In the doorway stood Edouard Maurois and the man I had swatted on the chin. Each had a gun.
I looked at Inés Almad, wondering what turn her craziness would take in the face of this situation. She wasn’t so crazy as I had thought. Her scream and the thud of her gun on the floor sounded together.
“Ah!” the Frenchman was saying. “The gentlemen were leaving? May we detain them?”
The man with the big chin—it was larger than ever now with the marks of my tap—was less polite.
“Back up, you birds!” he ordered, stooping for the gun the woman had dropped.
I still was holding the doorknob. I rattled it a little as I took my hand away—enough to cover up the click of the lock as I pushed the button that left it unlatched. If I needed help, and it came, I wanted as few locks as possible between me and it.
Then—Billie, the woman and I walking backward—we all paraded into the sitting-room. Maurois and his companion both wore souvenirs of the row in the taxicab. One of the Frenchman’s eyes was bruised and closed—a beautiful shiner. His clothes were rumpled and dirty. He wore them jauntily in spite of that, and he still had his walking stick, crooked under the arm that didn’t hold his gun.
Big Chin held us with his own gun and the woman’s while Maurois ran his hand over Billie’s and my clothes, to see if we were armed. He found my gun and pocketed it. Billie had no weapons.
“Can I trouble you to step back against the wall?” Maurois asked when he was through.