The Vulcan Disaster

“Okay,” I said. I sat back lightly on her pelvis and held both her hands in mine. “You and I are going up there. If you’ve been telling me the truth, you can go. If you’re lying, you’re in trouble. If you haven’t been telling me the truth, I’ll tie your hands behind your back, write ‘Collaborator’ on your forehead in ballpoint pen and release you in the middle of town. You’d better pray you’ve been...”

“No,” she said. “I’m not lying. I... come. I’ll show you.” I looked her in the eye, then got up, still holding her wrist, and helped her to her feet. “Come,” she said, looking at me, a strange, different look in her dark eyes. It was... it was fear and something else...

The fourth floor — we would have called it the fifth, Stateside style — was one flight up. Four-seventeen was halfway down the hall. It was almost completely quiet in the all but deserted hotel, but it was getting louder outside. There was still sporadic gunfire, only more of it. And there was the dull roar of heavier weapons far down the road. Out of habit, I tiptoed to the door. She didn’t have to. She’d lost her slippers in the scuffle, and her bare soles made no sound on the rug.

I put my ear to the door. Not a sound. I let go of her hand, stood back, drew Wilhelmina, and took a deep breath. Then, my weight back on one foot, I lashed out with the other at the lock. The door shook, but held.

“Mr. Carter,” she whispered. “Mr. Carter, the room’s on fire.” Her tiny hand pointed at the crack under the door. Little tendrils of acrid-smelling smoke were curling up from under the thick barrier that kept us out of the room. I reared back and kicked again. The door gave this time, and smoke rushed out. Coughing, I stepped back. Then I reached inside my jacket for the little gas mask that I use sometimes in connection with my little friend Pierre — the tiny, deadly gas bomb strapped now inside my upper thigh. I had it on in a moment, and motioned the girl aside.

The mask kept out enough of the smoke to let me breathe a little, but it was hard to see anything. I could make out that it was a two-room unit, probably not a regular suite, but a pair of connecting rooms that had been rented together and unlocked for the occasion.

The flames were apparently in the other room. This one was mainly full of smoke. And the fire wasn’t a quick one; the suddenly open door had apparently done very little to fan it. It had a stuffy smell, as if something slow and difficult to ignite was smoldering away. I moved through the first room, my eyes scanning it through the thick smoke.

There was a couch and a desk. The desk was covered with scattered papers — scattered in haste, it appeared, and some of them dumped unceremoniously on the floor. I made for these in a hurry and they turned out, for the most part, to be business correspondence. The letterhead jumped out and hit me in the eye:

HERMANN MEYER

Import-Export

68-72 Nathan Road

Kowloon, Hongkong

K.P.O. Box 4567 Hongkong

Cable Address “MEYEX”

Okay, I thought, so far so good. I grabbed a page of it at random. It was covered with penciled notes, scrawled at great speed in an almost unreadable Germanic hand, and there were columns of meaningless figures at the bottom. I stashed it in my pocket for future reference, then shuffled through the rest of the junk on the floor for a bit before deciding that there was nothing much there that looked useful; it’d been picked over pretty well already.

The couch — there was an open briefcase down there beside it; I dipped inside, found nothing much there but a few things rattling around in the bottom. I upended it and dumped the contents on the floor. There wasn’t much there to pick through, either. The only thing more personal than folded handkerchiefs and socks was a single photo of an elderly German type, the stuffy burgher sort of man, with a dazzling, dyed-blonde girl on his arm. She was sporting a full-length mink, if I knew my furs, and I gave her a quick second look. She was something special: the kind born for expensive furs. They set off, and nicly too, those wide cheekbones and almond eyes and that full-lipped wide mouth. The gorgeous smile was for the camera, not for her escort in the picture; nevertheless, when I flipped the picture, the handwriting on the back — in pale green ink — said “To Hermann with love, Tatiana.” I stuck this in a pocket too; maybe it would help me identify Meyer if I ever caught up with him.

But then I got up — slowly, still full of aches and pains — and went into the other room. And there was Meyer, all-right, stretched out on the floor in a puddle of red. He wouldn’t be doing any running from me or anyone else, ever again. There were patches of dark red blood, fresh and wet, in several very vulnerable places on his body, and you could see that he was very, very dead. He’d been playing in some very tough, very sanguinary company, it seemed.