“ ‘He called me a Balkan, said I had big feet, and that I had a square head, and that I was hardly what one would call a gentleman.’
“Berthier’s eyes popped out like saucers.
“ ‘It’s unthinkable,’ he said. ‘He must have been describing that crook we’re after.’
“I could see that Berthier took this robbery seriously.
“ ‘I thought you never fell for those old gags,’ I said.
“ ‘Old gags!’ he retorted, his voice rising. ‘Hardly a gag, that!’
“ ‘Old as the hills!’ I assured him. ‘The basis of most of the so-called magic one sees on the stage.’ I paused. ‘And what will you do with these nice people when you catch them?’
“ ‘Ten years in jail, at least,’ he growled.
“I looked at my watch. The twenty-four hours were well over. Berthier had talked himself out of adjectives concerning this gang of thieves; he could only sit and clench his fists and bite his lips.
“ ‘Four million,’ he muttered. ‘It could have been avoided. That man Armand—’
“I took my cue. ‘That man Berthier,’ I said crisply, accusingly, ‘should run his establishment better. Besides, my wager concerned you, and not Armand—’
“Berthier looked up sharply, his brain struggling with some dark clew. I mechanically put my hand in my trousers pocket and very slowly drew out a long iridescent string of crystallized carbon ending in a great square pendant.
“Berthier’s jaw dropped. He leaned forward. His hand raised and slowly dropped to his side.
“ ‘You!’ he whispered. ‘You, West!’
“I thought he would collapse. I laid the necklace on his desk, a hand on his shoulder. He found his voice.
“ ‘Was it you who got those necklaces?’
“ ‘No. It was I who stole that necklace, and I who win the wager. Please hand over the yellow diamond.’
“I think it took Berthier ten minutes to regain his composure. He didn’t know whether to curse me or to embrace me. I told him the whole story, beginning with our dinner at Ciro’s. The proof of it was that the necklace was there on his desk.
“And I am sure Armand thinks I am insane. He was there when Berthier gave me this ring, this fine yellow diamond.”
West settled back in his chair, holding his glass in the same hand that wore the gem.
“Not so bad, eh?” he asked.
I admitted that it was a bit complicated. I was curious about one point, and that was his make-up. He explained: “You see, the broad low-crowned hat reduces one inch from my height; the wide whiskers, instead of the pointed beard, another inch; the bulgy coat, another inch; the trousers, high at the shoes, another inch. That’s four inches off my stature with an increase of girth about one-sixth my height—an altogether different figure. A visit to a pharmacy changed my complexion from that of a Nordic to a Semitic.”
“And the hotel?” I asked.
“Very simple. I had Berthier go around and pay the damages for plugging that hole. He’ll do anything I say now.”
I regarded West in the waning firelight.
He was supremely content.
“You must have hated to give up those Indian gems after what you went through to get them?”
West smiled.
“That was the hardest of all. It was like giving away something that was mine, mine by right of conquest. And I’ll tell you another thing—if they had not belonged to a friend, I would have kept them.”
And knowing West as I do, I am sure he spoke the truth.
THE FAREWELL MURDER
1
I was the only one who left the train at Farewell.
A man came through the rain from the passenger shed. He was a small man. His face was dark and flat. He wore a gray waterproof cap and a gray coat cut in military style.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the valise and gladstone bag in my hands. He came forward quickly, walking with short, choppy steps.
He didn’t say anything when he took the bags from me. I asked:
“Kavalov’s?”
He had already turned his back to me and was carrying my bags towards a tan Stutz coach that stood in the roadway beside the gravel station platform. In answer to my question he bowed twice at the Stutz without looking around or checking his jerky half-trot.
I followed him to the car.
Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills. The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.
The flat-faced man was in a hurry. We purred over the road at a speed that soon carried us past the last of the cottages sprinkled up the hillside.
Presently we left the shiny black road for a paler one curving south to run along a hill’s wooded crest. Now and then this road, for a hundred feet or more at a stretch, was turned into a tunnel by tall trees’ heavily leafed boughs interlocking overhead.
Rain accumulated in fat drops on the boughs and came down to thump the Stutz’s roof. The dullness of rainy early evening became almost the blackness of night inside these tunnels.
The flat-faced man switched on the lights, and increased our speed.
He sat rigidly erect at the wheel. I sat behind him. Above his military collar, among the hairs that were clipped short on the nape of his neck, globules of moisture made tiny shining points. The moisture could have been rain. It could have been sweat.
We were in the middle of one of the tunnels.
The flat-faced man’s head jerked to the left, and he screamed:
“A-a-a-a-a-a!”
It was a long, quivering, high-pitched bleat, thin with terror.
I jumped up, bending forward to see what was the matter with him.
The car swerved and plunged ahead, throwing me back on the seat again.
Through the side window I caught a one-eyed glimpse of something dark lying in the road.
I twisted around to try the back window, less rain-bleared.
I saw a black man lying on his back in the road, near the left edge. His body was arched, as if its weight rested on his heels and the back of his head. A knife handle that couldn’t have been less than six inches long stood straight up in the air from the left side of his chest.
By the time I had seen this much we had taken a curve and were out of the tunnel.
“Stop,” I called to the flat-faced man.
He pretended he didn’t hear me. The Stutz was a tan streak under us. I put a hand on the driver’s shoulder.
His shoulder squirmed under my hand, and he screamed “A-a-a-a-a!” again as if the dead black man had him.
I reached past him and shut off the engine.
He took his hands from the wheel and clawed up at me. Noises came from his mouth, but they didn’t make any words that I knew.
I got a hand on the wheel. I got my other forearm under his chin. I leaned over the back of his seat so that the weight of my upper body was on his head, mashing it down against the wheel.
Between this and that and the help of God, the Stutz hadn’t left the road when it stopped moving.
I got up off the flat-faced man’s head and asked:
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
He looked at me with white eyes, shivered, and didn’t say anything.
“Turn it around,” I said. “We’ll go back there.”
He shook his head from side to side, desperately, and made some more of the mouth-noises that might have been words if I could have understood them.
“You know who that was?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You do,” I growled.
He shook his head.
By then I was beginning to suspect that no matter what I said to this fellow I’d get only headshakes out of him.
I said:
“Get away from the wheel, then. I’m going to drive back there.”
He opened the door and scrambled out.
“Come back here,” I called.
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He backed away, shaking his head.
I cursed him, slid in behind the wheel, said, “All right, wait here for me,” and slammed the door.
He retreated backwards slowly, watching me with scared, whitish eyes while I backed and turned the coach.
I had to drive back farther than I had expected, something like a mile.
I didn’t find the black man. The tunnel was empty.
If I had known the exact spot in which he had been lying, I might have been able to find something to show how he had been removed. But I hadn’t had time to pick out a landmark, and now any one of four or five places looked like the spot.
With the help of the coach’s lamps I went over the left side of the road from one end of the tunnel to the other.
I didn’t find any blood. I didn’t find any footprints. I didn’t find anything to show that anybody had been lying in the road. I didn’t find anything.
It was too dark by now for me to try searching the woods.
I returned to where I had left the flat-faced man.
He was gone.
It looked, I thought, as if Mr. Kavalov might be right in thinking he needed a detective.
2
Half a mile beyond the place where the flat-faced man had deserted me, I stopped the Stutz in front of a grilled steel gate that blocked the road. The gate was padlocked on the inside. From either side of it tall hedging ran off into the woods. The upper part of a brown-roofed small house was visible over the hedge-top to the left.
I worked the Stutz’s horn.
The racket brought a gawky boy of fifteen or sixteen to the other side of the gate. He had on bleached whipcord pants and a wildly striped sweater. He didn’t come out to the middle of the road, but stood at one side, with one arm out of sight as if holding something that was hidden from me by the hedge.
“This Kavalov’s?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said uneasily.
I waited for him to unlock the gate. He didn’t unlock it. He stood there looking uneasily at the car and at me.
“Please, mister,” I said, “can I come in?”
“What—who are you?”
“I’m the guy that Kavalov sent for. If I’m not going to be let in, tell me, so I can catch the six-fifty back to San Francisco.”
The boy chewed his lip, said, “Wait till I see if I can find the key,” and went out of sight behind the hedge.
He was gone long enough to have had a talk with somebody.
When he came back he unlocked the gate, swung it open, and said:
“It’s all right, sir. They’re expecting you.”
When I had driven through the gate I could see lights on a hilltop a mile or so ahead and to the left.
“Is that the house?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. They’re expecting you.”
Close to where the boy had stood while talking to me through the gate, a double-barrel shotgun was propped up against the hedge.
I thanked the boy and drove on. The road wound gently uphill through farmland. Tall, slim trees had been planted at regular intervals on both sides of the road.
The road brought me at last to the front of a building that looked like a cross between a fort and a factory in the dusk. It was built of concrete. Take a flock of squat cones of various sizes, round off the points bluntly, mash them together with the largest one somewhere near the center, the others grouped around it in not too strict accordance with their sizes, adjust the whole collection to agree with the slopes of a hilltop, and you would have a model of the Kavalov house. The windows were steel-sashed. There weren’t very many of them. No two were in line either vertically or horizontally. Some were lighted.
As I got out of the car, the narrow front door of this house opened.
A short, red-faced woman of fifty or so, with faded blond hair wound around and around her head, came out. She wore a high-necked, tight-sleeved, gray woolen dress. When she smiled her mouth seemed wide as her lips.
She said:
“You’re the gentleman from the city?”
“Yeah. I lost your chauffeur somewhere back on the road.”
“Lord bless you,” she said amiably, “that’s all right.”
A thin man with thin dark hair plastered down above a thin, worried face came past her to take my bags when I had lifted them out of the car. He carried them indoors.
The woman stood aside for me to enter, saying:
“Now I suppose you’ll want to wash up a little bit before you go in to dinner, and they won’t mind waiting for you the few minutes you’ll take if you hurry.”
I said, “Yeah, thanks,” waited for her to get ahead of me again, and followed her up a curving flight of stairs that climbed along the inside of one of the cones that made up the building.
She took me to a second-story bedroom where the thin man was unpacking my bags.
“Martin will get you anything you need,” she assured me from the doorway, “and when you’re ready, just come on downstairs.”
I said I would, and she went away. The thin man had finished unpacking by the time I had got out of coat, vest, collar and shirt. I told him there wasn’t anything else I needed, washed up in the adjoining bathroom, put on a fresh shirt and collar, my vest and coat, went downstairs.
The wide hall was empty. Voices came through an open doorway to the left.
One voice was a nasal whine. It complained:
“I will not have it. I will not put up with it. I am not a child, and I will not have it.”
This voice’s t’s were a little too thick for t’s, but not thick enough to be d’s.
Another voice was a lively, but slightly harsh, baritone. It said cheerfully:
“What’s the good of saying we won’t put up with it, when we are putting up with it?”
The third voice was feminine, a soft voice, but flat and spiritless. It said:
“But perhaps he did kill him.”
The whining voice said: “I do not care. I will not have it.”
The baritone voice said, cheerfully as before: “Oh, won’t you?”
A doorknob turned farther down the hall. I didn’t want to be caught standing there listening. I advanced to the open doorway.
3
I was in the doorway of a low-ceilinged oval room furnished and decorated in gray, white and silver. Two men and a woman were there.
The older man—he was somewhere in his fifties—got up from a deep gray chair and bowed ceremoniously at me. He was a plump man of medium height, completely bald, dark-skinned and pale-eyed. He wore a wax-pointed gray mustache and a straggly gray imperial.
“Mr. Kavalov?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.” His was the whining voice.
I told him who I was. He shook my hand and then introduced me to the others.
The woman was his daughter. She was probably thirty. She had her father’s narrow, full-lipped mouth, but her eyes were dark, her nose was short and straight, and her skin was almost colorless. Her face had Asia in it. It was pretty, passive, unintelligent.
The man with the baritone voice was her husband. His name was Ringgo. He was six or seven years older than his wife, neither tall nor heavy, but well set-up. His left arm was in splints and a sling. The knuckles of his right hand were darkly bruised. He had a lean, bony, quickwitted face, bright dark eyes with plenty of lines around them, and a good-natured hard mouth.
He gave me his bruised hand, wriggled his bandaged arm at me, grinned, and said:
“I’m sorry you missed this, but the future injuries are yours.”
“How did it happen?” I asked.
Kavalov raised a plump hand.
“Time enough it is to go into that when we have eaten,” he said. “Let us have our dinner first.”
We went into a small green and brown dining-room where a small square table was set. I sat facing Ringgo across a silver basket of orchids that stood between tall fiver candlesticks in the center of the table. Mrs. Ringgo sat to my right, Kaval
ov to my left. When Kavalov sat town I saw the shape of an automatic pistol in his hip pocket.
Two men servants waited on us. There was a lot of food and all of it was well turned out. We ate caviar, some sort of consommé, sand dabs, potatoes and cucumber jelly, roast lamb, corn and string beans, asparagus, wild duck and hominy cakes, artichoke-and-tomato salad, and orange ice. We drank white wine, claret, Burgundy, coffee and créme de menthe.
Kavalov ate and drank enormously. None of us skimped.
Kavalov was the first to disregard his own order that nothing be said about his troubles until after we had eaten. When he had finished his soup he put down his spoon and said:
“I am not a child. I will not be frightened.”
He blinked pale, worried eyes defiantly at me, his lips pouting between mustache and imperial.
Ringgo grinned pleasantly at him. Mrs. Ringgo’s face was as serene and unattentive as if nothing had been said.
“What is there to be frightened of?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Kavalov said. “Nothing excepting a lot of idiotic and very pointless trickery and play-acting.”
“You can call it anything you want to call it,” a voice grumbled over my shoulder, “but I seen what I seen.”
The voice belonged to one of the men who was waiting on the table, a sallow, youngish man with a narrow, slack-lipped face. He spoke with a subdued sort of stubbornness, and without looking up from the dish he was putting before me.
Since nobody else paid any attention to the servant’s clearly audible remark, I turned my face to Kavalov again. He was trimming the edge of a sand dab with the side of his fork.
“What kind of trickery and play-acting?” I asked.
Kavalov put down his fork and rested his wrists on the edge of the table. He rubbed his lips together and leaned over his plate towards me.
“Supposing”—he wrinkled his forehead so that his bald scalp twitched forward—“you have done injury to a man ten years ago.” He turned his wrists quickly, laying his hands palm-up on the white cloth. “You have done this injury in the ordinary business manner—you understand?—for profit. There is not anything personal concerned. You do not hardly know him. And then supposing he came to you after all those ten years and said to you: ‘I have come to watch you die.’ ” He turned his hands over, palms down. “Well, what would you think?”
Crime Stories Page 78