by Q. Patrick
Garr beamed at me. “I admire your spirit, Mr. Duluth, but very little else about you, I’m afraid. Among other things, I believe, you have been eager to meet Karl Pauly. I have made arrangements for that meeting to take place.” He nodded to the three men with guns. “Here are Mr. and Mrs. Duluth whom we were expecting. I think you know what to do with them.”
What could I do against four men and three guns? They took us through the back door and beyond. Everything was ready.
Mr. Garr was right. His men knew exactly what to do with us.
At some later, indeterminate hour, I opened my eyes. I might just as well have kept them shut because there was nothing to see—nothing but a thick, stifling blanket of darkness. My head ached. There was an unpleasant sickly sweetness in my nostrils. My arms were crushed somewhere behind my back and I seemed to be lying on something very hard. Feebly, I tried to move. My limbs showed little or no co-operation. The reason for this became apparent. My hands, behind my back, were securely tied together. So were my ankles.
I tried to think. At first I didn’t do such a very good job. All that came was a vivid mental picture of my grandmother mounted on a scarlet cow charging the Brooklyn Dodgers with a pitchfork. I tried again. Gradually, the phantasmagoria images dissolved. There was nothing but the darkness and the smell in my nostrils.
The smell in my nostrils—
Memory came back then—very distinctly. Garr with his glinting spectacles and his quiet little smile; Iris, her face white with horror, twisting Aloma’s yellow handkerchief; and the three men who had come through the inner door. The boys from the back room were in particular focus. Revolvers aimed—rope expertly used—and then the sponge of ether over my mouth. That nauseating sweet scent; a blurred image of Iris and then nothingness.
Nothingness—and now this!
The moments between the ether and now had entirely gone. I had no idea where I was. The darkness was suffocating. A thought pricked me like a red-hot needle: Where is Iris. What have they done to Iris?
In a funny little voice, throwing it out into the black pall, I piped: “Iris.”
Another voice came instantly out of the darkness. It wasn’t Iris’ voice. It was a man’s voice, a voice I’d never heard before with a vaguely foreign intonation. It said, “So you’ve come out from under at last, have you?”
I couldn’t cope with strange voices. That was much too complicated. Again, I said, “Iris.”
“She’s here,” said the strange voice. “At least, there’s some woman here, right next to you. I guess she’s still under.”
Iris right next to me in the darkness! Was that good or bad? Where were we? What—? Why not use that strange voice? It seemed in a mood to give information.
I asked: “Where are we?”
The voice laughed. It was a hollow, cheerless laugh. “On a ship,” it said. “Somewhere very deep in the hold of the Purple Star.”
The Purple Star! I didn’t have to know any more. That was quite enough. Suddenly I started realizing about the voice too.
“Then you,” I said, “you must be Karl Pauly.”
“Why, yes.” The voice was startled. “But how do you know? And who are you?”
“That,” I said, trying once more to wriggle off my back and failing, “is a very long and a most depressing story.”
My head was worse. The darkness started wabbling around. I shouldn’t have moved so violently—not yet. Thoughts came. Iris and I had tried, among other things, to save Karl Pauly. That was funny. Ha-ha. Now we were in the hold of the Purple Star, stuffed down with Ruby’s bombs and gunpowder and ammunition which were all set to explode at five o’clock. And we had tried to save the Purple Star too. Ha-ha, ha-ha.
Iris lying there in the darkness next to me, hopelessly remote. Iris—
Her voice came then, weak and piping like mine had been.
She said, “Peter.”
“Iris, darling.”
“Peter, I feel awful. And—and my hands seem to be tied behind my back.”
“They are, honey.”
“It’s—it’s very dark. Where are we?”
What was the use of trying to spare her? “In the Purple Star,” I said. “Right in the bowels of the Purple Star with all the bombs. The happy-go-lucky Duluths.”
“Peter!”
“And we have a companion. Remember how we were going to rescue Karl Pauly from Garr? Well, he’s here too. Pauly, meet my wife. By the way, are you tied up too?”
“‘Fraid so.” Karl Pauly gave an awkward little laugh. “Been here forever, it seems. But I don’t understand. You’ve got to tell me who you are.”
Did it matter who we were? There was nothing I’d left forgotten now. I remembered Garr quietly announcing that Nikki and Ruby were being “rescued” from our apartment. Knowing Garr, they certainly had been. (What of poor Aloma and Rudolph?) And with Ruby rescued, that meant the destruction of the Purple Star would continue as per schedule. So why bother to tell Karl Pauly anything that Manhattan’s biggest explosion would only make him forget again—any minute now?
The time! That was the crucial thing. Five o’clock was to be the zero hour, our last and least pleasant moment on earth. What was the time now?
“Pauly, do you know the time?”
“No idea.”
“I have a wrist-watch,” said Iris, who was obviously thinking the way that I was thinking, “only it’s somewhere behind my back with my wrists. Maybe I could twist around and one of you could see.”
We did an awful lot of maneuvering. Finally we succeeded. Iris had rolled over onto her side. Painfully I rolled over until I was close to her. I could see the little luminous disk, the only shining thing in that impenetrable, musty smelling darkness.
The watch said 4:30. Half an hour left!
Somehow the hard fact of thirty-minutes was worse than the vagueness that had gone before. The utter dismalness of our failure surged over me like a black wave. We had thought so grandiosely that we were a match for the legendary Garr. We were going to show him. Look at us now!
Iris’ voice came: “Peter.”
“Yes, honey?”
“We know what’s going to happen. So don’t let’s talk about it. Let’s try to be civilized.”
Civilized in the hold of a ship with a lot of bombs! “Okay,” I said.
She said softly, “And we should tell Karl everything—about his mother, everything.”
“Mother!” Karl’s voice sounded eagerly.
I told him then about Marta, tragic, courageous little Marta who had been the first victim of this catastrophe. There was some advantage to our predicament after all—for Karl’s sake, at least. If you have to hear that your mother is dead, it’s less of a shock when there’s little or no chance of your being able to survive her long enough to mourn. I told him the whole lamentable story of our own decline and fall too.
Although he was still only a disembodied voice in the darkness, I was starting to admire Karl Pauly. He still had enough spunk to be mad.
“That dirty swine, Nikki,” he muttered. “Poor Mother. I—I might have known she’d have tried to help me. I might have known—” He gave a gaunt little laugh. “And you! It’s rather late in the day to thank you. But you were—”
“Think nothing of it,” I said.
“It’s all my fault.” Karl Pauly’s voice was savage. “I swore I’d get them single-handed. Single-handed! And I dragged you and Mother into it.” He paused. “You actually found Garr; you found out what the plot was; you did all the things I never did. And yet we end up like this. In twenty minutes, the Purple Star—”
“We said we weren’t going to talk about it,” put in Iris. “Sorry.” There was a flat, miserable silence. Then Karl said,
“But you actually called Leslie at Pine 3-2323 from Garr’s place?”
“Yes. But Garr broke off the call in mid-air.”
Karl’s voice had a slight ring of hope: ”
But they could trace where the call came from. Just asking for Leslie was enough. They’ll be round here. And maybe—”
“I’ve thought of that,” said Iris quietly. “And it’s no use. What if they do go around there? All they’ll find will be a little bookseller. They won’t be able to do anything. They know nothing about us, nothing about the Purple Star, nothing about anything. What can they do?”
She was right, of course, and that faint glimmer of hope faded as quickly as it had come. We lay there in the jet-choking darkness. The little gleaming dial of Iris’ watch—my anniversary present—swam in front of my eyes, a torturing reminder of reality.
Seventeen minutes to five.
There was absolutely no sound from the mysterious body of the ship above us. Almost anything would have been better than that silence. I filled it with vivid mental pictures—pictures of the unattractive Captain Fischer and Ruby and, maybe, Nikki, tense with anticipation, their plans ready, waiting for the exact moment to light the fuses that would blow us all to perdition and earn them one hundred thousand dollars. They were up there, all of them, so near—so far.
And we, down here in the hold, must be of such complete unimportance to them. Most murderers before the kill have a few uneasy moments about the disposal of the body. None of us were going to leave a telltale corpus delicti behind. No, sir.
Suddenly, out of that thick silence, Karl said, “Who’s the other person they threw down here?”
“Other person?” said Iris and I together.
“Yes. Quite a while after you two, they tossed someone else down the hatch. He was making an awful racket, but he quieted down. I think he must have got knocked out by the fall.”
At that moment, as if a cue was being followed in a play, a faint groan came from somewhere in the darkness beyond us.
“Who’s there?” I called, having no idea on the subject.
The groan came again. It was a deep groan with an overtone of indignation. Then, rather dizzily, a booming voice remarked: “Jeepers.”
I said again, “Who is it?”
There were vague scrambling sounds. Then the voice said gloomily, “That ain’t you, Miz Duluth?”
I knew then. Disaster makes strange bedfellows. “Rudolph?”
“Miz Duluth, they done truss me up like a rooster. I can’t move me a limb.”
“We’re all in the same boat,” I said, ruminating on the most painful pun of my career.
Poor Rudolph. My heart bled for him. The gaggin’ and bindin’ had come home to roost. And it was all our fault.
“I doan’ get it,” Rudolph was bewailing. “I doan’ get it at all. I was back in your apartment keepin’ an eye on them two crooks like you said, an’ all of a sudden they came in, a whole bunch of ‘em. Didn’t knock or nothin’; must have picked the lock. They has me covered, takes away my gun, an’ they unties the white feller an’ the woman an’ they holds me up with a gun an’ they tells me to come with them or they’d let me have it; an’ they all came here to this boat an’ they trussed me up an’ they pitches me down here; an’ I hits me haid. An’ me just outa Sing Sing and provin’ to ‘Loma I could go straight—”
He gave up there. The saga of woe was too woeful for him even to finish it.
Poor Rudolph! This was the straw after the last straw. That this should have happened to him on the eve of his new era of legality under the sponsoring eye of Aloma. What price for rehabilitation now?
Iris said, “But Aloma, Rudolph—what’s happened to Aloma?” There were more grunts while Rudolph was vainly kicking against the pricks. “I doan’ know, Miz Duluth. She wasn’t there
when these fellers came. She was out.”
“Out?”
“Yeah. Soon as you went, she says she doan’ trust you. She figures you was doin’ somethin’ you was too dumb to do an’ she better go after you, she says. So she went out and she lef me there alone, an’ it wasn’t but fifteen minutes or so after that these fellers come an’—”
Rudolph went on reiterating his mournful story. I was hardly listening. For a rap of hope flickered once more—a very tenuous ray, but a ray. Aloma knew about the Royal Book and Record Shop. Aloma knew Garr’s name. Aloma knew dimly about the Purple Star. And Aloma had gone out into the night to save us.
There was a chance, just a chance that—no, the pencil-thin ray faded. What possibly could Aloma do? What chance was there for a solitary though indomitable colored woman against all the powers of Evil?
The little dial, gleaming in front of me, said ten minutes to five. Rudolph’s monologue had stopped and none of us did anything about disturbing the silence. My mind was very clear, but somehow my reactions were numbed. I knew what was going to happen. I knew that Iris, lying there next to me, that Karl, whom we’d never even seen, that Rudolph, that all of us had less than the fraction of a fraction of a chance. Even now, above us, matches must be hovering over fuses.
Garr had won—overwhelmingly. We should have known from the start that he would.
Let’s not talk about it, Iris had said, Let’s not think about it, either. I tried to go back in my mind to that remote time when the evening had been young.
“Peter!” It was Iris’ voice, very soft. “Yes, honey.”
“You love me passionately.”
“I do?”
“No one but a dope would let his wife get him into this infernal mess unless he loved her passionately.”
“Maybe I’m a dope too, darling,” I said. Iris!
Eight minutes to five. I wanted to touch Iris’ hand. That’s really all I wanted in the world. It wasn’t much to ask. But I couldn’t do it.
Meekly Rudolph’s voice floated through the darkness, “Miz Duluth, how long do we stay here?”
“Not much longer now.”
“Miz Duluth, I’m—hungry.”
A funny little stifled laugh came from the place in the darkness that was Karl Pauly. It wasn’t really a laugh.
The silence sunk down over us again like a tarpaulin. That profound, unequivocal silence. Surely, before the end, we would hear some sound.
I strained my ears against that utter absence of sound. Was it my imagination? Or was there some vague scurrying noise— miles away, like the sound of distant mice feet? I concentrated on my ears. Nothing but my ears. Surely—
“Listen!” Iris said that sharply. “What is it?” asked Karl.
“There’s a noise. A noise of people moving around, hurrying.” As I listened, that sound became more distinct. Footsteps. It was footsteps—hurrying footsteps coming nearer. The pulses in my temples started to throb.
Seven minutes to five. Garr and his ruthlessly efficient timetable. Now was the time for the fuses. Footsteps of people moving stealthily to their appointed places.
“They’re coming nearer,” said Karl.
I was suddenly, horribly alive to the imminence of death. I was going to die. Iris was going to die. I didn’t want Iris to die.
The footsteps were louder. They sounded almost above us. Images of people creeping forward with matches in their hands. Was it to start here? Was the death stab to the Purple Star going to be delivered right here above our heads?
Watch out, New York.
I had to say something, anything, just because the suspense of it was unendurable. I said at random, “I had the funniest dream under ether. I dreamed that my grandmother was riding a scarlet cow and charging the Brooklyn Dodgers with a—”
There was a scraping overhead. Heavy feet stamped.
And then, suddenly, in the blackness above us was a square of light. For an instant I saw vague, trousered legs, lots of them. Then a flashlight pointed straight down at us and I saw nothing but its blinding glare.
Five minutes to five—
There seemed nothing but that dazzle pointed full in my face. Dimly, I caught a glimpse of the dark, shadowy hold around us. Then there was a confused babble of voices above us.
I didn’t r
eally try to hear what was being said. The voices meant nothing to me. And then, suddenly, they meant everything in the world. Because one of them soared above the others, shrill and female and boisterous and triumphant and it said:
“What did I tell you? Is they there or ain’t they there? You should of believed me from the beginnin’ without all that fussin’ around. Yoohoo, Miz Peter, yoohoo, Miz Iris! Bring out the brass band, Rudolph. Here I come with the G-men.”
Aloma! Aloma the treasure.
Iris and I were standing together on the deck of the Purple Star. That slap-happy release still seemed like something in a dream. Beyond the rail, vague, crouching forms in the pre-dawn darkness, loomed the other ships which, but for Aloma’s miracle, would have been blown up with the Purple Star. An occasional light, flickering to the left, revealed the gaunt outlines of the docks. Five o’clock over and done with, and all’s well.
Around us, moving silently and expertly about their various assignments, hurried FBI men and dock police, magiced out of thin air. Karl Pauly, visible at last as a pleasant-faced kid with a mop of blond hair, was moving around with them. One of the FBI men—Leslie, for all I knew—was talking to us, telling us exactly what had happened.
I found it difficult to concentrate because my arm was around Iris and because the tangy salt air was so pleasant after the stifling hold.
“… we got Mrs. Duluth’s call at Headquarters. We traced it and went straight around to the Royal Book Shop. A whole squad of us. That was Garr’s big slip. He never knew Karl Pauly had been in contact with us; he never knew about that secret telephone number. He didn’t know what he was doing when he let you make that call.”
Iris’ profile, against all those cranes and girders and bollards or whatever they were, was wonderful. Iris wasn’t blown up in little pieces; she was right there—beautifully intact.
“… but although we went there, we thought it was pretty hopeless. We’d had Pauly’s signal but that was all. We didn’t know what it meant, although we suspected it was to do with Garr. We arrived at the Royal Book Shop. We didn’t have any motive for investigating it. And then, as we came up, we found this colored woman on the street corner arguing like mad with a policeman. She was raising Cain because she said her employers were being held prisoners in the book shop. The cop was trying to get rid of her, figuring she was just a screwball. But she was a godsend to us. She gave us a handle for breaking into the shop. We broke in and we found this little guy and a couple of other men. He was very polite and made out he knew nothing about anything. Of course, we didn’t know who he was. And then, suddenly, this colored woman started calling him Garr, giving him hell and swearing her employers were there. We were in that back room, sort of like an office, and suddenly she bent down and picked up a little yellow handkerchief from the floor and started bawling about its belonging to this Mrs. Duluth and proving she’d been there—”