It was Peter Highman!
My mind was still absorbing this as Highman hefted his package and strolled up the walk to the building entrance opposite which the car had dropped him. It was a small building, and when I approached it myself after he'd gone inside, I saw that it housed a sort of combination museum and art gallery. A group of five or six well- dressed people entered it after Highman, and I fell in close behind him.
I followed them as they moved slowly through a series of cubicles with paintings, sculptures, and other art objects arranged in them. There was no sign of Highman. Off one of the cubicles, I noticed a staircase leading to the second floor of the gallery. I broke away from the group and mounted it.
I found myself in a large lecture hall. It was empty. At the far end was another door like the one leading from the staircase. I crossed over and opened it. Now I was in a narrow hallway. There were two or three doors leading off it, and from the open transom above one of them I heard voices. One of the voices was Highman's.
"Make sure it doesn't get to the airport until the last possible moment," Highman was saying. "But remember that it must be on that midnight plane."
"But where will I keep it until then?" the other voice asked. "It's too big for the safe. And I can't have a thing like this just lying around."
In Salisbury, the doors are old-fashioned – conveniently old-fashioned. They have keyholes – nice, big keyholes. This door outside which I was eavesdropping was no exception. So I made the most of it, squashing my nose against the door as I stooped to peer into the room.
The object they were discussing was on the desk directly opposite the keyhole. I had a perfect view of it. I recognized it immediately, although I'd never seen it before. I would have known it anywhere from Singh Huy-eva's description. It was the gold-encrusted, multi-jeweled phallus which had been hacked off the Nepalese god-idol!
I could appreciate that they had a problem. Four feet of jeweled genitals isn't exactly an easy thing to hide. I mean, they couldn't exactly play "Purloined Letter" with it, or anything like that. And it was too valuable to just shove in a drawer or a closet somewhere.
But Highman had an answer. "There's a lock on the door of that refrigerator down in the basement, isn't there? Well, put it in there. And don't let the key out of your possession."
I jumped away from the door and flattened myself against the wall as they came out. They didn't see me. When they'd passed through the door leading to the lecture auditorium at the end of the hallway, I slipped into the room they'd left.
I thought I'd have a fast look around and see what I could see. I saw nothing. It was a perfectly ordinary office with nothing incriminating around. Its interest had dimmed with the departure of the jeweled phallus in Highman's arms.
I glanced out the window just in time to see Highman leave the building. My face broke into a grin as I saw Vlankov, the Russian agent, step out of a doorway and start to tail Highman down the street. The grin grew wider – if a bit puzzled – as I spotted a third man fall in all too casually behind Vlankov and start to tail him.
I didn't waste any time trying to figure this third man's angle. I figured I'd better get out of the office before Highman's playmate returned. But what should my next move be?
On the spur of the moment, I came up with an answer. I decided to have a try at retrieving that jeweled phallus. If I succeeded, I'd be doing Singh a favor, I'd be bugging S.M.U.T., and I'd be forcing Highman to come to me – which just might be a step in the direction of finding Dr. Nyet.
I found my way down to the basement without any trouble. The refrigerator unit was right there, in plain sight, a large steel box that looked impregnable. It was fastened with a stout chain and a heavy lock.
What now? I might have been able to blow it with nitro, but – wouldn't you know it? – I'd left my nitro in my other suit or someplace. If I'd had the skill, maybe I could have picked the lock. But, despite my checkered background, that was one knack I hadn't picked up. Well then, there was always muscle.
I found a poker hanging beside the furnace. Made of iron, it was a natural crowbar. It was too thick to work into the lock itself, but I just managed to wedge it between the links of the chain. Teeth gritting, muscles bulging, adrenal glands pumping, I strained with all my might. Finally, something gave. Me.
I stood back and looked at the goddamn chain. All my prying hadn't opened it so much as a centimeter. I cursed and smacked the crowbar against its linky teeth. That would teach it to kick sand in my face! But it only grinned back at me, undented by the blow.
My money-back guarantee from Charles Atlas having run out, I decided there was no point in my continuing to rail against my physical shortcomings. I faced the fact that I wasn't going to be able to bust the chain. And I put my brain to work to find another way of getting at the refrigerated genitalia. The thing to do, I finally decided, was to find the man with the key, wave my gun under his schnozzola, and make him unlock the freezebox. I decided to wait for nightfall when the gallery would presumably be closed and there wouldn't be anybody around to get in my way. So I curled up behind the unlit furnace and dozed the afternoon away.
When I woke up, the small cellar window told me it was night. I went upstairs and found the gallery closed and darkened as I had figured it would be. I guessed the man with the key was probably in his office on the second floor, and so I kept going up the stairs. But I was in for a surprise as I came out the stairway door and into the auditorium.
The lecture hall was filled with people. The man I was seeking wasn't hard to find. He was put on the platform with two other speakers. I stuck my gun back inside my jacket and took a seat in the rear of the hall. Obviously I couldn't deal with him until whatever was going on was over.
It seemed to be some sort of a debate on art. My target was evidently the moderator. The audience was all-white, well-dressed, and definitely upper-crust Rhodesian. The first speaker went to some lengths, citing all sorts of arbitrary classical standards, to prove that primitive art isn't art at all. His point seemed to me to be more politically racist than artistically valid. Summed up, he was trying to prove that only Caucasians were capable of producing real art. The rhetorical convolutions he went through in attempting to place all African and Oriental art beyond the pale were worthy of a Governor Wallace. But the audience was obviously with him. It was the time for rationales from every area of white Rhodesian life to justify the steps being inaugurated by the government to insure that black Rhodesians were kept barred from all those lily-white provinces – the art world included – which the whites had earmarked for their own.
Loud applause greeted the end of this diatribe. Then the moderator introduced the second speaker. Right off the bat it was obvious that he was licked.
First of all, he had a decidedly English university accent which wasn't calculated to please a crowd which so obviously identified with the slurred Rhodesian speech pattern of the previous speaker. Second, his voice was unfortunately high-pitched, an easy target for laughter. And third of all, the audience was in no mood to listen to any point of view, no matter how moderately presented, which might suggest that the native art of the land was a cultural asset to be treasured. Still, they didn't resort to catcalls to shut him up.
They didn't have to. It only took two men and a trick that carried me back to my high school days to accomplish that. It's a trick that depends on the speaker using a p.a. system, which was the case here. Two people sitting in opposite corners of the room take ordinary, half-filled water glasses and make sure the inner parts of the rims are thoroughly wet. Then they each run the tip of one finger around this inner rim. The result is a crossfire of unheard high-frequency sound-waves which are picked up by the microphone. Then, when the speaker talks into the mike, his voice is transmitted as a garbled series of high beeps and his words are lost in a senseless caterwaul. As a kid, I'd been involved in pulling off this stunt once or twice when a high-school assembly speaker had been particularly dull. Now two grown men were doing it to drown out a speaker pleading for artistic appreciation and tolerance.