His people”—Higgins cursed softly—”whoever they may be, were probably sore at him because you started uncovering Harry’s business. I think when Harry went to Baltimore he was trying to contact somebody. We had men on him the whole time.”
“You did!”
Higgins’ eyes smiled, but not his lips. “This isn’t any amateur outfit, Bogan! Yes. But he never made a contact — not that our men saw, anyhow. He did consult doctors. He said he was sick — and I guess he was. Sick from fear. The doctors couldn’t treat that. So he came back here and maybe got the word. Or knew his number was up because they didn’t get to him in Baltimore. So he took that thing — and probably coughed the skin of it out as he died.”
“That means,” Duff said gravely, “Harry knew what he was doing the whole time.”
Again the G-man swore. “It means that, whatever the hell they are trying to do! By now, I’d give a leg to know. A life, I guess! I’ll take a fast gander at the room, even though you did clean it up.”
Duff nodded. “Okay. Incidentally, I tried to find your agents around here yesterday.
They must have been taking a day off.”
Higgins stared. Then he laughed. “You thought you could deliver the capsule to my men, hunh? They were here, just the same, son. As I said they’d be.”
“But there wasn’t a soul! Except some colored road workers!” Duff, seeing the G-man’s look, broke off and blushed. “Oh!” He joined ruefully in Higgins’ chuckle. “I did find one thing, though. There’s a sinkhole”—he pointed out the window—”beyond the banyan and those gumbo-limbo trees.”
Higgins said he’d have it looked over. Perhaps it had been; Duff couldn’t tell from the G-man’s response. Higgins went upstairs and returned to the kitchen shortly. He said to Duff, who was eating a home-grown banana and drinking coffee, “Brother, you sure would make some girl a wonderful wife! When you clean, you clean!”
Duff walked down the drive with him. “Thought you didn’t want any — people to know you were still interested in this place?”
Higgins nodded. “I checked with my road crew before this call. If anybody peculiar had showed up, I’d have got a signal and you’d have had to sneak me out.”
“There’s another item. Harry’s funeral. That’s tomorrow. Since we know now what Harry was, perhaps the family—”
The G-man shook his head. “No. They’re going?”
“They intend to. Even Eleanor plans to cut some of her schedule.”
“Lovely girl,” Higgins said absently. “No, Bogan. Things have to keep seeming normal around here. We’ll have a man at the services, of course. There won’t be many people. Some of his old letter-carrier pals. A few from the garage. Some of the cronies he used to fish and spot-cast with. You and the kids and the missus, you go. Don’t tell ’em Harry was a spy.”
The word, even then, shocked Duff. “A funny person to be one.”
Higgins said grimly, “That’s the worst thing about it! About those — those — Hell! No word for ’em. They reach the insides of patient, peaceful, law-abiding guys like Ellings! Rot out their hearts! And yet leave their outside just like always. You see some good-humored, industrious chap. Courteous, helpful, loves kids, sticks around home. Maybe, long ago, he was slighted or hurt or made to feel inferior. Something — something that switched him over to that crooked, rotten, enemy line! So he goes overboard. He keeps on looking like a good citizen. But in his head, night and day, he’s scheming to kill or enslave every man and woman and kid in the country! You know, Bogan, it’s the ability to do that to people that frightens me more than all the war and defeat and national uproar and trouble put together. It gets me!” He tried for a better phrase. “I hate it!”
Duff said, almost whispered, “Yeah. Me too.”
Higgins doubled his fist, stared at it unclenched it. “Shooting it out with gangs. That was easy! Tagging tax violaters. That’s just work! But finding out that people who do things you’ve been led to admire are just rotten, low, filthy enemies! Traitors! It makes a man sick!
It scares a man!” He nodded curtly and walked away toward the road.
Duff went over to the campus that afternoon. He had left some notes in a laboratory locker, he explained to Mrs. Yates. He had decided to go over them during the holidays and to finish a thesis on certain aspects of electromagnetic fields and radiant particles. He smiled when she answered him by making a funny face; she didn’t know what he meant.
Even to himself, Duff did not quite admit, until he walked up to the bungalow, that he was really going to Coral Gables to try to call on Indigo. He felt ashamed of running away from her. He also felt more than a little intrigued by her avowed passion for him; it was an unprecedented experience and Duff, after all, was a young man. He had always liked girls, but he’d never really had a girl of his own. Any other young man, undergraduate or graduate student, or any young instructor, for that matter, would almost surely have accepted Indigo’s passion with enthusiasm; even with a certain smugness. The fact that he was wary of her made Duff wonder if, perhaps, when the right girl came along, he wouldn’t know how to behave. In that case, he’d wind up a bachelor.
On account of such sensations and speculations, it seemed very necessary to Duff to make amends for refusing her offer, on the evening before, of a nightcap — a possible euphemism for something more personal and disturbing than alcohol, which had scared him away.
There was a car parked in front of Indigo’s pretty, modernistic bungalow. Her own car was in the garage and the sedan of the girl with whom she lived was not there. Duff shied at the fact of a caller and then decided that it might be better, diplomatically, to see her first in the presence of others. So he stepped up to the front door and dropped the chrome knocker. Nobody answered. That surprised him because he had heard voices inside. He knocked again, loudly, but there was no response.
So she did have a visitor, but she didn’t want to be disturbed. Duff reflected gloomily that a girl like Indigo could easily find a thousand admirers and doubtless would brush one off in a hurry for behaving as he had. He walked slowly away. Great swain, I am, he thought.
Casanova and Don Juan rolled into one. He reminded himself never to tell anybody of his behavior and its swift rebuff.
He spent two desultory hours in the lab and went back to the Yates house with a crowd of bus riders who held a general discussion on the prospects of a University of Miami victory in the Orange Bowl game. It was only days away. And thank the Lord for that, he thought. Perhaps afterward Eleanor would return to normal.
It was dark when he reached home. Dark — and Mrs. Yates was fretting. “I wish this business was over, Duff. It’s nearly six. And Eleanor’s due at a banquet at seven. And she has to change, but she’s not home yet. I know it’s not her fault that she gets delayed—”
Charles was setting the table. Marian was cooking. Duff inspected the contents of pots and pans on the oil stove and told Marian — making her happy by doing so — that the guy who won her would have not a good cook, but a real chef.
He took his notes upstairs, looked through them and straightened up the room. He heard Charles calling numbers, asking for his sister and getting unsatisfactory replies, for he kept dialing. Duff lay down on his bed and read a chapter on nuclear engineering.
He was interrupted by the boy’s voice, coming worriedly up the stairway, “Hey!
Duff! Eleanor never did get to the Fashion Parade today! I just found out!”
He closed the book, tossed it on his table and clattered downstairs. Mrs. Yates had wheeled herself into the living room. Her anxiety had visibly increased. “Charley just reached someone who was there, Duff. They waited for Eleanor till half past four. They tried to call here, but the line was busy all the time. No wonder. The calls that come in. So they went ahead without her.”