“Monk tell you what was in that bag?” he asked.
I noticed that he kept his drink in his left hand. His right hand went into the right pocket of the jacket and closed around something and stayed there. So it was a gun.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s hot jewelry, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “We thought you took off with it in all the excitement today. It was mighty nice of you to go back to your hotel and wait for Monk. Most guys would just disappear if they had a chance like that.”
I was on mighty dangerous ground and I knew it. This was something I had to explain satisfactorily to Leon Schell or forget about getting any direct evidence on him, and maybe forget about living. But I had thought a lot about it and was ready for him.
“Maybe,” I said. “Only hot jewelry isn’t my line. It’s too hard to handle and too hard to get rid of unless you have the right contacts. And I didn’t want you guys gunning for me.”
Schell was far from a dummy, I couldn’t tell from his eyes if he bought it or not, but I thought I could sense a slight relaxation in his body.
“Speaking of guns,” he said, “what do you think of this?”
He took his right hand out of the pocket and I saw his fist closed around one of those small calibre European models. He didn’t aim it at me exactly, it was just pointed in my general direction. I didn’t say anything.
“Marvelous piece of workmanship,” he said. “I don’t like your clumsy American arms at all. I can almost hide this in the palm of my hand but it’s deadly under fifty feet. You know I practise a great deal with it in my spare time — I lay empty beer or soda bottles on their sides and try to shoot through the necks of the bottles and knock the bottoms off from forty or fifty feet. I can do that seven out of ten times.”
“So you’re a good shot,” I said. I was trying to figure out what he was up to.
“Do you have a weapon on you now?” he asked.
Now I knew. He was a pro, all right. I didn’t want him frisking me — if he ran his hands over my legs he couldn’t miss the recorder parts taped to my thighs.
“Yeah. I got a little nervous today so I borrowed this one from a friend of mine.” I pushed my jacket aside and showed him the butt of Harry Sloan’s .38 stuck in my belt.
“May I see it?” he said.
“Sure.”
I pulled it out, being careful to keep it pointed to the floor, and handed it to him. His gun was two feet away from my nose, and it was aimed directly at it. He put his drink down on the bar.
“This is typically American,” he said as he took it. “It’s just like your cars and your houses and everything else — much too big. It’s clumsy and inefficient and not nearly as accurate as my gun. Don’t you agree?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. I was beginning to think Schell was a bit of a weirdie — this was really going the long way round to lift a gun off a guy. He backed away from me, then half turned around and walked to the far side of the room, where the little hallway was, and laid my gun on top of an end table. He put his own gun back in his jacket pocket but kept his hand on it. Then he motioned to me to sit in a chair near the bar, picked up his drink, and sat in another chair across from me.
“May as well relax and enjoy your drink,” he said. “If you don’t mind I’ll leave your gun over there. I don’t like people I don’t know too well to be armed around me, it makes me uncomfortable. Now tell me what happened today — everything.”
This wasn’t going the way I wanted it to, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t care about the gun, but I wanted his voice on the tape, not mine, and I didn’t want his opinions about the size of American guns, automobiles, or houses.
I told him almost the same thing I told Monk, only I didn’t say anything about leaving the attache case in a public locker — instead I told him I went into a movie house until it got dark so it would be safer to go back to my hotel to wait for Monk. And I told him the time Monk arrived there was a half hour earlier than the time he had really come.
I had a simple plan to trap Schell, something that was based on a very simple fact. The one single thing all thieves have in common is their fear of being double crossed. No matter how long a thief has known or worked with another thief, he always has that fear in the back of his mind, and sometimes it’s not so far back. My job now was to plant a big fat seed of mistrust in Schell’s mind about Monk Saunders and Larry Coster and force it to grow fast until it became a certainty. I wasn’t too worried about him suspecting me; the biggest thing in my favor there was that Monk saw me in a prison cell next to his three years ago — Schell would know about that. And now here I was in front of him, playing it dumb, but I had carried the attache case in to him.
I slanted my story carefully, working slowly towards the big pitch. Schell just sat there listening attentively, watching me through half-closed eyes. It began to look to me that it would have to be the big pitch, or nothing, because he didn’t interrupt me once.
“...so he said I should wait right there in my hotel room for him. Then he went out, he took the bag with him, and came back about forty minutes later. He told me to come on, we had to...”
Leon Schell’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I was wondering why you took so long to get up here,” he said. “Monk got to your hotel room almost two hours ago. You mean he left you there, took that bag out, and then came back?”
“Yeah, that’s right. He said something about the locks being pretty good, but not good enough. Then when he came back he said we had to meet Larry...”
“Shut up,” Schell barked.
There was a thin white line around his nostrils, his forehead was furrowed with lines. I could almost see him thinking of Monk working over those locks. If Monk could open burglar-proof vaults, those locks on the attache case wouldn’t be too tough for him, no matter how good they were.
“Monk wasn’t supposed to open that bag,” Schell said. He was thinking out loud now. “It was going out of the country. If he and that other crumb pulled anything on me...”
He was on his feet, the gun in his pocket forgotten as his right hand searched in the trouser pocket and came out with a long, slender key. He walked over and picked up the attache case and laid it on the radio, then slid the key into the first lock — it snapped open in a moment. Then he unlocked the other one and lifted open the top. He stood there for long seconds, his face draining of color the white line around his nose and mouth deepening. He picked up a handful of the stones, held them under the light, and for more long seconds studied them closely.
Leon Schell knew diamonds, he didn’t need a loupe. And he knew glass stones, even good glass stones. He let out something that sounded like a groan and flung the whole handful against the far wall.
He stood still for almost a minute, not saying anything, his face working spasmodically. Then he started swearing in a low, deadly voice. He called Monk Saunders and Larry Coster every vile name I ever heard, and some I never heard before. His hands shook in his rage.
“...those slobs couldn’t get in that building even when they were open for business. I never should have cut them in. It was all my work, my work and planning, two whole years it took, and then I get this from pigs like them...”