“Yeah. I lost your chauffeur somewhere back on the road.”
“Lord bless you,” she said amiably, “that’s all right.”
A thin man with thin dark hair plastered down above a thin, worried face came past her to take my bags when I had lifted them out of the car. He carried them indoors.
The woman stood aside for me to enter, saying:
“Now I suppose you’ll want to wash up a little bit before you go in to dinner, and they won’t mind waiting for you the few minutes you’ll take if you hurry.”
I said, “Yeah, thanks,” waited for her to get ahead of me again, and followed her up a curving flight of stairs that climbed along the inside of one of the cones that made up the building.
She took me to a second-story bedroom where the thin man was unpacking my bags.
“Martin will get you anything you need,” she assured me from the doorway, “and when you’re ready, just come on downstairs.”
I said I would, and she went away. The thin man had finished unpacking by the time I had got out of coat, vest, collar and shirt. I told him there wasn’t anything else I needed, washed up in the adjoining bathroom, put on a fresh shirt and collar, my vest and coat, and went downstairs.
The wide hall was empty. Voices came through an open doorway to the left.
One voice was a nasal whine. It complained:
“I will not have it. I will not put up with it. I am not a child, and I will not have it.”
This voice’s t’s were a little too thick for t’s, but not thick enough to be d’s.
Another voice was a lively, but slightly harsh, barytone. It said cheerfully:
“What’s the good of saying we won’t put up with it, when we are putting up with it?”
The third voice was feminine, a soft voice, but flat and spiritless. It said:
“But perhaps he did kill him.”
The whining voice said: “I do not care. I will not have it.”
The barytone voice said, cheerfully as before: “Oh, won’t you?”
A doorknob turned farther down the hall. I didn’t want to be caught standing there listening. I advanced to the open doorway.
III
I was in the doorway of a low-ceilinged oval room furnished and decorated in gray, white and silver. Two men and a woman were there.
The older man — he was somewhere in his fifties — got up from a deep gray chair and bowed ceremoniously at me. He was a plump man of medium height, completely bald, dark-skinned and pale-eyed. He wore a wax-pointed gray mustache and a straggly gray imperial.
“Mr. Kavalov?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.” His was the whining voice.
I told him who I was. He shook my hand and then introduced me to the others.
The woman was his daughter. She was probably thirty. She had her father’s narrow, full-lipped mouth, but her eyes were dark, her nose was short and straight, and her skin was almost colorless. Her face had Asia in it. It was pretty, passive, unintelligent.
The man with the barytone voice was her husband. His name was Ringgo. He was six or seven years older than his wife, neither tall nor heavy, but well setup. His left arm was in splints and a sling. The knuckles of his right hand were darkly bruised. He had a lean, bony, quick-witted face, bright dark eyes with plenty of lines around them, and a good-natured hard mouth.
He gave me his bruised hand, wriggled his bandaged arm at me, grinned, and said:
“I’m sorry you missed this, but the future injuries are yours.”
“How did it happen?” I asked.
Kavalov raised a plump hand.
“Time enough it is to go into that when we have eaten,” he said. “Let us have our dinner first.”
We went into a small green and brown dining-room where a small square table was set. I sat facing Ringgo across a silver basket of orchids that stood between tall silver candlesticks in the center of the table. Mrs. Ringgo sat to my right, Kavalov to my left. When Kavalov sat down I saw the shape of an automatic pistol in his hip pocket.
Two men servants waited on us. There was a lot of food and all of it was well turned out. We ate caviar, some sort of consommé, sand dabs, potatoes and cucumber jelly, roast lamb, corn and string beans, asparagus, wild duck and hominy cakes, artichoke-and-tomato salad, and orange ice. We drank white wine, claret, Burgundy, coffee and crème de menthe.
Kavalov ate and drank enormously. None of us skimped.
Kavalov was the first to disregard his own order that nothing be said about his troubles until after we had eaten. When he had finished his soup he put down his spoon and said:
“I am not a child. I will not be frightened.”
He blinked pale, worried eyes defiantly at me, his lips pouting between mustache and imperial.
Ringgo grinned pleasantly at him. Mrs. Ringgo’s face was as serene and inattentive as if nothing had been said.
“What is there to be frightened of?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Kavalov said. “Nothing excepting a lot of idiotic and very pointless trickery and play-acting.”
“You can call it anything you want to call it,” a voice grumbled over my shoulder, “but I seen what I seen.”
The voice belonged to one of the men who was waiting on the table, a sallow, youngish man with a narrow, slack-lipped face. He spoke with a subdued sort of stubbornness, and without looking up from the dish he was putting before me.
Since nobody else paid any attention to the servant’s clearly audible remark, I turned my face to Kavalov again. He was trimming the edge of a sand dab with the side of his fork.
“What kind of trickery and play-acting?” I asked.
Kavalov put down his fork and rested his wrists on the edge of the table. He rubbed his lips together and leaned over his plate towards me.
“Supposing” — he wrinkled his forehead so that his bald scalp twitched forward — “you have done injury to a man ten years ago.” He turned his wrists quickly, laying his hands palms-up on the white cloth. “You have done this injury in the ordinary business manner — you understand? — for profit. There is not anything personal concerned. You do not hardly know him. And then supposing he came to you after all those ten years and said to you: ‘I have come to watch you die.’” He turned his hands over, palms down. “Well, what would you think?”
“I wouldn’t,” I replied, “think I ought to hurry up my dying on his account.”
The earnestness went out of his face, leaving it blank. He blinked at me for a moment and then began eating his fish. When he had chewed and swallowed the last piece of sand dab he looked up at me again. He shook his head slowly, drawing down the corners of his mouth.
“That was not a good answer,” he said. He shrugged, and spread his fingers. “However, you will have to deal with this Captain Cat-and-mouse. It is for that I engaged you.”
I nodded.
Ringgo smiled and patted his bandaged arm, saying:
“I wish you more luck with him than I had.”
Mrs. Ringgo put out a hand and let the pointed fingertips touch her husband’s wrist for a moment.
I asked Kavalov:
“This injury I was to suppose I had done: how serious was it?”
He pursed his lips, made little wavy motions with the fingers of his right hand, and said:
“Oh — ah — ruin.”
“We can take it for granted, then, that your captain’s really up to something?”
“Good God!” said Ringgo, dropping his fork. “I wouldn’t like to think he’d broken my arm just in fun.”
Behind me the sallow servant spoke to his mate:
“He wants to know if we think the captain’s really up to something.”
“I heard him,” the other said gloomily. “A lot of help he’s going to be to us.”