Rex Stout (21 page)

Lee said quietly, “Do as you please. Yesterday with Secretary Wardell I lost control of myself. It enrages me to deal with fools.”

Skinner nodded. “He baited you a bit, didn’t he? Well, we’re going to release you. But before you go I’d like to make you a proposition. Were you concerned in the kidnapping of President Stanley? Wait a minute, wait till I’m through. Do you know anything at all about it, who planned it, who did it, where he is, what’s happened to him? Don’t think you’re dealing with another fool because I ask you this. I want an answer; I’ll know what to do with it. Well?”

Skinner’s gray eyes, which Lee had justly called good, bored into Lee’s. Lee was not interested in the boring, he merely maintained his gaze. He said, “No. I know nothing about it. I have my own concerns, and my country’s. I have
no interest in the games of children and criminals. Nor should you have. You have the quality—”

“Hold it, Lee. Well discuss my quality some other time, I’d be glad to. I believe you. I don’t think you’re mixed up in this, I think you’re too smart. That’s why I’m making you a proposition, because I think you’re smart. You know who I am. I’m at the head of the Secret Service of the United States. I doubt if I’ll ever have the job of chasing you; if you ever get far enough along to be chased they’ll probably have to set the army on you. In the meantime it wouldn’t hurt you a bit to have me feeling friendly to you. You know, just not hostile. That’s the way I’d feel if you happened on a chance to help me out on the job I’m on now. I’m setting you free. You know a lot of people and you get around a lot and you hear a lot of things outside of church. If you get a hint, no matter what, about the President, will you let me know? If it’s any of your friends of course you won’t, but it may not be. You might happen to hear almost anything. Will you let me know? It wouldn’t hurt you any; you don’t give a damn about the President one way or the other anyhow, you’ve got your mind on bigger things. Will you help me out?”

Lincoln Lee’s mouth was twisted, contemptuous beyond all considerations of ordinary amusement or scorn. His tone did not descend to resentment: “You know I won’t.”

“You won’t?” The Chief’s brows went up. “The hell you won’t. Would you like to think it over?”

“I don’t think things over.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you try it once? I’m not expecting you to betray your friends; all I ask is a little coöperation.”

“You’re asking me to stool for you. I forgive you the insult, Chief Skinner. But don’t repeat it.”

Skinner looked at him not quite with credence, like a botanist at a familiar plant off on a sport. At length he shook his head, turned to the phone and told the clerk to send in a man. He turned back again: “You’re a specimen all right, Lee. You’re quite a little guy. I hope to God I haven’t offended you. I’d hate to think there was anything between us except some good strong bars.”

A man entered. Skinner said, “Take this nut out of here and turn him loose at the door. And don’t let him sell you a gray shirt on the way down the hall.”

At four o’clock Thursday afternoon Ben Kilbourn sat in the library of the Daniel Cullen home in Pittsburgh, reading a book with red and yellow primulas stamped in color on the cover, beneath the title,
How to Build a Rock Garden
. It was chilly, and he sat before a fire in the fireplace, with his legs stretched out on a stool and his shoulders halfway down the back of a large leather chair. He was reading, some. Now and then he stuck his finger into his place in the book and got up and walked to a window and looked out, and after a little returned to the fire. He was listening for two things: for a possible telephone call from Washington, from Cullen who had gone there the night before, and for noises from the street.

At half-past two he had been rung up by Arkmore, one of the vice-presidents of the Federal Steel Corporation. It seemed that certain of the citizens of the steel capital and its environs, unemployed Reds and similar scum, had determined upon a more lively expression of their prejudices than holding meetings and sending delegations to the Mayor’s office. A gang of them had attacked the main office of the corporation in the city itself, broken windows, smashed in a couple of doors, and got themselves beaten up by the police. Other gangs had besieged the homes of two steel officials in McKeesport and one in Donora, captured the car of a couple of state troopers in Monessen and manhandled them, and made various other sorties here and there throughout the domain. Arkmore had called Kilbourn to tell him that one mob, obviously headed for the exclusive residential section on the hill, had already been intercepted and turned back, and that a squad of police was being sent to the Cullen home as a measure of precaution. The police were there now, scattered along the sidewalk and among the shrubbery at the rear, and that was why Kilbourn was listening for noises from the street.

After reading a paragraph or two on the desirability of incorporating plenty of grit and stone-chips with the soil between the rocks, Kilbourn would pause to reflect that if he
were the Mayor of Pittsburgh he would wire the Governor at Harrisburg without delay for a detachment of the National Guard. For the two hours following noon he had had the radio turned on, and he had gone through an early edition of an afternoon paper. It appeared to him that each little item of the day’s news shared with all the others a more ominous tone than could be occasioned by the routine bubbling of the chronic scum. The New York Stock Exchange was closed. Martial law had been extended to Maryland and Delaware and parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Virginias. The outbursts of violence had nowhere assumed formidable proportions, but they were occurring hourly, all over, and many of the reports came from unheard-of places and were informed with strange and grotesque characteristics. In Cumberland, Maryland, the citizens had thrown stones at the soldiers! There was certainly nothing to be made out of that, you couldn’t possibly find any sense in it, but it didn’t have the appearance of a bubbling scum. Conjecturally, ordinary people, those who commonly pay their taxes and eat chocolate candy and vote for Republicans or Democrats, had really got mad about something.

Ben Kilbourn thought, if it’s really like that, if they’ve really got enough spirit in them to keep a rage going overnight, they’ll turn this country upside down and anything can happen. He read another page, and stopped to decide that his guess was Fascism.

He got up, stood listening, and went to a window to open it and lean out. It was a gray afternoon, raw for late April, with a gusty ill-tempered wind. Across the wide lawn, he could see over the shrubs and between the trees that a car had drawn up at the curb and two policemen were getting out of it. Those on the sidewalk gathered around. One of the newcomers did not stop, but came trotting up the path toward the house.

Kilbourn went back and sat down. In a few minutes there was a knock at the library door, and the butler entered. He came over to the fireplace and told Kilbourn:

“An officer, sir. He says that people appear to be coming here, but it is not expected they will arrive. He says that it was thought we should be informed. Would you care to speak to him, sir?”

Kilbourn smiled up at him. “Are you scared, Ferris?”

“No, sir. I see no occasion for it.”

“I suppose not. I suppose you really aren’t. You were in the World War.”

“Yes, sir. I was at Ypres. And of course other places on the Continent during three years.”

“Yes. On the Continent. Quite. Well, we won’t get scared; I doubt if our guests are equipped with pineapples. Mrs. Cullen has not returned?”

“No sir. Around seven o’clock, she said.”

“Good. If we are besieged you can telephone her to stay away. I’m glad Miss Cullen is not here; she would be for arming us with thirty-sixes and potting them from the windows. Thank you, Ferris. I think I needn’t see the officer.”

The butler bowed and went. Kilbourn resumed his book.

Twenty minutes later he put it down. Unquestionably, this time, there were noises. He went to the window. At first he could see no one, no policemen at all, but leaning out and stretching his neck he caught sight through the screen of leaves of a small knot of them on the sidewalk at the far corner of the grounds; he could not see what they were doing, but they were moving. Noises now were quite distinct, and were coming from various directions; the loudest seemed to be from around the house, from the rear; it was a confused hum, the low preamble to a roar, the mob murmur of anger not to be mistaken for any other collective human sound. Suddenly, also from the direction of the rear, there was a volley of shot, the swift rattle of explosions nearly simultaneous. The roar swelled, and shouts and yells could be distinguished with it.

Kilbourn stood back from the window. Certainly he was not scared, but he was trembling and his lips were working. He said aloud, “By God, they still do. Hear that? They still do.” He started to the window, but a knock on the door turned him. It was Ferris back again.

The butler said, “Another officer, sir. A captain of police. He says the—er—persons will not be permitted to enter the grounds. The police have been instructed to shoot. He says we need feel no alarm.”

Kilbourn laughed, so sharply and suddenly that the butler could not stop his surprise before it got to his face. He erased it, promptly and successfully. Kilbourn said:

“That’s damned nice of him, Ferris. Don’t you think so? I’d go down and thank him, only I must wait here for a telephone call from Mr. Cullen. Mr. Cullen is in Washington, giving
them hell for not delivering the war he ordered. Thank the police captain for me, Ferris. Tell him how nice I think he is.”

“Yes, sir.” The butler hesitated, swallowed; and then, obviously, plunged. “Don’t let yourself get excited, Mr. Kilbourn. It doesn’t pay to get excited. We—we should do these things calmly, sir. Like me, sir, if I may say so. I have been contemplating a step for some time; it is as good as decided; I have in mind becoming a Communist, sir.”

Kilbourn stared. He stared for all of thirty seconds, and then exploded. “Oh for Christ’s sake! No! Oh for Christ’s sake!” He roared with laughter, into the gently perturbed face of the British butler.

The modern large American hotel is an ideal meetingplace for clandestine affairs. If you are properly dressed, not in need of a shave, and have the trick of looking decently aloof, you can enter an elevator and be carried to any floor, and the bustle of the lobby crowd leaves you satisfactorily unnoticed; and in a case requiring extraordinary precaution it is a simple matter to get off at the sixth floor and walk two flights up to the eighth, or off at the tenth and walk two down. House detectives and elevator starters are alert and vigilant observers, but even they see only what they are looking for, and those at the Pilgrim Hotel in Washington, late Thursday afternoon, had no suspicion of the singular gathering assembled in Suite D on the eighth floor. The name after which that suite was entered on the register of the hotel was A. R. Thomas of Chicago; the man occupying it, expecting to sleep in one of its beds that night if he slept at all, was Daniel Cullen, arrived early in the morning from Pittsburgh.

Vice-President Molleson was there, licked. He had too many vulnerable spots; the structure of his personal fortunes leaned shakily on too many borrowed timbers to withstand any serious pressure; and Cullen and Caleb Reiner, the oil king, had put the screw on him. The joining of the Cullen and Reiner interests was alone enough to stamp the gathering as unique. Denham was there, and Arthur Porter King; Voorman, Senator Allen, and the Pierce Brothers of the Wall Street house. But what gave the group its central and sinister
significance was the presence there of four men of a totally different type, men who were presumed to work for a living and receive their pay from the government of the United States: three Major Generals, Hedges, Jones, and Kittering, and Brigadier General Ridley.

If D. L. Voorman had been kept in jail incommunicado, Cullen and Reiner would have managed a collection of generals anyhow, but it would not have been precisely that quartet. Voorman had been released shortly after noon on the general order. He was of course completely ignorant of the nature of the developments of the past twenty hours; he had no notion why, after having been suddenly arrested, he had as suddenly been released. He walked down the sidewalk away from the jail, stopped at a newsstand and bought a paper, walked farther, entered a bookstore and came out again, and was a little annoyed at his discovery that he was being followed. People on the sidewalk had preoccupied faces and seemed all to be bound for somewhere; there were, in this section of the city, three or four soldiers to a block, their guns on their shoulders and their cartridge belts filled. Voorman stopped a taxi and gave the driver the address of his home.

His wife, slim blond Sally, was at home with a welcome for him. Voorman had to have a bath and change. While he soaped and brushed Sally sat on the corktop stool and told him things. She had much gossip, a little information, and two items of instruction: he was not to use the telephone for anything of importance, and he was to call as soon as possible at the office of Coulter, President of the Potomac Trust Company. Voorman got a bite of lunch, took a taxi to Coulter’s office, and was told by that discreet and dignified gentleman, “Go to Suite Eight D at the Pilgrim. Get off at the ninth or tenth and walk down.” Voorman said, “If you have a car you can spare for half an hour, would you tell your man to drive it up the alley to the back entrance of Howard’s hat shop and wait there for me?” Mr. Coulter would be glad to do that. In a few minutes Voorman left the bank, walked three blocks to Howard’s shop, nodded and beckoned Walter Howard to the rear, and was let out at the back door. Coulter’s car got him to the Pilgrim Hotel in less than fifteen minutes.

That was why the generals were so well selected. Voorman got there in time to prevent overtures to several, particularly Cunningham, who he knew were either dangerous or incompetent. He knew which of them were itching for the big job,
the top command, when war came; which were close to Oliver and which were outside of the clique; which were likely to prove most susceptible to the sophistry all prepared for them, and to offer least resistance to the dazzling temptation likewise all prepared.