Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

He stood still. He was larger than he had looked at first. A big, slope-shouldered, barrel-bodied husky. His hands were empty. I spotted the flashlight on his face for a split second. A flat-cheeked, thick-featured face, with high cheek-bones.

“Ignati!” the girl exclaimed over my shoulder.

He began to talk what I suppose was Russian to the girl. She laughed and replied. He shook his big head stubbornly, insisting on something. She stamped her foot and spoke sharply. He shook his head again and addressed me.

“General Pleshskev, he tell me bring Princess Sonya to home.”

His English was almost as hard to understand as his Russian. His tone puzzled me. It was as if he was explaining some absolutely necessary thing that he didn’t want to be blamed for, but that nevertheless he was going to do.

While the girl was speaking to him again, I guessed the answer. This big Ignati had been sent out by the general to bring the girl home, and he was going to obey his orders if he had to carry her. He was trying to avoid trouble with me by explaining the situation.

“Take her,” I said, stepping aside.

The girl scowled at me, laughed.

“Very well, Ignati,” she said in English, “I shall go home,” and she turned on her heel and went back up the alley, the big man close behind her.

Glad to be alone, I wasted no time in moving in the opposite direction until the pebbles of the beach were under my feet. The pebbles ground harshly under my heels. I moved back to more silent ground and began to work my way as swiftly as I could up the shore toward the center of action. The machine gun barked on. Smaller guns snapped. Three concussions, close together — bombs, hand grenades, my ears and my memory told me.

The stormy sky glared pink over a roof ahead of me and to the left. The boom of the blast beat my ear-drums. Fragments I couldn’t see fell around me. That, I thought, would be the jeweler’s safe blowing apart.

I crept on up the shore line. The machine gun went silent. Lighter guns snapped, snapped, snapped. Another grenade went off. A man’s voice shrieked pure terror.

Risking the crunch of pebbles, I turned down to the water’s edge again. I had seen no dark shape on the water that could have been a boat. There had been boats moored along this beach in the afternoon. With my feet in the water of the bay I still saw no boat. The storm could have scattered them, but I didn’t think it had. The island’s western height shielded this shore. The wind was strong here, but not violent.

My feet sometimes on the edge of the pebbles, sometimes in the water, I went on up the shore line. Now I saw a boat. A gently bobbing black shape ahead. No light was on it. Nothing I could see moved on it. It was the only boat on that shore. That made it important.

Foot by foot, I approached.

A shadow moved between me and the dark rear of a building. I froze. The shadow, man-size, moved again, in the direction from which I was coming.

Waiting, I didn’t know how nearly invisible, or how plain, I might be against my background. I couldn’t risk giving myself away by trying to improve my position.

Twenty feet from me the shadow suddenly stopped.

I was seen. My gun was on the shadow.

“Come on,” I called softly. “Keep coming. Let’s see who you are.”

The shadow hesitated, left the shelter of the building, drew nearer. I couldn’t risk the flashlight. I made out dimly a handsome face, boyishly reckless, one cheek dark-stained.

“Oh, how d’you do?” the face’s owner said in a musical baritone voice. “You were at the reception this afternoon.”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen Princess Zhukovski? You know her?”

“She went home with Ignati ten minutes or so ago.”

“Excellent!” He wiped his stained cheek with a stained handkerchief, and turned to look at the boat. “That’s Hendrixson’s boat,” he whispered. “They’ve got it and they’ve cast the others off.”

“That would mean they are going to leave by water.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “unless — Shall we have a try at it?”

“You mean jump it?”

“Why not?” he asked. “There can’t be very many aboard. God knows there are enough of them ashore. You’re armed. I’ve a pistol.”

“We’ll size it up first,” I decided, “so we’ll know what we’re jumping.”

“That is wisdom,” he said, and led the way back to the shelter of the buildings.

Hugging the rear walls of the buildings, we stole toward the boat.

The boat grew clearer in the night. A craft perhaps forty-five feet long, its stem to the shore, rising and falling beside a small pier. Across the stern something protruded. Something I couldn’t quite make out. Leather soles scuffled now and then on the wooden deck. Presently a dark head and shoulders showed over the puzzling thing in the stern.

The Russian lad’s eyes were better than mine.

“Masked,” he breathed in my ear. “Something like a stocking over his head and face.”

The masked man was motionless where he stood. We were motionless where we stood.

“Could you hit him from here?” the lad asked.