Free Background to Danger by Eric Ambler Page B

that we search that room immediately. You, Tamara, and I will go. You have a pistol, Rashenko?”
    Rashenko nodded.
    “Good. Ortega the traitor will remain here with you. If he tries to go, shoot him.”
    The Spaniard burst into excited speech.
    “No hara Vd. esto! Debo ir. El hijo de zorra tenia una pistola—a que dudar? Lo maté porque era necesario. No tengo fotografías, lo juro. Dejeme escapar, seré perseguido por la policia—tenga piedad!”
His voice rose hysterically.
    Zaleshoff, struggling with his overcoat, took no notice of him.
    “He says,” said Tamara in Russian, “that he must go.”
    “Tell him,” said her bother in the same language, “that he is a fool, and that it is safer for him to remain. Safer, because the police will not look here for him, also because if he tries to leave, Rashenko will shoot.”
    When, a few minutes later, they hurried away, Rashenko was sitting in his chair, a large revolver in his hand. Ortega had taken a rosary from his pocket and was kneeling by the fire, the beads clicking through his fingers and words bubbling from his lips. As the Russian listened a smile spread over his drawn face, for he knew a little Spanish. Señor Ortega’s orisons would have made even a Bilbao docker blush.
    Andreas Prokovitch Zaleshoff was, as many could have testified, a deceptive character. For one thing, he gave the impression of being almost childishly naïve; for another,he possessed a subtle sense of the value of histrionics. Violent displays of emotion, if well timed, distract the shrewdest observer and hamper his judgment. Zaleshoff’s timing was invariably perfect. He rarely said what he really thought without making it sound like a clumsy attempt to dissemble. Passionate conviction was with him a sign of indifference to the point at issue. For Tamara, who understood him better than he supposed, he was a constant source of entertainment.
    As she kept watch in the darkness behind the Hotel Josef she was, however, worried. His anger with Ortega had been very nearly genuine. That could mean only one thing: that he was badly puzzled. He did not, she knew perfectly well, expect to find the photographs in the murdered man’s room. She also knew that he was taking an unnecessary risk to confirm the obvious.
    She was turning these matters over in her mind when she was startled by the noise of Kenton’s arrival on the roof of the outhouse. Wondering why her brother had not returned the way he had gone (by the tradesmen’s door), she moved away from the wall to meet him.
    Tamara was not used to automatics. But for that fact, the career of a little-known but promising journalist might have been cut short by death in, as the newspapers say, mysterious circumstances. As the light from her torch showed for a split second that the man before her was not her brother, her forefinger jerked involuntarily at the trigger of the gun Zaleshoff had slipped into her hand before he had gone inside. If the safety catch had been disengaged, not even Kenton’s leap for the wall would have saved him.
    Zaleshoff joined her some five minutes later with the expected news that the photographs were missing. Hurriedly she told him of her encounter. He listened thoughtfully, then asked for a precise description of the man. The descriptionshe gave would not have flattered Kenton, but he would have been struck by the accuracy of it.
    “He might easily,” she concluded, “have been an American or possibly English.”
    “Did you see his tie?”
    “No his coat collar was turned up. But the hat looked American or English.”
    Zaleshoff was silent for a moment or two. Finally, he led the way into the street again.
    “Go back to the Kölnerstrasse and wait there until I telephone you,” he said.
    He watched her out of sight, then turned and made his way by a circuitous route to the street in front of the hotel. As he drew nearer, he slowed down and kept in the shadows. When he was about twenty yards from the saloon