It must have been because I had been reading one of the magazines that young Mellon had left lying about in the common room that the idea came to me. The magazine had been sent to him from the States, and was one of those immensely knowledgeable and outspoken publications that make you feel while you’re reading them that everyone except the writer, and possibly the editor, has up to now been living right on the outside of things.
What may have roused me was that this particular piece of outspokenness was directed against the British. The author was evidently a Californian counterpart of our great Dr. Smith. He had been over here, sampled us, found the flavour a bit stale and tasteless, and had returned to warn the rest of mankind against further nibbling. In his eyes the one thing in which we possessed a whole corner was picturesqueness. But there was a scarcely concealed threat behind it all that if the British didn’t pull their socks up and manage things a bit better they would find a United Nations Commission taking the job of preservation over from them. And as for scientists engaged in work of military importance, it was the writer’s view that the time had already come. “According to the F.B.I, files,” the article went on, “British investigation methods are only 43.7 per cent as effective as the American. And Britain’s Harwell”—I don’t think that the Pacific Coast expert had ever heard of Bodmin —“is now the international staging-post for Stalin’s spies playing between Las Vegas and Russia’s Kharkovsk.”
I read that sentence twice. The first time with a kind of sultry resentment because I suspected the fellow of over calling his hand. And the second time with a great flash of understanding as though one of Pontecorvo’s pills (that was the writer’s phrase, not mine) had gone off right inside me. Perhaps “understanding” is too strong a word. Because at the moment it was nothing more than one big, howling suspicion. But it felt like understanding all right. And I have noticed before that there comes a point in all philosophical systems where the straight hunch is worth any amount of pure reason. Not the least of its advantages is that it is so much quicker.
I argued it out this way. The U.S.A. is the most violently anti-Communist country in the world. Ergo any American is non-suspect. Nowadays an American could come into Southampton with a hammer under one arm, and a sickle and two H-bombs under the other, and the Customs man would chalk him up to go through the barrier before he had even had time to complain about the coffee.
Young Mellon fitted perfectly into that picture. You couldn’t see him without liking him. Inside the first five minutes, fully-grown disgruntled scientists and policemen succumbed before the open sunny charm of the campus and the drug-store. And women didn’t even have to wait that long. If Mellon had accidentally sunk the duty destroyer in the Sound the Admiral wouldn’t have thought twice about forgiving him.
And I saw now the uses to which Mellon had been putting his charm. It had been the master key and passport to everything. Every time his big blue Buick swept down the Institute’s front drive, the older ones, with all passion spent, had sat about shaking their heads sadly over another impending West Country fall. It was significant, too, that whenever the Inspector saw Mellon going by he winked at him—that from an ice-cold eye showed what the Mellon myth could do. And I remembered it was Mellon who had spread the myth. While we had assumed that he was safely rounding up some houri in Okehampton, he could have been half-way to the Soviet Embassy.
That meant that I now had no fewer than three separate lines of inquiry. I still wanted to know more about Dr. Smith’s poste restante activities in Plymouth. There was an investigation agent’s job to be done watching the disarming little villa in Padstow. And now there was Mellon’s Buick to be trailed. That didn’t promise to be too easy. Even when all my eight cylinders had still been working, Mellon’s Fireball acceleration had always left me somewhere on the wrong side of the level-crossing.
But I had learnt one thing from Wilton. That was to leave the other fellow to do the talking. And it occurred to me that if I just planted myself on a bar-stool adjacent to Mellon’s and kept the conversation going with an occasional “You don’t say!” or “My, my, isn’t this a small world?” I might be able to find out quite as much as if I bought a T.T. racing-model Norton and went road-hogging after him.
Starting up the conversation wasn’t difficult. After mine —some way after—Mellon’s thirst was easily the biggest thing in the Institute. Whisky ruined by ice was his tipple. And because he was a nice friendly boy he liked to have someone beside him just to suggest the next round to him. He was there exactly where I expected him to be. And his “What’ll you have?” before I had even got across to the bar made me just a wee bit cautious. It occurred to me that he may have been just as eager as I was to get the other one to do some talking.
The first thing that I noticed was that he was still intent on establishing his part. He turned the conversation to sex before I got myself properly settled on the high stool alongside him.
“Say, what are your divorce laws like around here?” he asked.
I shook my head before answering.
“Pretty stiff,” I told him. “Adultery’s usually punished by stoning. Both parties.” I paused. “It’s worse up Somerset way,” I added.
But young Mellon was in no mood for spoiling his own effect by seeming to take things too lightly.
“Do they still hang you if you kill someone?” he asked.
“Only if they catch you,” I reassured him.
“And what about crime passionel?” he went on.
Here I shook my head again.
“No use pleading that,” I advised. “If you’d ever seen an English jury you’d know that they’d convict for the passionel part even without the crime. They’re dead against it in our law courts.”
Mellon still looked worried.
“Can ya get police protection if you ask for it?” he inquired.
“You’ve been having it,” I replied.
“Then I guess I gotta find some other way.”
It was my turn to stand this round.
“Who’re you planning to kill?” I asked.
Mellon pushed his glass away from him. This itself was an unnatural gesture and showed that the internal stresses must have been considerable.
“Ya got me all wrong,” he said. “I’m the guy that’s on the spot.”
“Meaning you’re hot?” I asked.
“Meaning there’s some god-damn fool of a husband who’s after me,” he corrected me.
I smiled. Only inwardly, I hope. Because I didn’t want Mellon to know what I was really thinking.
“And what do you propose to do?” I asked.
I had my fingers crossed at this point.
“Get outer here,” Mellon answered. “Get outer here before they have to carry me.”
That meant that my fingers could uncross again.
“Where to?” I asked innocently. “He’ll find you easily enough if he’s really all that keen. It’s only a small place, Bodmin.”
Mellon was reaching out for his glass again. Evidently instinct had got the better of panic.
“Who said anything about Bodmin?” he demanded. “I mean Paris; Paris, France.”
“Or Rome, Italy,” I suggested.
“Could be,” he agreed.
“Then why tell me?” I asked. “I might help to put him on to you.”
Mellon finished the rest of the drink before answering and called for another as soon as he put the glass down.
“Because I’m going crackers,” he answered. “How d’you like it yourself if ya just had to sit around here waiting for some crazy guy to come sneaking upter ya?”
“I see your point,” I said. “Must make ya sorter restless.”
Altogether it was one of the neatest pieces of sustained strategy that I had so far encountered. And the acting throughout had been admirable. There wasn’t a single one of us in the Institute who wouldn’t have been prepared to go into the witness-box to swear character—Mellon had seen to that. And even if running away from danger wasn’t quite in the best Illinois tradition I felt that Mellon would be able to laugh that one off all right by the time he got through to Moscow, Russia.
What was more, now that he had told me everything, he knew that he was perfectly safe. Simple, sun-soaked and boyish, young Mellon may have been. But I felt that since he had arrived here, he had made a pretty accurate reading of English character. He knew that if only you confide in an Englishman you can tell him the date and time of his own assassination with the absolute certainty that he’ll turn up punctually and wait about if necessary.
The only thing that he didn’t know was how much an Englishman can think to himself without saying anything.