The Dangerous Hand

The Dangerous Hand

By James Lincoln Warren. Excerpt

The next morning Treviscoe sat in his usual corner at Lloyd’s reading the Public Advertiser, there occasionally being some topic of interest to him in that well-circulated periodical, when Pofret staggered into the coffee-house.

Pomfret might not still have been drunk from the night’s revels, but neither had he recovered from what must have been an epic debauch. His eyes were red, his unshaven face was as rough as a cat’s tongue, and his attire was so carelessly arranged he might have posed for Hogarth’s series on the Rake’s Progress a generation earlier.

He searched the smoky room with bleary eyes and made straight for Treviscoe’s table. On cue, he sat next to Treviscoe with the full force of gravity, once again shaking the floor with a loud thump that startled the patrons.

He stared at Treviscoe with what might have been hostility.

“Coffee, for God’s sake,” he croaked to a passing waiter.

“Shame!” scolded an insurance man at the next table before turning his back on the spectacle of Pomfret in favour of his pipe.

Treviscoe put the newspaper on his lap.

“You appear to have survived some major trial since las we spoke,” he said, his voice sympathetic but his eyes not without a hint of amusement.

“Survived? Have I survived? I was not till this moment at all sure, that I had survived.”

“I see you before me whole, but not unscathed.”

“Not, not unscathed, by God.”

The insurance man at the next table turned to scowl ferociously but said nothing.

The Dangerous Hand. Photo by Elena

“Old Langlade’s a Huguenot, you know,” said Treviscoe, referring to the disapproving man. “I expect he thinks you’ve been drinking all night.”

“Not all night, sir. Not until… hold. Yesterday I sought your aid, and you refused me.”

“No, sir: yesterday you sought my services without benefit of compensation and were refused,” replied Treviscoe.

“Have you no pity?”

“Pity? Pity? For a man who should be wiser, and yet knowingly allows himself to be fleeced? Are you in earnest, sir?”

“Then you are resolved not to help me?”

“I’ve never been resolved against you, Mr. Pomfret. I will gladly help you o the appropriate terms, videlicet, ten per cent, of the amount I save you. These have always been my conditions, as is well know to you.”

“Ten per cent! Ten per cent, why, that comes to over fifty pounds!”

“Yesterday it would have been a mere fifteen. Tell me how you have lost even more.”

“Will you help me?”

“Do you agree to my terms?”

“You are a hard man,” Pemfret said dolefully, “but I agree to them, through under protest.”

Trevescoe covered his face with his hand as if suppressing an eructation; in fact he was hiding a smile. It was small wonder that jolly old Pomfret was a sharp’s target, given how much he hated to part with the stuff: he was as thrifty as a Scot. It must make stealing his money  delicious. Getting control of himself, he looked up into Pomfret’s ravaged eyes. “Now tell me all.”

Published in September 2000, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery magazine