Читать книгу The Adventures of Detective Barney - Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins - Страница 5

He was so obviously—so breathlessly—excited when he burst in upon the detectives that ​Corcoran came to his feet at sight of him. “What ’s the matter?”

Babbing jerked off his spectacles. “What has happened?”

“I go-got it,” Barney stammered, tugging at the book that stuck in his pocket.

“Got what?”

“His—his book.”

“What!” Corcoran grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and snatched the volume from his hand. He glanced at its brown cloth cover. “What?” he cried. And that second “What” expressed the extreme of incredulous disgust. He held out the book to Babbing who had not moved from his seat at the table. “He ’s swiped the man’s dictionary!”

Babbing looked at it. It was a “pocket Webster,” a cheap abridged edition, on cheap paper. “Where did you get this?” he asked; and there was no kindly personality showing in the cold malevolence of his flat eyes.

“On his desk. I—”

“Why did you bring it?”

​“Oh, hell!” Corcoran muttered. “This kid business!”

“That’ll do!” Babbing flared out at him. “I ’m in charge of this case.”

They glared at each other, as if they were old enemies, with old jealousies concealed and long injustices unforgiven. Corcoran turned with a shrug and sat down on the bed. Babbing rounded on the boy again.

“Why did you bring this?”

“Well, gee,” Barney defended himself. “As soon as he got the telegram, he beat it to his desk an’ yanked this book out of a drawer, an’ began to hunt the words up in it, an’—”

“Wait a minute. Corcoran get on watch out there. If you hear anything, come back for this boy. Take him in to Cooper and tell him you ’re the house detective—that you caught the boy with this book and he confessed he ’d stolen it from eight-eighteen. Give it back and ask him not to prosecute—because it would hurt the hotel. He won’t anyway. And that ’ll hold him quiet till we can get time ​to turn round. Otherwise, ’we ve tipped our hand.’’

Corcoran was already at the door. He went out on the final word.

“Now,” Babbing said, with perfect suavity, “take your time. Show me exactly what he did.”

“Well, look-a-here!” Barney took the book. “He got this out o’ the drawer, an’ then he sat down this way, an’ got a pencil, an’ then he wrote down the telegram—”

“Wrote it down? Where? On what?”

“On a piece o’ paper. An’ then he looks in the book, this way, an’ gets a word. An’ then he looks at the telegram. An’ then he goes back to the book an’ turns over the pages. An’ then he—”

Babbing reached the dictionary from him. “Wait.” He put on his spectacles and wrote on the back of an envelope: “Thunder command wind kacaderm.” Below that he wrote it again, reversed, and then several times with the words transposed and permuted in all ​possible orders. He turned to the word “thunder” in the dictionary. It was at the bottom of the first of the three narrow columns that filled the page. He studied it. He studied the words around it. He turned the page, and his eyes widened thoughtfully on the word “through” at the bottom of the third column. The line read “Through, (throo) prep. from.” And on the margin the point of a pencil had made a light indentation. He turned back to “Thunder”; and on the margin there, the pencil mark showed in a raised point.

He wrote, under the word “thunder” on his paper, the word “through.”

He turned to the word “command” in the dictionary, but after a prolonged scrutiny he wrote nothing.

He turned to “wind.” And he found, on the same page but in another column, the word “will” touched with a faint pencil mark. He sat back in his chair and his face became meditatively blank.

​His eyelids constricted sharply. He wrote: “Murdock will come through.” Turning back in the dictionary to the word “command,” he found “come” standing directly beside it in the parallel column of print on the page. He looked at Barney and nodded. “Got it!” he said, grimly. “Go and bring Corcoran.”

Barney, almost running—but on his tiptoes—with the secrecy and the excitement, saw himself vindicated to the surprised Corcoran. He saw himself the hero of the occasion. He had solved the mystery! He had discovered the cipher! He signaled imperiously to Corcoran in the hall. The operative came scowling.

When they returned to the room, Babbing said: “Sit down there, boy, and keep quiet. You scuttle like a rat. … Jim, I 've got his method. I want you to send off some messages while I ’m translating these. Wire our Chicago office: ‘Case 11A393. Case completed. Immediately arrest Number Two on information in your files.’ Wire Indianapolis ​in the same words to grab Pirie. He ’s Number Three. And have Billy ’phone the office to get papers and an officer up here, at once, for our friend next door. I ’ll hold him till they come. Go ahead. I ’ll finish this.”

He settled down to his task studiously, copying out cipher telegrams, and writing between the lines the translated words as he found them in the dictionary. And in a room that was quiet and sunny, working with a little complacent pucker of the lips occasionally, or raising his eyebrows and adjusting his spectacles in a pause of doubt, he looked anything but sinister, anything but the traditional “bloodhound” on the trail in a man-hunt. There was something Pickwickian in his small rotundity. The nattiness of his business suit gave him an air of conventional unimportance.

Barney watched him fascinatedly. His plump little hands—his rather flat profile with its small beaked nose and the owlish spectacles—his dimpled chin—all reminded the boy of some one incongruous whom he could not ​place. When Babbing took out a white silk handkerchief to polish his glasses and buried his nose in it before he replaced it in his pocket, Barney remembered. It was a bishop who had once graced the closing exercises of the parochial school by conferring the prizes. He had given Barney a “Lives of the Saints.”

“Now, young man,” Babbing said, “get off that uniform. I ’m going in to get a statement from your Mr. Cooper. If any one rings me up, take the number. If any of the men come in here, tell them where I am. I ’m registered as A. T. Hume. Wait here till I come back.” He had taken a small blue-metal “automatic” from his hip pocket and put it in the side pocket of his coat. He gathered up his notes and the dictionary. “Don’t make the mistake again of exceeding your instructions. You 've forced our hand, already.”

“Yes, sir,” Barney said, contritely. But the door had scarcely closed before he was capering. He did a sort of disrobing dance, ​his face fearfully contorted with grins that were a silent equivalent of whoops of delight. And it was an interpretative dance. It expressed liberation from drudgery and the dull commonplace. It welcomed rhythmically a life of adventure, in which a boy’s natural propensity to lie should be not only unchecked but encouraged—that should give him, daily, games to play, hidings to seek, simple elders to hoodwink and masquerades to wear. He danced it, in his shirt sleeves, waving his coat—and in his shirt tails waving coat and trousers. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and he darted into the bathroom to be ready in case he should be called upon.

He was clothed and sober—rocking himself to an ecstatic croon in one of the Antwerp’s bedroom rockers—when he heard a thudded report in the hall. It sounded to him as if two books had been clapped together. He sat listening.

Babbing came in. “Get out of here, boy. What have you done with that uniform? Put ​it in my valise. Snap it shut. Hurry. Report to the office to-morrow morning at eight-thirty.” He was at the telephone. “Give me the house detective,” he said. “What? Mr. Dohn, your house detective.” He put his hand over the transmitter. “How much have you been earning?”

“Six dollars a week—with the tips.”

“You’ll start at twelve. Hurry up. Get out of here. To-morrow morning at eight-thirty.”

Barney started for the door, reluctantly.

“Hello. Dohn? This is Babbing. Get up here as quick as you can with a doctor. That Chicago swindler in eight-eighteen has shot himself. Through the mouth. He ’s blown the back of his head out. Hurry up!”

Barney, slamming the door behind him, fled down the hall, frightened, aghast, but with a high exultant inner voice still crooning triumphantly: “I ’m a de-tec-tive! I ’m a de-tec-tive!” Through the mouth! The back of his head out! Even in his horror there was a ​pleasurable shudder, for he had all a boy’s healthy curiosity about murder, shootings and affairs of bloodshed. “I ’m a de-tec-tive!” And he hurried to tell his mother of his new job, aware that she would cry out against it—till he explained: “I start at twelve a week.” That would settle it with her. “I ’m a detective! I ’m a detective!”