without being ruined, perhaps …
As a young man he had been a good judge of time, so good that once when his watch, his beautiful gold watch with the fine-china dial and the double lids, had failed him, he had carried no substitute while it was being repaired. Now time seemed to slip away. Time was running faster. “Time is, time was, time’s past.” He recalled many afternoons when he was twenty that had been longer than the longest days were now. He mused on them for a moment, how they had tied the Airedale to Dr. Cooper’s bulldog to make them fight, watching, later, from the white bench under the elm.
There was more noise outside. He rose to look, drawing his coat about him; it was cold in the outer room, so cold his peephole had frozen again.
Cars, one black, or gray, or perhaps green—in the headlights, the dancing flashlights, it was difficult to say. The prisoner was a slightly larger man this time, nude, Illingworth thought, under a blanket. His hands were tied in front of him, so he was able to hold the blanket around him, but he was blindfolded like the other. Illingworth wondered if they had blindfolded the Gypsy princess too, after they had led her away.
A big, handsome woman followed the blindfolded man carrying his clothes, or at least carrying a bundle of clothes that were presumably his. She talked for a moment with one of the men with flashlights while their prisoner did a little dance in the snow, lifting one bare foot, then the other. The man with the flashlight took the clothes from her, and she started toward Illingworth’s building.
He backed away from his peephole and lit a cigarette, but she seemed to pay no attention to him when she came in, though she paused to stamp the snow from her boots. He thought her extraordinarily attractive for a woman of her size—she must have been almost six feet—despite a complexion nearly as dark as the Gypsy’s. On her shining black hair she wore a little fur hat with a peacock’s feather, a hat made to match her sweeping coat; even the tops of her boots were trimmed in the same spotted fur. Their heels rattled like musketry as she marched into the older man’s office.
When she had gone, Illingworth went to his peephole again; almost at once he heard the click of the latch behind him. The big man in the black raincoat was coming out. Illingworth nodded to him in a way he hoped was reserved yet friendly.
The big man’s hand went to his shirt pocket, but came away empty. “You wouldn’t have another cigarette, would you?”
“Certainly.” Illingworth held out his silver case.
“Thanks a lot. I smoked all mine on the drive out here.” He took a cigarette and lit it with his own Zippo, then extended his hand. “I’m Cliff Rebic.”
“Cassius Illingworth.”
“Very pleased to meet you, sir. You a government man?”
“No,” Illingworth told him. “I’m a publisher.”
“Ah. Newspaper?”
“Magazines.”
“Ah,” Cliff said again. “I’m a private investigator—got my own agency.” He fumbled under the black raincoat and brought out a card. “You never know when you might need a competent team of investigators, Mr. Illingworth, and if Doyle & Rebic’s good enough for General Whitten’s bunch,” Cliff jerked his head toward the inner office, “it’s good enough for anybody.”
“I see. They employed you.”
“Yes, sir, they did.”
“They employed me as well.” Illingworth paused, studying the ceiling. “You might say they enlisted the very competent reportorial staffs of my magazines.”
“No kidding. How much they pay you?”
“That, I fear, must remain confidential.”
“Yeah, sure. I know how it is. It’s just that I thought knowing might be useful to me in my profession, you get me? Like maybe pretty soon they might want Doyle & Rebic again, and I’d like to know what the traffic will bear. Doyle’s dead, by the way. I’m president.”
“And similarly,” Illingworth said, “I should like to know just how much they paid you. Not for publication.”
“Then there’s no problem, right? Tell me, and I’ll tell you.”
“You would rely upon my veracity.”
“Sure.”
“And you would not modify your answer, based upon my own?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then this is what I propose.” Illingworth produced a pocket notebook and a pen. “We will each write the sum, each fold his slip of paper, and exchange them.”
“Got you. Here, I got my own notebook.”
For a moment there was silence except for the scratchings of the pens on paper and the faint sounds of an automobile on the road beyond the gates. Cold haunted the bare room like starlight.
“Okay, you ready?”
Illingworth nodded, and Cliff handed him a folded scrap of paper. He crumpled it without reading it and let it fall to the gritty floor as he gave Cliff his own.
“What the hell is this? ‘Thirty pieces of silver’?”
“You will not recognize the quotation,” Illingworth told him, “but
