Uncertain Voyage Page 11
Prodding herself—she had not come this far to be defeated by a blown-up child’s erector set, she told herself scornfully—Melissa crossed the avenue and walked up to the ticket window. The first platform, she decided, would not be enough, the highest platform would be too much; she would compromise on the middle one and then come right down again. She pulled out three new francs and purchased her ticket. The elevator was waiting, already half filled with afternoon tourists, among them a number of American teenagers expressing noisy warnings about jumping.
“Who wants to when we haven’t seen the Folies Bergères yet?” demanded one of them, and Melissa smiled faintly.
The elevator came to a creaking halt at the first platform and three women and a man walked out. “I should have gotten off here, too,” thought Melissa suddenly, but it was too late. The elevator began its ascent again, and she moved a little closer to the person next to her for consolation, but then abruptly the elevator reached the second platform and stopped.
Melissa drew a deep breath and walked out. Behind her the elevator banged and creaked upward and the squeals of the teenagers grew fainter. She had forgotten there would be a wind up here. It reminded her of the ocean and of the gales that incessantly swept the ship’s deck. She walked slowly, cautiously, to the guard rail and halted. The people who had left the elevator with her dispersed to right and left along the platform and presently drifted away. Off to one side she heard the clang of another elevator. “It’s going up!” someone shouted in English.
“Good! Let’s try the top!”
Melissa remained still. Below stretched Paris, divided from her by space and distance, a diminished and peopleless city like a toy spread under a Christmas tree. She gripped the railing, aware of the hypnotic pull of space. Space frightened her, she supposed that everything without solidity and structure dismayed her: unstructured time, formless days, unenclosed buildings, heights, the sea. But she was here. She was not enjoying herself but she was here on the second platform.
“So now I can go down again,” she thought with relief. “Good!” She turned to retrace the few steps she had taken in a direct line from elevator to railing, and her heart gave a sickening leap. A gasp—a whimper—involuntarily escaped her because she had forgotten all about The Pale One. She had neither thought of nor remembered his existence for hours—and he had found her. He was planted squarely between her and the elevator, his eyes resting on her without expression and it was this expressionlessness that added to the horror of the moment for surely there ought to be recognition, she thought—even intimacy—between a stalker and his prey. He had cornered her now. They were utterly alone here in this corner of the platform—one up for him, she thought hysterically.
Here on this windy platform only a railing separated her from Paris below, he need make only one move to close the distance between them and over she would go, plunging down through dizzying space. “Oh God,” she thought, “how could I have been such a bloody fool!” But it was all over now, everything; she could not move, she only waited, completely paralyzed and submissive, her glance dropping to his tie because she could not bear to look into his eyes and see her death depersonalized and then she could not bear the waiting and she closed her eyes. And still she waited for the feel of his hands on her waist and shoulder, and for the push that would send her hurtling through space into oblivion. They would say she had jumped or fallen and no one would ever know. Time stood still. She waited, drained of life, too weak, too impotent either to move or to cry out, almost longing now for deliverance from the agony of suspense.
The sound of the elevator coming down startled her back to life and she opened her eyes. For a second she did not understand that she was to be reprieved, and then slowly her gaze moved questioningly to The Pale One, and she saw that it was not even a reprieve because he was regarding her with the blank, impersonal boredom of a stranger. It had all been in her mind. Now he detached his glance and turned toward the elevator to enter it and then he stepped back to allow Melissa to enter first, and she was dazed by this polite masquerade when only a moment before—She moved forward obediently. As the elevator descended to the ground floor she felt the shock of the encounter spread through her limbs until, reaching the ground, she tottered from the elevator like an old woman. She moved slowly to a cement pillar and facing it, placed both hands around it for support, heedless of who saw her.
He had not killed her.
He had not killed her.
Her lips began to tremble and she placed both hands to her cheeks to conceal them. She realized that someone was asking her if she was all right, and she turned to see a little man with a broom peering short-sightedly up into her face. She nodded and managed a reassuring smile. With enormous effort she pulled herself together and tore herself from the wall to flag down a passing taxi. The man followed and vehemently waved his broom at an empty cab.
“Merci,” she told the man gratefully, and he smiled and touched his cap.
She fell into the rear seat of the taxi, directed the driver to her hotel, and leaned back in exhaustion. But now she faced a new terror, because if The Pale One had not killed her—had not even tried to kill her—then how much of this did she imagine and how much of it was real? In the darkening cave of her mind it seemed to her that only her death at his hands could have proved her sanity, for if she was in no danger from The Pale One—if she was imagining it all—then she must be slipping into a final madness from which neither Doctor Szym nor God could rescue her.
10
She could not go on like this, thought Melissa, not knowing of what and of whom she was frightened. She sat down at the small writing desk in her room that evening and put her head into her hands, trying to think, to pierce the fog of suffocating despair that had enveloped her since the travel agency’s letter had arrived. It seemed to her that only facts could dispel the mysterious dreads that surrounded her now. After a few moments of quiet she drew out paper and pen, the typed itinerary, the Carmichael letter, and a calendar.
The air mail letter from the agency was postmarked June thirtieth Bruxton, Massachusetts. In it Mr. Carmichael referred to a cable received only an hour earlier from Europe, and a cabled reply that had been dispatched at once. She circled June 30th on her calendar and concluded that whoever had demanded her itinerary must have received it—allowing for the time difference—either late in the evening of June 30th or early on the first of July.
So much for those dates….
She had arrived in Copenhagen on June 29th, late in the afternoon, and had not left her hotel for the rest of the day. She had met Adam on the following afternoon, which was June 30th, the day when the Carmichael Agency in America received the cabled request for her itinerary. It was on the next day, July 1st, that Adam had first pointed out The Pale One to her—and she remembered that she would never have noticed him at all but for Adam’s fastidiousness about clothes.
The dates fitted. The Pale One would have had time to receive the cable and pick up her trail at the hotel by that time.
She began examining it next from the other end, from the beginning aboard ship. Stearns had been murdered just before the boat reached its first port, and only a few hours before he was to disembark. What faceless stranger could have poisoned a man already aware that he might be in danger? It scarcely seemed something that a passenger could arrange.
She frowned, trying to fit together the few pieces of the puzzle that she had been given by Stearns and by circumstance. Immediately it struck her as extraordinary that Stearns traveled by sea when a plane would have carried him to Europe so much faster. Such a choice on his part implied an urgent need to deceive, to avoid the predictable and to conceal himself. But in choosing to travel by sea it was also obvious that he had cut himself off from all possible help, for otherwise he would never have had to appeal to a stranger. This in turn implied haste as well as desperation in his selection of routes.
&nbs
p; Haste…He could have been hotly pursued in New York by enemies. He might even have been discovered in the act of taking something from them, whoever they were, with no time for so much as a telephone call. Perhaps Stearns had jumped aboard ship only seconds before sailing time, believing that he left his pursuers behind, outwitted and frustrated.
But then he really would have been as safe as he felt.
“Unless,” she thought slowly, “unless they had someone already aboard that ship, someone whom they could contact with a description, an explanation, and an order to search and kill. A passenger? No, that would be too wild a coincidence.
“A room steward,” she whispered, growing very still. Yes, that would fit. Someone already aboard, placed there long ago for other purposes, such as collecting information. It wouldn’t even have had to be Stearns’ own room steward so long as there was access to his trays, or his vitamin pills or aspirin.
And Stearns had guessed. Had it been a gaze too frequently encountered for coincidence, a face glimpsed somewhere before, or was it a sensitivity to danger so acutely developed that the scalp prickled and the flesh crawled without tangible provocation?
But his murderer must have been deeply shocked to discover that Stearns no longer carried whatever it was they wanted from him. For five days his murderer must have stalked him, knowing why Stearns was aboard the ship and where he was going, and always supremely confident that Stearns had no knowledge of surveillance. Once this mistake was uncovered, Stearns’ murderer must have begun a methodical investigation of everyone with whom the man had contact. When he did this he would come up against the unalterable fact that one other person at table 43 was going to Majorca.
How would he learn this?
“Forms!” she remembered. The forms had been distributed among the passengers very early in the trip. Name: Melissa Aubrey. Travel plans: Denmark, France, and Majorca. A room steward would have little difficulty in gaining access to such information.
Majorca…If they knew Stearns’ destination was Majorca, and if they knew or guessed about the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company, then this would label her at once as a possibility. During the twenty-four hours between Cherbourg and Bremerhaven the information could have been sifted, conclusions drawn, and conferences held. And once she had been singled out as the strongest possibility—why, there was the bright label on her suitcase to aid and abet them in gaining even more information.
The Pale One had found her by Tuesday. The Danish police had not found her until Friday of that week.
“They are much cleverer than the police,” she thought with a shiver. “But then of course they had the advantage of knowing that Stearns was murdered. Naturally, since it was they who poisoned him!”
Yet if it had taken the police five days to find her, it might not have been easy for them to catch up with her. They could have followed her from the ship, of course, or met the boat train at Hamburg. But they might have lost her, as well, and after trudging behind that suitcase with its travel agency label they could have resourcefully sent their cable so that they need never lose her again, and could make efficient arrangements ahead….
But arrangements for what? This was what baffled her, for The Pale One had not killed her after all, and this proved a miscalculation on her part. She began to make a list:
(1) The Pale One does not know that he was a joke between Adam and me in Cophenhagen, or that he was noticed there at all;
(2) He does not know that Joe Carmichael wrote to me about cables and itineraries, or that I am aware that someone cabled for them to America;
(3) He does not (apparently) have orders to kill me;
(4) He has not tried to strike up an acquaintance with me;
(5) No one has even—so far as I know—entered my room or searched my suitcase;
(6) No stranger has tried to speak to me except a CIA agent named Grimes, and he immediately went away (I think) satisfied.
It was all very curious—yet The Pale One continued to follow her every move.
“As if they want only to keep an eye on me,” she said aloud, with a frown. “As if they’re not sure, perhaps, but are waiting…”
Waiting for what?
They were not threatening her, nor closing in, and apparently they had no intention of hurting her…unless?
She drew in her breath sharply. “Unless I arrive in Majorca and head for the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company!” she gasped.
That was it, of course—why hadn’t she seen it? She had been so blinded by fear, so afraid of force that she’d not seen that in spite of her traveling alone, in spite of her constant accessibility, The Pale One had remained patiently in the background, no more than a watching shadow. He was there to make certain that she followed the prescribed itinerary, did not fly off to Majorca a day early or make any other unexpected moves.
They did not really know then.
They would not know unless she visited the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company. Even in Majorca she would remain safe unless she incriminated herself by going to the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company.
She felt almost dizzy with relief.
She was safe. They did not want her, they wanted only the person who was going to go to the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company.
And that would not be she. Oh, no.
She stood up, excited and dazzled by her conclusions and by the rush of relief that filled her. The life that had appeared so untenable only a few hours ago was now livable and manageable. She discovered that she wanted to live, that she had been yearning to live. She began to walk about the tiny room, up and down the aisle between the furniture, and now everything was marvelously real to her again: the room, the sink, the couch, the table, the heavy curtains, the building next door. She touched the wardrobe lovingly. “You’re real,” she cried with delight. It was glorious to feel alive again after being frightened for days. It was pure joy to relax, to be no longer gripped by terror; she could feel this marvelous sense of reprieve thawing out every knotted tension. Her new life was opening out before her once more; she was not going to be snuffed out after all, she was going to live. She was safe. Not even Majorca held any threat for her now. She could go there tomorrow and fly away again in five days and nothing at all would happen to her, nothing at all—so long as she took pains to go nowhere near the Anglo-Majorcan Export Company. And this she had no intention of doing.
Laughing out of pure relief she began to pack her suitcase for Majorca.
* * *
—
She was at Orly two hours before flight time, as usual afraid—even as she smiled over it—that some unforeseeable circumstance might prevent her reaching the terminal on time, thus condemning her to being left behind and to violating the inviolable order to her itinerary. She could dislike herself for this compelling need to be early yet she could imagine herself waiting until the last minute and jumping into a taxi downtown to say, “Air Terminal please!” and the taxi pulling out into Paris traffic to crash into a second car. What horror to arrive too late and miss her plane!
The fear of missing trains and buses had been a recurring nightmare throughout her life, for was there anything more terrible than the finality of being left behind? Even thinking of it tightened the nerves of her throat. Being too late implied loss, it meant feeling deserted and alone, unprotected and insecure. “Melissa must always be early—hours early!” Charles had been accustomed to saying fondly, as if speaking of a cherishable eccentricity that made her lovable. She tried now to recall that distant Melissa, to picture and to feel the Melissa that had lived with Charles.
She remembered that she had been surprisingly strong and sure as she functioned within her small circle of safety. She supposed that to others she had appeared a veritable fortress of strength, as strong and as composed as the people strolling past her now in this lounge at Orly; and observing them as they smiled, chattered, waved, shouted, and wa
ited, she envied their sureness with passion. To be frightened of many things was a difficult way to live, yet was she really so different from these people except that her buried fears had been lifted to consciousness where she could see and feel and taste them? The fears had always been there but banished to a depth from which they had governed her with neither her permission nor her understanding; and from hiding they had ruled her by rendering flawed judgments and wrong decisions without her awareness of motive or reason. Such people, she reflected, were the walking wounded of the world, priding themselves on their health as they rejected responsibility, ran from love, slapped down minority races, and started wars. Surely it was better—it had to be better—to begin all over again, humbly, even if it meant enduring for a while this terrible defenselessness of healing, this working through the alphabet of fears that had ruled her.
The lounge was filling now with people, among them The Pale One. She could regard him almost with friendliness today because he had not killed her yesterday; surely there existed no better grounds for friendship, she thought with humor, and wondered if she dared to smile at him. But it was obvious that he had to perpetuate his masquerade and pretend that he had gone unnoticed on the streets of Paris and unobserved beside the elevator at the Eiffel Tower. And perhaps it was no masquerade at all, perhaps he believed in his continuing invisibility.