Another shot sounded, and running feet thumped in the hall. The pockmarked man’s face came through the hangings. He poured grunts at the wrestler. The wrestler scowled at me and protested. The other insisted.
The wrestler scowled at me again, rumbled, “You wait,” and was gone with the other.
I finished my cigarette to the tune of muffled struggle-sounds that seemed to come from the floor below. There were two more shots, far apart. Feet ran past the door of the room I was in. Perhaps ten minutes had gone since I had been left alone.
I found I wasn’t alone.
Across the room from the door, the hangings that covered the wall were disturbed. The blue, green and silver velvet bulged out an inch and settled back in place.
The disturbance happened the second time perhaps ten feet farther along the wall. No movement for a while, and then a tremor in the far corner.
Somebody was creeping along between hangings and wall.
I let them creep, still slumping in my chair with idle hands. If the bulge meant trouble, action on my part would only bring it that much quicker.
I traced the disturbance down the length of that wall and halfway across the other, to where I knew the door was. Then I lost it for some time. I had just decided that the creeper had gone through the door when the curtains opened and the creeper stepped out.
She wasn’t four and a half feet high—a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy