Cloak of Darkness Read online

  “That may be too late.”

  “This wasn’t any ordinary mugging, Ari. They meant to knock me over the head, kidnap me. When that failed, they tried to shut me up. Permanently.”

  “Kill you?”

  “They weren’t playing games.” Claudel paused. “Ari, I need your help. Telephone Georges Duhamel. It’s urgent. Ask if I can meet him at his office—within the hour.”

  Aristophanes nodded, his eyes on the blood-soaked towel around Claudel’s arm. “I’ll send Sophia—she knows about wounds,” he said hurriedly as he left.

  First, decided Claudel, I’ll write out the message, keeping it short but clear. After that I encode it and take it to Duhamel. No one else handles it, and I’ll stand beside him. Six items in all. He found his memo pad and pencil near the phone, began noting.

  (1) Erik—alive, seen in town, has friends.

  (2) Exports Consolidated—US military supplies (illegal) for Ethiopia, and consignment of US weapons (false declaration) to Djibouti; all crates shipped on SS Juanita Barcelona origin) from Algiers.

  (3) Klingfeld & Sons—sent message (intercepted) to their informant in The Hague, asking further details of my mission here.

  (4) Klingfeld, again—may have engineered an attack on me tonight. (Arm sliced, but not to worry.)

  (5) The agent Husayn—can no longer be trusted.

  (6) Duhamel—port security, co-operating fully, help invaluable.

  That about covered it, Claudel thought. The arm had to be mentioned (all wounds and severe illnesses had to be reported— Bob Renwick insisted on that), but no need to include the shoulder: not dislocated, not broken, thank God; just a heavy bruise, a tendon made painful for a week or two. No need, either, to name William, the sweet old Englishman, not until Claudel could report in detail when he was back in London and explain the little he had guessed about Jean. He owed her that delay.

  The door opened. He tore off the page of notes and thrust it into his pocket. Madame entered, every henna-red curl in place, with a bottle of peroxide, antiseptic bandages, and a small first-aid box. “All we have,” she said, and set to work. “This needs stitches.”

  “Later.”

  She shook her head. “There is so much infection—”

  “I know, I know. I have visited the tropics before. Many times.”

  Madame raised a pencilled eyebrow but asked no questions. “So much violence tonight! It comes all at once. A quiet week, and then nothing but trouble. You are lucky, monsieur. You are not dead like that poor sailor, all his clothes taken, left lying in a back street dressed like an Arab. Some Arab! Blue-eyed and face blistered by the sun.”

  “Navy or merchant seaman?”

  “A sailor,” she repeated. “From the Spaarndam. But that took an hour to find out. They say he was in the bar with the others. Then he left with someone. So many were here, no one could remember when he left. Or who was with him.” She finished cleaning the wound, began bandaging the arm. “Hold still, Monsieur Claudel! Perhaps he went out to meet a woman. Men take such chances. But stabbed to death—so silently! No one heard even one small cry for help.”

  “The other seamen from the Spaarndam?”

  “Never knew a thing. They left to join their ship before the poor boy was identified.”

  “Were they together?”

  “Why, no—in small groups, some singly.” She looked up at him in surprise. What made him interested in sailors who drank so much that they could hardly walk to a taxi?

  “When was the body discovered?”

  Her surprise increased. “About eleven o’clock.”

  “Near here?”

  “A short distance away. Thank the Lord it wasn’t found on our doorstep.” She tucked the ends of the bandage neatly in place, said, “You ought to be a lawyer in court, Monsieur Claudel. So many questions.”

  “Sorry. And thank you. Perhaps you should be a nurse. You have gentle hands.”

  That won her completely. She even blushed under the circles of rouge on her plump cheeks.

  “But you have,” he insisted. “One last question, if I may. You said the man’s clothes had been taken. Does that mean everything he owned?”

  “Everything. Why else was it so hard to identify him?”

  Stripped completely. Papers that he might have carried for safety in a belt under his shirt, his boarding pass—Claudel drew a deep breath. “A thorough job.”

  “A cruel one. So many evil people in this world!” She gathered up the last of her equipment. “I’ll have brandy sent up to you, Monsieur Claudel. But the hospital would be the place—”

  “Thank you, no. I have some things to do.”

  Both thin-pencilled eyebrows lifted. “At this time of night?” The question had been forced out of her. She didn’t wait for a reply, perhaps knew from her experience with Aristophanes that none would be given. With tact and a sympathetic look, she left.

  Yes, Claudel verified from his watch, it was almost twelve thirty. The Spaarndam would have sailed. With Erik? In the right clothes he could have slipped on board, mixing with a group of drunks who were hardly capable of noticing anything beyond their own footing. And the officer in charge? Like those at the entrance to the dock, he would be counting heads and passes. And the fake Englishman would be waiting to hide and help the stowaway. I may, thought Claudel, have to rephrase my report.

  Angry and frustrated, he reached for the telephone and asked to be connected with the duty officer at the dock where the Spaarndam had been berthed. There was a tedious wait, of course, but at last he had his information. The Spaarndam had sailed at midnight—no delay.

  “Any of the crew left on shore?” He turned quickly as the door opened, but it was Aristophanes with a bottle of brandy and two glasses.

  None. Those at liberty had all returned. Earliest arrivals at twenty-three fifteen; the last man at twenty-three fifty.

  “Cutting it fine,” joked Claudel and thanked the unknown voice. So the correct numbers were accounted for; between quarter past eleven and ten minutes to twelve, all crew members had gone on board. Including a dead man.

  Erik... “God damn him to everlasting hell,” Claudel said, and faced Aristophanes.

  A moment for diplomacy, thought Aristophanes, and offered a glass of brandy to Claudel. “You sound more like yourself, my friend. Drink up!”

  Hardly the right advice for brandy, thought Claudel, but he did. Aristophanes poured again, along with a glass for himself. Now what deserves two free brandies? Certainly not one small wound on my arm. “So you couldn’t reach Duhamel. Or you did, and he couldn’t see me tonight. Right?” He cursed softly, steadily.

  Aristophanes waited. “He is dead. Duhamel is dead.”

  There was a long silence. “How?”

  “His car went out of control. It crashed, exploded.”

  “Where? When?”

  “Tonight. As he was leaving the port. He had been working late, so his assistant told me, and he was on his way to town—a special meeting.”

  An official meeting, guessed Claudel. If the raid on Asah’s warehouse had uncovered a cache of weapons, then there would be one hell of a discussion. His thoughts broke off, and for a moment his brain seemed to have stopped functioning. He gathered his wits. “His car went out of control?” Georges was an excellent driver, and he babied that little Renault. “There was nothing wrong with it this morning. I drove it.”

  “I think,” Aristophanes said slowly, “you should return to France. Tomorrow.”

  “Were there witnesses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which came first—the explosion or the crash?”

  Aristophanes studied his glass, dropped his role as innkeeper. “They could have come together. The wheel could have controlled an explosive device. At the first sharp turn—and one is necessary when leaving the docks—there would be an explosion.” He finished his drink. “Yes, my friend, you take the first plane to Paris. There is a flight leaving tomorrow.”

  “Fi
rst, I must send an urgent message to London. May I use your transmitter, Ari?”

  “Very urgent?”

  “More urgent than ever.”

  “Perhaps send it to Athens? London may be too far.”

  “I’ll try for London.”

  “I’ll show you how to—”

  “I have to encode it.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not because of you, Ari,” Claudel said quickly. “But there are unfriendly ears. You understand?”

  “Only too well. When will you be ready to send your report?”

  “Give me an hour.” He’d need all of that. The arm was throbbing, that damned shoulder hurt more than he had expected, and his mind was stunned.

  “An hour,” Aristophanes said as he left the room. Claudel drew the scrap of paper from his pocket, lifted the pencil, and began to make the changes.

  “The first entry now became: Erik—was in Djibouti, most possibly now stowed away on SS Spaarndam sailing toward Suez, aided by early sympathiser (Berlin origin; false British passport in name William Haversfield) travelling as passenger same ship. Means of escape from Djibouti: murder.

  The sixth entry was expanded. Duhamel—port security, co-operated fully, help invaluable, killed tonight in suspicious circumstances.

  Claudel began to encode the report for Gilman in London. (Bob Renwick would hear the details in New York.) At the sixth entry, he paused. His eyes blurred. He closed them, passed his hand over his brow. What about Duhamel’s wife? She was coming out here in November. In time for Christmas, Georges had said.

  Claudel picked up the pencil, finished his task. He added a postscript: Leaving tomorrow.

  8

  “It’s always fantastic,” Nina said as she unpacked their travelling clock and set it back five hours before placing it on a night table.

  “What is?” Renwick was studying the phone numbers he had copied down from Brimmer’s Minus List.

  “We left London at one and we were in New York by three.” Fantastic, too, that she had managed to pack and close the flat in two days. Not bad for a beginner, she told herself. Bob had managed all these meetings at Merriman’s, all the phone calls, all the clearing of his desk in his office, as if he had no more to worry about than keeping a dinner engagement. “How long do we stay at the Stafford?” It was a pleasant hotel, and Ronald Gilman, who used it on his visits to Manhattan, had been able to get them a room. “I mean, do I unpack completely or just for tonight?”

  “That depends. Let me put in some phone calls first.” It was now four thirty, he noted. He could catch the Senator and the two business-men before they left their offices. If not there, then he’d try their home addresses. The Minus List, with deadly efficiency, held both sets of numbers.

  “I’ll go downstairs and have a cup of coffee.”

  “No. I’d rather you stay here, honey. Will you? I won’t be too long.” He kissed her. “Keep that smile in place. And the door locked.” Then he left.

  There was a public phone in the lobby. Renwick, weighed down with nickels and dimes, began his calls. The Senator was in Alaska on an ecological study. One business-man was fishing in Nova Scotia but would be home on Tuesday. The other had taken his family for a week in Wyoming.

  Duty done, thought Renwick as he ended the three calls. Now he put in a fourth call, but this time it was to a car-rental agency. The week-end was his. Relax, he told himself as he returned to their room. There never was any use worrying about something over which he had no control, and three characters wandering through the wilds of Alaska, Nova Scotia, Wyoming were certainly out of reach. Not just his but Brimmer’s, thank God.

  Nina was in the shower, her dress unpacked and ready for this evening—optimist that she was. “Best of news,” he called to her. “We can enjoy the Fourth like everyone else. Keep the water running—I’ll have a shower, too.”

  Nina looked around the bathroom door, her hair bound in a towel. “Couldn’t hear you, darling.”

  He stripped off the last of his clothes, “I said I’ll have a shower, too.”

  “Your telephone calls—”

  “All over.”

  “And everything is all right?”

  “Very much all right,” he told her, catching her around the waist. “Tonight, the town. Tomorrow, ocean breezes.”

  All worry banished, she thought, and she hugged him. He pulled away the towel from her head, let the loose flow of golden hair drop over her shoulders.

  “I’m in the middle of my shower,” she protested as she kissed him.

  “Are you?” he teased. “We’ll turn off the water. There’s a lot of time to put in before dinner.”

  ***

  Next morning, they drove to the far end of Long Island. The rented car performed well, and an early start from New York helped them avoid much of the holiday traffic on the expressways. “Miles of white beaches,” he promised Nina, “and four days of sun. You’ll be a beautiful bronze before Monday arrives.”

  “Or a peeling pink. But how on earth did you get a room at an inn for July Fourth week-end?”

  “Friends,” Renwick said with a broad smile. He hadn’t felt as good as this in months. Four days with Nina and all problems pushed aside until they were back in New York. Communication with Interintell would be easy—again through a friend, Chet Danford, partner in the law firm to which Frank Cooper had belonged. Cooper was gone, killed two years ago, and could never be replaced, but Danford had stepped into that gap and was now a staunch ally of Interintell. He had bought Cooper’s place on Sixty-first Street in New York, made use of it when he needed a town house, and—above all—kept Cooper’s top-floor room secure. It contained a neat set of communication devices that had always astonished Renwick. Old Frank had been a radio enthusiast since his days with the OSS when his life in Nazi-occupied territory had depended on it.

  “Friends?” Nina was asking. Bob seemed to know an amazing number of people in America—more than she did.

  “One friend in particular. He has also offered us his house in New York. On Sixty-first Street. It’s convenient.” And safe, Renwick thought as he looked at Nina.

  She was wide-eyed with delight. “But how marvellous.”

  “Just for a week or so. Until we take off for Washington. That all depends, really, on how my arrangements go.” Such as the return of three marked men from their July vacations. Such as a visit to the New York office of Exports Consolidated.

  “I ought to phone Father and warn him we’ll—”

  “And have your stepmother start arranging parties for us? No, thank you, darling. Call him when we reach Washington. Time enough.” And let’s hope Francis O’Connell and his Beryl will be miles away on the Maryland shore. Then, feeling he had been too rough, he added, “I have guilt about not seeing my own people. But that will come later—before we go back to London.” And by that time the danger may be over—it will damn well have to be. He glanced at Nina. Horrify her by telling her the truth? Nina, my love, my name is on a death list. All Renwicks are best avoided; all O’Connells, too, until we get a certain matter straightened out. “That’s an attractive spot.” He pointed to a windmill with a shingled house attached, a garden with roses on a white picket fence, large maples and chestnut trees and a bright-green lawn.

  “It’s the third house today I’ve wanted to buy.” This part of the world was new to her. Even New York would be mostly strange: a pass-through visit was all she had so far paid it. “Could we ever, do you think?”

  “On second thoughts, too much grass cutting, too much leaf raking in the fall.”

  “My foot-loose husband. Travel, travel—”

  “Listen to that! From the girl I had to chase from Istanbul to Bombay before she’d even kiss me.” He slowed down for the mess of traffic in East Hampton’s Main Street, cars parked every inch of the way, trucks of all sizes mixing with the slow stream of automobiles as thick as clotted cream.

  Nina looked around her in dismay. “Don’t tell me they�
�ve let the main highway run right through their village.”

  “Goodbye New England, welcome New York’s clutter.” Including modern construction, new buildings for old. He shook his head as some real inhabitants—you could tell them by their normal dress and stunned expressions—tried to cross the street, far outnumbered by all the brief pants and yards of bare skin that pressed around them. “We’ve another village to pass”—and another Main Street gone the way of all flesh— “and then let’s hope there are still some farms and woodland around. Can’t be shopping centres everywhere.”

  Twenty minutes later, once they cut away from the highway and took the old road that edged the ocean, they could leave the procession of cars speeding toward the happy hunting ground for shark and swordfish at Montauk, the last tip of the Island’s long finger that pointed at Europe. At Portugal, actually. “I always forget how far south New York lies from London. If it weren’t for the Gulf Stream, the English Channel could have Labrador’s climate.”

  “What, no playing fields at Eton? No swimming, no tennis, no strawberries and cream?” Then Nina became serious. “Nature’s mercies—we don’t think of them much, just take them for granted. Which means we’re ungrateful. Then Nature blows her top, just to remind us: a mountain explodes or the earth cracks open or—Bob, is this hurricane territory?” She looked out at the Atlantic with its perpetual breakers, high-crested even on this hot summer day of blue sky and little breeze, that sent white surf crashing onto the beach below the dunes.

  “Later in the year. Don’t worry, my pet. We won’t waken tomorrow with tons of salt water dumped on us and winds of a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour behind them.” He pointed to the small house that stood just ahead of them, built on top of the dunes. Well beyond it, above some thin but determined trees, he could see the spreading roofs of a hotel. “Yes, this must be it.” He drew the car up at the side of the cottage. “Chet Danford said the bed is made up, food is in the refrigerator, and the world is ours. No, to be quite honest. I added the last bit.”

  Nina stared at the cottage, stared at him, said, “But I thought—”