Fly Paper and Other Stories

  We went into a small green and brown dining-room where a small square table was set. I sat facing Ringgo across a silver basket of orchids that stood between tall silver candlesticks in the center of the table. Mrs. Ringgo sat to my right, Kavalov to my left. When Kavalov sat down I saw the shape of an automatic pistol in his hip pocket.

  Two men servants waited on us. There was a lot of food and all of it was well turned out. We ate caviar, some sort of consommé, sand dabs, potatoes and cucumber jelly, roast lamb, corn and string beans, asparagus, wild duck and hominy cakes, artichoke-and-tomato salad, and orange ice. We drank white wine, claret, Burgundy, coffee and crème de menthe.

  Kavalov ate and drank enormously. None of us skimped.

  Kavalov was the first to disregard his own order that nothing be said about his troubles until after we had eaten. When he had finished his soup he put down his spoon and said:

  “I am not a child. I will not be frightened.”

  He blinked pale, worried eyes defiantly at me, his lips pouting between mustache and imperial.

  Ringgo grinned pleasantly at him. Mrs. Ringgo’s face was as serene and inattentive as if nothing had been said.

  “What is there to be frightened of?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Kavalov said. “Nothing excepting a lot of idiotic and very pointless trickery and play-acting.”

  “You can call it anything you want to call it,” a voice grumbled over my shoulder, “but I seen what I seen.”

  The voice belonged to one of the men who was waiting on the table, a sallow, youngish man with a narrow, slack-lipped face. He spoke with a subdued sort of stubbornness, and without looking up from the dish he was putting before me.

  Since nobody else paid any attention to the servant’s clearly audible remark, I turned my face to Kavalov again. He was trimming the edge of a sand dab with the side of his fork.

  “What kind of trickery and play-acting?” I asked.

  Kavalov put down his fork and rested his wrists on the edge of the table. He rubbed his lips together and leaned over his plate towards me.

  “Supposing”—he wrinkled his forehead so that his bald scalp twitched forward—“you have done injury to a man ten years ago.” He turned his wrists quickly, laying his hands palms-up on the white cloth. “You have done this injury in the ordinary business manner—you understand?—for profit. There is not anything personal concerned. You do not hardly know him. And then supposing he came to you after all those ten years and said to you: ‘I have come to watch you die.’” He turned his hands over, palms down. “Well, what would you think?”

  “I wouldn’t,” I replied, “think I ought to hurry up my dying on his account.”

  The earnestness went out of his face, leaving it blank. He blinked at me for a moment and then began eating his fish. When he had chewed and swallowed the last piece of sand dab he looked up at me again. He shook his head slowly, drawing down the corners of his mouth.

  “That was not a good answer,” he said. He shrugged, and spread his fingers. “However, you will have to deal with this Captain Cat-and-mouse. It is for that I engaged you.”

  I nodded.

  Ringgo smiled and patted his bandaged arm, saying:

  “I wish you more luck with him than I had.”

  Mrs. Ringgo put out a hand and let the pointed fingertips touch her husband’s wrist for a moment.

  I asked Kavalov:

  “This injury I was to suppose I had done: how serious was it?”

  He pursed his lips, made little wavy motions with the fingers of his right hand, and said:

  “Oh—ah—ruin.”

  “We can take it for granted, then, that your captain’s really up to something?”

  “Good God!” said Ringgo, dropping his fork. “I wouldn’t like to think he’d broken my arm just in fun.”

  Behind me the sallow servant spoke to his mate:

  “He wants to know if we think the captain’s really up to something.”

  “I heard him,” the other said gloomily. “A lot of help he’s going to be to us.”

  Kavalov tapped his plate with a fork and made angry faces at the servants.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Where is the roast?” He pointed the fork at Mrs. Ringgo. “Her glass is empty.” He looked at the fork. “See what care they take of my silver,” he complained, holding it out to me. “It has not been cleaned decently in a month.”

  He put the fork down. He pushed back his plate to make room for his forearms on the table. He leaned over them, hunching his shoulders. He sighed. He frowned. He stared at me with pleading pale eyes.

  “Listen,” he whined. “Am I a fool? Would I send to San Francisco for a detective if I did not need a detective? Would I pay you what you are charging me, when I could get plenty good enough detectives for half of that, if I did not require the best detective I could secure? Would I require so expensive a one if I did not know this captain for a completely dangerous fellow?”

  I didn’t say anything. I sat still and looked attentive.

  “Listen,” he whined. “This is not April-foolery. This captain means to murder me. He came here to murder me. He will certainly murder me if somebody does not stop him from it.”

  “Just what has he done so far?” I asked.

  “That is not it.” Kavalov shook his bald head impatiently. “I do not ask you to undo anything that he has done. I ask you to keep him from killing me. What has he done so far? Well, he has terrorized my people most completely. He has broken Dolph’s arm. He has done these things so far, if you must know.”

  “How long has this been going on? How long has he been here?”

  “A week and two days.”

  “Did your chauffeur tell you about the black man we saw in the road?”

  Kavalov pushed his lips together and nodded slowly.

  “He wasn’t there when I went back,” I said.

  He blew out his lips with a little puff and cried excitedly:

  “I do not care anything about your black men and your roads. I care about not being murdered.”

  “Have you said anything to the sheriff’s office?” I asked, trying to pretend I wasn’t getting peevish.

  “That I have done. But to what good? Has he threatened me? Well, he has told me he has come to watch me die. From him, the way he said it, that is a threat. But to your sheriff it is not a threat. He has terrorized my people. Have I proof that he has done that? The sheriff says I have not. What absurdity! Do I need proof? Don’t I know? Must he leave fingerprints on the fright he causes? So it comes to this: the sheriff will keep an eye on him. ‘An eye,’ he said, mind you. Here I have twenty people, servants and farm hands, with forty eyes. And he comes and goes as he likes. An eye!”

  “How about Ringgo’s arm?” I asked.

  Kavalov shook his head impatiently and began to cut up his lamb.

  Ringgo said:

  “There’s nothing we can do about that. I hit him first.” He looked at his bruised knuckles. “I didn’t think he was that tough. Maybe I’m not as good as I used to be. Anyway, a dozen people saw me punch his jaw before he touched me. We performed at high noon in front of the post office.”

  “Who is this captain?”

  “It’s not him,” the sallow servant said. “It’s that black devil.”

  Ringgo said:

  “Sherry’s his name, Hugh Sherry. He was a captain in the British army when we knew him before—quartermasters department in Cairo. That was in 1917, all of twelve years ago. The commodore”—he nodded his head at his father-in-law—“was speculating in military supplies. Sherry should have been a line officer. He had no head for desk work. He wasn’t timid enough. Somebody decided the commodore wouldn’t have made so much money if Sherry hadn’t been so careless. They knew Sherry hadn’t made any money for himself. They cashiered Sherry at th
e same time they asked the commodore please to go away.”

  Kavalov looked up from his plate to explain:

  “Business is like that in wartime. They wouldn’t let me go away if I had done anything they could keep me there for.”

  “And now, twelve years after you had him kicked out of the army in disgrace,” I said, “he comes here, threatens to kill you, so you believe, and sets out to spread panic among your people. Is that it?”

  “That is not it,” Kavalov whined. “That is not it at all. I did not have him kicked out of any armies. I am a man of business. I take my profits where I find them. If somebody lets me take a profit that angers his employers, what is their anger to me? Second, I do not believe he means to kill me. I know that.”

  “I’m trying to get it straight in my mind.”

  “There is nothing to get straight. A man is going to murder me. I ask you not to let him do it. Is not that simple enough?”

  “Simple enough,” I agreed, and stopped trying to talk to him.

  Kavalov and Ringgo were smoking cigars, Mrs. Ringgo and I cigarettes over crème de menthe when the red-faced blonde woman in gray wool came in.

  She came in hurriedly. Her eyes were wide open and dark. She said:

  “Anthony says there’s a fire in the upper field.”

  Kavalov crunched his cigar between his teeth and looked pointedly at me.

  I stood up, asking:

  “How do I get there?”

  “I’ll show you the way,” Ringgo said, leaving his chair.

  “Dolph,” his wife protested, “your arm.”

  He smiled gently at her and said:

  “I’m not going to interfere. I’m only going along to see how an expert handles these things.”

  IV

  I ran up to my room for hat, coat, flashlight and gun.

  The Ringgos were standing at the front door when I started downstairs again.

  He had put on a dark raincoat, buttoned tight over his injured arm, its left sleeve hanging empty. His right arm was around his wife. Both of her bare arms were around his neck. She was bent far back, he far forward over her. Their mouths were together.

  Retreating a little, I made more noise with my feet when I came into sight again. They were standing apart at the door, waiting for me. Ringgo was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. He opened the door.

  Mrs. Ringgo addressed me:

  “Please don’t let my foolish husband be too reckless.”

  I said I wouldn’t, and asked him:

  “Worth while taking any of the servants or farm hands along?”

  He shook his head.

  “Those that aren’t hiding would be as useless as those that are,” he said. “They’ve all had it taken out of them.”

  He and I went out, leaving Mrs. Ringgo looking after us from the doorway. The rain had stopped for the time, but a black muddle overhead promised more presently.

  Ringgo led me around the side of the house, along a narrow path that went downhill through shrubbery, past a group of small buildings in a shallow valley, and diagonally up another, lower, hill.

  The path was soggy. At the top of the hill we left the path, going through a wire gate and across a stubbly field that was both gummy and slimy under our feet. We moved along swiftly. The gumminess of the ground, the sultriness of the night air, and our coats, made the going warm work.

  When we had crossed this field we could see the fire, a spot of flickering orange beyond intervening trees. We climbed a low wire fence and wound through the trees.

  A violent rustling broke out among the leaves overhead, starting at the left, ending with a solid thud against a tree trunk just to our right. Then something plopped on the soft ground under the tree.

  Off to the left a voice laughed, a savage, hooting laugh.

  The laughing voice couldn’t have been far away. I went after it.

  The fire was too small and too far away to be of much use to me: blackness was nearly perfect among the trees.

  I stumbled over roots, bumped into trees, and found nothing. The flashlight would have helped the laugher more than me, so I kept it idle in my hand.

  When I got tired of playing peekaboo with myself, I cut through the woods to the field on the other side, and went down to the fire.

  The fire had been built in one end of the field, a dozen feet or less from the nearest tree. It had been built of dead twigs and broken branches that the rain had missed, and had nearly burnt itself out by the time I reached it.

  Two small forked branches were stuck in the ground on opposite sides of the fire. Their forks held the ends of a length of green sapling. Spitted on the sapling, hanging over the fire, was an eighteen-inch-long carcass, headless, tailless, footless, skinless, and split down the front.

  On the ground a few feet away lay an airedale puppy’s head, pelt, feet, tail, insides, and a lot of blood.

  There were some dry sticks, broken in convenient lengths, beside the fire. I put them on as Ringgo came out of the woods to join me. He carried a stone the size of a grapefruit in his hand.

  “Get a look at him?” he asked.

  “No. He laughed and went.”

  He held out the stone to me, saying:

  “This is what was chucked at us.”

  Drawn on the smooth gray stone, in red, were round blank eyes, a triangular nose, and a grinning, toothy mouth—a crude skull.

  I scratched one of the red eyes with a fingernail, and said:

  “Crayon.”

  Ringgo was staring at the carcass sizzling over the fire and at the trimmings on the ground.

  “What do you make of that?” I asked.

  He swallowed and said:

  “Mickey was a damned good little dog.”

  “Yours?”

  He nodded.

  I went around with my flashlight on the ground. I found some footprints, such as they were.

  “Anything?” Ringgo asked.

  “Yeah.” I showed him one of the prints. “Made with rags tied around his shoes. They’re no good.”

  We turned to the fire again.

  “This is another show,” I said. “Whoever killed and cleaned the pup knew his stuff; knew it too well to think he could cook him decently like that. The outside will be burnt before the inside’s even warm, and the way he’s put on the spit he’d fall off if you tried to turn him.”

  Ringgo’s scowl lightened a bit.

  “That’s a little better,” he said, “Having him killed is rotten enough, but I’d hate to think of anybody eating Mickey, or even meaning to.”

  “They didn’t,” I assured him. “They were putting on a show. This the sort of thing that’s been happening?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the sense of it?”

  He glumly quoted Kavalov:

  “Captain Cat-and-mouse.”

  I gave him a cigarette, took one myself, and lighted them with a stick from the fire.

  He raised his face to the sky, said, “Raining again; let’s go back to the house,” but remained by the fire, staring at the cooking carcass. The stink of scorched meat hung thick around us.

  “You don’t take this very seriously yet, do you?” he asked presently, in a low, matter-of-fact voice.

  “It’s a funny layout.”

  “He’s cracked,” he said in the same low voice. “Try to see this. Honor meant something to him. That’s why we had to trick him instead of bribing him, back in Cairo. Less than ten years of dishonor can crack a man like that. He’d go off and hide and brood. It would be either shoot himself when the blow fell—or that. I was like you at first.” He kicked at the fire. “This is silly. But I can’t laugh at it now, except when I’m around Miriam and the commodore. When he first showed up I didn’t have the slightest idea that I couldn’t ha
ndle him. I had handled him all right in Cairo. When I discovered I couldn’t handle him I lost my head a little. I went down and picked a row with him. Well, that was no good either. It’s the silliness of this that makes it bad. In Cairo he was the kind of man who combs his hair before he shaves, so his mirror will show an orderly picture. Can you understand some of this?”

  “I’ll have to talk to him first,” I said. “He’s staying in the village?”

  “He has a cottage on the hill above. It’s the first one on the left after you turn into the main road.” Ringgo dropped his cigarette into the fire and looked thoughtfully at me, biting his lower lip. “I don’t know how you and the commodore are going to get along. You can’t make jokes with him. He doesn’t understand them, and he’ll distrust you on that account.”

  “I’ll try to be careful,” I promised. “No good offering this Sherry money?”

  “Hell, no,” he said softly. “He’s too cracked for that.”

  We took down the dog’s carcass, kicked the fire apart, and trod it out in the mud before we returned to the house.

  V

  The country was fresh and bright under clear sunlight the next morning. A warm breeze was drying the ground and chasing raw-cotton clouds across the sky.

  At ten o’clock I set out afoot for Captain Sherry’s. I didn’t have any trouble finding his house, a pinkish stuccoed bungalow with a terra cotta roof, reached from the road by a cobbled walk.

  A white-clothed table with two places set stood on the tiled veranda that stretched across the front of the bungalow.

  Before I could knock, the door was opened by a slim black man, not much more than a boy, in a white jacket. His features were thinner than most American negroes’, aquiline, pleasantly intelligent.

  “You’re going to catch colds lying around in wet roads,” I said, “if you don’t get run over.”

  His mouth-ends ran towards his ears in a grin that showed me a lot of strong yellow teeth.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, buzzing his s’s, rolling the r, bowing. “The capitaine have waited breakfast that you be with him. You do sit down, sir. I will call him.”

  “Not dog meat?”