The following two days were filled with a peace which puzzled Harsh. He knew that Miss Muirz, Doctor Englaster, and Mr. Hassam must have gone away, basing this conclusion on the fact that he did not see them about. No one told him whether they had departed permanently. He thought of asking Brother about it, but he decided he would not give Brother the satisfaction of saying a damn word to him. He was cultivating a murderous dislike of Brother, and along with thinking about methods of getting into the wall safe, he was letting his mind take an excursion into ways of shutting Brother up permanently.
In the meantime Mr. Hassam reached New York and made the bank deposit. He presented the card with Harsh’s fingerprints along with the signature of
He took his customary succession of taxicabs in a zig-zagging route uptown to a small shop on Seventh Avenue, near Macy’s. The Seventh Avenue shop was operated by a near countryman of Mr. Hassam’s, a Jordanian named Ghaset, who carried on a small plastics manufacturing business. The man was actually a wizard with plastics. He could do something that, so far as Mr. Hassam knew, no one else could or would do. He could furnish a mastic to be applied to a human hand, peeled off when dry, and from this he could fashion a glove which anyone with a hand of similar size could wear to duplicate the fingerprints of the original hand. The price for this was five thousand dollars. He and Mr. Hassam did business without delay.
Brother came in and took Harsh’s temperature once each six hours, but otherwise the two did not see each other. During the first twenty-four hours following the scar operation Harsh did not leave his room. He tried several times to get into the wall safe, succeeding as usual in opening nothing but the outer door to which he had the combination. The only progress he was making as far as he could see, he was getting so he could work the combination lock in nothing flat. That was something. He wedged a match head behind the painting that covered the safe, placing the match head in such a position that it would drop unnoticed to the floor if the painting was disturbed. Then he felt he could take a walk for some much-needed exercise.
The house seemed to be more castle than had been his first impression, a wedding cake castle under whipped cream clouds, the lawn tailored green velvet, each shrub placed with landscaper’s perfection. Half the jerk towns in the country did not have a schoolhouse so large, Harsh thought. The grounds were some ten acres enclosed in a high pink coral wall on three sides. On the fourth side the wall ran into the sea and enclosed a lime- white beach where there were two thatched cabanas resembling South Sea island huts as Hollywood would conceive them.
Harsh took a stroll to the iron gate. It looked solid, but it could be unfastened from the inside with a whack from a heavy rock, if he was any judge of padlocks. But it would be noisy. On the wall, starting about as high as a man could reach by jumping and extending over the top and probably down the outside of the wall, jagged broken glass was embedded. A man might have trouble getting out of the place.
He moved on to the beach and sprawled on a deck chair in front of one of the cabanas. He wondered if he should worry about getting out of the place. The hell with being scared, he thought, let him get hold of the fifty thousand dollars and he could jump the wall flatfooted. He watched the sea. The sunlight was as warm and relaxing as soft honey poured from a pitcher. Boats moved past on a rifle blue sea. A helicopter flailed along a hundred feet overhead following the beach, and later so did a couple of light planes. The chick-like outcries of bathers came intermittently from the unseen beaches to the north and to the south, never near enough for him to distinguish what they were so happy about.
For lunch the co-pilot/servant brought a tray on which was bouillon, garlic bread, an omelet, and sweetish black coffee.
“You fly the food around too, do you, buddy?”
The man kept a wooden face. “No
There was a telephone on a small table in the cabana. Harsh noticed it through the cabana entrance. He stared at the telephone for some time and abruptly got up and went into the cabana and picked up the telephone directory on which the instrument was sitting.
If there’s one in the telephone book, he thought, it’ll be in the classified section. Under L. L for Locksmith. His hand was shaking until he had to wedge the telephone directory against the wall while he turned pages.
As the fellow says, nothing gets results like action, he reflected, and he picked up the telephone.
“May I serve you?”
It was Brother’s voice.
Harsh froze. He had made a mistake here, he had made a real mistake. The damn line plugged into a private switchboard at the house, and Brother had been keeping an eye on it. What could he do about it? He did not want Brother to know he had even toyed with the idea of using the telephone. He held his breath, wondering whether he had gasped or anything earlier so that he could have been heard. Jesus, if he put the telephone back on the cradle now, Brother would know for sure something was screwy.
His eyes chanced on the luncheon tray sitting on the sand outside. I need a table to eat my lunch off of, don’t I? he thought. As quietly as he could he placed the telephone on the cabana floor where it might have fallen if dislodged from the table. Then he picked up the telephone table one-handed, carried it outside, and plunked the legs down in the sand beside his chair. He maneuvered the luncheon tray onto the table, bracing it against his cast. Then he sat down and picked up knife and fork. He ate two bites before Brother came running from the direction of the house.
Brother looked into the cabana. “That telephone is off its hook.”
“It is? Say, I guess it fell off the table when I moved the thing out here. Put it back, will you? If I bend over to do anything, this face of mine stabs me blind.”
Brother’s syrup-dipped eyes stayed on Harsh. His lips were compressed. His breath came and went through his nose rather audibly. Then Brother began to call Harsh things in Spanish, words too fast for Harsh to understand, but which had the tongue lash that profanity has in any language.
Harsh waved a forkful of food at Brother. “Cuss all you want to, you crazy bastard. You think I care?”
Brother became suddenly pale and silent. Then he wheeled and strode back to the house and went inside. Harsh was both surprised and amused, and he was congratulating himself on having gotten rid of the man when Brother reappeared from the house. Now Brother had a shotgun. He came back to the cabana at a run.
Harsh got wildly to his feet, not knowing what he was going to do, feeling sure Brother was going to shoot him down. His skin felt like it was crawling with lice, so great was his nervous tension. Brother ran straight to him and jammed the muzzle of the shotgun against his chest. It was a double-barreled shotgun, a hammer model, and Harsh could see it was cocked. All right, I am going to die anyway, what is there to lose, Harsh thought. He fell back on his army training. It was no trick, the instructor had told them, to disarm a man who has a gun on you providing the gun is jammed against your body. You just grab the gun and knock it aside. It is a matter of the telegraphic speed of nerve impulses. If the gun is jammed against some part of your torso, you can make it, because it takes a split second for your brain to send the grab message to your muscles, and a split second for the other man’s brain to send the message that you are going to grab, pull the trigger. Your message gets the first start, and this is the difference. Enough difference.
Harsh was twisting when he struck the gun. It went off. Noise, a tubful of fire, powder stink. A hole appeared in the sand at their feet large enough to be a grave for a small pig. Jesus God, Harsh thought, it worked, that
