Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) (47 page)

There was no answer, only the silence of an empty room.

He turned away from the door and looked at the superintendent expecting to see a look of open triumph. But it seemed as if the man was still listening.

“You were right,” Paul said. “There’s no one there, no one at all.”

The superintendent said nothing. He was looking at Paul now, and there was a change in his expression. For a moment he hesitated, his eyes thoughtful. He decided to take the chance. “Look,” he began, “seems to me as if—”

But Paul had hurried past him and was already half-way downstairs. “Where’s a ’phone I can use? In the hall?” he called back.

* * *

As Rona had climbed the stairs to Orpen’s apartment, her nervousness increased. Everything depended on her first phrases. If they were wrong, she would never get beyond Orpen’s door.

She rang the bell and waited. There was only silence. Then from inside the room came a slight rustle suddenly stilled. He’s hiding, she thought. He is in danger, then. And he knows it. Her doubts and hesitations began to recede. She knocked gently, and she spoke. “This is Rona Metford. I have an urgent message. From Scott Ettley.”

She waited. “This is Rona Metford,” she said again to the man listening on the other side of the door. “This is urgent. About Scott.” Suddenly, she had the feeling that she was being observed. How, she couldn’t tell; she could see no obvious spy-hole. The door opened slightly.

“You came alone?” Orpen asked.

“Yes.”

The door opened still more, just enough to let her slide through into the room, and it closed quickly behind her. Orpen locked it and bolted it.

She looked round the disordered room. Orpen had been writing. A steel box filled with papers stood open on his desk and sheets of typescript were scattered beside it. On the table were scraps of food—a piece of cheese, a hunk of stale bread, a half-emptied can of baked beans, a battered coffee-pot, a dirty cup and plate. The hearth was littered with the thin black curling leaves of burned paper. The ashtrays hadn’t been emptied for days. They were overflowing with crushed cigarette stubs stained with dried lip marks. The windows were closed. The air was stale with pipe smoke, with the clinging smells of cheese and sardines and beer and coffee.

“Yes?” Orpen’s quiet voice asked behind her.

She turned to face him.

He touched his unshaven chin, drew the opened neck of his shirt together. “I haven’t been feeling too well in these last few days,” he said, watching her eyes. “But you needn’t look so horrified. I’m not as ill as I look. What’s the message you bring?” He moved quickly over to the desk, jammed some of the papers into the steel box and snapped it shut.

“Don’t worry,” Rona said. “I’m not a spy.”

He turned to look at her sharply. Then a smile flickered over his grey-white face. “What’s the message from Scott?”

Rona sat down on an armchair. She said, “You are in danger.”

“I am?” His mock concern hid his own feelings. He took off his glasses and wiped them.

She went on, in the same quiet voice, “Scott said you had been condemned. As a traitor.” He was watching her face, but she stared back at him as impassively as she could.

“You expect me to take that seriously?” He made a good pretence of amusement. He gave his glasses a final polish and put them on again.

She shrugged her shoulders. “It seems ridiculous to me, or to anyone who isn’t a Communist. But then, we don’t live in your world.” She looked down at the ashes on the hearth. “Scott took it seriously,” she said. “And so will Thelma and Murray and your other comrades.” She looked up at him quickly. She had struck deep. All the pretended scorn had gone from his face. He was tight-lipped, tense. His shadowed eyes, ringed with lack of sleep, stared out of a white mask.

“Where did Scott learn this?” he asked at last. At the meeting last night? Yes, it must have been there. Last night the decision had been made: Peter’s decision. That explained the watchers down in the street this morning...

Orpen walked over to the window. He stood there, hidden by the curtain, looking down at the warehouse wall. He had thought they had been sent as a warning, like the telephone calls he had treated with silence, like the visitors who had gone away from his door without seeing him. But now he knew they weren’t watching down there in order to frighten him into obedience. They were more than a warning. How many of them? But did that matter? All that mattered was the fact that they were there. Comrade Peter had won.

“Scott didn’t tell me where he learned it,” Rona was saying. She was suddenly thankful for her hoarse voice, it couldn’t give away her tensed emotions. “Scott only told me the message.”

Scott, he was thinking, Scott had known the house would be watched and he had sent the girl. So Scott is on my side, Scott is one ally. But why hadn’t he ’phoned? I would have spoken to him. In an emergency like this, he could have risked a call. Scott knew how to disguise a message and make it seem harmless. Or was Scott too afraid to risk that? Scott was playing safe. As all my friends will play safe, Orpen thought bitterly.

He left the window. He walked aimlessly as if he couldn’t decide what to do next. He stopped at the desk, looking down at the box and the few remaining sheets of paper containing the lists of names that he had made. List after list of men who were in secret control, in absolute power—the policy makers of the American Communist Party. And the answer was always the same. The Americans on that list were few, their power was limited. They were tolerated as Orpen had been tolerated. The real power was in the hands of the Russians. Orders came from Moscow.

Yes, he had always known that; but he had never expected the grip to tighten, to grow more absolute as it had done in those last months. By using the foreigners for all these years, he had led himself to this defeat. By thinking to benefit from them, he had surrendered himself to them completely. And the Party—defeated and surrendered too? The Russians or the Party: that was the choice. That was what he had admitted at last, and he still hadn’t found the answer. He had been condemned as a traitor before he could find the answer. The Russians, the Party. How was it possible to disassociate them, to refuse one and keep the other? And who would help him?

Orpen picked up the last of the lists that he had written. He had made them and burned them and made them again, as if to convince himself that there might be some hope for his revolt. But the answer was always the same. The real power was in the hands of the Russians or of those foreigners who had lived for years in Russia so that they were almost accepted as “reliable.” He wasn’t the only one who had felt this, but the others were wiser than he had been. They accepted the inevitable and forced themselves to rejoice over it. Cynics? What other choice was there, except to give up the Party too? And without beliefs, how did a man live? Without beliefs, and nothing to take their place? Nothing and nothingness. A man became a sleeping eating drinking animal, one of the unthinking mass to be controlled. Without beliefs, there was no power.

He crumpled the sheet of names and threw it back on the desk. I’ve been a fool, an impulsive fool with emotions out of control—the emotions I have always denied myself and warned others against. As I used to warn Scott...

He remembered the girl, then, who sat so silently behind him. He swung around to face her. “Tell Scott to do nothing rash. Tell Scott I was wrong. I will admit my guilt.” Yes, he thought, I shall confess openly that I’ve been wrong in questioning the recent policies of Comrade Peter. That is all they know against me; that is all they need to know. “Well,” he said sharply, “why don’t you leave? You gave me the message, and I’ve given you the reply.”

But she sat very still, her eyes watching him curiously. “It’s too late,” she said, “too late to send any message through Scott.”

Too late... Then Scott Ettley had told the Committee about him. Last night, Ettley had gone to the meeting, last night Ettley had informed. “No,” he said sharply. He put a hand to his eyes, half-covering his face. You can’t even think clearly, he told himself, you can’t even think, far less plan. “It’s too late?” He repeated her words as if he refused to believe them.

Then suddenly, he looked up at Rona, his eyes narrowing, his voice cold and alert. “How do you know it’s too late?” He crossed the room quickly and stood before her. “How do you know anything about me or Scott or the Party?”

Rona didn’t answer. Here is the truth, she thought wearily. Now all the hideous suspicions are bitter facts.

Orpen’s anger was sudden and terrible. “You weakened him. You destroyed him.” Then he restrained himself, forcing his voice down to a quietness that was still more threatening. “He told you everything, didn’t he?”

She shook her head.

“And did he also tell you the penalty he may expect?”

Rona said slowly, quietly, as if she were talking of someone she scarcely knew, “He’s dead.”

Orpen stared at her, unbelieving.

“He came to see me last night,” Rona went on. “He was upset. And afraid. Then—he left me. I heard, this morning, that he had killed himself. He jumped in front of a subway train.”

Was she lying? Was this the trap she had come to set? Orpen’s eyes searched her face. Then, suddenly, he knew she was speaking the truth.

“Why?” he asked at last. “Why did he do this?” The lines on his face were taut. He turned abruptly away. He went over to a chair, but he remained standing, his hands grasping its back as if he needed the support more than he would admit. “Why?” he asked again.

“That is what his father will ask. That’s what I’ve been asking. But perhaps your answer will be nearer the truth than ours.” She looked at her hands and saw the faint white mark of the ring she used to wear. “He lived your kind of life,” she said. “He was beginning to think like you, to act like you.” She looked up at him suddenly, challenging him to deny it. “Have you never felt as Scott must have felt last night?”

His grasp on the chair tightened. “No,” he said bitterly. Ettley the informer... Have you never informed, Orpen? You didn’t call it informing then, you called it duty to the Party. You called it the extermination of traitors and saboteurs. Have you never felt as Scott must have felt last night?—“No,” Orpen repeated, thrusting the chair away from him so that it fell against the table, “you don’t trap me, as you trapped Ettley.”

“Trap you?” she asked, her eyes widening.

“Who sent you here? Ettley is dead. Who sent you?”

“No one.” Did Orpen live in a world of commands, as well as of fears and suspicion?

He looked at her searchingly. Then he moved quickly to the window, standing well behind the curtain, moving it gently so that he could watch the street.

“You see,” Rona said, rising and coming over to him, “you can’t even look out of the window like a normal man. You hide, you are afraid. You can’t walk down a street without looking over your shoulder as if your own shadow would rise up and denounce you. And it isn’t my world that terrifies you. You aren’t half as afraid of my world as you are of your own. Why do you live in it?” She stepped in front of the window.

Orpen caught her wrist sharply and pulled her roughly back to the centre of the room.

“Let me go,” she said angrily.

The grip on her wrist tightened. Last night the grip had tightened.

“Who sent you here?” Orpen asked.

“No one,” she said. “People don’t always have to be told what to do. Let me go!”

“And no one else knows what Ettley told you?”

The grip on her wrist warned her. She kept silent.

He pressed the advantage. “You are the only one who knows about Ettley,” he said.

She shook her head slowly, watching him.

“Who else?” he asked mockingly.

“The police...the police are interested. And the FBI.”

He laughed. “They are?” Then, just as suddenly his mood changed again and he said bitterly, “You are lying. Scott might have told you, but he would tell them nothing.”

“They know,” she said.

He let go her wrist. “Sit down,” he commanded. He stood in front of her, his hands on his hips, his eyes watching her face intently. “Did Scott go to the police? Or to the FBI?”

She shook her head again.

“Did you go to the FBI?”

She hesitated.

He noticed it. “I beg your pardon,” he said with his old biting sarcasm, “did you go to the FBI and the police? I mustn’t forget the double threat.” He shook his head and smiled. “That was too good a try, Miss Metford. One of them might have been believable. But two were a little too much.”

Rona said wearily, “Have it your own way.” Whatever I say, this man only interprets according to his own reasoning. I had to be ordered to come here, I am trying to trap him, I argue with hidden threats, I lie... Must he always doubt the truth?

“If you went to the FBI,” Orpen said with evident enjoyment, “do you know what they are doing now? They are checking on you, not on Scott. They are checking first on you to see if you are reliable before they act. And if you gave them only a lot of wild suspicions, how can they take action? They need facts.”

“So they aren’t the tyrants your propaganda makes them out to be?”

His lips tightened. “And you had no real facts to give them—just an emotional outburst from Scott Ettley. Even if they ever could prove he was a Communist, that would mean nothing. It isn’t illegal to belong to the Communist Party.” That idea seemed to amuse him, for he smiled and added, “You have talked contemptuously of my world, Miss Metford. But at least we aren’t the fools that inhabit yours.”

He looked over at the telephone on his desk. “What did you say to the FBI about me?” he asked. “If you did go to them, that is.”

“I didn’t go to them. They came to see me,” she said.

He was very still. Then slowly, he looked back at her.

“They came to see me this morning about Scott,” she went on. “They seemed to know that he was a Communist. I think they’ve been following him. He was afraid of that, last night.”

Orpen’s face was rigid. Then he moved quickly over to the telephone. I have to risk it, he thought. This ’phone may be tapped, I may be under observation, but I have to risk it. The others must be warned. But he still hesitated, his hand on the telephone.