Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

“You said that before. What’s his name?”

“That’s his business. I don’t see that it means anything to you.”

“Where did he go?” the watchman asked sharply. “You sound suspicious to me.”

“I don’t care how I sound. It’s his business where he went. I don’t even know.”

“Oh, you don’t?” The watchman’s voice rang with quick unfriendliness. “I don’t suppose you know anything about a lot of robberies that’ve been going on around here either.”

“Nothing,” said Cappo.

“I think we’ll see about that. Start your car, you’re coming along with me.”

“What’s your authority?”

“This,” said the watchman. He clicked the safety off the .45 automatic on his knee.

3

“You’ll have to lie quiet. You’ve been very ill.” The woman in the nurse’s uniform adjusted the bed lamp so that she sat in the shadow.

Spud moved his head wearily on the pillow, fighting a nausea that clutched at his stomach threateningly. His senses were numb and dull, yet beating against his brain with the rhythmic blows of a woodsman’s ax was the thought that somewhere in the not so distant past he had rushed headlong into a trap with all the rash precipitation of an arrant fool.

He opened his eyes and gazed achingly at a wall. The room he was in was windowless and quiet except for the woman’s breathing and the monotonous hum of a ventilating fan heard through a grille in one corner. Rough cloth was against his skin. He glanced down at his chest. It took him several seconds to realize that he was in a single bed clad only in a hospital nightgown.

Memory began to trickle back slowly. Cappo, Fifty-seventh Street, the girl with the perfume bottle, and the House of Bonnée. Then the tiny stream of thoughts rose and grew until he felt himself drowning in bitterness as he remembered Maclain.

The Captain trusted him as he trusted no other living man. He had given him a job to do, a simple job, and Spud Savage had bungled it by showing no more foresight than a ten-year-old boy. The mechanism of the Ediphone seemed to be grinding against his nerves, mockingly repeating the message from Duncan Maclain: —

“Be cautious, because it’s dangerous as hell! . . . I’ve become the quarry now. If you find anything suspicious, get in touch with Colonel Gray. Tell him to keep an eye on me.”

No one knew the Captain’s methods better than Spud Savage. The Captain was about to walk deliberately into a situation where a single slip meant death. He was pinning his faith on Spud and Colonel Gray, and Spud had failed.

He tried to move his arm and found that the sheets were tucked in tightly about him. Then a stab of hope cut into the pressure of his self-recrimination, bringing the painful relief of a surgeon’s lance.

He had thought of Cappo. Cappo knew where he had gone, and Cappo was free. Spud relaxed with a lethargy even more foreboding than before. An organization which struck with such surety and finesse in a game played for nations would not have overlooked Cappo.

One single chance remained—a chance that he had not been unconscious too long, and could find some desperate means of getting away. Even if he failed to escape alive, he must get the Captain’s message to G-2.

He lay quiescent, certain that the woman’s eyes were looking at him all the time. Moving the fingers of his right hand as unobtrusively as possible, he began to work the covers free. The sheet was nearly untucked at the side of the bed when a key turned in the door. Spud drew a long breath, held it a few seconds, and released it cautiously.

A powerful, thick-set man in interne’s white came into the room. He wore an operating mask which almost entirely hid his face. Spud watched him from under lowered lids as he carefully locked the door and pocketed the key.

“He’s restless,” said the woman in the nurse’s uniform.

“I was afraid of that.” The doctor spoke throatily. “I’d better give him an injection which will help him sleep until dawn.”

Spud felt a constriction around his heart when he learned it was not yet day. There might still be time to save Maclain if he acted immediately.

The doctor came forward, stood beside the bed for some minutes looking down at Spud, then lowered the sheets a trifle and bared Spud’s arm. The nurse left her chair to stand on the other side of the bed. Spud drew up his knees, forming a tent of the bedclothes. At the same instant, the table lamp gleamed on a hypodermic in the doctor’s hand.

Once Spud Savage was aroused, few men living could move with such unexpected agility. The doctor took a pinch of Spud’s flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and leaned over to drive the hypodermic home. As he did so, Spud’s arms snaked from under the covers, reached up with simian strength to grasp the doctor’s head, and smashed the masked face down with crushing force against an upraised knee.

Blood stained the surgeon’s face, and the hypodermic clattered to the floor. The whipcord fingers of Spud’s right hand fastened on the doctor’s throat with a strangler’s grip, searching for the carotid artery. With his left hand, Spud jerked the covers free and threw them over the doctor’s head. He left the bed like a dementia praecox case fighting for freedom and landed on top of the physician on the floor.

The doctor cried out hoarsely from beneath the muzzling covers, circled Spud’s arm with muscular hands made doubly strong by fear, and vainly tried to tear the throttling fingers free.

Lights went up in the room. Spud’s yellow eyes glared up at the nurse standing above them with an automatic in her hand. His lips curled back in a grin which held a tinge of insanity.

The woman fired just as Spud whirled underneath the doctor, lifting the hundred and ninety pounds two feet clear of the floor. He heard the shot as the bullet plowed