The Night People

by Edward D. Hoch

  “Well,” Win admitted, “you’ve convinced me it’s true, anyway.”

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  “I didn’t say that. Let me have your star, and I’ll see what can be done. It won’t cost you a cent, in any event. Just sort of a gift from me to old Uncle Sam.”

  “The government will find a way of repaying you.”

  “You said on the phone my life was in danger.”

  “Well it might be. The other side has men here, too. They may have discovered I am a so-called ‘black’ agent.”

  “Black?”

  “As contrasted with ‘white,’ the office workers back in Washington, who admit to their employment. But I’m talking too much, Mr. Chambers. In my line talkative persons don’t last too long. Good luck and be careful. If you see anyone following you or suspect you’re being watched, call me at once. Otherwise, I will expect you—when?”

  “I’ll be seeing her tomorrow. It depends on how difficult it is.”

  “Very well. I’ll be here tomorrow after eight. Just in case your luck runs good.”

  They shook hands and Win Chambers went downstairs quickly to the street, feeling for all the world like a lover slipping away by darkness after some midnight assignation. Tomorrow, he knew, would be an interesting day….

  Win breakfasted early with Martha, and listened with half an ear as she read over the crowded schedule for the second day of the Festival. This was the Russians’ day, and there would be a dinner following the screening in the afternoon. Though the picture was shown again in the evening for the general public, at Feru the judges, officials, and studio representatives always attended the afternoon performance.

  “You’ve got something on your mind, Win,” Martha commented as they were finishing coffee.

  “Not really. Just the excitement of it all.”

  “Hear any more from that Falconi?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I thought he might have brought you more news about Betty Ainsley’s marriage.”

  “That sounds like a bit of jealousy to me.”

  “Not at all! I just worry when you’re so quiet.”

  “I’m conserving my energy for this afternoon.”

  Someone slapped him on the back and boomed out a greeting. He turned to see Ed Baine and a press agent named Wren just coming in for breakfast. “How’s it goin’, boy?” Baine asked him. “Miss Hollywood yet?”

  “Haven’t missed it in five years.”

  Baine and Wren sat down uninvited and ordered toast and coffee from the English-speaking waitress. “You should come back. Tell him he should come back, Miss Myers.”

  Martha stayed pleasingly silent, with her best Anglo-American smile frozen to her lips. Baine was being his most American this morning, and even the press agent was looking distasteful. He cleared his throat and shifted subjects. “Where are your stars, Mr. Chambers? I expected you’d do big things with that pic of yours.”

  “Martha, this is Sam Wren, in case you didn’t meet him yesterday. New York press agent type.”

  “Thanks for nothing!” Wren ate a piece of toast.

  “To answer your question, my girl is shooting a film back in Paris. Couldn’t get away. And Georges broke his leg skiing. The life of a producer, I guess. Tell him how it is, Baine.”

  Ed Baine nodded. “He knows how it is. Goin’ to the Reds’ party tonight?”

  “Why not?”

  “I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it, at something like this. I passed up one at Cannes a couple years back and the State Department was on my neck.” He downed his coffee without a pause. “Come on, we’ll give you a ride over.”

  The afternoon’s activities went about as planned. The Russian film, a sombre affair about a collective farm worker dreaming of the horrors of a Third World War, was more propagandistic and thus less successful than a number of fine Soviet films Win had seen the previous year. He was certain at this point that the judges favoured the previous day’s Italian entry.

  At the dinner which followed, Win found it easy to place himself next to Tonia Dudorov. She wore the Lenin Award proudly on her bosom, and talked gaily of the old days before the war as if she were a woman of middle age. “Are you going to the British affair later?” she asked Win as the dinner neared its end.

  “What’s that? I lost my schedule.”

  “I thought your secretary kept you up on such things. They are showing a two-reel short subject out of competition, and this will be followed by cocktails. Will you be my date, Win?”

  “If you don’t mind being seen with a thirty-six-year-old man.”

  “In Moscow I am sometimes seen with men twice your age. Politics, you know.”

  Her invitation simplified the rest of Win’s plan. He knew she couldn’t be seen at two gatherings in the same dress, and as he expected she invited him up to her hotel room while she changed. When she stepped into the bathroom for a moment, he opened the bedroom door, walked quickly to the bed, and removed the small red star from her dress. The duplicate went on quickly in its place. It was so easy he couldn’t quite believe the thing had been done. All of Falconi’s talking and planning had gone towards this—five seconds in Tonia’s hotel room. Somehow he didn’t yet feel like a spy.

  Later, after the screening of the British short subject. Win found an opportunity to slip away from Tonia’s watchful eyes. While she chatted with Baine and some of the other Americans, he asked Martha to cover for him and went out into the darkened garden. A grilled gate in the wall led from there to a quiet side street, which he knew was only a few blocks from Falconi’s apartment. He could be there and back in twenty minutes, not much longer than a slow trip to the men’s room.

  He walked quickly, feeling the warm breeze from the sea on his face, feeling too the hardness of the Lenin Arts Award in his pocket. For a reason he couldn’t quite explain, he kept it clutched in his hand during the brief journey, as if its physical presence there in his pants pocket were the only reality about this whole mad day. He hadn’t yet attempted to work into his mind an exact explanation of the motives that had compelled him to agree to Falconi’s urging. It was not, he felt sure, any deep loyalty to the country he’d left behind five years ago. Nor was it any sense of guilt that needed rectification. Rather it was, if anything, only a sort of liking for Falconi, an odd man making his way through a too-dark world. This, and a middle-aged urge to do something the least bit out of the ordinary.

  So he climbed the dim steps to John Falconi’s apartment, still clutching the priceless lump of metal alloy in his pocket. Perhaps this visit would save a million lives—or take them—at some distant point in time that none of them could see. Or perhaps the mysterious alloy would end up only as a footnote to a lengthy report gathering dust in some Pentagon file.

  Win knocked at the door and waited. When no answer came, an instinct born of a thousand movies and a hundred half-remembered dreams drove him to turn the knob and push open the unlocked door. He saw John Falconi at once. The grey man was slumped in his chair behind the little desk, and he seemed somehow especially small among his books and the neatness of his life.

  Win knew at once that he was dead, that the game was now for real, that the enemy lurked just beyond any shadow. John Falconi had been a spy who talked too much….

  He’d been shot through the right temple, and apparently he’d died peacefully, not expecting the final blow of bullet against flesh. Everything was as neat as Win remembered it; there’d been no attempt to fake a robbery or a crime of passion. The local police could puzzle it out if they wanted, while in the meantime the killer stepped quietly aboard a plane or train to carry him across a boundary or an ocean.

  All right, John Falconi. All right.

  Win’s inexperienced eyes scanned quickly over the desk and bookshelves, searching for something, anything, out of place. But the ashtrays were clean, and he knew there’d be no fingerprints. The killer might have been a man from Mars appearing in this room just long enough to
pull or squeeze the trigger of a gun. A silenced gun, of course, because no one had been attracted by a shot.

  Something.

  One of the books, The Red Badge of Courage, seemed not quite right to his eye. He pulled it out of its accustomed space on the shelf, aware now that the thing which had bothered him was the title stamped in gold on the book’s spine. It now ran from bottom to top instead of from top to bottom. Someone had returned the volume to the shelf upside-down. He remembered examining this particular book yesterday, and he knew it had been neatly correct then. He knew he had not reversed it. Then who? Hardly the carefully exact Falconi. But very possibly the only other person known to have been there—the killer.

  He flipped through the pages of the book, half expecting some coded letter or message in invisible ink to fall to the floor. But there was nothing to catch his eye, nothing that spelled out s-p-y to the untrained observer. He returned the book to its proper space, right side up.

  He next debated for several seconds on the advisability of calling the police and decided against it. The thing to do was to wipe off any of his fingerprints and return to the party. Perhaps he would not be missed, and if he was—if the police connected him somehow with the crime—well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. As for the tiny bit of alloy in his pocket, he could only hope to make contact with Falconi’s superior and pass it along to him.

  The streets were deserted going back, and he saw only a few wandering romantics at a distance. A youth in the uniform of the French navy sent Win’s thoughts off on another tangent. Was there still a French navy these days, when all you ever heard about were the paratroops? France itself was now little more than a pawn, placed conveniently between Russia and America, a stamping ground for spies to meet and exchange their wares. The world was contracting somehow, catching little people and second-rate nations in its squeeze, and who was to say that the contraction was not the beginning of a final death throe?

  Back at the party, he saw at once that Tonia had missed him. She found a path through the chattering groups, conversing over their drinks in a dozen languages, and headed for him. He searched the room for Martha, but she wasn’t in sight. “Win, where have you been?”

  “Just out for some air, Tonia.”

  “You want a cocktail?”

  “These English! It’s too late in the evening for cocktails, but I’ll have some Scotch.” They worked their way to the elaborate makeshift bar and ordered two drinks. The bored bartenders might almost have been imported for the occasion. Certainly they were strangers to the usual nightlife of Feru.

  “Win?”

  “What?” He was having difficulty focusing his thoughts. The memories of Falconi’s corpse were too near the surface of his mind.

  “Win,” she said, speaking softly, close to his ear so he could hear her over the babble of voices. “While you were gone, two of my people came looking for you.”

  “Who?” At first he didn’t understand her words.

  “Two of my people. They want you for something. You may be in danger, Win.”

  He sipped the Scotch casually, giving not a hint of the quickened heartbeat within him. “Why should I be in danger from the Russians?”

  “I don’t know. Win, but I have seen them operate before. One of them, in Paris, broke a man’s arm, while I watched. They are dangerous people.”

  “And they were looking for me?”

  Tonia nodded. “They asked me where you were. They will be back.”

  He felt again the bit of metal in his pocket, the cause of it all. Certainly they wouldn’t harm him, an American, and yet he knew the danger was not entirely imaginary. He remembered that Falconi too had been an American.

  He spotted Martha across the room and excused himself. “Thank you for the information, Tonia. I hate to be a cad, but could your party see you back to the hotel? It might be better if I wasn’t seen with you.”

  “Of course, Win! Be careful. I’ll see you again before I leave.”

  He rescued Martha from the clutches of a drooling Englishman who’d just about decided he could make her, and headed for the door. “Come on,” he said briefly. “I’m in a jam.”

  “What kind?”

  “Remember that guy Falconi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody killed him. And I may be next on the list.”

  “Win! What are you talking about? What have you been drinking?”

  “Not enough, believe me. Look, I have to find someone here in Feru.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know who. A friend of Falconi’s, but I don’t know his name.”

  “Win, you’re talking in riddles.”

  “Did you tell me back in Paris that the hotels were filled up here?”

  “Yes, with people for the festival. Feru isn’t that big a place.”

  “Look, Martha, I want you to get the register of everyone attending the festival—press, judges, producers, everyone. Understand?”

  “No, but I’ll get it.”

  “You’re a doll, Martha. I’ll see you back at the hotel room.”

  “Mine or yours?” she asked with a wicked grin.

  At any other time he would have had an answer for that, but he only smiled and started quickly down the steps to his car. Then, on second thought, he said, “You’d better take the car. I’ll get a taxi back to the hotel.” He knew she’d have to drive across town to the hotel that served as registration office for the festival.

  There was no taxi in sight, and he went back inside to call one. “Monsieur Chambers!” someone called, and he saw one of the French party, a minor government representative, bearing down on him. “Monsieur Chambers, the American, Monsieur Baine just called for you. He is at the theatre and wants you to join him at once.”

  “Oh?” It sounded strange. He tried to remember if he had seen Baine inside. Certainly the American producer would have no reason for summoning him to the deserted theatre in the middle of the night. “Thanks for the message. I’ll see him.”

  The theatre was not far from the hotel where he was staying, and Win decided to skip the cab and walk the distance. He’d seen too many movies of kidnappings in taxicabs. He remembered back seats without doorknobs, gas jets through the floor, and various other refinements. These were no longer the fantasies of his youth. Now they seemed a part of a very real game, a game of life and death.

  The theatre was dark when he reached it, but the side door was unlocked. He knew Baine would not be waiting there. Only death would be waiting, probably in the person of the two Russians that Tonia had mentioned. He turned away from the door, and saw too late that he’d miscalculated one point. They’d been waiting outside the theatre for his arrival.

  Two bulky, broad-shouldered shapes in the night, cutting diagonally across the street to intercept him on his route! There was no escape, unless he went through the theatre door where anything might lurk. No, he’d wait in the street for them, hoping that a passing car or two might save his life.

  “Mister Chambers,” one of them said thickly. There was no mistaking that these were the Russians.

  He broke into a trot, heading towards the hotel. Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw one of the men reach into his coat, but the other put out a restraining hand. They wouldn’t shoot, not while they didn’t have the star.

  But they followed. He reached the hotel lobby panting for breath, seeing them across the street. Then up in the elevator, without a plan, without much of a hope. He had the terrifying thought that they might grab Martha when she arrived, and then what would he do? He felt suddenly so small and helpless, without a friend he could trust, in a foreign city where the shadows grew steadily darker.

  Then he was unlocking his door, falling inside, snapping on the light to confront a tall middle-aged man he’d never seen before. The man rose smiling as he entered, extending his hand. “Didn’t mean to startle you, Mr. Chambers. My name is Tweller. I was a friend of John Falconi….”

  Twel
ler was an Englishman, with a moustache and hair that reminded Win of Sir Anthony Eden. He carried himself like a businessman or even a politician—anything but a secret agent. Win supposed this was what made him good at his profession.

  “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Couple of Russians down in the street.”

  Tweller stepped quickly to the window. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll attend to them. You’ve been playing a dangerous game.”

  “Not of my liking, believe me. Falconi roped me into it with his smooth talking.”

  Tweller smiled. “Yes, he was a one for that. We’ll miss him. Did you accomplish your little mission on our behalf?”

  “Didn’t Falconi tell you? Didn’t you see him today?”

  The Englishman shook his head. “No. I only know you went to see him tonight.”

  Something stirred in Win’s mind, a vague forming of thought. He watched the Englishman strolling aimlessly, nervously, about the room, picking up objects here and there. “I gave him the thing,” Win said, on an impulse. “The Russians must have gotten it back.”

  Tweller turned in the act of opening a book—a guide of some sort that was in all the rooms. “What? The Russians didn’t get it back. You didn’t visit Falconi’s room until after he was dead.”

  Win felt his heart beating fast again. “How could you know that? How could you know when he died?”

  The Englishman blinked. “Give me that star, Chambers, or I’ll have you arrested for treason.”

  “You could know if you were there,” Win said, hurrying on. “You could know I didn’t give Falconi the star if you were there and you killed him. One of the books on his shelf was upside down. The stamping ran from bottom to top, as it does on the spines of English books. An Englishman like you might have been wandering around, looking at Falconi’s books while you talked to him. Holding the closed book in your hand, you might have replaced it upside down so that the title read in the English style. Certainly a neat man like Falconi would never have done it, nor left it long like that if he noticed it. You’re no C.I.A. man, Tweller.”