“Yes, Gilbert, you’ve won. You have been true to your principles, but I have been false—a traitress. If Philip knew, he would curse me with his dying breath.” She stopped to bite her lip. “I have no desire to escape because I realize that you do not care sufficiently to go with me. So I will stay until—until Sir Harker Bellamy and your other friends come. You can hand me over to them yourself: it will be a further triumph for you.”
He passed her gibe by.
“To the best of my knowledge they do not know of this address. They have not learned it through me. But Philip may have papers on him….”
“By rights I should kill you, but, God help me, I love you! I started out to make a fool of you, but it is I who am the fool….Gilbert, have you no pity for me! See to what depths I have sunk!”
A maddening desire to crush her to him, to take all that she was prepared out of her love to offer almost overwhelmed him. But between him and the temptation rose the never-to-be-forgotten picture—the image of a murdered man.
“We are on different sides, my dear,” he replied.
“But, listen to me—God! how shameless I am!—I will throw up the work——”
There was a peremptory knock on the door.
He rushed to her.
“Quickly! Isn’t there another way out? a secret exit? You must go!”
“No! Let them take me! Nothing matters now! You have won!”
“Open this door!” called a strident voice.
“I love you,” lied Chertsey. “I will join you in Paris!”
“You swear that?”
“I swear it.”
She pressed a hidden spring beneath the big desk and the wall fell apart. Into this opening, after snatching up hat and coat, she stepped.
“Gilbert!”
“Go!” he ordered.
The panel had scarcely swung to before the door of the room crashed open. A number of men rushed in. At their head was Sir Harker Bellamy.
“Arrest that man!” he ordered.
Chertsey tore off the false moustache and removed the plain-glass spectacles.
“Chertsey! What in the devil are you doing here?”
“Clearing up. I understand you have arrested a man named Philip O’Donnell for the murder of Robert Baintree. You did so on the strength of an anonymous typewritten communication—supplied by me.”
“By you?”
“It’s rather a long story, but when you turned me down I resolved to find Baintree’s murderer on my own. Luck was on my side.”
“How?”
“The circumstances are personal and I do not propose to explain them.”
Bellamy came back to the essentials.
“O’Donnell worked with a woman named Sophie Laurent. She was his half-sister. She was the brains of this outfit—and we want her. Where is she?”
“How should I know?”
“Know! Of course, you know! You’ve been constantly in her company for weeks. I’m serious, Chertsey, and you had better understand it. Even now I’m not certain that you’re not mixed up in this poisonous business yourself. We know this to be the hiding-place of O’Donnell—the woman can’t be far away.”
Chertsey shrugged with as much ostentation as he could contrive.
“Since you are so well-informed, find her.”
“I know this much; the woman, Sophie Laurent, fooled you to the top of her bent, and perhaps made a traitor out of an honest man. Stand back!…Stevenson, see that crack in the wall by the side of the desk?…If you don’t stand aside, Chertsey, I swear I’ll shoot!”
“Don’t be a fool, Bellamy!”
“Stand aside!”
From the other side of the wall came a voice, clear if unsteady:
“Gilbert—Good-bye!”
Then a revolver shot filled the room with sinister sound.
THIEF IS AN UGLY WORD
PAUL GALLICO
ONE OF AMERICA’S most famous sportswriters in his day, Paul William Gallico (1897–1976) nevertheless had always wanted to write fiction and eventually quit his job as sports editor and columnist at the New York Daily News to devote himself to producing novels and short stories, selling the latter for substantial fees to such popular magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Liberty, and McCall’s, among many others in his prolific storytelling career.
Noted for the romanticism and sentimentality of his stories (which even extended to his nonfiction work), Gallico is not widely read today, though a great many of his books and stories inspired successful and much-loved motion pictures and television series.
Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees (1942) became a movie tearjerker in the same year, titled Pride of the Yankees, with Gary Cooper playing the doomed young New York Yankees superstar, who retired at thirty-six and died less than two years later of ALS, the disease that now carries his name. Cooper and Theresa Wright, who played Gehrig’s wife, received two of the film’s eleven Oscar nominations.
The Clock (1945), based on Gallico’s short story, is the charming romantic tale of a soldier (played by Robert Walker) on leave who meets a girl (Judy Garland) by the clock in Pennsylvania Station and falls in love with her.
Perhaps Gallico’s most famous book (though not a successful one) was The Poseidon Adventure (1969), which became one of the biggest box office “disaster” films of all time when it was released in 1972. Produced by Irwin Allen and directed by Ronald Neame, it is the story of passengers on a giant steamship that has capsized and their challenges in attempting to escape before it sinks. Its huge all-star cast included Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley, Shelley Winters, Roddy McDowall, Stella Stevens, and Leslie Nielsen.
The Love of Seven Dolls (1954) is an expansion of his 1950 short story “The Man Who Hated People,” which was filmed as the Oscar-winning Lili (1953) with Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer. The unapologetically sentimental The Snow Goose (1941), the author’s first successful book, finally reached the screen in 1971 as a British made-for-television movie starring Richard Harris and Jenny Agutter.
“Thief Is an Ugly Word” was originally published in the May 1944 issue of Cosmopolitan; it was first collected in Confessions of a Story Writer (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
THIEF IS AN UGLY WORD
PAUL GALLICO
IF ONE WERE TO take a pencil and upon a stereographic projection of a world map execute a series of straight lines connecting New York, Munich, and Buenos Aires, one would find oneself looking at a large isosceles triangle, the points of which are at such a distance from one another that they might seem to preclude the coincidences of a certain day early in January of 1944. However, since this is not a mathematical treatise, beyond the simple arithmetic of Mr. Augustus A. Swinney, an American refrigeration engineer whose life’s philosophy could be summed up in the inescapable verity that two and two add up to four, we are less concerned with a geometric shape than the shape and pattern of the events that took place at those widely separated points.
For instance, take the functioning of two gentlemen of similar general titles, one in Munich and the other in New York, Herr Professor Hildebrand Bressar and Mr. Curtis Henry. Mr. Curtis Henry was active on the American Commission for Salvage and Protection of Art and Historic Monuments in Europe. His opposite number, Professor Bressar, operated under the beautiful title of Kunstverwaltungsrat für arisch-europäische Altertumskultur, which, literally translated, means “Art-Custodian-Adviser for Aryan-European Ancient Culture.”
Boiling their work down to the very essence of its nature, Curtis Henry might be termed an art detective engaged in ferreting out the hundreds of thousands of objects of art pilfered throughout Europe by the Germans, with the eventual objective of returning them to their original owners. Professor Bressar, for all of his wing-collar dignity and high position as curator of the Pinakothek in Munich, w
as nothing more than a kind of superfence, engaged in the disposal of same. Being merely a good, Third-Reich German, and lacking, like most such good Germans, the moral and ethical probity of a cherrystone clam, it would have been difficult to make the professor understand that what he was doing was wrong.
But we are interested in Herr Bressar only because of his ill-concealed satisfaction at the dawning of that certain day in January, illuminated as any particular day of international villainy always is to a German by being thought of as “Der Tag.”
In fact, that is what Herr Professor Bressar’s assistant called it when he greeted him with “Good morning, Herr Kunstverwaltungsrat. This is the day, is it not?”
“Jawohl, Herr Reinecke, today. I have had a cable from Buenos Aires.”
“Ah. Then it—they arrived. Everything goes well.”
Professor Bressar consulted a cablegram on his desk and then shifted his gaze to certain lists of items before he smiled and replied, “There is nothing that can go wrong. A member of the Argentine Government is the sponsor. The Americans remain stupid and asleep and besides they dare not interfere in Argentina. And human greed remains what it has always been. Think what it means, Reinecke: millions of dollar-credits for the Partei,” and he rubbed his hands. Herr Reinecke licked his lips.
Mr. Curtis Henry’s brief connection with this story is that some three thousand miles away in his office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art he was taking the deposition and claim of a Dutch refugee, a chubby, shabby-looking little man with the face of a careworn child by the name of Jan van Schouven.
He gave his address, one on the lower West Side, which confirmed the tale of penury and reduced circumstances hinted at by his clothes.
“And the art object to which you wish to lay claim—” said Curtis Henry, his pen posed over the blank he was filling in.
“Se Old Woman uff Haarlem, py Rembrandt van Rijn,” said Van Schouven simply.
Henry put down his pen and whistled. “Great heavens! You are that Van Schouven?”
“I wass,” replied Van Schouven with such simple dignity that all the questions Henry had been forming were stifled and he confined himself to the questions on the information blank.
“Family?”
“My wife iss with me. She iss ill….” Some memory of misery and hatred flared in the Dutchman’s placid eyes for a moment, a somber flash of indignities suffered. “My son iss in the English flying. My daughter iss a nurse. Also in England.”
“Value of the picture?”
“It would bring between t’ree hundert and t’ree hundert fifty t’ousand dollars today.”
Henry had a sudden insight into what such a sum would mean to a once wealthy merchant who had obviously suffered complete ruin at the hands of the Germans. He read the next line, “Proof of ownership—” and then checked himself, but Van Schouven chose to reply.
“Se picture hass been in our family for generations. I belief your expert, Mr. Chester Allen Buskirk, knows—”
Curtis Henry made a nose at the mention of one of America’s foremost art critics and experts. “Ah—Mr. Buskirk is a little too internationally art-conscious for us. The world recognizes the picture as your property.” He completed the form and then turned to the little refugee again.
“Ah—look here, Herr van Schouven. I’m sorry, but you realize of course that at present we can do no more than list these properties and the whereabouts of their rightful claimants. There is very little chance of their being recovered for a considerable period. Even after the Germans have been defeated, we—”
Van Schouven rose and bowed. “Sank you. I realize that. As a refugee honored with a home in your great country, I only felt it my duty to assist you in your work. Some day se time will come….”
The thing was happening in his eyes again. Then it faded. He bowed again, put on his shabby hat, and went out.
It was on that same day at the end of the third leg of the triangle, five thousand three hundred airline miles from New York, that Mr. Augustus Swinney was attending a cocktail party in Buenos Aires.
* * *
—
From the first, Mr. Swinney had found himself fascinated by the intricacies of the diplomatic niceties, the frozen faces and the delicately balanced situations of a gathering under the sponsorship of a neutral nation.
Representatives of belligerent, semibelligerent, and neutral countries were collected uncomfortably under the same roof, munched at the same buffet table, from carefully studied positions, in which well-tailored but chilly backs formed impregnable circles, or gathered in tight, unassailable little groups in various corners of the two brilliantly lighted and ornate salons given over to the guests, opening the ranks only to admit one whose nationality or politics fitted them into the particular group.
Thus the Germans remained a hard core, hard-headed, hard-shirted, dark-suited, immediately beneath the splendid crystal chandelier suspended over the center of the inner room where the buffet table was located. Bright feminine bits of silk drifted toward the dark core, swirled, floated away. Small dark Argentines, distinguished by their dark eyes and English clothes, revolved around the rim; the solid Prussian center never changed or moved.
The British contingent, semiofficial and obviously on hand to see what was in the wind, managed to achieve a bland unawareness of the enemy by rallying beneath an excellent Romney hanging in the outer room, a gloomy portrait of the Duchess of Colchester gazing down dispassionately at her countrymen forming their own tight little isle in the swirl of humanity brought out by the exhibition of a new art treasure acquired by Alfonso de Paraná, Argentine millionaire and collector, and sponsored officially by the gray, frosty, super-correct person of Dr. José Calderriega, Sub-Minister of Culture of the Argentine Republic.
The British were bounded on the north by the Russians, who, looking as though they had slept in their clothes, held together a kind of lumpy and disheveled front, and on the south by a small satellite island of correct and careful Swiss. A small group of Americans, thoroughly ill at ease, remained close to the door for immediate escape in the event of any total loss of social composure. Italians and French drifted disconsolate and homeless, unable to create any nucleus that satisfied them. In spite of strong rocks of nationalism, the party was kept fluid by the circulating movement of lovely women of indeterminate allegiance and the many glowing-eyed men whose allegiance was plainly and simply to the lovely women.
Mr. Swinney, free American citizen, cosmopolite, due to his world wanderings as refrigeration engineer and expert for Swift & Co., the meat packers, unhindered by the social quavers that gripped other members of the American colony, drifted, moved, searched, came and went as he pleased, shouldering his tall, lean figure through the crush of uneasy celebrants.
He went everywhere, talking, chatting, listening with his skin as well as with his ears, and avoiding only the existence and perimeter of the dark, ugly core of Nazis, whose presence stank in his nostrils.
That two and two added up to four he was still quite certain, but of the real purpose behind this curious yet brilliant gathering he was not at all sure, beyond that it was for the ostensible occasion of viewing a painting, a canvas of sufficient importance to cause the Argentine Sub-Minister of Culture to spread the gray mantle of his sponsorship over the affair. It was only because of this semiofficial diplomatic mantle that such an extraordinarily mixed group was able to attend.
It was also, Mr. Swinney knew quite well, because of the quasi-Government sponsorship that social barriers were down, to him as well as three quarters of those in the rooms. Most of those present would otherwise never have been permitted to set foot in so much as the anteroom of the home of Señor Alfonso de Paraná, one of the wealthiest men in the Argentine and a social figure of importance in Buenos Aires and Paris.
The guest list apparently represented a cross-section of the wealth, diplomac
y, industry, and international society of Buenos Aires. Mr. Swinney was not unaware why he in particular had been invited, since, holding the important position of chief refrigeration engineer for Swift & Co., the meat packers, he did belong to the upper stratum of industry.
He was also able to reason that since art is generally accepted as an international commodity, this might well account for the international nature of the gathering. But since Mr. Swinney was also well aware, as was everyone else present, that their host, De Paraná, was an ardent Argentine fascist, a supporter of fascist Government policy and an enemy of the United Nations, he was alive with curiosity as to the real reasons underlying the gathering.
Where Allies and fascists met across the front lines, they shot at one another. Here they mingled and circulated, sipping champagne and nibbling delicacies.
It was Mr. Swinney’s first experience of the grand diplomatic and social lie that covered human behavior under such circumstances, a lie that was acted out daily in Turkey before it swung to the side of the Allies, in Portugal, in Switzerland, in Buenos Aires. Mortal enemies met, rubbed shoulders, passed, pretended they were not there.
As a cultured American businessman in his early forties, a man at home in five languages and most of the European capitals, this curiously childish kind of pretending amused rather than outraged Mr. Swinney. It was the presence of a second lie that aroused his curiosity and vaguely disturbed him. He wondered whether the canvas hanging behind the closed doors of De Paraná’s fabulous library, not yet thrown open to the guests, was actually, as rumored, Rembrandt’s famous Old Woman of Haarlem. He doubted it. And yet—
That was just it. No one had said that this was the picture they had been invited to see, and yet everyone seemed to know. No one said anything, and everyone knew everything—how the Germans were bringing goods into the Argentine, how quinine was being diverted from Bolivia and sent into Germany via Franco Spain, how secret information about a British meat convoy found its way into the hands of the commander of a Nazi submarine wolf pack, how even perhaps a Dutch art treasure might conceivably turn up in Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 45
