Catspaw Ordeal Read online

  Rosalind was white, but her mouth was firm, and there was something in her that Archer had never seen.

  “I’m not talking offhand,” she went on. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. You talk in your sleep, Dan. You talk about Della and things I don’t know about. I think you’re still in love with that girl, Danny.”

  “Roz, that isn’t so.”

  “I don’t think you’re aware of it yourself.”

  He said angrily, “Is that what your precious brother Stanley has been telling you?”

  “Stanley has nothing to do with this.”

  “But he’s been talking about me, hasn’t he?”

  Roz was strangely calm. “I’ve thought this out myself, Danny. You’re lost, and you can’t find yourself as long as you live with me. You once said you felt trapped, and you meant me and our marriage as being that trap. Well, I’m going to open the gate. I’m going to let you go. I’m leaving you, Danny.”

  “Roz, this is—”

  “It’s final. I won’t argue it. When you make up your mind, and if you want to find me, I’ll be in Stanley’s apartment in New York—for a while, at least.”

  “You can’t go,” Archer said.

  “Don’t argue, Danny. We’ve argued too much about trivial things lately to be able to discuss this reasonably. You can do as you wish. If you want a divorce, I’ll agree. Whatever you want, Danny. For your sake.”

  “Very noble,” he said, and then instantly regretted the tone of his voice. “Roz—”

  But she had got up from the sunny breakfast table, her face white and strangely alien. “That’s all, Dan.”

  That was the way this strange, wrong day began.

  Now here he was, having brawled with a stranger in Tom’s, quarreled with Stanley, lost in the heat and daze of liquor. To hell with it, he thought. He was drunk and he knew it, and suddenly he wanted to be cold sober, to think things out calmly. He wanted clean air and the smell of the salt sea and dark quiet in which to straighten himself out…

  He got into the car, fumbling for the ignition switch. The thought of going back to the house on Bass Point, with its emptiness, appalled him. On impulse, he turned the car toward the beaches on the Sound, and behind him another car started up, its headlights bright and baleful, swinging around the corner after him.

  More than a dozen cars were parked in the fenced area he picked out overlooking the beach. It was no cooler here by the water, but that made no difference to the lovers in the cars parked facing the water. The moonless sky and the wide, black water made a dark, hot vault of emptiness. Archer got out and looked behind him at the road that came down to the beach. There was no other car there. He skirted the rail barrier and walked out into the darkness of the beach. He had gone only a short distance when lights swept in twin beams overhead and a second car pulled into the parking area and stopped beside his own.

  Archer paused and looked back. The headlights flicked out. He could hear the low murmur of the surf, near at hand. Twenty miles across the water, Long Island showed no lights tonight. He wondered if he were being followed, and he thought of the sharpie and the nicely dressed girl who had been with the man. It didn’t make sense. Of a sudden, he was sure Roz had nothing to do with this.

  A car door slammed up above, on the edge of the parking lot. He could see nothing in the moonless night. To the right, lights were switched on and a car backed away from the rail, as if in annoyance. It was not the same car that had followed him here.

  Archer turned and walked deliberately to the water’s edge. He was alone on the empty beach. From far down the shore came the glow of town lights, but it only made the darkness more emphatic here. The sea wind touched his face, and he felt better. He thought of his ham radio outfit in the den of his house on Bass Point, and he wondered if going on the air tonight would help him. Then he heard the footsteps behind him.

  He looked back quickly, but there was nothing to see except the low line of a half-buried jetty, dark against the lighter sand. Nothing moved. A queer sense of danger touched him, as light as the edge of a feather against the back of his neck.

  Something was there. Somebody had followed him.

  Why? he wondered.

  He turned back toward the water again. The tide was out, and the wet sand smelled of the sea. Occasionally his shoes crunched through patches of shell. He could see the thin white line of the surf and he turned left, aware of the thing behind him that had followed him all night from bar to bar and now here. But he didn’t turn back to see what or who it was.

  Out of the gloom ahead came the gaunt and skeletal outline of an abandoned pier, the tilted pilings crusted with barnacles, the salt-eaten timbers in twisted array. The darkness was deeper here. He walked around a rock outcropping and paused to listen again.

  Footsteps hurried after him with a quick, dry hissing sound in the sand, and then halted.

  The rocks stood higher than Archer’s head. He knelt, hoping to find a piece of driftwood, a stone, anything to hold in his hand. His fingers found nothing in the cool sand.

  He tried to decide if his pursuer was a man or a woman. He couldn’t tell. The steps came from his left, almost inaudible over the crash of the surf. He moved around the rock outcropping, his feet cautious, and then felt a quick start of dismay when he felt the shape rise up behind him. There had been two of them, all along.

  He had no chance to cry out, to defend himself. Something slashed at the side of his head, driving him to his knees with blinding pain. He tried to struggle up, to fight back, and a heavy foot slogged into him, drove him off balance to sprawl in the sand. The dark beach and the darker sea whirled crazily around him. There was a fury and hatred in this attack that suddenly touched his consciousness with terror.

  Vaguely through the roaring in his ears he heard someone shout. He was kicked again, but the blow seemed halfhearted, as if distracted. Archer sank down in the sand, listening to the quick footsteps approaching, then to the others, running away. Over him, the dark sky spun crazily, and he dug into the sand to keep the nausea from erupting inside him.

  Someone bent over him, tugging at his shoulders. But the hands were gentle, and he did not fight back.

  “Danny?” a voice said. “Danny?”

  He fought the darkness in his mind. The sand felt cool under his hands as he pushed himself up. He felt worse than drunk now. The old abandoned pier loomed above him, wavering against the dark sky. Mingled with the salt smell of the sea was perfume. A woman’s perfume, oddly haunting and familiar.

  He knew who the girl was. He felt no surprise, because everything in this queer, wrong day had been pointing toward it. She had been in his mind, a ghost fragment

  of his past, and now here she was bending over him, anxious and concerned.

  “Danny, are you all right?”

  It was Della Chambers.

  Chapter 3

  HE LET her drive, content to sit still beside her, nursing the ache in his ribs and his head. He asked no questions. She seemed to know where she was going and what she was going to do. Della had always been like that.

  He turned his head slightly to look at her. In the dim glow of the dashboard, he saw the outline of her face, the softly modeled chin, the delicate arch of brow and highlighted curve of her cheek. Her dark hair winged back in a different style from that which he had remembered. Her long, smiling eyes were fixed with attention on the road.

  “Quite a car you have, Danny,” she murmured. “Quite a lot of drinking, too. You never used to drink so much, Danny.”

  “Things are different,” he said.

  She was silent. They were going through the center of town now, and the streets were dark and quiet. A mile from the beach, the heat closed in like a wall around them. The dark mass of the Manning-Archer Company slid past them; a single light burned in one of the offices, but he felt no impulse to stop and investigate. He looked at Della again, and it was as if the past five years had never been. Southwich and Rosalind were the dream now, and Della the reality, evoked out of his memory. She wasn’t changed at all. If anything, she was more beautiful than ever. She wore a dark linen suit that did nothing to hide her long, lovely legs and the slim curves of her body. Abruptly he heard her laugh, that familiar, throaty sound that had haunted him so long.

  He said, “How long have you been in town, Della?”

  “Two days, darling.”

  “And you didn’t come to see me?”

  She laughed again. “Your wife was around too much. But it’s all right now. We’ll go to your house and talk about it there.”

  “No,” he said. “Not my house.”

  “Moral scruples, darling?”

  “No, it isn’t that, it—”

  “Your house, Danny,” she said.

  She knew the way. She threaded the maze of lanes on Bass Point expertly, passing the other suburban estates and the summer places of New Yorkers. He wondered what time it was. He had no real recollection of the hours that had passed since he left Tom’s Bar. Midnight, he guessed, but when he looked at his watch his vision blurred. Questions and Della and the whole day tumbled through his mind, and again he regretted the drinks he’d had. The pain of the slugging on the beach was easing now. He felt a little better.

  The house that Stanley Manning had chosen for Roz and Archer—just another thing about which Archer had never been consulted—was a bulky, Tudor-style English structure with exposed half beams and stucco and diamond-paned casement windows, set back on a knoll that overlooked the Sound and surrounded by boxwood and careful lawns. It was too big and pretentious for Archer’s taste. There was a day woman who cooked and cleaned. Archer thought of her and was grateful that they had no one else living in. The house was dark when Della halted the convertible in fron
t of the double garage.

  “He didn’t take anything from you, did he?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “The man on the beach, darling.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Della said crisply, “Then get your keys and let’s go inside.”

  He thought for a moment that Rosalind might somehow be home, waiting for him. But the house felt empty when he stepped in. She wasn’t here. And he was relieved, and even excited as Della found a light in the long, narrow living room.

  The furnishings were neat and conventional. Archer had never liked the room. But now it seemed different, with Della in it. Della, tall and shining, turning gracefully, dismissing the place with her smiling eyes and then turning to him, coming to him with that familiar little quirk of her red lips.

  “Poor Danny,” she whispered. And then, as she put her arms around his neck and kissed him, “For auld lang syne, Danny.”

  Five years fell away from him, and nothing was changed because Della hadn’t changed. Her lips were the same, familiar and demanding, making him forget what had come between them and muffling his quick stab of conscience. Five years, and it was as vivid as if they had never parted.

  He felt drunk, but he remembered everything. He remembered making drinks for the two of them, the way she laughed at his questions and promised to tell him everything in the morning.

  “Poor Danny, poor darling!”

  Afterward, he wasn’t sure what was real or fancied. His memories were real enough, though. There had been something in the first glance, back there through time and distance in a nameless little bar in wartime New York. Something quick and instinctive between them, which needed no words. That sort of thing was in the air those days, and Archer knew it, yet for him and for Della it was different, because it happened to them personally.

  He remembered Burke Wiley saying, “There’s something for you that looks a lot better than the Martin J. Crump!”

  Burke, with his everlasting Cuban Mirador cigars, sat at the bar with him and watched Della, too, but somehow he stepped aside when Archer went over to the dark-haired girl. Talking to strangers came easily those days.

  “Hello, sailor,” she said.

  The words were not cheap the way Della spoke them. Nothing about her was cheap or ordinary. Archer knew this from the first, knew that this girl was different from all others for him, and would always be different. It was as if he knew at once that she would become something special in his life. And she knew it, too. There was no coy flirtation between them. There wasn’t time, for one thing, and Della was never coy. There was something complete and self-contained about her, a girl who knew what she wanted, man-fashion, and knew how to get what she wanted.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You’ve had a hard trip, haven’t you?”

  “It’s been worth it,” Archer said.

  Somewhere behind them a juke box thumped in that nameless little bar in the Village, and two couples were already dancing. He needed no words to invite Della to dance with him. Both of them wanted an excuse to touch each other, and they each knew what was in the other’s mind. They danced. She belonged to him. Nothing had to be said. Her body told him what he wanted and needed, and told him he could have it. Yet it was different. It felt right.

  Wiley, grinning, faded away, lighting another of his little Miradors. Della and Archer went outside. He remembered now that there had been a light snow falling, dusting Manhattan, making the brownout seem brighter and friendlier. They walked most of the way uptown, forgetting time and distance like old friends, old lovers.

  Her apartment was warm and neat, above Fifty-seventh Street. There were blue drapes that accented the clear, deep blue of her surprising eyes. She took the key from the door and handed it to him, and he pocketed it, and built a fire in the small fireplace.

  “When do you have to go back to your ship?” she asked.

  “Day after tomorrow,” he told her.

  “That’s good and bad. We have a little time.”

  “All the time in the world,” he smiled.

  She smoked a cigarette, watching him as he put another split log on the andirons. “Do you know anybody else in New York?”

  “Lots of people,” he said.

  “Girls?”

  “No.”

  “What a liar you are,” she smiled.

  “No girls,” he said. “Not any more.”

  There was a pressure inside him beyond resistance. Presently there was only the firelight in the studio room. Outside, the snow hissed against the tall windows. The city and sea beyond were far away and forgotten. When he kissed her, Della’s response was quick, eager, and frank. It happens only once, Archer thought.

  “Danny,” she said, “we hardly know each other.”

  “Yes, we do,” he whispered.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “We’ve always known each other.”

  Della said, “That’s the way it is with me.”

  “I know.”

  And then, “Danny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay here. Stay with me.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Something special, something different, Archer thought. The quick rush to each other, the close inwardness, the magic circle that shut out the snow and the city and the war. Tomorrow was a thousand years away. And when months at sea came between them, Archer knew his agony was shared somewhere by Della, who waited for him.

  He didn’t talk about her to Burke Wiley. Wiley used to come into the radio shack and chin by the hour—about the war and himself and women, generally and specifically. He remembered how Wiley looked the night they got it on the Murmansk run. Thick and squat, Wiley was older than Archer by seven years, with a face scarred by wind to a wrinkled tan, with clear white teeth and a knowing grin. There was a devil in Wiley that laughed at everything, that kept laughing even when the first ugly shock went through the old Liberty ship, followed by the roar and burst of escaping steam and the screams of men hurtling into the frozen Arctic. Wiley had just asked Archer if he meant to marry Della when the torpedo hit, and Archer never saw him again after that first frantic minute. Wiley ducked for the rafts, but Archer stayed at his key, breaking silence to warn the rest of the convoy. The Nazi sub seemed to like the old Crump, or maybe her commander had just the two torpedoes left. The second one hit forward, the third amidships, and Archer didn’t remember much of the rescue operations later, except that he kept thinking how incredible it was that Burke Wiley could be dead.

  Somehow, then, the war was over, and it wasn’t the same, this Della-and-Danny closeness, although Archer hated to think that everything they’d had and been and done together was just a product of war excitement. Yet Della changed. Maybe he changed, too. He tried to look back and remember what had made the difference, but he stopped remembering somewhere at this point. He thought he slept. And when he awakened the next morning in his own house on Bass Point, he remembered other, more recent things.

  The morning was as hot as the night before. He awoke drenched, the sun glaring in through the east windows. Usually Roz remembered to draw the curtains; but Roz hadn’t been with him last night, and he had been too drunk or drugged to do it.

  He sat upright wondering at the thought. Drugged? His head ached, and he remembered the stranger in the bar who hated him. He remembered Della taking him home. He looked quickly around the familiar bedroom, and felt oddly relieved at finding himself alone. He toyed with the idea that maybe he had dreamed everything. But the bump on his head was real enough.

  The heat in the room was close and heavy. He slid out of bed and looked into the familiar upper-floor hallway. Silence. A bright shaft of sunlight dazzled the end of the hall where the windows faced east. The house seemed empty.

  He showered and dressed quickly. While shaving, he stared at himself in the bath mirror. All of Rosalind’s things, her perfume bottles and cosmetics, were neatly ranged on the glass shelves over the washbowl. Her housecoat hung in the shallow closet nearby. He was aware of a disturbing emotional wrench inside him. His face, thin and tanned with unruly, thick black hair, looked older than he remembered it, though he was not usually given to self-contemplation. He decided he was being a fool.