Burgess cut across his objections. “Just answer one thing. Would he have once done it?”
“He would have once done it.”
“Then if he would have once done it, he’ll still do it. I tell you again there’s no age limit on that kind of loyalty. If he had it, then he has it. If he hasn’t it, then that only proves he never did have it.”
“But that’s an unfair test, that’s putting the hurdle too high.”
“If he’s the sort of a guy that would weigh a five-year contract against your life,” Burgess argued, “then he’s no good to you anyway. If he isn’t, then he’s the guy you need. Why not give him a chance to come through first, before you start to talk as though he won’t?”
He took a memorandum book out of his pocket, tore off a blank leaf, poised his knee for a writing rest, foot to the edge of the bunk.
NN29 22 CABLE VIA NBN = —,SEPT 20
NLT JOHN LOMBARD =
Compania Petrolera Sudamericana
Head Office, Caracas, Venezuela
Have been sentenced for Marcella’s death since you left a certain key witness can clear me if found my lawyer here has reached the end of his resources this is to ask you to come up and help me have no one else to turn to and no other chance of pulling through sentence set for third week in October and appeal has been turned down give me a hand will you
9
The Eighteenth Day Before the Execution
He still had some of the tan on him from warmer latitudes. He’d come up so quick he’d brought it with him, like people do when they travel nowadays; a cold in the head flies with them from the West Coast to the East; a three-day boil on the neck lasts from Rio to La Guardia Field before it pops.
He looked about the age Scott Henderson had once been; the former Scott Henderson of five or six months ago, not the pinched death-mask lingering on in a cell, who counted years by hours.
He was still wearing the clothes he’d put on in South America. A snowy panama that was out of season up here right now, and a gray flannel suit that was too light, both in shade and weight, for an American autumn. It needed the blazing Venezuelan sunshine to make it seem less conspicuous.
He was moderately tall, and easy moving with it; no effort at all to get around. You could think of him as always chasing after a street car, even when it was already a block away, because it was so easy for him to catch up with it. He was anything but a natty dresser, in spite of his vernal clothes. His small mustache could have stood a touch of the scissors, and his necktie needed steaming, it kept curling around on itself all the way down, like a spiral of spun-sugar candy. The impression he gave, in short, was that he’d be a lot better at bossing a crew of men or poring over a draughting board than dancing on a ballroom floor with the ladies. There was a certain gravity about him that indicated that, if outward indications are ever any good. What used to be called, in the days of simpler cataloguing, a man’s man.
“How’s he taking it?” he asked the guard in an undertone as he followed him along the tier.
“Just about.” Meaning, what can you expect?
“Just about, eh?” He shook his head, muttered under his breath, “Poor cuss.”
The guard had reached it, was opening it up.
He held back a moment, swallowed hard as if to get his throat working smoothly, then turned the corner of the cell grate into view. He went into the cell with a wry grin on his face and an outstretched hand leading the way. As though he were running in to him in the lounge of the Savoy-Plaza.
“Well, lookit old Hendy,” he drawled. “What’re you doing, trying to be funny?”
There was none of the bitterness present in Henderson’s reaction there had been the day the detective had visited him. You could tell this man was an old friend. His drawn face lighted up. He answered him in kind. “I live here now. How d’ye like that?”
They pumped hands as if they’d never get through. They were still working away at it after the guard had locked up and gone off again.
That link of hands carried messages for them, unspoken but plainly understood. Henderson’s was a warmly grateful, “You came. You showed up. So that stuff about a real friend isn’t the bunk.”
And Lombard’s was a fervent, encouraging, “I’m with you. I’m damned if they’re going to do it.”
After that, they steered clear of the subject the first few minutes. They said everything but what they really wanted to. A sort of skittishness, a diffidence, that a particular topic when it is too vital, bleeding, and raw, will sometimes bring about.
Thus Lombard said, “Gee, that was a dusty ride on the train, getting up here.”
And Henderson, “You look good. Jack. Must agree with you down there.”
“Agree, hell! Don’t talk about it, will you? Of all the lousy, God-forsaken holes! And the food! And the mosquitoes! I was a sucker ever to sign up for five years like I did.”
“But there was good money in it, I suppose, wasn’t there?”
“Sure. But what am I going to do with it down there, anyway? Nowhere to spend it. Even the beer has a kerosene flavor.”
Henderson mumbled, “I feel low, spiking it for you, though.”
“You did me a favor,” Lombard protested gallantly. “The contract’s still on, anyway. This is just time off I wangled.”
He waited a moment or two more. Then finally he edged up to it; the it that was on both their minds. He quit looking at his friend, looked somewhere else instead. “What about this thing anyway, Hendy?”
Henderson tried to smile. “Well, there’s a member of our class who’s going to take part in an electrical experiment two and a half weeks from today. What was it they gave me in the year book? ‘Most likely to get his name in the papers.’ Good prophecy. I’ll probably make every edition that day.”
Lombard’s eyes turned to stare at him truculently. “No, you won’t. Let’s quite horsing around. We’ve known each other half our lives; may as well kick off our shoes and drop the company manners.”
“Sure,” Henderson agreed forlornly. “What the hell, life’s so short.” He belatedly realized the unintentional appropriateness of that, grinned sheepishly.
Lombard slung one hip across the rim of the washbowl in the corner and relieved the leg that supported it of floor duty. He took it by the ankle with both hands and held it up. “I only met her once,” he said thoughtfully.
“Twice,” Henderson corrected. “There was that time we ran into you on the street, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. She kept pulling you by the arm, from behind, to break it up.”
“She was on her way to buy some clothes, and you know how they are when that’s in the wind. Neither time nor tide—” Then he apologized still further, in behalf of someone who was dead and gone, apparently without realizing how perfectly unimportant it was now. “We were always going to have you up for dinner, but I dunno — somehow — you know how those things are.”
“I know how it is,” Lombard agreed with diplomatic understanding. “No wife ever yet liked her husband’s premarriage friends.” He took out the pow-wow cigarettes, threw them across the narrow cell. “Don’t mind if they make your tongue swell up and your lips blister. They’re from down there; part gunpowder and part insecticide. I haven’t had time to change back to ours yet.”
He took a thoughtful drag. “Well, I guess you better give me the dope.”