Chapter X
“My Hands Will Be Steady”
Three steps they took into the darkness, and then the lights clicked on and Phil found himself helpless, his arms pinned in Mikhail’s powerful embrace. Kapaloff plucked the revolver from Phil’s hand and smiled into his face.
“The variable Mikhail — whom you see allied with me again — has a tough head, and I feared that my blow would not quiet him for long. You can imagine in what an unenviable position I found myself out in the halclass="underline" with you ahead and my erratic compatriot behind. When I could stand it no longer I came back and resuscitated him, enlisting him on my side again.”
Mikhail released Phil and stepped back. Kapaloff went on, with a gay mockery of plaintiveness:
“You will readily understand, Mr. Truax, that I cannot go on this way. A few more days of this and I shall be a wreck. I am a simple soul and cannot bear this distraction. You have seen Romaine. Do you accept my terms?”
Phil shook off the feeling of disgust with himself for having been so easily recaptured; and decided to play the same game he had played before: bluff until the actual pain came. He smiled and shook his head. “I’m afraid we’ll never agree.”
Kapaloff sighed. “I shall attend to the rites myself this time; so do not expect an outburst of tenderness to halt them. Though my heart bleeds for you my hands will be steads.”
Then the girl spoke. Her voice was tense, vibrant. Both men turned toward her. She was speaking to Mikhail, in Russian. Her voice gradually sank lower and lower until it was but a murmur, and took on an urgent, pleading tone. Mikhail’s lips were pressing together with increasing tension, and his carriage became rigid. His eves fixed on a spot on the opposite wall. Phil shot a puzzled look at Kapaloff and saw that he was watching his niece and servant with dancing eves. The girl’s voice crooned on, and the moisture came out on Mikhail’s face. His mouth was a thin, straight line, now, and the skin over the knuckles of his clenched hands seemed about to split from the strain. Still Romaine talked and, as she mentioned Serge’s name, suddenly it came to Phil what was happening. She was making an open appeal to Mikhail, reminding him of his brother’s death, goading him into desperation! The man’s eves were distended and the scar across his nose was a vivid gash — it might have been made yesterday. The muscles of his forehead, jaws, and neck stood out like welts; his breath hissed through quivering nostrils. Still the girl’s voice went on. Phil looked at Kapaloff again. A sardonic smile of amused expectancy was on his face. He spoke softly, mockingly, a few words, but neither the girl nor Mikhail heeded him. Her voice droned on: a monotonous chant now. Mikhail’s great fists opened and drops of blood ran down his fingers from where his nails had bitten into the palms. Slowly he turned and met his master’s eyes. For a second the eyes held, but Mikhail’s heritage of servility was too strong within him. His eyes dropped and he shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
The girl gave him no rest. The syllables came from her lips in a torrent, and her voice went abruptly high and sharp. Despite his unfamiliarity with the language, Phil felt his pulse drumming under the beat of her tone. Mikhail’s shoulders swayed slowly and a white froth appeared in the corners of his mouth. Then his face lost every human quality. A metallic snarl rasped from deep in his chest. Without turning, without looking, he sprang upon the man who had killed his brother. There was no interval the eye could discern. He was standing, swaying, looking at the floor with bulging, bloodshot eyes. Then he was upon Kapaloff and they were rolling on the floor. There was no appreciable passage!
Kapaloff discharged his pistol once, hut Phil could not see where the bullet hit. Over and over they rolled — Mikhail a brute gone mad, blindly fumbling for a grip on his enemy’s throat; Kapaloff fighting with every trick in his cool head, and as little disturbed as if it were a game. His eyes met Phil’s over Mikhail’s shoulder, and he made a grimace of distaste. Then Kapaloff twisted free, whirled to his feet, dashed a foot into the face of his rising assailant, and vanished into the dark of the hall. The kick carried Mikhail over backward, but he was up immediately, bellowing and plunging after Kapaloff.
Phil picked up the weapon Kapaloff had dropped — the revolver he had taken from Phil — and turned to the girl. Her hands were over her face and she was trembling violently. He shook her.
“Where’s the phone?”
She tried twice, and finally spoke: “In the next room.”
He patted her cheek. “You phone the police and wait for me here.”
She clung to him protestingly for a moment, then pulled herself together, smiled with a great show of courage, and went into the next room.
Phil moved to the hall door and listened. A scuffling sound and Kapaloff’s mocking chuckle came from somewhere on the stairs. A shot thundered. Mikhail bellowed. Phil felt his way to the foot of the stairs and started up. From above came the noise of a struggle, and Mikhail’s rasping breath. Two shots. A body fell, sliding down the steps. Phil had gained the second floor and was climbing toward the third. The sliding body came toward him. He recognized it as Mikhail by the gibbering snarls it emitted. Kapaloff’s laugh came from the head of the stairs. As he braced his legs to halt Mikhail’s descent, Phil raised his revolver and fired into the darkness above. Streaks of orange flame darted down at him; a bullet burned his cheek; others hit around him. Then the man at his feet was dragging him down with grim fingers that felt for his throat. He screamed into Mikhail’s ear, trying to bring comprehension to the man that his enemy was above, that he was attacking an ally. But the crushing fingers felt their way higher and higher up Phil’s chest, closed about his throat. He felt his breath going. With a desperate summoning of his failing strength he drove his pistol into the face he could not see in the dark, and wrenched himself away. The fingers slipped, clutched at him, missed, and Phil was stumbling up the steps ahead of something that had been a man, but was now a rabid thing clambering through the night, with death in its heart and no understanding of the difference between friend and enemy.
Phil reached the top of the stairs and, not knowing it in the dark, reached for the next step, stumbled, and fell forward in the hall. As he fell Kapaloff’s pistol spat, bringing down a shower of plaster. At the head of the stairs Mikhail was snarling. Phil rolled, jerking himself to one side, and pressed against the wainscoting, just in time to let the madman charge past. Two more shots rang out, but Mikhail’s broad body held all but a feeble reflection of the flashes from Phil. Then a bestial voice rose in a bellow of insane triumph, a scuffle, a groan so faint that it might have been a sigh, heavy bodies falling... silence.
Phil got to his feet and advanced warily up the hall. His legs touched a body. Something liquid, warm and sticky, was under his bare feet. He stumbled on and opened the first door he reached. He found the light button and pressed it. Then he turned and looked down the hall in the light that came through the open doorway...
He closed his eyes and groped his way to the stairs, down to the room where he had left the girl.
Chapter XI
The Death Letter
The girl ran to him. “Your face! You are hurt!”
“Just a scratch. I had forgotten it.”
She drew his head down and dabbed at this torn cheek with a handkerchief.
“The others?” she asked.
“Dead! Did you get the police?”
She said, “Yes,” and then could no longer withstand the weakness that tugged at her. She drooped into his arms, sobbing. He carried her to a couch and knelt beside her, stroking her hands and soothing her.
When she had mastered her weakness sufficiently to sit up, he asked her, more to take her mind from the gruesome termination of the affair than because his curiosity was so pressing, “Now, what’s this all about?”