I was winded by the time I rolled across the balcony-rail and landed on my feet. I hauled the sheets up after me and took a look in. Their Nibs were both dead to the world, sprawled there producing nasal music. One of the two electric globes had burned out during my absence and the corners of the room were in shadow. The door however was still securely locked. I removed the driver’s gun and refilled it with blanks, put it back again. Then I cracked the gardener’s, and just as I had that reloaded, I suddenly froze, bent over him.
There was a little round, cold steel mouth pressing into the back of my neck, just below the hair-line. Sort of kissing me, if you want to be poetic about it. Another one came up against me on my right side, and then a third just over my heart. There hadn’t been a sound in the room around me.
It was Torres’ voice that spoke. “I told you he’d come back. The way he left the gate down there open showed me that.”
I turned slowly, elbows out. The three of them were on top of me, and in the background was the woman who had contacted me at Filthy’s, hood thrown back now and eyes glittering with malice.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Pull your triggers!” she rasped. “You saw me with your own eyes! If he hasn’t already crossed us, he will tomorrow night! He knows too much. Are you going to let him go on living?” She meant it, too.
I was sweating like a needle-shower, not so much because I was afraid of being killed but because I had bungled the whole thing up the way I had.
Torres silenced her with his hand. “One thing at a time. If he has already betrayed us, then killing him won’t save us. If he hasn’t, it will be easy enough to silence him — for the rest of his life. Call the Villa Rosa. One of the presidential secretaries is on my pay-roll. Find out if the banquet has been cancelled or not, that will tell the whole story!”
They frisked me, but missed the leg-holster. They brought out rope and nearly broke both my arms fastening them wrist-to-elbow behind my back. They didn’t waste their time asking me where I’d been or what I’d done, just waited for word to come back.
The one who had gone to find out came running back again. “We’re safe! No orders have been given to postpone the banquet!”
“Then he hasn’t told them yet!” Torres gloated. “Well, we’ll make sure that he doesn’t! Stuff something in his mouth. Help me to get him down to the car. There’s a better way of getting rid of him than killing him here in the house—”
They all turned to look at him inquiringly.
“The House of the Good Shepherd,” he smiled evilly.
My blood froze, and for the first time I knew real fear; I was wishing now they had shot me down a while ago! I hadn’t been in the country long, but I already knew what that place meant, for all its high-sounding name. The State Institute for the Insane, a madhouse with three-feet thick walls, from which no one had ever yet been known to come out alive! I knew how they treated the insane down there, no restrictions, no experts on lunacy to make an examination. Once you were in you were as good as dead! And Torres just had pull enough to have me railroaded into that hell-on-earth, under a false name so that even the old man couldn’t get me out again. And he’d be dead by tomorrow night anyway, shot down by somebody else in my place.
I put up a terrific struggle, but all I could use was my legs, and that didn’t get me anywhere. They dragged me backwards down the stairs and dumped me into the car with my mouth gagged. “The more violent he is, the better!” I heard Torres chuckle. “He won’t last a week in that place!” He turned to the woman, whom they called “La Vibora” — the snake! “You lower your veil and come along with us. You can sign the commitment papers, as his nurse. We’ll book him as a homicidal maniac; the director there is a personal friend of mine.”
They got in with me and we started off, Torres himself at the wheel since his driver was still out. I reared violently, trying to throw myself out of the car and finish myself under the wheels, if I couldn’t do anything else, but one of them brought the butt of his gun down on my head and I slumped and went out. The last thing I heard was Torres saying, “We’ll go through with it tomorrow night just the way we intended to. Send somebody else there with the same sketches this damned gringo made; if he keeps his head lowered until he’s right in front of Savinas the old fool will never know the difference, he’s near-sighted, anyway!”
When I opened my eyes I was still in the back seat of the car, but it was standing still now, and Torres and La Vibora were missing. Greasy, age-old walls loomed near by in the dark, without a single break in them, without even a slit for a window. The House of the Good Shepherd, I remembered hearing, had been the old prison of the Spanish Inquisition three hundred years ago. And now worse things probably went on within it than even then.
A minute later they came back again, with two guards and the fat, sleepy-eyed director. “Here he is,” Torres said. “And I warn you he is a very dangerous type. His obsession is that he has been hired to kill some very influential man; sometimes it is Napoleon, sometimes Julius Caesar, sometimes — may the saints protect us — even our own esteemed beloved president! He escaped, I understand, from an asylum in his own country—”
“Well, he won’t from here!” the director promised softly, with a cruel gleam in his slitted eyes. He motioned the two guards. “Take him in — the necessary papers have all been signed by Señor Torres and the holy sister.”
I tried to hang onto the door handle with my bound hands as they lugged me out of the car feet first, and one of them promptly brought down a short leather-bound truncheon on my already aching skull. I groaned, but didn’t lose consciousness a second time.
A heavy iron door clanged ominously behind me, cutting me off from the world outside, and I was taken into the director’s office and stood up between the two guards like a mummy. He showed his true colors now that Torres and his party were gone, came in after us snarling ill-humoredly.
“Getting me up in the middle of the night like this — as though I haven’t got enough of them on my hands already!” he raged.
He sat down at the desk, banged open a huge book, yellow with age, began filling in an entry, consulting the papers those two devils had signed as he did so. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said. “John Doe, homicidal mania, eh? You better put him by himself, or he’ll kill some of the others. Seventeen’s empty, I think, since that last one hung himself, isn’t it? Throw him in there. If you have any trouble with him, give him the water cure. No knives or forks with his food, of course; pass it into him chopped up. Take away his belt and that necktie—” He threw down the pen, leaned back and yawned. That’s the way they did things.
They were already dragging me out between them, still tied and helpless. Along endless corridors they hauled me, past locked chambers of horrors where voices jabbered, laughed shrilly, or howled. All I kept thinking was, “They gotta leave that gun on me! If they only leave that gun on me—” I knew enough not to struggle, not to antagonize them in any way. There was just a bare chance that they’d overlook it.
They swung open a squealing iron door, so low that you had to stoop to get through it, hustled me in between them. The only light came from the corridor outside. One of them stood over me with his truncheon poised while the other one busied himself freeing my arms. The circulation was all gone. I couldn’t have made a move with them if I’d wanted to.
“Go get him a rig out of the storeroom,” one said.
“At this hour?” the other objected indolently. “Let him stay in his own clothes for tonight!”
They turned all my pockets inside out, to make sure I had nothing sharp-edged hidden about me, took my belt, tie and shoelaces off, then backed warily out, taking care not to turn their backs on me. My numbed right arm was already stealing lopsidedly down toward my leg, but they beat me to it; the cell door had crashed closed and the key turned in the lock before it got there. I heard their footsteps die away outside, and I was left there in a greasy six-by-four cell, without even a cot, just a pile of straw over in the corner. The door was the only opening in it, and the two small grilles at top and bottom of that — one for spying on me, the other for passing food through — were the only means of ventilation.