Terror's Cradle

by Duncan Kyle

  `White.'

  I knew that white' coat.

  `She have bag, and . . .' He mimed pulling on gloves. `Gloves?'

  `Yes. Glove.'

  `When she returned. What then?'

  `The same. A pretty lady.'

  `Very. You remember anything else?'

  `She look . . . mmm-m . . . not happy.'

  `When she went out, or when she came back?'

  `Both times, sir.'

  `Thanks.' I went out through the swing doors again and turned right, the way Alsa had gone, walking until I found the cinema. It was showing two Swedish films and I looked into the lighted foyer for a moment or two, feeling very puzzled. Alsa didn't enjoy the cinema much; I knew that. Theatres, yes, but she had an idiosyncratic dislike of films and TV. I like, she said often, to be entertained by live people, not manipulated images. She hardly ever went to the cinema and certainly wouldn't go alone, not in a strange city. In addition, this place was showing films of no great importance and in a language she didn'

  t speak.

  Everything about it was odd. I tried to think of some reason, any reason, why Alsa might have gone alone to the

  cinema, but nothing suggested itself.

  Finally I took Alsa's photograph out of my wallet and went in. Infuriatingly, the box office was closed. I swore to myself. There'd be a manager, but he wasn't likely to be much use; the girl at the box office would have seen all the people go in and out, would perhaps have remembered a striking redhead in stylish white. The manager would spend only part of his time in the foyer. All the same, I went to find him. He was bald, round-headed, wearing a worn dinner jacket and blinking owlishly. I said, '

  I'm looking for —' `You are English?'

  `Yes.'

  `My English bad. Something .. . ah . . . lost? Lost things we keep.'

  `Not things. A lady.'

  I showed him Alsa's photograph and he frowned. 'Lady is lost? No. I not see.'

  `You're sure?'

  Ì not see.'

  `Thanks anyway.' He was obviously telling the truth; he wasn't used to lost people, just lost property. But something struck me then; cinemas must have a system about lost property: all those gloves and umbrellas and handbags people left behind. I said, 'I understand she may have left something behind.'

  `Ya. It was . . .?'

  `Gloves,' I lied quickly. 'Brown gloves.

  `Come please.'

  We went into his little office, with its rolled posters in. one corner and film cans in another. He opened a cupboard and pulled out a cardboard box. In it lay a lot of gloves, a couple of purses tied round with string, a lighter, a copy of Strindberg. I turned them over, but everything was well-worn, lost-looking, rather forlorn. It had occurred to me that Alsa might have left something in the cinema deliberately, but all this stuff was ordinary, the litter of a passing trade.

  Back at the hotel, there was a note asking me to telephone Marasov at the Hotel Nord. I went up to my room, thought about the telephone bug, and decided to ignore it. If Marasov wanted 'to say anything important, I'd ring off and phone from somewhere else. He didn't. He asked whether there was any news of Alsa, and when I said there wasn't he said he was sorry and hoped there'd be better news soon.

  Ì hope so, too,' I said tersely. 'I'll let you —'

  `My superiors,' Marasov said quickly, 'are anxious to know about the publication of Russian Life.',

  `They what!' Suddenly I saw red. 'Well, you can bloody well tell them it can wait, as far as we're concerned, until —'

  Ì am sorry,' he said quietly. 'We understand, naturally. I was simply instructed to ask you.'

  `Well, you asked!' I slammed the phone down angrily. Sorry to hear she's disappeared, but would you mind getting back to more important matters! The bastards ! They could stuff their piddling magazine. So could Scown, sitting comfortably in his half-acre office, also with his mind on more important matters. Meanwhile, Alsa was God knew where, and anything could be happening to her. Schmid could play his verbal games, with hair-splitting answers and tricky questions, but he wasn't getting anywhere either. Marasov had triggered it, and now the fears, the frustrations and the depression of the last few days boiled together inside me. I was furiously angry, and determined, suddenly, to be put off no longer. There was one place where I felt sure I'd find some clue to what had happened, but I'd even been denied that!

  Well, I'd be denied no longer. I went out of the room, on to the end of the corridor, summoned the lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor. When the gates opened I headed for the fire-exit door to the hotel roof.

  The roof was flat. There was a big water tank and conduits of one kind and another, and a parapet waist high round the four sides. I went to the edge and looked over, but I was on the wrong side. Not for long though. A few

  seconds later I'd found the right spot and was looking down on the concrete balconies of the floor below, calculating which belonged to Alsa's room. It would be the fifth one along. Fine. One, two, three, four, five. The drop was about twelve feet, but so be it; it was a direct drop, the balcony would stop me from falling out into space and I was in no mood to be put off, especially since by hanging by my hands, I could cut down the distance by more than half.

  As I climbed over the parapet, though, my resolution was evaporating. It might be only a short drop to the balcony but it was a hell of a long one to the street below; not just long, fatal if I missed.

  You'll just have to be bloody careful, I told myself savagely. Careful about the drop and careful, too, that I should' not be seen from the street below by some public-spirited Swede who'd howl police. Clinging to the parapet, I lowered one foot into space and reached down with my right hand for the edge of the roof. This was the moment, and I hesitated. Once my left hand left the security of the parapet, I would be committed, unable to climb back, because my other foot would be levered out into space; I forced myself to relax my fingers, and held on desperately as my whole weight swung downward, jerking brutally at my grip. Now there was no changing my mind. I could only go down. I turned my head to squint awkwardly down at the balcony, to be sure I was correctly positioned, then let go.

  I landed where I intended to land, smack in the centre of the narrow balcony, but I fell awkwardly, jarring my knees, hips and right wrist and for a moment or two the pain convinced me I had broken bones all over the place. I lay still for a while, then the pain began to ease and I pulled myself shakily to my feet. The sound I'd made seemed to have attracted no attention; surprisingly, because it had seemed very loud to me. When the pain began to recede, I started to examine the double doors that led from the balcony into the room. Inevitably they were locked,

  which meant I'd have to do damage to get in, which meant in turn that it would be known the room had been entered. Even Schmid, I thought, wouldn't have much difficulty in guessing who was responsible.

  But I wasn't going to let that stop me. It wasn't difficult to tell which of the two doors were bolted and which held by the tenon of the lock. I looked cautiously round in case anyone might be out on one of the other balconies; at that time of night it was unlikely, but I checked. Then I looked down at the street. I watched for a minute or so and no-one seemed to look up at the hotel.

  Right, then. I leaned back against the balcony rail, gripping it tightly, and smashed my heel as hard as I could at the point on the door frame where the lock was housed. There was a splintering sound, frighteningly loud in the stillness, and I ducked down quickly in case it attracted attention. A couple of minutes later, certain that it hadn't, I smashed my heel at the door again. This time it gave and I slipped inside quickly, pushing the door closed behind me.

  The pale moon gave precious little light; certainly not enough to read by, and the pile of paper I could make out on the little corner desk fitment would need examining with care. I stood for a moment weighing the alternatives : should I take it all and leave, or risk switching on the light? Removing evidence would be a felony, no doubt about th
at, but then it was a crime to be in the room at all. What decided me was the realization of the futility of taking the

  i

  stuff away. Schmid might need it to find Alsa. I had no doubt he was searching genuinely enough, but I was beginning to doubt his capacity, or mine, or anybody else's, to find her. Still, Schmid might find her, and to do so he might need the papers. All right, then, I'd have to examine them here.

  The curtains weren't thick. Light would show through them. I stripped the heavy candlewick bedspread and draped it from the curtain rail, then switched on the bedside light and looked around. Alsa's handbag lay on a chair, presumably exactly where she'd left it. I opened it and looked at

  the contents. There were the usual impedimenta : lipstick, powder, nail file and scissors in a little case, a couple of Russian picture postcards that she hadn't used; a couple of ball point pens and a magnifying glass with a little stand for transparency viewing. It was no help. Suitcase, wardrobe and chest of drawers held only clothes. I crossed the room and started looking at the papers.

  There were a few layouts, but just roughs with pictures and type areas blocked in. They told me nothing. Then I started on the typewritten material : about a hundred articles of one kind and another, about a whole spectrum of Russian activities. Each had a note attached saying which Russian magazine it had appeared in and when. I began reading them, but to go through the lot would take all night and I hadn't got all night. So I flicked the pages of each one and got nowhere. Only a few pages showed anything apart from plain typescript, but there were one or two on which Alsa had begun to work; she'd made sub-editorial corrections and marked the type in which she wanted the text to be set. I looked at the familiar markings : twelve-point Medium Gothic lettering here, ten-point Metrolite capitals there, eight-point Times Roman for the bulk of the setting. It was all normal and ordinary; familiar, rabid marks, many indecipherable to the lay eve, but passing effective instructions from sub-editor to typesetter. My eyes ran over the markings absorbing and dismissing them quickly. There were marginal query marks here and there, too; SEE OD, which means she intended to check a spelling in the Oxford Dictionary; SEE Britannica, and so on. I stopped suddenly at one of them. See myopic. Myopic? What the hell was myopic? Hardly a standard reference book, anyway. I made a mental note to try to find out and continued my examination of the articles with a new urgency. A minute before, I'd seriously been doubting whether there was anything at all in the papers. Now instinct told me that there was more.

  I found the second oddity on a torn page of one of the articles that had been partly subedited. Paragraph one was Metrolite, twelve-point; paragraph two was ten-point Times. Paragraph three eight-point Times? But it wasn't. The type marking was one I'd never seen before. It said, ten-point Aggie Waggie, but the I opt had been struck through, invalidating the type instructions. I stared at it. Aggie Waggie? There are literally thousands of type faces, and in a long career I'd come across many of them, some with very weird names indeed, but I'd never heard of Aggie Waggie. Some novel Swedish face, perhaps? But worth checking.

  Ten minutes later, I found a third thing : a pencil note on top of one article said, 'No contacts. Check.' Contacts are contact photographic prints, made with the negative in direct contact with the photographic paper, and Alsa had none, either here in the room, or at the printers. I puzzled about it for a while, but could make no sense of it at all, partly because I had, by that time, been in the room about forty minutes and was getting jumpy. I'd have to leave soon. The sooner the better, in fact. With luck it would be next day before Schmid discovered I'd been in there and in the meantime I could try to work out what the three strange references meant.

  I rose and softly switched off the light, then tiptoed to the door. There was no possibility of leaving the room by any other route. Dropping down from the roof had been difficult enough; getting up again would be impossible. I waited until my eyes adjusted a bit to the. darkness and noticed that the bedspread I'd draped over the window had slipped at one corner. A triangle of light would have been showing, damn it! If anybody had noticed that . . .1

  I swallowed. There could now be somebody in the corridor outside, waiting for me, yet it was impossible to know until I opened the door. I'd just have to take the chance. With my hand on the doorknob, I thought of a tiny bit of insurance, went back and carried the little upright chair from the desk to the door and balanced it on its back legs so that the chair back would move beneath the handle as the door opened. Holding it steady with one hand, I turned the handle gently with the other. When the handle was fully turned, I began to ease the door slowly open, leaning to peer

  round it. With the crack an inch wide the corridor seemed empty. Another inch revealed nothing. I moved it a little more, until the door touched my fingers where they supported the chair. All well so far. It looked all right.

  But it wasn't all right. Suddenly there was a hand holding a gun, pointing at me from behind the angle of the door frame. Then Elliot's voice said, 'Hold it, Sellers. Hold it right there!'

  CHAPTER NINE

  `Step back and open the door,' he said. 'Don't put on any lights.'

  Àll right. 'As I took a step backward, I remembered my right hand was still holding the chair. I disengaged it successfully and took another step and the gun followed me round the door. As Elliot's head came after it, I whipped the chair upward hard, hitting the gun hand from underneath, and simultaneously smashed my foot against the door. The gun spun upward and fell with a thud on the carpet; the door cracked hard against the side of his head.

  With my foot jammed against the door to stop it opening, I flipped on the light and reached for the gun, then snapped the light off again. I'd never fired a hand gun in my life, but I felt a lot safer holding it, if only because Elliot was unlikely to have another. I moved the chair out of the way, reached for the handle, opened the door quickly, and stepped back. Then, I hurled myself out of the room into the corridor. It was empty. Elliot had gone, or if he hadn't gone, at least he wasn't anywhere I could see him. He could be waiting anywhere though, behind a door somewhere, in the lift, in my room. Or he might not be waiting at all, might have disappeared once he'd lost his advantage.

  I decided I'd get out of the hotel, if I could, and then

  stay out. Perhaps find myself another hotel; certainly get away from the immediate area. But first I had to get out. Available alternatives were the lift and the fire escape. If Elliot watched one, presumably he couldn't watch the other. Unless he had help. In any case, I had the gun, though I couldn't quite see myself using it.

  I chose the lift. It came up empty and I punched the Garage button, keeping a careful finger on the Doors Closed button as the lift descended. I stepped out into the sharplyshadowed light of the garage with the gun held inside my jacket, and looked round. The place was deserted and a concrete ramp, two cars wide, led upward to the street. I went up the side of it close to the steel guard rail and examined the street outside. There were a few people in sight still, but no obvious sign of Elliot, though he could easily be standing quietly in any of a hundred doorways.

  I came out sprinting, racing for the first cover, my bruised knee and hip joints protesting. As I ran, I rounded every corner I came to, every time I came to one. After two hundred yards I'd put three corners between myself and the Scanda Hotel and was standing in a doorway myself, trying hard to breathe without gasping noisily. I waited five seemingly endless minutes, then decided to take a chance, and walked quickly towards a brightly lighted thoroughfare fifty yards away. There I was lucky. A taxi was cruising towards me as I emerged in the street and I flagged it down.

  Somehow or other, amidst all the exertion, an idea had come to me and I wanted to investigate it while I had the chance. While the taxi was heading for the cinema I'd visited, I kept a careful watch, through the rear window to see whether anybody was following. Nobody seemed to be, at any rate not obviously, though among the fairly heavy late-night traffic it could have been done dis
creetly. At the cinema, I paid off the cab and began to walk back towards the hotel.

  It was Alsa's word contacts that interested me. No con-tacts — check. That was what Alsa's note had said, and I'd assumed, naturally in the context of articles and pictures, that it meant contact prints. But it could refer to something else. Alsa wore contact lenses. They hadn't been in her handbag, where she would normally keep them. Nor were her ordinary glasses, the heavy ones with the black library frames there either. It could mean nothing, of course; just that she'd left them somewhere else in the room and I hadn'

  t noticed. Or it could mean something else entirely.

  I remembered the little case in which she kept the contact lenses : a small, plastic tube about two inches long and one in diameter. She'd shown it to me once, a couple of years earlier, when the lenses were new. The case had a lid at each end. The lids were marked L and R for left and right, so the lenses didn't get mixed up, and the tube itself was filled with some protective fluid. There was one further thing about that little plastic case : it had a small transparent window for the owner's name and address in case it got lost. No contacts — check.

  It all fitted. She'd phoned me in America. She knew how I felt about her, knew that if anything happened to her, I'd be there come hell or high water. The note itself would mean nothing to anybody unless that person knew that Alsa wore contact lenses and perhaps not even then, because it was a commonplace thing to find written at the top of an article. I walked slowly along, looking at those buildings whose lights were on. There were a few restaurants still open, a cigarette kiosk, a news stand. Then a chemist's and I , hurried across the road, but the lights were display lights and the place was closed. I swore to myself and moved on.

  The shop, when I found it, wasn't in the main street and I almost walked past. It was tucked away perhaps fifty yards down a side street and it was the glowing pair of spectacles, neatly executed in red neon, that caught my passing glance. And this shop was open! There was a woman at the counter and a back room which must be the dispensary.