Bare-handed hero. But I cannot think of any kind of weapon small enough to lift: that would have done me much good. I cased the empty bushes. I made a slow circle of the house. From out in the dunes I saw Glory move past an uncurtained window. I stood up and somebody hit my head on a line drive to third, where it was fielded on one hop and hurled across to force the base runner at second, but he came in spikes high to break up the double play, and the second baseman threw my head over the first baseman and smack into the wall in front of the box seats along the first base line. My head rolled dead, eyes turned completely around so that they looked back into the blackness of my brain where fireworks were on display.
Then I was in a pocket in the dunes with a mouth half full of damp cold sand, my hands fastened behind me with something, and with something tied around my eyes. Somebody of considerable muscular weight and with very hard knees knelt on my back. They put a hand on my forehead and lifted my face out of the sand. They lifted it too far. They lifted it until my neck creaked.
“Hey!” I said, and spat sand. “Wait!” I said and spat sand.
A whisper came from lips close to my ear. It seemed to be a whisper with an English accent. “If I tell him to snap your neck, he will snap your neck.”
“I believe you.”
“What is your interest in this, Mr. McGee?”
“Interest in what?”
“Are you trying to find out if I will actually tell him to pull your head back another…”
“No! I was visiting Mrs. Geis. I’m an old friend. I saw something move in the bushes when I drove out.”
“You are a big man. You are in very good shape. You move very well through the night. With professional competence.”
“They put me in a brown suit and taught me a lot of things like that. Could he ease the tension a little? I’d hate to go through life looking straight up.”
“Terribly amusing,” he said. He spoke in a language I could not identify. The fellow on my back lowered my forehead a generous inch and a quarter.
I said, “Did you fellows squeeze a lot of money out of Doctor Geis before he died?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“It would be a matter of no interest to us.”
“Gloria Geis asked me to come up from Florida and see if I could find out. It’s sort of a hobby with me, helping my friends.”
“A profitable hobby?”
“Once in a while. Not real often.”
He was silent for a time. I listened to the surf. I ran my tongue over and around my teeth, collecting sand.
“I shall require you to accept certain assurances, Mr. McGee. We have no interest in any friends of yours, to do either good or harm. We are very careful people. You will gain nothing by reporting this to anyone. We examined everything you are carrying, and have replaced everything, exactly as we found it. If you had seemed overly nervous or hysterical about this, we would have been forced to execute you. In simplest terms, you go your way and we will go our way. Keep your mouth shut. We are not likely to meet one another again.”
“I am glad to hear that.”
They did not hang around to say good-bye and shake hands. A terse and guttural order was given. My face fell into the sand. The weight was lifted away, and a quick nip at my wrists freed them. I rolled over slowly and sat up. I worked at the small hard damp knot at the back of my head. My fingers were cold, and the tightness of the binding had numbed my fingers. When I at last uncovered my eyes, I was alone in the dunes. I was further,from Gloria’s house. Her house was completely dark. I massaged my neck and rolled my head around to loosen the kinked muscles. I found the strip of fabric which had been around my wrist, and put it with the fabric which had been tied around my eyes and stuffed them into my topcoat pocket. They were going to be very valuable clues. I found out later that one was my necktie and the other was the entire tail off my shirt.
I could find no specific impact point on my skull. The whole right side of it, from front to back, felt slightly tender.
The hideous and unspeakable bruise was upon my ego. I had been taken on open ground with a contemptuous efficiency, dropped, trussed, dragged, inspected, and dismissed. It had been done without giving me the slightest chance of any kind. Yet it was not because they thought me particularly dangerous, but because they were what the Limey whisper described-“very careful people.” And, I could add, very skilled people. Very well-trained and conditioned people.
They worked with military precision, spoke of execution as if it was their right by nature of their trade, and left me without a clue as to age, description, dress-or even how many there were.
At the end of a fifty-mile hike I got into the rental car, and as I started it up, I realized I was perfectly willing to take the word of the whisperer. They were not interested in Gloria Geis. Or in me. Or in the Doctor’s money. On the drive back into the city I could come up with only one wild guess-that the piece of empty lake beach was some kind of rendezvous point for transshipment of something, import or export, by boat from beach to ship or ship to beach or even beach to beach.
I knew one thing without having to guess. I did not want to try my luck against them in groups of two or more. Just as I had no interest in finding out if I had hands as fast as Cassius Clay, or if I could stop one James Taylor coming down the sidelines, all by myself.
There were two phone messages at the desk for me. A Mr. Smith had phoned, and would phone back in the morning before nine. A Mrs. Stanyard had called and left her number.
I got back to the room a little past eleven-thirty. I phoned Janice Stanyard immediately, and after it rang ten times I hung up. I showered again to get the sand and grit out of my scalp and limber up the muscles in my neck and shoulders. My head had begun to ache. It was that kind of dull traumatic throb which sets up echoes of queasiness in the gut and makes the eyes hypersensitive to light. And it makes you wonder if some little blood vessel in the brain might be ruptured and bleeding.
I sat on the bed and just as I reached toward the phone to try Nurse Stanyard again, it rang, startling me. It was Janice Stanyard.
“I called you back fifteen minutes ago, Janice, but there…”
“I’m not home. And… I need help.” Her voice was very tense, very guarded.
“Help you get. Any flavor.”
“Thank God! The person I’m supposed to help is with me. I have to get back to her. We’re at the Oriental Theater. It’s a movie house on West Randolph, just west of State. We’re in the middle of the last row downstairs on the left. Please hurry!”
I hurried. The box office was closed. I told the ancient ticket taker I wanted to catch the end of the feature. He pocketed my dollar, put a fist in front of a huge yawn, and waved me in. On the huge screen was an extreme closeup of a blonde singing Troooo Laahv to an enchanted throng of about twentyseven widely scattered customers, singing through a mouth big enough to park a pair of Hondas in. An usher bird-dogged me with wary flashlight until he heard Janice greet me, and then he moved away.
I sat beside Janice. A blonde sat on the other side of her, hunched and still, head bowed, hands covering her face. There was no other customer within fifty feet of us.
“She phoned me from the Trailways bus station. It’s in the next block east. She said Doctor Geis had written her to contact me if she needed help.”
“Susan Kemmer?”
“Yes. How did you…”
“Why wouldn’t she go home with you?”
“She’s afraid to. She’s been terribly beaten. She won’t tell me who did it. She seems… dazed. I phoned you before I left for the bus station. I’ve been phoning you from here. It seemed like… a good place to wait.”