Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Slip this inside your garter belt when you get dressed in the morning,” he told her. “I’ll have another one for the other side by then.”

She must have lain and thought about it all night. In the morning she said quite abruptly, “Johnnie, I don’t think I want to go on this business trip for you after all. Something about it — scares me. Something about it — isn’t on the up-and-up.”

He gave her a long hard look, then banged out of the house and went on the trip himself.

He was gone two weeks that time, and she knew he must have been with some woman at least part of that time. But she also knew it probably wasn’t the first time.

Now, returning from this latest trip, he asked her, “Anything new around here?”

“Harry Matsuko called.”

“I told him I’d be away — didn’t he know that?”

“He said you’d told him. He was just checking to see if you were back yet.”

They seemed to have difficulty talking to one another. It was not that they were strained or ill at ease; it was more as though they’d run out of things to say. Not just now, but some time ago.

“Anything else?”

“Oh, and some roofing contractor came around. I had the hardest time making him understand—”

“I didn’t send for anyone like that,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her.

“I told him I was sure you hadn’t, or you would have told me about it. I tried to explain there was nothing wrong with our roof whatever. But he spoke of some city ordinance about making sure loose tiles didn’t slide off and hurt somebody below. And they went ahead and put a ladder against the house and climbed up on the outside.”

“How many were there?”

“Two. The contractor and his assistant. They poked around up there an hour. I even saw them lift up some of the tiles and look underneath.” She stopped. “Why’d you do that?” she asked him curiously.

“Do what?”

“Stroke both sides of your face with one hand like that?”

“I was feeling to see if I needed a shave.”

“No,” she said tonelessly. “You did it when I spoke of that roofing contractor having been here.”

They were in the bedroom by this time. He shrugged off his coat and flung it across the back of a chair. “Guess I’ll shower up,” he said, untying his necktie. “That train coming up from saki was pretty sooty.”

She was standing there looking at him, but her thoughts seemed to be in another world.

He was down to his shorts and undershirt now. Suddenly he stopped and said, “Why do you have to stand there like that? Didn’t you ever see me getting undressed before? I don’t need help.”

She came back to herself with a start. “I’ll see how Micky’s getting along with the dinner,” she said and went out. Mikki was their maid of all work; her name was too long for them to handle, so they called her by just the first two syllables of it. Mikki, or, more often than not, Micky.

But she was back in the room again when he came out of the shower, toweling himself vigorously. He stopped for a moment, narrowly scanned the expression on her face, and then nodded. “So you wouldn’t be happy until you nosed, would you?”

“No,” she said wearily. “I only came back to see if you needed an extra towel.” She pointed to the chair seat. There was a fresh one lying folded on it.

He turned his back and began putting on his clothes again.

“But when a husband tells his wife not to stand watching him undress,” she went on, “it’s not modesty, it can’t be. It’s because he has something to hide.”

He didn’t answer.

“I found the money belt, with five thousand dollars United States currency in it.”

“You took the trouble to count it, too, I notice,” he said over his shoulder.

“You don’t trust me anyway,” she pointed out. “So I may as well have the game as long as I’ve got the name.”

“Go ahead, ask me,” he defied her. “Ask me where I got it and what I got it for!”

“Would you tell me the truth?”

“No!” he said sharply.

She shrugged her shoulders to show she knew the futility of it. “And the unset diamond, where did that come from?”

“Oh, you saw that, too.” He went over to her and held it out on the flat of his hand. “That’s something I don’t mind you asking about,” he told her unhesitatingly. “Although you probably won’t believe me about that, either. A Chinaman came up to me in Hong Kong and asked if I wanted to buy it. He was a refugee or something, needed money. I bought it off him for peanuts.”

“You don’t buy a diamond that size for peanuts,” she said skeptically.

“It’s probably hot.”

She didn’t seem too interested in the diamond bit. “I hope it brings you good luck,” she said indifferently. And then, as though turning to something of more consequence, “I also found a woman’s Chinese silk handkerchief stuffed in your breast pocket, reeking of some God-awful cheap perfume.”

“That’s something I picked up on the street.”

“The handkerchief or the woman?” she asked sweetly.

“Gee, you’ve been a busy little bitch in the half-hour since I came home!” he yelled. And he gave the door a slam that shook the whole house.

The girl in the taxi was extremely frightened as it drew up before Secret Service Headquarters. It was written all over her face, and every move she made indicated it plainly. She lowered her head first and peered worriedly under and out at the ugly, blocklike concrete building. Her hands were too rapid and agitated as she opened her purse and fumbled for money to pay the driver. Then, when he returned change, she fumbled again and spilled some to the floor. Finally, when she opened the door and got out, she left her gloves lying on the seat. He had to call her attention to them.

She was extremely beautiful, tall and straight for a Japanese girl, and with particularly lovely, long, well-proportioned legs, again an exception. She wore a tailored suit of tan pongee silk, with a turned-down white collar and a flowing black satin bow tie, such as artists are sometimes pictured wearing.

But she was still very frightened as she went up the steps and inside. The apprehensive way she looked all about her seemed to say, Why have I been sent for like this? What have I done? Will I ever come out of here again?

She noticed a building attendant and approached him. “The office of Colonel Setsu, please. Which way?”

He pointed. “Right at the end there, facing you.”

She went over to the door and stood there looking at it. Finally she went in.

The outer office was nothing to be frightened of. There were desks with typists seated at them, a receptionist, all the usual business office personnel. But they were all men; there wasn’t a woman in sight.

She was directed into an inner office and told to wait there. She sat down on a straight-backed chair placed against the wall and began to slap her loose gloves nervously with one hand against the other. Suddenly a door opened, and a young man in army uniform stood there, rigid and impersonal as an automaton. “In here, please,” he ordered her.

She got up and went in. The young man, closing the door behind her, remained outside.

The man at the desk in the center of the room was also in uniform. He was in his sixties, bald of crown and with a wizened but cracklingly intelligent face. A cigarette burned away in a little lacquered tray to one side of him, untouched.

He let her stand there for several minutes out in the center of the room before him, while he looked over papers. Then he said, as though reading from the papers, without looking up at her, “You are Tomiko.”

She inclined her head. “Yes, Colonel.”