"Do you have any children, sir?"
"No," I admitted, surprised. "I've never been married. My luck or lack of luck depends on the point of view. Relative, again."
"Pity," the boy said, sounding years older. " 'Course I lost my Mum and Dad. Long ago. I was away at school you see and they both died while on holiday in Zurich. A cable car snapped its hawser and—no matter—it happened so long ago. When I was perhaps eight or nine. It hasn't been so bad except there are days when I do miss them most awfully. You know what I mean, sir?"
"Sure. Like right now. Sightseeing at the Tower. Sorry, Torin. I wouldn't have brought you here if it was going to bring back bad memories. If you want, we can go somewhere else—"
"No, no," he protested in that adult way he had of speaking now and then. "It doesn't matter. Really. I do want to tell you about Mr. Cursitor, and we simply can't afford to lose any more time."
"That's exactly the way I feel. You begin someplace and I'll listen. From the beginning now—make like I'm really an alien and don't know anything. I just walked into this and you have to explain it all to me. Don't worry about our being interrupted. I'm on the alert."
He grinned at that, hugging the cannon. A little boy's grin for all of his going-on-sixteen declaration of age.
"Righto, sir. It's wizard, you know. You'll find it very difficult to believe. Out of whole cloth, you might say."
"Might, but I won't. Spin away, Torin."
And then Torin Bird told me a story.
Wizard? It was downright unbelievable.
The topmost, utmost, furthest, highest, most towering tale of them all. A Tall Story, London style, with C. B. De Mille extravagance. But he told it to me sincerely, forthrightly. Without a single fib or lie shining out of his cobalt blue eyes. He was an honest kid. He didn't know how to lie. Though he knew just about everything else.
The story-told-from-atop-a-cannon in the heart of the Tower of London was one of those rare, once-in-anyman's-lifetime sort of miracles. How could I buck it or deny it or refuse to accept it? There was absolutely nothing to go on but the word of Torin Bird.
A unique young man. The most remarkable I had ever known.
With a story the equal of all he was. If both were on the level.
And when he had finished—he talked in a low voice for about a half an hour, still lying on the cannon barrel, heedless of the tourists strolling by, keeping his eyes on my face to see if I believed him—I knew why Desmond Allan Cursitor, the missing scientist, had gone to London all of a sudden. I knew why he had just as suddenly disappeared. I also knew why the President had wanted him back so badly. It wasn't exactly Cursitor himself, though he was important; it wasn't Defection or Treason or Foul Play, really. It was Torin Bird. The young kid with me who looked years younger was the joker in the deck. The genuine kicker. What he was and what he had was the whole Operation in a nutshell. Putting it plainly, the kid was one-in-a-million and priceless, really priceless, to the country that was lucky enough and smart enough to claim his allegiance. Own his soul.
I had burned a couple of Camels down when Torin Bird finally wound up his tall tale and stared at me for a long, important second. I could see that whether or not I believed him, our whole future relationship was going to depend on what I said now.
"Wow," I managed in a soft voice. "And you can really do that? Scout's honor, son?"
He was obviously familiar with the Boy Scout's oath because he smiled warmly and looked incredibly unabashed and non-conceited.
Just about matter-of-fact and ho-hum, what's new?
"Scout's honor, sir. It's no great accomplishment, really. As I told you, I have been trained since the death of my parents. You could obtain nearly the same results with a monkey, I'll wager. Or a parrot. It's all a trick, you know."
"What do you mean—trick?"
"Don't you see," he explained very seriously and sincerely. "I have simply become accustomed to be able to do it. That's all. It's no more than a habit to me now, actually. Once you get accustomed to a thing like that, it's rather second nature, isn't it?"
"Rather—maybe—I don't know." He'd given me too much to think about in too short a time. I couldn't think straight. "Where's Cursitor, Torin?" I watched his face very closely, looking for sham.
His sigh was unhappy. "They've got him. That awful Mr. Morrow. And Sebastian. Sebastian is his man, you see. I don't know how they knew I was to meet you in the park. Unless they were able to make Mr. Cursitor tell them. Oh, I just don't know. What a terrible business all this is, Mr. Noon! I mean, isn't it? Adults all adither wrestling about, killing and torturing, just to get their hands on me. A boy. A boy who was taught to do something they think is highly desirable. All it does for me is make me feel a bit queer. Rather like a freak."
"No, Torin. Genuis is far more like it. You've got a great fight. No matter how it was given to you. You're worth your weight in IBM machines. Can you take me to where they are holding Cursitor?"
His blue eyes were suddenly afraid. Almost wary.
"I—think so. I couldn't go to the Yard or the Home Office. I just couldn't. I had to lie low. According to the instructions from your Government. It's been beastly, sir. I've felt like an animal. Holed up. Always on the dodge. Fortunately, I had enough funds to see myself through. But I do feel ever so bad about Mr. Cursitor. I owe him so much, you see. If it wasn't for him—"
"Yeah," I agreed a little sourly. "If it wasn't for him, my President wouldn't have asked him to come out of retirement to come here to pick you up. And if it wasn't for him, we both might have really had a chance to see this place. Crown Jewels, Black Tower, and all. As it is—we've got to go. You'll take me to where they're holding him?"
"Of course. Lord, but I hope we're not too late. They've held him ever so long, and it's been a nightmare to me. Wondering how he is and if he's still alive or not. But he must be! He's very strong and very brave, Mr. Cursitor is—"
I was thinking of Superintendent Gridley and Detective Allister, who'd known all the important names, who obviously weren't that much in the dark, and it was somehow incredible. A Scotland Yard, a Home Office, maybe twenty thousand cops all over London Town, and a very famous, very important man couldn't seem to be located. And a very amazing boy-child was able to run loose all over the four police districts and one hundred local stations and still be walking around free. Something was rotten in London. I didn't know what that was yet. Mr. Malvolio Morrow and Mr. Sebastian—two very bad 'uns, also unique and probably internationally infamous—had been able to kidnap Desmond Allan Cursitor out of a big, well-known hotel, ferry him to some hideout, and, again, all as easy as pumpkin pie. My nostrils and my native skepticism were wrinkling in disgust. None of it made any sense. Particularly if Torin Bird was all he had said he was, specifically if the President had not leveled with me about Cursi-tor's employment.
And the mysterious Troy O'Connell.
Who was he, and who was he working for?
Maybe the same people, maybe not.
I lifted Torin Bird down from the cannon barrel. He was lighter than a bag of chicken feathers. Not even nine stone, by the feel of him. He straightened out his orange sweater and hitched up his worn blue dungarees. He looked more juvenile than ever.
"Why did you phone me at the hotel, Torin?"
He stared up at me, his face slightly puzzled.
"Don't you know, sir? When contact was made with your government and Mr. Cursitor cabled me to wait for him here, there were two other names given me as references. Just in case, you understand. Your name was one—and of course, I'd read about your exploits. You're quite famous in London, sir. All those exciting cases. The headline stories. And well—that was it. Thought you understood that."
I ignored the assault on my own interior peace of mind. Talk about bolts from the blue. "What was the other name, Torin?"
"A darb, sir." He grinned in spite of his uneasiness about all the trouble he was in. "J. Edgar Hoover."
"Well, I'll b
e damned," I said. "You're putting me on."
"No, sir. Scout's Honor. That was the other name in the cable."
Again, it was too much. I took him by the shoulder and steered him toward the sloping stone walk that led down to the Roman Wall and a way out of the Tower proper. My mind was seething with ideas, none of which made sense. All on a grey, sunless London day, too.
"Cursitor, Torin. And right now. This is beginning to get me."
"Sir?"
"Skip it. Where do we have to go?"
"Stoke-Newington. A boarding house. Bit of a ride by bus, Mr. Noon. Perhaps an hour—"
"We'll cab it. I'm loaded with expense money. My treat."
"Thank you, sir."
"Don't mention it, Torin."
We left the Tower of London. Torin Bird skipped along at my side, reaching no higher than my shoulder. Seeing him like that, it was simply impossible to believe that he had something that the Red Chinese wanted, that the Russians wanted, that Castro wanted, that everybody involved in World Wars and cold peaces wanted.
Including my own country, the United States of America.
God, what a world this one is! We had all hit rock bottom.
Fifteen-year-old kids, going on sixteen, holding the lock and key to international security, global peace, and space program oneupmanship. It wasn't right, it just wasn't right.
Nothing would make it right. No amount of rationalization or ends-justifies-the-means pragmatics. Or else we were all back to Hitler.
A kid is a kid is a kid. Wasn't anything sacred?
I had my answer long before I flagged down another London taxi under the grey overcast of the leaden sky. Nothing is sacred when the countries of the world begin to play the game of hemispheres.
The game of I Win, You Lose. I Take, You Give—or else.
The charade of Instant Destruction.
Torin Bird was a walking gold mine.
To the nation that could keep him and hold him.
And use him.
"Mr. Noon—I say, sir. Are you all right? You've got the most peculiar look on your face——"
"Do I, Torin?"
"Yes—you look as if you were most awfully angry about something—you're not angry at me, are you, sir?"
I shook my head, grimly, wanting to shut my eyes, sit back on the leather seat of the cab, go to sleep, and wake up with all of it over and far away in the dead past. Like a very bad dream.
"It's nothing, kid," I said in my very best Cagney voice, "nothing." I was a Yankee Doodle, all right, right down the line, but in that moment of doubt, I was very far from Dandy.
And I didn't want my regards given to Old Broadway, and I didn't want to be remembered to Herald Square.
I wanted to tell all the gang at Forty-second Street that I was never coming back. I wasn't yearning to mingle with the old-time throng, either. My mood was Grade Z lousy.
I could smell a bad fish all the way to the White House.
And it wasn't kipper, either, London notwithstanding. No way!
It was a herring.
A red herring.
The reddest herring of them all.
And I had the distinct feeling that it had been sold to me by the President of the United States of America.
My Man, right or wrong.
It says here.
THE BLOKE IN STOKE-NEWINGTON
□ It was like visiting one of the poorer sections of the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens. I'd expected Tudor homes, spires of old churches, English gardens, and cozy tea shops. I got a jolt and a let-down. Stoke-Newington, give or take a tree or a copse of bushes and some ivy, was a narrow, twisting area of stone buildings looking like apartment houses, grocery stores, bars, and candy shops all utterly drab and time-worn. The bars didn't look like pubs, the candy stores weren't the "sweet shops" they should have been, the grocer's was the typical American plate-glass window with overcrowded, poorly-arranged shelves. The streets and the building facades were as unwashed, paint-peeling, and grimy as the most poverty-stricken section of Harlem. There was no English countryside town flavor at all. Even our cabdriver seemed as if he were looking down his nose at our destination. I somehow sensed that if you said you came from Stoke-Newington, a native Londoner would immediately catalogue you as a member of the poor working class. It was a very dismal burg, all in all, a good distance past the historical beauty of Old London. A great gap clearly existed between this outer-reaches suburb and the somehow more fresh, modern appearance of the old city. Stoke-Newington wasn't even what they like to call "shabby genteel."
It was downright pitiful, by the standards of the Seventies.
Torin Bird told the driver where to stop. That seemed to be the main street of the town. The thoroughfare was a winding, downhill sort of road with hardly enough room for two lanes of traffic, but they managed it all the same. I marveled at a big red bus navigating the choked street and checked the passersby. Housewives with baby carriages—prams, they'd call them—and solitary men stalking along, looking blissful and contented in spite of being doomed to live in such squalor.
"We'd best leave off here," Torin Bird whispered to me in a low tone. "The building is only another square off and I suppose we ought to make our approach as unobtrusively as possible."
"Good thinking. You'll make an 007 yet, Torin."
I paid the driver his new pence rates, adding a forty-pence tip because it had been such a long haul, and he smiled his surprise, not expecting a Stoke-Newington fare to have the price. Grinning very toothily, he drove off, leaving me and Torin on the sidewalk. The sun had pierced the overhead haze it had been battling all day. Bright sunlight flooded the sidewalk. It only made Stoke-Newington look worse.
"Well," I said, "I wouldn't expect to see the Marble Arch around here. This must be a very old town."
"Oh, that it is, sir. They had bombings and all during the war. There's a great deal of old people living here now. Pensioners and the like. You won't find very many Nannies here, Mr. Noon. The younger people aim a lot further than Stoke-Newington."
"Sounds like a perfect spot to hide Cursitor. Lead on, Torin. And please remember. I'm in charge. You do what I say, do what I think is right. Are we agreed on that?"
"Oh, of course, sir. I'm deathly afraid of these men. I simply wouldn't know how to deal with them. The important thing is that we do get Mr. Cursitor away from them, you see. I do hope Sebastian was apprehended by that Bobbie."
"He'd have a hard time explaining away those two guns he had at the Albert Memorial. I think we can rule him out. Then there's only this Malvolio Morrow watching Mr. Cursitor, the way you see it?"
"That's right sir. The building is Number Twelve-Oh-Nine. Three floors. A boarding house, but really there's no one there except Mr. Morrow and Mr. Cursitor. Unless he's brought in reinforcements. I doubt that. Mr. Morrow seemed very keen on working alone."
"I know the type. Let's go, then. Stay close and keep back. If there's to be any fireworks at all, you fall flat on your face and lie low. I'm going to avoid it at all costs, but you can never tell on these capers. Personally, I'm not going to draw another free breath until we get Cursitor, get him out, and I can hear his version of this whole mess."
Torin Bird seemed to shudder, his face contrite and pink.
"You do believe me, sir? What I told you, I mean."
"Yes, Torin, I do. But it's like everything else that's miraculous. I have to hear it again, from someone else, before I can really nail it down in my brain to my own satisfaction. Nothing personal, kid."
We let it go at that and he led the way. Toward Imperial Street.
It wasn't far. As he had said, a block down the line, a turn of the corner, four or five more houses, and then, there it was. Torin Bird halted, pulled me back where a high hedge of evergreen blocked us from view, and pointed. The building was as he had said. A frame bulwark of rotting brown wood, a stone stoop so cracked it looked as if it had been designed that way. There were two windows on each storey, and the door was an
arch of wood with slatted and peeling-paint panels. The house had an air about it, despite the proximity of solid stone structures flanking it on both sides, of being huddled, dark, solemnly quiet, and forlorn. Like one cavity in a mouthful of serviceable teeth. I didn't like the looks of the place. It would be impossible to rush in without being cut down, approach without being seen, and there was just no way of bluffing an entrance that I could see. Number Twelve-Oh-Nine looked deserted. And condemned.
A car horn blasted on the thoroughfare far behind us. There was a smell of dry rot and decaying leaves close by. I thought for a second. At my side, Torin Bird impatiently shifted his weight. The kid was nervous, and I couldn't blame him. Sebastian had been a ghoul, and Mr. Morrow must have been a lulu too. Which remeinded me to be a detective again.
"What does Malvolio Morrow look like?"
"Oh, he's short, sir. Much shorter than yourself. Smooth, too. Like a baby. Pink—but he's got the most wizard eyebrows. You'd think he'd had them painted on. They're so black and large—"
"Like Groucho Marx, huh?" Badger had the eyebrows but the rest was off.
"Yes—yes—that's it—why didn't I think of that?—but he's really quite cat-like, Sir. Feline, if you know what I mean."
"Him I'll have no trouble spotting. What's the back of the building like, Torin?" It wasn't possible to get a clear idea from the front
"No way of approaching by that route, I'm afraid. The building ends off and there's no more property, you see. The buildings on the other side simply are all aclutter, and there's just a small backyard all aheap with garbage and old refuse. Really quite run-down, sir."
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