when he stood tall and domineering above them, did what could have been expected when he was tossed down to them.
They tore him apart—actually—piece by piece. They dropped their guns and fought to get at him. Those farther away climbed over those nearer, smothering them, trampling them. They surged back and forth in front of the steps, an insane pack of men turned wolves, savagely struggling to destroy a man who must have died before he had been down half a minute.
I put the girl’s hand off my arm and went to face Djudakovich.
“Muravia’s yours,” I said. “I don’t want anything but our draft and train. Here’s the abdication.”
Romaine swiftly translated my words and then Djudakovich’s:
“The train is ready now. The draft will be delivered there. Do you wish to go over for Grantham?”
“No. Send him down. How do I find the train?”
“I’ll take you,” she said. “We’ll go through the building and out a side door.”
One of Djudakovich’s detectives sat at the wheel of a car in front of the hotel. Romaine and I got in it. Across the plaza tumult was still boiling. Neither of us said anything while the car whisked us through darkening streets. She sat as far from me as the width of the rear seat would let her.
Presently she asked very softly:
“And now you despise me?”
“No.” I reached for her. “But I hate mobs, lynchings—they sicken me. No matter how wrong the man is, if a mob’s against him, I’m for him. The only thing I ever pray to God for is a chance some day to squat down behind a machine gun with a lynching party in front of me. I had no use for Einarson, but I wouldn’t have given him that! Well, what’s done is done. What was the document?”
“A letter from Mahmoud. He had left it with a friend to be given to Vasilije if anything ever happened to him. He knew Einarson, it seems, and prepared his revenge. The letter confessed his—Mahmoud’s—part in the assassination of General Radnjak, and said that Einarson was also implicated. The army worshiped Radnjak, and Einarson wanted the army.”
“Your Vasilije could have used that to chase Einarson out—without feeding him to those wolves,” I complained.
She shook her head and said:
“Vasilije was right. Bad as it was, that was the way to do it. It’s over and settled forever, with Vasilije in power. An Einarson alive, an army not knowing he had killed their idol—too risky. Up to the end Einarson thought he had power enough to hold his troops, no matter what they knew. He—”
“All right—it’s done. And I’m glad to be through with this king business. Kiss me.”
She did, and whispered:
“When Vasilije dies—and he can’t live long, the way he eats—I’m coming to San Francisco.”
“You’re a cold-blooded hussy,” I said.
Lionel Grantham, ex-king of Muravia, was only five minutes behind us in reaching our train. He wasn’t alone. Valeska Radnjak, looking as much like the queen of something as if she had been, was with him. She didn’t seem to be all broken up over the loss of her throne.
The boy was pleasant and polite enough to me during our rattling trip to Saloniki, but obviously not very comfortable in my company. His bride-to-be didn’t know anybody but the boy existed, unless she happened to find someone else directly in front of her. So I didn’t wait for their wedding, but left Saloniki on a boat that pulled out a couple of hours after we arrived.
I left the draft with them, of course. They decided to take out Lionel’s three millions and return the fourth to Muravia. And I went back to San Francisco to quarrel with my boss over what he thought were unnecessary five- and ten-dollar items in my expense account.
Flypaper
I
It was a wandering daughter job.
The Hambletons had been for several generations a wealthy and decently prominent New York family. There was nothing in the Hambleton history to account for Sue, the youngest member of the clan. She grew out of childhood with a kink that made her dislike the polished side of life, like the rough. By the time she was twenty-one, in 1926, she definitely preferred Tenth Avenue to Fifth, grifters to bankers, and Hymie the Riveter to the Honorable Cecil Windown, who had asked her to marry him.
The Hambletons tried to make Sue behave, but it was too late for that. She was legally of age. When she finally told them to go to hell and walked out on them there wasn’t much they could do about it. Her father, Major Waldo Hambleton, had given up all the hopes he ever had of salvaging her, but he didn’t want her to run into any grief that could be avoided. So he came into the Continental Detective Agency’s New York office and asked to have an eye kept on her.
Hymie the Riveter was a Philadelphia racketeer who had moved north to the big city, carrying a Thompson submachine-gun wrapped in blue-checkered oil cloth, after a disagreement with his partners. New York wasn’t so good a field as Philadelphia for machine-gun work. The Thompson lay idle for a year or so while Hymie made expenses with an automatic, preying on small-time crap games in Harlem.
Three or four months after Sue went to live with Hymie he made what looked like a promising connection with the first of the crew that came into New York from Chicago to organize the city on the western scale. But the boys from Chi didn’t want Hymie; they wanted the Thompson. When he showed it to them, as the big item in his application for employment, they shot holes in the top of Hymie’s head and went away with the gun.
Sue Hambleton buried Hymie, had a couple of lonely weeks in which she hocked a ring to eat, and then got a job as hostess in a speakeasy run by a Greek named Vassos.
One of Vassos’ customers was
