The Devastators

by Donald Hamilton

  Somehow it didn’t seem right to drag her into the bathroom or stuff her into the wardrobe. I mean, she was a relative of mine, after all, and she could damn well be allowed what little dignity she’d managed to retain in death. Besides, anybody who was really curious would search the bathroom and wardrobe, anyway. I just pulled out my gun and went to the door, as the knocking came a third time, more sharply and impatiently now.

  “Matt,” a voice said. “Matthew, darling, let me in.”

  Even if I hadn’t recognized the voice, there was only one woman I knew—in London, anyway—who’d deliberately address me as darling while I was engaged in another woman’s room. I sighed, and checked my gun, and put it into my pocket, leaving my hand on it. I opened the door just far enough to let me slip out into the hall.

  “Hello, Vadya,” I said, pulling the door closed behind me.

  She had made a quick recovery since I’d seen her last. Her hairdo had been reconstructed on a slightly less spectacular scale. Her rumpled suit and damaged blouse had been replaced by a straight black linen dress—well, as straight as her contours allowed—that covered her shoulders but left her arms bare. A diaphanous, multicolored chiffon scarf was strategically arranged to mask the bruises on her neck she hadn’t quite been able to cover with makeup. She was wearing the kind of boldly patterned black stockings that were currently making a great fashion hit—I guess every woman has a secret yearning to look like a tart—and high-heeled black pumps.

  “It’s very thoughtful of you, Vadya,” I said. “I certainly appreciate it. But it wasn’t really necessary.”

  She frowned. “What in the world are you talking about, darling?”

  “Didn’t you come to give me back my coat? I thought you were afraid I might catch cold without it.”

  “Ah, you are joking me, and your coat is in my room at Claridge’s,” she said with a laugh. She glanced down at my bulging jacket pocket. “Is that necessary? You should be careful, Matthew, or you will become like those of whom we know, those who cannot even shave without aiming a gun at the man in the mirror and ordering him to stand still.”

  That took care of the polite preliminaries, and I asked bluntly, “Just what the hell are you doing here, doll?”

  “Why, I am following you, of course.” Her expression was bland and innocent. “Shall we say that I am protecting my interests? We are working together, are we not? That was agreed. When I see you consulting with another woman, and visiting her room, I am disturbed. That was not agreed.”

  I said, “Somehow I don’t seem to recall all these ironclad agreements.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps I used the wrong word. Perhaps it was not agreed, merely understood. But we are working together in the matter of McRow, are we not? Despite your lousy behavior of this afternoon, which I magnanimously forgive.” She touched her neck lightly, and let her hand fall. “And if there is to be another woman involved, should I not meet her? Who is this girl, Matthew?”

  I shrugged. “Just a kid who thinks she’s related to me in some way. She asked me up to see her family papers.”

  Vadya looked at me for a moment, and threw back her head and laughed with real amusement. “You are very entertaining, darling. First it is a wife and then it is a distant cousin. You surely don’t expect me to believe—”

  It was the reaction I had anticipated. Sometimes the truth can be more useful than a lie. I said, “Hell, believe what you like.”

  “Matthew, please! I am still not convinced of this marriage and this bride of yours. Don’t try to sell me any more of your relations today.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, so the girl is a desperate Mata Hari type packing a gun in her purse and a knife in her stocking. Have it your way.”

  “And you will ask me in to meet her?”

  I shrugged again. “Sure,” I said. “Go on in. Meet her.”

  I stepped back and opened the door. Vadya rearranged the filmy scarf about her shoulders and walked in. She stopped short. I heard her breath catch. I made a note of the fact that her hand went, not to her purse, but to the top of her dress.

  I said, “Be careful. This .38 Special makes an awful mess.” I reached back left-handed and closed the door and locked it.

  After a moment of silence, Vadya chuckled softly. “We seem to have already played this scene once. Did you kill her, Matthew?”

  I said, “Hadn’t you better make up your mind? A minute ago you were insisting she was my confederate; now you want to make her my victim. No, I didn’t kill her. Did you?” When Vadya didn’t answer at once, I said, “Somebody loaded that bottle on the dresser. The kid drank first. That’s how I come to be still alive,” Well, omitting some details, that was more or less true. I went on, “The poison seems to have been Petrozin K. I believe you’re acquainted with the stuff.”

  “Of course, but it was unsatisfactory. It has not been issued to us for many months.”

  “You might have had some left in the back of a drawer or the bottom of an old purse.”

  “Why would I kill her, Matthew?”

  I shrugged. “How should I know? But it’s kind of a coincidence. I come to London with a wife, and right away the wife disappears, and you’re sitting in the lounge downstairs. I meet another girl, never mind who, and immediately she’s poisoned, and you’re hanging around in the hall outside. And this time there aren’t even any extraneous Oriental ladies around to confuse the issue. Could it be that for some reason you want me all to yourself, Vadya? It’s a flattering thought. And what did you really come here for, to substitute a harmless bottle for the poisoned one to confuse the police, perhaps?”

  Vadya gave the same soft, throaty chuckle. “Your ideas are very ingenious, but look at me, darling. Just look at me. I admit I am a fine womanly figure of a woman in this stupid Dumaire disguise, but surely I am not so well-developed that I can hide a whole fifth of Scotch under my dress. If I came to switch bottles, where is my bottle?” She turned to face me. “And you are being inconsistent, also. If I am getting rid of little girls so I can have you to myself, as you so modestly suggest, would I put poison where you might drink it? I am under orders to work with you, not kill you, Matthew. Until the work is done, you are safe from me.”

  It wasn’t really a watertight argument, but I found myself inclined to believe her, just as a working hypothesis. I guess what I really believed was her involuntary start when she saw the dead girl: she hadn’t been expecting that. At least I didn’t think she had. I took my hand from my pocket and grinned.

  “Okay, Vadya. It was just a notion. I thought I’d better check it out. Well, we’d better get out of here. Just let me pick up my own stuff and wipe off a few fingerprints. No sense making things too easy for the British constabulary—”

  I stopped talking and put my finger to my lips. Somebody had been passing in the hall outside. At least I’d thought they were passing, but then the footsteps had stopped. I waved a hand at Vadya. She nodded, reached down to slip off her pumps and, moving very quietly in her stocking feet, on tiptoe, she vanished into the bathroom. I looked around quickly. The dead girl looked convincingly poisoned with her glass beside her. I went over to my own broken glass and arranged myself carefully on the rug, closed my eyes, and started breathing as shallowly as I could.

  There was a wait of at least three full minutes, as the person in the hall stood silent, presumably listening. At last I heard the sound of a key being inserted into the lock, and the door opened.

  12

  It went as smoothly as if we’d rehearsed it for hours. I heard our visitor enter and lock the door again and come forward. I heard him set something on the table. He paused briefly by Nancy’s body, and came over to me. I had placed myself so that, because of the table and chair, he had to make his approach from the bathroom side. As he stopped above me, in approximately the right position, I stirred very slightly and let out a feeble moan.

  I heard him jump back, startled. There was a quick, predatory movement beyond him, a faint scuffl
e, a choked-off gasp, and some ugly, muffled, cracking and snapping sounds, followed by a kind of expiring sigh and the sound of a body slumping to the floor.

  I heard Vadya’s voice: “You can get up now, Matthew.”

  I rose and brushed myself off. She was calmly putting her pumps back on. The scarf she’d worn about her shoulders now hung from her hand, twisted into a kind of rope. Obviously, it wasn’t as fragile as it looked. A man in a dark suit lay face down on the rug between us with a broken neck. He looked very dead. It seemed unnecessarily drastic, but I made no complaint. It wasn’t as if the guy had been a particular friend of mine. I did, however, wonder briefly if she’d had some reason for silencing him permanently—or maybe it was just an object lesson to show me that, when it came to garottes, two could play.

  I glanced toward the table. A bottle stood there, identical with the one on the dresser except that, presumably, the contents were safe to drink.

  I said, “My apologies, ma’am. This character seems to have come to do the switch job I accused you of. Do you know him?”

  She rolled him over with her toe, looked at him, and shook her head. “No, do you?”

  Her denial sounded convincing, but then, I reminded myself, her denials always did. I regarded our visitor—well, to be accurate, Nancy Glenmore’s visitor. He was a big, dark man with a broad, Slavic face. I had seen the face before.

  “I won’t say I know him,” I said, “but I saw him this afternoon. He’s the guy who was tailing us in a souped-up Mini when we went for that little spin in Crowe-Barham’s Rolls.”

  Vadya was touching her hair into place. She shook the creases out of her scarf and draped it gracefully about her shoulders again, frowning at the man on the floor. “When you saw him, was he alone?”

  “No, but I didn’t get a good look at the man with him.”

  “That means there may still be another nearby. We must watch for him as we leave. But first I think we should take a quick look around.”

  I made my voice casual: “For what?”

  Vadya glanced at me. “Don’t be stupid, darling. Maybe this one did come only to switch bottles, but maybe he came to find something, also. He must have had some motive for poisoning the girl, must he not? You search the room and check that purse, there’s a good boy. I will search the girl—”

  “Leave the kid alone,” I said.

  There was a brief silence. Vadya straightened up deliberately and swung away from the body on the floor to face me.

  “So there was something,” she murmured. “And you have it.”

  “There was something,” I said. “I have it.”

  She was a pro. There were a dozen questions she undoubtedly wanted to ask, but she hesitated only a moment. Obviously, I would tell her about it when I damn well felt like it, if I ever did. In the meantime, questioning me would be useless and humiliating. She shrugged.

  “In that case,” she said, “there is no more for us to do here, is there?”

  She walked to the door. I followed her, and let her out. I couldn’t help looking back before I joined her in the hall and pulled the door shut behind us. The kid still lay on the floor, in her rumpled, modernized Glenmore kilts. Beyond her lay the man who was probably most directly responsible for her death. At least his attempted bottle-switch seemed to point toward his being the one who’d planted the poison in the first place. You could call his fate a retribution of sorts, but it didn’t really help Nancy Glenmore much.

  The slow London twilight was fading when we came outside, having aroused no apparent interest in our progress down the stairs and through the lobby. Nobody followed us away from the hotel. For the moment it wasn’t raining, and the streets were drying, but it seemed a little chilly for Vadya in her sleeveless dress. Presumably she was capable of catching cold just like an ordinary woman. My gentlemanly instincts made me turn on the Spitfire’s heater for her as we drove away, but I got no thanks for it. She was busy powdering her nose with the aid of the little mirror in her purse.

  Presently, she closed the purse with a snap. “There is no sign of the little Austin, but we have a 3.8 Jaguar behind us,” she reported. “Three men. Somehow I think it is your British friends. They seem to lean toward honest faces and elaborate transportation.”

  I had already spotted the black sedan following us. “I’ll check with Les,” I said. “He did mention having a Jag available, and I want to call him anyway.”

  “Crowe-Barham?” Her voice held a wary note. “What are you cooking up with him now, darling? Your last cooperative venture wasn’t very comfortable for me.”

  I grinned. “You’re a suspicious Communist bitch,” I said, “and a sadistic one. If you wouldn’t go around killing people unnecessarily, I wouldn’t have to plead with other people to intercede with the police. Or would you rather have us dodging cops clear to Scotland?”

  She glanced at me sharply at this mention of our destination, and was silent. I found a phone and parked beside it. As I closed myself into the booth, I saw that the Jaguar had stopped to wait a block behind us, lights out. I decided they were just a little too conspicuous and obvious to be true. They were being clever. Everybody in London was being clever except me, and it was about time I started.

  I managed to figure out the combination of the instrument in front of me—some of those British pay phones have more pushbuttons than an old Chrysler transmission—and I got a secretary on the line, identified myself by name, and asked for Les, as I had done once before that day. This time my request got me a funny little pause, as if I’d said something unexpected. After a bit, a male voice I did not recognize spoke in my ear.

  “This is Charles Stark,” it said. I remembered being told by Les that a Colonel Stark was his current boss. The voice went on: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, making a face at Vadya, who was watching me from the car. Obviously, I’d run into a man who went by the book, silly passwords and all. The Anglo-American identification routine thought up by some brilliant bureaucrat required me to answer the passage from the Declaration of Independence with one from the Magna Carta, and I gave the Colonel a good one: “No taxes, except the customary ones, shall be levied except with the consent of a council of prelates and greater barons.”

  “Very good, Mr. Helm. Do I understand that you were asking for Crowe-Barham?”

  “That’s correct, sir.” It never hurts to sir them when they have pompous voices and military titles. “Why, is something wrong, sir?”

  “We hope not, Mr. Helm,” said Colonel Stark heavily. “However, Crowe-Barham did not report in earlier this evening as his schedule required. He has not yet been heard from. When last seen, he was leaving Claridge’s in your company and that of a certain lady, if I may misuse the word slightly…”

  After I’d finished with the Colonel, I made a quick call to our local relay man, asking him to pass the latest developments on to Washington, along with a couple of questions to which I needed answers. When I got back into the roadster, Vadya was powdering her nose again, keeping an eye on the sedan up the block. She glanced at me rather suspiciously, but asked no questions. That’s one thing to be said for dealing with a professional, even one whose motives are undependable and whose politics are deplorable: at least you avoid the yak-yak you’d get from an inquisitive amateur. Vadya started to close the purse as I sent us away.

  “Keep it open,” I said. “I’m going to try to lose them. Keep me posted.”

  “Yes, of course.” She raised the mirror again. “They just turned on their lights. They are following, about a block behind.”

  “What did you do with Crowe-Barham?” I asked.

  She did not take her eyes from the little mirror. “But really, darling! What dreadful crime have I committed now? Is he missing?”

  “Apparently. I was just talking with his boss, a Colonel Stark, who thinks you’re no lady.”

  She laughed. “How ungenerous of the Col
onel. But am I then to be held responsible for every person dead and missing in the city of London tonight?… They made that turn. They are still behind us. Two blocks behind now. Drive a little faster. Did Colonel Stark accuse me of having made away with his aristocratic operative?”

  “He kind of accused both of us. Anyway, he ordered us to report to his office for questioning, immediately.”

  She glanced at me. “You do not seem to be rushing in that direction, darling. Not unless they have changed their place of business since I was last informed.”

  “I take my orders from elsewhere,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’re eager to have a chat with the guy, either.”

  “Well, not exactly. What makes him think we have harmed poor Sir Leslie?”

  “Les is several hours overdue. And he was last seen with us, leaving Claridge’s. However, you and I both know he was okay an hour later when he dropped me off. And according to Stark, Les did not take you back to the hotel; at least neither you nor the car were seen there again. And it’s not a car anybody’s likely to overlook. Rolls-Royces aren’t that common, even in London.”

  Vadya said calmly, “I think you lost them on that turn… Naturally we were not seen to return to Claridge’s. Was I to walk in the front door of that so snooty hotel, and through that so snooty lobby, wrapped in a too-big man’s coat, with my hair hanging in my eyes and my stockings sagging around my ankles? I had Sir Leslie let me out half a block away, and I slipped into the building by… well, never mind. I may want to use that entrance again some time.” She closed her purse. “Yes, they missed us. They just went straight on by the intersection back there. Make a right turn ahead, and then perhaps a left, and I do not think we will see them again. Where would I have got this dress, if I had not been back to my room? Tell Stark to look in 443 and he will find your coat on the bed.”