The Grab: A Classic Crime Novel Read online

I was so startled for a moment I could only stand and look at her. Let me describe her.

  She was a swell-looker. That’s for a start. She was rather tall, and rather slim and very dark, though I don’t think she was Turkish originally. Maybe Hungarian. Maybe Romanian. Maybe Italian. I never can tell the difference.

  She had good hair and it was glossy black and fell in long waves, as if she had been combing it and had just thrown it back over her shoulders. She had a rather long, thin face, but attractively so. Her eyebrows were unfashionably thick, but they gave her face character far beyond that of any pencil aid. She had rich, ripe lips, though here she had applied rather too much lipstick. Her eyes didn’t match her appearance. That was why I thought she wasn’t Turkish. Her eyes weren’t brown, which you’d expect from a Turk, but were grey and slumberous. That is, her eyelids seemed to droop a little over them, and whether that was a natural way with them, or whether it was a pose designed to protect her eyes from being too easily read, I don’t know.

  She was dressed in one of those bright, beflowered dresses which look just right in this rather exotic climate and yet would be garish in more northern climes. It fitted her and it showed up her figure and—wow, what a figure!

  That girl had everything and that dress let you see it, almost.

  She looked at me and said: “Yes?” And I knew I had been recognized immediately for what I was—an American.

  At that I gulped, and the old Heggy brain began to work again. I said: “I—er, I’m looking for Miss Marie Konti.”

  She said, still in the same questioning voice: “Yes?”

  So I said straight out: “Are you Marie Konti?”

  She nodded. “But of course.”

  Then we both stood and looked at each other for a second, and I could have gone on looking at her, because she’d been made for that purpose. She was looking at me, too, and I don’t think there’s much about the Heggy frame to get a girl antagonistic. Anyway, in these countries the local girls don’t look at the man; they fall in love with the accent. The American accent speaks of dollars, and the world’s hungry for our greenbacks.

  I was climbing out of my surprise pretty quickly, but curiously I was not climbing out of my suspicions.

  For some reason I looked at that girl and thought: “You’re not Marie Konti. You can go on telling me you’re Marie Konti until your face is royal purple, but I won’t believe it.”

  Maybe I was obstinate. Maybe I just didn’t want to feel I’d made a fool mistake. I looked coldly at that dame and let my eyes tell her what was in my mind. I’m polite, where ladies are concerned, and don’t generally tell them when I think they’re lying. I had a little impression of her eyes flickering past me, and I turned at once to see what was creeping up behind. There was nothing.

  That corridor was empty save for myself. All the doors along the corridor appeared to be shut closely. I told myself I was getting unnecessarily jumpy, and switched my eyes back to that attractive girl in the doorway. And that attractive girl suddenly decided to invite me in.

  She smiled, and she had good teeth. Her eyes weren’t slumberous any longer. They were bold and inviting, and when I saw them, I thought: “This gal’s been around a bit.” She knew how to handle men.

  I went in. I don’t remember the last time I refused an invitation from an attractive girl to go into her apartment. Anyway, there was a lot I wanted to know about this girl who said she was Marie Konti.

  I closed the door behind me and then took a little precaution.... The girl never noticed it. She had gone through the little hallway into her room.

  I walked in after her. The shutters were down, so that people in the rooms opposite wouldn’t see her at her toilet or whatever a woman does in the privacy of her room. There was a bed over against one wall, and the other half of the room was furnished as if there wasn’t a bed there. That is the usual way with these Turkish hotels.

  She turned and she was playing up to me. I knew that, because I’d had it done to me before.

  But when she started her playing I was looking at the telephone, and I was thinking that during that climb up four flights of stairs someone could have phoned her and told her what to expect. Someone...like Benny, for instance.

  And suddenly I began to think about that elevator which seemed purposely out of action tonight. I realized that I hadn’t seen it moving for the past hour or so, and that is unusual even for this hotel. I was just wondering if there was more to it than a servant’s apathy towards his job—wondering if someone didn’t find it convenient to put a distance between the ground floor and, say, this one, the fourth. And then she started in earnest to play up to me.

  She did some eye-fluttering, and she stood right in front of me, and she stood closer than a dame usually stands up to a stranger. She was doing it for a purpose, and in a few seconds I knew what that purpose was.

  She spoke pretty good English, but it’s what I call cabaret English—that is, it’s been picked up and not learned in a school. She said, smilingly: “Why do you want to speak to me?”

  I stalled a bit. I don’t mind an attractive judy standing up and making a play at me. Show me the man who does. It made what I was doing pleasanter, anyway.

  I said: “Look, sister, things have been happening around here tonight. I saw a girl being given the run-out from this hotel, and I’m trying to find out more about it.”

  She arched those rather heavy eyebrows of hers, which looked attractive for all it might not seem so when it’s put down in words. “But why come to me? Do I know about it?”

  She had moved closer to me, and she was standing almost touching me, and she was promising things with her eyes and smiling at me in a way that brings to mind that word—seductive.

  She had scent on her—maybe too much scent, but I wasn’t going to argue about a litre or so just then. I liked it. And I could almost feel the warmth of her body and it seemed to creep out and envelop me. And I liked that. She was feminine and very wholesome and I didn’t find it a hardship to submit to her technique.

  All the same I kept my mind on the job.

  I heard the door handle turn cautiously behind me, through the little hall that gave on to the corridor.

  I began to turn, and it was an instinctive movement because of what I had done in the way of precautions. And then I found myself caught by the arms and held, and she was holding me pretty tightly, and now there wasn’t any space between our bodies,

  She was looking up into my face and talking quickly, and she wasn’t speaking English so perfectly now, but was mixing it with words of many languages. She was telling me that she liked me and she wanted to be my friend and—well, you know the line of patter they all give.

  Only this was too quick, a little too breathless—far too sudden.

  I said: “I’m liking it, sister, but your technique’s not too good.”

  She didn’t seem to notice the irony or at any rate be affected by it. She was pressing against me and her arms were up and around my neck and she begun to fumble with my ears—and I was wise to that, too. I could even afford to smile at her, and I did. And she was smiling at me and chattering away. Her eyes weren’t slumberous any more, but trying to tell me all manner of things, though there is nothing original in what a girl’s eyes can tell a man. Her face was only inches from my own, and I had that fascination which always comes over me when I see a girl’s face at such close quarters. I found my eyes watching her lips, and noticing the gleam of her teeth as she spoke to me, so close to me that I could feel the warmth of her breath upon my own face.

  I slid my arms around her. It’s what she wanted, anyway. And I found my pulse quickening as my bare hand slid along the smoothness of that thin, brightly-coloured dress of hers. The warmth that came through from her soft young flesh seemed almost scalding....

  She was calling me: “Beeg boy!” She was saying, in the stilted clichés of a foreigner not at home with another language: “I like you. I could go for you in a beeg way!”
/>   And she was smiling brilliantly up into my face, and those soft, red lips weren’t more than a couple of inches away from my own willing ones. She was putting in some work, too, pressing against me and stroking my arms with quick, little movements of her slim hands.

  I took it all. I didn’t say anything to stop her act for a few minutes. If she wanted to play, Joe P. Heggy wasn’t going to run away crying for mamma. I gave her squeeze for squeeze...fondle for fondle...and big smile for her brilliant ones. And I know she liked it, because there’s a lot of man in me—liked it even though I knew she was doing this in the line of duty.

  Time passed. We stood there under the solitary electric. Then she began to change in her manner; just as I was getting nicely worked up, her routine began to grow mechanical.

  I knew she was beginning to be disturbed. Then this sense of perturbation began to change to alarm and even apprehension. She was on strain as she stood in my embrace.

  I looked into her eyes—when they weren’t trying to stare round me. I wasn’t getting any colder. I was just beginning to think that B.G. could wait a long time with what he had dug up, when she started to try to push me away.

  She’d finally tumbled to it that a plan had gone wrong somewhere.

  I said, banteringly: “What’s eating you, sister? Don’t I rate for l’amour anymore?”

  I didn’t let her answer me. I caught her by the wrist and swung her back into my arms—picked her right off her feet and put the Heggy lips against hers. And they were so soft, so warm. They got the fires stoking up inside me and the blood began to roar up into my head. She’d started this—now I wanted it to go on.

  She tried to push away again, and we toppled and went wedged together in a deep chair. She was mostly on top of me, one nyloned leg showing as far up as nylons can ever show. A shapely leg....

  I let her go after a while. She went away from me, tugging at things and pulling to straighten them, as women do after they’ve been in a huddle. From the chair I drawled: “They didn’t come, did they?”

  Because I’d known it all along, what was intended for me. She’d been tipped off to bait me—the sucker was to be bopped on the skull while enjoying her soft, red lips; some guy was to sneak in behind me while bright eyes held my attention. Only it hadn’t turned out like that, and now I was letting the dame know.

  She looked at me for a second, and then passion came into her face and she ran quickly into the hallway. We dead-heated for the corridor door. I wasn’t having that dame throw it open and let in any apes with muscles between their ears.

  I let her see what I’d done as I came into her apartment behind her. When she wasn’t looking, I’d slipped home an inside bolt.

  She began to abuse me then, loudly, furious because I’d been wise to her tricks. For a few seconds I thought she was going to hurl herself at me, with her reddened fingernails digging into my flesh—women can’t forgive being led up the garden path, I guess.

  But she didn’t go for me. Maybe she saw that I wasn’t disinclined for another huddle, so she stood back in the hallway and shouted blistering things at me. I got only a few words—mostly she came up with insults in unknown languages—but those few American words she knew must have been learned from the U.S. Marines.

  It wasn’t any good questioning the gal in that mood, so I didn’t make the attempt. Anyway, I’d learned quite a lot—this slim piece of leisure moments was concerned in some plot that quite evidently had something to do with the abducted girl. I couldn’t think otherwise, anyway.

  I shot back the bolt quietly, then opened the door a crack. If there’d been any apes standing out there, I’d have slammed the door to pretty quickly and got on the phone to my new friend the Turkish cop.

  But no silent muscle-men stood out on that thick corridor carpet, so I gave the shrill-voiced, angry dame a wink and a “Tch. Tck!” in best American style and went out.

  I went down that corridor pretty quickly. I’d got a feeling that I wasn’t going to be allowed to get away so easily. It’s a nasty feeling to have lurking in your mind the thought that someone’s waiting to pounce on you as you pass and do brutal things to your cranium.

  I went by those closed, silent doors like greased lightning. The hell, Joe P. Heggy doesn’t believe in taking unnecessary risks!

  Yet none of them opened.

  No one stepped out with a blackjack.

  I got out onto that balustraded area, and again the place was deserted. My fears had turned out to be groundless. Probably the apes didn’t dare make an open attack for fear of being spotted....

  I got a surprise, then. The elevator was standing before me, its gates wide open.

  I thought: “Heck, that old man’s got tired of his chambermaid!” He must have been a very old man, because it wasn’t midnight yet.

  So I went across to where it silently awaited me, peering into the dark interior for a sign of that old man who alone seemed to know how to make the thing work.

  I got another surprise, then.

  I was within a few yards of that elevator when I realized something. The gate was open but there was no elevator there.

  I didn’t have time to get over my surprise. I was just thinking: “The hell, what damn fool left the gates open?” Because anyone short-sighted could have stepped through the gates and gone four flights before breaking a neck.

  The lights went out.

  Someone came up behind me with a rush and I found myself being hurled through those open gates.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MISS DUNKLEY

  I did something instinctive in the darkness that assailed me. I let myself fall forward, but I fell not down the shaft but right across it. I couldn’t see where I was falling, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. But some instinct sent me sprawling out into space, my toes digging into the landing behind me, and my hands clutching desperately for some hold opposite.

  I smacked a wire rope with my left arm, but then my hands grabbed a ledge. I hung on. I was a bridge across a four-storey void.

  It was about this time that I began to see again. That’s how it always happens. Someone puts a light out and for an instant you’re blinded. And then your eyes adjust to lesser lights—in this case light reflecting up the elevator shaft from the floors beneath—and I was able to see the predicament I was in. I didn’t have long to muse over my situation. Someone took a kick at my ankles and my feet were knocked away from their toehold back on the landing. They were a nice lot of sons-of-bitches, whoever were playing games with me at that moment.

  My feet and body crashed down against the far wall of the elevator, and I bruised my knees and hurt my chest and lost a lot of beauty when I smacked that wall. But I wasn’t concerned about such details then. I was still hanging on, and for the moment I was alive.

  I screwed my head, and started to snarl good Americanese at my assailants. But I never said what was really in my mind, because as I got up steam I saw two shadows above and behind me, and they were crashing shut the elevator gates.

  I knew what those so-and-so’s were up to immediately. I guess I’m kind of intuitive at times. I saw one of the shadows reach out, and I recognized the action of a man stabbing an elevator button.

  At once I heard a whining sound above me, and I knew that the elevator had begun to descend.

  Those shadows seemed to vanish, and then the light came on the fourth floor above me. Maybe it would have been better without that light. Then at least I would have been in ignorance of when that elevator came to brush me off my hold and send me hurtling down into the basement—and then come and sit on me with all its several tons of weight.

  I think I was bawling my head off. Don’t tell me any other man would have behaved differently, unless he was a jessie and fainted. I just couldn’t faint then and I only wished I could.

  I looked up and saw that elevator coming down faster than I had ever thought that elevator could come down. The looped cable underneath it descended past me, and then it
was within a dozen feet of me....

  And then it stopped. For a few seconds I just stared up at it, not understanding. Expecting it to start again and put Joe P. Heggy in need of an undertaker after they’d scraped me out of the muck at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

  I couldn’t believe it—could only think: “My God, it’s broken down again!” If that was the explanation, then I’d never say anything against that old elevator again!

  But I didn’t stay long in a mental soliloquy. I wanted out of that hole, and quickly, before the elevator changed its mind and started to descend again.

  I found there was a ledge running right round the elevator shaft, on a level with the floor that I had just quit so hastily. It was a ledge full of dirt, so that when I started to move hand over hand along it I didn’t have too sure a grip at times. But right then I could have held on to it with my fingernails—even an eyebrow. Joe P. Heggy craves to live as long as any man.

  I got round to that closed gate, and all the time I was staring upwards, expecting to see that elevator come whining down to crush me.

  But it didn’t. I never saw a nicer elevator.

  It wasn’t hard, when I was round under that gate, to pull myself up onto the fourth floor and open those gates from the inside and step out onto the now well-lighted landing.

  I came out, and I saw two or three people in dressing gowns and pyjamas, hovering along each of the passages that gave on to this area with its elevator and staircase.

  They were mostly middle-aged and unprepossessing, in the way of middle-aged people just caught out of their beds. I didn’t hold that against them. In fact, at that moment I held nothing against anyone anywhere because I was so glad to be walking a firm floor again.

  I went down the stairs two or three at a time. I went into my own apartment, and I stripped off because my clothes were lined with grease where that elevator rope had touched them. I had a good wash and rid myself of the filth that had descended upon me during my couple of minutes as a prisoner in that elevator shaft. Then I put on a new set of clothes, prettied myself before a mirror, and then went down to meet B.G.