“Sorry. It was a nice thought, but I can’t take this.”
“Amthor he—he weesh to employ you, is it not?” She smiled again. Her lips rustled like tissue paper.
“I’d have to find out what the job is first.”
She nodded and got up slowly from behind the desk. She swished before me in a tight dress that fitted her like a mermaid’s skin and showed that she had a good figure if you like them four sizes bigger below the waist.
“I weel conduct you,” she said.
She pressed a button in the paneling and a door slid open noiselessly. There was a milky glow beyond it. I looked back at her smile before I went through. It was older than Egypt now. The door slid silently shut behind me.
There was nobody in the room.
It was octagonal, draped in black velvet from floor to ceiling, with a high remote black ceiling that may have been of velvet too. In the middle of a coal black lustreless rug stood an octagonal white table, just large enough for two pairs of elbows and in the middle of it a milk white globe on a black stand. The light came from this. How, I couldn’t see. On either side of the table there was a white octagonal stool which was a smaller edition of the table. Over against one wall there was one more such stool. There were no windows. There was nothing else in the room, nothing at all. On the walls there was not even a light fixture. If there were other doors, I didn’t see them. I looked back at the one by which I had come in. I couldn’t see that either.
I stood there for perhaps fifteen seconds with the faint obscure feeling of being watched. There was probably a peephole somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it. I gave up trying. I listened to my breath. The room was so still that I could hear it going through my nose, softly, like little curtains rustling.
Then an invisible door on the far side of the room slid open and a man stepped through and the door closed behind him. The man walked straight to the table with his head down and sat on one of the octagonal stools and made a sweeping motion with one of the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.
“Please be seated. Opposite me. Do not smoke and do not fidget. Try to relax, completely. Now how may I serve you?”
I sat down, got a cigarette into my mouth and rolled it along my lips without lighting it. I looked him over. He was thin, tall and straight as a steel rod. He had the palest finest white hair I ever saw. It could have been strained through silk gauze. His skin was as fresh as a rose petal. He might have been thirty-five or sixty-five. He was ageless. His hair was brushed straight back from as good a profile as Barrymore ever had. His eyebrows were coal black, like the walls and ceiling and floor. His eyes were deep, far too deep. They were the depthless drugged eyes of the somnambulist. They were like a well I read about once. It was nine hundred years old, in an old castle. You could drop a stone into it and wait. You could listen and wait and then you would give up waiting and laugh and then just as you were ready to turn away a faint, minute splash would come back up to you from the bottom of that well, so tiny, so remote that you could hardly believe a well like that possible.
His eyes were deep like that. And they were also eyes without expression, without soul, eyes that could watch lions tear a man to pieces and never change, that could watch a man impaled and screaming in the hot sun with his eyelids cut off.
He wore a double-breasted black business suit that had been cut by an artist. He stared vaguely at my fingers.
“Please do not fidget,” he said. “It breaks the waves, disturbs my concentration.”
“It makes the ice melt, the butter run and the cat squawk,” I said.
He smiled the faintest smile in the world. “You didn’t come here to be impertinent, I’m sure.”
“You seem to forget why I did come. By the way, I gave that hundred dollar bill back to your secretary. I came, as you may recall, about some cigarettes. Russian cigarettes filled with marihuana. With your card rolled in the hollow mouthpieces.”
“You wish to find out why that happened?”
“Yeah. I ought to be paying you the hundred dollars.”
“That will not be necessary. The answer is simple. There are things I do not know. This is one of them.”
For a moment I almost believed him. His face was as smooth as an angel’s wing.
“Then why send me a hundred dollars—and a tough Indian that stinks—and a car? By the way, does the Indian have to stink? If he’s working for you, couldn’t you sort of get him to take a bath?”
“He is a natural medium. They are rare—like diamonds, and like diamonds, are sometimes found in dirty places. I understand you are a private detective?”
“Yes.”
“I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.”
“And I think I need not detain you any longer.”
“You’re not detaining me,” I said. “I’m detaining you. I want to know why those cards were in those cigarettes.”
He shrugged the smallest shrug that could be shrugged. “My cards are available to anybody. I do not give my friends marihuana cigarettes. Your question remains stupid.”
“I wonder if this would brighten it up any. The cigarettes were in a cheap Chinese or Japanese case of imitation tortoiseshell. Ever see anything like that?”
“No. Not that I recall.”
“I can brighten it up a little more. The case was in the pocket of a man named Lindsay Marriott. Ever hear of him?”
He thought. “Yes. I tried at one time to treat him for camera shyness. He was trying to get into pictures. It was a waste of time. Pictures did not want him.”
“I can guess that,” I said. “He would photograph like Isadora Duncan. I’ve still got the big one left. Why did you send me the C-note?”
“My dear Mr. Marlowe,” he said coldly, “I am no fool. I am in a very sensitive profession. I am a quack. That is to say I do things which the doctors in their small frightened selfish guild cannot accomplish. I am in danger at all times—from people like you. I merely wish to estimate the danger before dealing with it.”
“Pretty trivial in my case, huh?”
“It hardly exists,” he said politely and made a peculiar motion with his left hand which made my eyes jump at it. Then he put it down very slowly on the white table and looked at it. Then he raised his depthless eyes again and folded his arms.
“Your hearing—”
“I smell it now,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of him.”
I turned my head to the left. The Indian was sitting on the third white stool against the black velvet.
He had some kind of a white smock on him over his other clothes. He was sitting without a movement, his eyes closed, his head bent forward a little, as if he had been asleep for an hour. His dark strong face was full of shadows.
I looked back at Amthor. He was smiling his minute smile.
“I bet that makes the dowagers shed their false teeth,” I said. “What does he do for real money—sit on your knee and sing French songs?”
He made an impatient gesture. “Get to the point, please.”
“Last night Marriott hired me to go with him on an expedition that involved paying some money to some crooks at a spot they picked. I got knocked on the head. When I came out of it Marriott had been murdered.”
Nothing changed much in Amthor’s face. He didn’t scream or run up the walls. But for him the reaction was sharp. He unfolded his arms and refolded them the other way. His mouth looked grim. Then he sat like a stone lion outside the Public Library.
“The cigarettes were found on him,” I said.
He looked at me coolly. “But not by the police, I take it. Since the police have not been here.”
“Correct.”
“The hundred dollars,” he said very softly, “was hardly enough.”
“That depends what you expect to buy with it.”
“You have t
hese cigarettes with you?”
“One of them. But they don’t prove anything. As you said, anybody could get your cards. I’m just wondering why they were where they were. Any ideas?”
“How well did you know Mr. Marriott?” he asked softly.
“Not at all. But I had ideas about him. They were so obvious they stuck out.”
Amthor tapped lightly on the white table. The Indian still slept with his chin on his huge chest, his heavy-lidded eyes tight shut.
“By the way, did you ever meet a Mrs. Grayle, a wealthy lady who lives in Bay City?”
He nodded absently. “Yes, I treated her centers of speech. She had a very slight impediment.”
“You did a sweet job on her,” I said. “She talks as good as I do now.”
That failed to amuse him. He still tapped on the table. I listened to the taps. Something about them I didn’t like. They sounded like a code. He stopped, folded his arms again and leaned back against the air.
“What I like about this job everybody knows everybody,” I said. “Mrs. Grayle knew Marriott too.”
“How did you find that out?” he asked slowly.
I didn’t say anything.
“You will have to tell the police—about those cigarettes,” he said.
I shrugged.
“You are wondering why I do not have you thrown out,” Amthor said pleasantly. “Second Planting could break your neck like a celery stalk. I am wondering myself. You seem to have some sort of theory. Blackmail I do not pay. It buys nothing—and I have many friends. But naturally there are certain elements which would like to show me in a bad light. Psychiatrists, sex specialists, neurologists, nasty little men with rubber hammers and shelves loaded with the literature of aberrations. And of course they are all—doctors. While I am still a—quack. What is your theory?”
I tried to stare him down, but it couldn’t be done. I felt myself licking my lips.
He shrugged lightly. “I can’t blame you for wanting to keep it to yourself. This is amatter that I must give thought to. Perhaps you are a much more intelligent man than I thought. I also make mistakes. In the meantime—” He leaned forward and put a hand on each side of the milky globe.
“I think Marriott was a blackmailer of women,” I said. “And finger man for a jewel mob. But who told him what women to cultivate—so that he would know their comings and goings, get intimate with them, make love to them, make them load up with the ice and take them out, and then slip to a phone and tell the boys where to operate?”
“That,” Amthor said carefully, “is your picture of Marriott—and of me. I am slightly disgusted.”
I leaned forward until my face was not more than a foot from his. “You’re in a racket. Dress it up all you please and it’s still a racket. And it wasn’t just the cards, Amthor. As you say, anybody could get those. It wasn’t the marihuana. You wouldn’t be in a cheap line like that—not with your chances. But on the back of each card there is a blank space. And on blank spaces, or even on written ones, there is sometimes invisible writing.”
He smiled bleakly, but I hardly saw it. His hands moved over the milky bowl.
The light went out. The room was as black as Carry Nation’s bonnet.
TWENTY-TWO
I kicked my stool back and stood up and jerked the gun out of the holster under my arm. But it was no good. My coat was buttoned and I was too slow. I’d have been too slow anyway, if it came to shooting anybody.
There was a soundless rush of air and an earthy smell. In the complete darkness the Indian hit me from behind and pinned my arms to my sides. He started to lift me. I could have got the gun out still and fanned the room with blind shots, but I was a long way from friends. It didn’t seem as if there was any point in it.
I let go of the gun and took hold of his wrists. They were greasy and hard to hold. The Indian breathed gutturally and set me down with a jar that lifted the top of my head. He had my wrists now, instead of me having his. He twisted them behind me fast and a knee like a corner stone went into my back. He bent me. I can be bent. I’m not the City Hall. He bent me.
I tried to yell, for no reason at all. Breath panted in my throat and couldn’t get out. The Indian threw me sideways and got a body scissors on me as I fell. He had me in a barrel. His hands went to my neck. Sometimes I wake up in the night. I feel them there and I smell the smell of him. I feel the breath fighting and losing and the greasy fingers digging in. Then I get up and take a drink and turn the radio on.
I was just about gone when the light flared on again, blood red, on account of the blood in my eyeballs and at the back of them. A face floated around and a hand pawed me delicately, but the other hands stayed on my throat.
A voice said softly, “Let him breathe—a little.”
The fingers slackened. I wrenched loose from them. Something that glinted hit me on the side of the jaw.
The voice said softly: “Get him on his feet.”
The Indian got me on my feet. He pulled me back against the wall, holding me by both twisted wrists.
“Amateur,” the voice said softly and the shiny thing that was as hard and bitter as death hit me again, across the face. Something warm trickled. I licked at it and tasted iron and salt.
A hand explored my wallet. A hand explored all my pockets. The cigarette in tissue paper came out and was unwrapped. It went somewhere in the haze that was in front of me.
“There were three cigarettes?” the voice said gently, and the shining thing hit my jaw again.
“Three,” I gulped.
“Just where did you say the others were?”
“In my desk—at the office.”
The shiny thing hit me again. “You are probably lying—but I can find out.” Keys shone with funny little red lights in front of me. The voice said: “Choke him a little more.”
The iron fingers went into my throat. I was strained back against him, against the smell of him and the hard muscles of his stomach. I reached up and took one of his fingers and tried to twist it.
The voice said softly: “Amazing. He’s learning.”
The glinting thing swayed through the air again. It smacked my jaw, the thing that had once been my jaw.
“Let him go. He’s tame,” the voice said.
The heavy strong arms dropped away and I swayed forward and took a step and steadied myself. Amthor stood smiling very slightly, almost dreamily in front of me. He held my gun in his delicate, lovely hand. He held it pointed at my chest.
“I could teach you,” he said in his soft voice. “But to what purpose? A dirty little man in a dirty little world. One spot of brightness on you and you would still be that. Is it not so?” He smiled, so beautifully.
I swung at his smile with everything I had left.
It wasn’t so bad considering. He reeled and blood came out of both his nostrils. Then he caught himself and straightened up and lifted the gun again.
“Sit down, my child,” he said softly. “I have visitors coming. I am so glad you hit me. It helps a great deal.”
I felt for the white stool and sat down and put my head down on the white table beside the milky globe which was now shining again softly. I stared at it sideways, my face on the table. The light fascinated me. Nice light, nice soft light.
Behind me and around me there was nothing but silence.
I think I went to sleep, just like that, with a bloody face on the table, and a thin beautiful devil with my gun in his hand watching me and smiling.
TWENTY-THREE
“All right,” the big one said. “You can quit stalling now.”
I opened my eyes and sat up.
“Out in the other room, pally.”
I stood up, still dreamy. We went somewhere, through a door. Then I saw where it was—the reception room with the windows all around. It was black dark now outside.
The woman with the wrong rings sat at her desk. A man stood beside her.
“Sit here, pally.”
He pushed me down. It
was a nice chair, straight but comfortable but I wasn’t in the mood for it. The woman behind the desk had a notebook open and was reading out loud from it. A short elderly man with a deadpan expression and a gray mustache was listening to her.
Amthor was standing by a window, with his back to the room, looking out at the placid line of the ocean, far off, beyond the pier lights, beyond the world. He looked at it as if he loved it. He half turned his head to look at me once, and I could see that the blood had been washed off his face, but his nose wasn’t the nose I had first met, not by two sizes. That made me grin, cracked lips and all.
“You got fun, pally?”
I looked at what made the sound, what was in front of me and what had helped me get where I was. He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of saying his prayers. But he had humorous eyes.
He stood in front of me splay-legged, holding my open wallet in his hand, making scratches on the leather with his right thumbnail, as if he just liked to spoil things. Little things, if they were all he had. But probably faces would give him more fun.
“Peeper, huh, pally? From the big bad burg, huh? Little spot of blackmail, huh?”
His hat was on the back of his head. He had dusty brown hair darkened by sweat on his forehead. His humorous eyes were flecked with red veins.
My throat felt as though it had been through a mangle. I reached up and felt it. That Indian. He had fingers like pieces of tool steel.
The dark woman stopped reading out of her notebook and closed it. The elderly smallish man with the gray mustache nodded and came over to stand behind the one who was talking to me.
“Cops?” I asked, rubbing my chin.
“What do you think, pally?”
Policeman’s humor. The small one had a cast in one eye, and it looked half blind.
“Not L.A.,” I said, looking at him. “That eye would retire him in Los Angeles.”