The Chief’s look was bitter. “He is as innocent as the day is long. He just happened to be passing by, broke and hungry, and he nipped in to look for money. We can’t shake him. Not yet, that is. We’re trying. Same with the characters we caught in the car that tried to run you down, Carter. They wanted to scare you off because they hate Americans, they said. And that’s all we’ve managed to get out of them.”
“How about the fellow with the cloak? The one I put to sleep?”
“Picked him up to keep him from reporting back. He’s cooling off until he talks, but he might as well have bitten his tongue out...”
It was the same story over and over again. The dead couldn’t talk and the live ones wouldn’t. The pattern was repeated when Stonewall arrived with Nick’s baggage and a report on the throwers of the flaming spears.
“Found one, killed one,” he reported glumly. “The live one is as silent as the dead. Glassy-eyed with hemp when we picked him up and now does nothing but shiver and moan.”
The last cheerful bulletin of the evening was that the President was hovering on the brink of death and that the news of his condition would have to be made public if there was no improvement within the next two hours or so.
Abe Jefferson stumbled off to bed and said he’d call as soon as he heard anything new. Nick showered, kissed Liz very tenderly and lay beside her until she drifted into sleep. Then he rose silently and put on his working clothes.
It took time to ease himself out of a rear window silently enough to avoid Abe’s watchers. Even then he scrunched on the gravel when he thought he was clear and had to wait for nearly half an hour in the shadows before he was sure of himself. After that it was easy going under the intensely black African sky, and he reached the corner of the Avenida Independencia without encountering anyone.
The Avenue itself was more of a challenge. He waited on his corner until he could distinguish the watchdogs in the gloom, and he began to wish that Abe hadn’t been so thorough. There were at least three men watching the front of the herbalist’s shop from various angles. The lane at the back was a different proposition. It was open at one end only, and there was a solitary watcher across from it, pacing back and forth like a leopard in a cage. Abe must have been running short of qualified men; the fellow was not a clever watcher. He was obvious, and he was bored. He was so obvious that Nick was not the first one to get past him.
Nick flitted silently into the lane and clung like a slowly moving shadow to the rear walls of the low buildings fronting on the Avenue. Surely, he thought, there should have been another watcher in the lane.
He was right. There had been. He lay at the far end of the lane with his face in a dark, sticky pool, the back of his head dented hideously and matted with drying blood. Nick paused long enough to be sure that nothing could be done for him and to draw on the special fingerprintless, skin-thin gloves made for him by AXE’s Editing Department.
He counted back doors until he knew he was behind the herbalist’s shop. There were no lights showing from within, and the lock gave without a struggle against Nick’s Lockpickers’ Helper. His pencil beam swept the shop and found it empty of everything but the junk he’d noticed earlier. He retraced his steps to the back stairway and started climbing stealthily, one hand lightly on the rail and the other holding the lethal Wilhelmina. A sagging stairboard complained like a startled cat and he froze for moments, waiting. Nothing stirred.
There were two doors on the tiny landing, both closed but neither of them locked. He fingered one open, very quietly, and sidled in. Still there was no sound. His small flashlight flicked on and probed around a tiny, filthy room with shuttered windows, an unmade bed and several rickety sticks of furniture, including a battered old armchair. The beam caught the chair and held it.
The room’s occupant sat slumped in the chair at a curiously awkward angle. The clothes it wore were those of an upperclass workman, a foreman of some kind or possibly an electrician. The shirtfront was dreadfully stained. Nick catfooted over and raised the head.
It grinned horribly at him. The grin was under the chin, and it stretched from ear to ear in hideous welcome. Nick let the head fall onto the bloodstained chest and swiftly scanned the rest of the room. Empty food cans and a grimy spoon in the closet. Thick dust under the bed. Nothing in the open bureau drawers but little scraps of trash.
He doused the light and crept quietly across the tiny landing to the other room. It was very much the same as the first one, except that it was cleaner and the bed was occupied.
His flashlight beam shone down on the dark face, against the pillow. Two eyes stared back at him. Two old, stone-cold dead eyes.
Pierre Gets the Creeps
The old herbalist had not been dead for very long. About as long as the plainclothesman in the lane, maybe, but not as long as the man with the permanent grin. And he had not died easily.
His legs were halfway out of the bed and the bedclothes were thrown back as if he had been getting up when someone had stopped him with two downward slashes of a knife and then left him for dead.
That was their mistake. The old man had bled copiously, and the still-wet blood made a pattern on the pathetic old nightshirt that showed that he had struggled to an awkward half-lying, half-sitting position and twisted to one side. Nick’s light slid from his body to the small table at the bedside. Its single drawer was open and revealed a typical old man’s collection of pills and cures obtained from the nearby modern drug store and some loose papers. Most of them were bills and receipts and some were blank notesheets. A couple of them had fluttered down to the floor. Nick turned the light on them and saw that they were also blank. Near them, almost under the bed, lay a chewed, blunt stub of pencil.
The light flickered back across the bed and the agonized face stared up at Nick accusingly. After trying to sit up the old man had fallen back on the bed and his scrawny arms lay limply by his sides. But the right hand was loosely open and the left was clenched into a fist. An edge of paper protruded from the gnarled black hand. Nick forced back the clutching fingers and withdrew it.
It was a pitiful attempt at a message. Nick stared at it for moments before he managed to decipher the painfully formed words. There were only two of them, and they seemed to be: Eyes Dakar.
Eyes... Dakar. He burned the words into his mind while he stuffed the paper into his pocket and made a lightning inspection of the room. There was nothing there but an old man’s carelessly kept clothes and few personal things. The single window looked down on the dark, back lane. Nothing stirred.
Nick left the one dead man and went back across the tiny landing to the other. He had left no messages, but Nick found a card identifying him as Alfred Gore, Electrician, Hotel Independence. The room smelled of blood, alcohol, and something else that Nick could not identify. An empty glass beside Gore’s chair reeked of the local whiskey, and so did the man’s horribly stained shirtfront. Laszlo of the Green Face and bulging eyes had evidently entertained him well before saying goodbye. There was no sign of the bottle or anything else... Bulging eyes. Eyes, Dakar. ‘Eyes’ had gone to Dakar?
And had covered his tracks behind him. Covered them with blood.
He had also taken with him anything that could possibly have been of any value to Nick, barring the scrawled note he had not known about. And of course the telephone extension that had been so handy for relaying information received from the Hotel Independence.
Maybe there was something of interest in the shop.
The watchers on the Avenida Independencia were still at their posts, blobs of thick darkness in the thinner darkness. Nick left them at their fruitless vigil and quickly made his way downstairs. He double-checked the backdoor latch to make sure that no one could steal in while he was in the front room, and then opened the door to the shop.