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

A chair creaked slightly under shifted weight. Once again the Captain pieced together a sequence of sounds and divined that a single sheet of the paper had fallen to the floor, to be retrieved by Number 2, who handed it back to the reader.

The man with the velvet voice suddenly spoke aloud. “It’s to be infinitely regretted that a brave man and an officer should be put to such inconvenience, Captain Maclain.”

The words were spaced. They rolled out dispassionately, without rancor or any noticeable mark of emotion. Unctious with an olive-oil texture, they managed to be detached, and terribly impersonal. There was no patriotism behind them, no warmth. Neither was there any coldness or inhumanity.

The Captain was seized with hopelessness at their sound. Trained to estimate others by voice and cadence instead of appearance, it was brought home to him crushingly that he was face to face with a living body whose mind possessed no attribute subject to human appeal. He felt himself in the grip of the ultimate, as though cast by fate into some strange universe. He stood before Mars himself, the god of war and destruction. It would be futile to argue with a being whose voice had only beauty; as futile as to try to check a headlong rush of nations into ruin by casting himself bodily into the maw of their lancinating machine.

A hand materialized, seized the end of the adhesive tape which muzzled his lips, and tore it loose with a single pull.

“Your solicitude overwhelms me,” said Duncan Maclain. “I judge that I’m supposed to talk now that my lips are free.”

“Assuredly,” the Number 1 voice agreed in a single word of unaltered pleasantness. “We find ourselves in an age-old situation, Captain Maclain. I possess something which in your peculiar scale of values is rated most highly—the life of a fellow being. A woman. You possess something which in my peculiar scale of values is rated equally high—the knowledge of plans to defend five salient points in New York City. I’m offering you an exchange, Captain Maclain—one which is more than fair. I want the name and location of those five salient points, and I want to know what measures have been taken to make them safe. I’m offering you the life of a woman in exchange. I say the exchange is more than fair, because whether you decide to tell me or not, a little more work on the part of the organization I represent will inevitably make those points known to me. The defense plans might take longer to obtain. Nevertheless, I’d learn them eventually.”

Duncan Maclain lived in a world of sound. He knew each note in the scale of speech; how to make it ring deep with compassion and equally well how to make it pump blood to the face of a listener under the coruscating stab of jibe and irony.

He threw back his head, opened his mouth, and suddenly began to laugh. It came from his heart, mirthful and unfeigned, and struck against the confining walls with rolling peals of jollity. Immoderately and long he continued, shaking his pinioned body in the chair.

The hand which had torn the adhesive loose flashed out and struck him cruelly. Blood stained his lips and a single drop slid quietly down his chin.

“What are you laughing about, you fool?” asked the voice of Number 1.

“I’m laughing about nothing,” said Duncan Maclain. “I’m laughing at you. In my peculiar scale of values, I possess two things which you know nothing about. They go by the names of perspicacity and integrity. The perspicacity tells me that neither I nor the woman you’re holding will ever leave here alive no matter what I say; the integrity would silence me more effectively than a hundred yards of adhesive no matter how the woman or I might die. Add them both together, my friend, and you have the cause for my laughter. I’m blind and helpless, but I’m an American officer who lost his sight on active service and you’re a renegade plotting the downfall of the country you’re living in. It amuses me to know that you’re the fool and not I.”

“A blind man’s ears are sensitive, Captain Maclain. Certain steps have been taken to prevent this country you speak about so staunchly from manufacturing war supplies to sell to enemies of mine. Those steps will be felt from coast to coast, joining the bells on Christmas Day. Nothing you can do, or anyone else, can interfere. You can, however, save yourself the maddened screams of a tortured woman pounding against your receptive ears. Hours of them, Captain Maclain. Hours of pleading and entreaty from a woman unwittingly involved in this by you. When you meet death in the end, the thought of those screams will be your torture. Do you know of any more difficult way to die?”

“One,” said Duncan Maclain. “Giving satisfaction to a fool.”

The chair behind the table moved back and the pleasant voice said, “Perhaps we’d better give you a few hours to think it over, Captain Maclain.”

CHAPTER XXIV

1

LOUIS MADOC, his long neck drawn turtle-like through the collar of his cardigan jacket, stood against the sheltering wall of the new addition and watched the men file by. It was Christmas Eve and occasionally one man more friendly than the rest would wave or call a greeting; but for the most part they passed him silently or deliberately turned away. The surliness of his fellow workers was lost on Louis entirely. He resented the noisy groups which formed to pass on ribald pleasantries and give advice about not eating too much dinner on the following day.

He was glad when they trickled on into the parking space, found their cars, and drove off. Only a handful of men was left when Louis forsook the shelter of the wall. He started toward the gate. A short distance up the road toward Glastonbury he had sighted the truck he wanted so