The Longest Second (20 page)

For a number of minutes, I stood concealed by one of the pillars of the overhead highway, blending into its shadow, while I watched the car parked before the Tajir building. In the distance, a clock struck eleven and I stepped away from the safety of the structural pillar and walked cautiously toward the auto. As I drew near, Amar left the doorway of the building and stood beside the car. He watched me approach, his face hidden in the shadow beneath his hat “You are prompt,” he said.

“Bi-anca?” I asked.

He didn’t reply. His hand moved to the door of the automobile and when he opened it, two men stepped out. Reaching behind them, they guided the blindfolded woman. “Bianca?” I repeated.

“Vic!” she said. “Oh, Vic!” I touched her shoulder. “May I take off this blindfold now?” she asked.

“No!” I told her, taking her arm and moving slowly down the street. If she removed her blindfold, if she could identify the building, or the men, her life would be in danger. Amar and his two men fell in silently behind me.

“Vic,” Bianca asked, holding my hand as she stumbled in the darkness, “are you all right?”

“Yes,” I told her.

“What is happening? Are you in trouble?”

“No.”

Her breath caught in a sigh, half tears, half laughter. “I’m glad ... so relieved! I’ve never been so frightened in my life. I was worried about you.”

“Bi-anca,” I whispered in reassurance as we turned the corner. The cab was still waiting where I had left it. Opening the door, I helped Bianca Hill into the taxi, and removed her blindfold. The three men stood apart, faint silhouettes in the night. “Home,” I told her.

Bianca nodded. In the textured darkness of the cab, I could see her eyes wide with fear. “I’ll go home,” she said. “Will you come over later?”

“Yes,” I told her. She leaned forward and kissed me. Then I closed the door of the cab, and it drove away.

Amar stirred. He stepped quietly to my side, the two men behind him. We turned, retracing our steps to the Tajir building. The rhythm of our strides met, fused, and became one sound along the deserted street. Indefinite, hazy points of light ... aureate yellow spots on the tiger of the night ... gathered in shallow pools on the sidewalk, and hung suspended in the air. After moments of silence, Amar said softly, “I do not understand it. There are many things in this life, which it is not given to understand. That woman is worth five million dollars to you?”

We walked on, his words only half heard in my ears. I was filled with a composure, a resignation, and an acceptance of peace which I had never known before. In the world out of which I came, there must have been few things which money could not buy—including women and security and power. And all these things, which were desirable in themselves, I had exchanged for the safety of a woman I didn’t love. I realized that Bianca Hill represented a world to which I was a stranger. She had touched me deeply with her giving, and had offered me an opportunity to rejoin men in a life that had never previously existed. I had accepted the gifts she offered, taken them, used them without pleasure because I had not known their worth. Her love and compassion had enabled me, for the first time, to see into another world as she saw and believed. It was a world of men and women, and not phantoms; a world of deep sleep and pleasant dreams, not nightmares; where words have meaning, and a man need not live alone in the desolate spaces of his own spirit

Beside me, Amar spoke again. I did not look at him although I could sense that he shook his head in wonderment “Five million dollars!” he said. And it was then that the full implication of his meaning burst over me washing me in fear. I had a million dollars in Wainwright’s name. Somewhere, then, I had four million dollars more ... Tajir’s money converted first to Wainwright, and then reconverted to Pacific. I had concealed it carefully ... too carefully! . , . behind names and words and places.

We turned into the building. Inside it was dark, and the dampness of the waterfront wrapped a shroud of cold sweat around the metal stairway as we climbed to the second floor. The hair on my head began to crawl, and a dryness clung to my tongue, my mouth, my lips, my throat, making it impossible to swallow. Because now it is too late. I can’t make a deal on Wainwright’s money alone. This is big, too big. It’s important enough for the top man to come all the way from Africa. Five million dollars lost. I have one million, but where are the other four?

There is one chance, and one chance only ... Horstman! If Horstman is at the meeting there’s hope. We have much between us. I know it. I’ve always known it Horstman is a friend of mine! A man I can trust! If he’s there, Horstman may be able to make the council see that I
don’t
remember where the money is concealed. If I’m executed I can never remember it! I’ll return all of Wainwright’s holdings without argument

But Horstman, be there, be there!

Here’s the door. It’s strange that in a moment like this my eyes should take the trouble to see so clearly—the grain of the wood, the dust on the lettering. What does it matter except it is a moment or two of life? Now Amar is opening it politely, too politely, and when I step through it, I’ll be leaving the land of the living.

This is no dream, it is the moment of the nightmare from which I will never again awaken. There in the shadows of the room is the desk. And above it, the bulb. It hangs from a cord and throws its helpless light against the darkness. The darkness is gathering together, to materialize, to rustle black within black, to expectorate the forms of the council.

There he is, big, black as Satan, with his white porcelain eyes. Ghazi. In his hand, the short scimitar. It flashes, but this is not yet the instant.

First, the pronouncement. Step forward,
El Saiyid.
I had forgotten you were tall, and growing old. Your face is lined by the gullies of the bitter years, and all your power cannot wipe away time’s dust from your cheeks. Where now are the tens of thousands of lives you have stolen and wrecked and killed? You have sold man’s spirit by the pound, and twisted human dignity into furry shapes.

You bow,
El Saiyid.
Your mocking bow is not lost, and at last you speak. You speak in German, and I remember now, it is our native tongue. We were brothers in blood, you and I, and I will return my blood for yours. It will run from our lips for a long time.

El Saiyid!

Down my sleeve it slides, into my hand it leaps, through the air it sings.

This is the longest second of my life.

SANTINI said, “The first time I saw him he was in a hospital with his throat cut, that was about a year ago. He got well. Now he’s in the morgue with his throat cut again, but this time it’s for keeps.”

“You’ve got all the facts now?” asked Burrows.

“Yes. What took me so long was getting the Army to relay the information from Berlin. He got it before I could grab him. He got it worse that way; all I could’ve done was get him deported probably. He outsmarted himself, that’s all.”

“You’ve been on this a long time,” said Burrows. “What didn’t you like about it?”

“Well, you see I kept asking myself why would this so-called Victor Pacific disappear completely after he got back from the war. He could’ve drawn a small pension for his disability if he’d wanted to; he had insurance, bonuses, and all that over the years which he never took advantage of.”

“He didn’t need it,” observed Jensen.

“That’s right, but a guy can’t live fifteen years without leaving a trace anywhere either. So Pacific had to have one of two motives.”

“Either he’d been in trouble, or he wasn’t Pacific,” said Burrows.

“That’s the way I figured it,” replied Santini. “There was no record of Pacific anywhere, so I decided that something had happened. The fingerprints, from his Army record, threw me off. But when I thought about it, I decided that if Pacific had been wounded, he might’ve been killed, too. So maybe this guy shows up with Pacific’s dog tag, identification, and papers; he’s put in a hospital, and then he’s shipped back to the United States.”

“Sure,” said Jensen, “but he’d be fingerprinted again in the hospital and the prints sent to Washington.”

“In those days,” said Santini, “with three million sets of prints going through the Army, when this guy’s identification prints are taken in the field and forwarded to Washington for his record, they’re swamped with the others. The prints are put on his record okay, but they aren’t checked back against his induction prints.” Santini walked to his desk and removed a heavy folder from it. “I took this stuff out of the files to work on it whenever I had a chance. It took me a while to wise up to what had happened.”

“What’d the Army say?” asked Burrows.

“They checked the prints at my request and admitted right away that they’d goofed up. Mathematically speaking, they had to make a mistake once in a while, the human element was too strong. They just used the new set of ED prints instead of the original because they thought they were both the same,” said Santini. “Then when the two sets weren’t the same, the Army checked the German files and found them.”

“Who was this guy?” asked Burrows.

“He had three names. Pacific and Wainwright were two of them. He was once a lieutenant colonel in Rommel’s outfit,” said Santini. “His real name was Hans Horstman.”

FIN

ABOUT BILL S. BALLINGER

Bill S. Ballinger was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin, and received his B.A. in 1934. From 1934 he worked in advertising, and as a radio and television writer. In 1936 he married Geraldine Taylor--they divorced in 1946. After extensive travels in Europe and the Middle East, Ballinger moved to southern California, to take advantage of the television 'boom' of the 1950s as a scriptwriter. In 1949, he married Laura Dunham; she died in 1962, and two years later he married Lucille Rambeau. Between the years 1977 and 1979, Ballinger served as an associate professor of writing at the California State University, Nortridge. In 1960, Ballinger received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from Mystery Writers of America for his TV work, and he was the guest of honor at the Boucheron World Mystery Convention II conference in 1971 in Los Angeles. In 1977-78, Ballinger served as a member of the board of directors of Health and Welfare Plan and Pension Plan, and in 1978-79 President of Federal Credit Union. Ballinger died on March 23, 1980.

In the beginning of his career, Ballinger published hard-boiled detective fiction. His first novel, THE BODY IN THE BED (1948) introduced the private eye Barr Breed from Chicago, a typical tough hero of the post-war fiction. However, his office is not a dump, but takes up a third of a floor and has and has panelled walls. The story was more or less a variation of the Maltese Falcon. Breed's second and last adventure, THE BODY BEAUTIFUL (1949), takes him to a nightclub, where a chorus girl is knifed. Ballinger's first success was a nonseries book, PORTRAIT IN SMOKE (1950), in which Danny April, the new owner of a collection agency, motivated by curiosity, attempts to trace a girl named Krassy Almauniski from her origins in Chicago's slums. Ballinger depicts also Krassy's rise to fame and riches by changing her identity. Finally Danny finds Krassy, falls in love with her, but she frames him guilty of murder. The books was filmed in 1956 under the title Wicked As They Come.

Ballinger soon abandoned the conventional detective formula, and concentrated on creating more innovative thrillers. The Wife of the Red-Haired Woman alternated between first-person and third-person narration. Moreover, it portrays a situation, in which the second husband is murdered by the first. At the end of the beautifully plotted story Ballinger reveals the racial background of the first-person narrator, the detective pursuing a murderer; he is black. The plot of The Tooth and the Nail revolves around false money and faking a murder. The protagonist is a magician, Luis Montana alias Lewis Mountain, who is pursuing his wife's murderer, Ballard Temple Humphries. Behind the crime there is a plan to counterfeit money. The alternating narrative tells about a murder trial, in which the identity of the accused is kept hidden from the reader. At the end, the reader learns that the avenger has faked a murder, by leaving in Humphries's cellar, in the central oven, signs of an apparent crime--a tooth and a nail along other items. Thus Lewis has successfully framed his opponent and gets his revenge. In Germany, the title of the book was rendered in 1957 as Die grosse Illusion (the grand illusion), missing much of the irony of the whole story – "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand". Also in the courtroom thriller with lesbian undertones, NOT I, SAID THE VIXEN (1965), Ballinger used multi-leveled narration. Cyrus March is a LA lawyer, who falls in love with his seductive client, accused of shooting another woman. The text on the front cover of Fawcett Gold Medal Book says, that "Even on the witness stand, the one thing she dared not deny was her own overwhelming sensuality".

In the 1960s, Ballinger participated in the spy boom producing a new series characters, CIA operative Joaquain Hawks, a James Bond-like secret agent, who operated mainly in Southeast Asia. He is featured in a series mostly "Spy" in the title. Hawks made his entrance in the novel THE CHINESE MASK (1965). Ballinger depicts carefully everyday life in China, Hawks sees dreams of his ancestors, and plays a Chinese circus performer. The resourceful, strong and handsome Hawks is half Spanish and half Nez Percé Indian, a linguist and smooth killer. Hawks continued his adventures in four other books, up until THE SPY IN THE JAVA SEA (1966). Interestingly, one of the minor themes of THE SPY IN THE JUNGLE (1965) is religious--not ideological--tolerance. Hawks shows some knowledge of the Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and Islam, and in Hanoi a Buddhist monk gives him a lecture on myths.