Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

His mouth just dropped open, and his face went kind of white and sick.

I picked up his check and started to tear it up into small pieces. “But there doesn’t seem to be anyone to collect it for him. That was him that was shot dead in Casey’s room on 99th Street last night. They couldn’t identify him until late this afternoon. He went there to double-cross us. Maybe to make sure Casey learned who had the other half, or maybe even to take it away from him because he wasn’t getting results, give it to someone else. It must have been already missing, the bartender’s two side-kicks got there first and swiped it, and Casey shot him down in cold blood believing he took it.”

Trainor picked up the third Collins and spilled it slowly out on the floor. Then he turned the glass upside-down on the bar with a knell-like sound. He said, without any bitterness now, “They always said he’d only bet on a sure thing. Well he lived up to his name, all right!”

“You Bet Your Life” ( Detective Fiction Weekly, September 25,1937) is one of Woolrich’s most off-trail stories. The bizarre wager between the ruthless cynic Fredericks and the idealist Trainor harks back to the bet between the Lord and Satan in the book of Job, although what happens next as the three godlike principals invisibly spy on the two mortals and wait to see which will first set out to kill the other has no counterpart in the biblical tale. The point of this cockeyed philosophic parable, as usual in Woolrich, is that the most powerful god of all is Chance.

Jack Hollinger, U. S. N., up from Yokohama on a forty-eight-hour liberty junket, said, “Shoo!” he swung his arms wildly in a mosquito-squatting gesture. He was squatting cross-legged on the floor in a little paper-walled compartment of the House of Stolen Hours, which was situated in one of the more pungent alleys of the Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s tenderloin. Before him were an array of thimble-sized saki cups. All of them were empty, but Hollinger hadn’t worked up much of a glow over them. A warm spot that felt no bigger than a dime floated pleasantly but without any particular zest behind the waistband of his bell-bottomed white ducks.

He tipped his Bob Davis cap down over one eye and wigwagged his arms some more.

“Outside,” he said. “Party no good. Party plenty terrible.” He made a face.

The geisha ceased her stylized posturing, bowed low and. edging back the paper slide, retreated through it. The geisha who had been kneeling, to twang shrill discords on her samisen let her hands fall from the strings. “Me, too?” she inquired. And giggled. Geishas, he had discovered, giggled at nearly everything.

“Yeah, you too,” said the ungallant Hollinger. “Music very bad, capish? Send the girl back with some more saki. And try to find something bigger I can drink it out of!”

The slide eased back into place after her. Hollinger, left alone with his saki-cups and the dancer’s discarded outer kimono neatly roiled up in the corner they seemed to wear layers of them — scowled at the paper walls. Presently he lit a cigarette and blew a thick blue smoke-spiral into the air. It hung there heavily as if it was too tired to move against the heavy staleness of the room’s atmosphere. Hollinger frowned.

“Twenty-four hours shore-leave left and not a laugh on the horizon.” he complained. “What a town! I shoulda stayed on the of battle-wagon and boned up on my course on how to be a detective. Wonder if I passed the exam I sent in from Manila?”

The racket in the public rooms up front, where they had been playing billiards all evening, seemed to have grown louder. He could hear excited shouts, jabbering voices that topped the raucous blend of phonograph-music, clicking roulette-wheels, rattling dice-cups, and clinking beer-glasses. Somebody had started a fight, he guessed. Those Japs sure lost their heads easy. Still a good fight might take some of the boredom out of his bones. Maybe he’d just— Nix. He’d been warned to stay out of trouble this trip.

They were taking a long time with that saki. He picked up a little gong-mallet, and began to swing it against the round bronze disk dangling between two crosspieces. He liked the low sweet noise.

There was a sound of feet hurrying across the wooden flooring now, as though a lot of people were running from one place to another. But it remained a considerable distance away, at the front of the big sprawling establishment.

Something whisked by against the outside of the paper screen walling him in. Like the loose edges of somebody’s clothes flirting past. The light was on his side, it was dark out there, so he couldn’t see any shadow to go with it. Just that rustling sound and the hasty pat-pat of running feet accompanying it. Whoever it was, was in a big hurry—

The pat-pat went on past until it had nearly died out, then turned, started back again quicker than before. Then it stopped right opposite where he was. There was an instant’s breathless pause...

Then the slide whirred back and a blond girl stumbled in toward him, both arms stretched out in mute appeal for help. He was on his feet by the time she’d covered the short space between them. He got a blurred impression of what she looked like as she threw herself against him, and stood panting and trembling within the circle of his arms.

She was all in. Two or three flecks of red splattered the front of her gold evening gown — even her dress was out of place in a spot like this. She hadn’t any shoes on, but you always had to leave your footgear at the door when you came in. Her blond hair made a tangled shimmer around her head and her attractive face was contorted with sheer panic. Her breathing was the quick, agonized panting of a hunted thing.

Hollinger looked down into her eyes — and whistled. He could tell by the contraction of the pupils that she’d been drugged. An opium pill, maybe, or morphine. He couldn’t be sure whether it hadn’t taken effect yet or she was just coming out of it.

Sound suddenly broke from her lips and she sobbed against his shoulder. “Say you’re real. Tell me I’m not seeing things!” Her fingers pressed against his chest. “Hide me! Don’t let them get me! They’re after me but I didn’t do it... I know I didn’t do it!”

He had squared off toward the opening in the slide, because the trampling of feet was coming this way now and he wanted to be ready.

She pulled at his blouse wrinkling it in her fingers. “No, don’t fight them. Don’t you see — that would be the worst thing you could do. It’s not just people, it’s the police—!”

Police? Hollinger swore. He took a quick step over and slammed the slide shut. He kept his hand on it tentatively, as though not sure of what he was going to do yet. He’d get the brig sure if he tangled with them, after the warning they’d been given on shipboard. But — this girl. Well, she was a girl, she was American, she was in a jam. He had to help her — he wasn’t any heel.

“What’re they after you for?” he asked. “What did you do?”

“They think I — murdered the man I came in with. I found him stabbed to death just now — right in the room with me when I... I woke up. I know — it sounds silly. They’ll never believe it.” She gestured helplessly toward the crimson flecks on her bodice. “This blood all over me — and the dagger in my lap when they came in— Oh please, get me out of this awful place! I know I didn’t do it. I know I couldn’t have—”

He eyed her ruefully.

She seemed to sense what was passing in his mind. She smiled wanly. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t anything like that. I’m not— The man was my fiancé. We were going to be married tomorrow. We were slumming. We stopped in here—”