Dangerous by nature, p.11
Dangerous by Nature, page 11
Even the bearded man seemed to find this argument a little unanswerable. He merely remarked that if when all was known it appeared that the President or his men were at fault, the President and his men would bitterly repent it, and the three men rose to go.
Massimo saw them off with cheerful reassurances. The distinguished señor had doubtless some urgent matter requiring his personal attention and had, with his customary energy and decision, gone to attend to it; he would doubtless reappear in his own good time. It might even, said Massimo with a smirk, be some entirely private matter connected with a lady.
His visitors’ reaction to this sympathetic suggestion was so violent as to deprive them entirely of their command of Spanish, and Massimo thus escaped the pain of understanding what they said. He bowed deeply and withdrew while they mounted their horses and rode sullenly away.
Hambledon took an early opportunity to go through the wallet which he had taken from the pocket of the Spaniard, Petroff’s assistant, whom Tommy had shot with his own gun. There was a little money in it—not much; fifty or sixty pesos in all, and there were a number of receipted bills from tradesmen in San Martin, which explained why there was not more money. The Spaniard had been doing the shopping for the camp, mainly tinned food, flour, salt on so on, and some kitchen utensils. All perfectly innocent and permissible. There was also an unopened letter addressed to Igor Petroff, c/o Poste Restante, San Martin, Esmeralda, Central America, and postmarked Moscow, May 27, 1949. One of the Spaniard’s errands had been to the post office to collect the mails; he had not handed the letter to Petroff before he was killed, and now
Petroff was dead also. Hambledon slit open the envelope and drew out the contents.
Hambledon’s knowledge of the Russian language was both elementary and limited. He could speak it rather better than he could read it, and he would have hated even to try to write it. He did, however, know the Russian alphabet tolerably well and expected to be able to recognize at least some of the commoner words, but in this letter he recognized none at all because there were none. The letter consisted entirely of numerals and full stops alternately in long lines right across the page. Sometimes there was a single figure and a full stop, and sometimes double figures, but never more. Hambledon gave an exasperated sigh.
“It’s a cipher,” he said disgustedly.
Letters in Russian were bad enough, and letters in cipher were his pet abomination, but a letter in cipher in Russian was really beyond a joke. “Someone else will have to deal with this,” he said crossly. “Even if I had the key it probably wouldn’t help me, and without it—oh dear.”
The key to the code was almost certainly somewhere in the Russian camp, wherever that was, and he had not discovered that yet. Perhaps Hobkirk knew. Perhaps he was washing dishes there, or mixing concrete. “Hope he is,” said Hambledon viciously. “Serve him right for being so damned mysterious.”
He took his siesta after lunch under his favourite tree in the garden, but the code letter came between him and sleep. It was a relief when he heard soft footsteps on the dry lawn and looked up to see Mateo standing beside him. Mateo saluted him, enquired after his health, and sat down at his feet.
“Well,” said Hambledon, for he had not seen Mateo that morning, “did your cousin get away all right last night?”
“Perfectly, thank you señor. I rode with him as far as the outskirts of the town to make sure that he got clear away, and to ride on those horses is like riding upon eagles. One would say their feet did not touch the ground. Then I returned in the moonlight singing a little song about my señor, whose generosity made all these things possible. It was a very good song,” said Mateo proudly. “Shall I sing it to you now?”
“Not at the moment, I think; some other time I shall be interested to bear it. You don’t know, I suppose, whether they have found the body on the roof of the prison tool shed yet?”
“Not yet, señor. I rode through the woods that way on Angelica, my mule, this morning; when I came near the” place I climbed a tree until I could see over the wall. He is still there, but I think it cannot be long before they notice him now. Even from that distance I could see that he was—”
“Thank you,” said Hambledon, “not so soon after lunch, if you don’t mind.”
“Señor, there is a man who is half brother to my aunt’s second husband, and he is one of the footmen at the palace.”
“Indeed? Very interesting,” said Tommy sincerely.
“He told me this morning that three men on horses came to the palace last night to ask for the Señor Petrofl. My relation was on duty in the hall when they went away again. His Excellency the President was telling them not to be anxious, that surely their friend would come back soon. He suggested that perhaps the Señor Petroff had gone to call on a lady.”
Hambledon roared. “Massimo said that? What did the three men say?”
“Miguel said that they replied in a foreign tongue he did not understand, but he was sure they were angry. Their eyes, he said, shone like cats’ eyes in the dark.”
“Oh. By the way, three horsemen. Did Miguel describe them?”
“Yes, señor. One man was a big man with a beard, one was a short man and fat, and one was a thin man with a face like a skull.”
“I saw them ride past,” said Hambledon, nodding. “I shall know them if I see them again. I asked who they were, but no one seemed to know.”
“They are Russians, señor,” said Mateo.
There was a short pause and Mateo said: “Let the señor forgive me if I have done wrong.”
“What is this frightful crime, Mateo?”
“My cousin Alejandro, when he laid the body of the Señor Petroff upon the roof, found a wallet which had slipped out of the dead man’s pocket into his hand. He had to take hold of it, señor, as otherwise it would have fallen on the ground where someone might have found it, and then they might have looked about and found the Señor Petroff.”
“Very likely,” said Hambledon, lighting a cigarette.
“Alejandro was excited and in haste; that is a partial excuse, When he got to my house and put his hand in his pocket, there was the wallet.”
“Well?”
“But, señor! To rob the dead!”
“Come off it, Mateo.”
“It is an abomination. It is sacrilege.”
“In short,” said Tommy, “it isn’t done. I agree, but your cousin could not reasonably be expected to go back and replace it.”
“That was what he said when I reproached him. After he had left my house I found it on the floor. I do not wish to keep it, and knowing the señor is interested in the Russians, I have brought it to him.”
“What do you expect me to do with it, Mateo? Burn it unopened?” said Hambledon, holding out his hand.
“I leave that to the señor’s conscience,” said Mateo, giving him what had once been a handsome and expensive wallet of crocodile leather with tarnished silver corners.
“I will consult my conscience,” said Hambledon solemnly, “and listen to what it says.”
Since Hambledon’s conscience raised not the slightest objection to his examining the contents of Petroff’s wallet he took it up to his bedroom and turned it out on the dressing table. The first thing he noticed was that there was no money in it at all, but it was just possible that Petroff kept his money somewhere else—in his hip pocket, for example. It was not important.
There was not very much of interest in the wallet. Hambledon had hardly expected that there would be. Petroff was not likely to be the head of the concern, above those three men who had gone to the palace to ask for him. They were all senior to him in age and bore a much greater air of command, especially the bearded one. Any detailed orders, plans and specifications, authority to take this or that action would be with the real head of the expedition. Petroff’s wallet contained notes of points to be raised at a meeting with the Minister of the Interior requesting permission to enroll native labour, and there was a pencilled tick against every point. Since, taken together, his demands practically amounted to powers of life and death over the peons in his locality, Petroff must have been a persuasive talker. “Money,” said Hambledon to himself, “also talks. Perhaps that’s why there was none in his wallet and I did Alejandro an injustice.”
There were some engineer’s notes of the coefficient of expansion of steel rail and also of concrete, and several pages of calculations of angles in a small loose-leaf notebook. There were other calculations also, headed by a word which Hambledon’s pocket Russian dictionary told him meant trajectory. Hambledon laid these aside with a sigh of relief. The investigation of such matters was no part of his work and could be passed on to experts. There was a letter from Petroff’s mother ha Vladivostok. It was dated several months earlier and gave him family news, including a description of the wedding of someone called “little Vanya,” who had such modern views that in the writer’s opinion the wedding was scarcely a wedding at all. “I have seen more joy over the signing of the lease of a farm,” the writer commented. “I am all in favour of the young having modern ideas in tune with our Socialist Soviet ideals, but need these children be quite so dull?”
There were some notes of requirements in the matter of steel of certain sections and a memorandum to ask V. L., whoever he was, for more details about a certain transverse diameter. There was Petroff’s membership card of the Communist Party and some identity papers, and finally a small book calendar in Russian, about two inches square, of the type which is sold to carry in purse or pocket. It had the Hammer-and-Sickle design on the cover, and its pages showed merely the dates of the various months tabulated into seven columns for the days of the week—the usual thing of its type. Hambledon had its English counterpart in his own wallet at the moment. He laid it aside as of no interest. “What I was hoping for,” he muttered, “was the key to that infernal cipher.” He ploughed through the other papers again. They might prove helpful and informative when the experts had gone through them, but there was nothing m them which even faintly suggested a key.
He leaned back in his chair, deciding to abandon the search and go downstairs for a drink. The British Consulate could have this packet with his blessing. He noticed, at first idly and then with growing interest, that the little calendar was lying open at November, and that the page was grubby from much fingering. Now the actual date at that time was July 1949. Hambledon picked up the calendar and examined it more carefully; it had plainly been evenly used all the way through, and there were tiny pencil dots here and there and even a line occasionally, as though someone had been running down the columns with a pencil and inadvertently touched the surface. “Odd,” said Hambledon. “Most peculiar. Why should a man consult—earnestly and repeatedly consult—the whole calendar for a year which is little more than half through?” He turned the pages over; from January to December they were not merely fingermarked but rubbed with usage.
“It can’t be Pay-As-You-Earn—they don’t have it here. Happy Esmeralda. I don’t think this indicates when something is due to arrive or happen or be completed; he doesn’t underline individual dates.”
Instead of going down to the bar for a drink he rang the bell and ordered a whisky and soda to be sent up to his room. When it came he strolled idly up and down his room, stopping for a sip at his drink and letting his eyes pass from the cipher letter to the calendar and back.
“Practically all I have to go-on is the fact that both are in figures. Yet if Petroff receives cipher letters, it is only natural that he should carry the key in his wallet. Such an innocent-looking key, too—if it is the key.”
He took a couple more turns up and down the room and made up his mind suddenly. He put his coat on, with the cipher letter and the calendar in one pocket, drank off his whisky, and walked down to the Café Marina to consult the man who really knew Russian well, the café proprietor Ernst Busch.
As soon as Hambledon was comfortably settled at a table with a cup of the German’s excellent coffee, Busch sent for his wife to serve such other customers as should occur and came to Hambledon’s table for a quiet talk. He congratulated Hambledon upon winning the great prize in the lottery and expressed his awestruck wonder at the impossible-to-be-duplicated nobility of character which had prompted the gifts to the crippled children and the retired soldiers. He had read all about it in the Centinela; in fact, he had kept a copy of the paper to remind him in years to come—
Hambledon cut him short and, to change the subject, asked if he had seen anything more of his Comrade Petroff. Busch said he had not and never wanted to again, and Tommy naturally refrained from telling him that he need not fear it since the man was dead. That piece of information was extremely secret and, Tommy thought, would remain so if the Esmeraldans had any sense. He leaned back in his chair and said that he had made one or two discreet enquiries and learned one interesting piece of news. “It appears, if I was told the truth, that they entered the country illegally. They landed, it is said, from a ship up the coast and went straight, inland.”
“No immigration certificate?” said Busch, “No permis-de-sejour? No passport examination? it is all most irregular.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” agreed Tommy. “What is the penalty for that sort of thing in Esmeralda, do you know?”
“Imprisonment or deportation or both.”
“Indeed. No doubt these Russians have escaped notice by confining themselves almost entirely to the mountains,” said Hambledon.
“No doubt that is so. Yet if an information were laid, the
Government might take action,” said Busch eagerly. “Especially if they are men sufficiently well off to be worth fining heavily.”
“They might,” said Tommy doubtfully. “But there must be a great number of illegal immigrants in a country such as this, where it is impossible to guard the frontiers.”
“No doubt,” said Busch. “But these—”
“There is, for example, yourself.”
Busch looked at him.
“You also landed from a ship, did you not?” pursued Hambledon blandly. “You also have no immigration certificate or permis-de-sejour? Or you have, perhaps, become naturalized?” Busch’s jaw dropped and he very slowly shook his head. Hambledon looked at the face swinging slowly before him with its mouth hanging open and thought it one of the silliest faces he had ever seen. Somewhere behind it, however, a brain was stored which could read Russian.
“B-but,” stammered Busch, “b-but, mein Herr, it is very different in my case. I am a poor refugee from tyranny. I work hard for my living and harm no man—”
“Oh, doubtless. Still, there is a proverb in my country which says that it is a mistake for the pot to reproach the kettle with being black. Never mind, Busch, I think you are quite safe so long as you remain humble and do not attract the attention of those in authority.”
“The very last thing I should ever wish to do,” said Busch in a voice which trembled with fervour, “is to attract even the smallest degree of notice from anyone in authority anywhere.”
“Very wise. If you stick to that decision I expect you’ll be all right. Now, I’ve got something here which I want to show you, on the definite understanding that you never speak of it to anyone, not even your wife. I have your promise?”
“Certainly, mein Herr. I will swear on oath if you wish that anything which the Herr may deign at any time to say to me—”
“That’ll do,” said Hambledon impatiently, for the man irritated him. “I have a letter here which I think is written in Russian,” and he handed the cipher letter to Busch, who put on his spectacles, looked at it and immediately said: “These are not letters, mein Herr. These are figures.”
“Yes,” said Hambledon.
“Although they are, I think, figures written by a Russian.”
“Yes,” said Hambledon again. Busch put down the letter and looked at him.
“A cipher,” he said.
“I think so.”
“I do not know anything about solving ciphers,” said the German. “I am completely at your service, but it would be useless to pretend to an accomplishment I do not possess.”
“You are perfectly right As a matter of fact, I have been visited with an idea for solving this cipher and I want you, if you will, to tell me if what I am getting out of it is Russian or rubbish.”
“I understand,” said the German.
“Or, of course, both,” said Tommy Hambledon.
Chapter XI. The River Of Monkeys
For greater privacy Busch led Hambledon into a room in his house, which adjoined the restaurant, and there Hambledon produced the pocket calendar.
“This belonged to the man to whom the cipher letter is addressed,” he said. “I noticed that, as you see, it has been a good deal used all the way through, and I wondered why, since we are now only in July. There are also small marks here and there. Look for yourself.”
“Someone has used it for calculation,” agreed Busch, “I wondered whether it was the key to the cipher.” Busch looked so pained that Hambledon nearly laughed. It was exactly the expression of an unmathematical small boy brought brutally face to face with his first quadratic equation: fascinated horror and a strong inclination to think about something else.
“If the Herr would explain very simply and clearly, I will do my best to understand.”
“It really isn’t difficult,” said Hambledon encouragingly. “Take a sentence like—er—‘Will you help me?’ Let’s write it down. There. Now, here’s a calendar. Suppose you start making A January first, B January second, C January third, and so on, where does W come? Twenty-third, that’s right. You put 23 with a full stop after it: 23. Yes. Now I comes before W, so you finish the first alphabet—WXYZ—and start the second one. So the second A comes on January twenty-seventh, doesn’t it? Carry straight on from January into February. I is February fourth. Get the idea? So we have 23.4. for WI, see?
