Free The Song of the Flea by Gerald Kersh

lid, didn’t you?”
    “I did,” said Pym, blushing, “because occasionally I had to pawn it, and pawnshops want to know if the typewriter is really yours. It saves trouble to stick the receipt inside.”
    “You got it back from Greenberg’s yesterday, though?”
    “Well, yes. It was only a temporary …”
    “Shortage?”
    “Shortage. But what makes you ask?”
    “A certain party took your typewriter to Greenberg’s pawnshop this morning and asked them to lend money on it. See. Said it was their property. Greenberg’s clerk remembered you got it out yesterday. Asked a few questions. Clerk was told you’d given that typewriter away. Is that so?”
    “Look here, detective-sergeant,” said Pym, uneasily finical. “I wish you’d tell me what you’re driving at.”
    “Not driving at anything, Mr. Pym, I assure you. Routine enquiry. Did you give Miss Joyce your typewriter?”
    Hazily remembering something he had read in a novel, terrified of the Law as a child is terrified of the dark, Pym said: “Yes and no.”
    He looked and felt, now, like a man with a secret. The detective-sergeant said: “Now come on, Mr. Pym! You give a thing or you don’t give a thing. Which was it?”
    “I gave the lady to understand that my house was her house. You know the kind of thing,” said Pym, trying to laugh: “—‘Everything I Have Is Yours’—as in the song. You know what I mean. ‘Help yourself,’ you say to somebody, ‘go ahead and help yourself to anything you want.’ Do you see?”
    “That’s right. You need a typewriter in your business, I should think.”
    “Can’t get on without one,” said Pym. “God knows how men like Dickens wrote books as big as Dombey & Son all by hand. No wonder they died——”
    “—You got your typewriter out of pawn to give it away to Miss Joyce, I take it?”
    “Well, no, not exactly … no. Miss Joyce was welcome to an indefinite loan of it, so to speak. It’s my fault—I ought to have scraped that receipt off the inside of the cover. To be quite frank, Detective-Sergeant, I don’t know what all this fuss is about. What is it?”
    “Miss Joyce——”
    “—She could easily have misunderstood me, don’t you see? I have a loose way of talking, as you must have noticed.”
    “Miss Joyce is under arrest, Mr. Pym. She’s been knocking stuff off right and left. There’s a nine-carat gold watch and an eighteen-carat double-curb Albert chain, a walnut bed, twenty-five leather-bound books, and a valuable microscope in a mahogany case. Now your typewriter. Why don’t you charge her? She’s best pinned down, for everybody’s benefit,” said the detective-sergeant.
    “Charge her? I don’t want to charge her,” said Pym, “why should I?”
    “Listen,” said Detective-Sergeant Packard, very patiently. “I’m a bit older than you, Mr. Pym, and I’ve had a bit more experience than you of that class of woman. Give her an inch and she’ll take a mile. Let her getaway with it again, and one of these days she’ll steal something off of somebody that really needs it. She wants to be checked, you know; you’d be doingher a kindness to let her see that it isn’t as easy as she thinks.”
    In an uncertain voice Pym said: “I daresay you’re right, Detective-Sergeant, but …. it’s a difficult thing to explain … You know how our sort of people get the habit of helping themselves? You borrow my trousers; I borrow your boots: it’s not stealing. There’s a kind of understanding about it. I would have got the typewriter back in due course. Personally, I don’t want to do anything at all about it.”
    The detective-sergeant shrugged his heavy shoulders so that the chair creaked, and he laughed. “You don’t need that typewriter , I suppose? You don’t need it in your business?” he said.
    “Oh yes, I need it all right. All I want is to get it back. I’m not going to prosecute anybody.”
    “How did you think you were going to get it back? I suppose you