Suddenly I could see again—not clearly—but the shadows were taking on colors; and my ears came back a little, so that grunts and growls and curses and the impact of blows sounded in them. My straining gaze rested upon a brass cuspidor six inches or so in front of my eyes. I knew then that I was down on the floor again.
As I twisted about to hurl a foot into a soft body above me, something that was like a burn, but wasn’t a burn, ran down one leg—a knife. The sting of it brought consciousness back into me with a rush.
I grabbed the brass cuspidor and used it to club a way to my feet—to club a clear space in front of me. Men were hurling themselves upon me. I swung the cuspidor high and flung it over their heads through the frosted glass door into California Street.
Then we fought some more.
But you can’t throw a brass cuspidor through a glass door into California Street between Montgomery and Kearny without attracting attention—it’s too near the heart of daytime San Francisco. So presently—when I was on the floor again with six or eight hundred pounds of flesh hammering my face into the boards—we were pulled apart, and I was dug out of the bottom of the pile by a squad of policemen.
Big sandy-haired Coffee was one of them, but it took a lot of arguing to convince him that I was the Continental operative who had talked to him a little while before.
“Man! Man!” he said, when I finally convinced him. “Them lads sure—God!—have worked you over! You got a face like a wet geranium!”
I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny.
I looked out of the one eye which was working just now at the five men lined up across the office—Soules, the three inky printers, and the man with the blurred “s,” who had started the slaughter by tapping me on the back of the head.
He was a rather tall man of thirty or so, with a round ruddy face that wore a few bruises now. He had been, apparently, rather well-dressed in expensive black clothing, but he was torn and ragged now. I knew who he was without asking—Hendrik Van Pelt.
“Well, man, what’s the answer?” Coffee was asking me.
By holding one side of my jaw firmly with one hand I found that I could talk without too much pain.
“This is the crowd that ran down Newhouse,” I said, “and it wasn’t an accident. I wouldn’t mind having a few more of the details myself, but I was jumped before I got around to all of them. Newhouse had a hundred-florin note in his hand when he was run down, and he was walking in the direction of police headquarters—was only half a block away from the Hall of Justice.
“Soules tells me that Newhouse said he was going up to Portsmouth Square to sit in the sun. But Soules didn’t seem to know that Newhouse was wearing a black eye—the one you told me you had investigated. If Soules didn’t see the shiner, then it’s a good bet that Soules didn’t see Newhouse’s face that day!
“Newhouse was walking from his printing shop toward police headquarters with a piece of foreign paper money in his hand—remember that!
“He had frequent spells of sickness, which, according to friend Soules, always before kept him at home for a week or ten days at a time. This time he was laid up for only two and a half days.
“Soules tells me that the shop is three days behind with its orders, and he says that’s the first time in eight years they’ve ever been behind. He blames Newhouse’s death—which only happened yesterday. Apparently, Newhouse’s previous sick spells never delayed things—why should this last spell?
“Two printers were fired last week, and two new ones hired the very next day—pretty quick work. The car with which Newhouse was run down was taken from just around the corner, and was deserted within quick walking distance of the shop. It was left facing north, which is pretty good evidence that its occupants went south after they got out. Ordinary car thieves wouldn’t have circled back in the direction from which they came.
“Here’s my guess: This Van Pelt is a Dutchman, and he had some plates for phony hundred-florin notes. He hunted around until he found a printer who would go in with him. He found Soules, the foreman of a shop whose proprietor was now and then at home for a week or more at a time with a bad heart. One of the printers under Soules was willing to go in with them. Maybe the other two turned the offer down. Maybe Soules didn’t ask them at all. Anyhow, they were discharged, and two friends of Soules were given their places.
“Our friends then got everything ready, and waited for Newhouse’s heart to flop again. It did—Monday night. As soon as his wife called up next morning and said he was sick, these birds started running off their counterfeits. That’s why they fell behind with their regular work. But this spell of Newhouse’s was lighter than usual. He was up and moving around within two days, and yesterday afternoon he came down here for a few minutes.
“He must have walked in while all of our friends were extremely busy in some far corner. He must have spotted some of the phony money, immediately sized up the situation, grabbed one bill to show the police, and started out for police headquarters—no doubt thinking he had not been seen by our friends here.
“They must have got a glimpse of him as he was leaving, however. Two of them followed him out. They couldn’t, afoot, safely knock him over within a block or two of the Hall of Justice. But, turning the corner, they found Chrostwaite’s car standing there with idling engine. That solved their getaway problem. They got in the car and went on after Newhouse. I suppose the original plan was to shoot him—but he crossed Clay Street with his eyes fastened upon the phony money in his hand. That gave them a golden chance. They piled the car into him. It was sure death, they knew his bum heart would finish the job if the actual collision didn’t kill him. Then they deserted the car and came back here.
“There are a lot of loose ends to be gathered in—but this pipe-dream I’ve just told you fits in with all the facts we know—and I’ll bet a month’s salary I’m not far off anywhere. There ought be a three-day crop of Dutch notes cached somewhere! You people—”
I suppose I’d have gone on talking forever—in the giddy, head-swimming intoxication of utter exhaustion that filled me—if the big sandy-haired patrolman hadn’t shut me off by putting a big hand across my mouth.
“Be quiet, man,” he said, lifting me out the chair, and spreading me flat on my back on the desk. “I’ll have an ambulance here in a second for you.”
The office was swirling around in front of my one open eye—the yellow ceiling swung down toward me, rose again, disappeared, came back in odd shapes. I turned my head to one side to avoid it, and my glance rested upon the white dial of a spinning clock.
Presently the dial came to rest, and I read it—four o’clock.
I remembered that Chrostwaite had broken up our conference in Vance Richmond’s office at three, and I had started to work.
“One full hour!” I tried to tell Coffee before I went to sleep.
The police wound up the job while I was lying on my back in bed. In Van Pelt’s office on Bush Street they found a great bale of hundred-florin notes. Van Pelt, they learned, had a considerable reputation in Europe as a high-class counterfeiter. One of the printers came through, stating that Van Pelt and Soules were the two who followed Newhouse out of the shop, and killed him.
THE ROAD HOME
Originally published under the pseudonym “Peter Collinson”
“You’re a fool to pass it up! You’ll get just as much credit and reward for taking back proof of my death as you will for taking me back. And I got papers and stuff buried back near the Yunnan border that you can have to back up your story; and you needn’t be afraid that I’ll ever show up to spoil your play.”
The gaunt man in faded khaki frowned with patient annoyance and looked away from the blood-shot brown eyes in front of him, over the teak side of the jahaz to where the wrinkled snout of a muggar broke the surface of the river. When the small crocodile submer
ged again, Hagedorn’s gray eyes came back to the pleading ones before him, and he spoke wearily, as one who has been answering the same arguments again and again.
“I can’t do it, Barnes. I left New York two years ago to get you, and for two years I’ve been in this damned country—here and in Yunnan—hunting you. I promised my people I’d stay until I found you, and I kept my word. Lord, man!” with a touch of exasperation, “after all I’ve gone through you don’t expect me to throw them down now—now that the job’s as good as done!”
The dark man in the garb of a native smiled an oily, ingratiating smile and brushed away his captor’s words with a wave of his hand.
“I ain’t offering you a dinky coupla thousand dollars; I’m offering you your pick out of one of the richest gem beds in Asia—a bed that was hidden by the Mran-ma when the British jumped the country. Come back up there with me, and I’ll show you rubies and sapphires and topazes that’ll knock your eye out. All I’m asking you is to go back up there with me and take a look at ’em. If you don’t like ’em, you’ll still have me to take back to New York.”
Hagedorn shook his head slowly.
“You’re going back to New York with me. Maybe man-hunting isn’t the nicest trade in the world, but it’s all the trade I’ve got, and this jewel bed of yours sounds phony to me. I can’t blame you for not wanting to go back—but just the same, I’m taking you.”
Barnes glared at the detective in disgusted.
“You’re a fine chump! And it’s costing me and you thousands of dollars! Hell!”
He spat over the side insultingly—native-like—and settled himself back on his corner of the split-bamboo mat.
Hagedorn was looking past the lateen sail, down the river—the beginning of the route to New York—along which a miasmal breeze was carrying the fifty-foot boat with surprising speed. Four more days and they would be aboard a steamer for Rangoon; then another steamer to Calcutta, and in the end, one to New York—home, after two years!
Two years through unknown country, pursuing what until the very day of the capture had never been more than a vague shadow. Through Yunnan and Burma, combing wilderness with microscopic thoroughness—a game of hide-and-seek up the rivers, over the hills and through the jungles—sometimes a year, sometimes two months and then six behind his quarry. And now successfully home! Betty would be fifteen—quite a lady.
Barnes edged forward and resumed his pleading, with a whine creeping into his voice.
“Say, Hagedorn, why don’t you listen to reason? There ain’t no sense in us losing all that money just for something that happened over two years ago. I didn’t mean to kill that guy, anyway. You know how it is; I was a kid and wild and foolish—but I wasn’t mean—and I got in with a bunch. Why, I thought of that hold-up as a lark when we planned it! And then that messenger yelled and I guess I was excited, and my gun went off the first thing I knew. I didn’t go to kill him; and it won’t do him no good to take me back and hang me for it. The express company didn’t lose no money. What do they want to hound me like this for? I been trying to live it down.”
The gaunt detective answered quietly enough but what kindness there had been in his dry voice before was gone now.
“I know—the old story! And the bruises on the Burmese woman you were living with sure show that there’s nothing mean about you. Cut it, Barnes, and make up your mind to face it—you and I are going back to New York.”
“The hell we are!”
Barnes got slowly to his feet and backed away a step.
“I’d just as leave—”
Hagedorn’s automatic came out a split second too late; his prisoner was over the side and swimming toward the bank. The detective caught up his rifle from the deck behind him and sprang to the rail. Barnes’ head showed for a moment and then went down again, to appear again twenty feet nearer shore. Upstream the man in the boat saw the blunt, wrinkled noses of three muggars, moving toward the shore at a tangent that would intercept the fugitive. He leaned against the teak rail and summed up the situation.
“Looks like I’m not going to take him back alive after all—but my job’s done. I can shoot him when he shows again, or I can let him alone and the muggars will get him.”
Then the sudden but logical instinct to side with the member of his own species against enemies from another wiped out all other considerations, and sent his rifle to his shoulder to throw a shower of bullets into the muggars.
Barnes clambered up the bank of the river, waved his hand over his head without looking back, and plunged into the jungle.
Hagedorn turned to the bearded owner of the jahaz, who had come to his side, and addressed him in his broke Burmese.
“Put me ashore—yu nga apau mye—and wait—thaing—until I bring him back—thu yughe.”
The captain wagged his black beard in protesting.
“Mahok! In the jungle here, sahib a man is as a lei Twenty men might find him in a week, or a month, it may take five years. I cannot wait that long.”
The gaunt white man gnawed at his lower lip and looked down the river—the road to New York.
“Two years,” he said aloud to himself, “it took to fin him when he didn’t know I was hunting for him. Now-Oh, hell! It may take five years. I wonder about them jewel of his.”
He turned to the boatman.
“I go after him. You wait three hours,” pointing over head, “until noon—ne apomha. If I am not back then do not wait—malotu thaing, thwa. Thi?”
The captain nodded.
“Hokhe!”
For five hours the captain kept the jahaz at anchor, and then, when the shadows of the trees on the west bank were creeping out into the river, he ordered the latten sail hoisted, and the teak craft vanished around a bend in the river.
RUFFIAN’S WIFE
Margaret Tharp habitually passed from slumber to clear-eyed liveliness without intermediate languor. This morning nothing was unusual in her awakening save the absence of the eight o’clock San Francisco boat’s sad hooting. Across the room the clock’s hands pointed like one long hand to a few minutes past seven. Margaret rolled over beneath the covers, putting her back to the sun-painted west wall, and closed her eyes again.
But drowsiness would not come. She was definitely awake to the morning excitement of the next-door chickens, the hum of an automobile going toward the ferry, the unfamiliar fragrance of magnolia in the breeze tickling her cheek with loose hair-ends. She got up, slid feet into soft slippers, shoulders into bathrobe, and went downstairs to start toast and coffee before dressing.
A fat man in black was on the point of leaving the kitchen.
Margaret cried out, catching the robe to her throat with both hands.
Red and crystal glinted on the hand with which the fat man took off his black derby. Holding the doorknob, he turned to face Margaret. He turned slowly, with the smooth precision of a globe revolving on a fixed axis, and he managed his head with care, as if it balanced an invisible burden.
“You—are—Mrs.—Tharp.”
Sighing puffs of breath spaced his words, cushioned them, gave them the semblance of gems nested separately in raw cotton. He was a man past forty, with opaquely glistening eyes whose blackness was repeated with variety of finish in mustache and hair, freshly ironed suit, and enameled shoes. The dark skin of his face—ball-round over a tight stiff collar—was peculiarly coarse, firm-grained, as if it had been baked. Against this background his tie was half a foot of scarlet flame.
“Your—husband—is—not—home.”
It was no more a question than his naming her had been, but he paused expectantly. Margaret, standing where she had stopped in the passageway between stairs and kitchen, was still too startled not to say ‘No.’
“You’re—expecting—him.”
There was nothing immediately th
reatening in the attitude of this man who should not have been in her kitchen but who seemed nowise disconcerted by her finding him there. Margaret’s words came almost easily. “Not just—I expect him, yes, but I don’t know exactly when he will come.”
Black hat and black shoulders, moving together, achieved every appearance of a bow without disturbing round head’s poise.
“You—will—so—kindly—tell—him—when—he—comes—I—am—waiting. I—await—him—at—the—hotel.” The spacing puffs prolonged his sentences interminably, made of his phrases thin-spread word-groups whose meanings were elusive. “You—will—tell—him—Leonidas—Doucas—is—waiting. He—will—know. We—are—friends—very—good—friends. You—will—not—forget—the—name—Leonidas—Doucas.”
“Certainly I shall tell him. But I really do not know when he will come.”
The man who called himself Leonidas Doucas nodded frugally beneath the unseen something his head supported. Darkness of mustache and skin exaggerated whiteness of teeth. His smile went away as stiffly as it came, with as little elasticity.
“You—may—expect—him. He—comes—now.”
He revolved slowly away from her and went out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind him.
Margaret ran tiptoe across the room to twist the key in the door. The lock’s inner mechanism rattled loosely, the bolt would not click home. The warmly sweet fragrance of magnolia enveloped her. She gave up the struggle with the broken lock and dropped down on a chair beside the door. Points of dampness were on her back. Under gown and robe her legs were cold. Doucas, not the breeze, had brought the bream of magnolia to her in bed. His unguessed presence in the bedroom had wakened her. He had been up there looking with his surface-shining eyes for Guy. If Guy had been home, asleep beside her? A picture came of Doucas bending over the bed, his head still stiffly upright, a bright blade in his jeweled fist. She shivered.
The Dashiell Hammett Megapack: 20 Classic Stories Page 22
