Hot Water

  'I don't know yet where he's sleeping, but I'll find out, and I'll leave a plan of the house under a stone on the right side of the front door steps, so you can get it when you come. And somewhere there'll be a window open for you. Okay?'

  'Kayo,' said Mr Slattery shortly.

  'You go to this guy, then, and knock the daylights out of him. Make him see it isn't healthy for him around these parts.'

  Mr Slattery, without speaking, extended a massive arm and clenched and unclenched the ham-like fist at the end of it. Mr Carlisle, smiling approvingly, bade him farewell and set out for the Château with an easy mind. He felt he had left the matter in good hands.

  3

  Mental activity generally expresses itself in correspondingly rapid physical action. Mr Carlisle had started to walk back to the Château at a brisk pace, and as the afternoon sun was now beating down with considerable force it was not long before he became conscious of feeling extremely warm. As he passed up the drive, he was thinking how remarkably pleasant a cold bath would be. And it was just as he had begun to toy with this thought that his eye was attracted by the silver gleam of water through the trees to his left.

  It drew him like a magnet. He left the drive and took a crosscountry route in its direction. And presently he found himself on the edge of what was known locally as the lake, but which was in reality a sort of salt-water lagoon connected with the harbour of St Rocque by a narrow channel.

  It looked extraordinarily inviting. He glanced modestly to right and left. Thick bushes screened this portion of the lake, almost meeting across the path down which he had come. There appeared to be no eye that could observe him. With a sigh of satisfaction, he removed his coat and tie, and he was just about to slide out of his trousers when there spoke in his immediate rear an austere, maidenly voice.

  'Hey!' said the voice.

  It seemed to rip through Mr Carlisle like a bullet.

  4

  Medway, the maid, on leaving Senator Opal, had taken her book down to the lake. It was a favourite haunt of hers. Here, lying on the soft turf in the pleasant shade, she proceeded to resume the adventures of Janice Devereux, Detective, at the point where she had left off on the previous night. But barely had she had time to read the opening murder of Chapter Eleven when the sound of footsteps told her that her sanctuary had been invaded. Legs passed her and halted on the brink of the water.

  Parting the bushes, she peered out. And it was the sight she saw that drew from her the shocked exclamation just recorded.

  All the woman in Medway was stirred to its depths.

  'Hey!' she cried, and it might have been Mrs Grundy herself speaking. 'What do you think this place is? A bath-house?'

  Mr Carlisle was still tottering where he stood. He looked like a gentlemanly poplar swaying in the breeze. The lake and the trees about it had not yet ceased to perform the complicated adagio dance into which they had broken. He gasped painfully, and with good reason.

  Any feminine voice speaking at such a moment would have startled Mr Carlisle. What rendered this one so peculiarly disintegrating was the fact that he recognized it. Indeed, one might say that it had been ringing in his ears ever since the day, twelve months ago, when it had called him a two-timing piece of cheese – a remark which had been followed almost immediately by the descent on his frontal orbital bone of a large china vase.

  It was the voice of his lost Gertie.

  The next moment, she had come out of the bushes and was facing him.

  'Gertie!' cried Mr Carlisle.

  We who have been privileged to peep into Gordon Carlisle's soul can understand his emotion. Although at their parting this girl had beaned him with a vase, and rather a good vase, too, all the old love still remained. The first shock of astonishment over, it was ecstasy that predominated in the bosom which he was now hastily covering with his coat. His trousers, it need scarcely be said, for the code of the Carlisles was rigid, he had hitched up at the first intimation that he was not alone.

  'Gertie! At last! After all these long, weary months!'

  The girl was looking cold and hard and proud. Ancient grievances still rankled in her bosom, for women do not lightly forget.

  'Well, Mr Carlisle,' she said.

  It was plain that such icy aloofness at what should have been a lovers' meeting wounded her companion.

  'Gertie,' he said, and there was the quiver in his voice which had once extracted a ten-pound subscription to the Home for Brave Ailing Mothers from a man named MacPherson, 'aren't you going to let bygones be bygones?'

  'No, I'm not.'

  Mr Carlisle gulped. He sought for words that would soften this obduracy.

  'You don't know how I've missed you, Gertie.'

  'Says you.'

  'I've been searching for you everywhere.'

  'Says you.'

  'Yes, says me!' cried Mr Carlisle passionately. 'What would I be doing over in Europe if I hadn't heard that you had gone there?'

  Medway laughed scornfully.

  'And I suppose you came to this Château as the Duke de something because you heard I was here? I know all about you. I was there when Miss Putnam was talking to the butler. She was saying put you in the Yellow Room. Personally,' said Medway, speaking with a sort of queenly disdain, 'I'd put you in the ash-can.'

  'No,' admitted Mr Carlisle, 'I did not come to the Château because I heard you were here. I'm on a job. And I'll bet it's the same job you're on. You've hired yourself out as a maid to get a chance of grabbing Mrs Gedge's ice.'

  'Well, have you any objection?'

  'Certainly, I've an objection. Just pushing your head into trouble, that's what you're doing. You haven't a chance, working alone.'

  Medway bit her lip reflectively. She had started on this enterprise with a gay optimism, feeling that surely the time must come when Mrs Gedge would forget just once to lock up her trinkets. She had learned now that she was in the employment of a woman who never forgot a thing like that, and hope had begun to die.

  'What's the idea?' she said. 'Do you want to team up with me?'

  'Well, why not?'

  'I don't know why not. I've nothing against a fifty-fifty strictly business proposition. But what good would you be? This thing isn't in your line. You can't bust a safe.'

  'I can, too, bust a safe. Soup doesn't know it, and I didn't tell him, but if it's the ordinary sort of safe these women have, I can do it easy.'

  'Who's Soup?'

  'You remember Soup Slattery. We're in this thing together. The idea is that I let him into the house and he does the blowing. But that's all wet. Now I've found you, we'll double-cross him and keep the stuff for ourselves.'

  Medway was impressed.

  'Where did you ever learn to bust safes?'

  'Plug Donahue taught me. It was just after you went away. He saw I was all shot to pieces and needed something to take me out of myself...'

  'Never mind all that apple-gravy. Talk business. If you want us to work together on this job – fifty-fifty – I'm willing. I've seen for quite a while it was too big for me.'

  Mr Carlisle breathed emotionally.

  'If you knew what it meant to me, Gertie, to feel that you and I are once more ...'

  'Say, listen,' said Medway, breaking in on what promised to be a speech of no small audience-appeal, 'here's something that's on my mind. Could a sap that says he's Senator Opal not really be Senator Opal?'

  'Nobody would say he was Senator Opal unless he knew it could be proved against him,' said Mr Carlisle, who was not a supporter of the great law-maker's views on the suppression of the Demon Rum. 'Why, is that old pest here?'

  'Him or somebody that claims to be him. And I found him just now snooping around in Mrs Gedge's room, where the safe is. And when I put it up to him, he had some story about being interested in antiques.'

  Mr Carlisle reflected.

  'I guess that's all there was to it,' he said, at length. Anyway, he can't be a ringer. These Gedges know Senator Opal. Mrs Gedge told m
e so. Nobody could slide in here made up for old Opal and get away with it. He was probably just rubbering around. But I'll tell you who is a ringer, and that's the fellow who says he's the Vicomte de Blissac.'

  'What!'

  'You see,' said Mr Carlisle, tenderly pointing the moral. 'You didn't know that, did you? How long has he been here?'

  'He blew in this afternoon. I saw the butler showing him into the drawing-room, and he told me who he was.'

  'Well, he isn't.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I've met the real one. I took a couple of thousand dollars off him once. You could have had half of that, Gertie, if you hadn't run off the way you did.'

  'Never mind that. So that bird's a ringer, is he? And I suppose he's after the ice, same as we are.'

  'Of course he is.'

  'Well, what do we do about it? We can't have him messing around. We've got to push him out.'

  'And how would you set about it?'

  Medway frowned.

  'I'm darned if I know.'

  'Exactly,' said Mr Carlisle, once more pointing the moral. 'Maybe you begin to see now how much you need me.'

  'What can you do?'

  'What can I do?' Mr Carlisle's manner was airy. 'Why, simply go to his room to-night and hammer the stuffing out of him. If he's here to-morrow, it'll be on crutches.'

  The little gasp which his companion gave at these brave words was the sweetest sound that Gordon Carlisle had heard in many a day. For it was the gasp of reluctant admiration. Her cold reserve seemed to have melted.

  'You couldn't do that?'

  'You see if I can't do it.'

  'But the guy's as big as a house.'

  'Tchah!' said Mr Carlisle carelessly.

  'Well, this is new stuff to me,' said Medway. Her eyes, as they rested on his face, were shining with a light that had not been there before. 'I didn't know you were like this.'

  'You've never got me right, Gertie,' said Mr Carlisle with affectionate reproach, 'never.'

  'You'll really go and beat this great, husky guy up?'

  'For your sake, Gertie, I'd beat up a dozen like him.'

  Medway drew a deep breath.

  'Well,' she said, 'if you put that through, maybe I might overlook all what happened a year ago. I'm not saying I will, mind you, but I don't say I won't. You do it, and then we'll chat things over and see where we stand.'

  ''At-a-girl!' said Mr Carlisle devoutly.

  No qualms disturbed him. He knew that he could rely on Soup Slattery.

  CHAPTER 11

  1

  NIGHT, sable goddess, from her ebon throne in rayless majesty stretched forth her leaden sceptre o'er a slumbering world. Down at the Casino Municipale brisk business was still being done, but up at the Château Blissac all was dark and silent. The hour was nearly one, and the Château Blissac had put the cat out and tucked itself in at about eleven-thirty. In all its broad grounds there was not a sound to be heard.

  If there had been, it would not have been Soup Slattery who made it. Despite his impressive bulk, there were few men who could move with a softer tread when the occasion demanded it. He had found Mr Carlisle's rough chart of the house and was now consulting it with the aid of an electric torch outside the window which the other had left open for him.

  The chart was clear. He switched off the torch and climbed silently in.

  To those who, like the Vicomte de Blissac and Gustave, the cocktail blender at the Hotel des Etrangers, had seen Soup Slattery only in his moments of conviviality, it would have been a revelation to behold the stern purposefulness of his face as he mounted the stairs. He was about to confront a trade rival, and towards trade rivals his attitude had ever been one of dour-ness and austerity. He did not like them, and he let them see that he did not like them. This particular one he intended to cause to jump out of the window in his slumber-wear and not stop running till he reached Paris.

  The door of Packy's room was locked, but locked doors meant nothing to Mr Slattery. A few seconds' expert manipulation of a small steel implement and the obstacle gave way.

  The noise of this operation, though slight, woke Packy. He was not aware, however, that a visitor had arrived until there came the click of the electric switch and light flooded the room.

  Even then, he did not immediately discover the intruder's identity. But recognizing sleepily that here was something hostile, he sprang from the bed and alighting on the heel of an upturned shoe spoiled any impressiveness the demonstration might have had by hopping vigorously.

  Mr Slattery was a plain, practical man, not at all inclined to waste time watching classical dances when on a business trip.

  'Stick' em up!' he said.

  The implied suggestion that he was covering Packy with a gun was not based on truth. He never carried a gun on these expeditions, holding very sensibly that if you had one you might use it and that if you used it all sorts of unpleasantness might ensue. What he was pointing at Packy was the small steel implement.

  But Packy was not concerned with the other's armoury. He had recognized him now and was greeting him as an old friend.

  'Mr Slattery – or may I say Soup, how nice of you to drop in. Neighbourly, I call it.'

  Mr Slattery was all confusion and apology.

  'You! Say, I didn't know you were in here.'

  'Oh, yes, this is my little nest. Come right on in and take a seat. You're just the man I wanted to see. I was planning to come to the hotel and have a talk with you.'

  'I wouldn't of bust up your beauty-sleep for the world,' said Mr Slattery contritely. 'I've been given a wrong steer. I'm looking for the bird who's here calling himself Veecount D. Blissac.'

  That's me. It's a long story...'

  'It's really you?'

  'Yes. You see ...'

  'Say, listen,' said Mr Slattery, once more nipping the narrative in the bud.

  He had seated himself on the bed, and was regarding Packy with a grave reproach. A moment before, he had been all remorse at the thought of having disturbed the night's rest of one who had saved him from the fate, so to speak, that was worse than death. But now other emotions had crept in. Personal friend though Packy might be, he was none the less a rival, and we have seen how Mr Slattery felt about rivals.

  'Say, listen,' he said, 'I hate to throw a spanner into a guy's game that's been as swell to me as you have, but you and me have got to have a little talk.'

  'Nothing I should enjoy more. You don't mind if I climb between the sheets again?'

  'You steered those cops off of me, and I owe you a lot for that. Still and all, when it comes to you horning into this joint and aiming to gum the works for me and my business associate, well, that's something else again.'

  Packy looked puzzled.

  'I don't quite follow this.'

  Mr Slattery shook his head in disapproval of this trifling.

  'You can't kid me. I know why you're in this Chatty-o.'

  'I'll bet you don't.'

  'Come clean,' said Mr Slattery, like a rebuking aunt. 'Quit fooling. You're after that ice.'

  'What ice?'

  'Mrs Gedge's ice.'

  'Mrs Gedge's jewels?'

  'Ah.'

  'Nothing of the kind.'

  'Brother!'

  'Nothing,' repeated Packy, 'of the kind. I want to get back a letter.'

  'A letter?'

  A compromising letter which a friend of mine wrote to Mrs Gedge and which, when she returns, will be in her safe. That is the safe I want you, if you will be so good, to open for me.'

  Many men in Mr Slattery's place would have rejected this story as thin. But Mr Slattery was a movie-fan and he knew all about compromising letters. Anything to do with them or with the missing papers or the stolen plans he was prepared to accept without question, especially when told to him by one whom he esteemed as highly as he esteemed Packy. He softened visibly.

  'Is that the straight up-and-up?'

  'It is.'

  'You're not stringing me?
'

  'Certainly not.'

  'Why, then everything's fine. I naturally thought you was after that ice.'

  'You can have the ice.'

  'Boy, I'm going to do just that little thing. And when I collect it, I won't forget the important documents.'

  '"t". Not "ts". One only. A single letter.'

  'I'll get it for you. You shall have it.'

  Packy patted his shoulder warmly.

  'Your words are music. I knew I could rely on you. I don't mind telling you that if you had failed me I should have been pretty badly stymied. You see, owing to a defective education, I couldn't even begin to open a safe myself. How do you, by the way? I've often wondered.'

  Mr Slattery was delighted to lecture on his favourite theme.

  'Well, first,' he said weightily, 'you get your soup.'

  'What's soup?'

  'Why, it's soup. Stuff you make out of dynamite. Get your dynamite, crumble it up, put it in a sack, fill a can half full of water, and boil. The grease sinks to the bottom, you drain off the water, and what's left is the soup. Put it in a bottle and there you are.'

  'In how many pieces?'

  Mr Slattery smiled tolerantly.

  'It won't explode. 'Course, you don't want to play football with it.'

  'I see. No, that might be a mistake. All right, we're through with the soup course. What then? We are now approaching the safe. What does our hero do?'

  'Well, there's two kinds of safe. The tough kind is the sort that's got a keester in it.'

  'And a keester is—?'

  Mr Slattery was no Thesaurus.

  'Well, hell, it's a keester. I don't know what else you'd call it. A sort of extra pete built inside the real pete.'

  'A kind of inner compartment?'

  'That's right. When it's one of those you're up against something. First, you've got to blow the door open to get at the keester. Then you've got to knock off the pressure bolt. Then you've got to wedge something into the top edge of the keester door. Then you've got to push in something thicker. Then you've got to plug in gauze. Then you wet the gauze with the soup and touch it off. It's no cinch, whatever way you look at it.'