Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

Half standing, I leaned toward her, stretching out one hand until it was close to her side.

“I want the gun,” I said.

She nodded, and sat still while I plucked it from her pocket, put it in one of my own, and sat down again.

“You said a little while ago that you didn’t care who I was,” she began immediately. “But I want you to know. There are so many of us Russians who once were somebodies and who now are nobodies that I won’t bore you with the repetition of a tale the world has grown tired of hearing. But you must remember that this weary tale is real to us who are its subjects. However, we fled from Russia with what we could carry of our property, which fortunately was enough to keep us in bearable comfort for a few years.

“In London we opened a Russian restaurant, but London was suddenly full of Russian restaurants, and ours became, instead of a means of livelihood, a source of loss. We tried teaching music and languages, and so on. In short, we hit on all the means of earning our living that other Russian exiles hit upon, and so always found ourselves in overcrowded, and thus unprofitable, fields. But what else did we know — could we do?

“I promised not to bore you. Well, always our capital shrank, and always the day approached on which we should be shabby and hungry, the day when we should become familiar to readers of your Sunday papers — charwomen who had been princesses, dukes who now were butlers. There was no place for us in the world. Outcasts easily become outlaws. Why not? Could it be said that we owed the world any fealty? Had not the world sat idly by and seen us despoiled of place and property and country?

“We planned it before we had heard of Couffignal. We could find a small settlement of the wealthy, sufficiently isolated, and, after establishing ourselves there, we would plunder it. Couffignal, when we found it, seemed to be the ideal place. We leased this house for six months, having just enough capital remaining to do that and to live properly here while our plans matured. Here we spent four months establishing ourselves, collecting our arms and our explosives, mapping our offensive, waiting for a favorable night. Last night seemed to be that night, and we had provided, we thought, against every eventuality. But we had not, of course, provided against your presence and your genius. They were simply others of the unforeseen misfortunes to which we seem eternally condemned.”

She stopped, and fell to studying me with mournful large eyes that made me feel like fidgeting.

“It’s no good calling me a genius,” I objected. “The truth is you people botched your job from beginning to end. Your general would get a big laugh out of a man without military training who tried to lead an army. But here are you people with absolutely no criminal experience trying to swing a trick that needed the highest sort of criminal skill. Look at how you all played around with me! Amateur stuff! A professional crook with any intelligence would have either let me alone or knocked me off. No wonder you flopped! As for the rest of it — your troubles — I can’t do anything about them.”

“Why?” very softly. “Why can’t you?”

“Why should I?” I made it blunt.

“No one else knows what you know.” She bent forward to put a white hand on my knee. “There is wealth in that cellar beneath the garage. You may have whatever you ask.”

I shook my head.

“You aren’t a fool!” she protested. “You know—”

“Let me straighten this out for you,” I interrupted. “We’ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to employers, and so on. You might doubt them, so we’ll throw them out. Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. It pays me a fair salary, but I could find other jobs that would pay more. Even a hundred dollars more a month would be twelve hundred a year. Say twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars in the years between now and my sixtieth birthday.

“Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weigh that against any sum of money. Money is good stuff. I haven’t anything against it. But in the past eighteen years I’ve been getting my fun out of chasing crooks and tackling puzzles, my satisfaction out of catching crooks and solving riddles. It’s the only kind of sport I know anything about, and I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it. I’m not going to blow that up!”

She shook her head slowly, lowering it, so that now her dark eyes looked up at me under the thin arcs of her brows.

“You speak only of money,” she said. “I said you may have whatever you ask.”

That was out. I don’t know where these women get their ideas.