Corkscrew and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  The first thin ray he sent downstairs missed me by an inch—which gave me time to make a map there in the dark. If he was of medium size, holding the light in his left hand, a gun in his right, and exposing as little of himself as possible—his noodle should have been a foot and a half above the beginning of the light-beam, the same distance behind it, six inches to the left—my left.

  The light swung sideways and hit one of my legs.

  I swung the barrel of my gun at the point I had marked X in the night.

  His gun-fire cooked my cheek. One of his arms tried to take me with him. I twisted away and let him dive alone into the cellar, showing me a flash of gold teeth as he went past.

  The house was full of “Ah yahs” and pattering feet.

  I had to move—or I’d be pushed.

  Downstairs might be a trap. I went up to the passageway again.

  The passageway was solid and alive with stinking bodies. Hands and teeth began to take my clothes away from me. I knew damned well I had declared myself in on something!

  I was one of a struggling, tearing, grunting and groaning mob of invisibles. An eddy of them swept me toward the kitchen. Hitting, kicking, butting, I went along.

  A high-pitched voice was screaming Chinese orders.

  My shoulder scraped the door-frame as I was carried into the kitchen, fighting as best I could against enemies I couldn’t see, afraid to use the gun I still gripped.

  I was only one part of the mad scramble. The flash of my gun might have made me the center of it. These lunatics were fighting panic now: I didn’t want to show them something tangible to tear apart.

  I went along with them, cracking everything that got in my way, and being cracked back. A bucket got between my feet.

  I crashed down, upsetting my neighbors, rolled over a body, felt a foot on my face, squirmed from under it, and came to rest in a corner, still tangled up with the galvanized bucket.

  Thank God for that bucket!

  I wanted these people to go away. I didn’t care who or what they were. If they’d depart in peace I’d forgive their sins.

  I put my gun inside the bucket and squeezed the trigger. I got the worst of the racket, but there was enough to go around. It sounded like a crump going off.

  I cut loose in the bucket again, and had another idea. Two fingers of my left hand in my mouth, I whistled as shrill as I could while I emptied the gun.

  It was a sweet racket!

  When my gun had run out of bullets and my lungs out of air, I was alone. I was glad to be alone. I knew why men go off and live in caves by themselves. And I didn’t blame them!

  Sitting there alone in the dark, I reloaded my gun.

  On hands and knees I found my way to the open kitchen door, and peeped out into the blackness that told me nothing. The surf made guzzling sounds in the cove. From the other side of the house came the noise of cars. I hoped it was my friends going away.

  I shut the door, locked it, and turned on the kitchen light.

  The place wasn’t as badly upset as I had expected. Some pans and dishes were down and a chair had been broken, and the place smelled of unwashed bodies. But that was all—except a blue cotton sleeve in the middle of the floor, a straw sandal near the passageway door, and a handful of short black hairs, a bit blood-smeared, beside the sandal.

  In the cellar I did not find the man I had sent down there. An open door showed how he had left me. His flashlight was there, and my own, and some of his blood.

  Upstairs again, I went through the front of the house. The front door was open. Rugs had been rumpled. A blue vase was broken on the floor. A table was pushed out of place, and a couple of chairs had been upset. I found an old and greasy brown felt hat that had neither sweat-band nor hat-band. I found a grimy photograph of President Coolidge—apparently cut from a Chinese newspaper—and six wheat-straw cigarette papers.

  I found nothing upstairs to show that any of my guests had gone up there.

  It was half past two in the morning when I heard a car drive up to the front door. I peeped out of Lillian Shan’s bedroom window, on the second floor. She was saying good-night to Jack Garthorne.

  I went back to the library to wait for her.

  “Nothing happened?” were her first words, and they sounded more like a prayer than anything else.

  “It did,” I told her, “and I suppose you had your breakdown.”

  For a moment I thought she was going to lie to me, but she nodded, and dropped into a chair, not as erect as usual.

  “I had a lot of company,” I said, “but I can’t say I found out much about them. The fact is, I bit off more than I could chew, and had to be satisfied with chasing them out.”

  “You didn’t call the sheriff’s office?” There was something strange about the tone in which she put the question.

  “No—I don’t want Garthorne arrested yet.”

  That shook the dejection out of her. She was up, tall and straight in front of me, and cold.

  “I’d rather not go into that again,” she said.

  That was all right with me, but:

  “You didn’t say anything to him, I hope.”

  “Say anything to him?” She seemed amazed. “Do you think I would insult him by repeating your guesses—your absurd guesses?”

  “That’s fine,” I applauded her silence if not her opinion of my theories. “Now, I’m going to stay here tonight. There isn’t a chance in a hundred of anything happening, but I’ll play it safe.”

  She didn’t seem very enthusiastic about that, but she finally went off to bed.

  Nothing happened between then and sun-up, of course. I left the house as soon as daylight came and gave the grounds the once over. Footprints were all over the place, from water’s edge to driveway. Along the driveway some of the sod was cut where machines had been turned carelessly.

  Borrowing one of the cars from the garage, I was back in San Francisco before the morning was far gone.

  In the office, I asked the Old Man to put an operative behind Jack Garthorne; to have the old hat, flashlight, sandal and the rest of my souvenirs put under the microscope and searched for finger prints, foot prints, tooth-prints or what have you; and to have our Richmond branch look up the Garthornes. Then I went up to see my Filipino assistant.

  He was gloomy.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Somebody knock you over?”

  “Oh, no, sir!” he protested. “But maybe I am not so good a detective. I try to follow one fella, and he turns a corner and he is gone.”

  “Who was he, and what was he up to?”

  “I do not know, sir. There is four automobiles with men getting out of them into that cellar of which I tell you the strange Chinese live. After they are gone in, one man comes out. He wears his hat down over bandage on his upper face, and he walks away rapidly. I try to follow him, but he turns that corner, and where is he?”

  “What time did all this happen?”

  “Twelve o’clock, maybe.”

  “Could it have been later than that, or earlier?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  My visitors, no doubt, and the man Cipriano had tried to shadow could have been the one I swatted. The Filipino hadn’t thought to get the license numbers of the automobiles. He didn’t know whether they had been driven by white men or Chinese, or even what make cars they were.

  “You’ve done fine,” I assured him. “Try it again tonight. Take it easy, and you’ll get there.”

  From him I went to a telephone and called the Hall of Justice. Dummy Uhl’s death had not been reported, I learned.

  Twenty minutes later I was skinning my knuckles on Chang Li Ching’s front door.

  VII

  The little old Chinese with the rope neck didn’t open for me this time. Instead, a young Chinese with a smallpox-pitted face and a wide
grin.

  “You wanna see Chang Li Ching,” he said before I could speak, and stepped back for me to enter.

  I went in and waited while he replaced all the bars and locks. We went to Chang by a shorter route than before, but it was still far from direct. For a while I amused myself trying to map the route in my head as he went along, but it was too complicated, so I gave it up.

  The velvet-hung room was empty when my guide showed me in, bowed, grinned, and left me. I sat down in a chair near the table and waited.

  Chang Li Ching didn’t put on the theatricals for me by materializing silently, or anything of the sort. I heard his soft slippers on the floor before he parted the hangings and came in. He was alone, his white whiskers ruffled in a smile that was grandfatherly.

  “The Scatterer of Hordes honors my poor residence again,” he greeted me, and went on at great length with the same sort of nonsense that I’d had to listen to on my first visit.

  The Scatterer of Hordes part was cool enough—if it was a reference to last night’s doings.

  “Not knowing who he was until too late, I beaned one of your servants last night,” I said when he had run out of flowers for the time. “I know there’s nothing I can do to square myself for such a terrible act, but I hope you’ll let me cut my throat and bleed to death in one of your garbage cans as a sort of apology.”

  A little sighing noise that could have been a smothered chuckle disturbed the old man’s lips, and the purple cap twitched on his round head.

  “The Disperser of Marauders knows all things,” he murmured blandly, “even to the value of noise in driving away demons. If he says the man he struck was Chang Li Ching’s servant, who is Chang to deny it?”

  I tried him with my other barrel.

  “I don’t know much—not even why the police haven’t yet heard of the death of the man who was killed here yesterday.”

  One of his hands made little curls in his white beard.

  “I had not heard of the death,” he said.

  I could guess what was coming, but I wanted to take a look at it.

  “You might ask the man who brought me here yesterday,” I suggested.

  Chang Li Ching picked up a little padded stick from the table and struck a tasseled gong that hung at his shoulder. Across the room the hangings parted to admit the pock-marked Chinese who had brought me in.

  “Did death honor our hovel yesterday?” Chang asked in English.

  “No, Ta Jen,” the pock-marked one said.

  “It was the nobleman who guided me here yesterday,” I explained, “not this son of an emperor.”

  Chang imitated surprise.

  “Who welcomed the King of Spies yesterday?” he asked the man at the door.

  “I bring ’em, Ta Jen.”

  I grinned at the pock-marked man, he grinned back, and Chang smiled benevolently.

  “An excellent jest,” he said.

  It was.

  The pock-marked man bowed and started to duck back through the hangings. Loose shoes rattled on the boards behind him. He spun around. One of the big wrestlers I had seen the previous day loomed above him. The wrestler’s eyes were bright with excitement, and grunted Chinese syllables poured out of his mouth. The pock-marked one talked back. Chang Li Ching silenced them with a sharp command. All this was in Chinese—out of my reach.

  “Will the Grand Duke of Manhunters permit his servant to depart for a moment to attend to his distressing domestic affairs?”

  “Sure.”

  Chang bowed with his hands together, and spoke to the wrestler.

  “You will remain here to see that the great one is not disturbed and that any wishes he expresses are gratified.”

  The wrestler bowed and stood aside for Chang to pass through the door with the pock-marked man. The hangings swung over the door behind them.

  I didn’t waste any language on the man at the door, but got a cigarette going and waited for Chang to come back. The cigarette was half gone when a shot sounded in the building, not far away.

  The giant at the door scowled.

  Another shot sounded, and running feet thumped in the hall. The pock-marked man’s face came through the hangings. He poured grunts at the wrestler. The wrestler scowled at me and protested. The other insisted.

  The wrestler scowled at me again, rumbled, “You wait,” and was gone with the other.

  I finished my cigarette to the tune of muffled struggle-sounds that seemed to come from the floor below. There were two more shots, far apart. Feet ran past the door of the room I was in. Perhaps ten minutes had gone since I had been left alone.

  I found I wasn’t alone.

  Across the room from the door, the hangings that covered the wall were disturbed. The blue, green and silver velvet bulged out an inch and settled back in place.

  The disturbance happened the second time perhaps ten feet farther along the wall. No movement for a while, and then a tremor in the far corner.

  Somebody was creeping along between hangings and wall.

  I let them creep, still slumping in my chair with idle hands. If the bulge meant trouble, action on my part would only bring it that much quicker.

  I traced the disturbance down the length of that wall and halfway across the other, to where I knew the door was. Then I lost it for some time. I had just decided that the creeper had gone through the door when the curtains opened and the creeper stepped out.

  She wasn’t four and a half feet high—a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy around her temples. Gold earrings swung beside her smooth cheeks, a jade butterfly was in her hair. A lavender jacket, glittering with white stones, covered her from under her chin to her knees. Lavender stockings showed under her short lavender trousers, and her bound-small feet were in slippers of the same color, shaped like kittens, with yellow stones for eyes and aigrettes for whiskers.

  The point of all this our-young-ladies’-fashion stuff is that she was impossibly dainty. But there she was—neither a carving nor a painting, but a living small woman with fear in her black eyes and nervous, tiny fingers worrying the silk at her bosom.

  Twice as she came toward me—hurrying with the awkward, quick step of the foot-bound Chinese woman—her head twisted around for a look at the hangings over the door.

  I was on my feet by now, going to meet her.

  Her English wasn’t much. Most of what she babbled at me I missed, though I thought “yung hel-lup” might have been meant for “You help?”

  I nodded, catching her under the elbows as she stumbled against me.

  She gave me some more language that didn’t make the situation any clearer—unless “sul-lay-vee gull” meant slave-girl and “tak-ka wah” meant take away.

  “You want me to get you out of here?” I asked.

  Her head, close under my chin, went up and down, and her red flower of a mouth shaped a smile that made all the other smiles I could remember look like leers.

  She did some more talking. I got nothing out of it. Taking one of her elbows out of my hand, she pushed up her sleeve, baring a forearm that an artist had spent a life-time carving out of ivory. On it were five finger-shaped bruises ending in cuts where the nails had punctured the flesh.

  She let the sleeve fall over it again, and gave me more words. They didn’t mean anything to me, but they tinkled prettily.

  “All right,” I said, sliding my gun out. “If you want to go, we’ll go.”

  Both her hands went to the gun, pushing it down, and she talked excitedly into my face, winding up with a flicking of one hand across her collar—a pantomime of a throat being cut.

  I shook my head from side to side and urged her toward the door.

  She balked, fright large in her eyes.

 
One of her hands went to my watch-pocket. I let her take the watch out.

  She put the tiny tip of one pointed finger over the twelve and then circled the dial three times. I thought I got that. Thirty-six hours from noon would be midnight of the following night—Thursday.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She shot a look at the door and led me to the table where the tea things were. With a finger dipped in cold tea she began to draw on the table’s inlaid top. Two parallel lines I took for a street. Another pair crossed them. The third pair crossed the second and paralleled the first.

  “Waverly Place?” I guessed.

  Her face bobbed up and down, delightedly.

  On what I took for the east side of Waverly Place she drew a square—perhaps a house. In the square she set what could have been a rose. I frowned at that. She erased the rose and in its place put a crooked circle, adding dots. I thought I had it. The rose had been a cabbage. This thing was a potato. The square represented the grocery store I had noticed on Waverly Place. I nodded.

  Her finger crossed the street and put a square on the other side, and her face turned up to mine, begging me to understand her.

  “The house across the street from the grocer’s,” I said slowly, and then, as she tapped my watch-pocket, I added, “at midnight tomorrow.”

  I don’t know how much of it she caught, but she nodded her little head until her earrings were swinging like crazy pendulums.

  With a quick diving motion, she caught my right hand, kissed it, and with a tottering, hoppy run vanished behind the velvet curtains.

  I used my handkerchief to wipe the map off the table and was smoking in my chair when Chang Li Ching returned some twenty minutes later.

  I left shortly after that, as soon as we had traded a few dizzy compliments. The pock-marked man ushered me out.

  At the office there was nothing new for me. Foley hadn’t been able to shadow The Whistler the night before.

  I went home for the sleep I had not got last night.

  VIII

  At ten minutes after ten the next morning Lillian Shan and I arrived at the front door of Fong Yick’s employment agency on Washington Street.