Stanley Abbott: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 30, No. 13, Mid-December, 1985

The smoke-gray steel of a small safe caught the light from the overhead lamp.

“Oh — oh! I never knew it was there!” Boris cried. “But the combination! We haven’t the combination!”

“Yes, we have. Look at the dial. It’s a double-combination lock, with a double radiating disk. It requires both letters and numbers to get into this hiding place of your wonderful grandmother’s. Suppose we try, ‘In 1739?’ I kept that for the last. I thought it was not what it seemed.”

I dropped on one knee beside the safe. On the outer ring of the disk I picked out the letters “i-n,” then on the inner ring I picked out “1-7-3-9,” and gave a twirl.

But nothing happened — nothing. For a second I was nonplussed.

“Of course, of course!” I cried. “We have to reverse it, in the code, turn the letters into numbers, the numbers into letters. But wasn’t it witty of her, to use ‘in’ to get into a safe!”

It took only a moment. In the code, “i-n” became “2823” and “1-7-3-9” (as you will see by a glance at my diagram of the roulette wheel) became the letters “z-k-c-s,” a “word” which no safe breaker ever would think of.

I picked at the double-disk again, and my heart was going fast.

Another twirl — the safe door swung open.

“But Dexter! It’s only — why, it’s only a pile of old rags!”

A chill ran up my spine. I spoke under my breath:

“You take them out — you — they are sacred — those rags—”

He made a little purring noise in his throat.

Leaning forward, with trembling hands he drew out something and held it up — a nondescript woolen garment, half dress, half cloak.

“Wait a moment,” I gasped; “there are other things here.”

I drew forth a small, worn leather bag, with a strap to go around the neck. Behind it on the floor of the safe were a small revolver and a folded paper.

Then together we left the closet. Sitting down on the floor of the studio, facing each other, we reverently spread out the things between us.

“The revolver” — I touched it with awe — “that was, of course, for herself — if she should be taken by the Red soldiers.”

The tears were running down Boris’s face. My own eyes were wet.

I opened that worn leather bag, took out the contents: a little packet of tea, another of salt, a comb, a cheap knife, fork, and spoon. A small brandy flask — empty.

Then I unfolded that paper — gave it to Boris, without a word.

It was a Russian passport. You know Russians have to have “papers,” to go from one village to another in safety.

But this was the passport of one “Anna Kovalchuk, seamstress.” Kovalchuk! The name of that man on the garage roof.

Boris shook his head — he knew nothing about this.

I reached over and touched his hand. “Look—”

I was pointing to a round hole under one of the arms of that woolen garment — dull stains there were, too.

“A bullet hole,” I whispered. “The bullet passed through and out — see the other side of that seam.”

He tried to speak — choked. He had seen those dull stains.

I was feeling the inside of that rough woolen garment, and now I took Boris’s hand, flexed the fingers, and pressed them against the coarse lining around the waist of it.

“Dexter!”

I thought he was going to faint.

“Steady,” I breathed, “steady, dear boy. Bring the scissors — that’s her little sewing basket there on the table.”

It pulled him together, having something to do.

He got me the scissors, then just dropped down on the floor again, facing me.

In two seconds I held out my hand, palm upward — a great gleaming emerald!

The Vorontsov jewels! A million dollars’ worth! Eighty years old, she had got out of Russia with them — torn from their settings, and sewn in the lining of that garment of the peasant seamstress.

For herself, she could never have done it. But for him—

After half an hour of cutting and ripping I had a large bowl full of priceless great stones — diamonds, rubies, pearls, emeralds, sapphires. And there were a few smaller stones, like those two which she must have sold for the fifteen and twenty thousand francs.

Why hadn’t she told her grandson? Because she wanted him to work, not idle away his young life. But when she had the bad spell early in February, she must have realized that it was no longer safe to withhold the knowledge from him. He should work for it, though — labor and think and develop his brains. A great game she would make of it. Can’t you imagine the shine of those brilliant old eyes of hers — eyes so incredibly young in that splendid old wrinkled face of hers — as she laughingly helped him with hints now and then to decipher the cryptograph? And when at last they had opened the safe — when he saw what she had done for him!

“Sois sage! Study and work, my child, for we Russians have learned how uncertain wealth is.”

Sergey Kovalchuk confessed to Boris and me the next day. In that letter from his mother, Anna Kovalchuk, she wrote him about selling the passport and dress to the princess, who had paid her for them with a diamond. When Sergey learned that the princess was dead, and that her grandson was absent from home, he had thought there might be other diamonds in the house.

That wildly grateful young Boris wanted to share the Vorontsov jewels with me! It took me the rest of my holiday week in Paris to persuade him that I had just had the time of my life in finding them for him, that they were his lawful inheritance, like any other estate, but that they ought to be sold now and the money wisely invested. Of course I accepted one stone — oh, it was a big one! — as a souvenir of the princess. It is still in a safe deposit vault in Paris. When I’m tired of this business of criminal hunting, I’ll sell it and buy a nice house — somewhere on the Left Bank.

So Dexter Drake ended his story of the Key in Michael, sitting there on the couch in our living room in New York, many years afterwards.

“Of course, Howard,” he added, after a moment of musing, “the jewels were in no danger, so long as nobody knew that she had escaped with them. The safe had probably been in that closet for years; she had only to have the combination changed. Who would look for a secret writing between the canvas and stretcher of a portrait over the mantelpiece? And even on the unimaginable chance that the paper was found and deciphered, who would fancy that a few lines of vers libre about sun, stars, and comets, had anything do to with the Vorontsov jewels?”

“Who,” I replied, “except you, would have fancied it!”

“Ah!” The great detective gave me his quick bright-eyed smile. “But you are forgetting the strange message to me from the dying woman. And even I, you remember, did not find it so easy to read that ingenious, that unique cipher, worked out on the numbers of the roulette wheel!”