For once I thought our dauntless Tish was daunted. How true it is that we forget past success in present failure! But after a number of mysterious absences she came into my room after Aggie had gone to bed and said: “I’ve found where they keep it.”
“Keep what?”
“My ambulance.”
I was putting my hair on wavers at the time, and I saw in the mirror that she had her hat and coat on, and the expression she wears when she has decided to break the law.
“I’m not going to spend this night in a French jail, Tish Carberry,” I said.
“Very well,” she retorted, and turned to go out.
But the thought of Tish alone, embarked on a dangerous enterprise, was too much for me, and I called her back.
“I’ll go,” I said, “and I’ll steal, if that’s what you’re up to. But I’m a fool, and I know it. You can’t deceive a lot of Frenchmen with your handkerchief-fish-trunk-pencil stuff. And you can’t book-soup-oysters yourself out of jail.”
“I’m taking my own, and only my own,” Tish said with dignity.
Well, I dressed and we went out into the street. I tried to tell Tish that even if we got it we couldn’t take it home and hide it under the bed or in a bureau drawer, but she was engrossed in her own thoughts, and besides, the streets were entirely dark and not a taxicab anywhere. She had a city map, however, and a flashlight, and at last about two in the morning we reached the street where she said it was stored in a garage.