by Tony Abbott
We ran through the palm bushes and were over the wall and on the back street before anyone saw us. We went to a corner a block down then circled around behind the gift shop to the main street, where Dia waved to her father to come over. I sorted the pages. There were ten, altogether. Mr. Martin drove up a minute later, laughing as before. He handed us some half-melted Italian ices. “Don’t tell Mommy about these. Have fun?”
“The best, Dad,” said Dia, climbing in the front with me. Then, setting the soggy pages across our kness, she whispered: “Doogie, prepare to read Chapter III.”
Right there on the way to her house for meat loaf and malangas (whatever they were), we began to read.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
— III —
THE HUNTED MAN
By Emerson Beale
My last day in Singapore was one of falling flowers and cackling birds. I left Harrow’s place by the rickety back stairs, hoping they wouldn’t buckle under me before I got to solid ground. I ducked into an alley seconds before the dead man’s family arrived. They looked like they wanted to talk with their fists, then let machetes drive their points home. I wished my friend well.
“One question,” I said before we parted.
“Shoot. Well, don’t shoot . . .”
“Why did you help me, after all?” I asked him. “I’m nobody to you.”
Harrow looked beyond the buildings to the single tree in the neighborhood that hadn’t been blighted by the war. It was pink with early blossoms that spun around in the breeze. The smile on his face seemed sad. “You’re nobody to me, true, but even a nobody sometimes has a heart. I fancy I know what’s in yours. Or, rather, who’s in yours.” His little laugh then was full of hurt. “I had a Marnie once. I lost her. Don’t lose yours.”
Then he said he’d probably never see me again. I hoped he was wrong. He headed for the airport. I headed for the dock by way of the post office. I figured if everything went right, I’d be back in Florida before the big brown envelope was. I also figured that not everything would go right.
My timing was perfect. A beat-up old tub of a tanker out of San Diego named Coronado was loading for departure. I thanked Harrow silently for the tip.
I hadn’t been there more than three minutes, sizing up my chances of getting onboard, when I heard the rattling cough of something iron, and the blue sedan rolled across the dock and heaved to a stop. Maybe I was still delirious or maybe I didn’t have time to wonder how in hell that car ever got to Singapore, but its doors squealed open and who else but Skull slunk out of the cab, socks first.
Two and a half years had done nothing for his complexion. He was as faded as hotel sheets. When he snapped his fingers, Tall Man unfolded himself from the sedan’s backseat.
No sooner had they begun arguing with some locals and searching the crowds than a handful of toughs from the alley swaggered in. The local chapter of the Oobarab Society was anxious to make a name for itself. Skull began to point, and the goons deployed across the dock. When he slapped his shoulder three times, his parrot fluttered out of the car and settled on him. But he had a new addition to his menagerie now.
“Bring it!” he called.
The giant clicked open the trunk, tugged once, then again, and a tiger, all ten rippling feet of it, slithered foot by foot by foot by foot down onto the dock.
“Malkin, heel!” Skull said.
Dia and I looked at each other. Malkin? The kitten?
When the tiger shook its massive head, the thugs’ fedoras nearly blew away. Malkin then poured itself over the dock to Skull, who took hold of the leash with both hands. It was a thick silver chain studded with blue stones.
Was it just my aching temples? Had my brain been blasted by that explosion. Or was this getting a little crazy now? Maybe it was all three.
I watched Skull pull something out of his coat pocket. It was a rag of blood-stained khaki. He dangled it under the tiger’s nose. Malkin sniffed it, pulled away, and lolled its massive head from side to side.
I hugged the backside of a shipping container. There came a low rumbling sound, then the shoosh of soft tires along the dock. The rumbling stopped. Peering around the container, I saw a motorcycle and sidecar. Driving it was a vision in purple wearing goggles and a veil. In its sidecar was Redbeard. He popped out. “Madame, vait,” he said.
His hands plunged deep in his cloak, the German rolled over to Mr. Bone, fuming.
“Ve gonna get him zis time, Shkull, eh?” he muttered. “Kuz if we not, Fank be real enkry.”
Corpse-face glared down at the short German. “Hoping so is what you oughta do, Punch. The Order won’t like him slipping through the claws of us. Malkin, sniff!”
Roused, the tiger pawed steadily down the dock toward the ship’s plank, jerking Skull forward as if he were a marionette on hooch. Malkin’s growl was not quite as loud as the ship’s engines, just low and deep and threatening enough to turn my vertebrae to jelly. Skull and his striped pet looked as if they were setting up shop and would be there awhile.
What could I do? I couldn’t go back into town. The crowd of well-wishers at Harrow’s hotel would have doubled by now and would be combing the streets. I had to get on that ship. More than that, I needed to know whether my wounds and Harrow’s work on them had done anything more than hurt like heck.
So I went up to him.
I went right up to Skull, to see if he knew me.
The bird on his shoulder had eyed me in a crazed way from the moment I’d emerged from behind the container, and cawed maniacally as I approached, “Faaaaangg!” The tiger sniffed me up and down, thumping its paws heavily on my shoes.
“Malkin, off!” Skull growled, yanking the animal’s chain harder than I would have.
Quivering inside my clothes, I patted my pockets, pretending to search for a cigarette. “Say, pal. Gotta smoke?” I was surprised that even my voice sounded different in the open air. Lower. Gruffer.
“Scram off, kid,” the ugly man growled, scanning my face for no more than a moment. “I’m working here.”
He pushed past me and walked on. It hurt to smile, but I managed it. “No problem. I was thinking of quitting, anyway.”
Still trembling, I went to the plank.
The ship’s purser stopped me at the bottom. In his forties, weathered, stocky, his eyes mechanical under a brimmed cap, he stood blocking the plank. The gray waters of the South China Sea seemed endless behind him. I thought of the black endless Gulf and Marnie on the other side of it and ached to see her. Marnie, Marnie, Marnie.
“You got fare and papers?” the purser asked me.
“I got,” I said, taking a small wad of bills from my pocket. I told you Harrow was an ace guy. The best.
The man squinted at my face, then at the money, then at the documents I handed him. A shiver ran up my spine to my neck. I glanced to my left. Only the water, gray and flat. To my right, Skull, Mr. Tall, the German, the tiger, the parrot, and half the Malay branch of the Order. The man folded the bills into his breast pocket and handed back the documents. He nodded at me slowly, knowingly, wrinkling up his forehead as he saluted and stepped aside.
“God bless ya, Private Randall Frederick Fracker. Welcome home.”
“Oh my gosh!” I said. “Fracker! The lawyer! Emerson became Fracker! Holy crud — I mean, excuse me! — but I have to tell my dad —”
“Wait! What the heck just happened here?” said Dia. She read the page again. Then a third time.
My brain was popping and stuttering like the engine of that blue sedan. I tried to sort it out for both of us. “Okay, look . . . Emerson Beale . . . I mean, Nick Falcon, was wounded. His face was messed up. Harrow fixed him up, and he looked different. So he came back as Fred Fracker, his dead Army friend. He had his dog tags. He had his papers. Fracker was alone in the world, remember? So Nick used the stuff because his face was so changed. And Nick Falcon became the lawyer that my dad knew years ago —”
“But is that true?” asked Dia. “Becau
se what about the kitten? Malkin is now a tiger? And the purple lady? And how does the blue car get all the way to Singapore?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“That sounds like some story,” said Mr. Martin, slowing and pulling into a gas station. “I need to fill up. Five minutes.”
He popped out of the car and trotted to the office.
We kept reading.
Teetering for an instant, I saluted the purser back then walked slowly up the plank and onto the deck. When the ship pulled away from Bonehead, his tiger, and the rest of the gang, I realized I had done it. For the moment, I had become someone else. I had slipped past the long arm of Oobarab and was that much closer to home.
Home! I could almost taste it. But my appetite had to wait. Florida was still ten thousand miles away.
After making every stop from Java to Pitcairn, the Coronado docked in San Diego two months later. I made friends with the postman and trusted him to do his job. For the next five months I worked my way to Phoenix, Galveston, New Orleans, and Hattiesburg. I caught wind of the Order prowling those places, but they were looking for Nick Falcon, not Freddie Fracker, so I moved on.
Working as an apple picker in Valdosta landed me in a hospital for over half a year with a bout of the malaria I’d contracted in the jungle. The doctor said my heart would suffer from its chronic recurrence. I wished him well, too. Finally, I hit Pensacola, where I was picked up on the southern route by a cigar salesman. He was motoring back to Tampa after three weeks on the road and asked me if I wanted a lift.
He filled me in. First about his wife and seven kids. Then Truman. The Marshall Plan. Stalin. War babies. The latest real estate boom. I told him next to nothing.
“A talker you’re not,” he said. “But good luck to ya.”
He finally dumped me at Charlie Doyle’s place. It was a little old Spanish house on 52nd South. You could practically taste the seawater, it was that close to Boca Ciega. Midnight came under a blue-black sky dotted with twinkling stars. I waited an hour more. Two. Making sure everyone everywhere was asleep, I hammered on his door.
Blinking, Doyle answered. He was shirtless in pajama bottoms. “Buddy,” he growled at me, “you’re two feet away, but I guess they don’t make watches where you are. It’s half past nothing here. Go away.”
I didn’t go away.
“It’s the middle of the night, pal,” he said. “You in a different time zone, or what?”
“It’s me,” I told him. “Nick Falcon.”
His face went suspicous, then sullen. “Nick Falcon is dead. He died on Saipan; everybody knows that. Beat it.” He started to turn.
“I sent you an envelope from Singapore over a year ago. If you never got it, I’ll have a word with the mailman —”
He swung his face back at mine and examined me for what seemed like forever before his scowl vanished. “You . . . you . . . Nick!” He practically leaped from the doorway, wrapped his skinny arms around me, and dragged me in off the street, practically sobbing.
Before I knew it I was sitting in his Florida room, my hands wrapped around a tall glass of anesthesia.
I told him nearly everything. He gaped, cried, whistled, laughed, and finally told me as much as he knew of what had been happening back home.
“I delivered the envelope like you wanted me to. Got myself in the hotel on a repair job and hid it behind the air grate like you asked, but then what? That was, I don’t know, fifteen months ago. Then nothing.”
“I had to cross ten thousand miles first. My malaria paid me a return visit, too,” I said, tapping my chest. “It never goes away for good.”
He took that opportunity to refill my prescription, and I told him the rest.
“Dang, Nick. The Secret Order of Oobarab,” he said with a low whistle. “Quentin Blaine’s underworld army. So they’re in Singapore, too? Fang’s a scary one, Nick. Or should I say . . . Freddie? Land is one of his two unholy obessions. He had an eye as dark as swamp water and teeth like a serpent when you saw him last. But it’s worse now. You don’t want to mess with him lately.”
“Way too late for that.”
“Golly, Nick. You picked a dangerous girl to fall in love with. She’s his other obsession.”
I shrugged. “You talk a blue streak. I imagine Marnie has her own mind.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Look. I didn’t read what you had me hide in the hotel, but how the heck would Marnie ever know about it? Like everyone else, she’s gotta think you died in Japan four years ago.”
I smiled at that. “Not so much. I sent her a postcard when I reached the States.”
“A postcard?” Charlie laughed. “You old snooker! That’s my idea! I used postcards as a clue while you were still sharpening pencils in grade school!”
I raised my glass to him. “To a writer who shares.”
“So you practice what I preach. Does the Order know you’re back in Florida?”
“Maybe,” I said, stroking my damaged cheek, “but not what I look like.”
He nodded. “I remember the date it hit the papers. June twenty-fourth, 1944. I remember because the paper was free that day. First time in three years. It rained all day.”
“I have to see her.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, shaking his head. “I guess I knew that was coming from the first.” He turned to the window, looked sadly into the coming dawn, then back at me. “She’s . . . changed, you know.”
I felt my heart skip a beat. “Not married?”
“No, no, no. Nothing like that. I guess she still holds a torch for you. No, it’s . . . there was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Nick, she’s in a chair. Been there since, I don’t know, awhile after I got your envelope. Half a year. Longer.”
Hearing it was like dying. Each word was a dagger in my heart. She’s in a chair. Marnie, my Marnie. I turned away. “It isn’t so.”
He leaned forward and spoke softly, painfully. “Freakish thing. Flying accident. Fang and Marnie in his danged autogyro. The official story goes he had engine trouble and plunged into the Bay,” he said. “He escaped minus an eye. Nick, it crashed hard. Lots of witnesses. She flew out, hit the water. Something about her spine. She was under the water a long time, too. That messed with her lungs . . . at the very least. Sorry, Nick. You gotta know the worst.”
I heard the words. I couldn’t believe them. My heart did. I started blubbering.
“Nicky, look. Fang — he went nuts about it. Blamed himself. He’s gone ‘off,’ they say. He’s wrapped the Order around her so tight nobody sees her anymore. They make hugger-mugger midnight trips to clinics. Not just here. Europe, Asia, too. As tough as it was to see her before, it’s impossible now. She lives a captive in his compound, if you call it living. She’s in that dark castle he calls the Towers.”
“I know the place,” I said. The image of prison grounds came to me. A prison with Marnie locked inside.
“Nick, a small army patrols the grounds. No phone. No friends. Just doctors, surgeons. You couldn’t get to her if you wanted to.”
“It’s far beyond wanting to,” I told him.
He looked at me for a long time. “All right,” he said finally. “I’ll help you. It won’t be easy, but what are friends for? I’ll snoop around. Heck, maybe I’ll even find out something. Golly, I still can’t believe you’re here. You escaped. You made it back!” He was near to crying now.
“I’ll need better papers,” I said.
“Sure, sure. Jeanette will help,” he said, wiping his face with his bare arm. “She always loved you. You’re staying here, by the way. I’ll make up the extra bed. Nick, we need to celebrate. In secret, of course.”
I smiled. “Later. First, can I use your typewriter?”
He grinned now. “Still the same old Nick, no matter what you look like. You got some story, I bet.”
“Not for the magazine, though. Not yet. And I’ll need some postcards.”
“Thanks.” Doyle had been my friend since I wrote my first mystery. He’d be my friend until my last.
My new identity kept me able to move around without Oobarab on my tail, but Doyle was right. There was no getting close to Fang’s tower-topped castle of black stone. It was crawling with thugs. The place was tighter than a drunk on payday.
The one chance I saw was that when the gossip press got a bit too hot about not seeing her, Marnie went out on carefully controlled occasions with a small battalion of nurses. But even that didn’t work. For the next eight months, I sent her postcards, visited tourist spots all over town, took them in alone, and came home alone.
As much as he could, Doyle went out, mostly at night, and scouted and searched and scrounged. He’d even taken to wearing all black, from crepe-soled shoes to a slouchy black beret. Month after month passed, and I tapped away, writing it all down.
“Black beret!” I said. “My gosh, it’s the same guy! I saw him. We both saw him at Brent’s Funeral Home!”
Dia nodded over and over. “And the postcards Nick sent were the ones we found at the bungalow. The ballfield, Webb’s drug store. This is so unbelievably cool!”
“Okay, okay,” I said, “but wait. Is the Towers the same as the Awnings? It’s like the kitten becoming a tiger. That can’t be real.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe it doesn’t matter. Does it matter?”
The car slowed and Mr. Martin pulled into their driveway. We took a break while the meat loaf made its way around the table and we talked about things. I told them about my father being Mr. Fixit with the house, skipping the little bit about why he fell from the ladder, and something about Mom traveling from place to place like a Ping-Pong ball. It did the trick. They frowned, then they laughed. After supper, Mrs. Martin had a class to go to, so she left first, then Dia and I helped her father clean up. When we were finished, I followed her to her room. We sat on her floor pillows and kept on reading and didn’t stop until the end.
My new face had bought me time to scout and plan, but I knew that sooner or later I’d have to break cover. It turned out to be later. The web Fang had woven around Marnie was as impenetrable as a Chinese wall. When she was hauled off to some secluded clinic, the trail went cold altogether, as if she no longer existed. I could do nothing but wait for her to surface again. It finally happened in the spring of 1952, four years after my return. Four interminable years.