Дэшил Хэммет - The Hunter and Other Stories

“What’s the old boy up to now?” a very thin squeaky voice asked. Its owner stood with the two men by the door. He was ridiculous. Well over six feet in height, he was a hill of flesh, a live sphere in loose gray clothes. His features were babyish — little round blue eyes, little lumpy nose, little soft mouth — all babyishly disposed, huddled together in the center of a great round face, between cheeks like melons, with smooth pink surfaces that seemed never have needed shaving. Out of this childish mountain more piping words came: “You oughtn’t to let him carry on like that, Tom. First thing you know he’ll be busting something and dying on us before we’re through with him.”

“The young fellow did it,” replied the cheerful man in the footman’s ill-fitting dress. “Seems like he’s a detective.”

“A detective!” The fat man’s features gathered closer together in a juvenile pout, blue eyes staring glassily at Trate. “Well, what does he come here for? We mustn’t have detectives!”

The long-armed brutish man in brown took a shuffling step forward. “I’ll bust him one,” he suggested.

“No, no, Bill!” the fat man squeaked impatiently, still staring at Trate. “That wouldn’t help. He’d still be a detective.”

“Oh, he ain’t so much a one that we got to worry about him,” the cheerful man said. “Seems like he ain’t been at it only for eleven days, and he comes in not knowing no what’s what than the man in the moon.”

But fat pink fingers continued to pluck at the puckered baby’s mouth, and the porcelain eyes neither blinked nor wavered from the young man’s face. “That’s all right,” the fat man squeaked, “but what’s he doing here? That’s what I want to know.”

“Seems like the kid got to the phone that time she slipped away from us in the mixup before we brought ’em down here, and she gives this young fellow a rumble, but she’s too rattlebrained to smart him up. He don’t know nothing until he gets in.”

The mountainous man’s distress lessened to a degree permitting the removal of his stare from Trate, and he turned to the door. “Well, maybe it’s all right,” his treble came over one of the thick pillows that were his shoulders, “but you tell him that he’s got to behave himself.”

He lumbered out, leaving the cheerful man and the malevolent man standing side by side looking at Trate cheerfully and malevolently. The young man put his back to those parallel but unlike gazes and found himself facing old Newbrith, who was sitting up on his sofa again, his eyes open, waving away his ministering womenfolk.

Looking at Trate, the old man repeated the burden of his recently screamed complaint, but now in the milder tone of incomplete resignation: “If she had to pick out one detective and bring him here blindfolded, why must she pick an amateur?”

No one had a direct reply to that. Trate mumbled an obvious something about everybody’s having been a novice at one time. The old man readily, if somewhat nastily, conceded the truth of that, but God knew he had troubles enough without being made Lesson II in a How To Be A Detective course.

“Now, Grandad, don’t be unreasonable,” Brenda Newbrith remonstrated. “You’ve no idea how clever Mr. Trate really is! He—” She smiled up at the young man. “What was that awfully clever thing you said at the Shermans’ about democracy being government with the deuces wild?”

The young man cleared his throat and smiled uncomfortably, and beyond that said nothing.

The girl’s father opened his tired eyes and became barely audible. “Good Lord!” he murmured. “A detective who amuses the guests with epigrams to keep them from making off with the wedding presents!”

“You just wait!” the girl said. “You’ll see! Won’t they, Mr. Trate?”

Mr. Trate said, “Yes. That is— Well—”

Mrs. Newbrith, raising her eyes from the ruins of her vial on the floor, said, “I don’t understand what all this pother is about. If the young man is really a detective, he will arrest these criminals at once. If he isn’t, he isn’t, and that’s the end of it, though I grant that Brenda might have exercised greater judgment when she—”

“Go ahead, young fellow,” Tom called encouragingly from the other end of the room, “detect something for the lady!”

The man with the brutish muzzle also spoke. “I wish Joe would leave me take a poke at him,” he grumbled.

“You can save us, can’t you, Mr. Trate?” the girl asked pointblank, looking up at him with blue eyes in which doubt was becoming faintly discernible.

Trate flushed, cleared his throat. “I’m not a policeman, Miss Newbrith, and I have no reason to believe that Mr. Newbrith wishes to engage my services.”

“None at all,” the old man agreed.

The girl was not easily put aside.

“I engage you,” she told him.

“I’m sorry,” Trate said, “but it would have to be Mr. Newbrith.”

“That’s silly! And besides, if you succeeded in doing something, you know Grandad would reward you.”

Trate shook his head again.

“Ethical detectives do not operate on contingent fees,” said he as if reciting a recently studied lesson.

“Do you mean to do nothing? Are you trying to make me ridiculous? After I thought it would be such a wonderful opportunity for you, and gave you a chance any other man would jump at!”

Before Trate could reply to this, the fat man’s treble was quivering in the room again. “Didn’t I tell you you’d have to make him behave himself?” he asked his henchmen.

“He’s just arguing,” the stolid Tom defended Hugh. “There ain’t no harm in the boy.”

“Well, make him sit down and keep quiet.”

The brutish Bill shuffled forward. “He’ll sit down or I’ll slap him down,” he promised.

Hugh found a vacant gilt chair in a corner half behind the elder Newbrith’s sofa. Bill said, “Ar-r-r!” hesitated, looked back at the fat man and returned to his post by the door.

The mountain of flesh turned its child’s eyes on old Newbrith, raised a hand like an obese pink star, and beckoned with a finger that curved rather than crooked, so cased in flesh were its joints.

Old Newbrith caught the unchewed end of his mustache in his mouth, but he did not get up from his sofa.

“You’ve got everything,” he protested. “I haven’t another thing that—”

“You oughtn’t to lie to me like that,” the fat man reproved him. “How about that piece of property on Temple Street?”

“But you can’t sell that kind of real estate by phone like stocks and bonds,” Newbrith objected. “Not for immediate cash!”

“ You can,” the fat man insisted, “especially if you’re willing to let it go for half of what it’s worth, like you are. Maybe nobody else could, but you can. Everybody knows you’re crazy, and anything you do won’t surprise them.”

Newbrith held his seat, stubbornly looking at the floor.

The fat man piped, “Bill!”

The brutish man shuffled toward the sofa.

Newbrith cursed into his mustache, got up, and followed the waddling mountain into the hall.

There was silence in the drawing-room. Bill and Tom held the door. The servants sat along their wall, variously regarding one another, the men at the door, and the four on the other side of the room. Mrs. Newbrith fidgeted in her chair, looking regretfully at the fragments of her vial, and picked at her magenta frock with round-tipped fingers that were pinkly striped with the marks of rings not long removed. Her husband rested wearily beside her, a cigar smoldering in his pale mouth. Their daughter sat a little away from them, looking stony defiance from face to face. Hugh Trate, back in his corner, had lighted a cigarette, and sat staring through smoke at his outstretched crossed legs. His face, every line of his pose, affected an introspective preoccupation with his own affairs that was flawed by an unmistakable air of sulkiness.