The Rat Race by Jay Franklin (book club books txt) 📕

so-and-so's push you around. Hell, this is a free country!"

"But I phoned Jimmie to meet me at the Ritz at five o'clock," I objected, "with our traveling things."

Vail glanced at his wrist-watch. "It's not three yet. If you phone her now the chances are she hasn't left. Tell her to stay put. Remember, the less you act guilty or scared the safer you are. The dog doesn't start to chase the rabbit until the rabbit starts to run."

I phoned back to Pook's Hill and was rewarded by catching Jimmie five minutes before the taxi was due to pick her up.

"Hold everything, dear," I told her. "Plans have changed. I'm coming out on the first train I can catch. How's Ponto?"

"Thank Heaven you called," Winnie's wife replied. "I couldn't find your dressing gown and your traveling case is in the room with Ponto and I didn't want to disturb him.... Oh he's snoring like mad. Passed out cold, I guess. He shakes the house. I never knew dogs got drunk, did you?"

When I first arrived at Pook's Hill I had a definite program in mind. First, I went to the kitchen, broke a raw egg into a tumbler and soused it in Worchester sauce. Then I added a good slug of brandy from the portable bar in my den. Armed with this Prairie Oyster, I went boldly to the second floor, opened the door to my bedroom and contemplated the debauched Great Dane.

Really, I could never have believed that a dog could look so completely blotto. Ponto was a bum in every sense of the word. He lay drooling and snoring on the bed, dead to the world.

"Ponto!" I ordered.

An ear pricked up, then dropped languidly back again. Then a blood-shot eye opened and shut. There was a half-whine, half snarl, interrupted by a violent hiccough.

"Here you are, Ponto!" I stated firmly, advancing on the bed, glass in hand.

The blood-shot eye opened again and the beast began to shake and shiver. I walked up, lifted his jowl in one hand, made a little funnel of his lip and poured in the Prairie Oyster. Then I clamped a firm control on the jaws, held Ponto's head back and let it slide gulping down his gullet.

Ponto heaved. He shuddered. He shook himself free, leaped from the bed and ran around the room, lurching, whining and shaking his head violently. He stopped and sideswiped his muzzle with a clumsy paw. He lay down on his back and rolled.

Then the dose took hold. A noble expression seemed to pour over his brow. His eyes opened wide and remained open, with a clear and friendly gleam. He stood up, shook himself, ran into the bathroom, gulped some water from his bowl very noisily, and then came bounding back.

"Wuff!" He said to me.

Then Ponto reared on his hind legs, placed two large paws on my shoulders and proceeded to lick my face thoroughly with a rough, wet tongue. I had made a friend, I decided. As Androcles had won the lion by removing the thorn from its paw, so had I tamed Ponto by administering first-aid.

There was a tap at the door. It was Jimmie. "Are you all right, Winnie?" she asked. "Is he still asleep?"

"Asleep!" I was contemptuous. "No, he's awake. Ponto and I are pals. We understand each other. He had a hang-over and I fixed him. We're buddies now, aren't we, old fellow?"

The answer was a low savage growl and I leaped through the door barely in time to escape his earnest but rather shaky attempt to remove a couple of pounds of meat from my exterior.

"Hell!" I explained, "that beast's not human. Let's send him back to the vet's and get something easier to live with—a Yorkshire or a poodle."

"I'd like a Chihuahua," said Germaine, "or one of those little Belgian Schipperke gadgets."

"How about a collie?" I asked.

Germaine raised piteous eyes to me. "Do you want to make me ill, with your talk of collies?" she asked. "Now come on down to the den and tell me what's been going on in town."

"Well, Jimmie," I began, "it's a long, long story—"

CHAPTER 14

"If it's going to be long," she said, "we'd both better have a drink. You always think better if you have a glass in your hand."

"Now, what is it you want to know?" I answered, after we were comfortably settled in front of the electric fire.

"It's—it's just that everything is so queer," Germaine began. "You've changed so that you almost seem like a different person. You even look better, not so flabby, as though you took regular exercise. At least I see a change, and then suddenly I find that you've been carrying on with that Briggs girl and I can't tell whether you've really changed or are just trying to fool me. She's a nice person, of course, and if you must have another girl, I'd rather have you pick someone—oh—safe and comfortable like her. But you said you hadn't been playing with the office girls. And then there's Ponto. He used to adore you and you swore by him. Now he tries to bite you and you want to get rid of him. And then there's all this talk about where you were during Holy Week and that F.B.I. man and Myrtle tells me they've been asking a lot of questions about you and Virginia. What have you been doing, dear, that you can't remember when our whole life may depend on it?"

"Jimmie," I told her. "I wish to God I knew. You must believe me when I tell you I can't remember things before Easter Monday. That was the second and today is the eleventh and I can remember everything that's happened since then. Before that it is all blank and all mixed-up in that dream I had."

She moved away from me, slightly. "You can't tell me that the F.B.I. would be interested in your dreams," she said sharply. "Not in time of war."

"They are in this dream," I told her. "You see I dreamed—if you want to call it that—that a certain American ship blew up in the North Pacific. The trouble is that the public hasn't been told that there is such a ship, like that 'Old Nameless' in the Solomons, and that the Navy Department doesn't know what happened to it. I believe that it did blow up. Harcourt believes my story, in the main, but from the F.B.I. angle they have to check up on whether I'm not part of an Axis spy-ring which could have caused the explosion. If I could only remember where I was and what I was doing the week before I could clear myself."

Her face lighted and she relaxed. "Oh, is that all?" she exclaimed. "I know you couldn't have done anything like that. All you've probably been doing is to go off with one of those silly girls of yours to some out-of-the-way place. That ought to be easy to check, even if you registered under a false name. For the first time, you know," she added, "I'm almost glad you've been chasing all those stupid blondes of yours. It will make it easy to establish your alias."

"Alibi," I corrected her. "Let me fix you another drink. From now on," I added, "there are going to be no more blondes or red-heads. I like Arthurjean Briggs—she's named Arthurjean for her father and mother. It's one word like Marylou or Honeychile—but she's more like a friend than a—oh—you know. You saw her. But I guess you're right. I must have been chasing around so much my mind got tangled up in itself and sort of blew a fuse. If I can't get my memory straightened out soon I'll look up a psychiatrist and see if he can't fix me."

"You know, Winnie—" Germaine began and then fell silent.

"Yes, Jimmie?"

She turned towards me and smiled rather wistfully. "You know, I was going to say that you and I—perhaps—Well, it's so long since we've been really—oh—close to each other. I wondered—"

"You mean that perhaps we ought to patch things up between us?"

"Isn't that what a wife's for?" she asked. "I mean—I mean when things get difficult it ought—there ought to be one person to whom you could turn."

I slipped my arm around her and drew her close to me on the lounge. She lowered her face against my coat and I could feel her shaking.

"You're crying!" I said. "You mustn't cry."

"Oh, Winnie, I've been so alone—so—"

I raised her face to mine and kissed her, tasting the wet, salt tears. Her lips were warm and soft against mine. Suddenly she pressed herself against me and responded to my kiss so fiercely that we were both startled. We sprang apart, almost guiltily.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "Oh—you haven't kissed me like that—"

She raised her lips again and this time we held it.

What with one thing and another, I didn't get back to the office until the Market closed on Thursday afternoon. I found my two partners in pretty good control of our operations but frankly mystified as to the cause of the official mugging of Tompkins, Wasson & Cone. We had laid out two and a half millions in all, despite the attempt to scare us off. The market had continued steady.

Neither Graham nor Phil asked me any direct questions about the events on Wednesday. They talked straight business and kept their curiosity in check. It was close to half-past four when we finished our general discussion of the operation, so I decided that they were entitled to some kind of explanation in return for their loyalty.

"See here, boys," I told them. "You've both been perfectly swell about this rat-race the S.E.C. started. Harry Willamer tried to put the squeeze on me for half a million dollars to finance him and a bunch of official bastards in a shady deal. When I turned him down he threatened to tie us up with a Commission investigation. I bluffed him out of it at the time by pretending there was an F.B.I. dictaphone record of our talk, so he laid off the heavy heat and just started needling us a little. Any time now he'll make the check at the F.B.I. and when he finds there isn't any record he'll try to tie us up tighter than a drum. All we can do is wait it out. The market's going to start dropping any day now and we'll clean up."

"Oh!" Wasson said. "Was that it? Willamer's a bad actor. Thanks for telling us, Winnie. Phil and I knew that there must be something screwy when—"

The door flew open and Arthurjean appeared, her face white.

"God!" she said at last. "He was such a swell guy. He—"

"Who? What's the mat—"

"It's Roosevelt!" she choked. "He's dead. It just came in on the ticker."

"No!"

"He died at Warm Springs." And she hid her face in her hands and left the room, sobbing.

Phil Cone stood up, paper-white, crossed over and turned up the radio.

"Flash!" the announcer was saying. "Warm Springs, Georgia. President Roosevelt died this afternoon following his collapse from a severe cerebral hemorrhage. More in a moment. Keep tuned to this station."

"Well, I'll be eternally damned!" I said. "So he was right—"

Cone whirled on me. "You knew about this," he stated flatly "When we were talking yesterday morning. You had more than a hunch. You knew he was going to die."

"Be your age, Phil," I told him. "How in hell could I know?"

"Je-sus Ke-rist!" Wasson growled. "This will knock holy hell out of the Market. Lucky trading's closed for the day. They can't open tomorrow. They'll have to shut down all the exchanges. They'll have to close the banks. God! What a mess!"

Cone still looked dazed. "No dancing in the streets?" he asked bitterly. "I thought this was going to send values sky-rocketing."

Wasson swung on him. "The hell with that talk, Phil," he snapped. "I was just shooting the bull. Roosevelt dead! Jesus H. Christ! You know, he wasn't a bad old buzzard after he got rid of all that New Deal nonsense and set to work winning this war."

Cone had recovered his poise. "Sure he did a swell job winning the war, but now we're going to lose the peace, sure as shooting!"

"Hell!" Graham's choice of expletives was strictly rationed. "This means that Truman will take over. What sort of a guy is he? You got any idea, Winnie? He's not up to Roosevelt, that's sure."

I shook my head. "I don't know from nothing," I began. "Sh!"

The radio announcer resumed his broadcast. "Warm Springs, Georgia. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away at four thirty-five this afternoon, Eastern War Time, following a severe cerebral hemorrhage. The late President had been spending a few days at his Georgia retreat getting rested after his strenuous