Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’ The chauffeur’s face had darkened, his voice was barely civil. ‘I’ll ring the house.’ He turned away, went into the small lobby behind the door, lifted the phone and pressed a button, and as he did so the heavy gate swung open silently, smoothly, of its own accord.

  ‘All we need now is a moat and a portcullis,’ Jablonsky murmured as we began to move forward. ‘Looks after his 285 million, does the old general. Electrified fences, patrols, dogs, the lot, eh, lady?’

  She didn’t answer. We were moving past a big four-car garage attached to the lodge. It was a carport-type garage without doors and I could see I had been right about the Rolls-Royces. There were two of them, one sand-brown and beige, the other gun-metal blue. There was also a Cadillac. That would be for the groceries. Jablonsky was speaking again.

  ‘Old Fancy-pants back there. The Limey. Where’d you pick that sissy up?’

  ‘I’d like to see you say that to him without that gun in your hand,’ the girl said quietly. ‘He’s been with us for three years now. Nine months ago three masked men crashed our car with only Kennedy and myself in it. They all carried guns. One’s dead, the other two are still in prison.’

  ‘A lucky sissy,’ Jablonsky grunted and relapsed into silence.

  The asphalt drive-way up to the house was narrow, long, winding and thickly wooded on both sides. The small evergreen leaves of live oak and long dripping grey festoons of Spanish moss reached out and brushed the roof and sidescreens of the car. Suddenly the trees receded on both sides from the beams of the headlamps, giving way to strategically placed clumps of palms and palmettos, and there, behind a stepped granite balustrade wall and a gravel terrace, lay the general’s house.

  Built as an ordinary family house, the girl had said. Built for a family of about fifty. It was enormous. It was an old white ante-bellum-type house, so Colonial that it creaked, with a huge pillared two-storey porch, a curiously double-angled roof of a type I’d never seen before and enough glass to keep an active window-cleaner in year-round employment. Over the entrance of the lower porch were two more lights, big old-fashioned coach lamps each with a powerful electric bulb inside. Below the lamps stood the reception committee.

  I hadn’t expected the reception committee. Subconsciously, I suppose, I had expected the old high-class routine of being welcomed by the butler and deferentially and ceremoniously conducted to the library where the general would be sipping his Scotch before a crackling pine fire. Which was pretty silly, when you come to think of it. When you’re expecting a daughter back from the dead and the door-bell rings, you don’t just keep on sipping whisky. Not if you’re halfway human. The chauffeur had warned them: hence the committee.

  The butler was there too. He came down the steps of the porch carrying a huge golf umbrella out into the heavy rain. He didn’t look like any butler I’d ever seen. His coat was far too tight round his upper arms, shoulders and chest in a fashion that used to be popular among prohibition gangsters and his face did nothing to dispel the impression. He looked first cousin to Valentino, the bodyguard back in the court-room. Or maybe even more closely related. He even had the same broken nose. The general had a weird taste in butlers, especially when you considered his choice of chauffeur.

  But the butler seemed courteous enough. At least I thought he was until he saw who it was behind the driving-wheel and then he made a smart about turn, went round the front of the car and escorted Mary Ruthven to the shelter of the porch where she ran forward and threw her arms round her father’s neck. Jablonsky and I had to make it alone. We got wet, but no one seemed worried.

  By this time the girl had become disentangled from her father. I had a good look at him. He was an immensely tall old coot, thin but not too thin, in a silver-white linen suit. The colour of the suit was a perfect match for the hair. He had a long lean craggy Lincolnesque face, but just how craggy it was impossible to say for almost half of it was hidden behind a luxuriant white moustache and beard. He didn’t look like any big business magnate I’d ever come across, but with 285 million dollars he didn’t have to. He looked like the way I’d expected a southern judge to look and didn’t.

  ‘Come in, gentlemen,’ he said courteously. I wondered if he included me among the three other men standing in the shadows in the porch. It seemed unlikely, but I went in all the same. I hadn’t much option. Not only was Jablonsky’s Mauser jammed into the small of my back but another man who’d just stepped out of the shadow also carried a gun. We trooped across a huge, wide, chandelier-lit, tessellated-tile floored hall, down a broad passage and into a large room. I’d been right about the room anyway. It was a library, it did have a blazing pine fire and the slightly oily smell of fine leather-bound books mingled very pleasantly with the aroma of expensive Coronas and a high-class Scotch. I noticed there was nobody there smoking cigars. The walls that weren’t covered with bookshelves were panelled in polished elm. Chairs and settees were in dark gold leather and moquette, and the curtains of shot gold. A bronze-coloured carpet flowed over the floor from wall to wall and with a strong enough draught the nap on it would have waved and undulated like a wind-rippled field of summer corn. As it was, the chair castors were so deeply sunk in it as to be almost invisible.

  ‘Scotch, Mr – ah –?’ the general asked Jablonsky.

  ‘Jablonsky. I don’t mind, General. While I’m standing. And while I’m waiting.’

  ‘Waiting for what, Mr Jablonsky?’ General Ruthven had a quiet pleasant voice with very little inflection in it. With 285 million bucks you don’t have to shout to make yourself heard.

  ‘Ain’t you the little kidder, now?’ Jablonsky was as quiet, as unruffled as the general. ‘For the little paper, General, with your name signed at the bottom. For the fifty thousand iron men.’

  ‘Of course.’ The general seemed faintly surprised that Jablonsky should think it necessary to remind him of the agreement. He crossed to the dressed-stone mantelpiece, pulled a yellow bank slip from under a paper-weight. ‘I have it here, just the payee’s name to be filled in.’ I thought a slight smile touched his mouth but under all that foliage it was difficult to be sure. ‘And you needn’t worry about my phoning the bank with instructions not to honour this cheque. Such is not my way of doing business.’

  ‘I know it’s not, General.’

  ‘And my daughter is worth infinitely more to me than this. I must thank you, sir, for bringing her back.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jablonsky took the cheque, glanced casually at it, then looked at the general, a speculative glint in his eyes.

  ‘Your pen slipped, General,’ he drawled. ‘I asked for fifty thousand. You got seventy thousand here.’

  ‘Correct.’ Ruthven inclined his head and glanced at me. ‘I had offered ten thousand dollars for information about this man here. I also feel that I’m morally bound to make good the five thousand offered by the authorities. It’s so much easier to make out one lump-sum cheque to one person, don’t you agree?’

  ‘And the extra five thousand?’

  ‘For your trouble and the pleasure it will give me to hand this man over to the authorities personally.’ Again I couldn’t be sure whether or not he smiled. ‘I can afford to indulge those whims, you know.’

  ‘Your pleasure is my pleasure, General. I’ll be on my way, then. Sure you can handle this fellow? He’s tough, fast, tricky as they come.’

  ‘I have people who can handle him.’ It was plain that the general wasn’t referring to the butler and another uniformed servant hovering in the background. He pressed a bell, and when some sort of footman came to the door, said: ‘Ask Mr Vyland and Mr Royale to come in, will you, Fletcher?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask them yourself, General?’ To my way of thinking I was the central figure in that little group, but they hadn’t even asked me to speak, so I thought it was time to say something. I bent down to the bowl of artificial flowers on the table by the fire, and pulled up a fine-meshed microphone. ‘This room’
s bugged. A hundred gets one your friends have heard every word that’s been said. For a millionaire and high society flier, Ruthven, you have some strange habits.’ I broke off and looked at the trio who had just come through the doorway. ‘And even stranger friends.’

  Which wasn’t quite an accurate statement. The first man in looked perfectly at home in that luxurious setting. He was of medium height, medium build, dressed in a perfectly cut dinner suit and smoking a cigar as long as your arm. That was the expensive smell I’d picked up as soon as I had come into the library. He was in his early fifties, with black hair touched by grey at the temples: his neat clipped moustache was jet black. His face was smooth and unlined and deeply sunburnt. He was Hollywood’s ideal of a man to play the part of a top executive, smooth, urbane and competent to a degree. It was only when he came closer and you saw his eyes and the set of the planes of his face that you realized that here was a toughness, both physical and mental, and a hardness that you would never see around a movie set. A man to watch.

  The second man was more off-beat. It was hard to put a finger on the quality that made him so. He was dressed in a soft grey flannel suit, white shirt, and grey tie of the same shade as the suit. He was slightly below medium height, broadly built, with a pale face and smooth slicked hair almost the same colour as Mary Ruthven’s. It wasn’t until you looked again and again that you saw what made him off-beat, it wasn’t anything he had, it was something he didn’t have. He had the most expressionless face, the emptiest eyes I had even seen in any man.

  Off-beat was no description for the man who brought up the rear. He belonged in that library the way Mozart would have belonged in a rock and roll club. He was only twenty-one or -two, tall, skinny, with a dead-white face and coal-black eyes. The eyes were never still, they moved restlessly from side to side as if it hurt them to be still, flickering from one face to another like a will-o’-the-wisp on an autumn evening. I didn’t notice what he wore, all I saw was his face. The face of a hophead, a junky, an advanced dope addict. Take away his white powder for even twenty-four hours and he’d be screaming his head off as all the devils in hell closed in on him.

  ‘Come in, Mr Vyland.’ The general was speaking to the man with the cigar and I wished for the tenth time that old Ruthven’s expression wasn’t so hard to read. He nodded in my direction. ‘This is Talbot, the wanted man. And this is Mr Jablonsky, the man who brought him back.’

  ‘Glad to meet you, Mr Jablonsky.’ Vyland smiled in a friendly fashion and put his hand out. ‘I’m the general’s chief production engineer.’ Sure, he was the general’s chief production engineer, that made me President of the United States. Vyland nodded at the man in the grey suit. ‘This is Mr Royale, Mr Jablonsky.’

  ‘Mr Jablonsky! Mr Jablonsky!’ The words weren’t spoken, they were hissed by the tall thin boy with the staring eyes. His hand dived under the lapel of his jacket and I had to admit he was fast. The gun trembled in his hand. He swore, three unprintable words in succession, and the eyes were glazed and mad. ‘I’ve waited two long years for this, you – Damn you, Royale! Why did –?’

  ‘There’s a young lady here, Larry.’ I could have sworn that Royale’s hand hadn’t reached under his coat, or for his hip pocket, but there had been no mistaking the flash of dulled metal in his hand, the sharp crack of the barrel on Larry’s wrist and the clatter of the boy’s gun bouncing off a brass-topped table. As an example of sleight-of-hand conjuring, I’d never seen anything to beat it.

  ‘We know Mr Jablonsky,’ Royale was continuing. His voice was curiously musical and soothing and soft. ‘At least, Larry and I know. Don’t we, Larry? Larry did six months once on a narcotics charge. It was Jablonsky that sent him up.’

  ‘Jablonsky sent––’ the general began.

  ‘Jablonsky.’ Royale smiled and nodded at the big man. ‘Detective-Lieutenant Herman Jablonsky, of New York Homicide.’

  FOUR

  It was one of those silences. It went on and on and on. Pregnant, they call it. It didn’t worry me much, I was for the high jump anyway. It was the general who spoke first and his voice and face were stiff and cold as he looked at the man in the dinner suit.

  ‘What is the explanation of this outrageous conduct, Vyland?’ he demanded. ‘You bring into this house a man who is apparently not only a narcotics addict and carries a gun, but who also served a prison sentence. As for the presence of a police officer, someone might care to inform me –’

  ‘Relax, General. You can drop the front.’ It was Royale who spoke, his voice quiet and soothing as before and curiously devoid of any trace of insolence. ‘I wasn’t quite accurate. Ex-Detective-Lieutenant, I should have said. Brightest boy in the bureau in his day, first narcotics, then homicide, more arrests and more convictions for arrests than any other police officer in the eastern states. But your foot slipped, didn’t it, Jablonsky?’

  Jablonsky said nothing and his face showed nothing, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking plenty. My face showed nothing, but I was thinking plenty. I was thinking how I could try to get away. The servants had vanished at a wave of the hand from the general and, for the moment, everyone seemed to have lost interest in me. I turned my head casually. I was wrong, there was someone who hadn’t lost interest in me. Valentino, my court-room acquaintance, was standing in the passageway just outside the open door, and the interest he was taking in me more than made up for the lack of interest in the library. I was pleased to see that he was carrying his right arm in a sling. His left thumb was hooked in the side pocket of his coat, and although he might have had a big thumb it wasn’t big enough to make all that bulge in his pocket. He would just love to see me trying to get away.

  ‘Jablonsky here was the central figure in the biggest police scandal to hit New York since the war,’ Royale was saying. ‘All of a sudden there were a lot of murders – important murders – in his parish, and Jablonsky boobed on the lot. Everyone knew a protection gang was behind the killings. Everybody except Jablonsky. All Jablonsky knew was that he was getting ten grand a stiff to look in every direction but the right one. But he had even more enemies inside the force than outside, and they nailed him. Eighteen months ago it was, and he had the headlines to himself for an entire week. Don’t you remember, Mr Vyland?’

  ‘Now I do,’ Vyland nodded. ‘Sixty thousand tucked away and they never laid a finger on a cent. Three years he got, wasn’t it?’

  ‘And out in eighteen months,’ Royale finished. ‘Jumped the wall; Jablonsky?’

  ‘Good conduct remission,’ Jablonsky said calmly. ‘A respectable citizen again. Which is more than could be said for you, Royale. You employing this man, General?’

  ‘I fail to see –’

  ‘Because if you are, it’ll cost you a hundred bucks more than you think. A hundred bucks is the price Royale usually charges his employers for a wreath for his victims. A very fancy wreath. Or has the price gone up, Royale? And who are you putting the finger on this time?’

  Nobody said anything. Jablonsky had the floor.

  ‘Royale here is listed in the police files of half the states in the Union, General. Nobody’s ever pinned anything on him yet, but they know all about him. No.1 remover in the United States, not furniture but people. He charges high, but he’s good and there’s never any comeback. A freelance, and his services are in terrific demand by all sorts of people you’d never dream of, not only because he never fails to give satisfaction but also because of the fact that it’s a point of Royale’s code that he’ll never touch a man who has employed him. An awful lot of people sleep an awful lot easier, General, just because they know they’re on Royale’s list of untouchables.’ Jablonsky rubbed a bristly chin with a hand the size of a shovel. ‘I wonder who he could be after this time, General? Could it even be yourself, do you think?’

  For the first time the general registered emotion. Not even the beard and moustache could hide a narrowing of the eyes, a tightening of the lips and a slight but perceptible draining of colour from
the cheeks. He wet his lips, slowly, and looked at Vyland.

  ‘Did you know anything of this? What truth is there –?’

  ‘Jablonsky’s just shooting off the top of his mouth,’ Vyland interjected smoothly. ‘Let’s get them into another room, General. We must talk.’

  Ruthven nodded, his face still pale, and Vyland glanced at Royale. Royale smiled and said without inflection: ‘All right, you two, out. Leave that gun there, Jablonsky.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘You haven’t cashed that cheque yet,’ Royale said obliquely. They’d been listening, all right.

  Jablonsky put his gun on the table. Royale himself didn’t have a gun in his hand. With the speed he could move at it would have been quite superfluous anyway. The hophead, Larry, came up behind me and dug his pistol barrel in my kidney with a force that made me grunt in pain. Nobody said anything, so I said: ‘Do that again, hophead, and it’ll take a dentist a whole day to repair your face.’ So he did it again, twice as painfully as before, and when I swung round he was too quick for me and caught me with the barrel of his gun high up on the face and raked the sight down my cheek. Then he stood off, four feet away, gun pointed at my lower stomach and those crazy eyes jumping all over the place, a wicked smile on his face inviting me to jump him. I mopped some of the blood off my face and turned and went out the door.

  Valentino was waiting for me, gun in hand and heavy boots on his feet, and by the time Royale came leisurely out of the library, closed the door behind him and stopped Valentino with a single word, I couldn’t walk. There’s nothing wrong with my thigh, it’s carried me around for years, but it’s not made of oak and Valentino wore toe-plates on his boots. It just wasn’t my lucky night. Jablonsky helped me off the floor into an adjacent room. I stopped at the doorway, looked back at the grinning Valentino and then at Larry, and I wrote them both down in my little black book.