Old Z.10 had let go of my arm and was doing something with a pocket-book. All of a sudden there was a click and a little round blob of light no bigger than a shilling popped out of the dark and slid across the tarnished silver edge of a leather note-case and the black and white of a half unfolded note. It came to rest on the big “Five” in one corner. If a note sounded good, it looked even better. I had sixpence in my pocket-sixpence. And if I pawned anything more, I shouldn’t have a change of clothes. Five pounds-ten pounds-ten pounds down… I heard the running stream, and I wondered when I was going to wake up.
“Well, Mr. Fairfax?”
I made myself look away from the patch of light.
“What have I got to do for this?”
“For this? Nothing. It is merely a retaining fee.”
“To what extent does it commit me?”
“It does not commit you at all-it merely enables my principal to make the observations which he considers necessary and advisable. Let me explain. He wishes to see you without being seen. To this end he wishes you to go to certain public places, which will afford him an opportunity of observing you. To do this you will have to replenish your wardrobe. Ten pounds will not, perhaps, go very far, but it should enable you to pass muster. You possess dress clothes?”
I didn’t think it necessary to tell him that they were in pawn, so I said,
“Yes.”
“Well, Mr. Fairfax,” he said again, “do you accept?”
There was something I meant to ask, but I didn’t know how to put it. I hesitated, and then got it out.
“Is your principal a woman?” Because if it was Anna, I thought I was going to prefer the workhouse after all.
He sounded most awfully surprised as he said,
“A woman? Certainly not. May I ask what suggested this idea to you?”
Naturally I wasn’t going to tell him that.
He slid the spotlight back on to the case, picked up two fivers, and held them out.
“You accept then?”
I took the notes and put them in the pocket with the sixpence.
“What am I to do?” I asked.
His hand with the torch in it had fallen to his side. The little circle of light swung to and fro on the worn edge of the road. It had been tarred, and the tar had broken away into holes that looked like the pictures of dead craters in the moon.
“Why,” he said, “nothing very arduous. This is Tuesday. To-morrow you will dine at Leonardo’s.”
“Alone?” I said.
“No-no-” He seemed to be considering the question. “No-I don’t think so. You had better invite a lady to accompany you.”
I laughed. I don’t know why, but the thing tickled me.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any lady whom I could ask.”
The little round shilling’s worth of light went swinging to and fro over the dead craters of the moon and a dry leaf or two and the dust of the road.
“Surely-surely,” he said. “Come, Mr. Fairfax-you do yourself an injustice. There is surely some one.”
“There is Mrs. Bell,” I suggested, and as soon as I’d said it I could tell that he knew Mrs. Bell was my landlady.
He moved sharply and was going to speak, and didn’t speak. I wondered how much he really did know about my circumstances. I began to think that he knew a good deal.
“And who is Mrs. Bell?”
“A British matron and my landlady.”
“Ah,” he said-“yes. But I have no time to waste on landladies. Come, Mr. Fairfax-you will not ask me to believe that your landlady is the only woman you know. I am informed that you have at any rate an acquaintance with one of your fellow lodgers. Would she not perhaps be a more suitable companion?”
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of Fay, but I hadn’t. She would certainly be-suitable.
“I could ask her,” I said. “But it’s short notice-she might be engaged.”
“Well, well,” he said again, “if she is, something must be done about it. If you arrive alone, a partner will be provided-but the other would be better.”
He turned out the light on the pocket-book and took out five one-pound Treasury notes.
“For expenses,” he said, and handed them over.
He then shut the pocket-book and put it away.
“Your engagement begins to-night. Your salary will be paid you to-day week. Your instructions will reach you from time to time either by letter, telegram, telephone, or word of mouth. Written communications will be signed ‘Z.10.’ Messages will be preceded by ‘Z.10’ as a pass-word. That is all. Good-night.”
He switched off the light, turned sharp round, and walked away down Olding Crescent. I could not see him, but I could hear his footsteps getting fainter and fainter. When I couldn’t hear them any longer I went home.
XIV
September 19th-I woke up next morning with the feeling that something had happened, or was going to happen. I wasn’t really awake, and I wasn’t really asleep. The sun was making a bright golden line all round the edge of my blind, and the room was full of that happened feeling.
Then I remembered that what had happened was fifteen pounds-two five-pound notes and five Bradburys. And what was going to happen was new boots, a suit of clothes- and dinner at Leonardo’s. It all felt pretty good, and at the moment I wasn’t bothering about what my principal, or Z, 10’s principal, might be going to ask me to do. I was going to get some new boots even if the skies fell.
I got up and made a list.
A reach-me-down suit-five guineas.
To get my dress clothes out of pawn-thirty bob (I ought to have got more on them, for they were brand new just before the crash, and I’ve hardly had them on since).
Two soft shirts-say, eight and six apiece.
Boots-fifty shillings.
That brought me up to ten pounds two. My hat’s pretty bad, but it will have to carry on for a bit.
I went out and shopped, and came home with my parcels. Then I went and asked Fay if she’d dine with me. I was rather fed up about having to ask her, because she was most awfully rude to Corinna Lee when I introduced them. Corinna is a friend of Peter’s, and I said so, and Fay gave an exhibition performance of bad manners that would be pretty hard to beat.
Well, I asked her to dine at Leonardo’s. She jumped at it, and wanted to know if I’d come in for a fortune. I said Henry Ford had just sent me a check for half a million, so she’d better wear her best dress.
We dined at eight. Leonardo’s wasn’t going three years ago, so I’d never been there. The place was crowded, and the dinner was top-hole. The whole thing felt awfully queer. I kept on finding my thoughts wandering, so that I didn’t hear what Fay was saying. One of the people, at one of the tables, was my employer, making his “observations.” I wondered if I would pass muster, and exactly what would happen if I didn’t. Anyhow I’d spent that ten pounds, and he couldn’t very well take my boots away. It was a very queer evening. I didn’t know a soul in the room. But one of these people knew me, and I naturally wanted to know which of them it was.
All at once I saw that Fay was watching me. She was smoking. The smoke hung round her, and she was looking through it at me. I apologized for being a bad host, but she didn’t answer; she just went on looking through the smoke. Her mouth was all plastered with paint, but the rest of her face was pale. She looked like something artificial in a glass case-beautifully finished and all that, but you wonder what on earth any one would do with it if they had it.
Just as I was beginning to feel annoyed, she said,
“Why did you ask me to dine with you?”
I said the obvious thing.
“Why didn’t you ask Peter’s friend?” she went on- “Clarissa what’s-her name.”
“Corinna Lee.”
“Who is she?”
“An American cousin of mine.”
“And a friend of Peter’s?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell her about me?”
>
“I didn’t tell her anything.”
She put her elbows on the table and leaned towards me.
“Did you think I was rude to her?”
“What do you think yourself?”
“I can be ruder than that,” she said, and laughed.
I didn’t like the look in her eye. When I didn’t answer, she began to talk about Rena La Touche the dancer, who had just come in with a boy who looked as if he oughtn’t to have left school, a young ass with pale hair and eyes like a love-sick rabbit. Fay told me his income, and her salary, and how many lovers she’d had in a year, and just what she’d paid for the feather frock she was wearing. She was all feathers and pearls, and bare back, and enormous eyes like pools of ink.
And then all of a sudden she asked,
“Did you tell her I was Peter’s wife?”
“Rena?” I said.
“Don’t be so outrageously stupid! That Clarissa girl.”
“Corinna Lee?”
“It’s all the same thing. Did you tell her?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not to. Do you hear?”
I told her what I thought about this idiot game of secrecy, but she only began to talk about Rena La Touche again.
After dinner we danced. Fay dances beautifully, and the floor was topping. She taught me the new steps. She can be very attractive when she likes. I can understand why Peter…It’s perfectly asinine of them not to give their marriage out.
When we were walking home, I thought she must be thinking me a brute, because the last time we really talked she told me she was absolutely up against it and she asked me to help her. Helping her was going to mean five hundred pounds, and as I hadn’t five hundred pence, it didn’t seem much good talking about it. It was one of the things that made me dally with Z.10 and his offer, so I hadn’t really forgotten Fay-or if I had, it was only for a few hours. It seems stupid to have forgotten a person when you’re actually dining and dancing with her. The fact is, the dining and the dancing rather went to my head-it was like going back to a bit out of the old life-and though I was talking to Fay and dancing with her, I wasn’t thinking about her at all; the nearest I got to her was Peter. When we were walking home I sort of woke up.
It was Fay who wanted to walk. Personally, I was feeling as if I could have walked to Brighton but I should have thought a taxi would have been more in her line. I was feeling a bit reckless, and I thought the exes would stand a taxi all right. She said no, she wanted to walk, so we started off, and for about a mile neither of us said a word.
It was a topping night, warm and windy, with the wind sounding like wings. Fay kept close to me, and all at once I heard her sigh, so I asked her if she was tired, and she said “No” and sighed again. And then I began to feel a brute. I was just going to say something when she pressed up against me and said,
“Have you really come into some money?”
I said “No-I’ve got a job-and part of the job is going and dining at Leonardo’s.”
“With me?” she sounded rather frightened.
“With any one.”
“How odd! I was hoping-Car, is it a good job?”
“I don’t know yet.” Then I went on, “Fay, did you mean all those things you said the other day?”
She slipped her arm through mine.
“Oh, I don’t know. What did I say? I’m damned miserable. Did I say that?”
I felt her shiver up against me.
“You said-”
“What’s the good of talking about what I said?”
“You said you must have five hundred pounds.”
“Can you give it me?”
“No-I can’t.”
“Then what’s the good of talking about it?”
“The man you mentioned-Fosicker-what is he like?” I don’t know what made me think of that, it just came into my head.
“I never mentioned any one.”
“You did.”
“I don’t know any one called Fosicker.”
“You said you got money from him.”
“Are you trying to insult me?”
“You said he paid you.”
She let go of my arm and pushed herself away from me so violently that I stumbled on the curb and nearly lost my balance.
“Hold on!” I said-I was furious. “You told me he paid you for distributing dope.”
She turned round on me in a sort of whirling fury.
“How dare you?” Then she seemed to catch hold of herself and calm down. It would have been more natural if she had gone on being angry. But she didn’t; she laughed and slipped over to me and took my arm again. “You’ve been dreaming, Car darling,” she said.
I wondered what on earth her game was. I could see she was frightened. Had she frightened herself-or had Fosicker frightened her? And who was Fosicker?
XV
September 20th-I got a registered letter next morning. There were five more one-pound notes and two lines of type on a sheet of plain foolscap. They were:
Repeat last night. Post this back to me at old address. Z.10.
I did what I was told-posted his own letter back to Box Z.10, International Employment Exchange, and the rest.
This is one of the things I don’t like-his first letter disappearing, and his second to be posted back to him. The more I go over the whole thing, the less I can make of it and the less I like it.
1. I have a printed advertisement thrust on me in the street. “Do you want to earn £500? If so, apply to Box Z.10, 187 Falcon Street.”
2. I write to Z.10 and I go to Falcon Street to make inquiries, and I hear Bobby Markham talking to a little Jew tobacconist about Benno having planted some one with something. No reasonable doubt that they were speaking about me and the advertisement. I vamoose without being seen-or at any rate I hope so.
3. Letter from Z.10 (signed Smith) asking me to ring up a number afterwards identified as paper shop.
4. Telephone conversation with Z.10 Smith. Tells me to be at corner of Churt Row and Olding Crescent (Putney) ten o’clock same evening.
5. I keep appointment. Am taken by car a long way (Linwood). Anna in car-not recognized till later. Driver perhaps Benno-not sure.
6. Interview in hut on Linwood Edge with Bobby Markham, and then Anna. Anna offers £500 if I will forge my uncle’s name and go to prison for it. She has a nerve!
7. Anna and I walk through Linwood; she to the house, I to village street, where driver and car are waiting- engine trouble. Some one passes in car and goes up to the house-probably Dr. Monk. Sounded like his old Puffing Billy, but I should think it must be dead by now. Wonder if my uncle is ill.
8. Letter next morning from Z.10 Smith, apologizing for having failed to meet me-accident to his car. Asks me to meet some place that evening.
9. Meet Z.10 Smith in the dark. Offers me retaining fee of £10 down, £3 a week, a fiver for expenses, pending decision of unnamed “principal” as to my fitness for post (Second Murderer?). Duties, pro tem., to dine and dance at Leonardo’s. Curiouser and curiouser!
I can’t make anything of it. It’s just possible that Markham and Anna butted in on a plan that hadn’t really got anything to do with them. I mean Z.10 may be genuinely wanting some one to do a confidential job for him, and either Markham or Anna may have got to know about it. One of them might have been buying papers while Z.10 and I were talking on the telephone-no, that won’t do, because Morgan was talking to the tobacconist about Benno having pushed off the advertisement on to me before I talked to Z.10 at all. Well, that doesn’t matter, because of course there are dozens of other ways he might have got to know about the affair- he, or Anna. And I suppose Anna could have jabbed a hatpin into his tyre and made him late for his appointment with me. I wonder whether Anna is really in a hole, or whether she’s just trying to get me into one.
And that’s another thing that’s odd. Anna says she’s in a hole, and will I please commit a forgery and do seven years, or whatever it is they give y
ou for forgery, to help her out of it, and she’ll say “Thank you kindly,” and press five hundred pounds into my hand. And Fay says she’s in a hole and can’t possibly get out of it unless I give her five hundred pounds-at least that’s what she said to start with, and now she says she never said anything of the sort, and that I must have been dreaming.
Now is there any connection between these two things? Or is it just a coincidence that Fay should be in a hole, and Anna should be in a hole, and that they should both, as you might say, harp on the sum of five hundred pounds? Can’t make head or tail of it. I can only go on writing things down as they happen.
Quite a lot happened last night. We got the same table at Leonardo’s. Fay seemed awfully bucked about coming, and about half way through dinner it came over me that I didn’t really care a damn about Z.10, or Anna, or anything else. My spirits went up with a run and I felt like taking on any old thing that was going to turn up.
Rena La Touche was there again, in what looked like a gold snake-skin. Fay told me she was wearing the largest emerald in the world. It was about an inch square, and she said it was flawless. I wondered whether nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand would have known the difference if it had been suddenly changed for a bit of colored glass. As long as they went on believing it as the biggest emerald in the world they’d have got just the same amount of thrill out of it.
She passed quite close to our table, with the love-sick rabbit about half a pace behind. Just as she was level with us she dropped her bag, a little gold affair with a handle made of twisted snakes. The rabbit picked it up as I was going to make a dive for it myself. She gave me a sort of perfunctory “come hither” look as she put out her hand to take it. She didn’t look at the rabbit at all, and I thought what a jolly time the poor devil must have, fetching and carrying and paying the bills, and buying her emeralds, or seeing other people buy them for her. She took the bag out of his hand, still looking at me, and began to move away.
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