The Dark Star

“Pistols?”

“Yes.”

“Loaded? Both of them?”

“Yes.”

“Clips?”

“No.”

“Unstrap them!”

The woman turned, bent almost double, twisting her supple body entirely around; but Ilse Dumont was at her side like a flash and caught her wrist as she withdrew her hand from the hem of her fluffy skirt.

“Now —take your life!” said Ilse Dumont between her teeth. “There’s the door! Go out!” – following her with blazing eyes – “Stop! Stand where you are until I come!”

Then she came quickly to where Neeland stood, astonished; and thrust two automatic pistols into his hands.

“Get Sengoun,” she whispered. “Don’t go down-stairs, for God’s sake. Get to the roof, if you can. Try – oh, try, try, Neeland, my friend!” Her voice trembled; she looked into his eyes – gave him, in that swift regard, all that a woman withholds until the right man asks.

Her lips quivered; she turned sharply on her heel, went to the outer hallway, where the other woman stood motionless.

“What am I to do with you?” demanded Ilse Dumont. “Do you think you are going out of here to summon the police? Mount those stairs!”

The woman dropped her hand on the banisters, heavily, set foot on the first stair, then slowly mounted as though her little feet in their dainty evening slippers were weighted with ball and chain.

Ilse Dumont followed her, opened a door in the passage, motioned her to enter. It was a bedroom that the electric light revealed. The woman entered and stood by the bed as though stupefied.

“I’ll keep my word to you,” said Ilse Dumont. “When it becomes too late for you to do us any mischief, I’ll return and let you go.”

And she stepped back across the threshold and locked the door on the outside.

As she did so, Neeland and Sengoun came swiftly up the stairs, and she beckoned them to follow, gathered the skirts of her evening gown into one hand, and ran up the stairs ahead of them to the fifth floor.

In the dim light Neeland saw that the top floor was merely a vast attic full of débris from the café on the ground floor – iron tables which required mending or repainting, iron chairs, great jars of artificial stone with dead baytrees standing in them, parts of rusty stoves and kitchen ranges, broken cutlery in boxes, cracked table china and heavier kitchen crockery in tubs which once had held flowers.

The only windows gave on a court. Through their dirty panes already the grey light of that early Sunday morning glimmered, revealing the contents of the shadowy place, and the position of an iron ladder hooked to two rings under the scuttle overhead.

Ilse Dumont laid her finger on her lips, conjuring silence, then, clutching her silken skirts, she started up the iron ladder, reached the top, and, exerting all her strength, lifted the hinged scuttle leading to the leads outside.

Instantly somebody challenged her in a guttural voice. She stood there a few moments in whispered conversation, then, from outside, somebody lowered the scuttle cover; the girl locked it, descended the iron ladder backwards, and came swiftly across to where Neeland and Sengoun were standing, pistols lifted.

“They’re guarding the roof,” she whispered, “ – two men. It is hopeless, that way.”

“The proper way,” said Sengoun calmly, “is for us to shoot our way out of this!”

The girl turned on him in a passion:

“Do you suppose I care what happens to you?” she said. “If there were no one else to consider you might do as you pleased, for all it concerns me!”

Sengoun reddened:

“Be silent, you treacherous little cat!” he retorted. “Do you imagine your riffraff are going to hold me here when I’m ready to depart! Me! A free Cossack! Bah!”

“Don’t talk that way, Sengoun,” said Neeland sharply. “We owe these pistols to her.”

“Oh,” muttered Sengoun, shooting a menacing glance at her. “I didn’t understand that.” Then his scowl softened and a sudden laugh cleared his face.

“I’m sorry, mademoiselle,” he said. “You’re quite welcome to your low opinion of me. But if anyone should ask me, I’d say that I don’t understand what is happening to us. And after a while I’ll become angry and go downstairs for information.”

“They know nothing about you in the salle de jeu,” she said, “but on the floor below they’re waiting to kill you.”

Neeland, astonished, asked her whether the American gamblers in the salon where Sengoun had been playing were ignorant of what was going on in the house.

“What Americans?” she demanded, incredulously. “Do you mean Weishelm?”

“Didn’t you know there were Americans employed in the salle de jeu?” asked Neeland, surprised.

“No. I have not been in this house for a year until I came tonight. This place is maintained by the Turkish Government – ” She flashed a glance at Sengoun – “you’re welcome to the information now,” she added contemptuously. And then, to Neeland: “There was, I believe, some talk in New York about adding one or two Americans to the personnel, but I opposed it.”

“They’re here,” said Neeland drily.

“Do you know who they are?”

“Yes. There’s a man called Doc Curfoot–”

“Who!!”

And suddenly, for the first time, Neeland remembered that she had been the wife of one of the men below.

“Brandes and Stull are the others,” he said mechanically.

The girl stared at him as though she did not comprehend, and she passed one hand slowly across her forehead and eyes.

“Eddie Brandes? Here? And Stull? Curfoot? Here in this house!”

“In the salon below.”

“They can’t be!” she protested in an odd, colourless voice. “They were bought soul and body by the British Secret Service!”

All three stood staring at one another; the girl flushed, clenched her hand, then let it fall by her side as though utterly overcome.

“All this espionage!” cried Sengoun, furiously. “ – It makes me sick, I tell you! Where everybody betrays everybody is no place for a free Cossack!–”

The terrible expression on the girl’s face checked him; she said, slowly:

“It is we others who have been betrayed, it seems. It is we who are trapped here. They’ve got us all – every one of us. Oh, my God! – every one of us – at last!”