“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.
“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 about 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.
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 bargain, 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.