I heard a faint sound of friction against the composition floor of the outer office and reached for my light to douse it. Before my hand touched it, the lights flashed on over my head and I straightened up blinking. Dr. Schneider dropped his left hand from the light switch beside the door, stepped forward a pace, and closed the heavy door behind him without turning.
His right hand stayed where it was at chest level, holding a Lüger pointed at me like a long thin finger with an empty, questioning tip.
I tried to palm the yellow envelope and the paper but he said, “Put it down, Dr. Branch. Evidently you have found what I was looking for. I was about to examine the T file when the noise of the elevator disturbed me.”
“Yes,” I said, putting it down, “you mingle philology with homicide and espionage, don’t you?” I hoped the light would bring Sale upstairs if I could stall the Lüger long enough. I looked at the windows. All the blinds were drawn. I could have used the ceiling lights myself.
“I am not a spy, Dr. Branch. Nor am I a homicide.”
“Nor is this anything but a game of cops and robbers.”
“This is not a game, sir. I refuse to allow my enemies to persecute me. You are forcing me to inflict death upon you in order to protect my personal honor.”
It sounded like the kind of nonsense a man talks when final disillusion has deprived words of all meaning for him, but his gun was as steady as part of the building. Yet he sounded faintly regretful, like a mosquito-lover who has to kill a mosquito.
To prolong the conversation I said, “Your personal honor seems to be extraordinarily flexible. Have you thought of offering it to the government as a substitute for rubber?”
“I have heard more dignified last words, Dr. Branch. I fear that your nature is essentially trivial. Your imagination seems unable to embrace the fact that I am on the point of shooting you.” His face and eyes and voice were very weary, as if he had lived past the love of life and the fear of death.
I hadn’t. He was standing nearly ten feet away from me, but I felt the cold iron of his gun in the pit of my stomach.
Tell him to give it to the W.P.B., one part of my brain piped in hysterical glee, and another part said calmly, You’ve got twenty-five years on him. If you don’t move now, you’ll never move again.
“You can’t mean it, sir,” I babbled. “Don’t kill me, sir, don’t kill me. I’m sick.” I rolled up my eyes and gasped, “I feel faint.”
I fell to the floor hard and he took three steps towards me and I rolled under the table onto my hands and knees. He shot and splintered a leg of the table in front of my face. I dived for his legs with chips in my eyes and he shot again and the bullet tugged at the padding in the left shoulder of my coat.
I got his legs and he went over backwards. The gun flew out of his hand and his head smacked very pleasingly against the doorjamb. I picked up the gun and stood over him. He didn’t stir.
I examined the Lüger and saw that it was empty except for the two used shells, and looked around for another weapon. There was the gilded horseshoe paperweight on the table. I picked it up and hefted it. It would do. I put the gun on the table and, with the horseshoe in my right hand in case he was shamming, kneeled down to examine him.
He was breathing stertorously and the whites of his eyes showed. I touched one eyeball with my finger. He wasn’t shamming and I put the horseshoe down.
I left Schneider as he was and went down the central stairs to get the policeman with the broken nose. I met him on the first floor coming in. Sale had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He pointed both at me.
“Hands up,” he said. His face gleamed yellowly, like wax, above the flashlight beam. I put up my hands.
Then he recognized me. “So it’s you, professor! I thought I heard a noise like a shot. What’s up?”
“The murderer,” I said. “On the fourth floor. I laid him out.” I lowered my arms.
“No kiddin’, professor! Show me.”
He followed me up the flight of stairs to the fourth floor and down the corridor to the Dictionary office. At the end of the hall I thought I saw green eyes glaring at me from the darkness at the top of the west stairs. I pointed Sale into the office and went to the end of the hall to turn on the corridor lights. Nothing on the stairs, not even a cat.
I turned out the lights and went back to the lighted office. Sale met me at the door with his gun in his hand and his broken nose poised like a hammer.
“This guy is dead, professor,” he said. “I got to put you under arrest.”
“Dead? Are you sure? He was just unconscious when I looked at him a minute ago.”
“He’s dead, professor. His brains are leaking out.”
“Let me see him, will you?”
“If you like it. But put up your hands.”
He circled me in the hall and walked behind me when I went into the office. I saw the top of Schneider’s head in the doorway. It had a deep hole in it, bleeding red and white onto the floor.
“My God, I didn’t see that,” I said.
“You see it now. He’s dead. Murdered.” He was still behind me and I couldn’t see his face but he smacked his lips over the last word.
“Murder, hell,” I said. “It was self-defense. He shot at me.”
“You’ll have a chance to prove self-defense,” Sale said. “Now I got to take you to the station.”
“Just a minute. I’ve got proof here that this man was a spy.”
“Go and get it and give it to me,” Sale said. I looked at him over my shoulder. He was standing three feet away with his gun leveled at my kidneys. My kidneys are important to me.
I stepped over Schneider’s head and shoulders into the inner room. The oilskin envelope and paper and the Lüger were gone from the table, but something else was there that made me feel sick. The gilded horseshoe was lying on the table. One end of it was splattered with red blood flecked with white. And the rest of it was covered with my fingerprints.
I thought of the green eyes in the stair-well at the end of the hall. I hadn’t been quick enough. Ruth Esch was very quick indeed. Perhaps she was as quick as Peter Schneider. My stomach heaved and I was sick on the floor.
Sale stood and watched me silently with his gun on me. When I had finished he said:
“Where’s your evidence, professor?”
“It’s gone.”
“Is this what you used to kill him?” He pointed at the horseshoe.
“Somebody used it to kill him,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”
“That’s right,” Sale said. “You just laid him out and he died naturally.”
“Better take it with you,” I said, and picked it up.
“Put that down, you bastard,” Sale yelled. “Fingerprints!” He started towards me. I was facing him with the horseshoe in my right hand, my back against the table. I leaned to the left as if to replace the horseshoe on the table on my left side.
When it was nearly touching the table, I threw the horseshoe backhand at Sale’s gun. The two pieces of metal clanged and the horseshoe ringed his wrist. The gun went off and dropped to the floor and I dropped after it.
Sale got me in the side with the toe of his boot but I got the gun. He put up his hands as I stood up with it.
“Nice work, professor. Just an old horseshoe pitcher, eh? But you’re crazy, professor. You can’t get away.”
I wasted three words, “I’ve been framed.”
“Sure, sure. We’ll get you, professor.”
The conversation bored me and I picked up the flash and locked him in the inner room, which had a heavy oaken door. I had to move Schneider to do it.
Before I reached the head of the stairs, I heard a police whistle.
I was a fool. He could whistle out of the window. But what could I have done to him? Tie and gag him? Sure, and suffer for it later. But I had his gun.