OCR Text |
Show llpAll Over But the M' ; Richard Powell- ShOOtttiq Sil?M- AN SANCTUM MYSTERY J fW,. M STARRING ARAB AND ANDY BLAKE wo feature. ' HI THE STORY THUS FAR: Lt. Andy Blake, Operations, was joined by his wife, Arab, who started to work for Ordnance In Washington. Andy had had a rtin In with Jones, who owned a house near Arab's. Andy searched the house and found reports and clippings that indicated indicat-ed Jones might be a German agent. 8eeing Arab coming toward the honse, to stop her and to prevent Jones from ending end-ing her, he attracted attention to himself by breaking the window. Jones came on and during the stalking of each other, Arab appeared and drew a gun on Jones. They escaped, and the next day Andy reported all facts to the FBI CHAPTER IX "Bring the car tonight, Andy. I feel like going out. Maybe we can take a peek at the apartment. And come for me at seven." "O. K. I'll show up around that time." It was just seven when I stopped In front of the house on Q Street. Before I could get out of the car, Arab came down the front steps. She was almost skipping. "Darling," she cried, "the timing was beautiful. Now we've got to move fast!" I said stupidly, "Huh?" "This is a getaway, darling. Hurry Hur-ry up if you don't want us to be followed." Butterflies began skipping in my stomach. Or maybe bats. It would be a night to remember, all right a night for shots in the dark and groans and the whisper of stealthy feet. I knew Arab. When she acted that way lt was no time to look for a love nest. It was a moment for diving into an air-raid shelter. I swung away from the curb with yowling gears, grumbling, "What's the program?" "First we go to your quarters, Andy." I looked at her suspiciously. "O. K.t" I said, "but I wish you meant it the way I was going to mean it." "Why, Andyl ' Had you planned to take me there? Lovely!" 1 "The Crowleys are out for the evening eve-ning and . . . and I thought we could go there and be alone and . . ." Arab gave a sinister laugh. "We won't be alone," she said. "Yeah," I muttered. "I was afraid if that." Arab sat forward happily on the edge of the seat like a little girl tell-ng tell-ng a ghost story to her friends. I jrovided the circle of wide staring ;yes. "It's like this," she said. "The Tiaster minds decided that there vasn't any spy angle, so I decided o dig up proof." "You can have a front seat at my :ourt-martial." "They won't court-martial you if Cm right." "I get it. The army shoots me If ou're wrong. The spies shoot me If ou're right. I got about as much uture as a fruit fly." She ignored me. "There are," she aid, "sixteen girls in the house on 3 Street. By an odd coincidence hey're all from important branches if the government. By an odd co-ncidence co-ncidence we all have good jobs and ike to chatter." "I noticed that. A guy might think le'd wandered into the parrot house it the zoo." "You're not getting the point, ndy. Don't you see that every girl n the place must have been care-ully care-ully picked? There isn't one of us .vho doesn't hear important infor-nation infor-nation during the day." "You don't mean that you girls oss secret dope around, do you?" It's . . . it's hard to explain, idy. I've never heard any of them .onsciously tell any secrets. But vhen you chatter a lot, things slip mt. Little things. Things that night not mean anything to the average listener." I stirred around In the dregs of my memory. "Wait a minute," I -iaid. "That hunk of paper I picked jp in the fat man's house. What Arere those two notes on it?" "I memorized them," Arab said. "One was: 'Betty I hope I can make it but we've been working late a lot of nights.' The other was: Genevieve It's a wonder to me that trains don't get even more crowded these days, y but maybe people are earning to ' stay home.' Are you interested to know that there's a girl named Betty In the house who works in Operations in the War Department? Depart-ment? And on named Genevieve who works for the Transportation Corps?" "Yeah, I'm interested." "And can you figure anything out from those remarks when you know vho made them?" "I might," I said cautiously, think that Operations was bringing something to a boil. I might think that troop movements had been increased." in-creased." "And do you think that Plain Mr. Jones and Joey Raeder might be interested?" in-terested?" "Maybe." "Oh, don't be so stodgy! Of course they're interested. They take little remarks like that and things they cUp from newspapers and play jigsaw jig-saw puzzle." "Urn. Kind of hard to prove. "Hold onto your seat, big boy. I'm going to prove it Tonight." "Now wait, now wait. I m not laughing it off. I'll turn in a report in . u "Darling, you aren t going to have time to write any report I elected elect-ed you to be bait" Bait?" ' "TJn-huh, bait All week I've been keeping a diary. And every time I heard one of the girls drop an interesting in-teresting remark, I noted it down. I have quite a collection. Some of it is junk but some looks intriguing." in-triguing." "You framed me," I growled. "I wondered last week why you insisted insist-ed on staying around the house every ev-ery night. You did it so this story of yours would look good." "Andy, don't get angry yet because be-cause that's only the start. I said you weren't taking all these notes directly for Counter-intelligence but just sort of on your own and would take it up with Counter-intelligence when you got a real collection of loose talk. I said you had all your notes at your quarters and had invited in-vited me to come up and see them tonight, but I giggled and said that it sounded just like a new way of asking a girl to come up and see your etchings and of course I wouldn't dream of going to your rooms. And after I finished, Joey got up and left the table very fast and Mrs. Fielding looked pale and then you came before anything could happen." "Friends," I said, "let me introduce intro-duce you to the Widow Blake." "So," Arab said happily, "we're going to your quarters and wait in ambush." "I'll be right with you just as soon as I can run down to Fort Knox and borrow an Armored Division." "Darling, if you think you can get help, I'm all for it." That remark startled me. It was the first time Arab had ever admitted admit-ted that we might need help In taking tak-ing on a few dozen thugs. I tried to Imagine how our story would "Maybe I ought to yell for the U. S. Marines." sound to some high-ranker of the Military District of Washington. He would listen politely, and the next thing a doctor would be tapping my kneecap to find out if the leg reacted normally. "With that story," I muttered, "a guy would be a fool to lend us even one M.P." "That's what I thought, too. So it's up to us." "What do you mean? Stop being so sinisterl" "Well, suppose there's nothing to my story. No enemy agents. No secret se-cret information in my notes. No nothing. What happens?" "Nobody raids my room . . . but I'd age five years waiting for them, just the same." "Suppose there is sorhething in my story. Suppose they raid your room and find nothing. What happens?" "We go on living. A little thing, but nice." "And how long do we go on living?" liv-ing?" "Huh?" "Andy, you don't seem to realize that now we're tagged as the couple who prowled through the fat man's house a week ago. Nobody could miss connecting us with that, after the act I put on at dinner. If Joey and the fat man are agents, they won't want to leave us hanging over their heads. We've been too curious." curi-ous." "You're telling me." "Oh, darling, don't you understand? under-stand? We haven't any real evidence evi-dence on Joey and his boss. If we wait they may do a lot of damage before they're tripped up. This is our one chance to make them come out in the open. If they raid your room, we've got evidence. Then it'll be all over but the shouting." "O. K.," I said. "Put on your wedding ring, Mrs. Blake. We're about to play house." "Andy, you're a darling! You'll do it?" I didn't explain my reasoning to her. If a beautiful blonde wanted to think I was wonderful, who was I to undeceive her? "Sure," I said, "bring on your spies." ' I turned the car off the lane and through a cowpath gap in the hedge, and drove bumpily back over the meadow, paralleling the lane, as far as possible. That left the car far enough away from the cottage to escape anything but a real search. We' walked the remaining few hundred hun-dred yards to the Crowley place and found it quiet and deserted. Arab looked around the living room, .and said, "Maybe I ought to yell for the U. S. Marines." A fifth of Scotch, two highball glasses, and a silver basket-weave bottle of carbonated water stood on the table. Beside them a sign lettered let-tered ICE pointed to the kitchen. Bill Crowley's dragon-embroidered dressing gown hung on one chair, while Ellen Crowley's wickedest pink negligee was on another. A little trail of rice led upstairs. The Crowleys were cute. "Let the Marines get their own girls," I growled. "This is one situation situ-ation the army has well In hand." "It might take them a while to find this place. If you played your cards right you might be able to hold my hand." "Take it easy. We have a job to do. I could not love thee, dear, so much loved I not honor more. Tennyson." Ten-nyson." "It isn't. It's Lovelace, Richard. Sixteen-something to sixteen-some-thing. Do you really think we can't snatch a minute?" "Yeah. Let's see your notes." I picked up the notebook and sheaf of typed paper, taking care not to disturb the artillery. "Bring the rest and let's go to the cellar," I said. "Can't we stay here?" I began pulling down the shades on the first floor, and explained, "No use letting any lights show. The cellar cel-lar has blackout shades." We turned out the lights and went downstairs, closing the cellar door behind us. It might be an unnecessary unneces-sary precaution, like hiding the car, but nobody ever shot himself by making a detour around an unloaded unload-ed gun. I adjusted the blackout shades over the cellar windows. We settled down in a couple of wicker wick-er chairs and I began reading the typed translation of Arab's notes. She had done quite a job. Apparently Appar-ently she had never stopped taking notes from the time of our wild bus ride, nearly two weeks ago, right up to and including breakfast that morning. There were dozens of quotes on everybody in the house. I went back to the beginning of Arab's notes and read them again. This time I checked every quote with a list which identified the job held by each girl. When I finished, fin-ished, my skin was prickling. Something Some-thing was there. I couldn't see anything any-thing but I could feel it. We divided the pages and spread them over the ping-pong table. We went through them like prospectors hunting for gold except that instead of a thrill you got a shudder when you found something. We jotted down notes that fit the pattern on pages torn from the back of Arab's notebook, and scribbled comments about the remarks. We traded items and tossed some away after a discussion and went back and got others that we'd passed up at first-Probably first-Probably we missed things because we didn't have the necessary background back-ground knowledge to interpret them, but that couldn't be helped. When I finished reading I could feel Arab trembling against me. I swallowed, and it was like downing gravel. "Nobody mentioned D-Day," I growled. "That's a hell of a thing. We're going to put the enemy to the trouble of finding out all by himself when we land in North Africa." "Andy, I'm so scared I don't quite know what all these notes mean." "They mean a huge operation. Witness V-mail, a lot of Silver Stars, many cargo ships' being collected, lots of maps and big demand for oil." "And how much points to North Africa?" "Pocket guide to North Africa, maps probably using Arabic place names, Admiral Darlan, pyrethrum, First Armored Division trained for desert warfare, goggles and mosquito mosqui-to bars, iodine in water, narrow-gauge narrow-gauge railroads, report on scorpions, and battleship Jean Bart. The battleship bat-tleship even gives us one landing place: Casablanca. But since the real desert is farther east, lt sounds like landings over a long coastline." "A lot of those things show we're going in to stay, don't they? What else have we found out?" "Well, it's a joint operation, Army-Navy. The boys climb down cargo nets into Higglns landing boats, grab beach heads, build airfields air-fields with air-borne equipment throw new tank destroyers at Germans. Ger-mans. Among those present will be the First Armored Division, the First Infantry Division, now in England, Eng-land, and the Thirty-fourth Infantry Division. We catch Rommel in a vise between the Invasion forces and the British Eighth Army from Egypt" ; "It's all right to say it sounds thrilling, isn't it Andy?" j "It sounds thrilling to tell a guy you're going to smack him in the jaw. But sometimes it works out" better to smack him first" "There isn't a chance we could be having bad dreams?" (TO BE CONTINUED) j I |