“The first thing which gave him a clue was that all of a sudden his wife began to come constantly to his office. Several times when he’d been out on a job he would return to find her sitting there talking with Watkins, who as head of the bureau had a room of his own beyond the main office where Anderson and two junior reporters worked. Anderson watched and waited until his suspicions became certainty. Watkins was the man, without a doubt. He was a tall and good-looking fellow, a bold lover and a bold gambler — always playing the market and for more than he could afford.
“Then one morning he came into his wife’s room — they had separate rooms by this time — when she was having breakfast in bed, and she hastily pushed a letter behind the pillow. She was not so quick that he failed to see that it was written on stationery from his office. He looked at her and a slow wave of red flowed up from her breast to her forehead, but she didn’t say anything. Then, at last, he knew.”
The thin man finished his whisky and ordered another, and pointed a finger at Colonel Hepplethwaite. “I suppose a man like you,” he said, “would have done nothing about it. The English always try to ignore unpleasant facts. And you, Doctor, might have gone frankly to your wife and offered her a divorce so that she could marry her lover. And a Frenchman, no doubt, would have shrugged his shoulders and taken a mistress for himself. But Anderson was different. You see, he loved his wife more than anything in the world. He loved her and he didn’t want to lose her. He thought a good deal about what he ought to do, and one day he noticed that Watkins had a paper knife on his desk, one of those sharp dagger knives which Japanese samurai use to commit harakiri, with a long thin blade that slides in and slits their bowels, slips in smooth and easy as if it was hot and their flesh was butter. He saw what a dangerous weapon it was and it gave him an idea.
“In the offices of foreign news correspondents, you understand, they always work on Sundays because it’s generally known that a story gets a better play on Monday in America, where Sunday is a quieter day than it is in Europe. I mean that all the sporting news and so on has been published in the Sunday paper, and so there’s more space for news from Europe in the Monday edition. Anyway, foreign correspondents think so and always work Sunday afternoons, but without their secretaries, doormen, and so forth.
“So one Sunday about six o’clock, when Anderson came into the bureau with three or four friends who had been to the races with him, he knew that he would find Watkins at work in his private room. He said to his friends, ‘You sit here in the reading-room’ — it was near the entrance — ‘while I go along and look at the evening papers and try to earn my salary. I won’t be long, because I expect my boss is there and he’s a terribly decent fellow; he’ll probably handle anything that has to be sent, if I tell him that I want to go out to dinner with you. I won’t be more than half an hour at the outside and there are some magazines here and all the latest papers from New York. You don’t mind waiting, do you?’ They said no, they didn’t mind.
“Then he went into the main room of the office, which was empty because one of the juniors was off on a trip to the South of France where they had had some floods, and the other was to cover the night shift from eleven onwards in the building of one of the Paris newspapers. Anderson sat down and read the papers for a few minutes, then typed out some notes on his machine, and Watkins came in from the inner room. He said, ‘Is there anything worth sending?’
“Anderson showed him his notes and they talked a little, and Anderson said he’d like to go out to dinner with his friends because there didn’t seem to be much to do. His chief replied, ‘That’s all right, Joe, I’ll take care of this stuff. Just give me those notes of yours and that clipping from the Temps, and let’s have a glass of beer before you run along.’
“Anderson knew he’d say that; he always said it. They kept the beer in an icebox in the corner. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll bring it along with a couple of glasses.’ Watkins took the notes and the clipping and went back to his room. Anderson opened the bottle and poured out the beer, but in the glass for Watkins, his friend, whom he now knew to be his wife’s lover, he put some knockout drops, methyl nitrate, or whatever you call it, not many of them, not enough to taint the breath or enlarge the pupils of the eyes; just enough to send a man quickly to sleep for an hour or less. They drank the beer and went on talking.
“After a very few minutes Watkins slumped in his chair and went to sleep. Anderson sat down at his chief’s typewriter and began a letter to Watkins’ brother, who worked in an insurance office in Los Angeles. He wrote, ‘Bill, old man, I’m in a hell of a mess; I’m on the wrong side of the market and far too deep. My accounts are all muddled and...’
“Anderson left it at that. Then he took the paper knife by the blade and unbuttoned the other man’s vest and unhitched his suspenders and pulled up his shirt, doing it all quietly and gently so as not to wake him. Doing it quickly and neatly, humming a tune to himself, the Plume au Vent tune from Rigoletto about Love and Life being feathers on the breeze, humming the tune to himself as if he felt carefree and happy. He set the hands of the sleeping man upon the hilt of the dagger and fixed the point high up between his ribs and drove it in swiftly and smoothly, like a hot knife through butter, direct and deep in his heart.
“Watkins made no sound but his body arched back in a sudden convulsion, then fell forward on the desk.
“Anderson went to the little washroom next to the private office and washed his chief’s glass, holding it carefully by the bottom with a towel so as not to blur the finger marks. Then he washed his hands, although there wasn’t much blood on them; there isn’t much outward blood when a thin blade pierces the heart; the victim bleeds to death internally. Next he poured some more beer into the glass, still holding it by the towel at the bottom, and whispered gently, ‘I drink to your health in hell and to my wife’s blue eyes,’ and put the glass back on the desk.
“Then he went out through the reporters’ office to the reading-room, saying as he went, ‘Thanks awfully, old man, and good night,’ and added to his friends out there, ‘That’s the kind of boss to have. There was a story tonight but he knew you folks were waiting, so he said, “Go ahead, Joe; I’ll write it, they’re waiting; go ahead and have a good time.” ’
“After that, you understand, the rest was easy. You know what it’s like, Monsieur Dubois, in Paris on a Sunday; no one comes into the office and the outer door is shut, and the concierge just pulls the latch for those who go in or out. As I said, the night work is done in the building of whatever French paper you are linked with, so no one found the body until the next morning.
“Then there was a fuss and one of the stenographers fainted. When the police came, they rang up Anderson and he said, ‘Why, it’s impossible! When I left him last night he was quite all right and as cheerful as could be; indeed my friends and I remarked how kind he was to stay alone in the office and do some work that I should have done. What’s that you say, a letter? I didn’t know he was writing a letter. He said he was going to write a dispatch for me, the one I had given him some notes about and a clipping from the Temps. What... he said he’s lost money on the Stock Market... Oh, well, I knew he was playing the market, but I didn’t know that he’d lost money.’