1950 - Mallory Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ranleigh was different. He wasn’t their kind. Corridon couldn’t understand why Ranleigh was mixed up with these two. He liked Ranleigh. He had met so many of his kind in the army; dependable men of courage who did a job, won their medals without fuss and lost their lives.
    The girl pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat down before a table, facing Corridon. Jan stood behind her, pointing the Mauser at Corridon’s chest, his eyes as expressionless as two oysters on their half-shells.
    ‘Will you answer some questions about yourself?’ the girl asked abruptly. She laced her fingers, her hands on the table and looked straight into Corridon’s eyes.
    ‘Why should I?’ he demanded, aware of the threat of the gun. ‘What’s the idea? Who the hell do you think you are?’
    Her face-hardened. She wasn’t the type to be bullied or shouted at, but Corridon didn’t care. If he could make her angry so much the better. He knew how to deal with angry people.
    ‘We want a man for a certain - job,’ she said, hesitating over the word, frowning. She spoke fluent English with no accent, but at times she would grope for a word. ‘But first we want to know if you’re the right man. We cannot afford to make mistakes.’
    ‘I don’t want a job. You’re wasting my time.’
    ‘You want money, don’t you? We will pay well.’
    He smiled jeeringly.
    ‘How well?’
    They looked at each other across the table, and he realized there was much more than the table separating them; a gulf that neither of them would bridge. He couldn’t say exactly why he felt that; it was an instinct rather than a feeling. There was about her a hardness that sealed off pity and love and kindness and made her a neuter object in spite of her figure and looks.
    He couldn’t imagine making love to her. She was as sexless as a shop window dummy, and he wondered what could have happened to her to have made her like this. She had been beautiful. She had been small and soft-fleshed and big-eyed and blonde. She had slender white arms that were cool to the touch, and when they held you, made your blood hammer in your temples although you knew how rotten she was, and that her body was merely as finely adjusted mechanism for lust that she offered as a bribe if you would talk. He remembered how she had looked when she realized he was going to kill her. Her beauty had fallen from her, and the lies and the corruption and filth in her showed like nakedness.
    He had shot her in the mouth, and the heavy bullet had torn off part of her skull and smashed her face so that the young men who had loved her and talked would have shuddered with horror to have seen her. Thinking back into the past made him sweat and his heartbeat more quickly and this annoyed him.
    He moved uneasily, looking at the girl with angry eyes.
    ‘You were once caught by the Gestapo,’ she went on. ‘They tortured you, trying to make you tell who had been dropped with you and what your objective was. But you told them nothing in spite of everything they did to you. You escaped as the invading Allies entered Germany and you were sent home. You spent four months in a military hospital recovering from the brutalities of the Gestapo.’
    ‘Let’s make an end to this,’ Corridon said roughly. ‘What do you want? Come on, you’ve talked enough about me. What’s behind all this? What’s your racket?’
    ‘Am I right so far?’ she asked, unmoved by his outburst. ‘All this did happen to you, didn’t it?’
    ‘It happened all right. Now shut up about me or I’ll walk out of here.’
    ‘One more thing, please. And this is important. After the war you couldn’t find anything to do that interested you. You decided to go to America. You spent a year smuggling dollars into Canada. The American police suspected what you were doing, but you evaded them and returned to London. You have been here a week, and you are running short of money. You are not quite certain what you are going to do. It