Death Is My Comrade (3 page)

“Nothing's the matter with you.”

“Please go now, Chet. Call me in the morning?”

I nodded. I felt stiff and foolish standing there. I went down the steps and turned. Marianne blew me a kiss. Inside, the baby cried again.

I walked the few blocks to my own apartment near Canal Road with the taste of Marianne's mouth on my lips and an envelope in my pocket.

*
See
Danger Is My Line

Chapter Three

A
thing like that envelope can eat at you.

I was dreaming about it Saturday morning when the ringing telephone woke me. It was a crazy pastiche of a dream in which six Eugenie Duhamels wearing spangled bras and tights struck lewd poses and did bumps and grinds around an envelope almost the size of a boxcar. Then they used a lance to open it, all six of them gripping the long haft, and as the paper was torn away Marianne stepped out and into my arms. “It's too soon,” Marianne said.

Then there was the insistent ring of the phone and I thought, Freud would have a field day with that one.

“Hello?” I mumbled into the receiver.

“Oh my, did I wake you up? It's almost eleven.”

“Good morning, Marianne.”

“I feel like such a damn fool after last night.”

“What for?”

Silence. Then: “The reason I called, Ilya was here.”

“When?”

“He just now left. I … Chet, I told him you had the envelope.”

“Nothing wrong with that. It's his envelope.”

‘“I gave him your office address. He'll be there before noon, he said.”

“Last chance, Mrs. Baker, ma'am,” I said lightly. “Do I take a peek inside?”

“I don't think so, Chet. Unless you really think it's something for your friend Jack Morley or the C.I.A.” Marianne laughed. “Knowing the way Eugenie dramatizes things, it's probably a recipe for Russian borscht.”

“Or the specifications for a Pobeda four-door hardtop. Okay, I'll hold it for Ilya.”

Then Marianne said: “He did look scared, though. And as if he'd stayed up all night.”

“Maybe I ought to call Jack, at least. Could be he has a line on Ilya. We don't even know his last name.”

“Yes we do. He introduced himself formally this morning. He's Ilya Alluliev.”

The name meant nothing to me. I said I would call Jack Morley, and Marianne didn't protest. We talked another few minutes, then I dialed Foggy Bottom. Jack, who is State's Assistant Chief of Protocol, was out at National Airport to greet a visiting politician from Brazil. I said I would call back.

I was in my office, shaved, showered and stoked up for the day with a breakfast of hot cakes and sausage links, by a little after eleven. By twelve, Ilya hadn't showed up. The office is on the top floor of the Farrell Building, where F and 15th Streets form a letter T. From the window you can see the Treasury Building and wonder how the sixty-bucks-a-week clerks feel printing all that money. I looked and wondered, and by twelve-forty Ilya still hadn't showed up. I put another call through to Foggy Bottom. Jack wasn't expected back till mid-afternoon. By then the envelope was eating at me again. I twirled the big dial of the office safe, opened it and stashed the envelope inside. No reason, really, except to buffer my will power.

At one o'clock I said, “What the hell,” out loud, got Mike Rodin's unlisted phone number from the VIP file I'd bought for a couple of hundred bucks a few months back, told myself there are probably only three cities in the country where such lists are for sale, those being Hollywood, New York and Washington, and put the call through. It was a Wheaton exchange, which meant an address in the rolling hill country of Maryland north of Chevy Chase. Well within the range of Washington business, but Mike Rodin wasn't one to hobnob with the only moderately rich at Chevy Chase. He probably wore scarlet jackets and hunted foxes behind a pack of baying hounds.

“Oh-two-seven,” the telephone voice said, giving me the last three digits of Rodin's phone number.

“Mr. Rodin, please.”

“Who is calling?” The voice was deep and throaty. It took a while for me to realize that it belonged to a woman.

“He doesn't know me. The name is Chester Drum. I'm a private detective.”

“I'll, see if Mr. Rodin is at home, Mr. Drum.” But if her tone of voice meant anything, Mike Rodin was never home to private detectives.

“Hold it,” I snapped. “Tell him I may have a message from his daughter. Before he tells you he's not in.”

“May
have?”

“May have.”

For a while I listened to the miles of silence over the phone lines. Then the woman came back. “You wish to visit
Der Zauberberg?”

Der Zauberberg
was
The Magic Mountain
in German. A nice name for a house on a hill, better than Overlook or Hillcrest or something like that, but why let your erudition, such as it is, show?
“Der
what?” I asked.

“Mr. Rodin's residence,” she said frostily.

“That,” I told her, “is the general idea.”

She told me how to get there. Carefully and in detail, as you would tell a cretin. I looked at the dial of the wall safe and decided to leave Ilya's envelope there.

Another step toward a four-thousand-mile journey behind the Iron Curtain, but I didn't know that yet either.

Mike Rodin lived in a house on a hill, which is like saying the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum on an artificial lake.

The house stood north of Wheaton on the highest hill in the area, commanding a fine view of the neat Maryland farmland. It was surrounded by a red brick wall ten feet high with broken glass mortared into the top. The red brick curved back like quizzical eyebrows on either side of a wrought-iron gate not quite wide enough to launch an aircraft carrier.

From my side of the gate I could see an upward sloping lawn and, at the top of the rise, Mike Rodin's house. It was a massive red brick building, two stories high, with a white Georgian portico as long as a football field running the entire length of the façade. No road led to it, and I could see no garage. A red brick walkway, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, climbed the hill as straight as a ruled line.

I leaned on the horn. Pretty soon a gatekeeper came into view from behind one of the red brick gateposts. But he was a gatekeeper like the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum on an artificial lake or like
Der Zauberberg
was a house on a hill. He wore whipcord slacks and a whipcord shirt and he carried a shotgun, not broken, under his arm. It was a Browning over/under with a ventilated rib and a polished walnut stock.

When I got out of the car, he pointed the over/under at the ground six inches in front of my shoes.

“Mr.—?” he said.

“Drum,” I said.

“With a message from?” he said.

“Eugenie,” I said.

He opened the gate and I went through. He was a hard, sun-tanned, competent-looking guy in his thirties, and after I passed through the gate he shut and locked it behind me. Then he frisked me, casually but expertly.

“Mr. Rodin have a lot of friends?” I asked.

“Save the wisecracks, Jack. I just work here.” He jerked a thumb up the red brick walkway. “Get going.”

I took a half dozen steps. He fell in behind me. I stopped and turned around. “If your orders are to play follow the leader, that's okay. But you're not going to do it on a brick path with a loaded shotgun. You might trip.”

“How do you know it's loaded?”

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

“Then break it.”

He stared at me steadily. A car hummed by on the road on the other side of Mike Rodin's red brick wall.

“Break it,” I said.

He shrugged and smirked and broke the shotgun at the breech. I marched up the hill on the red brick walkway. He marched right behind me.

It was a hard quarter-mile climb through the bright sun. I mopped sweat off the back of my neck when we reached the top. Shotgun lounged in the shade, leaning against one of the columns of the portico.

I went inside.

Across a parquet floor, behind a butler. Through a dim room as cool as a crypt and furnished like the Governor's Palace in colonial Williamsburg. Down a hall that had tapestries for wallpaper. A woman met me at the far end of the hall, and the butler did a smart about-face and got lost.

“Five minutes,” the woman said in her deep, throaty voice.

She was a green-eyed redhead in a white dress, the only green-eyed redhead I have ever seen who looked as cool and as unapproachable as an ice statue.

She opened a door and I went through it and she shut it. That left me in a large tile-walled room, windowless, with fluorescent lights at the juncture of walls and ceiling and one of those square, step-down bathtubs just beyond the center of the floor.

Mike Rodin lay in the bathtub with his head and shoulders out of the water. Within easy reach of his right hand was a tiled slab with three phones—one red, one white, one black—on it. Mike Rodin stared at me. There wasn't any chair in the room. I stood. Rodin was a big man who shaved his head. There was dark shadow over his ears where the hair would grow if he let it. He had a long face with concave temples and a square jaw. The skin of his face was tautly drawn over heavy bone structure and his eyes slanted up slightly. That and the shaved head gave him an Oriental look.

“They keg the water in Marienbad and send it to me,” he said, making a ripple with his left hand.

“That's nice,” I said.

“It's just water,” he said, smiling slightly. “What kind of message did Eugenie give you?”

“She didn't give—”

He held up his right hand, dripping water. A light had gone on at the base of the red phone.

“Hello? Right. I don't care what they quote. Sixty a share. To hell with the proxies. They'll come begging to us. Two thousand shares minimum. Twenty-five hundred if you can get them. First thing Monday. The Corn Exchange Bank in Chicago.” He hung up, looking exasperated. “They'll do what you want,” he said, “if you tell them which foot is left.”

“Who?”

“Anybody. What did Eugenie want?”

“She had an envelope for you.”

“With what in it?”

“I don't know.”

He got that exasperated look again. “Exactly what did you want to see me about?” He blinked. “Oh, I see. Of course. Apparently you have the envelope now.” I'm fast enough, but he was too fast for me. “And you want to sell it to me? Five hundred dollars?”

“You don't even know what's in it.”

“Five hundred dollars,” he said again. “Miss Champion will write you a check.”

“For an envelope—contents unknown?”

He smiled. He either had perfect teeth, small and white, or good dental plates. “What difference does that make?” he said. “There is only one kind of rich in this country, Mr. Drum. All the rest is nonsense and sham. The one kind of rich is the kind where it doesn't matter how much you spend for whatever you want because you need it or don't need it. The one kind of rich is the kind where you can spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of all your money without succeeding. That's the kind of rich I am.”

There was only one thing I could think of to say to that. I said: “Congratulations.”

He didn't look self-satisfied, though. He didn't even look happy. He sighed and said, “Thank you for coming. Miss Champion will give you a five-hundred-dollar check in payment for the envelope. Good-bye.”

“I don't have it with me.”

“Why come here if you don't have it?”

“To look for a reaction.”

“Did you get any?” He was amused.

“No. You offered me five hundred bucks, but you'd probably offer me the same to shut the window if there was a draft.”

“Pity, isn't it?” he said, for no reason that I could see.

“The envelope came from the Russian Embassy,” I said.

His eyes widened. He sat up higher in the water. He had wide shoulders and the sagging pectoral muscles of a middle-aged man who'd been solidly built in his youth. “Say that again,” he said.

Before I could, his face twisted. Nose and mouth drawn to one side, lips parted wide. He made a sound in his throat. His arms and legs thrashed the water, sloshing some of it over the sides of the step-down tub.

“… amp …” he said. His eyes showed white around the irises. “Call … Miss Champion.…”

I called her. He went on thrashing in the tub. His head slipped under the water. I knelt and held him up by his shoulders. Miss Champion rushed into the room with a hypodermic needle. Hike Rodin lay naked in the Marienbad water, thrashing violently.

“Hold him,” Miss Champion said.

I leaned over and pinned his shoulders. He was slippery. His eyes showed only white now. The pupils had rolled back. Patiently, Miss Champion waited for her moment, then swiftly jabbed the needle into Mike Rodin's upper arm. He sighed. His chest shuddered. I kept holding his shoulders so he wouldn't go under. But his body was relaxing, the spasms becoming less violent. Pretty soon the butler came in. I helped him get Mike Rodin out of the tub. The butler threw a robe over him and we carried him through the door and across a hall to his bedroom.

Miss Champion came outside with me.

“You didn't see anything,” she said.

“What's the matter with him?”

“Mike Rodin Enterprises is built on a name and a legend and a reputation. It would fall apart if.… You didn't see anything. For five hundred dollars, Mr. Drum?”

That was the same sum Rodin had offered me for a pig in a poke.

I shook my head. “I don't want his money. Even if he has too much of it. I didn't do anything to earn it.”

“You're a strange man.”

“Compared to Mike Rodin, I'm a shadow on the wall.”

“Yes,” she said wistfully. “Aren't they all?”