Sinful Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

in it. Yielding for a moment to blazing rage, she banged it with her fist, got it closed. Then she opened the righthand drawer.
    Sylvia was still sitting with her eyes closed, a look of terrible pain on her face. It was Vicki, who had wandered restlessly around the room, and was now behind Sylvia, who saw what Hazel lifted out of the drawer. With an exclamation he leaped forward, for the gun was leveled straight at Sylvia. Sylvia opened her eyes, didn’t move a muscle. She said: “I’ll be looking at you, Hazel. Every night.”
    “No!”
    “Yes!”
    The crack of the Shoreham voice was followed by a terrible stare. Hazel looked away, as a cat does from a human being, whimpered, lowered the gun. Vicki, who was standing within an inch of her, took it, put it back in the drawer.
    Sylvia said: “Damn you, Vicki.” Then she got up, went over to the wall behind her, and said: “You’d better go now. Because I don’t know how long God will give me strength to stay away from that desk. From what’s in that desk. Go. Don’t be there when I turn around.”

Chapter Five
    C OMPARED WITH SYLVIA’S GLOWING twenty-five, Dmitri Spiro’s age was sallowly middle; compared with her slender curvation, his contours were distressingly blimpish. Yet he was still under forty, and in spite of pallor, fat, and baldness, he gave off something describable as magnetism. Spiro wasn’t his name, but it was a fair approximation of his mother’s name, she having been Hungarian; his father’s Lithuanian name was wholly unsayable and unwritable, at least to Americans, and he had dropped it. He had started life as stable boy on the estates of the late Baron Vladimir Alexis Gustavus Adlerkreutz, near Memel, where his father had charge of the cattle and his mother had charge of the cheese, curds, and butter. Respect for the Herrschaft was a prominent feature of the Spiro household, and young Dmitri early learned the deep bow that a peasant must give them, and the correct way to take off his hat to them, and the rigid stance that was required in speaking to them, to be relaxed only in case of critical moisture in the nose, when relief with the back of the hand was permissible. He had one friend, however: the young Vicki Adlerkreutz, son of the baron, and owner of a fine Shetland pony.
    After the last war, however, his education was interrupted, for he returned to Buda-Pest, whence he had been taken as a child, and got work tending horses in one of the circuses there. It wasn’t long, however, before he persuaded the management to let him do a comic turn with the clowns.
    Comedians are the business men of the theatre; indeed comedy is a business, requiring bookkeepers to keep track of its jokes, its emoluments, and its taxes. After that, his rise in show business was rapid, as was his increase in weight, and acquaintanceship with actresses of the grand, or Viennese style. Soon he had a company, first in Buda-Pest, then in Vienna, a theatre, and a monocle. But then came certain upheavals, and long before Anschluss he left hurriedly, for Paris. There he tried to get started again, but succeeded only in losing such money as he had been able to salvage. He came to Hollywood, and had been there only a few days when he met, at Vine and Selma, his former friend, the young Victor Alexis Olaf Herman Adlerkreutz, now baron in sight of God and all men except Hitler, who had taken his estates. It was the greatest moment of his life when Vicki recognized him, kissed him on both cheeks, dragged him into the Brown Derby, and borrowed $5. For the rest of his day he relaxed, and permitted his head to swim, and inhaled the iridescent beauty of the sunshine at the reflection that he, Dmitri Spiro, a peasant boy, had been thus treated by Adlerkreutz, a baron of Lithuania, with full seignorial rights over the peasant girls of his domain, and no doubt a great many actresses too.
    From then on he and Vicki saw each other a great deal, and within a week had taken an