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

poured two stiff drinks, handed one to Maclain, and tossed his own down.

“There’s something queer going on, Captain Maclain,” he remarked as he took the empty glass from the Captain’s hand. “I phoned the Boston police as well as Colonel Gray. They have no record of Thad’s daughter being found at all.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Maclain. “I thought that something important had made you decide to stay.”

2

Dr. Trotter came, left sedatives for Cheli and Maclain, and went away.

Cameron sat on the foot of Maclain’s bed and said, “It’s heartless not to let you sleep, but the lives and property of a lot of people are in terrible danger, and time is slipping away. We’ve broken the back of a spy organization which has wormed itself even into the army and navy. It was through you that we turned up their headquarters.”

The Captain heard a match strike and smelled tobacco.

“The F. B. I. wants to know, Captain Maclain, how you got wind of this House of Bonnée.”

“There’s a stencil and a copy of a letter in a false compartment in the top of my Gladstone bag, Mr. Cameron. You’ll find a brass stud in each corner of the bag in the inside. If you pull them, the lining will come free.”

He lay quiet while Cameron secured the stencil and the copy of the letter made by Bunny’s secretary. He pressed his fingers to his eyebrows and listened as the F. B. I. man read the letter aloud.

“It sounds like an ad,” said Cameron.

“It’s intended to sound like an ad.” The Captain was thinking of Spud and fighting an apprehension which threatened to dull his every faculty. “Actually, Mr. Cameron, that’s a code hiding a message which says that I have information much more important than Gilbert Tredwill’s plans, and telling the agents here in Hartford to concentrate on me.”

“You found the code?”

The Captain felt the movement of the bed as Cameron leaned forward. His snapped-out question indicated his tenseness. He went on speaking, holding himself still: —

“Let me tell you what that means, Captain Maclain. We don’t know how many tons of high explosives set with time bombs have been planted throughout this country today. We’ve found some, it’s true, but enough others exist to cause a holocaust tomorrow if they’re not uncovered. The prisoners we’ve taken either don’t know where these bombs have been planted or they refuse to say. If you’ve found a code, Captain Maclain, for God’s sake give it to me. Colonel Gray believes that the information we’re seeking is buried somewhere in a lot of dummy contracts taken from the files of the House of Bonnée.”

“The code is based on the odor of violets,” said Duncan Maclain, and swung his feet to the floor. “The key to it is the abbreviation for the name Violet, the word Vi. Lay the letter you’re holding down on the writing table, and make a perpendicular fold down the middle. See that the edges meet all the way around.”

The Captain heard the rustle of paper, and Cameron said, “Okay.”

“Now take a ruler—you’ll find one in the drawer. From the upper left-hand corner of the letter draw a line to the middle of the page at the bottom. It must be exact. From the bottom draw another line upward to the right-hand corner. You should have a V covering the entire page bisected by an I. Now read down on the left only those words touched by the left-hand line of the V, and up on the right, the same.”

Cameron read down, “City’s vital points and defensive more important,” and up on the right-hand side, “than balm sight use force to obtain.”

Almost unbelievingly, he grouped them together and read it aloud once more. “City’s vital points and defensive more important than balm sight. Use force to obtain.”

“You see,” said Maclain, “it’s right before you in plain English. I possessed, locked in my head, the knowledge of the city’s vital points and defensive. This was the tip-off to get that information by force. If it hadn’t been for your swift, clever work, I’m afraid—”

“Skip it,” Cameron hastened to say. He wrinkled his forehead and muttered, “Balm sight!”

“For bomb sight,” said Duncan Maclain.

“I’ll let you sleep in peace,” Cameron told him. “I have to get to the phone.”

3

The Captain turned over and grimly resettled himself, trying to rid his mind of the fiendishly obsessing rhyme: —

’Twas the night before Christmas

And all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring,

Not even a mouse.

The jingle proved just as bad on his left side as on his right. Persistently it dug rabbit warrens in his brain and circulated through it, turning his night into day. Mixed in with it to form a disturbing phantasmagoria worthy of a hashish smoker was Pierce’s story about the Christmas tree.

At ten minutes to two, somnolence was put to flight by a pair of facts that struck into his consciousness, carrying with them an internal clarity of vision bright as the light of a magnesium flare. Duncan Maclain was even more sensitive to silence than he was to sound. Like Nature, his well-trained ears abhorred a vacuum. Unlike most people who found themselves wakeful, his insomnia was not being caused by chafing noises, but by lack of a subconsciously expected sound. That was fact number one. He had not heard Arnold Cameron return from his downstairs trip to the telephone.

Fact number two had come more laboriously, built up piecemeal by selection and rejection of various reasons why anyone should want to make off with such a prosaic object as an untrimmed Christmas tree.

Pierce had said the tree was dragged down to the highway at the end of the house. At the end of the house was Thad’s intimate theater, and at the back of the stage in the theater was a door. Maclain’s methodical mind had tabulated that information and weighed it with care. The result was a logical conclusion that dragging the Christmas tree around the house to