Craig didn’t look around.
“No. I—just took a walk “
“Then take another one—straight home. Explore the icebox, refresh the tired frame, and seek repose. Expect you around ten in the morning. My fault, asking you to come back.”
* * *
Camille sat on the studio couch in her small apartment, trying to reconstruct events of the night.
She couldn’t.
It baffled her, and she was frightened.
There were incidents which were vague, and this was alarming enough. But there were whole hours which were entirely blank!
The vague incidents had occurred just before she left the Huston Building. Morris had been wonderfully sympathetic, and his kindness had made her desperately unhappy. Why had this been so? She found herself quite unable to account for it. Their entire relationship had assumed the character of an exquisite torture; but what had occurred on this particular occasion to make the torture so poignant?
What had she been doing just before that last interview!
She had only a hazy impression of writing something in a notebook, tearing the page off, and—then?
Camille stared dreamily at the telephone standing on her bureau. Had she made a call since her return? She moved over and took up the waste-basket. There were tiny fragments of ruled paper there. Evidently she had torn something up, with great care.
Her heart beginning to beat more swiftly, she stooped and examined the scraps of paper, no larger than confetti disks. Traces of writing appeared, but some short phrase, whatever it was, had been torn apart accurately, retorn, and so made utterly undecipherable.
Camille dropped down again on the divan and sat there staring straight before her with unseeing eyes.
Could it be that she had overtaxed her brain—that this was the beginning of a nervous collapse? For, apart from her inability to recall exactly what she had done before leaving the office, she had no recollection whatever, vague or other wise, of the two hours preceding her last interview with Morris!
Her memory was sharp, clear-cut, up to the moment she had lifted the phone on her own desk to make a certain call. This had been some time before eight. Whether she ever made that call, or not, she had no idea. Her memory held no record of the interval between then and Morris telling her she seemed tired and insisting that she go home.
But over two hours had elapsed—two lost hours!
Sleep was going to be difficult. She had an urge for coffee, but knew that it was the wrong thing in the circumstances. She went into the kitchenette and cut herself two sandwiches. She ate them standing there while she warmed some milk. This, and a little fruit, made up her supper.
When she had prepared the bed and undressed, she still felt wide-awake but had no inclination to read. Switching the lights off, she stood at the window looking down into the street. A number of darkened cars were parked on both sides, and while she stood there several taxis passed. There were few pedestrians.
All these things she noted in a subconscious way. They had no particular interest for her. She was trying all the time to recapture those lost hours. Never in her life before had such a thing happened to her. It was appalling . . .
At last, something taking place in the street below dragged her wandering mind back to the present, the actual.
A big man—abnormally big—stood almost opposite. He appeared to be looking up at her window. Something in his appearance, his hulking, apelike pose, struck a chord of memory, sharp, terrifying, but shapeless, unresolved.
Camille watched him. His presence might have nothing to do with her. He could be looking at some other window. But she felt sure he was looking at hers.
When, as she watched, he moved away, loose-armed and shambling, she stepped to the end of the bay and followed his ungainly figure with her eyes. From here, she could just see Central Park, and at the comer the man paused—seemed to be looking back.
Camille stole across her darkened room to the lobby, and bolted and chained the door.
A wave of unaccountable terror had swept over her.
Why?
She had never, to her knowledge, seen the man before. He was a dangerous-looking type, but her scanty possessions were unlikely to interest a housebreaker. Nevertheless, she dreaded the dark hours ahead and knew that hope of sleep had become even more remote.
Lowering the Venetian blinds, she switched up her bedside lamp and toyed with a phial of sleeping tablets. She had known many restless nights of late, but dreaded becoming a drug addict. Finally, shrugging her shoulders, she swallowed one, got into bed, and sipped the rest of the warm milk.
She did not recall turning the light out. But, just as she was dozing off, a sound of heavy, but curiously furtive, footsteps on the stair aroused her. There was no elevator.
The sound died away—if she had really heard and not imagined it.
Sleep crept upon her unnoticed . . .
She dreamed that she stood in a dimly lighted, thickly carpeted room. It was peculiarly silent, and there was a sickly-sweet smell in the air, a smell which she seemed to recognize yet couldn’t identify. She was conscious of one impulse only. To escape from this silent room.
But a man wearing a yellow robe sat behind a long, narrow table, watching her. And the regard of his glittering green eyes held her as if chained to the spot upon which she stood. He seemed to be draining her of all vitality, all power of resistance. She thought of the shell of a fly upon which a spider has feasted.
She knew in her dream, but couldn’t remember a word that had passed, that this state of inertia was due to a pitiless cross-examination to which she had been subjected.
The examination was over, and now she was repeating orders already given. She knew herself powerless to disobey them.
“On the stroke of ten. Repeat the time.”
“On the stroke of ten.”
“Repeat what you have to write.”
“The safe combination used by Dr. Craig.”
“When are you to await a call in your apartment?”
“At eleven o’clock.”
“Who will call you?”
“
She was exhausted, at the end of endurance. The dim, oriental room swam about her. The green eyes grew larger—dominated that yellow, passionless face—merged—became a still sea in which she was drowning.
Camille heard herself shriek as she fought her way back to consciousness. She sprang up, choked with the horror of her dreams; then:
“Did it really happen?” she moaned. “Oh, God! What did I do last night?”
Grey light was just beginning to outline the slats of the Venetian blinds.
Manhattan was waking to a new day.
Chapter VII
Nayland Smith crossed and threw his door open as the bell buzzed.
“Come in, Harkness.”
There was an irritable note in his voice. This was his third day in New York, and he had made no progress worthy of record. Yet every hour counted.
They shook hands. Raymond Harkness was a highly improbable F.B.I, operative but a highly efficient one. His large hazel eyes were ingenuous, almost childish in expression, and he had a gentle voice which he rarely raised. Of less than medium height, as he stood there peeling a glove off delicate-looking fingers he might have been guessed a physician, or even a surgeon, but never a detective.
“Any news?” rapped Smith, dropping restlessly into an armchair and pointing to its twin.
