by Otto Penzler
“Hullo!” he said, staring quizzically back at us. “Am I as frightening as all that?”
Croydon was from Queensland, Australia. He spoke with a burr that was cousin to a Tipperary brogue. And how the women ate it up when he told them about his rugged days on a stock farm before he took himself off to war. He was now a member of the Secretariat.
“Croydon,” I said, “I’m only one step ahead of the police. They’ll be here in a few minutes. Sir Quiller’s napoo. Dead. His throat’s cut.”
“Good God!” said Croydon, limping briskly to Bernice’s side. “Did he do it himself?”
I thought about the highly polished razor that had come down the escalator with the body. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Bernice, I’ll have to use your phone. I want to get this story in to a rewrite man. This is one scoop I don’t relish.”
“Of course,” murmured Bernice.
I dialed and began to talk. Sir Quiller was this month’s President of the Security Council. He had been handling delicate diplomatic secrets and he would be sorely missed.
As I rattled off what few facts I knew into the phone, I saw Croydon rest his tanned hand over Bernice’s in a comforting fashion. I could have kicked myself for being such a slowpoke about doing that myself. Now he had the edge on me. In spite of her generous body, the hand under his was small and fragile. The kind of hand you want to hold. A little girl’s hand. Her feet and ankles were small too.
The look she gave him in return was pure catnip.
I put down the phone. “Croydon, have you seen anybody around the escalator?”
“There’s nobody on this floor but us,” said Croydon with finality.
“Why was Sir Quiller meeting Senator Banner?”
“He never told me,” said Bernice. “He merely asked me to stay and work late. Shouldn’t we—shouldn’t we go down?”
“You’d better stay put, Bernice,” said Croydon. “A cut throat is a bit nasty. Watch the office. I’ll face it out with Farragut. Come along.”
I followed Croydon and his mechanical leg outside. He closed the door after us.
He caught my arm. “This sounds ugly. We must try to spare Bernice all we can.”
“I’ll go along with that,” I said.
“Lord, she’s a handsome girl. Some people in my country would call her a bonzer peach.”
“They’d call her a peach anywhere,” I said grudgingly.
“Do you think I stand half a chance?” he asked.
He wasn’t really asking me. He was asking himself.
Downstairs again. The first of the police had arrived. I stayed long enough with them to corroborate Surendranath Das’s story. Then I heard him say: “If you want me further, I’ll be at India House.”
I walked out of the Secretariat lobby with him.
Outside it was a cold, raw April night, thick with fog. Ceiling zero. It could explain why Senator Banner had not shown up if he was taking a plane in from Washington.
Das melted away toward his parked car.
Mournful foghorns croaked on the East River. I buttoned up my putty-colored Aquascutum against the mist and walked north on First to catch the bus at 49th Street that would take me crosstown to Park Avenue and the Waldorf.
The Waldorf lobby was all old rose carpet and tall alabaster marble columns and dignified hush. I could have used some of this kind of luxury. Thick rugs and thick wallets and thick bodies. I walked to the elevator bank. I didn’t have to ask where the Selwyns were staying. They had a permanent suite in the Tower.
I rode up to the 33rd floor, went to a door, and bumped a brass knocker.
Moira Selwyn opened the door as if on cue and for a long moment we looked at each other. Her shoulders were set stiffly.
After that tense moment there was a slight thaw. Her smile was as dangerous as thin ice. “Come in,” she said in clipped British. “I was expecting you.”
I almost dropped my hat. “Me?”
“You—or someone like you.”
I was in and she shut the door softly.
“It’s about—” I began.
“Something dreadful’s happened to my husband. You wouldn’t have any other reason to come to me.” There was practically no change in her placid expression. “How did I know? Call it intuition. Or premonition. Anything you like. I’m strongly psychic.”
“I never believed in it.”
“You don’t know enough about women. But that’s to be expected. You’re an American. Metaxa?”
“Who?” I said with a start.
While she was speaking she had lit a cigaret. One of those foreign brands. The brittle smile continued, as if she were mocking me. “Greek grape brandy.”
I watched her walk across the room to a cut-glass decanter. She was wearing an ashes-of-roses cocktail suit over a foundation that was a corsetiere’s sonnet. Moira was lithe anyway. Her face had those sharp, taut lines that must have made her look boyish in her teens. Her hair was blue-black and cut crisply short like a poodle’s and in one pink earlobe was only one blue chip of an earring. I watched her long legs move provocatively underneath the sheath skirt. And I was incensed at her remark that I didn’t know enough about women.
In her lurked potentialities neither banal nor restrained. Yet, while sexually she had whet many a man’s appetite, I had never heard of any having an affair with her.
She was in her proper setting. On the floor was an all-over carpet of midnight blue and there were chairs with seats of lustrous black satin.
She returned with the decanter and two glasses. The cigaret glowed in her plum-red mouth. Her black and brilliant eyes were half closed in the drifting smoke. At a low, lacquer-black cocktail table she bent over and poured two drinks—sweet, heavy, and dark.
Her moist lips moved slightly around the cigaret as she handed me the Greek brandy. “As a race, you’re all so very practical, though when it comes to us—and I mean women—you just don’t know beans. An American, my dear, gives more attention to his motorcar than he does to his wife. Reading a newspaper, he’ll stop to ogle a man in a baseball suit before he’ll turn to a picture of a girl showing her legs.”
Sipping her brandy, she walked to a settee in dusky violet, with orange-tan pillows, and sat down with the fluid grace of a mannequin. Every movement she made was deliberately for effect. She attended to the gratification of her senses as carefully as somebody else would cultivate a rose garden.
“What is it you see in baseball?” She crossed her legs. They were long and slim, a golden honey color in seamless nylons. A thin silver love chain winked roguishly on one slender ankle. Her perfect teeth showed and her ripe-red tongue darted. “Nine young morons running around a pasture on a bloody hot afternoon.”
I wanted to make a sneering reply that some of them weren’t so young—but she had two strikes on her already. I took brandy to cover my silence. It had a slight resin flavor.
She carefully tapped ash from her cigaret into a bronze tray. “In most European countries a boy is under the bridge with a girl when he’s fifteen. In this country he’s still playing baseball at twenty-one.” She looked me over from my Heidelburg haircut to the toes of my oxfords as if trying to commit me to memory. “I haven’t anything personal against you. What do you think of all this?… Stop standing there mum, dear boy, and say something.”
I said: “I think you’re an extraordinary woman.”
“Now you’re beginning to show some perception.”
“But if this baseball talk got out, you’d be rated as the most unsympathetic woman in America … I’m sorry.”
The smoke of her cigaret was clinging wraithlike to her attractive angular face and to her dark poodle hair. “Why?”
“Your husband is dead.”
Poised, she sniffed brandy. “I told you I was expecting dire news.”
“The details are a little grim,” I warned.
“Then don’t go into them. It’ll be gruesome enough when the police come tramping in. Is this why
you came to me so quickly—to prepare me?”
“I wanted to see you first. Sir Quiller knew many diplomatic secrets. He may have shared some with you.”
She tilted her glass. “You mean my own life may be in danger? You are a dear boy … As his wife, I did share confidences with him. He always thought I was very astute.”
“I’d say so too.” I put down my glass. “I hate to run. But this’ll be a hectic night.”
“Yes,” she said. She didn’t stir. “Shall I see you again?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Good night.”
I nodded at her and walked toward the suite door, feeling her eyes like ice cubes sliding down my back all the way out.
In a booth I phoned long distance to my pipeline in Washington.
“He hopped off in a copter about three hours ago,” was the reply.
I went out to Lexington Avenue and stopped a taxi and told the cabbie to take me to LaGuardia Airport. Hang the expense. It’d all go on my well-padded swindle sheet.
The cab crawled over Queensboro Bridge.
At the airfield everything was grounded. “Bird-walking weather,” said one of the loafing pilots.
I meandered out into the soup, the airport lights fuzzy around me. Finally I heard a whirring sound making erratic movements somewhere up above. An invisible aircraft landed out on a strip. Loud voices swirled in on the fog. Heavy footfalls approached on the concrete.
Senator Brooks U. Banner loomed out of the thick brew, coming in on the beam of his own Pittsburgh stogie. He was big and fat, with a rain-barrel figure. His white campaign hat was crammed down on his square head. An old tarp was thrown over his beefy shoulders like a poncho. I stepped out of the weak glow of the landing lights.
I said: “Let me introduce myself, Senator. I’m Bob Farragut, the AP district man at the UN.”
Banner stopped dead, peering around like a buffalo making up his mind to charge. And Banner was just as shaggy. “Lemme get my bearings, sonny boy. That gyrene that brought me here in a flying windmill flew by the seat of his pants all the way … How in hell’d you know I was coming?”
“Right from the Washington grapevine.”
“Goddammit! I’m supposed to be on a secret mission! Ain’t your stoolies got anything else to do besides tapping my telephones!”
“I’ve got news for you, Senator. Bad news. You’re too late to meet Sir Quiller. He was killed in the Secretariat at nine o’clock.”
“Killed!” He turned so that the murky light fell across his grim jowls for an instant.
“We don’t know how or why.”
“I’ll tell you why in one word.” He peered around at the fog-shapes suspiciously. “Spies!”
Then he didn’t say another word as we plowed in through the rotunda and out to the ramp to a taxi.
“The UN,” said Banner to the driver as he stumbled in. “C’mon, bloodhound!” I followed. We settled back as the cab lurched forward. Banner growled. “So they got old Quill! I thought mebbe he’d make news some day by moving into 10 Downing Street as prime minister. Now it’s just an obit. Haaak. He phoned me only this morning. Hush-hush secrets have been leaking out to the Commies. Secrets from his files. Rotten business. I was gonna meet him tonight, cuz he said he’d hand over the bugger that was doing it … Tell me how he got killed.”
By the time we reached the Secretariat, Banner knew as much about it as I did.
There was a corps of police brass on the scene now. The Secretary General was there, pale but trying not to show his anxiety.
The tarp rustling on his shoulders, Banner lumbered over to the Secretary General, sweeping off his hat to reveal a mop of grizzled hair. They talked quietly for a few minutes. Banner’s ruddy face was even grimmer as he turned back to me.
“No score,” he said. He prowled around the foot of the escalator, went up to the mezzanine, and came down again. “Shenanigans at the UN! You were one of the eyewitnesses, Farragut—prob’ly the only reliable one. Where’s a quiet place we can talk? Hah? The delegates’ lounge!”
I could tell that he was quite familiar with the buildings the way he found the right doors. The Conference Building is a low-lying structure catercorner behind the tall glass headstone of the Secretariat. We went in that direction.
Banner was saying, “The diplomatic game is the toughest in the world. It’s the iron claw in the velvet mitt, all right. You gamble millions of lives at every throw of the dice. And if you ever crap-out, like old Quill did, you’re a dead man.”
By the time we reached the delegates’ lounge we were all by ourselves.
We were in a block-long room with slanted glass paneling at the north end of the Conference Building. The lounge was thickly carpeted and stuffed with fan-backed Danish chairs, as well as tables and leather sofas. The chief feature of the room was the Honduras mahogany bar. Overhanging it was a huge relief map of the world, made of Cuban mahogany overlaid on Canadian ash. The only discouraging aspect was that there was no bartender.
“We call this the chicken yard,” I said, thinking of ruffled feathers.
“Waal,” rumbled Banner, “tonight we’re the only two roosters on the manure pile.” He looked thirstily at the bar, then made up his mind. He wore a shabby frockcoat bulging at the pockets. Grubbing into one of the pockets, he dug out a key. “See if that’ll open the likker cabinet.” He tossed it at me.
Miraculously the key fitted.
I placed my arms akimbo on the bar. “What’ll it be, Senator? There’s Dutch gin, Polish slivovitz, Mexican tequila, Russian vodka.”
He glided a five-dollar-bill across the bar. “Stick that in the till and hand out that dimple bottle of Haig & Haig and we’ll shoot the breeze.”
I did. He took his straight. I had soda with mine.
“Now,” said Banner in the hush of the deserted lounge, “how was it done?”
I’d been doing a lot of thinking about that. “Werewolves,” I said.
Banner smacked his lips. He liked the sound of that word. But he didn’t say anything. He waited for me to continue.
I said: “That hard core of Nazis that were left in Germany after the Second World War. They called themselves Werewolves. They fought dirty. They’d stretch a thin wire across a country road and when one of our jeeps would whiz by, the wire’d lop the GI’s head off.”
“Ho!” said Banner. “You’ve been thinking that old Quill was killed on the escalator by the same gimmick. A thin wire stretched across would ketch him just under the chin as he traveled down.” He frowned. “Waal, sir, I hate to throw cold water on you at the start, but there’re too many counts against it. An escalator moves slow—not fast like one of those jeeps in Germany. A wire might’ve given Quill a bad nick and knocked him over backwards. But you told me he fell forward. What’s more, you scooted up that escalator half a minute later and you didn’t encounter any wires. Wires! Judas priest! You saw the condition of his throat. A deep vicious razorlike slash!”
“But it wasn’t the razor!”
“No. Not that razor. Not the one that was found with him. The coppers told me that there wasn’t a trace of blood or a fingerprint found on it. Why was it there? The killer knew we’d look for a weapon, so as a mocking gesture we were given one.”
“What else do you think, Senator?”
“I think that the killer was actually holding the weapon at the instant of the murder. Yaas. That could be.”
“How so? There was nobody within twenty-five feet of him when he was struck down.”
Banner scowled. “Waal mebbe you got some explanations. Let’s hear ’em!”
I said carefully: “There’s a balcony effect around the escalator on the mezzanine. If somebody were standing on that balcony, we couldn’t see him from below. Croydon and Bernice were both on the mezzanine. Croydon comes from the wilds of Australia. He’d know more than any of us how to handle a boomerang. Suppose he threw some sort of boomerang at Sir Quiller. It’d return—”
“Wrong!” said Banner with a thump on the leather chair-arm. “A boomerang’d return to the thrower only if it missed its target!”
After a painful pause I said: “I’ve wondered about Surendranath Das.”
“I’ve been wondering about him too,” muttered Banner.
“That turban he wears. Do you know that when you unwind one of those turbans they reach six or eight feet?”
Banner howled with glee. “Now you’re reaching!”
I felt angry. He was simply playing with me. “Of course I’m reaching! I’m turning over every possibility to guess what the murder weapon was!”
“Yass?” He was hardly paying attention. “I know what the weapon is. What I wanna know is—where’s it hidden?” His eyes were speculating on the walls.
“You know!”
“It’s still in the building,” he went on, yammering to himself. “Everybody that’s gone out has had a police shakedown. That gal Bernice and Croydon are still here. So it ain’t been spirited out.”
“What’s it look like, Senator?”
“You’ll see—when we find it.”
Sometimes, in spite of his fame as a murder expert, I wondered if he weren’t an old fraud. It could be that he knew no more what it looked like than I did. Yet he was so acute that he’d recognize it for what it was the instant somebody else dug it up.
“Not even a hint?” I coaxed. “Is it some strange instrument?”
“Strange? No sir. It’s a pretty common thing. Though they ain’t as common as they once were.”
“That explains a lot,” I said sarcastically.
He chuckled. “Yass, it does, doesn’t it? It explains, frinstance, that Moira Selwyn, though a logical suspect, could not have done it. She’s the only one of our li’l group who wasn’t here tonight. The guards know who came and went … D’you know,” he said suddenly, “where Bernice Harper comes from?”
I nodded wearily. “She was born and brought up in Brooklyn. Lives on Columbia Heights. Why?”