‘How is there anywhere to get but here?’ demanded Joolby with stubborn insistence. ‘It’s going on just as ever, don’t I tell you, Nickle?’
‘Comlade Blonsky want look-see,’ announced Won Chou stolidly. As usual he gave the impression of knowing exactly what was going on without being there to see it, and although the ingenuity of his observation posts discounted the latter part of the assumption the former was probably correct enough.
‘All right,’ replied his master, with a painfully uncouth gesture of resignation, for the deputy was the last person he could have wished to have to deal with then, and he was feeling very tired. ‘Make show glad come in.’
‘Thank heaven even for Bronsky,’ remarked Nickle, pausing in his door-ward progress. ‘Time brings strange revenges!’
If Won Chou gave the impression of knowing everything without the least interest in what it was, Mr Bronsky’s bearing was plainly that of a man who had been kept too long in the dark and was now determined to receive his proper meed of due attention. The glossy attire might be slightly less resplendent than when he first appeared, but his entrance had lost nothing of its thick-skinned suggestion that he was there to push his way in and to the front whether he was welcome or unwanted. The kiss of fraternal love had no longer any place in his greeting, in fact the greeting itself was reduced to the most perfunctory word and nod in the host’s direction. Social distinctions were indicated by entirely ignoring the presence of both Nickle and the other two worthies.
‘What is this which I hear of things going not well, Joolby?’ he demanded, coming to the point at once. ‘I was definitely to have been keep inform of any of the sort happening.’
‘Ah, comrade, sorry that I didn’t notice you had come in—forgive the apparent discourtesy,’ intervened Nickle in his most offensive vein of politeness. ‘Well, I can only imagine that the omission has been through some underling mistaking his instructions—though possibly our not hearing anything detailed ourselves until now may have had something to do with the unfortunate position.’
‘Psss! Tsss!’ fumed Mr Bronsky, recognising that he was at a disadvantage in this sort of medium. He accordingly took off his hat and put it on again, sat down at the table with his back towards as many of those present as possible and began to drum loudly and persistently with his fingers.
‘I beg your pardon?’ remarked Nickle, raising his eyebrows; ‘I didn’t quite catch your remark,’ but as Mr Bronsky merely drummed with increased vigour, what is sometimes called ‘an awkward pause’ was all that resulted from this brief passage.
‘You have the letter, Nickle,’ said Mr Joolby with conspicuous mildness. He seemed to have exhausted all his fighting spirit. ‘Let him hear what Vallett says about it.’
‘It is a message in code,’ explained Nickle, shelving for the time being the acuter symptoms of resentment. ‘Joolby here sees in it a promising augury of success; everyone else thinks it means that if we don’t get out now we stand an excellent chance of getting about seven years a little later. However, I’ll decode the essential part and then you can decide which view appeals to you the more.’
‘How has this message you say is from Vallett come?’ demanded Mr Bronsky with all the importance of one propounding something really vital.
‘What the hell does that matter—comrade?’ replied Nickle. ‘Naturally we have our channels and this has come in quite the usual manner. If you think—but perhaps you would raise that valuable point after I have finished. Vallett writes: “I spotted the girl N.”—by that he means a Nora Melhuish who lives near—“to be the chief danger from the beginning. She is mixed up with a man called Max Carrados who is evidently taking a hand in the game though I don’t know yet exactly in what direction.”’
‘Ten thousand million tevils!’ exclaimed Mr Bronsky, springing to his feet and glaring wildly round at each one in turn. ‘What did I tell you, Joolby? Max Carrados again, and you would have it that he came to buy some of your junk rubbish. He was here that day I come and now he appear on the scene there. And you believe that all he wants are foreign stamps or is it dried ferns to stick into an album! Oh goddam, nobody can say I never warn you!’
‘Quite so,’ commented Nickle. ‘Well, to resume the tale: “Today something missed a cog and whatever it was N. is now all but satisfied that G.T. is not the authentic.”’
‘She smell a rat?’ propounded Mr Bronsky.
‘We think he must mean that,’ assented Nickle, with suspicious gravity. ‘Unless you can cut N. off before she spreads, the big noise may happen any minute and even then I shall have to make some quick tricks to get clear. This is a pity because in all other directions it was going good and I was fixing for next Saturday when there will be a full stock and conditions easy. There you have it, Bronsky.’
‘You shall do as you likes but I am done with it,’ declared the comrade without a shade of hesitation. ‘If it is as he says that this girl knows and is about there—why in name of thunder did you not have her taken care of before this happen?’
‘Well, you see, Bronsky, for one thing we aren’t in Bolivia here—not even in Chicago. People will talk so in the country—especially if it’s a young girl—that we might just as well have floodlit the village while we were about it.’
‘All the same, Mr Bronsky’s in the right,’ chimed in one of the others. ‘You must either put this here girl away or else call off the whole business.’
‘Precisely,’ agreed Nickle. ‘And as we can’t do that it is called off in the general interest.’
‘It is not called off,’ spat out Joolby, gathering himself together in a last stand for the glorious hazard that in the course of weeks had become his passionate obsession. ‘It is not changed one line, one inch, one minute. All this talk about recognising and risk and whatnot else is nothings but funk and fiddle. It is clear the girl did not be sure or she would have said so out and Vallett must have gone then. If she think there is something queer she is only puzzled what it is and days will go while she is making up her mind what has happened. I tell you these big jobs always has their touch and go and it is the side that does not get the jumps that comes away with the parcel.’
‘Howsoever, I cannot be in it now it has come to this,’ declared Mr Bronsky, siding with the majority with characteristic firmness. ‘It would bring ill name with Commission. After all, Joolby, this is only detail—in the one matter of paper. There will yet be other ways—’
‘There are no other ways,’ retorted the other harshly. ‘It was a perfect scheme and everything hung together. It still is and I’ll carry it through myself and be damned to your wet trousers! Remember, Nickle, this was to be in my hands and so long as Vallett stays there—’
‘Vallett will not stay there after today,’ Nickle interrupted coldly. ‘It’s sheer madness to let him stay and be taken like a rabbit. I got him there and I’ll make it my job to get him away tonight. So put that in those dry trousers of yours, Mr Joolby, and sit on it.’
‘You are all against me, so?… and it would have been the most terrific smash …’ muttered the cripple, falling back into his chair and seeming to grow less before their eyes as the realisation of failure closed in upon him. ‘You may as well go away now. I do not want you.’
‘Well, governor, what else could you expect?’ genially put in one of the hirelings, good-naturedly hoping to impart a tinge of cheerfulness to the general leave-taking. ‘Come to look at it as a reasonable man—blimey, hadn’t you better see what the perishing blighter wants before he cracks the ruddy contrivance?’
Joolby turned listlessly towards the telephone on his desk—he did not appear to have noticed the calls up to then—and with his slow elaborate movements got the receiver to his ear.
‘What?’ they heard him say, and above the top of the desk—caught by the intensity of that one word—they saw his face change as he listened and the lethargy drop from it in such a startling fashion that all four stiffened where they stood, frankly waiting for dro
pped crumbs of enlightenment.
‘Yes; yes; yes. Of course she will. Go easy and notice nothing. Here, hold on a minute, though. I want you to repeat what you’ve just said to Mr Nickle here. Nickle, get this slick and tell them what it means now.’
‘My everlasting Lincoln and Bennett!’ faltered Nickle, after he had complied, listened for a moment, and then hung up the receiver; ‘this—this is really one beyond the limit! George Larch says that Eliza there has suddenly gone sick and sent a cousin in her place to carry on until she gets over it.’
‘Go on, go on,’ blared Joolby, swelling and gasping in his chair as Nickle paused and looked round to gather their attention for his dramatic climax. ‘Tell them what he said then.’
‘The “cousin” is Nora Melhuish from Tapsfield—Soapy recognised her for a cert—and now she’s walked in of her own free will and all we have to do is to shut the door and keep her.’
‘No need to call it off, you see,’ croaked Mr Joolby, enjoying his little triumph quite good naturedly. ‘It still goes on, eh, Nickle?’
‘Why the hell not?’ replied Nickle, with a shrug that might mean anything. ‘Joolby, I really begin to think that you must be under divine protection—by “divine” in your case of course I refer to the devil.’
CHAPTER XII
THE STAGE IS SET
‘GEORGE, dear,’ said Mrs Larch, as her husband put his head in at the door of the dining-room to see what was going on there, ‘do come in for a minute or two and make it a bit human.’
‘Why certainly; what is it, old girl?’ he inquired, amiably complying.
‘It isn’t anything particular,’ she confessed. ‘Only this place—it’s like a bloody prison.’
‘Well, for the matter of that it is one,’ he replied—still naïvely pained to hear Cora swear, even as it always came to him as a faint shock to see her drink gin and water. ‘That young fellow down there—’
‘Oh, don’t talk about it,’ she said with a deprecatory shudder. ‘The way one thing’s led to another till we’re mixed up in raids and kidnappings and Bolshie plots—! Thank goodness we’ve nothing to do with what goes on down below. Let his Chinks and dagoes do his dirty dungeon work if he wants it done, I say. It’s not what we’re paid for. Nothing was said to you about keeping anyone shut up in a cellar when you took it on to come here, was it, George?’
‘Not a thing. There was to be more room and it would be safer in a new place for a week or two—that was all I ever heard. I don’t like it any more than you do, Cora, but there seems nothing for it now we’re here but to hang on for the time and chance it.’
‘You may well say chance it, lad. From what I see and what I hear it seems to be getting a pretty near thing which side touches down first, but the old geezer’s dead set on going through whatever turns up, and God knows that if it comes to a general bunk he’s bound to be the hindmost.’
‘Except that he’d throw everyone else out to the wolves to make time to do a getaway,’ George amended. ‘He’s always been very lucky at that so far, has Joolby.’
‘Lucky! He has nigger’s own luck if you ask me about it. This thing was absolutely down on the rim over what natty Nora had spotted up there, and then, lo and behold, if my lady doesn’t coolly walk in to rescue her boy, for all the world like Glory le Roy in a Wild West three-reeler. That gives you the laugh, doesn’t it? As if she could have put it across the cat that she was Eliza’s cousin.’
‘Well, she could have put it across me for that matter if Dodger, who’d seen her up there, didn’t happen to call round to do with the business,’ admitted George simply. ‘All these finches seem to get themselves up in the same way nowadays, till I can’t tell one sort of tart from another. But I suppose there’s something you go by.’
‘There’s certainly something I can tell Nora Melhuish by from any cousin Eliza Higgs is likely to have, let alone one who’d be willing to come round here to carry on while Eliza was moulting. All the same, it’s none too pleasant for me. I’m used to Elizas. I understand their little ways and if they don’t understand mine they pretty soon get to. But this Hilda Kelly as she calls herself knows just how things should be properly done and that puts me at a disadvantage. Now would you say that those chairs ought to be left up to the table between meals, George, or pushed back, and should the cruet be kept on the sideboard or put away in the cupboard? I’m blessed if I know.’
‘I’m damned if I do either. But what does it matter?’
‘It doesn’t. That’s just the silly part of it—running the place for a crowd of crooks and roughnecks. But she would know, and if it’s not done à la Ritz she’d put it right after me and make me feel a mut. Wouldn’t say anything of course—just show me how it should be.’
‘Well it can’t be for long now,’ suggested George soothingly. ‘After this we’ll—’
‘And then there’s another thing,’ volubly continued Mrs Larch, to whom the relief of possessing George’s ear was scarcely less of a luxury than in the rag-and-bone shop days, ‘and I like it rather less than all the other. She’s not to be out of my sight for so much as a tick, if you please, unless I pass her on to that half-baked Chink, and all the time I’m not so sure that someone else isn’t told off to keep an eye on me—and perhaps on you too, George, for that matter.’
‘They’re welcome,’ said George, with the proud consciousness of innocence. ‘What I say I’ll do I do. Joolby knows well enough that I’ve never double-crossed anyone.’
‘At all events we can go in and out and that’s more than Hilda Kelly is to be allowed to. Mustn’t answer the door, mustn’t touch the telephone, mustn’t stir out of the house—I ask you now, George, what’s likely to be the end of this sort of thing when her people get the wind up? And if the cops begin to take notice what does it look like on a night like this, when everyone else is sitting in their shirt-sleeves with the windows wide open, and all these are shut up as if we expected a siege—well, I ask you?’
At this, George looked dutifully about and with a wise shake of the head admitted that from this point of view it might certainly strike the unprejudiced outsider as ‘a bit rummy’. The place was the dining-room of the old-fashioned, well-retired house in Maplewood Avenue, a spacious, heavily furnished apartment, sufficiently well lit by a single cluster electrolier but with its windows—although they were overlooked from nowhere but its own secluded grounds—not only all scrupulously closed on that torrid summer night but with the curtains drawn, and shuttered. It had been a simple enough matter to keep Geoffrey Tilehurst secure without any elaborate precautions; a cellar, closed by a substantial oak door, and a man deprived of everything faintly resembling a tool could be thrust in and safely left to his own devices. But in Nora’s case the fiction of liberty was outwardly kept up and though from the moment of her quixotic intrusion she was shadowed at every step and had not the remotest chance of slipping away if she repented of her boldness, she was even yet unable to decide whether her identity had been discovered or whether the spying and restraint were not merely commonplace details of this very queer household.
‘One thing,’ added George, after the peculiarities of the situation had been sufficiently admitted, ‘it’s going to be the last time I’m mixed up in what isn’t strictly on the level. If we get clear this once with anything like tidy, old girl, it’ll be that little cottage with the pigs and poultry for a moral.’
‘Oh, my dear lad, that cottage!’ exclaimed Mrs Larch, somewhere between laughing and tears. ‘I wonder how many times we’ve paid a pretty price for it already!’ and then on a common impulse this curiously simple pair of habitual criminals were in each other’s arms and exchanging fond kisses for all the world like honest lovers.
‘Hullo, turtle doves,’ remarked Nickle, stumbling in upon this idyll and accepting it with saving coolness. ‘Seen anything of Toady since dinner?’
‘He was in his own sanctuary about five minutes ago with that latest Alsatian Bolshie. Arranging for the end of the
world, I suppose. Did you want him?’
‘No, it can wait. It’s rather amusing, you know. I’ll tell you the very latest.’
‘If it’s one of your funny stories, Mr Nickle,’ interposed George rather hastily, ‘perhaps we’d better go—’
‘No, that’s all right,’ said Nickle with a comprehensive smile. ‘This is something that really happened just now—not what the barmaid said about the bathing suit to the bishop. I was going across the Triangle down there and who should I run into but our interesting invalid, Eliza Higgs, making her way towards the Rialto Picture House, with an equally young lady friend, both very superbly dressed for the occasion.’
‘Well I never!’ contributed Mrs Larch.
‘Oh yes, I assure you. Jewels flashed and silk garments rustled. Well, seeing that further disguise was useless Eliza capitulated and at the inducement of a strawberry ice—supplemented may I perhaps say by the attraction of my society—permitted herself and friend to be lured into Cushing’s Comfy Corner Café where under skilful innuendo she broke down at her third sundae and gave away the whole transaction.’
‘She would,’ was Mrs Larch’s tart comment. ‘That’s Eliza Higgs all over.’
‘Oh well; we mustn’t be too harsh. The young lady who dropped down on Eliza from the clouds—she’d evidently been watching for the chance—assured her that it was all a joke, in fact that she’d made a bet she could act as a servant for a week in a strange house without anything being spotted. Then she offered Eliza five Bradburys and what she was wearing at the time to co-operate and Eliza, we may imagine, simply leapt at it.’
‘It was a mean thing to give it away though,’ remarked George severely. ‘After taking the money.’
‘Possibly Eliza misunderstood some of the facts. From what she dropped, apropos of what I had said, I gathered that she may have assumed that I was in the secret, on Hilda Kelly’s side, from the start,’ admitted Nickle glibly. ‘However, it didn’t really matter either way. We knew pretty well how it stood already.’
The Bravo of London Page 17
