The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, March 1925

I

It started in Boston, back in 1917. I ran into Lew Maher on the Tremont street sidewalk of the Touraine Hotel one afternoon, and we stopped to swap a few minutes’ gossip in the snow.

I was telling him something or other when he cut in with:

“Sneak a look at this kid coming up the street. The one with the dark cap.”

Looking, I saw a gangling youth of eighteen or so; pasty and pimply face, sullen mouth, dull hazel eyes, thick, shapeless nose. He passed the city sleuth and me without attention, and I noticed his ears. They weren’t the battered ears of a pug, and they weren’t conspicuously deformed, but their rims curved in and out in a peculiar crinkled fashion.

At the corner he went out of sight, turning down Boylston street toward Washington.

“There’s a lad that will make a name for hisself if he ain’t nabbed or rocked off too soon,” Lew predicted. “Better put him on your list. The Whosis Kid. You’ll be looking for him some one of these days.”

“What’s his racket?”

“Stick-up, gunman. He’s got the makings of a good one. He can shoot, and he’s plain crazy. He ain’t hampered by nothing like imagination or fear of consequences. I wish he was. It’s these careful, sensible birds that are easiest caught. I’d swear the Kid was in on a coupla jobs that were turned in Brookline last month. But I can’t fit him to ’em. I’m going to clamp him some day, though — and that’s a promise.”

Lew never kept his promise. A prowler killed him in an Audubon Road residence a month later.

A week or two after this conversation I left the Boston branch of the Continental Detective Agency to try army life. When the war was over I returned to the Agency payroll in Chicago, stayed there for a couple of years, and got transferred to San Francisco.

So, all in all, it was nearly eight years later that I found myself sitting behind the Whosis Kid’s crinkled ears at the Dreamland Rink.

Friday night is fight night at the Steiner Street house. This particular one was my first idle evening in several weeks. I had gone up to the rink, fitted myself to a hard wooden chair not too far from the ring, and settled down to watch the boys throw gloves at one another. The show was about a quarter done when I picked out this pair of odd and somehow familiar ears two rows ahead of me.

I didn’t place them right away. I couldn’t see their owner’s face. He was watching Kid Cipriani and Bunny Keogh assault each other. I missed most of that fight. But during the brief wait before the next pair of boys went on, the Whosis Kid turned his head to say something to the man beside him. I saw his face and knew him.

He hadn’t changed much, and he hadn’t improved any. His eyes were duller and his mouth more wickedly sullen than I had remembered them. His face was as pasty as ever, if not so pimply.

He was directly between me and the ring. Now that I knew him, I didn’t have to pass up the rest of the card. I could watch the boys over his head without being afraid he would get out on me.

So far as I knew, the Whosis Kid wasn’t wanted anywhere — not by the Continental, anyway — and if he had been a pickpocket, or a con man, or a member of any of the criminal trades in which we are only occasionally interested, I would have let him alone. But stick-ups are always in demand. The Continental’s most important clients are insurance companies of one sort or another, and robbery policies make up a good percentage of the insurance business these days.

When the Whosis Kid left in the middle of the main event — along with nearly half of the spectators, not caring what happened to either of the muscle-bound heavies who were putting on a room-mate act in the ring — I went with him.

He was alone. It was the simplest sort of shadowing. The streets were filled with departing fight fans. The Kid walked down to Fillmore street, took on a stack of wheats, bacon and coffee at a lunch room, and caught a No. 22 car.

He — and likewise I — transferred to a No. 5 car at McAllister street, dropped off at Polk, walked north one block, turned back west for a block and a fraction, and went up the front stairs of a dingy light-housekeeping room establishment that occupied the second and third floors over a repair shop on the south side of Golden Gate avenue, between Van Ness and Franklin.

That put a wrinkle in my forehead. If he had left the street car at either Van Ness or Franklin, he would have saved himself a block of walking. He had ridden down to Polk and walked back. For the exercise, maybe.

I loafed across the street for a short while, to see what — if anything — happened to the front windows. None that had been dark before the Kid went in lighted up now. Apparently he didn’t have a front room — unless he was a very cautious young man. I knew he hadn’t tumbled to my shadowing. There wasn’t a chance of that. Conditions had been too favorable to me.

The front of the building giving me no information, I strolled down Van Ness avenue to look at the rear. The building ran through to Redwood street, a narrow back street that split the block in half. Four back windows were lighted, but they told me nothing. There was a back door. It seemed to belong to the repair shop. I doubted that the occupants of the upstairs rooms could use it.

On my way home to my bed and alarm clock, I dropped in at the office, to leave a note for the Old Man:

II

Eight o’clock the next morning found me a block below the house in which the Kid had gone, waiting for him to appear. A steady, soaking rain was falling, but I didn’t mind that. I was closed up inside a black coupé, a type of car whose tamely respectable appearance makes it the ideal one for city work. This part of Golden Gate avenue is lined with automobile repair shops, second-hand automobile dealers, and the like. There are always dozens of cars standing idle to the block. Although I stayed there all day, I didn’t have to worry over my being too noticeable.

That was just as well. For nine solid, end-to-end hours I sat there and listened to the rain on the roof, and waited for the Whosis Kid, with not a glimpse of him, and nothing to eat except Fatimas. I wasn’t any too sure he hadn’t slipped me. I didn’t know that he lived in this place I was watching. He could have gone to his home after I had gone to mine. However, in this detective business pessimistic guesses of that sort are always bothering you, if you let them. I stayed parked, with my eye on the dingy door into which my meat had gone the night before.

At a little after five that evening, Tommy Howd, our pug-nosed office boy, found me and gave me a memorandum from the Old Man:

After I had read this memorandum, I gave it back to the boy, — there’s no wisdom in carrying around a pocketful of stuff relating to your job, — and asked him:

“Will you call up the Old Man and ask him to send somebody up to relieve me while I get a bite of food? I haven’t chewed since breakfast.”

“Swell chance!” Tommy said. “Everybody’s busy. Hasn’t been an op in all day. I don’t see why you fellas don’t carry a hunk or two of chocolate in your pockets to—”

“You’ve been reading about Arctic explorers,” I accused him. “If a man’s starving he’ll eat anything, but when he’s just ordinarily hungry he doesn’t want to clutter up his stomach with a lot of candy. Scout around and see if you can pick me up a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of milk.”

He scowled at me, and then his fourteen-year-old face grew cunning.

“I tell you what,” he suggested. “You tell me what this fella looks like, and which building he’s in, and I’ll watch while you go get a decent meal. Huh? Steak, and French fried potatoes, and pie, and coffee.”

Tommy has dreams of being left on the job in some such circumstance, of having everything break for him while he’s there, and of rounding up regiments of desperadoes all by himself. I don’t think he’d muff a good chance at that, and I’d be willing to give him a whack at it. But the Old Man would scalp me if he knew I turned a child loose among a lot of thugs.

So I shook my head.

“This guy wears four guns and carries an ax, Tommy. He’d eat you up.”

“Aw, applesauce! You ops are all the time trying to make out nobody else could do your work. These crooks can’t be such tough mugs — or they wouldn’t let you catch ’em!”

There was some truth in that, so I put Tommy out of the coupé into the rain.

“One tongue sandwich, one ham, one bottle of milk. And make it sudden.”

But I wasn’t there when he came back with the food. He had barely gone out of sight when the Whosis Kid, his overcoat collar turned up against the rain that was driving down in close-packed earnest just now, came out of the rooming-house doorway.

He turned south on Van Ness.

When the coupé got me to the corner he was not in sight. He couldn’t have reached McAllister street. Unless he had gone into a building, Redwood street — the narrow one that split the block — was my best bet. I drove up Golden Gate avenue another block, turned south, and reached the corner of Franklin and Redwood just in time to see my man ducking into the back door of an apartment building that fronted on McAllister street.

I drove on slowly, thinking.

The building in which the Kid had spent the night and this building into which he had just gone had their rears on the same back street, on opposite sides, a little more than half a block apart. If the Kid’s room was in the rear of his building, and he had a pair of strong glasses, he could keep a pretty sharp eye on all the windows — and probably much of the interiors — of the rooms on that side of the McAllister street building.

Last night he had ridden a block out of his way. Having seen him sneak into the back door just now, my guess was that he had not wished to leave the street car where he could be seen from this building. Either of his more convenient points of departure from the car would have been in sight of this building. This would add up to the fact that the Kid was watching someone in this building, and did not want them to be watching him.

He had now gone calling through the back door. That wasn’t difficult to explain. The front door was locked, but the back door — as in most large buildings — probably was open all day. Unless the Kid ran into a janitor or someone of the sort, he could get in with no trouble. The Kid’s call was furtive, whether his host was at home or not.

I didn’t know what it was all about, but that didn’t bother me especially. My immediate problem was to get to the best place from which to pick up the Kid when he came out.

If he left by the back door, the next block of Redwood street — between Franklin and Gough — was the place for me and my coupé. But he hadn’t promised me he would leave that way. It was more likely that he would use the front door. He would attract less attention walking boldly out the front of the building than sneaking out the back. My best bet was the corner of McAllister and Van Ness. From there I could watch the front door as well as one end of Redwood street.

I slid the coupé down to that corner and waited.

Half an hour passed. Three quarters.

The Whosis Kid came down the front steps and walked toward me, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar as he walked, his head bent against the slant of the rain.

A curtained black Cadillac touring car came from behind me, a car I thought had been parked down near the City Hall when I took my plant here.

It curved around my coupé, slid with chainless recklessness in to the curb, skidded out again, picking up speed somehow on the wet paving.

A curtain whipped loose in the rain.

Out of the opening came pale fire-streaks. The bitter voice of a small-caliber pistol. Seven times.

The Whosis Kid’s wet hat floated off his head — a slow balloon-like rising.

There was nothing slow about the Kid’s moving.

Plunging, in a twisting swirl of coat-skirts, he flung into a shop vestibule.

The Cadillac reached the next corner, made a dizzy sliding turn, and was gone up Franklin street. I pointed the coupé at it.

Passing the vestibule into which the Kid had plunged, I got a one-eyed view of him, on his knees, still trying to get a dark gun untangled from his overcoat. Excited faces were in the doorway behind him. There was no excitement in the street. People are too accustomed to automobile noises nowadays to pay much attention to the racket of anything less than a six-inch gun.

By the time I reached Franklin street, the Cadillac had gained another block on me. It was spinning to the left, up Eddy street.

I paralleled it on Turk street, and saw it again when I reached the two open blocks of Jefferson Square. Its speed was decreasing. Five or six blocks further, and it crossed ahead of me — on Steiner street — close enough for me to read the license plate. Its pace was moderate now. Confident that they had made a clean getaway, its occupants didn’t want to get in trouble through speeding. I slid into their wake, three blocks behind.

Not having been in sight during the early blocks of the flight, I wasn’t afraid that they would suspect my interest in them now.

Out on Haight street near the park panhandle, the Cadillac stopped to discharge a passenger. A small man — short and slender — with cream-white face around dark eyes and a tiny black mustache. There was something foreign in the cut of his dark coat and the shape of his gray hat. He carried a walking-stick.

The Cadillac went on out Haight street without giving me a look at the other occupants. Tossing a mental nickel, I stuck to the man afoot. The chances always are against you being able to trace a suspicious car by its license number, but there is a slim chance.

My man went into a drug store on the corner and used the telephone. I don’t know what else he did in there, if anything. Presently a taxicab arrived. He got in and was driven to the Marquis Hotel. A clerk gave him the key to room 761. I dropped him when he stepped into an elevator.

III

At the Marquis I am among friends.

I found Duran, the house copper, on the mezzanine floor, and asked him:

“Who is 761?”

Duran is a white-haired old-timer who looks, talks, and acts like the president of an exceptionally strong bank. He used to be captain of detectives in one of the larger Middle Western cities. Once he tried too hard to get a confession out of a safe-ripper, and killed him. The newspapers didn’t like Duran. They used that accident to howl him out of his job.

“761?” he repeated in his grandfatherly manner. “That is Mr. Maurois, I believe. Are you especially interested in him?”

“I have hopes,” I admitted. “What do you know about him?”

“Not a great deal. He has been here perhaps two weeks. We shall go down and see what we can learn.”

We went to the desk, the switchboard, the captain of bell-hops, and upstairs to question a couple of chambermaids. The occupant of 761 had arrived two weeks ago, had registered as Edouard Maurois, Dijon, France, had frequent telephone calls, no mail, no visitors, kept irregular hours and tipped freely. Whatever business he was in or had was not known to the hotel people.

“What is the occasion of your interest in him, if I may ask?” Duran inquired after we had accumulated these facts. He talks like that.

“I don’t exactly know yet,” I replied truthfully. “He just connected with a bird who is wrong, but this Maurois may be all right himself. I’ll give you a rap the minute I get anything solid on him.”

I couldn’t afford to tell Duran I had seen his guest snapping caps at a gunman under the eves of the City Hall in daylight. The Marquis Hotel goes in for respectability. They would have shoved the Frenchman out in the streets. It wouldn’t help me to have him scared up.

“Please do,” Duran said. “You owe us something for our help, you know, so please don’t withhold any information that might save us unpleasant notoriety.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “Now will you do me another favor? I haven’t had my teeth in anything except my mouth since seven-thirty this morning. Will you keep an eye on the elevators, and let me know if Maurois goes out? I’ll be in the grill, near the door.”

“Certainly.”

On my way to the grillroom I stopped at the telephone booths and called up the office. I gave the night office man the Cadillac’s license number.

“Look it up on the list and see whom it belongs to.”

The answer was: “H. J. Paterson, San Pablo, issued for a Buick roadster.”

That about wound up that angle. We could look up Paterson, but it was safe betting it wouldn’t get us anything. License plates, once they get started in crooked ways, are about as easy to trace as Liberty Bonds.

All day I had been building up hunger. I took it into the grillroom and turned it loose. Between bites I turned the day’s events over in my mind. I didn’t think hard enough to spoil my appetite. There wasn’t that much to think about.

The Whosis Kid lived in a joint from which some of the McAllister street apartments could be watched. He visited the apartment building furtively. Leaving, he was shot at, from a car that must have been waiting somewhere in the vicinity. Had the Frenchman’s companion in the Cadillac — or his companions, if more than one — been the occupant of the apartment the Kid had visited? Had they expected him to visit it? Had they tricked him into visiting it, planning to shoot him down as he was leaving? Or were they watching the front while the Kid watched the rear? If so, had either known that the other was watching? And who lived there?

I couldn’t answer any of these riddles. All I knew was that the Frenchman and his companions didn’t seem to like the Whosis Kid.

Even the sort of meal I put away doesn’t take forever to eat. When I finished it, I went out to the lobby again.

Passing the switchboard, one of the girls — the one whose red hair looks as if it had been poured into its waves and hardened — gave me a nod.

I stopped to see what she wanted.

“Your friend just had a call,” she told me.

“You get it?”

“Yes. A man is waiting for him at Kearny and Broadway. Told him to hurry.”

“How long ago?”

“None. They’re just through talking.”

“Any names?”

“No.”

“Thanks.”

I went on to where Duran was stalling with an eye on the elevators.

“Shown yet?” I asked.

“No.”

“Good. The red-head on the switchboard just told me he had a phone call to meet a man at Kearny and Broadway. I think I’ll beat him to it.”

Around the corner from the hotel, I climbed into my coupé and drove down to the Frenchman’s corner.

The Cadillac he had used that afternoon was already there, with a new license plate. I passed it and took a look at its one occupant — a thick-set man of forty-something with a cap pulled low over his eyes. All I could see of his features was a wide mouth slanting over a heavy chin.

I put the coupé in a vacant space down the street a way. I didn’t have to wait long for the Frenchman. He came around the corner afoot and got into the Cadillac. The man with the big chin drove. They went slowly up Broadway. I followed.

IV

We didn’t go far, and when we came to rest again, the Cadillac was placed conveniently for its occupants to watch the Venetian Café, one of the gaudiest of the Italian restaurants that fill this part of town.

Two hours went by.

I had an idea that the Whosis Kid was eating at the Venetian. When he left, the fireworks would break out, continuing the celebration from where it had broken off that afternoon on McAllister street. I hoped the Kid’s gun wouldn’t get caught in his coat this time. But don’t think I meant to give him a helping hand in his two-against-one fight.

This party had the shape of a war between gunmen. It would be a private one as far as I was concerned. My hope was that by hovering on the fringes until somebody won, I could pick up a little profit for the Continental, in the form of a wanted crook or two among the survivors.

My guess at the Frenchman’s quarry was wrong. It wasn’t the Whosis Kid. It was a man and a woman. I didn’t see their faces. The light was behind them. They didn’t waste any time between the Venetian’s door and their taxicab.

The man was big — tall, wide, and thick. The woman looked small at his side. I couldn’t go by that. Anything weighing less than a ton would have seemed tiny beside him.

As the taxicab pulled away from the café, the Cadillac went after it. I ran in the Cadillac’s wake.

It was a short chase.

The taxicab turned into a dark block on the edge of Chinatown. The Cadillac jumped to its side, bearing it over to the curb.

A noise of brakes, shouting voices, broken glass. A woman’s scream. Figures moving in the scant space between touring car and taxicab. Both cars rocking. Grunts. Thuds. Oaths.

A man’s voice: “Hey! You can’t do that! Nix! Nix!”

It was a stupid voice.

I had slowed down until the coupé was barely moving toward this tussle ahead. Peering through the rain and darkness, I tried to pick out a detail or so as I approached, but I could see little.

I was within twenty feet when the curbward door of the taxicab banged open. A woman bounced out. She landed on her knees on the sidewalk, jumped to her feet, and darted up the street.

Putting the coupé closer to the curb, I let the door swing open. My side windows were spattered with rain. I wanted to get a look at the woman when she passed. If she should take the open door for an invitation, I didn’t mind talking to her.

She accepted the invitation, hurrying as directly to the car as if she had expected me to be waiting for her. Her face was a small oval above a fur collar.

“Help me!” she gasped. “Take me from here — quickly.”

There was a suggestion of foreignness too slight to be called an accent.

“How about—?”

I shut my mouth. The thing she was jabbing me in the body with was a snub-nosed automatic.

“Sure! Get in,” I urged her.

She bent her head to enter. I looped an arm over her neck, throwing her down across my lap. She squirmed and twisted — a small-boned, hard-fleshed body with strength in it.

I wrenched the gun out of her hand and pushed her back on the seat beside me.

Her fingers dug into my arms.

“Quick! Quick! Ah, please, quickly! Take me—”

“What about your friend?” I asked.

“Not him! He is of the others! Please, quickly!”

A man filled the open coupé door — the big-chinned man who had driven the Cadillac.

His hand seized the fur at the woman’s throat.

She tried to scream — made the gurgling sound of a man with a slit throat. I smacked his chin with the gun I had taken from her.

He tried to fall into the coupé. I pushed him out.

Before his head had hit the sidewalk, I had the door closed, and was twisting the coupé around in the street.

We rode away. Two shots sounded just as we turned the first corner. I don’t know whether they were fired at us or not. I turned other corners. The Cadillac did not appear again.

So far, so good. I had started with the Whosis Kid, dropped him to take Maurois, and now let him go to see who this woman was. I didn’t know what this confusion was all about, but I seemed to be learning who it was all about.

“Where to?” I asked presently.

“To home,” she said, and gave me an address.

I pointed the coupé at it with no reluctance at all. It was the McAllister street apartments the Whosis Kid had visited earlier in the evening.

We didn’t waste any time getting there. My companion might know it or might not, but I knew that all the other players in this game knew that address. I wanted to get there before the Frenchman and Big Chin.

Neither of us said anything during the ride. She crouched close to me, shivering. I was looking ahead, planning how I was to land an invitation into her apartment. I was sorry I hadn’t held on to her gun. I had let it fall when I pushed Big Chin out of the car. It would have been an excuse for a later call if she didn’t invite me in.

I needn’t have worried. She didn’t invite me. She insisted that I go in with her. She was scared stiff.

“You will not leave me?” she pleaded as we drove up McAllister street. “I am in complete terror. You cannot go from me! If you will not come in, I will stay with you.”

I was willing enough to go in, but I didn’t want to leave the coupé where it would advertise me.

“We’ll ride around the corner and park the car,” I told her, “and then I’ll go in with you.”

I drove around the block, with an eye in each direction for the Cadillac. Neither eye found it. I left the coupé on Franklin street and we returned to the McAllister street building.

She had me almost running through the rain that had lightened now to a drizzle.

The hand with which she tried to fit a key to the front door was a shaky, inaccurate hand. I took the key and opened the door. We rode to the third floor in an automatic elevator, seeing no one. I unlocked the door to which she led me, near the rear of the building.

Holding my arm, with one hand, she reached inside and snapped on the lights in the passageway.

I didn’t know what she was waiting for, until she cried:

“Frana! Frana! Ah, Frana!”

The muffled yapping of a small dog replied. The dog did not appear.

She grabbed me with both arms, trying to crawl up my damp coat-front.

“They are here!” she cried in the thin dry voice of utter terror. “They are here!”

V

“Is anybody supposed to be here?” I asked, putting her around to one side, where she wouldn’t be between me and the two doors across the passageway.

“No! Just my little dog Frana, but—”

I slid my gun half out of my pocket and back again, to make sure it wouldn’t catch if I needed it, and used my other hand to get rid of the woman’s arms.

“You stay here. I’ll see if you’ve got company.”

Moving to the nearest door, I heard a seven-year-old voice — Lew Maher’s — saying: “He can shoot and he’s plain crazy. He ain’t hampered by nothing like imagination or fear of consequences.”

With my left hand I turned the first door’s knob. With my left foot I kicked it open.

Nothing happened.

I put a hand around the frame, found the button, switched on the lights.

A sitting-room, all orderly.

Through an open door on the far side of the room came the muffled yapping of Frana. It was louder now and more excited. I moved to the doorway. What I could see of the next room, in the light from this, seemed peaceful and unoccupied enough. I went into it and switched on the lights.

The dog’s voice came through a closed door. I crossed to it, pulled it open. A dark fluffy dog jumped snapping at my leg. I grabbed it where its fur was thickest and lifted it squirming and snarling. The light hit it. It was purple — purple as a grape! Dyed purple!

Carrying this yapping, yelping artificial hound a little away from my body with my left hand, I moved on to the next room — a bedroom. It was vacant. Its closet hid nobody. I found the kitchen and bathroom. Empty. No one was in the apartment. The purple pup had been imprisoned by the Whosis Kid earlier in the day.

Passing through the second room on my way back to the woman with her dog and my report, I saw a slitted envelope lying face-down on a table. I turned it over. The stationery of a fashionable store, it was addressed to Mrs. Inés Almad, here.

The party seemed to be getting international. Maurois was French; the Whosis Kid was Boston American; the dog had a Bohemian name (at least I remember nabbing a Czech forger a few months before whose first name was Frana); and Inés, I imagine, was either Spanish or Portuguese. I didn’t know what Almad was, but she was undoubtedly foreign, and not, I thought, French.

I returned to her. She hadn’t moved an inch.

“Everything seems to be all right,” I told her. “The dog got himself caught in a closet.”

“There is no one here?”

“No one.”

She took the dog in both hands, kissing its fluffy stained head, crooning affectionate words to it in a language that made no sense to me.

“Do your friends — the people you had your row with tonight — know where you live?” I asked.

I knew they did. I wanted to see what she knew.

She dropped the dog as if she had forgotten it, and her brows puckered.

“I do not know that,” she said slowly. “Yet it may be. If they do—”

She shuddered, spun on her heel, and pushed the hall door violently shut.

“They may have been here this afternoon,” she went on. “Frana has made himself prisoner in closets before, but I fear everything. I am coward-like. But there is none here now?”

“No one,” I assured her again.

We went into the sitting-room. I got my first good look at her when she shed her hat and dark cape.

She was a trifle under medium height, a dark-skinned woman of thirty in a vivid orange gown. She was dark as an Indian, with bare brown shoulders round and sloping, tiny feet and hands, her fingers heavy with rings. Her nose was thin and curved, her mouth full-lipped and red, her eyes — long and thickly lashed — were of an extraordinary narrowness. They were dark eyes, but nothing of their color could be seen through the thin slits that separated the lids. Two dark gleams through veiling lashes. Her black hair was disarranged just now in fluffy silk puffs. A rope of pearls hung down on her dark chest. Earrings of black iron — in a peculiar club-like design — swung beside her cheeks.

Altogether, she was an odd trick. But I wouldn’t want to be quoted as saying that she wasn’t beautiful — in a wild way.

She was shaking and shivering as she got rid of her hat and cloak. White teeth held her lower lip as she crossed the room to turn on an electric heater. I took advantage of this opportunity to shift my gun from my overcoat pocket to my pants. Then I took off the coat.

Leaving the room for a second, she returned with a brown-filled quart bottle and two tumblers on a bronze tray, which she put on a little table near the heater.

The first tumbler she filled to within half an inch of its rim. I stopped her when she had the other nearly half full.

“That’ll do fine for me,” I said.

It was brandy, and not at all hard to get down. She shot her tumblerful into her throat as if she needed it, shook her bare shoulders, and sighed in a satisfied way.

“You will think, certainly, I am lunatic,” she smiled at me. “Flinging myself on you, a stranger in the street, demanding of you time and troubles.”

“No,” I lied seriously. “I think you’re pretty level-headed for a woman who, no doubt, isn’t used to this sort of stuff.”

She was pulling a little upholstered bench closer to the electric heater, within reach of the table that held the brandy. She sat down now, with an inviting nod at the bench’s empty half.

The purple dog jumped into her lap. She pushed it out. It started to return. She kicked it sharply in the side with the pointed toe of her slipper. It yelped and crawled under a chair across the room.

I avoided the window by going the long way around the room. The window was curtained, but not thickly enough to hide all of the room from the Whosis Kid — if he happened to be sitting at his window just now with a pair of field-glasses to his eyes.

“But I am not level-headed, really,” the woman was saying as I dropped beside her. “I am coward-like, terribly. And even becoming accustomed— It is my husband, or he who was my husband. I should tell you. Your gallantry deserves the explanation, and I do not wish you should think a thing that is not so.”

I tried to look trusting and credulous. I expected to disbelieve everything she said.

“He is most crazily jealous,” she went on in her low-pitched, soft voice, with a peculiar way of saying words that just missed being marked enough to be called a foreign accent. “He is an old man, and incredibly wicked. These men he has sent to me! A woman there was once — tonight’s men are not first. I don’t know what — what they mean. To kill me, perhaps — to maim, to disfigure — I do not know.”

“And the man in the taxi with you was one of them?” I asked. “I was driving down the street behind you when you were attacked, and I could see there was a man with you. He was one of them?”

“Yes! I did not know it, but it must have been that he was. He does not defend me. A pretense, that is all.”

“Ever try sicking the cops on this hubby of yours?”

“It is what?”

“Ever notify the police?”

“Yes, but” — she shrugged her brown shoulders — “I would as well have kept quiet, or better. In Buffalo it was, and they — they bound my husband to keep the peace, I think you call it. A thousand dollars! Poof! What is that to him in his jealousy? And I–I cannot stand the things the newspapers say — the jesting of them. I must leave Buffalo. Yes, once I do try sicking the cops on him. But not more.”

“Buffalo?” I explored a little. “I lived there for a while — on Crescent avenue.”

“Oh, yes. That is out by the Delaware Park.”

That was right enough. But her knowing something about Buffalo didn’t prove anything about the rest of her story.

VI

She poured more brandy. By speaking quick I held my drink down to a size suitable for a man who has work to do. Hers was as large as before. We drank, and she offered me cigarettes in a lacquered box — slender cigarettes, hand-rolled in black paper.

I didn’t stay with mine long. It tasted, smelt and scorched like gunpowder.

“You don’t like my cigarettes?”

“I’m an old-fashioned man,” I apologized, rubbing its fire out in a bronze dish, fishing in my pocket for my own deck. “Tobacco’s as far as I’ve got. What’s in these fireworks?”

She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, with a sort of coo in it.

“I am so very sorry. So many people do not like them. I have a Hindu incense mixed with the tobacco.”

I didn’t say anything to that. It was what you would expect of a woman who would dye her dog purple.

The dog moved under its chair just then, scratching the floor with its nails.

The brown woman was in my arms, in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck. Close-up, opened by terror, her eyes weren’t dark at all. They were gray-green. The blackness was in the shadow from her heavy lashes.

“It’s only the dog,” I assured her, sliding her back on her own part of the bench. “It’s only the dog wriggling around under the chair.”

“Ah!” she blew her breath out with enormous relief.

Then we had to have another shot of brandy.

“You see, I am most awfully the coward,” she said when the third dose of liquor was in her. “But, ah, I have had so much trouble. It is a wonder that I am not insane.”

I could have told her she wasn’t far enough from it to do much bragging, but I nodded with what was meant for sympathy.

She lit another cigarette to replace the one she had dropped in her excitement. Her eyes became normal black slits again.

“I do not think it is nice” — there was a suggestion of a dimple in her brown cheek when she smiled like that — “that I throw myself into the arms of a man even whose name I do not know, or anything of him.”

“That’s easy to fix. My name is Young,” I lied; “and I can let you have a case of Scotch at a price that will astonish you. I think maybe I could stand it if you call me Jerry. Most of the ladies I let sit in my lap do.”

“Jerry Young,” she repeated, as if to herself. “That is a nice name. And you are the bootlegger?”

“Not the,” I corrected her; “just a. This is San Francisco.”

The going got tough after that.

Everything else about this brown woman was all wrong, but her fright was real. She was scared stiff. And she didn’t intend being left alone this night. She meant to keep me there — to massage any more chins that stuck themselves at her. Her idea — she being that sort — was that I would be most surely held with affection. So she must turn herself loose on me. She wasn’t hampered by any pruderies or puritanisms at all.

I also have an idea. Mine is that when the last gong rings I’m going to be leading this baby and some of her playmates to the city prison. That is an excellent reason — among a dozen others I could think of — why I shouldn’t get mushy with her.

I was willing enough to camp there with her until something happened. That apartment looked like the scene of the next action. But I had to cover up my own game. I couldn’t let her know she was only a minor figure in it. I had to pretend there was nothing behind my willingness to stay but a desire to protect her. Another man might have got by with a chivalrous, knight-errant, protector-of-womanhood-without-personal-interest attitude. But I don’t look, and can’t easily act, like that kind of person. I had to hold her off without letting her guess that my interest wasn’t personal. It was no cinch. She was too damned direct, and she had too much brandy in her.

I didn’t kid myself that my beauty and personality were responsible for any of her warmth. I was a thick-armed male with big fists. She was in a jam. She spelled my name P-r-o-t-e-c-t-i-o-n. I was something to be put between her and trouble.

Another complication: I am neither young enough nor old enough to get feverish over every woman who doesn’t make me think being blind isn’t so bad. I’m at that middle point around forty where a man puts other feminine qualities — amiability, for one — above beauty on his list. This brown woman annoyed me. She was too sure of herself. Her work was rough. She was trying to handle me as if I were a farmer boy. But in spite of all this, I’m constructed mostly of human ingredients. This woman got more than a stand-off when faces and bodies were dealt. I didn’t like her. I hoped to throw her in the can before I was through. But I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that she had me stirred up inside — between her cuddling against me, giving me the come-on, and the brandy I had drunk.

The going was tough — no fooling.

A couple of times I was tempted to bolt. Once I looked at my watch — 2:06. She put a ring-heavy brown hand on the timepiece and pushed it down to my pocket.

“Please, Jerry!” the earnestness in her voice was real. “You cannot go. You cannot leave me here. I will not have it so. I will go also, through the streets following. You cannot leave me to be murdered here!”

I settled down again.

A few minutes later a bell rang sharply.

She went to pieces immediately. She piled over on me, strangling me with her bare arms. I pried them loose enough to let me talk.

“What bell is that?”

“The street door. Do not heed it.”

I patted her shoulder.

“Be a good girl and answer it. Let’s see who it is.”

Her arms tightened.

“No! No! No! They have come!”

The bell rang again.

“Answer it,” I insisted.

Her face was flat against my coat, her nose digging into my chest.

“No! No!”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll answer it myself.”

I untangled myself from her, got up and went into the passageway. She followed me. I tried again to persuade her to do the talking. She would not, although she didn’t object to my talking. I would have liked it better if whoever was downstairs didn’t learn that the woman wasn’t alone. But she was too stubborn in her refusal for me to do anything with her.

“Well?” I said into the speaking-tube.

“Who the hell are you?” a harsh, deep-chested voice asked.

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to Inés.”

“Speak your piece to me,” I suggested, “and I’ll tell her about it.”

The woman, holding one of my arms, had an ear close to the tube.

“Billie, it is,” she whispered. “Tell him that he goes away.”

“You’re to go away,” I passed the message on.

“Yeah?” the voice grew harsher and deeper. “Will you open the door, or will I bust it in?”

There wasn’t a bit of playfulness in the question. Without consulting the woman, I put a finger on the button that unlocks the street door.

“Welcome,” I said into the tube.

“He’s coming up,” I explained to the woman. “Shall I stand behind the door and tap him on the skull when he comes in? Or do you want to talk to him first?”

“Do not strike him!” she exclaimed. “It is Billie.”

That suited me. I hadn’t intended putting the slug to him — not until I knew who and what he was, anyway. I had wanted to see what she would say.

VII

Billie wasn’t long getting up to us. I opened the door when he rang, the woman standing beside me. He didn’t wait for an invitation. He was through the doorway before I had the door half opened. He glared at me. There was plenty of him!

A big, red-faced, red-haired bale of a man — big in any direction you measured him — and none of him was fat. The skin was off his nose, one cheek was clawed, the other swollen. His hatless head was a tangled mass of red hair. One pocket had been ripped out of his coat, and a button dangled on the end of a six-inch ribbon of torn cloth.

This was the big heaver who had been in the taxicab with the woman.

“Who’s this mutt?” he demanded, moving his big paws toward me.

I knew the woman was a goof. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had tried to feed me to the battered giant. But she didn’t. She put a hand on one of his and soothed him.

“Do not be nasty, Billie. He is a friend. Without him I would not this night have escaped.”

He scowled. Then his face straightened out and he caught her hand in both of his.

“So you got away it’s all right,” he said huskily. “I’d a done better if we’d been outside. There wasn’t no room in that taxi for me to turn around. And one of them guys crowned me.”

That was funny. This big clown was apologizing for getting mangled up protecting a woman who had scooted, leaving him to get out as well as he could.

The woman led him into the sitting-room, I tagging along behind. They sat on the bench. I picked out a chair that wasn’t in line with the window the Whosis Kid ought to be watching.

“What did happen, Billie?” She touched his grooved cheek and skinned nose with her fingertips. “You are hurt.”

He grinned with a sort of shamefaced delight. I saw that what I had taken for a swelling in one cheek was only a big hunk of chewing tobacco.

“I don’t know all that happened,” he said. “One of ’em crowned me, and I didn’t wake up till a coupla hours afterwards. The taxi driver didn’t give me no help in the fight, but he was a right guy and knowed where his money would come from. He didn’t holler or nothing. He took me around to a doc that wouldn’t squawk, and the doc straightened me out, and then I come up here.”

“Did you see each one of those men?” she asked.

“Sure! I seen ’em, and felt ’em, and maybe tasted ’em.”

“They were how many?”

“Just two of ’em. A little fella with a trick tickler, and a husky with a big chin on him.”

“There was no other? There was not a younger man, tall and thin?”

That could be the Whosis Kid. She thought he and the Frenchman were working together?

Billie shook his shaggy, banged-up head.

“Nope. They was only two of ’em.”

She frowned and chewed her lip.

Billie looked sidewise at me — a look that said “Beat it.”

The woman caught the glance. She twisted around on the bench to put a hand on his head.

“Poor Billie,” she cooed; “his head most cruelly hurt saving me, and now, when he should be at his home giving it rest, I keep him here talking. You go, Billie, and when it is morning and your poor head is better, you will telephone to me?”

His red face got dark. He glowered at me.

Laughing, she slapped him lightly on the cheek that bulged around his cud of tobacco.

“Do not become jealous of Jerry. Jerry is enamored of one yellow and white lady somewhere, and to her he is most faithful. Not even the smallest liking has he for dark women.” She smiled a challenge at me. “Is it not so, Jerry?”

“No,” I denied. “And, besides, all women are dark.”

Billie shifted his chew to the scratched cheek and bunched his shoulders.

“What the hell kind of a crack is that to be making?” he rumbled.

“That means nothing it should not, Billie,” she laughed at him. “It is only an epigram.”

“Yeah?” Billie was sour and truculent. I was beginning to think he didn’t like me. “Well, tell your little fat friend to keep his smart wheezes to himself. I don’t like ’em.”

That was plain enough. Billie wanted an argument. The woman, who held him securely enough to have steered him off, simply laughed again. There was no profit in trying to find the reason behind any of her actions. She was a nut. Maybe she thought that since we weren’t sociable enough for her to keep both on hand, she’d let us tangle, and hold on to the one who rubbed the other out of the picture.

Anyway, a row was coming. Ordinarily I am inclined to peace. The day is past when I’ll fight for the fun of it. But I’ve been in too many rumpuses to mind them much. Usually nothing very bad happens to you, even if you lose. I wasn’t going to back down just because this big stiff was meatier than I. I’ve always been lucky against the large sizes. He had been banged up earlier in the evening. That would cut down his steam some. I wanted to hang around this apartment a little longer, if it could be managed. If Billie wanted to tussle — and it looked as if he did — he could.

It was easy to meet him half-way: anything I said would be used against me.

I grinned at his red face, and suggested to the woman, solemnly:

“I think if you’d dip him in blueing he’d come out the same color as the other pup.”

As silly as that was, it served. Billie reared up on his feet and curled his paws into fists.

“Me and you’ll take a walk,” he decided; “out where there’s space enough.”

I got up, pushed my chair back with a foot, and quoted “Red” Burns to him: “If you’re close enough, there’s room enough.”

He wasn’t a man you had to talk to much. We went around and around.

It was fists at first. He started it by throwing his right at my head. I went in under it and gave him all I had in a right and left to the belly. He swallowed his chew of tobacco. But he didn’t bend. Few big men are as strong as they look. Billie was.

He didn’t know anything at all. His idea of a fight was to stand up and throw fists at your head — right, left, right, left. His fists were as large as wastebaskets. They wheezed through the air. But always at the head — the easiest part to get out of the way.

There was room enough for me to go in and out. I did that. I hammered his belly. I thumped his heart. I mauled his belly again. Every time I hit him he grew an inch, gained a pound and picked up another horsepower. I don’t fool when I hit, but nothing I did to this human mountain — not even making him swallow his hunk of tobacco — had any visible effect on him.

I’ve always had a reasonable amount of pride in my ability to sock. It was disappointing to have this big heaver take the best I could give him without a grunt. But I wasn’t discouraged. He couldn’t stand it forever. I settled down to make a steady job of it.

Twice he clipped me. Once on the shoulder. A big fist spun me half around. He didn’t know what to do next. He came in on the wrong side. I made him miss, and got clear. The other time he caught me on the forehead. A chair kept me from going down. The smack hurt me. It must have hurt him more. A skull is tougher than a knuckle. I got out of his way when he closed in, and let him have something to remember on the back of his neck.

The woman’s dusky face showed over Billie’s shoulder as he straightened up. Her eyes were shiny behind their heavy lashes, and her mouth was open to let white teeth gleam through.

Billie got tired of the boxing after that, and turned the set-to into a wrestling match, with trimmings. I would rather have kept on with the fists. But I couldn’t help myself. It was his party. He grabbed one of my wrists, yanked, and we thudded chest to chest.

He didn’t know any more about this than he had about that. He didn’t have to. He was big enough and strong enough to play with me.

I was underneath when we tumbled down on the floor and began rolling around. I did my best. It wasn’t anything. Three times I put a scissors on him. His body was too big for my short legs to clamp around. He chucked me off as if he were amusing the baby. There was no use at all in trying to do things to his legs. No hold known to man could have held them. His arms were almost as strong. I quit trying.

Nothing I knew was any good against this monster. He was out of my range. I was satisfied to spend all that was left of my strength trying to keep him from crippling me — and waiting for a chance to out-smart him.

He threw me around a lot. Then my chance came.

I was flat on my back, with everything but one or two of my most centrally located intestines squeezed out. Kneeling astride me, he brought his big hands up to my throat and fastened them there.

That’s how much he didn’t know!

You can’t choke a man that way — not if his hands are loose and he knows a hand is stronger than a finger.

I laughed in his purple face and brought my own hands up. Each of them picked one of his little fingers out of my flesh. It wasn’t a dream at that. I was all in, and he wasn’t. But no man’s little finger is stronger than another’s hand. I twisted them back. They broke together.

He yelped. I grabbed the next — the ring fingers.

One of them snapped. The other was ready to pop when he let go.

Jerking up, I butted him in the face. I twisted from between his knees. We came on our feet together.

The doorbell rang.

VIII

Fight interest went out of the woman’s face. Fear came in. Her fingers picked at her mouth.

“Ask who’s there,” I told her.

“Who — who is there?”

Her voice was flat and dry.

“Mrs. Keil,” came from the corridor, the words sharp with indignation. “You will have to stop this noise immediately! The tenants are complaining — and no wonder! A pretty hour to be entertaining company and carrying on so!”

“The landlady,” the dark woman whispered. Aloud: “I am sorry, Mrs. Keil. There will not be more noises.”

Something like a sniff came through the door, and the sound of dimming footsteps.

Inés Almad frowned reproachfully at Billie.

“You should not have done this,” she blamed him.

He looked humble, and at the floor, and at me. Looking at me, the purple began to flow back into his face.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I told this fella we ought to take a walk. We’ll do it now, and there won’t be no more noise here.”

“Billie!” her voice was sharp. She was reading the law to him. “You will go out and have attention for your hurts. If you have not won these fights, because of that am I to be left here alone to be murdered?”

The big man shuffled his feet, avoided her gaze and looked utterly miserable. But he shook his head stubbornly.

“I can’t do it, Inés,” he said. “Me and this guy has got to finish it. He busted my fingers, and I got to bust his jaw.”

“Billie!”

She stamped one small foot and looked imperiously at him. He looked as if he’d like to roll over on his back and hold his paws in the air. But he stood his ground.

“I got to,” he repeated. “There ain’t no way out of it.”

Anger left her face. She smiled very tenderly at him.

“Dear old Billie,” she murmured, and crossed the room to a secretary in a corner.

When she turned, an automatic pistol was in her hand. Its one eye looked at Billie.

“Now, lechón,” she purred, “go out!”

The red man wasn’t a quick thinker. It took a full minute for him to realize that this woman he loved was driving him away with a gun. The big dummy might have known that his three broken fingers had disqualified him. It took another minute for him to get his legs in motion. He went toward the door in slow bewilderment, still only half believing this thing was really happening.

The woman followed him step by step. I went ahead to open the door.

I turned the knob. The door came in, pushing me back against the opposite wall.

In the doorway stood Edouard Maurois and the man I had swatted on the chin. Each had a gun.

I looked at Inés Almad, wondering what turn her craziness would take in the face of this situation. She wasn’t so crazy as I had thought. Her scream and the thud of her gun on the floor sounded together.

“Ah!” the Frenchman was saying. “The gentlemen were leaving? May we detain them?”

The man with the big chin — it was larger than ever now with the marks of my tap — was less polite.

“Back up, you birds!” he ordered, stooping for the gun the woman had dropped.

I still was holding the doorknob. I rattled it a little as I took my hand away — enough to cover up the click of the lock as I pushed the button that left it unlatched. If I needed help, and it came, I wanted as few locks as possible between me and it.

Then — Billie, the woman and I walking backward — we all paraded into the sitting-room. Maurois and his companion both wore souvenirs of the row in the taxicab. One of the Frenchman’s eyes was bruised and closed — a beautiful shiner. His clothes were rumpled and dirty. He wore them jauntily in spite of that, and he still had his walking stick, crooked under the arm that didn’t hold his gun.

Big Chin held us with his own gun and the woman’s while Maurois ran his hand over Billie’s and my clothes, to see if we were armed. He found my gun and pocketed it. Billie had no weapons.

“Can I trouble you to step back against the wall?” Maurois asked when he was through.

We stepped back as if it was no trouble at all. I found my shoulder against one of the window curtains. I pressed it against the frame, and turned far enough to drag the curtain clear of a foot or more of pane.

If the Whosis Kid was watching, he should have had a clear view of the Frenchman — the man who had shot at him earlier in the evening. I was putting it up to the Kid. The corridor door was unlocked. If the Kid could get into the building — no great trick — he had a clear path. I didn’t know where he fit in, but I wanted him to join us, and I hoped he wouldn’t disappoint me. If everybody got together here, maybe whatever was going on would come out where I could see it and understand it.

Meanwhile, I kept as much of myself as possible out of the window. The Kid might decide to throw lead from across the alley.

Maurois was facing Inés. Big Chin’s guns were on Billie and me.

“I do not comprends ze anglais ver’ good,” the Frenchman was mocking the woman. “So it is when you say you meet wit’ me, I t’ink you say in New Orleans. I do not know you say San Francisc’. I am ver’ sorry to make ze mistake. I am mos’ sorry zat I keep you wait. But now I am here. You have ze share for me?”

“I have not.” She held her hands out in an empty gesture. “The Kid took those — everything from me.”

“What?” Maurois dropped his taunting smile and his vaudeville accent. His one open eye flashed angrily. “How could he, unless—?”

“He suspected us, Edouard.” Her mouth trembled with earnestness. Her eyes pleaded for belief. She was lying. “He had me followed. The day after I am there he comes. He takes all. I am afraid to wait for you. I fear your unbelief. You would not—”

“C’est incroyable!” Maurois was very excited over it. “I was on the first train south after our — our theatricals. Could the Kid have been on that train without my knowing it? Non! And how else could he have reached you before I? You are playing with me, ma petite Inés. That you did join the Kid, I do not doubt. But not in New Orleans. You did not go there. You came here to San Francisco.”

“Edouard!” she protested, fingering his sleeve with one brown hand, the other holding her throat as if she were having trouble getting the words out. “You cannot think that thing! Do not those weeks in Boston say it is not possible? For one like the Kid — or like any other — am I to betray you? You know me not more than to think I am like that?”

She was an actress. She was appealing, and pathetic, and anything else you like — including dangerous.

The Frenchman took his sleeve away from her and stepped back a step. White lines ringed his mouth below his tiny mustache, and his jaw muscles bulged. His one good eye was worried. She had got to him, though not quite enough to upset him altogether. But the game was young yet.

“I do not know what to think,” he said slowly. “If I have been wrong — I must find the Kid first. Then I will learn the truth.”

“You don’t have to look no further, brother. I’m right among you!”

The Whosis Kid stood in the passageway door. A black revolver was in each of his hands. Their hammers were up.

IX

It was a pretty tableau.

There is the Whosis Kid in the door — a lean lad in his twenties, all the more wicked-looking because his face is weak and slack-jawed and dull-eyed. The cocked guns in his hands are pointing at everybody or at nobody, depending on how you look at them.

There is the brown woman, her cheeks pinched in her two fists, her eyes open until their green-grayishness shows. The fright I had seen in her face before was nothing to the fright that is there now.

There is the Frenchman — whirled doorward at the Kid’s first word — his gun on the Kid, his cane still under his arm, his face a tense white blot.

There is Big Chin, his body twisted half around, his face over one shoulder to look at the door, with one of his guns following his face around.

There is Billie — a big, battered statue of a man who hasn’t said a word since Inés Almad started to gun him out of the apartment.

And, last, here I am — not feeling so comfortable as I would home in bed, but not actually hysterical either. I wasn’t altogether dissatisfied with the shape things were taking. Something was going to happen in these rooms. But I wasn’t friendly enough to any present to care especially what happened to whom. For myself, I counted on coming through all in one piece. Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed. I’ve had twenty years of experience at dodging that. I can count on being one of the survivors of whatever blow-up there is. And I hope to take most of the other survivors for a ride.

But right now the situation belonged to the men with guns — the Whosis Kid, Maurois and Big Chin.

The Kid spoke first. He had a whining voice that came disagreeably through his thick nose.

“This don’t look nothing like Chi to me, but, anyways, we’re all here.”

“Chicago!” Maurois exclaimed. “You did not go to Chicago!”

The Kid sneered at him.

“Did you? Did she? What would I be going there for? You think me and her run out on you, don’t you? Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you, and the same as the three of us done to the boob.”

“That may be,” the Frenchman replied; “but you do not expect me to believe that you and Inés are not friends? Didn’t I see you leaving here this afternoon?”

“You seen me, all right,” the Kid agreed; “but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else. But I ain’t got nothing against you now. I thought you and her had ditched me, just as you think me and her done you. I know different now, from what I heard while I was getting in here. She twisted the pair of us, Frenchy, just like we twisted the boob. Ain’t you got it yet?”

Maurois shook his head slowly.

What put an edge to this conversation was that both men were talking over their guns.

“Listen,” the Kid asked impatiently. “We was to meet up in Chi for a three-way split, wasn’t we?”

The Frenchman nodded.

“But she tells me,” the Kid went on, “she’ll connect with me in St. Louis, counting you out; and she ribs you up to meet her in New Orleans, ducking me. And then she gyps the pair of us by running out here to Frisco with the stuff.

“We’re a couple of suckers, Frenchy, and there ain’t no use of us getting hot at each other. There’s enough of it for a fat two-way cut. What I say is let’s forget what’s done, and me and you make it fifty-fifty. Understand, I ain’t begging you. I’m making a proposition. If you don’t like it, to hell with you! You know me. You never seen the day I wouldn’t shoot it out with you or anybody else. Take your pick!”

The Frenchman didn’t say anything for a while. He was converted, but he didn’t want to weaken his hand by coming in too soon. I don’t know whether he believed the Kid’s words or not, but he believed the Kid’s guns. You can get a bullet out of a cocked revolver a lot quicker than out of a hammerless automatic. The Kid had the bulge there. And the Kid had him licked because the Kid had the look of one who doesn’t give a damn what happens next.

Finally Maurois looked a question at Big Chin. Big Chin moistened his lips, but said nothing.

Maurois looked at the Kid again, and nodded his head.

“You are right,” he said. “We will do that.”

“Good!” The Kid did not move from his door. “Now who are these plugs?”

“These two” — Maurois nodded at Billie and me — “are friends of our Inés. This” — indicating Big Chin — “is a confrere of mine.”

“You mean he’s in with you? That’s all right with me.” The Kid spoke crisply. “But, you understand, his cut comes out of yours. I get half, and no trimming.”

The Frenchman frowned, but he nodded in agreement.

“Half is yours, if we find it.”

“Don’t get no headache over that,” the Kid advised him. “It’s here and we’ll get it.”

He put one of his guns away and came into the room, the other gun hanging loosely at his side. When he walked across the room to face the woman, he managed it so that Big Chin and Maurois were never behind him.

“Where’s the stuff?” he demanded.

Inés Almad wet her red mouth with her tongue and let her mouth droop a little and looked softly at the Kid, and made her play.

“One of us is as bad as are the others, Kid. We all — each of us tried to get for ourselves everything. You and Edouard have put aside what is past. Am I more wrong than you? I have them, true, but I have not them here. Until tomorrow will you wait? I will get them. We will divide them among us three, as it was to have been. Shall we not do that?”

“Not any!” The Kid’s voice had finality in it.

“Is that just?” she pleaded, letting her chin quiver a bit. “Is there a treachery of which I am guilty that also you and Edouard are not? Do you—?”

“That ain’t the idea at all,” the Kid told her. “Me and Frenchy are in a fix where we got to work together to get anywhere. So we’re together. With you it’s different. We don’t need you. We can take the stuff away from you. You’re out! Where’s the stuff?”

“Not here! Am I foolish sufficient to leave them here where so easily you could find them? You do need my help to find them. Without me you cannot—”

“You’re silly! I might flop for that if I didn’t know you. But I know you’re too damned greedy to let ’em get far away from you. And you’re yellower than you’re greedy. If you’re smacked a couple of times, you’ll kick in. And don’t think I got any objections to smacking you over!”

She cowered back from his upraised hand.

The Frenchman spoke quickly.

“We should search the rooms first, Kid. If we don’t find them there, then we can decide what to do next.”

The Whosis Kid laughed sneeringly at Maurois.

“All right. But, get this, I’m not going out of here without that stuff — not if I have to take this rat apart. My way’s quicker, but we’ll hunt first if you want to. Your con-whatever-you-call-him can keep these plugs tucked in while me and you upset the joint.”

They went to work. The Kid put away his gun and brought out a long-bladed spring-knife. The Frenchman unscrewed the lower two-thirds of his cane, baring a foot and a half of sword-blade.

No cursory search, theirs. They took the room we were in first. They gutted it thoroughly, carved it to the bone. Furniture and pictures were taken apart. Upholstering gave up its stuffing. Floor coverings were cut. Suspicious lengths of wallpaper were scraped loose. They worked slowly. Neither would let the other get behind him. The Kid would not turn his back on Big Chin.

The sitting-room wrecked, they went into the next room, leaving the woman, Billie and me standing among the litter. Big Chin and his two guns watched over us.

As soon as the Frenchman and the Kid were out of sight, the woman tried her stuff out on our guardian. She had a lot of confidence in her power with men, I’ll say that for her.

For a while she worked her eyes on Big Chin, and then, very softly:

“Can I—?”

“You can’t!” Big Chin was loud and gruff. “Shut up!”

The Whosis Kid appeared at the door.

“If nobody don’t say nothing maybe nobody won’t get hurt,” he snarled, and went back to his work.

The woman valued herself too highly to be easily discouraged. She didn’t put anything in words again, but she looked things at Big Chin — things that had him sweating and blushing. He was a simple man. I didn’t think she’d get anywhere. If there had been no one present but the two of them, she might have put Big Chin over the jumps; but he wouldn’t be likely to let her get to him with a couple of birds standing there watching the show.

Once a sharp yelp told us that the purple Frana — who had fled rearward when Maurois and Big Chin arrived — had got in trouble with the searchers. There was only that one yelp, and it stopped with a suddenness that suggested trouble for the dog.

The two men spent nearly an hour in the other rooms. They didn’t find anything. Their hands, when they joined us again, held nothing but the cutlery.

X

“I said to you it was not here,” Inés told them triumphantly. “Now will you—?”

“You can’t tell me nothing I’ll believe.” The Kid snapped his knife shut and dropped it in his pocket. “I still think it’s here.”

He caught her wrist, and held his other hand, palm up, under her nose.

“You can put ’em in my hand, or I’ll take ’em.”

“They are not here! I swear it!”

His mouth lifted at the corner in a savage grimace.

“Liar!”

He twisted her arm roughly, forcing her to her knees. His free hand went to the shoulder-strap of her orange gown.

“I’ll damn soon find out,” he promised.

Billie came to life.

“Hey!” he protested, his chest heaving in and out. “You can’t do that!”

“Wait, Kid!” Maurois — putting his sword-cane together again — called. “Let us see if there is not another way.”

The Whosis Kid let go of the woman and took three slow steps back from her. His eyes were dead circles without any color you could name — the dull eyes of the man whose nerves quit functioning in the face of excitement. His bony hands pushed his coat aside a little and rested where his vest bulged over the sharp corners of his hip-bones.

“Let’s me and you get this right, Frenchy,” he said in his whining voice. “Are you with me or her?”

“You, most certainly, but—”

“All right. Then be with me! Don’t be trying to gum every play I make. I’m going to frisk this dolly, and don’t think I ain’t. What are you going to do about it?”

The Frenchman pursed his mouth until his little black mustache snuggled against the tip of his nose. He puckered his eyebrows and looked thoughtfully out of his one good eye. But he wasn’t going to do anything at all about it, and he knew he wasn’t. Finally he shrugged.

“You are right,” he surrendered. “She should be searched.”

The Kid grunted contemptuous disgust at him and went toward the woman again.

She sprang away from him, to me. Her arms clamped around my neck in the habit they seemed to have.

“Jerry!” she screamed in my face. “You will not allow him! Jerry, please not!”

I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t think it was exactly genteel of the Kid to frisk her, but there were several reasons why I didn’t try to stop him. First, I didn’t want to do anything to delay the unearthing of this “stuff” there had been so much talk about. Second, I’m no Galahad. This woman had picked her playmates, and was largely responsible for this angle of their game. If they played rough, she’d have to make the best of it. And, a good strong third, Big Chin was prodding me in the side with a gun-muzzle to remind me that I couldn’t do anything if I wanted to — except get myself slaughtered.

The Kid dragged Inés away. I let her go.

He pulled her over to what was left of the bench by the electric heater, and called the Frenchman there with a jerk of his head.

“You hold her while I go through her,” he said.

She filled her lungs with air. Before she could turn it loose in a shriek, the Kid’s long fingers had fit themselves to her throat.

“One chirp out of you and I’ll tie a knot in your neck,” he threatened.

She let the air wheeze out of her nose.

Billie shuffled his feet. I turned my head to look at him. He was puffing through his mouth. Sweat polished his forehead under his matted red hair. I hoped he wasn’t going to turn his wolf loose until the “stuff” came to the surface. If he would wait a while I might join him.

He wouldn’t wait. He went into action when — Maurois holding her — the Kid started to undress the woman.

He took a step toward them. Big Chin tried to wave him back with a gun. Billie didn’t even see it. His eyes were red on the three by the bench.

“Hey, you can’t do that!” he rumbled. “You can’t do that!”

“No?” The Kid looked up from his work. “Watch me.”

“Billie!” the woman urged the big man on in his foolishness.

Billie charged.

Big Chin let him go, playing safe by swinging both guns on me. The Whosis Kid slid out of the plunging giant’s path. Maurois hurled the girl straight at Billie — and got his gun out.

Billie and Inés thumped together in a swaying tangle.

The Kid spun behind the big man. One of the Kid’s hands came out of his pocket with the spring-knife. The knife clicked open as Billie regained his balance.

The Kid jumped close.

He knew knives. None of your clumsy downward strokes with the blade sticking out the bottom of his fist.

Thumb and crooked forefinger guided blade. He struck upward. Under Billie’s shoulder. Once. Deep.

Billie pitched forward, smashing the woman to the floor under him. He rolled off her and was dead on his back among the furniture-stuffing. Dead, he seemed larger than ever, seemed to fill the room.

The Whosis Kid wiped his knife clean on a piece of carpet, snapped it shut, and dropped it back in his pocket. He did this with his left hand. His right was close to his hip. He did not look at the knife. His eyes were on Maurois.

But if he expected the Frenchman to squawk, he was disappointed. Maurois’ little mustache twitched, and his face was white and strained, but:

“We’d better hurry with what we have to do, and get out of here,” he suggested.

The woman sat up beside the dead man, whimpering. Her face was ashy under her dark skin. She was licked. A shaking hand fumbled beneath her clothes. It brought out a little flat silk bag.

Maurois — nearer than the Kid — took it. It was sewed too securely for his fingers to open. He held it while the Kid ripped it with his knife. The Frenchman poured part of the contents out in one cupped hand.

Diamonds. Pearls. A few colored stones among them.

XI

Big Chin blew his breath out in a faint whistle. His eyes were bright on the sparkling stones. So were the eyes of Maurois, the woman, and the Kid.

Big Chin’s inattention was a temptation. I could reach his jaw. I could knock him over. The strength Billie had mauled out of me had nearly all come back by now. I could knock Big Chin over and have at least one of his guns by the time the Kid and Maurois got set. It was time for me to do something. I had let these comedians run the show long enough. The stuff had come to light. If I let the party break up there was no telling when, if ever, I could round up these folks again.

But I put the temptation away and made myself wait a bit longer. No use going off half-cocked. With a gun in my hand, facing the Kid and Maurois, I still would have less than an even break. That’s not enough. The idea in this detective business is to catch crooks, not to put on heroics.

Maurois was pouring the stones back in the bag when I looked at him again. He started to put the bag in his pocket. The Whosis Kid stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“I’ll pack ’em.”

Maurois’ eyebrows went up.

“There’s two of you and one of me,” the Kid explained. “I trust you, and all the like of that, but just the same I’m carrying my own share.”

“But—”

The doorbell interrupted Maurois’ protest.

The Kid spun to the girl.

“You do the talking — and no wise breaks!”

She got up from the floor and went to the passageway.

“Who is there?” she called.

The landlady’s voice, stern and wrathful:

“Another sound, Mrs. Almad, and I shall call the police. This is disgraceful!”

I wondered what she would have thought if she had opened the unlocked door and taken a look at her apartment — furniture whittled and gutted; a dead man — the noise of whose dying had brought her up here this second time — lying in the middle of the litter.

I wondered — I took a chance.

“Aw, go jump down the sewer!” I told her.

A gasp, and we heard no more from her. I hoped she was speeding her injured feelings to the telephone. I might need the police she had mentioned.

The Kid’s gun was out. For a while it was a toss-up. I would lie down beside Billie, or I wouldn’t. If I could have been knifed quietly, I would have gone. But nobody was behind me. The Kid knew I wouldn’t stand still and quiet while he carved me. He didn’t want any more racket than necessary, now that the jewels were on hand.

“Keep your clam shut or I’ll shut it for you!” was the worst I got out of it.

The Kid turned to the Frenchman again. The Frenchman had used the time spent in this side-play to pocket the gems.

“Either we divvy here and now, or I carry the stuff,” the Kid announced. “There’s two of you to see I don’t take a Micky Finn on you.”

“But, Kid, we cannot stay here! Is not the landlady even now calling the police? We will go elsewhere to divide. Why cannot you trust me when you are with me?”

Two steps put the Kid between the door and both Maurois and Big Chin. One of the Kid’s hands held the gun he had flashed on me. The other was conveniently placed to his other gun.

“Nothing stirring!” he said through his nose. “My cut of them stones don’t go out of here in nobody else’s kick. If you want to split ’em here, good enough. If you don’t, I’ll do the carrying. That’s flat!”

“But the police!”

“You worry about them. I’m taking one thing at a time, and it’s the stones right now.”

A vein came out blue in the Frenchman’s forehead. His small body was rigid. He was trying to collect enough courage to swap shots with the Kid. He knew, and the Kid knew, that one of them was going to have all the stuff when the curtain came down. They had started off by double-crossing each other. They weren’t likely to change their habits. One would have the stones in the end. The other would have nothing — except maybe a burial.

Big Chin didn’t count. He was too simple a thug to last long in his present company. If he had known anything, he would have used one of his guns on each of them right now. Instead, he continued to cover me, trying to watch them out of the tail of his eye.

The woman stood near the door, where she had gone to talk to the landlady. She was staring at the Frenchman and the Kid. I wasted precious minutes that seemed to run into hours trying to catch her eye. I finally got it.

I looked at the light-switch, only a foot from her. I looked at her. I looked at the switch again. At her. At the switch.

She got me. Her hand crept sidewise along the wall.

I looked at the two principal players in this button-button game.

The Kid’s eyes were dead — and deadly — circles. Maurois’ one open eye was watery. He couldn’t make the grade. He put a hand in his pocket and brought out the silk bag.

The woman’s brown finger topped the light-button. God knows she was nothing to gamble on, but I had no choice. I had to be in motion when the lights went. Big Chin would pump metal. I had to trust Inés not to balk. If she did, my name was Denis.

Her nail whitened.

I went for Maurois.

Darkness — streaked with orange and blue — filled with noise.

My arms had Maurois. We crashed down on dead Billie. I twisted around, kicking the Frenchman’s face. Loosened one arm. Caught one of his. His other hand gouged at my face. That told me the bag was in the one I held. Clawing fingers tore my mouth. I put my teeth in them and kept them there. One of my knees was on his face. I put my weight on it. My teeth still held his hand. Both of my hands were free to get the bag.

Not nice, this work, but effective.

The room was the inside of a black drum on which a giant was beating the long roll. Four guns worked together in a prolonged throbbing roar.

Maurois’ fingernails dug into my tongue. I had to open my mouth — let his hand escape. One of my hands found the bag. He wouldn’t let go. I screwed his thumb. He cried out. I had the bag.

I tried to leave him then. He grabbed my legs. I kicked at him — missed. He shuddered twice — and stopped moving. A flying bullet had hit him, I took it. Rolling over to the floor, snuggling close to him, I ran a hand over him. A hard bulge came under my hand. I put my hand in his pocket and took back my gun.

On hands and knees — one fist around my gun, the other clutching the silk sack of jewels — I turned to where the door to the next room should have been. A foot wrong, I corrected my course. As I went through the door, the racket in the room behind me stopped.

XII

Huddled close to the wall inside the door, I stowed the silk bag away, and regretted that I hadn’t stayed plastered to the floor behind the Frenchman. This room was dark. It hadn’t been dark when the woman switched off the sitting-room lights. Every room in the apartment had been lighted then. All were dark now. Not knowing who had darkened them, I didn’t like it.

No sounds came from the room I had quit.

The rustle of gently falling rain came from an open window that I couldn’t see, off to one side.

Another sound came from behind me. The muffled tattoo of teeth on teeth.

That cheered me. Inés the scary, of course. She had left the sitting-room in the dark and put out the rest of the lights. Maybe nobody else was behind me.

Breathing quietly through wide-open mouth, I waited. I couldn’t hunt for the woman in the dark without making noises. Maurois and the Kid had strewn furniture and parts of furniture everywhere. I wished I knew if she was holding a gun. I didn’t want to have her spraying me.

Not knowing, I waited where I was.

Her teeth clicked on for minutes.

Something moved in the sitting-room. A gun thundered.

“Inés!” I hissed toward the chattering teeth.

No answer. Furniture scraped in the sitting-room. Two guns went off together. A groaning broke out.

“I’ve got the stuff,” I whispered under cover of the groaning.

That brought an answer.

“Jerry! Ah, come here to me!”

The groans went on, but fainter, in the other room. I crawled toward the woman’s voice. I went on hands and knees, bumping as carefully as possible against things. I couldn’t see anything. Midway, I put a hand down on a soggy bundle of fur — the late purple Frana. I went on.

Inés touched my shoulder with an eager hand.

“Give them to me,” were her first words.

I grinned at her in the dark, patted her hand, found her head, and put my mouth to her ear.

“Let’s get back in the bedroom,” I breathed, paying no attention to her request for the loot. “The Kid will be coming.” I didn’t doubt that he had bested Big Chin. “We can handle him better in the bedroom.”

I wanted to receive him in a room with only one door.

She led me — both of us on hands and knees — to the bedroom. I did what thinking seemed necessary as we crawled. The Kid couldn’t know yet how the Frenchman and I had come out. If he guessed, he would guess that the Frenchman had survived. He would be likely to put me in the chump class with Billie, and think the Frenchman could handle me. The chances were that he had got Big Chin, and knew it by now. It was black as black in the sitting-room, but he must know by now that he was the only living thing there.

He blocked the only exit from the apartment. He would think, then, that Inés and Maurois were still alive in it, with the spoils. What would he do about it? There was no pretense of partnership now. That had gone with the lights. The Kid was after the stones. The Kid was after them alone.

I’m no wizard at guessing the other guy’s next move. But my idea was that the Kid would be on his way after us, soon. He knew — he must know — that the police were coming; but I had him doped as crazy enough to disregard the police until they appeared. He’d figure that there would be only a couple of them — prepared for nothing more violent than a drinking-party. He could handle them — or he would think he could. Meanwhile, he would come after the stones.

The woman and I reached the bedroom, the room farthest back in the apartment, a room with only one door. I heard her fumbling with the door, trying to close it. I couldn’t see, but I got my foot in the way.

“Leave it open,” I whispered.

I didn’t want to shut the Kid out. I wanted to take him in.

On my belly, I crawled back to the door, felt for my watch, and propped it on the sill, in the angle between door and frame. I wriggled back from it until I was six or eight feet away, looking diagonally across the open doorway at the watch’s luminous dial.

The phosphorescent numbers could not be seen from the other side of the door. They faced me. Anybody who came through the door — unless he jumped — must, if only for a split-second, put some part of himself between me and the watch.

On my belly, my gun cocked, its butt steady on the floor, I waited for the faint light to be blotted out.

I waited a time. Pessimism: perhaps he wasn’t coming; perhaps I would have to go after him; perhaps he would run out, and I would lose him after all my trouble.

Inés, beside me, breathed quaveringly in my ear, and shivered.

“Don’t touch me,” I growled at her as she tried to cuddle against me.

She was shaking my arm.

Glass broke in the next room.

Silence.

The luminous patches on the watch burnt my eyes. I couldn’t afford to blink. A foot could pass the dial while I was blinking. I couldn’t afford to blink, but I had to blink. I blinked. I couldn’t tell whether something had passed the watch or not. I had to blink again. Tried to hold my eyes stiffly opened. Failed. I almost shot at the third blink. I could have sworn something had gone between me and the watch.

The Kid, whatever he was up to, made no sound.

The dark woman began to sob beside me. Throat noises that could guide bullets.

I lumped her with my eyes and cursed the lot — not aloud, but from the heart.

My eyes smarted. Moisture filmed them. I blinked it away, losing sight of the watch for precious instants. The butt of my gun was slimy with my hand’s sweat. I was thoroughly uncomfortable, inside and out.

Gunpowder burned at my face.

A screaming maniac of a woman was crawling all over me.

My bullet hit nothing lower than the ceiling.

I flung, maybe kicked, the woman off, and snaked backward. She moaned somewhere to one side. I couldn’t see the Kid — couldn’t hear him. The watch was visible again, farther away. A rustling.

The watch vanished.

I fired at it.

Two points of light near the floor gave out fire and thunder.

My gun-barrel as close to the floor as I could hold it, I fired between those points. Twice.

Twin flames struck at me again.

My right hand went numb. My left took the gun. I sped two more bullets on their way. That left one in my gun.

I don’t know what I did with it. My head filled up with funny notions. There wasn’t any room. There wasn’t any darkness. There wasn’t anything...

I opened my eyes in dim light. I was on my back. Beside me the dark woman knelt, shivering and sniffling. Her hands were busy — in my clothes.

One of them came out of my vest with the jewel-bag.

Coming to life, I grabbed her arm. She squealed as if I were a stirring corpse. I got the bag again.

“Give them back, Jerry,” she wailed, trying frantically to pull my fingers loose. “They are my things. Give them!”

Sitting up, I looked around.

Beside me lay a shattered bedside lamp, whose fall — caused by carelessness with my feet, or one of the Kid’s bullets — had KO’d me. Across the room, face down, arms spread in a crucified posture, the Whosis Kid sprawled. He was dead.

From the front of the apartment — almost indistinguishable from the throbbing in my head — came the pounding of heavy blows. The police were kicking down the unlocked door.

The woman went quiet. I whipped my head around. The knife stung my cheek — put a slit in the lapel of my coat. I took it away from her.

There was no sense to this. The police were already here. I humored her, pretending a sudden coming to full consciousness.

“Oh, it’s you!” I said. “Here they are.”

I handed her the silk bag of jewels just as the first policeman came into the room.

XIII

I didn’t see Inés again before she was taken back East to be hit with a life-sentence in the Massachusetts big house. Neither of the policemen who crashed into her apartment that night knew me. The woman and I were separated before I ran into anyone who did know me, which gave me an opportunity to arrange that she would not be tipped off to my identity. The most difficult part of the performance was to keep myself out of the newspapers, since I had to tell the coroner’s jury about the deaths of Billie, Big Chin, Maurois and the Whosis Kid. But I managed it. So far as I know, the dark woman still thinks I am Jerry Young, the bootlegger.

The Old Man talked to her before she left San Francisco. Fitting together what he got from her and what the Boston branch got, the history runs like this:

A Boston jeweler named Tunnicliffe had a trusted employee named Binder. Binder fell in with a dark woman named Inés Almad. The dark woman, in turn, had a couple of shifty friends — a Frenchman named Maurois, and a native of Boston whose name was either Carey or Cory, but who was better known as the Whosis Kid. Out of that sort of combination almost anything was more than likely to come.

What came was a scheme. The faithful Binder — part of whose duties it was to open the shop in the morning and close it at night — was to pick out the richest of the unset stones bought for the holiday trade, carry them off with him one evening, and turn them over to Inés. She was to turn them into money.

To cover up Binder’s theft, the Whosis Kid and the Frenchman were to rob the jeweler’s shop immediately after the door was opened the following morning. Binder and the porter — who would not notice the absence of the most valuable pieces from the stock — would be the only ones in the shop. The robbers would take whatever they could get. In addition to their pickings, they were to be paid two hundred and fifty dollars apiece, and in case either was caught later, Binder could be counted on not to identify them.

That was the scheme as Binder knew it. There were angles he didn’t suspect.

Between Inés, Maurois and the Kid there was another agreement. She was to leave for Chicago with the stones as soon as Binder gave them to her, and wait there for Maurois and the Kid. She and the Frenchman would have been satisfied to run off and let Binder hold the sack. The Whosis Kid insisted that the hold-up go through as planned, and that the foolish Binder be killed. Binder knew too much about them, the Kid said, and he would squawk his head off as soon as he learned he had been double-crossed.

The Kid had his way, and he had shot Binder.

Then had come the sweet mess of quadruple and sextuple crossing that had led all three into calamity: the woman’s private agreements with the Kid and Maurois — to meet one in St. Louis and the other in New Orleans — and her flight alone with the loot to San Francisco.

Billie was an innocent bystander — or almost. A lumber-handler Inés had run into somewhere, and picked up as a sort of cushion against the rough spots along the rocky road she traveled.