I followed him to the car.
Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills. The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.
The flat-faced man was in a hurry. We purred over the road at a speed that soon carried us past the last of the cottages sprinkled up the hillside.
Presently we left the shiny black road for a paler one curving south to run along a hill’s wooded crest. Now and then this road, for a hundred feet or more at a stretch, was turned into a tunnel by tall trees’ heavily leafed boughs interlocking overhead.
Rain accumulated in fat drops on the boughs and came down to thump the Stutz’s roof. The dulness of rainy early evening became almost the blackness of night inside these tunnels.
The flat-faced man switched on the lights, and increased our speed.
He sat rigidly erect at the wheel. I sat behind him. Above his military collar, among the hairs that were clipped short on the nape of his neck, globules of moisture made tiny shining points. The moisture could have been rain. It could have been sweat.
We were in the middle of one of the tunnels.
The flat-faced man’s head jerked to the left, and he screamed:
“A-a-a-a-a-a!”
It was a long, quivering, high-pitched bleat, thin with terror.
I jumped up, bending forward to see what was the matter with him.
The car swerved and plunged ahead, throwing me back on the seat again.
Through the side window I caught a one-eyed glimpse of something dark lying in the road.
I twisted around to try the back window, less rain-bleared.
I saw a black man lying on his back in the road, near the left edge. His body was arched, as if its weight rested on his heels and the back of his head. A knife handle that couldn’t have been less than six inches long stood straight up in the air from the left side of his chest.
By the time I had seen this much we had taken a curve and were out of the tunnel.
“Stop,” I called to the flat-faced man.
He pretended he didn’t hear me. The Stutz was a tan streak under us. I put a hand on the driver’s shoulder.
His shoulder squirmed under my hand, and he screamed “A-a-a-a-a!” again as if the dead black man had him.
I reached past him and shut off the engine.
He took his hands from the wheel and clawed up at me. Noises came from his mouth, but they didn’t make any words that I knew.
I got a hand on the wheel. I got my other forearm under his chin. I leaned over the back of his seat so that the weight of my upper body was on his head, mashing it down against the wheel.
Between this and that and the help of God, the Stutz hadn’t left the road when it stopped moving.
I got up off the flat-faced man’s head and asked:
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
He looked at me with white eyes, shivered, and didn’t say anything.
“Turn it around,” I said. “We’ll go back there.”
He shook his head from side to side, desperately, and made some more of the mouth-noises that might have been words if I could have understood them.
“You know who that was?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You do,” I growled.
He shook his head.
By then I was beginning to suspect that no matter what I said to this fellow I’d get only head-shakes out of him.
I said:
“Get away from the wheel, then. I’m going to drive back there.”
He opened the door and scrambled out.
“Come back here,” I called.
He backed away, shaking his head.
I cursed him, slid in behind the wheel, said, “All right, wait here for me,” and slammed the door.
He retreated backwards slowly, watching me with scared, whitish eyes while I backed and turned the coach.
I had to drive back farther than I had expected, something like a mile.
I didn’t find the black man.
The tunnel was empty.
If I had known the exact spot in which he had been lying, I might have been able to find something to show how he had been removed. But I hadn’t had time to pick out a landmark, and now any one of four or five places looked like the spot.
With the help of the coach’s lamps I went over the left side of the road from one end of the tunnel to the other.
I didn’t find any blood. I didn’t find any footprints. I didn’t find anything to show that anybody had been lying in the road. I didn’t find anything.
It was too dark by now for me to try searching the woods.
I returned to where I had left the flat-faced man.
He was gone.
It looked, I thought, as if Mr. Kavalov might be right in thinking he needed a detective.
II
Half a mile beyond the place where the flat-faced man had deserted me, I stopped the Stutz in front of a grilled steel gate that blocked the road. The gate was padlocked on the inside. From either side of it tall hedging ran off into the woods. The upper part of a brown-roofed small house was visible over the hedge-top to the left.
I worked the Stutz’s horn.
The racket brought a gawky boy of fifteen or sixteen to the other side of the gate. He had on bleached whipcord pants and a wildly striped sweater. He didn’t come out to the middle of the road, but stood at one side, with one arm out of sight as if holding something that was hidden from me by the hedge.
“This Kavalov’s?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said uneasily.
I waited for him to unlock the gate. He didn’t unlock it. He stood there looking uneasily at the car and at me.
“Please, mister,” I said, “can I come in?”
“What — who are you?”
“I’m the guy that Kavalov sent for. If I’m not going to be let in, tell me, so I can catch the six-fifty back to San Francisco.”
The boy chewed his lip, said, “Wait till I see if I can find the key,” and went out of sight behind the hedge.
He was gone long enough to have had a talk with somebody.
When he came back he unlocked the gate, swung it open, and said:
“It’s all right, sir. They’re expecting you.”
When I had driven through the gate I could see lights on a hilltop a mile or so ahead and to the left.
“Is that the house?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. They’re expecting you.”
Close to where the boy had stood while talking to me through the gate, a double-barrel shotgun was propped up against the hedge.
I thanked the boy and drove on. The road wound gently uphill through farm land. Tall, slim trees had been planted at regular intervals on both sides of the road.
The road brought me at last to the front of a building that looked like a cross between a fort and a factory in the dusk. It was built of concrete. Take a flock of squat cones of various sizes, round off the points bluntly, mash them together with the largest one somewhere near the center, the others grouped around it in not too strict accordance with their sizes, adjust the whole collection to agree with the slopes of a hilltop, and you would have a model of the Kavalov house. The windows were steel-sashed. There weren’t very many of them. No two were in line either vertically or horizontally. Some were lighted.
As I got out of the car, the narrow front door of this house opened.
A short, red-faced woman of fifty or so, with faded blonde hair wound around and around her head, came out. She wore a high-necked, tight-sleeved, gray woolen dress. When she smiled her mouth seemed wide as her hips.
She said:
“You’re the gentleman from the city?”