There was sudden silence.
Clarence stared in shock. Harold watched breathlessly, as close to high drama as he could ever remember. Carruthers leaned back in his chair, idly inspecting the ceiling. Briggs frowned and made a face.
“Cliff,” he said querulously, “was it absolutely necessary to offer that completely unsolicited information? Especially at this particular time? Couldn’t you have waited awhile? A few days, or even better, a few weeks? Now we’ll probably get kicked out of here.” He sighed and reached for the brandy, as if to be sure to have at least one more drink before being evicted into the unfriendly night.
“Well, I really didn’t know what to do or what to say,” Simpson said unhappily. “That’s what I wanted to talk to Billy-Boy about, to ask him precisely what to do or what to say under the circumstances. I’m awfully sorry if I—”
“It’s probably as much my fault as yours, Cliff,” Carruthers said in a conciliatory tone, bringing his eyes down from the ceiling. “I suppose I should have insisted upon waiting until we could discuss the matter among ourselves in private—”
Clarence came out of his daze. His hand bounced off the table once again, scattering cards.
“Wait a second! Wait a second!” he said harshly. “What do you mean, you have no dough?” He reached over and grabbed the bag Simpson had brought, opening it roughly, upending it, shaking it furiously. Two pair of worn socks fell out, and a frayed handkerchief followed by a dog-eared cheap edition that Simpson had been reading on the train. Clarence stared at this detritus.
“I’m afraid it’s the truth,” Carruthers said regretfully. “Believe me, we feel as badly about it as you.” He looked at the bottles of brandy and champagne as a French prisoner might look back at his sweetheart on the docks of Marseilles as he was being carted off to Devil’s Island, never to return. “It is a sad fact but true. As you Americans are wont to say — if one can believe the cinema — the three of us are cracked.”
“That’s broken,” Briggs said critically.
“You mean, broke,” Harold said, pleased to be able to help.
“Shut up! Shut up! All of you!” Clarence glared from one to the other, ending with Carruthers. “What do you mean, broke? What about that award you guys won? That Jarvis whatever? Was it phony?”
“No, it was quite legitimate. Twenty thousand pounds,” Carruthers said, and sighed deeply at the memory. “Twenty thousand of the best. We spent a quid or two for new suits, we admit, and a trifle here plus a trifle there. And we took that cruise on the Sunderland, you know, plus those few days in Gibraltar—”
“Peanuts!” Clarence snarled. “What about the rest? The paper said you’d invested it!”
Carruthers nodded. “And so we did. Poorly, I might add. So that now it is gone.” He intoned the words tragically and spread his hands. “Gone, like chaff before the winds—”
“Like free ices at an orphans’ picnic,” Simpson contributed dolefully.
“Like Safe-Cracker Sam before the uniformed minions of the law, once they had him in their ken,” Briggs came up with, and defended his selection. “That was from my book—”
“Shut up! Shut up!” Clarence glared murderously. “Forget how it went. Where did it go?”
“To that big bottomless safe in the sky to which all poor investors donate,” Carruthers said sadly.
“To ‘the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,’” Simpson said, and despite the tragedy of the loss he could not help beaming, albeit a trifle lugubriously. “I remembered! I remembered! Hamlet, Act three, Scene one!”
“To that—” Briggs hesitated and then gave up.
“Shut up! Shut up!” Clarence sounded distraught.
Carruthers sighed deeply.
“My dear sir,” he said commiseratingly, “believe me when I repeat that we feel as badly about the situation as you. Harold informed me you only wished half of our capital; we have lost it all. But it is truly gone. Gone, as Clifford just mentioned, to that undiscovered something from whose something else no somebody else ever returns. Take my word for it, sir. We are, indeed, impecunious, impoverished, destitute, moneyless, or pauperized, whichever you prefer.”
Clarence fell into a chair, stunned.
“But people don’t kidnap people who don’t have money,” he found himself saying.
“As a general rule, I believe that is probably correct,” Carruthers said, agreeing. “There are, however, exceptions, and I’m afraid this is one of them.”
“You honestly mean you can’t pay a ransom? Of any size? Not even a little one?” Clarence was trying to comprehend the dismal fact, to clutch at straws. “What about your friends?”
“My dear man,” Carruthers said, truly saddened by the other’s lack of understanding, “if we didn’t have many friends when we were in possession of these funds — and the slightest research on your part will indicate that we didn’t — how many friends do you think we have now that we are penniless?” He paused a moment, thinking, and then frowned. “Did I leave that one out before? No matter. The fact is, without money people are usually without friends.”
It was all too true and nobody knew it better than Clarence. Nor did he doubt for a moment that the old men were telling the truth. In the first place, he was sure that with money they would have paid the first ransom demand without hesitation and he would have been rid of the entire bunch days before. In the second place, he was sure the innocence in those china-blue eyes would never permit their owner to bandy the truth. And lastly, of course, with idiots like these three, it must have been duck soup for some sharpie to sell them worthless stocks. He just wished he had gotten to them first.
Harold had been listening in silence, his brain struggling with the attempt to translate all the words flowing in to him from all directions into meaningful pictures his mind could study. It seemed to him that if he understood the conversation correctly, the old men were saying they had lost all their moola and were flat busted. But something occurred to Harold, burrowing itself through his subconscious to titillate the proper nerve ends and generate itself into verbal expression.
“Hey!” he said suddenly. “You guys ain’t broke!”
“We’re not?” Carruthers asked, surprised.
“We’re not?” Briggs asked, sarcastically.
“We’re not?” Simpson asked, doubtful but wishing to be convinced.
“Not you, skinny,” Harold said disdainfully, dismissing the thin man. “I ain’t even played with you, not yet, anyways. I mean them two. I owe them dough. I owe pops a bundle, and I even owe shorty, here, a little bit.”
“Roughly a thousand quid,” Briggs said, “if you call that a little bit.”
“Whatever.” Harold frowned as a second thought wriggled its way past the bone, interposing itself on the first. His face fell. “The only thing is, I was goin’ to pay you guys out of my share of the ransom dough. Now I guess I’ll just have to owe it to you.”
“As someone once remarked,” Carruthers said, “that is supposedly better than cheating us out of it. Although,” he added, “that never quite rang true, to me.”
Clarence had been listening to this exchange without paying too much attention to it. He was trying to console himself that not all capers worked out one hundred per cent, and also that he hadn’t really needed the money; but the fact was that Clarence was unhappy. He hated failure. Not only was he to gain nothing from his efforts — and his detailed planning and execution on such short notice deserved better than that — but he was also out a goodly sum from the amounts of food and liquor that had been consumed by his guests, for at heart Clarence was a miser. His non-paying guests, he reminded himself bitterly. He could still, of course, take out his feelings of frustration by dropping the three of them down the well, although he was fairly sure the tall one’s head would remain well above the water line when he was through. And burying them under the barn would entail too much excavation to dispose of the fat one, plus the fact that the tall one’s feet would probably stick out. They really didn’t build barns in England like they did in Wapakeneta, he thought bitterly.