Fenner the secretary laughed. “I can soon settle that difficulty for you. I assure you he’s quite all right; we left him writing at his desk only a few minutes ago. He was alone in his flat; it’s a hundred feet up from the street, and so placed that no shot could have reached him, even if your friend hadn’t fired blank. There’s no other entrance to this place but this door, and we’ve been standing outside it ever since.
“All the same,” said Father Brown, gravely, “I should like to look in and see.”
“Well, you can’t,” retorted the other. “Good Lord, you don’t tell me you think anything of the curse.”
“You forget,” said the millionaire, with a slight sneer, “the reverend gentleman’s whole business is blessings and cursings. Come, sir, if he’s been cursed to hell, why don’t you bless him back again? What’s the good of your blessings if they can’t beat an Irish larrykin’s curse.”
“Does anybody believe such things now?” protested the Westerner.
“Father Brown believes a good number of things, I take it,” said Vandam, whose temper was suffering from the past snub and the present bickering. “Father Brown believes a hermit crossed a river on a crocodile conjured out of nowhere, and then he told the crocodile to die, and it sure did. Father Brown believes that some blessed saint or other died, and had his dead body turned into three dead bodies, to be served out to three parishes that were all bent on figuring as his hometown. Father Brown believes that a saint hung his cloak on a sunbeam, and another used his for a boat to cross the Atlantic. Father Brown believes the holy donkey had six legs and the house at Loretto flew through the air. He believes in hundreds of stone virgins winking and weeping all day long. It’s nothing to him to believe that a man might escape through the keyhole or vanish out of a locked room. I reckon he doesn’t take much stock of the laws of nature.”
“Anyhow, I have to take stock in the laws of Warren Wynd,” said the secretary, wearily, “and it’s his rule that he’s to be left alone when he says so. Wilson will tell you just the same,” for the large servant who had been sent for the pamphlet, passed placidly down the corridor even as he spoke, carrying the pamphlet, but serenely passing the door. “He’ll go and sit on the bench by the floor-clerk and twiddle his thumbs till he’s wanted; but he won’t go in before then; and nor will I. I reckon we both know which side our bread is buttered, and it’d take a good many of Father’s Brown’s saint and angels to make us forget it.”
“As for saints and angels—” began the priest.
“It’s all nonsense,” repeated Fenner. “I don’t want to say anything offensive, but that sort of thing may be very well for crypts and cloisters and all sorts of moonshiny places. But ghosts can’t get through a closed door in an American hotel.”
“But men can open a door, even in an American hotel,” replied Father Brown, patiently. “And it seems to me the simplest thing would be to open it.”
“It would be simple enough to lose me my job,” answered the secretary, “and Warren Wynd doesn’t like his secretaries so simple as that. Not simple enough to believe in the sort of fairy tales you seem to believe in.”
“Well,” said the priest gravely, “it is true enough that I believe in a good many things that you probably don’t. But it would take a considerable time to explain all the things I believe in, and all the reasons I have for thinking I’m right. It would take about two seconds to open that door and prove I am wrong.”
Something in the phrase seemed to please the more wild and restless spirit of the man from the West.
“I’ll allow I’d love to prove you wrong,” said Alboin, striding suddenly past them, “and I will.”
He threw open the door of the flat and looked in. The first glimpse showed that Warren Wynd’s chair was empty. The second glance showed that his room was empty also.
Fenner, electrified with energy in his turn, dashed past the other into the apartment.
“He’s in his bedroom,” he said curtly, “he must be.”
As he disappeared into the inner chamber the other men stood in the empty outer room staring about them. The severity and simplicity of its fittings, which had already been noted, returned on them with a rigid challenge. Certainly in this room there was no question of hiding a mouse, let alone a man. There were no curtains and, what is rare in American arrangements, no cupboards. Even the desk was no more than a plain table with a shallow drawer and a tilted lid. The chairs were hard and high-backed skeletons. A moment after the secretary reappeared at the inner door, having searched the two inner rooms. A staring negation stood in his eyes, and his mouth seemed to move in a mechanical detachment from it as he said sharply: “He didn’t come out through here?”
Somehow the others did not even think it necessary to answer that negation in the negative. Their minds had come up against something like the blank wall of the warehouse that stared in at the opposite window, gradually turning from white to grey as dusk slowly descended with the advancing afternoon. Vandam walked over to the windowsill against which he had leant half an hour before and looked out of the open window. There was no pipe or fire-escape, no shelf or foothold of any kind on the sheer fall to the little by-street
