Read Online The Night People by Edward D. Hoch - Free Book Online Page A

a spy.
    Later, after the screening of the British short subject. Win found an opportunity to slip away from Tonia’s watchful eyes. While she chatted with Baine and some of the other Americans, he asked Martha to cover for him and went out into the darkened garden. A grilled gate in the wall led from there to a quiet side street, which he knew was only a few blocks from Falconi’s apartment. He could be there and back in twenty minutes, not much longer than a slow trip to the men’s room.
    He walked quickly, feeling the warm breeze from the sea on his face, feeling too the hardness of the Lenin Arts Award in his pocket. For a reason he couldn’t quite explain, he kept it clutched in his hand during the brief journey, as if its physical presence there in his pants pocket were the only reality about this whole mad day. He hadn’t yet attempted to work into his mind an exact explanation of the motives that had compelled him to agree to Falconi’s urging. It was not, he felt sure, any deep loyalty to the country he’d left behind five years ago. Nor was it any sense of guilt that needed rectification. Rather it was, if anything, only a sort of liking for Falconi, an odd man making his way through a too-dark world. This, and a middle-aged urge to do something the least bit out of the ordinary.
    So he climbed the dim steps to John Falconi’s apartment, still clutching the priceless lump of metal alloy in his pocket. Perhaps this visit would save a million lives—or take them—at some distant point in time that none of them could see. Or perhaps the mysterious alloy would end up only as a footnote to a lengthy report gathering dust in some Pentagon file.
    Win knocked at the door and waited. When no answer came, an instinct born of a thousand movies and a hundred half-remembered dreams drove him to turn the knob and push open the unlocked door. He saw John Falconi at once. The grey man was slumped in his chair behind the little desk, and he seemed somehow especially small among his books and the neatness of his life.
    Win knew at once that he was dead, that the game was now for real, that the enemy lurked just beyond any shadow. John Falconi had been a spy who talked too much….
    He’d been shot through the right temple, and apparently he’d died peacefully, not expecting the final blow of bullet against flesh. Everything was as neat as Win remembered it; there’d been no attempt to fake a robbery or a crime of passion. The local police could puzzle it out if they wanted, while in the meantime the killer stepped quietly aboard a plane or train to carry him across a boundary or an ocean.
    All right, John Falconi. All right.
    Win’s inexperienced eyes scanned quickly over the desk and bookshelves, searching for something, anything, out of place. But the ashtrays were clean, and he knew there’d be no fingerprints. The killer might have been a man from Mars appearing in this room just long enough to pull or squeeze the trigger of a gun. A silenced gun, of course, because no one had been attracted by a shot.
    Something.
    One of the books, The Red Badge of Courage, seemed not quite right to his eye. He pulled it out of its accustomed space on the shelf, aware now that the thing which had bothered him was the title stamped in gold on the book’s spine. It now ran from bottom to top instead of from top to bottom. Someone had returned the volume to the shelf upside-down. He remembered examining this particular book yesterday, and he knew it had been neatly correct then. He knew he had not reversed it. Then who? Hardly the carefully exact Falconi. But very possibly the only other person known to have been there—the killer.
    He flipped through the pages of the book, half expecting some coded letter or message in invisible ink to fall to the floor. But there was nothing to catch his eye, nothing that spelled out s-p-y to the untrained observer. He returned the book to its proper space, right side up.
    He next debated for