"They'll ring when they're ready." Mac was silent for a moment. I sensed his disapproval. "Isn't this a little obvious, Eric? Besides not being quite in line with the agreement we made with the lady and her department? We promised to preserve her reputation, remember?"
"Also her life," I said. "Things have happened, sir, and I'd like to be in a position to keep a better eye on her. Assure her that her virtue will remain intact and that her reputation will be restored by the matrimony route very shortly. We just haven't got time to make the preliminary sparring look as refined and proper as we'd planned, and it may not matter anyway. Please switch on the recorder."
I heard a click. He said, "Recording. Go ahead, Eric."
"Male, forty-five give or take five. Those rocky faces are hard to judge," I said. "Say a hair under six feet. Say two-twenty give or take five. A lot of shoulder. Some paunch. Pretty much a skinhead. What hair there is, is kind of grizzled. I never got close enough to make the eye color. Nose big, bony, has been broken. Ears protruding, a regular jughead. The name he gives out is Karl, Karl Kroch. They shouldn't have any trouble running him down. Everything about him says pro. End of description."
"Hold on again… All right, he's being checked."
"What about the Mariassy?"
"They're having a little trouble with the circuits."
"Well, I'll give them another couple of minutes, and then I'd better warn her direct and to hell with our cover. This Kroch has worked over one female tonight; I don't want to give him a crack at another."
"Tell me what's happened," Mac said, and I told him. When I was finished, he was silent for a moment. I could visualize him frowning. He said at last, "That isn't good. Obviously your cover is thoroughly blown already, at least as far as this Kroch is concerned, and he would seem to be the audience you were playing for. What about the Vail girl? Could she be implicated?"
"It's hard to see how, sir," I said. "She could hardly be a plant. I picked her at random out of a whole bar full of people."
"Well, she's obviously involved now. And even if she's completely innocent, she can make trouble for us if she decides to go to the authorities. It's always embarrassing having to clear up these things through official channels, and any publicity right now would be a serious handicap to the whole operation."
I said, "She won't go near the police."
"So she told you. But women have been known to change their minds, waking up in the morning bruised and disfigured, wondering how they can explain their humiliating appearance to friends and neighbors."
I said, "She won't talk, sir. I'll bet money on it. But if you want to put a local man to watching her, okay. He can at least see that nobody bothers her again."
Mac hesitated. "You seem to have been impressed by this young girl, Eric."
I glanced at the mean-looking hombre in the mirror. I said, "Hell, I threw her to Kroch deliberately, as it turned out. I just feel kind of responsible for her now. She's a good kid."
"Good or bad, a little surveillance won't harm her. And it may give us advance warning in case she doesn't live up to your high expectations. Now what about the man?"
I glanced at my watch. Not as much time had passed as I'd thought. I told myself the Mariassy was safe enough if she followed instructions. Unlike Toni Vail, she knew she was involved in a dangerous game. If she stuck her neck out contrary to orders, it was her own damn fault.
"Karl Kroch?" I said. "I only saw him once. As I told you, sir, he's got the earmarks of a pro. And he does a real smooth job of tailing for such a big man: you'd never know he was there. But he talks too much. All that stuff he told Toni, including his name, for God's sake! And his warning to me that he's going to act when the time comes and to hell with me. That's schoolboy stuff. Either he's a screwball with delusions of grandeur who really thinks he can scare me off by roughing up girls, or he's deliberately putting out a lot of phony bluster and playing a real cagey game underneath. But if so, what is it?"
Mac said, "It's possible he's being clever, of course. However, you know how those big hard men sometimes get after years of success in the business. They start thinking the rules are not for them-they don't have to be careful like lesser agents; then can run right over any opposition. They are superhuman and practically invisible, they think. Shortly thereafter they are either killed or put away quietly to dream their Napoleonic dreams in locked and padded rooms. Mr. Kroch seems to be displaying most of the symptoms."
"Maybe," I said, unconvinced. "But I never like to act on the assumption that a man is crazy until I actually see him foaming at the mouth, sir."
"He seems to have worked up a pretty good lather tonight," Mac said, "judging by the Vail girl's report. And we can be glad of it. His behavior gives us a chance of retrieving what might have been a complete disaster. Under ordinary circumstances, once he spotted you, a man in Kroch's position would simply have disappeared and notified his superiors to send in an unknown replacement. As it is, overconfident, he apparently intends to stay right on the job covering Dr. Mariassy in spite of you. He has even served notice that if he gets the signal to act he will execute it right under your nose. As a result of this bravado, he is still available to you if you act quickly, before he has time to reconsider."
"Yes, sir," I said. "That's another reason I decided to speed up the romance timetable."
Mac was silent for a moment. "Since Kroch already has you spotted, there would seem to be hardly any reason left for the amateur theatrics."
"We've got to be doing something plausible while we're getting him out of town to where we can take him," I said. "I don't know New Orleans well enough to pull anything here; I'd probably wind up behind bars. And Kroch is acting very funny and kind of obvious, as if he were really trying to draw attention to himself. What if there's somebody else to do the dirty work, and big, blustering, loudmouthed Kroch is just a decoy?"
"In that case, the other agent will have been warned about you by Kroch. Your performance with Dr. Mariassy will not deceive him, either. And we are not interested in identifying every possible agent involved. All we want is one man who will talk. One man who will lead us to Taussig."
I said, "God knows I'm not yearning to get drunk and disorderly with our tweedy intellectual, sir, let alone marry her, even in name only. But until I know exactly what's going on, I'd rather stick to the original plan with minor modifications. It may still fool somebody, who knows?"
"Well, maybe you're right," Mac conceded. "On second thought, it's never wise to drop a cover hastily, particularly when the opposition is acting in a peculiar manner. Very well, I-" He stopped. I heard a phone ringing in the upstairs office some fifteen hundred miles to the north and east of where I sat. "Just a minute. This is probably the call we're waiting for."
I sat on the bed and looked at the wall and thought about a small, hurt, disheveled girl lying face down on a rumpled bed in a wrecked room. Then I thought of a burning car and a shape under a blanket and a single silver slipper. I heard Mac pick up the phone. When he spoke, his voice held a note of urgency.