The Night People (7 page)

The address proved to be only a few blocks distant, within walking distance. As the street name implied, the place overlooked the harbour area, where a narrow wandering river finally found its home in the sea. John Falconi lived on the second floor, in a building that must have been ancient when Win was born. He came to the door in answer to the knock and hurriedly closed it after Win had entered.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

“Look, either you stop bothering me, or….”

“Were you followed?”

“How the hell should I know if I was followed? I told you I was a movie producer!”

“Will you give me five minutes to speak to you? Over a drink?”

Win sighed unhappily. “All right. Five minutes and no more.”

While the grey man mixed the drinks Win looked around the apartment, seeing the ordered neatness so unusual in bachelor living. There were bookshelves, filled to capacity with classics and bestsellers, all in American editions. He took out an illustrated edition of
The Red Badge of Courage
and glanced through it, thinking it might still make a good movie in spite of a previous Hollywood attempt.

“Here we are. Is scotch all right?”

“Fine. Two of your minutes are up already.”

Falconi smiled. “Then I’ll come to the point.”

“I thought you did that this afternoon.”

“I could not be completely frank until I got the okay from higher up.”

“J. Edgar Hoover?”

“You’ve been away. This sort of thing is handled by other people now.”

“I’ve heard of the C.I.A.”

Falconi only smiled. “Let’s just say the American taxpayers are paying the bills.”

“Fine. You’ve got about ninety seconds left.”

“You saw Tonia Dudorov today.”

“I saw a lot of people today. I shook hands so much my right one feels like it might fall off.”

“She was wearing the Lenin Award.”

“Yes. Your sources of information are quite good.”

“Not really. Your pictures are in the newspaper.”

“Oh.” Oddly enough. Win was beginning to like the man. He stopped looking at his watch and sipped the scotch.

“Listen, Mr. Chambers, it would be quite simple for you to get that pin for us, to substitute this one for it.”

“Maybe it would, but why should I? Didn’t I make it clear that I owe nothing to the United States?”

“Except some back taxes,” Falconi reminded.

“Yes, except those. But the C.I.A. hardly makes a practice of recruiting tax dodgers as spies, does it?”

Falconi spread his hands. “Your background has been cleared by Washington, and you’re the only man in a position to accomplish the mission.”

“And just what is the mission? Why is Washington so anxious to steal a medal from a Russian film star?”

“I can tell you now. I saw my immediate superior this evening and cleared it with him.”

“You people have quite an outpost here. I suppose it’s a nice vacation spot, though.”

The grey man smiled. “My superior is only visiting. But temporarily you might say we are birds of a feather here in Feru. It is a wonderful little city.” He chuckled to himself at some private joke and then went on. “The Russians have a nice little habit in recent years of developing high-test metal alloys, mainly for use in missiles and jet bombers. Of course the exact chemical composition of these alloys is a closely guarded secret, but we find they occasionally use the metals for other purposes. The alloy in question is being used in the nose cone of their newest missile. It is able to withstand the great re-entry temperatures generated by air friction, and it just might be better than anything we have for the same purpose. We know the Russians, praising this metal alloy highly, are using it also for their new Lenin Award stars.”

“And it’s easier to steal a star off Tonia’s dress than a whole missile nose cone, right?”

“Correct, Mr. Chambers. Quite correct.”

“I don’t believe it.” Win sat back and lit a cigarette.

“What?”

“I don’t believe the Russians, or anybody else, possessing a secret alloy like that, would risk passing it out, even to heroes and movie stars.”

“You are a doubting man, Mr. Chambers. Just a few years ago the Russians used remelted metal shavings from a jet bomber’s wing to make coat hangers, of all things. We obtained one of the coat hangers, ran a spectroanalysis and chemical test on it, and were able to determine not only operational range for the plane, but its bomb load as well. Actually, one of the big American missile manufacturers did something similar just last year. They named a girl employee
Miss Missile
and adorned her with a pendant made from beryllium, a missile metal lighter than aluminum. Of course, beryllium is not exactly top secret.”

“And if I delivered Tonia’s star to you?”

“I would pass it on to my superior. It would be in Washington by the end of the week.”

Win ground out his cigarette and lit a fresh one, as he always did when he was thinking. He’d always been a great one for experience, but he’d never before acted as a spy. Somehow the years of Hollywood life had accustomed him to thinking of spies as shadowy men in dark alleys who waited with knives to strike down the State Department courier and steal the secret code. Could one actually become a spy by simply stealing a tiny red star off a girl’s dress and substituting another bit of metal for it?

“What’s this star of yours made of?” he asked Falconi.

“An alloy which we hope approximates the weight of the Lenin Arts Award. Fortunately, the red lacquer hides any difference in colouring of the metal. With luck the lady will never realize the substitution. We worked directly from photographs in the Moscow press at the time of the award. But of course the knowledge of the Award’s physical make-up reached us through another source.”

“Well,” Win admitted, “you’ve convinced me it’s true, anyway.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“I didn’t say that. Let me have your star, and I’ll see what can be done. It won’t cost you a cent, in any event. Just sort of a gift from me to old Uncle Sam.”

“The government will find a way of repaying you.”

“You said on the phone my life was in danger.”

“Well it might be. The other side has men here, too. They may have discovered I am a so-called ‘black’ agent.”

“Black?”

“As contrasted with ‘white,’ the office workers back in Washington, who admit to their employment. But I’m talking too much, Mr. Chambers. In my line talkative persons don’t last too long. Good luck and be careful. If you see anyone following you or suspect you’re being watched, call me at once. Otherwise, I will expect you—when?”

“I’ll be seeing her tomorrow. It depends on how difficult it is.”

“Very well. I’ll be here tomorrow after eight. Just in case your luck runs good.”

They shook hands and Win Chambers went downstairs quickly to the street, feeling for all the world like a lover slipping away by darkness after some midnight assignation. Tomorrow, he knew, would be an interesting day….

Win breakfasted early with Martha, and listened with half an ear as she read over the crowded schedule for the second day of the Festival. This was the Russians’ day, and there would be a dinner following the screening in the afternoon. Though the picture was shown again in the evening for the general public, at Feru the judges, officials, and studio representatives always attended the afternoon performance.

“You’ve got something on your mind, Win,” Martha commented as they were finishing coffee.

“Not really. Just the excitement of it all.”

“Hear any more from that Falconi?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I thought he might have brought you more news about Betty Ainsley’s marriage.”

“That sounds like a bit of jealousy to me.”

“Not at all! I just worry when you’re so quiet.”

“I’m conserving my energy for this afternoon.”

Someone slapped him on the back and boomed out a greeting. He turned to see Ed Baine and a press agent named Wren just coming in for breakfast. “How’s it goin’, boy?” Baine asked him. “Miss Hollywood yet?”

“Haven’t missed it in five years.”

Baine and Wren sat down uninvited and ordered toast and coffee from the English-speaking waitress. “You should come back. Tell him he should come back, Miss Myers.”

Martha stayed pleasingly silent, with her best Anglo-American smile frozen to her lips. Baine was being his most American this morning, and even the press agent was looking distasteful. He cleared his throat and shifted subjects. “Where are your stars, Mr. Chambers? I expected you’d do big things with that pic of yours.”

“Martha, this is Sam Wren, in case you didn’t meet him yesterday. New York press agent type.”

“Thanks for nothing!” Wren ate a piece of toast.

“To answer your question, my girl is shooting a film back in Paris. Couldn’t get away. And Georges broke his leg skiing. The life of a producer, I guess. Tell him how it is, Baine.”

Ed Baine nodded. “He knows how it is. Goin’ to the Reds’ party tonight?”

“Why not?”

“I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it, at something like this. I passed up one at Cannes a couple years back and the State Department was on my neck.” He downed his coffee without a pause. “Come on, we’ll give you a ride over.”

The afternoon’s activities went about as planned. The Russian film, a sombre affair about a collective farm worker dreaming of the horrors of a Third World War, was more propagandistic and thus less successful than a number of fine Soviet films Win had seen the previous year. He was certain at this point that the judges favoured the previous day’s Italian entry.

At the dinner which followed, Win found it easy to place himself next to Tonia Dudorov. She wore the Lenin Award proudly on her bosom, and talked gaily of the old days before the war as if she were a woman of middle age. “Are you going to the British affair later?” she asked Win as the dinner neared its end.

“What’s that? I lost my schedule.”

“I thought your secretary kept you up on such things. They are showing a two-reel short subject out of competition, and this will be followed by cocktails. Will you be my date, Win?”

“If you don’t mind being seen with a thirty-six-year-old man.”

“In Moscow I am sometimes seen with men twice your age. Politics, you know.”

Her invitation simplified the rest of Win’s plan. He knew she couldn’t be seen at two gatherings in the same dress, and as he expected she invited him up to her hotel room while she changed. When she stepped into the bathroom for a moment, he opened the bedroom door, walked quickly to the bed, and removed the small red star from her dress. The duplicate went on quickly in its place. It was so easy he couldn’t quite believe the thing had been done. All of Falconi’s talking and planning had gone towards this—five seconds in Tonia’s hotel room. Somehow he didn’t yet feel like a spy.

Later, after the screening of the British short subject. Win found an opportunity to slip away from Tonia’s watchful eyes. While she chatted with Baine and some of the other Americans, he asked Martha to cover for him and went out into the darkened garden. A grilled gate in the wall led from there to a quiet side street, which he knew was only a few blocks from Falconi’s apartment. He could be there and back in twenty minutes, not much longer than a slow trip to the men’s room.

He walked quickly, feeling the warm breeze from the sea on his face, feeling too the hardness of the Lenin Arts Award in his pocket. For a reason he couldn’t quite explain, he kept it clutched in his hand during the brief journey, as if its physical presence there in his pants pocket were the only reality about this whole mad day. He hadn’t yet attempted to work into his mind an exact explanation of the motives that had compelled him to agree to Falconi’s urging. It was not, he felt sure, any deep loyalty to the country he’d left behind five years ago. Nor was it any sense of guilt that needed rectification. Rather it was, if anything, only a sort of liking for Falconi, an odd man making his way through a too-dark world. This, and a middle-aged urge to do something the least bit out of the ordinary.

So he climbed the dim steps to John Falconi’s apartment, still clutching the priceless lump of metal alloy in his pocket. Perhaps this visit would save a million lives—or take them—at some distant point in time that none of them could see. Or perhaps the mysterious alloy would end up only as a footnote to a lengthy report gathering dust in some Pentagon file.

Win knocked at the door and waited. When no answer came, an instinct born of a thousand movies and a hundred half-remembered dreams drove him to turn the knob and push open the unlocked door. He saw John Falconi at once. The grey man was slumped in his chair behind the little desk, and he seemed somehow especially small among his books and the neatness of his life.

Win knew at once that he was dead, that the game was now for real, that the enemy lurked just beyond any shadow. John Falconi had been a spy who talked too much….

He’d been shot through the right temple, and apparently he’d died peacefully, not expecting the final blow of bullet against flesh. Everything was as neat as Win remembered it; there’d been no attempt to fake a robbery or a crime of passion. The local police could puzzle it out if they wanted, while in the meantime the killer stepped quietly aboard a plane or train to carry him across a boundary or an ocean.

All right, John Falconi. All right.

Win’s inexperienced eyes scanned quickly over the desk and bookshelves, searching for something, anything, out of place. But the ashtrays were clean, and he knew there’d be no fingerprints. The killer might have been a man from Mars appearing in this room just long enough to pull or squeeze the trigger of a gun. A silenced gun, of course, because no one had been attracted by a shot.

Something.

One of the books,
The Red Badge of Courage,
seemed not quite right to his eye. He pulled it out of its accustomed space on the shelf, aware now that the thing which had bothered him was the title stamped in gold on the book’s spine. It now ran from bottom to top instead of from top to bottom. Someone had returned the volume to the shelf upside-down. He remembered examining this particular book yesterday, and he knew it had been neatly correct then. He knew he had not reversed it. Then who? Hardly the carefully exact Falconi. But very possibly the only other person known to have been there—the killer.