by Otto Penzler
He put his ear to the keyhole, could hear the guy breathing there on the other side of the door, waiting! He went at the trunk, pitched out all the things he’d been stuffing in it when she interrupted him. Like all wardrobes, one side was entirely open, for suits to be hung in; the other was a network of small compartments and drawers, for shoes, shirts, etc. It wasn’t a particularly well-made trunk; he’d bought it secondhand. He cleared the drawers out, ripped the thin lath partitions out of the way bodily. The hell with the noise, it was no crime partly to destroy your own trunk. Both sides were open now, four-square; just the metal shell remained.
He dragged her over, sat her up in the middle of it, folded her legs up against her out of the way, and pushed the two upright halves closed over her. She vanished, there was no resistance, no impediment, plenty of room. Too much, maybe. He opened it again, packed all his shirts and suits tightly around her, and the splintered partitions and the flattened-out drawers. There wasn’t a thing left out, not a thing left behind, not a nail even. Strangest of biers, for a little fool that hadn’t known her man well enough!
Then he closed it a second time, locked it, tilted it this way and that. You couldn’t tell. He scanned his boat ticket, copied the stateroom number onto the baggage label the steamship company had given him: 42-A. And the label read: NEEDED IN STATEROOM. It couldn’t go into the hold, of course. Discovery would be inevitable in a day or two at the most. He moistened it, slapped it against the side of the trunk.
He gave a last look around. There wasn’t a drop of blood, nothing to give him away. The last thing he saw before he let the porter in was the hollow heel that had betrayed him to her, lying there. He picked it up and slipped it in his pocket, flat.
He opened the door and jerked his thumb. The blue-bloused porter straightened up boredly. “Allons!” Babe said. “This goes right in the taxi with me, understand?”
The man tested it, spit on his hands, grabbed it. “He’ll soak you an extra half-fare.”
“I’m paying,” Babe answered. He sat down on the edge of the bed and finished lacing his shoes. The porter bounced the trunk on its edges out of the room and down the passageway.
Babe caught up with him at the end of it. He wasn’t going to stay very far away from it, from now on. He was sweating a little under his hat band; otherwise he was okay. She hadn’t meant anything to him anyway, and he’d done so many lousy things before now….
He’d never trusted that birdcage French elevator from the beginning, and when he saw Jacques getting ready to tilt the trunk onto it, he had a bad half-minute. The stairs wouldn’t be any too good for it, either; it was a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other. “Will it hold?” he asked.
“Sure, if we don’t get on with it.” It wobbled like jelly, though, under it. Babe wiped his forehead with one finger. “Never dropped yet,” the porter added.
“It only has to once,” thought Babe. He deliberately crossed his middle and index fingers and kept them that way, slowly spiraling around the lethargic apparatus down the stair well.
Jacques closed the nutty-looking little wicket gate, reached over it to punch the bottom button, and then came after him. They’d gone half a flight before anything happened. Then there was a sort of groan, a shudder, and the thing belatedly started down after them.
It seemed to Babe as if they’d already been waiting half an hour, when it finally showed up down below. He’d been in and out and had a taxi sputtering at the door. The concierge was hanging around, and by looking at him, Babe could tell Manon had spoken the truth. He had been asleep until now, hadn’t seen her go up.
The porter lurched the trunk ahead of him down the hall, out onto the Rue l’Ecluse, and then a big row started right in. One of those big French rows that had always amused Sherman until now. It wasn’t funny this time.
The driver didn’t mind taking it, but he wanted it tied on in back, on top, or even at the side, with ropes. The porter, speaking for Babe, insisted that it go inside the body of the cab. It couldn’t go in front because it would have blocked his gears.
Sherman swore like a maniac. “Two fares!” he hollered. “Damn it, I’ll never make the North Station—” A baker and a scissors-grinder had joined in, taking opposite sides, and a gendarme was slouching up from the corner to find out what it was about. Before they got through, they were liable to, at that….
He finally got it in for two and a half fares; it just about made the side door, taking the paint off it plentifully. The gendarme changed his mind and turned back to his post at the crossing. Sherman got in with it, squeezed around it onto the seat, and banged the door. He slipped the porter a five-franc note. “Bon voyage!” the concierge yelled after him.
“Right back at ya!” he gritted. He took a deep breath that seemed to come up from his shoes, almost. “Hurdle number one,” he thought. “Another at the station, another at Cherbourg— and I’m in the clear!”
The one at the Gare du Nord was worse than the one before. This time it was a case of baggage car versus the compartment he was to occupy. It wasn’t that he was afraid to trust it to the baggage car, so much—five hours wouldn’t be very dangerous—it was that he was afraid if he let it go now, it would go right into the hold of the ship without his being able to stop it, and that was where the risk lay. He couldn’t get rid of her at sea once they put her in the hold.
The time element made his second hurdle bad, too; it had narrowed down to within a minute or two of train time. He couldn’t buy the whole compartment, as he had the extra taxi fare, because there was already somebody else in it, one of the bulldog-type Yanks who believed in standing up for his rights. The driver had made the Gare as only a Paris driver can make a destination, on two wheels, and “All aboard!” had already been shouted up and down the long platform. The station-master had one eye on his watch and one on his whistle. Once he tooted that, the thing would be off like a shot—the boat trains are the fastest things in Europe—and Sherman would be left there stranded, without further funds to get him out and with a death penalty crime and a “hot” pearly necklace on his hands….
3
He kept running back and forth between his compartment and the stalled baggage hand-truck up front, sweating like a mule, waving his arms—the conductor on one side of him, the baggage-master on the other.
“Put it in the car aisle, outside my door,” he pleaded. “Stand it up in the vestibule for me, can’t you do that?”
“Against the regulations.” And then ominously, “Why is this trunk any different from all the others? Why does m’sieu insist on keeping it with him?”
“Because I lost one once that way,” was all Babe could think of.
The whistle piped shrilly, doors slammed, the thing started to move. The baggage-master dropped out. “Too late! It will have to be sent after you now!” He turned and ran back to his post.
Sherman took out his wallet, almost emptied it of napkin-size banknotes—what was left of Manon’s savings—about forty dollars in our money. His luck was he’d left that much unchanged yesterday, at the Express. “Don’t do this to me, Jacques! Don’t make it tough for me! It’ll miss my boat if I don’t get it on this train with me!” His voice was hoarse, cracked by now. The wheels were slowly gathering speed, his own car was coming up toward them. They’d been up nearer the baggage car.
The conductor took a quick look up and down the platform. The money vanished. He jerked his head at the waiting truck-man; the man came up alongside the track, started to run parallel to the train, loaded truck and all. Babe caught at the next vestibule hand-rail as it came abreast, swung himself in, the conductor after him. “Hold on to me!” the latter warned. Babe clasped him around the waist from behind. The conductor, leaning out, got a grip on the trunk from above. The truckman hoisted it from below, shoved it in on them. It went aboard as easily as a valise.
They got it up off the steps and parked it over in the farther corner of the vestibule. The conductor banged the car door
shut. “I’ll lose my job if they get wise to this!”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Babe assured him. “I’ll get it off myself at Cherbourg. Just remember to look the other way.”
He saw the fellow counting over the palm-oil, so he handed him the last remaining banknote left in his wallet—just kept some silver for the dockhand at Cherbourg. “You’re a good guy, Jacques,” he told him wearily, slapped him on the back, and went down the car to his compartment. Hurdle number two! Only one more to go. But all this fuss and feathers wasn’t any too good, he realized somberly. It made him and trunk too conspicuous, too easily remembered later on. Well, the hell with it, as long as they couldn’t prove anything!
His compartment mate looked up, not particularly friendly. Babe tried to figure him, and he tried to figure Babe. Or maybe he had already.
“Howja find it?” he said finally. Just that. Meaning he knew Babe had been working Paris in one way or another. Babe got it.
“I don’t have to talk to you!” he snarled. “Whaddya think y’are, an income tax blank?”
“Tell you what I am, a clairvoyant; read the future. First night out you’ll be drumming up a friendly little game—with your own deck of cards. Nickels and dimes, just to make it interesting.” He made a noise with his lips that was the height of vulgarity. “Lone wolf, I notice, though. Matter, Surete get your shill?”
Babe balled a fist, held it back by sheer will power. “Read your own future.” He slapped himself on the shoulder with his other hand. “Find out about the roundhouse waiting for you up in here.”
The other guy went back to his Paris Herald contemptuously. He must have known he’d hit it right the first time, or Babe wouldn’t have taken it from him. “You know where to find me,” he muttered. “Now or after we’re aboard. I’ll be in 42-A.”
The label on that wardrobe trunk of his outside flashed before Babe’s mind. He took a deep breath, that was almost a curse in itself, and closed his eyes. He shut up, didn’t say another word. When he opened his eyes again a minute later, they were focused for a second down at the feet of the guy opposite him. Very flat, that pair of shoes looked, big—and very flat.
The motion of the train seemed to sicken him for a moment. But this guy was going back alone. A muffed assignment? Or just a vacation? They didn’t take 3,000-mile jaunts for vacations. They didn’t take vacations at all! Maybe the assignment hadn’t had a human quarry—just data or evidence from one of the European police files?
The irises of the other man’s eyes weren’t on him at all, were boring into the paper between his fists—which probably meant he could have read the laundry mark on the inside of Babe’s collar at the moment, if he’d been called on to do so. Federal or city? Babe couldn’t figure. Didn’t look government, though. The dick showed too plainly all over him—the gentleman with the whiskers didn’t use types that gave themselves away to their quarry that easy.
“So I not only ride the waves with a corpse in my cabin with me, but with a dick in the next bunk! Oh, lovely tie-up!” He got up and went outside to take a look at his trunk. Looked back through the glass after he’d shut the door; the guy’s eyes hadn’t budged from his paper. There’s such a thing as underdoing a thing; there’s also such a thing as overdoing it, Babe told himself knowingly. The average human glances up when someone leaves the room he’s in. “You’re good,” he cursed him, “but so am I!”
The trunk was okay. He hung around it for a while, smoking a cigarette. The train rushed northwestward through France, with dead Manon and her killer not a foot away from one another, and the ashes of a cigarette were the only obsequies she was getting. They were probably missing her by now at the jewelry shop on the Rue de la Paix, phoning to her place to find out why she hadn’t showed. Maybe a customer would come in today and want to be shown that pearly necklace, number twenty-nine; maybe no one would ask to see it for a week or a month.
He went back in again, cleaned his nails with a pocket-knife. Got up and went out to look, in another half-hour. Came back in again. Gee, Cherbourg was far away! At the third inspection, after another half-hour, he got a bad jolt. A fresh little flapper was sitting perched up on top of it, legs crossed, munching a sandwich! The train motion gave him a little qualm again. He slouched up to her. She gave him a smile, but he didn’t give her one back. She was just a kid, harmless, but he couldn’t bear the sight.
“Get off it, Susie,” he said in a muffled voice, and swept his hand at her vaguely. “Get crumbs all over it, it ain’t a counter.”
She landed on her heels. “Oh, purrdon me!” she said freshly. “We’ve got the President with us!” Then she took a second look at his face. He could tell she was going mushy on him in another minute, so he went back in again. The flatfoot—if he was one—was preferable to that, the way he felt right now.
Cherbourg showed about one, and he’d already been out there in the vestibule with it ten minutes before they started slowing up. The train ran right out onto the new double-decker pier the French had put up, broadside to the boat; all you had to do was step up the compan-ionway.
His friend the conductor brushed by, gave him the office, accomplished the stupendous feat of not seeing the huge trunk there, and went ahead to the next vestibule. The thing stopped. Babe stuck his head out. Then he found out he wouldn’t even need a French middleman, the ship’s stewards were lined up in a row on the platform to take on the hand-luggage for the passengers. One of them came jumping over. “Stand by,” Babe said. The passengers had right of way first, of course. They all cleared out—but not the wise guy. Maybe he’d taken the door at the other end of the coach, though.
Then the third hurdle reared—sky-high. “In the stateroom?” the steward gasped respectfully. “That’s out of the question, sir—a thing that size! That has to go in the hold!”
About seven minutes of this, two more stewards and one of the ship’s officers—and he wasn’t getting anywhere. “Tell you what,” he said finally, groggy with what he was going through, “just lemme have it with me the first day, till I can get it emptied a little and sorted out. Then you can take it down the hold.” He was lighting one cigarette from another and throwing them away half-smoked, his eyebrows were beaded with sweat, the quay was just a blur in front of him….
“We can’t do that, man!” the officer snapped. “The hold’s loaded through the lower hatches. We can’t transfer things from above down there, once we’re out at sea!”
Behind Babe a voice said gruffly: “Lissen, I’m in there with him and I got something to say—or haven’t I? Your objection is that it’ll take up too much room in there, cramp the party sharing the cabin with him, right? Well, cut out this bellyaching, the lot of you, and put it where the guy wants it to go! It’s all right with me, I waive my rights—”
4
Babe didn’t turn around. He knew what had just happened behind him though, knew by the way their opposition flattened out. Not another word was said. He knew as well as if he’d seen it with his own eyes: the guy had palmed his badge at them behind his back!
He would have given anything to have it go into the hold now, instead, but it was too late! He swallowed chokedly, still didn’t turn, didn’t say thanks. He felt like someone who has just had a rattlesnake dropped down the back of his neck while he’s tied hand and foot.
He got down from the car, and they hopped in to get it. He didn’t give it another look. He headed slowly toward the companionway he’d been directed to, to show his ticket, and was aware of the other man strolling along at his elbow. “What’s your game?” he said, out of the corner of his mouth, eyes straight ahead.
There was mockery in the slurring answer. “Just big-hearted. Might even help you make out your customs’ declaration on what y’got in it—”
Babe stumbled over something on the ground before him that wasn’t there at all, stiff-armed himself against a post, went trudging on. He didn’t have anything in his shoulder for this guy before. He had something i
n his heart for him now—death.
He looked up at the triple row of decks above him while an officer was checking his ticket and passport at the foot of the companionway. It was called the American Statesman. “You’re going to be one short when you make the Narrows seven days from now!” he told it silently. “This copper’s never going to leave you alive.”
They maneuvered the trunk down the narrow ship’s corridor and into the stateroom by the skin of its teeth. It was a tight squeeze. It couldn’t, of course, go under either one of the bunks. One remaining wall was taken up by the door, the other by the folding washstand, which opened like a desk. The middle of the room was the only answer, and that promptly turned the cabin into nothing more than a narrow perimeter around the massive object. That his fellow passenger, who wasn’t any sylph, should put up with this was the deadest give-away ever, to Babe’s way of thinking, that he was on to something. Some of these punks had a sixth sense, almost, when it came to scenting crime in the air around them. He wouldn’t need more than one, though, in about a day more, if Babe didn’t do something in a hurry! It was July, and there were going to be two of them in there with it.
He tried half-heartedly to have it shunted down to the hold after all—although that would have been just jumping from a very quick frying pan to a slower but just as deadly fire—but they balked. It would have to be taken out again onto the quay and then shipped aboard from there, they pointed out. There was no longer time enough. And he’d cooked up a steam of unpopularity for himself as it was that wouldn’t clear away for days.
The dick didn’t show right up, but a pair of his valises came in, and Sherman lamped the tags. “E. M. Fowler, New York.” He looked out, and he saw where he’d made still another mistake. He’d bought a cabin on the A-deck, the middle of the three, just under the promenade deck; a C-cabin would have been the right one, below deck level. This one had no porthole opening directly above the water, but a window flush with the deck outside. But then he hadn’t known he was going to travel with a corpse, and her money had made it easy to buy the best. Now he’d have to smuggle her outside with him, all the way along the passageway, down the stairs, and out across the lowest deck—when the time came.