Cry For the Baron Read online

  He laughed.

  There wasn’t anything to laugh about. He was a prisoner, and his captors meant business. They wanted the Tear – and for a while he had forgotten it. Ought he to wish that he had never seen it? Then the door opened and a fat man came in.

  The newcomer wasn’t simply fat, he was huge, but there was nothing gross or flabby about him. He was well-dressed, his pale face was impressive and handsome. He had big eyes with drooping lids. His black hair was curly and glistened in that poor light. He closed the door and crossed the room quietly, almost as if he were walking on tip-toe. He had a small cupid’s bow of a mouth, red as if with lipstick. He stood by the bed looking down at Mannering.

  Mannering said: “Good evening.”

  “Good evening. How are you?” It was a smooth, cultured voice, with no trace of accent.

  “Counting my blessings,” Mannering said.

  “You have some to count?”

  “I’m alive.”

  “Yes, you are alive.” The man ought to smile, but didn’t. “It is a good thing to be alive. Do you know me?”

  “No.”

  “I hope that is true,” said the fat man. “I do not want more difficulties. I come to talk to you.” His phrasing was too precise, it was strange that he had no accent. He drew up a small chair and overlapped the sides when he sat down. He placed his hands on his knees; they were small, pale hands, and on the left little finger was a huge signet ring; he wore no other jewellery, and was dressed in excellent style. “This diamond, the Tear. You have it?”

  “No.”

  “I do not want you to He to me.”

  Mannering felt as if part of his mind were asleep; that there were things he had said in the past that he ought to repeat now, but he couldn’t be sure that he remembered everything; in particular there was something he had told Julia Fiori – ah! He remembered and felt easier.

  “You understand,” the fat man said. “It will help you to tell me the truth.”

  “I haven’t got the Diamond of Tears. It was stolen from Bernstein’s shop before I got there.”

  “That is what you said before, but I do not believe you,” said the fat man. “Tell me what happened when you reached the shop, why you went there—everything, please.”

  He sat like Buddha in modern clothes while Mannering told him; and in the telling became much more certain of himself. He described his meeting with the man who had come from Bernstein’s, described how he had searched the shop before the police had arrived, looking for the Tear. He even talked of a book in which he thought it had been hidden, but said that the hiding-place was empty. He believed he spoke with conviction, but as he went on he became more and more uneasy beneath the steady scrutiny of those big eyes.

  When he finished, the man asked: “And this man whom you met at the door, you saw him?”

  “Not clearly. It was dark, and he had a handkerchief over his face.”

  “You would recognise him again?”

  “No. I remember his size and build, that’s all.”

  “Perhaps it is enough,” said the fat man. He leaned towards the dressing-table and touched a bell-push which Mannering hadn’t noticed. There was no sound, but the door opened and a man came in. The first glimpse made Mannering start back, for it was almost as if he were reliving the past. The man had a Homburg hat, pulled low over his eyes, was stocky and broad, and had a white handkerchief over the lower part of his red face. He came in quickly and closed the door, approached aggressively – and he might easily be the man who had come out of Jacob’s shop.

  It was the man he had followed from Fay’s flat.

  The fat man said: “You have seen this man before?”

  “It could be the murderer.”

  “You are not sure?”

  “I can’t be sure.”

  “At least that is the truth.” The fat man turned to the other and contemplated him from beneath his lashes, and now Mannering saw that the blunt-fingered hands of the masked man were trembling. Yes, the fat man’s gaze could be frightening. Mannering’s own nerves were dulled with the drug, his indifference artificial. He would be frightened of the fat man if his senses weren’t dulled. He did not question the danger and the horror and the capacity to frighten of this man.

  “Mannering tells me again the Tear was not there when he arrived.”

  “It must have been!”

  “Tell me again, why is that so?”

  “I called Bernstein up an hour before. He said he had the Tear there. So it must have been there. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find it. Then Mannering arrived and I had to run. Who else could have found it?”

  The fat man said: “One of you is lying.”

  “It’s Mannering!”

  “Yes, perhaps it is Mannering, but I am not sure. I am not sure whether you can be trusted. The Tear is a great temptation and you have always been a greedy man. Go and wait for me.”

  “I tell you—”

  “Go and wait.”

  The other turned and, still shivering, went out of the room. The door closed silently behind him. There was still no vestige of any expression on the big face.

  “It is a bad thing to lie to me, Mannering. You understand, I must obtain the Tear. I will do anything to obtain it. I will not be harassed by the greed of little men or the persistence of men like you. Already you have been a great nuisance. That must not be allowed to continue, so you will stay with me until everything is finished. If you have not the Tear, you will not suffer. If you have—” He shrugged. “You will tell me. It is easy to make men talk. You understand me?”

  Mannering said slowly: “Yes.”

  “Remember the photograph,” the fat man said, and stood up with unexpected grace of movement. At the door he looked back. “Do not forget that photograph, Mannering, or that I must have the Tear. It is not important what you consider right. It would have been better had you not gone to that shop, because then Fay would have inherited all that Bernstein left, including the Tear, and all would have been well. I can afford to wait. But now the diamond is stolen and I must find it again. Again,” he repeated, and the word was like a sigh.

  He went out. From the passage he called: “You will listen. In a little while you will understand what I mean.”

  The door closed.

  Mannering sat looking at it, and felt as he had done when Julia Fiori had left his flat. Cold, frightened. The effect of the drug was working off. There was a dull pain at the back of his head and an ache across his eyes.

  “You will listen. In a little while you will understand what I mean.”

  What had the fat man meant? Who was he? A name sprang to mind immediately – Fiori. If you saw him and Julia together you would have to agree that they shared something more than looks and a good presence; they shared self-confidence. This man had threatened unnamable things so quietly. He felt able to talk in such a way, to kidnap a man from his own doorstep, to bring him safely here and to behave as if he could keep him prisoner for as long as he wished. He knew exactly what he wanted and did not doubt that he would get it. He treated the law as if it did not exist.

  Was he Fiori?

  A sound broke the quiet of the house; a cry, not far away. It plucked at Mannering’s nerves, made him sit up abruptly – and then it came again, longer, high-pitched, a cry of pain and fear.

  “You will listen,” the fat man had said. “In a little while you will understand.”

  A third scream, wild and uncontrolled, brought sweat to Mannering’s forehead and a chill to his spine – and as he got out of bed more screams came and merged with one another in a continuous shriek of agony.

  Chapter Eleven

  Torment

  The door was locked; and the screams went on. They came from the next room, now high pitched and shuddering, now
little more than moans; soon there was only the moaning, followed by a steady voice which might be the fat man’s. Mannering could not hear the words but guessed that Bernstein’s killer was being , questioned with the cold-blooded cruelty that the secret police reports had revealed in the affair of the Diamond of Tears.

  Then Mannering distinguished shrill words.

  “No!” A murmur of questions followed. “It wasn’t there.” Another murmur. “I didn’t take it!” Silence, and then a cry of dread: “No, don’t do it again, don’t do it again! I didn’t take the stone!”

  The man was suffering like this because Mannering had lied; even the fact that he had killed Bernstein could not justify that. Mannering could hear his sobbing, and tensed himself to withstand more screaming; none came. Slowly he relaxed – and gradually the obvious dawned in his mind so obvious that he hadn’t given it a thought.

  He must get away.

  He turned swiftly to the window, pulled aside the curtains – and faced green-panelled steel shutters. The rounded heads of the rivets stood out all round, and there was no keyhole; they must be electrically controlled. He backed away slowly and turned to the door.

  There was a lock on the door.

  He thrust his hand into his pocket to get his knife, but it wasn’t there. Everything else was; keys, silver and copper, the oddments he always carried; he went through his other pockets quickly, but the knife wasn’t anywhere.

  He sat heavily on the foot of the bed. Why couldn’t he think?

  Slowly he bent down and put on his shoes, forcing himself not to fumble with the laces. He would get nowhere if he went on like this. He was too susceptible to the atmosphere, the mental torment. But he couldn’t argue with physical facts and his hands were unsteady, his nerves aquiver. He stood up and went to the dressing-table, opened the drawers, found a nail file but nothing else remotely like a tool.

  There were some reels of cotton; red, white, green – many colours. You could use cotton in more ways than one.

  He heard a footstep, shut the drawer and spun round, his right hand in his pocket, holding his cigarette-case. That was the only thing he had for a weapon, except the chair on which the fat man had sat. He leaned forward and held the chair top, ready to raise it as a club – and all the time he argued with himself. You couldn’t defeat the fat man by blunderbus methods, you had to match his cunning. First pain, then the drug had sapped what cunning he had, reduced him to elemental thought of brute force and –

  The door opened.

  Mannering swung the chair, but did not need to use it. A man was pushed into the room, a sobbing wreck of a man. The Homburg hat, still perched on his head, supplied an added touch of horror. His eyes were bloodshot, two burns showed livid on his cheeks, blood dripped from the top of one of his fingers as he thrust out his hand to save himself from falling.

  The fat man said from the door: “Look after him, Mannering.”

  Then the door closed.

  You had to match cunning by cunning.

  The tortured man lay on the bed, his eyes wide open as he stared towards the ceiling.

  Mannering had found a salve in the dressing-table, applied it to the burns and to the little finger, the end of which had been crushed and the bone probably broken. He had bandaged that with his handkerchief, there was little else he could do, the man must see a doctor to have that finger put right. Doctor! Now the man lay sullen and resentful, smoking one of Mannering’s cigarettes.

  You took a deep breath and accepted facts as they were; this devilry was part of the fat man’s technique and you couldn’t stop it by ordinary means. You just accepted the position, then, and tried to deal with it. If you concentrated on what was likely to happen when the door opened again, you would only be in a state of funk and nerves. So you thought further ahead, looking at the mystery from the beginning. You planned what you would do when you were away from here, not whether you would ever get away – and you wondered how you could take advantage of this situation.

  You knew what the fat man was planning.

  Mannering hitched his chair nearer the bed and the bloodshot eyes turned towards him.

  “Feeling any better?”

  “I feel like hell.”

  “You’ve a nice employer.”

  “I’d like to smash his face in.”

  “Worked for him for long?”

  “Too long.”

  “Why don’t you get out of it?”

  “Have you ever tried to get out of a padded cell? That’s what this is—a padded cell. You can’t get away from him.”

  “Is he Fiori?”

  “Supposing he is?” A glint shone in the man’s eyes, as if he realised that he was talking too freely. “You’ll get yours. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have had this.”

  “What makes you so sure I took the Tear?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Someone else could have taken it. Bernstein might have found a specially safe hiding-place for it. The police might be foxing, and have it at the Yard. I told Fiori the truth. I didn’t expect him to work on you like this, and there was nothing I could have done about it if I’d known. Why does he want the Tear?”

  “He’s crazy about that diamond. It isn’t the first time he’s tried to get it. He’ll do anything for it but he doesn’t make us take risks for anything else, he’s smart most of the time. The Tear makes a fool out of him.”

  Mannering said: “If I were in your shoes I wouldn’t get a laugh out of anyone.”

  The man snapped: “Shut your trap!” He stared at the wall, his uninjured hand clenching, as if with sudden pain. The cigarette was nearly finished and burning close to his lips.

  “Why did you kill Bernstein?”

  “I had to kill him.”

  “There’s just one thing that might save you from a life sentence,” said Mannering. “Well, two things. Fiori might kill you first. The other—” He broke off. “Another cigarette?”

  The man pushed out his lips. Mannering took the stub away, lit him another and stuck it into his mouth; he didn’t grunt thanks. Mannering sat back and looked at the wall then the door, wondering how long he would be left here, whether it was possible that Fiori could listen to their conversation. There were no holes in the wall, nothing to indicate a speaking tube or a microphone. Even if one were hidden somewhere it wouldn’t help much to find it. He closed his eyes, and blotted out ugly thoughts, until the man on the bed said harshly:

  “What’s the other way?”

  “Other way to what?”

  “Don’t stall! You reckon the busies will get me, that I haven’t a chance of dodging them except—”

  “Oh, that. Queen’s evidence. Ever heard of it? You did a foul job with Bernstein, but maybe you were acting under pressure from someone else – from Fiori. That wouldn’t save you, but if you tell the police all you know about Fiori, it would go a long way towards helping you.”

  “I’m not a squeaker.”

  “I didn’t think you were so fond of Fiori.”

  “He’d never let the police get me.”

  “He’s not so clever as all that. You could have gone to see Bristow at the Yard this morning, instead of picking up that stuff at Fay Goulden’s flat and taking it to Benoni.”

  He said “Benoni” carelessly; the glitter in the other’s eyes, the tensing of the man’s body, rewarded him. They looked at each other, intent, hostile, before the man on the bed growled: “What do you know about Benoni?”

  “That he was paid a hundred pounds for the job, that he’s got a girl in trouble, and the girl lives at Woking, or somewhere in Surrey. Also, that he’s a frightened little rat who would squeal if the police got him. He would give you away, wouldn’t he? Maybe he has by now. What did you do with the stuff you took from Bernstein?”

  “
To hell with you!”

  The man turned his head again, but Mannering did not think he would keep quiet for long.

  He was sitting here talking calmly to a man who had committed murder; a man who would hang and for whom he felt no pity at all – but one who might save him. How much time was there?

  The man said abruptly: “I took it to Fay’s flat.”

  “Why not to the café?”

  “I took it to the flat and left it. Then I was told to pick it up and give it to Benoni. That’s how Fiori covered his own tracks. I didn’t want him to use me this morning, but you can’t argue with Fiori.”

  There were two things wrong with that reasoning. Fiori hadn’t covered his own tracks by having the jewels delivered to the café. And he invited trouble by sending the killer as a messenger.

  “Why didn’t you hide?”

  “He wanted to see if the cops had me covered.”

  “Had they?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “What is Fay worried about?” Mannering asked.

  “You’d be worried if you had to work for Fiori.”

  “Does she know him?”

  “Sure she knows him.”

  “Do you know her boy friend, Kenneth?”

  “That dude!” The man laughed. “He couldn’t see trouble if you stuck it on the end of his nose. He doesn’t know she’s mixed up in anything, doesn’t know she can hardly move out of doors without being frightened. I’d like to wring his neck!”

  “Who is he?”

  “She goes around with him. I can’t tell you anything else. And I don’t have to tell you anything. It won’t do you any good anyway. When Fiori gets a man he doesn’t let him go. You’ve got in his way, see? He’ll rub you out when he’s finished with you. And you’d better tell him where to find the Tear; if you don’t your own wife wouldn’t recognise you afterwards.”