The Content Assignment

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2019, is an unabridged republication of the work published by Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK, in 1958.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Roth, Holly, author.

  Title: The content assignment / Holly Roth.

  Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2019. | “This Dover edition, first published in 2019, is an unabridged republication of the work published by Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK, in 1958.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042499| ISBN 9780486832968 | ISBN 0486832961

  Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.O85413 C66 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042499

  Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

  832961012019

  www.doverpublications.com

  To my Mother

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  1

  THE minute I saw those few words at the bottom of one of the long columns in the previous Friday’s Times I had the answer to the question of what I would do with my life. I had had the answer for two years, of course, but until that hot July morning I hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

  The item was at the tail end of a long description of the departure of the Queen Elizabeth. The fact that I was reading column after column of The Times’ exhaustive detail shows the extent of my boredom with life. Morning after morning I sat in my small flat and read The Times like a proof-reader, comma by comma. If I got behind, as I currently had, I rushed furiously through the long, grey, out-dated columns, impelled, as I dimly knew, by the simple need to fill my life, to seem busy. I was doing free-lance writing, and very successfully, and I think my subconscious defence for the vast waste of time I permitted myself before settling down to work was that I might get a usable idea out of the news. Well, I got one that morning—usable in many senses.

  My first impulse was to take off—just take off for America without further to-do. But common sense and financial considerations—the latter being so unavoidable in England these days—held me back. Free-lance writing doesn’t pay when you aren’t doing it—most things don’t—but free-lancing is even more dependent upon output than most jobs. And other than the cheques I get for my articles, all I have is a few pieces of furniture, a portable typewriter, and £200 a year from my mother’s estate.

  So I called Nigel Lamson. I was put through quickly—I demanded to be put through quickly—and when I got him on the line I asked if I could come round and see him immediately. He mentioned that he had appointments, and I mentioned that he and I would never speak again, and I would never write a line for his paper again, if I didn’t see him before lunchtime. Nigel knows me very well, and he had never heard me take such a tone before. So, more as a friend than as an editor, I suppose, he said, Oh, well—if it was like that.

  I dressed, leaped into a cab, and was in Fleet Street fifteen minutes later.

  Lamson is a very nice chap. He welcomed me into his cubbyhole of an office and gave me a cigarette and time to settle down before he said, “Now, John, what’s it all about?”

  I extracted the scrap I had torn off the bottom of Page 4 of the previous Friday’s Times. “I’ve been reading the competition again—”

  “Not competition. A way of life.”

  “—and in their usual extensive report of the sailing of the Queen Elizabeth I came across this item.” I pointed. “Here.”

  Lamson took the snip of paper from me and read it carefully. He looked at me, and then he turned the paper over.

  I said, “No. You had the right side in the first place. Read the part that starts, ‘Among the other passengers . . .’ ”

  He read it again. Then he cocked an eyebrow, and read the few words aloud: “ ‘Among the other passengers is Miss Ellen Content of New York who, after a brief stay in England, is returning to America to fill a series of dancing engagements.’ Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I’m afraid, John, I’m no clearer.”

  “I want you to send me to New York on assignment. The assignment is to follow Miss Content’s tour and then write a series of articles on it.”

  Nigel’s eyebrows went up almost into his hairline. He stared at me for a minute, and then he said, “I take it you’re serious?”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “Nigel, listen to me. I’m deadly serious. I don’t know what I’ll get in the way of a story. I don’t even know if I’ll get a story. I’ve got to go for entirely personal reasons. If you don’t send me I’ll manage on my own some other way. But if you do send me you stand a chance of getting a wonderful story. And if no story materializes I’ll do a series for you—without payment—on any topic you name. I can only ask you to trust my instincts.”

  I sat back. “I suppose,” I added slowly, “that’s a lot of trust.”

  Nigel looked contemplatively at me and silence settled over the little room. It occurred to me that we looked very much alike. We’re distinctly, and yet nondescriptly, British. We’re both quite a bit over six feet tall, fairish, with a good deal of hair that we keep cropped very close, and regular features that don’t seem outstanding in any particular way. Nigel is about forty-five, and so has ten years on me, and it is always comforting, when I look at him, to realize that if the parallel of our appearances holds up, I’m going to get older gracefully and almost imperceptibly.

  He finally said, “What you’re really asking, then, is that I, or rather, this paper, advance you money—lend you money—in an indeterminate amount, probably between five hundred and a thousand pounds—and battle the Bank of England for permission to allow that money to go out of the country.”

  “I suppose, if we must get down to unvarnished nutshells, that’s about it. But I’m also giving you, as the paper’s editorial head, a gambler’s chance at what may be a very good story. Exclusive.”

  “And since you haven’t yet offered me a hint of what this story is about, I expect you don’t intend to?”

  “No, I don’t. I can’t. It might be dangerous to the lives of the people involved.”

  Nigel looked startled. It was a dramatic comment. And Nigel and I, who are alike in more ways than appearance, don’t often make, or even hear, dramatic pronouncements. We were both in the war, thoroughly in it, as a matter of fact, and we both did—well, creditably—but basically we are quiet men, conventional men. We’re not the stuff of which dangerous living is made. And the quietness and conventionality I saw in Nigel’s startled face was, I knew, reflected in mine.

  Lamson said abruptly, “All right, John. You’ve been a good reporter—always delivered for me. Not all reporters have. I’ll give you the—uh—assignment on the grounds that you’ve got a failure coming to you. Now, when do you want to leave?”

  “I want to beat the Elizabeth to New York.”

  The eyebrows went up. “Then you’ll have to fly. And fast. I’m pretty certain she docks in the States tomorrow morning—Tuesday.”

  He pushed a button on his desk. As his secretary entered the room he said, “Mrs. Brighton, please find out what planes are leaving for New York this afternoon or evening. Book passage for Mr. Terrant on the first available plane after”—he looked questioningly at me—“five o’clock?” I nodded—“five o’clock. Cable the New York office to have someone at the airport to advance expenses to Mr. Terrant. Then start an application to the Bank of England for permission to underwrite his expenses. File our request under ‘The Content Assignment.’ Also. . .”

  2

  AT six that evening I took off from London Airport. At a quarter to five the next morning we landed, in sluicing rain, at Gander, Newfoundland. And there the big plane squatted, like a marooned and disconsolate duck. There was, we were given to understand, bad weather ahead also.

  I almost went out of my mind in Gander. We were held up there for over an hour and a half. As I prowled the lounge and peered through the glass wall at the instruments that measured our impotency, I was filled with the formless fury that only elements can provoke—a rage that can find no satisfactory target. After nearly two years of waiting and seeking, I was within hours of Ellen Content, and there I had to sit. And while I sat and raged at the delay, my mind went into its well-worn groove, over and over the finding and losing of Ellen Content, seeking the answers with so pitifully few facts as a base for speculation.

  It was raining the night I met Ellen, too. A nasty, cold drizzle was falling over Berlin, and I was talking with Ed Bigeby, an American newspaperman, in the lobby of a small hotel a few blocks behind the Adlon. We were both living in the second-rate little hotel, which had become a newspaperman’s haven.

  It was early autumn of 1948
. I was a full-time working reporter on assignment in Berlin. I had seen service for four years in the infantry and had received a medical discharge—four bullets in my left leg had left me with a limp, which was getting rapidly less noticeable and less bothersome. I was thirty-two years old, and a fairly contented, happy man. My service in the Army was a blessedly faint memory. I had come out of it alive, and, compared to many, healthy. I was doing the work I liked best, and I was fortunate enough to be doing it in a city that was, at that moment, the news spot of the world.

  Berlin, or what was left of it, was a busy, bustling place. Confusion reigned, and Babel was a small village with two visiting foreigners compared to the mess of languages in Berlin. The city had adjusted to the difficult business of absorbing the evacuees who were still pouring back in. De-nazification was almost completed in the British and American zones, proceeding slowly in the French zone, and almost not at all in the Russian sector.

  The Russians’ lack of good will or good faith was out in the open; they had walked out of the Allied Control Council that spring, begun the blockade, and announced that they would no longer participate in the four-power Kommandatura. The magnificent Allied air lift, raised to break the blockade, had been started, and it was going full tilt by the time I got there.

  I had been in Berlin only two weeks, and I had been delighted to find Ed, whom I had known slightly before the war when he was working in the London office of the New York Herald Tribune and I was a rank beginner. At that time he had been kind and very helpful—without condescension—and he had certainly done far more to teach me my business than any of the people on my paper—more, for that matter, than any of my compatriots.

  Bigeby was a large, bluff, laughing man who always knew the latest jokes. When he had brought you up to the moment on the new ones, he told you old ones—and their age or your familiarity with them didn’t matter a bit, for he told them magnificently and there was more pleasure in the run of the story than in its point—a rare talent. There was something about his garrulity, his shining, good-natured face, his inability to remain still for more than a few seconds at a time, that caused many people to underestimate him. I was not one of those people. Ed Bigeby was not a fool; in addition to being a well-found companion, he was an experienced, intelligent newspaperman.

  On that rainy night in Berlin, Bigeby was telling me a non-stop joke when he interrupted himself and called to a girl who was just going out of the door, “Hey, Ellen. Ellen!” The girl turned, smiled, and came towards us.

  That moment will go on in my memory if I live for ever. And that makes excellent sense, because there are very few important moments in a lifetime. To see coming towards you the face that will mean an end of oneness is—far more than birth itself—the beginning of life. I suppose appearances don’t mean very much and, in theory, a glimpse of her face could have been misleading—she could have been a silly girl or a stupid one. And yet that wasn’t really possible because it was the intelligence, the shyness, and the warmness I saw in her face that mattered to me from that moment on.

  Ellen was not conventionally pretty. Her face was too broad at the forehead and too narrow at the chin. And the breadth of its upper half was the more noticeable because of her black, arched brows. Her hair and eyes were so dark as to seem almost black, and, by contrast, her fair skin was startling. She had a small, rather indeterminate nose and a full but small mouth. She was a small girl altogether, and slight, and that day she was, unlike most American girls I’d met, almost shabbily dressed. She had on a brown mackintosh, and a very blue scarf—which I imagine she intended to bind over her head against the rain—fell loosely over her shoulders. Her beautiful hair, straight and soft and short, cut in a Dutch bob like a small English boy’s, framed her small, pale face like a black mist.

  As she came towards us I thought she looked defenseless, poignantly alone, but the impression receded when she spoke. Her low voice carried charm and intelligence and self-reliance, and the American drawl, which I always find pleasant, was, as it came softly from her lips, particularly musical.

  She said, “Hello, Ed. Haven’t seen you in a long time. Why aren’t you out slaving for a living?”

  “Nothing ever happens in this flea-hole of a town. But you—what are you doing in our den of iniquity? Don’t tell me you’ve deserted that girls’-club kind of joint you live in that I can never seem to pry you out of?”

  She smiled—shyly, but with a kind of inward assurance. “I’m using your lobby as an alley, walking one block—from the north door to the south door—inside. The heavens have just opened and it’s darn damp outside. Why a den of iniquity? Just because it’s full of newspapermen?”

  “Isn’t that enough? And here’s another newspaperman for you. This is Johnny Terrant. He’s on an English paper, so you might take a chance and come eat some dinner with us. English newspapermen are gentlemen. This is Ellen Content, Johnny.”

  I took her small hand and said, “Nobody in the whole world—except Ed—calls me Johnny. Will you call me John, and join us for a bit of dinner?”

  She said, “Yes, John. I’d like that.”

  3

  FOR an evening so memorable, I must admit that nothing very memorable occurred. We went to the Adlon, much to Ed’s surprise. But I felt inexplicably expansive, and insisted upon doing it with flourishes. Over dinner I asked her what she was doing in Berlin, and she said, “I’m a civilian typist attached to the Army’s office of information—over on Unter den Linden. The American Army, of course.”

  I remember that I was surprised. Those comprehending eyes, that high forehead, only partially obscured by the black bang, and her understanding of the political situation didn’t seem at all compatible with a typist’s job.

  I asked her, “And what did you do before—was it patriotism? a desire to see the world?—brought you here?”

  She laughed. She had a charming laugh, a really gay laugh that took all the sadness out of her eyes. “I’m afraid it was nothing more important than a desire to see the world,” she said. “I was a schoolteacher in New York City. A very minor one, teaching the lower grades in the public grammar schools. History and geography.”

  That seemed more like it. She would be a good teacher, I thought. Sympathetic, understanding, warm. It was easy to visualize her in front of her class—loved and loving.

  The only odd incident of the evening occurred as we discussed dessert. Although Ellen and I considered the prospect with horror, Ed wanted dessert, and he wouldn’t give in and order the inevitable strudel. He insisted on his right to choose from the elaborate list on the menu, but he couldn’t catch the headwaiter’s eye to get one of the enormous menus from which we had ordered the first part of our dinner. Then Ellen said, in a rather vague way, “Dessert? Well, now, let me see. There’s a choice of—” and she rattled off twenty or so fancy dessert descriptions in the part French, part language-of-the country that is so typical of menus in expensive restaurants the world over.

  When she had finished her recitation there was a moment of startled silence, and then Ed said, “Don’t tell me! Let me guess. You’re leading a double life. In the evenings you’re having an affair with the chef. Better yet, you’re an international spy and this is headquarters, the meeting place for the members of Local Fifty-two, International Organization GT 8. You’re been here so often you know the menu by heart and when you are—”

  I interrupted. “Do tell me. I can’t guess. Have you been here so often?”

  Ellen shook her head shyly. She had flushed a little and the soft colour was charming against her hair. “I’ve been here only once before. It’s—it’s the result of two little tricks—a knack for languages, and the ability of total recall.”

  Good memories have always fascinated me. I’m a forgetter by nature. I asked, “Do you remember by seeing? That is, are you one of those people who can recall anything once you’ve seen it written down?”

  She said, “No, the trick doesn’t seem to be limited. What I’ve seen, heard, overheard”—she laughed a little—“anything. I can reproduce a map, for instance, although I have little drawing ability, and on the other hand, I can sing an odd tune I’ve heard only once—though I certainly have no voice. It’s the direct reason for my language facility, of course. And it also accounts for my teaching history and geography. No brains, you see, just simple facts.”