Kapaloff stood watching them with the smile of one who sees his difficulties dissipated. Finally their hands fell apart and they sought chairs. There was an awkward pause. Phil knew that though they sat there until nightfall he could not bring up the question of the girl’s sanity, demand the corroboration of her uncle’s story, which was the excuse for the meeting. Kapaloff said nothing, sat smiling benignly upon girl and boy. The girl glanced at her uncle, as if expecting him to open the conversation, but when he ignored her silent appeal she turned impulsively to Phil, putting out her hand.
“Uncle Boris told you about my — about the trouble?”
Phil nodded, started to reach for the extended hand, thought better of it, and twined his fingers together between his knees.
“Then you know how fortunate it was that your gallantry wasn’t successful. I can’t understand why you didn’t laugh at Uncle Boris’ story — it must have sounded fantastic to you. But— Oh, it is horrible! I can never trust myself again, no matter what the doctors say!”
Phil found that he was holding her hand, after all. He looked at Kapaloff, who was smiling sympathetically. Phil and the girl stood up, and for an instant her eyes held a baffling undertone of pleading. Then it was gone, and she was turning to her uncle. Phil had but one idea in his mind now: to hand over the bag, get rid of these people, and be alone with his shame and disgust. He moved toward the door. “I’ll get the bag,” he said in a tired, weak voice.
A silver purse that dangled from the girl’s wrist clattered to the floor. As Phil turned his head at the sound, Kapaloff bent to pick up the purse, and Romaine Kapaloff’s eyes met Phil’s. For an infinitesimal part of a second her eyes burned into his as they had Tuesday morning, and stark terror wiped out the smooth young beauty of her face. Then her uncle was holding out the purse, her face was composed again, and Phil was walking toward his bedroom door with blood pounding in his temples. He sat on the top of his trunk, gnawed a thumb-nail, and thought desperately. Then he took the bag from the trunk and thrust it under his coat and returned to his guests.
“It is gone.”
Kapaloff’s urbanity seemed about to desert him. His face darkened and he took a swift step forward. Then he was master of himself again, and was asking pleasantly, “Are you positive?”
“You may look it you like.”
Phil went to the telephone and a few seconds later was talking to the desk sergeant at the district police station.
“A burglar got in here last night. One of your men was in afterward, and I told him I hadn’t missed anything. Now I find that a lady’s handbag is gone. All right.”
He turned from the telephone to the Kapaloffs.
“I woke up some time this morning and found two burglars in the room. They escaped, and I thought everything was safe. I forgot about the bag, and didn’t look to see if it was still here. I am sorry.”
Neither of the Kapaloffs gave any indication of previous knowledge of the burglary. Boris Kapaloff said evenly, “Very unfortunate, but the bag and its contents were not so valuable that we should worry unduly over the loss.”
“I am going to the police station this afternoon to give a description of the bag. Shall I tell them that it is your property and have them turn it over to you?”
“If you will be so kind. Our address is, La Jolla Avenue, Burlingame.”
Conversation lagged. Several times Kapaloff seemed about to speak, but each time he restrained himself. The girl’s eyes, when Phil met them, held a question which he made no attempt to answer. The Kapaloffs departed. Phil shook hands with both of them, answering the girl’s unspoken question with a quick pressure.
When they were gone, he withdrew the bag from under his vest, counted three hundred and fifty-five dollars from the bills in his pocket, and put the money in the bag. Then he drew a deep breath. That was the end of three years of searching for an “easy living.” Since his discharge from the army he had been drifting, finding himself at odds with the world, gambling, doing chores for political factors — never doing anything very vicious, perhaps, but steadily becoming more and more enmeshed in the underworld. As he looked back now, with the memory of his shame and self-disgust of a few minutes ago still fresh, he thought that he would not feel quite so worthless if there had been some outstanding crime in his past, instead of a legion of petty deeds. Well, that was past! After this tangle came to an end he would get a job and go back to the ways he had known before the war interrupted his aspirations.
He wrapped the bag in heavy paper, tied it, and sealed it securely. Then he took it downtown and turned it over to the friendly proprietor of a poolroom to be put in the safe.
For two days Phil kept to his rooms — days in which he sprang to the telephone at the first tingling of the bell. He tried to reach Romaine Kapaloff by telephone, got her house, and was told by a harsh voice in broken English that she was not at home. Three times he tried it, but the results were the same. Then he tried to talk to her uncle, and got the same answer. On the second night he slept hardly at all. He would doze and then spring into wakefulness, imagining that the bell had sounded, race to the telephone, to be asked, “What number are you calling?”
Then he decided to wait no longer. When a man’s luck is running good he should force the issue — not wait in idleness until his fortunes turn.
Chapter VI
“Flashing, Dripping Jaws”
In Burlingame Phil easily found the Kapaloffs’ house. At the first garage where he inquired, the name was unknown, but they knew where “the Russians” lived. Even in the dark he had no difficulty in recognizing the house from the garage-man’s description. He drove past it, left his borrowed car in the darkest shadow he could find, and returned afoot. The building loomed immense in the night, a great gray structure set in a park, ringed about by a tall iron fence overgrown with hedging. The nearest house was at least half a mile away.
No light came from the house, and Phil found the front gate locked. He crossed the road and squatted under a tree some two hundred feet away. His plan involved nothing further than waiting in the vicinity until he saw Romaine, found some means of communicating with her, or found an avenue through which his luck could carry him toward a solution of whatever mystery existed in the house across the road. The chances were that Romaine was a prisoner; otherwise she would have got word to him before this. His watch registered 10:15.
He waited.
When his watch said 1:30 his youth and his faith in his luck overcame his patience. A man might as well be home in bed as sitting out here waiting for something to turn up. When a man’s luck is running good... He skirted the hedge-grown fence until he found a tree with a branch that grew over the barrier. He climbed the tree, crawled out on the overhanging limb, swung for a minute, and dropped. He landed on hands and knees in soft, moist loam. Carefully he moved forward, keeping a cluster of bushes between himself and the house. When he reached the bushes he halted. Nothing that might serve to conceal him was between the bushes and the building, and he was afraid to trust himself out in the pale starlight. He sat on his heels and waited.
Three-quarters of an hour passed, and then he heard the sound of metal scraping against wood. He could see nothing. The sound came again and he identified it: someone was opening a shutter, cautiously, stopping at each sound the bolt made. A babel of dogs’ voices broke out at the rear of the house, and around the corner swept a pack of great hounds, to throw themselves frenziedly against one of the lower windows. Phil heard the shutter slam sharply. In the wake of the dogs a man stumbled. The shutter opened and Kapaloff leaned out to speak to the man in the yard. Above the men’s words Phil heard Romaine Kapaloff’s voice, raised in anger. In the rectangle of light shining from the window six wolfhounds were twisting and leaping — not the sedate, finely bred borzois of my lady’s promenade; but great, shaggy wolf-killers of the steppes, over half a man’s height from ground to shoulder, and more than a hundred pounds each of fighting machinery. Phil held his breath, shrunk behind his screen, and prayed that what he had heard somewhere of these wolfhounds hunting by sight and not by scent be true, that his presence escape their noses. Kapaloff withdrew his head and closed the shutter. The man in the yard shouted at the dogs. They followed him to the rear of the house. A door closed, shutting off the dogs’ voices. Phil was damp with perspiration, but he knew that the dogs were kept indoors.