Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (36 page)

But Orpen said it for him. “A traitor?” He shook his head slowly. “This did not happen to me overnight, Scott. It’s been a battle of months, and I’ve been forcing myself to avoid the issue. First, the Hungarian purge, and then the Bulgarian arrests... I knew some of those men, too. I persuaded myself they had made a fool out of me. But now, there’s Jack. I know him too well. I can’t accept this!” He struck a blow at the newspaper with his clenched fist. “If anyone is making a fool of me, of you, of all the rest of us, it is Comrade Peter and the men who give him orders. We work and fight and suffer for the revolution. But they will win it.”

Scott Ettley didn’t speak. The flush had left his cheeks. His face was pale, his eyes were troubled. Then he found the explanation he had been seeking. Peter had discovered some fundamental errors in Orpen’s work—the scandal attached to Thelma’s apartment, for instance; Peter wouldn’t approve of important meetings having been held in such a place—and Orpen was being disciplined. Orpen saw demotion ahead of him. And his years of work, his pride in having been a martyr were making him bitter. Bitter and dangerous.

Orpen was saying, “Open your eyes, Ettley! Who helped you get as far as you have? You don’t think you did it under your own steam, do you?”

“I owe you a certain amount,” Ettley said stiffly. “But I don’t owe you everything. Let’s get that straight!”

“Yes, let’s get that straight. It’s true. You don’t owe me everything; you owe it most of all to your father.”

“What?” Ettley’s lips were tight with anger.

Orpen’s voice became patient. “Scott, I’m telling you this so that you will
listen
to me. Call it shock treatment if you like. But it’s the truth. You owe everything to your father. If he hadn’t been the owner of a newspaper, would I ever have been instructed to develop you so thoroughly, so carefully? If your father had been a plumber or a druggist, where would you be today? Attending mass meetings, handing out leaflets, carrying a picket sign, being given little odd jobs to do. Would you ever, in ten years, have met Comrade Peter? In twenty years? No. You can thank your father for your usefulness to us.”

There was a pause. “Where is the meeting tonight?” Scott Ettley asked in a tight, cold voice.

Nicholas Orpen looked at him. “Now is the time to see what will happen to you,” he warned. “Now is the time to leave. With little to worry you,” he added unhappily.

“Leave the Party?”

“Until it’s safe from foreign control. Until then, we are only betraying it.”

“You’re not sick. You’re crazy!”

“No,” Orpen said wearily, almost hopelessly. “I’m only seeing things in their future shape. Scott, have I ever given you bad advice?”

Scott looked down at him, and moved forward from the mantelpiece where he had been standing. “Yes,” he said quietly.

“Ah,” Orpen said, thinking of Rona too. “But that wasn’t bad advice, Scott.” Then he rose. And in a quiet grave voice he gave Ettley the address of the house where the meeting was to take place. It was on the west side, this time.

Scott Ettley picked up his hat, looked round the disordered room and then turned to the grey-haired man who stood watching him so quietly. Something in the troubled eyes touched him. He found himself saying, “Shall I see you at the meeting?”

Nicholas Orpen shook his head slowly.

“What are you going to do?”

There was a hesitation, a gesture of helplessness from Orpen. “I don’t know,” he said hopelessly. “I don’t know.”

* * *

In the street, the warehouse doors were beginning to close. The last trucks had pulled away. A mechanic stood at the bleak black entrance of the deserted garage, pointing out a direction to a quiet inoffensive man in a neat dark suit. The man offered the mechanic a cigarette, gave him his thanks and, keeping a wary eye alert for the baseball that the kids were throwing over his head, set out at a leisurely steady pace after Scott Ettley.

The mechanic picked up the ball which had rolled near his feet, and threw it back to the boys. He felt pretty good. In the three days he had been working there, that was the first visitor Orpen had allowed to enter his room. And McMann, all dressed up as the new superintendent, tinkering with an electric outlet in the hall of Orpen’s house, would be feeling pretty good too. As soon as McMann had signalled that the fair-haired, well-dressed stranger was a visitor for Orpen, the ’phone call had been made from the garage. And a reinforcement, suitably dressed, had arrived to leave his car and be ready to follow. Now, it was up to the quiet man.

The mechanic threw away the cigarette and admired the makings of a fine sunset this evening—a cleared sky, a nice grouping of high clouds behind the midtown office buildings. He didn’t even seem to glance at the house that interested him as he turned back into the huge cavern of the garage. But from where he worked, he could keep his eye on the one necessary patch of street. That was lucky, he thought. In another half hour I’d have been off duty. If that fellow with the fair hair had come an hour later, then the night watchman would have been the guy who had the excitement of making a ’phone call. It didn’t sound so very much, and it might mean nothing at all. But anyone who visited Orpen was liable to be interesting! That was a cheering thought with which to end a long day.

20

After leaving Orpen, Scott Ettley returned to his own apartment. He walked quickly, urgently, but the route he followed was as random and bewildered as his own mind. Orpen couldn’t mean what he had said. It couldn’t be true. Orpen had only been testing him, surely. Orpen was ill, crazy... But what if Orpen did mean it? There, Ettley’s thoughts stopped. Beyond that question, they could not reach out.

In his apartment, he changed his clothes, discarding his smart double-breasted grey suit for an inconspicuous brown tweed jacket, old flannels, a grey shirt and a plain brown tie. He was now driven by a cold excitement that steadied his nerves, made him feel alert and capable. As he dressed, he worked out a plan for reaching the west side in good time for the meeting. This was not a night on which to be late.

And then he set out. He walked towards Lexington, stopping at a drugstore for a quick sandwich and a cup of coffee. In spite of himself, he began thinking about Orpen again. So I owe everything to my father, he told himself. But do I? We’ll see about that. His worry over Orpen changed to bitterness and anger. We’ll see about that, he thought again, as he paid his cheque. He left the drugstore in a grim mood.

He walked half a block, his nondescript brown felt hat pulled well down over his brow. He lit a cigarette, and dropped the matches. As he bent to pick them up, he could look back along the street. There seemed to be just the usual crowd drawn out of doors by a hint of good weather on a spring evening. Certainly there was no one immediately behind him who could possibly be following him. Still, it was necessary to be careful. He was on his own tonight. From now on, he was definitely on his own. Yes, he admitted frankly then, Orpen had indeed meant what he said.

Did the Committee know about Orpen? Did Comrade Peter? Or was Ettley the first with this news? It was vital, of that there could be no doubt. Orpen must have held a key post in the Party. Jack proved that. Jack had been one of the leaders in Czechoslovakia, and it wasn’t likely that Orpen had worked so closely with him without being on the same high level. In that case, Ettley’s report would be urgent.

Suddenly, Ettley’s excitement left him. He was filled with a sense of shame, a sense of fear, as if Orpen were facing him, reading his thoughts.

No, he decided. I’ve no report on Orpen to make. That isn’t my job. If Orpen is finished, then he is finished. I won’t help in that.

A bus came lumbering down Lexington. He boarded it, counting out his small change. The door wheezed shut behind him, and then opened again with a resigned sigh as a man left on the sidewalk knocked sharply on its window. “You’ll kill yourself yet,” the driver warned the latecomer, who was red in the face, breathing heavily. “What’s all the rush?” The bus started forward, the driver’s bitter eye on the traffic lights which were about to change to red. The man, lurching suddenly with the abrupt start, let his money drop. He bent to pick it up, and all that Ettley noticed before he took a seat in the rear of the bus was a neat grey hat searching for a dime on the floor. “Rush, rush, rush, that’s all people think of,” the driver informed his load of passengers while he changed a dime with one hand, steered with the other, and watched the traffic ahead to gauge the lights he might be able to jump.

It was a quick ride. Ettley left the bus at Grand Central, and took a southbound subway to Fourteenth Street. There, he came above ground again and turned west along the broad sidewalk, making his way through the groups of window-shoppers eyeing the masses of cheap clothes so colourfully displayed under bright lights. He wasn’t sure if he’d take a bus or a subway northwards again. But a bus was waiting at its terminus, with a crowd of people elbowing their way on board, and that decided him. He joined the crowd, and stepped on to the bus in the middle of a talkative group of men and women. Other people followed. By the time he had found a seat, the bus was full. This pleased him; safety in numbers, he thought. And he was pleased, too, when the bus travelled quickly through streets now practically deserted. For at this hour, there were no truckers from the garment district, no delivery vans, no crowds of jaywalkers forcing their way against the stream of traffic.

At Forty-second Street, he left the bus along with several other people, stepping off into a crowd that swallowed them up. He felt safe enough, as safe as he ever felt on this kind of trip. Better stop thinking about Orpen, though, he warned himself for the third time. Concentrate on yourself. He walked quickly, weaving his way under an awning of glaring lights through a crowded block of wandering pleasure-seekers. Times Square, with all its noise and movement and brilliance, was a good place to lose yourself. Then satisfied with his care, and adroitness, he slipped into a subway entrance and took the first express train uptown. When he left it, at Ninety-sixth Street, he had only a few blocks to walk southwards before he turned in the direction of Central Park. Thinking of the long journey, he congratulated himself on its speed and efficiency.

Before he turned east from upper Broadway, leaving behind the brightly lit movie houses and cafeterias, leaving the open-necked shirts and the mink stoles, leaving sidewalks where the older people sat at the doors of small shops and the voices spoke in foreign tongues, he halted at a delicatessen. Seemingly, he was admiring its rich display of lox and bagel, the golden plaited loaves, the bounteous bowls of potato salad and coleslaw, the pyramids of cans and jars, the food boxes for abroad (You pay, We send, They get), the abundance of caviar and sour cream. But all his attention was focused on the quick glance he suddenly threw over his shoulder. Satisfied, he went on his way toward Amsterdam Avenue, where the names above the bars were now Irish, and small stores had Spanish signs advertising cheap travel from Puerto Rico.

The street he sought was a residential one where workers lived. Their cars, parked closely along the curb, shielded the sidewalks and discouraged tentative traffic on the street’s narrowed width. Here, the tempo of city life had slowed down. Three boys played desultory baseball near one corner, two pretty Negro girls were setting out for a movie, a few children hopped and skipped and shared roller skates in front of their houses, one or two women sat at their doorsteps and watched the kids or gossiped, two or three men were passing by. It was a placid enough street, where most people were indoors watching television. A quiet street, a safe street. The light was beginning to fade. The sun had set behind the Hudson River. And there was even a stiff breeze starting up from the west, bringing a breath of cool air.

Scott Ettley was glad of that. Whether it was the crowds through which he had travelled so quickly, or the hot glaring lights of Broadway, or the constant rush of traffic and noise through which he had passed, he felt uncomfortably warm. He mopped his face with his handkerchief, opened his jacket to let his sodden shirt dry. He halted at a closed laundry just after he had crossed Amsterdam Avenue. He still had a few minutes to wait, not enough time to walk around the block. In the laundry’s sheltered doorway, he lit a cigarette. His hand, he noticed, was steady. Steadier than his thoughts. He forced them into a cold logical pattern. He would be business-like, correct; he need not mention Orpen. That’s not my job, he reminded himself again.

He threw away his unsmoked cigarette. Then as he buttoned his jacket over the damp shirt, he noted once more the number on the shop door. The address he wanted must lie in the middle of this block. He glanced at his watch and began walking, not looking at the houses, paying as little attention to the few people on the street as they paid to him. Then, in spite of his decision to keep unconcerned and calm, he felt his pulse quicken as he saw the house.

Like the others in this part of the street, it was a four-storeyed brownstone house with a row of steep steps leading over the basement area to the first floor. It was the first floor he wanted—a doctor’s office, not distinguished by any name plate fixed permanently at the door, but with only a white card stuck in the window between the rain-streaked pane and its drawn shade.

It was exactly eight o’clock as Ettley walked quickly up the steps, stood in the deep entrance, and knocked on the ornamented glass pane of the door. He had been expected, for the door opened quietly and he was admitted into the dark hall. It was Martin, Thelma’s “butler,” who had opened the door. Now, without speaking, Martin led him into the first-floor apartment. The room they entered lay to the front of the house. Its windows were carefully shaded, its lights were crudely bright. Martin—or rather Bill, Bill’s the name, Scott Ettley reminded himself—turned to face him.

He was looking very different from either the obsequious butler he had been last Sunday, or the genial conspirator of Monday night. Here was a third Bill, frowning, angry, nervous. Here was a man who was worried and suspicious. “So you did come,” he said slowly.