Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  Then they might be finished, and he would be finished, too. Redefect, Sandor, or we’ll turn you in! You’ve betrayed your own mother and father—betrayed the country you’re living in. You’ve betrayed us once, until you saw the light. How do we know you won’t do it again?

  So he’d go to his room and sit on the bed and outwait and outwit them all. He’d sit in this jail and nurse his fears and when the right moment came he’d kill them all.

  Steve, the jailer playing chess now with another prisoner. Others watching. The smarter ones like Aaron Turlock sitting frozen in catatonic stupidity ranged in chairs along the wall.

  Comfortable chairs. Not like Recsk where they forced you to sit for hours on a pointed stool. Chairs like those in the lobby of the Grand Hungarian Hotel. See, they couldn’t make him forget his fears. They were all his own, with him even when he bellhopped in the Grand Hungarian Hotel.

  Afraid of the manager. Afraid to lose his pittance in wages. Afraid to say no when the secret police in those days demanded he play the part of a spy.

  He’d become a spy, but it had proved a very bad day for him, and a bad day for the A.V.O. Once you learned to be a spy you spied on everyone. He could remember his family’s hatred of communism, even though now he couldn’t exactly remember their name. Unless it was Sandor, like his brother’s, Zoltan.

  So many deeds you couldn’t remember. What had landed him in Recsk prison? He didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. From that time on there was only the memory of fear.

  The beatings. The torture. The crawling for miles through filth and muck under charged barbwire. And the trail of blood he left behind from his knife-ripped belly.

  Then there was Opal.

  Then there was Nikki.

  And always there was Pringle to be met somewhere.

  Now he was here. The fear still with him. Facing torture of a different kind, but torture still.

  What a difference between there and here?

  There were leafy trees outside of the prison windows. Summer surely. A fountain with an unclad woman, cold and unattainable, and cruel as all women were.

  By raising his head and staring with cunning he could see the driveway that led to freedom. It lay beyond the charged barbwire. But everyone out there was against him, aware of all his perfidy. He would have to kill them all out there if he hoped to be rid of the fear.

  Sooner or later they would try to get him. Send some of their assassins in. Send them in here.

  The Amity Rest Home.

  That was here.

  A minor victory that he could keep to himself, and would keep to himself, never telling anyone that the Amity Rest Home was here.

  By careful thought that secret could be tied up to so many things. His fear of machinery and where it was acquired. When they’d tried to kill him they had used a machine.

  It was growing dusk and that was the time of day in front of his house in Garden City that they’d used the machine. Getting nearly time for dinner. He’d go down to the dining room later. Miss Kirby would try to talk to him. She’d cut his meat and carefully take the knife away, not knowing about the bigger and sharper one taped to the steam pipe in his room.

  Then she’d tell him he had nothing to fear.

  Steve finished his chess game and switched on lights. The prisoner Steve had lost to put the pieces away.

  Aaron slipped cautiously to the window as soon as Steve had left the room. There could be no rule against staring out at the darkening world through the mesh of the prison screen.

  The fountain-woman was almost lost in the deep enveloping gray.

  As Aaron watched the beams from headlights lit the fountain, bathing the naked woman in yellow as a car turned in. Then the nymph was swallowed in darkness and a two-toned convertible had pulled up outside the prison door. The motor stopped.

  A car door slammed and Aaron flinched. It took the sound of a thousand doors that had slammed behind you forever to cause so sharp a pain.

  Another prisoner!

  Igor Sandor knew those dragging footsteps, that hopeless blank look of a beaten dog, that drawing back, as the woman took the man’s arm, led him up the steps and in.

  Another prisoner? Or the assassin Aaron was waiting for? Which had come in?

  They were gone an unknown length of time while Aaron mulled the problem over. The man might be just another one he would have to kill.

  He stood at the window, his fingers tightly clutching the screen. At last the woman came out again, got in the car and closed the door softly.

  This time she didn’t want to alarm him. Headlights flared on suddenly. A starter whirred. An engine caught. Gravel flew.

  The fear of machinery was back again. He was back once more in front of his house in Garden City—full in the glare of those headlights on the big black car that had tried so hard to run him down.

  He was no more use to the communists. No use to Pringle. No more use to anyone. The whole world was out to take his life and crush him to bits.

  This time it was Aaron Turlock, not Igor Sandor, who filled his terror-struck lungs to bursting and began to scream!

  Chapter Ten

  For years Sunday afternoon had been open house at the Morels. Many times the open house was a carry-over—Anne called it a hangover—from the night before. She had learned through hard experience that Maury, who was a more or less moderate drinker during the week, was inclined to let the bars down on Saturday night.

  He never lacked company. In all the years of their marriage Anne had never ceased to be amazed at not only the number, but the wide variety of people her husband knew.

  Before midnight on hundreds of Saturdays, the living room of Apartment A-11 had been jammed with as many as two dozen visitors, often more.

  Labor leaders rubbed shoulders with industrialists. A world-wide columnist might be swapping yarns with a politician or a general he had openly pilloried the week before.

  Editors and associate editors of rival weekly news magazines mixed drinks with insults. Drama critics met actors they had panned. Literary critics received verbal doses of their own printed acid from unhappy best-seller authors. Officials of associations against racial prejudice were presented to representatives of southern states, and started quietly divesting the congressmen of their prejudiced fur.

  TV personalities. Radio personalities. Women fashion editors, home editors, cooking editors, givers of advice to the lovelorn. Rabbis. Priests. Ministers. Gamblers. Bishops. News photographers. Foreign correspondents. Policemen. Senators—United States and State. Governors, ex and in. Aldermen. Army Intelligence. Navy Intelligence. Brass fresh out of the Pentagon.

  Through the years Anne Morel had met them all. Usually they had departed by four in the morning, but she had ceased being startled at coming in to the living room at eleven or twelve on Sunday morning to find a couple of snoring men in the pulled-out daybed, and sometimes a third one bedded down on the floor.

  The party had been rough on the night of the Saturday that Anne got back from San Francisco. Maury had hired his usual car and met her at La Guardia in the afternoon. They’d had dinner at Luigi’s before going home.

  Their meeting at the airport had been strained. Maury felt that the warmth he had sensed on his telephone call the previous Tuesday had chilled. By the time they had finished dinner, and Anne had failed to thaw under the stimulus of Martinis, Lasagna, and a bottle of Chianti, he knew that the barrier between them, that had worried him for a year, had been raised again. He tried to reassure himself by saying she was tired from the plane trip, but he knew he was whistling in the dark.

  Hal Gow was the first to phone after they reached the apartment. Marge and the kids were in New Jersey for the weekend. He’d heard that Anne was home. Could he drop in and bring his own bottle along?

  Maury’s voice was more than pleased when he said, “Sure!” It was eager. He wanted time to think before he faced a showdown with Anne, and a showdown of some kind was certain if he had to spend this fi
rst evening with Anne alone.

  She looked up from her unpacking. “Who was that?”

  “Hal. Marge and the kids are New Jerseying. He’s coming down with a bottle.”

  “And twenty other drunks, I presume.” She was standing in her slip, her black hair carefully waved, but showing thin lines of gray. Anne was slender, long legged, and attractive at forty; her pointed breasts still firm. Only her kindly face with its prominent nose gave a hint of how weary she was, and the corners of her large dark eyes showed crow’s-feet of strain.

  “Hal’s not a drunk, Anne, any more than you and I.”

  “I could make something out of that if I wanted to, and that goes for your other so-called friends, too.” Anne took a pair of shoes from her bag and lined them up carefully under the edge of her bed. Still bent over she said, “Why did you have to blat it all over the office exactly when I was coming home?”

  “I told T. T. He was the only one. I asked him down for cocktails and dinner tomorrow evening. Maybe he told Hal. I don’t know. Did you want to keep it a secret?”

  “I thought we might have one Saturday night and Sunday together. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in California. I wanted to talk with you.” Anne came and sat on his bed beside him.

  “Really? I must have failed to notice it at dinner, and while we were driving in from La Guardia.”

  The phone rang. Anne answered it.

  “Oh, hello, Erick.—Just a few minutes ago.—Oh, by all means do.—No, you don’t need to bring any beer, we have plenty in the ice box. You’re not putting us out, at all. Hal Gow’s coming. I expect there’ll be plenty of others, too. Yes—sort of a homecoming brawl.” She hung up.

  “Just let me guess,” Maury said. “I hope he brings his deodorant and breath-sweetener along.” He got up and started for the living room.

  “You could use a deodorant on your disposition, Maury. It stinks!”

  “Do you think I told Sorenson you were coming home?” Maury turned in the doorway and stood leaning against the jamb.

  “No. I’m quite sure you didn’t.” Anne got up to resume her unpacking.

  “Then you’ll have to admit that there is such a thing as a Greenwich Village grapevine.”

  “Not in this particular case.” Anne shook out three dresses and fitted them on hangers. “Erick called me long distance on Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours after you phoned. I’d made reservations by then and told him what day I’d be home.”

  Maury felt an ache in the muscles along his jaw. “So it was that little pimp who ransacked this place, was it? Stole your pictures and our address book—God knows what else. And you stand there quite calmly and tell me he had the consummate gall to call you long distance. What the hell goes on?”

  “That’s a question I hoped you would answer, Maury. I’ve been asking myself that very thing for a long time now: ‘What the hell goes on?’ As for Erick stealing the address book—you didn’t have it, yet you managed to get me on the phone through San Francisco information.” Anne pushed by him with the three dresses, hung them in her hall closet, and being careful not to touch him, returned to the bedroom.

  “Cover for him all you want.” Maury massaged his aching jaw. “I think I’m entitled to know why he called you.”

  Anne sat on her bed, crossed her long bare legs and lit a cigarette. “He was worried about you.”

  “Worried that I hadn’t been killed the night before?”

  “He’s been working part time in a second-hand bookstore and free-lancing on true crime stories, Maury, since Hal let him go. He learned something from Dykes, your own man at headquarters. Apparently a lot of people don’t hate Erick like you do—”

  “Including you.”

  “Now you know how idiotic you’re being when you take that line. Erick heard that a man had been killed, and that you were in St. Vincent’s.”

  “Dykes didn’t know I was in St. Vincent’s.”

  “Well, Erick got it from someone—from where, I don’t know. He didn’t know that you’d been discharged until I told him you’d called me two or three hours before.”

  “This damned solicitude is cutting me to the quick! What did this slimy Samaritan want you to do?”

  “Come home. Which I told him I was already planning to do. He thought you might be mixed up in something dangerous. Then I got your letter about that Lebanese being stabbed and I’m beginning to think so, too. Besides, Maury, you sounded frightened when I talked to you.” She put out her cigarette.

  Maury went over to the bed, lifted her up, then held her tightly and kissed her. She responded, coolly at first, and then with a touch of passion.

  The doorbell buzzed.

  “Damn,” he said. “That’s Hal, I suppose.” He looked deep into her candid eyes before he slowly released her. “If I was frightened, Anne, it was because of you, but neither of us is in danger—unless it’s the danger, that because of something I can’t explain, you might start to lose faith in me. If I ever think we’re in physical danger, I’ll be the first to tell you.”

  “No you won’t, Maury.” She shook her head, and a shadow crossed her face. “I’d like to believe it, but I’ve learned in eighteen years of marriage that you live apart in your private world and actually never tell anyone the whole of anything. Now I have to get dressed. Go and let Hal in.”

  Two by two, like filling the Ark, they began to drift in. Once in awhile the telephone rang. More often it was just a knock on the door, a tap on the window, or the doorbell’s strident ring.

  Men with somebody else’s wives, or maybe even with their own. Couples who were owlishly drunk, or half a couple drunk, and half quite sober—a condition soon remedied when the Bourbon and Scotch began to flow.

  Only Hal Gow and Erick Sorenson had come alone. Hal for some reason was slugging his drinks, which was most unlike him. His blue eyes kept getting dimmer, his incisive speech thicker. By one o’clock his squat powerful figure had become nothing more than a blob of flesh collapsed in Maury’s easy chair.

  Anne was talking easily and amusingly, mixing drinks, polite to everyone.

  Sorenson, unaware of rebuffs, gulped down his endless cans of beer, broke in on every conversation, told shaggy dog stories that no one heard, and vainly all evening tried to isolate Maury or Anne. It was after two when Maury, drunk enough to be provoked beyond endurance, decided to give him the air.

  “Come on Erick, let’s break this up. Anne’s dead on her feet and we’ve got to tuck Hal away on the couch. If you leave now it will start things moving. Maybe the rest will take the hint.” He pointed to a group, making incoherent talk, clustered around the door to the kitchen. “I’ll walk down to Hudson with you and see if we can flag a taxi. I need some air.”

  Much to his surprise, Sorenson agreed without question, and got his coat from the closet in the hall. They walked in silence across the court. Maury, feeling unsteady, sucked in great gulps of the muggy July night air.

  On Morton Street instead of turning toward Hudson, Erick turned left and began to walk slowly the other way. “More chance of getting a cab on Seventh Avenue.” He took hold of Maury’s elbow, as though to steady him. “Walk a ways with me. I’ve been trying all evening to talk with you.”

  Maury stopped short. He had no hat or coat on, but was wearing a long-sleeved yellow sports shirt. Even through the fabric the feel of Erick’s fingers were about to give him a chill.

  He twisted away from the clinging grasp. “Keep your hands to yourself, Erick. I’ve got to get back, so make it snappy—say what you have to say.”

  “You’re in a hell of a mess, Morel. You’re just about to be tossed from your job—and expelled from the Party at the same time. Maybe that interests you. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, that’s all that I have to say.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sorenson.” Maury made as though to move away.

  “Don’t start pulling that stuff on me.” Across the dark street a drunken couple laughed raucou
sly. Sorenson leaned so close that Maury could smell the mingled fumes of bad breath and beer. “I’ve never been out of the Party, Comrade, any more than you have. You may be a few steps higher up—but they don’t have any receipts from me showing I’ve been in their pay.”

  Maury’s first inclination was to knock this sniveling creature, suddenly turned menacing, into the gutter of Morton Street.

  Wasn’t that exactly what they wanted?

  Undoubtedly! Any comrade could bring charges against him, regardless of how trumped up or unfounded those charges might be. The technique was to keep you on the hot seat, always trembling in your boots, wondering just where and when the next blow might fall.

  One fact was not to be doubted—in the intricate mesh of twisted Party thinking, scheming, and mechanizations, Maury Morel had been signaled out as the instrument to carry out some vital plan.

  Sorenson was the tightener of the thumbscrews. The start would have been a specific charge—chauvinism, carrying the implication of considering oneself superior to others. It would have meant an instant summons into Party court, had Maury let his temper flare and socked his heckler on the jaw.

  As to those receipts that Sorenson had mentioned, Maury knew what they were. He had written three articles for a liberal magazine, New Lines, right after the war. It made no difference that he had used the pseudonym of Robert L. Skeene. The checks for a hundred dollars each had been made payable to Maurice Morel, and had been endorsed and gone through his bank. Then New Lines had been proved to be a Communist publication, and bombed in the press by Maury himself. The editor called before a Senatorial subcommittee had invoked the Fifth Amendment. So the Party had definite proof in their files that Maury Morel had taken money from them and was in their pay.