The Melting Man rc-4 Read online

  I stood up and loosened my tie, opening the neck of my shirt. Then I walked over and had another look at the wall thermometer. It was now reading eighty. I really was worried then because something had begun to nag at me.

  I looked at the copper grid in the floor by the window. There was a line of them all round the room, set about two feet back from the walls. This one was fastened to the floor by a couple of screws at each end. Hot air streamed up through the ornamented grid work, very hot air.

  I looked at the thermometer again. It now ready eighty-two. Ever since Durnford had closed the doors on us the temperature had started to rise. When I had first come in here the place had been at a comfortable room heat. Now it was hot enough to grow orchids.

  I looked across at O'Dowda and Kermode. O'Dowda, his gown flowing open untidily, was leaning back in his chair, glass in hand, watching me, the light from the candles behind him on the raised throne burnishing the stiff stubble of his red hair.

  Kermode was sitting on the edge of the throne, a small, bent-up grasshopper of a man, the side of his face caked with dried blood, his dark eyes on me, full of interest, promising himself, no doubt, some dark pleasure of revenge when the moment came.

  O'Dowda, imagining I was about to say something, said, 'Not so cocky now, eh? But don't waste your breath trying to make any deal. You're here and we're here and we're going to get you. So no deals.'

  He was right. I was going to speak, but not about deals.

  I said, 'What's the temperature limit on this heating system?'

  They both looked surprised at the question, then Kermode said, 'Somewhere around ninety-five.'

  I said, 'It's gone up from seventy to over eighty in the last ten minutes.'

  'So what? It's that bloody fool Durnford. He's locked us in and turned up the regulator,' said O'Dowda. 'The man's gutless. He doesn't like us and that's all he can think of doing. I'd have had some respect for him if he'd pulled a gun on me — even though he was talking through his hat about all that murder stuff. Sit down, boyo, and take your jacket off and finish your champagne. Might feel like a nice sleep afterwards.' He chuckled to himself.

  I had it then, of course. For the last few minutes it had been at the back of my mind, but now I had it clear. Durnford was crazy, but he was no fool. And there wasn't any question of his being willing to wound and afraid to strike.

  I said quickly, 'Remember the first time I was in this room, O'Dowda? I handed over a thermal bomb to you. A big overweight beast of a thing that could blow this room to bits. What did you do with it?'

  He wasn't any fool either. He was with me at once.

  'I gave it to Durnford to get rid of.'

  'Well, my guess is that he has. Somewhere in this room. Probably, on the pipes under one of the floor grids, that bomb is sticking like a limpet waiting for the temperature to hit the right mark. Durnford has pulled a gun on you all right, and the rest of us.'

  They were both on their feet.

  I said, 'Kermode, go quickly round this room and see if you can spot any grid screws that have been scratched or tampered with.'

  'The windows,' said O'Dowda, and now there was alarm in his voice. 'Smash 'em open, that'll bring the temperature down.'

  'Only the air temperature. It won't affect the bomb. It's clamped against a pipe somewhere.'

  'We can take up all the grids and turn the heat off at the individual radiators,' said O'Dowda.

  He was panicking now.

  I said, 'There are about two dozen in this room, and we need a screwdriver. The only thing to do is to spot the grid he used. We can rip that up, maybe.'

  As I spoke Kermode was already on his way round the room, examining the grids.

  I checked the grids along the window wall. None of them showed signs of having been moved. The thermometer on the wall now read eighty-five. What would he have set the temperature control at on the bomb? Ninety? Eighty-seven?

  Kermode came out from behind the throne and said, 'I can't see any grid that's marked.'

  'Pull 'em all up,' shouted O'Dowda. 'Come on.'

  He went to the nearest grid, bent, got his huge fingers in the ornamented copper-work and pulled. The soft copper face bulged upwards, stretching under his power, but the screws at either end held. And they would hold, I knew that. He was a millionaire. Millionaires don't tolerate shoddy work. In any suburban house the screws would have come out as though they had been set in soap. Anyone who worked for him was forced to give full value for money. That was his epitaph. I couldn't bother with mine. I checked the thermometer again; it was eighty-seven. I put what might be my last bet on Durnford having plumped for ninety and headed for the door. The grids ran all around the room except across the door end. If any spot was going to be safer than another, it might be this end. Also it was well away from the windows. I didn't want momentarily to survive the blast and have a sheet of glass take my head off.

  Kermode stood, lost, at the foot of the throne and shouted, 'What the hell do we do?'

  I said, 'Come down here and fix yourself some cover.'

  As I spoke, I toppled over a duchess and laid her lengthways as a barricade. I piled a gent in diplomatic corps dress on top of her. At least I was observing social levels.

  Kermode began to move, but O'Dowda, panicking, not believing that there wasn't something that could be done, working on the old millionaire's principle of maintaining immunity from everything unpleasant, shouted, 'Give me a hand with this!'

  He was tugging at another grid, the sweat lacquering his red face. Kermode hesitated, glancing towards me as I broke the social code and put a Coptic bazaar merchant on top of the diplomatic corps man.

  O'Dowda roared at Kermode again and Kermode went to him. He had to, he had to bank on survival, and that meant he had to be in O'Dowda's good books. Master and man, it's a bond that lasts right up to death, when the master is a millionaire. I was glad I was my own master and man. There was no quarrel between us. I added three more bodies and then propped a tall, thin, ascetic-faced university don with a fur- tipped robe against the pile. I wondered what he'd done to annoy O'Dowda. Voted against him in convocation, maybe, when the others wanted to give him an honorary law degree in return for some new university building.

  Between them, they ripped up the grid at last, buckling it back. The screws were still holding but they gained enough room to feel inside. O'Dowda bent and groped and almost immediately was up and reaching for another grid. He was a trier. With luck — and it would have to be the luck of the Irish — he might strike the right grid this time, might even get it opened up and have his hand poised, but he was running a race with ninety degrees Fahrenheit and my bet was that it was pushing the eighty-nine mark already.

  Gun and parcel in either hand, I settled behind my barrier and shouted, 'For God's sake be sensible. Get some cover away from the grids!'

  Kermode, straining at the grid with his master, turned and looked at me. All he could see was my head behind the barricade. His eyes were full of longing, but he dared not leave his master.

  Then suddenly he straightened up, taking his hands off the grid.

  'KERMODE!' roared O'Dowda angrily.

  'Wait a minute.'

  Kermode turned and ran towards the throne. There was a strip of fine Persian carpet across the floor four yards away from the monstrous effigy of O'Dowda. He ripped it aside. There was a grid underneath it.

  'I'd forgotten this one…' He bent over, examining the screws. 'This one! This one!'

  O'Dowda moved towards him, gown flying, knocking over a table as he went, shoving a Rajah-like figure, turbanned, white-suited, out of his way.

  'The screws… look!' Kermode pointed.

  And then they were at it, fingers gripped in the copper work, both of them putting their backs into it. The bomb had to be under there. That's where Durnford would have put it. Under the monstrous effigy, and close to where O'Dowda normally sat. If Kermode had remembered that grid at the start…

  I yelled, 'Gi
ve it up! Get down here!'

  They took no notice of me. Big man and little man, sweating at the grid, master and man, linked by so many things in the past: loyalties, villainies, drinking bouts, fishing trips, rough houses in the old days, sophisticated manipulations as the master grew richer, and always the one thinking he was untouchable, his own law, and the other knowing himself safe in the shadow of the other's power. And they didn't listen to me. They had forgotten that I was there. You don't sit down and let unpleasant things happen to you, not an O'Dowda, you fight and you overcome. That was how it had always been and that was how it would be, had to be, or life was not worth living.

  I dropped behind my barrier, snuggled in against the cold, bare wax back of the duchess and then pulled the don down on top of me.

  As I did so it happened. The end of the world. There was a bang as though a jet had broken the sound barrier in the room, and everything moved. I was slammed backwards, tangled up in duchess, diplomat and don, towards the steel doors. I should have been killed. I thought I was killed, ears ringing, all breath gone from my body. The steel doors waited for me, waited for the shock-wave to slam me against them and flatten me. But the wave must have hit the doors a second ahead of my body and flung them back like untidy crumpled wings. I slid twenty yards down the gallery and lay flat, eyes closed, waiting… And in the waiting I heard glass crashing, heard plaster and stone and wood falling and breaking.

  I came slowly to my feet and, dazed, rubbed dust and grit from my eyes and face. On the floor at my feet was my gun and the parcel, and the severed head of the duchess with a six-inch glass splinter sticking out of her right cheek. I stepped over a red-tabbed general, half of his white moustache torn away and one glass eye shattered, and made for the door.

  The room was full of smoke and dust and I could only just see the full length of it. There was no sign of O'Dowda or Kermode. But there were heads and arms and legs scattered all over the place. Most of them were wax. As I went over the threshold, staggering, not really knowing what I was doing, a gentle rain began to fall on me from the remnants of the fire sprinkler system in the roof. I went through it to the throne. The curtains and woodwork on both sides were burning away, and the robes of O'Dowda's effigy were blazing. The flames licked up around its face as it lay on the floor, one arm and one leg severed. I stood looking at it from a distance, and wondered if I were still really alive, or trapped for ever in some nightmare of death. O'Dowda was burning and melting away.

  The wax of the face began to run. With the heat beating at my face, still full of stupidity from the shock-wave, I watched the great figure slowly melting before me, melting down to size, melting down to less than size. The sprinkler rain fell on my bare head, streaking down my dirty cheeks like tear-runnels, and the blaze burned fiercely at my skin so that I slowly began to step back, my eyes on O'Dowda's wax face. As the features ran away into shapelessness, I watched in horror at the thing that came swelling up through the wax into the flickering flame-light. Slowly, like a film developing, another face surfaced, grimacing up at me through the running, bubbling wax, another face, fleshless, eyesockets first dark, then filled by the fire and alive with hissing little flames. A mouth grinned, tight, and then slowly fell open as the jaw broke away and slid to the floor with burning wax spurting little red and yellow tongues from it.

  Behind me, miles away it seemed, I heard voices shouting, heard a great stir of life, bells, sirens, and the clatter of feet.

  I staggered to a far wall, bent over and vomited, knowing that the horror was going to be with me on many a night…the sight of a small fragile skull slowly coming back into the light as O'Dowda's face melted away.

  As I straightened up, I saw the real O'Dowda. When the bomb had exploded Kermode must have been shielding him. He had been slammed away across the room to hit the window wall like a two-hundredweight sack of corn. He lay huddled against the wall and floor angle, naked from the waist up, his head cocked horribly to one side and his one remaining leg twisted back up under his body. In the fingers of his right hand, outflung, was still held a large, jagged piece of the copper grid-work.

  I went back, out of the room, leaving the fire flaring away around the throne. I picked up the parcel, nearly falling from giddiness as I did so, and then staggered away down the corridor, tucking the parcel into the wasitband of my trousers and buttoning my jacket-front over it.

  Sitting in a red velvet chair at the head of the stairs was Durnford, smoking, quiet, composed. He looked at me, nodded, as though congratulating himself on a neat piece of arrangement. O'Dowda and Kermode killed — main targets; Carver, shaken, contrite — minor target; and he, himself, not caring what happened now, because no one could ever take away from him the savour of the last hour, content to wait, no man able to touch him.

  He said mildly, 'I phoned the fire brigade. They're arriving now.'

  I said, throat dry, words coming like the dry rustle of old reeds, 'I don't feel in the mood for company.'

  He pointed to a side door behind his chair. 'Go through there. Down the stairs at the end and you'll find the garage.' Then, as I braced myself for the move, he said, 'How was he at the end?'

  I said, 'I thought it was panic, but it wasn't. He just knew, as always, that nothing could ever beat him. He missed out by about five seconds.' Then I went to the door and, my hand on it, added, 'When the police get here they won't let you into that room. If you want to make your farewell, do it now.'

  'To him?'

  'No, to her. She's on the throne, waiting for you.'

  He looked at me, not understanding for a moment, and then he got up slowly and began to move away, up the gallery towards the smoke-veiled and water-sprayed room. I found my way down to the garage and out across the grounds, knowing that I had been lucky. The exception. I had got away with something that belonged to O'Dowda. That was a record. Even the things he owned but no longer wanted, he kept. Just as he had kept her, locked up in himself…

  CHAPTER TEN

  'Kissing don't last: cookery do!'

  (George Meredith)

  The Facel Vega was still where I had left it. I crawled into it like a hermit crab going back to its shell and drove off. A fire tender nearly put me into the bushes before I reached the main gates. Nobody can accuse a French pompier of not driving with panache. A police car nearly did the same for me as I turned into the main road. Somebody shouted at me through an open window. I didn't stop. It could have been Aristide Marchissy la Dole.

  I went down to the lake and along to Geneva, and I kept seeing that melting wax face, bubbling and seething, and the horror coming up through it. I was going to have bad dreams for a long time unless I got away and grabbed my long-promised holiday.

  I stopped at a call box and rang through to Najib.

  I said, 'I've got the parcel for you. How long will it take you to get Julia?'

  'No damned time at all.'

  'I'll meet you outside the west end of the Cathedrale de Saint Pierre in half an hour. Okay?'

  'We'll be there, and as a bonus you'll also get two thousand pounds.'

  'You're slipping,' I said. 'The Alakwe brothers always pay in guineas.'

  'Guineas,' he said.

  I drove to the cathedral and waited.

  They made it in twenty minutes, so they must have been holding Julia in Geneva somewhere.

  They came trooping across to me in a merry family party, the Alakwe brothers, Miss Panda Bubakar and Julia.

  I stood by the car and waited for them.

  Jimbo patted Julia on the shoulder and pushed her gently towards me. He was wearing a green corduroy jacket, black trousers, a yellow shirt and a red tie with a great leaping salmon on it. He couldn't have known that the salmon touch was the reason for my frown.

  He said anxiously, 'You tell him, missee, we treat you with every respect and courtesy.'

  Julia came into the crook of my arm. She didn't have to tell me anything. It was all in her face.

  I handed the parc
el to Najib. He fingered it, and I knew he was itching to open and check it.

  'Go on,' I said, 'It won't offend me.'

  'I trust you,' he said.

  Panda semaphored her teeth and eyes at me and said, 'You never gave me a chance. Everything I had I was ready to trust you with. Don't forget, lover-boy, when she throws you back in the pond you come swimming to Mamma. Whoof! Whoof!' She did a high kick, pirouetted, and tossed me a fat envelope.

  'American dollars,' said Najib. 'All you do now is avoid the arm of the law.'

  I shook my head. I said, 'You can twist it a bit for a while, but never avoid it.'

  We drove off, heading for Bonneville and then the road to Megeve.

  She said nothing for a long while.

  I said eventually, 'Where do you want to stop and do the shopping?'

  'Anywhere. You sold the parcel to them?'

  'No — it was a straight exchange for you. I didn't ask for any money. But when it was offered I thought I had earned a bonus.'

  I went on and told her all that had happened since I had last seen her. Before I had finished her hand was out just touching me on the arm, and when I had finished she said, 'But what happens about you and Interpol now?'

  I said, 'I don't know and I don't care. I'm just not going to think about it. What are you planning to cook for dinner?'

  We had poulet sauté aux olives de Provence. While she was making it I had a bath and changed and laid out my ritzy pyjamas, and then I came down and sat and drank and got up each time she called from the kitchen for her glass to be refilled and it was on the second refill that her arms went round my neck and her lips found mine.