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

“I’ve told you everything, there isn’t anything I’ve left out,” he said earnestly. “I even told you about Ruth, the second night we met.”

“Oh, Ruth,” she said in contemptuous dismissal. “Every married man tells the girl he loves everything about his wife the very first thing. That’s nothing. I want to know you deeper than that, closer than that.”

“There isn’t any deeper, there isn’t any closer,” he said stubbornly.

“Then there isn’t any use for us to keep on meeting every night,” she said, as stubbornly. “What for, if you’re going to keep part of yourself away from me?”

He was glumly silent, and she saw that this was going to require more than just ordinary persuasion.

“Suppose I were to say yes,” she came out with suddenly. “I’m not saying yes — this is just supposition, remember. But suppose I were to say yes. Then where would we go? My family’s at my own home. I won’t go to your house. And I’m not the sort of girl, Mr. Johnnie Lyons, would go with you to some disreputable hotel just for the night.”

His face lit up like a floodlight. A little pulse in his temple started to jazz. His carburetor was in business again.

“I have a little bungalow, a country place, outside the city, on the Peninsula, overlooking the bay. Would you come there with me? We could make it in a forty-minute drive.”

“What would we do there?”

He chuckled outright in her face.

“But I mean—” she went on falteringly, “has it got a radio, anything like that?”

He stopped short, and the air between them was filled with sudden tension.

“What made you ask that?” he said in a cold, wary voice.

“Well,” she said plausibly, “we can’t make love all the time. We can’t drink all the time. We can’t eat all the time. I simply wondered if there was something to help pass the time away, if I did decide to stay with you.

He relaxed again. “Oh, I didn’t get you for a minute.”

She knew enough not to ask the question a second time, and finally he said, of his own accord but a trifle reticently, “Yeah, it’s got a radio.”

“What are you put out about, Johnnie?”

“Well, y’know, your asking that isn’t exactly a compliment to me,” he said sulkily. “You worried I won’t keep you busy enough? Don’t worry, baby, you won’t need any music out there with me. We’ll make our own.”

“Johnnie!” she reproached. “Wait for me here a minute,” she said then, smiling shyly. “I’ll be right back. I’ll have to telephone home and make up some excuse to tell my family.”

In the dressing room she motioned the maid out, closed the door and picked up the phone, all in one swift motion.

“Tomiko. Colonel Setsu, official business.”

Setsu’s voice came on with uncanny quickness, almost as though he’d had his hand ready on the instrument.

They didn’t waste time exchanging names.

“He has a little bungalow on the Peninsula,” she began in a low-voiced rush. “It has a radio. He’s taking me there now. Do I refuse, do I delay, do I go at once — your order?”

“How did he react about the radio?”

“He stopped short. His pride as a man rebelled that I should ask about outside entertainment.”

Colonel Setsu had the sixth sense typical of the good Secret Service man. “He is the right one,” he said instantly. “That was not his pride as a man, that was his caution as a secret agent.”

“Then I go?”

“Absolutely essential. It will have to be in your own hands entirely, at first. It may take all night until I can identify the exact location and have my men reach there. Report back as soon as you safely can. But be very careful. One thing I must warn you about—”

Lyons was standing in the dressing room doorway, looking at her. She had not heard the door open.

“Good-bye, honorable father,” she said, and hung up.

She turned to him with a dazzling smile.

“What’d they say?” he grunted.

“What does any family in any part of the world say when the eldest daughter tells them she is spending the night with a girl friend? They think they know, they’re afraid they’re right, but they hope they are mistaken.”

She shrugged as she turned toward the door. “Well, Johnnie. Here goes nothing.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said, tightening his arm possessively around her waist. “I wouldn’t say that at all!”

When she awoke in the morning he wasn’t in the bed with her and wasn’t in the room.

The overturned goblets, the empty champagne bottles in the bucket, floating now in water that had once been chopped ice, told the story of their night. Successful from his point of view, barren from hers. She hadn’t learned a thing more than she’d already known in the city.

She put on a man’s black silk kimono she saw lying there — his, for she hadn’t brought anything of her own with her — and ran to the window.

The view from the little country house was as beautiful as a Japanese print. In the foreground were nothing but dwarf fir trees, glossy and dark green. Beyond and below them the pebbly beach, rosy-beige in color. And then past that the waters of the bay, an incomparable blue. Out from the shore a little fishing smack rode motionless, reflected upside down as on a sheet of glass. There was no sign of life aboard it. All under a porcelain-smooth sky.

No use to search the tiny little two-room place again this morning, even though he wasn’t here. She had done that exhaustively during the night, in the intervals between their love-bouts, while pretending to roam aimlessly about.

She went to the telephone and dispiritedly gave Colonel Setsu’s name.

“I have failed. I came out here for nothing.”

“The radio?”

“It is nothing more than it seems. One of our own inexpensive Japanese makes, table-top, that you can buy in any store.”

“You’re sure?”

“I have examined it all over. It has no transmitter, messages cannot be sent out over it. The back panel is even broken, which made it easier for me to see inside.”

“Stay there until you find it,” ordered the Colonel curtly. “It may be right before your eyes and you do not know it.”

She hung up disconsolately.

A law of diminishing returns would soon set in, and she knew it. The second night she would already mean less to him than the first, the third night less than the second. Her cards were down, she had nothing left to play with. And his were still being nursed up close to his face.

She went back to the window. The fishing smack had moved in closer to shore since she had last seen it. And he was standing up on it; she could recognize his tall lanky figure even at that distance. He must have been below somewhere the first time.

It may be right before your eyes and you do not know it .

She made a sudden swift turn, as if to go back to the telephone she had just left and pick it up once more, then thought better of it. He would be back to the house in a matter of minutes.

But she knew where the radio was now. She knew unerringly where he kept it.

She ran out of the house and down the slope to the beach to meet him, naked as she was under the kimono and in bare feet, uttering gleeful little cries of “John-eee! John-eee!”

They were both sitting on the edge of the gunwale now, trailing their bare feet in the water. He’d taken off shoes and socks now, too.

“Why can’t I go down inside the hatch?” she asked for the tenth time.

“You don’t want to go down there. Nothing but a lot of greasy machinery. Get yourself all dirty.”

“I bet you’re hiding a woman down there. That’s why you won’t let me see.”