Дэшил Хэммет: Woman in the Dark

The bald man said: “Nice picking. Get the guy?”

“Hospital, I guess.”

Luise Fischer turned to him: “Was he — was he badly hurt?”

The huge man grumbled: “I don’t know about it. Can’t I guess?”

The bald man called: “Luke!”

A thin, white-mustached policeman came in. The fat man said: “Put her in the royal suite.” Luise Fischer said: “I wish to see my lawyer.” The three men looked unblinkingly at her.

“His name is Harry Klaus,” she said. “I wish to see him.”

Luke said: “Come back this way.”

She followed him down a bare corridor to the far end, where he opened a door and stood aside for her to go through. The room into which the door opened was a small one furnished with cot, table, two chairs, and some magazines. The window was large, fitted with a heavy wire grating.

In the center of the room she turned to say again: “I wish to see my lawyer.”

The white-mustached man shut the door and she could hear him locking it.

Two hours later he returned with a bowl of soup, some cold meat and a slice of bread on a plate, and a cup of coffee.

She had been lying on the cot, staring at the ceiling.

She rose and faced him imperiously. “I wish to see—”

“Don’t start that again,” he said irritably. “We got nothing to do with you. Tell it to them Mile Valley fellows when they come for you.”

He put the food on the table and left the room. She ate everything he had brought her.

It was late afternoon when the door opened again. “There you are,” the white-mustached man said, and stood aside to let his companions enter. There were two of them, men of medium height, in dull clothes, one thick-chested and florid, the other less heavy, older.

The thick-chested, florid one looked Luise Fischer up and down and grinned admiringly at her. The other said: “We want you to come back to the Valley with us, Miss Fischer.”

She rose from her chair and began to put on her hat and coat.

“That’s it,” the older of the two said. “Don’t give us no trouble and we don’t give you none.”

She looked curiously at him.

They went to the street and got into a dusty blue sedan. The thick-chested man drove. Luise Fischer sat behind him, beside the older man. They retraced the route she and Brazil had taken that morning.

Once, before they left the city, she had said: “I wish to see my lawyer. His name is Harry Klaus.”

The man beside her was chewing gum. He made noises with his lips, then told her, politely enough: “We can’t stop now.”

The man at the wheel spoke before she could reply. He did not turn his head. “How come Brazil socked him?”

Luise said quickly: “It was not his fault. He was—”

The older man, addressing the man at the wheel, interrupted her: “Let it alone, Pete. Let the D.A. do his own work.”

Pete said: “Oke.”

The woman turned to the man beside her. “Was — was Brazil hurt?”

He studied her face for a long moment, then nodded slightly. “Stopped a slug, I hear.”

Her eyes widened. “He was shot?”

He nodded again.

She put both hands on his forearm. “How badly?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Her fingers dug into his arm. “Did they arrest him?”

“I can’t tell you, miss. Maybe the District Attorney wouldn’t like me to.” He smacked his lips over his gum-chewing.

“But, please!” she insisted. “I must know.”

He shook his head again. “We ain’t worrying you with a lot of questions. Don’t be worrying us.”

It was nearly nine o’clock by the dial on the dashboard, and quite dark, when Luise Fischer and her captors passed a large square building whose illuminated sign said “Mile Valley Lumber Co.” and turned in to what was definitely a town street, though its irregularly spaced houses were not many. Ten minutes later the sedan came to rest at the curb in front of a gray public building. The driver got out. The other man held the door open for Luise. They took her into a ground-floor room in the gray building.

Three men were in the room. A sad-faced man of sixty-some years, with ragged white hair and mustache, was tilted back in a chair, with his feet on a battered yellowish desk. He wore a hat but no coat. A pasty-faced young blond man, straddling a chair in front of the filing cabinet on the other side of the room, was saying, “So the traveling salesman asked the farmer if he could put him up for the night and—” but broke off when Luise Fischer and her companions came in.

The third man stood with his back to the window. He was a slim man of medium height, not far past thirty, thin-lipped, pale, flashily dressed in brown and red. His collar was very tight. He advanced swiftly toward Luise Fischer, showing white teeth in a smile. “I’m Harry Klaus. They wouldn’t let me see you down there, so I came on up to wait for you.” He spoke rapidly and with assurance. “Don’t worry. I’ve got everything fixed.”

The storyteller hesitated, changed his position. The two men who had brought Luise Fischer up from the city looked at the lawyer with obvious disapproval.

Klaus smiled again with complete assurance. “You know she’s not going to tell you anything at all till we’ve talked it over, don’t you? Well, what the hell, then?”

The man at the desk said: “All right, all right.” He looked at the two men standing behind the woman. “If Tuft’s office is empty, let ’em use that.”

“Thanks.” Harry Klaus picked up a brown briefcase from a chair, took Luise Fischer’s elbow in his hand, and turned her to follow the thick-chested, florid man.

He led them down the corridor a few feet to an office that was similar to the one they had just left. He did not go in with them. He said, “Come on back when you’re finished,” and, when they had gone in, slammed the door.

Klaus jerked his head at the door. “A lot of whittlers,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll stand them on their heads.” He tossed his briefcase on the desk. “Sit down.”

“Brazil?” she said. “He is—”

His shrug lifted his shoulders almost to his ears. “I don’t know. Can’t get anything out of these people.”

“Then—?”

“Then he got away,” he said.

“Do you think he did?”

He shrugged his shoulders again. “We can always hope.”

“But one of those policemen told me he had been shot and—”

“That don’t have to mean anything but that they hope they hit him.” He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down into a chair. “There’s no use of worrying about Brazil till we know whether we’ve got anything to worry about.” He drew another chair up close to hers and sat in it. “Let’s worry about you now. I want the works — no song and dance — just what happened, the way it happened.”

She drew her brows together in a puzzled frown. “But you told me everything—”

“I told you everything was all fixed, and it is.” He patted her knee. “I’ve got the bail all fixed so you can walk out of here as soon as they get through asking you questions. But we’ve got to decide what kind of answers you’re going to give them.” He looked sharply at her from under his hat brim. “You want to help Brazil, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the stuff.” He patted her knee again, and his hand remained on it. “Now, give me everything, from the beginning. “

“You mean from when I first met Kane Robson?”

He nodded.

She crossed her knees, dislodging his hand. Staring at the opposite wall as if not seeing it, she said earnestly: “Neither of us did anything wrong. It is not right that we should suffer.”