Presently she asked very softly:
“And now you despise me?”
“No.” I reached for her. “But I hate mobs, lynchings — they sicken me. No matter how wrong the man is, if a mob’s against him, I’m for him. The only thing I ever pray to God for is a chance some day to squat down behind a machine gun with a lynching party in front of me. I had no use for Einarson, but I wouldn’t have given him that! Well, what’s done is done. What was the document?”
“A letter from Mahmoud. He had left it with a friend to be given to Vasilije if anything ever happened to him. He knew Einarson, it seems, and prepared his revenge. The letter confessed his — Mahmoud’s — part in the assassination of General Radnjak, and said that Einarson was also implicated. The army worshiped Radnjak, and Einarson wanted the army.”
“Your Vasilije could have used that to chase Einarson out — without feeding him to those wolves,” I complained.
She shook her head and said:
“Vasilije was right. Bad as it was, that was the way to do it. It’s over and settled forever, with Vasilije in power. An Einarson alive, an army not knowing he had killed their idol — too risky. Up to the end Einarson thought he had power enough to hold his troops, no matter what they knew. He—”
“All right — it’s done. And I’m glad to be through with this king business. Kiss me.”
She did, and whispered:
“When Vasilije dies — and he can’t live long, the way he eats — I’m coming to San Francisco.”
“You’re a cold-blooded hussy,” I said.
Lionel Grantham, ex-king of Muravia, was only five minutes behind us in reaching our train. He wasn’t alone. Valeska Radnjak, looking as much like the queen of something as if she had been, was with him. She didn’t seem to be all broken up over the loss of her throne.
The boy was pleasant and polite enough to me during our rattling trip to Saloniki, but obviously not very comfortable in my company. His bride-to-be didn’t know anybody but the boy existed, unless she happened to find some one else directly in front of her. So I didn’t wait for their wedding, but left Saloniki on a boat that pulled out a couple of hours after we arrived.
I left the draft with them, of course. They decided to take out Lionel’s three millions and return the fourth to Muravia. And I went back to San Francisco to quarrel with my boss over what he thought were unnecessary five- and ten-dollar items in my expense account.
Fly Paper
Originally appeared in The Black Mask, August 1929
I
It was a wandering daughter job.
The Hambletons had been for several generations a wealthy and decently prominent New York family. There was nothing in the Hambleton history to account for Sue, the youngest member of the clan. She grew out of childhood with a kink that made her dislike the polished side of life, like the rough. By the time she was twenty-one, in 1926, she definitely preferred Tenth Avenue to Fifth, grifters to bankers, and Hymie the Riveter to the Honorable Cecil Windown, who had asked her to marry him.
The Hambletons tried to make Sue behave, but it was too late for that. She was legally of age. When she finally told them to go to hell and walked out on them there wasn’t much they could do about it. Her father, Major Waldo Hambleton, had given up all the hopes he ever had of salvaging her, but he didn’t want her to run into any grief that could be avoided. So he came into the Continental Detective Agency’s New York office and asked to have an eye kept on her.
Hymie the Riveter was a Philadelphia racketeer who had moved north to the big city, carrying a Thompson submachine-gun wrapped in blue-checkered oil cloth, after a disagreement with his partners. New York wasn’t so good a field as Philadelphia for machine-gun work. The Thompson lay idle for a year or so while Hymie made expenses with an automatic, preying on small-time crap games in Harlem.
Three or four months after Sue went to live with Hymie he made what looked like a promising connection with the first of the crew that came into New York from Chicago to organize the city on the western scale. But the boys from Chi didn’t want Hymie; they wanted the Thompson. When he showed it to them, as the big item in his application for employment, they shot holes in the top of Hymie’s head and went away with the gun.
Sue Hambleton buried Hymie, had a couple of lonely weeks in which she hocked a ring to eat, and then got a job as hostess in a speakeasy run by a Greek named Vassos.
One of Vassos’ customers was Babe McCloor, two hundred and fifty pounds of hard Scotch-Irish-Indian bone and muscle, a black-haired, blue-eyed, swarthy giant who was resting up after doing a fifteen-year hitch in Leavenworth for ruining most of the smaller post offices between New Orleans and Omaha. Babe was keeping himself in drinking money while he rested by playing with pedestrians in dark streets.
Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn’t like that. Jealousy spoiled the Greek’s judgment. He kept the speakeasy door locked one night when Babe wanted to come in. Babe came in, bringing pieces of the door with him. Vassos got his gun out, but couldn’t shake Sue off his arm. He stopped trying when Babe hit him with the part of the door that had the brass knob on it. Babe and Sue went away from Vassos’ together.
Up to that time the New York office had managed to keep in touch with Sue. She hadn’t been kept under constant surveillance. Her father hadn’t wanted that. It was simply a matter of sending a man around every week or so to see that she was still alive, to pick up whatever information he could from her friends and neighbors, without, of course, letting her know she was being tabbed. All that had been easy enough, but when she and Babe went away after wrecking the gin mill, they dropped completely out of sight.
After turning the city upside-down, the New York office sent a journal on the job to the other Continental branches throughout the country, giving the information above and enclosing photographs and descriptions of Sue and her new playmate. That was late in 1927.
We had enough copies of the photographs to go around, and for the next month or so whoever had a little idle time on his hands spent it looking through San Francisco and Oakland for the missing pair. We didn’t find them. Operatives in other cities, doing the same thing, had the same luck.
Then, nearly a year later, a telegram came to us from the New York office. Decoded, it read:
Major Hambleton today received telegram from daughter in San Francisco quote Please wire me thousand dollars care apartment two hundred six number six hundred one Eddis Street stop I will come home if you will let me stop Please tell me if I can come but please please wire money anyway unquote Hambleton authorizes payment of money to her immediately stop Detail competent operative to call on her with money and to arrange for her return home stop If possible have man and woman operative accompany her here stop Hambleton wiring her stop Report immediately by wire.
II
The Old Man gave me the telegram and a check, saying:
“You know the situation. You’ll know how to handle it.”
I pretended I agreed with him, went down to the bank, swapped the check for a bundle of bills of several sizes, caught a street car, and went up to 601 Eddis Street, a fairly large apartment building on the corner of Larkin.