brother played around with her some time ago. Why?'
'He... hated that woman. She was a tramp. He hated tramps.' 'Did she know it?'
Michael shook her head. 'In public he seemed fond of her. When we were alone... he said awful things about her.' 'How far did he go?'
She looked up helplessly. 'He kept her. I don't know why he did it... he didn't like her at all. The woman he did care for at the time left him because he spent all his time... nights... with Berga. Carl... was upset about it. One night he had an argument with someone about her in his study. He was so mad afterward he went out and got drunk, but he never saw Berga after that. He had an argument with her, too.'
'You know about Carl's testifying before a congressional committee?'
'Yes. It... didn't seem to bother him. Not until... he heard that... she was going to speak against him.' 'That was never made public.'
'Carl has friends in Washington,' she said simply. 'Yet he never worried about it?'
'No.'
'Let's go back further, sugar. Let's go back before the war. Was there any time you can remember when something bothered Carl so much it damn near drove him nuts?'
The shadows around her eyes deepened, her hands pressed together tightly and she said, 'How did you know? Yes, there was... a time.'
'Now go over it slowly. Think about it. What did he do?'
Something panicky crossed her face. 'I... nothing. He was hardly ever home. He wouldn't let me talk to him at all. When he was at home all he did was make long-distance calls. I remember because the phone bill was almost a thousand dollars for the month.'
My breath was coming in hot. It hissed in between my teeth with a whisper and burned into my lungs. I said, 'Can you get that bill? Can you get the itemized list that went with it?'
'I... might. Carl keeps everything... in the safe at home. Once I saw the combination on the back of the desk blotter.'
I wrote down an address. Pat's. But all I gave her was the address and the apartment number. 'Find it. When you do, bring it here.' I folded the paper into her hand and she dropped it into her bag after looking at it long enough to etch it into her memory.
He'd get it. He'd pass it on and the boys in the blue suits would tie into it. They had the men and the time and the means. They'd do in a day what it would take me a year to do.
I snubbed out my butt, pulled the belt tight on the trench coat and stood up. 'You'll spend the rest of your life hating yourself for doing this. Hating me too. If it gets too much I'll take you around and show you a lot of dirty little kids who are orphans and some widows your own age. I can show you pictures of bodies so cut up you'll get sick. I'll show you reports of kids who have killed and are condemned to death because they were skyhigh on dope when they decided to see what it was like to burn a man down. You won't be stopping it all. You'll slow it down a little, maybe, but a few people who would have died will go on living because of you.'
For a few seconds she seemed completely empty. If there was any emotion in her it had drained out and all she was left with were her thoughts. They showed on her face, every one of them. They showed when she looked back into the past and brought to life what she had known all along but had refused to acknowledge. They showed when the life came back to her eyes and her mouth. She tilted one eyebrow at me, did something to her head that shook her hair loose down her back.
'I won't hate you, Mike? Myself, perhaps, but not you.'
I think she knew it then. The thought of it hung in the air like a charged cloud. Michael said, 'They'll finally kill me, won't they, Mike.' It wasn't a question.
'What's left of them... if they ever find out... would like to think they will. They'd like to kill me too. You can always remember one thing because they'll be remembering it too. They're not as big as they think they are.'
She smiled, a wan, drawn smile. 'Mike...' I took the hand she held out to me.
'Kiss me again. Just in case.'
The wetness glistened on her lips. They were firm lips, large, ripe, parted slightly over the even lines of her teeth. There was fire there that grew hotter as I came closer. I could see her mouth open even more, the tip of her tongue impatiently waiting, then the impatience broke and it met me before lips did.
I held her face in my hands, heard the soft moan she made, felt her nails biting into my arms through the coat, then I let her go. She trembled so violently she had to press her hands against the booth and the fiery liquid of her mouth passed on into her eyes.
'Please go, Mike,' she said.
And I went. The rain took me back again, put its arms around me and held tight. I became part of the night, part of the wet, part of the noise and life that was the city. I could hear it laughing at me, a low, dull rumble with a sneer in it.
I walked down the side streets, crossed the avenues and got back to my kind of people again. I drifted through the night while my mind was days away and I was saying it off to myself and wondering how many other people were doing the same things. I was looking at a picture through the rain, knowing what was going on and not being able to make out the details.
It was a picture of a grim organization that stretched out its tentacles all over the world with the tips reaching into the highest places possible. It was an organization fed on the money of destruction and one tentacle was starving. The two million that was sent to feed it never arrived. No, that was wrong. It did arrive, but someplace it sat and was still there. In its sitting it had doubled its worth and the tentacle wanted it bad. It had to feast now to live. It was after the food with all the fury of its hunger, ready to do anything in the final, convulsive gesture of survival.
You could say it started with Berga. She wasn't the girl in the headlights any longer. She was younger now, a tall luscious Viking with eyes that could draw a man. She was a blonde snare with a body full of playful curves that held out triple challenges, a body full of dares waiting to be taken up. She was coming home from a visit to Italy and in the hidden hours on board that ship she had found a person who was ready to call the dare. He wasn't a special kind of a man. He was a guy with a small export business who could pass unnoticed in the crowd. He was a guy with a legitimate excuse to travel at certain times. He was a guy who was part of a great plan, a guy named Nicholas Raymond who really wasn't anything at all and because of it was the one they used as a messenger to bring in the vital food for the tentacle over here.
But he had a fault and because of it a lot of people died and the tentacle was starving. He liked the women. And Berga was special. He liked her so much he never followed the plan of delivery through and made plans to use the stuff himself. He and Berga. Two million bucks after conversion. Tax free. Someplace the stuff was still there. Maybe it took them a long time to find him again, or maybe they wanted the stuff first and were afraid the secret would die with him. However it was it took him a while to die. Maybe they thought Berga had it then. And she died. That put it on me.
I was thinking of something then. Horror, terror, fear... all of it that was there in her face for a little while, a confusion of emotions that. stopped too suddenly.
I cursed to myself as the minute details started to fall into place, spun around and yelled at a cab. He jammed on the brakes, swerved slightly and was hardly stopped before I had the door opened. I told him where to take me and sat on the edge of the seat until we got there.
The elevator took me up to my office. I got out jangling my keys from my hand, stuck one in the lock and turned it. The outer office was empty, her typewriter a forlorn thing under its cover. Velda's desk was covered with mail separated into classified piles of bills, personals and miscellaneous. I went through them twice, didn't find what I was looking for, then spotted the pile that had come through the door slot I had pushed aside when I came in. There wasn't anything there, either. I went back to the desk, the curse still in my mouth when I saw it. The sheet lay under the stapler with the top under the flap of the envelope. I turned it over and saw the trade name of a gasoline company.
It was a simple statement. One line. 'The way to a man'sheart-' and under it the initials, `B. T. 'Velda would have known, but Velda never saw it. Berga must have scribbled it at the service station after lifting the address from the registration tacked to the steering post of my heap, but it was the old address. The new one was on the back out of sight and she hadn't seen the lines drawn through the words that voided it.
I looked at it, remembered her face again and knew what she was thinking when she wrote it. I felt the thing
