it for a long moment over his clasped hands, his old eyes shrewd and kindly, his face gentle. No muscle in his face moved. Nothing changed in his eyes.
The nails of his right hand slowly cut a red gash across the back of the clasped left hand.
“It is true,” he said softly, “that one acquires wisdom in the company of the wise.”
He unclasped his hands, picked up the photograph, and held it out to the beefy man. The Whistler seized it. His face drained grey, his eyes bulged out.
“Why, that’s—” he began, and stopped, let the photograph drop to his lap, and slumped down in an attitude of defeat.
That puzzled me. I had expected to argue with him, to convince Chang that the medal was not the fake it was.
“You may have what you wish in payment for this,” Chang Li Ching was saying to me.
“I want Lillian Shan and Garthorne cleared, and I want your fat friend here, and I want anybody else who was in on the killings.”
Chang’s eyes closed for a moment—the first sign of weariness I had seen on his round face.
“You may have them,” he said.
“The bargain you made with Miss Shan is all off, of course,” I pointed out. “I may need a little evidence to make sure I can hang this baby,” nodding at The Whistler.
Chang smiled dreamily.
“That, I am regretful, is not possible.”
“Why—?” I began, and stopped.
There was no bulge in the velvet curtain behind The Whistler now, I saw. One of the chair legs glistened in the light. A red pool spread on the floor under him. I didn’t have to see his back to know he was beyond hanging.
“That’s different,” I said, kicking a chair over to the table. “Now we’ll talk business.”
I sat down and we went into conference.
XI
Two days later everything was cleared up to the satisfaction of police, press and public. The Whistler had been found in a dark street, hours dead from a cut in his back, killed in a bootlegging war, I heard. Hoo Lun was found. The gold-toothed Chinese who had opened the door for Lillian Shan was found. Five others were found. These seven, with Yin Hung, the chauffeur, eventually drew a life sentence apiece. They were The Whistler’s men, and Chang sacrificed them without batting an eye. They had as little proof of Chang’s complicity as I had, so they couldn’t hit back, even if they knew that Chang had given me most of my evidence against them.
Nobody but the girl, Chang and I knew anything about Garthorne’s part, so he was out, with liberty to spend most of his time at the girl’s house.
I had no proof that I could tie on Chang, couldn’t get any. Regardless of his patriotism, I’d have given my right eye to put the old boy away. That would have been something to write home about. But there hadn’t been a chance of nailing him, so I had had to be content with making a bargain whereby he turned everything over to me except himself and his friends.
I don’t know what happened to Hsiu Hsiu, the squealing slave-girl. She deserved to come through all right. I might have gone back to Chang’s to ask about her, but I stayed away. Chang had learned that the medal in the photo was a trick one. I had a note from him:
Greetings and Great Love to the Unveiler of Secrets:
One whose patriotic fervor and inherent stupidity combined to blind him, so that he broke a valuable tool, trusts that the fortunes of worldly traffic will not again ever place his feeble wits in opposition to the irresistible will and dazzling intellect of the Emperor of Untanglers.
You can take that any way you like. But I know the man who wrote it, and I don’t mind admitting that I’ve stopped eating in Chinese restaurants, and that if I never have to visit Chinatown again it’ll be soon enough.
The Gutting of Couffignal
I
Wedge-shaped Couffignal is not a large island, and not far from the mainland, to which it is linked by a wooden bridge. Its western shore is a high, straight cliff that jumps abruptly up out of San Pablo Bay. From the top of this cliff the island slopes eastward, down to a smooth pebble beach that runs into the water again, where there are piers and a clubhouse and moored pleasure boats.
Couffignal’s main street, paralleling the beach, has the usual bank, hotel, moving-picture theater, and stores. But it differs from most main streets of its size in that it is more carefully arranged and preserved. There are trees and hedges and strips of lawn on it, and no glaring signs. The buildings seem to belong beside one another, as if they had been designed by the same architect, and in the stores you will find goods of a quality to match the best city stores.
The intersecting streets—running between rows of neat cottages near the foot of the slope—become winding hedged roads as they climb toward the cliff. The higher these roads get, the farther apart and larger are the houses they lead to. The occupants of these higher houses are the owners and rulers of the island. Most of them are well-fed old gentlemen who, the profits they took from the world with both hands in their younger days now stowed away at safe percentages, have bought into the island colony so they may spend what is left of their lives nursing their livers and improving their golf among their kind. They admit to the island only as many storekeepers, working-people, and similar riffraff as are needed to keep them comfortably served.
That is Couffignal.
It was some time after midnight. I was sitting in a second-story room in Couffignal’s largest house, surrounded by wedding presents whose value would add up to something between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars.
Of all the work that comes to a private
