Free The Night People by Edward D. Hoch Page A

strolling aimlessly, nervously, about the room, picking up objects here and there. “I gave him the thing,” Win said, on an impulse. “The Russians must have gotten it back.”
    Tweller turned in the act of opening a book—a guide of some sort that was in all the rooms. “What? The Russians didn’t get it back. You didn’t visit Falconi’s room until after he was dead.”
    Win felt his heart beating fast again. “How could you know that? How could you know when he died?”
    The Englishman blinked. “Give me that star, Chambers, or I’ll have you arrested for treason.”
    “You could know if you were there,” Win said, hurrying on. “You could know I didn’t give Falconi the star if you were there and you killed him. One of the books on his shelf was upside down. The stamping ran from bottom to top, as it does on the spines of English books. An Englishman like you might have been wandering around, looking at Falconi’s books while you talked to him. Holding the closed book in your hand, you might have replaced it upside down so that the title read in the English style. Certainly a neat man like Falconi would never have done it, nor left it long like that if he noticed it. You’re no C.I.A. man, Tweller.”
    The Englishman turned full around. His hand had come out from under his coat, and he held a short foreign pistol equipped with a silencer. “All right, the masquerade is over, Mr. Chambers. Please raise your hands above your head.”
    “The very gun, I imagine.” For some reason he wasn’t frightened. Martha would come, would somehow bring help.
    Tweller blinked his eyes and moved backwards a step to grasp the window blinds. He closed and opened them in some sort of signal. “Don’t move, Mr. Chambers, or your troubles will be over quite quickly.”
    They waited a few moments in silence, until the hall door opened. The two Russians came in, followed by Martha. “God, Martha!” he gasped out. “Where’d they get you?”
    She wasn’t smiling. Her face was hard and there were lines of sadness about her eyes. “They didn’t have to get me, Win. I’m one of them.”
    Around him the world seemed to collapse. There’d been a night much like this back in the States, his last time with Betty, but somehow Martha had betrayed more than just him. “What do you mean?” Knowing too well what she meant.
    “God, Win, I would have done anything to keep from betraying you. Please believe me! I report information to Tweller here, and I told him you met with John Falconi. That’s all I told him!”
    “You told him I left the party to visit Falconi. You must have told him that, too.”
    “Yes.”
    “Enough of this talk,” Tweller said, motioning with the gun. “Will you produce the Award, Mr. Chambers?”
    Win felt death was very close at this moment. It was in the eyes of the two waiting Russians, and it was in the tightening trigger finger of the Englishman named Tweller. The tiny medal still rested in his pocket, but he said, quite calmly, “I don’t have it.”
    Tweller smiled thinly. “You have it. Falconi was a talker. He told me you had it before he died. He was quite a talker.”
    “It cost him his life,” Win said. “He was in the wrong line of work.”
    “Possibly,” the Englishman agreed. “But then, for which of us is this the right line of work? I was a schoolteacher outside London ten years ago. Martha will tell you—she was a pupil of mine.”
    “You taught her well.”
    Tweller sighed. “One hundred years from now man might have different values for right and wrong.”
    “I doubt that.”
    “But enough talk, Mr. Chambers. Falconi told me you had the Award, and Martha told me he was already dead when you reached him—which of course I knew anyway. My two Russian friends just missed you at the party. Since you didn’t give the Award to Falconi, you still have it.”
    “Maybe I didn’t get it from Tonia. That ever occur to you?”
    “If you didn’t get it, you’d have