‘You’d bet er not travel from L.A. Station. They may have the joint pegged out. I’l drive you to
’Frisco. You can get a train from there.’
‘If they stop us and find me with you…’
‘Forget it! Come on: let’s go.’
He went to the door and started down the stairs. Picking up my suitcase, I followed him.
In the lobby, Carrie was waiting.
‘I’m going home, Carrie,’ I said.
Rusty moved on into the street, leaving us together.
‘Here.’ I offered her my last two five-dollar bins. ‘I want you to have these…’
She took one of the bills.
‘That’ll take care of the room, Mr. Jeff. You keep the rest. You’l need it. Good luck.’
‘I didn’t do it, Carrie. No mat er what they say, I didn’t do it.’
Her smile was weary as she patted my arm.
‘Good luck, Mr. Jeff.’
I went out into the darkness and got into the Oldsmobile. As I slammed the door, Rusty shot the car away from the kerb.
II
We had been driving for ten minutes or so in silence, when I said, ‘It’s a funny thing, Rusty, but al I can think of now is to get home. I’ve learned my lesson. If I get away with this mess, I’m going to start my studies again. I’m through with this kind of life – through with it for good.’
Rusty grunted.
‘It’s about time.’
‘You heard her sing. She had a voice in a mil ion. If only she hadn’t been a junky…’
‘If she hadn’t been a junky, you would never have met her. That’s the way it is. If you ever see her again, you run for your life.’
‘I’ll do that. I hope I’l never see her again.’
We reached San Francisco around three o’clock in the morning. Rusty parked by the station while I waited in the car, he went to check on the trains.
When he came back, I could see he was worried.
‘There’s a train to Hol and City just after eight: eight ten,’ he said. ‘There are two cops at the booking office. Maybe they aren’t looking for you, but they’re there. You can by-pass them. I bought your ticket.’
I took the ticket and put it in my wallet.
‘Thanks. You leave me now, Rusty. I’l go and sit in a cafe and wait. I’l pay you back. You’ve been a real pal to me.’
‘You go home and settle down to a job of work. I don’t want the money back. You keep clear of Los Angeles from now on. The way to pay me back is to settle down and do a real job of work.’
We sat side by side in his car, smoking, dozing and talking while the hours crept by.
A little after seven o’clock, Rusty said, ‘We have time for a coffee, then you can get off.’
We left the car and walked over to a coffee bar. We had coffee and doughnuts.
The time came when my train was due. I took Rusty’s hand in mine and squeezed it.
‘Thanks.’.
‘Forget it. Let me know how you make out.’
He gave me a slap on my shoulder, then walked fast to his car.
I walked into the station, holding my handkerchief to my face to hide my scar.
No one paid any attention to me.
Long before the train got me home, something happened that made the murder of a film studio guard no news at all: an event that had such a tremendous impact that the hunt for a man with a scar on his face became something of no importance.
An atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Under cover of this momentous news, I got home in safety.
By the time Japan had surrendered, I was back in college. By the time the world began the tricky business of peace making, I was qualified as a consulting engineer: two years exactly from the first time I had met Rima.
I wasn’t to meet her again for another eleven years.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
I
A lot can happen in eleven years.
Looking back on those years, I can say now that they were the most exciting and most invigorating of my life.
The one black spot was when my father died, two years after I had qualified as a consulting engineer.
He died from a heart attack while working in the bank: the way he would have wanted to die if he had had the choice. He left me five thousand dollars and the house which I sold. With this for capital, plus my qualifications as a trained engineer, I went into partnership with Jack Osborne.
Jack had been in my battle unit when I had gone to the Philippines. We had landed on the beaches of Okinawa together. He was five years older than I was, and had completed his training as an engineer before he had gone to war. He was thick set, short and tubby with sandy coloured hair, going thin on top and a brick red face, covered with freckles.
But what a ball of fire! He had a capacity for work that left me standing. He could work twenty hours of the day, snatch four hours’ sleep, and then start again with the same dynamic drive.
It was my good luck that he came to Holland City to look me up around the time when I had five thousand dollars from my father’s estate.
Jack had been in town three days before, he called on me, and during that time he had talked to people, summed up the city, and had decided this was the place where a consulting engineer could make a living.
Then he breezed into my one-room apartment, put out a hard, rough hand and grinned at me.
‘Jeff,’ he said, ‘I’ve looked this place over, and this is where I’m set ing up my flag. How about you and me going into partnership?’
So we set up in business as Osborne and Halliday.
Halliday was my father’s name. I had taken my mother’s name of Gordon when I had gone to Hollywood as I had been unsure of myself and I had had an instinctive feeling that I might run into something that I wouldn’t like to get back to my father. One of those odd instincts that happen and that pay off.
For the next three years we didn’t do much except sit around in our one-room office and wait and hope. If we hadn’t had some money behind us we would have starved, but between us we managed to get by, but it was tight living. We shared a room in a rooming-house; we cooked our own meals. We did our own typing. We ran the office
