Death Is My Comrade

by Stephen Marlowe

  He gave her a scathing look, raked the rest of us with his eyes so as not to make us feel left out, took three big strides toward the door, slammed it behind him and was gone.

  Jack asked Miss Champion: “Well, does he or doesn’t he?”

  “He approves of Mr. Drum,” she said coolly. “He’d have told me if he didn’t.”

  Jack sighed. “The first hurdle.”

  “The second, Chester,” Pappy said, “is you.”

  “You saw the picture, Drum,” MacReedy told me. “Shave off Rodzianko’s hair and they almost look like twins. Rodin will change places with his brother. He will have a valid American passport, and a Russian visa. Vasili Rodzianko will leave Russia with them.”

  “What,” I asked, “happens to Mike Rodin?”

  Jack said: “He stays on in his brother’s place, until Vasili Rodzianko crosses the border.”

  “That’s great for Rodzianko,” I said. “But what about Rodin? What happens then?”

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Miss Champion said bitterly. Her eyes were shining with tears. She turned her back to us and stood at the window.

  Larned told me: “Mike Rodin is dying, Drum. He has an incurable bone cancer. Surgery is impossible and it’s spread too far for radiation to help. He has, at the outside, six months to live.”

  “So what happens to him, what happens after the impersonation is discovered,” MacReedy said, “doesn’t matter. By then, if things go smoothly, you and Vasili Rodzianko would have flown out of Russia.”

  I think I smiled. “Me and Vasili Rodzianko,” I said. “Why don’t you give me something easy to do, like kidnaping Krushchev?”

  Pappy laughed. Jack smiled. MacReedy and Larned looked, respectively, studious and grim.

  Miss Champion turned around. Her green eyes were all right now. “Mike—Mr. Rodin—has gone over all this with me. He can change places with his brother, Mr. Drum, but he’ll need help. For one thing, he is a sick man. For another, Vasili Rodzianko hasn’t seen him in more than thirty years, and thinks he is dead. For a third, there is the matter of actually making the switch. And most important, in the event of—shall we say—unforeseen complications, someone will have to be on hand to help Vasili Rodzianko escape from Russia.” Her eyes got shiny again. “It would be a tragedy if Mr. Rodin were to sacrifice the last few months of his life for nothing.”

  “That’s where you come in, Chet,” Jack told me earnestly. “You’ll be listed with the Exhibition team as Chief of Security. That will be your official capacity. You won’t be a government employee because the Exhibit is sponsored by private interests this year. You will have no government connection whatever.”

  “In case we don’t make it,” I said.

  “Okay, in case you don’t make it. You’ll be on your own over there. After a few days it will be arranged for you and ‘Mike Rodin’ to fly home on a regularly scheduled SAS liner via Helsinki, and it ought to work out like that.”

  “You can see,” MacReedy took it up smoothly, before I could get a word in edgewise, “why we couldn’t send a CIA agent. With the exception of this meeting here, the mission is one with which the government wants no official connection.”

  “I didn’t know your boys carried around sandwich signs,” I said.

  MacReedy reddened. “Morley suggested your name, Drum. I never heard of you till this morning. You’ve gone on undercover missions for the State Department before, and Morley said—”

  Miss Champion cut him off. “If Mr. Drum is afraid to go, please don’t twist his delicate little arm. We’ll find someone else.”

  Jack scowled at her, and got a frosty stare right back. There was only one man in Miss Champion’s life. The rest of us were dirt. “Here’s the point, Chet,” Jack said. “This is not a government mission. It won’t even be paid for in government funds, and I don’t have to tell you no CIA agent or State Department man can accept private employment. Besides, the best agent in the world is often a one-shooter, provided he has the background. Which I don’t have to tell you you have.”

  “What they mean, Mr. Drum,” Miss Champion said coolly, “is that because you are in business for yourself and because you happen to qualify, you are more expendable than a full-time agent.”

  “Don’t you like anybody?” I asked her.

  Inadvertently her eyes moved to the door. As good an answer as I was likely to get.

  “For any other agent,” Jack said, “we’d have to invent a cover. You’ve got a natural one. You’re a private eye with something of an international reputation. You’d be just the man private business interests might be expected to select as chief of security for the “Moscow Exhibit.”

  “They didn’t—until now,” I said dryly.

  MacReedy asked, a little impatiently, “Do you want the job or don’t you?”

  “I haven’t been offered a job. But suppose I say yes. Suppose I say yes and Laschenko gets to Russia while I’m there.”

  “You’d be dead,” Pappy said matter-of-factly. “But he won’t get there. We’ll keep him on ice.”

  Miss Champion inserted a cigarette in a long black holder, and lit it. “You say you haven’t been offered a job. Here is the offer: a magnanimous offer, I think, from a very brave man.” Her red lips parted to blow a smoke ring. “All expenses, Mr. Drum—and ten thousand dollars.”

  I looked at her for a moment. It was not the kind of offer you could say no to right away. My rates, nudged up by inflation, are a hundred dollars a day. But a private eye does not work every day, five days a week.

  But there were Marianne and the twins. I hadn’t seen Marianne yet. I had seen Mrs. Gower come for the twins last night. There wasn’t any message for me. And come to think of it, it was strange that Marianne hadn’t called this morning either. What had Pappy said? You ought to marry the girl.

  It wasn’t that. I had tried marriage once and it hadn’t worked. But I liked to think Marianne needed me, and all of a sudden the fact that she hadn’t called was beginning to gnaw at me. If she didn’t watch herself, Dr. Nickerson had told me, she could be a very sick girl. If that had happened, now, and if there was anything I could do, I wasn’t about to go traipsing off to Russia.

  Cut it out, I told myself. You’re acting like an old lady. Nothing’s wrong with Marianne.

  “All expenses, Mr. Drum,” Miss Champion said again, as if taunting me to refuse the offer, “and ten thousand dollars.”

  And MacReedy said: “I don’t want to wave the flag at you, Drum, but if the West can succeed in getting Vasili Rodzianko out he’ll put the lie to the Russian claim that he repudiated his book. I don’t have to tell you what that can mean in the neutralist countries, especially since Rodzianko’s name has been highly touted by the Russians themselves for twenty years now. And I don’t have to tell you what it can mean in the Red satellite countries.” MacReedy repeated: “So I don’t want to wave the flag at you—”

  “Then don’t. There’s a moral question involved in squelching a murder investigation, too, but you people spent the first ten minutes here gloating over how you managed that.”

  “But it’s an open-and-shut case,” MacReedy protested. “Laschenko killed Alluliev, and he has diplomatic immunity. It’s open and shut, I tell you.”

  I went to the door. “No murder investigation ever was or ever will be.”

  Jack came right after me. “You turning down this job?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to let you know.”

  Miss Champion’s smile was almost sweet.

  “Today,” MacReedy said. “Let us know today.”

  I nodded. Miss Champion looked contemptuous, Larned indifferent, MacReedy disappointed, Jack troubled. The only one who smiled as I got out of there was Pappy.

  He said: “If you shake a leg you can get over there right after those yellow roses.”

  I shook a leg.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mrs. Gower opened the door for me. There were stars in her eyes. You could have
driven a truck through her smile.

  “If I were twenty years younger, Chester Drum,” she said, “I’d give Mrs. Baker a run for her money.” She stood on tiptoe and grabbed at my lapels and planted a moist kiss on my cheek.

  Marianne’s voice, behind her, sounded strained. “Who is it, Mrs. Gower?”

  “Oh, a fellow named Prince Charming.”

  “Hey,” I protested, “cut it out.”

  “Listen,” Mrs. Gower said in a whisper, “are you doing anything today? I don’t want to be a busybody, but Mrs. Baker can use some fun. You know, in Rock Creek Park, or maybe a drive down to Virginia or something? She’s been acting funny. She won’t let the twins out of her sight. I’m sure it’s nothing a day in the—”

  “Chet?” Marianne called. “Is that you, Chet?”

  “I ought to mind my own business,” Mrs. Gower went on, not smiling now, “but several times she started to call you, at least she said she was going to call you, and each time she hung up, and once I caught her at the phone looking like she was ready to cry.”

  Marianne was waiting in the doorway of the nursery, a finger to her lips. “They’re sleeping.”

  I took her hand, led her through the hall to the living room. Mrs. Gower sailed past us into the kitchen and started clattering pots and pans in there.

  Marianne was wearing a light blue blouse and a dark blue skirt. Her blond hair hung loose, framing the deep tan of her face. She wore no makeup. She didn’t need any. But there were smudges under her eyes and when she tried to smile her full lower lip trembled.

  “The flowers are lovely,” she said. They had been arranged in a cut-glass vase on the piano.

  “I had some business,” I said. “I would have been over earlier. I’ve been thinking of you all morning.”

  Still holding her hand, I pulled her toward me. She was pliant in my arms, but passive as I kissed her. After a while her lips formed words an inch from my mouth. “I wish you wouldn’t do that. I … Chet, there aren’t any words to thank you for what you did last night. But I just want you to know that I.…” She started to cry. She turned around so I wouldn’t see.

  I touched her shoulder. She didn’t turn back toward me. I placed my hands on the curves of her hips. I kissed the nape of her neck. I could feel her stiffen.

  “I said I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Now you’re mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Then mad at yourself. That’s worse.”

  “I’ve got nothing against myself,” I said lightly. “Mrs. Gower thinks I’m Prince Charming.”

  Marianne turned and smiled a little, then she sat down on the piano bench with her back to me. The fragrance of the yellow roses filled the room.

  “I couldn’t sleep all night,” Marianne said slowly. “Even after Mrs. Gower brought the twins back. I was thinking.” She ran a finger from the high notes to the low on the piano, softly. Back again. Her shoulders lifted as she took a deep breath. “Chet?” Her voice was very small. I could hardly hear the words. “Chet, do you … want to marry me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said quickly, without thinking.

  High notes to the low again. “Used merchandise. That’s what I get for asking. Shameless hussy.”

  “Marianne, I—”

  “I know. Chester Drum isn’t the marrying kind. Think nothing of it, my dear sir. It is a habit with me. Whenever I get an eligible male alone for five minutes I up and pop the question.” Her voice was thin and high and ready to break. “I’ve had just offers and offers. They all say yes.”

  “Cut it out, Marianne.”

  “Then say no.”

  “I don’t want to say no.”

  “Then say yes. But if you said yes I would then say you have to get a nice sane and safe job somewhere like—”

  “Like Wally had?”

  Then Marianne really started to cry. I’d wanted her to. She was torturing herself. I stood behind her and put both hands on her shoulders and kneaded the flesh there.

  “Make me a drink,” she said after a while. “As hairy as an orang-utang.”

  “It’s too early in the day.”

  She swung around on the piano stool. There were tears on her cheeks. “I had it all planned,” she said. “Damn it, why couldn’t you just say no?”

  The words came slowly. I had used them once, years ago, to someone else, and they’d brought nothing but grief. “Because I love you, Marianne.”

  She shut her eyes. The faintest of smiles touched her lips. “But you won’t marry me?”

  “Not on your terms. I can’t.”

  “And if I said yes—on your terms?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I couldn’t. I have the twins. After Wally, I thought I was immune. I loved the twins, sure, but I thought there was a little place way down deep, my special place, and no matter what happened, ever, to anyone, I could go down there and be all right. But I died last night, Chet. I died a hundred times.” She asked abruptly, opening those brown eyes of hers that always surprised you, framed as they were by the platinum blond of her hair: “Your work is more important to you than anything in the world, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the wrong way to put it. It’s what I am. It’s me. That’s all. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you and the twins. You know that.”

  Marianne’s smile was fleeting and wistful. She must have known we were going around in circles. “Then prove it—by giving up your work. I couldn’t take it, not now, not any more, waiting nights, not knowing where you are or who’s going after you with a gun, or those trips you take.”

  “Could you see me as a white-collar worker behind a desk?”

  For the first time Marianne’s smile was genuine. “With a pot belly, telling stale jokes at the water cooler and getting a little bit drunk at the company Christmas party? No. No, I couldn’t. That wouldn’t be Chester Drum.”

  I felt awkward, watching the smile fade from Marianne’s face. I asked lightly: “So where do we go from here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Status quo ante?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. We’d just wind up hurting each other.” Marianne’s voice got high and thin again but her tone was flippant which, knowing Marianne, meant she was trying her damnedest not to cry. “Besides, they tell me I’m a very eligible widow-gal type. And the twins need a family, a real family with a father and all. One of these days I’m liable to up and get married. The only thing the lucky man won’t get,” Marianne went on, still lightly, still trying her damnedest not to cry, “is much of a dowry. Wally’s insurance came to ten thousand, or twenty with double indemnity. But I couldn’t work for six months, and money goes so fast in Washington, and there’s Mrs. Gower to pay, and View doesn’t exactly load down its staffers with gold.”

  “Why don’t you request a transfer?”

  “You shouldn’t have to ask me that.”

  There were no more words for a while. I remembered Mrs. Gower’s suggestion. “How about a spin down to tidewater V.A.? There’s a place I know serves the biggest—”

  “I’d rather not, Chet. Not today.”

  “Walk in Rock Creek Park, then?”

  “I think I’d rather just stay home with the twins, thanks.”

  We talked for a while longer, inconsequentially, and then Marianne walked me to the door. I started to take her into my arms.

  “I wish you wouldn’t—” she began. Then my mouth closed on hers. At first she was stiff and then suddenly not stiff at all but holding me fiercely and one of us, or maybe both of us, made a little deep-throated sound as her body fitted itself against mine and her lips parted.

  “That’s enough, I think,” she said shakily after a while, drawing her face back far enough to talk. Her eyes looked up at me. “You’re implacable even when you kiss.”

  “Or when I’m in love.”

  As I went across the sidewalk to
my car Marianne called after me: “Status quo ante.”

  Then she blew me a kiss, and then the Chrysler took over.

  The lawyer’s name was Johnny Tey. His office was in the Farrell Building down the hall from mine, but this being Sunday I saw him at home. He had a small ranch-style house ten miles south of Washington, in Alexandria. After we had chatted a few minutes and after his wife had made us a pair of tall cool gin and tonics, he asked:

  “Business or social call, Chet?”

  “I want to put some money in a trust fund.”

  “Who for? Relatives?”

  “Two six-month-old boys. I’m their godfather. Is there any way I could do it so I couldn’t touch the money myself even in a weak moment?”

  He gave me a strange look. “Sure. That’s called an irrevocable trust. But a man in your line of work shouldn’t set it up that way. You don’t draw a steady paycheck, you know, Chet. You’re liable to need the money one of these years.”

  “That’s just it. I want to make sure it’s theirs, for keeps, while I have it. To be drawn when they’re eighteen, with their mother as trustee?”

  Tey shrugged. “It’s your money.”

  “How soon can you fix the papers?”

  “Monday morning, if you have the money.”

  “I’ll have it,” I said. “Would ten thousand bucks, put in trust now, send a couple of kids through college eighteen years from now?”

  “Sure, unless inflation runs wild. We could invest the fund in blue-chip stocks. But where the hell did you get ten thousand bucks?”

  “I’m about to start earning it,” I said.

  We shook hands, and a while later I drove home, having told Tey I would drop in to his office on Monday morning. When I got home I felt a little less implacable and a little more human. I stood in the hall near the phone table and stared into the hall mirror. I suddenly liked my face, up to and including the little knife scar on the right cheek. “She loves you, you dope,” I said out loud.

  Then long distance got me Mike Rodin’s Maryland number. Miss Champion was surprised to hear from me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We got a Capital Airlines Viscount to New York on Tuesday, the 18th of June. Miss Champion went with us that far. I sat across the aisle from them on the one-hour flight. If Miss Champion ever took her eyes off Mike Rodin’s face, I never noticed it.