Contents

- Chapter 1

- Chapter 2

- Chapter 3

- Chapter 4

- Chapter 5

- Chapter 6

- Chapter 7

- Chapter 8

- Chapter 9

- Chapter 10

- Chapter 11

- Chapter 12

- Chapter 13

- Chapter 14

- Chapter 15

- Chapter 16

- Chapter 17

- Chapter 18

- Chapter 19

- Chapter 20

- Chapter 21

- Chapter 22

- Chapter 23

- Chapter 24

- Chapter 25

- About Patrick Quentin

- Bibliography

PATRICK QUENTIN

THE FOLLOWER

Copyright © 1950 by Patrick Quentin

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

The Follower

1

THE New York plane made a ten-minute stop-over in Miami. Mark Liddon, big, blond, burnt almost black by the tropical sun, hurried to the Western Union desk.

In Venezuela it had seemed a wonderful idea to surprise Ellie. He had wanted to pretend that the eight-week separation hadn’t existed and that here he was just casually coming home from the office as usual.

‘Hey, baby. Had a good day?’

But during the long hours of the plane trip from Caracas his common sense had reasserted itself. His wife wasn’t expecting him for two weeks, and Ellie certainly wasn’t the little woman who sits at home by the fireside warming her husband’s slippers. Why wouldn’t she be out — at the Lorton Club, for example? Or, worse still, what if she had the apartment jammed with her bright, chattering friends who thought of a party as a kind of endurance marathon? No; he was going to have Ellie alone tonight. There was to be no nonsense about this homecoming.

A bored blonde sat behind the counter beating out messages on a machine. Mark took a blank form, scribbled the address and wrote:

SEE YOU AT ONE TONIGHT. IT’LL BE A MERRY CHRISTMAS AFTER ALL. LOVE MARK.

As he handed the form to the blonde, a hollow voice over the public address system boomed: ‘All passengers for Flight 312 to New York please board the plane at Gateway Number Twelve.’

As the plane strained off the ground into the air, Mark felt he had the world under his thumb. It had been hell to leave Ellie after only three agonizingly short weeks of marriage. But now his decision had triumphantly justified itself. The oil survey in Venezuela had been a huge success. It had been the one thing he had needed to establish him as a free-lance mining engineer. The long years of arduous night study, makeshift jobs, catchpenny boxing bouts and bitter self-denial had paid off at last.

Now the only wrong thing about his marriage had been righted. No one any more could call him that obscure ex-boxer who had abducted Ellie Ross into matrimony. Nor could Ellie’s parents look down their long, in-bred noses and mutter: Fortune-hunter. He was up in the chips where he had always known he would eventually find himself.

Of course, Ellie laughed at the financial inequalities of their marriage.

‘Darling, we’re mad for each other. Who cares where the dreary little dollar bills come from?’

But Ellie didn’t understand. She was too young and far too wild to know what worked and what didn’t work. That two-month exile in Venezuela was going to be the making of Mr and Mrs Mark Liddon.

The plane was lulling Mark into a pleasant state of drowsiness. Luxuriously, he let his mind roam back to his first meeting with Ellie. It was a game which he had learned to play in the oil-swamps of Venezuela, a game which had brightened his sweltering days and gloomy, mosquito-infested nights. Now, through much use, the memory was as vivid as a moving picture on a screen.

It always began in the same way, with Arlene and himself sitting at the bar of the dancing-gambling Lorton Club. Mark had a hard-working man’s contempt for smart night life and had only consented to go that evening because it was Arlene’s birthday; one of her clients at Maurice’s, where she worked as a hair-stylist, had given her a visitor’s pass.

At the start of the memory movie he was feeling disgruntled and bored, when a girl came suddenly out of the double doors which led to the gambling rooms. Two men in tuxedos were with her. One was a large, stuffy-looking young man of the type that marries débutantes in the social pages. The other was Victor, the owner of the club.

But the girl riveted all Mark’s attention. She was wearing a white, preposterously bustled evening gown, and the deeply tanned skin of her arms, back and face glowed below the cream-colored hair which was only a few shades darker than the white dress. She looked like a crazy little school-kid trying to be glamorous before her time. She was beautiful, sure, but it was that eager childishness that hit him so violently.

‘All a wonder and a wild desire.’ Some poet in some high-school English book had said that.

Arlene, glancing up from her drink, said: That’s Eleanor Ross. I do her hair.’

He’d heard of her, of course. Anyone who ever glanced at a column had heard about Ellie Ross, the only daughter of the President of Ross Steel Products. She’d been a sensation ever since she’d cut off her braids three years ago and galloped into the headlines with a run-away near-marriage to a fading ex-cowboy movie star.

As he watched her, fascinated, she and her escort left Victor and strolled towards the bar. Suddenly she saw Arlene and her face lit up like a kid’s face again, a kid seeing something that was fun.

‘Why, Arlene! Thank God there’s someone amusing here at last. It’s such a lugubrious bunch to-night. Meet, for example, Corey Lathrop.’

As she gestured at her escort, her blue eyes, restless as butterflies, settled on Mark. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said but I’m going to dance with you. This is utterly and absolutely essential.’

At this point there was a blur in the memory movie. Then they were on the dance floor. She was light as a pop-over, but she clung close and warm with casual intimacy. That was a quality she had. In five seconds you felt you had known her all your life.

‘I’m furious with Victor.’ The remembered dialogue was almost as real to him now as if her voice was talking in his ear. They won’t let me gamble.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m high. When I’m high I have the most majestic hunches, but I always lose my shirt. That’s what Victor says. He doesn’t want me to lose — because if I lost I wouldn’t pay and he’d have to kill me.’ She looked up at him solemnly, a child bored with the dull tyrannies of adults. ‘That’s true, you know. He has to kill people who don’t pay their debts. That’s the only way he can keep in business.’

Mark had no technique for this sort of aimless chatter. It belonged, with the girl, in a world he had hardly glimpsed, the frivolous world of Arlene’s clients and the occasional parties to which he had eccentrically been invited in his boxing days. But she smiled again and suddenly he knew that he wanted her more than anything in the world.

‘No one introduced us,’ she said. ‘I’m Ellie. Ellie Ross.’

‘I’ve heard of you.’

‘Oh dear; if you’ve heard of me, you’re forewarned. Who are you?’

‘Mark Liddon.’

‘My parents know some dreary Liddons in Newport. In the chemical line.’

‘I’m Liddon by court-order — born Liczdonski. My father was in the shoe-repairing line.’

She laughed. ‘How fascinating.’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course it is. It’s a dark family secret, but the Ross fortune is founded on shoe-repairers. My nasty old grandfather churned out cobbler’s needles in a sweat shop. They were lousy too. Thousands of shoe-makers complained. Bitterly.’

‘Thousands ? ‘

‘Hundreds of thousands.’

The air hostess, coming down the aisle, jogged his elbow and the memory screen went blank. She smiled her professional smile at him. He smiled back, not seeing her, and, closing his eyes, let the dialogue roll on. Where had he got to?

‘Thousands?’

‘Hundreds of thousands. You’re the blondest man I ever saw. What is that? Swedish?’

‘Czech.’

‘I am a little high. You’re swaying gently from side to side like a mast. What do you do, mast? Repair shoes too ?’

‘I’m an engineer.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘Why?’

‘Everyone’s an engineer or something respectable.’

‘Are they?’

‘I’m not. I suddenly, terribly want to ask you an unrespectable question.’

‘Ask ahead.’

‘Are you Arlene’s boy-friend?’

‘Not particularly. We grew up together in Providence. I’ve known her since way back when.’ Excitement shivered up his spine. ‘Is Lathrop your boy-friend?’

‘Corey? Oh, he’s supposed to be. He’s a junior vice-something or other in Father’s company. He’s got twelve promising careers ahead of him. Twelve — count them. And he’s terribly, terribly virtuous too. Crammed with good works. He’s Father’s new secret weapon to blast me out of my life of sin.’

‘How sinful is it?’

‘Just as sinful as you think it is — and then some. Far too sinful for any of Corey’s redemption.’ Her fingers pressed against his shoulder. ‘Here he comes to cut in. Knock him down, engineer; shoot him; tell him I’ve gone away for the week-end.’

Sleep had almost overtaken Mark now. The movie was becoming a montage, jamming together the crazily wonderful week when he had hardly left Ellie night or day, the inevitable clash with Corey Lathrop, the spontaneous marriage in Maryland, the subsequent unsatisfactory scene with Mr and Mrs Ross — all the improbable elements which should have spelt disaster and had, in fact, brought him an even more improbable happiness.

Shoot him; tell him I’ve gone away for the week-end. What was the next line? The question became confused in his mind and then faded. He dreamed he was already with Ellie, and smiled in his sleep.

When he awoke, they were landing at La Guardia field. He felt refreshed and keyed up to the highest pitch of exhilaration. He sailed through Customs, the fuss of arrival and the hearse-like trip in the airline limousine to 42nd Street. It was snowing. As his taxi swung into Park Avenue snowflakes twirled secretly downward past darkened apartment houses. Along the center of the almost deserted street, Christmas trees, festooned with lights, dwindled away in sparkling perspective.

‘Corner of Seventy-fifth ,was it?’ asked the driver.

‘That’s right.’

The taxi made a U-turn and stopped in front of a long canvas portico. Mark got out, pulling his suitcase after him. The doorman was off duty at this hour. He paid the taxi and it disappeared into the weird silent world of snow. He walked into the apartment house vestibule. The old night elevator man was snoozing in a Louis Quinze chair beside a mirrored wall. He jumped up, blinking, and surprisingly recognized Mark, although Mark himself still felt an interloper in the luxurious territory which was so essentially Ellie’s.

‘Why, Mr Liddon. Welcome home. Back for Christmas, eh?’

‘Yes.’

The two of them moved to an elevator. The old man, wheezing sleepily, took him to the top floor.

‘Want me to carry your suitcase, Mr Liddon?’

‘That’s okay. I’ll take it myself.’

‘Okay, Mr. Liddon. Merry Christmas, Mr Liddon.’

Mark crossed the little foyer to the front door of his apartment. His heart beating quickly, he took out his keys. The door opened into darkness.

He knew at once that Ellie wasn’t there. Light was an obsession with her. Wherever she was all the lights blazed. His exhilaration collapsed. He put down his suitcase and snapped the light switch. As the long foyer sprang into illumination, he saw a yellow Western Union envelope lying on the thick carpet at his feet. He picked it up and read it.

SEE YOU AT ONE TONIGHT. IT’LL BE A MERRY CHRISTMAS AFTER ALL. LOVE MARK.

He felt a sick sensation of disappointment. Ellie had gone out before the telegram arrived. He had left it too late. He cursed his infantile decision to surprise her.

He moved into the living-room, flipping the switch, which brought all the lamps jumping alive. The huge, fantastically decorated room, with its navy-blue walls, its swirling drapes, its abstract paintings, was not very welcoming. There had not yet been enough time in his marriage for him to identify this extravagance with home. But Ellie would be back eventually. He would take a shower, change, mix himself a drink at the bar and wait for her. It wasn’t the way he had imagined his homecoming, but it would have to do.

He went into the dark bedroom. As he crossed the threshold the scent of Ellie’s perfume — light and spring-like — trailed out to him. Its impact on him was so violent that he felt she must be there. But he turned on the lights, and the room where their four-poster bed stood, sybaritic and canopied on its dais, was empty and in a state of high disorder. A long grey evening gown was tossed over a pink chaise-longue; golden slippers had been strewn on the floor by the vanity. The bed itself was not made and a brassiere dangled from the tumbled pink sheets.

Poverty and the severe discipline of foreign-born parents had bred in Mark a fastidious neatness, but he had grown accustomed to the chaos in which Ellie seemed to live by choice. Almost for the first time since his marriage he found himself wondering what Ellie and his patient, uncomplicated Czech mother would have thought of each other. The combination was so unlikely that he grinned.

‘Mom would probably have taken a baseball bat to her,’ he thought. ‘Maybe it would be a good idea at that.’

Enjoying the confusion as if it were another of the many emancipations which had come with Ellie, he pulled off his own clothes and tossed them around with equal abandon. Stripped, he walked into the black-tiled bathroom and took a shower.

As the hot jets of water rained down on his straw-colored hair, mirrors reflected his big, muscular body from all angles. In Venezuela he had lived in shorts, and the contrast between the mahogany of his torso and legs and the pallor of his lean hips was almost grotesque.

Where the hell was Ellie? Out, of course, with some of her crazy friends, who were still known to him only vaguely as first names. But where? For no apparent reason he thought of Corey Lathrop. He had won Ellie from Corey; he ought to be able to be indifferent to him. But Corey had everything he had never had himself — inherited wealth and position established on a solid foundation of the right family and the right education. Obscurely, although he wouldn’t admit it, Corey made him feel inferior. The rasping idea came: ‘What if she’s out with Corey Lathrop?’

He dried himself, walked out into the bedroom and pulled from the closet his shabby old grey-flannel bathrobe. He had been embarrassed by it on his wedding night and wished he had thought to buy a new one. But Ellie had adored it.

‘Darling, it positively reeks of gyms and Y.M.C.A. shower-rooms. Why didn’t I think of marrying a boxer years ago?’

Twisting the cord around his waist, he returned to the living-room and started up the curved staircase which led to the bar. Of course Ellie wasn’t with Corey. Corey bored her. She had said it a dozen times.

‘He sits on Parole Boards and redeems convicts in his spare time. What can you possibly do with a man whose idea of mad gaiety is to redeem convicts?’

The living-room was two floors high and the bar made a little balcony at the head of the stairs, railed off with a white iron balustrade on which philodendrons and other vines trailed from white pots in tropical exuberance. Mark reached the head of the stairs. The light from the living-room was only a shadowy radiance here. He paused, tried to remember where the electric switch was, remembered and snapped it on.

He saw the familiar lavender and grey walls, the low divans, the horse-shoe bar of bleached oak.

He came to an abrupt halt.

Sprawled on his back at the foot of a bar stool, bizarrely spruce in a neat dark suit, lay a large young man.

He recognized Corey Lathrop immediately.

And yet this seemed as if it must be some mad materialization of his own thoughts.

He dropped to his knees. There was a blood-caked hole in the jacket just about where the heart would be. Mark Liddon picked up a cold, limp wrist and felt a pulse that was not there.

Corey Lathrop wasn’t a mirage. He was here all right. And he was just as certainly dead.

2

MARK LIDDON got up and stood very still. He could feel the sweat trickling down from his armpits. He thought with a kind of anguished tenderness:

‘My God, what’s the little fool got into now?’

Then, instinctively, he groped for explanations that would put Ellie in the clear. Maybe she had gone away. Maybe she had lent the apartment to Corey. Maybe … He pushed all that aside. He mustn’t start trying to kid himself. Because Ellie was Ellie, because she had an affinity for disaster, she was almost certainly in this up to the neck. This was her jam all right.

And because it was hers, it was his too. He must keep calm. He mustn’t feel. Not yet — not until he had this thing under control. He must work it out coldly like a problem in engineering, reconstruct what had happened, gauge the danger and neutralize it. Later he would start feeling about Ellie.

‘Keep calm.’

He said it to himself in words in his mind. It was a habit he had developed in the early rough and tumble of his boxing days when a crisis had materialized in the ring. The actual shape of the words had seemed to have some magic power for him, and now he found that the charm still had its effect. He felt a little giddy. That was all and that would pass.

‘Keep calm.’

He squatted down again by the body, the skirts of his bathrobe sliding back from his bare knees. He touched a cold cheek. He knew practically nothing about rigor mortis, but he could see that the jaw had begun to stiffen and elongate. Corey hadn’t been dead long. A couple of hours, maybe. He searched for a gun. He couldn’t find one. It was crazy, then, to hope for suicide. He might as well accept the fact too.

He crossed to the bar and poured a shot of Scotch into a tumbler. There were two soiled glasses standing side by side next to a whisky bottle. Two — Corey and Ellie? That was bad too. His reflection was thrown back to him from a mirror behind the bar. With the old grey bathrobe wrapped around him and his light hair spiky from the shower, he looked absurdly informal for a man facing the greatest ordeal of his life. He sat down on one of the stools, sipping the liquor, thinking.

Two dirty glasses. No gun. No Ellie. She had killed him, then? And fled in a panic with the gun? Because that’s what Ellie would have done. If something bad had happened, she wouldn’t have hung around, she would have run away from it.

It was amazing, in a way, how clearly he understood her shortcomings and accepted them without criticism. Yes, Ellie would have run away. But there was something else about her that was far more important, something he was as certain of as he could be certain of anything. However wild she was, Ellie could never be cold or calculating. If she’d killed Corey, there’d been an accident, maybe, or some situation which had to have this ending. She could kill like a kid, but not like a murderess. But what had happened here to end in murder didn’t matter yet.

It was what he was going to do to straighten it out that mattered.

Against all probability, he felt a kind of excitement. His masculinity, his function as his wife’s protector, was being put to the test.

He accepted the challenge.

He finished the Scotch. It had made him icily calm. Already he had decided what he would have to do. Mark had none of the instincts of an outlaw. Unless there were completely unforeseen elements, he would sooner or later go to the police. That was only common sense. He and Ellie could not spend the rest of their lives as fugitives. But he would have to find Ellie first, learn what had happened, coach her into a reasonable story. To call the police now and have to admit that she had run away would be fatal for her. She’d never stand a chance in court — particularly since Corey had been an ex-fiancé. No, it was imperative to find her before the police found Corey. And to find her would take time. By now she might be almost anywhere. Certainly she would never come back here.

Tomorrow morning, around nine, Ellie’s old Swedish maid would arrive. If the body was still here, she would see it. That gave him only a few hours’ leeway in which to find Ellie. A few hours were not enough.

Okay, there was only one thing to do. He’d have to get Corey out of here.

This decision, so wildly different from anything he had ever expected to have to do, seemed perfectly natural to him. His exaggerated calm made him feel that he had never been more lucid. To conceal a body was a criminal offence. Okay. That couldn’t be avoided. Things were bad enough already; they might as well be that much worse.

But, for the eventual show-down with the police, he drew, on a sheet of Ellie’s elegant grey stationery, a precise, engineer’s diagram indicating the exact position of the body. At least that would show that he was not being irresponsible. Having completed it, he folded it neatly and put it in his bathrobe pocket.

He sat down again on a bar stool, looking at Corey. Whatever his plan for the body’s removal, he would need a car. He did not own one himself, but Ellie’s Cadillac was parked in a garage a couple of blocks away. At least, it was if she hadn’t gone off with it. Before he did anything else he’d have to go around and check.

He dressed in the bedroom, putting on the same clothes he had worn in the plane and transferring the diagram to his jacket pocket. He glanced through Ellie’s closets, trying to find out whether she had taken any baggage with her, but she had so many clothes that he couldn’t be sure.

His tactical plan was already half formulated. The service elevator was self-operating and the man who worked it during the day was off duty at eight-thirty. On the ground floor a service door opened into an alley which led to the crosstown street. If he parked the Cadillac at the mouth of the alley, he could bring the body down in the elevator and, maybe, manage to carry it to the car without being seen. At least there would be no danger from the man on the front elevator.

After that … the rest of the plan was still vague. Perhaps he could take the body and dump it either by the river or in the park. The simplest plan was usually the safest.

He put on his topcoat in the foyer and moved out into the vestibule. He pressed the button of the service elevator; a little red eye winked on. When the cage came up he stepped inside. Someone had left an old mop and a pail of dirty water in it. He rode down with them to the ground floor. He had never been there at night before, and the anxious thought came that perhaps the door leading to the alley was locked. But it was merely bolted on the inside. He released the long bolt, and, stepping out, drew the door almost shut, so that, to a superficial glance, it would seem to be closed.

It was still snowing. He moved down the hundred or so feet of the alley to its mouth, paused, glanced to left and right, and then went out into the deserted street. On this hurried walk to the garage he passed only a scattering of pedestrians. None of them looked at him. Their heads were bent low against upturned collars. The snow, blurring identity, shut each of them off in a little world of his own.

He reached the garage. The dim overhead lights of its lower floor revealed packed, gleaming rows of automobiles. Joe, the night attendant, was not visible.

The large cement ramp loomed in front of him. Ellie’s normal parking place was upstairs. As he started towards the ramp he heard a clatter deep in the garage and saw for a moment the dungareed figure of Joe stooping over a car at the back.

His rubber-soled shoes making no sound on the cement, he walked up the ramp. The upper floor was enormous and desolate. The cars, parked in long parallel lines, seemed to be waiting for some sudden inrush of people that would bring them bursting to life. He moved along the broad central aisle. With quickening of his pulses, he saw the sleek rear end of Ellie’s Cadillac parked where it usually stood, just a few cars from the sliding doors which led to Dead Storage.

So far so good.

He squeezed past a Town and Country Buick and reached the driver’s door of the Cadillac. As he opened it he happened to glance towards the doors to Dead Storage. They were ajar. A sudden idea came. He skirted the Buick again and moved through the narrow aperture between the sliding doors into the dark interior of the space beyond.

Around him, visible only as faint, unrelated gleams of metal, stretched the cars, set up on blocks, which had been put away for the winter. Why wouldn’t this be a far safer dumping place for Corey than a haphazard location by the river or in the park, where he would certainly be discovered before morning? Once a car was laid up for the winter, who would look for it? It was cold here too - cold like a refrigeration plant. If he could smuggle the body past the attendant, it might not be discovered for weeks. That would give him excellent control of the time element. Corey could stay there until he was ready to produce him again.

He groped his way to the car nearest him and tried the door handle. It opened. With a twinge of elation, he returned to the garage proper. It would be safer if Joe didn’t hear him take the Cadillac out, even though it would be no tragedy if he did. He pushed the car to the head of the ramp and coasted down, going into gear only when he had swung into the street. He was practically sure that Joe had noticed nothing.

He drove to the apartment house, parked the Cadillac at the opening of the alley and returned to the apartment by the service elevator.

As he passed the bedroom, he caught once again the fleeting fragrance of Ellie’s perfume. A sudden longing for his wife and for a reasonable, ordinary homecoming overwhelmed him, almost cracking his somnambulistic calm.

‘Ellie,’ he thought, Ellie, baby, where are you?’

But in a moment he had the situation in hand again. Later - for all that. He turned on one light in the living-room and climbed the stairs, past the iron balustrade with its trailing vines - back into the bar.

3

IN the vague light from downstairs the body seemed large and menacing. He dropped at its side. In his mind he still called it Corey Lathrop, but he had made himself deny its humanity and think of it as an object - a nondescript something which had to be removed from here and dumped in a winter-stored car.

He rolled it over on its face. Easing his shoulder under its stomach, he rose slowly until he was erect with it slumped over his shoulder, the long legs dangling in front of him. He moved to the head of the stairs and started down them, steadying himself with his free hand against the iron banister. Although his muscles were in perfect condition, he found Corey far heavier than he had imagined possible. On the bottom step he stumbled and the corpse sagged off balance. Before he could right himself, he fell sprawling into the living-room. The body, cold and impersonal, rolled after him.

He got up and stood for a moment panting. It would probably be easier to drag it. He gripped the hands and started to pull the resisting hulk towards the front door. It knocked against the table leg, making a lamp totter. He felt absurd anger welling up against it.

At the door he dumped it and moved out into the vestibule. The service elevator was still there from his upward trip. He propped the door back with the mop and the pail of dirty water and, dragging Corey inside, laid him half upright against the wall. He brought the mop and pail in and closed the door.

As he did so, Corey lurched sideways and down, sending the mop clattering and overtilting the pail. The noise, in that confined space, seemed deafening, and Mark felt the dirty water sliding clammily around his shoes.

Downstairs, he made sure the coast was clear and then brought the body out into the alley. With the snow acting as a slide, it was easy to pull it along and the tracks would soon be obliterated. There were lighted windows above him, but he was almost sure the alley itself was too dark for anyone to see him. Somewhere, far off, a radio or a phonograph was playing. He could just make out soprano voices caroling: Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

At the head of the alley he propped the body in a sitting position against the house wall. This was the most dangerous moment — the moment of getting it into the car. Corey was very obviously dead. No one close enough to see him clearly would mistake him for a Christmas drunk.

Mark moved to the corner, glanced out and then flattened himself back against the wall. Across the street, behind the Cadillac, a woman in a leopard-skin coat was walking a Doberman Pinscher on a leash. Mark had been alone so long that, although the street separated them, she seemed frighteningly close. And the dog … Did dogs smell corpses? Would it raise its nose, sniff, drag its mistress across the street? The fantastic notion and his extreme reaction to it warned him that his nervous energy was more nearly exhausted than he had supposed. He stood, close to the wall. Corey’s shoulder sagged, limp, against the back of his knee.

The woman paraded up and down, her leopard collar flapped up to protect her from the snow. The dog was snuffing listlessly along the sidewalk. At last it strained towards a snow-capped fire-hydrant and lifted its leg.

‘Good doggie; good Eisenhower.’

The woman’s voice seemed shatteringly loud. She bent and patted the dog, which looked up at her, foolishly lolling its tongue. She started away down the street, with the Doberman pulling her forward.

No one else was in sight. He moved to the car and opened the rear door. An automobile rug was on the back seat. He threw it over the front seat and, returning to the alley, hauled Corey up to a standing position, then, in a clumsy rush, impelled him across the sidewalk and toppled him into the back seat. He managed to cram the body down on the floor and threw the rug over it.

Sweating in spite of the cold, he drove to the garage and swerved the car up the ramp. As the office flashed by, he glanced inside it. Joe did not seem to be there. On the second floor he parked just outside the sliding doors which led to Dead Storage. He got out and stood, straining his ears. In the dank silence he could hear an occasional echoing clank of metal from below. Joe was still at work. His luck hadn’t deserted him yet.

With a speed that now had in it a touch of hysteria, he maneuvered the body out of the car and half dragged, half carried it the few feet into the darkness of the Dead Storage room. He parked the Cadillac in its original position and returned to the body. He resisted the temptation to dump it in the nearest car. It would be safer to choose one deeper in the spectral phalanx.

He walked along a row of shadowy, jacked-up automobiles and selected one at random near the end of the line. It was a station wagon. He could just make out its sleek contours. He tried the rear door. It was unlocked. He returned to the body and lugged it to the wagon. Bracing himself, he lifted it and tried to push it into the rear seat, but it sank back on him, pinioning him against the side of the adjoining automobile. He slid out from under it, and climbed into the station wagon’s back seat. From inside, he reached out and, grabbing the body, tugged and wrenched at it, gradually pulling it in towards him.

There was something about that silent battle which, for the first time since he had left the apartment, kindled horror in him. The full realization suddenly returned that this senseless, passive antagonist was Corey Lathrop, important business executive, well-known New York social figure, Ellie’s ex-fiancé, who had been killed in Ellie’s apartment. Downstairs, pottering with an automobile, was the garage attendant, representing law and retribution for the law-breaker. Surely, at any moment, he would hear Joe’s footsteps clattering towards him over the oil-stained cement.

But no sounds came.

With one last jerk, he managed to drag Corey fully on to the floor of the back seat. He himself was squashed up, somehow, on the seat itself. He crawled over the body and out of the car. If there had been a rug in the station wagon it would have been better. But, crammed down on the floor, Corey certainly would not be visible from outside. No one would find him unless, for any reason, they looked inside the car itself.

He knew he had already spent too much time up here, but he lingered, reviewing every move he had made, assuring himself that nothing had been overlooked. Satisfied, he slipped out of the Dead Storage room and, turning up his coat collar, walked through the central aisle past the cars and down the ramp.

As he reached the foot of the ramp Joe was coming through the cars towards him carrying a spanner. Mark suppressed an impulse, born of physical debilitation, to run out of the garage. It didn’t matter very much now whether Joe saw him or not. So many other patrons would have come in and out so many times before the body was discovered.

The attendant’s young face, beneath tousled red hair, was sleepy and bored.

‘Hiyah, Mr Liddon. Thought I heard a car just come in. Cold enough for you?’

‘Hi, Joe.’

‘Personally I like a White Christmas myself. Nice for the kids.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, good night, Mr Liddon.’

‘Good night, Joe.’

‘Merry Christmas, Mr Liddon.’

Mark went out into the falling snow.

A few minutes later he was back in the apartment. He went straight up to the bar. He found that there wasn’t much blood and what there was had missed the central rug and merely stained the marbleized floor. He wiped it up with a wet rag, rinsed the rag out in the kitchen and dropped it in the trash can.

He poured himself a drink of water from the tap and sat down on a white enamel kitchen chair. He was feeling lightheaded from fatigue, but the almost automatic calm had not deserted him. Okay, he had carried out the first half of what had to be done. The body was safely stowed away until he chose to have it revealed. Now it remained to find Ellie.

He tried gropingly to project himself into her mind. After something so terrible had happened, what sort of place would have meant safety to her? Some friends’ house, maybe? But he didn’t know her friends. A threatening blank wall seemed to loom in front of him. If only he knew Ellie better! That was the ironical part of it. He loved her, he thought he understood her, he knew every nuance of her body, the little mole under her left shoulder blade, the pattern of white and golden suntan on her skin. But he didn’t really know her as a husband can know a wife. How could he? He hadn’t had the time.

Suddenly his mind wouldn’t function. If he tried to think any more now he might panic. It was better to put everything off till morning and get some sleep.

He was half-way through the living-room on his way to bed when he thought of Corey’s overcoat. Obviously Corey would not have come here through the snow without a hat and coat. He opened the hall closet and saw there an unfamiliar snap brim brown felt hat, a Burberry and a small black briefcase. The sight of them as nearly defeated him as anything that had happened that evening. He knew that they would have to be disposed of. Now that he was irrevocably committed to the course of obliterating all connection between Corey and the apartment, it was far too dangerous to leave things here. He picked up the briefcase and unzipped it. It was full of papers. Almost certainly they would make a direct link with Corey. He tossed them on the hall table. He would burn them later.

He put on Corey’s Burberry over his own coat. He tried on the hat. It was too small. He squashed it into a ball and pushed it into a pocket.

With the briefcase under his arm, he made his third trip by way of the service elevator into the desolate world outside. It was after four; the dead hour of New York. He didn’t pass a soul as he forced his rebelling body crosstown to the river and then downtown ten blocks. At the end of a sidestreet below Sutton Place he took off Corey’s coat and dumped it with the briefcase into the river.

It was exactly five o’clock when he returned for the last time to the apartment. There were still the papers. He took them into the living-room, and, hardly able to keep his eyes open, glanced through them. There were minutes of a board meeting, and a lot of technical manuscripts which he didn’t try to understand. They might well have been of major importance to the Ross Steel Products Company, but he couldn’t concern himself about that.

He pulled the fire screen from the hearth and deliberately, one by one, burnt all the papers and dispersed the ashes in the grate.

He turned off the lights, moved into the bedroom, stripped off all his clothes and, naked, dropped into Ellie’s tumbled pink sheets.

Suddenly, as if some tap had been opened, anxieties flooded through him, dispelling his great fatigue. He had done what he had been able to do for Ellie. But what did it amount to? At the time it had all seemed planned, efficient, almost heroically sound; all traces, it seemed, of Corey’s visit to the apartment had been erased.

Now, with a merciless clarity, he saw that the ark of safety he had built for his wife was as riddled with holes as a sieve. Corey Lathrop was an important man, with secretaries and dozens of friends. Why wouldn’t one of them know that he had planned to visit Ellie that evening? His disappearance would be reported tomorrow. Why wouldn’t the police make a bee-line for Ellie’s apartment? Why wouldn’t an elevator operator remember taking Corey up to the penthouse? Why…? There were a thousand ‘whys.’

Until then he had succeeded in keeping from thinking emotionally about his wife. But now she leaped into reality as vividly as if she were in the bed with him, and his love and fear for her clutched at him. Where was she? The poor, frightened kid, what was she suffering?

He twisted on to his side and his hand touched something. His fingers curved around it and picked it up. It was Ellie’s brassiere.

‘What a homecoming,’ he thought. ‘What a hell of a homecoming …’

4

MARK LIDDON woke up. For an instant he confused the scarlet bed canopy with mosquito netting and was back in Venezuela. Then he remembered where he was and what had happened. He looked at his watch. It was almost nine o’clock. He had slept less than four hours, but it seemed to him that he had been recklessly wasting time. There was so much to do.

He got out of bed and put on his grey bathrobe. Outside the window the rooftops of Manhattan gleamed white like great frosted cakes. It was not actually snowing, but the heavy grey of the sky indicated that the storm was not over. The brief sleep had restored his thoughts to their normal coherence. He had to find Ellie before the police found Corey, or everything he had done for her, instead of helping her, would boomerang on them both. It was as simple as that.

He went into the living-room and inspected the fireplace to be sure that he had efficiently burned Corey’s papers the night before. Satisfied, he went up to the bar and studied the area of floor which had been bloodstained. He had done a better job than he had thought. Police analysis might be able to detect blood, but there was nothing visible to the human eye.

He thought of the rag with which he’d cleaned up the night before. Going into the kitchen, he picked it out of the trash can and put it down the chute which led directly to the apartment house incinerator. If he had thought of the chute last night, he could probably have disposed of Corey’s coat and briefcase that way. But, until he met Ellie, his New York days had been spent in cheap walk-ups. The chute was still exotic to him. In the emergency he had reverted to the technique of poverty.

By now Ingeborg, the Swedish maid, should have arrived. She might know something of Ellie’s whereabouts. He prepared coffee and put the percolator on the stove. Ingeborg still hadn’t come by the time he finished breakfast. In the bedroom he found the maid’s number in Ellie’s telephone book. A woman’s voice, heavily accented, answered his ring. No, it wasn’t Ingeborg; it was her sister. Ingeborg was in Atlantic City. Hadn’t Mrs Liddon told Mr Liddon that she had given Ingeborg two weeks off for Christmas? Hadn’t Mrs Liddon told Mr Liddon that she was going away?

‘Going away?’ echoed Mark.

‘Yas. She tell Ingeborg she oughtta take a vacation too, have a good time for Christmas.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Since two days. Since two days Ingeborg is in Atlantic City.’

‘Two days ago. Did Mrs Liddon go away two days ago too?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Know where she went?’

‘Ingeborg don’t know. She says Mrs Liddon just says she’s going away.’ The voice added anxiously: ‘You want I should tell you Ingeborg’s address? You want she should come back?’

‘No. No, thanks.’

‘If you want I should tell …’

‘No. It’s okay.’

‘Okay, then. Merry Christmas, Mr Liddon.’

‘Merry Christmas.’

Mark put down the receiver. Ellie had sent Ingeborg away two days ago and had said she was going away too. Why shouldn’t it be true? She hadn’t expected him for two weeks.

Knowing Ellie, it was fantastic to suppose that she would have planned to spend Christmas in a lonely apartment. For the first time, he thought that perhaps his wife hadn’t killed Corey Lathrop. He was too cautious to give hope full rein, but the dark pall was lifting.

Maybe he had invented a nightmare for Ellie and himself which had never really existed. If she’d gone away two days ago, she was definitely in the clear. She could have lent Corey the apartment in her absence. Corey, as a parole officer, could have run into trouble with one of his pet redeemed convicts. Yes, it might have easily happened that way.

His spirits soared. But he wasn’t going to let optimism run away with him. Perhaps Ellie had left two days ago. But he would still have to find her and make sure everything was all right before he could think about going to the police.

And finding her, even if she were innocently off on a trip, would not be easy. She had as many ‘favorite’ places as she had ‘favorite’ friends — Palm Beach, La Jolla, Sun Valley. Distance didn’t exist for her. She would jump a plane to Hawaii if she felt in the mood.

He thought of asking around in the apartment house — the elevator boy, the doormen. But he decided against it. Until he knew more than he did now it might be risky.

Perhaps her parents would know something, although it wasn’t likely. Ellie had turned her back on the Rosses and all they stood for some years ago, and ever since their contemptuous rejection of Mark as a son-in-law she’d been hardly on speaking terms with them. But, unwelcome though he would be at Gramercy Park, it was the most obvious place to try first.

From the taxi window, on his way downtown, he watched the snow-heavy Christmas trees pass by. Somewhere, at Corey’s apartment or at the Ross Steel Products Company, people would be starting to wonder about Corey. A maid, perhaps, had found his bed unslept in and was speculating idly as to why Mr Lathrop hadn’t told her he was spending the night out. Soon a secretary at the office would be thinking: ‘Mr Lathrop’s late this morning.’ An attendant at the garage might be wondering whether he’d remembered to drain the radiator of that station wagon he had blocked up for the winter a while ago.

Since yesterday the whole face of the city had changed. It wasn’t just a town any more. Both for himself and for Ellie wherever she was — it was becoming a trap.

Outside the Rosses’ apartment house in Gramercy Park, snow clung to the iron railing which surrounded the gardens and sat in white puffs on the winter bushes. Mark entered the old-fashioned foyer and moved to the cramped self-service elevator. The atmosphere of the house depressed him. To him money was something you took intelligent advantage of once you’d got it. Why did the immensely rich Rosses choose to play at the simple life? Just because Mrs Ross had been a Van-Something that didn’t mean they had to live in the Mayflower.

The elevator stopped at the third floor. The Rosses owned the whole building. Mrs Ross’s father had built it. But they kept only one floor for themselves. A dowdy ‘family’ maid opened the door. She looked uneasy.

‘Oh! Mr Liddon. One moment, please.’

She made as if to close the door, but he pushed past her into the foyer.

‘Where are they?’

‘In the library, but . .’

He ignored her twitterings and strode through the foyer. The maid scurried ahead of him, and, opening a door, announced breathlessly:

‘Mr Liddon.’

Mark walked past her into a room of sad brown leather and musty blue. Everything remained the way it had been left by Mrs Ross’s father. A bust of Dante stared from its niche above the bookshelves. A portrait of Mrs Ross’s father, painted by Sargent, stared with equal stoniness from above the marble mantelpiece, beneath which a meagre fire was burning.

Mrs Ross sat by the fire, with a coffee-cup in her hand and a low table set with a breakfast tray at her side. She was a large woman with deliberately untidy grey hair and a handsome profile. Mr Ross, thin and dignified as an elder statesman, stood by the window. It had started to snow again. White flakes twirled and sank behind him. They both looked at Mark unsmilingly.

She said: ‘Why, Mr Liddon, we thought you were in Brazil or somewhere.’

She used his name as if it were slightly foreign and difficult for her quiet precise voice.

‘I got back earlier than I expected,’ Mark said. ‘Ellie’s not home. I’ve come to find out if you know where she is.’

Mrs Ross sipped her coffee. ‘She’s not here, I’m afraid.’

‘No,’ said Mr Ross, ‘she’s not here.’

A small clock chimed softly from the mantel. There was a Christmas tree in the corner, carefully trimmed with tinsel snow and shining balls, blue, yellow and green. Mark wondered irrelevantly what two old people wanted with a Christmas tree. Probably it was because there’d always been one. Another of Mrs Ross’s memorials of her dead father.

He said: ‘Know where she is ?’

Neither of them spoke. They were not being rude or hostile; they were too polite for that. They were just passively uncooperative.

Finally Mr. Ross said: ‘I’m afraid Ellie doesn’t keep us informed of her comings and goings.’

‘But you’ve seen her recently ?’

Mr and Mrs Ross exchanged a swift look which seemed to serve them as an adequate means of communication. The snow falling past the window gave the weird illusion that Mr Ross was moving very slowly upward.

He said: ‘As a matter of fact Ellie came to visit us last week.’

‘And she didn’t say anything about going away for Christmas?’

‘I don’t believe so,’ said Mr Ross. Mrs Ross’s untidy head was bent over her coffee. ‘Yes,’ continued Mr Ross. ‘Ellie came to visit us because she wanted to borrow — money.’ He pronounced the word as if it were almost indelicate.

‘Borrow money?’ Mark said.

‘It appears she had been gambling. She owed a large sum. She was not able to meet it.’

‘It’s happened again and again,’ put in Mrs Ross suddenly, and the soft bitterness in her voice managed to reveal a whole life of maternal disillusionment.

So Ellie had been gambling. She’d got a little high at Victor’s, had one of her ‘majestic hunches’ and lost her shirt. Now the whole picture was changed again — and for the worse.

He asked: ‘And you let her have the money?’

‘No,’ broke in Mrs Ross again. ‘No, we did not.’

Mr Ross smiled his sad, distinguished smile. ‘Perhaps this is as suitable a time as any to explain certain things to you. My wife and I have tried to be good parents to Ellie. We have given her every advantage and attempted to set her a good example. But for several years she has chosen to lead a frivolous and worthless life with what we consider idle and vicious associates. It has not been easy for us to see our only daughter systematically destroying herself, but you can hardly expect us to encourage that process.’

He paused. ‘We always hoped that these — these dissipations were a passing phase. We were pathetically prepared to believe that she might marry Corey Lathrop and become a responsible citizen again. But instead of marrying Corey —’

He looked down at his carefully manicured hands. ‘We have nothing against you as a man. How can we? We know nothing about you and were given no chance to. But we have everything against you as a factor in Ellie’s life. In the past we have helped her out of many scrapes and received precious little gratitude for it. After this — er — irresponsible marriage was thrust upon us we put down a foot which should have been put down much earlier. We told Ellie that in future we would give her no financial aid whatsoever. She has her own income from her grandmother. It should be more than sufficient to support in luxury both herself and any impecunious husband to whom she chose to attach herself.’

Mark’s anger rose to the obvious goad, but he was even more shocked than angry. His own parents would have disapproved of gambling too. But if Ellie had been their daughter they would have stood by her to the last ditch and the last debt. It was inconceivable to think of them adopting this glacial washing of hands attitude.

Suddenly he imagined Ellie as a little girl growing up in this bleak, loveless mausoleum. For the first time he saw pathos in her as well as brilliance. It added a new tenderness to his feeling for her. Poor kid, with a couple of icebergs for parents, no wonder she had run to ‘idle and vicious associates’ for warmth and affection. This was enough to have soured anyone on respectability for life.

The clock on the mantel chimed softly again. It was an idiot clock that had lost contact with time. A slight draught from somewhere made one of the golden balls on the Christmas tree nod.

‘She tried to borrow from Corey too.’ The words burst out of Mrs Ross as if there was some masochistic streak in her that enjoyed reopening wounds. ‘Imagine trying to borrow from Corey after jilting him the way she did. Corey asked Mr Ross what we wanted him to do.’

‘We told him,’ said Mr Ross, that he was on no account to lend her anything.’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Ross She added suddenly: ‘Perhaps there aren’t even any debts. She lies. She always has ever since she was a little girl. You can’t tell what’s true and what’s false. Perhaps there aren’t any debts at all.’

Mark wanted to slap her face.

He said: ‘Then you can’t help me in any way?’

‘In no way whatsoever,’ said Mr Ross.

Mark started for the door. Behind him Mrs Ross’s voice, fine and brittle as porcelain, rose again:

‘John, dear, you’d better drink your coffee. It’s getting cold.’ Mark reached the door. Down in Gramercy Park a child shouted.

‘There, dear,’ said Mrs Ross behind him. ‘Drink it. You know how you hate your coffee cold.’

5

OUT IN Gramercy Park again, Mark hurried past the sedate, snow-covered gardens. The Lorton Club would be closed at this hour, but Ellie would certainly have Victor’s number in her telephone book at home. And he knew he had to see Victor at once.

Mark had seen enough racketeers around the athletic gymnasiums to know how the underworld mind operated. If Ellie owed Victor money and couldn’t pay, the fact that she was just a crazy kid and a personal friend wouldn’t help her at all. Victor would stop at nothing to see that the debt was settled.

What if he’d put the screws on Ellie and she had run away? Although the Rosses had forbidden Corey to help her, they were no match for Ellie in persuasion. What if she’d left Corey to handle Victor and Corey had bungled it badly enough to get himself shot? That could have happened. And, if it had, it would mean a new danger for Ellie — a danger far more immediate than any from the police. It would mean that Victor was on her trail — out after her blood too.

A gnawing fear for Ellie took possession of him. His instinct was to storm around to Victor and demand a showdown. But he knew that would be stupid. Victor was far too dangerous for crude tactics. He would have to walk very warily indeed.

There were three numbers listed for Victor in the black book. One of them said Victor D’Iorio. Mark hadn’t known his last name.

The first number didn’t answer. He dialed the second. Sa9-6412. A girl’s voice sounded in a languid: ‘Yeah?’

‘Is Victor D’Iorio there?’

‘Who wants him?’

‘Mark Liddon. I’d like to come around and see him.’

‘Hold it.’ There was a pause and the voice came back. Is that the Liddon married to Ellie Ross?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Business or personal?’

‘Both.’

‘When’d you want to come?’

‘Right away.’

‘I guess that’s okay.’

‘What’s the address?’

*

The house was a massive Victorian edifice with a haughty iron-grilled front door. Mark climbed the snowy steps and pressed a buzzer. The door was opened by a big man with a round, solid face and hairy wrists. He looked like a night-club bouncer, but he was dressed as a butler.

‘Mr Liddon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Step in. He’s in bed. He’ll see you upstairs.’

The butler closed the door, took Mark’s hat and coat and led him into a living-room that looked like a Hollywood set for an Edith Wharton novel. Only the most chic decorators, obviously, were good enough for Victor. Between two richly draped windows stood a large Christmas tree trimmed with tinsel and colored balls. The Rosses and Victor at least shared the same taste in Christmas decorations. The frou-frou of the room was climaxed by a marble staircase, which rose upward in a swan-necked curve.

The butler said: ‘Upstairs.’

As Mark started through the room, a girl came down the stairs. She was a sleekly built red-head, wearing a cream-colored quilted housecoat and smoking a cigarette from a long ivory holder.

She and Mark met half-way up the stairs. She paused, watching him from heavy-lidded, uninterested eyes.

‘You Liddon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Victor’s in bed.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

She stuck the cigarette holder between her teeth. Lazily she leaned towards him and, with orchid-nailed fingers, frisked him for a gun.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Go on up. First door to the left down the passage.’

As he continued up the stair, she stood, hand on hip, watching him. Below in the hall the butler stood watching him too.

He walked down the corridor, found a door and knocked. A voice called.

‘Come.’

He opened the door and stepped into the bedroom. The walls were covered with crimson satin. A woman’s silver evening dress was slung over a crimson wing chair. In an immense four-poster bed with a crimson canopy Victor D’Iorio was lounging, his head propped against a pile of pillows, a breakfast tray on a table at his side.

He was wearing white silk Russian pajamas. The jacket was unbuttoned, revealing an athletic expanse of hairless olive-skinned chest and stomach. His tar-black hair was ruffled, and his handsome face, dark almost as a Hindu’s, was veiled with an expression of near-sleep. The Hollywood atmosphere of downstairs was even more marked here — and screwier. It was as if two movies had been mixed up and Tarzan had strayed into a Lana Turner boudoir set.

Victor looked up at Mark from under lashes thick as twigs. If Mark hadn’t known he was one of the shrewdest and most plausible operators in New York he might have almost been fooled by the boyish charm. But only almost — for there was an intelligence in the drowsy eyes which was not completely camouflaged. Victor suppressed a yawn, smiled friendlily and patted the crimson spread.

‘Sit down, kid. Park it.’

Mark sat down.

‘Got a cigarette? For all the service I’m dealt in this dump I might have stayed put in the Y.M.C.A. Only one goddam cigarette in the whole house and that red-headed bitch just grabbed it off of me.’

Mark gave him a cigarette. Victor pushed himself up on one big elbow and, sticking the cigarette in his mouth, leaned it towards Mark’s lighted match.

‘Thanks, kid.’

Mark wondered why Victor had been so willing to admit him. It wasn’t the way of big racketeers to receive casual acquaintances. Perhaps he had his own reasons for wanting to see him. If, for example, he had shot Corey in Ellie’s apartment, Ellie’s unexpectedly returned husband would be very interesting indeed.

Victor took a deep drag on the cigarette. ‘Okay. What’s on your mind? Thinking of taking up boxing again? Just say the word and I can get you a good set-up.’

Mark said: ‘I’ve come about Ellie.’

Victor grinned. ‘About Ellie, eh? A swell kid, Ellie. Crazy as a hoot-owl. But a swell kid. What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve been away. I came back earlier than I expected. Ellie’s not home. I thought you might know where she is.’

‘Me?’ Victor watched him. ‘Why should I know where she is?’

‘You’re a friend of hers.’

Victor lolled over on his back, his knees pushing the crimson spread up into a tent-like triangle. The black eyes slid Mark a sidewise look. He seemed amused.

‘Sure I’m a friend of hers. I’m a friend of half the café cookies in New York. But I’m not their chaperone.’

‘Not even when they owe you money?’

The door opened and the red-head came in. Without bothering to glance at the two men, she went to the crimson wing chair and picked up the evening gown. Under it were a brassiere, a pair of panties and stockings. She gathered them all up and started back towards the door.

Victor called: ‘Hi, kid, don’t you want your slippers? They’re under the bed.’

The girl came to the bed. She knelt down by Mark’s feet, the red hair falling across her eyes. She fumbled and brought out a pair of silver slippers. Looping all the clothes into a clumsy bundle, she got up, reached across Mark, tugged the cigarette out of Victor’s mouth and stuck it between her lips. She crossed back to the door, went through it and closed it behind her.

‘Damn little tramp,’ said Victor affectionately. He shot out a hand and made a beckoning gesture with two fingers. Mark gave him another cigarette and lit it for him. Victor yawned again. ‘What’s this about Ellie owing me money? Who told you that ?’

‘Her mother.’

‘Come to think of it, she does. Got a little high one night at the club and dropped quite a bit at roulette.’ He looked at Mark with mock parental severity. ‘You ought to control that wife of yours better. Put her next to a roulette table and she loses all sense of proportion. But you weren’t around, were you? That’s right. She told me you were on a trip. South America or something.’

The indolent charm was absolutely unruffled. If he had killed Corey, surely there would be some tension in him. Mark said: ‘How much does she owe you?’

Victor made a clucking sound. ‘Now, kid, how would you expect me to know a detail like that? I’d have to look it up in the books.’

‘Have you been pressing her to pay?’

‘Me?’ Victor’s smoky eyes went wide and hurt. ‘What d’you think I am? A gangster in the movies or something? Ellie’s an old friend; she’s an old customer of the club. She’s rich; she’s got connections. A note from Ellie’s good as money in the bank. You’d as soon see me pressing my old mother to pay me back pocket money.’

He was either lying or not lying. There was no possible way of telling. But if he were telling the truth and there was no emergency, why had Ellie gone to her parents for money?

Mark said: ‘So Ellie gave you a note?’

‘Sure. It’s on file down at the club as all the other notes of all the other dizzy little rich girls. They’re wise to gambling, all of ‘em. They know a debt’s a debt and they all pay in the end.’ Victor’s hand crossed the crimson spread and settled on Mark’s. ‘Look, kid, I can see you’re the worrying type. Now don’t you bother that pretty little head of yours. There’s not any trouble coming to Effie from me. I understand Ellie; Ellie understands me. When she can pay she’ll pay. When she can’t pay, there ain’t going to be no masked bandits waving gats and hollering: “Pay up, Cookie, or this is it.” That’s not the way I operate. Get me?’

‘Okay. That’s what you say.’

Victor’s hand doubled into a fist and punched Mark’s shoulder chummily. ‘Relax, toots. Forget about it. If you came around here thinking your wife was in a jam, just throw it out of your mind. Okay? That what you want to hear?’

‘I want to know where she is.’

Victor’s white teeth showed in a smile. ‘At least you know she’s not in the East River wearing a nice warm pair of cement Arctics.’ He sat up and, pushing his hand down the back of his pajamas, started to scratch. ‘Aw, shucks. Can’t reach.’ He rolled over on his stomach. ‘Be a pal. Scratch my back, baby. I’m allergic to that red-head. She gives me hives.’

Mark started scratching.

‘No, a little lower, more to the left. That’s it.’ Victor wriggled voluptuously and purred his contentment. ‘Keep going, kid.’

Scratching steadily, Mark said: ‘Then you can’t help me about where Ellie is?’

‘N-no, kid. Don’t think I can. She was in the club about a week ago. Yakked a lot. Know how she is. Talk your ear off if you give her a chance. Now, come to think of it! Hey, don’t quit. A little higher. To the right. That’s my boy. Yeah, she yakked on about you being in South America on a big deal. She’s crazy about you. Know that? Couldn’t talk enough about you. Said it was too bad you weren’t going to be back for Christmas. Said …’

He broke off and swung around, almost catching Mark’s hand under his torso.

‘Hey, wait a minute. She did say something. She went on about being alone for hristmas. What a bore, she said. Then she said maybe she’d go off some place.’

‘Where?’

Victor furrowed his brow. He pushed out his lower lip like a little boy on a picturesque postal card from Italy

‘Palm Beach, was it? Or Sun Valley?’ He made an apologetic grimace. ‘Sorry, kid. It’s no good me saying something. I’m just not going to be sure.’ Victor smiled at him blandly. ‘Looks like you’re in for a solo Christmas. If you get lonesome, come around the club. I’ll show you a good time till she gets back.’

Mark got up from the bed. There was no point in staying longer. If Victor did know anything, he was certainly not going to tell. And it would be wildly rash to bring up the subject of Corey. Mark looked down at the other man who was admiringly studying his own flat stomach.

‘Thank Victor.’

‘Think nothing of it, kid.’

‘Know anyone else who might give me a lead?’

Victor frowned again. ‘Let me see. Ellie switches friends like diapers. Who’s she been palling around with lately? Seems to me there’s a feller. Sort of a stuffed shirt. Looks like he smells a bad smell most every place except the Harvard Club.’ He grinned. ‘Corey Lathrop. That’s the name. Know the guy?’

‘Yes. I know him.’

Victor rolled over on his side and yawned, indicating that the interview was over.

‘He’s your best bet. He probably knows. Ask Corey Lathrop.’

If Victor had killed Corey, this was the brashest line in history. Mark started for the door. Victor called after him: ‘Hey, be a pal. Leave me those cigarettes.’

Mark tossed the pack. Victor reached out an arm and caught it neatly.

‘Thanks, honey. Merry Christmas. And, look, when you locate Ellie drop me a post card. I’d like to send the kid a little Christmas present.’

Mark left the room. As he walked down the corridor towards the head of the stairs he heard a soft ‘psst’.

The red-head had opened a door to the left. She was beckoning, the sleeve of her housecoat falling back from her round, white arm.

‘Hey, you, Liddon.’

He turned towards the door. She pulled him in and closed it behind them. The butt of the cigarette she had snitched from Victor still drooped from her lips. She looked straight at him with absolutely no expression in the flat green eyes.

You didn’t tell Victor where Ellie is, did you?’

‘I don’t know where she is. That’s what I came to find out. Do you know?’

‘Me? I don’t know from nothing. But find her. Find her and find her fast — before Victor does.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t you know why? Don’t you know she dropped twenty-five grand last week and took a powder?’

Twenty-five thousand! He had never dreamed it could be that much.

The red-head flicked the butt across the room into the fireplace. ‘I’m no Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,’ she said. ‘Ellie Ross could be peddling her wares on Lexington Avenue and I wouldn’t lend her a penicillin pill. But I don’t like sudden death. I’m funny that way.’

She put her hand on his arm. ‘You look like a nice guy, Liddon. Why should you be a widower? Find that girl and make it snappy.’

‘And if I raised the cash?’ He knew he couldn’t — not half of it. But he had to know.

The red-head shrugged. ‘Now you’re being silly. It isn’t the dough, it’s the principle. She ran out on him. She gets the twenty-five grand work-out. Matter of ethics.’

Suddenly something Ellie had said to him the first night they met came back. It had seemed frivolous then. Now it had terrifyingly changed its mood. ‘Victor doesn’t want me to lose. Because — if I lost I wouldn’t pay and he’d have to kill me. He has to kill people who don’t pay up. It’s the only way he can keep in business.’

Because Mark was an essentially straightforward person, Victor’s duplicity appalled him. He’d shot Corey, of course. Now there was no doubt about that. And there was no doubt either that his hoodlums would be combing New York for Ellie. And yet he could lie languidly in his preposterous bed, grinning, being affectionate, bumming cigarettes from the husband of the girl he had condemned to death.

He asked urgently: ‘He doesn’t know where she is? You’re sure of that?’

‘I told you I don’t know from nothing. Relations between Victor and me are conducted strictly by gestures. But I don’t think he does.’ The red-head pushed him towards the door.

‘Now get out of here and don’t blab about this little interview. I’m a neurotic gal. I like having two arms and two legs and none of them broken.’

At the door he turned to look at her, wondering what the hell her life must be like. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

She grinned. ‘Think nothing of it, Liddon. Just remember me next time you unroll your prayer mat.’

The butler was waiting in the hall with his hat and coat. He helped him on with the coat and let him out into the gently falling snow.

‘Merry Christmas, Mr Liddon,’ he said and closed the door.

6

MARK started towards Fifth Avenue. The falling snow made a Radio City stage show out of Central Park. He was tormented by a feeling of responsibility. It was his fault that this dreadful thing had hit Ellie. He saw that now. When she married him she’d been drifting, frightened, with nothing to cling to. He’d been warmth, security, safety to her. And, instead of sticking by her, he’d blundered off trying to make money because his pig-headed pride couldn’t take the fact that she was richer than he. Other offers would have come along later. Why hadn’t he waited? Why hadn’t he followed his heart rather than his head? He’d been crazy to go away and leave her alone.

Now that he knew she hadn’t killed Corey he could go to the police. But the danger was much too urgent for the lumbering machinery of the law to help. Apart from anything else, it would be days before they’d trust him once he’d confessed to hiding Corey’s body. No, this was something he had to handle himself. He had to find Ellie.

With a sudden inspiration, he thought of Arlene. He hadn’t seen her or had her in his mind since his marriage. But Ellie still went to Maurice’s at least once a week to have her hair done. It was just possible that Arlene might know something.

In the great excitement of his marriage to Ellie he had never stopped to think whether his complete neglect of Arlene might have hurt her. He didn’t think of it now. Arlene was just someone who might have some information about his wife.

*

The reception room of Maurice’s was a foamy pink and white. A great bowl of daffodils stood in front of a plate-glass window. A couple of women lounged, cross-legged, in deep chairs, smoking and reading fashion magazines. The blonde receptionist glanced up from trimming her nails and beamed.

‘Why, stranger, look who’s here.’

‘Hey, Gloria. Arlene around?’

‘She’s doing a finger wave. She should be through any minute. Take a seat. I’ll go see.’

She clicked away on high heels through the glass door which led to the beauty rooms. The two women glanced up from their magazines, assessing Mark with the shameless appraisal of the smart and rich. They did not interest him. He sank into a chair and reached for the nearest magazine. It was Harper’s Bazaar. He flicked through the pages idly. A portrait of the Duchess of Windsor showed something with which she had wowed Cap d’Antibes. He turned the page and was confronted with a photograph of his wife.

Its unexpectedness gave him a jolt. There was Ellie gazing out at him. She was half turned from the camera, in a long black evening gown, ruffled at the hips and slashed down the back. She was looking over her shoulders with her eyes glamorously half closed. It wasn’t really like her. It was too posed and languorous. It had none of her reckless little-girl quality. But it was Ellie.

The caption beneath the picture said that Mrs Mark Liddon, the former and celebrated Miss Eleanor Ross, was modelling a new evening gown of tiered black marquisette which Valentina had made for her. Mark read the paragraph through twice. Mrs Mark Liddon. It gave him a warm feeling of possession. Wherever she was, whatever had happened, she was still his. Mrs Mark Liddon. He peered at the photograph proudly, searching for the little mole under her left shoulder. It didn’t show.

The receptionist came tapping back.

‘Arlene’ll be right out in a minute, Mark.’

She turned her brightness on the two women and led them away through the glass doors. Mark sat by the daffodils looking at Mrs Mark Liddon, the former and celebrated Miss Eleanor Ross.

The fluffy room was empty now. The falling snow outside hushed everything. Mark heard the glass doors open, heard footsteps.

A voice said: ‘Mark.’

He got up and turned. Arlene was standing a few feet from his chair. She had cut her red hair short and wore it in little curls on top of her head like Ellie’s. It didn’t become her. She’d been putting on weight too. She was a good-looking girl, but weight had always been her trouble — even as a kid.

‘Hi, Arlene.’

She wasn’t smiling. She was looking straight at him. Her mouth was unsteady.

‘Why didn’t you ever come and see me?’

He said literally: ‘I’ve been out of town.’

‘I know that. I mean, why did you never come and see me after the marriage?’

He could feel the emotional tension in her, but he didn’t want to cope with it. Not now. He said: ‘I just never got around to it, baby. I’ve been busy and …’

He shrugged an end to the sentence. Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, one glistening drop at the edge of each eye. ‘Swine,’ she said.

In a dry, academic way he felt sorry for her. He even felt faintly guilty.

But — not now.

He said: ‘Have you seen Ellie?’

‘The former and celebrated Miss Eleanor Ross? As a matter of fact, I have.’

‘When?’

‘About four — no, five days ago.’

‘Did she say anything about going away?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘Did she tell you where?’

Arlene shook her head.

‘You’re sure?’

She just said she was so tired of the terrible, terrible climate and was going to flee away to the sun. Really, she said, why do all these foolish people insist on rotting away in these dreary New York winters?’

‘That’s all she said?’

‘What do you expect her to have done? Given me a map with little flags stuck in it marking every rest room she’d hit between here and Topeka, Kansas?’

Careful to seem casual, he asked, ‘Has anyone else been here asking for her?’

Arlene was quick. She always had been. That was a dangerous question, but he had to make sure that Victor hadn’t got on to this lead.

She said: ‘Why should anyone ask me about her? I’m no intimate friend. I’m just a face-fixer.’

She was dry-eyed now and watching him quizzically. At least she was trying to be quizzical, but the emotion was still pent-up in her ready to break out. He could tell that.

She smiled brightly. ‘So she’s walked out on you, glamour boy. The two-month wonder wedding.’

He wouldn’t get angry. There wasn’t any point. ‘I got back from Venezuela early. I told you. I should have cabled.’

‘You certainly should have cabled. Homecoming husbands should always cable — particularly the husband of the former and celebrated Miss Eleanor Ross.’

‘Just what the hell do you mean by that?’

Arlene glanced over her shoulder at the glass doors. The receptionist had not come back. She sat down on the arm of a chair. Her hips bulged. An incongruous memory came of her twelve years ago at the Knights of Pythias Ball at Providence High School Auditorium in her sister’s evening gown — pretty as a candy stick.

With sudden heat she blurted: ‘You’d better watch out for that wife of yours.’

‘So?’

‘Yes, it’s about time somebody told you.’

‘Told me what?’

‘The truth. She’s tangled up with a crummy bunch, the worst bunch in New York, drunks, million-dollar bums, gamblers, hopheads.’

‘Who’d you expect her to pal around with? The Busy Bee Needlework Club of Passaic?’

Arlene clutched at his arm. ‘Why did you marry her, Mark? She’s a tramp. You know that. Just a junior miss tramp. And because she tramped out of the Social Register you were smitten. Haven’t you any sense?’

He felt an uprush of anger, but he checked it. This was just Arlene’s spite showing. He’d thrown her over. He hadn’t been nice about it. Okay. He had this coming to him.

‘Know what she’s been doing?’ Arlene’s voice was hard now with an undercurrent of hysterical triumph. ‘Almost from the moment you went away she’s been up at the Lorton Club all the time. I’ve got a friend who’s a hat-check girl there. She told me. Running around all the time with Victor D’Iorio. He’s the lowest, most vicious character in New York. He’s not just a racketeer, a gambler; he peddles dope; he … She’s been at the Lorton Club all the time.’

‘So she’s been at the Lorton Club all the time.’

‘Don’t you understand anything, Mark?’ Arlene was crying now. The mascara was smudging under her eyes. ‘Victor’s Ellie’s sort of person. She belongs in that bunch of stinking rich degenerates that hang around Victor. You think she really loves you? Don’t make me laugh. She just had a mood. She thought she was tired of all that filth. She thought she wanted to get away from Victor and all those characters. How wonderful to marry a decent, clean boy and turn over a new leaf. That’s what she thought. But she knew she’d never make it. She’s in too deep. She couldn’t stay in love with you any more than she could stay in love with Corey Lathrop. She …’

‘Shut up.’

He was so angry now that he was almost frightened of himself. He gripped her arms. He could feel his fingers dig into the soft, unresisting flesh.

‘Mark,’ she whimpered. ‘Mark, don’t … ‘

‘Do you or don’t you know where Ellie is?’

‘I don’t, Mark. I told you I didn’t.’

‘Okay.’

He pushed her away, picked up his hat from the pile of magazines by the daffodils and headed for the door.

She came running after him. She caught at his arm.

‘Mark…’

‘Get the hell away from me.’

‘If you really want to know where she is.’

Mark swung around. Her face was red and swollen.

‘You know?’

‘No, no I don’t.’

‘Then      ‘

‘I just remembered. She was talking about a suit she’s having made at Derain’s.’

‘And …?’

‘And she said it wouldn’t be ready by the time she left. She said she was going to have them send it after her. They’d have the address.’

Suddenly Mark was on level ground again. ‘Derain’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks.’

He turned away from her and went to the door.

Behind him her voice trailed thinly:

‘Mark, I’m sorry. Please, Mark, darling. Don’t go like this. Please…’

He pulled open the door and stepped out into the snow.

7

DERAIN’S was only a couple of blocks down the Avenue. He pushed his way through the struggling throng of shoppers, thinking: ‘I’ve got the lead at last.’ He felt confident, almost cheerful, and Arlene’s self-revealing spite dwindled into insignificance. Yes, he had the lead and he was still ahead of Victor. He was almost sure of that.

Rockefeller Center heaved solid stone up into the air and then melted into the grey-white snowstorm. A travel agency blared a vivid poster, splashed with Mexican women in red skirts and great lace head-dresses. ‘Come to Mexico, the Land of Sun.’ A group of Salvation Army lasses were clanging their bells on a corner. ‘Give for Christmas… Give for Christmas…’

He reached Derain’s. Its façade was chichi as a French poodle. He’d been there a couple of times with Ellie. She said their suits were as well-cut as Mainbochers and cheaper, so she’d buy four instead of three.

‘Darling, it’s the most wonderful bargain, like drug-stores when they give you an extra tube of toothpaste free.’ .

He entered a reception room which made Maurice’s look provincial. There were angled modern statues, tall delicate screens. Lengths of imported tweeds were tossed around with thoughtful nonchalance. Classical music played softly from a concealed phonograph. Three women with suits and pearls were fingering and chattering. A salesgirl came up to Mark. She was young and slim, with dark hair to her shoulders. She was disguised in a black suit and pearls to be an almost perfect imitation of the customers. But Mark, who had learned to cover his own beginnings, could see the background showing through.

She was haughty and offhand, as if she were a girl he was meeting at a cocktail party. That was the Derain line.

‘Yes?’ she said, not looking at him, putting a hand to the pearls.

He said: ‘I’m Mr Liddon. My wife’s having a suit made here.’

The name identified him and her quick smile made him an accepted customer.

‘Yes, Mr Liddon.’

‘She wants me to pick it up if it hasn’t been shipped out.’

‘One moment, Mr Liddon.’

She went away and came back with an older girl, a well-built assured blonde in a grey suit. The blonde smiled the Derain smile and said:

‘Good morning, Mr Liddon.’

The first girl loitered by them, fingering her pearls and looking abstracted again.

Mark said to the blonde: ‘My wife had to leave town earlier than she expected. She wants me to bring the suit along to her unless it’s already been sent out.’

‘It has been sent out,’ said the blonde. ‘We mailed it yesterday.’

‘To our home address?’

‘No, Mr Liddon. We sent it after Mrs Liddon the way she asked us to.’

‘That’s fine. Then she’ll be getting it in a couple of days.’ With studied casualness he said: ‘By the way, she did call and explain, didn’t she?’

‘Call, Mr Liddon?’

‘We changed our vacation plans at the last minute. She meant to call you and give you the new address. Didn’t she do it?’

‘No, Mr Liddon. She didn’t call.’

It was almost certain that Victor hadn’t been here, but he would have to check. ‘And she didn’t send anyone else in to pick it up?’

‘No, Mr Liddon.’

‘Then where did you mail the package?’

The blonde was definitely less cordial now. ‘Where is Mrs Liddon now?’

‘Palm Beach,’ Mark extemporized.

He saw the blonde’s face pull down its shutters against him. The smile was still there, but it meant nothing.

‘Then it has gone to the wrong address. But if you give me the new one I’ll see that the package is forwarded the moment it comes back.’

She was gazing at him challengingly. She was smarter than he had imagined. There was nothing for it now but to try the ‘frankly charming’ approach. He grinned at her.

‘This is kind of embarrassing. Maybe I should have come out with it from the start. The truth is I’ve been away and came back unexpectedly early. There was no chance of letting my wife know. She’s away for Christmas. I remembered the suit and thought I could maybe locate her through you.’

The blonde was implacable now. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Liddon. It’s against our policy to give out our clients’ addresses.’

‘But I’m her husband.’

The little dark salesgirl glanced at him under her lashes.

He suppressed an impulse to jump on the blonde, shake her and force the address out of her. There was a better way of handling this.

The blonde was saying: ‘I’m sorry, Mr Liddon. I wish we could help you.’

He glanced quickly at the other girl. The lashes drooped lower. That’s okay,’ he said to the blonde. ‘Sorry I troubled you.’

‘It’s no trouble, Mr Liddon. I hope it will all work out. Merry Christmas.’

The dark girl moved with bored languor at his side to conduct him off the premises.

As she opened the door for him she ran a hand behind her dark hair, shaking it away from her neck. ‘Goodbye, Mr Liddon,’ she said in the elegant Derain accent. ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Liddon.’

It was eleven-thirty. There should be a good half-hour before the Derain employees started going for lunch. His bank was just around the corner. He went to it and drew out a thousand dollars. As he left the bank, he passed a news-stand where an old canvas awning shielded the papers from the snow. Even if the greatest calamity had happened and Corey’s body had already been discovered, he knew there could be no announcement yet. But he bought a paper and searched through it methodically.

He found nothing, tossed the paper into a trash container and returned to Derain’s. He skirted the block and located the employees’ exit. He crossed the street. There was a book store, its window decorated with red paper wreaths, green paper bells and tinsel snow. He stepped into the doorway, turned down his coat collar and waited.

An occasional employee straggled out of the exit. At exactly twelve-thirty the blonde appeared. She was wearing a Persian lamb coat and tall fur overshoes. She looked like a competent Valkyrie. She turned towards Fifth Avenue and disappeared into the throng of shoppers. It was five minutes later that the little dark salesgirl came out. She’d put on a simple black coat and a fur cap. She glanced up at the falling snow and then across the street. He moved over and joined her.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what a coincidence.’

She looked sidewise at him under long black lashes. Her eyes were very big and dark; her face was well-made. He thought she probably thought she looked like Hedy Lamarr.

‘Kind of treacherous weather,’ he said. You don’t want to catch cold. How about a warm, refreshing drink?’

She shrugged. ‘Why not?’ She played with the fingertips of her gloves. ‘I often drop into Twenty-One at this hour for a cocktail.’

‘Fine.’

He hailed a cab. When they joined the flood of traffic on Fifth Avenue she took a cigarette from her bag and put it in her mouth. He lit it for her.

She said: ‘Found your wife yet, Mr Liddon?’

‘No,’ he said. Crazy, isn’t it?’

‘Work around Derain’s a while. You won’t think anything’s crazy.’

She flicked the ash from her cigarette on the cab’s floor. ‘Alone for Christmas, eh? That’s a hell of a note.’

‘Yes.’

Her leg moved slightly. He could feel the faint pressure of her calf against his. The taxi drew up in front of Twenty-One Club.

They found a table in a corner. The girl was playing it blasé. All she needed was a pair of sunglasses to be a star of stage, screen, radio and television. She dropped the coat from her shoulders and peeled off her gloves.

‘What’ll you have?’

‘I think a champagne cocktail would be bearable.’

He thought of asking whether she always found a ‘champagne cocktail bearable’ at this hour.

After the waiter had brought the drinks, he said: ‘It’s on the level, you know. I’m not trying to get any dirt on my wife.’

She sipped her cocktail, watching him steadily over the glass-lip. ‘You’re not?’

‘It’s just a crazy accident. We crossed each other.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl.

‘Do you know her?’

‘Mrs Liddon? I’ve seen her a couple of times in the store and her picture’s in Harper’s Bazaar this month.’ Under the table her foot touched his and stayed there. She was looking over his shoulder as if interested in people at the next table.

Mark said: ‘You know where she is, don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t.’ She picked up one of her gloves and ran it through her fingers. Mark took out his wallet, opened it, and looked intently at the thick wad of bills. She said, ‘I could find out, though.’

‘That’s the girl,’ said Mark. He folded the wallet and put it away.

‘Won’t take me a couple of seconds to run up to the shipping department now Ester’s off for lunch.’ She put down the glove and turned the big, expressionless eyes on him. ‘You’re my type, Mr Liddon.’

‘That’s a break for me.’

She finished her champagne cocktail. ‘Let’s go.’

Mark paid the check. Another taxi took them back to Derain’s.

‘You wait, Mr Liddon. Wait in the bookstore doorway where you were waiting before.’

She slipped in through the employees’ entrance. Mark crossed the street to the bookstore and stood in the snow looking at the neat tower of books, festooned with their paper decorations. The girl was back in less than five minutes.

Her voice behind him made him turn. ‘Here, Mr Liddon.’ She handed him a piece of paper. ‘I copied it out from the shipping department.’

Written on the paper in a round, sprawling hand were the words:

Mrs Mark Liddon,

Hotel Granada,

Madero,

Mexico, D. F., Mexico.

He put the piece of paper in his pocket. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He took out his wallet, removing two fifty-dollar bills, and handed them to her.

She said, ‘I can take the afternoon off and I’ve got a room with a kitchenette. We can pick up some junk on the corner and I’ll fix lunch.’

Mark grinned at her. ‘Thanks. But some other time.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘Merry Christmas, baby.’ He turned towards Fifth Avenue, leaving her alone on the sidewalk.

He passed the Salvation Army girls again, secure in their homely godliness, clanging their bells and chanting: ‘Give for Christmas.’ Exhilaration surged up in him. It was coming out right after all. Ellie was safe in Mexico and he would be able to reach her long before Victor or his minions could do her any harm. He would call her, tell her not to worry, that he was coming, that he would fix everything. Then he would take the first plane.

He got a tourist card at the Mexican Tourist Bureau and went to an airline office. The first plane to Mexico City left at six that evening.

Back home, he put in a person-to-person call to Ellie. The lines to Mexico were jammed with Christmas business and he was told there would be a long delay. He ate something in the kitchen and packed a suitcase. Then he mixed himself a drink and paced up and down the living-room, waiting.

Now that he could feel reasonably sure Ellie was safe he could plot the future with slide-rule precision. He would bring Ellie back. Together they would go to the police and make a full confession. There would be a scandal, of course. Ellie was too well-known to avoid that. And he would certainly get into trouble for his hiding of the body. The outlook was not rosy. But it was far less disastrous than it had seemed a few hours before. Mark was shrewd enough to realize that if he should be arrested and brought to trial for obstructing justice there would be a very good emotional defense — a husband’s natural determination to protect his wife.

Yes, once he had reached Ellie, the situation would be in hand.

Almost two hours later the call came through. He jumped to answer the phone.

The operator’s voice said: ‘Ready with your call to Mexico City.’ There was a pause. Then a man’s voice said:

‘Bueno Bueno.’ The operator asked: ‘Is that the Hotel Granada ? ‘

‘Yes. This is the Hotel Granada.’

‘Mrs Mark Liddon, please. New York is calling.’

There was another pause. Excitement lit Mark. Then the distant man’s voice in Mexico said:

‘I am sorry, but Mrs Liddon is not here.’

‘When are you expecting her back?’

‘I do not know. She left no message.’

Mark said: ‘Operator, let me talk to him. Switch this to a regular call.’

‘All right, sir. Go ahead, sir.’

Mark said: ‘Hello. Mrs Liddon :s there at the Hotel Granada? She is staying there?’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ said the man’s voice. She is here, but she is not in. She is out.’

‘Will you take a message?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell her her husband’s coming. Tell her he’s taking the six o’clock plane from New York.’

‘Very well, sir.’

‘And tell her — tell her not to worry about anything.’

‘Not to worry about anything, yes, sir. Anything else, sir?’

‘No. That’s all.’

Mark put down the receiver. He ran into the hall, put on his topcoat and picked up his suitcase.

It had stopped snowing, but in the dusk Park Avenue was white and fluffy as a lamb. Pedestrians hurried by carrying gaily wrapped packages. Holy Night, Silent Night trailed from the radio of a passing taxi.

Suddenly the lights on the Christmas trees came to life, and for miles, it seemed, the Manhattan twilight was spangled with little twinkling globes …

8

IT was one-thirty in the afternoon when Mark drove from the Mexico City airport. Bad weather had made the plane several hours late and the delay had frayed his nerves dangerously.

The taxi took him down a broad new boulevard, landscaped with young trees which would look impressive in several years. Most of the buildings to his left and right were in construction. The mountain sunlight was bright and crisp; it heightened the effect of rawness, of a city growing too fast. Soon the traffic thickened. The air was loud with the irresponsible honking of horns. The taxi plunged into narrow, excitable streets, competing recklessly with other cars. A huge cathedral loomed and was left behind. Elegant shops crowded on either side. The taxi swerved to a stop in front of a canopied doorway.

Mark had changed money at the airport. He paid the driver in pesos, pulled out his suitcase and stood looking at the doorway. Hotel Granada was written across the canopy above him. A corridor led past a tobacco stall and a long rack displaying American magazines to a lobby inside. A barefoot Indian padded by with a pile of Christmas trees roped to his back.

Mark walked into the lobby. The enormous ordeal was over. In a moment he would be with her.

After the brilliance of the sunshine it was almost dark inside the lobby. A few people, mostly American, sat around in heavy old-fashioned chairs. They looked harassed, as if worn out by a morning’s sight-seeing. There was a solid family atmosphere. It wasn’t Ellie’s sort of place. He wondered why she had picked it.

He saw the desk in a far corner. A clerk stood before the high pigeon-holes for keys and mail. A bellhop, very small and dark, hurried for Mark’s bag. He nodded him away and carried the suitcase to the desk.

The front of the desk had a glass top and served as a showcase for tourist trinkets, silver ornaments, combs, leather belts, little pottery figures. As Mark reached it, the clerk moved along the desk and stopped in front of him.

‘Yes, sir?’ he inquired in English. ‘You wish a room?’ He was young, about twenty, scrupulously tidy with dandified black hair and brown eyes framed by thick black lashes. Mark said: ‘What is Mrs Liddon’s number?’

‘Mrs Liddon?’ The boy watched him thoughtfully. ‘Mrs Mark Liddon?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You are, perhaps, her husband? The gentleman who telephoned yesterday from New York?’

‘I am.’

The boy smiled dazzlingly. ‘I am so sorry. Yesterday when you call I make an error. I think Mrs Liddon has just made a walk, but no — ‘He shook his head and ran a delicate brown finger over the side wing of his hair. ‘She has gone. She has already checked out.’

He felt as if iced water had been dashed in his face. Was it always going to be this way? Was the pattern going to repeat itself endlessly?

‘She didn’t get my message?’

‘Oh no, sir. I am sorry, sir. It was an error.’

A plump middle-aged American woman, covered in Taxco silver with a spray of bougainvillea in her hair, flounced to the desk and asked querulously:

‘Hey, Oscar, any mail for me?’

‘I am sorry, madam.’ The clerk turned on her a white, infinitely friendly smile. ‘Is Christmas time. The letters come late.’

The woman pouted and stomped away.

Mark said: ‘But she was here? Mrs Liddon was at this hotel?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Where did she go?’

Oscar looked blank. ‘Who knows, sir?’ He began to study the manicured nails of his right hand. ‘Yesterday morning about twelve a gentleman comes to see her. They go out together to take the lunch perhaps.’

Mark’s hand suddenly tightened into a fist. ‘What sort of gentleman?’

Oscar pondered this problem solemnly. ‘He was from the States like you, sir, and blond-haired like you. But more small, less beautiful.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I have the afternoons free and return for the evening. Soon after they leave, I leave too and the other boy is on duty. But Mrs Liddon returns with the gentleman. They pay the bill and they take her bags away. This I do not see myself.’ He looked proud. ‘But after you telephone I make inquiries and find this out from the other boy.’

‘Where is the other boy now?’

Oscar’s dark eyes became almost dreamy. ‘His mother is sick. This morning he goes to his mother. Where does she live?’ He gesticulated. ‘Guadalajara? Oaxaca? Vera Cruz? Who knows?’

This may or may not have been the Mexican temperament at work, but, whatever it was, it was immensely irritating. ‘She didn’t leave a forwarding address?’

Oscar did not answer. He had lowered his gaze and was studying the trinkets on sale beneath the glass top of the counter. Without looking, up he announced:

‘We have here many pretty things. Mementoes; souvenirs of your stay in Mexico. Perhaps you wish to buy a watch bangle?’

‘No.’

Oscar looked up mournfully. ‘No, sir?’ His gaze had settled now on the grey cashmere sweater which showed under Mark’s jacket. ‘Is a fine sweater you have. Such a sweater here in Mexico costs very high. Eighty pesos perhaps you pay for such a fine sweater.’ One of his small hands reached out and, very daintily, took a pinch of sweater between finger and thumb. Yes, very fine. Most elegant.’

His hand went back to the counter. His eyes, almost coaxing, met Mark’s. It was the crudest overture to a shakedown that Mark had ever experienced. Its very crudity made it rather disarming. He took out his wallet.

‘Guess you could buy a sweater for fifty pesos?’

Oscar’s smile was blinding. ‘Sixty pesos.’

Mark pulled out a fifty-peso and a ten-peso bill. Oscar took them from his hand as delicately as a cat taking a chicken scrap. ‘The other boy, he brings Mrs Liddon’s bags to the taxi. He thinks he hears her say the Hotel Reforma.’

‘Is that near here?’

Oscar waved. ‘Just down the Avenida; and then down the Paseo. Some few blocks, sir.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

Oscar darted the bills into his pocket and ducked down behind the counter. He came up carrying a small pottery ashtray designed in the shape of a Mexican sombrero. There was a little pottery band ending in tassels twisted around the crown. One of the tassels was broken. Oscar pressed it into Mark’s hand.

‘Is a souvenir, sir. Is free. Is your present from me.’ ‘Thanks, Oscar.’

‘Oh, no trouble. Thank you very much, sit. Happy Christmas, sir.’

Mark walked out of the Hotel Granada into the sunlight again. It was probably all right. Why should the blond young man have anything to do with Victor? Ellie was an inveterate acquaintance-gatherer. She had probably picked up some American boy to take care of the chore of changing hotels. Carrying his topcoat and suitcase, he started past a broad, tropical park and reached a vast boulevard. After a few minutes he saw the Hotel Reforma, climaxing a row of large modernistic apartment and office buildings. He crossed the wild traffic and climbed the steep steps into the hotel lobby. A Christmas tree, ornamented with shining balls and silver streamers, stood in its center. There were American tourists here too, but they put on more of a show. They looked like money, and the place looked as if it knew how to take money away from them. This was a more appropriate hangout for Ellie.

He went to the desk, this time carefully bridling his hope. One of the clerks moved to wait on him.

Mark said: ‘Is Mrs Liddon — Mrs Mark Liddon — staying here?’

‘Yes, sir. Mrs Liddon is in Suite 332.’

At last the moment had come.

‘I’m her husband.’ Mark took the tourist card out of his pocket and put it down on the desk. Okay if I go right up?’

The clerk examined the card. ‘Is Mrs Liddon expecting you?’

‘Yes,’ he prevaricated.

The clerk looked at the card again and handed it back. ‘Very well, sir, if you wish. You will kindly register?’

A bellhop ran over and took Mark’s suitcase. Mark registered and turned from the desk. Behind him, the clerk’s voice sounded:

‘I’m afraid Mrs Liddon isn’t in just now, sir.’

Mark swung round. ‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I happened to notice her leaving about half an hour ago.’

The bellhop at his side blurted: ‘Mrs Liddon has gone to the bulls.’

‘The bulls?’

‘The bullfight. A gentleman came for her. They went to buy tickets over there where they sell themselves.’ He pointed to a desk at the other side of the lobby. ‘I hear them, sir. They buy tickets.’

‘When do the fights start?’

‘At four o’clock, sir.’

Mark looked at his watch. It was three fifteen. ‘Can I buy a ticket over there?’

‘Of course, sir. Sure, sir.’

Mark crossed to the desk where the bullfight tickets were sold. A Mexican girl with hair piled on top of her head smiled at him.

He said: ‘Do you know Mrs Liddon?’

‘Yes, sir. She was just here with a gentleman. He buys two tickets in the Sombrao.’

‘I’m her husband. Can you get me a seat near them?’

The girl glanced at a book in front of her. ‘I think I can.’ She ran a painted fingernail through a box of tickets. ‘Here. I have AL45 8. Is right next to them, I think.’

Thanks.’

Mark bought the ticket. The bellhop hovered. Mark gave him his suitcase and topcoat and told him to take them up to Ellie’s suite. Downstairs he found an American soda fountain. He had a hamburger and a milk shake and then told one of the taxi-drivers waiting outside the hotel to take him to the bullring.

He relaxed against the torn upholstery. He could afford to let himself be happy. The man with Ellie couldn’t have anything to do with Victor. No henchman of Victor’s would be taking Ellie to the bullfight. She was being just an ordinary tourist. Probably by now she’d completely forgotten Victor and her gambling debt. She was quite capable of that sort of convenient amnesia.

Smiling, he started to hum the Toreador’s Song from Carmen.

9

THE great circular structure of the Plaza de Toros loomed over a white, unfinished suburb. Mark paid off the taxi in front of a gate in the high concrete wall. Broad sidewalks alternated with areas of dust and rubble. The feeling was of a city that had been bombed rather than of a town which was catching up with itself. The little stalls selling fruit, candy, cold meat and weird omelets which sizzled over charcoal braziers looked improvised after disaster. Even the people who were storming the gates seemed a refugee-mixed swarm … fashionable women, bare-foot Indians, men in prosperous business suits, girls with rebozos over their heads, half-naked children and dogs.

His ticket was rejected at the first gate and he was waved towards another entrance further around the wall. He bucked the crowd. A little boy selling lottery tickets whined after him.

Chickens squawked away from him and almost got run over by a passing limousine. Music, blaring from a loudspeaker, was incongruously American.

‘Candy, I called my sugar candy…’

Mark reached the next gate and presented his ticket. He was let into a spacious parking area jammed with expensive automobiles. The great wall of the bullring reared ahead of him, split with stairways and entrances. He was jostled towards cement stairs and up them. He passed through one of the gaps, to find himself half-way up one side of a monstrous cup of stone. Far below, the circle of the arena itself looked hardly bigger than the cardboard cap of a milk bottle. Tiny men in red coats and white pants were scurrying around smoothing the sand. A brass band was playing a paso doble. The stone tiers of seats, beveling the huge crater, were already a third full. Clusters of people alternated with great grey gaps of stone. Ribbons of bright advertisements stretched around the circumference of the arena — Carta Blanca Beer, Gayosso, Buy Adam’s Hats.

Mark pushed his way around the circular walk, searching for his seat. If Ellie and the unknown gentleman’ had left the hotel half an hour before him, they must certainly be here by now. He found his section. He started down steep stone steps towards his row. ‘L ‘was much nearer the ring. There was an iron railing to help the descent. The music stopped. One patch of people on the far side of the arena were mad about something. They started to whistle and shout. Mark reached Row L’. The outside seats were occupied. He eased past Mexican knees, looking ahead for Ellie. There was no sign of her.

A little boy, staggering under an immense basket, screamed: Cerveza. Hay cerveza. Bohemia. Dos Equis. Hay cerveza.’

Ahead of Mark were three empty seats. he struggled to them. He looked at the numbers 454, 456, 458. A man selling cushions was wandering in the next aisle. Mark signaled him. The man scrambled through the tier below and threw him a cushion.

Mark handed down a peso, dropped the cushion on his scooped-out cement seat and sat down. He glanced at his watch. It was exactly four o’clock. Maybe Ellie and her escort were having lunch first. Ellie had never been on time for anything in her life. Suddenly a trumpet sounded. It must have been a signal, for the people sitting in the high tiers across the ring started to run and tumble downwards to take the unoccupied seats below. It was strange to watch the mad rush of those tiny, distant figures. They had a false air of panic as if a tremendous ship were sinking.

Down in the ring one of the wooden gates in the corral that surrounded the arena was thrown open. An old man, dressed in antique splendor with a long plume in his hat, rode out alone on a white horse. He crossed the full extent of the ring. He reined his horse below Mark, took off the hat, made a sweeping bow, and then slowly, majestically, backed the white horse away again across the ring.

When he reached the point from which he had started a group of matadors in brilliant costume appeared behind him. The florid pageant started to parade around the arena.

In the din, Mark suddenly heard an American voice, a girl’s voice, saying

‘Excuse me. I’m so sorry. Thank you.’

He looked sharply to his right. A girl in a grey tailored suit with blonde hair to her shoulders was pushing past the knees of the other people in the row, coming towards him. She had a scarlet handbag on a strap slung over her shoulder. She was tall and slim. She managed to be graceful while she scrambled across wedged skirts and pants. She reached the empty seats next to him, Ellie’s seats. She had a ticket in her hand. She leaned down to look at the number on the seats and then sat down next to Mark.

Behind the loose fair hair, her profile, with its marked cheekbones and pure chin line, had a kind of laconic beauty. Her lips were heavily made-up with a shade of scarlet that matched the handbag. She had the general ambience of a New York model, of a girl who knew her way around.

‘Sorry, lady,’ said Mark. ‘That’s my wife’s seat.’

The girl still had her ticket stub in her hand. She held it out to him, watching him with blank indifference.

‘Can you read, bub?’

Mark looked at the ticket. It said Section AL 456. Exasperation welled up in him. Had it happened again? Had the girl at the Hotel Reforma given him the wrong seat? He turned his head, scanning the seats behind him. They were all occupied and Ellie was not there.

‘Well?’ said the girl. ‘Want to make something of it?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Always the gentleman.’

Mark paid her no attention. He felt frustrated and angry. What should he do? It was hopeless to try to locate Ellie in this giant bedlam. Should he go back to the hotel and wait for her there? The prospect of another indefinite wait was almost more than he could bear.

The girl had crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. She was watching the ring, indolently, as if she didn’t know what was going to happen and cared less. The parade was over now. The arena was deserted. A wooden gate opened to one side and a great black bull with a frivolous red ribbon curled on its back stomped into the ring, pawing the ground, snorting, looking important. Men with large magenta and yellow capes ducked out from behind the barrier and started fluttering the capes like butterflies. The bull charged half-heartedly at one of them. The girl turned, the cigarette still in her hand and said:

‘Where’s your wife, anyway? Down there fighting the bulls?’

‘Yeah,’ said Mark. ‘She’s the one on the horse.’

The girl’s speculative gaze did not alter its expression. ‘Going around shedding wives all over the place! Sloppy, that’s what it is.’

She looked back at the ring. So did he. One of the men was swooping his cape back and forth around the terrified bull. People were cheering and yelling Ole. To Mark it was just a slaughter-house in Technicolor, but the audience was loving it. He thought Ellie’s here somewhere. He tried to picture her as one of those little insects clinging to the side of the vast cup. It didn’t bring her closer. She only seemed less real.

The girl waved at a drink vendor and bought a beer in a cardboard cup. She leaned back comfortably with it, surveying the arena. A man was sticking darts in the bull’s back. They were gay fluffy darts like little pink Christmas trees. Mark made his decision. He would go back to the hotel and wait. As he shifted in his seat to get up, a man’s cheerful voice called in English from the aisle beyond the girl:

‘Hi, there you are, Mrs Liddon.’

Mark reacted to the name as if he had been stabbed by a dart. He spun around. Ellie was here. Then all this time … Eagerly he scanned the row of faces on the tier behind him again. They were all Mexican and unfamiliar.

He turned back to the man who had called Ellie’s name. He was pushing his way down the row towards the girl with the red handbag. He was just as obviously American as she. In his early forties, he had a happy pink moon-face, shrewd eyes, crinkled at the corners, an expensive suit and a loud hand painted tie. He looked like the vice-president of any prosperous company with an eminent position in the Elks or Shriners. He reached the seat next to the girl and sat down.

‘Guess you thought I’d abandoned you. Never try and telephone in this country. You can walk there quicker.’ He turned his beaming smile to the girl. ‘Have I missed anything good?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said the girl. ‘No one’s been killed yet. Is that good or bad?’

The pink-faced man laughed uproariously and slapped a plump knee. ‘I can see I have a cynic on my hands. I’ll have to initiate you into the mysteries of the bulls, Mrs Liddon.’

There it was. It had been said again. There was no getting around it. The blonde with the red handbag, sitting in the seat next to him, was called Mrs Liddon.

Mark’s first feeling was one of dejection. The ticket-seller at the Reforma had not made a mistake. She had given him a ticket next to a Mrs Liddon and her ‘gentleman.’ This was the Mrs Liddon she had meant. There must be two Mrs Liddons at the hotel.

And yet, surely, if there had been two Liddons listed the clerk at the desk would have mentioned it. Was this then the only Mrs Liddon at the Reforma? Was this, too, the Mrs Liddon who had stayed only a short time at the Hotel Granada and checked out with a blond young American? The idea carried Mark even farther back and was suddenly appalling in its implications. What if the salesgirl at Derain’s had made a mistake and given him the address of a Mrs Liddon who was not Ellie?

Was this whole journey a preposterous wildgoose chase? Was he stranded here in Mexico while Ellie was still somewhere in New York?

A matador was in the ring now, prowling around the bull with a scarlet cape and a drawn sword. Mark’s common sense came back. No, the girl at Derain’s could not possibly have made a mistake. She knew Ellie by sight; she knew her picture was in Harper’s Bazaar; and on the address she had copied for Mark, Ellie’s name had been written: Mrs Mark Liddon. It was inconceivable that Derain’s could have two customers called Mrs Mark Liddon who had both bought suits and needed them shipped at the same time.

Ellie, then, had asked to have her suit sent to the Hotel Granada. She had at least planned to go to Mexico. And, when he had called the hotel from New York, he had specified Mrs Mark Liddon. Surely no coincidence could have brought two Mrs Mark Liddons to the Hotel Granada simultaneously. Ellie must have been the Mrs Liddon whom Oscar had seen go off with a blond young American. For that matter, Mark had specified Mrs Mark Liddon at the Reforma too.

A sudden new idea came to him. It was improbable, but no other theory fitted the improbable facts. He couldn’t believe in two Mrs Mark Liddons following each other from Derain’s to the Hotel Granada, from the Hotel Granada to the Hotel Reforma.

Then …

Down in the ring the matador seemed to have hypnotized the bull. It stood with solid patience, its head lowered, in front of the man who loomed on tiptoe over it, his raised sword pointed ominously downward at the animal’s neck. The huge arena was caught up in a charmed silence. Suddenly the sword swooped. It disappeared in the bull’s thick neck. The bull staggered. Its tongue lolled out. An enormous blast of roared applause swept through the auditorium like a gale. Blood spilled out of the animal’s throat. It gave a kind of hissing cough and collapsed on to its side in the sand.

Clappings, screams, cheers bellowed around Mark. He turned to look at the girl next to him. The businessman type had jumped up and was applauding heartily. He glanced down jocularly at the girl.

‘Well, well, what do you think of that?’

‘It’s making a bouillon cube the hard way,’ said the girl.

Her escort laughed his good-natured, foolish bray.

‘Ah you!’ he said archly. ‘You little cynic, you, Mrs Liddon!’

The girl was very serene. With a casual glance at Mark, she pulled the red handbag around on to her lap, fumbled in it and brought out a compact. Frowning slightly at the compact mirror, she started to remake the scarlet arcs of her lips.

There was something haunting about that young face with the disenchanted blue eyes and the delicate, almost gaunt cheekbones. But Mark wasn’t looking at her as a woman; he was looking at her as a potential enemy.

Because he was almost sure of it now. There was no other explanation.

This girl was impersonating his wife.

10

BERIBBONED mules dragged away the dead bull. The Matador strutted around the arena to cheering, the stomping of feet and the waving of white handkerchiefs. The businessman type sat down. The girl lit another cigarette. The roar of the crowd subsided to a murmur and then rose again to a buzzing of anticipation as a second bull charged clumsily into the ring.

He glanced sidewise at the girl. Her head was half-turned from him as she listened with unenthusiastic politeness to her escort’s lecture on bullfighting. To have this happen on top of everything else seemed more than any man should have to bear. Mark fought against his growing sense of frustration. This was another crisis and he could only meet it by keeping calm.

‘Keep calm,’ he said to himself as he had said when he found Corey’s body in the apartment. The charm worked once more. He felt much steadier. Okay. This girl next to him was impersonating Ellie. Why? Almost immediately an explanation occurred to him. It was far-fetched, but it fitted with Ellie. If she was frightened enough of Victor, she might have thought that escape to Mexico was not enough. She might have persuaded or bribed this girl to take over her public identity while she went into hiding. It would have been a muddled idea because, presumably, anyone Victor sent after her would know what she looked like. But Ellie — particularly Ellie frightened — wasn’t any Quiz Kid.

Until he knew more facts that would do as a premise. He glanced again at the girl. Whether she was an ally or an enemy of Ellie’s, she was obviously the key. He would not let her out of his sight until he had tricked, cajoled, frightened, or forced out of her whatever it was she knew.

He sat pretending an interest in the ring, straining his ears to hear every word exchanged by the girl and the man with her. For so bizarre a situation the conversation was almost incredibly banal. From the man’s heavy politeness and his constant use of the formal ‘Mrs Liddon’ Mark was sure that they were only slight acquaintances. He gathered from a few stray remarks that the man’s name was Riley and that his business was in Mexico, but his guide-book dissertation on the sights of the city proved that the girl had only recently come from the States. The man was not making passes at her, but there was a certain courtliness in his behavior, as if she was worth the expenditure of time and charm. He would, Mark reflected, treat the wife of an important business contact that way.

Since it was safer to cover every possibility, he tried to decide whether or not it was specifically to deceive this man that the girl was pretending to be Ellie. Having listened to their conversation through the brief decline and fall of three more bulls, he convinced himself that the man was not important (unless they were both playing an immensely cautious game). They had met casually perhaps at the Hotel Reforma and the resident American had offered to take the tourist to the bulls.

After the mules had pranced out with the cadaver of the fourth bull, Mr Riley said:

‘There are two more to go, Mrs Liddon. Want to stay?’

The girl shrugged. ‘I guess that’s enough blood for this Miss Dracula.’

Mr Riley laughed. He seemed almost fawningly eager to appreciate his companion’s ‘great little sense of humor’. He said ‘Well, let’s get out before the rush starts.’

He rose. The girl turned to follow Mr Riley past the gauntlet of knees, she glanced back at Mark over her shoulder. She waved her hand in a gesture of farewell.

‘Keep your eye on the bulls, chum. Let us know who wins.’

She pushed after Mr Riley to the aisle. Together they started up the steep steps to the exit door. In a small but steady trickle other customers were starting to leave. Mark waited until half a dozen people had passed. Then he rose too and climbed the steep ramp to the exit.

Passing through it was like walking across the lip of a huge sea-shell. Below stretched the gleaming tops of the automobiles in the car park. It was easy to pick out the girl’s red handbag and her escort’s burly figure in the handful of departing fans. Mark moved down the steps after them. They passed through a gate and hailed one of the taxis waiting at the curb. Mark slipped into another and indicated with signs that the driver was to follow them. The driver beamed with the tolerant understanding of someone who was used to the eccentricities of gringos.

Speed, like the bullfights, seemed to be one of the outlets for the caged violence of the Mexican temperament. The two taxis hurtled insanely after each other through the sprawling city like entertainment cars in some giant carnival sideshow. They reached the hectic center of the town again and the first taxi swerved to a stop in front of an elegant green-and-white awning. Mark’s driver, with a flair for conspiracy, shot past it, turned a corner and swung to the curb. Mark paid a double fare and hurried back around the corner. On a balcony above him a flamboyant red-and-blue macaw was screaming. He was just in time to see the girl and Mr Riley pass under the awning and through a door.

He moved down the sidewalk until he reached the building. It was a kind of glorified snack bar with large plate-glass windows stretching its whole length. Inside he could see fashionably dressed Mexicans chattering at tables. It was apparently ‘tea hour’ in a south-of-the-border Schrafft. A flurry of women with expensive hats and white Spanish skins pushed past him to the door. Through the window he caught a glimpse of the girl and Mr Riley moving to a table.

He crossed the street and stood outside a fashionable dress-shop. When a taxi came by he stopped it, indicating once again with gestures that the driver was to wait. In about half an hour the girl and Mr Riley emerged from the tea-shop and hailed a taxi. The girl waved to Mr Riley and climbed in. Mr Riley started to walk away. With Mark following, the girl’s taxi drove her straight to the Hotel Reforma.

Mark paid off his own driver and climbed the steep steps. The lobby was more crowded than it had been when he first entered it, but he saw the girl immediately. She was standing at the desk and a clerk was handing her a large package. He moved behind the Christmas tree and watched her through its heavy, decorated branches. The clerk was making her sign for the package. He was, Mark saw, a different boy from the one to whom he had spoken. It was just possible that he would not tell the girl that her ‘husband’ had arrived.

It didn’t particularly matter whether he did or not. But Mark was almost sure that he had said nothing because, after the girl had signed, she merely smiled, waved away a bellhop who offered to carry the package and moved with it to the elevator.

He followed. She did not notice him until he had entered the elevator with her and the doors were closing. When she did, she showed no surprise. She looked at him from her cool, enigmatic eyes and said:

‘So we share the same rat-hole.’

Apart from the operator, they were the only people in the elevator.

The operator asked ‘What floor, please?’

‘Three,’ said the girl.

Mark said nothing. He was looking at the package in her arms. It was wrapped in elegant white paper and tied with black cord. One of its sides was jaggedly broken where it had been opened, probably by the Customs. From the angle at which she carried it he could not see the address, but he made out in large black capitals the letters DERA…

He said ‘Let me carry that for you.’

She let him take the package without protest. He glanced down and saw the complete word: D ER AI N’ S . The address was: Mrs Mark Liddon, Hotel Granada, Madero, Mexico, D. F., Mexico. It had been sent airmail. There was a Customs declaration at the left-hand top corner. It said ‘One suit — value $350.00.’

If there had been any doubt that this girl was impersonating Ellie, it was gone now. Derain’s had sent the package airmail three days ago; it would have arrived the day before yesterday; the Customs would have sent a notice to the Hotel Granada, which would have sent it on to the Reforma, which would have sent a boy to clear the package. This was definitely Ellie’s suit and this girl had calmly accepted it as her own. She was compromised up to the neck.

The elevator stopped at the third floor. The girl gestured for the return of the package.

‘This is my floor, too,’ said Mark.

‘Well, well, what a coincidence.’

He followed her down the thickly carpeted corridor. She reached a door marked 332 and opened it with a key from her handbag.

She gestured again for the package. He pushed her through the open door into the room, stepped after her and closed the door behind him, standing squarely in front of it, the package in his arms.

She was remarkably calm. Her features, like a model’s features, seemed trained to express no other emotion than one of glamorous indifference.

‘If this is a seduction,’ she said, ‘I’m not in the mood. Come back tomorrow.’

His suitcase stood on the floor by the door where the bellhop must have left it. She did not seem to have noticed it. Curiosity and anger made him exceptionally observant. He saw that some of the red lacquer was chipped off one of her nails and that the blonde hair was dyed. He could just trace the natural uninteresting brown at the roots of her part.

She was still watching him flatly. ‘Well,’ she said, don’t just stand there. Say something. Or do you only bay at the full moon ?’

‘I’m Mark Liddon.’ He took out his tourist card and showed it to her.

If she were an ally of Ellie’s, this was the moment for her to welcome him. But she did no such thing. She glanced idly at the card and handed it back.

Without the slightest sign of discomposure, she turned and moved out of the foyer into a gay ‘modern’ living-room. He followed. She took a cigarette from an onyx box under a vase of pink sweet-peas. Lighting it, exhaling smoke, she picked up the receiver of a telephone by a couch. She gave him a bright smile over the instrument.

‘Oh, Mr Mark Liddon, what’s the Spanish for dangerous lunatic and sexual assault?’

He went to her and took the receiver from her hand. She did not resist. He put the receiver back on its stand. She was wearing the same perfume as Ellie. It distracted him.

He said ‘Where’s my wife?’

‘Haven’t you found her yet? How sloppy can you be?’

‘I’m Mark Liddon. I’ve followed my wife to Mexico. You’re impersonating her.’

The girl was watching him, dead pan. She pushed the loose blonde hair back from one shoulder. ‘I’m Mrs Mark Liddon. I’ve left my husband in Lincoln, Nebraska. You’re impersonating him.’

‘You mean there is more than one Mrs Mark Liddon in this hotel?’

‘For all I know there are ninety.’

‘My wife ordered a suit from Derain’s in New York. They sent it after her.’ He ripped the cord off the package, stripped away the wrapping paper, opened the box and tugged out a light-grey suit. ‘Explain this.’

The hours of frustrated hope and constant disappointment came rushing out as anger against this calm, impervious girl. He dropped the suit on the couch and, crossing to her, gripped her arms. Once again she made no effort to resist.

‘You’re going to tell me sooner or later. You might as well tell me now.’

Her face was only a few inches from his and her red lips parted in a little smile as if something secret was amusing her. ‘Such virility,’ she murmured. ‘Such hot breath on the neck.’

‘Where’s my wife?’

‘I don’t know where your wife is.’

His grip tightened on her arms. ‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t know.’

Abruptly he pushed her aside and crossed to the telephone. He glanced back at her over his shoulder. ‘Oh, Mrs Mark Liddon of Lincoln, Nebraska, what’s the Spanish for the police and the American Embassy?’

She took a step towards him. For the first time the blue eyes were clouded with anxiety.

‘You wouldn’t…’

‘Like hell I wouldn’t.’

Quite suddenly she collapsed. With a resigned shrug, she took the receiver from him and put it down on the stand.

‘All right. Since you ask so prettily, I’ll tell you what I know.’

‘That’s more like it.’

‘Sit down, Mr Mark Liddon. Relax. I’ll get you a drink and tell you the story of my life.’

11

HE sat down on the yellow and grey striped couch. She went to a tin credenza by the wall, took out a bottle of brandy and poured two jiggers. She brought them to the couch, handed one to Mark and sat down next to him. She had abandoned the sophisticated pose and seemed suddenly very young and friendly.

Too friendly, Mark thought.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Liddon.’ She smiled at him over her brandy. ‘It was dumb of me to try to bluff it out. You took me by surprise. No one told me she had a husband who would follow her.’

‘You know now.’

‘Yes, I know now.’ She reached past the sweet-peas for a cigarette. She was trying very hard to appear at her ease, but he could tell that behind the careful calm she was frightened or, if not frightened, wary. ‘You’re not going to like what I’m going to tell you, Mr Liddon.’ She lit a cigarette and looked straight at him. ‘I don’t know where your wife is. I don’t even know who she is or what’s happened to her.’

‘You don’t know anything about her. You just took over her identity on a girlish whim?’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘Why should I?’

‘There’s no reason, I suppose.’

For the first time he noticed that her hand, holding the cigarette, was slightly roughened around the knuckles. It wasn’t the sort of hand that went with the luxury hotel and the insouciance. Almost certainly she wasn’t a model. Her glamour was as synthetic as her presence of being Ellie. What the hell was she? He felt momentarily the immense strangeness of another human being. They were sitting only a few inches apart, but what went on in her mind was as impossible to guess at as the dark side of the moon.

The faint perfume, trailing from her, plagued him with a desire for Ellie more poignant than he had yet felt in Mexico. But he was learning patience. He must hear what the girl had to say, and then decide what to do with her.

‘It’ll sound phony to you, Mr Liddon.’ The blue, steady eyes were still on his face. He neither believed nor disbelieved their candor. He had learned there was no rule for interpreting eyes. ‘Things always sound phony when you come in on the end of them. I’m pretending to be Mrs Mark Liddon because I don’t have the right papers.’

‘Papers?’

‘Passport, birth certificate, things to get back to the States with.’

‘What’s this got to do with my wife?’

‘Give me time. You see, I was born in Czechoslovakia. My father was a Czech. In 1938, when I was a kid, he sent me and my brother over to Brooklyn to live with an aunt. Seems I should have taken out papers or something when I was twenty-one, but I didn’t get around to finding that out. Apparently I’m still a Czech citizen.’

He sat watching her, saying nothing. Did foreign children, once they had been accepted in the States, have to take out papers to become citizens? He didn’t know. But the fact that she, like his own folks, came from Czechoslovakia, made an irrelevant bond.

She smiled again tentatively, to see whether he would smile back. He didn’t.

She said: ‘I sing in nightclubs. That’s how I make my living — if you call it a living. A couple of weeks ago I was out of work in San Diego. I drove across the border with some people to Tia Juana for the day. In a cantina I met up with a Mexican. He said he owned a nightclub here in Mexico City. He offered me a job. He had a car. I wasn’t believing in that nightclub until I saw it with my own eyes, but there didn’t seem to be much future to beating the sidewalks of San Diego. So I said okay. I never thought it would be hard to get back to the States. I guess I don’t have my finger on the pulse of history. Once an American, I thought, always an American. Little-did-I-know department.’

The steep angle of her cheekbones, the quality of her skin, brought Mark fleeting memories of photographs of his own Czech cousins. She didn’t look like them, but the same mold had been used. This fact somehow confused the issue, kept him from concentrating on the only thing that mattered — Ellie.

She went on: ‘I drove here from Tia Juana with the Mexican. I had underestimated him. He did own a nightclub, but it was a nightclub with rooms upstairs for private parties. I haven’t come to that yet. I kissed him goodbye. Since then I’ve been batting around Mexico City with no pesos and a nostalgia for Brooklyn as wide as De Kalb Avenue.’

He thought suddenly and without context that she was attractive. She might be an enemy; she might be a monster of deceit. But the easy-moving limbs, the young girl’s body, the fair, planed face aroused him. It made no difference, of course. She was just a strand in the thread which led to Ellie.

‘I’d met a man,’ she said, ‘who works in one of the airline offices. I thought, if I made charm to him, he might pull wires to airmail me home as perishable merchandise. I let him take me out to dinner. That’s when I was wised up. He told me you need more than your carfare to get back to the States. If you come with a tourist card, you’re okay. If you didn’t - and I didn’t - you need proof of citizenship. What proof do I have? My aunt, maybe, could dig out a birth certificate in Czech saying I was born in Opava. That’s not going to slay the U.S. immigration officials.’

The nervousness behind her voice had completely gone now. He suspected that she knew she was attractive to him and was confident for that reason. He never trusted people who thought they were clever enough to charm him.

She asked: ‘Does this bore you?’

‘It will soon if you don’t get to my wife.’

‘I’ll cut it as short as I can. Next scene: me yesterday in a bar yakking over a bunch of tequilas with the barman, an American kid who came here to study under the G.I. Bill of Rights. I was in a mood to let down my hair. I told him my sad story of being a Displaced Person from Brooklyn. He’s one of those big-hearted Harrys. He said he could fix me up.’ She waved at the elegant living-room. ‘This is it. This is how he fixed me up.’

‘Am I meant to understand yet?’

‘Soon. You see, this barman knows things. Barmen always do. He told me there was an American girl who’d just come to Mexico to do a temporary disappearing act. She was looking for someone to take over her identity for a while. He could get me her tourist card, he said. There’s no photograph on them. I could use it. And they would give me money for a plane ticket home. All I had to do was to hang around here for a week pretending to be her.’

‘And this girl is my wife?’

‘Mrs Mark Liddon. That’s the name. Of course, I jumped at the deal. I made a date to meet him later. He brought me some suitcases of clothes - your wife’s clothes, I suppose money and the tourist card. He told me to check in here at the Reforma as Mrs Mark Liddon. After a week I could fly home. That’s all I know, Mr Liddon.’

‘Show me the tourist card.’

Her eyes flickered with sudden anxiety. ‘Don’t take it away from me, Mr Liddon.’ Her hand with the chipped fingernail settled on his arm. ‘Of course, you want to find your wife. That’s all you care about. I understand that. But she gave me the card. It was her idea. Don’t take it away.’

‘Show me that card.’

‘Why should I?’ Her face flushed with anger and instinctively she clutched the red handbag closer to her. ‘I’ve told you everything I know. Isn’t that enough?’

Mark reached out and put a hand on the handbag. ‘I didn’t come all the way to Mexico to play guessing games. Your whole story may be a lie. At least I can see that card.’

She looked down rather helplessly at his hand and then, with a shrug, pushed it aside, opened the handbag, searched in it and brought out a card. He took it. It was the regulation tourist card for visitors to Mexico. It had been filled up and signed in Ellie’s bold, sloping writing. There was no doubt at all about that.

There was then, at least, this amount of confirmation to her story. And it could, of course, be true. With certain variations, it fitted the theory he had already evolved. The barman could be the blond American who had picked Ellie and her bags up at the Hotel Granada. The two of them could have cooked up this thing together as a precautionary measure.

It seemed odd that Ellie should have taken a barman so deeply into her confidence. But, in a way, that was like Ellie too. She knew no one here in Mexico City. Inevitably she would have drifted to a bar, and barmen are traditionally sympathetic and omniscient.

The girl was watching him bleakly. He twisted the card between his finger and thumb.

‘Is this barman a blond guy, smaller than me?’

‘Yes.’

‘He told you to check in here at the Reforma last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you never actually saw my wife?’

‘No, no.’

‘You don’t know where she is?’

‘No.’

‘Who was the man you were with at the bullfight?’

She blinked. ‘Mr Riley? He’s just a man I met at Tony’s Bar. He asked me to the bulls. It was something to do.’

‘What’s the barman’s name?’

‘George.’

‘Where does he work?’

She asked brightly, helpfully: ‘Do you want me to call him and ask him around?’

‘Yes. Don’t tell him anything about me. Just say you want to see him.’

She picked up the receiver and gave a number in Spanish. He stood at her side, watching her. There was much more to her than showed on the surface. He was almost sure of that now, although he wasn’t sure whether that made her merely interesting or dangerous. She talked to a voice at the other end of the wire. There appeared to be no veiled warnings in what she said. She put down the receiver.

‘He can get away in half an hour but he doesn’t have time to come here. He’ll meet us at the Salon de Lisboa.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A cantina. It’s near where he works.’ She looked at him pleadingly. ‘He’ll know where your wife is. He’ll take you to her. Please, Mr Liddon, let me have that card.’

He studied her thoughtfully. She was attractive, and if she was to be believed, she was in a jam. But thousands of other girls were attractive and in jams too and they weren’t impersonating his wife. She had stirred him, absurdly, because she had come or said she had come from Czechoslovakia and reminded him of his own family. He resented her for having moved him.

He said: ‘Maybe I’ll give it to you when I find my wife.’ He put the card in his pocket and took her arm. ‘Let’s go see George.’

12

SURELY this time he was on his way to his wife.

It was strange how little what had actually happened in New York seemed to matter now. The chase had carried him so far from that apartment that the chase itself was absorbing all his emotional reserves.

The taxi had passed out of the tourist section of the city into a long, tired street of little shops and shabby barred houses. As always, it seemed, in Mexico, a Ferris wheel in some corner lot carnival loomed against the evening clouds. What was it in Mexicans that made them want to swing up in the sky on little seats in a child’s toy? Was it the same passion for the Big Moment that kept them buying lottery tickets and yelling at the bullfights?

Sidewalk stalls of a market had narrowed the street to the proportions of an alley. The taxi had reluctantly slowed its speed. Shoddy merchandise — cheap rosaries, hanging dungarees — brushed against the car window like twigs in a country lane. The taxi turned a corner and stopped at the broken curb beside a black-shawled woman frying tortillas over a charcoal brazier. Behind her, painted swing doors showed the entrance to a cantina. Above them, in faded white lettering, were the words: Salon de Lisboa.

Mark and the girl picked their way past a half-starved dog and a pock-marked beggar to the swing doors. This wasn’t Mark’s idea of a place to meet anyone. He paused suspiciously outside the swing doors.

The girl glanced at him with faint mockery. ‘Don’t be elegant, Mr Liddon. All the real Mexican cantinas are like this. The others are for tourists.’

She pushed through the swing doors. He followed.

The cantina was small, squalid and loud with guitar music. A wooden bar curved at one side and wooden chairs and benches stood around rickety wooden tables. There was a sour odor of people and a strange sweetish stench of fermentation. The customers were all men, quiet, dark men sitting alone or in couples playing dominoes or in crowded groups. Three musicians in costumes ornate as matadors were standing, strumming guitars, by one of the tightly packed clusters of men. One of the musicians started to sing in a high, off-key tenor.

The girl studied the room. ‘George isn’t here yet.’

She made her way to an empty table in a corner. They sat down. She was the only woman in the room, fantastically conspicuous for her white skin, her blonde hair, her elegant clothes. Black male eyes watched her guardedly, but she showed no embarrassment.

A waiter came. The girl ordered tequila. She said: ‘You’re going to end up drinking tequila, Mr Liddon. You might as well get used to it.’

The waiter brought two jiggers of colorless liquid and a plate of sliced limes. The girl put salt on the base of her thumb, squeezed lime juice on it, swallowed her tequila and licked the salt. Mark followed her lead. He didn’t like the tequila. He didn’t like this place. It was too much like a trap.

The girl was looking at him across the table.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Liddon. George will know where your wife is.’

‘He will?’

‘And he’ll take you to her — ‘She paused. ‘Unless, of course, it’s you she’s disappearing from.’

‘It isn’t me.’

‘I’ve heard about your wife. Eleanor Ross. She used to show up all the time in the New York columns, didn’t she?’

‘I guess so.’

‘What’s the trouble?’ She started playing with a slice of lime. Or is it none of my business?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

She smiled a quick, warm smile. ‘How come you’re mixed up in that fancy café society bunch, Mr Liddon? You don’t belong.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Where are you from?’

‘Providence.’

‘The Liddons of Providence?’

‘The Liczdonskis. My folks came over from Czechoslavakia before I was born.’

‘No!’

‘Some little hick town there on the border of Poland.’

The musician had stopped singing, and the guitars stopped too. Without the music the cantina was remarkably quiet. There was the clatter of dominoes. That was all. Unlike Americans, Mexicans didn’t seem to talk in public places. Once again, without meaning to, Mark had become interested in the girl. There was something about her that put him off his guard.

He asked: ‘What’s your name?’

‘Frankie.’ The girl glanced over his shoulder towards the swing door and tensed. She put her hand on his arm. ‘Here he is. Here’s George.’

A young man was coming quickly through the tables. He was slight and as towheaded as Mark. He walked with his thin shoulders held exaggeratedly straight from arrogance perhaps or perhaps, Mark thought, because he had taken a mail-order course in weight-lifting. He had the intense, pigeon-chested look of a body-builder.

He came straight to the table. Frankie said: ‘Hello, George. I’m glad you could get away from the bar.’

Her slight emphasis on the word ‘bar’ was unnatural and it brought Mark’s suspicions rushing back. That word could be a follow-my-lead cue.

George didn’t smile a greeting. He merely looked from the girl to Mark with pale, intense blue eyes. The effect once again was one of arrogance or the bluster of the extremely shy. Frankie had referred to him as a big-hearted Harry. This was not Mark’s idea of a big-hearted Harry.

The girl gestured at Mark. ‘This is Mr Liddon, George. Mr Mark Liddon from New York.’

George was quick. Mark had to hand him that. Whatever his status, this must have come to him as a big surprise, but he took it in his stride. He merely fixed the pale-blue eyes on Mark. They were burningly alive with a kind of cold Puritan flame as if he were seeking out Evil preparatory to castigating it.

He said: ‘I suppose you’re looking for your wife, Mr Liddon?’

Mark said: ‘Frankie tells me you know where she is.’

‘I didn’t tell him that,’ said the girl quickly. ‘I told him you might know.’

George pulled up a third chair and sat down. Frankie ordered two more tequilas from the waiter. She said to Mark: ‘George doesn’t drink. Barmen never do.’

There it was again? that signaled ‘barman’. George put his hands on the table. They were small and delicate, the sort of hands people call musical although real musicians usually have the hands of bricklayers.

‘You’ve been away, haven’t you, Mr Liddon? Out of the States?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your wife didn’t expect you home so early?’

‘That’s it.’

George was looking down at the scarred table top as if his eyes were weapons only to be used in an emergency. The fair hair tumbled over his forehead. The effect was almost naively boyish, but there was none of the boy’s gentleness. The thin body was taut as a set trap.

The waiter brought the tequila. Frankie picked hers up. She was watching George. Mark, watching them both, saw that her hand was unsteady. She was scared. He was sure of it. And if she was scared, then she had been lying, because there was nothing in the story she had told him that should make her afraid of this interview.

Suddenly George said: ‘You don’t know anything about this trouble your wife’s mixed up with, do you?’

‘I’m waiting for you to tell me.’

The musicians had started to sing again — all three of them, three high sweet voices singing flat. Mark noticed that George’s nails were bitten down to the quick. The cuticle was gnawed too. Bartenders were not usually nervous people.

‘If the girl’s dangerous,’ he thought suddenly, ‘this boy is ten times more dangerous.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘My wife’s obviously talked to you about me and she’s obviously in trouble. If you’re guarding her from something, fine, and I’m grateful. But you know it isn’t me she’s hiding from. You know she’ll want to see me.’

George did look up then. The blue eyes, fixed without expression on Mark’s face, were fanatic’s eyes. That was it, Mark thought. He’s hipped on something — Communism, stamp-collecting, building boats.

‘Oh yes, Mr Liddon, I know your wife would be crazy to see you.’

‘Then where is she?’

George smiled then — it was as unreal a smile as a smile on a scarecrow or a Hallowe’en pumpkin.

That’s the trouble. I’m very sorry, Mr Liddon, but I’m afraid you’ve just missed her. She flew to Guatemala this afternoon.

13

FRANKIE had finished her tequila. She had never taken her eyes from George’s face. Mark felt a stultifying weariness. If Ellie was in Guatemala, it was infinitely depressing. If this young man was lying, it was more so. Perhaps it was hunger, he thought, that brought on this apathy. He had hardly eaten since he had arrived in Mexico.

He said to Frankie: ‘Do they serve food here?’

‘If you don’t mind it hot.’

‘Anything.’

Frankie beckoned to the waiter and talked Spanish. The waiter went away. Mark looked across the table at George. It was desperately important to gauge whether or not this was a hoax; but his judgment seemed to have deserted him. He was too far from his base. Too many unlikely things had happened. He only knew there was danger. That didn’t clarify anything.

The waiter came back with some sliced hard rolls, ringed with raw onion and stuffed with some sort of chopped meat. Mark started to eat one and chili corroded the roof of his mouth like acid.

‘She flew to Guatemala this afternoon?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why?’

The boy had high-angled cheekbones like the girl. He might almost have been her brother — her skinny twin brother burned up inside by some chili-like passion.

‘You’ve been in Venezuela, haven’t you, Mr Liddon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your wife wasn’t expecting you back till after Christmas?’

‘No.’

George picked up a little tin salt shaker and examined it with his devouring attention. ‘Mrs Liddon is flying through Guatemala to Caracas to meet you.’

Guatemala and now Venezuela. An image came of Ellie as a tiny figure dwindling, dwindling in space. The food had made him stronger but not strong enough to cope with this constant shift.

‘Why, if she was going to meet me in Venezuela, did she make this trip to Mexico?’

George looked up again. His face was well made. Women who liked that intense type might find him attractive. ‘I only know what your wife told me. It may not be the whole truth. After all, I was just a stranger — someone behind a bar.’

‘A big-hearted Harry.’

He had said that condescendingly. George flushed, the blood showing crimson under the thin white skin. He’s touchy too, Mark thought. He doesn’t like me because I’m bigger. Certainly he’s taken a weight-lifting course.

‘Mrs Liddon said she’d run up big gambling debts in New York. She couldn’t cover them. She tried to raise the money and failed. The outfit she owed the money to started to get tough. She was scared they’d hurt her so she took off for Mexico. She thought she’d be safe here, but some friend called her from New York to tell her the outfit was sending a gunman after her. She’d just heard this before she came to the bar. She was pretty frantic. I guess that’s why she spilled it all to me. She said the only place she’d be safe was with her husband. She said she’d booked a passage on the Guatemala plane. She was going to change planes there for Venezuela.’

Mark had hoped for an obvious falsehood in George’s story which would give away a hoax. It hadn’t happened that way. This was exactly what he had figured himself. Maybe Ellie was flying to Guatemala.

He glanced at Frankie. She had detached herself from the conversation and was smoking a cigarette, looking indifferently around the dilapidated bar. She was like the well-trained wife who had learned to obliterate herself when her husband talked business at lunch. Under the circumstances it did not seem to be a natural reaction.

He asked: ‘How does Frankie fit into this set-up?’

He knew then that Frankie’s indifference had been a fake. Quickly, before George could speak, she said: ‘I told him, George, about my not having papers to get back to New York, about your fixing it for me to use Mrs Liddon’s tourist card.’ Her candid blue eyes moved to Mark. ‘I didn’t tell you that part of the story. At least I didn’t tell it well. Mrs Liddon thought that if she left a phony Mrs Liddon behind as a decoy it might put the gunman off the scent long enough for her to make her get-away to Venezuela.’

‘Yes,’ put in George. ‘Mrs Liddon asked me if I knew anyone who might take on the job. Frankie showed up. It all fitted in together.’

Mark was sure then that they were working as a team. Frankie had had no time to brief George on the story she had told at the Hotel Reforma. The moment they had come to her part in the tale she had taken over. It had been done smoothly and George had followed her lead. But Mark knew now that his first instinct had been right.

They were both lying in their teeth.

He wondered how he could ever have considered believing them. It was his physical exhaustion which had confused him. He should always have trusted his sense of danger.

He didn’t, of course, know why they were lying. Off-hand, he didn’t see how they could connect with Victor. Victor had in Ellie only the routine interest of a racketeer whose policy was to eliminate patrons who welshed on their gambling debts. In Victor’s plans, there would be no place for this impersonation. Ellie must have run from one disaster head on into another. But - what?

He thought of the darkest possibility - that these two had murdered her. They were low enough, he felt, on the financial scale to have been tempted by her jewels alone. If they had done that, he would represent a great menace to them. He was something they had not bargained for, something to be appeased at all costs, to be got out of the picture. They had already told him Ellie was in Venezuela. If they were guilty - whatever their guilt - they would try to persuade him to follow her so that they would be safe from him in Mexico.

The musicians had stopped singing. They were drinking beer out of bottles. The customers were as quiet over their tequilas as if they were in church. A little barefoot boy was paddling from table to table selling papers.

Mark said to Frankie: ‘So, just for a tourist card, you’ve been ready to play pheasant to a gunman?’

‘I told you I want to get back to the States.’

Mark turned to George. ‘If my wife left her tourist card with Frankie, how did she get out of the country?’

‘She had her passport with her too.’ George smiled again that smile which was meant to be amiable. ‘You’ve had a tough break, Mr Liddon. I wish I could help, but I guess there’s only one thing to do. I don’t even know that they did actually send a gunman after her. It may have been just a scare. Certainly no one’s showed, so far as I or Frankie know.’

‘I’m sure your wife’s safe and sound in Venezuela. You’d better hop a plane and go after her.’

‘Yes,’ put in Frankie. ‘That’s what you’d better do, Mr Liddon.’

He felt for a moment the craziness of a world in which you could fly from Venezuela to New York to Mexico City to Guatemala to Venezuela. He felt weary again and dispirited. It depressed him that they thought they could fool him so easily. He got up and pushed his chair back against the wall. He ignored the girl and looked straight at George.

‘Where’s my wife?’ he said.

‘In Venezuela.’

‘Forget that nonsense. Where’s my wife?’

‘So you don’t believe us.’ George got up too, standing very straight as if he was straining to be as tall as Mark. He seemed excited. Mark knew the type. They lied well and earnestly for their cause, these fanatics, but they didn’t get their kick out of it. What they enjoyed was the dramatic moment of action. ‘Why don’t you believe us, Mr Liddon?’

Mark wondered if George was carrying a gun. He probably was. George to George would always be right. People like that can shoot anyone who stands in their way and still wear a halo.

Mark said: ‘Never mind why I don’t believe you. Where’s my wife?’ The time had come for the bluff. ‘If you don’t tell me, I shall report this girl to the police for impersonation, theft of my wife’s personal property and intent to deceive the U.S. Immigration Bureau. I shall also go to the American Embassy and demand a full investigation of my wife’s disappearance.’

Both George and he had been talking quietly, but the antagonism between them had affected the atmosphere. The other customers were conscious of it. The musicians were watching unobtrusively over their beer bottles. The clatter of dominoes had stopped.

Frankie said: ‘Please, Mr Liddon, don’t make difficulties. We don’t know any more than we’ve told you.’

Mark ignored her. He was still watching George. ‘Do I go to the police and the Embassy?’

George was smiling now. It was quite a different smile from his earlier smile of condolence. Maybe he smiled this way the day in lesson five he lifted the weight that was meant for lesson six.

‘Okay, Mr Liddon. You win.’

‘My wife didn’t fly to Guatemala?’

‘No.’

‘She’s here in Mexico?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s all right?’

‘Perfectly all right.’

‘You’ll take me to her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this from the beginning?’ George was still smiling. ‘I have her interests at heart, Mr Liddon. I was waiting until I had decided you were reliable.’

‘And you’ve decided I am reliable?’

‘I’ve decided you’re reliable.’ George nodded to the door. ‘Ready?’

‘Yes.’

Mark paid the check. The girl pushed past him towards the door. Every man in the bar watched her in silence. Somehow the feeling of tension had made them even more conscious of her sex. Mark and George together followed the girl through the swing doors out on to the sidewalk.

They were caught up in the raucous stream of Mexican street life. After the quiet of the cantina, it was momentarily bewildering. Three men were playing a marimba in the gutter. Buyers swarmed around the stalls that sold tropical fruit and fruit drinks, grey, crimson, saffron and lime in tall glass jars. There was a stench of decaying fruit and vegetables and underfoot moved a complicated sub-life of dogs and children. The wheeze of a pipe organ sounded from the fairground beyond.

George said: ‘Let’s cut up to Artes. We can get a taxi there.’

He turned past the corner of the Salon de Lisboa into a small side street. Frankie took Mark’s arm and drew him after George. It was almost night. The alley was empty. It wound crookedly ahead towards the grotesque silhouette of the Ferris wheel. The wheel was lit now with hundreds of little gleaming bulbs, patterning the sky like an astrologer’s chart of the fixed Zodiac. Although the alley was completely silent, the street noises still roared behind them. They might have been in a deserted cavern within hearing of the sea.

Frankie was leaning on his right arm. George was strolling nonchalantly ahead. Okay. He knew exactly why they had led him into this dark alley. He knew what was going to happen. He could have avoided it, but he preferred to have the issue forced. He wasn’t unlike George. The slow-drawn-out game of cat-and-mouse had made him restless too. That and his anger readied him for violence. He wasn’t afraid of them. He had known more dangerous people than this.

George would spin around suddenly. Mark was sure of that. He would spin around and there would be a gun in his hand. But he wouldn’t do it just yet. He would wait until they were deeper in the darkness, nearer to the bellow of the fairground pipe organ which would drown out the sound of a shot. Frankie was holding on to Mark’s right arm to obstruct him if he too should have a gun. He didn’t have one. He despised the priesthood of the bullet.

They were both, of course, equally false. Both of them, from some dark reason, were trying to keep him from Ellie. But it was Frankie against whom his anger was directed. For a moment the girl had won his sympathy because she had been born or said she had been born in Czechoslovakia. She had used a kinship to trick him and he hated her for it. Women were always more contemptible than men as enemies, anyway. It was the weapons they used.

She was leaning heavily on his arm. She was warm. He could smell traces of Ellie’s perfume. The dyed hair shone faintly in the vague light. Within a foot of the spot Mark would have chosen himself George spun around. The barrel of a revolver gleamed in his right hand.

Frankie gave a little cry.

George said: ‘Okay, Mr Liddon. You asked for it.’

Mark felt a sudden exhilaration now that the moment for action had come at last. He increased his pressure of Frankie’s arm and, swinging her in front of him, pushed her violently forward so that she hit George like a missile. She sprawled on the ground. George staggered under the impact. Mark jumped at him, knocked his arm sideways, sent the gun clattering across the cobblestones and then kicked him in the stomach. George sank with a groan into the darkness. The girl scrambled to her feet and started to run away up the alley. Mark stooped for the gun. He couldn’t find it. As he groped for it, George suddenly sprang up and fled after the girl. After a minute’s fumbling Mark found the gun. He grabbed it and started in pursuit up the alley.

He could no longer hear their footsteps against the cobblestones ahead. He reached a curve in the alley and turned it, to find himself suddenly in the fairground. Lights dazzled. The pipe organ was blaring out a nineteen-twenty American song: ‘I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.’ The instrument was set up under a shade tree, its ancient facade quivering with the effort of music-making. The square was crowded with people. He pushed through the humble throng of peasant women, children, barefooted Indians and the inevitable mongrel dogs. He passed sleazy old carnival tents and stalls selling acid-green candy. An orange carrousel, as old as the pipe organ, circulated dark solemn children on gilded horses. Ahead of him the Ferris wheel lumbered creakingly around its circle — the astrologer model in motion, working out some pedantic problem of trines and houses.

He searched the fairground grimly and thoroughly. There was no trace of George or Frankie. He went back down the alley.

Outside the Salon de Lisboa he stood alone in the darkness, feeling baffled and goaded like the bull in the arena that afternoon with the Christmas tree darts stuck in its back.

14

THE anger, pent up inside him, was dangerous, like rising river water. He moved to the corner where the shabby swing doors led into the Salon de Lisboa. He knew neither George nor the girl would have gone back there, but he pushed his way through the doors into the cantina.

The musicians were singing and twanging their guitars again. The customers were still playing dominoes or sitting silently over their drinks. Nothing outwardly changed at his entrance, but he could tell they were all aware of him. He was for them part of a tension that had not been resolved. He brought the potential of violence with him, and their reaction to him was excitement. They were quite unlike an equivalent group in an American bar, who would have been indifferent or embarrassed. It was as if each of these quiet, dark-skinned men carried a knife on his hip and was hoping that he might have to whip it out.

There was nothing to be gained by staying. He was on the street again, stepping over rotting papayas, avoiding a girl who leaned out of a stall to offer a shoddy scarlet scarf for sale. Ellie was still in Mexico. He was at least sure of that. She was here either alive or dead. At the moment he was able to face the possibility that she might be dead. That was because he was so angry. A cheap little torch singer and her nail-biting boyfriend had tried to push him around. His response was ruthlessly uncomplicated. They had abducted his wife and tried to kill him. He would hunt them down and smash them.

That seemed almost as important as finding Ellie.

He was walking at random. He had left the market area and was moving along a sloping street with raised, crooked sidewalks and pink-washed wall faces, whose barred, shuttered windows hinted at some inaccessible life within. He knew nothing about the girl and the boy or where to find them again. Almost certainly the girl wouldn’t be stupid enough to go back to the Hotel Reforma, but somewhere in the suite there might be a clue that would lead to Ellie.

A car came down the sloping street with a cardboard sign reading Libre propped against its windshield. He hailed it and drove back to the hotel. As he entered the foyer, a dance orchestra was playing in some other room. The clerk at the desk was the one who had been there when Mark arrived. He gave the key of the suite to Mark without his having to ask for it. At least, Mark thought, he was established here as Mrs Mark Liddon’s husband. He could come and go as he pleased.

The suite was exactly as it had been when he and the girl left it. He made a systematic search of the two rooms. He found nothing to give a clue to the false Mrs Liddon’s actual identity or whereabouts and nothing that connected with Ellie. Almost certainly Ellie had never been here, anyway. It had been from the Hotel Granada that she had vanished.

He was a little steadier now and he saw that there was no need for him to go searching for Frankie and George. Since he was dangerous enough for them to have tried to kill him, they would not leave him alone. They would come after him. All he had to do was to wait.

But if he waited, what might the delay mean to Ellie?

He refused now to think of her as dead. To admit the possibility was to admit defeat before he had started to fight. Ellie had been at the Hotel Granada and she had vanished. Whether this new complication’ connected with Victor or not didn’t matter at the moment. The obvious thing was to go back to the Hotel Granada and see whether he could pick up her trail from there.

He moved to the window, looking down at the street lights shining through the trees like luminous grapefruit. Suddenly the telephone rang. He crossed the room and picked up the receiver. Incredulously he heard Frankie’s voice. She said:

‘I’m so glad you’re there, Mr Liddon. I thought you might be.’

They must be even more eager to settle accounts with him than he had imagined. The sound of her voice brought a vivid visual picture of the fair hanging hair, the pure candid lines of her face. He could feel the anger straining inside him, but he could control it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m here.’

‘Mr Liddon, I’m sorry about what happened. So’s George.’

‘That’s nice.’ His voice was very quiet.

‘It was all a stupid mistake. George didn’t trust you. He thought you were just pretending to be Mrs Liddon’s husband. But it’s all right now. I convinced him.’

‘That’s nice too.’

She paused. ‘I know you’ll want us to explain everything and then take you to your wife. Why don’t you meet us? We’re at a bar in Artes. The Baja California.’

‘With a nice dark alley outside?’

‘I told you that was all a mistake. George thought you were the triggerman the gamblers had sent from New York to get Mrs Liddon. He was protecting her. Don’t you see?’

Was that possible? It just might be. He said nothing, waiting.

‘You must see, Mr Liddon, we’re her friends. We want to protect her. George wasn’t going to shoot. He just pulled the gun to frighten you and to get your gun if you had one. Things are different here in Mexico. People are always pulling guns on each other.’

‘And you picked up the habit — like drinking tequila?’

‘Mr Liddon, you do want to see your wife, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we’ll take you to her.’

‘Okay. Come over here and pick me up. I’ll wait for you.’

‘Oh no,’ she said quickly. ‘No. That wouldn’t do.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s just that — well, it’s easier to start from here.’

She was setting her trap so clumsily that he was almost persuaded to fall into it. Perhaps that was the quickest way to reach Ellie — by letting them get at him again on their own terms, on their own ground. But he was so angry that he did not trust himself. He knew it was unwise to walk into danger when you are emotionally out of control. If he met them again to-night he would be too eager, he would jump the gun. With George that might be fatal.

He said wearily: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more subtle.’

‘Subtle? I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Is George’s stomach still sore?’

‘Where you kicked him? I — I don’t know. I — Mr Liddon, are you coming?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I want to find my wife, but I want to stay alive too.’

She did not answer for a moment. When she did, she gave a little sigh. ‘I knew you wouldn’t fall for it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It was George’s idea to try to make you come here. I told him it wouldn’t work. But he made me call.’

‘He twisted your arm?’

‘Mr Liddon.’ Her voice had changed. It sounded urgent and sincere. Not that it made any difference how it sounded. ‘Please listen to me. You shouldn’t be here. It was a terrible mistake you coming to Mexico.’

‘A mistake from whose point of view ?’

‘I can’t explain. I can’t tell you anything. But George is planning to kill you. He’s got to kill you if you stay.’

‘He’s not very good at killing people.’

‘Mr Liddon, be serious. If you leave, it will be all right. Your wife will be safe back in New York within a week. I swear it. Please believe me. There’s an early morning plane back to New York. Take it. Everything will be all right if you leave.’

‘And if I stay?’

‘Among other things, your wife may be killed.’

There was no way of assessing anything this girl said. Already she was so deeply implicated in lies that to believe any of her lightning shifts and changes would be imbecile.

She said again with the same emotional urgency: ‘Mr Liddon, please, please, leave.’

Things had drifted so far into a realm of unreality that there was nothing to lose by pretending to play it her way. ‘If I do leave, you guarantee Ellie will be okay?’

‘Yes, yes, I swear it.’

‘Okay. I’ll take the morning plane.’

‘You really will?’ She seemed immensely relieved.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m so glad.’

‘Why are you glad?’ He was really interested to know what she would say.

She hesitated and then blurted: ‘Because I like you. You’re attractive and your folks came from Czechoslovakia. I don’t want anything to happen to you.’

‘That touches me.’

‘The plane leaves at six forty-five.’

‘Okay.’

‘George doesn’t know I’ve said anything of this. I’ll see he doesn’t bother you until then.’

‘Thanks.’

She added very seriously: ‘You will go, won’t you? You’re not lying to me.’

‘I’m being as honest as you are. Goodbye.’

He dropped the receiver back on the stand. At least he was sure now that Ellie was still alive; their whole attitude implied it so clearly. If they had killed Ellie, there was no reason why they themselves shouldn’t have left Mexico. They would not have been so eager either to kill him or drive him away.

It was just possible that the girl was fool enough to believe his promise to leave. If she was, she would keep George away for the rest of the night, which would give him a chance to go to the Hotel Granada without being under observation. But he wasn’t going to take her gullibility for granted. Presumably she had called from the cantina on Artes where they had hoped to trap him. If he went to the Granada at once, he would be there before they could reach the Reforma.

He put on his topcoat, checked that George’s revolver was loaded, slipped it in his pocket and left the suite. He walked down the stairs and out of a side door so that the desk clerk would think he was still in the suite if they should inquire. He turned up the paseo towards the center of town.

An uneventful fifteen-minute walk brought him to the door of the Hotel Granada. He entered the gloomy lobby, which was empty of tourists now. A bellboy was cleaning ashtrays. Mark could see a clerk moving behind the desk. As he approached, the clerk looked up.

It was Oscar.

He came down to the end of the desk, standing behind the trinket counter, watching Mark from dark, pleased eyes. ‘Good evening, Mr Liddon.’

Mark said: ‘You Mexicans work long hours.’

‘I sleep in the afternoon. I come again for the night shift. One has to live, Mr Liddon.’

A jaunty maroon sweater, which had not been there that morning, showed under the boy’s immaculately pressed grey jacket. Mark glanced at it. Oscar looked both shy and happy.

‘I have bought it in my lunch hour.’ He caressed the sweater’s V-neck. ‘Is pretty, no? Not so sharp as yours — but sharp.’ He paused, glancing at Mark under his long black lashes. ‘You have then found your wife at the Hotel Reforma, Mr Liddon?’

‘No,’ said Mark.

‘How brutish!’ Oscar studied a coiled crocodile belt under the glass top of the counter. She takes perhaps the sightseeing tour to Cuernavaca or Puebla? Is pretty, Puebla. Many pretty churches.’

His face was expressionless and his voice registered nothing more than polite interest. But Mark knew, as clearly as he knew when a girl wanted to be propositioned, that the boy was waiting for a business overture. He studied the dark, impassive face curiously. Was it possible that Oscar too was connected with the conspiracy surrounding Ellie? It was unlikely. It was much more probable that what he knew, if he did know anything, was something he had been smart enough to see or overhear.

He said: ‘Where’s my wife, Oscar?’

The boy’s lashes were demurely lowered again. ‘She does not stay in the Hotel Reforma?’

‘She never got there.’

‘No? Perhaps she has changed her mind once more in the taxi. Is a lady of moods, no?’

‘You saw her get into the taxi?’

‘No, it was the other boy.’

‘But he saw her?’

‘Yes.’

‘With a blond American man?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does she look like?’

‘Mrs Liddon?’ Oscar looked up and smiled vividly. ‘A tall, beautiful lady young like a girl, with light hair in little snakes — so.’ He raised his hand above his own head and twisted a finger around to indicate curls. ‘And a ring — a very fine ring with a sapphire.’

That was Ellie all right. He had given her the sapphire ring on the day before the wedding.

Oscar’s eyes had moved to Mark’s topcoat. They were examining it wistfully. ‘In Mexico,’ he announced, ‘such a coat sells itself for two hundred and fifty pesos. Here, if I work much, much, I earn two hundred and fifty pesos in one month. I have the old mother and six sisters.’ He shook his head dolefully. ‘Six sisters is much sisters.’

Mark took out his wallet. ‘Tell me where my wife is and you get two hundred and fifty pesos.’

Oscar cocked his head at the wallet and sighed. ‘Already I have said. She goes to the Hotel Reforma.’

‘Two hundred and fifty pesos?’ Mark pulled out the bills. ‘Where is she?’

When he was happy Oscar’s face was suddenly an open book. Already, Mark could see, the boy was in his mind strutting in a men’s store, trying on topcoats in front of a mirror, being lordly with the sales clerk. Oscar’s brown hand moved crabwise along the counter towards the bills. It hesitated a moment and then, very daintily, took them from Mark.

‘Suddenly I remember, Mr Liddon. Soon after she has left, she has given a call by telephone, telling me she does not go to the Hotel Reforma. She leaves a new address for dispatching letters.’

‘What is the address?’

Oscar produced a handsome lizard-skin wallet and slipped the bills inside. ‘The new address of Mrs Mark Liddon is — 20 Bonaventura, Colonia Guadalupe. Is out from the city by the big shrine.’

Mark knew the story was a bare-faced lie. Even if Ellie had called the hotel to leave a new address — which was improbable — Oscar, by his own word, had not been on duty at that time. But it didn’t matter that Oscar was lying about how he had obtained the information. The information itself just might be true.

He said: ‘If I don’t find her at that address, you return the money or I report you to the manager for taking bribes.’

Oscar’s face broke into a quick, infectious grin. ‘The manager takes bribes too.’

‘Twenty Bonaventura, Colonia Guadalupe. How do I get there?’

‘You are a rich American. For you there are taxis. For me it is the bus, the trolley car, the walking.’ Oscar was mournful again. ‘Is a terrible state to be poor.’

‘You should worry. Keep this up and you’ll have a villa in Acapulco before the year’s out.’

‘Ay!’ Oscar was transported. ‘A villa on the cliffs with a swimming pool and below the waters of Los Hornos — so blue.’ His face went grave. He said hopefully: ‘You like the ashtray I give you?’

‘Yes. It’s fine.’

‘Is small but is from the heart. I hope you find your wife, Mr Liddon.’

‘If I don’t, I’ll know you’re the biggest liar in Mexico.’

‘Liar!’ Oscar looked shocked and hurt. ‘You think I would lie to my friend?’

‘Yes,’ said Mark.

Oscar shook his head sadly. ‘You are what they call a very cynic man, Mr Liddon.’

Mark turned away from the desk and started towards the door. Oscar called after him ‘Good night, Mr Liddon. Happy Christmas in Mexico, Mr Liddon.’

15

ALL day, it seemed to him, parts of this unfamiliar city had been wheeling past taxi windows. His life had become a pursuit, constantly in motion, getting no nearer its destination. Ellie’s image was alarmingly dim in his mind now. He forced memories of her, trying to re-establish contact. Ellie in a yellow swimming suit lying in the sun, Ellie mixing Martinis in the lavender and grey bar, Ellie lying next to him in the great canopied bed. She would not come alive; she stalked jerkily through these remembered scenes like a faceless puppet.

Suddenly it was the other girl, the girl with the calm, lying face and the fake blonde hair, who became real to him. Against his will, she leaped into his thoughts. He could reconstruct her presence close to him on the couch of the hotel suite; he could see every detail of the slightly roughened hand, lying inches from his own, which he could have touched and hadn’t. The emotion she evoked was anger. But it was a flesh-and-blood anger. Ellie had become as abstract as the solution to an algebra problem.

Outside the car window, narrow, cluttered streets hemmed them in. Apathetic burros, loaded with wood, baskets of fruit or sacks of charcoal, blocked their way. The frenzied buying and selling of trivial objects was still in full spate, and still, inevitably, a cacophony of music from street orchestras, jukeboxes, marimbas, blared through the night. The taxi nosed into a large, tree-shaded plaza in front of a huge stone church, and here the crowds and confusion were twice as chaotic as any he had yet seen.

‘Navedad.’ The driver grinned at him over his shoulder. ‘Una fiesta grande. Many people.’

Colored electric lights nestled like tiny balloons in the trees. There was yet another carrousel and tents and stalls — all the carnival squalor which had haunted his day. A group of Indians with fantastic feather head-dresses and skirts were dancing fervently beside a frozen-custard stand. Tall iron railings guarded the church from this seething mass of merrymakers or worshippers or whatever they were. And, above the church, on top of an eccentric hill like a brandished thumb, stood a small chamber-like building which was probably the shrine itself.

The taxi crawled through one block of chaos and then turned again into winding narrow streets. The houses on each side were hidden behind high stuccoed walls and barred windows. An occasional light hinted at life within, but it was obviously a humble, Mexican life, fantastically inappropriate for Ellie.

‘Bonaventure 20.’

They stopped in front of one of the blank walls no different from the dozens of others in the street. Mark stood in front of the closed, rickety wooden door, wondering why he had come. The house was situated at the foot of the thumb-like hill which led to the shrine above; a narrow, dusty alley wound upwards past its side wall. Music and clamor roared from the plaza, hidden by masonry only a few hundred feet away.

Peering in the dim light, he could make out a chipped tin plaque saying: 20, which had been nailed above the door frame. A faint radiance at one of the barred windows indicated that someone was at home. With no hope at all, he beat on the wooden panels.

The thumping echoed unexpectedly loud above the obbligato of music from the plaza. Instantly it was challenged by the shrill, neurotic barking of a dog inside. He knocked again. The barking sprang nearer. With it sounded the click of footsteps on stone or tile. He had no feeling of danger. He felt only lassitude. This wasn’t a trap. It was a mare’s nest.

A woman’s voice scolded sharply and the dog stopped barking and started to whimper. The footsteps paused with just the thickness of the door between them and him, and then, slowly, the door opened a crack. A woman’s face showed in the opening. It was a young, anonymous Mexican face framed by a dark rebozo. A dog’s snout appeared lower down, sniffing suspiciously.

The woman said nothing. In the obscure illumination her face seemed as expressionless as a face at prayer.

‘I am looking for my wife,’ said Mark slowly. ‘My wife. An American woman.’

The dog, unable to control its outraged feelings any longer, gave a falsetto yelp. The woman bent swiftly and slapped it. She looked at Mark impassively again.

‘No entiendo, Saar.’

‘An American woman. Una Americana.’

She gazed at him with the stupid look of someone who had given up all effort to understand.

‘Oscar,’ he tried. ‘Oscar sent me. Oscar.’

Her voice came suddenly, echoing the name. ‘Oscar.’

‘Oscar from the Hotel Granada.’

‘Momento.’ The woman’s face disappeared; the door slammed shut; the footsteps clicked away inside. It hadn’t been a rejection. She had obviously gone to consult some higher authority.

Above the vulgar street music the solemn boom of a bell sounded from the cathedral. The footsteps began to click again inside. This time they were confused, multiple. Once again the door opened a crack. Framed in the crack was a different face, a tiny, wrinkled, old woman’s face, sharp as a half moon. Behind it, Mark caught a glimpse of the first woman.

The half moon gazed at him. ‘¿Que quiere, Senor?’

‘Oscar sent me. Oscar from the Hotel Granada.’

‘Es amigo de Oscar,’ breathed the other woman in the shadowy background.

The bell was still tolling. Inside, the dog was whining again. The old woman studied Mark for a long moment in silence and then opened the door wide.

“Pase Vd, Senor.’

He stepped inside. The old woman closed the door behind him. They were in a dimly lit patio. Straggling vines in kerosene cans cast queer shadows on the broken-tiled floor. Dim arches hinted at rooms to left and right. From a blanketed birdcage hung on the wail came a sudden, startled chirp.

The little woman, frail and desiccated as a dead plant, stood in front of him. She was wearing black. The other, younger, woman hovered behind her. The dog, a scrawny yellow adolescent, wriggled to Mark in propitiation. The next move was obviously up to him.

He said again all he could say. ‘I want my wife. Oscar sent me for my wife.’

The women stood patiently and in silence. There was no sense of conspiracy, no feeling that they were keeping anything back from him. He seemed to be merely something incomprehensible that had happened, something that had arrived and would in time go away. The young woman suddenly and timidly asked: ‘¿No habla espanol, el Senor?’

He knew enough to understand that and said: ‘No, I don’t speak Spanish.’

‘Ah,’ said the old woman, nodding her head at something she could grasp. ‘El Senor no habla espanol.’

There were vague whisperings and movements in the shadows of the patio beyond. Cautiously a young girl emerged from the darkness. She was followed by another, and then another, and another, until there were four of them. They all! wore black. The family must be in mourning. They stood in a silent semi-circle around the two older women, watching Mark from black eyes bright with polite curiosity.

Mark said: ‘Doesn’t anybody speak English?’

The woman who had opened the door to him said again: ‘Es amigo de Oscar.’

‘Oscar,’ rippled the four girls, glancing at each other and nodding. ‘Oscar.’

All six women stood watching Mark fixedly, waiting for a revelation. Because it was useless to talk any more, Mark gestured towards the interior of the patio indicating his desire to search there for his wife. The old woman seemed to understand. She said politely: ‘Si, si, Senor.’ She turned back into the shadows and started to guide Mark deeper into the house. The five other women followed. Only the oldest of the followers, the one with the shoes, made footsteps. The others glided silently as ghosts.

The old woman reached an open door, from which emanated a faint radiance. She stood by it, gesturing with her hand that Mark should enter. He stepped inside. He was in a bare floored square room lit by three candles stuck in empty liquor bottles, which stood on a wooden highboy. Two large iron beds filled almost half the space. Four wooden chairs were lined up stiffly along the wall. The highboy, gleamingly polished, obviously the pride and joy of the household, dominated the room. On it, between the candles, stood a photograph in a silver frame. Above it, on the grimy whitewashed wall, hung a large poster of the Holy Virgin of Guadalupe. The atmosphere was one of crushing poverty. In spite of its foreignness, it brought Mark memories of Providence.

The room was not empty. On one of the beds a little girl of about eight sat cross-legged. She too was wearing a frock of unrelieved black and was clutching the straw casing of a champagne bottle passionately and possessively as if it were a doll.

The old woman joined him. Now in the candlelight he could see that she was not really old. Although her face was immensely wrinkled and eroded, it was still a young face. She was probably no more than forty. She pulled one of the wooden chairs from the wall, placed it in front of the highboy and indicated that Mark should sit. He realized that she had mistaken his gesture in the patio. She had merely assumed that he was criticizing her hospitality, and wanted to be received in state. He sat down. The five other females collected in the room and stood in shy silence around him.

If they had been hostile, he could have ignored them, searched the house and gone away. But their exquisite politeness, their naive trust crippled him.

He said again, beginning to feel foolish: ‘Doesn’t anyone speak English?’

The little girl, clutching the champagne casing, leaned towards him from the bed, jet-eyed, fascinated. No one spoke. One of the candles above him gutted out. He glanced up instinctively and found himself looking straight at the photograph in the silver frame. It was a photograph of Oscar - Oscar in a formal dark suit, with his hair carefully brushed and gleaming, Oscar, smiling the supercilious, aristocratic smile of a Spanish grandee.

The old woman, seeing where he was looking, laughed suddenly and said:

‘Oscar.’

All the girls tittered proudly and said: ‘Oscar’ too.

A mother and six sisters. He should have realized it earlier.

In some mood of perverse humor Oscar had sent him to his own home.

Mark’s first feeling was anger. Then he started to wonder. If Oscar had sent him on a wild-goose chase simply to cheat him out of two hundred and fifty pesos, would he have risked sending him to his own family? It seemed unlikely. Then what? Perhaps Mark’s original conjecture had been right. Perhaps Oscar was much more deeply involved in the conspiracy than his role as hotel clerk implied. Perhaps Ellie was housed or imprisoned here, and the desire for a two-hundred-and-fifty-peso topcoat had been alluring enough to make Oscar betray his allies.

It was just possible. And, if it were possible, these women were merely feigning stupidity. He looked from one face to the other. The proud giggling which had accompanied the mention of Oscar’s name had subsided. All six women looked back at him passively like gentle jungle animals. Only the little girl on the bed seemed excited. She had dropped her ‘doll’ and had squirmed closer to him until she was almost toppling off the bed. Her lips were half parted in a kind of ecstasy of wonder.

Mark got up from the chair. All the women shied as if they were going to scurry off into the patio, but they did not move.

Mark was angry again, not with the women, but with the day’s bitter frustration. They sensed his anger. He could tell that. Although they stood their ground, they were all tense. The music from the fiesta in the plaza pulsed faintly in the air, not like music but like distant pumping.

He asked harshly: ‘Where is my wife? The American woman?’

All of them stepped backwards as if he had struck them. But they did not answer. Perhaps it was only the product of his own suspicions, but they seemed suddenly knowing, guilty.

‘The American woman,’ he repeated.

From the bed a small but very clear voice said in English:

‘The American woman.’

He spun around. The little girl was smiling up at him with an expression of almost ludicrous pride on her face. One of the girls cried warningly: ‘Lupita.’ She ran to the bed and sat down next to the child, putting an arm around her. All the other women converged into a group.

Mark dropped to his knees and took both of the child’s tiny hands in his own. ‘You speak English?’

The girl on the bed dragged at the child and said again: ‘Lupita.’

But the child was still watching Mark enraptured. Very slowly she said: ‘I speak English in the school.’

‘Where’s the American woman?’ asked Mark. ‘Tell me. Where is the American woman?’

The mother almost shouted: ‘Callate, chiquita.’

But the child smiled at Mark a smile of ravishing sweetness. She tugged one hand out of his grip and, picking up the champagne casing, pointed with it across the patio.

‘The American woman is in the other room.’

The room was very still. Suddenly Mark heard a rustle behind him. He jumped up and turned. The mother and all the daughters were moving cautiously towards the door.

‘Hey,’ he called.

They all swung back to watch him, panic showing in their widened eyes and parted lips. Then, as he started forward, they scattered like hens stampeded in a chicken yard. He was caught up in their hysterical flight. The mother and two of the daughters reached the door before him. Another girl plunged into the frame at exactly the same instant as he and, for a moment, they were wedged there together. He could feel her soft warm flesh yielding to his elbow; her dusty-smelling rebozo flicked his cheek. The yellow dog, reappearing from nowhere, was flirting around them, jumping and yelping. An extra shove catapulted the girl and himself through the doorway into the patio. The girl staggered and clutched at his arm for support. Once she had steadied herself, she gave a thin scream and fled with the others. They all swooped away like large, shabby moths into the darkness.

He stood a moment, trying to get his bearings. The immense excitement of having at last found Ellie confused him. And this black, cluttered patio was a type of architecture to which he wasn’t accustomed. The other room? Where would the other room be? The women had not run to Ellie. He was sure of that. Their chaotic flight had been planless - nothing more than a primitive impulse to escape from danger.

He peered through the darkness. The dog was nipping playfully at his trouser leg and clinging with its teeth to the cloth. He shoved it with his foot. It whimpered with pleasure and bit into the trouser leg again, enjoying the game.

Ahead to his right he could make out a faint radiance - the light from a candle, perhaps, seeping through the cracks of a shuttered window. He started towards it. The dog was still mauling his trousers. He had to drag it with him.

As he moved forward, the light grew more distinct. He started to run. He stumbled against a stone pillar which supported a large plant in a kerosene can. The plant toppled and crashed to the ground. He tripped and fell sprawling over it The dog moaned with fright. Then it was licking his cheek with a warm, rubbery tongue.

He jumped up again. The dog pranced and barked around him. As he started forward once more, it leaped up and caught at his sleeve with its teeth. It dangled there, squirming like a fish on a line. He shook it off. The light did come from a window. He could tell that now. Then there must be a door.

He ran straight into a wall. His fingers, groping over the rough surface, found a door frame. Moving down the panelling they reached a handle. He turned it. It was locked. He was shaking now as if he had a fever. Behind him, a thin night piping came from the covered birdcage. He shook at the door handle. The meagre wooden panels quivered.

‘Ellie.’

The dog shrilled a falsetto bark and hurled itself at the back of his knee. He crashed against the door with his shoulder. The lock snapped on the first try. The door sagged inwards.

He crossed the threshold. Inside, the air was stale with a heavy, sweetish stuffiness. A single candle in an empty bottle sent light and shadow quivering around a bare, poverty-stricken room. An iron cot stood against a side wall. Lying on it, with a serape thrown over her, was a girl.

Her face was turned to the wall. Her head was in shadow. She was merely a huddled, anonymous female body. But in the first instant of corroding relief he recognized his wife.

It was suddenly as if neither time nor space had separated them. He ran to the low bed. He dropped to his knees at her side.

‘Ellie.’

She did not stir. Until then he hadn’t wondered at her not moving when he broke down the door. Now dread invaded his vitals.

‘Ellie.’

He put his hand on her arm. Almost roughly he pulled her around on to her back. Her face moved slowly into the dim candlelight. The shock was like ice on the nape of his neck.

Her fair hair lay in limp disheveled tangles. Her face - the face which had almost faded from his memory and then sprang vividly back to be the only real face in the world for him - was almost unrecognizable. It was still beautiful. Nothing could destroy its beauty. But it was empty as an idiot’s face. The lips hung in a meaningless smirk. The eyes, blue and very wide open, looked up at him without any expression at all.

He knew she was not dead; he could see the slow rise and fall of her breasts. But this, because he didn’t understand it, was almost more horrible.

He said: ‘Ellie.’

Something pressed against his knee. The yellow dog had crept up to him. It was sitting on its haunches, its tongue lolling out, looking at Ellie with alert interest.

‘Ellie.’

She did move then. Her whole body changed its position like a child in a profound dream. He felt lost in a world where he didn’t belong.

Two little bubbles of saliva swelled on her lower lip and burst. She giggled.

‘Ellie.’

She giggled again, a low, chuckling giggle like a dirty message scribbled on a wall.

16

THE giggle unmanned him. Almost for the first time in his adult life he was completely without a plan. He put his hands on her arms and, half raising her from the bed, shook her violently. Some of the dazed blankness left her face. She gave a little grunt. Her eyes roamed and settled on his. For a moment they seemed to show a gleam of understanding. Then they dulled.

Out of the terrible confusion in his mind the thought came that she was insane. Once he had been taken through a mental hospital. He had seen inmates lying like that, stare-eyed, immobile, all their humanity swallowed up in a blind vegetable apathy. He stopped shaking her. Words tumbled out of him.

‘Ellie, baby, it’s me. It’s Mark. I’m here. I’m Mark. I’m here.’

Her head moved slightly. Her eyes were fixed on his again, and for the first time he noticed that the pupils were constricted almost to slits. A vague memory told him that the pupils dwindled under the influence of some sort of narcotic, a little of the horror was crowded out. She was under dope. That’s what they’d done to her. They’d brought her here to imprison her. With only Oscar’s fluttering women-folk as jailers they had doped her for safety’s sake.

He forgot his fear then. In its place came a murderous anger against Frankie and George.

The dog gave a sudden delighted yelp and started to drag at something. He looked down automatically. Ellie’s handbag, its mouth agape, lay on the floor by the bed. The dog had the strap in its teeth and was worrying it tentatively. He picked the handbag up, snapped it shut and looped it on his arm. He bent over his wife again, saying:

‘Ellie, Ellie.’

One of her arms started to move upwards. Her wedding ring and the dark sapphire which he had given her the day before their marriage gleamed in the flickering candlelight. The hand crawled with a gentle creeping of fingers around his neck. Her skin was warm and dry. She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to indicate that she had the faintest realization of who he was. But the trustful clinging of her arm touched him to the core.

He lifted her other hand up to his neck. Her fingers caught obediently to the collar of his topcoat. He pushed his arms under her and carried her off the bed. The grey and black serape slid on to the floor, revealing the fact that she was wearing a black suit which was shockingly creased and stained.

The dog whimpered, ran to the open door and paused, glancing back with cocked ears. He followed it into the patio. The darkness was portentously silent. He thought of the six Mexican women, hovering somewhere in the shadows.

The dog jumped around them, ran ahead and paused again. It thought it was going to be taken for a walk. It wasn’t headed towards the door through which he had entered the house. Maybe there was another exit. He followed the dog. It galloped forward. Soon he heard expectant whines and the sound of claws scratching on wood. He caught up. The dog was sniffing eagerly at what seemed to be a rough wooden gate in the wall. Mark released one hand from Ellie, fumbled, found a bolt, scraped it back and swung the door inwards on creaking hinges.

The dog bounded out. He followed into a deserted alley. The women had made no attempt to stop him. It was a strange, flat way to escape after so much effort had gone into finding Ellie.

Music bellowed from the fiesta in the square. You scream, I scream, We all scream for ice-cream. The dog loped away up the alley.

The dusty path through adobe walls sloped downwards to the left towards a main street where a single street light showed. A burro, with a length of corrugated iron tied to its back, was tethered to a scrawny oleander bush. A child’s pink balloon, escaped from the fiesta, floated over a wall, trailed its string across the corrugated iron and then, after a moment in which it seemed to knot itself to the donkey’s tail, was caught in a breeze and soared upwards.

Suddenly Mexico, which had never seemed completely real to him, had become a dream world. He lost all contact with it. He was carrying Ellie through a picture or through a fantasy in someone else’s mind.

Her cheek had come to rest against his. Her lips nuzzled against his ear.

‘Ellie, baby,’ he whispered.

‘Ellie, baby,’ she echoed in a small, thin voice.

‘It’s Mark, honey.’

‘It’s Mark, honey.’

His throat constricted. He wanted to hit something, to destroy something and that way to jar himself out of this feeling of unreality. He carried her down the alley to the street which was on the fringes of the square. Colorful crowds were streaming in both directions, but the throng was not as dense as it had been in the square itself. A few cars crawled at tortoise pace down the middle of the road. One of them was a taxi. As Mark’s gaze fell on it, it stopped and an enormous woman in black maneuvered herself out, entangled in a huge bunch of Easter lilies. That’s what he wanted, he thought vaguely. A taxi was what he wanted.

He braced himself to shove his way through the swarming bodies. But it was not necessary. Everyone, even a group of swirling feathered dancers, moved aside to make a path for them with grave, formal politeness. Once one of Ellie’s sandals knocked against a woman’s shoulder and fell off. A whole group of people stopped to retrieve it. One of them slipped it shyly on to Ellie’s foot again. An Indian wearing a great white straw hat, with two tiny boys clinging to his trousers, opened the taxi door. Mark lifted Ellie inside and climbed in after her. The Indian shut the door.

Mark took Ellie in his arms. She giggled again. Her hand, moving at random, found his. The little finger curled delicately around his thumb.

Slowly he became aware that the driver had twisted in his seat and was watching him from bright eyes.

‘¿Un medico? ¿El Senor quiere un medico?’

He paid attention with an effort.

‘¿Un medico?’ asked the driver again. Shyly he tried English. ‘You want a doctor, yes?’

An unknown Mexican doctor pawing Ellie, asking embarrassing questions, insisting perhaps on the police? No, he couldn’t face a doctor. Not now.

He shook his head. ‘A hotel,’ he said.

‘The Hotel Reforma? Is nice. Is a good hotel.’

‘No, not the Reforma. And not a hotel near the Reforma.’

‘Then the Hotel Mirador? Is close. Is good.’

‘Okay. The Mirador.’

After an interminable period of crawling and horn-honking, the taxi broke free of the fiesta crowd and plunged down a long, almost deserted street. Behind the anger and shock, part of Mark’s mind had started to function automatically. George had taken Ellie from the Hotel Granada and had imprisoned her under dope at Oscar’s house. Why? What was the pattern? Were George and Frankie playing some small-time kidnap racket for a ransom? Or did all this somehow still link up with Victor? If only he could find some sense, some thread, he might be able to steady himself. But the questions wobbled and scattered like an image on a television screen losing its focus.

Ellie’s finger was still clinging to his thumb. She leaned heavy and inert against his shoulder. He tried to take in the enormous fact that he had found her. She had been hedged around with mystery and danger, and yet against all odds he had found her. There should be a feeling of triumph.

But there wasn’t. Ellie had always been to him something vivid, animated, more full of life than any other person he had ever known. This speechless, senseless body hunched against him was almost repulsive to him. It was some nightmare travesty of his wife created by George and Frankie.

He told himself that the dope would wear off soon. She would come out of this chrysalis of stupor. There would be no permanent damage. Then he would hear the whole story from Ellie’s own lips, and he would be able to settle his score with George and Frankie.

At some point the taxi turned off a residential street through high gates into elaborately landscaped grounds. The headlights spotted palm trees and bougainvillaea vines, cascading over white walls. They stopped in front of a portico. Mark gave the driver a bill from his wallet and lifted Ellie out of the car.

The driver laboriously counted crumpled bills and handed Mark change. He hadn’t expected it or wanted it, but the driver forced it on him.

‘Good hotel,’ he said, nodding emphatically. ‘Good hotel for the lady.’

Mark lifted Ellie out of the taxi. She moaned and started to squirm petulantly in his arms. He thought she wanted to be put down and he slid her feet to the ground. She stood for a moment with her hand on his arm to support her. Then she giggled. She took two or three swaying steps like a preposterously drunk person. Her knees buckled abruptly under her. He caught her before she fell and lifted her in his arms again.

He carried her into a lounge which looked like a stage set for a south of the border musical. It was deserted except for a bellhop and a clerk behind a desk embowered with poinsettias.

He went to the desk, prepared to be belligerent if they made difficulties. He said: ‘My wife’s been taken sick. We have no baggage. I’ll pay for the room in advance.’

His Americanness made them automatically respectable. He could tell that right away. The clerk twittered solicitously, ushered them himself into the elevator and took them up to a room where the beds were disguised as studio couches with chartreuse covers and the telephone was white. Mark laid Ellie down on one of the beds. The clerk hovered with discreet offers of service. Mark paid him the price of the room and he went away.

Mark dropped Ellie’s handbag on the floor and sat down on the bed, taking his wife’s hot, dry hands in his. Her wide-open eyes still gazed inwards at some dream, but it seemed to him that some of the idiot blankness was gone. The stereotyped prettiness of the room made him poignantly conscious of her crumpled black suit and disheveled hair. Ellie always made a point of being exquisitely groomed. He tried to smooth some of the creases out of her skirt. He reached down for the handbag, searched its chaotic contents and found a comb. He ran it clumsily through her hair in a barren attempt to impress some order on it. He thought suddenly of Frankie at the Hotel Reforma, wearing Ellie’s clothes, using her perfume.

He got up and started to pace about the room. He found a cigarette in his pocket and fumbled for a match. He had none. His glance fell on a painted Indian table. A book of matches lay in a charro-hat pottery ash-tray, a larger version of the one Oscar had given him. He picked the matches up. The book said: ‘Hotel Mirador, the friendly hostelry that brings you all the color of quaint Old Mexico.’ He lit the cigarette and put the book in his pocket.

It suddenly enraged him that Ellie should be lying there like a drunk picked up off the street. At least she should be put to bed. He crossed to the second bed and pulled down the coverlet, revealing light yellow sheets. One of the couch cushions was a pillow in disguise. He pulled it out from its chartreuse cover. He went back to Ellie. He took off her sandals. Gently he removed her stockings and, raising her unresisting torso, stripped off the suit jacket and blouse. He unzipped the skirt and drew it down from her thighs. She was wearing a white silk slip.

He lifted her from the bed. Once again her arms moved up around his neck trustingly. As he carried her across the room, she stirred and moaned.

‘No,’ she said suddenly. She moaned again. ‘No, no, oh no.’ Her voice trailed off and then, just as unexpectedly, she cried: ‘Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Oh, goddam it, don’t let them come in here again.’ She giggled then, that awful giggle.

He was trembling all over. He put her in the second bed and drew the sheets and the chartreuse coverlet over her. She moved her head voluptuously against the pillow and then lay quite still.

Her clothes were lying sprawled on the floor. Instinctively he picked them up and went to the closet. He hung the jacket on a hanger. He tried to hang the skirt, but didn’t know how to do it neatly. He threw it on to a hook.

Behind him, in a clear, perfectly normal voice, Ellie said: ‘What time is it?’

He spun around. She was half-sitting up against the pillow. Her arm was flung over her face as if the light hurt her eyes. He ran back to the bed and dropped down at her side.

‘Ellie,’ he cried. ‘Ellie, baby.’

He touched her. She shied away from him and sat bolt upright, the arm still covering her eyes.

‘Ellie, it’s Mark.’

The arm dropped from her face. She looked straight at him. Uncertainly she put her hand out towards him and then drew it away again.

He said: ‘It’s all right, honey. It’s me. It’s Mark.’

‘Mark.’ She said his name very softly. ‘Mark.’

He longed to take her in his arms, but he was afraid of scaring her. Things didn’t really make sense to her yet. She was only half-way over the threshold of reality. She raised a hand to her hair and patted at it. Slowly she moved her gaze around the room, looking at a chair, a drape, the other bed, trying to place herself in some setting. It seemed too difficult for her.

‘I was in Finland,’ she said. ‘There were great enormous white polar bears. They sang. They sang “Wash me in the Blood of the Lamb” in repulsive syrupy voices and blew trumpets and banged tambourines. They were Salvation Army polar bears.’ She whimpered and threw herself forward, pressing her face against his shoulder. ‘Don’t let them come back. Whoever you are, don’t let them come back.’

‘Mark,’ he said.

‘Mark,’ she said obediently. ‘Mark.’

He put his arms around her and held her close. Once again he told himself that she was here — his wife was here. But it was like holding a ghost.

‘They wanted me to sing with them,’ she said dreamily. ‘I wouldn’t. I said I wasn’t going to go around singing with any old polar bears that happened to pass by. I….’ She started to laugh. ‘Goddam evangelical polar bears.’

‘Forget the polar bears, baby. They’ve gone now.’

‘Yes, they’ve gone.’

Maybe he shouldn’t force her back too soon. But the suspense had gone on too long to be supportable.

‘Effie, can you understand me?’

‘Of course I can understand you.’

‘It was George, wasn’t it? George took you to that house and doped you.’

She stirred in his arms, looking up at him. Her mouth was against his cheek. Her eyes were obviously making a great effort to catch on to the present.

He repeated, ‘It was George, wasn’t it?’

A little secret smile twisted her lips. ‘My husband is in Venezuela,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t talk that way if my husband wasn’t in Venezuela.’

Stubbornly, he went on: ‘Victor, Ellie. Is George tied up with Victor?’

‘Victor,’ she echoed.

‘Yes, Victor.’

‘Victor’s never been to Finland. He hated seals.’ She patted at her hair again. All the intelligence was back in her face, but she was as far away from him as she ever had been. She smiled the sudden, studiedly charming smile of a woman at a cocktail party.

‘Would it be too much trouble if I asked you for a glass of water? It’s terribly stuffy in here. My throat feels dry as a bone.’

He hesitated.

She said: ‘Oh, please, just one glass. That wouldn’t be too great an imposition, would it?’

This new, bright mood was even more harrowing than the stupor. To keep from looking at her, he got up and went into the pink-tiled bathroom. There was a pink plastic tooth glass. He filled it with water and carried it back. In his absence, Ellie had picked up the handbag. All of its contents were strewn haphazardly over the chartreuse spread. She was sitting upright with her large square silver compact in her hand, patting at her face with the puff.

When she saw the glass, she reached for it. The compact fell out of her hand on to the floor.

‘Oh, thank you. This is kind.’

He sat down again beside her. As she started to drink the water, her eyes closed. The glass tilted in her hands. He took it from her. She fell back against the pillows and gave a contented grunt.

‘So sleepy,’ she murmured. ‘Shocking, isn’t it, to be so sleepy? It’s really a divine party. The most divine party.’

Her hand, with the sapphire ring sparkling in the light from the bedside lamp, moved to his knee. Very slowly she started to caress it.

‘Mark,’ she whispered. ‘Mark, my love, my only love.’

She hadn’t said that to him. He was almost sure she hadn’t the faintest idea he was there. It was just a thought that had strayed through her mind like the polar bears.

Her hand dropped from his knee. She twisted over on to her side with her back to him. In a moment she seemed to be fast asleep.

He sat with the empty glass in his hand, watching the steady rise and fall of her breathing. He had learned nothing from her, and his frustration took the form of a restless claustrophobia. As the minutes dragged by, the prospect of having to stay here all night, waiting, doing nothing, became unendurable. The unfulfilled need for action still nagged at him and he began to invent reasons why he should not be sitting here idle.

Although he had rescued Ellie, Frankie was still impersonating her. She and George had some scheme under way which involved Ellie’s name. Until he knew what the scheme was he had won only half the battle, and time might be an all-important element. By sitting here, he was leaving the field to them. Shouldn’t he go and hunt them down now?

It would be easy to find them. Since Oscar had let them keep Ellie prisoner in his house, he would certainly be in touch with them. Oscar would still be on duty at the Hotel Granada, and Oscar was probably the most easily corruptible of all the inhabitants of Mexico. Ellie was safe here. They had not been followed from Oscar’s house. There was no way in which Frankie and George could possibly trace her.

Yes, at least he could go and see Oscar. After he’d done that he could judge what the next move should be.

He didn’t realize he had talked himself into this — largely because staying here with Ellie was too great a strain on his nerves. He got up from the bed. As he did so, he saw Ellie’s compact on the floor. The mirror in the lid had come loose and a photograph which had been behind it had slipped out on to the carpet.

He picked it up and remembered it immediately. It had been taken on the only night that they had gone together to the Lorton Club after their marriage. Ellie, in a low-cut black dress, was smiling radiantly, a balloon glass of brandy raised to the camera. He was grinning too — broadly, almost foolishly happy. The memory wrenched him.

Then he stiffened. Behind the bar, between their two photographed images, was a barman wearing the typical unobtrusive smirk of an employee caught in a picture with customers. Mark must have noticed in the past that a barman figured in the photograph, but he had never paid him any attention.

Now the barman became the only important thing in the snapshot because he was, quite unmistakably, George.

So one question, at least, had answered itself. George and Frankie were not something new. They were Victor’s hirelings. The whole picture fitted together, with Victor as the key figure. Victor had been ahead of him all the time, and, surely, with these complications of kidnapping and impersonation, there must be more at stake than Ellie’s gambling debt. It may have started that way. But now Victor must have some really important project afoot in which Ellie’s identity, if not Ellie herself, was of vital significance.

Now the unresolved danger for Ellie seemed infinitely greater and the need to challenge it correspondingly more urgent.

He was still wearing the topcoat with George’s gun in its pocket. In the bed Ellie was lying sound asleep, her hand with the wedding ring and the sapphire curled under her chin. It was almost certain that she wouldn’t wake up for hours. But, just in case she should, he scribbled a note on Hotel Mirador stationery, telling her to stay in the room, whatever happened, and wait for his return.

He propped it against the mirror of the vanity and, bending over the bed, kissed his wife gently, unemotionally, the way one kisses a sleeping child.

Then he hurried out of the room.

17

IDLERS were still promenading the main street in the mild mountain darkness. Movie houses announced their wares in glaring neon. Across the way, on the fringes of the park, couples still made leisurely love. It was a night in which time had completely lost its orthodox form for Mark. It seemed impossible that these ordinary city activities could still be going on, that it was little more than two hours ago that he had left this spot in search of Ellie.

He walked into the lobby of the Hotel Granada. A scattering of American tourists, looking bored and discontented, sat around in the stuffy, red-leather seats, wondering what to do with Mexico now they had it. A bellhop was emptying ashtrays; he had been doing exactly that when Mark had come here the first time. Oscar, standing behind his trinket counter, was studying his fingernails with elegant approval. The moment he saw Mark his young face broke into a smile of unadulterated delight.

‘Ah, Mr Liddon, you come again to visit me.’

‘Yes.’

‘This time you find your wife?’

‘I found her.’

‘I am much contented.’ Oscar was obviously proud. ‘It is fortunate that I remember her dispatching address, is it not?’

He knew Mark must have discovered that the ‘dispatching address’ was his own house; he also knew that Mark would have found Ellie there kidnapped and doped. And yet he blithely continued his pretense of innocence. This utter disregard for reality might have been disarming under other circumstances. It wasn’t disarming now.

Mark said: ‘Why was my wife held prisoner in your house?’

‘Prisoner?’ Oscar seemed pained. That is a most curious way to express it, Mr Liddon. My mother and my sisters are most kind to her. Especially my sister Carmelita.’ His face brightened. ‘Did you notice my sister Carmelita? Everyone says she is good almost as a saint. And pretty, pretty. She is only sixteen.’

An American man and woman, rather drunk, came to the desk for their key. Smiling apologetically at Mark, Oscar said: ‘Excuse me. I attend to this lady and gentleman.’ He handed them their key and bowed with grandiose deference. Then he came back to Mark and cupped his chin in his hand.

‘Yes, Mr Liddon?’

‘My wife had been doped. Did you know that?’

Oscar blinked. ‘Why, naturally, I know.’

‘What do you mean — naturally?’

‘She is a lady who is pleased by drugs. There are many ladies and gentlemen too who are pleased by drugs. Some prefer marijuana. Some prefer…’ He shrugged. ‘At the moment I forget the names of the various drugs. But it is most common.’

These appallingly sophisticated sentiments were spoken in a voice of boyish candor. ‘The whole story is simple, Mr Liddon. I am instructed not to tell. But’ — he glanced down at his new sweater — ‘since you are now my such good friend, I tell you? Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is this blond American man. This one I speak of, who is like you but more small?’

‘George.’

Yes, George. He explains that Mrs Liddon is pleased by taking drugs and does not find it convenient in the hotel. There are too many distractions, maids coming in to tidy, no doubt, things of that nature. He explains she wishes to find a quiet lodging.’

‘So you rented him a room in your house?’

Oscar smiled dazzlingly. ‘He was most pleased with it and has paid a most generous sum. I am happy to have made him and Mrs Liddon so contented.’

This was a preposterous story. At least, it would have been if it had involved anyone except Oscar and Victor’s George. With those two as central characters, it made complete sense. George wouldn’t think twice about representing Ellie as a dope-addict, and for the chance of picking up a few pesos Oscar would willingly have closed his eyes to a bare-faced kidnap plot.

‘Okay’, said Mark. ‘Now tell me where I can find George.’

‘Ah!’ Oscar’s brow furrowed. ‘This is more difficult. I do not think it would please George for you to know.’

Mark moved closer to the trinket counter. ‘I’m in a hurry and I’ve got a gun.’

‘A gun?’ Oscar gazed at him serenely. ‘But you cannot use a gun in the Hotel Granada, Mr Liddon. Observe.’ He gestured with a graceful arm towards a plump woman sitting in a nearby chair. ‘There is that American lady who is reading your Time magazine. And there’ — he indicated a man — ‘is that American gentleman. He is waiting for a telephone call from a lady whom he meets at the Osiris Club. He has been waiting for more than an hour. She will not call, I do not think. He does not look wealthy enough to interest the ladies of the Osiris. He should have gone to the Esmeralda. But you can understand that they would not like it — not if you used a gun.’

In spite of himself, Mark was succumbing to Oscar’s unparalleled combination of charm and gall. ‘I’ll take a chance on making them mad. Where’s George?’

The ecstasy which always appeared when the time came for a deal bathed Oscar’s face in a kind of acolyte’s radiance. ‘If I do tell you, Mr Liddon, George must not know that I tell from friendship. You must say you came ferociously like a bull and forced me to my knees with your gun.’

‘Okay.’

The boy threw him a glance of ravishing sweetness. ‘Tomorrow I buy my topcoat. It would please me to buy also a glove, a wool scarf and one of those English hats black and stiff — like this.’ He circled his head with a finger and took up the dignified stance of an English milord wearing a derby. ‘I tell you where George is for one hundred and fifty pesos.’

‘Nothing.’

‘One hundred and forty.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ Oscar regarded him patiently. ‘But for nothing I would tell you the wrong address. You would go for miles and miles and then have to come back here with your gun. Think of the time you would lose. One hundred and fifty pesos.’

Mark could imagine Oscar’s ancestors, generations ago, arguing the pants off a conquistador.

‘Okay. One hundred and thirty.’

A faint look of guilt spread across the boy’s face. ‘Perhaps I do morally wrong to tell you. Sometimes it is not easy to know when one does morally wrong. But George wished an apartment for himself too. By chance a very good friend of mine an American gentleman — has gone to New York for a month. He has a pretty apartment and he leaves with me the key because out of friendship he feels I may like to rest there in the afternoons.’

‘So you rented George your friend’s apartment?’

‘Oh, I tell him to be most careful of my friend’s possession.’

‘Where is it?’

Oscar’s brown dainty hand came out. ‘First the money, Mr Liddon.’

Mark took out his wallet. As Oscar accepted the pesos, the man who had been waiting for the call from the lady of the Osiris Club came over to the desk. He had obviously given up.

‘Hey, boy, is there anywhere around here where a guy can have a bit of fun?’

Oscar smiled politely. ‘If it is to dance you wish, sir, there is the Molina Roja. If it is perhaps friendly ladies, I recommend the Esmeralda.’

The man gave Mark a rather embarrassed glance. ‘Where’s this Esmeralda located?’

Oscar looked suddenly vague. The man put a five-peso bill down on the counter. Oscar smiled again and told him an address. The man went away. Oscar’s wallet came out. As he neatly inserted his loot, he glanced doubtfully at Mark.

‘Mr Liddon, you think perhaps it is frivolous to spend my money for clothes? You think perhaps it would be more wise to place it in a bank and save for the little villa in Acapulco?’

‘The address, Oscar.’

‘Oh yes. Bolivar 45. The top apartment. On the roof. But, Mr Liddon, you must remember? I do not tell you from friendship. I tell you only because I am cruelly overpowered with the gun.’

The boy gave a little sigh.

‘I do hope this is morally right. When one has many friends, it is sometimes difficult to keep them all happy.’

18

NUMBER 45 gave the impression of having just been finished in a hurry from a charming blueprint that no one had completely checked. As Mark climbed the broad stairway to the top floor, there was a faint odor of fresh paint, and yet the stucco walls were already cracking. At the landings, smudges of putty still showed on the glass of the pretty picture windows whose large panes bulged inwards slightly as if the tensions had been miscalculated. Someone would soon have to pull it all down and build a new house.

There was a single door on the top floor. A printed card slipped into a socket which had been screwed slightly crooked on to the paneling, said: Harry S. Jameson. That presumably was the name of Oscar’s generous American friend. Mark took the gun out of his pocket and held it so that it was aimed at the stomach of whoever should answer the door. He hoped it would be George. He would like to see George caught unawares on the other end of a gun.

He pressed a buzzer. A faint chime sounded inside the apartment. He waited. Nothing happened. He pressed the buzzer again. At length he heard the clicking of a woman’s heels. The door opened and Frankie was standing there.

She looked straight at him and then down at the gun. Her young face, with the Slavic, almost gaunt cheekbones and the wide blue eyes, was completely calm. She had no sense of crisis. He might have been a man come to check the gas-meter, if they had gas-meters in Mexico. She pushed the fair hair which had fallen forward over one shoulder.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Mr Liddon.’

‘Surprised to see me?’

‘Why should I be? You’re always going in for this where-angels-fear-to-tread routine. I’m getting used to it.’

‘Where’s George?’

She smiled a deliberately mechanical smile. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Liddon. He isn’t here right now. He just stepped out for a minute.’

He kicked the door inwards and started towards her with the gun. It didn’t bother her. She moved backwards, glancing over her shoulder to avoid bumping into anything.

‘I told you to go back to New York, Mr Liddon.’

‘I know you did.’

‘You promised to go.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Now you’ve loused everything up for everybody.’

‘For everybody? Or just you and George — and Victor?’ They had reached the living-room. Oscar’s American friend seemed to be even crazier about the color of quaint Old Mexico than the Hotel Mirador was. There were serapes flung over the couches and hangings on the walls. There was enough pottery to start an export business.

‘Keep moving,’ he said. ‘Into the next room.’

She blinked. ‘Planning on a sublet?’

‘I’m going to find out whether George is here.’

She backed ahead of him towards a door in the right wall. She paused at its threshold. When he joined her, she gestured inside.

‘This is the kitchen. It’s small but cozy and ever so convenient. We often whip up a tasty little dinner for eight jolly friends.’

He looked into the kitchen and nodded. She crossed through the living-room to the only other door.

‘And this is the bedroom. It gets the afternoon sun.’

There was a closet in the far wall. Mark went to it, opened the door and investigated. A French window, with the inevitable putty stains, led to the roof. He stepped outside. A metal glider and a table made a sort of improvised sun porch. Chimneys loomed vaguely in the darkness.

Frankie joined him. The scent of Ellie’s perfume trailed through the night air.

‘In the daylight you can see the mountains,’ she said. ‘And then’ — she gestured — ‘the chimneys. There’s something so appealingly garrety about chimneys Don’t you agree?’

As he started forward, she put her hand on his arm. He whipped around to point the gun at her.

She said: ‘My, but you’re jumpy, Mr Liddon. It must be the altitude. Don’t you want to see the bathroom and check that the toilet flushes?’

They returned to the bedroom. Mark looked into the bathroom and then guided her back into the living room. ‘Satisfied George isn’t here?’ she asked.

‘When’s he coming back?’

She shrugged. ‘I really wouldn’t know.’

He nodded at a studio couch which was covered with a black-and-white serape.

‘Sit down.’

Frankie glanced across the room. He followed her glance. Her scarlet leather handbag lay on a chair by a tin coffee table.

‘Sit down,’ he repeated.

Frankie sat. Mark crossed to her handbag. He turned it upside down and dumped its contents on to the chair. In a confusion of articles as chaotic as Ellie’s, he saw a small revolver. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. He poked with his finger at the other objects. There was an envelope with Thomas Cook and Sons printed on it. He opened it. Inside he found a regular travel agent’s receipt for a room reservation at the Hotel Casa Miranda in Acapulco. It was dated December 24th. That was tomorrow. He put it in his pocket too and crossed back towards Frankie, the gun still aimed at her.

He chose a chair from which he could keep both her and the front door covered.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re planning a little trip.’

She had been watching him brightly without the slightest change of expression. ‘Yes,’ she said; ‘they tell me Acapulco is delightful at this time of year.’

‘You’re travelling no doubt as Mrs Mark Liddon?’

‘What a quaint thought!’

‘We’ll be a lot quainter before I’m through with you.’ He took out his pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. He lit a cigarette.

She said: ‘Since we’re being quaint, perhaps you’ll quaintly offer me one of those things.’

He tossed her a cigarette. She caught it and put it in her mouth.

‘And a quaint match?’

He tossed her the book of matches. She lit her cigarette, carefully rearranged the book and threw it back.

‘Now,’ she said, lounging easily back against the serape. ‘Bul!y me, Mr Liddon.’

In spite of her pretense at calm she was tense. He was beginning to realize that. She knew he had control of the situation.

‘I’ve found my wife,’ he said.

‘I know you have.’

‘She was under the influence of dope.’

‘Yes, she was indeed.’

‘I’ve got her somewhere safe. You won’t be able to kidnap her again.’

‘No. We probably won’t.’

‘I know now who George is. He’s one of Victor’s barmen. God knows who you are. That’s one of the things you’re going to tell me.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘And what else am I going to tell you?’

‘Everything.’

She crossed her long, slim legs. She was wearing a very smart pair of alligator shoes. They were probably Ellie’s shoes.

‘Hasn’t your wife told you everything, Mr Liddon?’

He said bitterly: ‘How do you expect her to tell anything when she’s under dope?’

She lolled back against the cushions of the couch, looking at him through a blue curl of cigarette smoke.

‘You’re crazy about her, aren’t you?’

‘Does that surprise you?’

‘It doesn’t surprise me. Perhaps it - saddens me.’

‘And why does it sadden you?’

‘I told you I like you. I do like you.’

‘That makes me all warm and cozy inside.’

‘Damn you.’ She suddenly spat the word at him. ‘Damn you for barging in where you don’t belong; damn you for being a big dumb Czech; damn you for having the horns and hide of a water buffalo.’

Her unexpected violence had an odd effect on him. For a moment he was as conscious of her lean young body as if she were in his arms. Her deliberate mechanical smile broke the spell.

‘Excuse me, Mr Liddon. That wasn’t in your script, was it? Where were we? Oh yes. I was going to tell you everything.’

‘First you’re going to tell me how Corey Lathrop got killed.’

‘Corey — what?’

‘Corey Lathrop.’

‘Who’s Corey Lathrop? It sounds like a firm that manufactures deep freeze units.’

The return of her artificial frivolity was exasperating beyond endurance.

He said: ‘You’re going to tell why you kidnapped my wife and why you’re impersonating her.’

She looked patient. ‘But you forget so quickly, Mr Liddon. I’ve already told you why I’m impersonating your wife. I want to get back to the States. I have no papers. I…’

‘Must I listen to all that crap again?’

‘We’ve got to fill in the time somehow.’

‘You seem to forget that I have a gun. George isn’t the only one who’s picked up the gun habit in Mexico.’

She smiled friendlily. ‘But George uses his gun to stop people doing things. You seem to use yours to make people tell things. That’s quite different. If you blew the top of my head off, you wouldn’t find the quote solution to the mystery end of quote, neatly inscribed on my skull, would you?’

She leaned forward. Her face was suddenly frank and sympathetic. It was an expression to which he was used by now. Once it had fooled him. Now it put him even more on his guard.

‘It’s about time that we made at least a dim attempt to understand each other. I am impersonating your wife. I have a very good reason for doing so, and neither George nor I have the slightest intention of telling you what that reason is. If you had trusted me at the beginning, there would have been nothing to worry about. Your wife would have been returned to you in gorgeous Technicolor. Everything would have been ducky. But since you didn’t trust us, you’re on your own. You want to fight us. Okay. Go ahead and try. We’ll fight right back. And, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll give up this two-gun Tony characterization. Stop brandishing guns. That’s something we’re much better at than you. You’ll only end up with blood all over your lovely blond head.’ She put her cigarette down on an ashtray and gazed at him fixedly. ‘Any questions?’

He felt a sudden elation. ‘No questions,’ he said. ‘Just a few statements. Statement number one. Get your coat. It’s kind of chilly outside.’

‘My coat?’ she echoed.

‘You can use guns for stopping people doing things. You can also use them for making people do things. You’re impersonating my wife. Your impersonation involves a trip to Acapulco tomorrow. It’s too bad, but you’re not taking that trip. You’re getting out of here right now with me. And you’re going to sit with me in some particularly uncomfortable place until you’re good and ready to tell me what I want to know. See? I picked up the kidnapping habit in Mexico too.’ He rose and went towards her with the gun. ‘Get up.’

For a moment she continued to sit, looking at him, her wide blue eyes frankly admiring.

‘Why, Mr Liddon, you’re brighter than I gave you credit for.’

‘Maybe in time you’ll learn to love me. Do you want to come like this or do you want your coat?’

‘Oh, the coat definitely.’ She stood up. ‘I can just picture the place where we’re going to sit and look at each other - a cellar full of cobwebs and draughts and empty tequila bottles.’

‘Where’s the coat ?’

‘In the bedroom.’

‘Get it.’

She started towards the bedroom door. He followed her with the gun. They entered the room. They passed the French windows and came to the closet. She tugged open the door and frowningly, surveyed the hanging clothes inside. These must be her own; she probably kept Ellie’s at the Reforma.

‘Now, what would be a good dungeon outfit?’ She took out a grey wool coat and, swinging it around, held it out towards Mark. ‘How about this little number?’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Fine.’

With a sudden lunge she threw herself on him, tangling the coat around his head and shoulders. In the first instant, while he struggled to extricate himself from the smothering wool, Frankie gripped his gun arm with both her hands and clung to it with all her strength. In the same confused second, a man’s voice said:

‘All right, Frankie. I’ve got him covered.’

Mark shoved the coat away. It fell to the floor. Frankie was still clutching at his arm. George had come in through the French windows and stood facing him, very pale and eager, a gun directed at him.

‘Drop the gun, Mr Liddon.’

Mark let go of the revolver. Frankie snatched it and stepped away from him. She stood at George’s side, looking back at Mark rather sadly.

‘I told you we could do this sort of thing much better than you, Mr Liddon. Now look what you’ve done. I don’t get kidnapped after all. You’ve ruined my day.’

19

MARK'S first reaction was fury against himself. George had obviously been hiding all the time on the roof behind one of the chimneys. He had let Frankie distract him from a thorough search by the crudest device of clutching his arm and deflecting his attention to herself. Through sheer stupidity he had muffed his big opportunity.

George was very excited. He couldn’t take things calmly like Frankie. His fair hair fell in a nervously disheveled lock over his blue fanatic’s eyes. He looked small and undernourished and immensely determined to be dangerous. He snapped at Frankie.

‘How much does he know?’

‘He says his wife’s still under dope. I don’t think he knows anything. But he has got my gun.’

‘Get it back. And, if he has it on him, get Mrs Liddon’s tourist card too.’

While he kept Mark covered with his revolver, Frankie retrieved her gun from Mark’s pocket and searched until she found Ellie’s tourist card. She tossed it on a table and continued to search. Her hand went into his pants pocket and came out with the key to the room in the Hotel Mirador. For a bad moment Mark thought the hotel’s name might be stamped on the metal tag. But it wasn’t — just the number.

Frankie studied the key thoughtfully and then, throwing it up in the air and catching it again, moved towards George’s side.

George had been watching like a celebrated surgeon waiting for his nurse to complete the preliminaries for an operation. Now he said:

‘How did you find out where your wife was, Mr Liddon? From Oscar?’

Mark could at least keep his bargains. ‘I forced it out of him.’

‘And this address too?’

‘Yes.’

George took a step closer. That was supposed to intimidate him. Mark could see all the wheels going around behind the ‘tough-guy’ characterization. It struck him as odd that this should be the man Victor had chosen to do his dirty work. He seemed far too undisciplined — too nearly the amateur.

‘We warned you to keep out of this, Mr Liddon. You had your chance.’ There it was again, that stuffy, preacher’s tone as if he were scolding an intractable congregation. He took the key from Frankie and held it up. ‘Okay. You’ve taken your wife to a hotel. What hotel?’

Perhaps, if less had happened that day, if his emotional reserves had not been almost exhausted, Mark might have taken the danger more seriously. But it seemed absurd that George should expect an answer to that question. Guns can’t make people tell things. Frankie had said that.

George was breathing quickly now as if he had been running. It was the dictator-whose-patience-is-almost-exhausted pose. But he was genuinely angry too. The best bet was to make him even madder. George was the type to do something foolish when he was in a passion.

‘I’m waiting, Mr Liddon. Where’s your wife?’

Mark grinned. ‘If you want to find her, you’d better wire Victor for reinforcements.’

The blood flushed up through the thin white skin of George’s face. ‘Where’s your wife?’

‘You’re wasting your breath.’

‘Yes, George darling, you really are.’ Frankie had been watching them. Now she stifled a theatrical yawn. ‘After all, we haven’t got much time. Let’s give up being ominous and go get her.’

Mark stiffened.

‘Get her?’ echoed George. ‘You mean you know where she is?’

‘Of course I do.’ Frankie picked her coat up from the floor and put it on, carefully arranging the collar around the neck. ‘Mr Liddon is the worst wife-preserver on record. He hadn’t been here five minutes before he lit a cigarette from a book of matches. I asked for a light and there it was all beautifully written out on the matches.’

She turned to Mark and smiled brightly. ‘Mrs Liddon is at the Hotel Mirador, that friendly hostelry which brings you all the color of quaint old Mexico.’ She took the key from George, studied it and dropped it into her coat pocket. ‘Hotel Mirador - Room 26.’

As Mark returned her cool, steady gaze, he knew for one crystal-clear moment what it was to hate someone. There was no end to this girl’s duplicity, to her casual expertness in tricking him all along the line. Ellie’s safety had hung precariously from a matchbox. Frankie had been clever enough to realize it and he had lumbered into the trap she had set. Like a water-buffalo. That’s what she’d called him. And that’s what she’d made of him. A water-buffalo. Or a bull. For the second time that day he thought of himself fantastically as a bull. A vivid mental image came of the bull charging Frankie, tossing her over its shoulder with a horn.

He glanced at George’s tensely clutched revolver. Now that they knew where Ellie was, his only hope was violence. And, since they had the guns, it could only be the violence of desperation. Had he been right in summing George up as a straw-man? He had crumpled once before that evening in the alley behind the Salon de Lisboa. Mightn’t he crumble again?

He tensed his muscles, waiting for the slightest chance to jump George. Frankie had two revolvers, but they were both in her coat pockets. She despised him now. And, because she despised him, she might underestimate him.

George was smiling his strained, sanctimonious smile. It was obvious that he was already taking full credit for Frankie’s cleverness.

‘Well, Mr Liddon, I guess we don’t need your help after all. We’ll go around to the Mirador and get Mrs Liddon. And then…’ He turned to Frankie and started to speak in rapid Czech.

Frankie’s reaction was lightning quick, but not quite quick enough. In the second before she cried ‘Shut up. He may understand,’ Mark’s rusty Czech had been sufficiently good for him to have heard George say: What shall we do with her? Take her with us to …?

That was the point at which Frankie had cut in. But it was almost certainly to Acapulco that they were going. That was where Frankie had her hotel reservation at the Casa Miranda. Tomorrow this crazy conspiracy, whatever it was, would reach a climax in Acapulco.

Thanks to George’s blunder, the game was not irretrievably lost. Now, even if the worst happened and he couldn’t keep them from recapturing Ellie, he at least knew where they would be taking her. But he would have to play dumb. If they thought that he’d understood, they might be cagey enough to change their plans. He arranged his expression to one of exasperated disappointment.

They were both watching him, their eyes intent and scrutinizing.

Frankie said to George: ‘He’s Czech. I should have told you. Czech born.’

‘What difference does it make?’ George still kept the gun aimed straight at Mark. ‘I didn’t say anything that mattered. And, even if he did get it, we’re going to put him out for a while.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Frankie. ‘Yes, I suppose we’ll have to.’ Get the tape.’

Frankie went to a drawer and brought out a large roll of adhesive tape and a lethal looking pair of scissors.

Smiling at Mark, she said: ‘I’m afraid this is on the corny side, Mr Liddon. But you’re a logical man. You see the need of it.’

George said: ‘Put your hands behind your back.’

Yes,’ said Frankie, ‘definitely behind the back. I don’t want to be thrown at George again like a ball.’

Mark put his hands behind his back. Frankie started to circle him. Once they’d taped his wrists, all hope would be gone. It was now or never. Very conscious of the scissors behind him, he, threw himself forward at George.

He had been right in his judgment of the other man.

George didn’t fire. He merely ducked to one side. But it was Frankie who acted. Almost in the first instant that Mark moved she jumped at him from behind, clinging around his neck with her arms. The unexpected extra weight threw him off balance. As he struggled to right himself, George’s arm flashed upward and he felt the impact of the revolver butt behind his ear. He reeled, with Frankie still clutching him. George hit him again. He felt Frankie sliding away from him. The pretty room with its colorful serapes rotated around him. There was a dim sensation of having no knees.

Then he dropped into unconsciousness.

When he was next aware of anything it was of his name called in a quiet, crooning voice:

‘Mr Liddon. Mr Liddon.’

His head was aching. His mouth felt as if some sticky hostile hand were clamped over it. He tried to move his ankles. He couldn’t. He remembered the adhesive tape.

‘Mr Liddon.’

He twisted around and opened his eyes. He was looking straight into a pretty golden-brown face with long lashes curling around black, solicitous eyes.

‘Mr Liddon, is me. Your friend — Oscar.’

It made no sense that Oscar should be there. But that didn’t matter.

‘You are tied up, Mr Liddon, with this material which doctors use. Do you wish me to remove it?’

Mark nodded.

‘It may bring pain.’ Oscar’s dainty fingers gripped the tape over Mark’s mouth. ‘Courage, Mr Liddon. Ay.’ He ripped the tape away.

Everything had come back to Mark and with it a great sense of urgency. ‘How long have I been out?’

‘How long? Perhaps half an hour. At the hotel I think maybe my friend needs help. I follow. I see George and the girl come out. Luckily, when I rent the apartment, I make a second key. I wait until they drive away. Then…’

‘Get the tape off my wrists and ankles.’

Oscar’s face broke into a happy smile. ‘You are in a hurry, Mr Liddon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps a one-hundred-peso hurry ?’

‘Anything you say, but get the tape off.’

Oscar’s smile became a beam of delight. ‘First I take the money. Is more simple.’ His hand slid into Mark’s breast pocket and brought out his wallet. Having carefully selected one hundred pesos, he stripped off the tape. Mark jumped up and started for the door.

Behind him Oscar called: ‘You want a taxi?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am more young, I go more quickly.’ The boy dashed past him and down the stairs. When Mark reached the street he was standing proudly by a waiting taxi. They both climbed in.

‘Where, Mr Liddon?’

‘Hotel Mirador.’

Oscar spoke Spanish to the driver. As the taxi shot forward, Mark grimly assessed the situation. Oscar’s unexpected one-hundred-peso rescue had been a help, but it wouldn’t alter the situation. Frankie and George had at least a half-hour lead. They had the key to Ellie’s room. Ellie wouldn’t be able to do anything to defend herself. Almost certainly they had her out of the hotel by now.

Mark never kidded himself. This disaster was entirely his fault. He should never have left Ellie alone in the hotel. He’d tried to be too clever. Now Ellie was paying for it. Frankie and George had a car. Oscar had said he had seen them driving away from the apartment. Probably they were already on their way to Acapulco. A tormenting image came of Ellie huddled helpless in the back seat of a speeding automobile. With a great effort of will he suppressed it. There was no point in torturing himself.

He would follow to Acapulco.

The taxi swung into the self-conscious grandeur of the Hotel Mirador’s driveway. He took money out of his wallet and handed it to Oscar.

‘Pay him.’

Mark ran through the lobby out into the patio and up the stairs. He reached Room 26. The door was ajar. He ran in. Ellie was gone and her clothes too. Even though he had been prepared for this, the sight of the tumbled sheets on the empty bed almost defeated him.

He hurried downstairs to the desk. ‘Did you see my wife leave?’

The clerk blinked. ‘No, sir.’

‘And did anyone come here to ask for her?’

‘Why, no, sir. No one at all.’

He’d expected that. Frankie and George must have known the Hotel Mirador, known that one could slip from the grounds through the patio and up the stairs without being seen from the lobby.

‘The only thing that happened, sir,’ said the clerk uneasily, was that Mrs Liddon telephoned.’

‘Telephoned?’

‘Yes, sir. There were three calls. Two local calls and one to New York.’

‘Do you have the New York number?’

‘Why, yes, sir. I put the call through myself.’ The clerk crossed to the switchboard and consulted a little book. ‘It was Sacramento 9-6412.’

Sacramento. That was Victor’s exchange. It was Frankie, of course, who had called Victor, pretending to the clerk that she was Mrs Liddon. That was to be expected too. She and George would have to check in at headquarters — report Ellie’s escape and subsequent recapture.

He turned to Oscar, who was hovering behind him. ‘How long does it take to get to Acapulco?’

‘Acapulco ? ‘Oscar’s face brightened. By plane, is one hour and a half. But the plane goes only in the morning. By car is nine-ten hours.’

‘Can I hire one now?’

Oscar’s white teeth flashed. ‘It happens I have a friend. He owns a most pleasant car.’

‘Could you get it right away? ‘

‘I believe so. But’ — Oscar was watching his fingernails — ‘the roads to Acapulco are most treacherous to strangers, very long and winding. My friend — he is most particular. I do not feel he would wish you to drive it yourself.’

‘But he’d let you drive it?’

‘Oh yes, yes. He has much confidence in me. Is very good friend.’

‘Okay. Go get it.’

‘And I drive you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ay!’ Oscar’s face clouded. ‘There would, of course, be a financial arrangement.’

‘Of course.’

‘And there is, too, my work at the hotel. I must pay a boy to take my place.’

‘How much do you want altogether?’

Oscar looked shy. ‘You have not many pesos remaining, Mr Liddon. This I happen to notice when I see your wallet. But American dollars will be all right.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps seventy dollars — for everything?’

Mark gave him the dollars. Oscar surveyed the bills with awed reverence and, bringing out his plump wallet, added them to his hoard.

‘We’ll take a taxi together to the Reforma,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll wait for you there.’

Mark’s suitcase was still at the Hotel Reforma. He would need a change of clothes.

When they reached the Reforma, Oscar hurried off down the Paseo. Mark was given the key to Frankie’s suite without question. His suitcase still stood in the hall and Ellie’s clothes still hung in the closet. He shaved in the bathroom and changed his clothes. Having repacked his bag, he carried it downstairs and ate something in the American snack-bar which was just about to close.

It was just two-thirty when Oscar returned. Mark followed him out into the street. A new green Buick convertible was parked at the curb. Oscar caressed a fender lovingly.

‘Is beautiful, no? My friend is American. Many of my friends are Americans.’

He ushered Mark into the car and put his suitcase in the back seat. As he climbed in himself, he gave a polite cough.

‘Is one thing, Mr Liddon. My fee as chauffeur. You feel perhaps that one dollar for each hour is excessive?’

‘That’s okay.’

‘One dollar for each hour! Oh, boy!’

As Oscar started the car, he turned on Mark a look of swooning adoration. ‘Of all my friends, Mr Liddon, you are the one who pleases me most. From now on I leave them all, all for you.’

20

AT last there was no immediate need to fight against the exhaustion that was besieging him. Almost at once Mark dropped into a heavy sleep and when he awoke it was morning. The car was speeding recklessly through a landscape of brown mountains and dusty canyons. Oscar, at the wheel, looked fresh as a child just after its morning scrub. He smiled at Mark cheerfully.

‘You wish some breakfast, Mr Liddon?’ He reached down on the seat at his side and shyly offered two dilapidated packages. ‘In Mexico I buy things for eating. One is of oranges. The other of sandwiches of ham. Take them. Are free. Are my present to you.’

As Oscar chattered on about his unswerving loyalty to his new friend, Mark ate an orange and a ham sandwich. Sleep and the crisp mountain air had restored him. This morning the situation seemed less hopeless than it had the night before.

He had no gun. That was unfortunate. But he had certain advantages. Frankie and George couldn’t know that Oscar had double-crossed them and released him from the apartment on Bolivar. They wouldn’t be expecting him to follow them. He had the element of surprise on his side — and he had Oscar as an ally too.

He glanced at the boy, who, as he spun the car around a hair-raising curve, flashed back to him a smile of blind adoration. Mark had no illusions about Oscar. He had switched sides only because the pickings were better with Mark. Once they reached Acapulco, his great love would vanish the moment Frankie or George held a larger fistful of pesos in front of his pretty nose. But even a shaky ally was better than none.

The car toppled down into a valley and then roared crazily up a mountain peak. Mark considered a plan of campaign. Frankie, for some reason, had a rendezvous, posing as Mrs Mark Liddon, at the Casa Miranda Hotel. Since they couldn’t possibly take Ellie as a prisoner to a respectable hotel sponsored by Thomas Cook and Sons, George would presumably drive Ellie to some prearranged hideout, and Frankie, her business completed, would almost certainly rejoin them. One way to find Ellie would be to follow Frankie in Oscar’s car. In any case, he would have to go to the Casa Miranda and pick up the thread from there.

The prospect of another clash with Frankie was oddly exciting. How he handled her would depend on the circumstances of the moment, but at least he would have one more chance to redeem the fiasco of the day before.

Soon they were driving into the outskirts of the town. High above them on the peaks of the hills, luxury hotels reared like sultans’ palaces, but down here the atmosphere was one of squalor and improvisation. Ramshackle dwellings with roofs of dried palm leaf stood in dusty yards. Naked children, molting turkeys, and the inevitable pigs tumbled over each other and scattered across the streets.

They reached a crowded central square. It was cluttered, like the squares in Mexico, with sleazy stalls and rocking to the din of rival jukeboxes from sidewalk cafes. Oscar swung the car up a steep hill and almost immediately they had climbed into a world of wealth and landscape gardening. Within a few minutes the Casa Miranda came haughtily into view on the crest of the mountain. Oscar drove through tropical gardens and stopped the car in a broad gravel area before the hotel’s imposing facade.

He turned, beaming, to Mark. ‘I drive well, no? Fast, fast. Nine hours.’

‘That’s fine, Oscar.’

‘And now — what do you wish me to do? You know that 1 do anything for you, Mr Liddon. Anything.’

‘Wait here for me. If, by any chance, I come out with Frankie, follow us in the car. But don’t let her see you.’

Oscar nodded, but added anxiously; ‘Perhaps there will be danger for you, Mr Liddon?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Then ‘— the boy looked demure — ‘perhaps is best to make our financial settlements now. Nine dollars. One dollar for each hour. Is nine dollars.’

Mark reached into his breast pocket for his wallet. As he did so, Oscar produced his own expectantly. A sudden idea came to Mark. He leaned forward and, tugging the boy’s wallet out of his small brown hand, transferred it to his own pocket.

Oscar’s mouth dropped open in horror. He made a lightning grab towards Mark’s pocket. Mark caught his wrist.

‘Don’t worry, Oscar. You’ll get it back.’ He grinned at the boy. ‘It’s just a hostage. I want to be sure you won’t develop another best friend while I’m away.’

Oscar’s eyes were round with outraged sensibility. ‘Mr Liddon, how can you be so cynic?’

Mark patted his hand and got out of the car. ‘Just do what I say and you’ll get it back — plus your nine dollars plus another ten-dollar bonus.’

It was extremely hot. He took off his topcoat and hat, threw them in the back seat and hurried across the parking area into the hotel lobby. The Casa Miranda was obviously one of those ‘spend-the-honeymoon-you-will-never-forget’ establishments. It reeked of glamour. The lobby stretched back to a vast plate-glass window which exhibited a view of flamboyant gardens. Bellhops in plum-colored uniforms flocked around Mark. He pushed through them towards the desk. A girl with heavy lashes moved to wait on him. Her air of tired elegance reminded him of Derain’s.

He said: ‘Is Mrs Mark Liddon here?’

The girl studied him listlessly. ‘Are you the gentleman she’s expecting?’

This was too good to be true. ‘Yes,’ he lied.

‘She’s waiting for you at the Belvedere.’

‘Where is it?’

The girl gestured to the right. ‘Through the gardens, past the swimming pool and straight on.’

Mark started through the lobby. For once his timing had been perfect. He was coming in just at the very moment of the rendezvous. With any luck, this break might lead him not only to Ellie but to the solution of the whole crazy mystery.

A corridor led him into a spacious lounge. At one side stretched a long counter which sold Mexican curios and American magazines. As he passed it, his eye fell on a pile of Harper’ s Bazaars. He was almost certain that it was the same issue as the one he had seen at Maurice’s. He leafed through a copy and came upon the photograph of Ellie — the former and celebrated Miss Eleanor Ross.

Excitement pricking him, he bought it and tucked it under his arm. Frankie had Ellie’s tourist card; she had her nerve and her brilliance at deception. Probably at this moment, she was as sure of her ability to carry off the impersonation as she had ever been sure of anything.

She was due for a nasty shock. This magazine was a far more lethal weapon against her than any revolver.

French windows opened on to the gardens. Mark followed a winding path through blazing pink, yellow and scarlet hibiscus and emerged on to a sunny red-tiled terrace, where chairs and tables under gay beach umbrellas stood around a swimming pool. Another path led deeper into the gardens. He took it. After twenty yards or so he reached a smaller circular terrace jutting over the cliff’s edge, where white-painted iron chairs faced a sensational vista of the Pacific.

Frankie was standing there alone by the brick balustrade. Her back was to him. She was wearing a simple white frock with a broad scarlet belt. The scarlet leather handbag was looped over her shoulder. In the dazzling sunlight her dyed blonde hair gleamed almost silver. A large portable radio, bound in pigskin, lay on the balustrade at her side.

For a moment Mark waited at the entrance to the Belvedere, looking at her. Then, very quietly, he said:

‘Good morning, Mrs Liddon.’

At the sound of his voice she spun around. Her eyes, fixed on his face, were completely off their guard.

‘You!’ she breathed.

‘Yes, me.’

‘But how …?’

‘I’m Superman. I broke my bonds and flapped down here in my old grey cloak.’

She was really frightened. He could tell that. Fear made her look very young, rather awkward, and terribly innocent. No one, seeing her then, could have told that she was as dangerous as a boxful of vipers.

He wasn’t going to make it any easier for her by leading the conversation. He just stood there, grinning at her. In a strange, impersonal way he was fascinated to know how she was going to try to wriggle out of this predicament. Any minute now the ‘gentleman’ she was expecting would show up and the rendezvous, whatever it was, would take place. She couldn’t tell how much, if anything, Mark knew, but she must realize that, unless she managed to get rid of him quickly, she would be ruined. To her he must be like a time bomb, standing there, ticking, ticking, warning of an explosion that might come any second.

She had her face under control now. There was no longer any sign of fear. She was gauging the situation, deciding what her next characterization should be — threatening, propitiatory, or seductive. He was getting to know her almost as well as if he were married to her.

Finally, in a small, husky voice, she said: ‘Mr Liddon, I want you to listen to me. Please, this is most important.’

She was being sincere. That was the personality she had picked.

‘Okay,’ he said. I’m listening.’

‘You’ve never trusted me, and I don’t blame you. But now you’ve got to believe me. You’ve made a mistake in coming here.’

‘I have?’

‘You love your wife. You’re trying to find her. That’s all you care about, isn’t it?’

‘That — and other things.’

She put her hand on his arm. He noticed that she had repaired the chipped lacquer of her fingernail. ‘She isn’t here. You understood what George said in Czech yesterday. You thought we were bringing her here with us. We didn’t. We changed our plans.’ She was gazing at him earnestly — much too earnestly. ‘I’ll make a deal with you. If you go away from here right now and promise to stop following George and me I’ll tell you where she is.’

If this were a genuine deal, if there had been the slightest chance of her telling the truth, he would have had to accept her terms. To find Ellie was still the most important, the only really important thing. But he could see through her as clearly as through the plate-glass windows of the Casa Miranda Hotel. This was just another of her dodges — a makeshift scheme for getting him out of the way before the rendezvous.

He stood, looking at her and saying nothing. He knew that delay was his deadliest weapon.

She waited until she could bear it no longer. Then she asked: ‘Well, Mr Liddon?’

‘Okay. Tell me where my wife is.’

‘And you’ll promise to go away?’

‘Maybe.’

‘What sort of bargain is that?’

‘It’s my type of bargain with your type of person. Tell me where you claim my wife is. If I believe you — maybe I’ll do what you say.’

She stamped her foot. It was an absurdly conventional gesture of frustration. ‘Very well, Mr Liddon. If you want it like that. Your wife’s in Mexico City.’

‘She is?’

‘At Oscar’s house.’

‘And how does she happen to be back there?’

Frankie glanced swiftly towards the path which led from the hotel. It was a glance of desperate anxiety. ‘Oscar took her back. He followed when you took her to the Hotel Mirador. After you’d left he went up to the room and got her.’

Of all the lies she had ever told him, this was the most preposterous. He longed to tell her that Oscar, when he was supposedly rekidnapping Ellie, had been at the Hotel Granada giving him George’s address; that it was Oscar who had released him from the apartment in Bolivar; Oscar who had driven him down here; Oscar who was waiting outside the hotel right now. But he couldn’t play a trump card just for the malicious pleasure of seeing her crumple.

‘So my wife’s in Mexico City.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Very interesting. Even so, I think I’ll stick around here for a while.’

She took a step backward. It was almost as if he had hit her. He gave it to her then straight between the eyes. ‘I’m interested in meeting your friend. After all, any friend of my wife’s is a friend of mine.’

‘What friend?’ She tried to look bewildered. It was a pitiful failure. ‘What friend are you talking about?’

‘The gentleman quote you’re expecting unquote. The man for whom you’re pretending to be Mrs Mark Liddon.’ He took the Harper’s Bazaar from under his arm. Deliberately he flipped over the pages until he came to the photograph of Ellie. He held it out towards her. ‘I thought he might like to see a picture of the real Mrs Liddon.’

She was completely defeated then. As she gazed at the picture, her shoulders hunched. She looked smaller, thinner.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t do that.’

There were hibiscus bushes all around the Belvedere. A humming-bird with a bright orange breast whirred past her face and darted into the mouth of a huge scarlet blossom. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, she threw herself into his arms. Her fingers clutched his lapel. Her cheek was pressed against his chest.

‘Oh, Mark, Mark, please believe me. You musn’t stay. I’m not thinking of myself. I’m thinking of you. You can’t stay. It’s dangerous for you. It’s …’

The words choked off in a sob. He was staggered at her power of recovery. Having lost on ‘sincerity’, she had thrown herself headlong into ‘seduction’. She never knew when she was licked.

She was still clinging to him, her hands moving spasmodically up and down his arms, when a man appeared around a bend in the path from the hotel. Frankie’s back was to the path and she did not seem to hear him. But to Mark, looking over her head, he was in full view. He reached the mouth of the Belvedere and paused. He was a stranger — a middle-aged, rather handsome Mexican in a neat white suit. When he saw the two of them his face registered doubt. He was about to turn towards the hotel when his glance settled on the portable radio lying on the balustrade and, as if reassured, he started towards them.

In a voice with no trace of accent he asked: ‘Excuse me, but am I addressing Mrs Mark Liddon?’

Frankie broke away from Mark, who said: That’s right. This is her. I’m Mark Liddon — her husband.’

Frankie managed another of her magnificent switches. As the stranger surveyed her carefully, she smiled back at him with her cool, model’s smile and held out her hand.

The stranger took it. ‘I’m Frederico Gonzales, Mrs Liddon. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.’ He turned to Mark, his hand still outstretched. ‘And yours too, Mr Liddon — although I didn’t expect you to be a member of the party.’

Mark tucked the Harper’s Bazaar under his arm and looked challengingly at Frankie. She returned his gaze serenely and murmured to Senor Gonzales: ‘Yes, we didn’t expect it, either. My husband just joined me at the last minute.’

Senor Gonzales, face was impassive. ‘Then he is, of course, familiar with the…?’ He finished the sentence with a gesture of his wrist.

‘Sure,’ said Mark. ‘I know everything. I thought my wife could do with a little assistance.’

‘I see.’ Senor Gonzales smiled an amiable smile. ‘It is an excellent idea.’ For a moment he paused in front of Frankie, then leisurely he crossed to the balustrade and picked up the radio, examining it with casual admiration. ‘This is a handsome machine, Mrs Liddon. I hope you registered it with the Customs when you came in. Sometimes, if you don’t, you have difficulty taking them out again.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Frankie. ‘I registered it.’

There was nothing in either of their voices to indicate that the radio was of any other than trivial importance. But Mark was sure by now that it played some vital role in the rendezvous. Gonzales put it under his arm and gave a little formal bow.

‘Well, the chauffeur is waiting with the car, Mrs Liddon. Your husband, of course, will accompany us?’

‘Oh, no,’ put in Frankie quickly. ‘I don’t think so. He’s just flown from the States. He’s terribly tired. He’d better get some sleep.’

‘Listen to the little woman.’ Mark slid his arm around her waist and grinned at Gonzales. ‘I’m fresh as a daisy. Of course I’m coming along.’

Frankie’s eyes were agate hard, but she moved her mouth into a smile of travestied sweetness. ‘Very well, darling. You know best. But you won’t want to tote that tired old fashion magazine, will you?’

She pulled the Harper’s Bazaar from under his arm. She crossed with it to the balustrade and tossed it down the precipitous slope. Still smiling, she turned back to Gonzales and looped her hand through his arm.

‘All right, Senor Gonzales,’ she said. Let’s get started.’

21

A BLACK limousine with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel was waiting outside the hotel. Senor Gonzales ushered them both into the back seat and got in after them. Frankie took the radio from Mark and held it on her lap. As the car started, Mark glanced out of the window. Oscar’s green Buick was still parked where it had been. Oscar himself was not visible. He had almost certainly ducked down out of sight when he saw them coming. Mark had no fears about Oscar. So long as the boy’s wallet was in Mark’s pocket he could be depended on to follow him — to Cape Finisterre if necessary.

As the car purred down the hill past the square and along a broad shore highway, Senor Gonzales made polite conversation about the charms of Acapulco. Frankie replied with equally banal politeness, but her leg, pressed against Mark’s, was tense as a ballet dancer’s on her points. He still hadn’t the remotest idea of what he had got into, but he knew Frankie was scared. So long as she was scared that meant he had control of the situation, and that was all that mattered.

During the twenty-five minute drive along the romantic coast, with its drooping palms and wide sandy beaches, Mark did not risk looking back for Oscar. But the road they were taking had no turn-offs. A child of ten could be following them successfully. At length the car climbed a mountain and dropped down its other side. A tiny, brilliantly blue cove stretched below them. On a headland stood a single white villa from whose grounds a wooden pier stretched out to a dock where a gleaming pleasure cruiser was moored.

Senor Gonzales gestured towards it with a modest smile of ownership. ‘There is my little place.’

Just before the car turned through tall iron gates, Mark noticed a track leading off through a shrubbery of large, tangled oleander bushes. That would be the obvious place for Oscar to park unobtrusively. He kept its bearings in his mind as the car passed up a winding drive through orange trees and stopped in front of the villa.

They all got out. Senor Gonzales spoke in Spanish to the chauffeur, who drove the car away. The scarlet-painted front door was opened to them by a young Mexican houseboy in a white jacket. Senor Gonzales led them down a short flight of steps into a long, sunny living-room filled with pre-Columbian art. Grotesque stone statues of men and animals were dramatically distributed around the room. One wall was hung with bizarre masks of tin and feathers. A man in a palm-beach suit was lounging in an easy chair by the window. As they entered, he jumped up and came towards them, beaming.

The moment Mark saw him he recognized him. There was no mistaking the Elkish heartiness, the pink, florid skin and the glaring hand-painted tie. So here was another of Frankie’s lies exposed. Mr Riley, the man who had taken her to the bullfight, had not been just a casual acquaintance. He was part of the conspiracy too.

Mr Riley went straight to Frankie, holding out a large hand. ‘Well, well, Mrs Liddon. Didn’t expect to see me, did you? I thought I rated some sunshine so I snuck away for a couple of days.’

His gaze moved then to Mark. For one very bad moment Mark was afraid he might recognize him, even though there had been nothing about him at the bullfight to make him particularly memorable. But Mr Riley’s moon face registered nothing more suspicious than polite hesitation.

Frankie put down her portable radio on a table and made a cursory gesture. ‘Mr Riley — my husband.’

‘Your husband, eh?’ Mr Riley glanced at Senor Gonzales. ‘Well, well, we certainly didn’t expect him.’

Senor Gonzales explained: ‘He came along at the last minute. I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?’

‘Excellent.’ Mr Riley gave his braying, rather foolish laugh. ‘A swell idea.’

He enveloped Mark’s hand in warm, yielding flesh.

Senor Gonzales said: ‘Well, sit down, everybody, and make yourselves comfortable.’

They all sat down. Mr Riley, drawing up a chair next to Frankie, started to talk to her facetiously about the bullfights. Senor Gonzales moved around, offering cigarettes. Mark didn’t know what he had expected, but he certainly hadn’t expected this absurdly normal sociability. There wasn’t the slightest hint in the bearing of any of them to suggest anything more sinister than a rather dull group of people gathered together for a dull party.

And yet this was what Ellie had been kidnapped for; this was the climax of those long hours of intrigue and danger; this was the moment that had Frankie quaking in her shoes.

After a while Gonzales said: ‘If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll go and see about drinks.’ He left the room and was gone quite a long time. Eventually he returned and soon afterwards the houseboy who had let them in appeared with a silver tray of bottles, glasses and ice. Frankie asked for a Scotch and soda. So did Mark. After Frankie had been served, the house-boy came to Mark with his drink. As he bent over him and offered the g!ass, Mark was astonished to feel a little piece of paper slipped into his palm. The boy went on to take Mr Riley a highball and then moved silently out of the room.

The note couldn’t have come from Frankie. She had had no opportunity either to write it or give it to the boy. Curiosity burned Mark. He waited until he had a chance to comment on the collection of masks and then strolled over as if to admire them at close range. He put his drink down on a table and, pretending to examine one of the masks, opened his palm and smoothed out the note.

To his amazement, he recognized Ellie’s broad, sloping handwriting.

Mark, darling, it’s a trap. There’s terrible danger for you. Please, please get away. Don’t worry about me. They won’t harm me now. But get away quickly.

His astonishment turned to exhilaration. This made no sense. It was the craziest of all the crazy developments. But Ellie was here.

Behind him the rapid cocktail conversation droned on. Slipping the note in his pocket, he moved to examine another mask. Since George and Frankie had brought Ellie here, then Mr Riley and Gonzales must be their allies, not their dupes. The meeting at the Belvedere must have been merely a front. They both knew that Frankie was only posing as Mrs Mark Liddon. They were all three of them in on the deal, keeping up the pretense for some reason.

Why? Was it for his sake? Was it possible that Frankie had fooled him yet again and, by pretending to be afraid of him, had deliberately lured him here? It’s a trap, Ellie had written. Then that must be it. Gonzales and Riley knew as well as Frankie that he was their enemy. He wasn’t fooling anyone.

He was conscious of someone at his side and Gonzales’ smooth voice was saying: ‘So you find my masks interesting, Mr Liddon?’

Mark turned to him. ‘Very interesting.’

‘Then we must examine them together later. Right now I think Mrs Liddon might be amused to take a stroll down to the yacht.’

‘I’d love it,’ said Frankie.

She rose. So did Riley, hurrying ahead of her to open the French windows. Gonzales put his hand on Mark’s elbow and the four of them moved out into the sunshine of the gardens.

As they strolled down a path towards the beach, Mark was thinking furiously. Why was Gonzales proposing this trip to the yacht? It would be a more discreet place than the house itself in which to hold him or to kill him. Yes, that was almost certainly it. So, if he was going to save Ellie, it was now or never.

The pier came into view at the end of the path. Its whiteness dazzled the eye. A scattering of sea-birds, idling over the blue water of the cove, seemed flakes of white paint shaved off its railings. In front, moored to the jetty, was the cruiser. There were no visible signs of life on it. It looked quiet and ominous as if it too were part of the conspiracy.

There was not much he could do except gamble. He turned to Gonzales with an apologetic grin. ‘I’m afraid I’m not used to this tropical sun and I stupidly forgot my hat. D’you suppose I could get the houseboy to find me one?’

Frankie, whose arm was linked in Mr Riley’s, suddenly stopped and turned back to look at him. It seemed to Mark that a quick glance was exchanged between Gonzales and Riley. Then Gonzales smiled his affable host’s smile.

‘Why, of course, Mr Liddon. You shouldn’t be out in this sun without a hat if you’re not used to it. I’ll go back with you and find you something.’

‘Don’t bother. I can ask the boy.’

‘It’s no bother.’ Gonzales’ hand was on his arm again. He glanced over his shoulder to Riley. ‘Perhaps you’d take Mrs Liddon on to the yacht. We’ll join you later.’

Mr Riley and Frankie started down the pier. Mark hadn’t expected his plan to work any better than this. At least he had got rid of two of them. As they moved through the gardens, he played with the idea of knocking Gonzales out, but decided against it. So long as they went on playing it polite he would take his cue from them.

They entered the living-room. Frankie’s pigskin portable radio still stood on the table where she had left it. Gonzales led him through the hall and straight upstairs. They went down a tiled corridor to a room which was obviously Gonzales’ bedroom. Gonzales opened a built-in closet, revealing a number of hats on a shelf.

‘There, Mr Liddon, take your choice.’

Mark’s gaze moved over the large hand-carved bed. On a night table at its side stood a portable radio, bound in pigskin, which appeared to be the exact duplicate of Frankie’s. In view of the fuss Gonzales had made over the other radio, this must surely be more than a coincidence. He selected a hat at random and tried it on.

As he did so, he heard the sound of a car drawing up outside the Villa. Gonzales hurried to the window and, after a second, returned, his face rather flustered.

‘If you’ll excuse me, Mr Liddon. Someone has arrived. A matter of business. I’ll be back in a minute.’

He left the room and Mark crossed to the window. The black limousine which had brought them from the Casa Miranda was parked outside the front door and a tall dark man in a brown gabardine suit was getting out.

Immediately he recognized Victor D’Iorio.

The pattern was fitting together now. Last night, when Frankie had called him from the Hotel Mirador, Victor must have decided the situation was grave enough for him to fly down from New York to straighten it out in person. This also explained the delaying tactics downstairs. Gonzales, Riley and Frankie had been waiting for the boss to arrive before they took action.

But at least his arrival had given Mark his chance. He started for the door and then, playing a hunch, turned back and picked up the radio. He hurried with it out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He moved from door to door, calling softly:

‘Ellie, Ellie; it’s me, Mark.’

At the fourth door he was answered by a little cry. His heart beating rapidly, he threw the door open and entered the room. Ellie was running towards him.

‘Mark!’

She threw herself into his arms, clinging to him like a child rescued from the terrors of darkness.

‘Oh, Mark, Mark, darling…’

22

HE held her close to him, kissing her mouth, feeling her heart beating rapidly. He knew there was no time. He should be planning to get her out of the house, to Oscar’s car and back to the safety of Acapulco. But there had to be this moment. She was dressed in a cool white summer suit. She looked lovely, immaculate. He let his hands slide down her back, remembering the lines of her body, restoring her from shadow to reality.

‘I saw you arrive,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Out of the window. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Oh, Mark, darling, how did you get here?’

‘It wasn’t easy, but I made it.’

‘In Mexico I had a kind of dream that you were there, but it didn’t seem real.’

‘And I never dreamed you were here until I got that note. How did you manage to get it to me?’

‘I gave the houseboy my — my sapphire ring.’ She held up her hand to show that the ring was gone. Her eyes were veiled with a curious expression almost of dread as if he were her executioner rather than her deliverer. ‘Oh, Mark, there’s so much to explain.’

‘Just a couple of things now. The rest can wait. They kidnapped you and had Frankie impersonate you? Why?’

You don’t know?’

‘I don’t really know anything.’

She gave a little gesture with her hand. ‘One night I got high. I gambled at the Lorton Club. I lost…’

‘I know that.’

‘I couldn’t pay. I got scared. I ran away. Victor sent someone after me.’

‘George.’

‘Yes, George. He was supposed to kill me. But, since I was here in Mexico, they thought out this other idea.’

‘What other idea?’

‘I didn’t know at first. All the time I was shut up in that house in Mexico City they kept me drugged or something. It it was only when they brought me here that Mr Riley explained. It’s dope.’

‘Narcotics ?’

‘Victor isn’t just in the gambling racket. He runs dope into the States too. He brings it in most through Mexico, from here, from Senor Gonzales’ yacht. Mr Riley is the middleman. Apparently he has carriers bringing it across the border all the time. And now Gonzales has a shipment of heroin. I — I don’t really understand, but it seems to be terribly valuable. Victor wanted to be extra careful with it so he thought out the idea for Frankie to take it across pretending to be me — because I’m fairly well known. Eleanor Ross. The Customs wouldn’t think about searching Mrs Mark Liddon.’

So he knew the explanation at last. It was as simple and sordid as this.

‘Oh, Mark,’ Ellie was clinging to his arm. ‘It’s been so terrible. When they brought me here and told me everything, they said they would have killed me if I’d been anyone else. But Victor didn’t want them to because — because I’d been a friend. They threatened me, though. They said they would still kill me unless I promised never to say anything and not to try to get away until they had got the shipment safely through. I promised. Of course I did. So I’m all right. But it’s different with you. You’ve been fighting against them. You could ruin everything for them. They know that. That’s why they lured you here — to kill you.’ She shook her head despairingly. ‘Oh, darling, darling, you’ve got to try to escape.’

Of course they would escape — together. Because he’d found her, because he knew the dirty truth behind Frankie’s duplicity at last, he felt immensely confident. He saw too, with grim pleasure, that he had a chance to smash Victor’s racket. The function of the two identical radios was obvious now.

The meeting at the Belvedere had been a precautionary measure played out in case of spying eyes. The distinguished Mrs Mark Liddon, staying as a tourist at the Casa Miranda Hotel, had casually run into the distinguished Senor Gonzales who had invited, her to lunch at his villa. Mrs Mark Liddon had taken her chic portable radio — but a switch would have been made. Gonzales’ radio — the one which Mark had with him — was the dummy, the carrier for the narcotic shipment.

While Ellie watched anxiously, he moved to the window. It faced into the front yard. Immediately underneath, less than five feet below, was the sloping roof of the entrance porch. The limousine which had brought Victor had disappeared and there was no one in sight. Escape seemed ludicrously, almost suspiciously simple.

He crossed back to Ellie. ‘Oscar’s waiting out there in a car. At least I’m almost sure he is. All we’ve got to do is to get out of here and run.’

‘But Mark … ‘ She gazed at him uncertainly

He kissed her. ‘Don’t be scared, baby. It’s a cinch.’

Picking up the radio, he put an arm around her and drew her to the window. For a moment she hesitated; then, with a fleeting smile at him, she climbed over the sill and dropped on to the porch roof. He followed with the radio. In a few seconds they had both slid down the narrow pillars of the porch and were running towards the cover of the orange trees.

Any minute he expected some uproar from the house behind them. But nothing happened. Once again he had the uneasy suspicion that this was all too simple. They reached the grove. The brilliant sunshine, filtering through the leaves, made the ripe oranges burn brassily. The air was sweet with the fragrance of orange blossom. It was like running through some insane wedding bouquet. They came to a low wall which marked the edge of the property. Beyond it he could see the oleanders. He vaulted the wall and turned to help Ellie over it. They pushed their way through the tangled bushes and then, ahead, he caught a glimpse of shiny green metal.

In a few seconds they were out on the track, and there was the Buick with Oscar at the wheel.

Relief surged through him. Mark put the radio in the back seat and grinned at Oscar.

‘So you made it. Wonderful.’

The boy did not return his smile. The expression of outraged martyrdom which he had worn at the Casa Miranda was still on his face. Mark remembered the confiscated wallet and pulled it out of his pocket.

The instant he saw it, Oscar beamed with delight. His small hand shot out for it. In his eagerness, he knocked it from Mark’s fingers and it fell on to the ground. As Mark stooped to pick it up, something small and sparkling rolled out of it and disappeared under a dead leaf. He pushed the leaf back and picked the object up. He saw what it was and, for a moment, his heart seemed to stop.

The thing which had rolled from Oscar’s wallet was Ellie’s sapphire ring.

In those first seconds, as he stared at it, gleaming darkly in his palm, he could impose no pattern on his confused thoughts.

The ring had fallen out of Oscar’s wallet. Oscar’s wallet had been in his own pocket ever since he had taken it from the boy outside the Casa Miranda. And yet Ellie had said she had given the ring only half an hour ago to Gonzales’ houseman.

All he could master at this stage was the fact that Ellie had lied. She must have lied. There was no possible doubt about it.

He turned to her, holding out the ring. He mustn’t think what he was thinking. He must wait, not feel, wait and see what would happen.

In a very quiet voice, he remarked: ‘You said you gave this to Gonzales’ houseman?’

He had been hoping against hope that the question would not jolt her, that her face would not change. But the look of dread which had been there up in the room was back in her eyes. She took a step towards him, gesturing weakly.

‘I - I can explain. I said that, yes. But - I was only thinking of you. Mark, I had to get you out. I…’

The truth was beginning to dawn on him very slowly. It was like the first hint of a pain which would inevitably grow and grow until it became unendurable.

‘Mark, listen to me … ‘

He turned from her to Oscar, who was still sitting in the car, watching.

‘Okay, Oscar - how did you get this ring?’

Ellie spun around. ‘No, Oscar. Don’t.’

She took a step towards the car, but Mark pushed past her and gripped Oscar’s shoulders.

‘Tell me. And tell! me the exact truth. How did you get this ring?’

Already, even without a word from Oscar, he almost knew. How could there be more than one explanation? Last night in Mexico City, when he had left Ellie, supposedly, doped and asleep, at the Hotel Mirador, the ring had been on her finger. He had seen it gleaming in the light from the bedside lamp. According to her story - according to what he had believed - Frankie and George had come then and kidnapped her again. If that had been true, how possibly could the ring have got into Oscar’s wallet?

The pain was getting stronger and stronger - that pain without any particular focus that in the end was going to overwhelm him.

‘Tell me, Oscar,’ he insisted.

The boy glanced from Ellie’s white face to Mark. Then, with a little shrug, he said: ‘If I must choose … then, Mr Liddon, you are more my friend than Mrs Liddon. She gave it to me - last night.’

It was coming. ‘When?’

‘Just before you arrived with your gun at the Hotel Granada, she telephoned to me. She said, if I went to George and Frankie and told them I had taken her back to my house she would give me the ring. Later, after you’d left to go to George’s apartment, she came to the hotel. She gave me the ring.’

She came to the hotel. Ellie, whom he had left doped, incoherent, lying like a corpse in the bed at the Mirador!

Oscar’s voice went on: ‘I did what she told me. I went around to Bolivar 45. George and Frankie were coming out to go to their car. I told them I had Mrs Liddon back at my house. I told the story most well so that they believe me. Then - I went upstairs and helped you to escape.’

Mark had given up struggling now. This was the truth. It was a truth bitter as strychnine, but he had to swallow it.

When Frankie had told him at the Belvedere that Ellie was back at Oscar’s house it had seemed the flimsiest of all her flimsy lies. It had, of course, been a lie. But it hadn’t been Frankie’s lie. It had been a lie which she had believed to be the truth, a lie which had been deliberately manufactured by Ellie and Oscar.

He could see the whole picture now. It was a picture shockingly unlike anything he had ever imagined. He had thought it was Frankie who had telephoned Victor from the Hotel Mirador last night. But it had been Ellie. It was Ellie who had played a gigantic hoax that had fooled them all.

It wasn’t Frankie who was Victor’s ally. It was Ellie.

Oscar was looking at him beseechingly. ‘Mr Liddon, was such a pretty ring. Always I want so much a sapphire ring. Was it then bad what I did? Was it bad against you — my friend?’

It seemed preposterous that even Oscar could be caring about Oscar at that moment. Okay, the boy had been playing all of them against each other. With his immense talent for intrigue, he had kept himself on a three-way payroll. But who cared? Venality was Oscar’s function in life, anyway. Who cared about Oscar?

He made himself turn to Ellie although it took almost more strength than he had left. There seemed to be some block to his vision. He was looking at her, but she seemed quite different, small, insubstantial like a ghost with great staring eyes in a thin, gaunt face.

Slowly, forming each word with an effort, he said: ‘Last night — when I saved you from Oscar’s house, you were only pretending to be doped.’

Her hand fluttered out to him. Her voice sounded quite different too — thin, almost piping like a ghost’s voice.

‘Mark, if only you’ll listen … ‘

He went relentlessly on, snapping fact after fact into place. ‘Everything you told me back in that room was a lie — a distortion. Frankie wasn’t going to carry that heroin for Victor. It was you. You were going to do it yourself.’

‘Mark       …’

‘You came from New York to do it. Then Frankie and George managed to stop you and Frankie took your place. When I rescued you, you wanted to be rescued, but you didn’t want me. I was just something in the way — something to be got rid of as soon as possible so you could carry on for Victor. You just pretended to fall asleep at the Hotel Mirador last night; probably you let that picture drop out of the compact on purpose so that I’d find out that George was Victor’s barman and go chasing after George. Because you wanted to get me out of the room, didn’t you? So you could call Victor. So you could tell him: “Look, George and Frankie kidnapped me but I’ve escaped. I’m on the job again. Of course, there’s that lug of a husband of mine blundering around, lousing things up, but I can take care of him. Okay, Victor, I’m free again. What’s the order of the day?”’

She opened her mouth to speak, but he went on:

‘And now, here at the villa, you weren’t any prisoner up there. You were just one of the kids, one of Victor’s cozy little clique. Oh God, you said when you saw me, here comes the old water-buffalo lumbering in again. Let’s write it a note and send it shambling away.’

He hadn’t wanted to be bitter, but the bitterness flowed out from some secret part of him, turning everything sour.

Ellie was crying. Dimly he was aware of it. And dimly her thin, piping ghost’s voice trailed through to him.

‘If you’ll listen — Mark, if only you’ll listen to me. Yes, I did all that. I said I’d carry the dope for Victor. But it was only because he made me, he forced me. If I didn’t, he said, he’d tell you — tell you dreadful things about me. He’d make it, he said, so’s you’d never want even to touch me again. Mark, he forced me. Don’t you see? I loved you. I love you. To do this for Victor, to settle the score — that was my only hope to keep him quiet, to save our marriage. And now, up in that room, I couldn’t tell you the truth. How could I? If I did, you’d have despised me, I’d have lost everything I’d been fighting for. But I wanted you to escape because there is terrible danger for you here. So I wrote that note to save you. Oh, Mark, if you’d try to believe me…’

He was only half listening, only half understanding. She’d done all these things to save their marriage — because she loved him. She was saying that again. If she hadn’t squared Victor, he’d have told things that would have made Mark hate her. What things? What could Victor possibly have to say that could make any difference? There was still so much he didn’t understand. Maybe, eventually, it would all be of terrible importance. But he couldn’t cope with it now.

Now there was only one thing. It was against all logic, but there it was, as real as the nagging pain inside him. This was so. That was so. Okay, okay. But beyond anything, he had to know about Frankie.

Ellie was still chattering on. Or was she? He couldn’t be quite sure.

‘Tell me about Frankie and George,’ he said. ‘George was Victor’s barman, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s working against him. That’s got to be it. He and Frankie are working against him.’

‘Yes … oh yes. I suppose so. Yes.’

He wouldn’t ask why. Even if Ellie knew why, that didn’t matter at the moment. What mattered was that he had been the greatest fool of all time. Stumbling blindly in pursuit of Ellie, he had always thought of Frankie as the enemy, Frankie as the thing to be destroyed. He had seen falseness and trickery behind everything she had said and done. And yet, all the time, she had been working against Victor.

With a curious, invalid’s clarity — the clarity that comes at the point of complete emotional exhaustion — he saw how, from the start, he had over and over again almost shipwrecked her. By saving Ellie in Mexico City, he had played straight into Victor’s hands. By following Frankie to Acapulco, by holding her up with the magazine at the Belvedere, he had almost done it again.

And that wasn’t all. He, Mark, had given Ellie the chance to call Victor and warn him of the impersonation. Almost certainly Victor had ordered her to pick up Mr Riley in Mexico and drive to Acapulco to warn Gonzales of the false ‘Mrs Liddon’. That morning, at the Belvedere, Gonzales had known Frankie was an impostor. He had put on a smooth front merely to lure her to the villa. She had thought she was fooling him. But, thanks to Mark, she was the one who had been outsmarted.

And now that they had got her, now that they had taken her to the yacht .

He turned suddenly to Ellie. ‘What are they going to do with Frankie?’

His wife seemed even less real to him now — a ghost that had almost entirely faded with only the big, staring eyes swimming in a kind of void.

‘Frankie ?’

‘They’re going to kill her, aren’t they?’

She gave a sort of exasperated shrug. ‘Who cares? Oh, Mark, darling, who cares what they do with her? She’s just nothing. It’s only you and I who matter.’

He despised her then. If he had stopped to think, it would have seemed impossible that those few crowded moments could have been sufficient to change his great love to contempt. But he wasn’t thinking. He was living through the moment and he felt the contempt in his blood like a poison. This was the girl he had loved — a girl who could lie, cheat, play along with gangsters to ‘save her marriage’ and then, having helped to lure Frankie to her certain death, could shrug and say:

‘Who cares whether they kill her or not? It’s only you and I who matter.’

Vaguely, like a snatched glimpse of a photograph before it was whisked away, an image came of Mrs Ross, sitting frostily by her meagre fire, her head bent over her coffee cup.

‘She lies. She always has ever since she was a child. You can’t tell what’s true and what’s lies.’

There was only one thing to do. Of course. He saw that now. He was still holding the ring and Oscar’s wallet. He stuffed them into his pocket. Turning from Ellie, he started to run back towards the villa.

He heard her scream behind him and call out: ‘Mark, Mark, where are you going?’

‘To get Frankie.’

‘No, no; Mark, come back. Mark, they’ll kill you.’

He heard his wife’s footsteps padding behind him.

‘Oh, Mark, darling, I love you. I love you. Come back.’ He vaulted the low stone wall and ran on through the orange trees.

23

HE came out of the orange grove on to the gravel drive. The villa loomed in front of him. He had to pass it to reach the pier which led to the yacht. There was no cover. He didn’t care about that either.

His mind hadn’t yet had time to catch up with the enormous change in his heart. He knew he was being reckless. But this, in a strange way, was a release. Out of the labyrinth of lies and confusion he had emerged at last with one indisputable truth.

Frankie was against Victor and, partly through his fault, she was in terrible danger.

He had no gun, no plan. He had nothing to offer as a savior except this stubborn determination to salvage at least something. For all he knew, Frankie and George were as crooked as the rest of them - two small-time operators, perhaps, trying to muscle in on Victor’s racket. But there was a chance that Frankie was someone good.

As he thought of Frankie, she sprang vividly alive in his mind exactly as he had seen her that first time at the bullfight, young, cool, with her straight blue eyes surveying him candidly. He had hated her so many times since then, hadn’t he? It seemed to him that he had. But through all those long hours he had misinterpreted his own emotions as much as everything else.

As he ran straight past the house and down the path which led to the pier he felt an improbable exhilaration. At last he was doing something that might be worth doing after days dedicated to the pursuit of a phantom. If there had been anyone in the house, they must have seen him. But there was no outcry, no sound of activity behind him. Perhaps, since Ellie was Victor’s pal, they had all been deliberately allowing him to go and come as he liked. Maybe Ellie had made that request. He could almost hear her saying it. ‘Victor, darling, why don’t we let my poor addle-pated husband get away? What harm can he do? He’s far too dumb and far too much in love with me to be any menace.’

The bitterness was stirring in him again. Yes, that was probably it. That explained why their escape’ from the villa bedroom had been so simple. He had thought he was the dashing hero saving his wife from the clutches of her persecutors. In reality, all he had been was a - clown.

He reached the pier and started to run along its wooden slats towards the yacht moored at the jetty. A large white bird, perched on the railing, squawked, flapped its wings and lumbered away. He reached the gangplank which led on to the yacht’s deck. He hurried across it and paused. There was no sign of any crew. They must have been sent away. He moved to the head of a companionway leading down to the cabins. The searing thought came that maybe he was too late. It was well over half an hour ago that he had left Mr Riley and Frankie on the pier. If they had had her there all that time…

He swung down the companionway. A corridor stretched towards the bows with closed doors leading off to the cabins. As he hesitated, straining his ears, he heard voices coming from one of the rooms ahead. He moved to the closed door. Mr Riley’s braying laugh sounded, followed by another voice - drawling, self-assured. Victor’s voice.

They would be armed, of course. He was walking head-on into danger. But he had made his decision. He pushed the door inward and entered the cabin.

In the same instant that he saw Victor and Mr Riley he saw Frankie, and the sight of her sent his spirits soaring. He was not too late. She was sitting in a chair against the cabin wall. Now that things were really tough for her, she had lost that little-girl frightened look. She seemed as calm as always and rather bored. She was smoking a cigarette and her legs were crossed. She was refusing to admit a crisis again. And suddenly he didn’t care if she were a crook or not. This girl had more guts than the rest of them put together. Whatever she might be, whatever she had done, she was worth saving.

Immediately in front of her Victor was lolling on a bunk. A revolver dangled from his hand. Against the opposite wall was Mr Riley. He too had a revolver. Senor Gonzales was not there.

As Mark entered, all three of them turned. But only Mr Riley registered emotion with a stertorous gasp. Frankie merely glanced at him through cigarette smoke, and Victor continued to lounge on the bunk as indolently as he had lounged in his crimson-canopied bed in New York. His bright, street-urchin’s eyes, under their thick lashes, watched Mark gravely for a moment. Then he nodded to Mr Riley, who crossed to Mark, frisked him and then moved back to his place by the wall. Then Victor’s handsome face broke into a friendly grin.

‘Well, this is a surprise. You’re supposed to be escaping.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘That’s what I gathered.’

‘Ellie asked for it special. We’d all of us do anything for Ellie.’ Victor looked down at the gun in his hand. ‘What happened? Didn’t she write you a note to scram?’

‘She did.’

‘And didn’t Gonzales take you upstairs and leave you there to contact her?’

So he had been shepherded into his escape as thoroughly as that. ‘Yes, he did.’

Victor’s lashes veiled his eyes. ‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’

Mark had never felt less like being devious. Trickery and deceit were so inalienably connected now in his mind with Ellie and the life he had to reject if he was to keep sane. Everything in him wanted to yell out, ‘I’ve come to get Frankie’. But he knew his only hope for saving her lay in playing their game, using the technique which had been developed in him by his catastrophic pursuit of Ellie.

He grinned back at Victor. The grin came quite easily. ‘I’m here,’ he said, ‘because I’ve a couple of scores to settle with Frankie myself. I thought I might be able to help.’

If he could make Victor believe, for a little time, that he was prepared to be an ally, he might put him off his guard long enough at least to grab a gun.

Victor accepted this remark in silence. He pushed himself up on one elbow, the gun still drooping from his fingers.

‘First let’s get one thing straight, baby. Just how much do you know?’

‘Enough.’

‘Ellie told you?’

‘I figured it out myself.’

Victor patted the gun affectionately. ‘You could make things sort of awkward for us. Realize that?’

‘Sure. If I wanted to.’

‘But you’re ready to go along with us?’

‘I’ve followed Ellie this far. Think I’d go back on her now?’

Victor grinned again. ‘Love is a wonderful thing. Okay. So you’re mad with Frankie too. Everyone’s mad with Frankie. What have you got against her?’

‘What haven’t I got against her? She and George kidnapped my wife; they tried to beat me up; they … ‘

‘Okay, okay.’ Victor seemed satisfied. ‘So you’re sticking by us. Fine.’ He pointed with the gun at Frankie. ‘Now, we’ve got this little bitch — thanks to Ellie, thanks to you, thanks to a couple of other people. But she’s only half of what we want. The guy I’m mad at is George. He gets himself in jail. Okay. When he comes out, I give him his job back, and what thanks do I get? He and this smart cookie try a little high jacking routine to the tune of seventy grand.’ He shook his head. ‘Yeah, George is the boy I want.’

Mark knew the truth now - if Victor was to be believed. Frankie was just another crook, teamed up with George to highjack a shipment of Victor’s narcotics. This then was to be a story with no heroine and no role for him as Sir Lancelot. But he had already gone so far down the road of disillusionment that this didn’t alter his decision. However tawdry her racket, Frankie was the girl whom Ellie had been prepared to let die in order to ‘save her marriage’. For that reason alone she had to be rescued at all costs.

Victor was still looking at him. ‘Now, Frankie knows where George is. But Frankie isn’t being very co-operative. You could help a lot, kid, if you know where we could locate him.’

‘Last night he was in Mexico City,’ said Mark. ‘That’s all I know.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Afraid so.’

Victor sighed. ‘That’s too bad. So you know what you’re going to do now? You’re scramming out of here back to your little wife. I’m afraid we’re going to have to make Frankie change her mind. It won’t be nice to watch.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Mark, ‘it’ll be very nice. I think I’ll stick around.’

He had expected the other man to see through that. But Victor seemed to accept it. His black eyes merely showed a faintly surprised interest as if he hadn’t credited Mark with such a laudable lack of squeamishness.

‘Okay, baby. If you want to, stick around. The more the merrier.’

Mark was beginning to feel a faint hope. At least he had established himself as something Victor could understand - a petty, revengeful character with a sadistic desire to watch a girl beaten up. All through the conversation Mr Riley had been standing in silence. If there was a weak spot, he would be it. Mark edged towards him. With a quick spring at the right moment he might succeed in getting his gun.

Victor had risen slowly from the bed and was hitching up his pants. With the revolver in his hand, he turned towards Frankie and moved until he was standing directly in front of her. He looked down at her, smiling his warm, affectionate smile.

‘Okay, sugar. Where’s George?’

Frankie smiled back at him with equally matched sweetness. ‘You’re wasting your breath.’

‘I am, am I?’ Victor gave her a light, almost playful slap on the cheek. It knocked the ash from her cigarette on to the floor. Without the slightest change of expression, Frankie clucked disapprovingly and pointed to the ash.

‘Now look what you’ve done - messing up the pretty carpet.’

For the first time a hint of anger showed on Victor’s face. Mr Riley was watching them both, his heavy cheeks twitching in anticipation. Mark moved the fraction of an inch closer to him. He felt a strange excitement. He remembered the moment last night in the apartment on Bolivar when he had tried to bully Frankie. Frankie didn’t bully easily. You can’t make people tell things with guns.

Victor was half stooped over the girl. ‘Do I have to begin with the bugs and the flowers? We’ve got you here. We’re going to keep you. You’re not going to get away. You’re going to tell us where George is.’

Frankie took the cigarette out of her mouth and brushed a flake of ash from her skirt. ‘And if I don’t?’

Victor shrugged. ‘This happens - and then that happens. And then, finally, you end up dead.’

‘And,’ murmured Frankie serenely, ‘you end up without George.’

Victor laughed. ‘You think we won’t be able to get him? A little jailbird like that floating around on his own without two cents in his pocket?’

‘Maybe he’s not so much on his own as you think.’

‘Meaning?’

Frankie’s smile was exasperatingly tranquil now. ‘Do I have to begin with the bugs and the flowers? George was jailed because he was caught carrying your dope for you, yes. He was in jail three years. That’s quite a long time. It was long enough for Hitler to write a book. It was long enough for George to think up a little kampf of his own.’

She leaned forward, the cigarette still in her hand, looking kindly, like a school teacher smoothing out a problem in the eighth grade.

‘This is obviously the time and the place to tell you the story of George’s life.’

Although there were two guns directed at her, she had almost succeeded in snatching control of the situation away from Victor.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Listen to this sad little tale. You thought you had George in your pocket because he’d picked up that morphine addiction in the Army hospital and you kept him supplied with dope after he came out. When they arrested him he didn’t squawk on you. No. But things happen, as I said, in jail. One thing that happened was that they cured him of the habit. Another thing that happened was that George, being George, got cured the big way. He turned into an anti-dope crusader, with half a dozen flaming swords in either hand. Sitting there in his cell, he figured out a plan and he took it to the authorities in his hot little hand. His plan was to get his job back with you and see whether he couldn’t find out some interesting things about you. The police thought it was a dandy idea and let him out on parole.’

Still smiling at Victor, she dropped her burning cigarette on to the carpet. ‘So you see what I mean when I say he’s less on his own than you think.’

Victor hadn’t liked that at all. Mark could see the growing uneasiness take possession of him. And, as he watched, his own excitement was mounting. So much for the crook-against-crook theory. Why shouldn’t this be true? Why shouldn’t Frankie and George be on the side of law and decency after all?

Frankie was still gazing straight at Victor. Mr Riley, his puffy cheeks a splotched grey now, was caught up in the intensity that the two others had engendered. This, if ever, was Mark’s moment. He braced himself to jump on Mr Riley. As he did so, the cabin door was thrown open. All of them spun around. Ellie stood on the threshold, her eyes big as a lemur’s eyes, her face haggard and despairing. She had a leather handbag on a strap slung over her shoulder. It hadn’t been there when Mark had left her by Oscar’s car.

Oddly, now that all his emotion for her was spent, that was the only thing he noticed. She had started to run after him without a handbag — now she had a handbag.

For a moment she hesitated by the open door, her gaze moving wildly from Mark, to Victor, to Mr Riley.

Then, with a sob, she ran towards Victor, her handbag swinging like a pendulum.

‘Don’t hurt him,’ she cried. ‘Please, Victor, don’t do anything to Mark. It’s just that we had a quarrel. I can make it all right again.’

She turned to Mark and gripped his arm, gazing up at him. ‘Mark, darling, tell him you’re on our side. If you explain, he won’t do anything to you. Tell him that was just a crazy notion of yours — breaking in here trying to rescue Frankie.’

Her hands were nagging at his arms. He looked over her shoulder at Victor. The damage was done, of course. Here she was trying to ‘save her marriage’ again and, with that one sentence about rescuing Frankie, she had destroyed everything for him as effectively as if it had been part of a malicious plan.

Mr Riley’s gun was still aimed at Frankie. But Victor had swung around slowly so that his revolver was pointed straight at Mark’s stomach.

‘Well, well, Mr Liddon,’ he said quietly, ‘so you’re being smart too. Everyone’s being smart. George has his tie-up with the police. Frankie has her tie-up with you.’

Ellie was still chattering and pulling at his arm. He stepped back with her until they were both standing against the cabin wall. She was pressed at his side, the sharp edge of her handbag sticking uncomfortably into his ribs. He looked from Victor to Frankie. The girl had risen and was looking back at him. For a moment her eyes seemed to him to be haunted with anxiety. But, almost immediately, they were in control again.

Victor was watching Ellie now. His face was very grim. ‘Sorry, kid,’ he said to her. ‘I’d have liked to save this one for you, but I guess you’ll have to find yourself another husband.’ He jerked the gun forward. ‘Okay, Mr Liddon. Where’s George?’

It was Frankie who spoke. Suddenly, in a voice harsh with contempt, she said: ‘You fool, he doesn’t know.’

Victor paid her no attention. ‘I’m waiting, Mr Liddon.’

‘He doesn’t know.’ Frankie took a step forward. Her chin was thrust out defiantly. ‘Don’t you have any sense? Can’t you see he’s been fighting us all along the line? For God’s sake, forget about him. Give him back to his wife.’

Victor did glance at her then and his face broke slowly into a grin of triumph. ‘So that’s the way it is. Very interesting. Very interesting and romantic. Two of you. Two beautiful babes — both stuck on Mr Liddon.’

Frankie glared at him. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’

‘I won’t make you laugh, sugar. I promise, cross my heart, I won’t make you laugh.’ Victor looked down at the gun pointed at Mark and then looked up at her. ‘Okay, Frankie. Tell me where George is or I shoot your boy-friend. I’ll give you a count of ten.’

The cabin was deathly quiet now. Mark looked straight at the revolver, feeling nothing.

‘One, Frankie. Where’s George? Two. Where’s George?’ Ellie, pressed against Mark, was shivering. He could hear her breath coming in tiny sobs. The handbag, half hidden behind her arm, was digging against him. Suddenly, when there seemed to be no hope, a thought came. Ellie had not had the handbag in the car. Although she’d been running after him, she had stopped and collected it.

Why? Because there was a gun in it?

His hand dropped behind Ellie’s. Very slowly he started to inch his fingers up the slippery leather side.

‘Three. Three, Frankie. Where’s George?’

Frankie was looking terribly young and ingenuous. She had looked that way at the Belvedere when she had been really frightened. But he knew, of course, that she wasn’t going to tell. Why should she? This was George’s life against his and she was George’s girl. There was nothing devious, vacillating or perverse about Frankie. She knew where her loyalties lay.

His fingers crept cautiously higher and higher up the handbag’s side. Ellie’s arm was in front of him, shielding it from Victor’s view. But he couldn’t be sure that she was shielding it on purpose. He couldn’t even be certain that she realized what he was doing. It was ironical. This was his wife, the girl he had loved, but, although he could understand everything that was passing through Frankie’s mind, Ellie was still a complete mystery. Her loyalties were as incomprehensible as a Martian’s. Now that it was his life or Victor’s which way would she jump?

‘Four, Frankie. Where’s George?’

Frankie had half turned towards Mark. Her hand went out to him in a hopeless little gesture. He knew exactly what it meant. She was letting him know that it was agony for her, but there was nothing she could do. He understood. He wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise. This hadn’t been any of her doing. She had done everything in her power to keep him out of it. But it was unbearable for him to see her suffering so much, and he hated Victor then — not for what he was doing to him, not even for what he had made of Ellie, but for what he was forcing Frankie to endure.

Mark’s fingers, moving up Ellie’s handbag, found the clasp. He eased it open and his hand crept downwards into the bag. As it did so, he felt Ellie stiffen. His hand froze. His heart was beating like a bird’s wings smashing against a window pane.

‘Five, Frankie.’ Victor twirled the gun around his finger.

Slowly, very slowly, Ellie’s hand started to crawl up the bag towards Mark’s. In a few seconds it was at the clasp. Then it started to slide down into the bag itself. Vaguely, Mark realized that his whole marriage was finding its meaning at this moment. It was wretched, of course, beyond any hope of repair. But this one moment would show whether there had ever been a spark of validity in it.

‘Six, Frankie,’ said Victor.

Ellie’s hand, moving down, touched his. For one second the fingers seemed to hesitate, then they settled around his. This, if she were on Victor’s side, would be the moment when she would scream her warning. Mark waited, tense as a violin string. But the scream didn’t come. Ellie’s fingers tugged at his; they were guiding them expertly deeper into the bag.

‘Seven, Frankie.’

Mark’s hand touched metal. Ellie’s fingers pressed his down against the revolver. Then, when she was sure he had clasped the gun, she withdrew her hand stealthily and her arm was back slack at her side again, hiding his hand from Victor.

He had the gun now. A panoramic montage of his marriage rushed through him There had then been something to it, after all. For this one second, at least, Ellie had been his wife.

Victor grinned at Frankie. Then he twirled the gun again.

‘Eight, Frankie. Where’s George?’

With one rapid movement Mark tugged the revolver out of Ellie’s bag and shot. Victor’s gun pirouetted through the air. Mark shot again. Victor’s right hand soared bizarrely upwards. His face took on an expression of immense surprise. Blood spurted from his shirt front and, as the gun clattered to the floor, he pitched forward after it on to his face.

As if he had three pairs of eyes, Mark saw with simultaneous exactness, Frankie plunging for Victor’s gun, Mr Riley swinging around towards him and Ellie flinging herself forward.

As Frankie leaped on Victor’s gun, Mr Riley fired straight at Mark. In the same instant, Mark’s gun arm was knocked sideways and Ellie was stumbling on to her knees. A fourth shot rang out and Mr Riley staggered back against the cabin wall, groaned and slid, like a stuffed sack, on to the floor.

Automatically, Mark’s mind went on ticking, putting things into place. Mr Riley had fired at him; Ellie had thrown herself in front of him to save him, and then Frankie had shot Mr Riley with Victor’s gun.

That was it. That was what had happened. Ellie was still on her knees. He stooped to put his arms around her. She gave a little whimpering cry. She half turned towards him and he saw her profile, white and contracted with pain and fear. And, as he half sank to the ground beside her, he saw the blood too on her white suit.

Suddenly all the old tenderness for her came surging back. She had seen Mr Riley moving before he had. She could have waited. She could have left it to Mark to fight his own battle. But she had thrown herself across him to take the bullet.

‘Ellie,’ he whispered. ‘Ellie.’

Frankie was somewhere there. Her voice, quite unnatural to him, was saying: ‘Victor’s dead. Mr Riley’s out. It’s all right. I’ve got his gun.’

On his knees, Mark bent over Ellie. Her eyes, still dark with fear, were gazing up at his.

‘It could, Mark,’ she said. ‘It could have — worked out.’ He found one of her hands and held it tight. He would have done anything to make the fear go from her eyes.

‘Ellie,’ he said. ‘Ellie, baby.’

But he could feel the life sinking out of her. Although her eyes were still fixed on his face, she wasn’t seeing him. He could tell that.

‘Ellie,’ he said again.

Then he knew that she was dead in his arms.

24

HE slipped his arm from under her and stayed on his knees at her side. She was dead. His love — the pursuit — everything had ended like this.

Vaguely he was conscious of blood soaking through the sleeve of his right arm. Vaguely too he became aware of pain. He looked at his arm. The pain was concentrated there. He was wounded, then. The bullet that had killed Ellie had passed right through her heart and lodged in his arm. He gazed stupidly at the stained sleeve, thinking:

‘It’s there. The bullet that killed her is in me.’

A hand on his shoulder demanded attention. He glanced up. Frankie, the blonde hair falling forward around her young solemn face, was bending over him.

‘Mark, I’m sorry. I want you to know that. I’m sorry.’

‘That’s okay.’

He turned back from her to look at his arm. She noticed it too.

‘You’re shot.’

‘It’s okay.’

She was on her knees at his side. She was unbuttoning his jacket and pulling it back over his shoulders. As she drew the sleeve off his right arm, the pain flared up. He welcomed it. It was something to focus on, something that wasn’t the body in front of him or the charnel-house horror of the cabin.

Rather clumsily she had pulled back the sleeve of his shirt, revealing the wound on his upper arm. She said, ‘I’m not good at this sort of thing, but I’ll try.’

In a few seconds she was twisting a handkerchief tightly around his biceps above the wound. Her face, very close to his, was taut with concentration.

She said: ‘You’ve got to believe one thing. I didn’t lie about her. I did think she was at Oscar’s in Mexico City.’

All his thoughts seemed to be in miniature, tiny images of past, uninteresting things.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It was Oscar. She bribed him to tell you that. Oscar’s been playing all ends against the middle.’

She was trying to tie the handkerchief into a knot. The wound throbbed, bringing him a sensation of queasiness.

‘I didn’t realize it,’ she said. ‘Neither did George. We thought everything was okay. I never dreamed I was walking into a trap here.’ The handkerchief was tied now. She worked at his necktie, undid it and managed to construct a sling for his arm. There.’

She picked up his jacket and arranged it on his shoulders like a cloak. You saved me,’ she said suddenly. ‘I thought you were going to ruin everything and it was you who saved me.’

He started to get up. Her hand went out as if to stop him. But he got to his feet.

He said: ‘I haven’t saved you yet. There are still Gonzales and his pals at the villa.’

He glanced back towards Ellie, and Frankie cried:

‘Don’t. Don’t look at her.’ She gripped his left arm. Don’t.’

He felt even more disembodied now. Even the shock of Ellie’s death was fading into something small and far away. Frankie was looking at him bleakly. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll get you out of here.’

‘Not me.’ She said that sharply. ‘You go. We’ll get you off the boat and hide you somewhere. Then you get away. You’ve done enough. But I’m going to stay.’

‘Stay?’

‘I’ve got to. George sent me here to get that stuff. I’ve got to find it. It’s the only actual proof.’

It took him a moment to understand. The stuff? You mean the dope in the radio?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘You’ve got it!’

‘Yes. And I’ve got Oscar waiting in a car too.’

Her look of astonishment somehow touched him. He smiled at her faintly.

‘You’d be surprised about water buffaloes. There’s no holding them once they get up momentum.’

She stood looking at him for a long, enigmatic moment. Then she hurried to the cabin porthole. He watched her peering out, very slim and tense. Suddenly she gasped. He crossed to her side.

The porthole gave a view of the pier and the gardens stretching up to the villa. In the brilliant sunshine he saw a number of men collecting at the foot of the pier. For a second, he thought: ‘So this is the end. Gonzales has heard the shots and got himself a posse.’ Then the figures started up the pier towards the yacht and he saw that most of them were in uniform — policeman’s uniform or soldier’s uniform. And, improbably, leading them, were George and Oscar.

‘George!’ Frankie’s face broke into a radiant smile. Obscurely, it hurt him like the wound in his arm to see that expression of joy on her face. ‘George.’

She turned sharply from him and ran out of the cabin. He followed down the corridor towards the companionway. He climbed it laboriously, pulling himself up with one arm. He stood on the deck, the heat of the tropical sun pounding at him. Oscar, George and the police — he counted seven of them — were running towards the yacht and Frankie was running towards them. As he looked, she reached George and was throwing herself into his arms. The policemen and Oscar swarmed around them and on. In a few seconds they were climbing on to the yacht. Oscar, his eyes sparkling with excitement, ran to his side.

‘Mr Liddon, you are safe?’

‘I’m safe.’

‘And the others?’

Mark nodded towards the companionway. ‘There’s no danger.’

Oscar called imperiously to the policemen like a young captain exhorting his men into battle. They started towards the companionway. The boy lingered at Mark’s side. His gaze settled on the sling and his face darkened with distress.

‘But you are wounded!’

‘Yes.’

‘Is bad?’ Delicately Oscar touched Mark’s arm. ‘Is much pain?’

‘It’s okay.’

‘What a terrible thing.’ Oscar cocked his head on one side and then added very diffidently: ‘And my wallet? In the danger, the shooting, you do not lose my wallet and the ring?’

‘I’ve got them.’

‘Ay.’ Oscar beamed.

George and Frankie were coming along the gangplank with three more policemen. George’s arm was around Frankie’s waist. Automatically, although he didn’t care, Mark asked: ‘How did George get here?’

The old familiar look of guilt spread over Oscar’s face. ‘Perhaps what I do is bad. Perhaps you do not forgive me. But, as I followed you in the car, I got more and more mad. I think: “Mr Liddon is my friend and he steals my wallet. What sort of friendship is that?” Finally when I come to the villa I begin to think: “Maybe George is my better friend.” So I leave the car, find a little tienda and call the number George gave to me in Mexico. I …’

George and Frankie were at their side now. George’s intense, zealot’s face was glowing with excitement.

‘Mr Liddon, I’ve got to apologize and I’ve got to thank you. Until Oscar called about an hour ago I hadn’t any idea Frankie was in danger. I got on to the police as quickly as I could. But I would have been too late. It was you who saved her.’

Mark didn’t say anything. The feeling of numbness was returning. All this noise, confusion and excitement jarred on him like the blaring jukeboxes in the Mexican cafés. Okay, okay. In a pet, Oscar had pulled off his last and biggest double-cross and had managed to save the day. Police were everywhere. Senor Gonzales would be arrested. Mr Riley — if he was still alive — would be arrested. Victor’s ring was broken. Frankie was restored to her boy-friend.

And Ellie was dead.

Okay, okay. Let them all dance boleros, throw confetti and shoot off rockets in the public squares. What did it matter now?

The deck under his feet seemed to be swaying slightly as if they were at sea. George’s eyes, under the flopping blond forelock, were fixed on his face.

‘Frankie tells me you got the radio. That’s wonderful. Wonderful. But there’s still a couple of things I’ve got to ask you. I …’

‘Not now, George.’ Frankie’s hand was on Mark’s arm. ‘No one’s going to ask him anything. I’m going to take him to a doctor.’

‘But …’

‘He’s in pain, can’t you see?’

‘Yes,’ broke in Oscar. ‘I know a most good, a most inexpensive doctor. I drive.’

Frankie and George were arguing. Mark didn’t bother to listen. In a few seconds or minutes he and Frankie and Oscar and one of the policemen were walking back towards the house. Frankie’s hand was still on his arm, steadying him. They passed the house and went through the orange grove back to Oscar’s car.

When they reached it, Oscar ran ahead, plunged into the back seat and came out gingerly holding the portable radio. He carried it to Frankie, his eyes round with doubt.

‘Perhaps I do wrong,’ he said. ‘When Mr Liddon leaves it there in the car I am bored, bored. I try to play it; it does not work. I open the back to fix it and is all full of white powder. Some of it spills on the floor of the car. Just a little not much.’

The policeman took the radio and returned towards the villa. Oscar jumped into the driver’s seat. Frankie helped Mark in and climbed in herself.

Majestically, Oscar swerved the car out of the track and down the road back towards Acapulco.

25

Now that the villa was left behind, he was starting to feel again. The car was speeding past a tropical landscape, bright and gay as a travel poster. Come to Mexico, the Land of Sun.

Frankie’s hand with the slightly roughened knuckles lay on her lap only a few inches from his own. The sight of it took him back to the first clash he had had with her in the Hotel Reforma when he had looked at that same hand, lying on the couch close to his, and had felt the immense strangeness of another human being.

Although she had become the most important thing in his life, he knew practically nothing about her — except that she was George’s girl. Perhaps, if he found out more, if he tried to put everything on a basis of plain, impersonal fact, he would feel less lost.

He said: ‘So you’ve been working for the police?’

She turned to him. ‘I suppose so. In a way. But I only did it for George.’

‘And what you told Victor about George was true?’

She nodded. ‘For a long time the narcotics squad suspected Victor was the head of this ring, but they couldn’t get anything on him; they weren’t even sure how he brought the stuff into the country or from where. So they let George out on parole to try it his way. It was a terrific gamble for them and for him having him play a lone hand — but he pulled it off.’

He resented the pride in her voice — foolishly. What right had he to object to her being proud of her boyfriend?

‘And you?’ he asked. ‘What are you? Not a torch singer with the wrong papers.’

‘Not with the wrong papers. But I’m a torch singer. A lousy one. Half the time I spend washing dishes in hash houses. I’m not important. I just came in on it when George found out that Victor was sending Ellie down the grapevine to pick up a shipment. It seemed his big chance to catch them all red-handed, not only Victor but the whole chain of them. But once he had the idea he needed someone to take on the impersonation. He used me.’

She said that as easily as if it had been the offer of a job in the Girl Scouts.

He asked: ‘And the danger didn’t bother you?’

She shrugged. ‘So I ended up on somebody’s marble slab. Who cares if a fourth-rate torch singer bites the dust? There are plenty more where I come from. This meant everything to George. I’d seen him before he was cured. I knew what he’d gone through. I’m not anything on a white charger the way he is. But I know a job that’s got to be done when I see it.’

He thought wryly: ‘That’s how I felt about Ellie. I was trying to save Ellie; Frankie was helping George to redeem himself.’

And she was the one who had succeeded.

He said: So you both followed Ellie to Mexico City. George took her to Oscar’s house, you contacted Mr Riley as Mrs Liddon and then later he sent you on to Gonzales in Acapulco.’

‘That’s all I had to do. I couldn’t be Mrs Liddon at the Granada, of course, even with my short-order dyed hair, because they’d seen Ellie there. That’s why I switched to the Reforma.’ She glanced quickly at him. ‘We weren’t going to hurt your wife. Please believe that. We were just going to keep her out of the way until I’d finished the impersonation.’

She’d always said that, of course; and he’d never believed her. It was one of the many things he had never believed.

‘And I butted in,’ he murmured. ‘I did my best to louse everything up.’

‘Of course you butted in. If I’d been you I’d have done the same thing. You didn’t know what it was all about and we couldn’t explain. You realize that. We couldn’t risk everything by taking a stranger into our confidence. Besides’ — her voice faltered — ‘I couldn’t have done it, not once I’d seen you, got to know you. I couldn’t have told you the truth about Ellie.’

He knew he would have to face this. If he put it off, if he let it turn inward, it would form an ulcer in him which would infect all the rest of his life.

‘Tell me about Ellie. I’ve got to know sooner or later. She lost a lot of money gambling. She couldn’t raise it. She got scared. But even so, how could she have done this thing? How could she have let them…?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

Her hand moved to his. It would have been easier if she hadn’t tried to be comforting. But he couldn’t explain that to her.

After a few seconds she said: ‘There was more to it than the money she lost.’ She paused again. ‘You didn’t know her. Not really. You just met her, got dazzled and jumped into marriage. You didn’t really know her.’

That was true. All the time he had been following Ellie that fact had been brought closer and closer to home. He had loved her, been ready to do anything for her, but he hadn’t known her.

Frankie was saying: ‘It was her life — the life she’d led before she met you. I can’t understand people, I can’t judge them. I’m a jerk about psychology. She was young, attractive, rich. She had everything. God knows why she got herself tied up with Victor.’

‘With Victor?’

‘Something was missing, 1 guess. Something she thought would be there with Victor. She was only nineteen, anyway, when she first fell for him. It must have been something a little new for Victor — corrupting a young debutante. But the rest of the pattern was old as garbage cans. I don’t know when he started her on dope. I don’t even know when he got bored with her. But she never got bored with him. It couldn’t have been encouraging hanging around the Lorton Club seeing him chuck a different little cookie under the chin every night. No, it couldn’t have been terribly encouraging.’

In his memory Ellie was standing now in the oleander grove by Oscar’s car, gazing at him despairingly. He said he’d tell you things about me, terrible things, things that would make you never want even to touch me again. He knew now what those ‘terrible’ things had been. He remembered the Rosses’ chilly hints and Arlene’s bitter attack. You think she loves you. Don’t make me laugh. Victor is her type of person. She married you just because she bad a mood …

‘Listen to me, Mark.’ Frankie’s voice sounded almost angry. ‘You mustn’t think she didn’t love you. Don’t fall into that trap. When she met you you were something strong, something she could cling to. She was scared to tell you the truth about Victor, the dope — all that. But she did love you and with you she might have been able to pull out of it. But you went away too soon. You left her alone, and she wasn’t strong enough without you. That’s why she drifted back to the Lorton Club, that’s why she started taking dope again. And then she lost the money and she was right back where she’d started, far more under Victor’s thumb than she’d ever been. When he decided to use her as a carrier — she couldn’t say no. She was in too deep. She didn’t have that kind of courage.’

No, he could see that now. She could have told him the truth in the beginning and he would have stood by her. She could still have confided in him at the Hotel Mirador instead of pretending to be doped; she could have done it again in the bedroom at the villa. Even then, if she’d trusted his love, everything might have been all right. But she had always chosen to be devious; to play along with Victor rather than to stand up to him; to deceive Mark rather than to ask for his help; to let Frankie be tortured or killed rather than face up to reality. No, Ellie hadn’t had that kind of courage. Frankie was right.

But in the end, when it was too late, she had found a courage of her own. She had brought him a gun and thrown herself in the path of Mr Riley’s bullet.

He had expected disenchantment, disgust, even hatred. But all he felt now was pity and a stirring of remorse. Poor kid, she had needed such different things from the things he had tried to give her. As it had turned out, now he knew the truth, he hadn’t made her much of a husband.

Oscar at the wheel was very quiet and self-effacing. The wound in Mark’s arm pulsed uncomfortably. Frankie was looking straight ahead at the white, brilliant road.

After a long pause, she said: ‘You want to hear the rest?’

Already he was beginning to realize what the rest would be. But it wasn’t going to hurt much more. He had the picture of Ellie now. The details, however tragic, couldn’t alter the general outline.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me about Corey.’

She was still looking fixedly at the road as if she were driving and responsible for their safety.

‘When you came home and got back to your apartment his body must have been there?’

‘It was. I moved it. I didn’t know what had happened. I took it out and dumped it in a winter-stored car.’

‘From the start I wondered what you’d done. I couldn’t ask you, of course.’ She paused and added awkwardly: ‘You’ve guessed how it happened?’

Had he guessed? It was better not to think, better to let her say it.

‘Go on.’

‘You know Corey Lathrop sat on a parole board. He happened to be George’s parole officer. The day before George was going to follow Ellie to Mexico, he had to turn in a full report to Corey Lathrop. George didn’t know he’d been in love with Ellie. George is too far up in the clouds to know or care who loves who. But you can imagine how Corey reacted to all the sordid details.’

Yes, he could imagine. Corey, the prissy young protégé of the Rosses, Corey ‘whose idea of mad gaiety was to redeem convicts’.

‘He stormed right around to her apartment. Ellie was packing, just ready to take the plane for Mexico. He tried to stop her. He threatened if she went through with the carrier job to tell the whole miserable story to her parents and to you. You see, she was caught between two fires. If she didn’t go, Victor would ruin her marriage. If she did go, Corey would do the same thing. I guess she’d been taking dope, anyway, and by that time she was half out of her mind with all the pressures, the doubt, the guilt. There was some sort of a struggle. I don’t know quite how the gun came into it, whether it was his or hers, but . .

‘She shot him?’

‘Yes, she shot him.’

Slowly, out of the tangle in his mind, the question rose: ‘But how do you know all this?’

‘George. Victor had arranged for the stuff to be brought across the border in a portable radio. At the last minute, he thought it would be safer for Ellie to take in a duplicate with her so she could register it with the Customs. Just before she was ready to start he sent George around to your apartment with the radio. Ellie let him in. He found her there — with the body. She was in a terrible state, of course. But George is a man with only one idea. All he cared about was getting her to Mexico so that the impersonation could go through. She hadn’t the faintest notion, of course, that he was working with the police. She thought he was just one of Victor’s boys. So when he told her to go ahead to Mexico and swore that he and Victor would get the body out of the apartment and cover up for her, she finally believed him. Somehow he got her out to the airport.’

She paused. ‘Once she’d left, he didn’t do anything with the body. He knew, if he reported it to the police, they would have to take action and arrest Ellie. That meant his whole Mexican scheme would fall apart. So he just left it there, hoping it would be days before someone found it. He took the next plane to Mexico and went to Ellie at the Hotel Granada. She still trusted him, naturally. He told her the body had been taken care of. He also told her that Victor wanted her to leave the Granada and contact Mr Riley somewhere else. That’s how he got her to Oscar’s house and that’s where I came into the picture.’

It was all explained now. He sat looking into the past, looking back at himself dragging Corey’s body down the snowy alley to the car. He wondered whether it had been found yet. Probably not. He would have to go to the police. That was all he had to look forward to in New York. He wondered whether they would jail him for compounding a felony. It didn’t matter very much. In the mood of bleakness which had him in its grip, nothing that could happen to him seemed to make much difference.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I hid the body. I guess I’ve quite a genius for doing the wrong thing.’

‘You were standing by your wife. That’s not my idea of doing the wrong thing.’

‘I hope the police will see it that way.’

She turned to him with a sudden smile. ‘You don’t have to worry about the police. I’ve already got that all worked out. George can tell them Victor disposed of the body. Victor’s dead. We might as well make use of him.’

She said that in a casual, matter-of-fact voice. Obviously, to her mind, with its direct and uncompromising logic, it was the most natural thing in the world to use a bad dead man to help a good live man out of a jam.

He looked at her with an admiration that was tinged with regret. She had just said there were plenty more where she came from. He only wished it was true. It wasn’t, of course. There were Ellies, probably, dozens of them. Dozens of Georges and dozens of Marks. But there weren’t any other Frankies.

George with his flaming sword and his white charger was the luckiest crusader in history.

Her eyes, returning his gaze, were blue as the bay of Acapulco which was swinging into view behind her.

She said thoughtfully: ‘We haven’t been exactly chummy, have we?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘We’ve fought each other like a couple of wolverines.’

‘Whatever they are.’

‘But – ’  She paused. ‘But there’s something you’ve got to know.’

‘There is?’

‘Yes.’ She looked down at her right hand, examining the nails. ‘I would have told where George was. Before Victor counted to ten — I would have told.’

He couldn’t believe she had said that. It was so completely unlike her. He gazed at her with astonishment and a new, improbable hope.

‘You would have told?’

She nodded solemnly.

‘After all you’d done for George?’

‘After all I’ve done. I love him. Of course I love him. But, let’s face it. I’m not something out of Mourning Becomes Electra.’

‘My God,’ Mark exclaimed, ‘he’s your brother!’

For a moment Frankie looked blank, then a smile started in her eyes and spread to her mouth.

‘You dope,’ she said. ‘Hadn’t you realized that?’

The car had plunged into a noisy, crowded street now. In a few seconds it stopped, and Oscar, turning from the wheel, said:

‘Here, Mr Liddon. Here is the doctor.’

He jumped out and opened the door for them. Automatically they both got out. Oscar, hovering at Mark’s side, tugged diffidently at his sleeve.

‘Mr Liddon — is bad to ask if you give me back my wallet now?’

Mark produced the boy’s wallet and tossed it to him. Oscar examined its contents carefully and then brought out the sapphire ring. For a moment he cupped it in his small brown palm, gazing at it wistfully. Then he held it out to Mark.

‘I think and I think, Mr Liddon. And I cannot keep this ring. Is pretty. Ay, is pretty. Always I want a sapphire ring. But’ — he shook his head — ‘is for you — my friend.’

Mark looked at the ring in the boy’s outstretched hand. Then his eyes moved to Frankie. She was standing patiently on the curb while the Mexican crowd jostled past her. The dyed blonde hair gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. Suddenly he wondered what she would look like with her hair brown. Wonderful, he thought. With her hair brown, she would be wonderful.

Oscar’s hand was still stretched out to him. He grinned and closed the boy’s fingers over the ring.

‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘Keep the goddamn thing.’

FIN

PATRICK QUENTIN

Patrick Quentin is one of the pseudonyms used by two writers of English origin who have lived the bulk of their lives in the U.S.A. Under the names of Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge, they have written some thirty mystery novels and over a hundred short stories. Since their discharge from the army both of them have spent the summer and autumn months in New England where they write concentratedly together, doing a little amateur farming as a relaxation. During the winter and spring, they separate and travel, gathering material for future stories. Although they have investigated the Far East, Africa, and South America, their most frequent haunts have been France, Italy, Bermuda, and Mexico. Each, temporarily forswearing the collaboration, has recently written a straight novel on his own.

Bibliography

- A Puzzle For Fools (1936)

- Puzzle For Players (1938)

- Puzzle For Puppets (1944)

- Puzzle For Wantons (1945) aka Slay the Loose Ladies

- Puzzle For Fiends (1946) aka Love Is a Deadly Weapon

- Puzzle For Pilgrims (1947) aka The Fate of the Immodest Blonde

- Run To Death (1948)

- The Follower (1950)

- Black Widow (1952) aka Fatal Woman

- My Son, the Murderer (1954) aka the Wife of Ronald Sheldon

- The Man With Two Wives (1955)

- The Man in the Net (1956)

- Suspicious Circumstances (1957)

- Shadow of Guilt (1959)

- The Green-Eyed Monster (1960)

- The Ordeal of Mrs Snow (1961), short stories

- Family Skeletons (1965)

As Q Patrick

- Cottage Sinister (1931)

- Murder at the Women’s City Club (1932) aka Death in the Dovecote

- SS Murder (1933)

- Murder at the ‘Varsity (1933) aka Murder at Cambridge

- The Grindle Nightmare (1935) aka Darker Grows the Valley

- Death Goes To School (1936)

- Death For Dear Clara (1937)

- The File on Fenton and Farr (1938)

- The File on Claudia Cragge (1938)

- Death and the Maiden (1939)

- Return To the Scene (1941) aka Death in Bermuda

- Danger Next Door (1952)

As Jonathan Stagge

- The Dogs Do Bark (1936) aka Murder Gone To Earth

- Murder by Prescription (1938) aka Murder or Mercy?

- The Stars Spell Death (1939) aka Murder in the Stars

- Turn of the Table (1940) aka Funeral For Five

- The Yellow Taxi (1942) aka Call a Hearse

- The Scarlet Circle (1943) aka Light From a Lantern

- Death, My Darling Daughters (1945) aka Death and the Dear Girls

- Death’s Old Sweet Song (1946)

- The Three Fears (1949)

As Hugh Wheeler

- The Crippled Muse (1951)

Table of Contents

Copyright © 1950 by Patrick Quentin

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About Patrick Quentin

Bibliography