“I’m afraid,” Len said. “She hates me and has gone away. I’ll get my revenge some day—on everyone some day.”
“I saw you when you came in,” Igor said. “It frightened me and I screamed because I thought you were a spy sent in to kill me. Are you a spy?”
“You’re frightening me now,” Len said dully. “You hate me.” He started to rise. “I’m going to my room and lie down. Somehow, I have to get away.”
“My woman hates me, not yours.” Igor gently but firmly pushed Len back in his chair. “She hasn’t been here since last Monday. She could come every day, but she’s taken our child, Nikki, and gone away. For a week she came every day.” He placed his mouth close to Leonard’s ear. “Come to my room tonight after ten when they put the halls in darkness. Room 22. Come and we can talk about fear—and I’ll tell you how we can both get away.”
He was gone like a shadow before Len could answer—back to his room to untape the knife from the steampipe and place it beneath his mattress. The man wasn’t very clever, and if he should prove himself a spy, Igor would kill him in the darkness.
He’d have to kill them all some day!
Chapter Fourteen
The Amity Rest Home never rested at night.
It waited.
At ten the lights in the hall were dimmed, leaving the red bulbs of exit lights over a door at either end. Not really exits, at least not exits to escape and freedom, for the reinforced doors were double locked and needed two keys used simultaneously to be opened. Each of the keys was in the possession of a different attendant, who waited, along with the Rest Home, in tiny cubicle offices at each end of the hall. The exits merely led to other parts of the building.
By ten the nightly medications were given, and by half past ten the patients were bedded down. Some nights most of them were asleep by midnight—most of them. Never all.
There was no fixed routine. Some of the patients closed their room doors, that couldn’t be fastened. Others left them open. Some turned off their reading lights and ceiling lights. Others, beset by fears of darkness, slept or lay awake all night with one, or both lights on.
Steve Weldon was relieved at midnight by a gentle, powerful Irishman, Michael Boyle, who did a twelve hour shift. Dave Alren, who came on at eight, also worked twelve hours. The attendants alternated every two weeks. The night shift was hard on the nerves, and not even the best trained male nurses could stand it continuously. After a while you began to imagine that menacing figures were peopling the darkened hall.
There was a midnight inspection. Rather cursory. Any well-trained staff knew that rigid rules and discipline were impossible to enforce on human beings who had fled within themselves from the rules and discipline demanded by civilization. Better to ignore small breaches entirely, or if that was impossible, have none at all.
Restless patients would visit from room to room at all hours, often helping each other more by mutual confiding than any psychiatric or shock therapy could have accomplished. Nearly always they left without protest if another patient made it clear he wanted to sleep, or be alone.
That wasn’t the case if an attendant broke up such a surreptitious visit. Both patients invariably turned against the heavy hand of authority. Force might even be necessary to get the visitor back to his room, struggling and screaming, with every chance that weeks of treatment had been totally undone.
There were good nights and bad. No one knew why. Records had been compiled for years throughout the country. Still there was no acceptable data on what might cause a bad one. Often they just came out of the blue when nothing had happened. A day too peaceful and pleasant could just as well start one.
A new arrival. An incident at dinner. A manic depressive, morose for days, starting to dance and sing in the lounge, suddenly become “high.” A cheerful patient starting to cry. A patient quietly playing cards tearing them up without warning and stamping the pieces into the carpet.
Daily incidents. Generally accepted by the others without a change of demeanor. Then some night the spark would flash and no one knew why. But everyone, staff and inmates, knew without speaking when a bad night had come.
Lights out, and like a brush fire the awareness of trouble had spread down the hall and ignited unrest and latent phobias in every room.
Condition red! Too many patients roaming the halls or too many smoking contraband cigarettes lit with equally contraband matches in the washroom. Nobody sleeping. Too many lights in the bedrooms out, or too many on. The wrong doors open, the wrong ones closed. Better phone Dr. Marchand, the night physician, and tell him to stand by with his hypo loaded.
Bedlam would break before morning if all signs were correct and things didn’t quiet down. Dr. Marchand would be needed.
Then some nights, still without apparent cause, a warning of trouble would be in the air, and by midnight everything would be in hand again with nothing more serious having occurred than a couple of hours of tension that left both staff and patients jumpy, if not with the actual jitters.
Monday night was one of those false alarms.
Len Ducro managed with some neat prestidigitation to duck his yellow sleeping capsule of Nembutal under Steve’s watchful eye. Thirty minutes later, lying in bed with his light out, he almost decided to take it, go to sleep and forget it all.
Igor Sandor was expecting him, but it wouldn’t do to appear too anxious. On the other hand, Igor’s suspicions might be aroused if Len postponed the dreaded interview until too late.
He tried to relax and think clearly. His legs kept twitching. His door was open and he found himself acutely conscious of figures passing up and down the hall.
He wished he had Ed Waters to talk to. What, exactly, had the S.A.C. told him? To get everything he could out of Sandor-Turlock to add to a raw file in Washington. A matter of internal security.
Everything about what?
About Igor Sandor, the bird of prey that walked like a man! Len was supposed to have some common sense, wasn’t he? Common sense was essential for special agents. Well, he’d like to tell Mr. Waters that he shouldn’t stick his agents in places where they might quickly lose it all. Lose their uncommon senses, too.
The damn hatch was too quiet tonight! Len had just reached a point where he felt quite friendly to an unseen woman upstairs who had started at ten, every night he’d been in, and howled like a dog for thirty minutes. Tonight she’d quit. Here he was with Igor Sandor on his mind, and she’d deliberately let him down.
He wished he could tuck the children in, kiss them good night, and then have a quiet drink with Connie. Or wouldn’t a noisy drink be better? He was stoned into a stupor with quiet. Certainly Connie would be nicer than Ed Waters to talk to. More informative and sympathetic. She was prettier, too. Len began to wonder if you could be informative, sympathetic and pretty and ever reach the status of an S.A.C. in the FBI.
He’d better get back to Sandor. He was paid for a week in advance at the Home, but he’d already arranged with Dave Alren to phone Connie for him as soon as he gave Dave the word. Connie could get him out tomorrow on Dr. Emerson’s say-so—provided he got all he could from Sandor tonight, and could honestly report to Waters that this part of the case was completely in hand. Then Waters would probably assign him to something easy—getting information from a Bengal tiger who was plotting against the zoo!
Now his feet were twitching!
Len got out of bed, put his slippers on over bare feet, and took a cigarette from the pack he had taped to the back of the bureau. There were paper matches stuck on with the pack but he didn’t take one. You could always get a light from the cigarette of some patient smoking in the washroom. Sort of an Eternal Fire—the Light That Never Fails. Save the matches for smoking in your room.
Bruce and Ackers were leaning against wash basins, while three other patients listened with polite inattention as Bruce outlined the final chapter of the mythical book he’d completed that day. Bruce gave Len the use of his lighted cigarette without missi
ng a word of his monotoned diatribe.
Len shut himself in a booth and sat on the toilet to finish his smoke. He heard another patient come in the washroom and say: “Mackie tried to kill himself.”
“He did kill himself,” Ackers corrected. “Been hiding out pills—or his wife brought him some in yesterday. Good way to go. I tried it once. I’ll try again some day.”
“I have a man in my book who went that way,” Bruce said with a little more animation. “He was crazy. The book I finished today—he was.…” His voice rambled on.
Len disposed of his cigarette butt in the toilet. Mackie was a friendly old man with watery blue eyes. He kept much to his room. Len hadn’t seen him more than twice, except at meals. “Good way to go,” Ackers had said.
Was it?
Who knew how many years of mental agony had finally cracked old Mackie’s brain! Suicide, the verdict would be. Suicide while temporarily insane. So that was the cause of tonight’s depression. Of tonight’s oppressive atmosphere. Just another lifer escaped. It might be better if the verdict read: Suicide while temporarily sane.
Igor Sandor was waiting for Lennie in the hall outside the washroom door.
“Later,” he whispered in his best conspiratorial tone. “Later, after the watch has changed. My room. Alone.” He drifted away.
Again Len had to prod himself into a proper state of watchfulness and caution. Igor Sandor’s air of theatrical intrigue was dangerously lulling. You wanted to laugh and take him lightly. He reminded you of a hissing villain, twirling a gummed-on mustache in a Boucicault melodrama: “Curses, me beauty! Would you save your country—come to me room after midnight, when the watch has changed! Alone!”
You daren’t forget for an instant the cauldron of death that Igor had escaped from to be spewed up with a million others on America’s shores. The torture back of those mutilated fingers. The fear and hate that probably, no, surely, lurked in his twisted mind from an overdraught of his own country’s witches brew. Better remember it, Special Agent Ducro, if you value your life! Igor Sandor has escaped the net of the A.V.O. from the hands of men far more cruel, and a thousand times more ruthless than Ed Waters and you.
There’s nothing theatrical about him. The Igor Sandors, like the heads of the Gestapo, the MVD, the A.V.O., and all the initials of horror that made him and his kind, are unfortunately all too true.
Len lay in his bed, staring at pictures that came and went through the darkness, until Mike Boyle flashed a torch in his room and passed quickly on.
The watch had changed. Weldon to Boyle. Dave Alren still on until morning guarding the rooms on the opposite side.
He waited ten minutes, then put his slippers and bathrobe on. The night had turned chilly. Two patches of yellow still showed from open doors where tired brains, asleep or awake, were fighting for rest. The exit lights glimmered warningly at each end of the hall. There was a fragrant smell of coffee from one of the cubicles where Boyle and Alren were busy with their midnight snack. No screams. No moans. No flitting figures.
Just four lights, two yellow, two red, and the sirupy silence of Amity Rest Home patiently waiting. Dreadful silence. That was all. The silence of old man Mackie, dead in the basement mortuary, filtering upstairs to penetrate every nook and cranny of rooms and hall.
Room 22.
Len paused an instant, debating whether or not to knock. Sandor was unpredictable, a tap on the door might upset him. He might just as well attack without warning if Len stepped into his room unannounced, or, worse, start to scream, ending any chance Len might have to get information.
Len realized that his ankles were cold. Sandor must have his window wide open for a draft of night air was blowing out under his bedroom door.
Len pulled his bathrobe tighter about him, opened the door and stepped inside. Against the darkness of the room the window formed a rectangular blob of paleness. The shade had been raised up clear to the top, and the bottom sash was pushed up full.
On the outside of the window the protective screen formed a grating of diamond-shaped wire openings, visible against the lightness of the summer sky.
A piece of paper, caught by the draft, swirled from the table. Len checked the door just before it slammed behind him.
“Igor—”
He was answered by the sirupy silence he’d brought inside from the corridor. No movement. No breathing. Not even the rustle of leaves in the trees, black outside beyond the diamond grille.
Len found the switch beside the door, flipped it, and the ceiling light turned on.
His fears about Igor Sandor had been groundless, but Igor’s fears had been quite real. Igor lay on his side, his hunched up body almost as grotesque in death as his gnarled broken fingers had been in life.
Len knelt down beside him, touching nothing. A featherless arrow had finally dropped the bird of prey. A slender shaft of steel, slightly tapered, no thicker than a pencil, and about twice as long. The larger end protruded three inches out through the jacket of Igor’s white pajamas. Only a trickle of blood ran down. A commando’s weapon, silent, deadly, and efficient. Obviously fired from some type of a spring gun at very close quarters while Igor spoke to someone outside through the wire screen.
He got up and stood fiddling with the cord of his bathrobe. It was one of those spots you got in, inevitably, as an agent of the FBI. You were on your own. Just your own judgment to go by. Nobody to call.
Anything he did would probably be wrong. But his orders had been clear: “This whole deal will fall flat on its face if anyone smells the fact that you’re from the FBI.”
When the S.A.C. said anyone that’s just what he meant. Doctors. Orderlies. Patients. Police. The one unpardonable sin in Waters’ category was doing nothing. Next in line was violating instructions that were clear.
So, he was Leonard Ducro, a reactive depressive who had just found a body. He’d never heard of the FBI. He was a patient in a Rest Home and he’d damn well better get to work and act like one.
He walked down the hall to the office where Boyle and Alren were having coffee and stood stolidly in the door until Dave Alren looked up and said, “What’s the trouble, Mr. Ducro? Can’t you sleep? Let’s go back to your room now and I’ll give you another pill.”
“I wanted to talk to Sandor,” Len said lethargically. “He wouldn’t answer me.”
“Well, he’s asleep, like you should be.”
“No.” Len moved his head in a leaden denial. “He’s dead. Like old man Mackie.” He raised his voice to a higher note. “He’s dead, I tell you. On the floor. Like old man Mackie. Dead—dead—dead—”
Both the orderlies were quickly on their feet. “Now don’t get excited, Mr. Ducro,” Mike Boyle admonished in his deep soothing voice. “Nothing to get excited about. Just take it easy. You go lie down, now. Dave and I will go and see.” One on each side, they expertly hustled Len to Room 14.
Len lay on the bed and closed his eyes. Mike stayed with him. A few minutes later Dave Alren came back and beckoned Mike into the hall.
Len was up instantly, and outside of Room 22 as soon as they closed the door, his ear pressed close to the panel.
Their voices reached him, subdued but clear:
“He’s been murdered all right. Look at that thing, Mike. What’s your guess?”
“Must have been talking to someone outside. Shot through the screen.”
“How could—”
“I’ll bet we’ll find one of the park benches pulled up for someone to stand on. Unless it was moved. Say—”
“That’s not our problem, Mike. What do we do now? Phone the cops?”
“The hell with that. Get Doc Marchand’s fat behind out of his warm bed. This is his little red wagon.”
“Wait a minute.”
“What—?”
There was a sound of an opening drawer. Then Dave exclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. You remember those three nickels and that pencil the old boy kept taped to the bottom of this drawer? Look here, Mike. Th
ey’re gone—but the tapes still here, hanging down.”
“What ever made you think of that?”
“Sandor would have died before he parted with those. Good lord, Mike, you know how they all are. Hoarding some trifling little thing.”
“Let the cops look for them, Dave. We can tell them, but put back the drawer. We’d better call Marchand—”
“There’s another thing—this guy may be in here under a phony name. His real name may be Turlock.”
“Who told you that?”
“A reporter. He slipped me ten bucks last Tuesday to find out if I know of a patient named Turlock—Polish, Russian, or Hungarian. I asked if Sandor might do. He said if Sandor turned out to be Turlock, I’d get another ten.”
“You know this reporter?”
“He’s Maury Morel. Staff writer for the Globe-Star.”
“Well, that’s another you can tell the cops, Dave. Let’s get on the ball.”
Len was deeply feigning sleep when the police arrived an hour later in answer to Dr. Marchand’s call.
Next afternoon Connie took him out. He’d been too upset by questioning, she told Dr. Rheinemann. She was afraid her husband would have a relapse. He didn’t like the atmosphere at all.
Chapter Fifteen
“Who is this character, Harry Catlett?” Maury demanded of Thomas Tremayne Sturtevant.
“I believe I stated Sunday evening, while partaking of that frugal repast at your miserable edifice on Morton Street, that I would obtain additional information for you concerning Crescent Valves, Inc., as well as one Max Rheinemann, and the brokerage house of Metzger, Montross and Stoane.”
T.T. clicked open the lid of a large gold hunting-case watch, squinted at the time through his pince-nez, and returned the watch to its nest in his vest pocket. “It is now three-forty-five on Tuesday afternoon. Our appointment with Mr. Catlett is at four, in his office on the fifth floor of the United States Court House on Foley Square. As Nietzsche said, ‘One must have a good memory to be able to keep, the promises one makes.’ I have a good memory, dear boy. I also mentioned to you and your gracious lady that this extra effort on my part would entail a slight additional fee.”
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