The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun

by Howard Fast

  “My dear, we are going to forget this, every bit of it,” his wife added.

  “For heaven’s sake, Helen,” Patience said, “it doesn’t matter whether you forget it or not. The point is that I brought a friend here to the Embassy. He was seen at a party by a great many people and now he has been murdered. Such things hardly ever happen, but sometimes they do. Now just how disconcerting is all this to you and to the Embassy?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Burton Adams replied.

  “Then until we know, shall we not talk about it?” Patience asked, adding, “I am very tired. Please excuse me.”

  In her own room Patience Quigley let go of all her defenses and wept. She wept because her last hope of heaven had been destroyed; she also wept because she had lain in the arms of a murderer, for whom she felt no hate but only the lonesome agony of grief—and she wept because she was afraid, because there were people who had decided to kill her.

  Breckner had known about his own impending fate—just as she now knew. Had he attempted to flee, to escape it? In any case, when he sent her the manuscript, he had died to her and had accepted his death. Perhaps he also died to himself—and then simply waited for the bullets from the Schmidt to find him.

  Could she wait like that? For hours she lay awake in the darkness of the room, turning over and over in her mind what faced her and what possibilities there were. She was dry-eyed now. She had wept all there was in her to weep for Richard Breckner.

  Then, finally, at long last, she slept.

  It was raining when she awakened, that fine, silver, misty rain that is almost a part of the air Britain breathes. She showered, pulled on a woolen skirt and a sweater, and over it a woolen cape, and then walking shoes and a transparent hood and gloves, and went quietly downstairs and out without seeing anyone but one of the clerks and the policeman at the door.

  She walked downhill toward Piccadilly and across it, and then realized that she was deliberately returning to St. James’s Street; she was provoked with herself. “I am not a little girl with my first love!” she said aloud and angrily. Then she walked on to the Mall and followed it through the Admiralty Arch to Trafalgar Square. Her cape was quite soaked, but like good British wool it held the damp away from her body. She walked slowly around the monument, telling herself that surely they had tracked her to here and that any moment they might kill her; and then all the tricked-up films she had seen returned to memory and confirmed her fear until she felt screaming panic rising up inside her and an impulse to fling herself into the arms of the nearest policeman and whimper for protection. But that was only for a moment; then her control returned and common sense reasserted itself and she said to herself:

  “They only wanted you dead because you were tied with Breck. They don’t know what you know or that you know anything at all, but surely there is no point in their killing you now. Their target is Norton Glee Quigley, not his wife.”

  Yet her face must have registered her fear, because a policeman walked over and asked, “Is something wrong, madam?”

  “No, nothing. Nothing at all.”

  He stood before her, tall, majestic, comforting in his black rain clothes; and Patience found herself wondering why a policeman in London reacted upon her so differently from a policeman in Boston or in New York.

  “It’s a nice bit of rain we’re having,” he said, his tone implying that perhaps it had never rained in London before. “You want some shelter or you’ll be soaked.” He nodded toward Haymarket. “You’ll get a nice cup of tea over there.” He filled the air with a feeling that everything was rather nice, if you only saw it properly; but suddenly Patience was ravenously hungry, and she thanked the policeman and almost ran up the street.

  She had hot scones and butter and two eggs and a pot of dark tea. She ate all the scones and then asked for another order and began on those voraciously.

  A small old lady asked timidly whether she might not share Patience’s table, since the room was filling with people, and when Patience nodded, the old lady sat down happily, smiling and approving of the scones.

  “It’s the weather makes them so good. Tea and scones are in the nature of the weather.”

  “They are delicious,” Patience agreed.

  “Oh—you’re an American. Now isn’t that nice? It’s always so pleasant to meet an American. Don’t you agree?”

  “Being one, I hardly know.”

  “Of course. You know, I live with my daughter in Kensington and she’s meeting me for the matinee, and isn’t that nice? I mean, how many young girls today give a thought to that and of thing? And it’s such a nice way to spend an afternoon. I don’t mean that they wouldn’t go themselves, but to go with an old lady, that’s something else.”

  She had a complexion of peaches and cream, a debt to the rain and damp, and she was open and unafraid. Her world bore no menace but the weather.

  “And you know that’s the secret of our people,” she said. “When you’re able to bear the weather here, there’s precious little you can’t put up with.”

  She paused, staring at Patience. “Oh, my dear,” she said. “What did I say that offended you? You mustn’t cry.”

  Chapter 17

  IT was almost one o’clock when Patience returned to the Embassy. Soaked almost to the skin now, she could think only of a hot bath and stripped off her clothes the moment she was in her room. There was a telegram and a letter for her. The telegram was from her husband and informed her that since he had concluded his business in India, he would be in London a day earlier than he had expected to be there. He would be arriving at about two, London time. Half naked, chilled, she called the Embassy office and was informed that Mr. Adams had tried to reach her and, failing that, had gone off to meet the plane.

  The letter was from her sixteen-year-old son, and after proper filial preliminaries, he wrote, “We tried the catamaran for the first time yesterday and it was cool. In spite of some trouble which Granny thinks I should tell you about, and that wasn’t really dangerous or anything, but it hung us up sort of. Jill and myself and Art Kelly who you remember, he’s a tall, freckled kid, and we were out about a mile in the Sound with a very stiff breeze with Jill at the tiller and Arty and me hanging way out for outrunners and this squall hit us on the breeze and we flipped. It was crazy, Ma. There I was flying through the air, and I could see Arty and Jill flying through the air …”

  Patience had taken the letter into the bathroom with her, thinking to draw the tub and read while she waited, but now had forgotten the tub and herself.

  “… and the cat spinning over, and then I hit the water and went under and it looked like the cat had landed on Jill and Arty and man I thought they were dead and it was like my heart was breaking under the water there. But when I came up, there they were and none of us harmed. It was positively groovy, believe me, and would you believe that the mast of the cat was driven into a sand bar fifteen feet down. What a time it was dismantling that mast under water, and there there were half a dozen stinkpot boats there to rescue us and we even dragged the cat home …”

  “Oh, my God,” Patience whispered. “Oh, my God.”

  She sat naked on the toilet top, staring at herself in the mirror that faced her, skinny, small, bereaved, her mind filled with the tragedy that had not happened. She was chicken skin all over, and she went trembling into her bath; but after a few minutes in the hot water she felt better. She remained there for almost half an hour, following in her mind’s eye the landing of her husband’s plane, the brief flurry of newspapermen—or possibly no press since his return had been unheralded—he and Adams into the big Embassy car, and then their drive back. She could follow it all very explicitly, and she realized that any moment now he would be at the Embassy, or perhaps had arrived already.

  Her first smile in the past twenty-four hours came at the thought of him finding her in the tub. She pictured him as a clean-cut, good-looking thermometer, with the red line up to one hundred degrees of heated rage, topped by a
smooth face, small, regular features, and a shock of thinning light-brown hair. He was very handsome; he could never be at a party without women clustering around him; and even his enemies conceded his fine, aristocratic appearance. But being a diplomat, the face was never angry in public. That was her own private knowledge.

  Patience got out of the tub now, dried herself, powdered her body, dabbed under her arms and at her neck with some toilet water, and then wrapped herself in a quilted pink robe that circled her one and a half times. Almost as if signaled, the phone rang.

  “Norton?” she inquired, smiling. “Where are you?”

  “In Burton’s office. Do you suppose you could spare me a moment or two?”

  “Always, my dear. Shall we have tea together?”

  “Tea or a drink. Whatever you wish.”

  “In about an hour?”

  “Where?”

  “I have a lovely little sitting room all of my own here.”

  “Very well.”

  Patience replaced the phone and sat without moving, her face thoughtful, for a moment. Then she sighed, picked up the phone again, and ordered tea from the kitchen. She dressed, very carefully, in a plain black frock, combed her hair, and put on her makeup.

  She composed herself and sat with her own thoughts until the tea came, intelligently accompanied by a bucket of ice. She mixed a martini for Norton who arrived just as one hour had passed. He was always prompt.

  She knew that Norton’s entrance would signal his mood. He wore moods as other men wore clothes, and he was eternally playing one role or another in little playlets of his own contrivance. Whether he was performing domestically in terms of his own wife and children or internationally with the blurry eyes of the world upon him, he was always a character of his own creation in a skit of his own contrivance. Now, as he entered her room, he was purposefully abstract, his brow furrowed with concern, his eyes weary. Patience understood, as she was supposed to, that he, Norton, was running with one foot in destiny. That dragged a bit. He didn’t try to kiss her, neither did he by word or gesture reject her. He was the understanding neutral.

  “Martinis,” he said. “How thoughtful of you! You do make the best martinis in the world, Pat.”

  “Thank you.”

  She poured herself tea while he drank his martini. She was silent and waited, the cues being his.

  “You look good, Pat.”

  “Thank you again.”

  “Oh, long and weary and bothersome. I do not like India.” He had stretched out on her chaise, one leg under him, his pose calculated to demonstrate that at fifty-one his limbs had not lost their flexibility; but then he sat up and gestured to her. “Cheers. Well, they will have to push very hard to get me back there. There are no words to describe Calcutta today. Seven and a half million people in the worst-run, worst-planned city in the world. Talk of urban decay, our little ghettos in New York and Chicago are paradise indeed compared with Calcutta.”

  “I hear Delhi is much more pleasant,” Patience said, asking herself, Can he possibly not know that I am putting him on? Can you be married to a man for so long and never know whether he is an absolute fool or not?

  “Oh, yes, no doubt of that. Hot—perhaps too hot—but pleasant.”

  “In London it rains,” Patience said, smiling slightly.

  “Not enough to prevent you from having an interesting time, I hear.”

  His fangs are showing, Patience thought. He is going to play. But she herself had no desire to play, and she said flatly, “So you and Burton have had a chat.”

  “There are also the papers, my dear.”

  “And what do they say?”

  “That a friend of yours has been murdered.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s less the fact of murder, which is always distasteful, than the company you kept.”

  “Dear Norton,” she said, “you are the first person I have ever heard put so clever a tag on murder. You find it distasteful.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I find it monstrous.” Patience paused, then said, “Do you want another martini?”

  “What I want,” he said firmly, “is to get at the bottom of this business.”

  “Why?”

  “Pat—do you truly have the gall to sit there and ask me why?”

  “Oh, yes, I have the gall.”

  “Then let me reply by saying that, once and for all, you are to learn your position in this world we occupy. This, upon my part, is emphatic and absolute. You will learn. You will refrain from associating with the filth you pick up along the way. You will once and for all play your role properly.”

  “What is my role, Norton?”

  “My wife, period,” he said. “I am trying not to lose my temper, Pat. I am trying to let what has been die. I am trying to let sleeping dogs lie. I am trying to see both sides—”

  “Norton, if you throw one more of your dreadful clichés at me, I shall scream.”

  “You have one devil of a nerve!”

  “More than that, Norton—much more. As you shall see.” She rose then, went to the closet where her wardrobe was, took the manuscript out of the drawer, and handed it to her husband.

  “What the devil is this?” he demanded.

  “This, Norton,” she answered demurely, “is a manuscript, letter, confession—call it what you will—that Richard Breckner wrote before he was murdered. It is also in the way of being a sort of explanation addressed to me. It concerns both of us, and it is probably one of the most terrible and terrifying documents I have ever read. I want you to read it.”

  He glanced at it. “All right—when we have finished our talk.”

  “No,” Patience said firmly. “We will not finish our talk—ever. You must read it now.”

  “Why now? Do you realize I have just arrived here from India? I have reports to write, people to see. I must be in touch with the State Department. I have meetings, interviews. There is an appearance on BBC—”

  “Oh, Norton, stop telling me how rotten damn important you are! There is nothing in the whole world as important to you as that manuscript on your lap. You are going to read it now—because your wretched life and mine, too, depend upon your reading it now. And if you refuse, I will take the whole filthy, dirty story to the newspapers and give them such a ball as they haven’t had since Wallis Warfield did them out of a king. So make your choice, Norton. And make it in the next few minutes. My time is limited.”

  “Pat, what has come over you?”

  “A little taste of power. Oh, ever so small, but if you raise your aristocratic hand to me now, I will crucify you on the front of this building, right out there under the big eagle.”

  “I never knew you had this kind of hate—”

  “Because you were too dull and insensitive to know anything about me. Now you bore me. Will you please read?”

  He stared at her in amazement, began a retort calculated to build into a full-scale contest of will, and then let his eyes fall to Breckner’s carefully written first page. He read the first half-dozen lines, and then he read on. The silence in the room became heavy, turgid; but he read with a sort of thunderous intensity, turning page after page.

  The telephone rang and Patience answered it. It was Adams, and he said, “For heaven’s sake, Pat, you two can’t hole up this way, like a pair of reunited lovers. It’s very touching, but the world keeps turning, you know.”

  “I’ll give you Norton.”

  She brought the telephone to her husband, who looked up from the manuscript like a lost man, like a drowning man.

  “I can’t talk to him,” Norton said.

  She covered the mouthpiece. “But you must, my dear Norton. Just put him off.”

  Norton took the telephone and said, “Yes, I understand. Damn it, Burt, I understand only too well. But not now. When? In an hour, two hours—”

  Patience put the phone away, and then he cried out, “My God, what kind of a filthy joke is this?”

  “You tell me,
Norton.”

  He slammed his hand down on the manuscript. “How do you know Breckner wrote this?”

  “I know. Take my word for it.”

  “Did you know him that well?”

  “Later,” Patience said calmly. “That will come later, Norton. It’s rather pointless to excite yourself. Do you remember in Coleridge’s poem—‘Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung.’ That manuscript is our albatross, dear Norton. It hangs about our necks and it stinks with truth.”

  “Have you read it?” he demanded, not as a question but as a declaration of terror and a plea for doubt.

  “Twice.”

  “Well, God damn it, did you read what he put down here? He murdered Alexander Hoppner! There’s a man standing trial at home right now. Do you believe in this Department of theirs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t. Do you think that anyone can reach into the United States and rig a trial and establish a suspect? This is a cock-and-bull story from the word go.”

  “I want you to finish reading it, Norton,” she said quietly. “I don’t care whether you think it a cock-and-bull story or not. I told you that you must read it. I don’t think we should go through that again.”

  She rose and walked slowly back and forth as he returned to the manuscript. He turned page after page, and then he stopped reading.

  “Dahu Sind,” he said softly. “Dahu Sind.”

  “You don’t believe.”

  “I was with him a few days before. I was with Dahu Sind. I was in that same room. How could he know the room?”

  Patience shrugged. “He was there, I suppose.”

  “Then this is true.”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “And you knew this man—this bloody, unholy monster. You made a friend of him. You brought him here.”

  “Yes.”

  Finding himself again, Norton Quigley said sternly, “God help you, Pat, if there’s no reasonable explanation for all this.”

  “I would read the rest of it, Norton dear,” she said evenly. “It doesn’t get better.”

  “What do you mean by that?”