“Now David Green’s hunter, the third prize winner, Bill Bast.”
Bast, like Jenny, treated the whole thing as a joke — emphasizing even more Grey Wyler’s seriousness about the whole thing.
“I wrote David a letter commenting on his work,” Bast said. “On college stationery. All very official. But at the end I put something like this: ‘For the last minute you have been handling paper impregnated with a deadly contact poison, phenylhydrazine. This is spreading through your system. By the time you finish reading this, you will be dead.’ ”
As the applause subsided, Simon gratefully concluded his own part in the program.
“The nature of the prizes has been kept secret. I’m told that Dr Manders will make the announcement.”
Manders managed to suppress the more obvious signs of his peevishness as he mounted the dais. Simon supposed that all men who spent a great deal of time lecturing must develop some skill as actors. Manders, while hardly enchanting, at least arranged his face into a pleasant mask.
“The prizes have been kept secret because of their nature,” he said. “And I think the news of that nature will come as a surprise to all of you — who perhaps expected something on the order of a fountain pen or a cheap chess set. You will be very pleased, I think, to hear that a special grant has been made to me by the British Foundation for the Advancement of Psychological Research — five hundred pounds worth, to be exact.”
When the oos and ahs abated, Manders went on.
“This, along with certain anonymous private donations, will be used to send our three victorious young murderers to an international conclave of Death Game prize winners... for a week’s holiday on Grand Bahama Island.”
At that point, which might have set loose an uproar, the audience seemed too stunned to move.
“I have the air tickets, which I shall now distribute. Grey Wyler, Jenny Turner, and Bill Bast will be flying across the Atlantic to the Bahamas tomorrow.”
As Manders stepped down, pulling an envelope from his jacket pocket, the response delayed from the first moment of the announcement broke with full force. Simon kept to the relative safety of the wall as students milled among the tables talking excitedly and trying to shake the hands of the prize winners. Manders had opened his envelope and was holding the tickets over his head, making his way into the center of the tumult.
Bill Bast emerged from the melange of bodies like a particle compensatorily discharged because of the entry of Dr Manders’ greater mass. He wore anything but the expression one might expect to see on the face of a man who has just been awarded a free trip to a West Indian island.
“You don’t seem very pleased,” Simon volunteered, to give Bast another chance to resume his interrupted confidences.
“I... I’m not. This is even worse — or maybe I should say stranger than I expected.”
“I gather you want to tell me about it, so I don’t think I’m prying if I suggest that you speak up. The suspense is beginning to get me.”
“Not here,” Bast said, glancing into the crowd. “You leave now while they’re all worked up and not noticing anything. I’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”
The Saint nodded agreeably. He knew now that his instinct had not been at fault. The night was definitely not going to have been wasted.
4
In the space of a few welcome lungfuls of comparatively unpolluted smog, the Saint found his way back to the psychology building. He entered the main hallway without any difficulty, but found the door to the laboratory locked. He did not have to wait long, however, before Bast appeared, a lanky figure loping along the hall like a worried giraffe.
“They think I left something behind here,” Bast said, as he unlocked the door. “They don’t know you’re with me, so I’ll try to explain fast,”
When they were inside the big room he relocked the door behind them and looked furtively around as if expecting some spy to be hiding among the fragrant cages of drowsy mice which occupied the lower part of one wall.
“If you’re worried,” Simon said, “I’m fairly certain nobody followed me.”
Bast motioned Simon to one of the wooden chairs arranged around a central table.
“I feel like an idiot, carrying on like this,” he said. “But I know it’s not my imagination. Or at least I think I know. Maybe I’m manufacturing a big dramatic fantasy out of almost nothing.”
“The psychologist speaking,” Simon said. “Let’s not worry about the epistemology of it and get on with the facts. What’s on your mind?”
Bast took a deep breath and perched on a stool with all the relaxation of a praying mantis on the head of a pin.
“I don’t have a clue as to how this Death Game started,” he said, “but it wasn’t here in London. Six months ago nobody’d ever heard of it. All of a sudden students all over the world were playing it.”
Simon shrugged.
“Stranger things have happened. Hula hoops, marathon dancing, the frug. You think there was something ominous involved?”
“Not necessarily in the beginning. As I say, I don’t know. It’s what’s happened since — here — that bothers me and makes me wonder if the whole thing really did start merely as some kind of spontaneous student fad.”
“Well, what has happened?”
“To begin right now instead of at the beginning, the British Foundation for the Advancement of Psychological Research didn’t give Dr Manders any grant of five hundred pounds.”
“So you think Manders is lying?”
“I know he is.”
“You checked with the foundation, I suppose,” Simon said.
“I couldn’t,” Bast answered. “I couldn’t even find the foundation.”
“It doesn’t exist?”
Bast fulfilled the threat of his nervous posture and took off for a fast lap around the long table.
“Oh, it exists all right — on paper. But try to find out anything about it. They’ve got a post office box and somebody who sends out vague answers to queries, and that seems to be it. They claimed they were a branch of the International Foundation for the Advancement of Psychological Research, with headquarters in Vienna, but when I inquired at that address — by mail, of course — I got no answer at all.”
“Well,” the Saint said, “so long as they’re passing out funds for worthy causes — like holidays for you in the Bahamas — I wouldn’t rock the boat. Some of the few millionaires left in this drearily democratized world choose strange ways of arranging their tax deductions.”
“I don’t think the gift comes without strings attached,” Bast said earnestly. “And I think there’s something fishy at the bottom of it. All Manders’ talk about the value of the Death Game as a research device... nonsense! There aren’t enough controls. There aren’t enough opportunities for observation — under the present setup, I mean. And who the hell would choose to donate five hundred pounds for transatlantic vacations when the department’s crying for a... well, for a better computer, for instance.”
“Maybe some millionaires just aren’t mad about computers,” Simon hazarded. “But that isn’t positive evidence of skullduggery.”
“There’s more, and this is what really got me worked up about this thing in the first place. About a month ago I was at Manders’ house one evening. We used to be on quite good terms back... before he started changing. You might say we were getting together for old times’ sake — after a faculty meeting. Anyway, he went out to the kitchen to get a bottle of whiskey. I happened to notice a letter on the floor, and I picked it up. I think the breeze may have flipped it off a stack of other papers. It was very short, so even with a glance I got the idea. It told Manders — as if it were from somebody who had a perfect right to give him orders — to send a full report on Death Game activities. The whole thing was so strange that I took another look at the signature. It was typed in under an initial ‘T’ sploshed on with one of those splurgy felt-tipped pens: Kuros Timonaides.”