by David Garth
And that clearly ended everything. Berkeley turned and reluctantly retraced her steps down the entrance hall. Well, back to the filing office and the whole rest of the day she would be wondering what Carney and Buckthorne might have said to each other. She opened the door to leave and then in a flash it was clear to her—don’t leave, stay here—and her mind bit on the chance that leaped into her consciousness. She shut the door resoundingly and waited, standing in the hall of the suite, her heart racing as with that one gesture she steered off on an entirely new and risky course. But she was still here in Carney’s suite, with her eye on that Japanese screen, and Buckthorne was due in a few minutes. It was all part of her instinctive follow through.
She moved quickly. Making no sound on the soft rug she glided back to the tall Japanese screen that stood near the steps down into the living room. It was placed in a way to suggest that it had blocked off the living room, and two of its sections folded back toward the wall of the entrance hall. Noiselessly, she slipped around behind it and stood there, leaning back against the wall, a rhythmic beat in her ears.
From the edge of the screen she could see something of the living room. Carney was sitting at the desk scanning the file she had just brought him. E-24. Campaign contributors bracketed in three groups. She had examined it thoroughly in the taxi coming up. Right now she could have wished she was in the taxi going back. There was no way of seeing one step ahead of her from now on.
For fifteen minutes or so there was no sound in the living room. The “fly-swatter” apparently spoke only when he was spoken to, and Carney studied the E-24 file, making frequent notations on a desk pad.
The knock at the door came with such abruptness that she nearly started. She heard the “fly-swatter” brush close to the screen as he went to answer it. And a moment later, between the sections of the screen, she saw Sam Buckthorne stride into the living room. Carney greeted him and then spoke to his bodyguard.
“Go on down to the cigar counter, Budlong,” he said. “Play some dice with the cutie and amuse yourself.”
Berkeley heard him leave and when the suite door closed Carney was instantly galvanized. He slapped his palm down on the desk.
“Sit down, Sam. Something has happened.”
Buckthorne sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair.
“We had over a million coming for this election and I could have spent eight hundred grand of it without a thought. Electing you is going to take some doing. Well, we may not get the money.”
“Double-cross?” exclaimed Buckthorne. “We can do that kind of thing, too.”
“Oh, stop blowing out your cheeks.” Carney’s voice was freighted with unmistakable contempt. “Somebody blew a secret gold shipment of theirs to hell down in a Mexican port. That’s where the money is, over a hundred feet down in salt water.”
“Somebody?” said Buckthorne hoarsely. “Somebody must be on to them, Art—”
“Yes, and they know who it is. Leave that to them.” Carney jabbed his cigarette at an ash tray. “We’ve got our own end to swing. Now sit there and get this. There are only a couple of ways you can get elected. You never been elected to anything before so there’s nothing much that can be hung on you and as long as you stump the state yelling up with motherhood and down with man-eating sharks nobody is going to be able to hand much on you. But behind you comes plenty of fixing.”
He stalked jerkily up and down, a wiry terse little man with pugnacious jaw and a voice that bit off his words short.
“Yeah, plenty of fixing. We got to have the right people in the right places. We got to have freight trains of floaters shipped in and out of counties all election day. We got whole blocks of tenements leased for registration addresses. And that’s not even the beginning. Eight hundred grand—I could spend it like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“If you ask me…” began Buckthorne.
“I didn’t,” said Carney. “I’m just telling you what’s happened.”
There was a silence. Buckthorne was plainly at a loss. He sat there, looking toward Carney, and abruptly he appeared less and less like his campaign portraits. It might have been by contrast with the sharp taut lines of Carney’s face, but Buckthorne appeared stupid, flustered, and gross under pressure of events. Somebody had blown a secret gold shipment to hell down in a Mexican port. The thought of that gave Berkeley strength and steadiness as she crouched back behind the Japanese screen and prayed they would go on talking.
“All right,” said Carney, “you got the picture. Now here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going straight ahead. Berlin has a smart guy taking charge here. He has to have money to work with and you can bet he’ll get it. A gold shipment blasted to hell and high water—it won’t lick him, it will just delay him. But my chips are on him. He did invaluable work in Poland and France, and he can swing his job over here. You don’t think this state election is all he cares about, do you? We’re only part of it—and he isn’t going to let dough stop him anywhere along the line.”
He lighted a cigarette and drew on it deeply.
“By God,” he said softly, “I hate that England. Ever since I saw my old man shot during the Black and Tan fights I’ve waited for a chance to crack down on her. And before I’d see this country line up with her I’d let the Nazis into every plant inside this state.”
There was no mistaking the real venom in his terse voice. “Well, I’m with you, Art, of course,” said Buckthorne. “You’re with me.” Carney laughed. “Well, you’re the best I could find to front in this election. A hundred thousand dollars and the governorship of this state—yeah, you’re with me. And sometimes I got to laugh when I think what the voters would look like if they knew you had secret legal retainers from the bund and about fifteen relatives in the Reich.”
“It won’t make any difference what they know if we don’t get money, plenty and fast,” muttered Buckthorne.
“You forget about that. Just go around blowing out your cheeks, like I told you. When the string is pulled in this country you’ll be riding high at the head of the parade. Now get down to headquarters and see the press on this state tax issue they’re trying to throw in your lap. You’ll find your statement all written out for you. Stick to it and you’ll get by.”
Berkeley heard Sam Buckthorne walk quickly from the lining room and out through the entrance hall. The door closed behind him. She wished passionately that she could have squeezed through after him. For there was a relentless hammering in her temples as the conversation she had just heard took on the quality of a nightmare.
She knew she had to get out of here. Otherwise she would be trapped. If Carney would only go into the other room she could risk the sound of the door closing. But the grim little political boss was at his desk telephoning. She heard him dialing a number. Evidently he had a private phone in the suite.
“Hello,” she heard him say gruffly. “Vokels? Buckthorne has just left and I’ve given him the picture. He knows about your blasted gold shipment. I told him everything was going to be all right. But me, I’m different, Vokels—I have to know everything is going to be all right.”
There was a brief silence, then Carney cut back in. “You know as well as I do that this has got to be quick! I can’t spend coin that’s lying on the bottom of a harbor. What? All right, make it New Orleans then.” He listened. “Where? I don’t get it—oh, Octave’s. All right, Vokels, I’ll see you there. But you,” he advised urgently, “get a piece of this. Somebody used brass knuckles on you with that gold shipment and I’ll like it better when you’ve got the finger on him.”
He slammed down the receiver and drummed on the desk with his fingers. Then pushing himself back from the desk, he walked toward that adjoining room.
It was the moment of escape and Berkeley knew it on the instant. It was a moment she could risk the sound of a closing door and she took it immediately. Flitting out from behind the screen she stole to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the corridor. Gratefully she saw t
hat there was no one in sight. She pulled the door to softly and released the knob. The girl did not bother about the elevator. She went down the stairs to the next floor and flagged an elevator there.
Back at the office, she walked into a satiric inquiry from Talbot, the filing head.
“Mr. Buckthorne ordered me to take a file up to Mr. Carney,” she explained. “I had to wait until Mr. Carney had time to see me.” She smiled at him guilelessly. “I’ll work overtime to make up for it, Mr. Talbot.”
Talbot said nothing, but turned back to his desk. Berkeley slipped into her chair at the table and went back to work on the correspondence files. But it was purely mechanical; she was hardly conscious of the stapling machine and the white cardboard file covers. Her heart was still pounding with the impact of the words she had overheard.
A lot of things were clear now. In the mysterious and threatening skein that seemed to spread across the United States one loose thread had come to light—a crooked political boss—and if that thread could only be explored the skein might unravel.
Carney—the tough little scrapper whose hatred of England had blinded him to everything else—and the Nazis were reaching for a state capitol. She felt a sense of panic sweep over her as if the election was already settled and Sam Buckthorne had taken the governor’s chair.
But there was still a chance, she realized, as she remembered that somebody had landed a wallop with brass knuckles by sending a gold shipment to the bottom of a Mexican harbor. That might stall them a while, for that unscrupulous state machine had to have Nazi money behind it to support Carney’s political trickery.
That phone call Carney had made—to whom? Vokels, it had sounded like. Whoever it had been, the person Carney phoned had appeared to be the Nazi contact. Vokels.
She paused in her stapling to stare straight ahead of her. Everything Tresh had said that day in Valleron seemed to be working out. As she had crouched back behind that fragile Japanese screen and listened to Art Carney on the phone, how close had she been to the ominous and mysterious thing called the Ivory Tiger? And even as in her home when she realized that her life had been sought, she felt again that sensation she was powerless to prevent, that terrible, chilling sense of something stealthy, something fierce, ruthless.
Then as she went back to her stapling she looked up and paused in the very act of drawing a correspondence file to her. For leaning indolently in the doorway of the filing office and talking desultorily with Talbot was that powerful-looking “fly-swatter” of Art Carney’s.
It was only then that she remembered he had been sent down to the cigar counter in the hotel lobby and it was entirely possible that he might have seen her leave the hotel long after she had been supposed to be on her way.
CHAPTER 15
The dim grayness of early twilight had settled over Philadelphia when Philip Courtney arrived at the Mayhew Foundation. He dismissed his taxi and stood there a moment, drawing on his gloves, glancing up at the old brownstone building. The Mayhew Foundation looked like one of those fine old private residences of an earlier period—solid, dignified, with great high windows and chimney pots studding an abruptly sloping slate roof.
Courtney walked up the stone steps, entered the storm vestibule, and before a grilled-iron door to the foyer proper he stopped and rang a bell. He heard it sound close at hand inside somewhere and shortly afterward the door was opened by a correct and courteous houseman.
“I would like to see Miss Linda Baker,” Courtney said. “I understand that she teaches here.”
The houseman escorted him to the Foundation’s office where an elderly woman receptionist took him in charge.
“Miss Baker is teaching,” he was informed. “Would you wait a half-hour or so?”
“Of course,” said Courtney.
As he sat in the small reception room off the wide, high ceilinged foyer, soft snatches of music occasionally reached his ears; once the strains of a violin flowed in gossamer waves as a studio door was opened, and another time he heard the deep sonorous manifestoes of a cello.
Linda was a long time coming. It seemed more than a half-hour before he heard the staccato beat of heels in the foyer and then looked up to see her sweep into the reception room.
“Court!” she exclaimed, and extended a hand. “I am astonished. But,” she laughed, “very pleased.”
She wore a simple black dress, its simplicity relieved only by a thin string of pearls about her throat. Yet with her black hair brushed back in two heavy wings from her low forehead and her mouth deftly touched with flame, the very simplicity of her costume became like an effective backdrop to the appeal of the low warmth of her cultivated voice and the quick expression in her mobile face.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” she went on, sitting down with him. “What brings you to this shrine of music?”
“The last time I saw Berkeley she said that you had mentioned teaching here,” said Courtney. He hesitated. “You have not seen her lately?” he asked tentatively.
“Only once, a day or two after we left the plane,” said Linda. She viewed him curiously. “You don’t mean you came down to Philadelphia just to ask me that?”
“Heaven forbid!” disclaimed Philip Courtney. “I mean—well, not exactly. You behold in me a rebel against the tradition that thirty minutes after a journey ends traveling companions scatter to the four winds to be remembered only by Christmas cards for a few years and then blank silence.” He grinned at her. “For example, I can remember very distinctly how we all had dinner in Horta that night—Berkeley and you and Luce and myself. Remember?”
“I do,” said Linda Baker. And if you are rounding up the same group you may count me in.”
“Unfortunately,” said Courtney, “I have no idea where either of them are. Luce, I don’t expect to see again. Berkeley is out of the state observing some political campaign or other, so her mother informed me.”
Linda looked at her wrist watch and then at him again. “I can imagine Berkeley observing some political campaign,” she said humorously. “Court, you sound a little foggy on that.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s the way it is. Will you have dinner with me, Linda?”
“Of course,” said Linda. “Just a moment while I phone my family.”
At Linda’s guidance they had dinner in a small, quiet restaurant in the vicinity of Rittenhouse Square.
Over his coffee Courtney talked in an offhand way about his career while Linda Baker listened, a cigarette between her fingers and her chin cupped in the palm of her hand.
“I’m supposed to have a future as an architect,” he said. “That Thomas Fellowship put me squarely on the path of a lot of things I always wanted to do. And right now I’m not so terribly interested in architecture. Strange, how suddenly there can be something more important than a man’s career.”
“And that important something,” said Linda, nodding, “goes, I judge, by the name of Berkeley Britton.”
“I didn’t say that,” he protested mildly.
“Pardon me,” said Linda with a slight smile.
He drew himself up closer to the table, a broad shouldered, tawny-haired man with lively gray eyes and amiable smile.
“As a matter of fact, Linda,” he said, “during that trip home from Valleron I often got the impression that she was distrait, in trouble, perhaps. I don’t know whether you noticed it or not. And now I can’t even get in touch with her. I tried twice—once I was told that Berkeley was visiting friends and the next time, by her mother, that she was interested in some state politics. It seems like crossed wires somewhere.”
He looked at her questioningly. Her chin was still cupped in the palm of her hand, but he could not see her eyes very well. Her lashes were half shut and in the indirect lighting her eyes seemed shadowy, mysterious.
“Court,” she said, “you’re tilting at windmills. Berkeley was going west for several weeks. She told me so herself.”
“Well, why don’t they say so, the
n?” He shook his head. “I must have looked like an untrustworthy character.”
“Go find her,” suggested Linda. “That’s your answer.” She glanced at her wrist watch and then gathered up her gloves. “I have two applicants to examine at the Foundation,” she said. “Shall we go, Court?”
They walked back together to the Mayhew Foundation, the night air crisp and clear, the sound of their footsteps on the deserted sidewalk staccato sharp.
They paused on the steps of the Mayhew Foundation. “I’m glad that you rebelled against the thirty-minute tradition,” said Linda, extending her hand. “Let me know when you’ve found Berkeley, won’t you, Court? And I hope you satisfy yourself as to her whereabouts soon before the world loses a good architect.
He still held her hand. “I talk too much,” he said with a laugh. “You’re blue ribbon in your own right, Linda,” he went on. “You’ve picked up again as though you’d never been away.” He pressed her hand and walked down the steps. Moving swiftly and lightly, his broad-shouldered figure passed through the pool of light of a street lamp and then melted into the shadows of a street lined with changing shade trees.
* * * *
The oaks that sentineled the driveway to the Rhodes mansion were changing, too, and the headlights of the car picked them out one by one as it swept up the rambling white house.
John Hardesty and two other men stepped out of the car and entered the house. Miss Melissa was waiting for them in the study, a fire burning on the hearth of the comfortable, low-beamed room, the flame flickering on the wainscoted walls and gleaming fitfully in the depths of the glass cases of pistols and swords.
“Good evening, Miss Melissa,” said the lawyer. “As I phoned you, I have brought these two gentlemen to see you. Major Barnes of the Military Intelligence section of the United States Army and Mr. Corcoran of the State Department.”
Miss Melissa nodded her white head graciously to them both. They were trim, spare men, Corcoran younger than the Intelligence officer. Major Barnes was not in uniform, but wore an ordinary sack suit.