at her again. “You know, it might do you good to come along, too. You need dinner, I think.” This wasn’t an evening to work alone in an office.

“No. But thanks, Paul.”

He hesitated.

“You see,” she explained frankly, “I am not going to add to the gossip that has been spread about you.”

“You mean about Blackworth and you and me?”

She nodded.

“Hell,” he said angrily, “are you going to avoid me just because of a rumour?”

“Haven’t you been avoiding me?”

“Well...” he said slowly, “I had a reason. I don’t have it now.” He glanced at the telephone.

Rona’s face coloured.

He sensed her embarrassment and wished his tongue hadn’t been so quick. “All right,” he said. “Sure you won’t come along with us tonight?”

At the door, he turned to say, “By the way, you saw the evening paper? Nasty business, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t read very much. It gave me an attack of guilt, somehow. We are just so busy with our own lives—that’s our only excuse, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Although there wasn’t much that anyone could do. He didn’t have many friends, did he?”

She looked at Paul in surprise. “He?”

“Charles.”

“Charles?”

“Yes. Don’t you remember Thelma’s son? The funny little guy with the red hair and the seesaw voice? It’s in the evening paper. Didn’t you—? Look, here it is!” He came back into the office, picked up the paper, and found the paragraph.

“What?” she said in sudden panic, hardly able to believe what she read. “Charles killed himself?”

“Jumped out of a window. And he injured a harmless old man on the sidewalk. Sort of pathetic that. Everything Charles did, he bungled, right down to the last moment.”

She put down the paper. “No,” she kept saying. “Oh, no!”

He had never seen her so upset. She hid her eyes.

“Did you know him?” Haydn asked. “Sorry, I didn’t realise...”

“I only met him that one time,” she said quickly. “On Sunday. And I really didn’t believe him. Not altogether. Perhaps I could have helped. Perhaps I could have—” She broke off. She sat very still.

“No one could have saved him. Look, here’s the newspaper report. It lets Charles down as lightly as possible, but it’s easy to see he was going to be sent to an alcoholics’ home. And he resisted. He jumped out of a window right in front of the two men who had come to take him away.”

“
What
men?” she asked sharply, her voice rising. “And
where
were they going to take him?”

“Rona,” he said in alarm. “Take it easy, there!”

She rose quickly. “That envelope I gave you—it was from Charles.” She was already at the door, hurrying through the main office into the corridor toward his room.

He followed her quickly. He unlocked the safe and handed her the envelope. She was calm now, calm and determined.

She said, “I got this letter on Monday morning. Read it. It will explain.”

He read the letter. “Yes,” he said at its end. He was frowning. He repeated aloud Charles’ sentences: “‘But if anything happens—and I think, now, that it is likely to happen—then the problem is solved for me. It will be at that moment, when I shall be morally free but perhaps not physically free to speak, that I shall need your help.’”

Too late, Rona thought miserably. Poor Charles... I was of no help.

Paul Haydn said, “He saw this coming—not suicide, but being shut away in some ‘rest home.’ If his mother agreed to that, then he felt free to speak out.”

“But when they came to take him away, he jumped from the window of his room,” Rona said. Then, watching Paul’s face, she asked, “Or did he jump?”

Paul said slowly, “They didn’t need to kill him: they had him, all right.”

“In a sense they did kill him.”

Haydn nodded. “This letter alters things a good deal. What other witnesses were there? What about the servants? Frankly, I think we’d better hand this letter over to the police.”

“What about the enclosed envelope? Charles suggested someone like Weidler to open it. Why didn’t he suggest the police?” Rona looked at the envelope in her hand, and then she dropped it on the desk, quickly—as if it were a flame that seared her fingers. She drew back half a pace, looking at the envelope. “Weidler will be home in Westchester,” she said almost to herself.

“He isn’t even there. He left for Chicago this afternoon. He will be back on Saturday.”

“But the envelope should be opened at once. Paul, what shall I do?”

He looked at the envelope, but he didn’t touch it.

“You take all this seriously?” she asked him.

“After a death—yes,” he admitted.

“It must be opened,” she said, still looking at the envelope. Or Charles’ death might mean nothing at all.

“I know a man,” Paul said slowly. “He would know what ought to be done.” Then he faced her frankly. “There may be nothing of importance in that envelope. But it must get into the right hands, whatever it contains. You agree?”

“Yes.” Who else could help? she wondered. There was Jon Tyson, there might have been Scott. But the most she could get from them would be advice, just as Paul was advising her. She didn’t need any more advice; she wanted action. “Is your friend in New York?” she asked.

“Yes. Actually, he’s waiting for me to pick him up now. We planned to have dinner and then go on to St. Nick’s for some wrestling.”

“You trust him?”

“Yes. And he knows a lot of people. That may be important for quick action.”

“All right,” she said.

Paul Haydn picked up the telephone and began dialling. “You know,” he said as he waited for an answer, “you are trusting
me
a lot.”

“Well, you ought to know about this kind of thing. After all you were in Military Intelligence, weren’t you?”

He looked at her in surprise. “Now what gave you that idea.”

“Why, you were always so silent about your assignment in London, I thought it was hush-hush.”

“Plenty of hush-hush jobs that weren’t Intelligence,” he said. Then he spoke into the telephone. “Roger? This is Paul. Look, something urgent has turned up. Could you come over here, right away?... Yes... Good... See you.”

Now it’s all out of my hands, Rona thought. But did I act wisely? What else could I do? Strange that I should have admitted so frankly that I trust Paul Haydn. Eight years ago...

Paul was saying, “Do you mean to say that you actually believed I was in Military Intelligence? Well, I suppose that’s one flattering rumour to have spread around. Except, it makes me feel I’m getting more credit than I deserve.” He was embarrassed.

“Oh, I didn’t talk about it,” she said quickly. “Only once, in fact—and that was after you were out of the army, too.”

He seemed to have thought of something. “Quite recently?”

She looked at him in amazement, half-smiling. “On Sunday. I was arguing with Scott about something, and I brought up Military Intelligence to prove a point. You know, Paul, you
are
a bit of a detective.”

And on Monday, Orpen’s stooge Murray dropped me, he was thinking. Any tie-up? He said with a grin, “Am I?”

It was her turn to look embarrassed. Had he guessed that she had been defending him on Sunday? (Scott had called Haydn an idiot. “Not so much of an idiot or he wouldn’t have been in Military Intelligence.” That’s how it had been.) “How long will it take your friend to reach here?” she asked.

“About ten or fifteen minutes. Here’s the most comfortable chair. Cigarette?” His voice was suddenly impersonal, matter-of-fact. He began talking about St. Nick’s Arena, a nice safe unembarrassing topic unless you were really interested in wrestling.

“Do you go there often?” she asked, grateful that she could stop thinking about either Charles or Scott.

“I’m hoping to write an article on the fine old American myth of the good one and the bad one.”

“How’s that?” She was beginning to smile.

“Well, in wrestling as it is done over at St. Nick’s, the hero begins by losing. That’s the way you know he’s the good one. Also, he’s got a fine innocent face. He fights clean—no fouls. And he falls for all the bad one’s tricks, unless the public yells its warnings. He’s taken in, sometimes, even when they do warn him. He can’t believe, a fine upstanding guy, that there could be any malice aforethought in a friendly handshake. So he takes a lot of punishment. But he doesn’t give up. Meanwhile, the bad one is being booed all around the ring. The public yells its hate at him. The more he wins, the more he’s hated. And then, just in the last couple of minutes, the good one suddenly loses his temper and starts winning. The crowd cheers itself hoarse, and everyone goes home feeling fine: that’s the way life should be—the good one winning, the bad one losing, and the public being wise to it all, right along.”

“A comforting myth,” Rona said.

“Harmless, too, unless you confuse it with reality.”

She had been studying his face. He’s changed so much, she was thinking. “Paul,” she said suddenly, “what kind of work
did
you do in the army? Or can’t you talk about it?”