“That’s not why I asked you to come back here.” My voice was dreary and toneless, and I caught back an unsteady breath.
In a second he was on his feet. “Cameron,” he said. “Cameron—you’re not crying?” With noiseless swiftness he crossed the room. His shoulders bulked large, close to me; he was kneeling by the arm of the chesterfield so that my head was nearly as high as his. I saw in his hand a faint glimmer of something white, and realized that he was kindly preparing to dry my tears.
At the sight, absurdly enough, I very nearly did cry.
“Go away,” I said in a strangled whisper. “I don’t need a handkerchief.”
“I didn’t mean to frighten you. Lord knows,” Barney said, “I meant to keep quiet. You needn’t tell me this is no time for love-making, but—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t.” On this feeble plea my breath gave out entirely.
“No,” he said, misunderstanding—and deliberately stretched out a hand on either side of me, “—I won’t touch you again; but I want to know what’s the matter.” I moved impatiently, and he added, “And I warn you, if you leap up haughtily you’ll fall right into my arms.”
I knew that. Every drop of my blood knew it. No need to rise; I could lean forward only a few inches—
With a desperate effort I pushed myself back into the cushions, and willed my voice to come out steadily. “I’m not frightened, of course. This shouldn’t be unexpected, I did seem to be asking for it.”
“If I thought you were asking,” said the level voice, “I might lose all my self-control.”
“That’s just it. When a girl complains that nobody loves her and suggests sitting in the dark, and then invites you—I didn’t think how it sounded, but I suppose you felt the least you could do was to—to respond. Well, you’ve done your bit of chivalry for the night. Now you know it wasn’t meant that way, you needn’t—say any more.”
When he spoke again there was a hint of laughter behind the low, husky voice. “I never felt less chivalrous. I wasn’t paying any attention to what you said, and you’ve done nothing but be yourself. That was plenty.”
“Barney, please. Really, you don’t have to—”
“Take it easy. You’re going to listen, since I’ve said this much already. You must have known; this has been coming on all evening, ever since I saw you there in the doorway, all done up in cellophane like something in a florist’s window.”
Perversely, if I hadn’t wanted so much to believe him, it would have been easier; if I could ever think of myself as wine instead of water—but at least he didn’t say zinnias.
“What a time and place I pick out!” he added with a sound that was half laugh, half groan. “There isn’t time to tell you how I feel—and if there were, the set-up is all wrong. I can’t say or do what I want to—
“I ask you, can I?” he said, motionless beside me in the dark.
From a great distance a voice that must have been mine faltered, “Not—now. Not tonight.”
—Go on, said the treacherous small thing inside me; go on, let yourself think he means it. Perhaps this is the man you’ve looked for, the man who has guessed what you’re really like, as nobody else has ever—
Tomorrow, I thought. “Tomorrow,” my whisper echoed; and then I gave a great start.
In defiance of his own rule, Barney had caught my wrist in a hard clasp.
He was rigidly still. “Listen,” he said. “Rumple up your hair, and open your dress at the collar.” His breathy voice was barely audible.
“What on earth—”
“Don’t argue. Do as I say. Hurry.” He rose from his crouching position with a single easy movement, and crept toward the hall door.
Then I heard what he had heard: the click of metal on wood. A moment since there had been a creak from that board in the corridor. Now someone—someone with a key—was trying to enter my apartment.
I could just see around the corner into the hall. Simultaneously the hall light was briskly flicked on, and Barney, pulling the door open, said in a tone of annoyance, “What the hell?”
There was a key in the lock, and a hand was attached to it. The owner of the hand, caught off balance, fell with complete abandon into the opening, saving himself only by flinging his arms around Barney’s neck. There was no mistaking the length and untidiness of that figure, even before Barney, his voice now a mixture of surprise and compunction, exclaimed, “Mr. Bassett!”
With immense dignity the figure regained balance. “Navigate under own power,” our landlord mumbled, wavered into the living room doorway and touched the switch of the ceiling light.
Blinking, disheveled, looking as embarrassed as I felt, I huddled in the corner of the sofa. He raked my person with a wild and bleary eye.
“Thash what I thought,” he accused me in a voice which cracked with indignation. “Necking!”
He steamed forward a few feet, and once more stopped dead. “Baloney,” he shrilled suddenly, “He’s no dect—no tective.” I cast one horrified look at Barney, behind the landlord.
Barney’s eyes were brilliant as if with a mysterious triumph.
Mr. Bassett thoughtfully lowered his voice. “Tenants, mustn’ disturb other tenants,” he murmured. “Thish respectable house. I’m in charge, goin’ keep it respectable.” He swayed a trifle from the ankles, fixing me with an implacable gaze. “Got to thinkin’. Girl went up, girl never came down again. Thought I’d come up and fin’ out what’s up to.”
He drew in a mighty lungful of air, and I held my breath in expectation of a roar.
“Necking,” Mr. Bassett said in a penetrating whisper, and sat down all of a piece on the occasional chair. Its unexpected hardness wrung from him a surprised moan.
No longer daring to meet Barney’s eyes, I began to fumble sheepishly with my hair and my collar. Barney lounged over from the doorway and turned so that he faced our visitor. “Aw, hell,” he said in an indefinably coarsened voice, “What’s wrong with that? A man gets sick of being on the job all the time. Can’t he have a little fun?”
“No,” the landlord said owlishly, “no—no—no—no. Not here. I’m gonna keep place decent.”
“Well, why do you have to pick on us?” said Barney reasonably. “We’re not givin’ any trouble, are we?”
Mr. Bassett’s eyes shifted off vaguely, and he muttered with an effect of reluctant truth, “Other people all been here a long time.” Then he swayed once more toward me. “You get out,” he said, “ri’ now. You ’n’ him. Don’t want immorial char’cters round here. Go on.”
It struck me all at once that this wasn’t entirely funny; he might mean it. Brooding among the tidies and Yards of Kittens in that first-floor lair, he had evidently arrived at this stage of pot-valiance where, Barney’s threats forgotten under the anesthetic of drink, he remembered only that something was wrong in apartment 4-D.
“I’ll go downstairs,” he finished magnificently, “an’ if you’re not down in fi’ minutes, baggage, everything, I’ll—I’ll—”
He would what? Rouse the household? Call the police to throw us out?
Barney’s back was still turned to me, but he had been observing the landlord with serious attention. “Aw, look, Mr. Bassett,” he said in what was almost a whine, “think it over a few minutes. It’s late, and we were just—well, have a heart. Say, why don’t we all have a little drink, and then talk about it?”
Mr. Bassett muttered something about carousing, but I thought the mention of a drink had touched his heart. “Sure,” Barney pressed his advantage soothingly, “that’s what we need. I’ll get it.”
He turned in the doorway, just out of Bassett’s line of vision. To my startled gaze appeared a combination of gestures and silently mouthed words. “Keep him looking at you!”
I wondered madly what Barney intended to serve at this midnight feast, but my orders were clear. Mr. Bassett, wavering on his pins, was already hitching himself from his chair, presumably to meet the drink halfwa
y. I darted into the zone of alcoholic air which surrounded him, and whispered, “Quick! While he’s out of the room, listen to me.”
He was still turning toward the door, and I seized his crumpled lapels. “You’ve got to help me. That man is a—a white slaver. He kept me up here, he said if I made a noise or tried to leave he’d kill me. You call up the police, downstairs—there’s no telephone here.”
“Don’t want to get police—this respec’ble house,” said Mr. Bassett, passing a hand over his lips and nervously trying to back away. I heard a slight clinking sound in the kitchen, and then silence.
“Oh, be quiet, or he’ll hear you!” Trying not to breathe, I brought my face close to his retreating one. “You don’t know what I’ve been through. He threatened me with—with worse than death. Listen, tell them when they come not to knock at the door. Tell them to climb the fire escape and take him by surprise.” Over Bassett’s shoulder I saw Barney in the doorway. “Look! Tell them to break in that window!”
With a dramatic gesture I released the shrinking form and swung my arm toward the rear wall. Involuntarily his eyes followed mine.
He was a little behind me. When I turned to him once more I could not believe what I saw. He was making me a deep bow.
From a distance of several feet Barney watched him solicitously.
Bassett kept on bowing, from the waist, and I stood spellbound. He bowed farther and farther, until his head was nearly on the floor. Then, without a sound, he collapsed at full length and lay there with his eyes beatifically closed.
My incredulous gaze moved to Barney. He seemed to be standing crookedly, and my look dropped slowly to his feet. One of them was bare.
From behind his back he brought out a curious object. It was a soft woolen sock, heavily and bluntly weighted. “Nice teamwork, my dear,” he observed. “I was at my wits’ end there, for a minute.”
“What—” I began, and had to stop and start again. “What—”
“Every time I handle those cacti of yours,” he said plaintively, “my hands get stuck full of prickers. I suppose, though, I ought to be thankful they were there—and growing in sand.”
Feebly I repeated, “What—” like a demented sea gull.
Barney calmly up-ended his sock and dumped out the sand in a heap. “I don’t advise you to make any muffins with your flour,” he observed. There was a heady elation in his manner, which seemed to inspire facetiousness. “I hid the cactus plants in the flour bin. The only problem was to get Comrade Bassett’s attention fixed on something so I could sock him. That was a swell performance. When you said ‘worse than death,’ cold shivers went up my spine.”
He stood up, re-shod, and walked over to the recumbent form of our landlord. “Now what are we going to do with him?” he murmured.
“Barney, you sandbagged that poor creature?”
“Only a little tap. You have to know just where to hit; they go out like a light, and they don’t wake up for a good long time. And then—they have a headache, sure, but ten to one they don’t know what hit them—just like Ma Ulrichson.”
“You were that worried about having the police called, or being thrown out of this building? But he wouldn’t really have made any trouble, do you think?”
Barney muttered gleefully, “Walked right into my parlor. I knew staying here was the best bet. He half expected to find me snooping all over the building.”
“What on earth are you doing?” I said, bending over his averted shoulder.
“Three guesses,” said Barney. He was going methodically through Mr. Bassett’s clothes, stacking the contents of the pockets beside him on the floor. It made a rather pitiful little heap of rubbish: a ragged handkerchief, some soiled business cards, a knife, a thinly stocked billfold and a handful of small change. Barney sat back on his heels, balancing on his palm a bunch of keys.
“Well, Fagin,” I said, “what sort of company have I got into?”
“Worse than death,” he replied elliptically, and grinned at me.
“You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
He looked up at me, the blue eyes still alight with merriment. “What a good soldier you make—throwing away your reputation like that. It was the only thing to do, though; and didn’t it give him a jolt!”
“Wasn’t it just what he expected?”
Barney shook his head. “That last of anything. Probably he thought I was out; but Lord, he’s quick! He was all prepared with that drunk act, so that when I caught him at the door—”
He caught my frown, and laughed softly. “Didn’t you know? Our late esteemed landlord was as sober as you are.”
NINE
Closed for Repairs
“HOW DO YOU KNOW?” I said blankly.
“His hands; I was watching ’em. He did the vague stare all right, and the speech—and plenty of whisky had been spilled around—but he found that light switch on the first try.”
“Look here.” I stared at him. “Do you mean me to think—”
Barney got to his feet. “I can’t control your thoughts,” he countered in a light tone, “though you might ask yourself why he was so anxious about our movements. Let’s just say—Bassett got in my way. We can’t afford interference, not at this stage of the game.”
I looked down thoughtfully at the limp figure. More than one sodden gentleman has crossed my path, though never in a state that had to be curbed with a sandbag. Bassett had seemed to me one of the ripest specimens I’d ever viewed.
Maybe Barney knew best; but, whether the landlord had been drunk or sober, one fact was certain. Sometime he’d wake up. This last thought seemed to echo in the mind of my companion.
“I wish I could get him put away,” he said. “If there were some place where he could be locked in until I had time to deal with him!”
“Uh-huh. Picture him coming to, and me trying to handle the fireworks.”
“I know—There’s a lock on the bathroom, of course, but only inside. Good Lord, there must be some place—”
“Wait a minute.” I looked up with a sudden inspiration. “That big old-fashioned key on his ring—I think I know what that unlocks.”
“Give out,” he encouraged me.
“On the second floor, around the corner from the staircase, there’s a sort of glory-hole where Mrs. Ulrichson keeps a vacuum cleaner. She lets the tenants use it, I’ve seen her getting it out—and I’ll swear that door has the kind of lock that fastens from the outside only.”
He was already disengaging the big key. With it in his hand, he looked at me dubiously. “I’m going to have a hard time managing this alone; Bassett’s no featherweight. It’s asking a lot of you, Cameron, but—as long as you’re with me—”
“You’ll let me go along to open the door? Good egg!” He grinned at my enthusiasm. “Or shall I carry Mr. Bassett?” I added, somewhat giddy with excitement.
“Why, no,” said Barney gravely. “I want him myself. Here, put that arm over my head, will you?”
He was pulling the unconscious form over his shoulder in the fireman’s lift. I had a sudden vision of meeting someone on the stairs and having to explain why we were locking our landlord in a broom closet. The giggles are not a habit of mine, but I very nearly had them then. “Barney,” I said, “what’s going to happen in that glory-hole when he wakes up?”
“If he’s got nothing on his conscience, I should think he’ll bang on the door and warn us. Otherwise, he’ll want to get out without any noise, without anyone’s knowing—and I didn’t leave a thing in his pockets that would serve to get him free.”
“And as for explaining—?”
“Oh, let’s work that out later. I can’t think of everything at once.”
I should like to have been dissociated from our next few minutes’ work, and to have been able to observe it impartially and all unwarned. It must have been remarkable; the terrific creak, under double weight, of the board outside 4-B, which startled me so that I leapt an inch into the air; the processional do
wn the stairs, me in front feeling for every step, Barney behind with his burden draped round his neck like a fox fur; the elaborate caution with which we approached the closet on the second floor, and the really bad moment when Barney had dumped his load to inspect the linen-laden shelves—and we heard footsteps on the stair coming up.
There was not really room enough for the three of us and the vacuum cleaner too; but in one second after the sound had reached our ears, we were wedged in somehow, and Barney was trying to close the door. It wouldn’t quite shut, and he had to hold it while the intruder went by. I did not dare to take a breath lest the extra pressure cause it to pop open. Under our feet Mr. Bassett slumbered blissfully, his cheek pillowed on a mop.
Barney’s arm across my chest was like padded steel.
And if the person who was mounting the stair should see the crack between door and frame, and the hand on the knob? What did one say—“Come right in, we’re playing sardines?”
Jay, or Fingers, or Gertie—coming quietly up, on the alert for anything out of the ordinary?
It was, thank heaven, none of them. There was a rustle of silk and the scent of damp fur in the corridor, and the woman’s feet tapped lightly on the carpet as she went down the hall to the right. Miss Rose Delage, perhaps, I thought; can anyone really be called Rose Delage, or are stage names customary in the business?
“Now!” Barney breathed as we heard the closing of a door at the end of the hall. I still had the key; I locked the closet and slipped the key in my pocket, and we shot up the stairs as if the whole pack were on our heels.
He had taken the other keys from Bassett’s ring. Now we halted on the fourth floor, and he ventured to use the flashlight with which we had inspected the interior of the broom closet. (“If he can pick a lock with a pillowslip,” Barney had said, “he’s a better man than Col—than I am.”) Before I had realized what he was about to do he’d pushed me inside my own door and was using the key marked 4-C, disappearing within my neighbor’s apartment. I stood waiting, the blood pounding in my ears.
The 9 Dark Hours Page 11
