The Devastators (11 page)

Mentally, however, she was a mess. She had the jitters so badly I wanted to pat her shining dark head in a fatherly—well, cousinly—way and tell her for God’s sake to relax.

The waiter put our drinks on the table. When he had gone, I said, “So you talked to Walling? I saw him, too, but he wouldn’t help me, either.” I kept my voice casual while I slipped her a fast one: “Kind of an antisocial gent, I thought. Kept looking at me through those slaty gray eyes of his like I was a bug on a pin.”

She frowned quickly. “That’s strange, I had a distinct impression Mr. Walling’s eyes were blue.”

Well, she’d passed that test. Either she had interviewed the real Walling or she’d been well briefed on his appearance. I shrugged. “The light was behind him. Maybe I made a mistake. Anyway, he wouldn’t help me, either. He just referred me to a book in the library.”

“I know.
The Scots Peerage
. It seems like a funny way of doing business.”

“Uhuh, funny,” I said, thinking of a dead man with his finger joints crushed and the back of his head beat in. “So your idea is that we should kind of pool our information?”

“Why, yes,” she said, straight-faced. “That is, unless you have some objection.”

“Hell, no,” I said. “Let’s pool. I’ve got an envelope full of stuff upstairs.” I gave her a long, deliberate, appraising look, starting high and ending low. With my eyes on her slim ankles, I said, “Let’s go up and look it over.” What it probably amounted to, I reflected, was that Basil had had to scramble to find a suitable young lady to play my distant Scottish-American relative—that is, to lead me into the new trap he was undoubtedly preparing for me. He’d had to settle for an amateur, or an inexperienced neophyte. He’d had to brief her and dress her in a couple of hours, and as a result neither the girl nor her getup were quite up to professional standards.

She was nervous and scared, and her clothes were all so new I kept expecting to see an overlooked price tag somewhere. I’d caught sight of the sole of a shoe when she crossed her legs uneasily, and the factory slickness had barely been scratched. She couldn’t have more than walked across a couple of sidewalks on it.

“I’ll have a bottle and some ice sent up.”

I raised my eyes abruptly to her face. She did not meet my glance. She said, “Well, I… I didn’t bring my material with me.”

I said, “Honey, you brought enough material for me.” She didn’t speak, and I said, “Okay, your place then. Where are you staying?”

“B-Brown’s Hotel.”

“Sure. Brown’s it is. Give me a minute to get my things.”

She hesitated uncertainly. I watched her. I’d made my lewd intentions perfectly clear. If she was just a nice young lady tourist after all, she’d at least postpone our genealogical consultation until daylight. More likely she’d slap my face indignantly and walk out on me. On the other hand, if she was Basil’s emissary, she’d undoubtedly been told to be as obliging as necessary to get me where I was wanted. Chastity is not a highly regarded commodity in our line of business.

After a moment, Nancy Glenmore laughed shakily. “Well… well, all right, if you’re sure…”

“If I’m sure of what?” I demanded.

She drew a long breath. “Never mind. All right. Run up and get your envelope, Mr. Helm. I’ll wait for you in the lobby.”

The doorman had the red Spitfire out front by the time I got back downstairs. We didn’t have far to go, and taking a taxi would have been easier, but if I was being decoyed away from Claridge’s for a reason, I might be glad to have my own car handy later. And then again, it might wind up sitting on the street unattended until the police had it hauled away, but that was a chance I had to take.

The girl had trouble getting in. You don’t walk into a sports car, you first lower your rump to the seat—they supply a special grab handle to help you—and then you swing both legs in at once; but she tried to enter left-foot-first and wound up half in and half out, giving us a generous display of nylon before she got herself all tucked inside. She was still rearranging her coat and kilts from the struggle when I got in beside her and sent the little bomb away, making some fine, sharp exhaust noises in the darkening street.

Over the years, Brown’s Hotel has been recommended to me by various Englishmen—Les Crowe-Barham for one—as the real place to stay in London. Claridge’s, according to these British accommodations experts, is more a museum piece than a hostelry. It had been some time since I’d last visited Brown’s, but I found it pretty much unchanged: a slightly less ostentatious establishment than the one we’d just left, with slightly less—but only slightly less—American mink drifting around the lobby like thistledown.

The second-floor room into which we sneaked rather guiltily would have made a good closet for the palatial chambers assigned to Winnie and me at Claridge’s. Well, almost. There was still plenty of space for a couple of good-sized beds, a writing table, an overstuffed chair, a couple of straight chairs, a dresser, a wardrobe, and a telephone stand, but if you wanted a morning workout in your room, you’d have to settle for simple setting-up exercises or move some of the furniture out into the hall.

A brand-new suitcase of pale-green molded plastic was open on a stand at the foot of the nearest bed. It had the right amount of stickers and tags on it to have flown, sailed, or swum across the Atlantic. Well, nobody in the business is going to miss out on an obvious detail like that. Elsewhere, closed, stood a smaller bag and a hatboxy sort of case to match, similarly labeled. Some nice new lingerie that did not look as if it had ever been worn showed in the open suitcase. Some nice new bedroom slippers or mules, the sexy kind consisting of a sole and a heel and not much else, stood by the beds.

Since it was getting late, and the Europeans go in for service in a big way, one bed had already been turned back by the maid, ready for occupancy. A long, shiny, pale-green nylon robe and nightgown had been laid out across the foot of it. Seduction-wise, I counted it a point in my hostess’ favor. This shortie stuff may be cute, but who wants a woman to look cute in bed? I mean, in the absence of a Lolita syndrome, it’s hard to get erotic about a female camouflaged to look like somebody’s kid sister. It’s practically impossible if she looks like Peter Pan.

Nancy seemed surprised and embarrassed by the intimate atmosphere of her quarters. Anyway, she started forward quickly, as if to smooth out the inviting bed and hang the seductive sleepwear out of sight. Then she caught herself and stopped.

“Just drop your things anywhere,” she said.

Her voice was casual, maybe a little too casual, and she’d turned away so I couldn’t see her face. Before I could offer to help her, she’d slipped out of her raincoat and hung it in the wardrobe, that massive piece of furniture that is a necessary adjunct to most European hotel rooms, since built-in clothes-hanging space is generally not provided. She turned back to face me. If she’d had any problems with her courage or her conscience, she had solved them very quickly. Her hazel-green eyes were clear and guileless.

“Would you care for a drink, Mr. Helm? I bought one of those customs-free packages they sell on the plane. We could ring for some ice.”

I laid my hat, coat, and envelope on one of the straight chairs. “The British drink their whiskey neat, I hear,” I said. “Let’s not bother the management. If they can do it, I can.”

“Well, there’s an open bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses over there on the dresser. Why don’t you do the honors while I… while I slip into something more comfortable.”

She stumbled a little on the last sentence. I couldn’t help glancing at her sharply to see if she was serious. I mean, it’s just about the oldest line in the world. Five will get you twenty Eve told Adam to hold that apple just a minute while she slipped into something more comfortable, even though the record shows she didn’t have a stitch on at the time. Nancy’s face turned pink under my regard. I grinned at her.

“Sure,” I said. “I know, your girdle’s killing you.” I grinned again, wolfishly, and picked up the green nylon stuff on the bed and presented it to her with a bow. “Well, we sure wouldn’t want you to suffer a minute longer than necessary, ma’am.”

She took the garments, hesitated, and started to turn toward the bathroom; then she swung back abruptly. “Damn you!” she snapped. “You don’t have to make fun of a girl just because she hasn’t done this corny hotel-room routine quite as often as you have!” She stalked to the wardrobe, disposed of the lingerie, closed the door, and turned again to face me. “All right, Mr. Helm, if that’s the way you want it! There’s the family Bible and the rest of the papers, right there on the table. You can start researching any time!”

It was kind of like being bitten by a blind, newborn puppy. She’d been all set to go through the usual shabby motions—strong liquor and slinky lingerie and the works—but I’d insulted her by not approaching the situation, and her, with the proper respect. I had made a mistake. I had treated her as an experienced female operative who’d been through the sex bit often enough not to mind having it kidded a little, but she was apparently new enough at the game to take it with deadly seriousness and expect me to do the same.

It made me feel uncomfortable, as if I’d been caught contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but I said harshly, “Cut it out. You know damn well I didn’t come up here with Bibles in mind—” I stopped. She did not speak or smile. Her eyes were hostile and unrelenting. I said hastily, “Okay, okay. Don’t be mad. Bibles it is.”

She hadn’t been quite sure I wouldn’t get rough, and I saw her face soften with relief as I turned away. I walked over and swung a chair around and sat down at the table with my back to the room. Presently I heard her let her breath out and give a kind of apologetic little laugh as if, since I was going to be nice about it, it wasn’t such a grave matter after all. She busied herself at the dresser and came over with two glasses and put one beside me. “There’s your drink, Mr. Helm.”

“Thanks.”

She picked up my manila envelope. “Is this the material you brought? Do you mind if I look?”

“Help yourself.”

She took it to the big chair in the corner, and set her drink on the end of the table. I noticed, because it’s the sort of thing you make a point of noticing under certain circumstances, that she hadn’t tasted it. I picked up my glass, watching her surreptitiously out of the corner of my eye. She was turning on the reading lamp behind her; she showed no reaction whatever. She went on to open the envelope without, apparently, the slightest interest in whether I drank or died of thirst.

Of course, the liquor didn’t have to be loaded, this time. She might want to go a little farther toward gaining my confidence—as far as the nearest bed, say—before lowering the boom on me. And even if the drink was drugged, there was nothing for me to do but gulp it down like a good boy and hope I’d wake up in the right place, preferably in Scotland, without too many shackles and bars and bolted doors between me and the girl I was supposed to assist and the man we were supposed to kill.

I told myself to quit stalling, but I couldn’t help the nasty sense of uncertainty you get before you commit yourself irrevocably to a risky course of action. There’s always the nagging question:
Have I figured this right?
I couldn’t help remembering that Buchanan and several others, who’d probably thought themselves, rightly or wrongly, just as smart as me, had figured wrong. They must have. They were dead. I tried to encourage myself with the thought that each man had lived long enough after being caught to get himself infected with a super-virulent disease, but somehow it didn’t make the future look very much brighter.

I nursed the glass in both hands, warming it as if it contained precious old brandy, while I pretended to look over the papers on the table. Then I raised it deliberately to my lips. The girl was examining one of my photostats with absorbed interest. I started to drink. It was the lack of ice, and the stalling I’d done, that saved me. Just as the stuff touched my lips, I caught the faintest hint of a scent rising from the warmed-up liquor that I probably would not have detected if the drink had been cold: a flowery scent that never came from good Scotch, or bad Scotch either.

Incongruously enough, it was the fragrance of violets. It told me what I was dealing with. We’d first encountered this stuff a couple of years before in the possession of a man we’d captured, something nice cooked up by their backroom boys: a colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid completely miscible with water and alcohol. It was volatile enough so that if the medical authorities on the scene didn’t take all kinds of precautions and work very fast they wouldn’t find much to analyze in the dregs of a drink in an open glass, or the body of a man who had drunk of it. It worked almost instantaneously. They’d called it Petrozin K.

Potentially, it had been a fine weapon for their dirty-works armory, and it had apparently passed all their laboratory tests, but in field use, like so many new products, it had revealed a significant flaw: it wasn’t quite stable. Although it had presumably been given all the usual lab-checks for sensitivity to light, temperature, and agitation, when it actually came to be carted around in agents’ pockets under normal operating conditions, it started to break down very slightly, and to react with its breakdown products in a peculiar way. It lost none of its potency, but traces of an aromatic contamination were produced—an ester, according to our chemists—that gave it a faint, betraying odor that might, by a romantic individual, be likened to the scent of violets.

Apparently they’d never managed to lick the problem. After six or eight months we started coming up against other unpleasant concoctions and heard no more of Petrozin K. However, an ex-agent of theirs—or a man pretending to be an ex-agent of theirs—who’d fallen into disgrace about that time might still have a little of the older poison in his possession; enough, say, to give to a green-eyed girl to spike a glass, or even a whole bottle, of Scotch.

I managed not to look at Nancy Glenmore, so-called. After all, it wasn’t the first time somebody had tried to kill me. It wasn’t even the first time somebody had tried to send me to hell by the chemical route. I just hadn’t been expecting it tonight. I’d been assuming that, like Buchanan and the others, I was wanted alive, at least temporarily. I guess it wasn’t the attempt that shook me so much; it was the fact that, thinking myself clever, I’d almost cooperated in my own murder. Well, the next step was obvious.