The Devastators

by Donald Hamilton

  The girl had trouble getting in. You don’t walk into a sports car, you first lower your rump to the seat—they supply a special grab handle to help you—and then you swing both legs in at once; but she tried to enter left-foot-first and wound up half in and half out, giving us a generous display of nylon before she got herself all tucked inside. She was still rearranging her coat and kilts from the struggle when I got in beside her and sent the little bomb away, making some fine, sharp exhaust noises in the darkening street.

  Over the years, Brown’s Hotel has been recommended to me by various Englishmen—Les Crowe-Barham for one—as the real place to stay in London. Claridge’s, according to these British accommodations experts, is more a museum piece than a hostelry. It had been some time since I’d last visited Brown’s, but I found it pretty much unchanged: a slightly less ostentatious establishment than the one we’d just left, with slightly less—but only slightly less—American mink drifting around the lobby like thistledown.

  The second-floor room into which we sneaked rather guiltily would have made a good closet for the palatial chambers assigned to Winnie and me at Claridge’s. Well, almost. There was still plenty of space for a couple of good-sized beds, a writing table, an overstuffed chair, a couple of straight chairs, a dresser, a wardrobe, and a telephone stand, but if you wanted a morning workout in your room, you’d have to settle for simple setting-up exercises or move some of the furniture out into the hall.

  A brand-new suitcase of pale-green molded plastic was open on a stand at the foot of the nearest bed. It had the right amount of stickers and tags on it to have flown, sailed, or swum across the Atlantic. Well, nobody in the business is going to miss out on an obvious detail like that. Elsewhere, closed, stood a smaller bag and a hatboxy sort of case to match, similarly labeled. Some nice new lingerie that did not look as if it had ever been worn showed in the open suitcase. Some nice new bedroom slippers or mules, the sexy kind consisting of a sole and a heel and not much else, stood by the beds.

  Since it was getting late, and the Europeans go in for service in a big way, one bed had already been turned back by the maid, ready for occupancy. A long, shiny, pale-green nylon robe and nightgown had been laid out across the foot of it. Seduction-wise, I counted it a point in my hostess’ favor. This shortie stuff may be cute, but who wants a woman to look cute in bed? I mean, in the absence of a Lolita syndrome, it’s hard to get erotic about a female camouflaged to look like somebody’s kid sister. It’s practically impossible if she looks like Peter Pan.

  Nancy seemed surprised and embarrassed by the intimate atmosphere of her quarters. Anyway, she started forward quickly, as if to smooth out the inviting bed and hang the seductive sleepwear out of sight. Then she caught herself and stopped.

  “Just drop your things anywhere,” she said.

  Her voice was casual, maybe a little too casual, and she’d turned away so I couldn’t see her face. Before I could offer to help her, she’d slipped out of her raincoat and hung it in the wardrobe, that massive piece of furniture that is a necessary adjunct to most European hotel rooms, since built-in clothes-hanging space is generally not provided. She turned back to face me. If she’d had any problems with her courage or her conscience, she had solved them very quickly. Her hazel-green eyes were clear and guileless.

  “Would you care for a drink, Mr. Helm? I bought one of those customs-free packages they sell on the plane. We could ring for some ice.”

  I laid my hat, coat, and envelope on one of the straight chairs. “The British drink their whiskey neat, I hear,” I said. “Let’s not bother the management. If they can do it, I can.”

  “Well, there’s an open bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses over there on the dresser. Why don’t you do the honors while I… while I slip into something more comfortable.”

  She stumbled a little on the last sentence. I couldn’t help glancing at her sharply to see if she was serious. I mean, it’s just about the oldest line in the world. Five will get you twenty Eve told Adam to hold that apple just a minute while she slipped into something more comfortable, even though the record shows she didn’t have a stitch on at the time. Nancy’s face turned pink under my regard. I grinned at her.

  “Sure,” I said. “I know, your girdle’s killing you.” I grinned again, wolfishly, and picked up the green nylon stuff on the bed and presented it to her with a bow. “Well, we sure wouldn’t want you to suffer a minute longer than necessary, ma’am.”

  She took the garments, hesitated, and started to turn toward the bathroom; then she swung back abruptly. “Damn you!” she snapped. “You don’t have to make fun of a girl just because she hasn’t done this corny hotel-room routine quite as often as you have!” She stalked to the wardrobe, disposed of the lingerie, closed the door, and turned again to face me. “All right, Mr. Helm, if that’s the way you want it! There’s the family Bible and the rest of the papers, right there on the table. You can start researching any time!”

  It was kind of like being bitten by a blind, newborn puppy. She’d been all set to go through the usual shabby motions—strong liquor and slinky lingerie and the works—but I’d insulted her by not approaching the situation, and her, with the proper respect. I had made a mistake. I had treated her as an experienced female operative who’d been through the sex bit often enough not to mind having it kidded a little, but she was apparently new enough at the game to take it with deadly seriousness and expect me to do the same.

  It made me feel uncomfortable, as if I’d been caught contributing to the delinquency of a minor, but I said harshly, “Cut it out. You know damn well I didn’t come up here with Bibles in mind—” I stopped. She did not speak or smile. Her eyes were hostile and unrelenting. I said hastily, “Okay, okay. Don’t be mad. Bibles it is.”

  She hadn’t been quite sure I wouldn’t get rough, and I saw her face soften with relief as I turned away. I walked over and swung a chair around and sat down at the table with my back to the room. Presently I heard her let her breath out and give a kind of apologetic little laugh as if, since I was going to be nice about it, it wasn’t such a grave matter after all. She busied herself at the dresser and came over with two glasses and put one beside me. “There’s your drink, Mr. Helm.”

  “Thanks.”

  She picked up my manila envelope. “Is this the material you brought? Do you mind if I look?”

  “Help yourself.”

  She took it to the big chair in the corner, and set her drink on the end of the table. I noticed, because it’s the sort of thing you make a point of noticing under certain circumstances, that she hadn’t tasted it. I picked up my glass, watching her surreptitiously out of the corner of my eye. She was turning on the reading lamp behind her; she showed no reaction whatever. She went on to open the envelope without, apparently, the slightest interest in whether I drank or died of thirst.

  Of course, the liquor didn’t have to be loaded, this time. She might want to go a little farther toward gaining my confidence—as far as the nearest bed, say—before lowering the boom on me. And even if the drink was drugged, there was nothing for me to do but gulp it down like a good boy and hope I’d wake up in the right place, preferably in Scotland, without too many shackles and bars and bolted doors between me and the girl I was supposed to assist and the man we were supposed to kill.

  I told myself to quit stalling, but I couldn’t help the nasty sense of uncertainty you get before you commit yourself irrevocably to a risky course of action. There’s always the nagging question: Have I figured this right? I couldn’t help remembering that Buchanan and several others, who’d probably thought themselves, rightly or wrongly, just as smart as me, had figured wrong. They must have. They were dead. I tried to encourage myself with the thought that each man had lived long enough after being caught to get himself infected with a super-virulent disease, but somehow it didn’t make the future look very much brighter.

  I nursed the glass in both hands, warming it as if it contained precious old brandy,
while I pretended to look over the papers on the table. Then I raised it deliberately to my lips. The girl was examining one of my photostats with absorbed interest. I started to drink. It was the lack of ice, and the stalling I’d done, that saved me. Just as the stuff touched my lips, I caught the faintest hint of a scent rising from the warmed-up liquor that I probably would not have detected if the drink had been cold: a flowery scent that never came from good Scotch, or bad Scotch either.

  Incongruously enough, it was the fragrance of violets. It told me what I was dealing with. We’d first encountered this stuff a couple of years before in the possession of a man we’d captured, something nice cooked up by their backroom boys: a colorless, odorless, tasteless liquid completely miscible with water and alcohol. It was volatile enough so that if the medical authorities on the scene didn’t take all kinds of precautions and work very fast they wouldn’t find much to analyze in the dregs of a drink in an open glass, or the body of a man who had drunk of it. It worked almost instantaneously. They’d called it Petrozin K.

  Potentially, it had been a fine weapon for their dirty-works armory, and it had apparently passed all their laboratory tests, but in field use, like so many new products, it had revealed a significant flaw: it wasn’t quite stable. Although it had presumably been given all the usual lab-checks for sensitivity to light, temperature, and agitation, when it actually came to be carted around in agents’ pockets under normal operating conditions, it started to break down very slightly, and to react with its breakdown products in a peculiar way. It lost none of its potency, but traces of an aromatic contamination were produced—an ester, according to our chemists—that gave it a faint, betraying odor that might, by a romantic individual, be likened to the scent of violets.

  Apparently they’d never managed to lick the problem. After six or eight months we started coming up against other unpleasant concoctions and heard no more of Petrozin K. However, an ex-agent of theirs—or a man pretending to be an ex-agent of theirs—who’d fallen into disgrace about that time might still have a little of the older poison in his possession; enough, say, to give to a green-eyed girl to spike a glass, or even a whole bottle, of Scotch.

  I managed not to look at Nancy Glenmore, so-called. After all, it wasn’t the first time somebody had tried to kill me. It wasn’t even the first time somebody had tried to send me to hell by the chemical route. I just hadn’t been expecting it tonight. I’d been assuming that, like Buchanan and the others, I was wanted alive, at least temporarily. I guess it wasn’t the attempt that shook me so much; it was the fact that, thinking myself clever, I’d almost cooperated in my own murder. Well, the next step was obvious.

  I turned slightly away from Nancy and threw my head back as if I were taking a good-sized swallow. I started to set the glass down; then I let it fall with a crash to the floor. I made a thick, strangling noise in my throat, started to rise, and picking a spot uncluttered with broken glass, fell face down on the rug. I thought it was quite a good performance.

  There was a brief silence; then I heard a kind of hasty rustling and rattling of papers. That would be my pretty, murderous relative clearing her lap for action.

  “Mr. Helm?” she said in a tentative voice, and more sharply: “Mr. Helm!”

  I heard her get up and come forward to bend over me. I felt her touch my arm cautiously.

  “Mr. Helm. Matthew?” Her voice had turned a bit shrill. “Damn the man, he’s passed out! Oh, dear, what do I do now?”

  She was obviously playing it safe; maybe she, too, had reason to beware of hidden microphones. She rose again without taking my pulse or testing my eyeball reactions, which was sloppy technique but understandable: she was, as I’d hoped she would, just taking for granted that her lethal stuff had done its work. Now, if I had a bit of luck, she would pick up the phone to report success. Even if she talked in code, it might give me a hint…

  I heard a sudden, choked little cry of distress and fear. I opened my eyes. Nancy Glenmore was standing by the table with her own glass, partially empty now, in her hand. She was staring into it with a kind of paralyzed horror. Her mouth was open and she seemed to be trying to breathe, at the same time as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her. Then the glass slipped from her hand and hit the rug and spilled but did not break, and she crumpled to the floor beside it.

  When I reached her, she was quite dead.

  11

  As I crouched by the motionless body, I couldn’t help thinking that it just wasn’t my day where women were concerned. In less than six hours I’d mislaid one carelessly, roughed one up uselessly—and now I’d lost one permanently by letting her drink poison right before my eyes. The fact that my eyes had been closed at the time didn’t really mitigate the error.

  Well, with a dead girl before me, that was a hell of an egocentric way of looking at things. It wasn’t Nancy Glenmore’s day, either, and would never be again. She looked small and broken, lying there, with a wisp of dark hair trailing across her face and her Glenmore kilts kind of bunched about her thighs—that damned, muted, airy-fairy version of the brave old hunting tartan that had prejudiced me against her from the start. I wondered if I would have had sense enough to believe her if she’d had sense enough to dress in the true, old-fashioned plaid.

  Because her death made it fairly obvious that her story had been straight from start to finish. Certainly, if she’d been what I’d thought, an enemy agent who’d lured me here to poison me, she’d have left the liquor strictly alone. There was still a remote possibility that she’d been an enemy agent who’d miscalculated in some way, or who’d been double-crossed, but that was straining pretty hard to account for what she’d done and what had been done to her.

  The simplest explanation, and the most likely one, was that she’d been exactly what she’d claimed to be: a tourist kid from the States who’d thought it would be cute to devote her European vacation to family research, in the course of which she’d heard of a distant relative similarly engaged, and had quite naturally looked him up. Probably she’d been feeling adventurous and daring, so far from home, reckless enough to indicate—somewhat nervously and amateurishly, to be sure—that she was available for just about any interesting project, including sexual intercourse, that Cousin Matthew might have in mind.

  I’d seen her willing attitude as part of a dark plot because I’d been looking for a dark plot, even hoping for one. But everything that had aroused my suspicion could be explained quite simply as the behavior of an inexperienced young girl, in a travel wardrobe bought new for the great occasion, blowing herself to what she’d hoped would be a giddy, uninhibited, memorable fling abroad, and let the stodgy old morals fall where they might. But she’d come to London at the wrong time, visited the wrong office, offered herself to the wrong man, and now she was dead.

  I bent over to sniff at the wet spot on the rug where her drink had spilled, and caught the scent of violets, already fading. I got up and went over to check the bottle on the dresser. Trapped in the corked container, the odor was much stronger. Obviously somebody had slipped in here while she was out and doped her liquor, which brought up the question of why anybody would want her dead.

  Well, she’d gone to Wilmot Square. She’d talked to the real, blue-eyed Walling. Almost certainly there was a connection between her death and her visit to this man, who’d subsequently, I remembered, been tortured for information. Apparently he’d told her something or given her something that was a threat to Basil and his cohorts, and after she’d left they’d grabbed him and forced him to reveal what it was.

  But on second thought it couldn’t very well be anything he’d told her, I reflected. Basil had had that office wired, as indicated by the fact that he’d known enough about Walling’s business to impersonate the man very convincingly. Anything Walling had said to Nancy would have been overheard. It had to be something he’d given her, then, something that probably meant nothing to her, but might mean something to me. According to her own statement, she�
�d announced her intention of getting in touch with me, right there in the office. She’d asked Walling for my London address…

  It was as easy as that, showing what a brain can do if you only take the trouble to use it. I found it in her purse: a folded piece of the kind of cheap white paper that comes made up in small pads for scribbling notes on. Judging by its appearance, she’d never even unfolded it. She hadn’t needed to refer to it, after all, to remember the name and address Walling had told her.

  I opened it up. On it was written: Matthew Helm, Claridge’s. Below was a hastily scrawled three-word message: Try Brossach, Sutherland. I’d found a real clue at last.

  I studied it thoughtfully, not to say suspiciously—I don’t have a great deal of faith in miracles—and got up and went to the table. The kid had come equipped. In addition to the family information she’d wanted to show me, she’d had maps galore. There were clan maps of Scotland, road maps of Scotland, and even a set of the half-inch-scale contoured Bartholomew maps that require over a dozen sheets to cover the Scottish mainland alone. It made me feel a sense of real loss. I mean, willing young girls aren’t too hard to come by, these days, but girls bright enough to know the value of good maps are pretty scarce.

  I knew approximately where to look. Sutherland is a county in northwestern Scotland; in fact, it’s the county in northwestern Scotland. As I studied the map of the right area, somebody knocked on the door. It was a tentative, diplomatic little knock, the kind that might be used by a hotel employee with fresh towels, or by a friend who didn’t want to interrupt if anything interesting was going on inside—except that I didn’t have any friends in London with the possible exception of Crowe-Barham.

  Hastily, I folded the map I’d been looking at and stuck it into my inside jacket pocket, and a couple of more besides, so as not to indicate too clearly, if I should be searched, the region in which I was interested. The slip of paper I tucked into the top of my sock, which was a little better than putting it into my wallet or wearing it in my hatband, but not much. I’d have preferred to destroy it, but I wasn’t quite through examining it yet. The discreet little knock came again. I made sure that all Nancy’s belongings were back in her purse, and that the purse was lying on the table in the proper, casual, tossed-aside way. Then I looked grimly at the dead girl on the floor.