The Drill Is Death

by FRANCES

  When the captain came. It was not for the better part of an hour that Reg’s reluctant mind changed “when” to “if.”

  This, he thought, goes beyond even the worst I have heard of the methods of the American police. This is official arrogance without meaning; this was the sort of thing the Nazis had done; that he supposed the Russian police still were doing. This went beyond—

  I am, Reg thought suddenly, a bit slow on the uptake. Lay it to inexperience in such matters; lay it to an orderly life within the law.

  These men said they were policemen; one of them showed me a piece of shining metal to prove it. But—the piece of metal did not prove it, did not prove anything. These men said that this was all a matter of routine, requiring only an hour or so for completion. Clearly, they lied. They said a “captain” would be right along. And lied.

  They said they were policemen—and lied.

  Which left his mind occupied with one large word—one large question. Why? The question grew louder as time passed.

  Poets require logical minds, since the use of words, and especially their non-wasteful use, is a logical exercise. Poets learn to practice economy of thought, as well as other economies more material. So, when it became apparent that the large question was not going to find an immediate answer, even a small one, Reginald Grant exercised mental economy. He turned out the light and lay down on the couch. Briefly, he considered rearrangement of a line of verse which had for some days persisted in his mind. Then he went to sleep.

  III

  Light wakened him and he discovered that sleep had not provided an answer to the Why?

  Sunlight trickled through the window and in mid-November the sun does not rise early. He looked at his watch, and it was well after ten o’clock. They had let him sleep in; decent of them. Unless, of course, they had merely locked him up and gone away, which would he anything but decent.

  He went to the window and looked through it. The trees were evergreens, closer than he had supposed when he had seen them wavering in the fog. No fog now; a bright day as November days go. The sun topped the trees, which screened the house—this side of the house, at any rate. He could see nothing beyond the trees, but got an impression that, beyond the first line of evergreens, the ground rose rather sharply.

  He turned from the window when he heard the key in the lock, and faced the door. The door opened and there were the two of them—the square man and, again, the taller dark man behind him. The square man carried a tray; the man behind him carried, in his left hand, a small suitcase which Reg recognized as his own, and a folded newspaper. In the other hand, he carried a pistol.

  “Breakfast,” the square man said.

  Reg merely looked at him; looked down at him, which was agreeable, but did not seem to give him any tangible advantage.

  “Have a good night?” the square man asked, and found a small table and put the tray down on it. The other man put the suitcase on the floor and the newspaper with it—two newspapers, from the bulk—and kept the pistol pointed at Grant.

  “Compliments,” Grant said, jerking a thumb toward the tray, “of the captain, I suppose?”

  “A joker,” the square man said, pleased. “A real sure enough joker. Captain said to tell you he was detained.”

  Grant took a step toward him.

  “Wouldn’t,” the square man said. “Just eat your breakfast and read your newspapers. Interesting story in the newspapers. Brought some of your things along, too. Think of everything, don’t we?”

  “What’s the bloody idea?” Grant said. He did not speak loudly; there was obviously no point in raising his voice, just as there was no point in going against the gun in the dark man’s right hand.

  “You’ll get it,” the man said. “Give you time and you’ll get it, Mr. Grant.”

  They went out then, not turning their backs on him, and closed and locked the door. Grant made no further move until the door was locked. Then he went over and picked up the newspapers. The Daily Mirror was uppermost, and there was enough on the front page:

  “Poet Sought In

  Co-Ed’s Murder!”

  That was enough. That was enough to go on with.

  Reginald Grant, admittedly a poet, stared at the leaping black letters.

  He picked up The New York Times. The headline was smaller on the front page of the Times, but it was on the front page of the Times. He sat on the couch and slowly, unbelievingly, read what was in the Times. As he read on, down the long column on the front page, on the inner page to which the account was continued, Reginald Grant became conscious of a kind of dizziness in his mind.

  The girl was—had been—Jeanette Larkin. She had been nineteen years old and a student in the College of Arts and Sciences of Dyckman University. Among the classes she had attended had been one in Contemporary Poetry and the class had been conducted by Reginald Grant, widely known English poet and this year’s Bingham Lecturer on modern poetry. And Reginald Grant was being sought for questioning by the police and had disappeared from his apartment.

  It was all most carefully worded. The account of the delivery of the girl’s body to the West Twentieth Street police station by Mr. Grant and Joseph Abrams, 57, of—Melrose Avenue, the Bronx, was accurate. And read about, it was preposterous. That anyone should, even for a moment, have believed so unlikely a story! Reginald Grant shivered slightly. He took the napkin off the tray, noticed that the plate contained scrambled eggs and bacon, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He could have done with something stronger.

  Mr. Grant had denied to the police any acquaintance with the girl. When her identity was established, several hours later (How, Grant wondered? Fingerprints?) the police had gone to Mr. Grant’s apartment to ask how it had happened that he had denied ever having seen a young woman who, since the opening of the academic year, had sat in a class to which he lectured each Tuesday afternoon. They had found that Mr. Grant was not in his apartment. They had also discovered that on the closet shelf in the apartment there was a dustless oblong where a small suitcase might have been, and that in the bathroom there was no shaving gear, no toothbrush. One dresser drawer was partly open and it appeared that several articles of clothing might have been hastily removed.

  The Times merely stated, did not comment.

  Miss Larkin had had a sister and had stayed in the sister’s apartment,—West Twelfth Street, in Greenwich Village, since the start of the school year. The sister was Peggy Larkin, a secretary. And, according to the police, Miss Peggy Larkin said that, far from being unknown to Mr. Grant, her sister had had several dates with him.

  “She was so happy,” Peggy Larkin was quoted as saying. “So excited that he had noticed her.”

  Grant put the newspaper down and blinked slightly, as if what he had just read had hurt his eyes. What they had hurt, however, was his mind. Momentarily, Reginald Grant considered the possibility that something had happened to it. Had his personality, which was to say his mind, split down the middle, each half periodically controlling his bodily activities? Grant finished the coffee in his cup and poured it full again, doing these things—these simple and reassuring things—very slowly.

  Theoretically, he supposed it was remotely possible that such a split had occurred. Such things were said to happen, and not only in the pages of Stevenson. If this had happened to him, there was clearly nothing he could immediately do about it and the presumption was that, eventually, he would end up in an institution for the criminally insane. Meanwhile—

  Meanwhile, the point was to arrive at some less embarrassing explanation, assuming he was now, and had all the time been, of one piece.

  He was not a hermit by nature. During his weeks in New York he had had “dates.” None of them was with a child; certainly none was with a child named Jeanette Larkin. Nor had he ever known a woman, apparently older, named Peggy Larkin. Start with those things, assume them incontrovertible. Then Peggy Larkin, like the men who had kidnaped him, lied. Why?

  The only explanation was
, on the face of it, preposterous: Peggy Larkin and the men who had pretended to be policemen must be in something together, and that something directed against him. It was, on the whole, almost easier to believe that his mind had divided against itself. Conspiracies simply were not arranged—not against people of so little importance as poets. There was, flatly, nobody in the world who would go to that much trouble to do in a man like himself. (He had, to be sure, been rather devastating a year or so before in reviewing a volume of verse by an English “poetess.” He had called her that, to rub it in a bit. She had, he was quite certain, been annoyed. But probably she was in Greece—she was a great one for being in Greece—and was in any event unlikely to be prone to violence. She wrote as if she were hand-coloring china, for one thing.)

  If there were a conspiracy, it must be directed against another man. He must, therefore, be a victim of mistaken identity. He tried to swallow that, and found it as difficult to get down as anything else. He reread the Times’s account.

  The police believed that Jeanette Larkin had been forced, or enticed, into the cab and killed there. If she had been killed elsewhere, it had been only minutes before she died (since she had bled so profusely in the cab) and there would have been “traces” of blood on the sidewalk outside. There had been none.

  Joe Abrams—could it be that Joe was, somehow, also involved in whatever this was?—had been questioned “at length.” He had not, according to the police, changed his story—his story that he had left the cab parked while he went to a restaurant, returned to it and not seen anything amiss, picked up Mr. Grant at around seven-thirty and been with him when he discovered the girl’s body.

  “Abrams, according to the police, insists he did not see Mr. Grant in the vicinity prior to the time Mr. Grant signaled him and he drove a quarter of a block and across the street to pick him up. He says that when he first saw Mr. Grant, the lecturer was standing at the curb. He did not see him come down the stairs from the building in which he has an apartment.”

  Why was that stressed? A moment’s consideration made the answer apparent. For all that Joe could testify to, Reginald Grant might have been out of his apartment for any length of time, and wandered anywhere in the fog and rain, including to the parked cab and back again.

  “According to the police, Mr. Abrams insists that Mr. Grant appeared to him to be very shocked at discovering the girl’s body, and gave no indication of knowing who she was. It was, he says, he, rather than Mr. Grant, who suggested that they drive the cab to the station house without first calling for an ambulance. He says, as the police report him, that it was Mr. Grant who made sure the girl was dead.”

  Fair enough—and with a residual implication. Intended by Joe Abrams? Believe Joe until proved wrong; a good egg, Joe, to all outward appearances. Reg read on. It was never said; he was merely wanted to “amplify” his earlier statement. It was never said that he had killed a girl he was having an affair with and pushed her into a cab and then, presumably as a cover story, “discovered” her body. Such things are not said in newspapers. If newspapers must leave space between the lines, that is a requirement of typography.

  Reg did not like what he read between the lines.

  At the bottom of the main story there was a briefer item, separated from it by a rule. Reg had not read it the first time; he read it now.

  “Special to The New York Times.

  “London, November 15—Reginald Grant, widely known as a poet and critic, has contributed to numerous publications in England and Scotland. In literary circles, he is considered one of the nation’s leading modern poets.

  “He is the son of the late Canon and Mrs. Arthur Grant, and is reported to be independently wealthy. He was educated at Cambridge. He is unmarried. At one time he drove in sports car races as an amateur, but according to friends has not raced in recent years.

  “He is a cousin of Dr. Benjamin Cutler, Oxford don, who was long active in left-wing causes. Dr. Cutler disappeared three years ago last spring under circumstances which remain mysterious. It was suggested, but not confirmed, that he had defected to the Communists and is now somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. During the Second World War, Dr. Cutler served the government as an authority on Slavic-speaking nations. It was officially denied at the time of his disappearance that his duties had made him privy to classified material in which the Russians, or others, might be interested.”

  Poor old Ben, Reg thought. Why drag him into it? Water long ago under the bridge, carrying its flotsam with it. He had known Ben slightly as one may know a cousin—their interests and their tastes (particularly political) had been as far apart as was easily possible, more than twenty years separated them in age. Of necessity, the police—not actually the police, he supposed, but near enough—had had a good many questions to ask him, as they had his father and, more especially, his mother, whose much older sister had been Ben Cutler’s mother. It was to those questions he had known no answers—no helpful answers. Everybody had been most polite about it, and most sympathetic. The United States consulate had not brought the matter up when he had applied for a visa, and in such matters the Americans were notoriously—and to most English minds ridiculously—sticky.

  He had not thought of Ben for years. If he liked Moscow, or wherever he was, it was all right with Reginald Grant. He wouldn’t, himself. It must be hellishly cold in Moscow in the winter, among other disadvantages.

  Why, now, drag him—the memory of him—into this? Merely to make it more preposterous? Or, merely to prove that the Times is a thorough newspaper?

  Reg ate the eggs, which had gone soggy cold. He left the bacon; American bacon was for those who liked it, a group in which he was not included. He finished the coffee. Much better than he would have got at home.

  He opened the suitcase and found that it contained precisely what he expected—electric razor, toothbrush, underwear, two shirts, hairbrush and comb, socks and handkerchiefs. All, he thought, precisely the things a man in a hurry to get away from somewhere would throw into precisely such a small suitcase as these had been thrown into. No wonder the police—the real police—thought he had made a run for it.

  Well, he might as well use what had been provided. Squeezing dentifrice onto his toothbrush he did, to be sure, momentarily wonder if the paste had been poisoned. Anything, at the moment, was as possible as anything else, in a world turned upside down. The toothpaste tasted much as usual. He shaved. A man is at a disadvantage with stubble on his face.

  With these small chores completed, and a shower postponed—a man is at a disadvantage naked under a shower—he went back into his comfortable cell and examined it. No convenient trap doors. The window would not open because it was nailed shut. The room was, of course, too warm. That was to be expected. The wooden door seemed heavy, needlessly solid. That, also, was to be expected. He thought of something and continued his examination—the nail heads were not shining new. So, this place had not been prepared for him. Had there been other transients?

  A great many questions; no useful answers. There was, clearly, nothing to do at the moment but wait. He read The New York Times. He read the Daily Mirror. Curious thing, the Mirror.

  He had finished both newspapers and returned to thought long before they brought him lunch. Thought had, again, got him nowhere. As to why he should be plotted against, if he was being plotted against, he still had not a glimmer. Whatever the plot, it did not, evidently, require his extermination—not, at any rate, his immediate extermination. He had been fed, and not poisoned. That was something.

  It was a little after two when they fed him again—again the same two men, the square man carrying a tray and the dark man a gun.

  “I suppose there’s no use—” Reg began, when they came in, and did not finish because the square man did not wait for him to finish, but said “Nope,” with emphasis. He brought newspapers with the lunch and said, “Read all about it,” and put the tray down on top of the New York World-Telegram and Sun and the Journal-American. The fo
od this time was in a compartmented aluminum tray—what presumably was, or had been, turkey in one pocket, peas in another and mashed potatoes in the third. Reg was momentarily puzzled, then recalled of having heard of something American called a “TV Dinner.” Presumably this was it. He ate it while he read the newspapers.

  The World-Telegram reported that “Search for Missing Poet Widens” in an eight-column headline. “Sought Poet Had Red Ties!” the Journal-American exclaimed. This briefly puzzled Reginald Grant, who was a conservative dresser and elected rather somber cravats. The first paragraph of the news story clarified the matter:

  “Reginald Grant, Dyckman lecturer sought for questioning in connection with the brutal slaying of a pretty co-ed, is a near relative of a notorious English left-winger who fled to Communist Russia several years ago, the Journal-American learned today.”

  (Learned, Reg thought, by reading The New York Times.)

  “This was not denied by police officers in charge of the investigation when it was brought to their attention by a Journal-American reporter. Asked whether the police were pursuing this angle, on the chance that the knife-murder of nineteen-year-old Jeanette Larkin might be linked with Red underground activities, a police spokesman would say only that all angles were being investigated.”

  Reginald Grant interrupted his reading briefly and tried to picture the flight of a pursued angle. Failing, he continued with the Journal-American’s account, which proved to be largely repetition, in shorter sentences, of what he had read in the Times. The police did, to be sure, decline to say whether they had uncovered leads to the whereabouts of the missing man. And associates of the poet-lecturer at Dyckman University professed themselves astonished that Mr. Grant should have been involved with one of his female students and found it difficult to believe that he could have had anything to do with murder. “A quiet and rather withdrawn man,” one of his associates said of Reginald Grant.