The Scarlatti Inheritance(116)
“Find it!”
“For Christ’s sake!”
“Find it, you fool!”
Canfield pushed at the crowd gathering in front of them. He scanned his eyes downward and saw the leather case. It had been run over by the heavy front wheels of the dolly, crushed but still intact. He shouldered his way against a dozen midriffs and reached down. Simultaneously another arm, with a fat, uncommonly large hand thrust itself toward the crumpled piece of leather. The arm was clothed in a tweed jacket. A woman’s jacket. Canfield pushed harder and touched the case with his fingers and began pulling it forward. Instinctively, amid the panorama of trousers and overcoats, he grabbed the wrist of the fat hand and looked up.
Bending down, eyes in blind fury, was a jowled face Canfield could never forget. It belonged in that hideous foyer of red and black four thousand miles away. It was Hannah, Janet’s housekeeper!
Their eyes met in recognition. The woman’s iron-gray head was covered tightly by a dark green Tyrolean fedora, which set off the bulges of facial flesh. Her immense body was crouched, ugly, ominous. With enormous strength she whipped her hand out of Canfield’s grasp, pushing him as she did so, so that he fell back into the dolly and the bodies surrounding him. She disappeared rapidly into the crowd toward the station.
Canfield rose, clutching the crushed suitcase under his arm. He looked after her, but she could not be seen. He stood there for a moment, people pressing around him, bewildered.
He worked his way back to Elizabeth.
“Take me out of here. Quickly!”
They started down the platform, Elizabeth holding his left arm with more strength than Canfield thought she possessed. She was actually hurting him. They left the excited crowd behind them.
“It has begun.” She looked straight ahead as she spoke.
They reached the interior of the crowded dome. Canfield kept moving his head in every direction, trying to find an irregular break in the human pattern, trying to find a pair of eyes, a still shape, a waiting figure. A fat woman in a Tyrolean hat.
They reached the south entrance on Eisenbahn Platz and found a line of taxis.
Canfield held Elizabeth back from the first cab. She was alarmed. She wanted to keep moving.
“They’ll send our luggage.”
He didn’t reply. Instead he propelled her to the left toward the second car and then, to her mounting concern, signaled the driver of a third vehicle. He pulled the cab door shut and looked at the crushed, expensive Mark Cross suitcase. He pictured Hannah’s wrathful, puffed face. If there was ever a female archangel of darkness, she was it. He gave the driver the name of their hotel.
“Il n’y a plus de bagage, monsieur?”
“No. It will follow,” answered Elizabeth in English.
The old woman had just gone through a horrifying experience, so he decided not to mention Hannah until they reached the hotel. Let her calm down. And yet he wondered whether it was him or Elizabeth who needed the calm. His hands were still shaking. He looked over at Elizabeth. She continued to stare straight ahead, but she was not seeing anything anyone else would see.
“Are you all right?”
She did not answer him for nearly a minute.
“Mr. Canfield, you have a terrible responsibility facing you.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
She turned and looked at him. Gone was the grandeur, gone the haughty superiority.
“Don’t let them kill me, Mr. Canfield. Don’t let them kill me now. Make them wait till Zurich.… After Zurich they can do anything they wish.”
CHAPTER 42
Elizabeth and Canfield spent three days and nights in their rooms at the Hotel D’ Accord. Only once had Canfield gone out—and he had spotted two men following him. They did not try to take him, and it occurred to him that they considered him so secondary to the prime target, Elizabeth, that they dared not risk a call out of the Geneva police, reported to be an alarmingly belligerent force, hostile to those who upset the delicate equilibrium of their neutral city. The experience taught him that the moment they appeared together he could expect an attack no less vicious than the one made on them at the Geneva station. He wished he could send word to Ben Reynolds. But he couldn’t, and he knew it. He had been ordered to stay out of Switzerland. He had withheld every piece of vital information from his reports. Elizabeth had seen to that. Group Twenty knew next to nothing about the immediate situation and the motives of those involved. If he did send an urgent request for assistance, he would have to explain, at least partially, and that explanation would lead to prompt interference by the embassy. Reynolds wouldn’t wait upon legalities. He would have Canfield seized by force and held incommunicado.