“That’s easy!” I argued. “With a couple of machine guns, a trunkful of grenades, knowing the island from top to bottom, in the darkness and in a storm, against bewildered civilians—it was duck soup. There are nine of you that I know of, including two women. Any five of you could have carried on the work, once it was started, while the others took turns appearing here and there, establishing alibis. And that is what you did. You took turns slipping out to alibi yourselves. Everywhere I went I ran into one of you. And the general! That whiskered old joker running around leading the simple citizens to battle! I’ll bet he led ’em plenty! They’re lucky there are any of ’em alive this morning!”
She finished her cigarette with another inhalation, dropped the stub on the rug, ground out the light with one foot, sighed wearily, put her hands on her hips, and asked:
“And now what?”
“Now I want to know where you have stowed the plunder.”
The readiness of her answer surprised me.
“Under the garage, in a cellar we dug secretly there some months ago.”
I didn’t believe that, of course, but it turned out to be the truth.
I didn’t have anything else to say. When I fumbled with my borrowed crutch, preparing to get up, she raised a hand and spoke gently:
“Wait a moment, please. I have something to suggest.”
Half standing, I leaned toward her, stretching out one hand until it was close to her side.
“I want the gun,” I said.
She nodded, and sat still while I plucked it from her pocket, put it in one of my own, and sat down again.
VIII
“You said a little while ago that you didn’t care who I was,” she began immediately. “But I want you to know. There are so many of us Russians who once were somebodies and who now are nobodies that I won’t bore you with the repetition of a tale the world has grown tired of hearing. But you must remember that this weary tale is real to us who are its subjects. However, we fled from Russia with what we could carry of our property, which fortunately was enough to keep us in bearable comfort for a few years.
“In London we opened a Russian restaurant, but London was suddenly full of Russian restaurants, and ours became, instead of a means of livelihood, a source of loss. We tried teaching music and languages, and so on. In short, we hit on all the means of earning our living that other Russian exiles hit upon, and so always found ourselves in overcrowded, and thus unprofitable, fields. But what else did we know—could we do?
“I promised not to bore you. Well, always our capital shrank, and always the day approached on which we should be shabby and hungry, the day when we should become familiar to readers of your Sunday papers—charwomen who had been princesses, dukes who now were butlers. There was no place for us in the world. Outcasts easily become outlaws. Why not? Could it be said that we owed the world any fealty? Had not the world sat idly by and seen us despoiled of place and property and country?
“We planned it before we had heard of Couffignal. We could find a small settlement of the wealthy, sufficiently isolated, and, after establishing ourselves there, we would plunder it. Couffignal, when we found it, seemed to be the ideal place. We leased this house for six months, having just enough capital remaining to do that and to live properly here while our plans matured. Here we spent four months establishing ourselves, collecting our arms and our explosives, mapping our offensive, waiting for a favorable night. Last night seemed to be that night, and we had provided, we thought, against every eventuality. But we had not, of course, provided against your presence and your genius. They were simply others of the unforeseen misfortunes to which we seem eternally condemned.”
She stopped, and fell to studying me with mournful large eyes that made me feel like fidgeting.
“It’s no good calling me a genius,” I objected. “The truth is you people botched your job from beginning to end. Your general would get a big laugh out of a man without military training who tried to lead an army. But here are you people with absolutely no criminal experience trying to swing a trick that needed the highest sort of criminal skill. Look at how you all played around with me! Amateur stuff! A professional crook with any intelligence would have either let me alone or knocked me off. No wonder you flopped! As for the rest of it—your troubles—I can’t do anything about them.”
“Why?” very softly. “Why can’t you?”
“Why should I?” I made it blunt.
“No one else knows what you know.” She bent forward to put a white hand on my knee. “There is wealth in that cellar beneath the garage. You may have whatever you ask.”
I shook my head.
“You aren’t a fool!” she protested. “You know—”
“Let me straighten this out for you,” I interrupted. “We’ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to employers, and so on. You might doubt them, so we’ll throw them out. Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. It pays me a fair salary, but I could find other jobs that would pay more. Even a hundred dollars more a month would be twelve hundred a year. Say twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars in the years between now and my sixtieth birthday.
“Now I pass up that twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weigh that against any sum of money. Money is good stuff. I haven’t anything against it. But in the past eighteen years I’ve been getting my fun out of chasing crooks and tackling puzzles, my satisfaction out of catching crooks and solving riddles. It’s the only kind of sport I know anything about, and I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it. I’m not going to blow that up!”
She shook her head slowly, lowering it, so that now her dark eyes looked up at me under the thin arcs of her brows.
“You speak only of money,” she said. “I said you may have whatever you ask.”
That was out. I don’t know where these women get their ideas.
“You’re still all twisted up,” I said brusquely, standing now and adjusting my borrowed crutch. “You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me. There’s nothing human about it. You might just as well expect a hound to play tiddly-winks with the fox he’s caught. We’re wasting time anyway. I’ve been thinking the police or Marines might come up here and save me a walk. You’ve been waiting for your mob to come back and grab me. I could have told you they were being arrested when I left them.”
That shook her. She had stood up. Now she fell back a step, putting a hand behind her for steadiness, on her chair. An exclamation I didn’t understand popped out of her mouth. Russian, I thought, but the next moment I knew it had been Italian.
“Put your hands up.”
It was Flippo’s husky voice. Flippo stood in the doorway, holding an automatic.
IX
I raised my hands as high as I could without dropping my supporting crutch, meanwhile cursing myself for having been too careless, or too vain, to keep a gun in my hand while I talked to the girl.
So this was why she had come back to the house. If she freed the Italian, she had thought, we would have no reason for suspecting that he hadn’t been in on the robbery, and so we would look for the bandits among his friends. A prisoner, of course, he might have persuaded us of his innocence. She had given him the gun so he could either shoot his way clear, or, what would help her as much, get himself killed trying.
While I was arranging these thoughts in my head, Flippo had come up behind me. His empty hand passed over my body, taking away my own gun, his, and the one I had taken from the girl.
“A bargai
n, Flippo,” I said when he had moved away from me, a little to one side, where he made one corner of a triangle whose other corners were the girl and I. “You’re out on parole, with some years still to be served. I picked you up with a gun on you. That’s plenty to send you back to the big house. I know you weren’t in on this job. My idea is that you were up here on a smaller one of your own, but I can’t prove that and don’t want to. Walk out of here, alone and neutral, and I’ll forget I saw you.”
Little thoughtful lines grooved the boy’s round, dark face.
The princess took a step toward him.
“You heard the offer I just now made him?” she asked. “Well, I make that offer to you, if you will kill him.”
The thoughtful lines in the boy’s face deepened.
“There’s your choice, Flippo,” I summed up for him. “All I can give you is freedom from San Quentin. The princess can give you a fat cut of the profits in a busted caper, with a good chance to get yourself hanged.”
The girl, remembering her advantage over me, went at him hot and heavy in Italian, a language in which I know only four words. Two of them are profane and the other two obscene. I said all four.
The boy was weakening. If he had been ten years older, he’d have taken my offer and thanked me for it. But he was young and she—now that I thought of it—was beautiful. The answer wasn’t hard to guess.
“But not to bump him off,” he said to her, in English, for my benefit. “We’ll lock him up in there where I was at.”
I suspected Flippo hadn’t any great prejudice against murder. It was just that he thought this one unnecessary, unless he was kidding me to make the killing easier.
The girl wasn’t satisfied with his suggestion. She poured more hot Italian at him. Her game looked sure-fire, but it had a flaw. She couldn’t persuade him that his chances of getting any of the loot away were good. She had to depend on her charms to swing him. And that meant she had to hold his eye.
He wasn’t far from me.
She came close to him. She was singing, chanting, crooning Italian syllables into his round face.
She had him.
He shrugged. His whole face said yes. He turned—
I knocked him on the noodle with my borrowed crutch.
The crutch splintered apart. Flippo’s knees bent. He stretched up to his full height. He fell on his face on the floor. He lay there, dead-still, except for a thin worm of blood that crawled out of his hair to the rug.
A step, a tumble, a foot or so of hand-and-knee scrambling put me within reach of Flippo’s gun.
The girl, jumping out of my path, was half-way to the door when I sat up with the gun in my hand.
“Stop!” I ordered.
“I shan’t,” she said, but she did, for the time at least. “I am going out.”
“You are going out when I take you.”
She laughed, a pleasant laugh, low and confident.
“I’m going out before that,” she insisted good-naturedly.
I shook my head.
“How do you purpose stopping me?” she asked.
“I don’t think I’ll have to,” I told her. “You’ve got too much sense to try to run while I’m holding a gun on you.”
She laughed again, an amused ripple.
“I’ve got too much sense to stay,” she corrected me. “Your crutch is broken, and you’re lame. You can’t catch me by running after me, then. You pretend you’ll shoot me, but I don’t believe you. You’d shoot me if I attacked you, of course, but I shan’t do that. I shall simply walk out, and you know you won’t shoot me for that. You’ll wish you could, but you won’t. You’ll see.”
Her face turned over her shoulder, her dark eyes twinkling at me, she took a step toward the door.
“Better not count on that!” I threatened.
For answer to that she gave me a cooing laugh. And took another step.
“Stop, you idiot!” I bawled at her.
Her face laughed over her shoulder at me. She walked without haste to the door, her short skirt of grey flannel shaping itself to the calf of each grey wool-stockinged leg as its mate stepped forward.
Sweat greased the gun in my hand.
When her right foot was on the doorsill, a little chuckling sound came from her throat.
“Adieu!” she said softly.
And I put a bullet in the calf of her left leg.
She sat down—plump! Utter surprise stretched her white face. It was too soon for pain.
I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.
“You ought to have known I’d do it!” My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger’s in my ears. “Didn’t I steal a crutch from a cripple?”
About the Author
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) charted a gritty new direction for American crime fiction, crafting true-to-life stories as brash as they are exacting. In 1922, he began writing fiction based on his experience as a private detective, and he pioneered the tough-minded, action-heavy, realistic style that became known as hardboiled. Among his best-known works are Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), The Thin Man (1934), and the Collected Case Files of the Continental Op, most of which were published in Black Mask magazine.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Foreword” Copyright © 2016 by Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “Corkscrew,” “Dead Yellow Women, and “The Gutting of Couffignal” Copyright © 1925 by Pro-Distributors; renewed by Pro-Distributors as agent for Dashiell Hammett, whose interest was conveyed by will in 1984 to the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust. All Rights Reserved.
Cover design by Jamie Keenan
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