The Light of the Day - Eric Ambler [10]
He turned and stared at me. All at once his face was neither old-young nor young-old. It was white and pinched and his mouth worked in an odd way. I have seen faces go like that before and I braced myself. There was a metal lamp on the writing table beside me. I wondered if I could possibly hit him with it before he got to me.
But he did not move. His eyes flickered towards the bedroom and then back to me.
“You’d better get something straight, Arthur,” he said slowly. “That was just a little roughing up you had in there. If I really start giving you a going over, you’ll leave here on a stretcher. Nobody’s going to mind about that except you. I came back and caught you stealing. You tried to strong-arm your way out of it and I had to defend myself. That’s how it’ll be. So cut out the bull, and the lies. Right?”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Empty your pockets. On this table here.”
I did as I was told.
He looked at everything, my driving license, my permis de séjour, and he touched everything. Finally, of course, he found the pass key in the change purse. I had sawn off the shank of it and cut a slot in the end so that I could use a small coin to turn it, but it was still over two inches long, and heavy. The weight gave it away. He looked at it curiously.
“You make this?”
“Not the key part. I just cut it down.” There seemed no point in trying to lie about that.
He nodded. “That’s better. Okay, we’ll start over. We know you’re a two-bit ponce and we know you heist traveler’s checks from hotel rooms when you get the chance. Do you write the counter-signature yourself?”
“Yes.”
“So that’s forgery. Now, I’m asking again. Have you ever been caught before?”
“No, sir.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any sort of police record?”
“Here in Athens?”
“We’ll start with Athens.”
I hesitated. “Well, not exactly a police record. Do you mean traffic offenses?”
“You know what I mean. Quit stalling.”
I sneezed, quite unintentionally, and my nose began bleeding again. He sighed impatiently and threw me a bunch of paper napkins from the drink tray.
“I had you pretty well figured out at the airport,” he went on; “but I didn’t think you’d be quite so stupid. Why did you have to tell that Kira dame that you’d had no dinner?”
I shrugged helplessly. “So that I could come here.”
“Why didn’t you tell her you’d gone to gas up the car? I just might have bought that one.”
“It didn’t seem important. Why should you suspect me?”
He laughed. “Oh brother! I know what that car you have sells for here, and I know that gasoline costs sixty cents a gallon. At the rates you charge you couldn’t break even. Okay, you get your payoffs—the restaurant, the clip joint, the cat house—but they can’t amount to much, so there must be something else. Kira doesn’t know what it is, but she knows there’s something because you’ve cashed quite a few traveler’s checks through her.”
“She told you that?” This really upset me; the least one can expect from a brothel keeper is discretion.
“Why shouldn’t she tell me? You didn’t tell her they were stolen, did you?” He drank his brandy down. “I don’t happen to like paying for sex, but I wanted to find out a bit more about you. I did. When they realized that I wasn’t going to leave without paying, they were both real friendly. Called me a cab and everything. Now, supposing you start talking.”
I took a sip of brandy. “Very well. I have had three convictions.”
“What for?”
“The charge in each case was representing myself as an official guide. In fact, all I did was to try to save one or two clients from those boring archaeological set speeches. The official guides have to learn them by heart before they can pass the examination. Tourists like to know what they are looking at, but they do not want to be bored.”
“What happened? Did you go to jail?”
“Of course not. I was fined.”
He nodded approvingly. “That was what Irma thought. Now you just keep on playing it straight like that