Money in the Bank (12 page)

In Chimp Twist's manner, as he received his visitors, there was an impressiveness befitting the sensational nature of the tale he was about to tell.

"Sit down, Dolly. Park the carcass, Soapy, So you both came along. I was only expecting Soapy."

Mr. Molloy's fine face expressed surprise, and Dolly interpreted.

"I was telling Chimp yesterday about you and the Cork dame, sweetie, and he prob'ly got the idea that we were
pfft.
We got Soapy all wrong, Chimp. He's explained everything. It seems he was just trying to sell her oil stock."

"Oh?" said Mr. Twist. "Is that so?"

He eyed Mr. Molloy with such open admiration for his ready resource that Dolly felt obliged to comment on it.

"You think he was stringing the beads, do you? Well, he wasn't. You tell him, Soapy."

"I sold the Corko a block of Silver River yesterday afternoon," said Mr. Molloy proudly. "She's giving me her cheque to-day."

"For a thousand pounds."

"For a thousand pounds," said Mr. Molloy, rolling the words round his tongue.

Chimp Twist winced. The thought of somebody else, especially somebody he disliked as much as he did Soapy Molloy, securing such a sum affected him like an aching tooth. Only the reflection that he had something on the fire which would make a thousand pounds look like chicken feed enabled him to regain his composure.

"Wei!," he said, dismissing the other's petty triumphs with a wave of the hand and coming to the thing that really mattered, "I guess you two got kind of a surprise yesterday."

"You mean the guy with the hay-coloured hair? Surprise," said Mrs. Molloy feelingly, "is right. When we found him doing a song and dance around the garden, claiming that he was J. Sheringham Adair, you could have knocked the both of us cold with a coupla feathers. Who is the bimbo?"

"Search me. All I know about him," said Chimp, giving a little shiver as that fearful scene of the previous afternoon rose before his mind's eye, "is that he's someone who doesn't like me."

"Can't you get closer than that?" asked Dolly. She seemed to be feeling that this rendered the field of identification too wide.

Chimp shook his head.

"I've been trying to place him, but I'm darned if I can remember where we ran across each other. Still and all, if a bird throws things at you, and then comes charging up the stairs to finish you off, you can pretty well label him as somebody that isn't too fond of you."

Mr. Molloy raised his eyebrows.

"Throws things … What things?"

"Well, I've been having a look at them, and they seem to me like flints of some kind. I tell you, when I saw him coming up those stairs, I was into the closet quicker than forked lightning. And it was on account I was in the closet that I come to hear the story this girl Benedick told him."

"What story?"

"About these diamonds."

"What diamonds?"

"Ah!" said Chimp. "That's just what I'm going to put you wise about. Start listening."

His visitors did so, with the alacrity which is always the result of mentioning diamonds to a certain type of auditor. When he had finished his narrative, Dolly's eyes were shining like stars, and Mr. Molloy's breathing had become so stertorous that he resembled a Senator suffering from a troublesome attack of asthma. The news that they were residing in a sort of Tom Tiddler's Ground or Cave of Ali Baba, where parcels of valuable diamonds might leap to the eye at any moment, had affected both of them profoundly.

"Fancy old Cakebread being a Lord!" said Dolly, breaking an ecstatic silence. "I'll tell you sump'n, Soapy. From now on, I'm going to give that lobster a rush, in a big way. When that memory of his starts hitting mid-season form again, I want to be the little playmate from whom he can conceal nothing."

"Ah," said Mr. Molloy, still having trouble with his bronchial cords.

"And meantime you be hunting around."

"I will."

"The stuff must be somewheres."

"Sure, it must be somewheres."

"And maybe you'll find it."

"You betcher it won't be for want of trying. Diamonds are my dish."

"I've nothing against 'em myself."

"And now," said Mr. Molloy, his old, easy-breathing self once more, "about terms."

Mrs. Molloy seemed perplexed. "Terms?"

"The divvying up," explained Mr. Molloy. "Don't forget, honey, that it's only fair to give Chimp his cut."

"Oh, yay," said Dolly, enlightened. She had overlooked this side-issue. "You mean, he ought to get a little sump'n for putting us on to this?"

"I think so," said Mr. Molloy. "Yes, I certainly think so. Chimp has been of considerable assistance. Of considerable assistance," he repeated: and if in his manner, as he beamed benevolently at his old friend, there was something a little patronising, it is always hard for a man who is doing a kindly act to avoid a certain complacency. "I feel that Chimp should have his share."

"Maybe you're right," agreed Dolly. She seemed to be thinking her husband's attitude a shade quixotic, but was prepared to yield a point. "What ought we to give him? Twenty-five per cent?"

"I would suggest thirty. You've got to take the big, broad view, sugar. Come right down to it, if it hadn't of been for good old Chimpie, we might never have gotten on to this."

"Just as you say, sweetness. Then we pencil Chimp in for thirty per."

"That's how I see it."

"It's a lot of money."

"Quite a good deal."

"Still, he's an old friend."

"A very old friend."

"I've always liked him."

"Me, too. I don't know a man," said Mr. Molloy, again with that slight suspicion of the patronising in his manner, "whom I esteem more highly than I do good old Chimpie."

A sharp, unpleasant, rasping sound broke the pause which followed these eulogies. It was good old Chimpie clearing his throat.

"Jussa minute!" he said. "Juss a minute, juss a minute!"

The atmosphere up to this point had been one of such jolly friendliness and good will that his words struck a discordant note. His two admirers could not conceal it from themselves that his tone had been acid. Furthermore, he was looking like a monkey which observes a couple of other monkeys trying to chisel it out of a banana.

"Something wrong, Chimpie?" enquired Mr. Molloy solicitously.

Mr. Twist's waxed moustache seemed to have been infected by its proprietor's emotion. It had the air of bristling at the ends.

"Yep," he replied briefly. "Your figures."

For one who had openly confessed her affection for this man, Dolly Molloy was not looking very loving. Her delicate brows had come together in a frown.

"Oh, Gawd!" she exclaimed, and it would be idle to pretend that she did not speak peevishly. "Here he is, acting up again! Every time we have one of these business discussions, he always opens his mouth so wide, it's a wonder he don't swallow himself. What's your beef about taking thirty per"

"Yes, Chimpie," said Mr. Molloy, dignified and reproachful. "What's eating you? Thirty per is nice money."

"Not so nice as ninety per."

"Ninety?" cried Mr. Molloy, with a start of pain, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a brother.

"Ni-yun-ty?" echoed Mrs. Molloy. She, too, seemed to have felt a loved one's teeth closing on a lower limb.

Chimp Twist fondled his moustache, as if soothing it and assuring it that all would come right in the future.

"That's what I said. I'm the promoter of this scheme. If it hadn't of been for me, there wouldn't be any scheme. Naturally, I expect you to do the simple, rough work for the customary agent's fee often per cent."

There was a silence.

"This would happen just the day when I've gone and gotten a cracked lip," said Mrs. Molloy, at length. "All the same, I guess I'll risk a slight guffaw."

She did so, and Chimp eyed her bleakly. "So you think it's funny?"

Dolly replied that that was the impression which she had intended to convey, and her husband's quizzical smile showed that he, too, was not blind to the humourous aspect of the proposition.

"You can't say it's not enough to hand us a laugh, Chimpie," he protested. "The point you're missing, if you'll excuse me mentioning it, is that the madam and I are inside the joint and that you're outside, looking in."

"Yes, that's the point you're missing, you poor dumb brick," assented Mrs. Molloy. "It's only purely and simply our kind hearts that makes us slip you a cut at all."

"And here's the point you're missing," said Mr. Twist. "A phone call from me to the Cork dame, putting her wise about the sort of oil stock you've been selling her, and you'd be out of the place in half an hour. Less, maybe. Depends on whether she let you stay and pack. Chew on that."

Mr. Molloy was shocked.

"You wouldn't do that?"

"I would."

"But it's low. It's not gentlemanly. I wouldn't have thought you'd have been able to stoop to such an act, Chimpie."

"I've been doing bending and stretching exercises lately," explained Mr. Twist. "I can stoop to anything now."

Mrs. Molloy, finding speech, of which this revelation of what was possible in the way of human baseness had momentarily deprived her, gave utterance to a remark so packed with thought and meaning that, although running to only about ten words or so, it provided a complete critique of Mr. Twist's appearance, manners, morals, moustache and parentage. A sensitive man would have been wounded by it, but Chimp Twist had heard too much of this sort of thing in his time to pay attention to it nowadays.

"That stuff won't get you nowhere," he said reprovingly.

"No," Mr. Molloy was forced to agree, "there's no percentage in cracks, honey."

"But you aren't going to let him get away with this customary agent's fee boloney, are you?" demanded Dolly, quivering.

Mr. Molloy, never a very sturdy fighter, looked unhappy.

"I don't see what else we can do, sweetness."

" Well, that's where you're different from me."

"But, pettie, he's right. If he spills the dirt to the Corko, it's outside for you and me. I've found her a nice, smooth-working sucker, always ready to listen to a spiel, but she's got a certain amount of sense, about enough to make a duck fly crooked, and she'll start asking questions. And I can't afford to have her asking questions. Don't forget I haven't gotten her cheque yet."

"That's the way to talk," said Chimp. "I like to listen."

"Then listen to this," shrilled Dolly. "This ice you're talking about—how do you reckon you're going to get it, except through I and Soapy?"

Chimp Twist gave his moustache a final twirl.

"Easy. Simple as pie. You told me yourself about this Yogi joint this dame is running, and when I was in the closet the girl was giving that guy the lowdown on it. So I understand the workings. All I got to do is simply drive up to the front door and say I'm a rich millionaire from the other side, who's heard about the place and wants to sit in, and they'll lay down the red carpet for me, same as they seem to have done for Soapy. How's that?"

"Not so good."

"No?"

"No. You'd never get to first base."

"What's to stop me?"

Mr. Molloy had been asking himself the same question.

To him, it seemed that the day was lost and that it would be futile to struggle further. He was experiencing all the complex emotions of a man who finds himself in a cleft stick, and he was at a loss to account for his loved one's apparent confidence. However, he had so often found her equal to situations by which he himself was baffled that he eyed her now with a certain faint hope.

"I'll tell you what's to stop you," said Dolly, once more showing herself worthy of a husband's trust. "That straw-headed gazook that's got it in for you. He'll be the first thing you bump up against when you breeze into the joint, and then what? He'll immediately start chewing your ugly little head off at the roots, same as he was planning to do before."

Chimp's jaw fell. His moustache drooped limply. He had completely overlooked this obstacle.

"Pers'n'lly and speaking for myself," proceeded Dolly, "I hope you will come down to the place, doing a buck and wing about being rich millionaires, because then everything'll be nice and simple for I and Soapy. All we'll have to do is buy a wreath and attend the funeral, and there we'll be, all set to start hunting for this ice without nobody interfering with us. Come along and join the party. There's good trains all through the day."

There was a silence. Chimp Twist was once more fingering his moustache, but nervously now, like a foiled baronet in an old-time melodrama. Mr. Molloy's eyes had lost their haggard look, and were alight with love and admiration. Dolly was touching up her lips with a lipstick.

"Remember yesterday in the garden, Soapy?" she said, "when we come on this bird by the pool? Remember how he stood there, sort of silhouetted against the evening sky, with all his muscles rippling like snakes?"

"Ah!"

"You thought he must be a prizefighter or sump'n."

"A wrestler."

"That's right, a wrestler. One of those all-in boys that get a hold on people and tear great chunks off of them with a flick of the wrist." Chimp Twist had heard enough.

"Well, what’s your proposition?" he asked sullenly, a beaten man.

"Fifty-fifty," said Dolly promptly.  

"Okay by you?"

Mr. Twist, though not with enthusiasm, replied that it was okay by him, and presently Mr. and Mrs. Molloy took their leave, the latter all smiles and amiability, the former a little thoughtful.

"You were too easy with him, pettie," he said, as they made their way through the cabbage-scented court. "The way you'd gotten him by the short hairs, why ever didn't you gouge him for seventy?"

"Well, I'll be darned!"

"Oh, I'm not sore," Mr. Molloy hastened to add. "I think you were swell. It's just that the thought of splitting Even Stephen with that little buzzard sort of goes against my better nature."

"Well, for the love of Pete!" cried Mrs. Molloy, astounded. "You don't suppose he's going to get anything, do you? Where's your sense, honey? Once we get our hooks on the stuff, natch'ally we sim'ly pick it up and fade away. I just said fifty-fifty to keep him happy."