His dove murmured, “Yes,” and left her chair, saying, “You’ll excuse me? I have a letter to write.”
“Certainly, my dear,” Gungen told her as he and I stood up.
She passed close to him on her way to the door. His small nose twitched over his dyed mustache and he rolled his eyes in a caricature of ecstasy.
“What a delightful scent, my precious!” he exclaimed. “What a heavenly odor! What a song to the nostrils! Has it a name, my love?”
“Yes,” she said, pausing in the doorway, not looking back.
“And it is?”
“ Dèsir du Cœur ,” she replied over her shoulder as she left us.
Bruno Gungen looked at me and giggled.
I sat down again and asked him what he knew about Jeffrey Main.
“Everything, no less,” he assured me. “For a dozen years, since he was a boy of eighteen he has been my right eye, my right hand.”
“Well, what sort of man was he?”
Bruno Gungen showed me his pink palms side by side.
“What sort is any man?” he asked over them.
That didn’t mean anything to me, so I kept quiet, waiting.
“I shall tell you,” the little man began presently. “Jeffrey had the eye and the taste for this traffic of mine. No man living save myself alone has a judgment in these matters which I would prefer to Jeffrey’s. And, honest, mind you! Let nothing I say mislead you on that point. Never a lock have