A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

She was out through the door now and about to break into a headlong spurt. And then she suddenly had to slow it down again. Renard was standing there, come to drink in her own triumph. People all around her showering congratulations, but her eye didn’t miss a trick. Her behind-the-hand whisper reached Leone as she was about to go past her. “Don’t hurry so. You may catch that on something and damage it.”

The voice of authority, that could not be disregarded. She tapered to a gracious walk, and one of the two men immediately made a signal to her. Not him. The other one.

She didn’t stop for it, so they came over to her instead, stood alongside her one on each side, peering closely with professional interest and professional pitilessness. Not at the gown this time, but at her. Only at her. She halted, with fear-glazing eyes.

“Your name Leone Aubry?” said one, pointing with a slim putty-green cigar he was holding between his fingers.

“What do you want?”

“Is your name Leone Aubry?”

“Yes, but what do you want?”

“You’re coming with us, is what we want.”

Then he showed her something, in a sort of wallet-carrying-case that split open across the top and uplidded, instead of opening along its edge like the usual money-carrying wallet does. She could make out the city’s coat-of-arms, then he squeezed it closed, with the same hand he was holding it in.

The police. She knew now who they were. She clapped both hands to her mouth, and held them there, at cross-angles to one another. People started to turn and look curiously at her. Finally she let her hands drop again, so that she could speak without impediment. “What for? What have I done?” she asked them, in a sort of piteous, passive, boxed-in panic.

“We don’t stand and talk to you here, in a place like this.”

And the other one, the one who had been at her heels for a week, surly: “We didn’t come here to buy our wives dresses, you know.”

“Can’t I go upstairs and change for a minute?” Just a minute more, anything for a minute more. You don’t value freedom when you have unlimited lengths and stretches of it. Then when you don’t have it anymore, how sweet just one extra minute of it is.

“No delays, you’re coming right as you are. Put a coat on over you.”

“But I can’t take it out of here. It belongs to the house. I’m not allowed to.”

Renard intervened. “What’s the trouble? Is this an arrest?”

“An interrogation.”

“Then please, gentlemen, no commotion. We’ve all worked too long and too hard for this, to have it spoiled.” And with that typical logic which had made her the successful business woman she was, she pointed out: “The dress is my property. You can’t take it out of here unless you have an order for its confiscation. Which you don’t have. Therefore the dress and the girl must be separated first before you can take the girl.”

One of them scratched his head and mumbled in an aside to his partner something about “not only designs clothes but she’s a lawyer in the bargain.”

“Go upstairs, Leone,” Renard said with a sort of localized sympathy. That is to say, a sympathy that was given freely and for the asking, until it collided with or obstructed her own one and only concern, the making and selling of dresses. Then it stopped and didn’t go any further. “Maybe it’ll work itself out all right. Let me hear from you, if you can.”

The three of them stood and stared after her, watching her heels flicker up the stairs like little flesh-toned mallets tacking down a carpet.

Upstairs in the hall, where there were no longer guests to be reckoned with, she made a bee-line for the dressing-room door, elbowing everyone aside and almost stumbling in her haste to get in there. The door clapped shut after her.

“Somebody help me to get out of here, quick!” she gasped. They all turned on the long dressing-bench and stared at her with one accord.

“There’re two men down there—”

“Two?” one girl said. “There must be twenty-five.”

“This isn’t anything to joke about. These two are cops. They’re standing right down at the foot of the stairs. They’re waiting to take me with them.”

“How do you know it’s you?”

“They said so right in front of Renard.”

She had the dress off now. She was shivering from head to foot, and not from the cold, either.

“By why you? What’ve you been up to?”

She summed the whole tragic little story up in just two words. “My fellow.”

“What is he, a loser with the cops? I had one like that once. Funny, how those guys always make the best kind of—”

Somebody gave a scream of synthetic modesty, of protest actually more than modesty, and one of the two from downstairs was standing in the open doorway motioning to her with his head. “Are you going to come out of there, or do you want me to come in and get you?”