“Okay,” I sighed. “Give me the name of the bookseller. I’ll get started in the morning.”
Putnam walked me back up to my own room, gave me the information, and then left. I got undressed and went to bed. I lay awake for a while, staring at the ceiling and thinking of Carrie Cromwell and leather panties. Finally the visions merged and I drifted into a dream.
There was Carrie stepping out of a calfskin nightgown, her breasts panting yes, her brown curls swirling as her head shook no-no-no. I reached for her, and her lips turned to leather. I backed away, and she was all flesh again. But now she was sharpening a hatpin on a leather strop, the kind barbers use to hone razors. I shrugged resignedly, and immediately she threw her arms around me. I noticed a “Made In Marriage Only” stamp on her shoulder. I forgot about it when she began moaning for me to hurry up. I threw her down on a bed, and she went wild. Then, suddenly, there was a sharp crack like the sound of a leather belt being snapped . . .
The sound woke me. I opened my eyes on the darkened hotel room, and they tried to ferret out the cause of it. They peered toward a bureau across the room. My ears re-evaluated the sound and decided it could have been caused by the inadvertent slamming of a bureau drawer which had been stuck. My eyes saw the silhouette of a figure in front of the bureau now and confirmed the guess. My brain, still half asleep, reacted stupidly.
“Hey! What the hell—-?” I started to yell.
The figure was a quick-moving blur that ended up hovering over me. I had a quick look at the face before my eyes were closed again. It was like looking into a mirror. It was my face. I blinked, and then it was too late for another look. Something very heavy hit me very hard on the head.
I dived down into a tunnel of black mirrors. There were reflections inside reflections inside reflections, and they were all me. They continued on into pitch-dark infinity. Yet I kept plunging, chasing them until they grew smaller and smaller and smaller until I was chasing only the most infinitesimal dot of a Steve Victor.
The dot hurt like hell. Even after it vanished and there was nothing but the black void, it kept on hurting. Now black agony was all there was.
No dream. No Carrie Cromwell. No leather panties, even. Just black pain filling my skull!
chapter TWO
THE MORNING sun didn’t wake me from sleep; it. just blazed bright enough finally to jar me back to consciousness. I swam back up through the mirrors with their repeating images and pried up the lids over my aching eye-balls. Now, instead of the repetitious me, I was seeing that ball of fire poking fingers of light through the window and into my sensitive orbs.
I cringed and turned away from the sunshine. As if I hadn’t had enough of mirrored nightmares, I got out of bed and crossed over to the mirror over the bureau to see if the real Steve Victor was still in condition to stand up. Barely. That’s what the mirror told me. There was a lump on the side of my head the size of a shot glass. The mirror didn’t have to tell me that, though. I got the message direct from the way it was throbbing.
Hobbling back over to the telephone on the night table, I called room service. I told them to send up a pot of black coffee and a bucket of ice. The party on the other end misunderstood.
“Do you want iced coffee, sir?” he asked, confused.
“No. I prefer to make it myself,” I said nastily, taking out my headache on him. “Just send up the hot coffee in a pot and the ice in a bucket.”
“Very well, sir.” The voice was unperturbed by my rudeness.
While I was waiting, I surveyed the room. Evidently, once he’d been spotted, the intruder hadn’t bothered to cover up the traces of the ransacking he’d given the place. The clothes which had been in my suitcase were on the floor where he’d flung them. One of the bureau drawers was still open. The trousers I’d hung in the closet had been tossed on a chair. They lay there with the pockets turned inside-out.
My wallet had been inside one of those pockets. It was gone. Besides various identification papers and about fifty bucks in cash, the slip of paper with the address and name of the bookseller on it which Putnam had given me was in the wallet. So now the intruder with my face had the papers to back it up and the signpost pointing to Cromwell’s trail—-if that was where his interest lay.
Was it? I thought about it. Everything had happened so fast the night before that it was hard for me to be sure where dream-fantasy had ended and reality had begun. Nor was I sure where reality had ceased and hallucination might have started me down the road to unconsciousness.
Had the intruder really been a ringer for me? Or had I imagined it? The question was crucial!
It was crucial because if I hadn’t been hallucinating, that double meant trouble. Real serious trouble! There was only one other man in the world that I knew of with my face. He hadn’t been born with it. It had deliberately been grafted on him. And that man was a Russian agent who’d whimsically assigned himself the name of Viktor Stevkovsky.
Stevkovsky and I had crossed paths violently in Manila5 . My assumption was that I’d left him behind there. But if I hadn’t, if he was in Washington, if it really had been him in my room last night, then I could look forward to hard times acomin’. If Stevkovsky was dogging me again, then it meant the Russians knew about Cromwell’s process and were after it.
Still, I had to admit to myself that my mind could have played tricks on me. I had a grudge against Stevkovsky that transcended opposing political philosophies and had kept him in the forefront of my mind since Manila. The grudge had to do with a girl Stevkovsky had seduced by pretending to be me. Even in the capers of agents, double agents, double crosses and triple plays, some things are inexcusable. And bedding down my girl by impersonating me is one of them. So I’d had many smoldering thoughts about Stevkovsky, and it was possible that in my semi-sleep my brain might have imposed his features—- my features, that is-—on the intruder.
It was a possibility, but not the one on which I could afford to act. Even if I’d dreamed it up, I had to assume that Stevkovsky was the intruder and that he'd turn up again. That meant that certain precautions were needed. I picked up the telephone and called Putnam to arrange them.
“I think you may have sprung a leak,” I told him when he answered the phone.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing personal. I mean a security leak. I have reason to think the Russians may be on to the Cromwell case.
“Explain,” he said curtly.
I did. “So watch out for somebody impersonating me,” I concluded. “Even if it’s face to face, make damn sure it’s me. We’d better have a code word so I can identify myself. ‘American original’,” I decided on the.spur of the moment. “I’ll always use that phrase for positive identification. If a Steve Victor turns up who doesn’t say that, lock him up and throw the key away.”
“ ‘American original’,” Putnam repeated. “Very well.”
I got the name and address of the bookseller from him again and hung up the phone. A waiter knocked at the door as the conversation ended. I took the tray with the coffee and the bucket of ice on it from him. I gulped the coffee, and it steamed its way down to my stomach. I wrapped the ice in a towel and put my head in deep freeze for about twenty minutes.