The thoughtful lines in the boy’s face deepened.
“There’s your choice, Flippo,” I summed up for him. “All I can give you is freedom from San Quentin. The princess can give you a fat cut of the profits in a busted caper, with a good chance to get yourself hanged.”
The girl, remembering her advantage over me, went at him hot and heavy in Italian, a language in which I know only four words. Two of them are profane and the other two obscene. I said all four.
The boy was weakening. If he had been ten years older, he’d have taken my offer and thanked me for it. But he was young and she—now that I thought of it—was beautiful. The answer wasn’t hard to guess.
“But not to bump him off,” he said to her, in English, for my benefit. “We’ll lock him up in there where I was at.”
I suspected Flippo hadn’t any great prejudice against murder. It was just that he thought this one unnecessary, unless he was kidding me to make the killing easier.
The girl wasn’t satisfied with his suggestion. She poured more hot Italian at him. Her game looked sure-fire, but it had a flaw. She couldn’t persuade him that his chances of getting any of the loot away were good. She had to depend on her charms to swing him. And that meant she had to hold his eye.
He wasn’t far from me.
She came close to him. She was singing, chanting, crooning Italian syllables into his round face.
She had him.
He shrugged. His whole face said yes. He turned—