The Pale Betrayer Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

  “Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —The Denver Post

  “Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —The Miami Herald

  “Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes, Los Angeles Times

  “A joyous and unqualified success.” —The New York Times on Death of an Old Sinner

  “An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —Daily Mirror (London) on Death of an Old Sinner

  “At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —The New York Times on A Gentleman Called

  “Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —Chicago Tribune on A Gentleman Called

  “An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —The New Yorker on The Judas Cat

  “A book to be long remembered.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch on A Town of Masks

  “Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —The New York Times on The Clay Hand

  “Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —The New York Times on A Death in the Life

  “Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —Library Journal on The Habit of Fear

  “Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and Shock Wave is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —The New York Times Book Review on Shock Wave

  The Pale Betrayer

  Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  For

  Judy

  and

  Steve

  Contents

  prologue

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  About the Author

  prologue

  ALTOGETHER THEY HAD MET only three times and that night, the twenty-fourth of May, they would gather without meeting, and for the last time. Eric Mather would stand in full view beneath the street lamp and give the sign by which the others would know that all was as he had said it would be; they would wait in the shadows and move after he had gone. A man’s briefcase would be stolen. It was not likely that he would even go to the police, for he was a busy man and the briefcase, to his knowledge, would contain nothing irreplaceable. In the morning the briefcase would, as it were, advertise its owner: it would be discovered in a postal deposit box, its contents—again to the owner’s best knowledge—intact. The joke would seem to have been on the thief who had stolen a few strips of highly publicized and widely disseminated film and the jottings of a noted physicist, his impressions of the international conference from which he had just returned.

  Three times they had met, Mather and his co-conspirators, whose names he knew only as Jerry and Tom. Nor did he want to know more of them. He had not even wanted to know what they specifically knew of him. After that night it would no longer matter.

  The first meeting had occurred in New York’s Washington Square. Mather, having finished his last lecture of the day at Central University, was standing in the February sun looking vainly for signs of spring. He was watching a group of students, two or three of his own among them, distributing ban-the-bomb literature, one of their leaflets in his hand.

  “What good do you think that will do?” a man said. Mather had not noticed him until he spoke. Short, pudgy-faced, he seemed vaguely familiar. Afterwards Mather knew to whom “Jerry” bore a resemblance. At the time he supposed he knew him from the university corridors.

  “As a friend of mine would say, it can’t harm,” Mather said. He started to walk away.

  The stranger caught up with him, not saying anything for the moment and needing to take three steps to Mather’s two in order to keep pace. Mather did not like it. He did not like Washington Square and wished he had walked out of the park instead of into it. He stopped abruptly. “Should I know you?”

  “Let me put it this way, Eric: you will. My name is Jerry.”

  “Very likely,” Mather tried to cut him. Vainly.

  Jerry pointed a stubby finger at the handbill Mather was still carrying. “I am engaged in such business myself. I have been looking for a partner.” There was a trace of foreignness in the way he said “partner.” Otherwise his accent was what Mather would have called New York nondescript. “You have been recommended.”

  “By whom?” Mather’s voice very nearly cracked, the tightening of fear catching his throat.

  “It is not so much by whom, Eric, as by what.” He added, almost regretfully, “I know quite a lot about you. Can’t we walk while we are talking?”

  “There is nothing …” Mather stopped. Jerry was shaking his head, a look of mournful reproof in his small dark eyes.

  “But we do not need to speak of that at all—not ever. What I have in mind … Please, let us walk, like friends who happened to meet. Okay?”

  This time Jerry set the pace. Mather noticed the people around them, several men idly watching from the benches. There was no way of knowing friend from foe among them. Most of them, the thought flickered through his mind, were, like himself, their own worst enemies.

  “I am really an idealist, Eric, as you are. An idealist although you might not think it to look at me.” Jerry glanced up at him. “What would you say I do for a living?”

  “You sell fruit,” Mather said bitingly.

  Jerry snorted, a noise that passed with him for amusement. “That is very good. I sell fruit. You don’t need to know anything more about me.” He paused in his walking to gaze down at a chessboard on a bench, the game temporarily abandoned by its players.

  “Don’t touch that!” A man buying a bag of chestnuts from the corner vendor shook his fist at them.

  Jerry held up his hands to indicate he had no intention of disturbing the board. To Mather he said: “I don’t understand this game, not like you. It takes a particular brain—a scholar, not a fruit seller.” He moved on, Mather following, inwardly cursing his cowardice, his vulnerability. “Eric, your friend, Peter Bradley—he will be going to Athens this spring, won’t he—to the International Conference of Particle Physicists?”

  “I have no idea,” Mather said.

  “But you do. I have just told you.” He clicked his tongue in disgust at the litter along the path, stooped and picked up an empty cigarette packet which he dropped into the litterbasket. “People have so little pride. Eric, is he truly your fr
iend? What I mean to say is, a man with such a deep involvement in science: what are friends to him? What is family? He has such an attractive wife. It is a shame you are …” Jerry shrugged, letting the gesture carry through his meaning.

  Mather clasped his fists within his pockets. He was deprived of anger by his fear. His very skin was crawling with fear, fear and loathing, much of it of himself who could not lift his hand to smash this wily, syrup-tongued bastard in the mouth. And if he were psychologically able, what would come of it, a quarrel between two men in Washington Square?

  “Wh-what do you want of me?” He sickened further, stuttering on the word.

  “I want Dr. Bradley to bring something from Athens on his return.”

  “Go to him yourself then.”

  Jerry shook his head. “It is a delicate matter, and since you are very good in matters of delicacy, it is my hope that you will undertake the entire arrangement. I am a simple man, a man of action, not planning, and I would put myself under your direction.” They were passing the chestnut vendor, the sweet fumes of the roasted nuts rising from the charcoal fire. “Do you like chestnuts?”

  “I loathe them,” Mather said.

  “They are not very American,” Jerry said, walking on.

  “Are you?”

  “I pass,” Jerry said amiably. “Shall I tell you now the problem I am hoping you will solve for me—for humanity you might say? You will agree I am sure that the kind of international exchange that goes on among scientists engaged in what they call basic research—loosely speaking, the peaceful potentials of nature’s energy—you will agree, it is a good thing to exchange such information?”

  “Does it matter whether or not I agree?”

  Jerry shrugged. “It is more pleasant to work with people whose ideals you share.”

  “Ideals is a word like peace. It means what you want it to mean at the moment, so cut the crap.”

  “I am happy to do so. Well. At every such conference as will be held this May in Athens, a thriving side-business goes on in espionage. Information—often useless, sometimes critical—is passed there, much of it for money, some for, you will excuse the expression, ideals. Motive, as you would be the first to point out, is irrelevant to the betrayed government. Very simply, I am asking you to help me find a traitor.”

  “To whom?”

  “To the Soviet Union,” Jerry said unhesitatingly.

  It might be supposed that Eric Mather, thirty-six years old, an assistant professor of English literature at Central University, born in the Midwest of New England ancestry, and with no more knowledge of international politics much less espionage than he gathered from the newspaper headlines, would have considered the whole encounter a hoax, a campus madness, the after-term prank of a disgruntled student. The thought did cross his mind, but over it almost simultaneously swept the feeling that he had been waiting, expecting something of this kind to happen. There was even a familiar nuance to the sly persuasiveness of “Jerry,” the intimation of an old affinity now to be renewed.

  “You are not betraying your own country in this, Eric. What you are doing is striking a blow for international disarmament.”

  “A very fine distinction,” Mather said.

  “Perhaps, but I said it out of respect for your New England conscience.” Jerry peeled the paper from a stick of gum and dropped it neatly into the next waste container. The incongruousness of someone on his mission chewing gum made Mather smile. Jerry was overplaying his role. Mather began to feel a needling sense of superiority.

  “You seem to have a great deal of confidence in me,” he said.

  “My dear Eric,” Jerry said, laying his hand on the teacher’s arm, “you have given us every reason.”

  Mather shied at the man’s touch, a reaction that made Jerry smile, but this was as close as he came to mentioning the source of his confidence in Mather’s cooperation.

  “Tell me what you want me to know,” Mather said.

  “We wish to intercept the highly secret military information intended for an American agent, and we want to have it brought to us here for evaluation. Such evaluation will tell us the source of the leak.”

  “You want it brought here—to the United States?”

  “I know it is hard for you to believe, but take my word, we are safer here than anywhere in the world.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Forgive me, Eric, but you do not need to. I will explain anyway: here we know our enemies and, perhaps fortunately for us, we have very few friends.”

  Mather liked the turn of phrase in spite of himself. It distracted him momentarily.

  “Neither you nor we should like to interrupt the good work of such international exchanges, so it becomes essential that our carrier—in this case Dr. Bradley—be kept in entire ignorance of his role. That is why we are calling on you.”

  Mather felt he had missed something. “Why Peter Bradley?”

  “Ah, of course. At the Athens conference our scientists will be making an extraordinary gesture. Grysenko will give film prints of recent Soviet nuclear experiment to certain scientists of other countries who my government feels have contributed to world progress in that particular area of research. It is a magnificent gesture. And Peter Bradley of course is foremost among those scientists.”

  “I see.”

  “It is our problem to see that Dr. Bradley also brings home what in another kind of film is called ‘a trailer.’”

  It was a moment or two before Mather spoke. They had walked the distance of the park. As they approached the gate he said, but with no great hope of it meaning anything: “I wish you luck, but you don’t need me.”

  “Ah, but we do and now we must have you. I have confided so much.” Jerry turned back into the park and Mather, turning after him, felt himself to be treading a counter-moving path. “You see,” Jerry went on, “in Athens itself we must establish Bradley as the man—there will be perhaps a half-dozen other American physicists there. It is too dangerous to use his name. You must find for him a mission—a particular, obscure work of antiquity—a monument perhaps?—something it will be imperative for him to visit because you, his friend, insist upon it. And on the day he returns he must be separated from his ‘trailer,’ but at the same time keep his innocence untouched.”

  “It is untouchable,” Mather said with fervor.

  Jerry had the effrontery then to laugh, and the instant Mather realized the source of his amusement his fury rose and exploded. “You son of a bitch!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jerry said. “I forgot myself and that you are now my superior. It will not happen again.” As he spoke he removed his hat and ran his hand through the black, lank hair, at the same time half-turning.

  Another man who, Mather realized, seeing him, had passed them as they turned back from the gate, now joined them. He was Mather’s height but twice his build. Blond and ruggedly handsome of feature, he looked like an aging ball player.

  “This is Tom,” Jerry said, “your other colleague.”

  Tom, standing very straight, his hands at his sides, said: “How do you do, sir.”

  Mather glowered at him and the other looked down at his own shoes. Mather knew his type from the classroom, the man who needed the grade and would do anything the teacher demanded in order to get it. A small tingle of satisfaction came with the realization.

  Jerry, missing nothing, said: “You are going to find it surprisingly good sport, Eric. Think about Athens for a few days. We shall be available when you want us.”

  They met twice again in the intervening months, once in the same park when Mather was ready to talk to them—he had seen one or the other of them there several times, but when he made no sign they had not approached him—and once in his apartment. Then on the morning of May 24 Mather posted a notice on the third-floor bulletin board in the General Studies Building: PUPPIES FOR SALE—CALL EL 7-2390 AFTER 9:00 P.M. After posting it he set about organizing a small party to celebrate the return of Peter Bra
dley from Athens that night.

  one

  THERE CAME THAT MOMENT of stillness which sometimes falls upon a crowded room. Several conversations were suspended at once and the only sound was the metallic clicking of the mantle clock. Even the street traffic beneath the open windows briefly ceased. Dr. Peter Bradley, host to a small party of students and faculty, had paused to search his memory for the name of a Greek physicist he had met at a conference in Athens from which he had returned that day. Robert Steinberg, an associate professor of physics under Bradley at Central University, had just told a joke to which no one got the point. His audience looked at one another questioningly.

  Eric Mather, his back to the mantle, felt his heartbeat quicken to strike pace with the clock’s loud tick. A moment out of time, it seemed, was being given him in which to weigh the last possibility of turning back. He could excuse himself to Janet Bradley who was showing him the dummied pages of her latest book, cross the room to her husband and say to him: “Peter, old man, I got you into something you didn’t know about …” But suppose it turned out that nothing had happened in Athens, that contact had not been made at all? He had been given a moment in which only to relish the last sweet dregs of a cup he had once thought would be bitter tea. Watching Peter tap his head, the sycophants hanging breathlessly for the wisdom he was expected to shake loose, Mather had no regrets. After all, his own greatest moments had always come from turning chagrin into triumph.

  Janet turned the last page of Child of the City, a photographic study of the East Twenties, where she and Peter lived, to the Bowery’s edge. Mather noticed her fingers tremble. It gave him an unexpected, an almost shocking thrill, to discover that Janet cared so deeply that he liked the book and, by extension, that he liked her. He remembered then Jerry’s intimation—the misfortune of Mather’s inadequacy to such opportunity—and the memory crippled the brief, exquisite emotion. It would not spring again, wish as he might to conjure it. He pitied Janet almost as much as he did himself. He reached out his hand to her in the need to have and give sympathy. But Janet, interpreting the gesture by her own heart’s dictate, clutched the book in both hands and looked toward her husband. Her lips met, about to say his name.