The Dark Star by Robert W. Chambers (best fiction novels of all time TXT) 📖

who looked like an American, was now speaking French like one to a perplexed official, inquiring where the Paris train was to be found. Neeland listened to the fluent information on his own account, then returned to the customs bench.

But the unusually minute search among his effects did not trouble him; the papers from the olive-wood box were buttoned in his breast pocket; and after a while the customs officials let him go to the train which stood beside an uncovered concrete platform beyond the quai, and toward which the fox-faced American had preceded him on legs that still wobbled with seasickness.

There were no Pullmans attached to the train, only the usual first, second, and third class carriages with compartments; and a new style corridor car with central aisle and lettered doors to compartments holding four.

Into one of these compartments Neeland stepped, hoping for seclusion, but backed out again, the place being full of artillery officers playing cards.

In vain he bribed the guard, who offered to do his best; but the human contents of a Channel passenger 263 steamer had unwillingly spent the night in the quaint French port, and the Paris-bound train was already full.

The best Neeland could do was to find a seat in a compartment where he interrupted conversation between three men who turned sullen heads to look at him, resenting in silence the intrusion. One of them was the fox-faced man he had already noticed on the packet, tender, and customs dock.

But Neeland, whose sojourn in a raw and mannerless metropolis had not blotted out all memory of gentler cosmopolitan conventions, lifted his hat and smilingly excused his intrusion in the fluent and agreeable French of student days, before he noticed that he had to do with men of his own race.

None of the men returned his salute; one of them merely emitted an irritated grunt; and Neeland recognised that they all must be his own delightful country-men—for even the British are more dignified in their stolidity.

A second glance satisfied him that all three were undoubtedly Americans; the cut of their straw hats and apparel distinguished them as such; the nameless grace of Mart, Haffner and Sharx marked the tailoring of the three; only Honest Werner could have manufactured such headgear; only New York such footwear.

And Neeland looked at them once more and understood that Broadway itself sat there in front of him, pasty, close-shaven, furtive, sullen-eyed, the New York Paris Herald in its seal-ringed fingers; its fancy waistcoat pockets bulging with cigars.

“Sports,” he thought to himself; and decided to maintain incognito and pass as a Frenchman, if 264 necessary, to escape conversation with the three tired-eyed ones.

So he hung up his hat, opened his novel, and settled back to endure the trip through the rain, now beginning to fall from a low-sagging cloud of watery grey.

After a few minutes the train moved. Later the guard passed and accomplished his duties. Neeland inquired politely of him in French whether there was any political news, and the guard replied politely that he knew of none. But he looked very serious when he said it.

Half an hour from the coast the rain dwindled to a rainbow and ceased; and presently a hot sun was gilding wet green fields and hedges and glistening roofs which steamed vapour from every wet tile.

Without asking anybody’s opinion, one of the men opposite raised the window. But Neeland did not object; the rain-washed air was deliciously fragrant; and he leaned his elbow on his chair arm and looked out across the loveliest land in Europe.

“Say, friend,” said an East Side voice at his elbow, “does smoking go?”

He glanced back over his shoulder at the speaker—a little, pallid, sour-faced man with the features of a sick circus clown and eyes like two holes burnt in a lump of dough.

“Pardon, monsieur?” he said politely.

“Can’t you even pick a Frenchman, Ben?” sneered one of the men opposite—a square, smoothly shaven man with slow, heavy-lidded eyes of a greenish tinge.

The fox-faced man said:

“He had me fooled, too, Eddie. If Ben Stull didn’t get his number it don’t surprise me none, becuz he was 265 on the damn boat I crossed in, and I certainly picked him for New York.”

“Aw,” said the pasty-faced little man referred to as Ben Stull, “Eddie knows it all. He never makes no breaks, of course. You make ’em, Doc, but he doesn’t. That’s why me and him and you is travelling here—this minute—because the great Eddie Brandes never makes no breaks––”

“Go on and smoke and shut up,” said Brandes, with a slow, sidewise glance at Neeland, whose eyes remained fastened on the pages of “Les Bizarettes,” but whose ears were now very wide open.

“Smoke,” repeated Stull, “when this here Frenchman may make a holler?”

“Wait till I ask him,” said the man addressed as Doc, with dignity. And to Neeland:

“Pardong, musseer, permitty vous moi de fumy ung cigar?”

“Mais comment, donc, monsieur! Je vous en prie––”

“He says politely,” translated Doc, “that we can smoke and be damned to us.”

They lighted three obese cigars; Neeland, his eyes on his page, listened attentively and stole a glance at the man they called Brandes.

So this was the scoundrel who had attempted to deceive the young girl who had come to him that night in his studio, bewildered with what she believed to be her hopeless disgrace!

This was the man—this short, square, round-faced individual with his minutely shaven face and slow greenish eyes, and his hair combed back and still reeking with perfumed tonic—this shiny, scented, and overgroomed sport with rings on his fat, blunt fingers and the silk 266 laces on his tan oxfords as fastidiously tied as though a valet had done it!

Ben Stull began to speak; and presently Neeland discovered that the fox-faced man’s name was Doc Curfoot; that he had just arrived from London on receipt of a telegram from them; and that they themselves had landed the night before from a transatlantic liner to await him here.

Doc Curfoot checked the conversation, which was becoming general now, saying that they’d better be very sure that the man opposite understood no English before they became careless.

“Musseer,” he added suavely to Neeland, who looked up with a polite smile, “parly voo Anglay?”

“Je parle Français, monsieur.”

“I get him,” said Stull, sourly. “I knew it anyway. He’s got the sissy manners of a Frenchy, even if he don’t look the part. No white man tips his lid to nobody except a swell skirt.”

“I seen two dudes do it to each other on Fifth Avenue,” remarked Curfoot, and spat from the window.

Brandes, imperturbable, rolled his cigar into the corner of his mouth and screwed his greenish eyes to narrow slits.

“You got our wire, Doc?”

“Why am I here if I didn’t!”

“Sure. Have an easy passage?”

Doc Curfoot’s foxy visage still wore traces of the greenish pallor; he looked pityingly at Brandes—self-pityingly:

“Say, Eddie, that was the worst I ever seen. A freight boat, too. God! I was that sick I hoped she’d turn turtle! And nab it from me; if you hadn’t wired 267 me S O S, I’d have waited over for the steamer train and the regular boat!”

“Well, it’s S O S all right, Doc. I got a cable from Quint this morning saying our place in Paris is ready, and we’re to be there and open up tonight––”

“What place?” demanded Curfoot.

“Sure, I forgot. You don’t know anything yet, do you?”

“Eddie,” interrupted Stull, “let me do the talking this time, if you please.”

And, to Curfoot:

“Listen, Doc. We was up against it. You heard. Every little thing has went wrong since Eddie done what he done—every damn thing! Look what’s happened since Maxy Venem got sore and he and Minna started out to get him! Morris Stein takes away the Silhouette Theatre from us and we can’t get no time for ‘Lilith’ on Broadway. We go on the road and bust. All our Saratoga winnings goes, also what we got invested with Parson Smawley when the bulls pulled Quint’s––!”

“Ah, f’r the lov’ o’ Mike!” began Brandes. “Can that stuff!”

“All right, Eddie. I’m tellin’ Doc, that’s all. I ain’t aiming to be no crape-hanger; I only want you both to listen to me this time. If you’d listened to me before, we’d have been in Saratoga today in our own machines. But no; you done what you done—God! Did anyone ever hear of such a thing!—taking chances with that little rube from Brookhollow—that freckled-faced mill-hand—that yap-skirt! And Minna and Max having you watched all the time! You big boob! No—don’t interrupt! Listen to me! Where are you now? You had good money; you had a theaytre, you had backing! 268 Quint was doing elegant; Doc and Parson and you and me had it all our way and comin’ faster every day. Wait, I tell you! This ain’t a autopsy. This is business. I’m tellin’ you two guys all this becuz I want you to realise that what Eddie done was against my advice. Come on, now; wasn’t it?”

“It sure was,” admitted Curfoot, removing his cigar from his lean, pointed visage of a greyhound, and squinting thoughtfully at the smoke eddying in the draught from the open window.

“Am I right, Eddie?” demanded Stull, fixing his black, smeary eyes on Brandes.

“Well, go on,” returned the latter between thin lips that scarcely moved.

“All right, then. Here’s the situation, Doc. We’re broke. If Quint hadn’t staked us to this here new game we’re playin’, where’d we be, I ask you?

“We got no income now. Quint’s is shut up; Maxy Venem and Minna Minti fixed us at Saratoga so we can’t go back there for a while. They won’t let us touch a card on the liners. Every pug is leery of us since Eddie flimflammed that Battling Smoke; and I told you he’d holler, too! Didn’t I?” turning on Brandes, who merely let his slow eyes rest on him without replying.

“Go on, Ben,” said Curfoot.

“I’m going on. We guys gotta do something––”

“We ought to have fixed Max Venem,” said Curfoot coolly.

There was a silence; all three men glanced stealthily at Neeland, who quietly turned the page of his book as though absorbed in his story.

“That squealer, Max,” continued Curfoot with placid ferocity blazing in his eyes, “ought to have been put 269 away. Quint and Parson wanted us to have it done. Was it any stunt to get that dirty little shyster in some roadhouse last May?”

Brandes said:

“I’m not mixing with any gunmen after the Rosenthal business.”

“Becuz a lot of squealers done a amateur job like that, does it say that a honest job can’t be pulled?” demanded Curfoot. “Did Quint and me ask you to go to Dopey or Clabber or Pete the Wop, or any of them cheap gangsters?”

“Ah, can the gun-stuff,” said Brandes. “I’m not for it. It’s punk.”

“What’s punk?”

“Gun-play.”

“Didn’t you pull a pop on Maxy Venem the night him and Hyman Adams and Minna beat you up in front of the Knickerbocker?”

“Eddie was stalling,” interrupted Stull, as Brandes’ face turned a dull beef-red. “You talk like a bad actor, Doc. There’s other ways of getting Max in wrong. Guns ain’t what they was once. Gun-play is old stuff. But listen, now. Quint has staked us and we gotta make good. And this is a big thing, though it looks like it was out of our line.”

“Go on; what’s the idea?” inquired Curfoot, interested.

Brandes, the dull red still staining his heavy face, watched the flying landscape from the open window.

Stull leaned forward; Curfoot bent his lean, narrow head nearer; Neeland, staring fixedly at his open book, pricked up his ears.

“Now,” said Stull in a low voice, “I’ll tell you guys all Eddie and I know about this here business of 270 Captain Quint’s. It’s like this, Doc: Some big feller comes to Quint after they close him up—he won’t tell who—and puts up this here proposition: Quint is to