Never Walk Alone

by Rufus King

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “Well, he didn’t notice it right away. The rain got us pretty wet coming back from the shop, and he took a bath and changed his clothes and then he noticed that the etching wasn’t on the wall. Uncle’s awfully funny sometimes. Little things will send him into a fury.”

  Light was beginning to break, at least in so far as to where the etching probably was. Its newness in Mr. Smith’s room had undoubtedly caught Leila’s attention while she had been tidying up, and the etching had simply appealed to her kleptomaniac fancy. What a pity poor Mr. Smith had worked himself into such a stew.

  “I got thinking about it after Uncle was gone,” Fergus was saying. “I don’t know much about artists. But I thought that maybe you had taken it, Mrs. Giles. To sign your name to it or something, like they do in books.”

  Mrs. Giles got up from the chair.

  “No, not that, Mr. Wade, but I am reasonably certain I can find it for your uncle.”

  He looked at her with charming diffidence while a curious flush spread slowly upward over his face.

  “That would be very lucky, Mrs. Giles.”

  She was averse to telling him outright her strong assurance that Leila had taken it. The less that Leila were brought to the attention of this ruggedly bashful Adonis, the better. Also, it seemed so unkind to spread the nature of Leila’s unfortunate habit. What a marvelous color young Mr. Wade had. Wind-swept.

  “Where is it?” he asked quietly.

  “I will see that it is replaced on the wall in the morning.”

  What a quick reflex in the muscles of his fingers!

  “I’d be grateful if you could get it for me now, Mrs. Giles. I’d like Uncle to find it there when he comes back.”

  “Come with me, Mr. Wade.”

  Mrs. Giles hooked the knitting bag over an arm and led the way upstairs. She wondered as he followed her on quiet feet through the ruby-tinted hall what reason she could offer for the etching being now in Leila’s cache. She hesitated for an instant before Kent’s door but then repressed a natural impulse to look in. How softly young Mr. Wade walked. She would scarcely know that he was following her.

  So softly, and still as they mounted the stairs to the attic floor his breathing was becoming audible, even though the silence lingered in his feet. Curious that Mr. Smith should have made such a to-do. Surely he must have known she would gladly have given him another India print of the placid stag at eventide at peace beside the forest pool.

  She pressed a switch, and the studio sprang into light. Fergus followed her inside and closed the door.

  “Is it in here, Mrs. Giles?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Who brought it here? Did you?”

  The voice had taken on a lower, a vibrant note, and for the first moment since she had been enchanted by it Mrs. Giles had the disturbing impression that Mr. Wade’s bashful smile was not quite nice. It seemed unchanged, but there was a faint distortion about it, and a smoky look had come into his eyes.

  She found herself fascinated just watching them while the large bright room receded blurringly and only his eyes were alive with embers slowly hinted. Avarice, a triumphant greed, like that look which Papa had described on the face of a friend of his who had been prospecting for years and had at last struck gold.

  “Get it.” The voice wasn’t a whisper. It was too choked, but its effect was of a whisper. “Get it, Mrs. Giles.”

  She found herself saying, “Why?”

  “I’ve told you why.”

  “Are you well, Mr. Wade?”

  “I said to get it, Mrs. Giles.”

  He walked softly toward her, step by gentle step.

  (What could occur? How could the feet of murder step past the patrol on the grounds and, once inside the house, step softly up, then, quelling the gorgon Nurse Jones, step onward into within reach of Kent?)

  “What have you done to him? What have you done to my grandson?”

  “Get me that etching quick before Smith gets back.”

  She had the gun half out of the knitting bag when it caught in a fold of the sweater. He took it gently from her, bag and all, and slung it into a corner of the room. He took her wrist in his fingers, and for an instant she knew blind pain.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Fergus,” Mr. Smith’s voice said from the doorway.

  Pain eased and her eyes cleared, and Mrs. Giles brought Mr. Smith into focus. He took a chair and brought it to her.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Giles. I saw that the studio windows were lighted. I found my nephew’s bags packed. It seemed advisable to come up.”

  Absurdly she wanted to cry. She felt that her brain had snapped. Death had brushed her because of the little stag. No, surely not. Something of vastly greater worth. Something that had been placed within the casement of the etching’s frame? Which had ripped to shreds her sound estimation of these two men’s fineness and exposed them in the color of blood?

  And Kent?

  “How much has he told you?” Smith asked her.

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you tell her, Fergus?”

  “You heard her.”

  Smith drew his breath in deeply, then he sighed.

  “It doesn’t matter now. This setup is ended. I should have known it was too perfect. Get the etching, Mrs. Giles.”

  “Is the etching why Mr. Russdorff was killed?”

  He said indifferently, “Yes.”

  She managed to stand up. She lingered for a moment’s regret over the solidity with which Papa had built the house. This room which he had converted for her use into a studio had been the children’s playroom. Neither the happy shrieks of games nor running feet had sifted out of it to disturb the quiet below.

  “I shall not give it to you, Mr. Smith.”

  He said with frank curiosity, “Why?”

  Deep inside herself she knew the answer without, in a sense, knowing it all. Kent and Miss Ashley and Mr. Russdorff and the scuffle on the gravel drive. Mr. Russdorff had been murdered because of her etching or for what its frame contained. The roached dark mare had bolted into murderous flight. And Kent had said to her: “You and I don’t matter if it’s what I think it is.” So even Kent himself was not quite sure. But he had been sure enough to risk an awful lot. And Mr. Smith wanted it now.

  He was quietly talking again.

  “You are an intuitive woman, Mrs. Giles, and, I am sure, a brave one. You have common sense. We will take the etching, and then Fergus and I will be gone. You will return to the gracious life you have always known. I will tell you this about Fergus. He does not kill. His value to us, to myself and to my associates, lies in other fields. He is an expert at persuasion. He is an artist at it. You see, he has no nerves.”

  A moment drew to its close.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to, Fergus, after all,” Smith said. Smith did not care to watch. He turned his back and faced the door he had just closed. But it was not closed. The man standing on the threshold was a stranger. Obviously he had just come in from the rain. His overcoat was wet, and a drop or two were falling from the brim of his dark felt hat. He held a revolver in his hand in a manner which informed Smith that the man was familiar with guns. A silencer bloated the revolver’s end.

  “Have they hurt you, Mrs. Giles?” Parling said.

  CHAPTER 34

  So profoundly glad was she to see him that Mrs. Giles was incapable of considering the coincidental patness of Mr. Parling’s appearance on the scene, or of delving into the magic which had caused a man, supposedly miles away from the house on a night shift, to show up in the nick of time.

  In the state her mind was in (which was no state at all) Mr. Parling’s role of deus ex machina was no stranger to her than the old pantomimes for which, in Mrs. Giles’s childhood, Mamma had arranged box parties at Christmastide for her and her school friends. Always, in the pantomimes, the forces of evil were routed by the good fairy and vanished to a satisfactory stewing through the trap doors out of
which they had so recently popped.

  Not that there was anything fey about Mr. Parling right then. She did wish he hadn’t struck Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade quite so hard with that short leather thing with a knob on it. They looked almost dead: slumped like two straw men at the base of Payne and Sons’ Albion hand press, where they had fallen. Evil though they were, certainly they were now fangless, and she worried about them.

  “Shouldn’t Dr. Hesley be called, Mr. Parling? Or at least Nurse Jones?”

  Sheer disbelief and fondness played fractionally in Failing’s eyes.

  “You just sit quietly, Mrs. Giles. Get your wind back. Then you can give me the plates and we’ll go downstairs and phone Stedman.”

  “Plates?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you get it? From anything they said?”

  “I’m afraid—I am sorry, but my head is so very confused.”

  He almost smiled.

  “You know, Mrs. Giles, you will think this odd. I wondered about you. Whether you were mixed up in it. So many families such as yours have lost their money. You might have been tempted. You had the printing press and the supplies of paper. Your position and the reputation of this house made such a perfect front.”

  “This is all completely unintelligible, Mr. Parling. I think if you would be simple about it…?”

  She listened earnestly while he talked. Her head cleared somewhat, and it did begin to make sense. These coincidental appearances, the bravura of these nicks-of-time were nothing extraordinary when you considered the canvas as a whole. There was nothing “coincidental” in organized crime, he told her. Or in its prosecution. The stakes were too high on both sides to permit of it. He led her lucidly through intricacies.

  Smith was one of the finest forgers of government bank notes in the country. Perhaps the very finest. They had tried to get on his trail for a long time but had never until recently been able to, and his fingerprints were not on record. Wade had never been caught up with either; he, too, was not on record, a fact which, in addition to his other abilities, made him highly serviceable to Smith and the rest of the mob.

  They had been able, because of this recordless slate, to obtain jobs in a war plant. Their credentials, of course, had been forged by Smith, to whom such trifles would be child’s play. As war workers they had felt their fronts to be secure, not only from the draft but from chance suspicion by the law. These were not the days when idle men went long unobserved.

  (Why don’t you, Mrs. Giles thought irrelevantly, put the bracelets on them? Wasn’t that always done? It did seem a bit extreme to knock them out so coldly when a kinder tap and handcuffs would, it appeared to her, have done the trick.)

  The job which Smith and his mob was now engaged on was not a simple one in the sense of being an ordinary attempt to print and shove the queer. It impinged on the war. Did Mrs. Giles know that the paper money paid to our troops in Africa differed from money here in that the seal of the United States was printed in gold? She did not. This was done, Parling said, to prevent the Axis from circulating United States currency seized from banks in Europe.

  (Mrs. Giles’s aching head was off again. Gold. Again the color tantalized her: that fleck of gold-faced paper which in sunshine and in shadow… How soothing Mr. Parling’s voice was. So sane. Like water cool on fever.)

  She would easily understand. Parling went on, the inestimable value to Axis agents of a first-class forgery job of such currency. A truly first-class one which attained perfection, one such as perhaps Smith alone could turn out.

  Getting the forged bills over there offered nothing insurmountable. Possibly Mrs. Giles had read that recent newspaper report where a plan to have gold bullion minted here into coins and then to transport them abroad by submarine had been scotched? Well, there had been such a plan, and this one which Smith’s mob had embarked on was completely similar.

  (Dear Kent! So this was it. So this was why. That dreadful money poured among the natives, weaning away their allegiance to the Allied cause, then the useless, cruel, wasted deaths piled onto the sum of our men.)

  But in the carefullest chain of planning, Parling said, there were imponderables which could express themselves in a weakening link. The human equation never in history had been sound. In this case, Russdorff. His international connections had bestowed on him the role of middleman between the Axis and Smith’s mob.

  Naturally he was greedy. Such men always are. The limitations of their honor were the bonds of cash. Their lives were milestoned with forty pieces of silver. Their coat of arms, the double cross. This deal of Smith’s mob was not unknown.

  Mrs. Giles would not be aware of it, but such items of news had a habit of running through the underworld like a secret river. (Parling was wrong in this. Mrs. Giles was excellently aware of the fact.) A rival mob to Smith’s was determined to highjack the job if it could. And this simply meant stealing Smith’s plates. They were the core, the very heart, of all forgery: the plates. Whoever had them had all. Even the government was checkmated on a forgery case until the actual plates were in its agent’s possession.

  Naturally Russdorff was delighted. Instead of just skimming off the undoubtedly handsome commission arranged for with Smith’s mob he would manage to steal the plates and hand them over to the proposed highjackers for a far handsomer sum.

  “You will wonder,” Parling told Mrs. Giles, “why he failed.” They must have met, Russdorff and the leader of the rival mob, several times. Undoubtedly there had been such a meeting on the night when Russdorff was killed. What had occurred? You could imagine, if you were familiar with the way of such things. Russdorff certainly did not have, as yet, the plates. For Smith had those so cleverly concealed, as the recent scene had proved, in the framing of Mrs. Giles’s little etching.

  Perhaps the leader of the rival mob did, on the other hand, have the money to turn over for delivery? Perhaps from Russdorff’s actions he grew suspicious that the double cross would bloom into a triple one? Perhaps he feared that Russdorff, after this unsatisfactory meeting, would run at once and tell Smith of this rival mobster’s plans? Naturally, for a price. Nothing with the Russdorffs of this world came free.

  (Was something wrong here? Mrs. Giles wondered. Was this quite right? It seemed so very sensible. So plain. The fatal dicker would have been the one which Hopkins had seen from the box of the brougham between Mr. Russdorff and that man who had exposed nothing but his back to Hopkins’ view. That man whom Mrs. Giles now understood plainly to have been the leading mobster of the highjack gang.)

  With all that in mind, Parling said, the rest must surely be plain. The rival leader had followed Russdorff and had been satisfied when he saw him enter the gates of River Rest that the triple cross was definitely on the make. So he had stabbed Russdorff and made off, to cook up some other scheme for getting hold of the plates. Russdorff would have to be dead. Otherwise he would have exposed the rival gangster’s identity to Smith.

  So much, Parling said, he had been able to determine. As to who this rival mobster was, frankly he didn’t know. And, now that the plates were safe, he did not care. Tonight’s imbroglio was as simple as it had been unimportant. The etching had left Smiths’ wall and come up here. Mrs. Giles evidently knew the answer to that one.

  Smith, in a fever of fear and rage, had rushed out of the house to contact the new agent who had taken Russdorff’s place. Parling knew this was so because he had followed Smith to his destination and then had followed him back here to the house. Wade, alone, had in some fashion applicable to his very simple brain hit on the possibility that Mrs. Giles might know where the etching was. Astoundingly, it seemed, he had been right.

  Again, the priceless plates. Once they were in Wade’s hands he could light out with them and reap, as he saw it and as it, in fact, was, a fortune larger than his dreams. But Smith had come back, and Wade’s moronically packed luggage had put Smith wise.

  Mrs. Giles would wonder, Parling said, how it was that he should have decided not to go to the pla
nt tonight. How he happened to have been on hand when Smith left the house and so was able to tail him. Well, it was because of her.

  (They must do something for that Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade. They hadn’t moved. It was so kind of Mr. Parling to tell her all these things, but surely the tale could be delayed until later?)

  “You see,” Parling said, “I followed your taxi from Merkwin’s Emporium this afternoon. I saw your most curious interest in the close vicinity of the shack which Smith and Wade had occupied. I didn’t and I don’t know what your interest was. It doesn’t matter. But I knew you were onto something and I was afraid.

  “I was afraid, Mrs. Giles, that you would talk to Smith. You would have tipped my hand before I got the invaluable plates. You would have driven him to flight. And so I did not leave the grounds.”

  Parling, with the faintest of sighs, relaxed. Well, he had lulled her now. He had done what he could. He took out a cigar and clipped off its end.

  His voice was businesslike.

  “If you will get the plates for me, Mrs. Giles, I will phone Washington that the case is closed.”

  The fleck of gold. Banding the cigar. In bright sunlight of the morning when she had driven home with Kent from the station and had met Mr. Parling standing on the porch. The cigar in his mouth. The flash, in a ray of sunlight, of its band of gold. Then in the drawing room, in its partial shade, the duller gleam of a band when he had smoked again.

  As he had smoked when he had stood near the shack and talked with Russdorff while Hopkins had watched them from the box. (As to who this rival mob leader was, frankly he didn’t know.) Liar. He knew too well. It was himself.

  Mrs. Giles knew what she was in for. What Kent and Hopkins and Ella and Leila, what all of them were in for. Mr. Parling would kill the lot of them, one of those terrifying endings of Shakespeare’s, where the curtain would fall on a tableau of corpses.

  Parling’s voice took on an impatient edge.

  “Get them, Mrs. Giles.”