Fly Paper and Other Stories (9 page)

“I'll have to talk to him first,” I said. “He's staying in the village?”

“He has a cottage on the hill above. It's the first one on the left after you turn into the main road.” Ringgo dropped his cigarette into the fire and looked thoughtfully at me, biting his lower lip. “I don't know how you and the commodore are going to get along. You can't make jokes with him. He doesn't understand them, and he'll distrust you on that account.”

“I'll try to be careful,” I promised. “No good offering this Sherry money?”

“Hell, no,” he said softly. “He's too cracked for that.”

We took down the dog's carcass, kicked the fire apart, and trod it out in the mud before we returned to the house.

V

The country was fresh and bright under clear sunlight the next morning. A warm breeze was drying the ground and chasing raw-cotton clouds across the sky.

At ten o'clock I set out afoot for Captain Sherry's. I didn't have any trouble finding his house, a pinkish stuccoed bungalow with a terra cotta roof, reached from the road by a cobbled walk.

A white-clothed table with two places set stood on the tiled veranda that stretched across the front of the bungalow.

Before I could knock, the door was opened by a slim black man, not much more than a boy, in a white jacket. His features were thinner than most American negroes', aquiline, pleasantly intelligent.

“You're going to catch colds lying around in wet roads,” I said, “if you don't get run over.”

His mouth-ends ran towards his ears in a grin that showed me a lot of strong yellow teeth.

“Yes, sir,” he said, buzzing his s's, rolling the r, bowing. “The
capitaine
have waited breakfast that you be with him. You do sit down, sir. I will call him.”

“Not dog meat?”

His mouth-ends ran back and up again and he shook his head vigorously.

“No, sir.” He held up his black hands and counted the fingers. “There is orange and kippers and kidneys grilled and eggs and marmalade and toast and tea or coffee. There is not dog meat.”

“Fine,” I said, and sat down in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.

I had time to light a cigarette before Captain Sherry came out.

He was a gaunt tall man of forty. Sandy hair, parted in the middle, was brushed flat to his small head, above a sunburned face. His eyes were gray, with lower lids as straight as ruler-edges. His mouth was another hard straight line under a close-clipped sandy mustache. Grooves like gashes ran from his nostrils past his mouth-corners. Other grooves, just as deep, ran down his cheeks to the sharp ridge of his jaw. He wore a gaily striped flannel bathrobe over sand-colored pajamas.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly, and gave me a semi-salute. He didn't offer to shake hands. “Don't get up. It will be some minutes before Marcus has breakfast ready. I slept late. I had a most abominable dream.” His voice was a deliberately languid drawl. “I dreamed that Theodore Kavalov's throat had been cut from here to here.” He put bony fingers under his ears. “It was an atrociously gory business. He bled and screamed horribly, the swine.”

I grinned up at him, asking:

“And you didn't like that?”

“Oh, getting his throat cut was all to the good, but he bled and screamed so filthily.” He raised his nose and sniffed. “That's honeysuckle somewhere, isn't it?”

“Smells like it. Was it throat-cutting that you had in mind when you threatened him?”

“When I threatened him,” he drawled. “My dear fellow, I did nothing of the sort. I was in Udja, a stinking Moroccan town close to the Algerian frontier, and one morning a voice spoke to me from an orange tree. It said: ‘Go to Farewell, in California, in the States, and there you will see Theodore Kavalov die.' I thought that a capital idea. I thanked the voice, told Marcus to pack, and came here. As soon as I arrived I told Kavalov about it, thinking perhaps he would die then and I wouldn't be hung up here waiting. He didn't, though, and too late I regretted not having asked the voice for a definite date. I should hate having to waste months here.”

“That's why you've been trying to hurry it up?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“
Schrecklichkeit
,” I said, “rocky skulls, dog barbecues, vanishing corpses.”

“I've been fifteen years in Africa,” he said. “I've too much faith in voices that come from orange trees where no one is to try to give them a hand. You needn't fancy I've had anything to do with whatever has happened.”

“Marcus?”

Sherry stroked his freshly shaven cheeks and replied:

“That's possible. He has an incorrigible bent for the ruder sort of African horse-play. I'll gladly cane him for any misbehavior of which you've reasonably definite proof.”

“Let me catch him at it,” I said, “and I'll do my own caning.”

Sherry leaned forward and spoke in a cautious undertone:

“Be sure he suspects nothing till you've a firm grip on him. He's remarkably effective with either of his knives.”

“I'll try to remember that. The voice didn't say anything about Ringgo?”

“There was no need. When the body dies, the hand is dead.”

Black Marcus came out carrying food. We moved to the table and I started on my second breakfast.

Sherry wondered whether the voice that had spoken to him from the orange tree had also spoken to Kavalov. He had asked Kavalov, he said, but hadn't received a very satisfactory answer. He believed that voices which announced deaths to people's enemies usually also warned the one who was to die. “That is,” he said, “the conventional way of doing it, I believe.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'll try to find out for you. Maybe I ought to ask him what he dreamed last night, too.”

“Did he look nightmarish this morning?”

“I don't know. I left before he was up.”

Sherry's eyes became hot gray points.

“Do you mean,” he asked, “that you've no idea what shape he's in this morning, whether he's alive or not, whether my dream was a true one or not?”

“Yeah.”

The hard line of his mouth loosened into a slow delighted smile.

“By Jove,” he said, “That's capital! I thought—you gave me the impression of knowing positively that there was nothing to my dream, that it was only a meaningless dream.”

He clapped his hands sharply.

Black Marcus popped out of the door.

“Pack,” Sherry ordered. “The bald one is finished. We're off.”

Marcus bowed and backed grinning into the house.

“Hadn't you better wait to make sure?” I asked.

“But I am sure,” he drawled, “as sure as when the voice spoke from the orange tree. There is nothing to wait for now: I have seen him die.”

“In a dream.”

“Was it a dream?” he asked carelessly.

When I left, ten or fifteen minutes later, Marcus was making noises indoors that sounded as if he actually was packing.

Sherry shook hands with me, saying:

“Awfully glad to have had you for breakfast. Perhaps we'll meet again if your work ever brings you to northern Africa. Remember me to Miriam and Dolph. I can't sincerely send condolences.”

Out of sight of the bungalow, I left the road for a path along the hillside above, and explored the country for a higher spot from which Sherry's place could be spied on. I found a pip, a vacant ramshackle house on a jutting ridge off to the northeast. The whole of the bungalow's front, part of one side, and a good stretch of the cobbled walk, including its juncture with the road, could be seen from the vacant house's front porch. It was a rather long shot for naked eyes, but with field glasses it would be just about perfect, even to a screen of over-grown bushes in front.

When I got back to the Kavalov house Ringgo was propped up on gay cushions in a reed chair under a tree, with a book in his hand.

“What do you think of him?” he asked. “Is he cracked?”

“Not very. He wanted to be remembered to you and Mrs. Ringgo. How's the arm this morning?”

“Rotten. I must have let it get too damp last night. It gave me hell all night.”

“Did you see Captain Cat-and-mouse?” Kavalov's whining voice came from behind me. “And did you find any satisfaction in that?”

I turned around. He was coming down the walk from the house. His face was more gray than brown this morning, but what I could see of his throat, above the v of a wing collar, was uncut enough.

“He was packing when I left,” I said. “Going back to Africa.”

VI

That day was Thursday. Nothing else happened that day.

Friday morning I was awakened by the noise of my bedroom door being opened violently.

Martin, the thin-faced valet, came dashing into my room and began shaking me by the shoulder, though I was sitting up by the time he reached my bedside.

His thin face was lemon-yellow and ugly with fear.

“It's happened,” he babbled. “Oh, my God, it's happened!”

“What's happened?”

“It's happened. It's happened.”

I pushed him aside and got out of bed. He turned suddenly and ran into my bathroom. I could hear him vomiting as I pushed my feet into slippers.

Kavalov's bedroom was three doors below mine, on the same side of the building.

The house was full of noises, excited voices, doors opening and shutting, though I couldn't see anybody.

I ran down to Kavalov's door. It was open.

Kavalov was in there, lying on a low Spanish bed. The bedclothes were thrown down across the foot.

Kavalov was lying on his back. His throat had been cut, a curving cut that paralleled the line of his jaw between points an inch under his ear lobes.

Where his blood had soaked into the blue pillow case and blue sheet it was purple as grape-juice. It was thick and sticky, already clotting.

Ringgo came in wearing a bathrobe like a cape.

“It's happened,” I growled, using the valet's words.

Ringgo looked dully, miserably, at the bed and began cursing in a choked, muffled, voice.

The red-faced blonde woman—Louella Qually, the housekeeper—came in, screamed, pushed past us, and ran to the bed, still screaming. I caught her arm when she reached for the covers.

“Let things alone,” I said.

“Cover him up. Cover him up, the poor man!” she cried.

I took her away from the bed. Four or five servants were in the room by now. I gave the housekeeper to a couple of them, telling them to take her out and quiet her down. She went away laughing and crying.

Ringgo was still staring at the bed.

“Where's Mrs. Ringgo?” I asked.

He didn't hear me. I tapped his good arm and repeated the question.

“She's in her room. She—she didn't have to see it to know what had happened.”

“Hadn't you better look after her?”

He nodded, turned slowly, and went out.

The valet, still lemon-yellow, came in.

“I want everybody on the place, servants, farm hands, everybody downstairs in the front room,” I told him. “Get them all there right away, and they're to stay there till the sheriff comes.”

“Yes, sir,” he said and went downstairs, the others following him.

I closed Kavalov's door and went across to the library, where I phoned the sheriff's office in the county seat. I talked to a deputy named Hilden. When I had told him my story he said the sheriff would be at the house within half an hour.

I went to my room and dressed. By the time I had finished, the valet came up to tell me that everybody was assembled in the front room—everybody except the Ringgos and Mrs. Ringgo's maid.

I was examining Kavalov's bedroom when the sheriff arrived. He was a white-haired man with mild blue eyes and a mild voice that came out indistinctly under a white mustache. He had brought three deputies, a doctor and a coroner with him.

“Ringgo and the valet can tell you more than I can,” I said when we had shaken hands all around. “I'll be back as soon as I can make it. I'm going to Sherry's. Ringgo will tell you where he fits in.”

In the garage I selected a muddy Chevrolet and drove to the bungalow. Its doors and windows were tight, and my knocking brought no answer.

I went back along the cobbled walk to the car, and rode down into Farewell. There I had no trouble learning that Sherry and Marcus had taken the two-ten train for Los Angeles the afternoon before, with three trunks and half a dozen bags that the village expressman had checked for them.

After sending a telegram to the Agency's Los Angeles branch, I hunted up the man from whom Sherry had rented the bungalow.

He could tell me nothing about his tenants except that he was disappointed in their not staying even a full two weeks. Sherry had returned the keys with a brief note saying he had been called away unexpectedly.

I pocketed the note. Handwriting specimens are always convenient to have. Then I borrowed the keys to the bungalow and went back to it.

I didn't find anything of value there, except a lot of fingerprints that might possibly come in handy later. There was nothing there to tell me where my men had gone.

I returned to Kavalov's.

The sheriff had finished running the staff through the mill.

“Can't get a thing out of them,” he said. “Nobody heard anything and nobody saw anything, from bedtime last night, till the valet opened the door to call him at eight o'clock this morning, and saw him dead like that. You know any more than that?”

“No. They tell you about Sherry?”

“Oh, yes. That's our meat, I guess, huh?”

“Yeah. He's supposed to have cleared out yesterday afternoon, with his black man, for Los Angeles. We ought to be able to find the work in that. What does the doctor say?”

“Says he was killed between three and four this morning, with a heavyish knife—one clean slash from left to right, like a left-handed man would do it.”