Before me, only a yard away, bowler-hatted, mustached, and wide-eyed, was one of the reporters, poking a camera up and beseeching me to stand still for a nice picture. I deftly brushed his arm to one side and tried to pass him. He skipped back with an almost triumphant laugh and winked at me broadly. He had the damnedest thick eyebrows, and for one split second that set off another bell in my head. The man was thin and undersized, as if the weight of the eyebrows and a real walrus mustache would topple him over. The camera looked mammoth in his bony fingers.
"Knew you were someone right off," the man chuckled. "Can't fool old Badger. Now who might you be? You've the look of someone important. Films? Sports World—or perhaps an industrial giant, eh?—"
"Take my picture and I'll take your head off. Out of the way."
"Now, now. That anyway to talk? Hands across the sea and all that? C'mon, Guv'nor. Just one for the Telegraph, I always say—"
"Get out of my way, old Badger."
"Now don't be a bloody mad Yank, Sir. It's not becoming at all—"
I tried to step on by him again. He dodged expertly back, keeping me in range even though I picked up the cadence, practically double-timing. There were probably a dozen different better ways to handle the situation but I had reacted just like a weary celebrity whose lifetime is filled with such goings-on. It was bad acting, all the way.
Old Badger got his picture.
And I never had a chance to go for my .45.
Or even to fling the attache case into the hairy contradiction of his face. I should have known better. I should have realized who I was and exactly what it was that had brought me to London.
Spies can never afford to be careless. James Bond, forbid.
But it was too late for tears. Or anything else. Even pity.
From a distance of a mere four feet, the camera in Mr. Badger's hand exploded. With a bursting, popping, deadly sound that I don't think I will ever forget. There was a split-second of realization, terror, and a sickening taste of defeat in my mouth. After that, the rest was horror.
Something liquid, fiery, and altogether lethal shot across the intervening space between my face and Badger's. The last I saw of him was a whirling, rotating, maddening blur of mustache, eyebrows, camera, and airport terminal looming beyond the ridiculous bowler perched primly on his skull. There was nothing to see after that. Nothing at all except a bansheeing, blinding red-black, purple-crimson nightmare of agony and pure terror. I dropped the attache case because it suddenly seemed like the most unimportant thing in the world, and a man called Desmond Allan Cursitor was someone I never, ever wanted to know. I cursed the day I first heard his name. Something deep inside me cried out in protest at a system of things in which men do violent things to one another in order to get what they want out of life. Get what they want out of people.
Get what they want out of the world.
When the stuff in Mr. Badger's trick camera reached my eyes, I screamed. I don't think I had ever heard myself do that. In quite that way.
I kept on screaming.
Even as I writhed and twisted, groveling like a crazed animal, on the hard paved floor of the airfield baking in the English sunlight, waves of stabbing agony pounding every nerve end in my brain, I knew I had been blinded. At Heathrow Airport, not more than thirty miles from London. And all that architectural and picturesque British history.
The world around me, the running feet, the shouting and the yelling, the thunder of jet motors, the echoing and reechoing of somebody screaming, were all somehow lost and made insignificant. The stunning impact of a new and terrible knowledge had set up shop in every corner of my brain. Like a very awful truth.
Millions of tiny black ants were crawling all over me, blackening and blotting out one light after the other.
Until there was no light left at all.
Not a flicker of any kind.
The world was dark.
And it was no kind of world for a blind man.
Not one that I could see——
FROM LONDON WITH LOVE
□ The front page of that day's edition of the Evening News carried the headline story a full eighteen hours before the details reached the White House in Washington, D.C.
It made a very important man, a very famous man, very unhappy. Indeed, not one of his closest personal aides had ever seen him so touched by what was seemingly no more than a tragic news item. Yet with Presidents of countries, who is to assess what is important and what is not? What is significant, what is trivial?
The story from London was pathetic, no matter how one looked at it. Give or take his loyalties and interests:
DETECTIVE BLINDED:
HEATHROW EXPLOSION
Above the bannerline, an underlined lead-in revealed to some extent the newsworthy aspects of the front page story.
YARD INVESTIGATING: Ed Noon Felled By Unknown Assailant
London, surfeited with unemployment troubles, Indian rallies in Trafalgar Square, flying swoops by the CID and Scotland Yard to track down the murderer of an Inspector, and Hippie demonstrations at Shaftesbury Fountain, found much to conjecture about in what had happened at Heathrow that day. And to gossip about, really.
From the urban environs of Kensington to the more pastoral confines of Hampstead, the story created a sensation of sorts.
It wasn't every day that something happened at the airport.
Truth was, it was rather like a bit of Belfast come to London to roost. As if the bleeding IRA had had some hand in the row.
At Heathrow.
As bloody unhealthy as that was!
And unlikely.
THIS WILL WHIP YOU
□ "Where is the boy, Mr. Cursitor?"
"I've told you. I don't know."
"But you do. Else there is no sane reason for your visit to London at this time of things. Nor would you have persisted in your sea voyage once having seen our own dear Mr. O'Connell. Come now. The time for games is ended. Consider your position."
"I'm sorry. I can tell you nothing. There is really no point to all this. Whoever you are, you've made a mistake. Your people have made a mistake. I'm no longer connected with the United States government. I thought everyone knew that——"
"I'm the one who is sorry, Mr. Cursitor. For now you reduce me to methods far too primitive for my own liking. Do you know just how much I abhor violence? Can you even guess?"
"Don't be a fool—whoever you are. As the Lord is my judge, I know nothing of this boy you talk of—whoever he is——"
"Then you are indeed cursed, my poor friend. For you will not get out of this unscathed unless you come up with some information about Torin Bird. My instructions give me carte blanche, you see, in the matter of locating him. Even down to the brutalizing of estimable American scientists such as yourself."
"I've told you! I know nothing—I retired years ago—"
"And I am compelled not to believe you. I cannot afford to believe you. I am sorry. Sebastian, you may break one of Mr. Cursitor's fingers now. I believe the right forefinger will serve as a starter."
The pain when it came was like nothing Desmond Allan Cursitor had ever experienced in all his forty nine years of living. Mercifully, if such a thing can be called mercy, he could not tell from what source the agony came. Nor could he see the silent Sebastian. The cultured voice which had purred close by his ear, as it had purred during all those other occasions when his mysterious abductors had come to talk and ask him about amazing Torin Bird, had always been of a piece. Slow, measured footfalls in the corridor somewhere outside his prison, whatever it was. He had not the foggiest notion. He had always been bound to a chair somehow, whether with ropes or leather bonds he never knew. Even calling out in the darkness with the thick swath of cloth wrapped around his eyes had never evoked more than the futile echoes of his own shouting. He had never set eye on his captors. His last conscious memory of that other world was a brief step into the hallway of the Embassy Hotel to see the porter about tickets for that ev
ening's performance of Alan Badel in Kean—and then nothing. But the stifling smell of chloroform, arms pinioning him from the rear, a rush of heavy, powerful figures, and then all was oblivion. He had regained consciousness in this very chair, this very room. How long ago was that? He had lost all track of time. He was only aware of the scratchy surface of his cheeks. His last shave had been in the tiled bathroom of the hotel suite. Nan and the children had all been asleep in the other rooms——
Crack! He had never even felt the coarse gag placed in his mouth.
The ugly sound of the bone in his right forefinger breaking under the pressure of a vise-like, relentless hand came to him even above the din of his own strangled gasp of pain. Red-hot agony lanced up his forearm, met the nerve ends in his brain, and the dark universe of the room reeled with a lightning bolt of throbbing pain and nausea. It was quite like a thousand toothaches all rolled into one.
Tears must have flooded the blindfold of swathing cloth. He could not tell. For an agony of minutes, he could not tell anything but stabbing hurt. And a rising nausea in the pit of his stomach which dampened the heavy gag between his lips. But even the gag could not contain the blurting scream roiling from his stomach. It was a pitiful moan from Hell.
Through a haze of red-curtained horror, he dimly heard the purr of that smooth, nearly liquid-like voice, requesting the ominous Sebastian to pause in his occupation. The voice that was all culture, all menace.
"There. You see we mean what we say, Mr. Cursitor. That is the very first of your fingers. Shall we begin on the second—say a pinky now—or will you come to your senses and say something that makes sense? Come now—the time for alternatives is over. And all conversation of denial. You must make it as simple as possible on yourself, Mr. Cursitor. You are at the end of all the ropes. You cannot get out of this room, your government has literally no notion of your whereabouts—indeed, they assume quite probably that you have defected. So—do not protect the boy any longer. It isn't worth ten broken fingers. Nothing is, I can assure you. The world will go on despite all our idealism and efforts to make a better one. Or a worse one. Now—where is Torin Bird?"
The gag was pulled away again. He gasped, feeling blood on his lips. The sudden oxygen made him cough.
"For the love of God—I don't know——"
"Sebastian?"
There was no place to go, nowhere to duck, to avoid the evil in the room. Blinded, he could do no more than recoil against his chair. It was completely useless. He felt rather than heard the sudden brush of a shoulder again his side, then the quick seizure of his left hand and again that remorseless machine of grip. Crack! How idiotic it all was, how cruel—how so terribly simple to break any of the fingers of a human being's two hands. Flashing, flooding, now white-hot flaming agony closed over his left side. It was as if a sewing machine gone lunatic had raced up and down his body, stitching the needles of agony everywhere it touched. He screamed again, he was sure of that. But he did not hear the sound. He had plummeted downward, spilled into a dark sea of violence and unconsciousness. There was no where else to go but that part of the mind that denies the existence of all pain, all terror. All feeling.
Desmond Allan Cursitor sagged against his bonds, mouth drooling, head lolling against his chest. The rumpled, unpressed state of his clothes and the unkempt condition of his grey-streaked hair said more than anything else how forlorn his last few days had been.
The man called Sebastian, directly behind the chair, still holding Cursitor's left hand, from which the little finger dangled unnaturally like the broken sapling on a new tree, glanced idly across the room at his superior. Sebastian was remarkably tall and skeletal in appearance. But his emaciation had the aura of cruelty rather than deprivation. His eyes were not quite real. They continually jumped and flitted no matter what the state of circumstances might be. Or would become.
"He's done," Sebastian muttered. His voice was also odd. It had the quality of a barrel being dragged across a stone floor.
From the bare stage before the chair which held the limp figure of Desmond Allan Cursitor, the man with the purring voice murmured an oath. The expletive was in the thick idiom of a peasant of the Russian steppes.
"Wake him up," the man commanded with his usual mellifluous tones. "We will begin again. He must tell us where the boy is."
Sebastian almost diffidently released the broken-fingered hand from his grasp. Cursitor's left arm swayed against his body and then stopped, like a flag signal suddenly halted. Sebastian's weird eyes flitted across the bare room again. Questioningly, weirdly.
"Can he be telling the truth, do you think?"
The feline-voiced man seemed to consider that possibility. He was a medium-sized man, dressed impeccably in Savile Row clothes. A wide-lapeled dark coat topped a pair of very sleek gun-metal gray trousers. His face was round, smooth, and as unpuckered as a child's. A baby face. It was only the grotesquely black dashes of his eyebrows which gave the face any meaning at all. Shadows of sophistication and cynicism flying as boldly as any flags against a background of dough-like, uncontoured innocence. The face of a bloodless man, one might say.
"He must know," the man said after a thoughtful pause. "We must continue to behave as if he does. Surely you can see that, my dear Sebastian. Mr. Cursitor could not have come to London simply to feed the pigeons in Hyde Park. Wake him up."
Sebastian nodded. His eyes jumped once more as he reached into his side pocket for something. He produced a small, conical ampule of plastic casing which held a bluish liquid of some kind.
"And if the boy is dead——?" The question grated out of his hollow chest almost harshly. His superior seemed to shudder but it was no more than an almost involuntary shrug of the impeccably clothed shoulders. A low, light, unamused laugh filtered across the bare walls of the little room. A laugh as feminine as any woman's.
"Then there is no place in the world that will hide us from their disapproval. You understand, Sebastian? Cursitor must tell us something or we are all dead men. No better off than he."
"Yes," Sebastian nodded quickly this time, breaking the capsule and deftly thrusting it under Desmond Allan Cursitor's nose. "I understand, Mr. Morrow. The boy. We must find him. I shall break every part of Mr. Cursitor that moves until he tells us."
"I'm glad you appreciate the delicacy of our position, Sebastian. The child prodigy must be found—it is as simple as that. And we cannot afford any more delays in time. There—the idiot is coming around. The efficaciousness of your little ammonia bottles never fails to astound me——"
"In the war," Sebastian muttred raspily, "they would waken a man from the severest sort of wound. No matter how deep he might be in shock——"
Desmond Allan Cursitor came awake to nightmare, coughing and gasping, the stinging acrid fumes of ammonia burning the tender membranes of his nostrils. Sebastian and Mr. Morrow hovered around his chair like two demoniac vultures from the dark and somber courts of the Spanish Inquisition. But the flame of agony, the dull throb of two broken fingers, and an overwhelming nausea of doom continued to permeate the unutterable darkness that engulfed him.
"Now," the purring voice intoned as heavy, cruel hands closed over the aching battlegrounds of his damaged hands once more, "where were we? Oh, yes. You were about to tell us the whereabouts of Torin Bird———therefore, we shall begin again——"
THE SLEEPING UGLY
□ "You're rather fortunate, Mr. Noon. You know, if that film star Miss Mitchum wasn't a bit of a wantonly foolish woman, your eyes would be in a deuce of a fix right this moment. As it stands, your prospects for one hundred percent recovery are remarkably good."
"Can you spell that out, Doctor?"
"I'll endeavor to. It seems the lady was traveling with a quart bottle of distilled spring water. Carries it with her wherever she goes. No joke. A health faddist, you could say. She acted with incredible foresight, considering she hadn't the glimmer of what was going on out there at Heathrow the other day. Wouldn't you agree?"
"I'm in the dark—completely. I don't remember a thing after that phony photographer christened me. What was that stuff anyway? I had a nightmare last night imagining the shape I'd be in if it had been something like acid. Didn't feel much better."
"Nothing more than a household detergent. One of the very strongest on this side of the water. Nearly a ninety percent solution of ammonia and chlorine. Miss Mitchum showed her nurse's training right off. Seems she was studying to be in service when the films snatched her up. But—there you were. Stumbling about in severe pain and shock—blinded, actually—behaving like a wild man from all eyewitness accounts—"
"A bloody mad Yank, Mr. Badger called me," I said.
"A good enough description, though not the same meaning here in London. Our cabbies reserve that phrase for quarrelsome fares of American stock. Miss Mitchum rushed to your side and completely flooded your eyes with her spring water. Though being a native Londoner, I fail to see why she should bring it back into this country with her. She needn't worry about the water supply here—"
"She's been in the States making a movie," I said, "and I owe her a bushel of American Beauties. I thought she was a dum-dum First Class. I should talk."
I was in darkness, behind twin swabs and layers of cooling bandages, not really knowing where I was or how I had gotten there. Not knowing what doctor I was talking to, what hospital I was in, or just how long I'd been in the fog. Days, maybe a week had passed and Operation: Find Cursitor had not gone any further than Heathrow Airport. I hadn't heard from the President, either. Not so much as a carrier pigeon Hello or a Get Well message. Espionage continued to move in mysterious, complex ways.
"I should think you would offer your thanks to the lady in some way," the Doctor said dryly. I hadn't ever laid eyes on him, of course, but he sounded as English as Terry Thomas. Though not nearly as funny. I expected to hear him say "Good show!" "Oh, I say!" and "Rahther!" any old second. "You owe her your eyesight, Mr. Noon. There's no two ways to that. They'd never gotten you to us in time. The tissue damage would have gone too far. If that awful stuff had had that amount of time in which to do its dirty work—as it was, she managed to clear your eyes of most of the fluid."
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