his hands carefully. “Yes, I see. I understand your Mr Harrow’s craving. Yes, I do understand.”
“Now the dough,” said Parker. To him the statue was merely sixteen inches of alabaster, for the delivery of which he had already been paid in full.
“Of course. Most certainly.” Menlo’s old smile popped back into place. He walked over and handed the statuette to Parker. “As you so ably expressed it, now the dough.”
He turned, looking around the room and murmuring to himself, “Apollo, Apollo” Then he snapped his fingers. “Ah! There!” He moved through the clutter of statues, a fat man weaving lithely, and stopped at a grey figure of a nude young man seated on a tree stump.
Parker and Handy followed him, Handy carrying the suitcase. Menlo patted the statue’s shoulder with pudgy fingers and smiled happily at Parker. “You see? A most ingenious solution. You have a figure of speech for this, I believe. One cannot see the forest for the trees. In this case, one cannot see the tree for the forest.”
“In there? In the statue?” Parker asked.
“Most certainly! Watch.” Menlo put his hands on the statue’s head, and twisted. There was a grating sound, and the head came off in his hands. “Hollow,” he said. “The young Apollo and his tree trunk packed with money.”
He stuck his hand down inside and brought out a batch of greenbacks. “You see?”
“All right. Let’s pack it,” Parker said. Handy opened the suitcase and as Menlo brought forth handful after handful of bills, Parker and Handy stowed it all inside.
The bills were all loose. There were hundreds and fifties and twenties, handful after handful, and gradually they filled the suitcase. They made no attempt to count, just stowed it away, quickly and silently.
When the suitcase was full, there were still some bills left over. “Alas, I misjudged,” said Menlo, smiling at the double handful of bills he held. “Who would have thought a small statue could have held so much?”
He stuffed the bills into his own pockets, and suddenly his right hand emerged holding a derringer, a Hi Standard twin-tubed .22. It packed hardly any power at all, but at this close range it could do the job as well as anything.
Menlo’s smile was now broad and cherubic. “And now, my dear professionals,” he said, “I am most afraid we must part company. You have been of such excellent assistance to me, I truly wish I could at least repay you with your lives. But you have already demonstrated once your ability in tracking your quarry, and I should prefer not to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. I hope you appreciate that.”
Parker and Handy both moved, each in opposite directions, but Menlo in his own way was also a professional. His face tightened as he fired twice, and both were hits. Handy slammed into the wall, and collapsed in a crumpled heap. Parker flailed backward, arms pinwheeling, scattering statues, as he crashed into a pedestal.
Menlo paused a moment, but both bodies lay still, and the derringer was empty. He gathered up the suitcase and statuette and hurried from the room, a round lithe fat man in a black suit, the suitcase hanging at the end of one short arm, the small white statuette tucked under the other.
The last thing he did before he left was switch off the lights.
PART THREE
1
AUGUSTE MENLO was forty-seven years of age, five feet six inches tall, weight two hundred thirty-four pounds. His title was Inspector, his occupation that of spy on his fellow-citizens. During the Second World War, when he was much younger, no taller, but quite a bit thinner, he had been active in the anti-Nazi underground movement in Klastrava, spending the last fifteen months of the war living in the mountains with a guerrilla band, every member of which had a price on his head, set by the Nazis.
An underground movement is primarily a destructive social force, and only secondarily a constructive political force. Whatever political ideology is present invariably reflects the political ideology of whichever outside nation supplies its materiel. Because of Klastrava’s geographical location, that outside nation was the Soviet Union. The support originally came, for the most part, from the United States through Lend-Lease, but this was never mentioned by the Russians, who were not born yesterday.
Klastravian soil was liberated from the Nazis by the Red Army. The collaborationist puppet government of wartime, having been summarily done away with, was replaced by men from the wartime resistance movement, and their political orientation was reinforced by the presence of the Red Army. Klastrava was quietly and efficiently absorbed, and shortly became one of the Soviet Union’s smallest but least troublesome satellites.
Before the war, Auguste Menlo had had no particular trade, being a young man content to be supported by his doctor father. During the war, and particularly during the last fifteen months of it, he had learned a trade, though this trade at first glance seemed to have no peacetime application. Then, in early 1947, through resistance comrades, he received an appointment to the National Police. At last Auguste Menlo had found his true vocation. He did his work well, and with enthusiasm, and his promotions came rapidly.
In any religion, it is the priest who is likely to ask the most pertinent questions; and if there are flaws in the religious structure, it is the priest, being closest to it and most learned in it, who is most likely to discover them. And Auguste Menlo became, in a way, a priest of Communism. In a quite literal way, he became a confessor; in the silent and private rooms of stone beneath the ground he listened to the halting confessions of the wrong in heart. Over the years, Auguste Menlo came upon the flaws that bothered no one else, and patched them as best he could, and efficiently went on about his business.
Till someone waved a hundred thousand dollars in front of his face. One hundred thousand dollars American.
Auguste knew instantly what he was going to do, the very second he was informed of his assignment. He knew it as though he had known it all his life, as though his entire career had been only a preparation for this great moment when he would come into one hundred thousand dollars American. The circumstances were too perfectly joined for there to be any alternative.
Auguste Menlo had been chosen for the job in the first place because he had such a perfect record, without a blemish of any kind. He had been married, since 1949, to a plump, practical woman, a good housekeeper and an efficient mother to his two teen-age daughters. So far as the record showed and the record was exhaustive he had never once been unfaithful to his wife, any more than he had ever been derelict in his duty to the state. He was the logical and inevitable choice.
