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Show fflAll Over But the MVP liPf Richard Powell- Shooting f 'lifcJ AN IK1N4ER SANCTUM MYSTERY f MIT" STARRING ARABANDAMDY BLAKE w fiatuws ' Hi THE STORY THUS FAR: Lt. Andy Blake, assigned to Operations, was agreeably agree-ably surprised by the arrival of his wife, Arab, who had come to Washington to take a job with Ordnance. On the bus while looking for living quarters for Arab, she said she was going to write down all of the loose talk taking place on the bus. While she was in the act she was noticed and the cry of "Spy" rang out. Arab and Andy were able to Jump off the bus, but In following her Andy tripped and passed out. When he came to the FBI questioned him, and he told all about Arab's work, and that she had been mistaken mis-taken for a spy. Andy was told to be lure that Arab did not interfere, but rather to report to FBI In the future. CHAPTER IU "Andy! Please, Andy. You've got to help me. You" I jammed my foot on the starter. f'Am I? You aren't staying here." She wrenched out of my grip, flung open the car door, and jumped to the sidewalk. She turned for a moment. mo-ment. "And if you won't help," she choked, "I'D do it alone." Her heels clattered on the walk and up the curved steps and then the door opened and she was gone. I sat there in the car. I sat there doing nothing. I wish I could even claim that dozens of reckless plans boiled through my head. Only one plan went through my head, and it limped through. I wanted to call a cop. That, of course, might be the very worst thing to do. It would identify Arab publicly as the girl in the white raincoat without solving any of the mystery. Probably I would have waited there until arrested for overtime parking if the problem hadn't been decided for me. The door of the Q Street house opened and a rugged-looking rugged-looking guy came out. He was tall and had shoulders which crowded the doorway. He eased himself down the steps and came, limping slightly, to my car. 'A guy wants to see you outside, Jack," he said. 'I don't get it," I said. "What's the Idea?" He drawled, "Are you coming out nice, or do I dig for you?" I wasn't happy. The Army likes Its officers to stay out of trouble, and has a few dozen regulations to that effect. You can get a court for a street brawl. But this case seemed to call for taking a chance. I shucked off my blouse and cap, so that I wouldn't be wearing any Insignia, In-signia, and started to get out of the car on his side. That was a mistake. I was only half out when he hit me. My head bounced off the door frame and got caught in a cross-rip of short hooks. It felt like having my head rattled in a giant dice box. Galahad was smiling. He could have dropped me with a real punch but he didn't try. He seemed to be having hav-ing fun. I got a foot up against his ribs and shoved hard. He staggered back and fell in the hedge and I had a chance to scramble out. There wasn't time to clear my head. The big boy came off the hedge like a fighter using the ropes, and rushed me. Then, Instead of dropping off to sleep, I found my head clearing. I had been doing a little instinctive work on his groceries and he didn't like it. He was trying to push me away. That was swell. I got a good flat-footed stance and threw hooks at his middle as fast as I could. He was tough. It was like hitting an underinflated tire. He would take a lot of softening. He I looked down, blinking. The guy had wilted. He was down. But he wasn't writhing slowly the way a man does when you really get to his groceries. He was sitting down, holding his right knee. "Get up," I snapped. "Go to hell." "Buddy," I said, "if you don't get up I'll " "What'll you do, kick me? Go on. Jack, kick me. It'll look swell in the sunrise edition. Army Lieutenant Kicks Cripple." This was getting silly. "You're no cripple." He yanked up his right trouser leg and said, "There you are. Jack. Bad knee. Jeez, they ought to give you a medal." He had a brace on the knee but lt didn't necessarily mean a thing. I've seen guys with braces like that rack up ten baskets in big-league basketball. 'You're just yellow," I said. A strange voice said, "Joey Raed-er Raed-er only likes fighting when he is winning." It was a harsh voice. It scratched like a bum needle on a phonograph record. I turned and saw a short fat man. The street light reflected on his glasses and made him look blind. He was so fat that his arms stuck out at angles instead of hanging straight down. Joey Raerier scrambled to his feet and grabbed the fat man's coat with his left hand. He snarled. "I've been taking that stuff off you ever since I came here. You're gonna learn to keep your mouth shut." I saw Raeder drop his right shoulder shoul-der and start a punch and I jumped forward to stop him. I wasn't needed. need-ed. What happened was almost too fast for me to follow. The fat man's hands made short white blurs against the darkness. Not hitting: slashing. With the edges of his palms. Raeder's arms dropped as if numbed and the edge of a palm clipped under the ear. He crumbled. The fat man said, "He works for me. He needed this lesson." He moved up close and the blind glasses glared with reflected light. "People think a fat man is a joke. They think he cannot fight or make love or plan." His voice was higher, scratchier. "Perhaps you think so? Perhaps you think so?" "Take it easy," I said. "I never gave it a thought." The voice came down a pitch. "Raeder lives in there," he said, tilting his head at the fake embassy. "Take him in. Tell him to report as usual tomorrow." I picked him up in a fireman's lift and staggered up the steps to the house. The door opened. The next ten minutes were among the worst' in my life. The place was filled with excited girls. None of them knew exactly what had happened, except that poor Joey was hurt and that I had done it. As I entered there was a gasp of horror. The way they shrank back I might have been a Jap task force. It was too much for me. I said brutally, "Where do you girls want the body?" A lovely little ash-blonde Southerner South-erner breathed, "Is ... is he daid?" "Nor" I growled. "He swooned. Can I drop him just anywhere?" "Don't you dare drop Joey," one of them cried. "You bring him back The big boy came off the hedge like a fighter. here to his room and be careful or we'll call the police!" I carted him to a bedroom-bath combination on the first floor and flopped him on the bed. Half a dozen doz-en girls clustered around him, twittering twit-tering with grief and smoothing his forehead and making him comfortable. comfort-able. I saw his eyelids flicker, but he didn't open them. In his place I'd have done the same. "If you really want him to move," I said, "call his draft board." They stormed at me that Joey was a genuine 4-F and had a terribly bad knee from fighting the Nazis in Spain long before persons of my type thought of fighting and he had gone up i.i a frightfully old plane the Spanish Loyalista hd given him and had knocked down five brand-new Messerschmitts and now wasn't I ashamed. "Not yet," I growled, "on account of the Germans didn't use any Me's in Spain." A weak voice said, "They got things wrong, Jack. It was Heinkels, and only four. I might of got five but I caught a slug in my knee." It was Joey, and he was starting to sit up at last. His admirers crowded around him and patted him and told him not to overdo it, but he shook them off bravely. 'Jack," he said, "we still got something to settle." I said hopefully, "Something we can disagree about?" A teen-age kid cried, "Now you just leave Joey alone! You knocked him out once." "Just for the recsrd," I said, "I didn't knock him out. He decided to sit out our waltz, and then his boss came along and they had an argument and his boss rocked him to sleep." Arab fell into a chair, whooping like an Indian bearing down on palefaces. pale-faces. I stamped out of the room. Luckily it didn't have a revolving door. As I reached the hallway a cool hand touched mine and a woman said, "Let me fix those cuts before you leave, Lieutenant." Her face was in a shadow but I could see a slim figure with legs that deserved a triple-A priority on nylon. She wore a tailored suit with a flaring white collar opened one more notch than a really shy girl would have opened it. "I'm all right," I said. "You better bet-ter take care of Joey, though. He's just been shot down by a mess of Heinkels. And besides, he's pretty." "You're not all right," she said. "You have a cut over your left eye and a bloody nose and your vanity is terribly bruised." "With Joey around," I grumbled, "there isn't any vanity left for anybody any-body else to have." She laughed softly and patted my hand. "You're a little boy, like most men. But a nice one, I think. Come along. I am Mrs. Fielding and this is my home." I lumbered down the hall beside her like a small grimy kid with a nice aunt. "If you own this place," I said, "why do you let a guy like Joey Raeder stay here?" The trim shoulders shrugged. "One needs a man around a house. To take care of the grass and furnace fur-nace and to open stuck windows and " "Yeah," I said, "I bet he's great on opening girls' windows. From which side?" She opened a door and fumbled for the light switch. "You have no right to say that," she said coldly. "Sorry." "Sit down," she said. "Don't worry about the girls coming in and bothering you. Their community room is across the hall." I sank into a chair and watched her rummage through a closet. I don't have a photographic mind but I never have much trouble remembering remem-bering a pretty face. And I hadn't forgotten hers. She came back from the closet with some absorbent cotton cot-ton and Band-Aid and alcohol, and I said softly, "Do you still like those tall glasses of cafe nature and onion soup at Les Halles at six a. m. and the tango and buttered croissants?" Her eyes widened but she didn't seem very curious. "What would be the use?" she said. "The Germans Ger-mans have Paris." "I don't want to pry," I said. "Shut me up if you want. But your name was Renee something-or-other and you were a hostess at Zelli's and half the college boys seejjjg Paris that summer were in love with you. It was August of thirty-one." thirty-one." She smiled faintly. "You have a good memory." "Why not? . You were Paris and mystery and all that." "I was seventeen and fresh from a Breton fishing village and nothing more. What else do you remember?" remem-ber?" "I remember we all tried to make you and you laughed and didn't have time for anybody really except a big happy-go-lucky kid from Dartmouth. Dart-mouth. He was half of one of their terrific pass combinations. He set a new record one night in Harry's New York Bar for emptying that two-liter beer mug. Something under un-der twenty seconds. What was his name?" "Bob. Bob Fielding." She said it so calmly that for a moment I didn't click. "Sure, Fielding," Field-ing," I said. "What happened to him? I don't remember him playing play-ing his senior year." "We were married. He didn't go back." I kept quiet. I had no right to get curious. She began dabbing at my face. My throat felt as if somebody had tied a knot in it, and I wouldn't have known the difference if s! - had used carbolic acid. My scratches didn't seem very important. I had my throat untangled by the time she finished. I thanked her but she wasn't listening. She tilted my face to the light and studied it. After a few moments I muttered, "You won't remember my face. Nobody No-body does." She gave a little start. "I'm afraid I wasn't even trying to remember you," she said. "That was not polite po-lite of me, was It? I was trying to remember a girl from Brittany." She rose. I stumbled to my feet and we turned toward the door. And there was Arab. She didn't look angry an-gry or suspicious. She looked like a college freshman hauled up before the Dean of Women. Her feet were toeing in and her fingers tightly laced and her eyes wide and fearful. I had never seen Arab frightened, although there had been a few times in the past when it would have been sensible of her. "I've been fixing your lieutenant's face," Renee said calmly. "Oh," Arab said. She sounded relieved, re-lieved, and I wondered if there had been a shade of emphasis when Renee said "your lieutenant" Women Wom-en make me feel helpless. Sometimes Some-times I get the idea that men don't have any choice at all, but just get dealt out by women to each other like cards.. From the bottom of the deck, too. "I know that you two had some misunderstanding," Renee said. "But you ought to forget it and start all over. I think that you will like each other." "We-111 . . ." Arab said. "I'll come back tomorrow night, if I may," I said. Arab murmured, "I want to fix up my room tomorrow night, but if it's all right for Lieutenant Blake to help . . ." When we got out on the porch nobody no-body was around, and I said, "Do I know you well enough yet to kiss you?" "Well, no. But it's a nice way to get acquainted." Arab looked at me hopelessly and said, "I've got to get some sleep. Do you mind?" "I'd better go, anyway," I said. (TO BE CONTINUED) |