Traitor's Purse (16 page)

The visitor did not waver or hesitate. He went on with what he was doing smoothly. He seemed to have considerable experience of guns. His hand came out of his coat with something in it. He laid his offering on the red tablecloth
and
they all looked at it. It was a thick packet of old banknotes secured with a rubber band.

‘Two-fifty,’ he said, ‘and we ask no questions.’

Lugg laughed. It was a genuine expression of surprised amusement and was entirely convincing. The newcomer was standing very still. Campion could feel him trying to pierce the shadow which shrouded both their heads. He made no movement himself and kept his gun steady.

Once again the dirty hand crept inside the sodden coat and presently another packet lay on top of the first. Once more the silence became suffocating.

The performance was very slow, definitely sinister, and, of course, in the circumstances entirely fantastic.

‘Chicken feed,’ said Lugg thickly and a third packet of notes appeared on the table and finally a fourth.

‘That’s the limit,’ said the stranger at last. ‘Take it or leave it. Suit yourself.’

‘And supposing it’s a deal?’ Lugg was showing more finesse in an impossible situation than Campion would have expected from him.

‘He quits his racket and gets out.’

‘Where to?’

‘London. Hell. Anywhere. We’re not fussy.’

Campion’s condition was making him slow-witted. It had taken him some minutes to realize that he was not dealing with the police, as he had expected. This man on the other side of the table, whose face he could not see, represented a new element in a complicated and terrifying predicament. He represented the element which until now had been maddeningly elusive. Here at last must be a definite materialization of the enemy. Campion’s limping brain seized on the discovery and he struggled to make as many bricks as he might out of this meagre straw.

The stranger belonged to a very definite class. He was a thug, one of that mercifully small army of professional bullies who in previous ages were euphoniously called ‘soldiers of fortune’; men, that is, who would undertake violence for a fee. It did not occur to Campion that it was
strange
that he should recognize so much. He accepted the fact without thinking, as a natural deduction based on some past experience which he had forgotten. He went on with his reasoning. Since the man was what he was it argued that he possessed employers, some intelligent organization which had the sense to use professional servants. The question now was what sort of organization? It was obviously anti-social, but how large? How dangerous? How big? International importance?

The old phrase came into his head and he rejected it. It was not quite right. National importance? That was it. He had heard something like that described lately and in some connexion which, taken together, had had an extraordinary effect upon him. It was an amazing experience. He was remembering something not mentally but emotionally. The ghost of an emotional upheaval was returning to him. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. The whole thing was recent, too, very recent. Anger was coming back to him and with it something else, something new and overwhelming, a passion. That was it. Something deeper than affection, something more primitive and disturbing than love of women.

For a moment he felt it again, experienced it as he had done some time so very lately, a burning, raging, invigorating thing, the stuff of poetry and high imagining, the fountain-spring of superhuman endurance and endeavour.

Once again a fact came to him without recollection. He knew something suddenly as surely and clearly as if he had arrived at it by a long process of thought.

He belonged to a post-war generation, that particular generation which was too young for one war and most prematurely too old for the next. It was the generation which had picked up the pieces after the holocaust indulged in by its elders, only to see its brave new world wearily smashed again by younger brothers. His was the age which had never known illusion, the grimly humorous generation which from childhood had both expected and experienced the seamier side. Yet now, recently, some time very lately,
so
near in time that the tingle of surprise still lingered, something new had appeared on his emotional horizon. It had been something which so far he had entirely lacked and which had been born to him miraculously late in his life. He saw it for what it was. It was a faith, a spiritual and romantic faith. It had been there always, of course, disguised as a rejected illusion, and must have lain there for years like a girl growing to maturity in her sleep. Now it was awake all right and recognizable; a deep and lovely passion for his home, his soil, his blessed England, his principles, his breed, his Amanda and Amanda’s future children. That was the force which was driving him. That was the fire which was crowding him on through and over the obscene obstacle of his own unnatural weakness.

He glanced towards the man with the filthy hands. This, then, this professional crook, this must be a hair on the hide of the Enemy, and, like the zoologists, from this one hair he must somehow reconstruct a whole beast. For God’s sake what organization was he up against, and what particular machination was it engaged upon now?

He pulled himself up, despair facing him. He was annihilatingly helpless. He knew so horribly little, even about himself. For instance, what sort of man was he, if this enemy, which was shrewd enough in all conscience, should so confidently expect to be able to bribe him?

A possible explanation of that final question occurred to him. It was so absurd and yet so likely that he laughed outright. Bending forward suddenly, he allowed the full light from the chandelier to fall upon his face.

It succeeded. Miraculously the outside chance came home, proving him right beyond all question. The effect on the man was immediate and sensational. He drew in a gulping breath and there was a faint rattle from the dreadful lungs.

‘Campion!’ he ejaculated in a thin voice. ‘Campion. You
are
Campion.’

He dived forward to snatch up his gun but Lugg was before him, bringing down his own revolver across the
grimy
wrist as it shot out over the cloth. It was a tremendous blow which might well have cracked the bone, and the sound it made was one of those ruthless noises which are inexplicably shocking in themselves.

The man sobbed once, deep in his throat, with pain, and then, before either of the others realized what he was doing, he turned and rushed from them, leaving gun and money still on the table. He threw himself at the window and burst out into the storm, leaving the curtains bellying behind him as a gust of rain surged into the room. Lugg stood gaping after him. Presently he went over and closed the window. He swore steadily for some little time.

‘What d’you know about that?’ he said at last. ‘Dirty little tyke! He made me sit up the moment I saw ’im. ’Oo’s ’e working for?’

Campion felt himself giggling. The money and the gun and the ridiculous mistake were all absurdities out of a nightmare.

‘I think I know that,’ he said, recovering himself. ‘I’m sure only one person could come to the conclusion that I was impersonating myself. Who was that man? I never saw his face clearly.’

‘That was no loss.’ Lugg was grimly amused. ‘I know ’im, and I’d like to know ’oo ’e’s sold ’is mortgaged little soul to this time. You know ’im all right. That was Weaver, B.’

He mistook Campion’s blank expression for lack of recollection and hurried on to explain, all his old anxiety about the younger man’s condition returning.

‘You’ll remember his brother better,’ he said coaxingly. ‘Weaver, T. A. They were both in the army together one time and they distinguished them like that, using the initials last. You remember them. I’ll tell you ’oo they was both working for when we struck them last. Simister. The man we kept calling Ali Baba. Doesn’t that ring a bell? Weaver, T. A., wasn’t the class this chap is. He ’adn’t the brains. He was killed with a tommy-gun when the Denver boys came over. This little sweep Weaver, B., went in for jam-jars afterwards. ’E’s a wizard with a petrol engine. If ’e’s in this
there’s
something big going on in the car line. Does that bring anything ’ome?’

Campion thought of the fleet of trucks in the hidden garage under the crouching body of the Nag and he nodded. His brain was working feverishly. It was Pyne again, of course. Pyne was the man who had assumed that he was another crook trying to muscle in on a racket by impersonating Albert Campion. What about Pyne, then? What about his questions and his ‘amusing organization’? And his snooping about at the Institute?

He glanced at the pile of money on the table.

‘They’re not broke, anyway,’ he said.

‘They are not.’ Lugg’s heartfelt agreement was unexpected. He was very serious and his small black eyes were open to their widest extent. ‘They’re a powerful crowd,’ he said. ‘Money to burn. There was a sort of share-out down here before we came, you know. The drunks filled every can in the place. Happy said ’e never saw anything like it. ’E reckons they’re on to something colossal, something that’ll need a lot of men from the way money has been splashing around.’

He gathered up the cash on the table and rolled back the cloth.

‘Wicked to waste it,’ he remarked virtuously.

The drawer was only just closed when the shopkeeper appeared behind them. His startled face came edging round the inner door.

‘They’ve scarpered,’ he said, using the rhyming slang which still serves a fraternity needing a patois. ‘Only one of ’em left. He’s leaning against the wall of a door or two down the road. What happened?’

‘Nothing to interest you, my lad.’ Lugg was heavily jocular. ‘Someone came along to make what you might call an extravagant gesture, that’s all.’

‘I don’t like it.’ Their host was inclined to whine. ‘It’s dangerous. There’s some pretty funny chaps in this town just now. I saw “Lily” Pettican walking down the street this morning.’

‘Lily?’ Lugg was clearly astounded. ‘You’ve got the ’orrors,’ he said.

‘If it wasn’t Lily, it was ’is brother ’oo ’appened to ’ave lost the same eye,’ the old man persisted. ‘Chew on that.’

‘Go away.’ Lugg was not amused. His small eyes were frightened.

‘All right, but I’ve got something for yer. What d’yer say to this lot?’ He wriggled into the room through the smallest possible aperture and presented one of those long narrow ledger-books in which small shopkeepers often keep their orders. It was open at the last page and he pointed to the final entry made in his own wildest handwriting.

‘A.C.’ it ran. ‘The White Hart, private sitting-room. Immediately. Come clean.’

Both Lugg and Campion read the line and exchanged glances.

‘Where the hell did you get that from?’

‘From a woman.’ The shopkeeper did not seem particularly surprised. ‘She came in just before I shut the shop. I was just going to lock the doors after giving you the word the busies were about. She was about fifty, I suppose. Very respectable, you know. I hadn’t never seen ’er before. She came up to the counter and said could I get ’er
Heartsease Novels
every week. I said I could and I got out my book to take ’er name. When I was ready she simply dictated that lot. After I’d written it down she said thank you very much and went out. A.C., that stands for you, doesn’t it, Guv’nor? Albert Campion, that’s your name.’

Lugg turned to his employer. He was completely startled.

‘But they were ’ere,’ he said stupidly. ‘They didn’t know you were A.C. then. Lumme, see what it means? See what it means? It’s someone else. It’s not them at all. “Come clean”? ’Oo the ’ell is it?’

The little shopkeeper looked at his excited face and shook his head.

‘That’s all I know, what I’ve told you,’ he began. ‘The White Hart’s that big hotel in the middle of the town.

Nothing could happen to you there, that’s one thing mortal certain. It can’t even be a try-on. More people know you than you know people.’

‘You’re telling me,’ said Campion fervently.

XIII

‘WHAT ARE YOU
going to do?’

The enquiry crept into the almighty muddle of confused thoughts and emotions in Campion’s tortured mind and opened out like a great question-mark-shaped hole of nothingness.

He did not answer because both men were looking at him confidently and he saw that he should have no help from them in his decision. He was the Boss still; they relied on him.

He was trying to marshal some sort of order among his scattered forces when another secret question shot out at him. Just how ill am I? Just how serious is this damned injury? Am I going to curl up and die from it, and if so, how long have I got? He put that query from him impatiently. He guessed he’d find that out when the time came. Meanwhile, what
was
he going to do?

There was something just under his nose which he had missed. He felt it was there and he groped for it. When at last he found it it grinned at him with the dreadful cross-eyed leer of complete insanity. This was the fourteenth. Moreover this was the evening of the fourteenth. Therefore, all the arrangements for the catastrophe, or whatever it was which he was struggling so blindly to avert, must have been made already, and the thing itself be on the very point of happening. And yet Pyne, or the Enemy, whoever he was, had been prepared to try to buy him off even at this eleventh hour. That argued that he was still dangerous to this unknown. How? What could he do now, this minute? What was there to do?

He glanced at the remarkable message in the notebook and then at the man who had written it. The shopkeeper had come forward and the light was on his face. It was not so much that sterling honesty shone from his eyes. It didn’t. He looked shifty and disreputable. But he was also puzzled. The message clearly fascinated him. He had no idea what it meant or from whom it came. He would like to have known. He, too, waited expectantly.

‘I’ll go down there,’ said Campion.

‘I’ll come with yer.’ Lugg was shaking off his carpet-slippers as he spoke. ‘You’ll be less noticeable if we go together.’