Death Is My Comrade Read online

  “She’s gone through a traumatic experience at the worst possible time in her life,” he’d told me. “Another such experience and.… But let’s just say, Mr. Drum, that she is to lead a very sane and ordered and sheltered life for the next year or so.”

  “Blue funk or brown study?” Marianne said, now, in her apartment in Georgetown.

  I handed her her drink. She was wearing pajamas and a dark blue cotton robe with red piping.

  “To blue funks or brown studies,” I said, and we drank.

  “To curiosity.”

  We hadn’t looked at Ilya’s envelope yet. I hadn’t even seen it.

  Marianne drained her drink and set it down on the night table. We were seated on the sofa, close together but not touching. Marianne’s hair had a perfume and healthy-young-woman smell. At first, with the wedge of sorrow between us after Wally’s death, I hadn’t felt anything but pity for Marianne. But lately, alone with her, I’d felt uncomfortable and even a little irritable fighting the kind of urge you’d get with Marianne, who is all woman.

  “Well,” she said, “I told you you’d like Eugenie.”

  “Like her? I met her, but I don’t know one darn thing about her.”

  “Sure you do. Put it this way. Ilya came there with something for her, and they got caught red-handed. It looked like Ilya was going to get away, except his boat didn’t start.” I’d told Marianne about that in the car. “So what does she do? She could have said it was a guy—maybe with a load on, Chet—banging at the wrong door. She could have said it was a prowler. That would have been dramatic enough. But she said someone had tried to rape her. Then when you and Laschenko brought Ilya back inside, she was stuck with her inspiration.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that’s Eugenie all over. She takes excitement like other people take vitamins. She’s spoiled to her ears, Chet. But she’s charming too. She’s always had everything she wanted, from money on down, and for years now she’s chased around the boarding-school circuit in Europe, escapading her way in and out as fast as a footloose traveling salesman. Lucienne Duhamel, to put it mildly, is loaded with the folding green and—”

  “Is there a Mr. Duhamel?”

  Marianne shook her head. “Duhamel’s the maiden name. Eugenie’s father is Mike Rodin. Lucienne divorced him years ago.”

  “That wouldn’t be the financier?”

  “Would and is. You know him?”

  “By reputation. He’s up to his wheeling-dealing ears in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Controls several corporations which haven’t made the proper kind of shareholder reports, so S.E.G. is breathing down his neck, threatening to deport him.”

  Marianne looked surprised. “Where to? Rodin’s a real mystery man. He’s not American by birth, but if anyone knows where he’s from originally, they’re keeping it a secret.”

  “Search me,” I said. “But go ahead.”

  Marianne shrugged as I filled our glasses again. “That’s it, I guess. I just wanted to give you the background.” All of a sudden Marianne laughed. “We’re a couple of good ones,” she said. “A private eye whose middle name is curiosity and a magazine staffer who makes her living that way, and we haven’t even taken one tiny look at the envelope yet.” Marianne sipped her drink. “There’s a story in it, too.”

  “What kind of story?”

  “When Eugenie gave me the envelope she said, ‘This is for my father. I trust you. I have to trust you.’ Or something like that.”

  “For Rodin?”

  “For Mike Rodin, yes.”

  “Want to take a look at the envelope?” I asked.

  “What do you think Ilya’s going to do?”

  “Search me. He didn’t want to go home with Laschenko.”

  The ice rattled against Marianne’s teeth as she drank. If you had to look for an overt sign of what Wally’s death had done to her, that was it. There aren’t many girls who will beat me twice running with two ounces of Jack Daniels on the rocks, and now Marianne was clinking her glass against the square bottle for another refill. I poured an ounce and she went right to work on it.

  “Did you get the impression,” she asked, “that Eugenie wasn’t wild about Laschenko?”

  “Now that you mention it, yeah.”

  “Lucienne’s going to love that. She’s marrying the guy next week.”

  “Want to take a look at the envelope?” I said.

  Marianne grinned. “The implacable Chester Drum. Me, I’ve been stalling because my conscience is bothering me. I gathered Eugenie just wanted me to deliver the envelope to her father.”

  “Okay, then we won’t take a look.”

  “I didn’t say that!” Marianne gave me an exasperated stare; then we both smiled. “You’re supposed to coax me, darn it.”

  “Want to take a look at the envelope?”

  “Implacable. I knew it.”

  Marianne got her pocketbook off the hall table, sat down again next to me and opened the purse on her lap. The envelope was white, legal-sized, sealed. There was no writing on it. Marianne held it up to the light. We could see a single sheet of paper inside.

  “Gosh, Chet, I don’t know,” Marianne said.

  “Well, look. You have four choices. Make that five. You can just hold it here until Eugenie or someone comes for it. Or you can turn it over to Central Intelligence, figuring there’ll be something in it for them. Or you can turn it over to the boys down at Foggy Bottom. I’ve got a friend in the State Department.”

  “I know. Jack Morley. I’ve met him.”

  “That’s three. Or we can open it here, right now, and find out, maybe, you’re getting all worked up over nothing.”

  “That’s four.”

  “I know. The build-up’s for number five. I’m trying to sell it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Let me have the envelope. I won’t open it unless you say so. I’ll put it in my office safe and we’ll sleep on it.”

  “Chet, you want to know something crazy? It—it scares me for some reason. Crazy, isn’t it? I don’t know why, but I’m afraid to open it.”

  I took the envelope out of her hand. “Then it’s settled. I’ll hold onto it and call you tomorrow. All right?”

  “I guess so. Why should I be scared of it, though?”

  “Eugenie,” I said. “Maybe you got to wondering what a girl who’d holler rape because, of several possible ruses, it seems the most fun, would have in an envelope she gave to you for safekeeping.”

  “You left out choices six and seven.”

  “Did I? Shoot.”

  “Six: we destroy the envelope, right here, right now.”

  “But you wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “No. I wouldn’t. Seven: I deliver it to Mike Rodin.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t want to mess with Rodin. If you do want it delivered, tell me in the morning. I’ll be the messenger boy. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” Marianne said. She looked relieved.

  “Look at the twins before I go home and crawl into the sack?”

  “But of course,” Marianne said lightly, then squeezed my hand. “You’re their godfather.”

  We tiptoed into the nursery, past Mrs. Gower’s door. Mrs. Gower was snoring serenely.

  Twin white cribs for twin sleeping boys. I could never tell them apart. By the light of the dim night lamp I could see their plump rosy cheeks. I thought they looked like Wally, but they had Marianne’s silver-blond hair.

  “Which is which?” I said.

  “You mean you still can’t tell them apart?”

  I shook my head.

  “Chester’s in the left-hand crib.” Marianne laughed softly. “I think.”

  She walked me to the front door. I opened it. The air was cooler now, and a mist had drifted in off the river. I turned and kissed Marianne lightly on the lips. As I drew away, her hands tugged at my lapels. She drew my lips down to hers again, and her own lips were soft and moistly
parted.

  I felt a quickening in me as I slid my hands down to her waist. She was taut and firm-fleshed and I could feel the flat firmness of muscle move under my hands as she stood on tiptoe, her hips moving forward against me. Her hands laced behind my neck and I felt her teeth against my lips; then she broke a little away and turned her head, and my mouth was on the nape of her neck. She sighed and the moment of stiffness was gone. She nestled against me again, sideways now, and my hand touched the softness of her breast and caressed it.

  We’d shared casual goodnight kisses once or twice before. This was different. This was the need in Marianne stirring after too long. I hadn’t expected it. I probably would have tried to avoid it. It rocked me.

  One of the twins cried out in his sleep.

  We broke it up in a hurry. Marianne’s eyes were shining. “That wasn’t fair of me,” she said breathlessly. “It’s … too soon. You’re too nice a guy. What’s the matter with me?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with you.”

  “Please go now, Chet. Call me in the morning?”

  I nodded. I felt stiff and foolish standing there. I went down the steps and turned. Marianne blew me a kiss. Inside, the baby cried again.

  I walked the few blocks to my own apartment near Canal Road with the taste of Marianne’s mouth on my lips and an envelope in my pocket.

  * See Danger Is My Line

  Chapter Three

  A thing like that envelope can eat at you.

  I was dreaming about it Saturday morning when the ringing telephone woke me. It was a crazy pastiche of a dream in which six Eugenie Duhamels wearing spangled bras and tights struck lewd poses and did bumps and grinds around an envelope almost the size of a boxcar. Then they used a lance to open it, all six of them gripping the long haft, and as the paper was torn away Marianne stepped out and into my arms. “It’s too soon,” Marianne said.

  Then there was the insistent ring of the phone and I thought, Freud would have a field day with that one.

  “Hello?” I mumbled into the receiver.

  “Oh my, did I wake you up? It’s almost eleven.”

  “Good morning, Marianne.”

  “I feel like such a damn fool after last night.”

  “What for?”

  Silence. Then: “The reason I called, Ilya was here.”

  “When?”

  “He just now left. I … Chet, I told him you had the envelope.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. It’s his envelope.”

  ‘“I gave him your office address. He’ll be there before noon, he said.”

  “Last chance, Mrs. Baker, ma’am,” I said lightly. “Do I take a peek inside?”

  “I don’t think so, Chet. Unless you really think it’s something for your friend Jack Morley or the C.I.A.” Marianne laughed. “Knowing the way Eugenie dramatizes things, it’s probably a recipe for Russian borscht.”

  “Or the specifications for a Pobeda four-door hardtop. Okay, I’ll hold it for Ilya.”

  Then Marianne said: “He did look scared, though. And as if he’d stayed up all night.”

  “Maybe I ought to call Jack, at least. Could be he has a line on Ilya. We don’t even know his last name.”

  “Yes we do. He introduced himself formally this morning. He’s Ilya Alluliev.”

  The name meant nothing to me. I said I would call Jack Morley, and Marianne didn’t protest. We talked another few minutes, then I dialed Foggy Bottom. Jack, who is State’s Assistant Chief of Protocol, was out at National Airport to greet a visiting politician from Brazil. I said I would call back.

  I was in my office, shaved, showered and stoked up for the day with a breakfast of hot cakes and sausage links, by a little after eleven. By twelve, Ilya hadn’t showed up. The office is on the top floor of the Farrell Building, where F and 15th Streets form a letter T. From the window you can see the Treasury Building and wonder how the sixty-bucks-a-week clerks feel printing all that money. I looked and wondered, and by twelve-forty Ilya still hadn’t showed up. I put another call through to Foggy Bottom. Jack wasn’t expected back till mid-afternoon. By then the envelope was eating at me again. I twirled the big dial of the office safe, opened it and stashed the envelope inside. No reason, really, except to buffer my will power.

  At one o’clock I said, “What the hell,” out loud, got Mike Rodin’s unlisted phone number from the VIP file I’d bought for a couple of hundred bucks a few months back, told myself there are probably only three cities in the country where such lists are for sale, those being Hollywood, New York and Washington, and put the call through. It was a Wheaton exchange, which meant an address in the rolling hill country of Maryland north of Chevy Chase. Well within the range of Washington business, but Mike Rodin wasn’t one to hobnob with the only moderately rich at Chevy Chase. He probably wore scarlet jackets and hunted foxes behind a pack of baying hounds.

  “Oh-two-seven,” the telephone voice said, giving me the last three digits of Rodin’s phone number.

  “Mr. Rodin, please.”

  “Who is calling?” The voice was deep and throaty. It took a while for me to realize that it belonged to a woman.

  “He doesn’t know me. The name is Chester Drum. I’m a private detective.”

  “I’ll, see if Mr. Rodin is at home, Mr. Drum.” But if her tone of voice meant anything, Mike Rodin was never home to private detectives.

  “Hold it,” I snapped. “Tell him I may have a message from his daughter. Before he tells you he’s not in.”

  “May have?”

  “May have.”

  For a while I listened to the miles of silence over the phone lines. Then the woman came back. “You wish to visit Der Zauberberg?”

  Der Zauberberg was The Magic Mountain in German. A nice name for a house on a hill, better than Overlook or Hillcrest or something like that, but why let your erudition, such as it is, show? “Der what?” I asked.

  “Mr. Rodin’s residence,” she said frostily.

  “That,” I told her, “is the general idea.”

  She told me how to get there. Carefully and in detail, as you would tell a cretin. I looked at the dial of the wall safe and decided to leave Ilya’s envelope there.

  Another step toward a four-thousand-mile journey behind the Iron Curtain, but I didn’t know that yet either.

  Mike Rodin lived in a house on a hill, which is like saying the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum on an artificial lake.

  The house stood north of Wheaton on the highest hill in the area, commanding a fine view of the neat Maryland farmland. It was surrounded by a red brick wall ten feet high with broken glass mortared into the top. The red brick curved back like quizzical eyebrows on either side of a wrought-iron gate not quite wide enough to launch an aircraft carrier.

  From my side of the gate I could see an upward sloping lawn and, at the top of the rise, Mike Rodin’s house. It was a massive red brick building, two stories high, with a white Georgian portico as long as a football field running the entire length of the façade. No road led to it, and I could see no garage. A red brick walkway, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, climbed the hill as straight as a ruled line.

  I leaned on the horn. Pretty soon a gatekeeper came into view from behind one of the red brick gateposts. But he was a gatekeeper like the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum on an artificial lake or like Der Zauberberg was a house on a hill. He wore whipcord slacks and a whipcord shirt and he carried a shotgun, not broken, under his arm. It was a Browning over/under with a ventilated rib and a polished walnut stock.

  When I got out of the car, he pointed the over/under at the ground six inches in front of my shoes.

  “Mr.—?” he said.

  “Drum,” I said.

  “With a message from?” he said.

  “Eugenie,” I said.

  He opened the gate and I went through. He was a hard, sun-tanned, competent-looking guy in his thirties, and after I passed through the gate he shut and locked it behind me. Then he frisked me, casually but
expertly.

  “Mr. Rodin have a lot of friends?” I asked.

  “Save the wisecracks, Jack. I just work here.” He jerked a thumb up the red brick walkway. “Get going.”

  I took a half dozen steps. He fell in behind me. I stopped and turned around. “If your orders are to play follow the leader, that’s okay. But you’re not going to do it on a brick path with a loaded shotgun. You might trip.”

  “How do you know it’s loaded?”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then break it.”

  He stared at me steadily. A car hummed by on the road on the other side of Mike Rodin’s red brick wall.

  “Break it,” I said.

  He shrugged and smirked and broke the shotgun at the breech. I marched up the hill on the red brick walkway. He marched right behind me.

  It was a hard quarter-mile climb through the bright sun. I mopped sweat off the back of my neck when we reached the top. Shotgun lounged in the shade, leaning against one of the columns of the portico.

  I went inside.

  Across a parquet floor, behind a butler. Through a dim room as cool as a crypt and furnished like the Governor’s Palace in colonial Williamsburg. Down a hall that had tapestries for wallpaper. A woman met me at the far end of the hall, and the butler did a smart about-face and got lost.

  “Five minutes,” the woman said in her deep, throaty voice.

  She was a green-eyed redhead in a white dress, the only green-eyed redhead I have ever seen who looked as cool and as unapproachable as an ice statue.

  She opened a door and I went through it and she shut it. That left me in a large tile-walled room, windowless, with fluorescent lights at the juncture of walls and ceiling and one of those square, step-down bathtubs just beyond the center of the floor.

  Mike Rodin lay in the bathtub with his head and shoulders out of the water. Within easy reach of his right hand was a tiled slab with three phones—one red, one white, one black—on it. Mike Rodin stared at me. There wasn’t any chair in the room. I stood. Rodin was a big man who shaved his head. There was dark shadow over his ears where the hair would grow if he let it. He had a long face with concave temples and a square jaw. The skin of his face was tautly drawn over heavy bone structure and his eyes slanted up slightly. That and the shaved head gave him an Oriental look.