The Alarming Clock Page 5

  I saw Maxim’s mocking face through a purple haze of red-white-and-blue dotted fury.

  Maxim’s purr came back, soft and velvety.

  “You will not tell me where the genuine clock is, Mr. Noon?”

  “I said what I had to say.” I staggered erect, trying to keep my middle from coming apart.

  “Yes, you did, of course.” Maxim spread his manicured hands. “Pity I am in no position to believe you. Tell me this then—where is Roland Ritz?”

  “We’ve never met, Max. Though I’d really like to see him. Just to find out what the hell this is all about.”

  Maxim scowled. “We can employ our own methods of reaching the truth.”

  I’d been waiting for that.

  “You guys are pretty good at that. Pretty brutal but pretty good. What’s it going to be this time? Rubber hose, burning matches under the fingernails? I can’t wait.”

  Maxim placed a dainty finger to his upper lip, traced a pattern on the moustache he didn’t have. Then his eyes flickered in Alma’s direction, flickered back to me again.

  “Tell me, Mr. Noon—how much pain can you endure?”

  “Whenever you’re ready,” I gritted.

  He smiled. “And the lady here?”

  “You leave her out of this.” I wanted to say something flip and funny. But the old cliché shot out of me like a rocket.

  “Ed, I’ll be okay—” Alma said, trying to make me feel better.

  “Just as one would expect,” Maxim purred. “The Americans will endure anything as long as the woman is spared. Ah, those movies. How accurately they depicted your squeamish culture.”

  “Max,” I said. “Drown yourself. First chance you get.”

  He wouldn’t get mad. His thin lips curled.

  “Wilhelm,” he purred over his shoulder. The giant stiffened to attention. “Show Mr. Noon how we treat our female prisoners. Indeed, Miss Wheeler may possibly enjoy herself. To Mr. Noon’s everlasting shame. And her own.”

  I didn’t need a reference book. Wilhelm advanced on Alma, his big, knotty-knuckled fingers flexing with anticipation. I cursed and lowered my hands but Maxim’s other helper let me get a closer look at his Luger by the simple and forthright manner of pointing its long nose right at my head.

  Maxim flung his head back and laughed as Wilhelm closed in on Alma.

  Chapter Seven

  I’ve had to watch many unpleasant things in my time. No thanks to the war, I’d seen a grenade split a man into a million mangled pieces right before my eyes, watched a machine gun cut a man nearly in half, and put a bandage on a hand that looked like something a truck had backed over a couple of times. The hand had belonged to a very close friend and I’d had to do it even though my eyes were giving my stomach a helluva bad time.

  But this was something else again. There wasn’t going to be any blood, any explosion, any need for first aid—maybe—but there was a difference. A screamingly loud, unfunny, unsubtle difference. Somebody was asking me to stand around with my hands up and watch my girl get ravished. I’d never been asked to do it before. I’d never even asked myself if I could do it. I didn’t have to.

  Maybe your brain has a lot to do with it. Maybe it hasn’t. But I was moving even before I could sensibly understand that I was a guy with a Luger pointed right at his head.

  Alma had made up her mind she wasn’t going to be easy anyway. Her silken leg shot out like jet propulsion and her pointed toe lost itself in Wilhelm’s big middle. The roar of his voice filled the basement with verbal thunder. She wheeled around him like a fast-moving mechanical toy and chopped savagely with her hand at the back of his neck. Maxim bellowed in German and my Luger bodyguard swivelled his eyes away from me for just a baffled second. It was all I needed.

  The hands I had raised above me locked together and I brought them swinging down in a wide curving arc for a three-point landing on the side of his jaw. He peeled off from a standing position to a horizontal one on the floor and Maxim cursed and dug for his own gun. Wilhelm was shaking his thick head and flinging an arm around Alma. He pulled her in to him like a fish on a line and her silken skirt came apart in his blocky fingers.

  The party was really getting wild now. Maxim ducked behind them nosing his Luger past the shield they made for him. Alma shrieked the way a dame will in a free-for-all and Maxim’s Luger smacked a slug going wild into the basement ceiling. But Wilhelm was still busy. The guy was tough. Alma’s shoe should have put him out of business but it hadn’t. His thick arms engulfed her squirming, twisting body but all it accomplished was to practically tear the clothes right off her back.

  Maxim’s helper on the floor was trying to come to when I kneed him fast and fell over him, reaching out for his fallen Luger. My hand closed around it, brought it up from the floor.

  They were a crowded, noisy milling trio in front of me. Alma, Maxim twisting around for a good shot at me and big Wilhelm still following orders by concentrating on the half-naked knockout in his arms.

  Wilhelm was head and shoulder above the other two. I fired once, fast and perfect, and the noise of the Luger rolled around the room the way thunder does in the Catskills.

  It was an easy thing to do for once. Killing a man I mean. Because he was so close, because of Alma and because of Alec St. Peter.

  Wilhelm screamed “Oh,” in a surprised and stupid voice and his eyes fought to see the little blue hole that jumped into view on his broad flat forehead. Then they closed, the red running down, and his arms released Alma. He took the floor the same way a brick wall collapses.

  Maxim was equal to tragedy. Alma was still standing alongside of him staring down in blank confusion at the man I had just killed. He jerked her in front of him and Alma’s face contorted with pain as he jammed his Luger into her naked back.

  I was helpless. Maxim knew it, I knew it. And Alma’s face was a sad, hopeless mask.

  The Luger in my hand might just as well have been a water pistol. For a second, the only sound in the big basement was Maxim’s hoarse breathing over her shoulder.

  “Go ahead, Max,” I said. “I’ve got no more cards.”

  I could see his small eyes glittering past her smooth shoulder.

  “Ed—” Alma rasped. “Forget about me. Take your chance—”

  “Shut up!” I yelled. “I told you dames and this racket don’t mix. It’s Max’s party now.”

  “Just so, Mr. Noon,” he hissed. “Drop that gun and raise your hands, please.”

  A please never sounded sillier. The Luger clanged to the basement floor. Maxim chuckled derisively.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded. “Wilhelm’s pushing up daisies and this cowboy on the floor won’t be good for another hour or so. Go ahead. Kill me. But you still won’t have your precious clock.”

  Maxim stopped chuckling. That clock seemed to mean more to him than all the time in the world.

  “I had hoped, Mr. Noon, to spur you into confession with my plan for the lady here. But she too seems as resourceful as yourself. Wilhelm is of no consequence. The clock is another matter entirely. Since I can now kill you both with little effort, perhaps you are in a more receptive mood for parlay.”

  Now that I had no gun, Maxim came around from behind Alma and circled away from us both warily. Alma shuddered. She was practically stripped down to her panties and the basement wasn’t the warmest place in the world. This one was damp too, the way basements usually are.

  Maxim regarded us both shrewdly. His tongue wet his upper lip.

  “What do you say, Mr. Noon? The clock can mean nothing to you. To myself it is another matter entirely. Now that you have reduced my army somewhat, I will make you a more reasonable exchange. Your life and the lady’s for the return of the real clock.”

  I thought fast. “How come you don’t think it’s one of the clocks you have upstairs? Tell me that first, Max.”

  He sneered and dug into his coat pocket with his free hand. It was the alarm clock from my desk. He flung it side-arm and it bo
unced off the wall to our left with a crash of glass and metal. Still angry, he dug another out of his other pocket and hurled it to the fate of the other. This one didn’t break but rebounded down from the wall with a thick, metallic sound. I half expected it to explode or something. It was the clock that Roland Ritz had left with me, the one that had started all this trouble.

  Maxim was still sneering. “Toys you give me to delude me. Come now, no more games or childishness. Lead me to the real clock and you are a free man.”

  The whole set-up was screwy and not exactly to my liking. But the heat was at least off and we were still alive. I smiled at Alma to make her feel better and turned it off when I looked back at Maxim.

  “Let me smoke on it, Max. I need time to think this over.”

  His smile was thin. “My brand if you please.” His free hand uncovered them, tossed them over. I took one, lit it and put Maxim’s cigarette box in my pocket. I wafted out some smoke that felt good and watched him closely. His eyes were clear, cold and calculating.

  “Come, Mr. Noon. What do you say?”

  What else could I do but stall? He still had the gun.

  “Fair enough, Max,” I said matter-of-factly. “But let’s tack on one more clause.”

  His eyes hardened. “Explain yourself.”

  “The clock is yours, Max. But how about letting me in on the big secret? I don’t care a rap about it as it stands but I’m one of the curious boys. Why is it worth so damn much time and energy to you? After all, I don’t want to throw away something that’s worth millions without at least having the satisfaction of knowing I’m doing just that.”

  He couldn’t follow me. Either that or he didn’t believe me. “You persist in this game of not knowing what the clock is? Then why did you hide it?”

  “Max, Max, Max—it’s old stuff with us private boys. Always make a switch till you find out what the facts are. Come on—I’ve always wanted to know just how much my life meant to me in dollars and cents. This way I’d get an idea. Also it’ll give me and Alma here something to tell the kids about on a rainy day.”

  I gave Alma a drag on the cigarette while Maxim fought it out with himself. Alma’s eyes were shining now that I’d dragged the kids into the conversation. Isn’t that just like a dame?

  Maxim coughed. “Very well. As you prefer. But I do hope you will not let my story influence your decision in any manner. I must have the clock. And I will have it. Whether you are dead or alive. Your co-operation merely makes it more of an immediate certainty. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly.” I kept thinking of Roland Ritz and the clock he had left with me. Maxim had that clock. Or rather it was shining in the gloom of the basement about three yards from where I stood. How come it wasn’t the one that Maxim wanted? And what the hell was this all about anyway? I hoped Maxim’s story would help.

  Maxim drew back the sleeve on his wrist and checked a gleaming platinum watch. He nodded to himself and smiled thinly again over the long-nosed Luger.

  “Time,” he said, showing us some more of his white teeth. “Have you noticed, Mr. Noon, that everything is time? Just so many hours to do this, a planned minute to do that, a zero hour for the master stroke, the eleventh hour before victory. The whole world is subject to time and the consumption thereof.”

  “There will be a brief pause for station identification,” I said dryly but Maxim could not be deflated.

  “Just so,” he admitted. “This clock is something like that. But this clock is also different. It is all of that and more. You may well wonder what it is and why it is so important. But you will also be astonished if you can but slightly grasp the magnitude of its significance as a power for the world.”

  “Oh shoot,” said Alma pulling the remnants of her clothes together disgustedly.

  Maxim didn’t hear her. He wouldn’t have understood her anyway. His face was flushed with something that we couldn’t see yet.

  “Keep talking, Max,” I urged him.

  He sighted along the barrel of the Luger.

  “The clock is not simply a clock,” he said.

  “It figures,” I said.

  “Rather it is a clock but it is something else besides a clock.”

  “It figures.”

  He arched his eyebrows and purred. “What you did not figure is a matter of great differentiation. The facts are simply this: Roland Ritz has been working in your country as an agent for a foreign power. It therefore follows that whatever information Roland Ritz unearths during his stay in America belongs to that power, yes?”

  “No names, please. Who is this power—Germany, Russia?”

  His purr got really alley-cat. “As you say, no names. I am German but in politics you may well realize it does not mean anything. But enough of this sidetrack—we were discussing Roland Ritz and his sudden love of America which causes him to betray his country and behave like an idiot. The man’s turned into an idealistic ass. It is hard to believe that he was once a fine product of the Elite Guard.”

  That was one for the books. A former SS man with a job in the Pentagon. But I was thinking fast now.

  “Okay. Roland Ritz has the same boss you have, a country with no name to be mentioned and then he gets the Statue of Liberty fever and double-crosses Operation Spy. Fine. I like the story line so far. But what in hell is this clock?”

  Maxim hesitated, then shrugged. His hand seemed to tighten fanatically on the Luger.

  “Roland Ritzfeld has placed information inside an alarm clock which is of vast importance to me and my country. I examined the clocks we brought from your office. It was not in either of them. Therefore, neither of them is the clock he left with you.”

  “What kind of information?”

  His eyes glinted coldly. “Top secret military data which would mean the complete safety of a country in all times of political stress.”

  “Say it in English, Max. Time’s awastin’.”

  He lost his purr in a violent burst of sarcasm.

  “I have told you enough. Now you must tell me.” The Luger cocked in the stillness of the basement. It sounded about as quiet as a firecracker going off in an alley. “What have you done with the clock?”

  “Which clock?” I asked him coolly.

  He controlled himself with an effort.

  “The clock that Roland Ritzfeld left with you earlier today. I warn you for the last time—you have no more time.”

  “Ritzfeld?” I shook my head. “I thought we were talking about a guy named Ritz. I see—he Anglicized his German monicker. Not a bad idea. Ritz is better than Ritzfeld at that—”

  Alma laughed and Maxim was really confused. His eyes darted back and forth and between us.

  “The clock, Mr. Noon.” He said it like he was going to ask me for the last time.

  I turned my silly expression off and stared at him. I let my expression get as dead serious as I could possibly manage.

  “Okay, Max. You win.”

  “Good.” The breath of relief charged out of him noisily. “Now, then—”

  “You’re right,” I rambled on. “I did switch clocks. Back at the office. I took the clock into Alec St. Peter’s office. Down the hall. He wasn’t in because you fellows were having a high old time beating hell out of him somewhere in the building. So I hid the clock in his office.”

  “Where?” His eyes were almost maniacal over the long nose of the Luger.

  “Best possible place. On his work table. With all the other repaired watches and junk. Didn’t you ever read Poe? Nobody ever looks in the right place for missing items.”

  I could see him taking my quick lies and turning them over, looking inside them and generally kicking them around to see if they made sense. Obviously, they did. His hand on the Luger relaxed a little.

  “We will check first of course. Nothing else will do. You may be lying again.” He re-checked the platinum job on his wrist. “But I will need help. And you have reduced my manpower. Though Otto here should be all right in another
moment or so.” He meant Adolphe Menjou who was starting to groan fitfully where he lay stretched out on the floor.

  I caught Alma’s eye and nodded my head ever so slightly. She looked worried but she nodded her head to show she understood.

  “What a crazy colour!” I suddenly blurted.

  Maxim’s head snapped towards me. “What are you talking about?”

  I pointed with my finger. As naturally as you please.

  “His tie. Haven’t you ever noticed what a crazy colour it is?”

  It sounds preposterous doesn’t it? But it was naturally said and naturally executed and Maxim was taken in. For just about the one sixteenth of a split second that a fast-moving combo needs.

  Maxim’s head flicked instinctively to see what I meant and Alma suddenly flung towards him. And I moved too. And Maxim brought his gun up cursing. But he was exactly one sixteenth of a second too late.

  The toe of my shoe made something snap like dry kindling in the wrist of his gun hand. The Luger roared noisily. Noisily and without meaning, the slug spanging into the stone ceiling above us.

  Maxim had slapped me about four or five times in the brief time we had known each other. Well, I hit him just once. But what a once.

  The punch shot him along the basement floor like a bowling ball. He almost bounced off the other end of the basement. He came down hard like a paratrooper landing in the heart of Wall Street.

  “My Hero,” Alma said gratefully, letting out a deep breath.

  My fist hurt but it had been worth it. I rubbed my fingers and blew on them.

  “Hero, nothing,” I said. “Pull yourself together, Wheeler, so you don’t look as if you had only just avoided a fate worse than death. We’re getting out of here. We’ve gotta go places and do things.”

  Chapter Eight

  I got organized in a hurry. For the first time since this whole mess had started, I was running things. Even if I still didn’t have all the answers.

  While Alma pulled what was left of her clothing together, I examined Maxim. I’ve thrown plenty of punches in my time but this one had been one of the best. He was going to be ten plus for quite a while. He wasn’t dead or anything like that but he was going to come to with an awful hangover. I gave myself just enough minutes to go through his pockets. I went through them like a whirlwind forgetting about everything but a nice ostrich leather wallet and a little black book that was crammed full of written-on pages.