The Tunnel Read online

  “Please,” Nat pleaded, “just write the order and don’t talk about it.”

  She impolitely gulped the double martini and started to mix another. The red-hot chill of the frosty gin struck hard at her stomach. How could he sit there calmly writing, feigning ignorance, with all his well-paid satellites fawning subserviently over him, chattering, eating and drinking in the booths around the room? Didn’t he think she could recognize a set-up stage when she saw one? His puppets were very good in their parts, made up to perfection.

  Nat disposed of the second double and felt her mind grow clear. She must be very important for Trev to go to so much trouble. Too bad he had failed to take account of her heightened sensitivity. She’d eat no poisoned food tonight in this death trap made to look like a restaurant. Back of the greasepaint and powder she had recognized everyone—stenographers, clerks, from Trev’s office, workers from his mill, all of them in Trev’s employ, and friends of Mona.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and slid out of the booth. He might at least have spared her this touch of being trapped in a dining car. She walked to the rear very slowly and cleverly passed the sign reading “Ladies.” Only a very stupid woman would allow herself to walk into a baited cage in the powder room.

  A waiter bearing a tray came out, started to speak and went on by her. Nat slipped past him through the swinging door into the kitchen and repelled the chef, who threatened her with a glittering knife, by her air of sheer disdain. Another door slammed behind her, shutting out Luigi’s forever. The icebox she had entered turned out to be an alley, dark and freezing. She realized she must hurry for her furs had been left behind her and there were only the four martinis to keep her warm. Pitiful things at best! One by one they would freeze into tiny goblets and snap their stems, break off from her to fall and shatter on the icy bricks beneath her feet.

  She tried to run, but her powerless legs refused to move. There was danger when the cold made you sleepy, and she was very sleepy. For hours she must have crept along, her fingers touching the wall. But wasn’t death better than sleep? The alley stretched on endlessly, making turn after turn. No light. No sound. Ineffable peace. The silence of the tomb. She never wanted to reach the end and be plunged again into swirling traffic, hooting horns and jostling people.

  She looked above her to see the stars, but there were no stars. Just an arch overhead. Suddenly she began to laugh. She knew the truth. In this endless game of life and death, Trevil Sherrett had won by tricking her into another endless tunnel. She’d die in there from his poisoned martinis and no one would ever find her, a frozen corpse lying forever in the ruined alleys of Moscow, or London, or Berlin.

  There was one more move to thwart him, but she had to be in her bed to do it. How warm! How snug! She could reach from under her quilt right now and find the pills on the table. The more you took, the longer you slept, snuggling up close to Robert Helms, going down … and down … and down …

  Chapter 10

  Mona was always perfect.

  She sat on the foot of Natalie’s bed and watched as Natalie busied herself at the dressing table, arranging her hair. Natalie got the feeling when Mona watched her that she was being mentally worked into part of a tapestry design to lie on the floor of a drawing room and be walked on, or to be hung in a curtain against a window for the sun to shine through.

  Mona’s two-piece suit and black-and-white-striped blouse on any other woman might have been too severe. On Mona, it became a figure-molding creation. She raised her hand to light a cigarette, and in the mirror Natalie caught the flash of a square-cut diamond glistening on the third finger of her right hand.

  “Heavens!” exclaimed Natalie, turning around. “Is it real?”

  “This?” Mona stretched her slender hand out toward the window and wiggled her finger until the diamond dissolved into a thousand blinding rays. “I hope so. If it isn’t, I’ve been cheated.”

  “Mona! You don’t mean you’re engaged?”

  “Not unless it’s to Trev,” said Mona. She left the bed and took the chair by the window to be nearer to an ash tray.

  Natalie brushed her hair more vigorously, her lips gone dry. Like so many other things, this couldn’t be happening either. Had Trev divorced her without her knowing it? Had everything in the world collapsed around her while her mind was in a state of blankness, leaving her here, an outcast in the Sherrett house, with a stranger who had quit her for another woman?

  “You mean Trev gave you that?”

  “Of course Trev gave it to me.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” said Natalie, since there didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Mona snuffed out a half-consumed cigarette and fingered the string of pearls at her neck. Her exquisite, sensitive face for an instant was marred by anger that crept up to darken her clear blue eyes. “What’s gotten into you, Nat? You know perfectly well that Trev gave me this diamond. You were asked into the dinner when he presented it to me two months ago.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember,” said Natalie. “Was that one of the evenings when you had a business conference with him at Luigi’s?”

  “No, it wasn’t one of the evenings I had a business conference with him at Luigi’s.” Mona folded her hands in her lap and leaned back in the chair, staring at Nat in the manner that Nat stared at crab shells. “I don’t know what you’re driving at, darling, but you’re not going to get a rise out of me.”

  “Really?” said Nat. She peered at herself closer in the triple mirror, giving a final touch to her hair. She looked very well this morning, her eyes unshadowed, her complexion translucently clear.

  “Yes, really,” said Mona slowly. “This was a dinner of the employees and directors of the Sherrett Company, Natalie, and you know it just as well as I do. I was voted a bonus last year for the work I did and refused to take it. Instead of the bonus, the company presented me with this ring.”

  “That was nice of them,” said Natalie.

  “Yes, wasn’t it?” Mona broke in sharply. “It was quite a tête-a-tête I had with Trev. Old Mr. Pritchard was there, chairman of the board of directors. He’s seventy-four, uses a hearing aid and screams at you. There was one bank president, two factors and their wives, the president of a weavers union, and about twenty other people whom I don’t know. It was held in a private dining room at the Bolivar Hotel, and the food was horrible.”

  “Sounds very interesting,” said Natalie. “I’m almost sorry I wasn’t there.”

  “It’s your own fault you weren’t there,” Mona told her. “You know very well you’ve kept a mile away from every company affair.”

  “I seem to be kept a mile away from a great many private ones at Luigi’s.” Nat felt very pleased with the remark as she started to apply her make-up. At least it had jounced the impeccable Mona out of her complacency and needled her into sitting upright in the chair. It required a great deal of subtlety and artifice to get Mona upset. She was holding her temper well in hand even now.

  “Just how am I supposed to take that, darling?”

  Natalie laughed. “You wouldn’t think I was doing anything but ribbing you, would you?”

  “I might easily,” said Mona. “Look, Nat, I didn’t meet you yesterday. We spent a long time together in the same room at school. Maybe you don’t happen to remember a pleasant little ribbing you gave me back in those days about a boy named Paul?”

  “I couldn’t very well forget it.” Natalie felt her face flame up to the roots of her hair. “You made an arrant fool of yourself, Mona, and you know it. Imagine not speaking to me for two whole months because I twitted you about Paul taking you to a dance while I was ill.”

  “My memory’s gone faulty now.” Mona was serious. “I’ve been thinking all these years that it was you who didn’t speak to me. If I was being twitted then, Nat, this going-over you’re giving me this morning must be an exhibition of first-class horseplay.”

  Nat said, “Now I really don’t know what you
mean.”

  “Don’t play dumb, darling,” Mona told her. “You’re one of the smartest women I ever knew. You not only know exactly what I mean, but you know from the tip of your toes to the top of your head everything to do to irritate” me.

  “I’m surprised you came all the way out here from the city if you feel that way. Won’t they need you at the office?”

  Mona bit the tip of one polished nail, then settled back in the chair again, grinning amiably. “I assure you, Nat, if I had expected to find you in so vile a temper, I’d have stayed away.”

  “Nobody’s forcing you to stay.”

  “I know,” said Mona, “that you’re forcing me to get to the bottom of this. What are these cracks about Trevil and me, and these private affairs at Luigi’s?”

  “Oh,” said Nat, “then there really have been private affairs?”

  Mona said, “I’m going to be nice if I have to chew all my lipstick off. I’m a designer, dear—”

  “That’s a neat way of putting it,” said Natalie, “and that certainly is a beautiful ring.”

  Mona drew a long breath and began again. “I’ll be more blunt. I’ve had no dinners with Trevil in town that weren’t absolutely necessary.”

  “Have I said you have?”

  “Yes,” said Mona, “—in fourteen different ways. You’ve also intimated lots of other things, among them that he personally gave me this ring.”

  “You said he did, too.”

  “I said he presented it to me on behalf of the company and on behalf of his board of directors because I earned it by working like a yellow dog. The ring was part of my pay.”

  “Added on to your twelve thousand a year,” suggested Natalie.

  “Yes,” said Mona, “added on to my twelve thousand a year. Now what have you got to say?”

  “I say that you seem quite perturbed over nothing.” Nat stared at Mona reminiscently. Mona had always been perturbed over nothing. Or were her frank upheavals covers for a secretive nature hidden behind her scintillating beauty? She could remember Mona at parties, at dances in years gone by when they double-dated together. Yes, she did know how to irritate Mona, but certainly she was justified.

  Mona was speaking. “—heaven knows, Nat, I’d certainly never have dinner with Trevil Sherrett if I didn’t have to. Things have been awfully tough this last year. We’ve had strikes and inflation and lack of materials, and dyes have been scarce, and every new design I think up is branded as too expensive.”

  “Trev seems to find it interesting,” said Natalie. “He certainly talks of nothing else.”

  “Well, it gets a little boring by the end of a day,” Mona told her. “I assure you, Nat, that Trev isn’t the only man who wants to take me out to dinner.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he wants to,” Nat said in a tone that confirmed everything.

  Mona spread her hands in a hopeless gesture. “Look, Natalie, if you’ve made up your mind to act like a jealous cat, I’m sure we can’t get anywhere. You introduced me to Trev yourself. I got this job with the company, and I’m making good and I intend to stay. Until conditions improve, it’s going to be necessary for all of us to work overtime. So if I have to carry my work through dinner with him, I’m going to do that, too. It means just that much earlier that I can get away.”

  She rose and came over to the dressing table and put a hand on Natalie’s shoulder, staring at her thoughtfully in the mirror. “I came out here to drive you to lunch at the inn, Nat. I love you better than anybody I know. Do you still want to go?”

  “Yes,” said Natalie dully, “I guess so.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s not true,” said Mona. “You know very well in the bottom of your heart that Trevil loves you better than anything in the world, and that neither I nor any other woman could ever take him from you. Now tell me what’s the matter.”

  “I’m writing a book,” said Natalie, “and I don’t know how it’s going to end.”

  She walked to the window and stood staring out. It really was a very beautiful day.

  Chapter 11

  Now she remembered as if it were happening again: The boy’s name was Paul Diffenbaugh, and he must have been all of eighteen. Natalie was quick to recognize his mature sophistication the instant she and Mona entered the drawing room at Miss Lancaster’s formal tea. He had wavy light hair, a prominent nose and even, white teeth. His sport jacket smacked slightly of Hollywood, but his very presence in the principal’s house marked him as socially acceptable.

  “Heavens!” Mona whispered. “Do you see what I see over by the punchbowl, Nat?”

  “I’m not quite blind, but I might be if I looked too long at that coat and tie.”

  “Let’s get through the chaperones.” Mona seized Nat’s arm to make her hurry.

  “Miss Lancaster can’t possibly know he’s here. She’ll throw him out and we’ll never get to meet him if the Bishop drops in.”

  “We’ll share him, turn and turn about, even though I saw him first.”

  “Don’t bother.” Nat could feel her face growing red with anger. “I wouldn’t have him at any price. I’ll bet he croons.”

  “But Nat, he looks keen—and since when did you turn on crooners?”

  “I hate them!”

  “What about all those pictures of Happy Valley that you have hidden in the bottom of your bureau drawer?”

  “That’s different. He’s a—a man, and he’s done something.”

  “Well, this new one looks more like a man to me than any of those kneepants infants Lanky has provided. Look at Pudgy Rice over there stuffing in cake! I’ll take the one by the punchbowl.”

  That was the trouble. Mona took everything. Everything was her discovery. Mona had everything—brains, talent, looks and popularity. By sheer brazenness, or something, Mona managed to make herself noticeable and get her own way among a hundred girls condemned to wear the school’s neat uniform. The uniforms were designed for blondes. Nat felt stifled under the blue-braided, sailor-type costume with the school’s initials embroidered just right to draw attention away from any signs of budding maturity. She didn’t want to look “outdoorsy,” healthy and brown, but that’s what the jumper and shirtwaist did for her, effectively killing her shining dark hair and gray eyes by failing to offer a decent contrast.

  Mona, on the other hand, managed to attain the ethereal wickedness of her current movie star by popping her blonde head and creamy complexion up above the neckline like some exotic lily emerging from the dirt of a flower pot. Nat felt certain that although Paul’s eyes were on her when he said, “Hello, gorgeous!” that the remark was intended for Mona. But why?

  Looking back now at these two little girls in a boarding school, wasn’t it possible that Paul Diffenbaugh might have preferred brunettes to blondes? Lots of men did. Why should Mona have wanted Paul when Jim Hartsdale was around?

  The answer to that was that Mona always wanted what she didn’t have.

  Jim had crashed somewhere in a flaming bomber, like Robert Helms, a victim of the war. Still, it might have made no difference if Jim had lived and married Mona. That would have meant two marriages disrupted instead of one. Mona couldn’t change her spots. No matter whom she had married, she would have wanted Bob Helms had she known him, just as now she wanted Trevil.

  This was digression of the highest type—getting away from the matter at hand, dodging the question of two little girls and a boy in school, because the searchlight of memory might make you look unpleasant. It needed a lot of courage to consider abstractly that silly little school-girl, Natalie Strong. Read coldly, the records made out a bad case for Mona Desmé.

  But were the records honest?

  If they weren’t, the situation reversed itself, and the reader reading between the lines found an indictment of the writer, Natalie Strong. Nat knew quite well that Paul Diffenbaugh preferred her to Mona, and for a long time to anyone. To admit that knowledge caused complexities
. It immediately became difficult to rationalize the actions of Natalie, the Immature. What in the name of common sense was this adolescent character trying to do? Was she jealous of Mona, her closest friend?

  Consulting the dictionary, jealousy was “unpleasant apprehension of rivalship in cases nearly affecting one’s happiness.” Jealousy wasn’t the word. Schoolgirl Natalie had no unpleasant apprehensions of rivalship about Mona Desmé and Paul. From the very first day she met him, Natalie had Paul Diffenbaugh tied to a string. Maybe she really disliked him and wanted him to fall for Mona and let her alone. No, that would have killed her.

  Then why did she treat him like a dog; keep him jumping through hoops; constantly throw him in contact with Mona; and even, later on, feign illness while Jim Hartsdale was east so that she could insist that Paul take Mona to the Senior Dance?

  The answer was slowly beginning to emerge.

  Natalie was unsure of herself, woefully lacking in the normal belief of her own ability, appearance and charm. It wasn’t enough to have Paul on a string, or the world on a string. She must manufacture undue strain to test the strength of the tie. It was lucky, or sagacious, that she had found how weak were the bonds between her and Paul. She had sensed the change several weeks before, noticed the lack of his usual laughter, and the lengthening of silences between them.

  She met him at the La Jolla Beach Club on that glorious June morning and they swam out to the raft together.

  “I’m called up to the Navy, Nat,” he told her when they were perched on the edge of the raft. “There’s something I want to say to you before I go.”

  “That will be a change,” Nat said lightly. “You’ve spoken so little for the past three weeks I’ll scarcely know you’re away.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” said Paul.

  “What?”

  “That you won’t even know I’m gone. We’ve been kicking around together for three years now off and on.”

  “Has it been that long?”