Дэшил Хэммет - The Hunter and Other Stories

In front of the house a high grilled gate interrupted the black fence. It was a gate designed for shutting out rather than admitting, a gate wrought in lines as uninviting as the upright sharp pickets, but it was not locked. The young man closed it behind him and went up the walk to the house.

The young man shut the gate behind him and went up the walk to the house. The door was opened in response to the bell by a stolid red-faced man of genial cast whose footman’s clothes did not fit him very well.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I should like to see Miss Newbrith.”

“She ain’t home. Sorry.”

“Wait a moment,” the young man insisted as the door began to close. “I’ve an appointment. She phoned me. My name is Trate.”

“That’s different,” the stolid man said cheerfully, opening the door again and stepping to one side. “Why didn’t you say so? Come on in.” He closed the door behind the young man and started up a broad flight of stairs. “Up this way.”

On the second floor landing the stolid man halted to face Trate again.

“You don’t happen to be carrying a gun, now do you?” he asked pleasantly.

“Why no.”

“You see, we can’t take no chances,” the man explained, and, stepping close, ran swift hands over Trate’s hips, chest, and belly. “We got to be mighty careful in a spot like this.” He stepped back and moved toward a broad closed door on the right, throwing a friendly “Come along” over his shoulder.

Eyes wide in surprise, Trate followed obediently to the door, which the man opened with a flourish.

“A young fellow to see Miss Newbrith,” he shouted merrily, bowing low with an absurd outflinging of his arms. When he straightened up he added, “Ha-ha-ha!”

Hesitantly Trate advanced into the room wherein was nothing to set him immediately at ease. It was a drawing-room in gold and white, quite long, elaborate with the carved, inlaid, and stuccoed richness of the fourteenth Louis’ day. Opaque blinds and heavy curtains hid the windows. A glittering chandelier lighted the room. From the farther end a dozen faces looked at Trate with indefinite expectancy.

The owners of these faces had divided themselves into two groups. The larger numbered eight. They, no matter how comfortably established on chairs in this gold and white room, were unmistakably servants. Across the floor from them the smaller group occupied more space. The eldest of these four sat upright in the middle of a sofa. He was small, slight, old, and well preserved except that his mustache, white as his hair, was ragged at one end with recent gnawing. To his right a full-bodied woman of forty-something in a magenta frock leaned forward on her gilded chair and held a champlevé vial near her thin nose. Beside her a middle-aged man sat in a similar chair. He resembled — in younger, plumper mould — the man on the sofa, but was paler, more tired than the elder.

The fourth member of the group stood up when Hugh came in. She derived from both the sitting men: a girl of less than twenty, small with a daintiness of bone-structure and fleshing which, however delicate, had nothing to do with fragility. Her face was saved from the flat prettiness of mathematically proportioned features by her mouth: it was red, too narrow, full and curiously creased. She took four steps toward Trate, stopped, looked past him at the door through which he had come, and at him again. “Oh, Mr. Trate, it was nice of you to come so quickly!” she said.

The young man, still a dozen paces away, approached smiling somewhat stiffly, a little pink, looking at her with brown eyes that seemed uneasily aware of the concerted stare of the eleven other persons watching him with ambiguous hopefulness. He made a guttural gargling sound, in no way intelligible, but manifestly polite in intention. The girl took his hand, then his hat and overcoat, and turned with him to face the others.

“Grandad,” she said to the old man on the sofa, “this is Mr. Trate. He—” She stopped, indicated something behind her by a swift sidewise jerk of her eyes, and nodded significantly.

“Say no more.” The old man’s glance darted for a fleeting instant past Trate. A dry whisper crept from behind his white mustache. “We are in your hands.”

Trate said something like, “Uh,” and shifted his feet uncertainly.

The girl told him that the tired man and the woman in magenta were her parents, and now the woman spoke, her voice nasally querulous. “The stout man is by far the most odious and I do wish you would secure him first.” She gestured with the champlevé vial toward the door.

Two men stood in that end of the room. One was the stolid man who had opened the door. He nodded and grinned amiably at Trate. His companion scowled. The companion was a short man in shabby brown, with arms too long hanging from shoulders too broad. Red-brown eyes peered malignantly from beneath the pulled-down visor of his cap. His face was dark, with a broad nose flat on his long and prominent upper lip above an outthrust chin.

Trate looked from one Newbrith to another. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” the old man assured him. “Your own way.”

Trate frowned questioning puzzlement at the girl.

She laughed, the creases in her red mouth multiplying its curves. “We must explain it to Mr. Trate. We can’t expect him to guess the situation.”

Old Newbrith’s ragged mustache blew out from his mouth in a great blast of air.

“Explain! Didn’t you—?”

“There was no time,” said the girl. “It took me nearly five minutes to get Mr. Trate on the wire, and by then they were hunting for me.”

The old man leaned forward with bulging eyes. “And you’ve no assistance? No men outside?”

“No, sir,” Trate said.

The elder Newbrith looked at the girl’s father and the girl’s father looked at him, each looking as if he found the sight of the other amazing. But the amazement with which they regarded one another was nothing to that with which they looked at the girl. The old man’s small fingers crushed invisible things on the sofa beside his legs.

“Precisely what did you tell Mr. Trate, Brenda?” he asked.

“Why, I simply told him who I was, reminded him I had met him at the Shermans’, and asked him if he could run up here immediately. That was all. There wasn’t time for anything else, Grandad. They were already hunting for me.”

“Yes, they would be,” said the old man, softer of voice, his face angrier. “So instead of giving the alarm to the first voice you heard, you wasted five minutes getting this — ah — young gentleman on the wire, and then hadn’t time to do more than — ah — casually invite him to join us?”

“Oh, but really,” his granddaughter protested, “Mr. Trate is very clever. And I thought this would be such a wonderful chance for him to make a reputation at the very beginning of his career.”

“Ah!” the old man cooed while wild lights twinkled in his eyes, “so our young friend is at the very beginning of his career, is he?”

“Yes. I met him at the Shermans’ reception. He was guarding the presents, and he told me that was his first case. He had only been a detective for three days then. Wasn’t that it, Mr. Trate?”

Mr. Trate said, “Uh — yes,” without taking his eyes from the old man’s face.

“So then our Mr. Trate has had by this time” — Newbrith was lisping with sweetness now — “no less than ten days experience?”

“Eleven,” Trate said, blushing a little.

Old Newbrith said, “Ah, eleven, to be sure!” and stood up. He smiled and his face was swollen and purple. He plucked two buttons from his coat and threw them away. He found a yellow scarf to tear into strips and a handful of cigars to crunch into brown flakes. He took the champlevé vial from his daughter-in-law’s hand and ground it under his heel. While thus engaged he screamed that his granddaughter was an idiot, a fool, a loon, a moron, a dolt, an ass, a lunatic, a goose, a simpleton, a booby, a numbskull, an imbecile, and a halfwit. Then he relapsed on the sofa, eyes closed, legs out, while daughter-in-law and granddaughter strove with loosening, fanning, chaffing hands to stop the bubbling in his upturned open mouth.