They parted company at last, and he walked down toward the shore, while she came up the path to the hotel. She passed quite close to where I crouched in the bushes. I watched her out of sight, noting that, unlike the average woman in a narrow dress and high heels, she managed to walk without excessive posterior undulations. She looked respectable and restrained and expensive, obviously a very high type of lady, the kind who’d never dream of giving herself to a man casually, merely to win his confidence.
I made a face at my thoughts and told myself that everything was fine. Just great. This new development had actually improved my situation. Trustworthy women are a menace to have around, I told myself, particularly when they’re beautiful as well. You get to feeling responsible for them and their damn beauty. Tricky, double-crossing females, on the other hand, regardless of looks, make no demands on the conscience, and they can be very useful. For instance, they often know things the trustworthy ladies don’t.
I slipped out of my hiding place and headed for the car, telling myself that I was really a very smart fellow and they should have known better than to try to put one over on Matthew Helm. So I got into the car and somebody rose from the floor behind—where I should have looked but hadn’t—and stuck a gun in my ear. That’s approximately what happens in this racket whenever you start thinking about how very smart you are.
“Take it easy, Eric,” said a youthful male voice I recognized. “This is Francis. Bill Menander, remember? It’s your turn to keep looking straight ahead or comes it a big hole in the head. You’d better check your dose, Mr. Helm. I only slept for an hour and fifteen minutes on what you gave me back there at the porpoise farm.”
I said, “I’ll tell the lab. What happens now?”
“You pass your gun back here, very slowly.”
“Here it comes.” I held it up and felt it taken away. “And now?”
Before he could answer, somebody came running up to the car. “Okay, Bill,” said a breathless man’s voice that I didn’t recognize. “I got the kanaka. He’s out cold.”
“For how long?”
“For long enough. Let’s get out of here before Pressman comes looking for his tough beach boy… Move over, you!”
I moved over. There were, of course, all kinds of spectacular responses I could have made, but most of them are designed to leave people dead on the ground. Taking a gun away from a man is risky business at best. Taking it away from him without hurting him isn’t something you want to try unless you’ve got a life or two to spare. And there were some interesting angles here. It seemed better to explore them cautiously than to act like a hero agent with a short fuse.
I sat docilely in the right front seat, therefore, with the gun at my neck, while the unknown youth beside me drove us down the hotel hill and south along the coast highway.
“What’s a kanaka?” I asked at last.
The driver glanced at me irritably, as if to tell me to shut up, but Francis answered behind me, “It used to mean just a man. Well, a native man. I think Jack London once wrote a story called ‘The Kanaka Surf.’ That was the big he-man surf that only natives could handle, as opposed to the malahini surf, the little surf suitable for tourists to play in. It used to be a proud word, I guess, but people took to using it in a derogatory way, so now… Well, you’ve got to be kind of careful whom you call a kanaka. It’s kind of like calling a Mexican a greaser. I mean, Rog here wouldn’t call Mister Glory a kanaka to his face, would you, Rog.”
The driver said, “Go to hell. I’m not scared of that beach bum. You should have seen the way I took care of him. He never knew what hit him.”
“Mister Glory?” I said. “Who’s that, the bronze character in the jeep?”
“His real name is Jimmy Hanohano,” Francis said. “He’s supposed to be descended from kings or something.”
The youth called Rog said, “So what? So’s every Mick I ever met.”
Francis said, “Anyway, Hanohano means honor or glory in Hawaiian, so he called himself Mister Glory in a band he had for a while. Mister Glory and his Surf Kings. He still sings and plays in the bars—that Beyond-the-Reef kind of mush—and makes love to the female malahinis. They really go for him. He can do the old-time slack-string guitar bit, too, real ethnic, but you’ve got to catch him in the mood. But you don’t want to meet him drunk with a broken bottle in his hand.”
“Ah, shut up,” said Rog. “You sound like his press agent or something. He’s not so damn tough.”
“Well, I just hope you laid him out good. He’s one guy I don’t want any trouble with. And Pressman’s another. That hatchet-faced creep would order us killed like ordering eggs for breakfast.”
“Maybe he already has. Or the Monk has. There’s the only guy who scares me. Those damn blue eyes of his… Hang on, we might as well turn here and get off the road a bit.”
As we swerved, the headlights flashed across one of the colorful tourist-bureau markers put up to identify local points of interest. Then we were bouncing along a dirt track through the big Hawaiian mesquites—excuse me, kiawes. The road emerged from the trees and dove into a sugarcane field that seemed endless in the dark: just interminable rows of tall green cane sliding into the lights on either side of the car. Finally this gave way to a canyon of sorts, heading up into the invisible hills. Rog stopped the car under a wall of rock and cut the lights and the ignition. There was a little silence after the engine had died. Francis tapped me on the shoulder.
“Here’s your gun, Mr. Helm,” he said, holding it out to me butt first.
I looked at it, a little startled. As I say, we’re disillusioned and suspicious; we don’t believe in Santa Claus at all. And there are a number of nasty routines that start with giving the prisoner back his gun. Before I could make up my mind to grasp the weapon, Rog had reached out and snatched it from Francis’ hand.
“Have you lost your everlasting marbles?”
Francis said, “We need the man’s help, don’t we? He’s the only guy we can turn to. So who’s going to help looking down a gun barrel, yet? Give it back to him.” He spoke to me: “Sorry about the holdup, sir, but we had to talk to you and you were being watched. There wasn’t any quick way to explain without letting the whole world know… Give it back to him, Rog!”
“Take it easy. Let’s hear what he can do for us before we get so damn generous with the firearms. Ask him about Jill.”
“What about Jill?” I demanded.
“That’s what we want to know, Mr. Helm,” Francis said. “She told us she had a kind of date with you this morning. We know she was trying to make up her mind about telling you…” He stopped.
“Telling me what?”
Rog asked suspiciously, “Did you see her this morning?”
“Yes, I saw her. She checked me out on a surfboard. Well, more or less.”
Rog said sourly, “That must have been something to see!”
I regarded him for a moment. There was enough light to make him out after a fashion: one of those handsome, tanned, sneering, dime-a-dozen boys with streaky, too-long hair. Not that I have any objection to long haircuts. Wild Bill Hickock wore his to the shoulders and nobody was heard to complain. But then, Hickock had a little more than hair going for him. All you could say for Rog was that he was making his associate, Francis, look better all the time, despite the plump face and the silly little moustache.
Francis said, “Lay off, Rog. Don’t mind him, Mr. Helm. He’s just scared. We’re both scared. We don’t know what the hell we’ve got ourselves into, sir, and now the Kilauea Street house is closed and nobody answers the phone and Lanny’s dead and Jill’s disappeared. You don’t know where she is? She claimed you’d been sent to investigate the information she’d passed to Washington. She was going to identify herself to you as soon as she dared. Didn’t she tell you anything while you were out there together this morning?”
I didn’t answer at once. The fact that Jill had apparently confided freely in these boys was a blow; it made a joke of
our attempts at security—particularly now that Francis had blabbed the essential facts to the warm night air. It wasn’t hard to decide how far I trusted him and his associate; I didn’t trust them at all. Even if they were sincere, which hadn’t been proved, they were obviously inexperienced and not too bright in professional matters.
However, this wasn’t really important now because there was somebody out in the dark whom I trusted even less, somebody who’d already heard too much.
17
I didn’t know who was out there, of course. My hearing and experience simply told me we were being stalked, like moose in a meadow. Just guessing, I eliminated Isobel. It didn’t seem like her kind of assignment; certainly she hadn’t been dressed for it when last seen. I figured it was probably either the hawk-faced man I now had a name for, Pressman, or his boy Hanohano, known as Mister Glory. Rog claimed to have put the latter to sleep for a reasonable period, but Rog wasn’t a source I considered completely reliable.
In any case, discretion was useless now. We’d been talking in normal tones and the car windows were open. It was a quiet night up here in the foothills, good for eavesdropping. I had to assume that the man out in the dark had heard facts about Jill he could not be allowed to repeat. A few more wouldn’t hurt. He might as well get a good earful while I tolled him in to where he could be silenced.
I said, speaking loudly and clearly, “Well, as a matter of fact she did tell me a few things. But she didn’t tell me she’d taken all of Hawaii into her confidence. I thought the girl was being careful, for God’s sake! Who else knows that she’s been in contact with Washington?”
“Just us, Mr. Helm,” Francis said. “And Lanny, but he’s dead.”
“Who’s Lanny and how’s he dead?”
“There were four of us—Jill, Lanny, Rog, and me. We… we kind of worked together. You know, on the peace bit. Jill was the spark plug, she was full of ideas…”
“Sure. She gave me that weep-for-the-toiling-Asian-masses line. Never mind that. Get to Lanny, who’s dead where?”
Francis said with a hint of stubbornness, “Well, first you’d better know how we all got recruited, sir. You see, after one of our meetings, Jill met this man who called himself Rath—”
“Monk,” I said. “She told me. He sold her the idea and she sold you. You were all going to save the world for peace on government pay.”
The stalker was moving in closer. I couldn’t really believe the boys hadn’t heard him, but city kids—kids who’ve never spent time in the woods with a rabbit gun or deer rifle—are practically deaf. Or perhaps they knew perfectly well he was out there. Perhaps this was a setup and their job was to make me talk for the man out in the dark, whoever he might be. For the moment I was happy to oblige.
Rog said angrily, “Hell, man, it’s our lives they want to throw away out in those crummy jungles. A man’s got a right to say what he’s going to get killed for, hasn’t he?”
I saw no need to get involved in that argument. I just asked, “What did Lanny get killed for? Or did he die a natural death?”
“He died of a broken neck,” Francis said, and shivered. “I think Monk did that, personally. Lanny’s lying there in the house on Kilauea Street with his head all twisted to one side… Mr. Helm, I think we were played for suckers. I think Monk, for some reason, wanted a bunch of young people with pacifist records, wanted them on the rolls, so to speak, to cover what he was really doing with the men whose names never showed on the books. I mean, we never got any real training, not to amount to anything. And nobody got reprimanded for getting involved in political affairs—or staying involved. You’d almost have thought Monk liked having us attract attention. And we never had much to do. Shadowing you was the first real assignment I was given. I guess I was pretty clumsy at it.”
“Let’s just say I spotted you,” I said. “I thought I was supposed to. Now, if you don’t mind, let’s bear down on your friend Lanny. He’s dead with a broken neck in the house on Kilauea Street. That’s the house in Honolulu Monk was using as headquarters?”
“Officially,” Francis said. “I’m beginning to think that was kind of a front, too.”
“Now the house is shut up? Nobody’s there except Lanny, dead?”
“That’s right,” Rog said. “Jeez, we practically fell over him when we broke in.”
Francis said, “You see, Mr. Helm, we tried to call, to report in and ask for instructions, and we got no answer at any of the usual numbers. I mean, I tried after I woke up—you’d given me a message to deliver, remember—and then I got hold of Rog, and I tried to reach Lanny and Jill, but I couldn’t. We tried the contact numbers again. No soap. So we drove on out there and the place was empty. No cars, nobody answering the door, nothing. Except Lanny’s Honda. We walked around and found a window half open and crawled in and found him. Lanny, I mean. I figure he did like we did, tried to call, and then drove out when he got no answer. But when he got there somebody was still there, and Lanny saw something he shouldn’t have, so he got killed.”
“What about Jill?” I asked. “You couldn’t locate her anywhere?”
“No.”
Rog said, “You haven’t told him about the boat.”
“We checked on the boat, after leaving the house,” Francis said. “The smaller boat, the one with the twin Evinrude seventies. It’s missing. The other, the big inboard-outboard job, has been gone for a couple of days.”
“So Jill told me,” I said.
“That’s what you say,” Rog said. “It seems to me we’re telling you a lot of stuff and you’re not telling us a damn thing. Just what did you and Jill talk about, out there in the surf? If you did talk.”
The stalker was quite close now. Because of the cliff near which we were parked, he was making his approach from the left side, which was fine with me. It put Rog more or less between him and me. I hoped the boy was reasonably bullet-proof, if it came to that. I couldn’t think of a better use for him.
I said, “Just a couple more questions before I tell you. First, did you ever hear of a place called K?” They shook their heads. I went on, “And Lanny was just dead? That’s all? Nothing fancy, no cigarette burns or anything to indicate he’d been made to talk?”
“No, sir,” Francis said. “Nothing like that.”
“Then we can hope that Jill is still in the clear. Assuming she’s alive, of course. I mean, neither of you has spilled any of this to anybody else?”
Rog said, “What do you think we are, stupid? Hell, if Monk knew we’d got together and arranged to have her contact Washington, he’d kill us all!”
“And what made you decide to contact Washington?”
“I told you, sir,” Francis said. “It began to look as if he was playing us for suckers. As if he had something big on—big and dangerous and, well, treasonable—and we’d be left holding the bag. When Jill said he’d been in touch with Peking—”
Rog said, “So I think the draft stinks and the war is for the birds, but it’s all in the family, if you know what I mean. If Monk wants to ring in a bunch of Chinks, he can play without me. I’m cutting out. Now, what arrangements did you make with Jill?”
“I’ll tell you,” I said, and lowered my voice to a confidential whisper, and started telling them. I used the truth. It was easier than thinking up a lie and made no difference at this point.
It worked like a charm. I mean, with my voice down he could no longer hear me out there, so he started to move in even closer to improve the reception, but good as he was he wasn’t quite good enough for that. The boys might be deaf, but they weren’t that deaf. Suddenly Francis held up a hand for silence, and I stopped talking, and Rog reached out abruptly and hit the lights, and there he was, almost on top of us, the golden boy himself, with a shiny revolver in his hand.
He threw himself to the side, and fired. It was great shooting, for a man half-blinded by headlights. I heard Rog take the first bullet; I didn’t wait to find out where the second was going. I just fell out the d
oor and ran like hell. There was more gunfire behind me as I ran. I heard one shot that had a dull, muffled sound, fired from inside the car. Hanohano’s answering two shots echoed sharp and clear between the walls of the canyon.
Then I was at the bend where the road turned into the sugarcane field. There was one final, sharp report behind me, and a bullet struck the dirt somewhere to the left and ricocheted on past me nastily. I turned the corner out of sight, unhit, leaving Mister Glory, I figured, with just one live round in his weapon if it was our usual five-shot model—two, if it was a six-shooter. It didn’t really matter. If he knew his stuff at all, and I thought he did, he wouldn’t come charging blindly after me with an almost-empty gun. He’d pause to reload, and to listen, and to make plans.
I gave him something to listen to, therefore. I kept pounding noisily along the road through the cane field, like a scared man intent on nothing but flight. As I ran I caught a glimpse of a vehicle backed into a track leading off to the left: the topless jeep. I continued past this, gradually slowing down, as if I were running out of strength and wind, which wasn’t far from the truth. Finally I was down to a breathless, almost soundless shuffle. Hanohano had heard, I hoped, a convincing pattern of receding footsteps gradually dying away as the runner’s distance and his weariness increased.
I turned and, moving as silently as I could manage, stole quickly back to the jeep. It was still standing in the cane, its glass and metal gleaming dully. I took a chance and went right up to it, gambling that I had beat the owner to it. I won my gamble. Nobody jumped me or shot at me. I stood there a moment, listening. There was no sound but a general rustling as breezes moved through the field around me. I picked my spot as carefully as if I’d been selecting a stand beside a game trail, and stepped back into the cane, and got some equipment ready to receive Mister Glory.
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