Dangerous Legacy

by George Harmon Coxe

  “Nothing serious?”

  “No.” She laughed lightly. “I think he has a girl in Manila.”

  “Yes,” he said and turned her so she had to look at him. “In that case it’s all right if I cut in once in a while.”

  She looked up at him as he held her arm, her head slightly tilted as she studied him. Starlight danced from her eyes but he could not read them and looked instead at her mouth, finding it softly curved and inviting.

  “I would like that,” she said.

  “Umm,” said Rankin. Still holding her arm he glanced about and found the metal settee empty. “Let’s sit down,” he said. “I’ll get a blanket.”

  “All right. And cigarettes too, please, Spence.”

  There was, it seemed to Rankin, a new intimacy in the way she spoke. It gave a nice lift to his anticipation and he found himself hurrying as he went below to the cabin he shared with Ulio, on the port side, ’midships, and two doors from a transverse passageway.

  Claire Maynard was uppermost in his mind as he turned the knob and stepped into the darkness. He felt no premonition of danger. When he clicked the light switch and found it did not work there was still no intuitive warning but only annoyance.

  Muttering irritably, he stepped toward the chest between the beds. Two lamps stood there, highlighted in the narrow lane of brightness that sliced in from the partly open door. Then, as he reached out, he heard the sound.

  It was not loud, nor even distinct. He did not know what it was but only that it was inside the room and close. Then, startled and uncertain as the tension hit him, he moved instinctively, wheeling, peering into the shaft of light and seeing beyond it some shadow darker than the rest that moved as he watched.

  Not speaking, nor knowing what it was, he lunged out, angling to his left and through the shaft of light. Then, in darkness again, his foot catching the edge of an unseen chair and tripping him, he swung at the shadow as he stumbled, knowing it was a man before a shoulder smacked into his side and knocked him sprawling.

  He went to his hands and knees, feeling the other dart past as he pivoted on one knee. Then, about to push up, he saw the man at the door turn swiftly. An arm rose and snapped down, something gleaming brightly in the hand.

  The muscular coordination that had served Spence Rankin so well as an athlete and a flyer saved him then. Not knowing what the hand held, he diagnosed the gesture and when that hand came down he moved, ducking sideways, his head down as something whistled past his ear to land with a solid thud two feet beyond him. Then, in the same instant that his head was turned, the door opened and slammed and blackness claimed the room.

  After that Rankin did what he could. It wasn’t much. The odds were bad and in his new blindness he stumbled over the chair again and had to grope for the door. When he finally opened it there was no one in the passageway, no sound but the even throb of the ship’s engines and the pounding of his heart.

  Before he knew it he was at the transverse passageway and it was then, as he stood there listening, that the fear struck through him.

  Until then there had been no time for anything but action, no thought of anything but his own skin. Now panic shook him and he raced back and into the room, not bothering with the lights but bending over the still form on Ulio’s bed.

  He ran his hand over the blanket that covered Ulio’s chest. He touched the face but his palm was so damp it told him nothing. Then, as he bent close, it came to him, the distinct and even sound of breathing.

  For a minute then his relief was so great that he could not stand still. He turned on the lamp and took another look at the peacefully sleeping figure. He let his breath whistle out and rubbed his palms against his coat. He stepped over to right the chair and then he saw the knife sticking in the closet door.

  He thought about fingerprints and decided they did not matter. It took a hard pull to free the blade and he saw it was about five inches long, with a handle that was divided into two parts so that when they were unclasped the blade swung neatly out of sight between them.

  Aware now that the room had been searched, he sat down on his bed, studying Ulio’s thin face and hollow cheeks and the fine line of his jaw.

  He made no attempt to inspect the ransacked bags but simply sat there, Claire Maynard and the cigarettes forgotten, beginning to understand at last some of the things Ulio had told him.

  3

  IN THE MORNING Spence Rankin told Ulio what had happened and together they examined their belongings. They discovered nothing was missing and discussed the reason for the prowler’s visit, convinced that it was not murder, since with Ulio passed out, it would have been a simple matter. In the end they agreed not to tell Claire nor the ship’s officers, since there was no evidence but the knife.

  “It may have nothing to do with Sanchez,” Ulio said. “Though it is a Filipino knife.”

  “If only I could have got one look at him,” Rankin said, “we’d damn soon find out. He must have seen me take you down and either he got scared off before he finished or he was just looking to see what we might be carrying.”

  Ulio admitted that this might be so and thereafter they seldom discussed the matter, the pattern of the trip settling into a lazy routine no different from that of any other five-day ocean voyage. They met their fellow passengers, finding some to play and drink with and some to avoid. Ulio and Claire liked bridge and they discovered a couple who made a congenial foursome; that gave Rankin a chance to look about and talk with stewards and carry on a little investigation of his own.

  Without knowing who he was looking for, he talked to all who would listen. In the bar and lounges and on the deck he got as much information as he could and at the end of the third day was forced to admit that he was no further along than when he had started.

  When the sight of a steward carrying a dinner tray along a passageway gave him a new angle he discussed it with the assistant purser, asking if there were any passengers aboard that did not frequent the public rooms. When he had examined his list, the purser said yes.

  “Three cabins,” he said. “The honeymooners, the Tuttles, in Suite B … Mrs. Stacey—she’s an invalid—and her nurse. And let’s see … yes, Mr. de Borja.”

  Rankin repeated the name and found he liked the sound of it. When he learned the first name was Carlos he liked it even better. “The kind of a name,” he told himself, “that goes nicely with knife-throwing.”

  “Where from?” he asked.

  The purser could not say. “He’s booked to Honolulu. A businessman of some kind, I believe.”

  Aside from his investigating, Rankin spent most of his time with Ulio and Claire, and it was not until the third night that he was able to be alone with her. Then, having played gin rummy with an insurance man bound for Manila until after eleven, he went below to find Ulio reading in bed. Ulio didn’t know where Claire was.

  “I left her about an hour ago,” he said. “She had some letters to write.”

  “I’ll take a look,” Rankin said. “Maybe she’d like to neck awhile.”

  “She might at that,” Ulio said and winked broadly.

  Rankin tried her cabin first and when he got no response to his knock he explored the public rooms and the promenade deck. Then he climbed the after ladderway to the boat deck and started along the starboard side, bucking the wind which had risen and having difficulty identifying the couple he found leaning on the rail because of the overcast sky.

  The metal settee was unoccupied. In the gap between stack and ventilator he could see a man and woman standing close together on the port side, but when, continuing along the rail, he crossed under the bridge wings and came back, the couple had gone. Now, as he passed the after stack, a familiar voice called softly from the darkness. When he located it, he found Claire Maynard waiting on the metal settee.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you. Ulio said you were writing letters but you weren’t in your cabin—”

  “I must have just missed you,” Claire
said. “I just came up.”

  “There was a guy and a girl over there on the rail. I thought it might be you. I was all set to get jealous.”

  Claire’s pause was noticeable, her words sounding hurried when she spoke. “No,” she said. “No, I just came up.”

  Rankin’s gaze moved to the spot where the couple had stood and it seemed to him that the woman had worn a scarf over her hair as Claire did, that she was as tall or taller than the man. Then, unwilling to press the point, he dismissed it and slipped his arm casually about her.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “Ulio said you were in Manila before the war. He said you had a Russian passport for a while.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not Russian.”

  She laughed and put her head back against his arm. “I had a friend,” she said. “He fixed up the passport for me. I got away with it for a year and a half—you should have heard my accent—but there were other White Russians there, most of them not so very particular. When the Jap officers got too insistent about the sort of collaboration I didn’t want to give I told them who I was. Fortunately I could prove it,” she added. “So I wound up in Santo Tomas with the others.”

  “And before that?”

  “I was in Shanghai, as part of a dance team. Ballroom stuff, if you know what I mean. Claire and Devold, right from the States. We weren’t very good but neither was the competition. The trouble was Devoid, the louse, found an English lady that he liked and I waited too long in Shanghai like a dope and the ship put into Manila and there I was.”

  She had more to say on the subject and Rankin let her talk, finding out that she came from Wilkes-Barre and a large family, and like so many others with a little talent and a longing for what was thought to be glamour, had gone to New York to try her luck. At eighteen she had clerked in a Broadway department store to pay for dancing lessons and had graduated in time to a six-girl line in one of the cheaper night clubs. After that there was a period of hat-checking followed by a road show that disbanded on the West coast.

  “I was doing the same old thing in Los Angeles and waiting for some scout to discover me when I got the chance to get to Shanghai.” She stopped abruptly and sat up. “That’s enough,” she said. “I’m beginning to bore myself. Can I have a cigarette?”

  Rankin laughed and gave her one, liking her humorous self-reliance and the absence of any effort to impress. He tried to get her talking about the dress shop she was opening and wondered if her backer was the same one who had fixed up the phony passport. He did not voice the thought, however, nor did he get much information about the shop. It was, she said, new and small but there were living-quarters over it and room to expand.

  “I’m going to make a lot of money. For three years not a yard of cloth came into the islands. Even after the liberation they kept the ships to fight the war. They got in a little flour just before the end but as for cloth—well, back in October they had a fashion show at the Manila Hotel, which was hardly fit to live in, and the material in those gowns sold for fifty dollars a yard. Which should give you an idea. I’ll clean up,” she said happily.

  Rankin turned her toward him and slid his hand inside her coat. Under her arm her body was soft and warm and she made no protest. When he kissed her she kissed him back. She made no objection to several encores during the next fifteen minutes, and when finally she straightened up, she sighed.

  “You’re nice,” she said. “From things Ulio told me I decided you were a pretty rugged character and maybe you are, but you know enough to let a girl talk and you have nice manners. Only now I have to get my beauty sleep,” she said and stood up.

  They went downstairs and when she had snapped on her cabin light she turned in the doorway, one hand on the frame. He looked beyond her, inspecting the room. The humorous, half-veiled eye told him this was as far as he went and because he liked her he did not mind, though he said, “For a little while?”

  She shook her head and smiled. She leaned forward and gave him a small chaste kiss on the lips. “Be a good boy,” she said; “it’s late.”

  Spence Rankin was a good boy. He said he’d see her in the morning and went along to his cabin but not immediately to sleep. Remembering the things she had told him he found himself wondering how much he could believe. He speculated on the coincidence that had brought her and Ulio to San Francisco at the same time; he tried to assay her attraction to Ulio—if that was what it was. He wondered again about the unknown couple who had so quickly disappeared from the boat deck, but in the end he accomplished nothing at all beyond what he already knew: that she had the native ability and looks to get what she wanted, that she was fun to be with, that she was beyond doubt wise in the ways of men.

  Spence Rankin had no chance to be alone with Claire the following day but on the last night out they went again to the boat deck where a repeat performance was given with an identical ending. This time, however, when he went back to his cabin the light was on and Ulio was sitting up in bed waiting.

  “Been up on the boat deck with Claire again?” he said. “She’s good, isn’t she? Sit down a minute, will you?”

  He reached for two envelopes on the chest between the beds, selected one, and tapped it against his fingers, the smile with which he had greeted Rankin completely gone.

  “I have something for you, Spence,” he said. “I’d like you to keep it.”

  Rankin took the envelope and leaned back to examine it. It was long, sealed, and on the front of it had been written, Spencer Rankin—To be opened in case of emergency.

  Puzzled, Rankin started to grin. He started to make a crack, then stopped when he saw his friend’s grave eyes and the troubled lines around them.

  “What kind of an emergency?”

  “Well—in case something should happen to me.”

  “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “Nothing I hope. It’s just that if anything should I’d like something done about it.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” Rankin said. “That’s why I’m along, remember?”

  Ulio’s smile was forced. “It’s best to be sure. You will take good care of it, Spence?”

  Rankin rose and winked, sobered now by Ulio’s manner and what he had said but reluctant to show he was impressed. “Okay,” he said. “Sure, Ulio, if it will make you feel any better.”

  The S.S. Molokai sailed proudly past Koko Head and Diamond the next afternoon, flirted with the beach hotels and slid serenely through the channel, docking near the foot of Front Street at four o’clock. Ulio had reserved rooms at the Moana—their plane left the next morning—and Rankin had already told the others not to wait for him since he had other plans.

  Now, as a result of a few well-placed tips, he was the first one down the gangplank and once in the shadows of the loading-shed he had no difficulty in finding an obscure point from which to witness the debarking of the other passengers, identifying them as they came off the ship.

  It took quite a while and he smoked a lot of cigarettes, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he leaned against the upright, a competent-looking man in a well-cut tropical worsted, with steady eyes and a well-boned face. Now and then he strolled forward to see if the assistant purser was still on deck, for the purser was his collaborator—for a fee—in this particular enterprise. Finally, when it seemed that everyone had gone, his hunch paid off and the man he had been waiting for appeared.

  He had, in the past day or two, been given a sketchy description by a certain steward of the mysterious man named De Borja who never appeared for meals, but he was not entirely prepared for what he saw when the purser gave the pre-arranged signal.

  For he had seen this man before, remembering instantly the stocky figure, the swart evil face and the outsized ears that no hat could quite disguise. He had seen him in the lobby of the Blake Hotel the afternoon he had followed Ulio and the detective. Now he knew that the man was no Italian vineyard owner up from the valley and waiting for momma and the k
ids; he had been waiting for Ulio Kane and his name was Carlos de Borja.

  4

  FOR A WHILE as the carromata bounced along behind the miniature Filipino pony, Spencer Rankin sat upright, viewing the destruction of Manila with an awed, incredulous gaze. Dust hung like a smoke pall over the streets. Trucks were everywhere and crowding them were jeeps, carromatas, cartellas, and pushcarts. Even the Pasig seemed muddier and when he crossed Jones Bridge and saw the leveled ruins that had once been Intramuros, and the total destruction of the government buildings, he was sickened by what war had done, unable even to remember how it had once looked to him so many summers ago when the city was called The Pearl of the Orient.

  In the business district and along the Escolta some buildings still stood, apparently sound since they had been repaired and were in use. Yet for every one of these there were huge piles of rubble as yet untouched, and yawning open spaces where new construction was getting under way.

  The General Post Office had apparently suffered less damage than some, for it was in good shape now, the scars erased. But the new Assembly building was nothing but a mountain of broken concrete and steel reinforcing rods that sprouted upward like quills on a porcupine’s back. In contrast, the yellow façade of the V-shaped City Hall still stood along the side that fronted on the street and he mentioned this to the driver.

  “This side, yes,” the man said. “In the war it was Headquarters building. But the other side”—he shrugged expressively—“is nothing.”

  Bumping along Burgos they passed what had once been a golf course outside the Walled City. Now the grass was high and here and there the tip of a white cross stood up to remind those who passed what the cost had been. When a uniformed Filipino traffic cop with an M.P. band on his arm waved them past the intersection and they started down one side of Wallace Field, long since taken over by the Army, Spence Rankin looked no more and put his mind on what Ulio Kane had told him.

  They had left Guam at four thirty that morning, arriving at Nichols Field at twelve twenty, and from the moment they landed they had not spoken to each other nor given any sign that they were acquainted.