The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels (Mammoth Books) Page 13

  Lyons’ face whitened – he would have been more than human if it hadn’t – but at least it stayed steady enough. “Is this it?” he asked.

  The Commandant didn’t answer. A turnkey brought in a folded campstool and set it up, and the official seated himself on it. The turnkey went out and relocked the cell door.

  “You wish to eat breakfast first?”

  Lyons sighed listlessly. “No. What is it?”

  “Has been discussions going on for some time,” began the Commandant by way of introduction.

  “I wondered what was taking it so long,” said Lyons, half to himself.

  “Is politics involved. No harm if you know this. Politics can forgive anything, if necessary. Overlook everything, no matter what.”

  “Why the briefing? I know I’m going to die,” said Lyons morosely. “This is no fun for me.”

  “Finally, agreement has been reached, after long delicate negotiations. Russia have in prison two, three very valuable Japanese secret agents we would like back. Also, Japan for political reasons, have no wish to be bad friends with Russia at this time. Want to conciliate. We already fighting one all-out war. So, in exchange for two, three Japanese agents Russia hand back to us, you be taken out of here some time this week, go under armed escort to Valadivostock, and be turned free on Russian territory.”

  It took several moments for it to sink in. Lyons blinked, and then blinked again. “In other words, I’m not going to hang at all. I’m being traded in for some Japanese agents Russia’s holding.”

  “Exactly,” said the Commandant. “This is not made known, of course, to public or newspapers. Is bad for morale in wartime. But people soon forget your name, think you already been executed. Is higher politics, that’s all. Happen many times before in this world.”

  “I’d be a liar,” Lyons admitted, “if I said I wasn’t glad. Anybody’d rather live than die.”

  “Now all you have to do,” said the Commandant, producing a fountain pen and uncapping it, “you sign one of these two paper, and everything taken care of.”

  “What is it? Can I read it?”

  The Commandant handed it to him. It was short, just a bare couple of lines, and typed in English. He read it half aloud to himself.

  “I, John Lyons, do hereby and for all future time to come renounce my citizenship in the United States of America.”

  He looked up at the Commandant blankly. “What’s the other one, the one I don’t have to sign?”

  “That automatically grant you Soviet citizenship as soon as you sign this first one. But first one must be signed before it can do so.”

  “But why?” said Johnnie dazedly. “Why? I don’t get it.”

  “Is very simple,” said the Commandant impatiently. “You haven’t heard about it here in prison maybe, but my country has been in state of total war with United States America since eight of December just past.”

  “What!” said Johnnie, stunned.

  “With Russia we still continue at peace. Is impossible exchange you as American citizen. As American citizen you must pay death penalty, for spying. Only as Soviet citizen can you be exchanged. Is only technicality, anyhow. You been working for Russia all along, for past several years.”

  “Yeah,” said Johnnie dimly. “But there was no war then. And I hadn’t seen a girl named Tomiko die.”

  He huddled forward and ran his hands through his hair.

  “How much time have I got to decide?”

  “How much time you need, to know if you want to live or die?” said the Commandant ironically.

  “Give me one night’s time.”

  The Commandant rose to his feet. “I return at exactly this time tomorrow morning. You let me know then which you decide.”

  When the Commandant came in he was again holding the same two papers, but there was no campstool this time.

  “Which?” he demanded tersely.

  “Death,” Johnnie said simply.

  The Commandant looked at him hard, for a long time. Then he said, equally simply, “I think you are right.”

  “Can I have one last favor?” asked Johnnie.

  “If possible.”

  “Can I have that paper? The one renouncing . . .”

  The Commandant handed it to him. Johnnie put a match to it. Then he dropped it to the floor and scuffed his foot around on it until it wasn’t there anymore.

  The death procession walked slowly toward the execution place, the Commandant at its head, Lyons in the center, flanked by two rows of three guards each, in stiff military formation. They came out into an open yard, with a pastel-blue sky overhead and clouds like gobs of shaving lather. A door in the cement wall facing them, ominous as the lid of a coffin standing upright, opened by itself before they had reached it. They filed in without breaking step. Then it closed after them, shutting out the light of Lyons’s last day.

  It was dim inside. Incense sweetened the air, and tapers were burning like shimmering little fireflies along an altar, illumining from below the serene downcast face of Buddha, hope and belief of half the world. A priest stood off to one side.

  This was not the death chamber itself, but a temple just outside it, the last way station just before eternity.

  They halted briefly, and the Commandant turned to Lyons. “Would you like to pray?” he asked him respectfully.

  “I’ll take mine straight,” said Lyons shortly.

  “He will say one for you, then,” said the Commandant, indicating the priest.

  “Thanks,” said Lyons. “That I won’t object to.” And as they moved on toward the rear, he suddenly added, “And to show my appreciation – ” Impulsively he jerked loose the little chamoisskin pouch that he had worn around his neck ever since his arrest – they had examined it, of course – and placed the huge diamond it contained in a little lacquered dish that stood there on the altar to receive any last gifts the condemned might wish to make as they moved on by toward the death place.

  Back to the god it belonged to, at long last.

  Behind the temple was the execution place. They led him over where the rope was and turned him around, and he, of his own accord, neatly fitted his feet in between the chalkmarks traced on the floor that showed the place he was to stand.

  And as he stood there, he was saying a prayer of a sort after all. His lips moved noticeably, and his eyes had a concentrated – and yet faraway – look. Not a prayer a church would know, not a prayer for himself or for his own soul. Not a prayer at all, maybe.

  He was saying the names of the states. Not all in the right order – he’d never been that good in geography. And he couldn’t get them all in; the time they gave him was too short. But he did what he could while he stood there.

  “Arizona, Alabama, Arkansas . . .”

  The ready-made noose was deftly fitted around his neck, and closed until it hugged him tight.

  “North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware . . .”

  The executioner tugged at the upright lever with both arms, like a railroad switchman throwing open a section of track. The floor shot open under him, and he was gone, head all the way over to the side.

  Ruth Lyons, still wearing the pallor of the four years of imprisonment that only the American Occupation had brought to an end, walked slowly along the gravelly cemetery path to where the grave was.

  She crouched beside it when she had reached it, and arranged the flowers she had brought with her around the little upright stone marker, but in such a way as not to obliterate it. Then she stood in silence looking down at it.

  It had just four words on it, above his initials. They had told her for what reason he had died. She knew now he would have wanted that to be on there. The words on the marker were:

  Here Lies an American

  J.L.

  LESLIE CHARTERIS

  The Sizzling Saboteur

  1

  Simon Templar had met a lot of unusual obstructions on the highway in the course of a long and varied career of eccentric trav
eling. They had ranged from migrant sheep to diamond necklaces, from circus parades to damsels in distress; and he had acquired a tolerant feeling toward most of them – particularly the damsels in distress. But a partly incinerated tree, he felt, was carrying originality a little far. He thought that the Texas Highway Department should at least have been able to eliminate such exotic hazards as that.

  Especially since there were no local trees in sight to account for it, so that somebody must have taken considerable trouble to import it. The surrounding country was flat, marshy, and reedy; and the sourish salty smell of the sea was a slight stench in the nostrils. The road was a graveled affair with a high crown, possibly for drainage, and not any too wide although comparatively smooth. It wound and snaked along through alternating patches of sand and reeds like an attenuated sea serpent which had crawled out of Galveston Bay to sun itself on that desolate stretch of beach, so that Simon had seen the log a longish while before he was obliged to brake his car on account of it.

  The car was a nice shiny black sedan of the 1942 or BF (Before Freezing) vintage; but it was no more incongruous on this ribbon of road than its driver. However, Simon Templar was noted for doing incongruous things. Enroute to Galveston via Texas City on Highway 146, he hadn’t even reached Texas City. Somehow, back where the highway forked left from the Southern Pacific right-of-way, Simon had taken an even lefter turn which now had him heading southwards along a most erratic observation tour of the Gulf coastline. A long way from the metropolitan crowding of New York, where he had recently wound up a job – or even of St. Louis, where he had been even more recently. Now his only company was the purring motor and an occasional raucous gull that flapped or soared above the marshland on predatory business of its own. Which didn’t necessarily mean that that business was any less predatory than that of Simon Templar, who under his more publicized nickname of the Saint had once left sundry police departments and local underworlds equally flatfooted in the face of new and unchallenged records of predatoriality – if this chronicler may inflict such a word on the long-suffering Messieurs Funk, Wagnalls, and Webster. The most immediately noticeable difference between the Saint and the seagull was the seagull’s protective parosmia, or perversion of the sense of smell . . . Yet the sun was still three hours high, and it was still twenty miles to Galveston unless the cartographer who had concocted the Saint’s road map was trying in his small way to cheer the discouraged pilgrim.

  And there was the smoldering blackened log laid almost squarely across the middle of the road, as if some diehard vigilante had made it his business to see that no casehardened voyager rushed through the scenery without a pause in which its deeper fascinations might have a chance to make their due impression on the soul.

  Simon considered his own problem with clear blue eyes as the sedan came to a stop.

  The road was too narrow for him to drive around the log; and in view of the tire rationing situation it was out of the question to try and drive over it. Which meant that somebody had to get out and move it. Which meant that the Saint had to move it himself.

  Simon Templar said a few casual things about greenhorns who mislaid such sizeable chunks of their camp fires; but at the same time his eyes were glancing left and right with the endless alertness hardening in their sapphire calm, and his tanned face setting into the bronze fighting mask to which little things like that could instantly reduce it.

  He knew from all the pitiless years behind him how easily this could be an effective ambush. When he got out to move the smoldering log, it would be a simple job for a couple of hirelings of the ungodly to attack him. A certain Mr. Matson, for instance, might have been capable of setting such a trap – if Mr. Matson had known that Simon Templar was the Saint, and was on his way to interview Mr. Matson in Galveston, and if Mr. Matson had had the prophetic ability to foretell that Simon Templar was going to take this coastal road. But since Simon himself hadn’t known it until about half an hour ago, it appeared that this hypothesis would have credited Mr. Matson with a slightly fantastic grade of clairvoyance.

  The Saint stared at the log with all these things in his mind; and while he was doing it he discovered for the first time in his life the real validity of a much-handled popular phrase.

  Because he sat there and literally felt his blood run cold.

  Because the log moved.

  Not in the way that any ordinary log would have moved, in a sort of solid rolling way. This log was flexible, and the branches stirred independently like limbs.

  Simon Templar had an instant of incredulous horror and sheer disbelief. But even while he groped back into the past for any commonplace explanation of such a defection of his senses, he knew that he was wasting his time. Because he had positively seen what he had seen, and that was the end of it.

  Or the beginning.

  Very quietly, when there was no reason to be quiet, he snapped open the door of the car and slid his seventy-four inches of whipcord muscle out on to the road. Four of his quick light strides took him to the side of the huge ember in the highway. And then he had no more doubt.

  He said, involuntarily: “My God . . .”

  For the ember was not a tree. It was human.

  It had been a man.

  Instead of a six-foot log of driftwood, the smoldering obstacle had been a man.

  And the crowning horror was yet to come. For at the sound of the Saint’s voice, the blackened log moved again feebly and emitted a faint groan.

  Simon turned back to his car, and was back again in another moment with his light topcoat and a whiskey flask. He wrapped the coat around the piece of human charcoal to smother any remaining fire, and gently raised the singed black head to hold his flask to the cracked lips.

  A spasm of pain contorted the man, and his face worked through a horrible crispness.

  “Blue . . . Goose . . .” The voice came in a parched whisper. “Maris . . . contact . . . Olga – Ivan – Ivanovitch . . .”

  Simon glanced around the deserted landscape, and had never felt so helpless. It was obviously impossible for him to move that sickening relic of a human being, or to render any useful first aid. Even if any aid, first or last would have made any difference.

  “Can you hold it until I get some help – an ambulance?” he said. “I’ll hurry. Can you hear me?”

  The burned man rallied slightly.

  “No use,” he breathed. “I’m goner . . . Poured – gasoline – on me . . . Set fire . . .”

  “Who did?” Simon insisted. “What happened?”

  “Three men . . . Met last night – in bar . . . Blatt . . . Weinbach . . . And Maris . . . Going to party – at Olga’s . . .”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t know . . .”

  “What’s your name? Who are you?”

  “Henry – Stephens,” croaked the dying man. “Ostrich-skin – leather case – in gladstone lining . . . Get case – and send . . . send . . .”

  His voice trailed off into an almost inaudible rasp that was whisked away along with his spirit on the wings of the wind that swept across the flats. Henry Stephens was dead, mercifully for him, leaving Simon Templar a handful of unexplained names and words and a decided mess.

  “And God damn it,” said the Saint unreasonably, to no better audience than the circling gulls, “why do people like you have to read that kind of mystery story? Couldn’t one of you wait to die, just once, until after you’d finished saying what you were trying to get out?”

  He knew what was the matter with him, but he said it just the same. It helped him to get back into the shell which too many episodes like that had helped to build around him.

  And then he lighted a cigarette and wondered sanely what he should do.

  Any further identification of Henry Stephens was impossible. His hair was all burned off, his hands were barbecued from trying to beat out the flames of his own pyre, and the few remnants of his clothes were charred to him in a hideous smelting. Simon debated whether to take the body wit
h him or leave it where it was. He glanced at his watch and surveyed the lonely country about him. There was still no living person in sight, although in the distance he could see a couple of summer shacks and the indications of a town beyond.

  Simon moved the body gently to one side of the road, re-entered his car, and drove carefully around it. Then his foot grew heavy on the accelerator until the side road eventually merged with the main highway and took him on to Virginia Point.

  It was inevitable that the Saint’s irregular past should have given him some fundamental hesitations about going out of his way to make contact with the law, and on top of that he had projects for his equally unpredictable future which argued almost as strongly against inviting complications and delays; but he heaved a deep sigh of resignation and found his way to the local police station.

  The sergeant in charge, who was sticking his tongue out over a crossword puzzle in a prehistoric and dog-eared magazine, listened bug-eyed to the report of his find, and promptly telephoned the police across the Causeway in Galveston proper.

  “I’ll have to ask you to stay until the Homicide Squad and the ambulance comes over to pick up the corpse,” he said as he hung up.

  “Why?” Simon asked wearily. “Don’t you think they’ll bring enough men to lift him? I’ve got business in Galveston.”

  The sergeant looked apologetic.

  “It’s – it’s a matter of law, Mr. – er – ”

  “Templar,” supplied the Saint. “Simon Templar.”

  This apparently meant no more to the local authority than John Smith or Leslie Charteris. He excavated a sheet of paper and began to construct a report along the lines which he had probably memorized in his youth, which had been a long time ago.

  “You’re from where, Mr. Temple?” he asked, lifting his head. “Tem-plar,” Simon corrected him with his hopes beginning to rise again. “I just came from St. Louis, Missouri.”

  The sergeant wrote this down, spelling everything carefully.