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Show llgAU Over But the . SK " ERicharS Powell- ShOOtiflCT if V""(Mfipl fa Af INNER SAMCTUl-l MYSTERY I A W STARRING ARAB D ANDY BLAKE w.u features f m& THE STORY THUS FAR: Lt. Andy Blake, Operations, was joined by his wile, Arab, who started to work for Ordnance Id Washington. She secured a room at a bouse on "Q" street, run by Renee, whom Andy recognized as a girl he had known i in Paris. Andy decided to search the I Jones bouse, near-by, where be found a j clipping service and other papers that i showed a spy ring operation. He looked out the window and saw Arab coming toward the house. Breaking a window 1 and calling out, be gave himself away, I but believed he might save her. Jones ' started firing. After hiding from each I other, Andy was saved when Arab put a f un in Jones' back. I CHAPTER Vin ' "We've got to be sensible," I I groaned. "You have to show up j again at that picnic. What about : Joey? Won't he be suspicious about where you've been?" "He tried to teach me a lesson by wandering of! with another glrL That worked out nicely. Because I'd arranged ar-ranged ahead of time for a taxi to wait near the picnic until I could slip away. So when Joey started to teach me a lesson, I zipped off to the taxi and had him rush me to as close as I dared go to the house." "What system do you use on Washington Wash-ington taxi drivers? Ordinarily they don't wait five minutes for a Senator, Sena-tor, let alone a CAF two." i . "1 paid him ten dollars ahead of time, Andy. And promised him ten more afterward." "Forgive me for asking, but do we still have a joint bank account? Or is it an out-of-jolnt bank account?" ac-count?" "It's . . . it's sort of going around In a splint." "Uh-huh. Well, let's get you back. There'i no reason why I can't show up too. I had an invitation.". "Oh, swell, Andy! But not In those clothes." "Gosh, I forgot I'm not In uniform. All my things are on the back ledge." I finished dressing and we drove out Rock Creek Parkway while I gave her a round-by-round report, from the moment I walked angrily out of her room two nights earlier to the moment when I smashed the i fat man's window. When I completed the report, Arab said, "It's wonderful! You've found out ever so much! If you go on like this they'll be putting you in Counter-intelligence." "If I go on like this they'll be put- ting me in Arlington National Cemetery. Cem-etery. And what I've found out j doesn't add up to anything." "Oh, but it does I We know that Plain Mr. Jones is an . Axis agent, j He wrote an isolationist news letter i when he knew what the real score I was. He clips military news, under the-cover of a legitimate clipping bureau, and sends it to Germany. He has a hold over your Renee , Fielding and makes her do some of ' the dirty work. He employs Joey Raeder in the clipping bureau, and Joey coaxes his girl friends to talk out of turn. I'll bet what Paula Thompson saw, the night she was ( kidnaneci was vour fat man and Joey cooking up something. And , she was afraid to phone the police from the house because, with Joey , Involved, she couldn't trust anybody In the house. What do you think of that?" She sighed, "Now what do we do?" "Me, I march up to Colonel Parker's Park-er's desk tomorrow and tell all." "Oh, Andy, that's awful stodgy of you. We were doing so nicely." "Get this," I said. "The war is not billed as Arab versus Axis. Lots of other people feel they own a piece of it, too. If Plain Mr. Jones really does croon himself to sleep with the Horst Wessel March, a couple of people at the War Department are gonna want in on it." "Sometimes," Arab said, smiling, "I really think I've fixed things so you've stopped taking the war for, granted. And I didn't mean to keep everything to ourselves. It's just that I'm afraid somebody will tell me I've been a bright little girl but now run along and don't bother your little head about what happens next. And I want to help!" "You can start helping right this minute." "Honestly? How?" "By coming clean with me." "Andy, darling, you don't think I'm holding out anything!" "I know it. I've tokT you everything every-thing and you haven't told me anything. any-thing. What have you found out?" "Almost nothing, Andy, really. The first night Joey and I had some hamburgers at a Hot Shoppe. Last night we went dancing some place on the road to Baltimore. Joey was curious about what I do in the War Department, but that was all." "Where does he get his black market mar-ket gasoline?" She looked at me admiringly, and said, "I forgot about that. At a little tumbledown country garage, a few miles past the District line on a side road off the highway to Baltimore. I wrote down directions how to get there. I counted each time the gas pump went ping and there were twelve pings, so Joey got twelve gallons. But the garage man didn't take any tickets from Joey's A book. How did you know Joey got black-market black-market gas?" 'I checked his speedometer against the mileage the last time his oil was changed, and found he was getting five hundred miles a week on an A book. Now let's hear what you dug up in the Fielding jhouse." "What makes you think I was digging, dig-ging, Andy?" "They fix up a picnic to see who will want to snoop through the house when it's deserted. They must have suspected somebody of wanting to snoop. And why? Because somebody some-body had been snooping. Three guesses who." "I didn't snoop much. Just a quick look around whenever I had a chance. I must have left things out of jrder in Joey's or Mrs. Fielding's room. But I really didn't learn much. I saw a letter in Mrs. Fielding's Field-ing's room. It was in French and mine is awfully rusty but I got the idea that she has some folks still living in Brittany." "What does that prove?" "It proves that Plain Mr. Jones can threaten her with something awful aw-ful happening to her people if she doesn't obey orders." I muttered, "I can't believe that she's mixed up in this racket." "I know, darling. Men never do like to believe anything very bad about a pretty woman. But if she isn't in on this racket, why does she let Joey stay?" "To tend the furnace and so on." "Piffle. Yesterday morning I overheard over-heard them scrapping. Mrs. "Fielding "Field-ing ordered Joey from the house and he just laughed. And I didn't give you all the details about my first interview with her, when I came to see about renting the room. If I'd told you at the time, you'd have said I dreamed it. We talked a long time about my background and all . . . Her hands patted me as lovingly as if I were a new spring hat. and she wasn't just making sure I'd fit in. She was making sure I had an important job at the War Department." Depart-ment." "You'll have to get more proof than that," I grumbled. "Did you find out anything else?" "That's all." "Cross your heart?" "And hope to die, honest." It was not much after ten by the time we parked the car and strolled to the scene of the picnic. Arab had been away only a little more than an hour. Long before this the picnic pic-nic had broken up into couples. They were rambling all over the place; nobody could have kept track of each individual. Joey was still missing with the girl who was supposed to make Arab jealous. Arab's disappearance disap-pearance hadn't been noted; her return, re-turn, . with me, brought no comments. com-ments. We only stayed long enough to nail down a sort of alibi. It didn't have to be perfect. Plain Mr. Jones couldn't identify the prowlers who had sprung his booby trap. Any one of a dozen members of the picnic group might have been guilty, to say nothing of outsiders. The first thing the next morning I briefed Colonel Parker on everything every-thing which had happened. When I finished, he said, "Your wife certainly can stir things up, can't she!" He thought for a moment, mo-ment, then added, "We could use another secretary. Maybe if we spread this story around Ordnance, they'd get scared and release her to us, hmmm?" "I doubt it, sir." "Urn. Yes. Explosives don't bother both-er those people, of course. Well, all this is out of my field. Let's take it somewhere else." I told the story again, and spread my scraps of evidence out: the clipping clip-ping about Corporal Bill Dwight's Armored Division, the torn newspaper newspa-per column about the secret German Ger-man radio station, and the paper with the scribbled lines reading: Betty I hope I can make it but we've been working late a lot of nights. Genevieve It's a wonder to me that trains don't get even more crowded these days, but maybe people are learning to stay ' home. Nobody spoke for a minute. I retired re-tired to a corner and wished that the QMC would put out a camouflage camou-flage outfit for junior officers assigned as-signed to The Pentagon. Finally a discussion' started. "Ve-ry interesting." "What do you make of it?" "Not much to go on, is there?" "You can take it up bit by bit and it's quite legal." "Yes, there's no law against clipping clip-ping items from newspapers." "Those two scraps of conversation could be anything. They don't mean a thing by themselves." "What do you know about this man Jones?" "Just that he runs a clipping bureau bu-reau and writes a confidential news letter and used to say it wasn't our war." "He can clip all the news he wants and be within his rights. The question ques-tion is, is he sending it out of the country? That's the point to check." "Right. Now about the missing girl. We can look into that. How long will it take. Major?" "Hard to say, sir. We haven't much to go on. Just a name. A week. Two weeks." "And about this Joey Raeder and Mrs. Fielding. It won't hurt to look up their history. Apparently he was In the Spanish fighting, and she came over from France within the past few years. The State Department Depart-ment may have some ideas. Well, Major ..." "My pigeon, sir?" "Yes. And a delicate pigeon. Gentle Gen-tle handling. Lieutenant!" That meant me. "Sir?" I squeaked. "Lieutenant, you will refrain from any further Independent investigation investiga-tion of this matter. If you observe anything of interest, report it to your commanding officer. That's all." Later in the day I managed to get time for a beverage bar date with Arab. I told her that there was nothing to the spy angle, that an investigation in-vestigation would be made Into the Paula Thompson case, and that I would be held responsible If she didn't limit her future war work to butchering carbon paper. I hinted that, if she -didn't, the War Department Depart-ment would authorize the expenditure, expendi-ture, on First Lieutenant Andrew Blake, of eight rounds of ammunition, ammuni-tion, ball, .30. She was very docile about it, which should have warned me, but didn't. The echoes of the war were louder, loud-er, though. My theater was starting start-ing to- crowd the cables and the shortwave channels. The Luftwaffe had given up trying to bomb Malta Into sand, and the RAF was striking hack. On the twenty-third they plastered plas-tered Genoa and Turin. And, the next day, Montgomery's Eighth Army began swinging punches from its shoelaces at the El Alamein line In Egypt. . Everyone had known that Montgomery Mont-gomery was going to attack. The Germans knew it as well as anyone. But what they didn't know was when and on what sector and in what strength. The Afrika Korps sagged a little, counterattacked, and then for days the infantry and guns slugged it out. The sullen masses of Axis and British armor hung back, waiting for a break-through. Something was cooking. You could feel the tension building up like steam pressure around The Pentagon. Penta-gon. Nobody said anything, but there were signs. Quickened steps. Grimmer faces. The crackle of questions at War Room shows. Of course I thought, things were cooking cook-ing for North Africa, but that was just because it was my theater. Everybody, Ev-erybody, from Commanding General to the newest dogface, always thinks his theater most important. When I looked at the situation in other parts of the world I realized that we. could be getting ready to sock the Axis almost anywhere. And Arab turned Into a one-woman task force. The fireworks started because I found an apartment. One of my friends got, his orders for overseas duty and I was the first to wish him luck in one breath and ask for his apartment in the next. I laid claim to it sight unseen, and we called up his landlord and closed the deal. The apartment would be mine in a week. I had lunch with Arab and told her. She didn't seem pleased. "It means leaving the house on Q Street," she explained. "You don't like the place, do you?" "I hate it, but I'll be walking out on a job. A job that needs doing." "Talk English, will you?" "I am talking English, and you know what about! A clean-up job needs to be done there. You can smell Hitler's New Oder all over the place. But you and the big brains here In The Pentagon have decided that there isn't any spy angle. an-gle. And so nobody' allowed to fumigate the place." We argued for fifteen minutes. 1 kept telling her that she was Imagining Imag-ining things, and ail I succeeded in doing was making her furious. Only one thing would have done any good: to tell her that the spy angle was being carefully investigated. And I was under orders not to tell her that. Finally she rose from the table, and said, "We aren't settling anything, any-thing, are we? Then let's not talk about it any more. Do we have some gas left in the car?" "Half a tank." (TO BE CONTINUED) |
