The Main Death and This King Business

by Dashiell Hammett

  She laughed and pulled my ear.

  “That was Gopchek, our very best detective. He’ll be furious.”

  “Well, don’t sic any more of ’em on me. You can tell him I’m sorry I had to hit him twice, but it was his own fault. He shouldn’t have jerked his head back the first time.”

  She laughed, then frowned, finally settling on an expression that held half of each.

  “Tell me about the meeting,” she commanded.

  I told her what I knew. When I had finished she pulled my head down to kiss me, and held it down to whisper:

  “You do trust me, don’t you, dear?”

  “Yeah. Just as much as you trust me.”

  “That’s far from being enough,” she said, pushing my face away with a hand flat against my nose.

  Marya came in with a tray of food. We pulled the table around in front of the divan and ate.

  “I don’t quite understand you,” Romaine said over a stalk of asparagus. “If you don’t trust me why do you tell me things? As far as I know, you haven’t done much lying to me. Why should you tell me the truth if you’ve no faith in me?”

  “My susceptible nature,” I explained. “I’m so overwhelmed by your beauty and charm and one thing and another that I can’t refuse you anything.”

  “Don’t!” she exclaimed, suddenly serious. “I’ve capitalized that beauty and charm in half the countries in the world. Don’t say things like that to me ever again. It hurts, because—because—” She pushed her plate back, started to reach for a cigarette, stopped her hand in mid-air, and looked at me with disagreeable eyes. “I love you,” she said.

  I took the hand that was hanging in the air, kissed the palm of it, and asked:

  “You love me more than any one else in the world?”

  She pulled the hand away from me.

  “Are you a bookkeeper?” she demanded. “Must you have amounts, weights, and measurements for everything?”

  I grinned at her and tried to go on with my meal. I had been hungry. Now, though I had eaten only a couple of mouthfuls, my appetite was gone. I tried to pretend I still had the hunger I had lost, but it was no go. The food didn’t want to be swallowed. I gave up the attempt and lighted a cigarette.

  She used her left hand to fan away the smoke between us.

  “You don’t trust me,” she insisted. “Then why do you put yourself in my hands?”

  “Why not? You can make a flop of the revolution. That’s nothing to me. It’s not my party, and its failure needn’t mean that I can’t get the boy out of the country with his money.”

  “You don’t mind a prison, an execution, perhaps?”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said. But what I was thinking was: if, after twenty years of scheming and slickering in big-time cities, I let myself get trapped in this hill village, I’d deserve all I got.

  “And you’ve no feeling at all for me?”

  “Don’t be foolish.” I waved my cigarette at my uneaten meal. “I haven’t had anything to eat since eight o’clock last night.”

  She laughed, put a hand over my mouth, and said:

  “I understand. You love me, but not enough to let me interfere with your plans. I don’t like that. It’s effeminate.”

  “You going to turn out for the revolution?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to run through the streets throwing bombs, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And Djudakovich?”

  “He sleeps till eleven in the morning. If you start at four, you’ll have seven hours before he’s up.” She said all this perfectly seriously. “Get it done in that time. Or he might decide to stop it.”

  “Yeah? I had a notion he wanted it.”

  “Vasilije wants nothing but peace and comfort.”

  “But listen, sweetheart,” I protested. “If your Vasilije is any good at all, he can’t help finding out about it ahead of time. Einarson and his army are the revolution. These bankers and deputies and the like that he’s carrying with him to give the party a responsible look are a lot of movie conspirators. Look at ’em! They hold their meetings at midnight, and all that kind of foolishness. Now that they’re actually signed up to something, they won’t be able to keep from spreading the news. All day they’ll be going around trembling and whispering together in odd corners.”

  “They’ve been doing that for months,” she said. “Nobody pays any attention to them. And I promise you Vasilijie shan’t hear anything new. I won’t tell him, and he never listens to anything any one else says.”

  “All right.” I wasn’t sure it was all right, but it might be. “Now this row is going through—if the army follows Einarson?”

  “Yes, and the army will follow him.”

  “Then, after it’s over, our real job begins?”

  She rubbed a flake of cigarette ash into the table cloth with a small pointed finger, and said nothing.

  “Einarson’s got to be dumped,” I continued.

  “We’ll have to kill him,” she said thoughtfully. “You’d better do it yourself.”

  XII

  THE NIGHT BEFORE

  I saw Einarson and Grantham that evening, and spent several hours with them. The boy was fidgety, nervous, without confidence in the revolution’s success, though he tried to pretend he was taking things as a matter of course. Einarson was full of words. He gave us every detail of the next day’s plans. I was more interested in him than in what he was saying. He could put the revolution over, I thought, and I was willing to leave it to him. So while he talked I studied him, combing him over for weak spots.

  I took him physically first—a tall, thick-bodied man in his prime, not as quick as he might have been, but strong and tough. He had an amply jawed, short-nosed, florid face that a fist wouldn’t bother much. He wasn’t fat, but he ate and drank too much to be hard-boiled, and your florid man can seldom stand much poking around the belt. So much for the gent’s body.

  Mentally, he wasn’t a heavy-weight. His revolution was crude stuff. It would get over chiefly because there wasn’t much opposition. He had plenty of will-power, I imagined, but I didn’t put a big number on that. People who haven’t much brains have to develop will-power to get anywhere. I didn’t know whether he had guts or not, but before an audience I guessed he’d make a grand showing, and most of this act would be before an audience. Off in a dark corner I had an idea he would go watery. He believed in himself—absolutely. That’s ninety percent of leadership, so there was no flaw in him there. He didn’t trust me. He had taken me in because as things turned out it was easier to do so than to shut the door against me.

  He kept on talking about his plans. There was nothing to talk about. He was going to bring his soldiers in town in the early morning and take over the government. That was all the plan that was needed. The rest of it was the lettuce around the dish, but this lettuce part was the only part we could discuss. It was dull.

  At eleven o’clock Einarson stopped talking and left us, making this sort of speech:

  “Until four o’clock, gentlemen, when Muravia’s history begins.” He put a hand on my shoulder and commanded me: “Guard His Majesty!”

  I said, “Uh-huh,” and immediately sent His Majesty to bed. He wasn’t going to sleep, but he was too young to confess it, so he went off willingly enough. I got a taxi and went out to Romaine’s.

  She was like a child the night before a picnic. She kissed me and she kissed the servant Marya. She sat on my knees, beside me, on the floor, on all the chairs, changing her location every half-minute. She laughed and talked incessantly, about the revolution, about me, about herself, about anything at all. She nearly strangled herself trying to talk while swallowing wine. She lit her big cigarettes and forgot to smoke them, or forgot to stop smoking them until they scorched her lips. She sang lines from songs in half a dozen languages. She made puns and jokes and goofy rh
ymes.

  I left at three o’clock. She went down to the door with me, pulled my head down to kiss my eyes and mouth.

  “If anything goes wrong,” she said, “come to the prison. We’ll hold that until—”

  “If it goes wrong enough I’ll be brought there,” I promised.

  She wouldn’t joke now.

  “I’m going there now,” she said. “I’m afraid Einarson’s got my house on his list.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “If you hit a bad spot get word to me.”

  I walked back to the hotel through the dark streets—the lights were turned off at midnight—without seeing a single other person, not even one of the gray-uniformed policemen. By the time I reached home rain was falling steadily.

  In my room, I changed into heavier clothes and shoes, dug an extra gun—an automatic—out of my bag and hung it in a shoulder holster. Then I filled my pocket with enough amunition to make me bow-legged, picked up hat and raincoat, and went upstairs to Lionel Grantham’s suite.

  “It’s ten to four,” I told him. “We might as well go down to the plaza. Better put a gun in your pocket.”

  He hadn’t slept. His handsome young face was as cool and pink and composed as it had been the first time I saw him, though his eyes were brighter now.

  He got into an overcoat, and we went downstairs.

  XIII

  PROGRESS GOES “BETUNE”

  Rain drove into our faces as we went toward the center of the dark plaza. Other figures moved around us, though none came near. We halted at the foot of an iron statue of somebody on a horse.

  A pale young man of extraordinary thinness came up and began to talk rapidly, gesturing with both hands, sniffing every now and then, as if he had a cold in his head. I couldn’t understand a word he said.

  The rumble of other voices began to compete with the patter of rain. The fat, white-whiskered face of the banker who had been at the meeting appeared suddenly out of the darkness and went back into it just as suddenly, as if he didn’t want to be recognized. Men I hadn’t seen before gathered around us, saluting Grantham with a sheepish sort of respect. A little man in a too big cape ran up and began to tell us something in a cracked, jerky voice. A thin, stooped man with glasses freckled by raindrops translated the little man’s story into English for us:

  “He says the artillery has betrayed us, and guns are being mounted in the government buildings to sweep the plaza at daybreak.” There was an odd sort of hopefulness in his voice, and he added: “In that event, we can, naturally, do nothing.”

  “We can die,” Lionel Grantham said gently.

  There wasn’t the least bit of sense to that crack. Nobody was here to die. They were all here because it was so unlikely that anybody would have to die, except perhaps a few of Einarson’s soldiers. That’s the sensible view of the boy’s speech. But it’s God’s own truth that even I—a middle-aged detective who had forgotten what it was like to believe in fairies—felt suddenly warm inside my wet clothes. And if anybody had said to me: “This boy is a real king,” I wouldn’t have argued the point.

  An abrupt hush came in the murmuring around us, leaving only the rustle of rain, and the tramp, tramp, tramp of orderly marching up the street—Einarson’s men. Everybody commenced to talk at once, happily, expectantly, cheered by the approach of those whose part it was to do the heavy work.

  An officer in a glistening slicker pushed through the crowd—a small, dapper boy with a too large sword. He saluted Grantham elaborately, and said in English, of which he seemed proud:

  “Colonel Einarson’s respects, Mister, and this progress goes betune.”

  I wondered what the last word meant.

  Grantham smiled and said: “Convey my thanks to Colonel Einarson.”

  The banker appeared again, bold enough now to join us. Others who had been at the meeting appeared. We made an inner group around the statue, with the mob around us—more easily seen now in the gray of early morning. I didn’t see the countryman into whose face Einarson had spat.

  The rain soaked us. We shifted our feet, shivered, and talked. Daylight came slowly, showing more and more who stood around us wet and curious-eyed. On the edge of the crowd men burst into cheers. The rest of them took it up. They forgot their wet misery, laughed and danced, hugged and kissed one another. A bearded man in a leather coat came to us, bowed to Grantham, and explained that Einarson’s own regiment could be seen occupying the Administration Building and the Executive Residence.

  Day came fully. The mob around us opened to make way for an automobile that was surrounded by a squad of cavalrymen. It stopped in front of us. Colonel Einarson, holding a bare sword in his hand, stepped out of the car, saluted, and held the door open for Grantham and me. He followed us in, smelling of victory like a chorus girl of Coty. The cavalrymen closed around the car again, and we were driven to the Administration Building, through a crowd that yelled and ran red-faced and happy after us. It was all quite theatrical.

  XIV

  CORONATION

  “The city is ours,” said Einarson, leaning forward in his seat, his sword’s point on the car floor, his hands on its hilt. “The President, the Deputies, nearly every official of importance, is taken. Not a single shot fired, not a window broken!”

  He was proud of his revolution, and I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t sure that he might not have brains, after all. He had had sense enough to park his civilian adherents in the plaza until his soldiers had done their work.

  We got out at the Administration Building, walking up the steps between rows of infantrymen at present-arms, rain sparkling on their fixed bayonets. More green-uniformed soldiers presented arms along the corridors. We went into an elaborately furnished dining-room, where fifteen or twenty officers stood up to receive us. There were lots of speeches made. Everybody was triumphant. All through breakfast there was much talking. I didn’t understand any of it. I attended to my eating.

  After the meal we went to the Deputies’ Chamber, a large, oval room with curved rows of benches and desks facing a raised platform. Besides three desks on the platform, some twenty chairs had been put there, facing the curved seats. Our breakfast party occupied these chairs. I noticed that Grantham and I were the only civilians on the platform. None of our fellow conspirators were there, except those who were in Einarson’s army. I wasn’t so fond of that.

  Grantham sat in the first row of chairs, between Einarson and me. We looked down on the Deputies. There were perhaps a hundred of them distributed among the curved benches, split sharply in two groups. Half of them, on the right side of the room, were revolutionists. They stood up and hurrahed at us. The other half, on the left, were prisoners. Most of them seemed to have dressed hurriedly. They looked at us with uneasy eyes.

  Around the room, shoulder to shoulder against the wall except on the platform and where the doors were, stood Einarson’s soldiers.

  An old man came in between two soldiers—a mild-eyed old gentleman, bald, stooped, with a wrinkled, clean-shaven, scholarly face.

  “Doctor Semich,” Grantham whispered.

  The President’s guards took him to the center one of the three desks on the platform. He paid no attention to us who were sitting on the platform, and he did not sit down.

  A red-haired Deputy—one of the revolutionary party—got up and talked. His fellows cheered when he had finished. The President spoke—three words in a very dry, very calm voice, and left the platform to walk back the way he had come, the two soldiers accompanying him.

  “Refused to resign,” Grantham informed me.

  The red-haired Deputy came up on the platform and took the center desk. The legislative machinery began to grind. Men talked briefly, apparently to the point—revolutionists. None of the prisoner Deputies rose. A vote was taken. A few of the in-wrongs didn’t vote. Most of them seemed to vote with the ins.

  “They’ve revok
ed the constitution.” Grantham whispered.

  The Deputies were hurrahing again—those who were there voluntarily. Einarson leaned over and mumbled to Grantham and me:

  “That is as far as we may safely go to-day. It leaves all in our hands.”

  “Time to listen to a suggestion?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you excuse us a moment?” I said to Grantham, and got up and walked to one of the rear corners of the platform.

  Einarson followed me, frowning suspiciously.

  “Why not give Grantham his crown now?” I asked when we were standing in the corner, my right shoulder touching his left, half facing each other, half facing the corner, our backs to the officers who sat on the platform, the nearest less than ten feet away. “Push it through. You can do it. There’ll be a howl, of course. To-morrow, as a concession to that howl, you’ll make him abdicate. You’ll get credit for that. You’ll be fifty percent stronger with the people. Then you will be in a position to make it look as if the revolution was his party, and that you were the patriot who kept this newcomer from grabbing the throne. Meanwhile you’ll be dictator, and whatever else you want to be when the time comes. See what I mean? Let him bear the brunt. You catch yours on the rebound.”

  He liked the idea, but he didn’t like it to come from me. His little dark eyes pried into mine.

  “Why should you suggest this?” he asked.

  “What do you care? I promise you he’ll abdicate within twenty-four hours.”

  He smiled under his mustache and raised his head. I knew a major in the A. E. F. who always raised his head like that when he was going to issue an unpleasant order. I spoke quickly:

  “My raincoat—do you see it’s folded over my left arm?”

  He said nothing, but his eyelids crept together.

  “You can’t see my left hand,” I went on.

  His eyes were slits, but he said nothing.

  “There’s an automatic in it,” I wound up.

  “Well?” he asked contemptuously.

  “Nothing—only—get funny, and I’ll let your guts out.”