She left her slippers on the bedroom floor. Very softly, stockinged feet carried her down the dark front stairs, tread by tread. Skirts held high and tight against rustling, she crept down the black stairs toward the room where two men- equally strangers for the time—sat trafficking.
Beneath the portiere, and from either side, yellow light came to lay a pale, crooked ‘U’ on the hall floor. Guy’s voice came through.
“. . . not there. We turned the island upside down from Dambulla all the way to the Kalawewa, and got nothing. I told you it was a bust. Catch those limeys leaving that much sugar lay round under their noses!”
“Dahl-said-it-was-there.”
Doucas’s voice was soft with the infinitely patient softness of one whose patience is nearly at end.
Creeping to the doorway, Margaret peeped around the curtain. The two men and the table between them came into the opening. Doucas’s over-coated shoulder was to her. He sat straight up, hands inert on fat thighs, cocked profile inert. Guy’s white-sleeved forearms were on the table. He leaned over them, veins showing in forehead and throat, smaller and more vivid around the blue-black of his eyes. The glass in front of him was empty; the one before Doucas still brimmed with dark liquor.
“I don’t give a damn what Dahl says.” Guy’s voice was blunt, but somehow missed finality. “I’m telling you the stuff wasn’t there.”
Doucas smiled. His lips bared white teeth and covered them again in a cumbersome grimace that held as little of humor as of spontaneity.
“But-you-came-from-Ceylon-no-poorer-than-you-went.”
Guy’s tongue-tip showed flat between his lips, vanished. He looked at his freckled hands on the table. He looked up at Doucas.
“I didn’t. I brought fifteen thousand hard roundmen away with me, if it’s any of your business,” he said, and then robbed his statement of sincerity, made a weak blustering of it, with an explanation. “I did a thing a man needed done. It had nothing to do with our game. It was after that blew up.”
“Yes. I-choose-to-doubt-it.”
Soft, sigh-cushioned, the words had a concussive violence no shouted You lie! could have matched.
Guy’s shoulders bunched up, teeth clicked, blood pulsed in the veins that welted his face. His eyes flared purplishly at the dark baked mask before him, flared until the held breath in Margaret’s chest became an agony.
The flare went down in the purple eyes. The eyes went down. Guy scowled at his hands, at his knuckles that were round white knobs.
“Suit yourself, brother,” he said, not distinctly.
Margaret swayed behind her shielding curtain, reason barely checking the instinctive hand with which she clutched for steadiness at it. Her body was a cold damp shell around a vacancy that had been until to-day—until, despite awakening doubts, this very instant—eight years’ accumulation of pride. Tears wet her face, tears for the high-held pride that was now a ridiculous thing. She saw herself as a child going among adults, flaunting a Manila-paper bandeau, crying shrilly, “See my gold crown!”
“We-waste-time. Dahl-said-half-a-million-rupees. Doubt-less-it-was-less. But-most-surely-half-that-amount-would-be-there.” The pad of breath before and after each word became by never-varying repetition an altogether unnatural thing. Each word lost association with each other word, became a threatening symbol hung up in the room. “Not-regarding-odd-amounts-my-portion-would- be-say-seventy-five-thousand-dollars. I-will-take-that.”
Guy did not look up from his hard white knuckles. His voice was sullen.
“Where do you expect to find it?”
The Greek’s shoulders moved the least fraction of an inch. Because he had for so long not moved at all that slight motion became a pronounced shrug.
“You-will-give-it-to-me. You-would-not-have-a-word-dropped-to-the-British-consul-of-one-who-was-Tom-Berkey-in-Cairo-not-many-yesterdays-back.”
Guy’s chair spun back from him. He lunged across the table.
Margaret clapped a palm to her mouth to stop the cry her throat had no strength to voice.
The Greek’s right hand danced jewels in Guy’s face. The Greek’s left hand materialized a compact pistol out of nothing.
“Sit-down-my-friend.”
Hanging over the table, Guy seemed to become abruptly smaller, as oncoming bodies do when stopped. For a moment he hung there. Then he grunted, regained his balance, picked up his chair, and sat down. His chest swelled and shrank slowly.
“Listen, Doucas,” he said with great earnestness, “you’re all wrong. I’ve got maybe ten thousand dollars left. I got it myself, but if you think you’ve got a kick coming, I’ll do what’s right. You can have half of the ten thousand.”
Margaret’s tears were gone. Pity for self had turned to hatred of the two men who sat in her dining-room making a foolish thing of her pride. She still trembled, but with anger now, and contempt for her boasted red wolf of a husband, trying to buy off the fat man who threatened him. The contempt she felt for her husband was great enough to include Doucas. She had a desire to step through the doorway, to show them that contempt. But nothing came of the impulse. She would not have known what to do, what to say to them. She was not of their world.
Only her pride had been in her husband’s place in that world.
“Five-thousand-dollars-is-nothing. Twenty-thousand-rupees-I-spent-preparing-Ceylon-for-you.”
Margaret’s helplessness turned contempt in on herself. The very bitterness of that contempt drove her to attempt to justify, recapture some fragment of, her pride in Guy. After all, what knowledge had she of his world? What standards had she with which to compute its values? Could any man win every encounter? What else could Guy do under Doucas’s pistol?
The futility of the self-posed questions angered her. The plain truth was she had never seen Guy as a man, but always as a half-fabulous being. The weakness of any defense she could contrive for him lay in his needing a defense. Not to be ashamed of him was a sorry substitute for her exultance in him. To convince herself that he was not a coward still would leave vacant the place lately occupied by her joy in his daring.
Beyond the curtain the two men bargained on across the table.
“. . . every-cent. Men-do-not-profitably-betray-me.”
She glared through the gap between portiere and frame, at fat Doucas with his pistol level on tabletop, at red Guy pretending to ignore the pistol. Rage filled her weaponless, impotent rage. Or was it weaponless? The light-button was beside the door. Doucas and Guy were occupied with one another -
Her hand moved before the motive impulse was full-formed inside her. The situation was intolerable; darkness would change the situation, however slightly, therefore darkness was desirable. Her hand moved between portiere and doorframe, bent to the side as if gifted with sight, drove her finger into the button.
Roaring blackness was streaked by a thin bronze flame. Guy bellowed out, an animal noise without meaning. A chair slammed to the floor. Feet shuffled, stamped, scuffled. Grunts punctuated snarls.
Concealed by night, the two men and what they did became for the first time real to Margaret, physically actual. They were no longer figures whose substance was in what they did to her pride. One was her husband, a man who could be maimed, killed. Doucas was a man who could be killed. They could die, either or both, because of a woman’s vanity. A woman, she, had flung them toward death rather than confess she could be less than a giant’s wife.
Sobbing, she pushed past the portiere and with both hands hunted for the switch that had come so readily to her finger a moment ago. Her hands fumbled across a wall that shuddered when bodies crashed into it. Behind her, fleshed bone smacked on fleshed bone. Feet shuffled in time with hoarse breathing. Guy cursed. Her fingers fluttered back and forth, to and fro across wallpaper that was unbroken by electric fixture.
The scuffling of feet stopped. Guy’s cursing stopped in mid-syllable. A purring gurgle had come into the room, swallowing every other sound, giving density, smothering weight to
the darkness, driving Margaret’s frenzied fingers faster across the wall.
Her right hand found the doorframe. She held it there, pressed it there until the edge of the wood cut into her hand, holding it from frantic search while she made herself form a picture of the wall. The light-switch was a little below her shoulder, she decided.
“Just below my shoulder,” she whispered harshly, trying to make herself hear the words above the purring gurgle. Her shoulder against the frame, she flattened both hands on the wall, moved them across it.
The purring gurgle died, leaving a more oppressive silence, the silence of wide emptiness.
Cold metal came under sliding palm. A finger found the button, fumbled too eagerly atop it, slid off. She clutched at the button with both hands. Light came. She whirled her back to the wall.
Across the room Guy straddled Doucas, holding his head up from the floor with thick hands that hid the Greek’s white collar. Doucas’s tongue was a bluish pendant from a bluish mouth. His eyes stood out, dull. The end of a red silk garter hung from one trouser-leg, across his shoe.
Guy turned his head toward Margaret, blinking in the light.
“Good girl,” he commended her. “This Greek was no baby to jump at in daylight.”
One side of Guy’s face was wet red under a red furrow. She sought escape in his wound from the implication of was.
“You’re hurt!”
He took his hands away from the Greek’s neck and rubbed one of them across the cheek. It came away dyed red. Doucas’s head hit the floor hollowly and did not quiver.
“Only nicked me,” Guy said. “I need it to show self-defence.”
The reiterated implication drove Margaret’s gaze to the man on the floor, and quickly away.
“He is-?”
“Deader than hell,” Guy assured her.
His voice was light, tinged faintly with satisfaction.
She stared at him in horror, her back pressed against the wall, sick with her own part in this death, sick with Guy’s callous brutality of voice and mien. Guy did not see these things. He was looking thoughtfully at the dead man.
“I told you I’d give him a bellyful if he wanted it,” he boasted. “I told him the same thing five years ago, in Malta.”
He stirred the dead Doucas gently with one foot. Margaret cringed against the wall, feeling as if she were going to vomit.
Guy’s foot nudged the dead man slowly, reflectively. Guy’s eyes were dull with distant things, things that might have happened five years ago in a place that to her was only a name on a map, vaguely associated with Crusades and kittens. Blood trickled down his cheek, hung momentarily in fattening drops, dripped down on the dead man’s coat.
The poking foot stopped its ghoulish play. Guy’s eyes grew wide and bright, his face lean with eagerness. He snapped fist into palm and jerked around to Margaret.
“By God! This fellow has got a pearl concession down in La Paz! If I can get down there ahead of the news of the killing, I can—Why, what’s the matter?”
He stared at her, puzzlement wiping animation from his face.
Margaret’s gaze faltered away from him. She looked at the overturned table, across the room, at the floor. She could not hold up her eyes for him to see what was in them. If understanding had come to him at once—but she could not stand there and look at him and wait for the thing in her eyes to burn into his consciousness.
She tried to keep that thing out of her voice.
“I’ll bandage your cheek before we phone the police,” she said.
THE ASSISTANT MURDERER
Gold on the door, edged with black, said:
ALEXANDER RUSH
PRIVATE DETECTIVE
Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.
The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handdom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the floor. On one buff wall hung a framed certificate that licensed Alexander Rush to pursue the calling of private detective in the city of Baltimore in accordance with certain red-numbered regulations. A map of the city hung on another wall. Beneath the map a frail bookcase, small as it was, gaped emptily around its contents: a yellowish railway guide, a smaller hotel directory, and street and telephone directories for Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. An insecure oaken clothes-tree held up a black derby and a black overcoat beside a white sink in one corner. The four chairs in the room were unrelated to one another in everything except age. The desk’s scarred top held, in addition to the proprietor’s feet, a telephone, a black-clotted inkwell, a disarray of papers having generally to do with criminals who had escaped from one prison or another, and a grayed ashtray that held as much ash and as many black cigar stumps as a tray of its size could expect to hold.
An ugly office—the proprietor was uglier.
His head was squatly pear-shaped. Excessively heavy, wide, blunt at the jaw, it narrowed as it rose to the close-cropped, erect grizzled hair that sprouted above a low, slanting forehead. His complexion was of a rich darkish red, his skin tough in texture and rounded over thick cushions of fat.
These fundamental inelegancies were by no means all his ugliness. Things had been done to his features.
One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked. Another way, you said it could not be crooked; it had no shape at all. Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its color. Veins had broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings. His lips were thick, tough-skinned. Between them showed the brassy glint of two solid rows of gold teeth, the lower row lapping the upper, so undershot was the bulging jaw. His eyes—small, deep-set, and pale blue of iris—were bloodshot to a degree that made you think he had a heavy cold. His ears accounted for some of his earlier years: they were the thickened, twisted cauliflower ears of the pugilist.
A man of forty-something, ugly, sitting tilted back in his chair, feet on desk.
The gilt-labelled door opened and another man came into the office. Perhaps ten years younger than the man at the desk, he was, roughly speaking, everything that one was not. Fairly tall, slender, fair-skinned, brown-eyed, he would have been as little likely to catch your eye in a gambling-house as in an art gallery. His clothes—suit and hat were gray—were fresh and properly pressed, and even fashionable in that inconspicuous manner which is one sort of taste. His face was likewise unobtrusive, which was surprising when you considered how narrowly it missed handsomeness through the least meagerness of mouth—a mark of the too-cautious man.
Two steps into the office he hesitated, brown eyes glancing from shabby furnishings to ill-visaged proprietor. So much ugliness seemed to disconcert the man in gray. An apologetic smile began on his lips, as if he were about to murmur, “I beg your pardon, I’m in the wrong office.”
But when he finally spoke it was otherwise. He took another step forward, asking uncertainly:
“You are Mr. Rush?”
“Yeah.” The detective’s voice was hoarse with a choking harshness that seemed to corroborate the heavy-cold testimony of his eyes. He put his feet down on the floor and jerked a fat, red hand at a chair. “Sit down, sir.”
The man in gray sat down, tentatively upright on the chair’s front edge.
“Now what can I do for you?” Alec Rush croaked amiably.
“I want—I wish—I would like—” and further than that the man in gray said nothing.
“Maybe you’d better just tell me what’s wrong,” the detective suggested. “Then I’ll know what you want of me.” He smiled.
There was kindliness in Alec Rush’s smile, and it was not easily resisted. True, his smile was a horrible grimace out of a nightmare, but that was its charm. When your gentle-countenanced man smiles there is small gain: his smile expresses little more than his reposed face. But when Alec Rush distorted his ogre’s mask so that jovial friendliness peeped i
ncongruously from his savage red eyes, from his brutal metal-studded mouth—then that was a heartening, a winning thing.
“Yes, I daresay that would be better.” The man in gray sat back in his chair, more comfortably, less transiently. “Yesterday on Fayette Street, I met—a young woman I know. I hadn’t—we hadn’t met for several months. That isn’t really pertinent, however. But after we separated—we had talked for a few minutes—I saw a man. That is, he came out of a doorway and went down the street in the same direction she had taken, and I got the idea he was following her. She turned into Liberty Street and he did likewise. Countless people walk along that same route, and the idea that he was following her seemed fantastic, so much so that I dismissed it and went on about my business.
“But I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. It seemed to me there had been something peculiarly intent in his carriage, and no matter how much I told myself the notion was absurd, it persisted in worrying me. So last night, having nothing especial to do, I drove out to the neighborhood of—of the young woman’s house. And I saw the same man again. He was standing on a corner two blocks from her house. It was the same man—I’m certain of it. I tried to watch him, but while I was finding a place for my car he disappeared and I did not see him again. Those are the circumstances. Now will you look into it, learn if he is actually following her, and why?”
“Sure,” the detective agreed hoarsely, “but didn’t you say anything to the lady or to any of her family?”
The man in gray fidgeted in his chair and looked at the stringy dun carpet.
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to disturb her, frighten her, and still don’t. After all, it may be no more than a meaningless coincidence, and—and—well—I don’t—That’s impossible! What I had in mind was for you to find out what is wrong, if anything, and remedy it without my appearing in the matter at all.”
Crime Stories Page 64