‘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.
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 setting 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 without the usual girl help.
Then, out of the blue, we got an offer to put up a block of apartment houses down by the river. The competition was blue murder, but we went at it like soldiers. We cut the costs to the bone and we got the job. Financially, we didn’t get much out of it, but at least it showed those interested what we could do.
Slowly we began to get other jobs, not as cut-throat but nearly as bad. It took us two more years to crawl out of the red into the black. Don’t imagine it was easy. It was tooth, claw and no holds barred, but we came out of it, and finally into the open.
Jack and I worked well as a team. He handled the outside work while I looked after the office. By now we were able to afford help. We hired Clara Collins, a thin, middle-aged spinster who looked on us as a couple of crazy kids, but who ran the office with an efficiency that more than covered her cost.
After we had been in business six years, we began to get a lot of private building: houses, bungalows, petrol stations, and even a small movie house, but we weren’t getting any civic building and that’s where the big money lay.
I decided to cultivate the mayor. His name was Henry Mathison. I had met him a couple of times and he seemed pretty easy to get along with. His son had been killed in the Philippines and when he learned Jack and I had fought out there, he was friendly, but he wasn’t friendly enough to throw any business our way.
Every civic project that came up we sent in estimates, but we never heard further. The established engineers always got the jobs: three firms that had been in Holland City for over twenty years.
It was while I was trying to find a real point of contact with the mayor that I met Sarita Fleming.
Sarita was in charge of Holland City’s Public Library. Her people lived in New York. She had taken some kind of degree in Literature and had been offered this job which she had jumped at as her mother and she didn’t get along together. She had been at the library two years before I wandered in, looking for information about Mathison.
After I had explained to her exactly what I wanted, Sarita couldn’t have been more helpful. She knew quite a lot about the mayor. She told me he was keen on duck shooting, was a good amateur cine operator and he liked classical music. Duck shooting and cine camera work were out of my field, but classical music put me back in the fight. Sarita said he was wildly enthusiastic about Chopin’s piano music.
She mentioned she had four tickets for a Chopin recital that was being held at the City Hall with Stefan Askenase at the piano, one of the greatest Chopin exponents in the world. She had been selling the tickets in the library and she had kept four of them back just in case. She knew Mathison hadn’t got a ticket and wouldn’t it be an idea for me to ask him to go with me?
The idea was so sound I looked up and stared at her, and this was the first time I really saw her.
She was tall and slim with a good figure. She wore a simple grey dress that showed off her figure to advantage. She had nice brown eyes, brown hair, parted in the middle and pulled back to form a coil of silky hair on the nape of her neck.
She wasn’t pretty, but there was something about her that excited me. Just looking at her, I had a feeling that she was the only possible woman I could live with, wouldn’t grow tired of, and who would make me happy.
It was an odd feeling. It came to me in a flash, and I knew then that if I was going to continue with my streak of good luck, before very long, she would be my wife.
I asked her if she would make up the fourth of the party: Mathison, his wife, she and me, and she accepted.
Jack was enthusiastic when he heard what I was planning.
