Afraid of a Gun and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  "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 humour 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 materialissd 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 defence she could contrive for him lay in his needing a defence. 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 co
mmended 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.

  —End—

  THE SECOND-STORY ANGEL

  Carter Brigham—Carter Webright Brigham in the tables of contents of various popular magazines—woke with a start, passing from unconsciousness into full awareness too suddenly to doubt that his sleep had been disturbed by something external.

  The moon was not up and his apartment was on the opposite side of the building from the street—lights; the blackness about him was complete—he could not see so far as the foot of his bed.

  Holding his breath, not moving after that first awakening start, he lay with straining eyes and ears. Almost at once a sound—perhaps a repetition of the one that had aroused him —came from the adjoining room: the furtive shuffling of feet across the wooden floor. A moment of silence, and a chair grated on the floor, as if dislodged by a careless shin. Then silence again, and a faint rustling as of a body scraping against the rough paper of the wall.

  Now Carter Brigham was neither a hero nor a coward, and he was not armed. There was nothing in his rooms more deadly than a pair of candlesticks, and they—not despicable weapons in an emergency—were on the far side of the room from which the sounds came.

  If he had been awakened to hear very faint and not often repeated noises in the other room —such rustlings as even the most adept burglar might not avoid—the probabilities are that Carter would have been content to remain in his bed and try to frighten the burglar away by yelling at him. He would not have disregarded the fact that in an encounter at close quarters under these conditions every advantage would lie on the side of the prowler.

  But this particular prowler had made quite a lot of noise, had even stumbled against a chair, had shown himself a poor hand at stealthiness. That an inexpert burglar might easily be as dangerous as an adept did not occur to the man in the bed.

  Perhaps it was that in the many crook stories he had written, deadliness had always been wedded to skill and the bunglers had always been comparatively harmless and easily overcome, and that he had come to accept this theory as a truth. After all, if a man says a thing often enough, he is very likely to acquire some sort of faith in it sooner or later.

  Anyhow, Carter Brigham slid his not unmuscular body gently out from between the sheets and crept on silent bare feet toward the open doorway of the room from which the sounds had come. He passed from his bed to a position inside the next room, his back against the wall beside the door during an interlude of silence on the intruder's part.

  The room in which Carter now stood was every bit as black as the one he had left; so he stood motionless, waiting for the prowler to betray his position.

  His patience was not taxed. Very soon the burglar moved again, audibly; and then against the rectangle of a window—scarcely lighter than the rest of the room—Carter discerned a man-shaped shadow just a shade darker coming toward him. The shadow passed the window and was lost in the enveloping darkness.

  Carter, his body tensed, did not move until he thought the burglar had had time to reach a spot where no furniture intervened. Then, with clutching hands thrown out on wide—spread arms, Carter hurled himself forward.

  His shoulder struck the intruder and they both crashed to the floor. A forearm came up across Carter's throat, pressing into it. He tore it away and felt a blow on his cheek. He wound one arm around the burglar's body, and with the other fist struck back. They rolled over and over across the floor until they were stopped by the legs of a massive table, the burglar uppermost.

  With savage exultance in his own strength, which the struggle thus far had shown to be easily superior to the other's, Carter twisted his body, smashing his adversary into the heavy table. Then he drove a fist into the body he had just shaken off and scrambled to his knees, feeling for a grip on the burglar's throat. When he had secured it he found that the prowler was lying motionless, unresisting. Laughing triumphantly, Carter got to his feet and switched on the lights.

  The girl on the floor did not move.

  Half lying, half hunched against the table where he had hurled her, she was inanimate. A still, twisted figure in an austerely tailored black suit—one sleeve of which had been torn from the shoulder—with an unended confusion of short chestnut hair above a face that was linen-white except where blows had reddened it. Her eyes were closed. One arm was outflung across the floor, the other lay limply at her side; one silken leg was extended, the other folded under her.

  Into a corner of the room her hat, a small black toque, had rolled; not far from the hat lay a very small pinch-bar, the jimmy with which she had forced an entrance.

  The window over the fire escape—always locked at night—was wide-open. Its catch hung crookedly.

  Mechanically, methodically—because he had been until recently a reporter on a morning paper, and the lessons of years are not unlearned in a few weeks—Carter's eyes picked up these details and communicated them to his brain while he strove to conquer his bewilderment.

  After a while his wits resumed their functions and he went over to kneel beside the girl. Her pulse was regular, but she gave no other indications of life. He lifted her from the floor and carried her to the leather couch on the other side of the room. Then he brought cold water from the bathroom and brandy from the bookcase. Generous applications of the former to her temples and face and of the latter between her lips finally brought a tremor to her mouth and a quiver to her eyelids.

  Presently she opened her eyes, looked confusedly around the room, and endeavored to sit up. He pressed her head gently down on the couch.

  "Lie still a moment longer—until you feel all right."

  She seemed to see him then for the first time, and to remember where she was. She shook her head clear of his re
straining hand and sat up, swinging her feet down to the floor.

  "So I lose again," she said, with an attempt at nonchalance that was only faintly tinged with bitterness, her eyes meeting his.

  They were green eyes and very long, and they illuminated her face which, without their soft light, had seemed of too sullen a cast for beauty, despite the smooth regularity of the features.

  Carter's glance dropped to her discolored cheek, where his knuckles had left livid marks.

  "I'm sorry I struck you," he apologized. "In the dark I naturally thought you were a man. I wouldn't have—"

  "Forget it," she commanded coolly. "It's all in the game."

  "But I—"

  "Aw, stop it!" Impatiently. "It doesn't amount to anything. I'm all right."

  "I'm glad of that."

  His bare toes came into the range of his vision, and he went into his bedroom for slippers and a robe. The girl watched him silently when he returned to her, her face calmly defiant.

  "Now," he suggested, drawing up a chair, "suppose you tell me all about it."

  She laughed briefly. "It's a long story, and the bulls ought to be here any minute now. There wouldn't be time to tell it."

  "The police?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "But I didn't send for them! Why should I?"

  "God knows!" She looked around the room and then abruptly straight into his eyes. "If you think I'm going to buy my liberty, brother"—her voice was icy insolent—"you're way off!"

  He denied the thought. Then: "Suppose you tell me about it."

  "All primed to listen to a sob story?" she mocked. "Well, here goes: I got some bad breaks on the last couple of jobs I pulled and had to lay low—so low that I didn't even get anything to eat for a day or two. I figured I'd have to pull another job for getaway money— so I could blow town for a while. And this was it! I was sort of giddy from not eating and I made too much noise; but even at that"—with a scornful laugh—"you'd never have nailed me if I'd had a gun on me!"