Curtain for a Jester Page 18

  The mezzanine from which she had come was a wide bridge across an enormous room. Corridors ran under it. If she could run back through one of the corridors, she could get to where Jerry was.

  She turned to her left, and moved again between counters. On one of the counters, the one on her right, she could just make out the dull gleam of—she checked herself for an instant, and looked unbelievingly. Arranged neatly on the wooden top of a counter were a dozen automatic pistols. Pam North seized the nearest and went on.

  She came to a corridor which, since it again ran to her left, must go under the mezzanine bridge. It was almost completely dark in the corridor. Pam held the pistol tightly, a little in front of her, and plunged into the darkness.

  Almost instantly, she walked into something, and the something was soft and yielding—and human. For a moment, Pam was locked with the other as in an embrace, and then each pushed against the other and Martha Evitts said:

  “John. No!” And then, “You’re not John!”

  Martha spoke softly, her voice reedy.

  “Sh-h!” Pam said, and whispered. “It’s Pam North. Punch is chasing me.”

  She reached out and held Martha’s arm.

  “I’ve got a gun,” Pam said. “We’ll—”

  “Let me go,” Martha said. “Can’t you understand? Let me go. John isn’t here. He didn’t—”

  She pushed at Pam, trying to get past her.

  “Wait,” Pam said. “I don’t know whether John Baker’s here. He could—somebody’s dressed as Punch. And somebody killed Mr. Dewsnap. Somebody dropped—”

  “You’ve got to let me go!” Martha said, and pushed and Pam took a step back in the darkness and would have fallen but someone caught her.

  “What the devil?” a man’s voice said, harshly, and a thin, questing ray of light shot out and fell on Pam North’s face, moved to Martha’s face.

  “John,” Martha said. “Don’t—don’t—”

  The man had a revolver in his hand. He was not pointing it, but it was ready. The pencil of light had not found the automatic in Pam North’s hand. She raised it, pointed it in the general direction of the light.

  “Let us go or—” Pam said and then, convulsive, with the automatic pointing at the man, she pressed a trigger.

  A balloon—a quite large, vari-colored balloon—spread itself from the muzzle of the automatic. It squeezed itself out and spread and spread, and then it floated prettily from a cord in a narrow shaft of light, at the end of the automatic. Pam stared at the balloon without belief.

  Then she turned and tried to run, but Martha Evitts blocked her progress in one direction and the man with the light in the other.

  Pam used the automatic as a club, the balloon wavering grotesquely, and swung it at the hand which held the light. Martha cried, “Don’t! It’s John!” and the butt of the automatic hit the metal of the flashlight with a sharp sound and the light went out and down and clattered on the floor.

  “Of all the—” the man said, and grabbed at the automatic and the balloon gave a loud “pop!” in the darkness. Pam leaped to the side, holding Martha’s hand, dragging at her. For an instant, Martha Evitts resisted; then she came. A hand caught at Pam, held briefly to the fabric of her blouse, and the blouse gave.

  “You little idiots,” the man said. “Wait. Don’t you—”

  They heard him. They did not stop. They ran out of the corridor into the rear showroom. Silhouetted against one of the distant windows, Punch towered. At the sound of their running, Punch turned toward them.

  “I know it’s John,” Martha said. “I—”

  “With Punch’s head,” Pam said, in a whisper. “Under here!”

  Jerry came out of the blackness and pulled himself up, holding to the counter. He was on his feet, but the room wavered around him. He had to get to Pam.

  Holding to the counter, while the room still wavered, he looked up at the mezzanine window. He could see all of the little office and it was empty. No—he could not see it all. He could not see the floor of the office. Pam was not standing there, not at the telephone on the desk. She might be—

  His legs were lead; his whole body seemed numb. There was a man somewhere who was quick and merciless, who—He heard a sound, but as he stood it was behind him. He turned, slowly, painfully, and between him and the entrance door there was a man, coming toward him.

  Jerry forced himself to stand unsupported in the aisle; forced himself to walk—although in reality he staggered—toward the man, whose face was a blur in the light. The man stopped and stared at him.

  “Slug me, will you,” Jerry said, and swung at the man while he was still some feet from him. Jerry swayed and the man caught hold of him, and held him.

  “And what,” Sergeant Mullins said, “is the matter with you, Mr. North?”

  “Teach you to—” Jerry said, and struggled for a moment and his head cleared. “Got slugged,” Jerry said, in his own voice. “Pam went to—” He remembered it all, now, more clearly. “Up there,” he said, and pointed.

  They looked up at the window of the mezzanine office. A tall figure in black stood there. It wore the head of Punch, the immortal. It looked down at them through Punch’s eyes. Then it turned, and seemed to stalk toward the rear of the room.

  “What goes on here?” Mullins said, in a voice that filled the spreading room. “In the name of all the saints—what goes on here?!”

  Martha Evitts was saying, “No, you don’t understand. The other man—not—not the man with the mask” and Pam said, “Listen. Listen!”

  And then Pam North stuck her head out from under the counter where she had pulled Martha Evitts, pushing aside the black stuff which had curtained them, and spoke. Pam North yelled.

  “Mullins!” Pam cried. “Sergeant Mullins! Watch out for Mr. Punch!” She paused, gathered breath. “Jerry!” She yelled. “Jer-ree. I’m here!”

  It was perhaps the least illuminating remark Pamela North had ever made. But she made it loudly.

  And then, all over the considerable area of the Novelty Emporium, lights went on.

  Light changed everything. All that had been shadowy and strange was harshly obvious and, if still strange, so without eeriness. But there was more than that—noise gave place to silence, violent action to cautious movement. And everything—to Pam, standing in an aisle with Martha Evitts beside her—happened at once.

  Jerry ran, and staggered as he ran, down a passage under the mezzanine bridge, and another man ran after him, apparently in pursuit. A smallish man dodged back and forth around a table which was piled with dolls, and two men dodged this way and that with him, in a kind of dance. He broke and ran and one caught him roughly; Jerry was beside Pam and had his arms around her—and to some degree around Martha Evitts, also—and the man who had pursued Jerry was Sergeant Mullins, who ran on past the three of them toward several men who seemed just to have entered the room—but from a doorway at the rear, not under the mezzanine.

  Then, through another passage under the mezzanine, a uniformed patrolman came running. Just as he reached the second room, he stopped and turned. In an instant he was grappling with still another man. They swayed for a moment, clinching, and then the man not in uniform freed himself. He turned a little as he did so, and there was light on his face and he was John Baker.

  Martha Evitts screamed, and then cried: “No. John! Don’t!” but John Baker, moving so quickly that the movement could hardly be seen, struck the policeman on the side of the jaw and the policeman staggered, revolved slowly and collapsed. Mullins veered in an aisle toward Baker and had his revolver ready and a voice came sharply from among the men who had entered by the rear door. “Hold it, sergeant,” the voice said, commanding, and Mullins half turned, blank surprise on his face. “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “Hold it.” Weigand ran toward Baker and Mullins and brushed a table as he ran. Toads of many sizes spewed from the table spreading, bouncing, on the floor.

  “Where is he?” Weigand called, as he ran, and Ba
ker said, “Somewhere around” and then, “Where’s Saul?”

  “Front,” Bill said.

  Then Baker, who was looking beyond Weigand, said loudly, “Stop him, damn it!” and a man in civilian clothes pounced like a big cat on the smallish man, who had dodged so agilely and had somehow, momentarily, dodged free.

  One of the men who had come in with Bill Weigand said, “Look, for God’s sake!” and pointed toward a far corner of the room—the corner nearest the rear windows, most distant from all of them.

  There was a spiral iron staircase there. A grotesque figure in black, the black spangled with stars, was going up the staircase. As the man who had seen him first shouted again and pointed, the spiral brought the figure around again and it looked down at them from the face of Mr. Punch. As the figure paused for an instant his grotesque shadow hesitated on the wall beyond.

  Then the figure went on up the stairs.

  “The door’s locked,” Martha Evitts said, tensely, beside Pam. “It’s always locked!”

  The figure had reached the top of the spiral stairs, and the door there. The black robe hid movement, but it was clear Punch tried the door—clear, as he turned, that the door had stopped him.

  Men were running toward the staircase then—there were half a dozen men running down aisles, around tables. Baker bent quickly over the policeman on the floor, and did something, and then ran with the others toward Mr. Punch.

  Mr. Punch stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at them all.

  “They were all rats,” Mr. Punch said, rather loudly, but in the same muffled, slurred voice Pam had heard before.

  “Hey,” one of the men who looked up said, and said it in a tone of utter surprise. “That’s the man who—that man’s dead.”

  “It is, Fox,” Bill Weigand said. “But he isn’t—don’t do that!”

  “Why?” Mr. Punch asked.

  He had something in his hand; the light glittered on it—on the blade of a knife.

  Mr. Punch held the knife, with its long blade pointed inward toward himself, and held it with both hands. He held it so for an instant, looking down at it, and then plunged the knife toward his own chest—plunged it until hands met chest, the hilt of the knife between them.

  He held it so, for a second, and then slowly moved his hands away and looked down at them. Only the hilt was between the hands. The blade had broken—

  Mr. Punch laughed, then—a high, strange laugh. He opened the clasped hands and the hilt of the knife fell from them, and began to clatter down the stairs. As it bounced, the blade shot out from the hilt and the thing was a knife again—as much of a knife as it had ever been.

  “You may as well come down, Monteath,” Bill Weigand said, mildly.

  “Yes,” Arthur Monteath said, from behind the grotesque mask of Mr. Punch. “You do seem to have won the last trick, don’t you?”

  Arthur Monteath came down the circular stair. In spite of the steepness of the stairs, the impediment of the long, starred robe, his descent was not without dignity.

  XII

  Friday, 5:45 P.M. to 7:10 P.M.

  Dorian Weigand sat in a deep chair, her right foot tucked under her left leg. A Siamese cat lay on her lap. A drawing pad rested on the cat, and Dorian made a picture on the pad—a picture of a towering astrologer with the head of Mr. Punch, standing at the top of a spiral staircase. The down-hooking nose of Mr. Punch all but met the chin which spiked up beneath it. Mr. Punch was in his most malevolent mood, and he cast a grotesque shadow on the wall

  “Was that the way it looked?” Dorian asked and Pam North, who stood above her, carrying a plate of olives and sliced raw carrots, said, “Um-m. Yes. Only worse, if anything. You don’t show the knife. But—that’s pretty much the way it looked. Olive?”

  “It seems,” Dorian said, “a little extreme, somehow. I guess not right now.” The last appertained to the olive.

  “Well,” Pam said, “Mr. Monteath seems to be an extreme man. Dropping the dummy off the roof. To say nothing of poor Mr. Dewsnap on his head. To say nothing of Mr. Wilmot, to begin with.”

  She gestured with the olive-carrot plate at Jerry North, who shuddered; at Bill Weigand, who merely shook his head. Pam took an olive. She looked at the carrots and said that what they needed was a rabbit. She returned to her own chair and sipped from the glass beside it.

  “To be perfectly honest,” Pam said, “I was surprised. But you weren’t. That’s why Sergeant Fox was there. To identify the voice. But you knew already.”

  This was to Bill Weigand, who sat in another chair, with another cat. The cat was Martini, and this was remarkable. Martini was more apt to nibble people (other than the Norths) than to sit on them.

  “I told you you can always go by cats,” Pam said to Jerry.

  “You did indeed,” Jerry said. “And you couldn’t, as it turned out. Because, if you could have, Punch would have been Mr. Baker. And Mr. Baker is—what, Bill? FBI?”

  “Near enough” Bill said, and did not amplify. They waited. “His name isn’t Baker,” Bill said. “He’s older than he looks.”

  “Martha will like that,” Pam said. “Of course, it will be confusing not knowing what her name is.”

  They all looked at her. Jerry blinked.

  “They’d been after Mr. Wilmot for some time, then,” Pam said. “Or was it more Mr. Dewsnap?”

  Bill shrugged. He had not been informed; it was unlikely that he would be. At a guess—Dewsnap had headed it, had been the professional.

  “A spy ring,” Pam said. “Right here in this apartment house. Atom bombs and everything.”

  Bill said he gathered atom bombs, as such, had already been pretty well taken care of. There were other things—a good many other things. He hadn’t been told what; wouldn’t be told what. But—if she cared for the term—a spy ring.

  “I like it very much,” Pam said. “And Mr. Wilmot was sending plans of things disguised as plans for other things—I mean magic cabinets and what not—to—to whom?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “To anyone who would buy, I imagine. That was all the other side of it, Pam. Not our side. Of course, the two things dovetailed.”

  “Suppose,” Dorian said, “somebody begins at the beginning? I came in at the end. This—” She gestured with the drawing pad. The cat on her lap stood up, arched back, revolved twice and sat down again. “Please, Sherry,” Dorian said. “You don’t need your spikes. I won’t let you fall off. Well?”

  Bill finished his drink. He looked at his empty glass. Jerry went for the shaker, mixed again, filled glasses.

  “Now,” Pam North said.

  “It began with blackmail,” Bill said. “Monteath admits that. Blackmail of his wife. He doesn’t say what she had done—or what it could have been made to appear she had done. He says, ‘I killed a man to keep a secret. Why should I tell it now?’ Behren knows, of course. But Behren isn’t in our hands. In any case, it doesn’t matter too much. And—I probably wouldn’t tell if I knew. The woman’s dead. She’s been dead a long time. She didn’t want to live. In effect, she killed herself. When I found that out, there was a pattern.”

  “You knew more than we did,” Pam said, with a somewhat defrauded air.

  Bill admitted that. He said, mildly, that that, among other things, was what policemen were for.

  “I wish,” Dorian said, “that people would quit interrupting people.”

  Bill grinned at her. He said, “Right.” He said it was this way.

  Years before, in Maine, Arthur Monteath had killed a man he said was an unknown intruder who had tried to force his way into a seaside cottage. The local police accepted this. It was not true. The man Monteath had killed was one of two not very skillful blackmailers—apprentice blackmailers. The other had been a red-haired young man named Alexander Behren. Monteath admitted, now—now that he was admitting almost everything—that the man he killed, Parks, and Behren had come to the cottage by arrangement, to collect. But by the time they came, Monteath ha
d decided not to pay, but to kill. His wife’s heart attack which he blamed on the strain she had been under—“I don’t know how justly,” Bill said. “But it was what he thought”—had made him ready to kill. He had planned to kill both men. Behren had escaped.

  Behren had not tried again, partly—one could guess—because he decided Monteath was too dangerous; partly because, with Mrs. Monteath dead, he had no safe victim. He could not tell what he knew about Parks’s death without revealing what had taken him and Parks to the cottage. Shortly after, Behren had been inducted into the army. The whole affair seemed to have ended.

  Bill paused to sip from his glass.

  “You got all this from Monteath?” Jerry asked. “After last night?”

  “In detail,” Bill said. “Before that, it was an hypothesis——based on a nurse’s memories. A pattern into which things seemed to fit. It gave me an assumption—something to test out.”

  So—with Mrs. Monteath dead, with Parks dead, with Behren in the army, the Maine affair appeared to have come to an end. If Wilmot and his wife had not, while on vacation, happened to stop by the Monteath cottage, it probably would have ended there.

  “And here, I’m still guessing,” Bill said. “Wilmot’s dead; Mrs. Wilmot doesn’t know; Monteath says he doesn’t know, whether Wilmot was involved in the blackmail attempt. I don’t know. He may have been. He may not have been—the Wilmots’ visit may have been entirely fortuitous. I rather suspect it was—and that Monteath’s attitude, before the fact, aroused Wilmot’s interest, after the fact. Monteath may have been obviously anxious to get rid of the Wilmots; Mrs. Wilmot thought he was. Wilmot may have suspected something was up. And if Wilmot was already involved in espionage, it would occur to him that Monteath might one day supply information, under pressure. The killing of Parks, if it wasn’t what it seemed to be, would give the means of applying pressure. My guess would be that Wilmot kept an eye on things and, when Behren came into it, got in touch with Behren—and got information that, when the time came, he could use. Monteath wasn’t ready for pressure then. He could be left to—well, to ripen, as he went on in the State Department. Wilmot could wait.”