by Max Brand
“Did you carry that away?”
“It weighed about two hundred pounds, I think. No, I didn’t carry that, but when I tried the lock, a bell rang, the lights flashed on, and fat Arthur Burchell sat up in bed, gasping with fear. He turned loose at me with an automatic, and I dived through a spray of lead for the door.
“I had sense enough to lock it behind me. The corridor held a maid and porter running toward the sound of the shooting, and I shouted robbers once or twice, and ran as if for help. I needed help, too.”
He drew up the sleeve of his left arm and showed her a broad, white dot on the bulge of the muscle of the forearm.
“Burchell had clipped me here, and I was bleeding pretty badly. But I got away over the roofs, and down to the street.”
“That ended the Burchell diamonds, I suppose?”
“No. I got them, all right.”
“When?”
“The same night. There’s nothing that makes for sound sleep like a foiled attack. I tied up my arm and waited in view of the hotel until the lights in the Burchells’ rooms went out at about four in the morning. Then I went back over the roofs in exactly the same way. I got into the room in the same way, too.”
“Weren’t you frightened to death when you stood at the door?”
“Not the least. This time I was pretty sure of myself. The door opened in an instant...I remembered it perfectly from the time before. When I got inside, I squatted down and listened to Burchell’s snoring, and hoped it wouldn’t waken his wife. I unloosed one ray from the shutter of the dark lantern and pricked the dark here and there with it. Burchell had been having champagne to celebrate his courage and his victory. There was a little table in the middle of the room that looked like a broken iceberg...it was so covered with glassware. I let the ray sparkle on it for a minute. Then I found the top of a champagne bottle in the ice bucket, and helped myself. It was pretty flat, but I never liked champagne with too much jump in it. I was very thirsty, you see, from the loss of blood. I hope that doesn’t sound like boasting? I mean, the champagne drinking in the middle of the robbery?”
“No, I think you’d do that,” she said.
“It was easy to find the electrical connection of the little jewel safe, now that I knew about it. I clipped the wires, and had the safe open in a moment. Just as I raised the lid and had sent a flash of light into the contents, Missus Burchell sat up and gasped. I faded onto the floor. She poked Arthur in the ribs, and when he woke up, she told him that she was sure that there was a man in the room. She’d seen an outline against the stars outside the window.”
“That was a ticklish moment,” said the girl.
“It was.”
“What did you do?”
“Sat still.”
“And then?”
“Burchell told his wife that she was nervous and that his sleep was worth more, anyway, than her blankety diamonds. He was snoring in another moment. After a while I went around to her bed to see if she was asleep.”
“Br-r-r-r,” said Marian Lane. “How did you tell?”
“By listening to her breathing. When I was sure of that, I went back and took the diamonds in their soft little chamois sacks, filled my pockets, and left them to have their sleep.”
“Tell me this...when you were seen by the maid and the porter in the hall, didn’t they see you clearly?”
“Very. The maid described a middle-aged man with a short black mustache for the detectives the next day, and the porter described a burly ruffian who looked like a prize fighter.”
“You hadn’t hired them?”
“Not with a penny, but in such cases excitement generally corrupts the faithful more thoroughly than a million dollars.”
“I suppose it does. So you got off scotfree?”
“Entirely. There was only the cut in my arm. It bothered me for a while, but not as much as the man did who I used as a fence...I mean, the fellow who receives stolen goods, do you see?”
“How did he bother you?”
“He paid me a hundred thousand for half a million’s worth of diamonds. And, after that, he tried to blackmail me for half of the hundred thousand he had paid me.”
“Did he?”
“They have their little ways, the fences.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed him,” Duval answered. “I was young, new at the business, and thought he meant to do what he threatened...about disgracing me, I mean.”
“You killed him! You murdered him?” she gasped.
Duval, looking down at her with admiration, said: “When I see you do that, I almost think that you mean what you say.”
“What do I mean, then?”
“I’m only a critic, not an interpreter,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was extremely hard to look at Duval without meeting his eye, for no matter how casual the glance that fell on him, the gray, keen eyes were apt to be turned instantly upon the observer, so that details were wiped out, and there remained only the impression of the pallor of the face and of the gray pupil itself. But Marian, watching him constantly as they walked along side-by-side, was gradually able to build up a more consistent picture of him, point by point. The pallor was the only point of weakness; otherwise, it was the face of an athlete in high condition, lean, with distinct ridges of muscle at the base of the jaw, and all the lines of nose, mouth, and hard chin showing dominance and intellectual sensitiveness together.
She thought of her own soft picture in the glass, and all seemed contrast, and yet there was something in her that flew out to meet his spirit and understood it. He, too, must have had somewhat the same sensation, or he would not have talked in this manner to her — roughly, as though she were a man.
It was a novelty to Marian Lane, and a not altogether unpleasant one.
“You killed the fence,” she repeated. “How?”
“In the back room of his place.”
“But I mean...how?”
“Why, I simply walked in and told him to draw his gun, which he did, and then I shot him through the head. The others made a good deal of noise, but when they saw that he was really dead, they stopped shooting after me and began to loot the place.”
“There were others?”
“There were three others, his pet yeggs. However, I had a hundred thousand out of him, and after that I lived very well for a couple of years and kept the old place up, and was complimented on my success in the street.” He laughed, without grimness, enjoying the memory, as it seemed.
“Only two years? That’s fifty thousand a year.”
“I mean that I lived well. Gave to the poor, too, like Robin Hood. Poor relations, I should say, to qualify my praise. But they’re the hardest kind to give to. They never know what to expect, except a little more than they get.”
“At the end of the two years?”
“Then I saw that I’d have to dig in deeper, and this time I chose the Merrill brooch. You’ve heard of that, I suppose?”
“No, never.”
“Merrill was a real-estate broker. He owned an improvement company, and when he got through improving a town, he had all it was worth for the next fifty years mortgaged to the hilt. Then he moved out and improved somewhere else. Missus Merrill had the brooch. She....”
“There was always a woman in it?”
“Even rich men seem to have wives,” Duval said. “That’s a riddle you may be able to work out for yourself. At any rate, there was the brooch. The Merrills didn’t splurge in quantity, but they did in quality. He went to India and came back with five rubies, any one of them worth a fortune. It cost him nearly a million, it was said, and I have reason to know that the estimate wasn’t extravagant. The big one was in the middle, and the other four set around it. It was big enough to fill the palm of a man’s hand, almost, but the silly woman wore
it as a brooch. It shone like a danger signal, and I determined to have it.
“One evening we were sitting at dinner, side-by-side, with a big fireplace just behind us, so I took off the brooch and chucked it back into the ashes. After a while, she missed it. There was a great commotion. Everyone was searched, and all that sort of thing. When the search was ended, and every inch of the room had been combed...except the flaming fireplace, of course...I raked the thing out with the toe of my shoe while I was kindly building up the fire for the sake of the chilly ladies. And I walked home with that million. Of course, I didn’t realize fifty percent, but that was a good deal.”
“How long did that last?”
“I increased my scale of living, but still it endured for four years, and would have gone longer if I hadn’t had some bad luck with the ponies.”
“Four into five hundred is a hundred and twenty-five a year.”
“Yes, I had a good time. The poor relations got less poor. But when the four years ended, I saw that I would have to operate again, and this time I decided that I’d take no chances.”
“What sort of chances? In stealing?”
“Not that. Unluckily, chances have to be taken in stealing. The business never has been organized past a very amateur standpoint, and, as you can see, I hadn’t had enough practical experience to work out a new theory. I mean to say, I decided to make it safe by stealing so much that I could live on the investment and the interest thereof without having to spend my capital.”
“How much did you need for that?”
“I wanted to be moderate...only to maintain the same scale that I had been living on up to that time. I thought that two million would do handsomely. At six percent, there’s a hundred and twenty thousand a year, and I thought that that should do.”
“Yes,” said the girl, “I should think so.”
“But how was I to make that much money in jewels?”
“Why did you have to stick to jewel robberies?”
“The unfortunate limitation of my mind,” Duval answered. “Of course, I shouldn’t have stayed with that one medium when there are so many others that are easier to negotiate in the open market. Securities that can be turned into cash, for instance. And then there are banks whose lucky vaults are bulging. But, as I said before, I was limited by my experience. Criminals generally are, and I can see how the criminal streak in me controlled me according to the old standards.
“Odd how crimes are repeated in the same way by the same men. There was the good old English wife-killer, who always strangled them in their bath and collected the insurance, I believe. There was I, with the world as open before me as it was before Robin Hood, and yet I had not his delightful variety. Tyros cannot imitate a genius. Robin ranged from highway robberies to the pillaging of castles. Poor David Castle could only do over again what he had already done.
“But he decided that in the first place such a large percentage should not go to the fences. What else to do, then? Why, pearls immediately jumped into my mind. You can take a long string and break it up into units. Not difficult to dispose of them in small quantities anywhere, and at the top market price. So I hunted around for rich pearl collectors, and hit upon Henry Hollinshed at once.
“He’d made his money in opium, poor old Henry. Worked hard, handled it from the growth of the poppy to the distribution of the drug in the States, including the smuggling in. His profits were very handsome. He built a church with part of them, and endowed a school with another part. But he loved pearls. He was a bachelor, was Henry. He collected the great strings and set pieces for the pleasure of seeing them with his own lonely eyes. He used to set them up on velvet like saints on an altar, and worship. Quantities, Hollinshed had, at rock-bottom Oriental prices, and a canny old Arab always collecting.
“I visited Hollinshed, after I’d devoted six months to the serious study of pearls and their values. He kept the pearls in a safe in a corner of his room, a perfectly modern, up-to-date safe, very hard to handle. It was doubly guarded at night, so I went in one noon and blew the door off. It was perfectly simple. I got the collection and disappeared with it through the back-cellar door. Then I went around in front and watched the police arrive, and after them the reporters. I was a plumber, with a plumber’s kit...full of pearls, now, besides a few tools...and a smear of lead on my face that would have disguised me from the eye of the most inquisitive angel. Only my patron demon could have known me.
“Then I went home, and on the way knocked my old grip against a lamppost and spilled out a dozen or more big pearls. Luckily for me they were so big, and I gave five cents apiece for them to some boys who were standing near if they would pick up the marbles for me...the ones that had rolled off into corners. I was taking some marbles home to my little boy, you see. I thought I had gathered up all those marbles, but it seems that I really hadn’t.
“At any rate, I went on home and examined my catch. I wanted to estimate it, but I didn’t need to do that. The evening papers said the gross total was nearly three million, and they were only a few hundreds of thousands out of the way. All was well, but in a few days, I had bad news. One of the boys had liked the look of that lustrous marble better than five cents. He kept it and he even showed it to his mother, and by bad luck she was a court stenographer’s wife who had known better days. She recognized it...thought it was paste...and took it to a jeweler. To a bad one, you’d think...to a cheap, around-the-corner chap, you’d say. Not at all. By the further grace of eminent bad luck, she took it to an honest man, who nearly fainted and asked her what she was doing with a twenty-thousand-dollar pearl.
“And immediately there was a hue and cry. The pearl was big enough for Hollinshed to identify it. Important enough for him to dig up the record of its sale, exact description of size, weight, color, et cetera. There was no doubt. It was Hollinshed’s pearl. Then who was the greasy, lead-marked young plumber? You see how embarrassing it was for me?”
“Of course I do,” said the girl.
“I decided to leave town and disappear entirely. I decided that I’d go where I could rest for a long time, and let the dust settle after this disturbance. For, in spite of what the detective story writers say, the police are as clever as fiends, and I dread them to the core of my soul.”
She nodded, her head bent, as it had been for some time.
“And having decided on retirement, what better place than to come West, where I’d spent so many happy summers as a youngster? No sooner said than....”
She raised her head, and Duval heard the merriest of laughter peal beneath the gloom of the trees, flooding them with music as bright as the sun.
“Is that funny to you?” he asked. “D’you think I should have picked Paris?”
“It isn’t really funny,” she said. “It’s almost sad that you should have told it to me. But, after all, I’m not really laughing at you. I’m admiring you, David, because you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever known.”
She faced him, both her hands placed on the broad head of the cane, and she needed that support, for she was rocking gently back and forth with her continued laughter.
“As pretty as a bird atilt on a bough,” Duval said in appreciation. “But why do you laugh?”
“To think of the waste, David! A mere jewel thief, farmer, and man crusher, when you would have made such a delightful writer of romantic stories.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
He watched her mirth, still with unchanged appreciation, still with critical thought. And, eventually, he began to laugh in turn.
When she had ended her laughter and was wiping her eyes, he still was chuckling, but stopped to say: “Did I choose the wrong line, then?”
“It was a beautiful line,” said the girl. “I enjoyed every minute of it. Oh, David, how wonderfully you told of that first time...and the crystal on the table...and the champagne...and every little detail, so that it pu
t me into the room. If you write it down, you’ll be remembered for it.”
And she came closer to him, and gasped her admiration, and clasped her hands together at her breast.
Duval admired her again. “I wish that you’d keep a little farther away, Marian,” he told her. “I’m a sedate fellow, a man with a quiet heart, and very much afraid of you. And when you come so close and open your eyes so wide, I grow a little dizzy. You make me feel as though I were standing on a very tall building.”
“Do I?” she said.
“You do,” said Duval.
She seemed to grow a little puzzled, but at length she snapped her fingers. “I have it!” she exclaimed.
“You have?”
“Yes. You’re going to try the other line, now that the first one has failed.”
“What other line?”
“You’re going to make love to me!”
“Ah,” Duval murmured sadly, “you wouldn’t believe a word of that either, would you?”
“I did believe part of the first one,” she confessed. “And so I might believe part of the second. I’d like to try. Will you begin as we walk on?”
She started slowly up the path, Duval beside her, and, tucking the walking stick under her elbow, she took the arm of Duval for support, her hand resting lightly upon it. She fell in step with him and trudged along at his side.
“Now,” she said, “do begin.”
“You embarrass me,” said Duval. “And you have hold of the arm that I need for gestures. What’s lovemaking without gestures?”