III
I was in the doorway of a low-ceilinged oval room furnished and decorated in gray, white and silver. Two men and a woman were there.
The older man—he was somewhere in his fifties—got up from a deep gray chair and bowed ceremoniously at me. He was a plump man of medium height, completely bald, dark-skinned and pale-eyed. He wore a wax-pointed gray mustache and a straggly gray imperial.
“Mr. Kavalov?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.” His was the whining voice.
I told him who I was. He shook my hand and then introduced me to the others.
The woman was his daughter. She was probably thirty. She had her father’s narrow, full-lipped mouth, but her eyes were dark, her nose was short and straight, and her skin was almost colorless. Her face had Asia in it. It was pretty, passive, unintelligent.
The man with the baritone voice was her husband. His name was Ringgo. He was six or seven years older than his wife, neither tall nor heavy, but well setup. His left arm was in splints and a sling. The knuckles of his right hand were darkly bruised. He had a lean, bony, quick-witted face, bright dark eyes with plenty of lines around them, and a good-natured hard mouth.
He gave me his bruised hand, wriggled his bandaged arm at me, grinned, and said:
“I’m sorry you missed this, but the future injuries are yours.”
“How did it happen?” I asked.
Kavalov raised a plump hand.
“Time enough it is to go into that when we have eaten,” he said. “Let us have our dinner first.”
We went into a small green and brown dining-room where a small square table was set. I sat facing Ringgo across a silver basket of orchids that stood between tall silver candlesticks in the center of the table. Mrs. Ringgo sat to my right, Kavalov to my left. When Kavalov sat down I saw the shape of an automatic pistol in his hip pocket.
Two men servants waited on us. There was a lot of food and all of it was well turned out. We ate caviar, some sort of consommé, sand dabs, potatoes and cucumber jelly, roast lamb, corn and string beans, asparagus, wild duck and hominy cakes, artichoke-and-tomato salad, and orange ice. We drank white wine, claret, Burgundy, coffee and crème de menthe.
Kavalov ate and drank enormously. None of us skimped.
Kavalov was the first to disregard his own order that nothing be said about his troubles until after we had eaten. When he had finished his soup he put down his spoon and said:
“I am not a child. I will not be frightened.”
He blinked pale, worried eyes defiantly at me, his lips pouting between mustache and imperial.
Ringgo grinned pleasantly at him. Mrs. Ringgo’s face was as serene and inattentive as if nothing had been said.
“What is there to be frightened of?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Kavalov said. “Nothing excepting a lot of idiotic and very pointless trickery and playacting.”
“You can call it anything you want to call it,” a voice grumbled over my shoulder, “but I seen what I seen.”
The voice belonged to one of the men who was waiting on the table, a sallow, youngish man with a narrow, slack-lipped face. He spoke with a subdued sort of stubbornness, and without looking up from the dish he was putting before me.
Since nobody else paid any attention to the servant’s clearly audible remark, I turned my face to Kavalov again. He was trimming the edge of a sand dab with the side of his fork.
“What kind of trickery and playacting?” I asked.
Kavalov put down his fork and rested his wrists on the edge of the table. He rubbed his lips together and leaned over his plate towards me.
“Supposing”—he wrinkled his forehead so that his bald scalp twitched forward—“you have done injury to a man ten years ago.” He turned his wrists quickly, laying his hands palms-up on the white cloth. “You have done this injury in the ordinary business manner—you understand?—for profit. There is not anything personal concerned. You do not hardly know him. And then supposing he came to you after all those ten years and said to you: ‘I have come to watch you die.’ ” He turned his hands over, palms down. “Well, what would you think?”
“I wouldn’t,” I replied, “think I ought to hurry up my dying on his account.”
The earnestness went out of his face, leaving it blank. He blinked at me for a moment and then began eating his fish. When he had chewed and swallowed the last piece of sand dab he looked up at me again. He shook his head slowly, drawing down the corners of his mouth.
“That was not a good answer,” he said. He shrugged, and spread his fingers. “However, you will have to deal with this Captain Cat-and-mouse. It is for that I engaged you.”
I nodded.
Ringgo smiled and patted his bandaged arm, saying:
“I wish you more luck with him than I had.”
Mrs. Ringgo put out a hand and let the pointed fingertips touch her husband’s wrist for a moment.
I asked Kavalov:
“This injury I was to suppose I had done: how serious was it?”
He pursed his lips, made little wavy motions with the fingers of his right hand, and said:
“Oh—ah—ruin.”
“We can take it for granted, then, that your captain’s really up to something?”
“Good God!” said Ringgo, dropping his fork. “I wouldn’t like to think he’d broken my arm just in fun.”
Behind me the sallow servant spoke to his mate:
“He wants to know if we think the captain’s really up to something.”
“I heard him,” the other said gloomily. “A lot of help he’s going to be to us.”
Kavalov tapped his plate with a fork and made angry faces at the servants.
“Shut up,” he said. “Where is the roast?” He pointed the fork at Mrs. Ringgo. “Her glass is empty.” He looked at the fork. “See what care they take of my silver,” he complained, holding it out to me. “It has not been cleaned decently in a month.”
He put the fork down. He pushed back his plate to make room for his forearms on the table. He leaned over them, hunching his shoulders. He sighed. He frowned. He stared at me with pleading pale eyes.
“Listen,” he whined. “Am I a fool? Would I send to San Francisco for a detective if I did not need a detective? Would I pay you what you are charging me, when I could get plenty good enough detectives for half of that, if I did not require the best detective I could secure? Would I require so expensive a one if I did not know this captain for a completely dangerous fellow?”
I didn’t say anything. I sat still and looked attentive.
“Listen,” he whined. “This is not April-foolery. This captain means to murder me. He came here to murder me. He will certainly murder me if somebody does not stop him from it.”
“Just what has he done so far?” I asked.
“That is not it.” Kavalov shook his bald head impatiently. “I do not ask you to undo anything that he has done. I ask you to keep him from killing me. What has he done so far? Well, he has terrorized my people most completely. He has broken Dolph’s arm. He has done these things so far, if you must know.”
“How long has this been going on? How long has he been here?”
“A week and two days.”
“Did your chauffeur tell you about the black man we saw in the road?”
Kavalov pushed his lips together and nodded slowly.
“He wasn’t there when I went back,” I said.
He blew out his lips with a little puff and cried excitedly:
“I do not care anything about your black men and your roads. I care about not being murdered.”
“Have you said anything to the sheriff’s office?” I asked, trying to pretend I wasn’t getting peevish.
“That I have done. But to what good? Has he threatened me? Well, he has told me he has come to watch me die. From him, the way he said it, that is a threat. But to your sheriff it is not a threat. He has terrorized my people. Have I proof that he has done that? The sheriff says I have not. What absurdity! Do I need proof? Don’t I know? Must he leave fingerprints on the fright he causes? So it comes to this: the sheriff will keep an eye on him. ‘An eye,’ he said, mind you. Here I have twenty people, servants and farm hands, with forty eyes. And he comes and goes as he likes. An eye!”
“How about Ringgo’s arm?” I asked.
Kavalov shook his head impatiently and began to cut up his lamb.
Ringgo said:
“There’s nothing we can do about that. I hit him first.” He looked at his bruised knuckles. “I didn’t think he was that tough. Maybe I’m not as good as I used to be. Anyway, a dozen people saw me punch his jaw before he touched me. We performed at high noon in front of the post office.”
“Who is this captain?”
“It’s not him,” the sallow servant said. “It’s that black devil.”
Ringgo said:
“Sherry’s his name, Hugh Sherry. He was a captain in the British army when we knew him before—quartermasters department in Cairo. That was in 1917, all of twelve years ago. The commodore”—he nodded his head at his father-in-law—“was speculating in military supplies. Sherry should have been a line officer. He had no head for desk work. He wasn’t timid enough. Somebody decided the commodore wouldn’t have made so much money if Sherry hadn’t been so careless. They knew Sherry hadn’t made any money for himself. They cashiered Sherry at the same time they asked the commodore please to go away.”
Kavalov looked up from his plate to explain:
“Business is like that in wartime. They wouldn’t let me go away if I had done anything they could keep me there for.”
“And now, twelve years after you had him kicked out of the army in disgrace,” I said, “he comes here, threatens to kill you, so you believe, and sets out to spread panic among your people. Is that it?”
“That is not it,” Kavalov whined. “That is not it at all. I did not have him kicked out of any armies. I am a man of business. I take my profits where I find them. If somebody lets me take a profit that angers his employers, what is their anger to me? Second, I do not believe he means to kill me. I know that.”
“I’m trying to get it straight in my mind.”
“There is nothing to get straight. A man is going to murder me. I ask you not to let him do it. Is not that simple enough?”
“Simple enough,” I agreed, and stopped trying to talk to him.
Kavalov and Ringgo were smoking cigars, Mrs. Ringgo and I cigarettes over crème de menthe when the red-faced blonde woman in gray wool came in.
She came in hurriedly. Her eyes were wide open and dark. She said:
“Anthony says there’s a fire in the upper field.”
Kavalov crunched his cigar between his teeth and looked pointedly at me.
I stood up, asking:
“How do I get there?”
“I’ll show you the way,” Ringgo said, leaving his chair.
“Dolph,” his wife protested, “your arm.”
He smiled gently at her and said:
“I’m not going to interfere. I’m only going along to see how an expert handles these things.”