Assignment - Quayle Question (14 page)

“Did he normally express such affection?”

“No.”

“But he wanted you to wear the ring?” “He gave it to me for that purpose.”

“Place your hand on the table, Deborah. Spread your fingers a bit. Yes. There. Just so.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing, yet. You still persist in being evasive. Do you know a man named Sam Durell?”

“No.”

“Do you know of an agency of the government called K Section?”

“No. I’ve never heard of either.”

“Please do not remove your hand from the table.”

“Why not? What are you going to do to me? I want to know.”

“There are many things we would both like to know, Deborah. You do not know Sam Durell. Or K Section. But you do know about the I. Shumata
zaibatsu
. A process of deduction?”

“I don’t know how I do it. It just comes to me. Like putting two and two together. I was thinking about what Martin might be worried about, and that’s what I came up with. I. Shumata is after my father’s Q.P.I.”

“And means to have it.”

“Never.”

“And will have it.”

“Not while Rufus Quayle is alive.”

“He is that stubborn?”

“More so.”

“You do not know for certain that he is alive. Or where he is. You know all his places of residence, Deborah. We have had them under surveillance for some months. He has not been seen. Neither has he been heard from. His Q.P.I. goes on of its own momentum, of course, but as a headless, mindless thing without a heart or soul of its own. Why has Quayle vanished?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why has he abandoned all those dedicated people who work for him, who show such devotion to him?”

“He hasn’t abandoned anyone. He’s done this before.” “Vanished? Ah. When?”

“Two years ago.” “Indeed?”

“For two months.”

“On what occasion?”

“My father did not always confide in me. I was distressed by it. As I am now, on this occasion.”

“How did he reappear?”

“He simply showed up one day, the same as ever.” “Exactly the same?”

“Yes.”

“You hesitate?”

“No.”

“How was he different?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he look different then, when he reappeared two years ago after that other disappearance?”

“No.”

“Or behave differently?”

“No.”

“You hesitate again.”

“You have a keen ear.”

“He sounded different?”

“Tired.”

“Could he have been with a woman?”

“My father was devoted to my mother’s memory. There were no other women in his life. I am sure of that. I would have known. No, no other women.”

“Perhaps this time, though?”

“He’s too old now.”

“Old men get foolish fancies.”

“Not Rufus Quayle.”

“Old men dream of young girls.”

“Not my father.”

“You do not know him all that well, Deborah. Nor have you seen him for over two months. Or heard from him. As a matter of fact, you really know very little about his personal life, do you?”

“I know enough to be sure of that.”

“Then perhaps he is ill?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Was he ill two years ago?” “I would have noticed.”

“Was he?”

“No.”

“You are being difficult. Suppose you wished to communicate with him? Suppose you had to transmit some important business information to him? Martin Pentecost wanted to do so, did he not? But he could not, and so, despite your personal differences that culminated in a divorce, he came to you. Surely, somewhere in that intricate network that comprises Quayle Publishing Industries, there is a single thread, a thin but unbroken line, between you, his daughter, and Rufus Quayle, this man of mystery.”

“He always communicated with me.”

“Always? But sometimes you had traffic for him in the other direction, of course.”

“He didn’t care. He chose his own time to see me.” “And where would those places be?”

“The last time was in our Djakarta office.”

“Were all your meetings face to face?”

“Yes.”

“He never used the mail, the telephone, the cable?”

“He didn’t trust them.”

“Why not?”

“It was a business idiosyneracy.”

“So you last saw him in Djakarta. Was he in good health?”

“He was as well as ever.”

“Where would he go if he were ill?”

“He always had his own physician with him.”

“But if his illness required surgery, perhaps, and hospitalization?”

“Rufus Quayle could buy and sell his own hospitals and surgeons. Nothing but the best.”

“Did he in fact own a private hospital?”

“No. He was never ill to my knowledge.”

“Why are you smiling, Deborah?”

“You’re up a tree, aren’t you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it has done you no good to kill Martin and kidnap me, since you can’t reach Rufus to terrorize or intimidate him with these facts. What good does it do you to have a hostage, if you don’t know where to send your demands?”

“Ah. But you shall tell us.”

“I can’t, because I don’t know, myself.”

“I cannot accept that reply.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Only the truth as you believe it to be. But deep inside that remarkable mind of yours, Deborah, you know otherwise.”

“I wish I did.”

“Would you cooperate if that were so?”

“To help you against Rufus? No.”

“Name me your father’s residences. I understand he often lived in one or another of his varied domiciles for quite some lengths of time.”

“He owns the hotel in Hong Kong—the Quayle Empress; he keeps the fiat in London, of course—everybody knows about that. And the villa on the California coast at San Hernandez. The Chicago office complex of Q.P.I.; he has the penthouse apartment there. The compound in the Florida Keys—two houses, the Tower, the whole of Black Pelican Key northeast of Key West. The chalet in Switzerland, above Lugano, and the other one at Montreux. The Q.P.I. Building—another penthouse establishment— in Manhattan, of course. He also has the apartment down on Wall Street, on top of the Geoger-Hall Building.”

“Why do you pause?”

“I’m thinking.”

“But you have all these places at your fingertips.”

“Yes. There’s his yacht, of course. The
Expediter
. He used to live on that a great deal, down among the Greek islands. The old Quayle family house—the farmhouse— out near Topeka, Kansas. It’s the only evidence of sentimentality he has ever expressed, keeping that.”

“And?”

“Sometimes he slept wherever he happened to be.”

“And the Ca’d’Orizon in New Jersey?”

“Of course. Everybody knows that place.”

“You were born there?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you put it last?”

“Subconscious, I suppose. I’ve always hated it.”

“Why?”

“It’s too lonely. Too gloomy. Too monstrous a joke. It goes back to what Rufus calls his ‘Era of Bad Taste.’ ” “When he first—ah—struck it rich?”

“Before he knew better. Before he became more sophisticated, perhaps.”

“And your mother died there.”

“Yes, there’s that, too.”

                             
****************************************

She remembered.

She had been summoned home from college to watch her mother die. She was just seventeen then, intent on learning all she could about the news media, with plans for a master’s at Columbia’s School of Journalism. Rufus wanted it that way, and she was agreeable. She sometimes felt such a close affinity to her father’s interests that she suspected a nascent jealousy-rivalry for him against her mother. Certainly her mother, in all the years of Rufus Quayle’s astonishing prosperity, never quite lost the Kansas farmgirl background that had captivated Rufus in his youth. Deborah often thought that her mother had become confused by the whirlwind growth of Q.P.I., by the publicity, the world-wide travels, the aura of power that surrounded her genius-husband. Her defense had been to retreat from that power and the spotlight of attention that followed Rufus Quayle wherever he went. As she retreated, Rufus had drawn closer to the daughter she had presented him, to Deborah, herself a child of this new and dizzying world of money and power.

She remembered.

She could still smell the cloying odor of antiseptic, medicines, of illness and hovering death. Her mother had looked a stranger to her. She had been repelled, and afterwards felt guilty for drawing back from the dying woman, this mother who never understood her or recognized her peculiar talent. But then Rufus had held her and urged her implacably forward, and whispered, “Kiss her. Say goodbye.”

She remembered.

In all that splendor of Ca’d’Orizon, they had been isolated, she and her father and the woman who died that night. Rufus Quayle was already a figure to be noted, photographed, written about. The grotesque old building in the Jersey marshes was like a besieged fortress, with chartered boats and the little bridges and roads—the bridges and roads were burned and bulldozed out of existence, afterward—all filled with reporters watching the great Rufus Quayle’s personal bereavement.

They would have tom her apart with their questions. Rufus told her later of the way to get in and out of that ornate stone house without being seen and noted. . . .

“Deborah? Miss Quayle? What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“You remembered something?”

“I was thinking of my mother.”

“Yes. I reminded you that she had died at Ca’d’Orizon. But what else troubled you in that memory?”

“It was just a bad time for me, that’s all.”

“What else?”

She remembered that Rufus had given her the ring, two days after the funeral. He had said, “Send it to me if you ever need help, Debbie. But I doubt that you’ll ever have to give me such a signal.”

“I’ll always need you, Daddy.”

“And I’ll always need you, honey. Times are going to change. We don’t know what the future holds for either of us. You’ll never want for anything, of course.”

“And you, Daddy?”

“I’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“But won’t you ever need or want anything?”

“I doubt that, little girl.” He had towered over her, emanating a sense of masculine strength that was almost brutal; but the strength encompassed her and she felt safe

within his presence. His blue eyes changed, looked dark and far-seeing for a moment. He had stared out over the marshlands from the tower window where they stood together, and for long moments he seemed at a distance from her. Then he said, “Some day I’m going to die here, honey. Every man has to go through that, of course. When it comes, I want it to happen here.”

“Why here?” she asked. “I don’t like this place.”

“It will be here,” he said. “This is where you will find me.”

                             
****************************************

“Deborah?”

“Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“What were you thinking of this time?”

“My father, of course.”

“Something came to you. You are a clever girl, a remarkable girl, but you have a transparent face. You have thought of something I must know.”

“No, it—”

“You have reasoned out where Rufus Quayle may be found, am I not right?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“You know where and how to reach him.”

“No!”

“Ah.”  

“I don’t.”

“We will send him that little ring you seem to prize so highly.”

“I can’t get it off my finger.”

“And then he will agree to discuss terms with us.”

“He won’t give you a dime for me. That’s the way he is. Maybe he loves me, in his strange way, but he would never surrender to blackmail or terror. Never, never. No matter what you do to me, it won’t change his mind.”

“We shall see. Antibolus?”

The shorter, squatter of the two hideous men behind her inquisitor stepped forward. He had a long, wide-bladed knife in his hand. Deborah tried to yank her hand from the table before her, but he was too quick for her.

He was not gentle. She felt as if her arm was yanked from its socket as he caught her wrist and flattened her hand painfully on the table. She looked at the ring on her finger. The man used the knife swiftly and expertly, and she was too stunned to feel the pain."

He severed her ring finger with one quick slicing motion.

She stared at the sudden spurt of blood from the amputated stump.

The squat man held up her finger with the ring shining and winking and twinkling on it, and her inquisitor nodded and smiled.

Then everything faded away for Deborah in a red, swirling haze.

Marcus limped after Durell across the dark expanse of the bus terminal parking lot. It was eleven o’clock at night, and the few street lamps held haloes of iridescent mist around the globes. Marcus’s wound turned out' to be superficial, just creasing the flesh along his upper thigh. Rufus Quayle’s resident doctor, a glum man unhappy in his position as personal attendant to the old man, had fixed it up, argued with Marcus about a day’s rest in a hospital, and then vanished at a wave of Quayle’s clawlike hand. Durell had telephoned to Washington and spoken to McFee.

“I have him,” he said. “I think he’s agreed to come into D.C. and let us protect him. He has a small army of guards, mostly ex-G.I.’s from Vietnam, but I think he’ll be better off with us.”

“Will he make a deal with the Shumata people?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even to save his daughter?”

“He’s heard nothing from her yet. Apparently, they don’t know yet where to send a ransom demand, although Tomash’ta was snooping around. Tomash’ta is dead, incidentally, although from his clothes, I think he was in New Mexico or out there somewhere in the last few days. And one other thing: Eli Plowman owned a piece of us.”

“What does that mean, Samuel?”

“Henley worked for Eli. It may be just the tip of an

iceberg. I don’t know how many others are in Plowman’s pocket. He always worked secretly.”