Pale Betrayer
Authors: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —
The Denver Post
“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —
The Miami Herald
“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes,
Los Angeles Times
“A joyous and unqualified success.” —
The New York Times
on
Death of an Old Sinner
“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —
Daily Mirror
(London) on
Death of an Old Sinner
“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —
The New York Times
on
A Gentleman Called
“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —
Chicago Tribune
on
A Gentleman Called
“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —
The New Yorker
on
The Judas Cat
“A book to be long remembered.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
on
A Town of Masks
“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —
The New York Times
on
The Clay Hand
“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —
The New York Times
on
A Death in the Life
“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —
Library Journal
on
The Habit of Fear
“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and
Shock Wave
is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Shock Wave
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
For
Judy
and
Steve
prologue
A
LTOGETHER THEY HAD MET
only three times and that night, the twenty-fourth of May, they would gather without meeting, and for the last time. Eric Mather would stand in full view beneath the street lamp and give the sign by which the others would know that all was as he had said it would be; they would wait in the shadows and move after he had gone. A man’s briefcase would be stolen. It was not likely that he would even go to the police, for he was a busy man and the briefcase, to his knowledge, would contain nothing irreplaceable. In the morning the briefcase would, as it were, advertise its owner: it would be discovered in a postal deposit box, its contents—again to the owner’s best knowledge—intact. The joke would seem to have been on the thief who had stolen a few strips of highly publicized and widely disseminated film and the jottings of a noted physicist, his impressions of the international conference from which he had just returned.
Three times they had met, Mather and his co-conspirators, whose names he knew only as Jerry and Tom. Nor did he want to know more of them. He had not even wanted to know what they specifically knew of him. After that night it would no longer matter.
The first meeting had occurred in New York’s Washington Square. Mather, having finished his last lecture of the day at Central University, was standing in the February sun looking vainly for signs of spring. He was watching a group of students, two or three of his own among them, distributing ban-the-bomb literature, one of their leaflets in his hand.
“What good do you think that will do?” a man said. Mather had not noticed him until he spoke. Short, pudgy-faced, he seemed vaguely familiar. Afterwards Mather knew to whom “Jerry” bore a resemblance. At the time he supposed he knew him from the university corridors.
“As a friend of mine would say, it can’t harm,” Mather said. He started to walk away.
The stranger caught up with him, not saying anything for the moment and needing to take three steps to Mather’s two in order to keep pace. Mather did not like it. He did not like Washington Square and wished he had walked out of the park instead of into it. He stopped abruptly. “Should I know you?”
“Let me put it this way, Eric: you will. My name is Jerry.”
“Very likely,” Mather tried to cut him. Vainly.
Jerry pointed a stubby finger at the handbill Mather was still carrying. “I am engaged in such business myself. I have been looking for a partner.” There was a trace of foreignness in the way he said “partner.” Otherwise his accent was what Mather would have called New York nondescript. “You have been recommended.”
“By whom?” Mather’s voice very nearly cracked, the tightening of fear catching his throat.
“It is not so much by whom, Eric, as by
what
.” He added, almost regretfully, “I know quite a lot about you. Can’t we walk while we are talking?”
“There is nothing …” Mather stopped. Jerry was shaking his head, a look of mournful reproof in his small dark eyes.
“But we do not need to speak of that at all—not ever. What I have in mind … Please, let us walk, like friends who happened to meet. Okay?”
This time Jerry set the pace. Mather noticed the people around them, several men idly watching from the benches. There was no way of knowing friend from foe among them. Most of them, the thought flickered through his mind, were, like himself, their own worst enemies.
“I am really an idealist, Eric, as you are. An idealist although you might not think it to look at me.” Jerry glanced up at him. “What would you say I do for a living?”
“You sell fruit,” Mather said bitingly.
Jerry snorted, a noise that passed with him for amusement. “That is very good. I sell fruit. You don’t need to know anything more about me.” He paused in his walking to gaze down at a chessboard on a bench, the game temporarily abandoned by its players.
“Don’t touch that!” A man buying a bag of chestnuts from the corner vendor shook his fist at them.
Jerry held up his hands to indicate he had no intention of disturbing the board. To Mather he said: “I don’t understand this game, not like you. It takes a particular brain—a scholar, not a fruit seller.” He moved on, Mather following, inwardly cursing his cowardice, his vulnerability. “Eric, your friend, Peter Bradley—he will be going to Athens this spring, won’t he—to the International Conference of Particle Physicists?”
“I have no idea,” Mather said.
“But you do. I have just told you.” He clicked his tongue in disgust at the litter along the path, stooped and picked up an empty cigarette packet which he dropped into the litterbasket. “People have so little pride. Eric, is he truly your friend? What I mean to say is, a man with such a deep involvement in science: what are friends to him? What is family? He has such an attractive wife. It is a shame you are …” Jerry shrugged, letting the gesture carry through his meaning.
Mather clasped his fists within his pockets. He was deprived of anger by his fear. His very skin was crawling with fear, fear and loathing, much of it of himself who could not lift his hand to smash this wily, syrup-tongued bastard in the mouth. And if he were psychologically able, what would come of it, a quarrel between two men in Washington Square?
“Wh-what do you want of me?” He sickened further, stuttering on the word.
“I want Dr. Bradley to bring something from Athens on his return.”
“Go to him yourself then.”
Jerry shook his head. “It is a delicate matter, and since you are very good in matters of delicacy, it is my hope that you will undertake the entire arrangement. I am a simple man, a man of action, not planning, and I would put myself under your direction.” They were passing the chestnut vendor, the sweet fumes of the roasted nuts rising from the charcoal fire. “Do you like chestnuts?”
“I loathe them,” Mather said.
“They are not very American,” Jerry said, walking on.
“Are you?”
“I pass,” Jerry said amiably. “Shall I tell you now the problem I am hoping you will solve for me—for humanity you might say? You will agree I am sure that the kind of international exchange that goes on among scientists engaged in what they call basic research—loosely speaking, the peaceful potentials of nature’s energy—you will agree, it is a good thing to exchange such information?”
“Does it matter whether or not I agree?”
Jerry shrugged. “It is more pleasant to work with people whose ideals you share.”
“Ideals is a word like peace. It means what you want it to mean at the moment, so cut the crap.”
“I am happy to do so. Well. At every such conference as will be held this May in Athens, a thriving side-business goes on in espionage. Information—often useless, sometimes critical—is passed there, much of it for money, some for, you will excuse the expression, ideals. Motive, as you would be the first to point out, is irrelevant to the betrayed government. Very simply, I am asking you to help me find a traitor.”
“To whom?”
“To the Soviet Union,” Jerry said unhesitatingly.
It might be supposed that Eric Mather, thirty-six years old, an assistant professor of English literature at Central University, born in the Midwest of New England ancestry, and with no more knowledge of international politics much less espionage than he gathered from the newspaper headlines, would have considered the whole encounter a hoax, a campus madness, the after-term prank of a disgruntled student. The thought did cross his mind, but over it almost simultaneously swept the feeling that he had been waiting, expecting something of this kind to happen. There was even a familiar nuance to the sly persuasiveness of “Jerry,” the intimation of an old affinity now to be renewed.
“You are not betraying your own country in this, Eric. What you are doing is striking a blow for international disarmament.”
“A very fine distinction,” Mather said.
“Perhaps, but I said it out of respect for your New England conscience.” Jerry peeled the paper from a stick of gum and dropped it neatly into the next waste container. The incongruousness of someone on his mission chewing gum made Mather smile. Jerry was overplaying his role. Mather began to feel a needling sense of superiority.
“You seem to have a great deal of confidence in me,” he said.
“My dear Eric,” Jerry said, laying his hand on the teacher’s arm, “you have given us every reason.”
Mather shied at the man’s touch, a reaction that made Jerry smile, but this was as close as he came to mentioning the source of his confidence in Mather’s cooperation.
“Tell me what you want me to know,” Mather said.
“We wish to intercept the highly secret military information intended for an American agent, and we want to have it brought to us here for evaluation. Such evaluation will tell us the source of the leak.”
“You want it brought here—to the United States?”
“I know it is hard for you to believe, but take my word, we are safer here than anywhere in the world.”