“Well, we know now why you were knocked on the head.”
“Knocked on the head?” Zagero took him up. “What do you-”
“Night before last,” I interrupted. “When I told you I’d walked into a lamp-post.” I told them all about the finding of the cutting and its subsequent loss.
“Would it have made all that difference even if you had read it?” Zagero asked. “I mean-”
“Of course it would!” My voice was harsh, savage almost, but the savagery was directed against myself, my own stupidity. “The fact of finding a cutting about a fatal crash which occurred in strange unexplained circumstances on the person of a man who had just died in a fatal crash in equally strange and unexplained circumstances would have made even me suspicious. When I heard from Hillcrest that something highly secret was being carried aboard the plane, the parallel would have been even more glaringly obvious, especially as the cutting was found on the man – an army officer – who was almost certainly the courier, the carrier of this secret. Anything larger than a match-box in the luggage the passengers were carrying I’d have ripped open and examined, radio and tape-recorder included. Smallwood knew it. He didn’t know what was in the cutting, but he – or Corazzini – knew it was a cutting and they were taking no chances at all.”
“You weren’t to know this,” Levin said soothingly. “It’s not your fault-”
“Of course it’s my fault,” I said wearily. “All my fault. I don’t even know how to start apologising. You first, Zagero, I suppose, you and Solly Levin, for tying you-”
“Forget it.” Zagero was curt but friendly. “We’re just as bad -all of us. All the facts that mattered were as available to us as they were to you – and we made no better use of them: less, if anything.” In the tiny glow from the torch I could see him shaking his head. “Lordy, lordy, but ain’t it easy to understand everything when it’s too late. Easy enough to understand now why we crashed in the middle of nowhere – the plane captain must have been in on it, he must have known that the mechanism was aboard and thought it important enough to put the passengers’ lives second and crash-land in the middle of the ice-plateau, where Smallwood could never reach the coast.”
“Not knowing that I was there waiting to oblige Smallwood,” I said bitterly. I shook my head in turn. “It’s obvious now, all too obvious. How Corazzini damaged his hand in the shack – not by saving or trying to save the radio but by accelerating its fall after he’d pushed the hinges in. How and why he lost the toss and had to sleep on the floor – to give him a chance to smother the second officer.”
“What you might call a good loser,” Zagero said grimly. Then he gave a short laugh. “Remember when we buried the second officer? I wonder what Smallwood’s burial service would have sounded like if we’d really been close enough to hear?”
“I missed that,” I nodded. “I missed the suggestion you made inside the plane that we should bury the murdered men – if you had been guilty you’d never have dared make that suggestion for then the way these men died would almost certainly have been discovered.”
“You missed it,” Zagero said feelingly. “How about me – /said it, and I never even thought of it till now.” He snorted. “Boy, am I disgusted with myself. As far as I can see the only thing I knew that you didn’t was that Corazzini clouted our friend Smallwood back in the pass there simply in order to throw suspicion on me: but, then, I knew that even trying to tell you that would have been crazy.”
There was a long moment’s silence, while we listened to the rise and fall of the Citroen’s exhaust note in the gusting, strengthening wind, then Solly Levin spoke.
The plane,” he said. “The fire – how come?”
“There was enough high-octane fuel in its tanks to take Hillcrest’s Sno-Cat a couple of thousand miles,” I explained. “If Hillcrest’s tanks had been empty when he arrived back at base and if he’d found out right away that the spare fuel in the tunnel had been doctored – well, it wouldn’t have taken him long to siphon out the stuff in the plane. So, no plane.”
The silence this time was even longer, then Zagero cleared his throat, as if uncertain how to begin.
“Seeing explanations are in the air – well, I guess it’s time we made one too.” Zagero, to my astonishment, sounded almost embarrassed. “It’s about the phony conduct of that phony character to your left, Doc, one Solly Levin. We’d plenty of time to talk about it when we were lashed to this damned sledge all of last night and-”
“Come to the point,” I interrupted impatiently.
“Sorry.” He leaned across to Solly Levin. “Want I should make a formal introduction, Pop?”
I stared at him in the darkness.
“Did I hear-”
“Sure you did, Doc.” He laughed softly. Top. The old man. The paternal parent. Says so on my birth certificate and everything.” He was enjoying himself vastly. “Confirmation on the right here.”
“It’s perfectly true, Dr Mason,” Solly Levin smiled. The dreadful Bowery accent was quite ‘gone, yielding place to a crisper, more decisive version of Zagero’s cultured drawl. Til put it briefly. I’m the owner and managing director – or was till I retired a year ago – of a plastics factory in Trenton, New Jersey, near Princeton, where Johnny managed to acquire a splendid accent and very little else. It was not, I might add, Princeton’s fault; Johnny spent most of his time in the gymnasium, nursing his – ah – pugilistic ambitions, much to my annoyance as I wanted him to take over from me.”
“Alas,” Zagero put in, “I was almost as stubborn as he is himself.”
“A great deal more so,” his father said. “So I made him a proposition. I’d give him two years – it seemed enough, he was already amateur heavyweight champion – to prove himself, and at the end of that time if he hadn’t made it he was to take his place in the factory. His first manager was as corrupt as they come and Johnny literally kicked him out at the end of a year. So I took over. I’d newly retired, I’d time on my hands, I’d a very strong vested interest in his well-being apart from the fact that he was my son – and, quite frankly, I’d begun to see that he really was going to get to the very top.” He broke off there – so I took the opportunity to interrupt.
“Zagero or Levin. Which is it?”
“Zagero,” the elder man answered.
“Why the Levin?”
“Some state and national boxing commissions refuse to permit a close relative to be either manager or second. Especially second. So I used an alias. A practice by no means uncommon, and officially winked at. A harmless deception.”
“Not so harmless,” I said grimly. “It was one of the worst acting performances I’ve ever seen, and that was one of the primary reasons for my suspecting your son and, in turn, for Corazzini and Smallwood getting away with what they did. Had you come clean earlier on, I would have known that they were bound, even in the absence of all possible evidence, to be the guilty men. But with Solly Levin – I’ll find it very difficult to think of you as Mr Zagero, I’m afraid – with Solly Levin sticking out like a sore thumb as an obvious phony – well, I just couldn’t leave you two out of the list of suspects.”
“I obviously modelled myself on the wrong person – or type of person,” Levin said wryly. “Johnny ribbed me about it all the time. I’m deeply sorry for any trouble we may have caused, Or Mason. I honestly never looked at it from your point of view, never realised the dangers involved in maintaining the impersonation – if you could call it that. Please forgive me.”
“Nothing to forgive,” I said bitterly. “A hundred to one I’d have found some other way of messing things up.”
Shortly after five o’clock in the evening Corazzini stopped the tractor – but he didn’t stop the engine. He came down from the driver’s seat and walked round to the cabin, pushing the searchlight slightly to one side. He had to shout to make himself heard above the roar of the tractor and the high ululating whine of the still-strengthening blizzard.
“Half-way, boss. Thirty-two miles on the clock.”
“Thank you.” We couldn’t see Smallwood, but we could see the tip of his gun barrel protruding menacingly into the searchlight’s beam. “The end of the line, Dr Mason. You and your friends will please get down.”