Corkscrew and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  “The prison board isn’t going to like this,” I told him.

  “You got me wrong,” he pleaded. “I ain’t been doing a thing. I was up here to see some friends. And when this thing busted loose I had to hide, because I got a record, and if I’m picked up I’ll be railroaded for it. And now you got me, and you think I’m in on it!”

  “You’re a mind reader,” I assured him, and asked the general: “Where can we pack this bird away for a while, under lock and key?”

  “In my house there is a lumber-room with a strong door and not a window.”

  “That’ll do it. March, Flippo!”

  General Pleshskev collared the youth, while I limped along behind them, examining Flippo’s gun, which was loaded except for the one shot he had fired at me, and reloading my own.

  We had caught our prisoner on the Russian’s grounds, so we didn’t have far to go.

  The general knocked on the door and called out something in his language. Bolts clicked and grated, and the door was swung open by a heavily mustached Russian servant. Behind him the princess and a stalwart older woman stood.

  We went in while the general was telling his household about the capture, and took the captive up to the lumber-room. I frisked him for his pocket-knife and matches—he had nothing else that could help him get out—locked him in and braced the door solidly with a length of board. Then we went downstairs again.

  “You are injured!” the princess, seeing me limp across the floor, cried.

  “Only a twisted ankle,” I said. “But it does bother me some. Is there any adhesive tape around?”

  “Yes,” and she spoke to the mustached servant, who went out of the room and presently returned, carrying rolls of gauze and tape and a basin of steaming water.

  “If you’ll sit down,” the princess said, taking these things from the servant.

  But I shook my head and reached for the adhesive tape.

  “I want cold water, because I’ve got to go out in the wet again. If you’ll show me the bathroom, I can fix myself up in no time.”

  We had to argue about that, but I finally got to the bathroom, where I ran cold water on my foot and ankle, and strapped it with adhesive tape, as tight as I could without stopping the circulation altogether. Getting my wet shoe on again was a job, but when I was through I had two firm legs under me, even if one of them did hurt some.

  When I rejoined the others I noticed that the sound of firing no longer came up the hill, and that the patter of rain was lighter, and a grey streak of coming daylight showed under a drawn blind.

  I was buttoning my slicker when the knocker rang on the front door. Russian words came through, and the young Russian I had met on the beach came in.

  “Aleksandr, you’re—” the stalwart older woman screamed when she saw the blood on his cheek, and fainted.

  He paid no attention to her at all, as if he was used to having her faint.

  “They’ve gone in the boat,” he told me while the girl and two men servants gathered up the woman and laid her on an ottoman.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “I counted ten, and I don’t think I missed more than one or two, if any.”

  “The men I sent down there couldn’t stop them?”

  He shrugged.

  “What would you? It takes a strong stomach to face a machine gun. Your men had been cleared out of the buildings almost before they arrived.”

  The woman who had fainted had revived by now and was pouring anxious questions in Russian at the lad. The princess was getting into her blue cape. The woman stopped questioning the lad and asked her something.

  “It’s all over,” the princess said. “I am going to view the ruins.”

  That suggestion appealed to everybody. Five minutes later all of us, including the servants, were on our way downhill. Behind us, around us, in front of us, were other people going downhill, hurrying along in the drizzle that was very gentle now, their faces tired and excited in the bleak morning light.

  Halfway down, a woman ran out of a cross-path and began to tell me something. I recognized her as one of Hendrixson’s maids.

  I caught some of her words.

  “Presents gone. … Mr. Brophy murdered. … Oliver. …”

  VI

  “I’ll be down later,” I told the others, and set out after the maid.

  She was running back to the Hendrixson house. I couldn’t run, couldn’t even walk fast. She and Hendrixson and more of his servants were standing on the front porch when I arrived.

  “They killed Oliver and Brophy,” the old man said.

  “How?”

  “We were in the back of the house, the rear second story, watching the flashes of the shooting down in the village. Oliver was down here, just inside the front door, and Brophy in the room with the presents. We heard a shot in there, and immediately a man appeared in the doorway of our room, threatening us with two pistols, making us stay there for perhaps ten minutes. Then he shut and locked the door and went away. We broke the door down—and found Brophy and Oliver dead.”

  “Let’s look at them.”

  The chauffeur was just inside the front door. He lay on his back, with his brown throat cut straight across the front, almost back to the vertebræ. His rifle was under him. I pulled it out and examined it. It had not been fired.

  Upstairs, the butler Brophy was huddled against a leg of one of the tables on which the presents had been spread. His gun was gone. I turned him over, straightened him out, and found a bullet-hole in his chest. Around the hole his coat was charred in a large area.

  Most of the presents were still here. But the most valuable pieces were gone. The others were in disorder, lying around any which way, their covers pulled off.

  “What did the one you saw look like?” I asked.

  “I didn’t see him very well,” Hendrixson said. “There was no light in our room. He was simply a dark figure against the candle burning in the hall. A large man in a black rubber raincoat, with some sort of black mask that covered his whole head and face, with small eyeholes.”

  “No hat?”

  “No, just the mask over his entire face and head.”

  As we went downstairs again I gave Hendrixson a brief account of what I had seen and heard and done since I had left him. There wasn’t enough of it to make a long tale.

  “Do you think you can get information about the others from the one you caught?” he asked, as I prepared to go out.

  “No. But I expect to bag them just the same.”

  Couffignal’s main street was jammed with people when I limped into it again. A detachment of Marines from Mare Island was there, and men from a San Francisco police boat. Excited citizens in all degrees of partial nakedness boiled around them. A hundred voices were talking at once, recounting their personal adventures and braveries and losses and what they had seen. Such words as machine gun, bomb, bandit, car, shot, dynamite, and killed sounded again and again, in every variety of voice and tone.

  The bank had been completely wrecked by the charge that had blown the vault. The jewelry store was another ruin. A grocer’s across the street was serving as a field hospital. Two doctors were toiling there, patching up damaged villagers.

  I recognized a familiar face under a uniform cap—Sergeant Roche of the harbor police—and pushed through the crowd to him.

  “Just get here?” he asked as we shook hands. “Or were you in on it?”

  “In on it.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Everything.”

  “Who ever heard of a private detective that didn’t,” he joshed as I led him out of the mob.

  “Did you people run into an empty boat out in the bay?” I asked when we were away from audiences.

  “Empty boats have been floating around the bay all night,” he said.

 
I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Where’s your boat now?” I asked him.

  “Out trying to pick up the bandits. I stayed with a couple of men to lend a hand here.”

  “You’re in luck,” I told him. “Now sneak a look across the street. See the stout old boy with the black whiskers? Standing in front of the druggist’s.”

  General Pleshskev stood there, with the woman who had fainted, the young Russian whose bloody cheek had made her faint, and a pale, plump man of forty-something who had been with them at the reception. A little to one side stood big Ignati, the two menservants I had seen at the house, and another who was obviously one of them. They were chatting together and watching the excited antics of a red-faced property-owner who was telling a curt lieutenant of Marines that it was his own personal private automobile that the bandits had stolen to mount their machine gun on, and what he thought should be done about it.

  “Yes,” said Roche, “I see your fellow with the whiskers.”

  “Well, he’s your meat. The woman and two men with him are also your meat. And those four Russians standing to the left are some more of it. There’s another missing, but I’ll take care of that one. Pass the word to the lieutenant, and you can round up those babies without giving them a chance to fight back. They think they’re safe as angels.”

  “Sure, are you?” the sergeant asked.

  “Don’t be silly!” I growled, as if I had never made a mistake in my life.

  I had been standing on my one good prop. When I put my weight on the other to turn away from the sergeant, it stung me all the way to the hip. I pushed my back teeth together and began to work painfully through the crowd to the other side of the street.

  The princess didn’t seem to be among those present. My idea was that, next to the general, she was the most important member of the push. If she was at their house, and not yet suspicious, I figured I could get close enough to yank her in without a riot.

  Walking was hell. My temperature rose. Sweat rolled out on me.

  “Mister, they didn’t none of ’em come down that way.”

  The one-legged newsboy was standing at my elbow. I greeted him as if he were my pay-check.

  “Come on with me,” I said, taking his arm. “You did fine down there, and now I want you to do something else for me.”

  Half a block from the main street I led him up on the porch of a small yellow cottage. The front door stood open, left that way when the occupants ran down to welcome police and Marines, no doubt. Just inside the door, beside a hall rack, was a wicker porch chair. I committed unlawful entry to the extent of dragging that chair out on the porch.

  “Sit down, son,” I urged the boy.

  He sat, looking up at me with puzzled freckled face. I took a firm grip on his crutch and pulled it out of his hand.

  “Here’s five bucks for rental,” I said, “and if I lose it I’ll buy you one of ivory and gold.”

  And I put the crutch under my arm and began to propel myself up the hill.

  It was my first experience with a crutch. I didn’t break any records. But it was a lot better than tottering along on an unassisted bum ankle.

  The hill was longer and steeper than some mountains I’ve seen, but the gravel walk to the Russians’ house was finally under my feet.

  I was still some dozen feet from the porch when Princess Zhukovski opened the door.

  VII

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, and then, recovering from her surprise, “your ankle is worse!”

  She ran down the steps to help me climb them. As she came I noticed that something heavy was sagging and swinging in the right-hand pocket of her grey flannel jacket.

  With one hand under my elbow, the other arm across my back, she helped me up the steps and across the porch. That assured me she didn’t think I had tumbled to the game. If she had, she wouldn’t have trusted herself within reach of my hands. Why, I wondered, had she come back to the house after starting downhill with the others?

  While I was wondering we went into the house, where she planted me in a large and soft leather chair.

  “You must certainly be starving after your strenuous night,” she said. “I will see if—”

  “No, sit down.” I nodded at a chair facing mine. “I want to talk to you.”

  She sat down, clasping her slender white hands in her lap. In neither face nor pose was there any sign of nervousness, not even of curiosity. And that was overdoing it.

  “Where have you cached the plunder?” I asked.

  The whiteness of her face was nothing to go by. It had been white as marble since I had first seen her. The darkness of her eyes was as natural. Nothing happened to her other features. Her voice was smoothly cool.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “The question doesn’t convey anything to me.”

  “Here’s the point,” I explained. “I’m charging you with complicity in the gutting of Couffignal, and in the murders that went with it. And I’m asking you where the loot has been hidden.”

  Slowly she stood up, raised her chin, and looked at least a mile down at me.

  “How dare you? How dare you speak so to me, a Zhukovski!”

  “I don’t care if you’re one of the Smith Brothers!” Leaning forward, I had pushed my twisted ankle against a leg of the chair, and the resulting agony didn’t improve my disposition. “For the purpose of this talk you are a thief and a murderer.”

  Her strong slender body became the body of a lean crouching animal. Her white face became the face of an enraged animal. One hand—claw now—swept to the heavy pocket of her jacket.

  Then, before I could have batted an eye—though my life seemed to depend on my not batting it—the wild animal had vanished. Out of it—and now I know where the writers of the old fairy stories got their ideas—rose the princess again, cool and straight and tall.

  She sat down, crossed her ankles, put an elbow on an arm of her chair, propped her chin on the back of that hand, and looked curiously into my face.

  “However,” she murmured, “did you chance to arrive at so strange and fanciful a theory?”

  “It wasn’t chance, and it’s neither strange nor fanciful,” I said. “Maybe it’ll save time and trouble if I show you part of the score against you. Then you’ll know how you stand and won’t waste your brains pleading innocence.”

  “I should be grateful,” she smiled, “very!”

  I tucked my crutch in between one knee and the arm of my chair, so my hands would be free to check off my points on my fingers.

  “First—whoever planned the job knew the island—not fairly well, but every inch of it. There’s no need to argue about that. Second—the car on which the machine gun was mounted was local property, stolen from the owner here. So was the boat in which the bandits were supposed to have escaped. Bandits from the outside would have needed a car or a boat to bring their machine guns, explosives, and grenades here and there doesn’t seem to be any reason why they shouldn’t have used that car or boat instead of stealing a fresh one. Third—there wasn’t the least hint of the professional bandit touch on this job. If you ask me, it was a military job from beginning to end. And the worst safe-burglar in the world could have got into both the bank vault and the jeweler’s safe without wrecking the buildings. Fourth—bandits from the outside wouldn’t have destroyed the bridge. They might have blocked it, but they wouldn’t have destroyed it. They’d have saved it in case they had to make their get-away in that direction. Fifth—bandits figuring on a get-away by boat would have cut the job short, wouldn’t have spread it over the whole night. Enough racket was made here to wake up California all the way from Sacramento to Los Angeles. What you people did was to send one man out in the boat, shooting, and he didn’t go far. As soon as he was at a safe distance, he went overboard, and swam back to the island. Big Ignati could have done it without turning a hair.”

&
nbsp; That exhausted my right hand. I switched over, counting on my left.

  “Sixth—I met one of your party, the lad, down on the beach, and he was coming from the boat. He suggested that we jump it. We were shot at, but the man behind the gun was playing with us. He could have wiped us out in a second if he had been in earnest, but he shot over our heads. Seventh—that same lad is the only man on the island, so far as I know, who saw the departing bandits. Eighth—all of your people that I ran into were especially nice to me, the general even spending an hour talking to me at the reception this afternoon. That’s a distinctive amateur crook trait. Ninth—after the machine gun car had been wrecked I chased its occupant. I lost him around this house. The Italian boy I picked up wasn’t him. He couldn’t have climbed up on the path without my seeing him. But he could have run around to the general’s side of the house and vanished indoors there. The general liked him, and would have helped him. I know that, because the general performed a downright miracle by missing him at some six feet with a shotgun. Tenth—you called at Hendrixson’s house for no other purpose than to get me away from there.”

  That finished the left hand. I went back to the right.

  “Eleventh—Hendrixson’s two servants were killed by someone they knew and trusted. Both were killed at close quarters and without firing a shot. I’d say you got Oliver to let you into the house, and were talking to him when one of your men cut his throat from behind. Then you went upstairs and probably shot the unsuspecting Brophy yourself. He wouldn’t have been on his guard against you. Twelfth—but that ought to be enough, and I’m getting a sore throat from listing them.”

  She took her chin off her hand, took a fat white cigarette out of a thin black case, and held it in her mouth while I put a match to the end of it. She took a long pull at it—a draw that accounted for a third of its length—and blew the smoke down at her knees.

  “That would be enough,” she said when all these things had been done, “if it were not that you yourself know it was impossible for us to have been so engaged. Did you not see us—did not everyone see us—time and time again?”