Free Fly Paper and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Page B

them out of the car. He carried them indoors.
    The woman stood aside for me to enter, saying:
    â€œNow I suppose you’ll want to wash up a little bit before you go in to dinner, and they won’t mind waiting for you the few minutes you’ll take if you hurry.”
    I said, “Yeah, thanks,” waited for her to get ahead of me again, and followed her up a curving flight of stairs that climbed along the inside of one of the cones that made up the building.
    She took me to a second-story bedroom where the thin man was unpacking my bags.
    â€œMartin will get you anything you need,” she assured me from the doorway, “and when you’re ready, just come on downstairs.”
    I said I would, and she went away. The thin man had finished unpacking by the time I had got out of coat, vest, collar and shirt. I told him there wasn’t anything else I needed, washed up in the adjoining bathroom, put on a fresh shirt and collar, my vest and coat, and went downstairs.
    The wide hall was empty. Voices came through an open doorway to the left.
    One voice was a nasal whine. It complained:
    â€œI will not have it. I will not put up with it. I am not a child, and I will not have it.”
    This voice’s t’s were a little too thick for t’s, but not thick enough to be d’s.
    Another voice was a lively, but slightly harsh, barytone. It said cheerfully:
    â€œWhat’s the good of saying we won’t put up with it, when we are putting up with it?”
    The third voice was feminine, a soft voice, but flat and spiritless. It said:
    â€œBut perhaps he did kill him.”
    The whining voice said: “I do not care. I will not have it.”
    The barytone voice said, cheerfully as before: “Oh, won’t you?”
    A doorknob turned farther down the hall. I didn’t want to be caught standing there listening. I advanced to the open doorway.
    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.
    â€œMr. Kavalov?” I asked.
    â€œYes, 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 barytone 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:
    â€œI’m sorry you missed this, but the future injuries are yours.”
    â€œHow did it happen?” I asked.
    Kavalov raised a plump hand.
    â€œTime 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,