Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (45 page)

“Why did you go out with him and walk into Central Park?”

“I was trying to help him.”

“He was in trouble?”

“I thought he was.”

“Did he say he was intending to leave the Communist Party? Did he express any fears for his own safety?”

“No. He was—he was just arguing with himself.”

“Was he upset by the broken engagement?”

“He—he had been,” she admitted. “He didn’t speak of it last night.” Only indirectly, only for a moment. He seemed to have forgotten all the wild threats he had made earlier in the week. As if he had come to accept the idea that she was no longer his... Or had he ever accepted it?

“Did he know about the documents which you had received earlier this week?”

“From Charles?” She was startled. “No,” she said. I was the one who spoke about Charles, she remembered. And immediately after I mentioned him, Scott started to leave. He left, and asked me to go with him...

She shivered. That couldn’t be true. Scott had acted on impulse when he went for that walk. I was still safe then. And yet, from that time, the pressure had mounted. Until then, Scott had been arguing with himself, as if he had been trying to persuade himself. Afterward, he had become afraid of what he might have said. And when I spoke of Orpen, he was doubly afraid. We went into the Park...

“Did Ettley ever talk about killing—” the detective began.

“Oh!” she cried out, hurting her throat.

The man waited, watching, saying nothing, his face expressionless.

“So that’s why you are here,” Rona said. “Orpen has been killed.” She spoke as if she had expected it.

“Nicholas Orpen?” Then that is something we have found out, the agent thought. He rose to his feet, and gave Fred a nod.

Rona looked at him in sudden panic. “Scott had nothing to do with that,” she said. “I know.” As far as I can know, she thought unhappily. She was remembering Scott’s face—at the end—when she spoke to him so bitterly. She saw again the look in Scott’s eyes, watching her contempt. And into his eyes had come contempt, too, and hatred. But not for her. “Rona,” he had said pitifully, as if asking her help for the last time, as if seeing himself as clearly as she was seeing him.

The agent picked up his hat. “Orpen is still alive,” he said. He hesitated, and then he decided not to break the news. It would be broadcast over every radio this evening. Scott Ettley was the son of William Ettley, after all. Yes, that would be the simplest way for her to learn. The easiest way for himself, certainly. Yet he still hesitated. It would be a cruel way to learn, too.

He frowned down at the hat in his hand. With an effort, he said, “I’m afraid we have bad news for you.” He looked up at her, but she didn’t help him. He had to say it. “Scott Ettley was found dead, early this morning. He was killed by a subway train. I’m sorry, Miss Metford, but the news will be published in the evening papers, perhaps even in the early afternoon editions. So...” He looked at her and waited.

“Yes,” she said, “it was better that you should tell me.” She didn’t rise. She sat so still that she seemed scarcely to breathe.

“Goodbye, Miss Metford. Goodbye, Barbara.”

Barbara waved a starfish hand.

The front door closed, firmly. The hall was silent again. Rona looked up to see Barbara’s face watching her, half-puzzled, half-frightened. She took a deep breath and got up from the couch. Her movements were stiff, unnatural. “It’s all right,” she heard herself saying, “it’s all right, Barbara.” And as proof of that, she opened the box of lozenges which she still clutched tightly in her hand. “It’s all right,” she repeated, trying to put aside her thoughts of Scott and his father. But it wasn’t all right. Her emotions were suddenly blotted out by a blinding anger: Orpen, she was thinking, Orpen...

* * *

The two agents went downstairs in silence. As Fred unlocked the door of their parked car, he said, “That was a tough half hour, Tom.”

“Yeah. But she took it well.”

“Did she tell the whole truth?”

“As far as she could, I think,” said Tom. “Pity we had to see her, though.”

Fred nodded. They both got into the car. In its privacy, he added, “And we still don’t know whether it was suicide or a political murder. All that trouble for nothing.” He glanced up at the windows of the apartment which they had just left.

“Not altogether,” Tom said. “Orpen’s in danger; we found that out. And there’s only one reason why a man like Orpen should be in danger: he’s breaking with the Party and he’s ready to talk. Better stop at the first drugstore you see, Fred. I’d like to put in a call.”

Fred started the car, and they began travelling westward. “Funny thing,” Fred was saying, “yesterday afternoon we had never even heard of Scott Ettley. Then at five o’clock when he visited Orpen he walked right into the picture. And he insisted on staying in the picture, getting us more and more interested, until he was wiped off completely. What bothers me is the fact that we found so little on him. Where did he keep his Party card? Not even in his room—I thought we might have found it there this morning.”

“Probably been told to destroy it,” Tom said gloomily. “Which makes him still more interesting.”

“Gone underground?”

“Looks more and more like it. I’ve a hunch the girl thought so too.”

“One thing I can say about Scott Ettley. As a Communist who got mixed up with a bunch of suspicious characters, he’s got the shortest file on our records.”

“We can forget him now. Orpen’s the man to watch. And the men who came out of that west side address last night after Ettley left it. Nice quiet little bunch, judging from their descriptions.”

Fred grinned. “Sure,” he was saying as they turned down Broadway and headed for the nearest drugstore where Tom could ’phone, “sure, they are always quiet and respectable guys these days. And all with names as Anglo-Saxon as Tom Jones even if they are straight from Bessarabia or Odessa. Funny thing that whenever they pick a false name it’s always something like Brown or Clark or James. You’d think they despised Russians and Germans and Rumanians, the way they become Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. Now my name’s Fred Bercowitz, and Bercowitz I stay even if it’s a helluva trouble spelling it out for a store clerk. But if I were a Commie, I’d be Fred Berry or Frank Burns.” He shook his head. “Bourgeois snobberies... Who do they think they’re kidding?”

“If they didn’t kid themselves, where would they be?” Tom asked.

25

On Saturday morning, Roger Brownlee’s office was officially closed, giving him time to attend to his “extra-curricular” work as he called it. The outer office, where two typists usually sat, was silent. “No clatter of knitting needles to disturb us this morning,” Brownlee had said when Paul Haydn arrived at midday. “Now, what’s the trouble?” And he listened to Paul’s story, and Paul’s decision.

“That’s all very well,” Brownlee said. “Except that you won’t need to worry much about Scott Ettley now. I’ve just had the information that he’s dead. Sure—that’s official.” And briefly he gave the police report of Ettley’s death.

“Was it suicide—or murder?” Haydn asked.

“Atonement or punishment?” Brownlee shrugged his shoulders. And at that moment the telephone bell rang.

Paul rose from the armchair, looking round the simply furnished room, and walked over to the window to study the courtyard outside. Scott Ettley was dead. Paul couldn’t quite believe it. It seemed almost as unreal as carnations dyed emerald green, as snow in August. Yet these happened too.

Then he became aware that the telephone call was over. He turned to see Brownlee watching him with a frown.

Brownlee said, “What’s worrying you now? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“It’s strange...” began Paul Haydn, and then stopped. “The hour before he died must have been pure hell.”

Brownlee nodded. “Nothing worse than that kind of hell, the hell you realise you’ve created for yourself.”

Paul Haydn said, “And Orpen—what will he think now?”

“As he is told to think. And that doesn’t allow room for any personal guilt.”

“How can he evade it? He began all this, back at Monroe College, when he first worked on Ettley. Sure, I know that Ettley must have had something in him that responded to Orpen’s talk—some lack of moral sense that let him accept lies and trickery as normal action. There must have been a willingness in him to believe Orpen, or he wouldn’t have fallen for his line. Plenty of other young men came under Orpen’s influence and weren’t won over. So Ettley did follow the path he wanted to walk. But last night, it became steeper than he imagined. He jumped off. Where was Orpen? From what we know now, they’ve been working close together.”

“We aren’t the only ones who are interested in Orpen,” Roger Brownlee said quietly. “That ’phone call was from Rona Metford. She wanted Orpen’s address.”

“Rona?” And Brownlee had given her the address. Paul had heard that much of Brownlee’s answers on the ’phone.

“She was insistent,” Brownlee said. Then he added quietly, “She knows that Scott Ettley is dead.”

“She’s going to Orpen’s?”

“She didn’t say.”

“She’s going to Orpen’s,” Paul said. He stared at the desk.

“It’s well guarded, inside as well as out,” Brownlee reminded him. “And Rona, although you may not know it, still has her own escort.”

“You’d let her go to see that man?” Paul burst out angrily. “You’d—”

“Easy, Paul, easy. As I’ve been told, no one has been allowed by Orpen to enter his apartment in these last three days—except Ettley yesterday afternoon. He’s kept himself out of touch, completely. He’s afraid, obviously. Something is wrong. Something is very far wrong for Comrade Orpen. Rona might be the one person he’d see. If she brought him the news of Ettley’s death, he might even talk to her. That might be the mood he’s in.”

“I don’t like it,” Paul said. “She’s been through enough.”

“Yes, she’s suffered enough, I agree. But she isn’t the one taking the punishment this time, Paul. She’s going to hand out a little punishment, for a change.”

“She’ll only get hurt.” Paul started toward the door. “You were crazy to give her that address.”

“She was hard to refuse. She’s angry, Paul.”

“Rona?”

Brownlee nodded. Then he said quickly, “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think? To protect Orpen?” Paul closed the door with exaggerated care. He always did that; Brownlee remembered, when he was at his angriest.

Brownlee made one telephone call, suggesting politely that the watchers around Orpen’s house be alerted. That, he was told, had just been done; a new angle to the Orpen situation had been reported. Then he tidied his desk, putting back into the safe the papers on which he had been working, and locked everything methodically. He left the office twenty minutes later than Paul. There was time enough, he thought. It would take Rona Metford at least three-quarters of an hour to travel from the Tysons’ apartment to Orpen’s street. This was a tricky situation. Yet the best way to deal with it might be the spontaneous idea, the natural action. He had proved that before in equally difficult problems—the solution was begun from the moment you accepted the spontaneous idea and made use of it. That was one reason why he had given Rona the address she asked for. And the other reason? Simply that Rona would have found the address somehow, perhaps from Milton Leitner or another student who had visited there. And, then, Brownlee would not have known when she was going to visit Orpen. That would have been really troublesome.

But Brownlee had misjudged one fact. Rona had not telephoned him from the Tysons’ apartment uptown.

* * *

After the two agents had left her, Rona ended all indecision by borrowing a dress from Peggy’s closet and taking Barbara to the apartment upstairs. There, she left Barbara safely with the slightly surprised but welcoming Burleighs. (“Delighted to Rally Around,” Moira Burleigh had said, that being her phrase of the month, and she rushed to the kitchen to set another apple baking and shape up another hamburger, while the two small Burleighs and Barbara invaded the living-room with high soprano shrieks, quite ignoring Frank Burleigh at his desk, his pen poised as he searched for the
mot juste
to end another chapter. He gave up the unequal struggle and was last seen heading for the bathroom, manuscript and pen in hand.)

Rona took a taxi downtown, leaving it at Lexington and Fiftieth, entered the first cigar store she saw, and went straight to the telephone directory. But it gave her no help. Orpen’s address was unlisted. His apartment was in this district, she knew. Scott had once said it wasn’t too far from her own, and she had come here quickly, so determined and sure of finding Orpen. For a moment she hesitated, then she refused to be defeated. Perhaps Paul could help, he might know Orpen’s address. Or Roger Brownlee would be better still. Paul would want to deal with Orpen himself. But Paul didn’t know all the facts. He couldn’t deal with Orpen.

As for me, Rona thought, I’ve only my suspicions and guesses—not enough to tell Paul or Brownlee or those two men who came to question me this morning. But Orpen won’t know they are only suspicions. He may tell the truth, thinking that I know it. All’s fair against Orpen.

She was in this mood when she telephoned Roger Brownlee. She remembered, as she dialled his number, that it was Saturday and his office could be closed. What would she do then? She must see Orpen before he had heard of Scott’s death. That was important, she knew. But her sudden attack of worry, that nervous sickness, ended as the telephone’s signal stopped and she heard Roger Brownlee’s voice.

It’s only a few blocks away, she thought, coming out into the bright May sunshine again. She hesitated on the sidewalk. I’ll walk slowly and arrange my thoughts, she decided. God knows they need arranging at this moment. And I can’t face Orpen unless I know what I mean to say. She turned eastwards, and then, reaching Third Avenue, she walked south. The street was busy, warm and friendly. People were relaxing; it was Saturday, another week of work was over, the sun was up and the sky was blue. She skirted a group of playing children, avoided the baby carriages heaped with the week-end groceries, listened to the words and the snatches of talk, watched the faces and the gestures and the carefree confidence.