“Well now, I don’t exactly know how to answer that one,” Jack Rhyce said. He laughed self-consciously, and so did Ruth Bogart.
“But you must admit it is a friendly place here, Mr. Bushman,” she said, and smiled at him dazzlingly.
“Now, now, honey,” Big Ben said, “let’s cut out the Bushman part. You call me Ben, and just remember I’m tolerant as hell, and I don’t blame Jack here, for one minute, but any time if two isn’t company and there isn’t a crowd, just kind of look around for me, will you? We might sing some old songs, or something. I’m nuts for old songs.”
“Why, that will be splendid, Ben,” Ruth Bogart said. “Jack loves old songs, too, and he has a lovely voice, if I do say so … but if he gets preachy or tiresome, I’ll know where to turn, and two will still be company, won’t it. Ben?”
“Oh, now, Ruth,” Jack Rhyce said. He wished that her flirtatiousness did not sound so genuine, but she was right as far as the business went. “I’m not as bad as all that, am I? But she’s right, Ben. I do like a jam session sometimes.”
“Well, maybe we can have one tonight,” Big Ben said. “There’s always a few groups here who like to sing, later in the evening. Just drop down here into the bar sometime later, say eleven—that is, if you haven’t something better to do.”
He smiled in a very friendly way.
“Oh, come,” Jack Rhyce said, “you mustn’t kid us, Ben.”
Big Ben slapped him affectionately on the shoulder and stood up.
“I’m not kidding you, boy,” he said, “I’m envying you. Well, see you later, I hope. And now I’ve got to be gittin’.”
“What’s your hurry?” Jack said. “Have another drink. Don’t go.”
Big Ben shook his head.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I want to get cleaned up for this dancing party, and maybe I can find a girl myself. You two make me lonely. Well, I’ll see you later, troops.”
Jack Rhyce heard Ruth Bogart sigh. He drew a deep breath himself, but his abnormal consciousness of life and motion was still with him as he watched Big Ben. The man’s walk was lazily loose-jointed, but at the same time perfectly coordinated. It was the gait of the highly proficient all-round athlete who could move from an eight-oar shell to the tennis courts, the boxing ring, the baseball diamond, or the football field with no need for conscious adjustment. You could not help admiring him because he was aesthetically magnificent. He sauntered past the bar without stopping, shoulders carelessly squared and arms swinging easily. If Bill Gibson had not seen him come in, Bill had surely seen him by now. Jack’s first instinct was to deliver some sort of warning, but this would have been superfluous, and besides it had become more important than ever that neither he nor Ruth Bogart should be connected with Bill Gibson. Things were moving so fast that everything at any moment might pour itself into a barrel and go over Niagara Falls.
“It was all so natural, wasn’t it?” she said, and her words echoed exactly what he had been thinking.
That conversation with Big Ben had been so frank and real, so entirely in keeping with the guises they had assumed, and so banal and dull, that he could nearly believe that it had been true, but actually it had been interwoven with threads of truth. Football at Oberlin, song fests because both of them honestly loved to sing, and even his growing interest in Ruth Bogart had all contributed to honesty. That piece about the Southern Baptist college was especially appealing. It was the one bit of really tangible revelation that had come through to him; its hidden tones had been touching in their frankness. It had all been small-time, Big Ben said, and Jack Rhyce could recall a lingering note of sadness. The Baptist college must have been true, just as there must have been some sort of social frustration there similar to what everyone faced in one’s adolescent years, and to which most people had learned to adjust. There had been something in that unknown Southern Baptist college that Big Ben could not handle yet, although later he had traveled to more sophisticated fields. Jack Rhyce could see the place in his imagination. Small institutions for higher learning were apt to have a dreary similarity in the South. He could imagine a quadrangle of decrepit dormitories, a chapel in bad repair, a lecture hall, a tiny library with its carefully culled collection of deserving books, a football field with its goal posts and bare bleachers, and long-needled pines covering a flat sandy country in the background. It all could have fitted into the composition of a Benton picture. The pinch of poverty would be over it, but at the same time lines of social demarcation would be etched more strongly by the poverty, making them far harsher than any differentiations existing in the North. Distinction would be more than just the other side of the tracks in such a place; there was a quality in Big Ben’s voice and gait that told its own story. White trash was the name for it, that unhappy phrase which was applied to people living in the clearings behind the pine-grown old fields, who had not solved for generations any of their economic problems. No matter what he had done at football, no matter about his singing town or in a great city. As he put the theoretical story to voice, Big Ben had been white trash once; and it was not hard to project imagination further, and see him in a mill gether. Jack Rhyce believed that the Chief in Washington had been right, if not about the missionary, at least about the religious background. Big Ben’s father might very possibly have been one of those itinerant preachers. The contagion of pulpit inflection still remained in Big Ben’s voice. It was a hymn-singing voice which Jack Rhyce could readily identify, since in many ways he and Big Ben had sprung from a common background, sharing many of the same repressions and simplicities. A minister’s son could spot a minister’s son. The saying was not wholly a joke.
He felt her hand on his arm, shaking him insistently.
“Darling, you’ve got to talk to me,” she said—“that is, if we’re going to keep sitting in this damn place, or else if you keep sitting like a wooden Indian everybody will begin to think we’ve had a fight. What have you been thinking about, Jack?”
“You ought to know,” he said, “about You-Know-Who, and you needn’t have given him such a big glad eye.”
“You-Know-Whom, you mean,” she said. “At least you don’t know everything, do you, Fearless Fosdick?”
“Maybe Fosdick knows a little about You-Know-Whom,” he said.
“And maybe Miss Fosdick does, too,” she answered, “and Miss Fosdick knows she can make him in about five minutes, if necessary. Maybe we should have registered as Mr. and Mrs. Fosdick. Do you think he was poor white trash, Jack?”
The mere fact that their minds had reached the same place independently gave his theory added substance.
“Yes,” he said, “I shouldn’t wonder. I didn’t know you knew the South.”
“There were Southern girls in boarding school,” she said. “My roommate was a Southern girl—deep South, very deep. People like him are apt to go off the track somewhere. I ought to know, because I’ve been off myself. Were you ever off it?”
“I was on two drops into Burma during the war,” he said. “There weren’t any tracks at all there. I’m sort of used to being off the rails.”
They were leaning toward each other, ostensibly absorbed in each other’s words, and they had waited long enough in the bar. They both had known, without saying so, that they should not leave the place directly on Big Ben’s heels. Jack signaled to a waiter, and paid the check.
“Well,” she said, “thank goodness. Does this mean we can bathe and change? Or have you got some other thought?”
The double bedroom, as she had said, afforded all the privacy of a goldfish bowl.
“Anyway,” he said, “we may be able to talk with your bath water running.”
“And we can talk with me splashing in it,” she said. “You don’t have to look, but I’m going to have a bath.”
They were another eager happy couple when they left the bar, as they walked hand in hand following the signs along the hotel corridor that pointed to the ell called Cozy Nook.
“You know, darl
ing,” he told her, “I was just thinking of another one of those Red Mill songs. Ben might just as well have sung it at Wake.”
“Oh, sing it now, dear,” she said, “softly, just for me.”
He drew her closer to him. They made a very pretty abstraction, flushed with their drinks from the Main Bar, on their way to Cozy Nook.
Not that you are fair, dear,
Not that you are true,
Not your golden hair, dear,
Not your eyes of blue.
He stopped and laughed.
“It doesn’t fit, does it?” he said. “Your hair is too dark, dear, and your eyes are grayish green.”
“Never mind,” she said. “I approve of the general scheme. Go ahead and finish it.”
As a matter of fact, when he finished it he approved of the general scheme himself.
When we ask the reason,
Words are all too few!
So I know I love you, dear,
Because you’re you.
“I wish to goodness,” she said, and her voice had a catch in it, “that I could be me again, or I, or whatever damn way you want to have it.”
It was the old lament again, and there was no solution to it, or certainly not then. Besides, there was not time to discuss it then because they had reached their room door, and he was pulling the clumsy outmoded key from his coat pocket.
“Why, say,” he said in the bemused tone that one should use after a session with the girl of one’s choice at the Main Bar, “it’s unlocked. I thought I’d locked it. Didn’t you think I had, honey?”
“Why, yes, darling,” she answered. “I kind of thought so.” And then she giggled. “But I did have other things on my mind.”
“Well, it all goes to show,” he said, “that I’m losing my memory in my old age.”
They both laughed like two college freshmen. Then they hastily opened the door, using the standard Farm precautions.
Mr. Moto was standing in the center of the room. The dust had been brushed from his light tan oxfords, his purplish blue suit had been freshly pressed. Jack Rhyce was not entirely surprised to see him, but he hoped that he acted surprised. The illusion was helped when Ruth Bogart suppressed a startled scream that sounded technically genuine.
“Well, how the hell did you get in here?” Jack Rhyce asked, assuming the correct badgering tone of an honest American dealing with a wily Oriental.
“So sorry,” Mr. Moto said, and Jack Rhyce was interested to see that his hands shook with artificial agitation. “The door was unlocked. So sorry.”
The door had not been unlocked, and it was a safe assumption that Mr. Moto knew he knew it. The only solution for the problem was to become more confused, to raise one’s voice a hectoring octave higher.
“And if the door was unlocked—so what?” Jack Rhyce said. “Does that mean you should walk inside?”
“Excuse,” Mr. Moto said, and his hands fluttered placatingly, “but the door was wide open. More better, I thought, to wait for your return. Then things would not be stolen. Such old-fashioned doors in this hotel.”
“That’s funny,” Jack Rhyce said in a more reasonable tone. “I thought I’d locked that door, but you never can tell, can you? Anyway, it doesn’t look as if anybody had got into the suitcases, and you had your handbag down at the bar with you, didn’t you, sweet?”
“Yes,” Ruth Bogart said. “My gold clip would have been the only thing that really mattered anyway. I think it was very thoughtful of Mr. Moto to wait here for us.”
He wished to heaven that he could place Mr. Moto, who was becoming an annoyingly loose end to the problem.
“Of course I’m grateful to Mr. Moto too, sweet,” he said. “I was only sort of startled at first, seeing him there, that’s all. Excuse it, Mr. Moto. What did you want to see me for?”
Mr. Moto bobbed his head and rubbed his hands together. Once more Jack Rhyce had the impression of a character that was too Japanese to be true.
“First, may I ask you if all is right here, and proper?” Mr. Moto asked.
It did not alleviate Jack Rhyce’s frustration when Ruth Bogart giggled softly at the word “proper.” He even wondered whether Mr. Moto had used it intentionally, but then “proper” was a favorite Oriental word with many shades of meaning.
“Everything is swell, thanks,” he answered.
“And your wishes for tomorrow?” Mr. Moto asked. “So many things to see. Might I suggest a picnic and a ride toward the base of Mount Fuji? And Lake Hakone is so very beautiful. But this means start early.”
If it wasn’t one problem, it was another. In the light of recent events, he should have rented a car and driven it himself, so that it would have been parked outside the hotel at all hours, if they needed to get away, but now his mobility was controlled by the Japanese in front of him. Bill Gibson, he was thinking, would not approve of what he had done about the car.
“I tell you what,” he said. “You be waiting outside with the car at seven o’clock tomorrow morning, and then we’ll decide what we want to do.”
“Seven o’clock,” Mr. Moto repeated, and Jack Rhyce could not tell whether it was a repetition or a question. It was a ridiculously early hour, out of keeping with a peaceful week end, but it might be that they would badly need the car.
“Maybe it’s a little early,” Jack said, “but I was thinking we might climb some of the mountains.” He smiled at Ruth Bogart affectionately. “You want to see as much of everything as you can, don’t you, dear—that is, if you’re not too sleepy in the morning?”
“Jack,” she said, “I honestly don’t know how I’ll feel in the morning.”
Jack Rhyce smiled at her patiently.
“Of course, dear, if you don’t feel like it in the morning,” he said, “we can change everything. But it won’t hurt to have him here early, just in case, now will it?”
“All right,” she said, “as long as it’s just in case.”
“Well, that’s settled,” Jack Rhyce said, smiling in a man-to-man way at Mr. Moto. “Let’s make it eight, and thanks, and forgive anything I said about your being in the room. I’ll see the door’s locked next time.”
XII
He stood close to the closed door listening to the sound of Mr. Moto’s footsteps retreating down the hall in a clumsy noisy rhythm wholly different from the soft step on the gravel by the temple. The footsteps indicated as plainly as words that Mr. Moto knew he would be listening. Ruth Bogart crossed the room, making a quick noiseless check of the suitcases. She shook her head as a signal that nothing had been disturbed. He moved to the window and peered out. The afterglow had left the sky, and the electric lights had been turned on along the paths of the hotel grounds. He drew the curtains carefully.
“Turn on the water in the tub,” he whispered.
“Oh, Jack,” she called as she turned the water on, “hasn’t it been a wonderful day, darling?”
It was not the right adjective to describe it, and besides, the day was only just beginning. She moved close to him and rested her head on his shoulder, and he was glad to put his arms around her. He had seldom felt so grateful for companionship.
“My God,” she said, “it’s really started now.”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s moving. What do you know about Skirov?”
“Skirov …” she repeated vaguely.
He could not blame her much when her whole mind must have been on the present.
“Yes,” he said. “Skirov, the Russian who’s running the Communist show here—the masterminder whom our boy makes contact with. The Chief briefed you on him, didn’t he?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jack. I was thinking about the Jap and the big goon down in the bar and everything. Yes, Skirov. I saw him in Vienna once—Cossack descent, I think.”
“You saw him?” Jack Rhyce said. “Then you can tell me if I have his description straight. Middle forties, five feet five, one hundred twelve, thin, agile, delicate hands and feet, Mongoloid features
.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s him.”
Jack Rhyce lowered his voice, not because he was afraid of being overheard, but because he dreaded that his idea might not be right.
“All right,” he said, “what about this Moto? Is he Skirov playing a Jap?”
He was conscious of his anxiety while he waited for her reaction. It had been one of those swift inspirations which he had learned to suspect, but if he were right, they might be able to end the show that evening, because they would have worked out the whole scheme of the apparatus. It would be Gibson’s job to make the ultimate decision regarding Skirov, but from their point of view, the mission would be accomplished. The prospect of completing a mission always had its alluring side; he had never before been so desperately anxious to end one, not so much because of himself as because of her.
She was still considering his question. Her forehead was wrinkled and she gazed straight ahead of her. He was aware both of her nearness and her beauty, which annoyed him because his mind should have been concentrated on abstractions.
Finally she looked up at him, not enthusiastically, but with respect.
“I guess I was wrong in thinking that big handsome boys like you are dumb,” she said. “I like your thought. I wish I could buy it all.”
He had already developed the thought further, while she was speaking.
“Maybe it’s more reasonable than it sounds at first,” he said. “Take it this way.” He began to speak in a whisper, in spite of the running water. “They looked us over in San Francisco. They’ve got us down as innocent bystanders. They think we’re absolutely pure.”
“Yes,” she said. “I check with that. I think we’re clear to date. I had that feeling in the bar.”
Right You Are, Mr. Moto Page 15