But Spice had kept his word.
Shaw had a bad day with Flame after that. She just sat there and looked pinched about the face and lips. But there were no tears. Her distress, he fancied, was too deep now, too torturing for tears; she was all dry inside.
Chapter Eleven
Next evening when Walley mounted the stairs with coffee and bread he said, “They’re back. Mr Spice and Mr Vilera.” He gave one of his weak grins. “With distinguished company, Mr Spice said.”
Flame had a haunted look and Shaw pressed her arm. To Walley he said, “Cut the details or I might chance the Colt and do you an injury from which you won’t recover.”
Walley shrugged and said, “Okay, okay. You’ll be seein’ for yourself soon.” He kicked the mess tin in and backed away as usual. Shaw made Flame try to eat some of the bread but it was no use. She gagged and said, “I just can’t. What’s the point, anyway?”
“Don’t give up,” he said harshly. “Plenty can happen yet.”
“Such as what?”
He didn’t answer that one.
The next visitors were Spice and Vilera themselves. Spice jerked the door open and said, “All right, dis is it. Move. Walk out one at a time. De girl first.”
As if in a dream Flame obeyed. As she went through the door, Spice, in a beautiful whiter-than-white silk shirt, moved in behind her with his gun. Then Vilera gestured Shaw out. The Puerto Rican moved behind him and once again Shaw felt the man’s gun nudge his backbone. Flame was going down the steps and ahead of her, backing down and facing her, was Walley with the Colt. Vilera’s voice breathed into Shaw’s ear. “You try anything,” it said, “and the girl gets it where it hurts most. Not to kill her, just to make her wish she hadn’t been born.”
They went on down. Shaw prayed Walley wouldn’t miss his footing — if he did, he might let the Colt off. It was aimed low and it would make a mess of Flame. On the other hand, if an unintentional bullet managed to kill her after all, it could be the kindest way out.
It took them some while to reach the passage at the bottom, thanks to Walley’s slow backward progress. When they made it Spice, instead of turning for the office, guided the girl towards a dark recess behind the rise of the stairway. He halted her just short of it and Walley, who was still ahead and walking the right way round now, bent and busied himself at dragging out an assortment of empty cardboard cartons and a spent oil drum. This done he straightened and said, “All clear, Mr Spice.”
Spice grunted. “Okay,” he said. “Cover de girl. Go ahead, Vilera.”
Vilera came away from behind Shaw and pushed past Walley into the recess. He felt around with his fingers outstretched, delicately. When he found what he was searching for he pressed hard with the heel of his hand at apparently solid stonework; Shaw could see the shoulder-muscles swelling beneath a thin shirt. After Vilera had been pressing for fifteen seconds there was a sudden loud click followed by the low hum of electrically-controlled machinery and a section of the wall began to move. Slowly it swung away inwards, revealing an intense blackness. Vilera took a step forward, reached in and flicked a switch. A dirty electric bulb, unshaded, came on and showed a flight of greasy stone steps running downward.
Vilera came back and glanced at Spice. Spice nodded. Vilera got behind Shaw again and to Flame Spice said, “Down the steps.”
Flame made no sound; she did as she was told and ducked under the stone lintel and started down the steps, with Spice close behind her. Shaw followed, and then Vilera. As Shaw entered the close air of the descending stairway he met a peculiar smell, sharp, cloying, horrible — the smell of death… death overlaid with another smell, the pungent, rotting-ants smell of what he fancied was formaldehyde.
They went down, down… the smell grew worse as the air grew staler and closer. There were more electric lights at intervals. The atmosphere held an overlay of damp and as they descended the steps became more and more greasy. Vilera and Spice were moving carefully now, feeling for firm footholds on the crumbling stone. When they reached the bottom they found themselves in a long, low, vault-like cellar, lit at intervals, as Vilera pressed another switch, by dim, unshaded lights like those on the stairs. There was a distant drip of water from the far end. Possibly the cellar ran deep below the Hudson River. All around one side of the place were slate-lined shelves set into alcoves, about waist high, while on the other side was a row of big iron doors like the fronts of ovens. Down the middle ran a series of tables, some bare, others carrying an assortment of bottles, hypodermic syringes and other paraphernalia more appropriate to a hospital than the cellar of a riverside warehouse.
But this wasn’t a warehouse at all.
They were marched right into the cellar, past the tables and the shelves, and then Spice said, “Okay, turn around. Now wait.”
“Wait for what?” Shaw asked.
“Jus’ wait, dat’s all. You’ll see.”
They waited. The atmosphere of this underground place, its foul smell, was tearing at Shaw’s nerves. He could no longer doubt what it was for, had to accept the fact that unless he could get hold of one of those guns neither he nor Flame were ever going to see the daylight again. Next stop Peking, and they wouldn’t be knowing much about that.
After a long wait there was a shuffle from the direction of the stairs and a man came in sight. He was a Negro and he was bearing a load. Something still and silent, wrapped in a white sheet-like covering. Behind him came another man, staggering under the other end, the bulkier end. Behind him again, two more Negroes and another sheeted corpse. The first was thick and obviously very heavy. The second was slight. General Osterman and grand-daughter, nearing the end of Stage One of their final journey.
It was horrible and it was uncanny.
There was an air almost of reverence about the way those bodies were being carried; the Negroes were as good as professional mutes. Even Spice and Vilera seemed subdued in the presence of death, though in fact this was probably no more than a kind of gag designed to heighten the tension. Anyway, the bodies were slid on to the slate-lined shelves with precision and decorum.
And there the dignified spirit of high society funeral direction dropped from Spice like a discarded coat. He went forward and jerked at the sheet covering the bulkier body. Beneath the sheet the corpse was naked. Shaw watched in horrified fascination, scarcely hearing Flame’s sudden, stifled cry. The tough, craggy features of General Osterman were familiar to him through press photographs. This man had been a big name in American military affairs, could almost be considered a U.S. hero. Even though his extreme views on segregation and all it meant in terms of human misery had been decried by responsible Whites in America, he still hadn’t deserved this.
Spice reached out and gave the head a jerk. It lolled aside and showed the pepper-spread of small holes in the back of the neck and skull. A 12-bore shotgun discharged at about ten yards range would do that. If discharged from behind, of course.
Spice threw the sheet back at the corpse. Then he jerked the shroud off Vanessa Osterman. Like her grandfather, she was naked; and she, no doubt swinging round in alarm when her grandfather had been so brutally attacked from behind, had taken a similar dose of shot in her chest and stomach. The velvet, lightly tanned, young-girl’s skin was pocked with the entry marks on and below the breasts and down as far as the navel.
Flame’s face was a sick grey. She screamed. Shaw’s fists bunched and he swung round on Spice, his face ugly. A gun bore hard into his guts. Slowly he relaxed. At the moment there was nothing to be gained by trying a frontal attack; it would be worse than useless. It was a simple case of cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them. Light Brigade heroics didn’t pay off to-day.