I landed where I intended to land, smack in the centre of the narrow balcony, but I fell awkwardly, jarring my knees, hips and right wrist and for a moment or two the pain convinced me I had broken bones all over the place. I lay still for a while, then the pain began to ease and I pulled myself shakily to my feet. The sound I'd made seemed to have attracted no attention; surprisingly, because it had seemed very loud to me. When the pain began to recede, I started to examine the double doors that led from the balcony into the room. Inevitably they were locked,
which meant I'd have to do damage to get in, which meant in turn that it would be known the room had been entered. Even Schmid, I thought, wouldn't have much difficulty in guessing who was responsible.
But I wasn't going to let that stop me. It wasn't difficult to tell which of the two doors were bolted and which held by the tenon of the lock. I looked cautiously round in case anyone might be out on one of the other balconies; at that time of night it was unlikely, but I checked. Then I looked down at the street. I watched for a minute or so and no-one seemed to look up at the hotel.
Right, then. I leaned back against the balcony rail, gripping it tightly, and smashed my heel as hard as I could at the point on the door frame where the lock was housed. There was a splintering sound, frighteningly loud in the stillness, and I ducked down quickly in case it attracted attention. A couple of minutes later, certain that it hadn't, I smashed my heel at the door again. This time it gave and I slipped inside quickly, pushing the door closed behind me.
The pale moon gave precious little light; certainly not enough to read by, and the pile of paper I could make out on the little corner desk fitment would need examining with care. I stood for a moment weighing the alternatives : should I take it all and leave, or risk switching on the light? Removing evidence would be a felony, no doubt about that, but then it was a crime to be in the room at all. What decided me was the realization of the futility of taking the
i
stuff away. Schmid might need it to find Alsa. I had no doubt he was searching genuinely enough, but I was beginning to doubt his capacity, or mine, or anybody else's, to find her. Still, Schmid might find her, and to do so he might need the papers. All right, then, I'd have to examine them here.
The curtains weren't thick. Light would show through them. I stripped the heavy candlewick bedspread and draped it from the curtain rail, then switched on the bedside light and looked around. Alsa's handbag lay on a chair, presumably exactly where she'd left it. I opened it and looked at
the contents. There were the usual impedimenta : lipstick, powder, nail file and scissors in a little case, a couple of Russian picture postcards that she hadn't used; a couple of ball point pens and a magnifying glass with a little stand for transparency viewing. It was no help. Suitcase, wardrobe and chest of drawers held only clothes. I crossed the room and started looking at the papers.
There were a few layouts, but just roughs with pictures and type areas blocked in. They told me nothing. Then I started on the typewritten material : about a hundred articles of one kind and another, about a whole spectrum of Russian activities. Each had a note attached saying which Russian magazine it had appeared in and when. I began reading them, but to go through the lot would take all night and I hadn't got all night. So I flicked the pages of each one and got nowhere. Only a few pages showed anything apart from plain typescript, but there were one or two on which Alsa had begun to work; she'd made sub-editorial corrections and marked the type in which she wanted the text to be set. I looked at the familiar markings : twelve-point Medium Gothic lettering here, ten-point Metrolite capitals there, eight-point Times Roman for the bulk of the setting. It was all normal and ordinary; familiar, rabid marks, many indecipherable to the lay eve, but passing effective instructions from sub-editor to typesetter. My eyes ran over the markings absorbing and dismissing them quickly. There were marginal query marks here and there, too; SEE OD, which means she intended to check a spelling in the Oxford Dictionary; SEE Britannica, and so on. I stopped suddenly at one of them. See myopic. Myopic? What the hell was myopic? Hardly a standard reference book, anyway. I made a mental note to try to find out and continued my examination of the articles with a new urgency. A minute before, I'd seriously been doubting whether there was anything at all in the papers. Now instinct told me that there was more.
I found the second oddity on a torn page of one of the articles that had been partly subedited. Paragraph one was Metrolite, twelve-point; paragraph two was ten-point Times. Paragraph three eight-point Times? But it wasn't. The type marking was one I'd never seen before. It said, ten-point Aggie Waggie, but the I opt had been struck through, invalidating the type instructions. I stared at it. Aggie Waggie? There are literally thousands of type faces, and in a long career I'd come across many of them, some with very weird names indeed, but I'd never heard of Aggie Waggie. Some novel Swedish face, perhaps? But worth checking.
Ten minutes later, I found a third thing : a pencil note on top of one article said, 'No contacts. Check.' Contacts are contact photographic prints, made with the negative in direct contact with the photographic paper, and Alsa had none, either here in the room, or at the printers. I puzzled about it for a while, but could make no sense of it at all, partly because I had, by that time, been in the room about forty minutes and was getting jumpy. I'd have to leave soon. The sooner the better, in fact. With luck it would be next day before Schmid discovered I'd been in there and in the meantime I could try to work out what the three strange references meant.
I rose and softly switched off the light, then tiptoed to the door. There was no possibility of leaving the room by any other route. Dropping down from the roof had been difficult enough; getting up again would be impossible. I waited until my eyes adjusted a bit to the. darkness and noticed that the bedspread I'd draped over the window had slipped at one corner. A triangle of light would have been showing, damn it! If anybody had noticed that . . .1
I swallowed. There could now be somebody in the corridor outside, waiting for me, yet it was impossible to know until I opened the door. I'd just have to take the chance. With my hand on the doorknob, I thought of a tiny bit of insurance, went back and carried the little upright chair from the desk to the door and balanced it on its back legs so that the chair back would move beneath the handle as the door opened. Holding it steady with one hand, I turned the handle gently with the other. When the handle was fully turned, I began to ease the door slowly open, leaning to peer
round it. With the crack an inch wide the corridor seemed empty. Another inch revealed nothing. I moved it a little more, until the door touched my fingers where they supported the chair. All well so far. It looked all right.
But it wasn't all right. Suddenly there was a hand holding a gun, pointing at me from behind the angle of the door frame. Then Elliot's voice said, 'Hold it, Sellers. Hold it right there!'
CHAPTER NINE
`Step back and open the door,' he said. 'Don't put on any lights.'
Àll right. 'As I took a step backward, I remembered my right hand was still holding the chair. I disengaged it successfully and took another step and the gun followed me round the door. As Elliot's head came after it, I whipped the chair upward hard, hitting the gun hand from underneath, and simultaneously smashed my foot against the door. The gun spun upward and fell with a thud on the carpet; the door cracked hard against the side of his head.
With my foot jammed against the door to stop it opening, I flipped on the light and reached for the gun, then snapped the light off again. I'd never fired a hand gun in my life, but I felt a lot safer holding it, if only because Elliot was unlikely to have another. I moved the chair out of the way, reached for the handle, opened the door quickly, and stepped back. Then, I hurled myself out of the room into the corridor. It was empty. Elliot had gone, or if he hadn't gone, at least he wasn't anywhere I could see him. He could be waiting anywhere though, behind a door somewhere, in the lift, in my room. Or he might not be waiting at all, might have disappeared once he'd lost his advantage.