was a smile of sorts on her face-a little strained, because those muscles hadn’t been exercised lately. The human mind is a mystery. She had no idea why the prospect of committing murder should make her feel
Was she actually going to shoot this creep Crowther? Perhaps. Yes, now that she was here in the airport at the appointed time, she had to admit that the thing had begun to take on a certain reality.
She hadn’t had a drink for three days. Of course she was sorry to say that she was taking more Dexamyl than was good for her. But she didn’t want to miss anything. She wasn’t sleeping. These were her last days on earth, not that she wanted to romanticize anything, and she had been hurrying from place to place, seeing old friends on impulse, making lists and then misplacing them. She had had two more conversations with the anonymous voice, the man who was going to help her assassinate Eliot Crowther. She had annoyed him, she thought, by saying casually that she might as well fall in with his suggestion because how much did she have to lose? He would have preferred a little passion. But that wasn’t her way. She would take things as they came, and at the last minute, if she actually saw the handsome face and phony white hair of Eliot Crowther, and if she had a loaded pistol in her hand at the time, she would undoubtedly pull the trigger. But she didn’t intend to shout any slogans. He wasn’t worth the effort.
Her co-conspirator, whoever he was, wasn’t happy about this. In all the famous assassinations-Judith and Holofernes, Charlotte Corday and Marat, Booth and Lincoln, and all the more recent ones-the assassins had been fanatics, dedicated people. Now and then Camilla could work herself up to that pitch, but it passed quickly. Her attention span was getting shorter and shorter.
Still, if he was willing to keep reminding her, she thought there was a good chance that it might actually happen.
And a day later, a ticket arrived in the mail, entitling someone named Mrs. Doris Myerson to admission to the luncheon at which Crowther was to receive his ludicrous medal. She would need to show this ticket to get into the ballroom elevator. She would show it again at a table on the eighth floor. She had been told exactly where she was to stand. She went to the hotel the next day, ascended to the eighth floor, looked into the ballroom, took up a position according to instructions, and pointed her finger at an imaginary attorney general, a step or two away.
When the voice called that night-in her mind she capitalized it, the Voice-she told him the whole thing seemed childishly simple, and reminded him that he had done nothing about providing a gun. They had a strange kind of quarrel on the phone, like any bickering married couple. He demanded to know, before he got in any deeper, whether she was playing a game with him, or was she serious? She gave him an honest answer: she didn’t know. She wouldn’t know till it happened.
Before he brought the lengthy call to an end, he gave her a lecture about technique. No doubt she wasn’t much of a marksman with a pistol. No matter; at that range, accuracy was not essential. The important thing was to keep her head. Too many assassins got a good position on their victims and then were so nervous or excited that they fired only a single shot. Even when the bullet went home, the victim sometimes recovered. The thing to remember was to keep firing until the gun was empty. The final bullet might be the one that did the crucial damage.
Because of their quarrel about her lack of sincerity, it wouldn’t have surprised Camilla to hear nothing more about it. But the next day’s mail brought further instructions, a tiny key, and a claims ticket for a piece of luggage checked on an incoming flight to the International Airport. The letter was postmarked New York, and she decided, on an impulse, to save the envelope. Then another impulse took hold, and she ripped up the envelope and threw it away.
Now, at 9:05 P.M. Friday, at the International Airport, she looked for a window marked Unclaimed Luggage. Finding it without difficulty, she handed in her check.
She didn’t like the Voice, she decided as she waited. It had been a little too oily. She believed there was something in people’s voices that gave them away. This man, she sensed, didn’t hate Crowther. The killing was incidental to something else-that much had come through. She was only an instrument. Which was all right, she supposed, as long as she knew what she was doing.
And suddenly, as she was waiting for the suitcase, an alternative began to take shape. Obviously Camilla Steele as a person had very little future. She was assuming, and so was the Voice, that she would be caught. Security guards and police would be swarming all over her before the shots stopped echoing. And after that? Like her husband, she would spend years in a condemned cell while the lawyers squabbled. Felix had enjoyed it, in a way; she sometimes thought that he had even enjoyed his execution. He had been the center of attention, and had been able to annoy everybody. But Camilla, by that time, would have escaped into madness-if she wasn’t crazy already, which was certainly arguable. When she came face to face with Crowther, what if she shot herself instead of shooting him? It would end the agony. By reviving the old story of the miscarriage of justice, it might, it probably would, put a stop to his political advancement.
And what was so bad about suicide? Every thinking person had to keep it open as the final option. She herself had frequently come close-most recently, on the night Paul London asked her to marry him and she had her first phone call from the Voice. Under that kind of bombardment, what was the point in living one more day? A funny thing had stopped her. Her only weapons were sleeping pills, and a sleeping-pill death would be impossibly banal. She wouldn’t have a second chance-she had to get it right the first time. Suicide at its most elegant was an act of disgust. Crowther disgusted her. Politicians disgusted her. Awarding Crowther the Freedom Medal was one of the most disgusting things that had ever happened. The least she could do was spoil his luncheon for him. If she killed herself at his feet, he would have to discard his prepared speech.
The checkroom clerk brought out a nondescript fabric suitcase and pushed it across the counter.
She had been told not to return to her apartment, but to check into a Beach hotel. A reservation had been made for her in the name of Meyerson, the name on the luncheon ticket. But she was beginning to balk at those precise instructions. She wanted to find out right now what her unknown friend had sent her. It was irrational not to wait, but after coming this far in an assassination plot without knowing whether or not she wanted to do it, she could hardly consider herself rational.
She carried the suitcase to the nearest ladies’ room. The booths were coin-operated. She had given the taxi driver her last loose change. Instead of going back to the concourse to break a bill, she made a bet with herself.
There was no one around. She decided to open the suitcase there and see if it did, in fact, contain a gun, as promised. If somebody came in and saw her, that would be a sign that the bad luck was running, and she could stop thinking of herself in terms of Charlotte Corday, and return to her idle life in the Miami Beach bars.
The key worked stiffly, but at last the suitcase opened. Inside, she found a handbag packed in crumpled newspaper. Inside that, there was a neat, blue-black automatic. It was surprisingly small, almost pretty, with a funny kind of metallic attachment at the end of the barrel. A silencer?
It fitted nicely into her palm. Looking up, she saw her reflection in the mirror-Camilla Steele, thirty (thirty!), in her best black cocktail dress, with a heavy gold necklace given her by a man whose name she could no longer remember, holding a firearm, no less deadly for being so small. The picture was so exactly
There was a sound behind her. When she straightened and looked in the mirror again, she was still alone, but the door was swinging slightly.
Now, of course, she had to hurry. She thrust the gun in the handbag. Leaving the empty suitcase lying open on the floor, she went back to the busy concourse. A voice on the public address was clamoring about planes that were about to depart. One of her sudden impulses hit her. Perhaps she should take that flight, no matter where it was going. She had money. When it landed, she would hunt up a cocktail lounge and order a drink.
The announcement came again-a Pan-American plane headed somewhere or other.
She started for the Pan-Am ticket counter. She saw a woman talking excitedly to a uniformed guard. She swerved and went down into a big kitchen. She thought she heard footsteps behind her. A surprised face under a chefs hat looked around, and somebody shouted. At an open door, an Eastern Airlines food truck was being loaded from rolling carts.
“What are you-” a voice said, and she ran past the food truck and out onto the loading apron.
