He fell upon his ice-cream, when it was brought to him, like a starved creature, and then I noticed the horrible deformity of his hands. He hooked a twisted stump about the handle of his spoon. Nearly all the fingers were gone; what was left were mere torn fragments of bone and tendon. His hands must have been horribly crushed, the top part of the hands crushed off entirely. It made me sick to look at them.
I produced my chart, and passed it over to him. He paused in his repast, wiped off his lips and beard, took out a blank sheet of paper from one of his ragged pockets, and translated with great rapidity, scribbling down the lines with a stump of a pencil about which he wrapped his crooked index stump very cleverly. He grew quite hot with excitement as he wrote; his enormous forehead turned pink. He smacked his lips: “Nu, madame, Boje moe, what a reward for your great, your excellent courage!”
He handed back both pages to me, and began on his ice-cream again. I took the translation and read it eagerly.
“The crown alone is worth every risk, almost every crime. Each jewel is a fortune to dream about. The robe is encrusted with the wealth of magic. If each stone is taken out and offered cautiously for sale at different and widely separated places, the danger of detection would now be very slight. You will have at each sale the dowry of a queen. And all of this splendor is hidden in the wall. There are two ways of reaching it. The easier is through the hole in the kitchen closet, the closet under the stairs. These are directions, easy to remember and easier to follow: Go up the sixteen steps, go along the passage to the inclined plane. Ascend the inclined plane. Count five rafters from the first perpendicular rafter from the top of the plane on your left side. The fifth rafter, if strongly moved, pulls forward. Behind it, on end, stands the iron box. The key is hidden back of the eighteenth brick to the left of the fifth rafter on the row which is the thirtieth from the floor of the passage. Have courage, have self-control, have always a watchful eye for Her. She knows.”
This was not signed. Now, I did a careful thing. I read this translation over five or six times. And then I memorized the directions. Sixteen steps up, ascend the inclined plane, five rafters from the one on your left at the top of the plane, the eighteenth brick to the left of the fifth rafter in the thirtieth row. And then I repeated “sixteen, five, eighteen, thirty,” till they made an unforgettable jingle in my brain.
“You will not forget me, madame?” murmured the priest, this time in Russian. “Madame ruined me, and madame will lift me up.” I lifted my eyes from the paper and smiled that horrible smile.
“I will not forget you,” I said in the same tongue. “You will still be at the address?”
“Until you advise me to change it,” he said cringingly.
“Excellent. Do svedania.”
He stood up and blessed me. I bent my head, and he stalked out, his long, light hair flapping against his shoulders as he walked. The clerks at the drug-store counter gaped and tittered at him. I followed him to the door. There he made me another bow, smiled a big, toothless smile, mounted his motor-cycle, and went off at a tremendous speed, his deformed hands hooked over the bars, the wind of his own motion sending the long points of his beard flying behind him like pennons.