by Ted Mark
"Maybe we shold split up," I suggested. "You'd be safer among your people."
"My people?" Lagula chuckled. "You think that because my skin and theirs are black that they are my people. Do you always deal in appearances, Mr. Victor?"
"What do you mean?" I was nettled because he seemed to be laughing at my naivete.
"While my sympathies are with them, the black men of Salisbury are not my people," Lagula explained. "We African pigmys are not Negroids as other native Africans are. We are Negrillos, smaller in stature and lighter in color than the average African. The Negrillos originally migrated to Africa from South Asia. But when you speak of 'my people' in that would-be definite way, not even all Negrillos share such a kinship. The two largest pigmy tribes are the Batwas who settled in the great bend of the Congo and the Akkas who live along the banks of the upper Nile. Neither group considers the other 'their people'. And I bear no relationship to either. 'My people' were the Balulwa tribe, a small and select group who lived for centuries in the Rhodesian bush."
"Were?" I fastened on the word. "What happened to them?"
"They are almost extinct by now. Earthquakes destroyed our village and nearly all the inhabitants some twenty years ago. Only two families survived. Mine and one other. Since then the old people have died off. The only ones left are myself – unfortunately an only child – and the offspring of the other family. And the other family had no sons. Only five daughters. Thus it fell to me to see to it that the Balulwa were perpetuated. Since the five girls are all attractive, that wasn't hard to do at first. But their sexual demands grew insatiable and eventually I was forced to flee from them. That's when I came to Salisbury and then went from there to
England for my education. But those five girls of the Bulalwa tribe are still waiting there for my return."
"And will you go back?"
"Eventually. It is my duty. And my pleasure, I admit. But when I go back it will be to die. The five of them will kill me with their lust."
"There are worse ways to go," I told him.
Amen! It came in the form of a sudden burst of tommygun fire, a rat-a-tat demonstration of one of those "worse ways". We'd been cruising up a long avenue and traffic was light when the limousine shot out of a side street and the fusillade was loosed at us. Only our hairpin-triggered reflexes kept Lagula and I from proving the point with our lives. Only by diving for the floorboards of the car did we avoid instant corpsedom.
With Lagula no longer at the wheel, the car spun out of control. It mounted the sidewalk, cut a neat swath across a wide lawn, and kept going to shear down a row of low bushes. Throughout, the other car paralleled our erratic route in the gutter and continued to spray us with bullets.
"Jump!" Lagula yelled as we kept going toward the brick wall of a house. "And run in different directions," he added.
It made sense. If we separated, the gunman would have to split his fire between two moving targets. We'd each have a better chance of getting away that way, too, since the car couldn't follow us both.
As it turned out, fortunately, it couldn't follow either one of us. I dived out and turned a somersault. As I came up, I saw Lagula skidding across the turf on his belly. He sprang up and kept going in a crouching run, bullets kicking up the dirt at his heels, but not catching up with him before he'd gained the shelter of a hedgerow. By the time he vanished behind the hedges, I was sprinting around the side of the house our car had rammed. The killer car was unable to stay with either of us and it roared off in frustration.
I kept running, cutting through backyards and alleys, avoiding the streets. After a half-hour or so of this, I was pretty winded. I slowed and cautiously went down a long driveway leading to another avenue. As I neared the mouth of it, I saw something that made me flatten myself against the garage wall and stare across the street.
A car was just easing into the curb there. I recognized the car. It was the same one which had just been spewing hot lead at me.
It stopped and a man got out of the back. He was carrying – so help me! – a violin case. I didn't have to think back to Jimmy Cagney movies to know this was no Heifetz toting a Stradivarius to Carnegie Hall. It was corny, but there it was. Chicago had shipped a reincarnation of Al Capone to sunny, fun-filled Salisbury.
The man stepped aside and another man emerged from the rear of the car. He too was carrying something, a large package of some sort; I couldn't tell what it was. The first man climbed back inside and the car pulled away. The other, left standing on the sidewalk, turned to watch it go, and I saw his face clearly for the first time.
It was Peter Highman!
My mind was still absorbing this as Highman hefted his package and strolled up the walk to the building entrance opposite which the car had dropped him. It was a small building, and when I approached it myself after he'd gone inside, I saw that it housed a sort of combination museum and art gallery. A group of five or six well- dressed people entered it after Highman, and I fell in close behind him.
I followed them as they moved slowly through a series of cubicles with paintings, sculptures, and other art objects arranged in them. There was no sign of Highman. Off one of the cubicles, I noticed a staircase leading to the second floor of the gallery. I broke away from the group and mounted it.
I found myself in a large lecture hall. It was empty. At the far end was another door like the one leading from the staircase. I crossed over and opened it. Now I was in a narrow hallway. There were two or three doors leading off it, and from the open transom above one of them I heard voices. One of the voices was Highman's.
"Make sure it doesn't get to the airport until the last possible moment," Highman was saying. "But remember that it must be on that midnight plane."
"But where will I keep it until then?" the other voice asked. "It's too big for the safe. And I can't have a thing like this just lying around."
In Salisbury, the doors are old-fashioned – conveniently old-fashioned. They have keyholes – nice, big keyholes. This door outside which I was eavesdropping was no exception. So I made the most of it, squashing my nose against the door as I stooped to peer into the room.
The object they were discussing was on the desk directly opposite the keyhole. I had a perfect view of it. I recognized it immediately, although I'd never seen it before. I would have known it anywhere from Singh Huy-eva's description. It was the gold-encrusted, multi-jeweled phallus which had been hacked off the Nepalese god-idol!
I could appreciate that they had a problem. Four feet of jeweled genitals isn't exactly an easy thing to hide. I mean, they couldn't exactly play "Purloined Letter" with it, or anything like that. And it was too valuable to just shove in a drawer or a closet somewhere.
But Highman had an answer. "There's a lock on the door of that refrigerator down in the basement, isn't there? Well, put it in there. And don't let the key out of your possession."
I jumped away from the door and flattened myself against the wall as they came out. They didn't see me. When they'd passed through the door leading to the lecture auditorium at the end of the hallway, I slipped into the room they'd left.
I thought I'd have a fast look around and see what I could see. I saw nothing. It was a perfectly ordinary office with nothing incriminating around. Its interest had dimmed with the departure of the jeweled phallus in Highman's arms.
I glanced out the window just in time to see Highman leave the building. My face broke into a grin as I saw Vlankov, the Russian agent, step out of a doorway and start to tail Highman down the street. The grin grew wider – if a bit puzzled – as I spotted a third man fall in all too casually behind Vlankov and start to tail him.
I didn't waste any time trying to figure this third man's angle. I figured I'd better get out of the office before Highman's playmate returned. But what should my next move be?
On the spur of the moment, I came up with an answer. I decided to have a try at retrieving that jeweled phallus. If I succeeded, I'd be doing Singh a favor, I'd be bugging S
.M.U.T., and I'd be forcing Highman to come to me – which just might be a step in the direction of finding Dr. Nyet.
I found my way down to the basement without any trouble. The refrigerator unit was right there, in plain sight, a large steel box that looked impregnable. It was fastened with a stout chain and a heavy lock.
What now? I might have been able to blow it with nitro, but – wouldn't you know it? – I'd left my nitro in my other suit or someplace. If I'd had the skill, maybe I could have picked the lock. But, despite my checkered background, that was one knack I hadn't picked up. Well then, there was always muscle.
I found a poker hanging beside the furnace. Made of iron, it was a natural crowbar. It was too thick to work into the lock itself, but I just managed to wedge it between the links of the chain. Teeth gritting, muscles bulging, adrenal glands pumping, I strained with all my might. Finally, something gave. Me.
I stood back and looked at the goddamn chain. All my prying hadn't opened it so much as a centimeter. I cursed and smacked the crowbar against its linky teeth. That would teach it to kick sand in my face! But it only grinned back at me, undented by the blow.
My money-back guarantee from Charles Atlas having run out, I decided there was no point in my continuing to rail against my physical shortcomings. I faced the fact that I wasn't going to be able to bust the chain. And I put my brain to work to find another way of getting at the refrigerated genitalia. The thing to do, I finally decided, was to find the man with the key, wave my gun under his schnozzola, and make him unlock the freezebox. I decided to wait for nightfall when the gallery would presumably be closed and there wouldn't be anybody around to get in my way. So I curled up behind the unlit furnace and dozed the afternoon away.
When I woke up, the small cellar window told me it was night. I went upstairs and found the gallery closed and darkened as I had figured it would be. I guessed the man with the key was probably in his office on the second floor, and so I kept going up the stairs. But I was in for a surprise as I came out the stairway door and into the auditorium.
The lecture hall was filled with people. The man I was seeking wasn't hard to find. He was put on the platform with two other speakers. I stuck my gun back inside my jacket and took a seat in the rear of the hall. Obviously I couldn't deal with him until whatever was going on was over.
It seemed to be some sort of a debate on art. My target was evidently the moderator. The audience was all-white, well-dressed, and definitely upper-crust Rhodesian. The first speaker went to some lengths, citing all sorts of arbitrary classical standards, to prove that primitive art isn't art at all. His point seemed to me to be more politically racist than artistically valid. Summed up, he was trying to prove that only Caucasians were capable of producing real art. The rhetorical convolutions he went through in attempting to place all African and Oriental art beyond the pale were worthy of a Governor Wallace. But the audience was obviously with him. It was the time for rationales from every area of white Rhodesian life to justify the steps being inaugurated by the government to insure that black Rhodesians were kept barred from all those lily-white provinces – the art world included – which the whites had earmarked for their own.
Loud applause greeted the end of this diatribe. Then the moderator introduced the second speaker. Right off the bat it was obvious that he was licked.
First of all, he had a decidedly English university accent which wasn't calculated to please a crowd which so obviously identified with the slurred Rhodesian speech pattern of the previous speaker. Second, his voice was unfortunately high-pitched, an easy target for laughter. And third of all, the audience was in no mood to listen to any point of view, no matter how moderately presented, which might suggest that the native art of the land was a cultural asset to be treasured. Still, they didn't resort to catcalls to shut him up.
They didn't have to. It only took two men and a trick that carried me back to my high school days to accomplish that. It's a trick that depends on the speaker using a p.a. system, which was the case here. Two people sitting in opposite corners of the room take ordinary, half-filled water glasses and make sure the inner parts of the rims are thoroughly wet. Then they each run the tip of one finger around this inner rim. The result is a crossfire of unheard high-frequency sound-waves which are picked up by the microphone. Then, when the speaker talks into the mike, his voice is transmitted as a garbled series of high beeps and his words are lost in a senseless caterwaul. As a kid, I'd been involved in pulling off this stunt once or twice when a high-school assembly speaker had been particularly dull. Now two grown men were doing it to drown out a speaker pleading for artistic appreciation and tolerance.
Watching the speaker turn red and start to stutter, I had a vague intuition about this business of using sound as a weapon. Somehow it seemed to tie in with all the gadgets which were activated by sound back in Highman's apartment in New York. I couldn't pin the connection down, but I sensed that the tactic somehow tied Highman in with what was happening in the lecture hall. Could it also have something to do, I wondered hazily, with the murders of Ilona Tabori and Prudence Highman?
The thought skipped away from the fringe of my mind as the speaker stopped trying to fight the interference. Angrily, but with dignity, he left the platform and strode down the center aisle toward the exit. The moderator hurried after him as if to apologize for what had happened.
I kept my eye on the moderator. He was the one I was after. He was the man with the key.
As he followed the speaker out the door, I got to my feet. But two men beat me to the exit. They were the same two men who'd pulled off the water-glass trick. I was right on their heels as they followed the speaker and the moderator down the stairs.
Talking in low, soothing tones which I couldn't overhear, the moderator led the speaker to a side door and opened it for him. He escorted him outside, to a narrow alley running alongside the building. Then he stood aside with a small smile on his face as the two men caught up with the speaker and stopped him.
The moderator was still standing there, a sort of disinterested observer, when I got outside. The two men were giving the speaker a silent, thorough going-over. I figured I'd get to them in a minute. First things first, and I wanted that key. So I shoved my gun against the moderator's belly and politely asked him to hand it over.
It happened so fast that he must have drawn at the same instant. The muzzle of his gun prodded me in the ribs even as I spoke. Only he didn't waste words as I had. He pulled the trigger.
The split-second realization that he'd do just that was all that saved me. Even as his finger tightened on the trigger, my hand was coming down with a karate chop to his wrist that sent the gun spinning from his grasp. The bullet grazed my hip, the pain searing but momentary. Still, it was just enough to give him the opportunity to make a grab for my gun.
We struggled for it. We sank to our knees, then rolled in the dust, neither of us able to make the other relinquish his grip on the revolver. Then one of the other men left off beating the speaker to come to my opponent's aid.
He stomped hard on my wrist, and the gun went flying. He started to dive after it, but I managed to stick out my foot and trip him up. The moderator was on top of me now, but I slammed my elbow into his throat and he fell back gasping.
The other bully-boy lunged to get into the act. But the gutsy speaker still had enough strength left to hinder him by sinking his teeth into the calf of his leg. I spotted the other gun lying on the ground where the moderator had dropped it. The first hoodlum saw it at the same moment. He dived for the gun and I dived for his groin. My head slammed into it, and I grabbed the gun. Now the moderator grabbed me from behind and we were again struggling for possession of a weapon. Only this time the gun went off.
The fight continued, but the sound of the shot drew footsteps both from inside the gallery and from the street beyond the alley. Before they reached us, one of the muscle-men clipped me from behind and the moderator wrenched the gun from my grasp. The spe
aker made a dive for him, and the moderator drilled a neat little hole right in the center of his forehead. Then he turned the gun on me and coolly drew a bead. From the sound of their footsteps, the crowd from both directions was almost on us now. Obviously he intended to finish me off before any more witnesses appeared on the scene.
Then, suddenly, his jaw dropped open in agonized surprise and he pitched forward on his face. In the moonlight I saw a small dart sticking out of the back of his neck. Immediately, there were people thronging around.
I wanted to elbow through them to his body. I wanted to get that key. But the two hoods had kept their heads in the sudden confusion, and now they were steadfastly flanking the corpse. They seemed to be known to many in the crowd, and they were explaining that I was a murderer and urging the others to grab me before I escaped.
Getting the key was out. I'd be lucky to get away with my skin. I could sense the building of a lynching fervor. I spotted one of the guns on the ground and swooped down to pick it up. Holding it on the crowd, I backed away from them. A sudden tug at my elbow almost gave me a heart attack, but then I looked down and saw that it was Lagula. He grinned up at me, and I grinned back my thanks for his once again having saved my life.
"This way," he told me.
I followed him into the bushes and then paced him as he started to run. Once again I found myself fleeing through backyards, over fences, and through alleys. Our route took us finally across the color line and into the native section of the city. Lagula paused at the rear of a rundown house and led me inside through a cellar window. A tall Negro boy of about sixteen was waiting for us in a back bin of the cellar. There was a single candle on the table in front of him and he was bent over a book. As we entered, I made out the title. It was H. G. Wells' Outline of History.
"This is Manzu." Lagula introduced the boy. "And this is Mr. Steve Victor from America," he told him.