The Assassin (14 page)

‘Yeah?'

‘There is a room booked for me. Name of Maggio.'

The superintendent dropped his match. The eyes behind the glasses flickered. Even if he hadn't just learnt this was a Maggio set-up, with its criminal implications, he would have recognised the big, fair man, with the look like splintered glass, as a familiar type. He took a key down from a rack behind him. ‘Four dollars sixty a night.' Keller counted out the money slowly and put it on the table. The super clawed it up and came out from behind. ‘Upstairs,' he said. ‘I'll show ya.' Two flights further up, he stopped and unlocked a door.

Keller held out his hand for a key. ‘Where can I get something to eat?'

‘Drugstore round the corner on 9th. If you want anythin' I could maybe get it.' He didn't exactly present his dirty palm, but Keller saw the gesture. He nodded towards the door and the super backed hastily out of it. He looked round at the room. It was small and furnished with a bed, a chair and a closet. He tried the bed; it was hard. He went to the window and tried to open it; it was stuck fast in its frame; even so, he could hear the rumble and roar of the traffic, the strident human noises. He put his few clothes away in the closet and slumped down, searching for a cigarette. And because he had nothing to do he had no defence against Elizabeth. If he closed his eyes she came into the dingy room, so real he could have reached out to touch her. The man who called him had ordered him to disappear while she was out, to leave no means whereby she could contact him again. Keller had done what he was told. But he had sent the flowers to say goodbye. The night before he had told her he loved her. He had taken some of his money and bought yellow roses for her, thinking at the same time he could have lived for a month on what they cost. He wanted her so badly that his body ached.

She hadn't been experienced in making love; she had been helpless and untutored, completely at the mercy of his skill, a skill picked up with whores who used the word love as they quoted a price. Elizabeth wasn't poor or in need like Souha. She would never follow him, unquestioning and childlike, ten paces behind. After she had got over him, when she accepted that he was never coming back, she would put up her blonde hair again, and go out with her smart American men who didn't know what to do to make her love them. The idea of it brought Keller up off the uncomfortable bed, sweating with jealousy. The thought of another man touching her, kissing the mouth he had kissed, playing with the beautiful hair, falling asleep with her in his arms, contented and warm, made him feel like a madman. He paced up and down the room, trying to calm his imagination. What the hell had become of his coldness, his indifference?—pity for Souha was one thing, but this sick fever for a woman was taking possession of him. He sat down again; he had to stop thinking about her, because the reality was that they would never see each other again. He had to control himself and banish the desire for her and the sickness of spirit that missed her so violently he felt like an abandoned animal. He had to forget her eyes and her laugh and the smoothness of her body, almost virginal, it was so soft and unmarked. A woman like Elizabeth was not for him. He had never come nearer one of them before than watching them drive past in big cars, or walking on the same street. It had happened to him by chance; he had been allowed through the gates of the good life for a short interlude, but now they had closed on him and he was yet again on the outside. He was back where he belonged, in a sleazy bedroom among his own kind. Elizabeth was gone for ever. The man who had lived her life and learned that it was possible to love another human being had gone too. Also for ever. The man prepared to kill for money was the reality. If he thought about the money, perhaps it would help him keep her out of his mind, until he could believe that it had been a fantasy, that he would forget her as he already feared she would forget him. The money. He lay back on the bed, kicking off his shoes. He could think about the money. Fifty thousand dollars was a fortune. Maybe not here, not in America where they spent that on a picture and then hung it in the men's room. But in Beirut he could live like a merchant prince. He could dress his Arab girl in beautiful clothes; he could pay to have the sheen of elegance and taste applied to her, so that perhaps he could find in her love what he had discovered with Elizabeth. Perhaps he could buy the kind of happiness which had been shown him by chance. He went to the window again and looked out. The man on the telephone had said it would be soon. Elizabeth had called him King; Eddi King, but to Keller he hadn't given a name. He had just given his orders. Get out of there; cut all contact with Miss Cameron. Your fee depends on it. Go to this address and wait. And keep indoors. You'll be contacted very soon. Then the line had gone dead. Keller let the window curtains fall. He went back to the bed and lay down on it again. Think about the money. Think what fifty thousand dollars can buy in the way of a new life.

Think about anything but Elizabeth. And if you can't stop yourself then use your old army training and fall asleep.

When Elizabeth opened the apartment door she knew he had gone. Her head had begun aching in the taxi; the driver was a talker, directing a constant stream at her over his shoulder. She had sat through the journey with her eyes closed, not even bothering to answer. The President, the Viet Nam war, the wave of hold-ups on cab drivers after dark. It washed over her, competing with the pounding ache behind her eyes. Her mother and father had been murdered. Their lives and the lives of all the other innocents on board that plane had been extinguished as deliberately as flicking a light switch to ‘off'. That shock was bad enough; the discovery of King's connection with those responsible for their death had been a secondary shock; in her subconscious the last and greatest blow of all was building up. Keller was one of them too. She had told Leary everything she could remember about Beirut, everything she could think of about Eddi King from the first time she met him. But she hadn't mentioned Bruno Keller. She walked through the hall into the living room, and even before she called out she knew he wasn't there. That was the worst of all the things which had happened to her. She had left the apartment that morning, and now nothing would be the same again. If she had found him there Elizabeth didn't know what she would have done or said. The one fact cast everything in doubt. She had protected him, even when she knew what King was, and therefore what he must be. Even with the evidence of that dreadful act of sabotage lying on Leary's desk in front of her.

‘You can't just walk out on me,' she had pleaded with him when they woke that morning, and he had only said he couldn't promise. He might have to do just that. There was no letter in the living room; she walked through to her bedroom and the one he had slept in for the first few days. There was nothing. Why didn't I tell Leary? She asked the question aloud. I knew it was something vital, and I sat there lying and holding back. All I have to do is go over and pick up that phone and call Peter Mathews. They'll find him. Loving him is no excuse.

When the doorbell rang she started to run to it, and then the crazy hope died in her. He had never gone out alone. She wouldn't find him on the other side. It was the hall porter. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Cameron. The gentleman asked me to bring these up when you came back.'

They were a sheaf of yellow roses, wrapped by the flower shop down the block. There was no card, no message. She held them in her arms and sobbed. That was the thing she had feared most, the callous vacuum left by a man to whom she had been nothing but a means of passing time. He had sent her flowers to say goodbye. And that morning, just before she left, he called her back and kissed her. She went back into the living room, holding the roses, crushing them without knowing. Thank God she hadn't told Leary anything. Thank God she would have time to find him first. He had talked all the time about being paid. If money was the only object then she could match whatever King was offering. She got up, meaning to put the roses into water; the paper had fallen to the floor, a pin gleamed on the telephone table. When she picked it up Elizabeth noticed that the top page of her telephone message pad had been torn off. She forgot about the flowers. No one had come to get him. He had been rung up and given an address to go to; he had written it down on the pad and taken the page with him. She held the pad up to the light; there were white marks on the paper, indentations made by the pressure of the pencil on the sheet which was gone. She couldn't make anything of them. She gathered the flowers and went to put them in water. Her hands were shaking very badly; she poured a neat Cognac into a glass and sipped it slowly. He drank a lot of whisky; never once had she seen it loosen his tongue or have any effect upon him. She had told him he had a hollow leg, and he had laughed. She sat down with the drink and the pad. It was meaningless, indecipherable. And then, calmed by the brandy, Elizabeth remembered something. White on white didn't show. But children knew that old trick about making secret writing and then running a pencil over the page to show the indentations up. She took the pencil and began, very slowly and carefully, covering the page from left to right with a dark background. The first two words showed up halfway down. Morries Hotel. And then a whole word written with the sloping capitals of a foreigner. West Thirty-ninth Street. He hadn't used the numerals; that would have been easier. He had written it all down as a stranger would. Morries Hotel West 39th. That was where Keller had been told to go. She tore the page off and put it in her handbag. Her first impulse was to go straight to him. It was wrong and she wouldn't give way to it. She wanted to find him. She wanted to tell him what had happened, weep and exhaust herself in his arms and be comforted. But if he was working for King she couldn't do that. She couldn't hope to do anything with him, not even try to match their price, until she knew exactly what it was that he was being paid to do. And the best way to find that out was to go to the source of the whole plan. She finished her drink and went into her bedroom to pack. Outside in the street the first of Peter Mathews' watchers settled back in his car to wait. He had taken his position as soon as Mathews called; Elizabeth Cameron had only been in her apartment ten minutes before he was right in position where he could see the front entrance. He had the full description relayed over to him on a short wave; to anyone tuned in it sounded like a radio cab pick-up call. Block four, Riverway, East 59th. Blonde, five foot seven, and aren't you a lucky guy … A little later he got the description and number of her car the same way. He had been there under two hours when the red convertible was brought to the front entrance. It was just after two-ten when she came out, carrying a small case, and drove off. Three miles out on the Long Island express way Mathews' man radioed back that she was taking the turn off to Freemont, Huntley Cameron's fortress house.

4

Huntley Cameron had built Freemont in the first years of the Depression. He had never been a popular figure; there was one unpleasant divorce case behind him and a reputation for sharp practice and autocratic dealings which had already soured his image. The laying of the foundation stone of Freemont caused a large-scale riot. At a time when America's economy was staggering, its unemployed numbered ten million and millions more were across the poverty line, one of the wealthiest men in the country outraged opinion everywhere by building a monument to his own extravagance.

Not even Huntley's political friends could find an excuse for Freemont; his enemies indulged in an orgy of righteous condemnation; the site was picketed; a police guard of hundreds protected the building operation from attack. Huntley Cameron was reviled, abused and lampooned. Freemont was not just a house; it wasn't even a New England mansion, elaborate enough by any standard. It was a German castle, transported stone by stone from Westphalia, bought by Huntley on his third honeymoon, and erected in the middle of the beautiful countryside twenty miles outside Boston. Thousands of tons of earth were moved to make a small mountain on which the castle could stand in lordly surveillance of the landscape, three thousand trees were planted round the estate to give privacy, and the curious were kept at bay by an electrified fence twelve feet high. Huntley's third wife was partially blamed for Freemont; she was pictured wearing his fantastic wedding gift of diamonds, accused of ordering a solid gold bath-tub, and stoned by angry crowds on a visit to inspect the progress of her new home. She and Huntley stayed in the Waldorf for the first year; there were threats made against both their lives; newspapers, not owned by Huntley, reported that she was under sedatives and afraid to leave her suite. Whether or not she was responsible for Freemont was never established; nobody dared ask Huntley, and in the event she never lived there because he divorced her before the castle was completed.

The castle was Huntley's obsession; it was also his relaxation from the labour of increasing his money and extending his power. He played with it like an enormous toy; he never denied the rumour that he had begun the whole thing to annoy William Randolph Hearst whose castle had come all the way from Spain. Unlike Hearst, with whom he had a bitter feud, Huntley didn't buy his art treasures in bulk. There were no packing cases full of Renaissance statues or Gobelin tapestries, no Leonardos crated up in the cellars. Huntley chose everything personally, supervised its arrangement and attended to the smallest detail. The three women he married during the next twenty years were not allowed to hang a picture or choose a curtain. The gardens at Freemont were as spectacular as the castle; Huntley liked variety, and everything within the compass of a vast estate was brought in miniature to Freemont. There was a glade full of rhododendrons, an artificial lake with an eighteenth-century pavilion he had travelled all the way to Florence to inspect, a hot-house full of rare orchids, a small wood with a stream, heavily stocked with trout, and hidden at the rear, protected by fifteen feet of dry wall, a huge, hot swimming pool.