by John Lutz
When the two men draw nearer, I see the way the man in the tan jacket is looking at me — warily, yet with a total disregard for how I am looking at him. Almost as if I'm inanimate. Fear drops through me like a wedge of ice.
"Congratulations," Ackerley says. "You have moved history." He is carrying the leather briefcase from which he usually pays me.
I nod, watching the man in the tan jacket watch me.
Ackerley sighs sadly, the sigh of a man taking a regrettable but necessary precaution. The short man draws a silenced automatic from beneath his jacket.
"Mr. Lockwood," Ackerley says, "there is a darker history of this world that must never be written."
I attempt to shout, but the silenced automatic jumps twice in the short man's hand, making two quick coughing sounds, like strangled laughter.
As I lay dying, watching the two men walk away, I concede through my agony that my killing was a neat, professional job. Ackerley must be pleased.
And no doubt his employer will be pleased.
Winds of Change
"Last night when I was with my wife I accidentally spoke your name."
Alison didn't answer David immediately. Slanted sunlight blasted from between the clouds in the California sky and glinted off the highly polished gray hood of her 1936 Chevy convertible. Tommy Dorsey's band was playing swing on the dashboard radio. The car was five years old, but Alison regarded it as if it were the newest model. She had only recently been able to afford such a luxury.
"What was your wife's reaction?" she asked at last, shifting gears for a steep grade in the twisting road.
David threw back his handsome head, his blond hair whipping forward in the turmoil of wind, and laughed. "None. She didn't understand me, I'm sure. There's so much she doesn't understand about me."
Alison didn't caution him to be more discreet as she usually did. She seemed lulled by their motion through the warm, balmy evening. Her long auburn hair flowed gracefully where it curled from beneath the scarf that covered her head and was knotted beneath her chin. She knew that she and David were an enviable young couple in her sleek convertible, speeding along the coast road in mountainous Big Sur Country, with the shaded, thick redwood forest on their right and the sea, charging the shore and crashing sun-shot against the rocks on their left.
He extended a long arm and languidly, affectionately, dragged his fingertips across the shoulder of her wool sweater.
She felt her heart accelerate at his touch.
"My wife doesn't know you're a spy," he said.
Alison turned her head toward him and smiled. "Let's hope not."
She braked the convertible, shifted gears again, and pulled to the side of the highway. Then she drove up the narrow, faintly defined dirt road that led to their usual picnic place. Within a few minutes, the car was parked in the shade of the redwood trees of smaller variety that grew in that wild section of California.
She got out the wicker picnic basket from the trunk, watching David's tall, lanky frame as he quite carefully spread the blanket on the grass. David was a methodical person, which was why he was good at his job; he had a talent and fondness for order. Alison stopped and deftly straightened the seams of her nylons, then joined him.
Alison Carter and David Blame both worked at Norris Aircraft Corporation just north of Los Angeles. Alison was a secretary and David the chief of security. The people who were paying Alison for information about the top-secret XP25 pursuit plane had advised her to strike up an acquaintance with the plant security chief. If she were caught, the relationship would be a valuable insurance policy.
Of course Alison had followed their advice. She believed everything they told her. She had been barely eighteen when Karl Prager had first approached her, had first become her lover. Nineteen when their affair was over and she was in too deeply as an informer ever to hope she might get out.
Not that it had bothered Alison to sell "industrial information." Oh, she knew she was working for the Germans, actually, but what difference did that make? It wasn't as if America was at war. Politics didn't interest Alison in the slightest, and the money Karl paid her more than doubled her meager salary earned as a secretary.
Alison hadn't had to think of a way to meet David. Her rather extravagant habits, considering her salary, prompted him to ask her some routine questions one day. When she'd told him she was the beneficiary of her late father's will, he'd believed her.
They'd seen each other again, after business hours, despite the fact that David was married. Apparently he and his wife Glenda were having difficulties. For Alison, the business of seducing the shy and precise David Blame quickly became pleasure. And by the time he found out she was violating company rules, he was willing to overlook her transgressions.
On Saturdays, David would often give Glenda an excuse, that probably even she didn't believe, and he and Alison would drive up the coast road in Alison's convertible and picnic with sandwiches and champagne in their private, lover's hideaway.
Alison sat down beside David on the blanket. She untied and removed her head scarf, plucking out the bobby pins helping to hold it in place. Through the trees, the undulating blue-green sea was barely visible, but she could hear its enigmatic whisper on the rocky beach.
David paused in unwrapping the sandwiches. He dug into his shirt pocket and handed Alison a folded sheet of paper patterned with scrawled numbers. "Here," he said casually, "these are the performance specifications you asked for."
The figures represented the date on the experimental plane's latest test flight. Alison accepted the paper with a smile and slipped it into a pocket of her skirt. She knew that David took the business of revealing company information no more seriously than she did. He didn't know to whom she was giving the information — probably he assumed it was a rival aircraft manufacturer — and he didn't care. It was his love affair that was important to him, that had consumed his very soul, and not dry columns of figures that meant nothing except to an aeronautical engineer. He knew he'd be fired if the company found out about Alison and him, but he could always get another job of some sort. And he'd still have Alison.
After they'd eaten the ham sandwiches and finished the champagne, David looked at her with his level blue eyes.
His head was resting in her lap, and she was stroking his fine blond hair that was just beginning to thin at the crown of his head. Alison had thought the first time she saw David that he looked very much like movie star Richard Widmark.
"There's so much I want to say to you today," he told her.
"Not now," she said, bending her body and kissing him on the lips. "Let's not talk now."
As usual, David saw her point of view and agreed with it.
An hour later, in the purpling twilight, Alison lay on her back and watched a plane drone high overhead in the direction of the sea. A U.S. Navy plane, she noted, on a routine nighttime training mission.
David was asleep beside her, his deep, regular breathing merging with the sounds of the plane and the eternal sighing of the sea. Though her body was very still alongside his sleeping form, Alison's mind was tortured and turning.
Not that she had any real choice. Her time of choices was over. She wished David had never told her about speaking her name in front of his wife. But he had. And Alison knew that he might speak her name again in the wrong circumstances, even if tomorrow he still saw things her way.
Quietly, she rose from the blanket and fished in her straw purse for her key ring. She walked to her car, the tall grass tickling her bare feet and ankles, thinking tomorrow, tomorrow.
She unlocked and opened the car's trunk and left it open as she returned to stand over David. She was holding a small revolver that she'd gotten from the trunk, the gun they had given her.
Alison didn't want to miss where she was aiming, didn't want to hurt him more than necessary. She did love him.
She knelt beside David, placing the gun barrel inches from his temple, and glanced in all directions to make certai
n they were alone. In the sudden chill breeze rushing in from the ocean, she drew in her breath sharply and squeezed the trigger.
The crack of the gun seemed feeble in the vastness of mountains and sea.
Alison sat with her eyes clenched shut until the sound of David moving on the blanket ceased. Then, still not looking at him, she returned to the car and got a shovel from the trunk.
She wrapped David's still body in the blanket and dragged it deeper into the forest. She began to dig.
In a very few hours, halfway around the world, a signal would be given, and the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor. War would immediately be declared, not only against Japan but against Germany and Italy as well. The rules of the game Alison was being forced to play would abruptly change. Who knew if David would have been willing to continue to play if the stakes were real? Who could say what else he might have accidentally let slip to his wife? Alison knew that much more than her job, and perhaps a criminal record, depended on David's silence now. Her survival was at stake.
As she cast loose earth over the huddled, motionless form in the blanket, Alison didn't realize she was burying a ring in David's pocket, the engagement ring he had intended to give her when he awoke. The ring with her initials engraved inside the band. The ring wrapped loosely in a copy of the letter he had written to his wife, confessing everything and explaining why he was leaving her.
Alison worked frantically with the shovel, feeling her tears track hotly down her cheeks. At least David's war was over. He was at peace. Her war was just beginning, and look what it had already forced her to do.
She would be one of the first to realize why hers was a losing cause.
The Lemon Drink Queen
She almost begged to be kidnapped, so I intended to oblige. Thana Norden was her name, the wife of Norman Norden, the millionaire lemon drink king. Old man Norden — about seventy years old — kept to himself in their big house on Florida's ocean coast, while his young wife Thana kept the bartenders busy in the big hotels up and down Collins Avenue.
Norman Norden worshipped his wife, and in the news releases concerning his civic activities, and in the society page write-ups, he never failed to mention the fact. "Worth all my money," he had said of her in one TV interview. That had stuck in my mind.
Thana acted the part of something worshipped. She was a very well-built brunette, of medium height and weight, about thirty, with large, slightly tilted brown eyes, long legs and a flaunting elegance about her. Her specialty, the way I heard, was to lead men on and then not deliver. She might not have been rare that way, but she was rare in a lot of other ways, and she loved to bring it to everyone's attention. I sat and heard her hold court with her bought friends in a lounge one evening. "My jewels . . . my car. . . he'd do anything for me . . . flying to Paris next Tuesday . . . why, he'd give a fortune to kiss my hand . . ." Those were the sort of remarks that dotted her conversation.
After watching Thana for a few weeks, I found that her favorite pastime also fitted in with what I had in mind. She liked to take long, solitary walks on the beach. I'd sit concealed in my old car and watch her stroll in the moonlight, and I'd consider the possibilities. I was almost forty now; the big break had never come. Everything I'd ever done had always started sweet and ended sour. Was I considering something stupid out of some mounting desperation, or had I realized finally that I had to take a chance?
I can't say I made up my mind all at once, or even consciously, but one day I realized that I had made up my mind.
So that night I took one final draw on my cigarette, took one final look through the windshield at the small figure of Thana Norden below me on the beach. She was walking barefoot in an evening dress, about to disappear around a gentle rise of sand. A long swelling wave rose from the dark ocean and rolled toward her to sigh and splay gently about her feet. In the moonlight she glistened like pure gold.
The kidnapping itself would be the easiest part; but where would I hide a package like Thana Norden?
I figured the answer to that would have to come later. The thing for me to do now was to learn all I could about Norman Norden himself. That way I'd know better how to proceed, and how much to ask for ransom.
It was easy to find out what I wanted to know about Norden — so easy it kind of scared me. He was more important than I'd thought, worth more than I'd thought. He'd inherited over a million dollars and the Norden Lemon Drink Company from his father, Milton Norden. Then, with the increasing popularity of concentrated frozen lemonade, he'd built his father's business to ten times its former size and branched out into manufacturing other food products. Alone, without an heir until Thana, Norman Norden had acquired a huge home in New England, a plush New York town house, two swank penthouse apartments in Miami and a vacation "cottage" in the Bahamas. He spent ninety-nine percent of his time in the sprawling mansion in Miami Beach, and from his office there he conducted his vast business.
On a particularly broiling, humid afternoon I lay on my back in bed and decided after some deliberation to ask $250,000 ransom for the precious Thana. With that figure in mind, I fell asleep listening to the rain begin to fall.
That evening, before it began to get dark, I had a quick snack, then drove to look over Norden's Miami property. I'd learned that both penthouses were used for business purposes only, and that they were seldom used at all. If someone very important came to town on Norden business, the larger penthouse with its pool atop the Brently Building was opened and put at the client's disposal.
I parked near the Brently Building and looked up at its top floor. According to the business-magazine article I'd read at the library, this, the more used of the two penthouses, was occupied for only a few weeks out of the year.
Squinting up into the sunlight, I could make out long rows of draped windows. A little casual conversation with the doorman told me the penthouse was unoccupied now, and the tiniest seed of an idea began to sprout in my mind.
When I saw the site of the second penthouse, smaller and less expensive than the first, on the top of the twenty-story Martinaire Hotel, that seed took root. The Martinaire was part of a section of older buildings, onetime fine hotels that depressed economic conditions were forcing out of business. What interested me most about the old but stately Martinaire was the vacant west wing. That wing, I discovered, was being remodeled to contain fewer but larger rooms. The front of the building was a sheer twenty-story rise, but the west wing rose only twelve stories to stair-step into the main section of building. I investigated further, then walked back to my car, smiling.
I had everything planned and was ready to act two evenings later. I tried to make up my mind when to perform the actual snatch, and as I followed a slightly drunk Thana Norden out of a bar that night about eleven o'clock, I decided then was as ripe a time as any if she were heading for her late walk on the beach.
Thana must have been even drunker than usual, for I had some trouble keeping my old sedan up with her fast and reckless driving. She pushed her little red sports car so hard it was almost suicidal, her dark hair whipping behind and around her in the wind. She was something, Thana Norden was, like a heroine from a book.
Finally she parked the car where she usually did, ran down to the beach and bent gracefully sideways to remove her shoes. I parked down the road about a hundred yards in the direction I knew she'd be walking and sat waiting, my hands clenched on the steering wheel.
After what seemed a long wait, I saw her below, walking slowly and carrying her shoes in one hand, looking out as she often did to the rolling dark sea. I got out of the car, shutting the door softly behind me, and watched her walk past before I started down toward her.
The sighing of the waves kept her from hearing me as I approached from behind, and when I touched her shoulder she whirled with a startled look in her pale face. "Thana Norden?"
"Yes . . . ?" she said, frowning as if I'd interrupted her from complex thought. "What do you want?"
"You're coming with me," I said
, watching her eyes for the fear that would allow me to manage her; but there was no fear — only annoyance, indignation.
"You must be out of your mind!" she snapped.
"You must be. A solid-gold girl like you, in the habit of walking alone on the beach at night. You were bound to be stolen."
"Stolen?" Now she looked at me curiously. "You're kidnapping me?"
"You've guessed it."
"You're serious?"
I nodded, drawing the small .32 revolver from my belt.
She looked up at the stars and laughed. "All right," she said when she was finished, "I'm kidnapped. You go ahead and call the shots."
"Walk along with me," I said, motioning with the revolver, and side by side we began the walk toward my car. Thana didn't seem frightened at all, didn't even seem nervous, though in a way she seemed excited, almost like a pretty girl embarking on a much anticipated date.
When we reached the sparsely grassed earth we stopped so she could put her high-heeled shoes back on. Then I prodded her ribs with the gun and we walked on faster toward the car.
I let Thana drive while I sat beside her with the revolver leveled at her side. I was glad to see that in the confines of my car she seemed more frightened than before.
"Back to the city," I ordered her.
"My makeup is in my car," she said as we passed her parked red convertible.
"It stays there. It won't matter what you look like for the next few days."
She drove on, staring ahead at the curving dark road. "How much ransom are you going to ask?" she said after a while.
"More than you're worth."
"I'd like to say you can't get away with it, but you probably can. My husband will pay plenty to have me back."
"Thanks for the moral support. Now be quiet and drive."
"I'm not stupid, you know," she said lightly, "even though I am beautiful. I know I'm worthless to you dead, so don't bother with your threats."