Or the World Will Die

IV

At the foot of my hill I crossed the wet ditch and sat on top of the damp stone wall. The top stones had been dried by the sun.

The life of the past had come closer; it had come into the village in the night and touched on my existence once more.

I remembered the warm light in Quinn’s eyes as he had talked of his job, of the Atom Foundation, of the successful efforts to delay the perfection of the Lessault Device. A sensitive and perceptive man, Quinn. Thoroughly dead. Probably slugged across the forehead as he was sleeping, with the fire to destroy the evidence of the blow.

I had a decision to make. It forced itself upon me. It would have been difficult but possible to say no to the man while he was alive. Suddenly it seemed almost impossible to say no again to the charred face, the sightless eyes — no identity left save the long slim bone structure.

Obviously Quinn had made no attempt to conceal his movements, evade those who would follow him. By traveling openly he had compromised me, assuming that I would have agreed to take the job on. I have a great distaste for the administrative methods of our Intelligence agencies. In other countries the agencies are given funds and are not required to account for the use of those funds. Our OSS operated that way during the war. It is the only way. But, during peacetime, Intelligence agencies must account for every penny, and all payments go on record. The red tape of bookkeeping serves to compromise the agent in the field and hamper his movements. I had no faith in stepping into the bureaucratic picture and preventing being further compromised.

For purposes of safety, I must assume that whoever had gotten rid of Quinn had a good idea of the purpose of his visit and a fair dossier on me. I must further assume that my movements were known and evaluated.

I thought that it would have made far more sense for them to have eliminated me, thus assuring that Quinn would be unable to secure my help. The reason for the elimination of Quinn baffled me. He had told me that he was getting nowhere, and there was no reason to doubt him. Thus, why take the risk?

I slid off the wall and walked briskly up the hill, determined to think of other things. Whistling in the dark, I suppose.

I went up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed, looking out across the hills, still grey with the touch of winter.

At last I called James and he came up.

I said, “James, I am going away for a time. You will make a garden, a large garden of flowers and vegetables. I will leave you three hundred dollars on which to run the house. Should anyone call here, you will tell him that I have gone to visit an old friend in San Francisco and you have unfortunately forgotten the name. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sahib. How large a garden?”

“A very large garden.”

“When is the sahib leaving?”

“Tonight.”

That was all. I heard him singing in the kitchen as I packed. I selected a very ordinary looking brown suitcase and filled it with conservative clothes. Dark, well-worn suits, shirts carefully mended. Slightly shabby and altogether respectable. A salesman of plumbing supplies. Or the owner of a small candy store. A small gold and enamel lodge pin in the lapel. A worn briefcase.

I took only one item which was out of character. It deserves description. It was fastened to a worn gold chain which I thread through a buttonhole of my vest. It looks like a toy pistol, and automatic. I had it gold plated. It looks as if it might be a trick pencil sharpener, or a lighter. It is but slightly larger than a pocket watch. Actually it is a German Kolibri, a three millimeter automatic that would inflict a bee sting from across the street, but would mean certain death if fired into your eye, ear or throat from close range. The bore is about one seventh of an inch in diameter. The chain is fastened to the rear of the grip, so that when you pull on the chain, as though about to look at a watch, it slides up into your fingers in firing position. I carry it with a shell in the chamber, the minute safety off. The clip holds eight slugs. I carry twenty extra rounds in the bottom of an opague bottle of pills. On the other end of the chain is one of those coins with a hinged semicircular knife blade that slides into it. In addition to the knife blade there is a coiled length of thin spring steel with the end bent into one of the more useful designs of lock pick. The spring itself, when slipped under the ratchets, will release almost any standard variety of handcuff. An innocuous arsenal.

I opened my wall safe, counted out the three hundred for James and took two thousand for myself. The largest bills I took were fifties, and there were only six of those. I made certain that I was completely without identification of any kind, including labels in the clothes and laundry marks.

After dinner I took the suitcase, and, with the aid of a pocket Hash and a small luminous compass, set out across country for the eight mile walk that would take me to a larger town where I could catch a two A. M. bus to New Haven.

Three hours later I cleaned the mud off my shoes by the light of the flash, threw the compass into the brush and walked into town. The late theater crowd was letting out, the drugstores packed with teen agers, nearly all of the houses dark. I found the bus terminal, bought a ticket to New Haven and a magazine. As I walked over to the hard bench for the two and a half hour wait, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror set into the front of the cigarette machine. I saw a plain sober man in a suit that was slightly tight across the middle. He looked dull, tired and uninteresting. If you had been in that terminal, you would have given him one casual look and then ignored him. Later, you would have been unable to give any description of him except, “Well, he was just an average looking guy in a dark suit. Yeah, he had a suitcase I think. How old? Gosh, anywhere from forty to fifty. Medium size. Average build, maybe a little stocky. Hair? Sort of brown I guess. I didn’t really look at him.”

I read my magazine and watched the people who came into the terminal. One bus left, and there were only three of us waiting. Myself, an old man with tobacco stained lips who mumbled to himself, and a Polish looking woman with two large bundles.

It is best never to completely relax. It is best to always assume that the most impossible looking person is the one who has been assigned to you. Disaster comes quickly to the smug, the egocentric, the careless.

I wished to leave no trail. Possibly I had succeeded. There is never a way to be completely certain.

A little after one a girl came in carrying a small cheap suitcase, of the design intended to be light weight for travel in aircraft. A blue and grey stripe on coarse lacquered canvas. She was quite tall and her legs were good, though thin. Her heels were run over, her dyed blonde hair dry and burned looking on the ends. She wore a short green coat in a livid shade. The bones of her face were good, but her eyes were shadowed in blue and her mouth was a soft crimson smear.

I heard her buy a ticket to New Haven. She sat on the bench about eight feet from me. I put an arch, silly smile on my face, leaned over and handed her the magazine. “Would you like this, Miss? I’ve finished it.”

She gave me a quick hard stare, an inventory stare, the kind that counts the bills in your wallet and the holes in your socks. She decided I was harmless, I believe. She said, “Thanks,” and took it, but, as I had expected, she didn’t open it immediately. She put it beside her on the bench and stared across at the grilled window of the ticket office, awaiting my next move.

I slid over closer to her and said, “I couldn’t help hearing you say you wanted a ticket to New Haven. I’m going there too.”

“How remarkable,” she said coldly, taking on what she evidently believed to be a distinguished accent.

“I don’t want to annoy you,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t sleep on the bus and I thought it would be nice to have someone to talk to.”

By the time the bus arrived, I carried her bag out to it and helped her, smiling, up into the bus. We sat together and she told me a very dull tale, possibly true, about how she was a “beauty operator” who was going down to New Haven on a better job. I told her that the company employing me had folded and I was traveling around looking for a good line to handle. Something in hardware preferably.

She made coy remarks about, “You salesmen,” implying that I was a sort of devil on wheels, and I managed to retain my sickly grin.

But she served her purpose. We were traveling as a couple, and she thus became a bit of smoke screen, a red herring along the trail. There no longer was a stocky average man, traveling alone. The bus was darkened so that the others could sleep. When we went through the small cities, the streetlights shone through the muddy windows, lighting up her plain good face with its thick coat of cosmetics, showing me the dull look in her grey eyes as her moist lips uttered the most appalling series of platitudes and clichés.

We sat together in the bus terminal in New Haven and waited for the dawn. She fell asleep and sagged against me, her burned hair on my shoulder, the caked lips parted, deep lines etched from the edge of her thin nose to the corners of her mouth. She murmured once in her sleep, telling someone that, “I won’t do it, I tell you. I won’t.”

I sat with my arm around her, my suitcase on the bench beside hers and planned what I would do next.

I finally made my quixotic decision. I would avoid Quinn’s outfit. I would work on the case cold, with no help, no entangling restrictions from the Washington office. Maybe it had something to do with the look in Holmes Quinn’s grey eyes.

I was on a job again, and I was afraid. It wasn’t the quick sort of fear, the terror that sometimes comes. It was a slow dull fear that knotted the muscles of my back and gave me a sour taste in the back of my throat.

There is nothing in the world as lonely as a mission among your enemies, even in your own land, among your own people.

My sleeping friend stirred again and awakened. The street outside was wet with rain and grey with the light of morning. “Geez, how I could use some coffee,” she said. I picked up the two bags and we walked out into the rain.