Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  “My four friends? D’ye mean that Jack and Frank—”

  “Precisely, Monsieur. Of those who visited the temple that night and bought the cat’s-paws from the old man, only you survive.”

  “But, good Lord, man; that means that maybe they’re on my trail, too!”

  “Unless I am much more mistaken than I think, you have stated the equation most exactly, Monsieur. Now, will you be good enough to show us Monsieur Marlow’s room?”

  “HUMPH,” COSTELLO GROWLED AS we entered the small neat bedroom. “It’s jist like I wuz afther tellin’ ye, sor. Th’ felley as did this must ha’ been a bird or sumpin’.” He flung the window up and pointed. “We’re up two flights o’ stairs, a good eighteen foot from th’ ground. Anybody who went out that winder would ha’ had to have a parryshoot or wings or sumpin’, an’ as for gittin’ in—how’d he make it? There’s no drain pipe near th’ winder for him to climb, an he couldn’t ha’ stood a ladder up against th’ wall. Ye don’t take ladders through th’ streets widout attractin’ attention, ye know. O’ course, he might ha’ lowered hisself from th’ roof wid a rope, but how’d he git up there to do it? Th’ lobby downstairs is full o’ flunkies, an’ guests an’ members are passin’ back an’ forth all th’ time. Since there’s no adjoinin’ buildin’ he couldn’t ha’ com across th’ roofs—”

  “It is, as you have said, a mystery, my friend,” de Grandin agreed, “but we are presently more concerned with who did these so strange murders than how he managed ingress to or egress from this room. It might be that—mordieu, I have the thought, I have the inspiration, me!”

  “Sure, have ye, now, sor?” asked Costello mildly. “Maybe, jist for old times’ sake ye’d be afther lettin’ us in on it?”

  “Assuredly, mon ami, pourquoi pas? Let us consult our friend Ram Chitra Das. He can tell us more in half an hour than we can guess in twenty-four. Await me here. I rush, I fly to telephone him.”

  Five minutes later he returned and beckoned to us. “We are in luck, mes amis Monsieur and Madame Das have just returned from the opera and not yet gone to bed. They will wait up for us. Come let us hasten to them. Meanwhile,” he took Costello by the arm, led him a little way apart and whispered to him earnestly.

  “O.K., sor,” I heard the detective agree. “I’ll do it, but it’s most irreg’lar. They’ll spring him before daylight.”

  “That will be time enough,” de Grandin answered. “Go telephone headquarters and make haste; we have little time to lose.”

  “What was all the whispering about?” I asked as we set out for New York. “What would be so irregular, and whom will they ‘spring’?”

  “The young Monsieur Ambergrast,” de Grandin answered. “They get into locked rooms whose windows are entirely inaccessible, those ones. Ha, but I do not think that they can penetrate a jail. No, even they would find that difficult. So, since we cannot take the young man with us and dare not leave him in his room, we shall have him arrested as a material witness and lodge him safely in the bastille for a few hours. Of course he will obtain bail, but in the meantime we shall not have him on our conscience. No. Certainly. Quite not.”

  “HULLO, THERE, GLAD TO see you!” Ram Chitra Das greeted as we trooped up the stairs to his second story walkup apartment in East Eighty-Sixth Street. “How are you, Dr. Trowbridge? Glad to meet you, Lieutenant Costello.” He shook hands cordially and ushered us into a room which might have served as setting for a more than usually elaborate presentation of the Arabian Nights. The walls were eggshell white and hung with rugs as gorgeous as the colors of a hashish eater’s dreams, across the floor of polished yellow pine were strewn the pelts of leopards, mountain wolves with platinum-hued fur, and, by the couch against the farther wall a tiger skin of vivid ebony and gold was laid. The place was redolent with a mixture of exotic scents, the fragrance of flowers, applewood burning in the fireplace and cigarette smoke.

  In his dinner clothes and spotless linen our host looked anything but Oriental. He might have been a Spaniard or Italian with his sleek black hair, alert dark eyes and small, regular features, and his accent was decidedly reminiscent of Oxford.

  The woman who rose from the couch and came forward to greet us was positively breath-taking in her loveliness. Tall, slender, rather flat-chested, she moved with a grace that seemed more a flowing than a walk, as if she had been wafted by an unfelt, silent breeze. Her skin was an incredibly beautiful shade of pale gold, smooth and iridescent, her hair, demurely parted in the middle and gathered in a great loose knot at the nape of her neck, was a dull black cloud. But it was the strange, exotic molding of her features that held our gaze. Her high forehead continued downward to her nose without the faintest indication of a curve—the blood of Alexander’s Grecian conquerors of India must have flowed in her veins—and beneath thin, highly arched brows her eyes were pools of deep moss-agate green. Her mouth was wide, her lips thin lines of scarlet. She wore an evening dress of dull white silk cut with classic Greek simplicity and girdled at the waist with a cord of silver. About her right arm just above the elbow was a wide bracelet of platinum set with emerald and rubies, and in her ears were emerald studs that picked up and accentuated the green of her eyes. Her whole appearance was one of superb, lithe grace.

  “My dear,” our host bowed formally as he presented us in turn, “Dr. de Grandin, Dr. Trowbridge, Lieutenant Costello. Gentlemen, my wife, Nairini, who but for a shockingly poor choice of husbands might now be Maharanee of Khandawah.”

  “Tiens, Madame,” de Grandin murmured, as he raised her slim jeweled fingers to his lips, “in India or Iceland, Nepal or New York, you would be nothing less than queen!”

  Her great eyes dwelt on him in green abstraction for a moment, then a smile came into them, and teeth like pearls showed between scarlet lips: I never saw a woman who did not smile at Jules de Grandin. “Merci, Monsieur,” she murmured in a voice so deeply musical that it reminded me of the cooing of doves, “vous me faites honneur!”

  “And now,” Ram Chitra Das demanded as we seated ourselves, “what seems to be the matter? From your rather hurried message I gathered that you suspect Indian skullduggery of some sort?”

  “Indeed, my friend, you have entirely right,” de Grandin nodded solemnly. “Consider what we know and what we suspect, then see if you can add the key-word to our enigma.”

  The Indian made no comment as de Grandin outlined our problem, then, as the small Frenchman halted: “I think that your suspicions are well founded. These little stinkers stumbled onto something they had no business gettin’ mixed up with, and the penalty they’ve been called upon to pay might have been foreseen by anybody who knows India and the Indians.

  “You know, I suppose, that the Criminal Tribes of India number almost ten million members. They aren’t just ordinary thieves and murderers and pickpockets; they’re literally born criminals, just as you Americans are born Protestants or Catholics or Democrats or Republicans. Every child among them is hereditarily a criminal and is as such in the records of the Indian police. Stealin’, murderin’ and other criminal activity is as much a religious duty with them as giving alms to the poor is to the Jew, Christian or Moslem, and to fail in a career of crime is to lose caste.

  “Loss of caste is serious to a Hindu. Something like excommunication to a medieval Christian—only more so. Spiritually it dooms him to countless reincarnations through unnumbered ages; physically it has drawbacks, too. If I were to return to my uncle’s palace in Nepal I’d find myself a real nonentity. No servant would wait on me, no tradesman would sell me merchandise, no one but scavengers and street sweepers would dare speak to me. As for Nairini, who ran away from her princely father to marry a casteless vagabond, if she went back they’d probably sew her up in a sack and dump her in the most convenient river.

  “So much for that. You know, of course, that Hindu workmen have gone nearly everywhere—China, the Dutch Indies, and, of course, the British colonies in Africa. It appears some of these ‘Crims,’ as the
y are familiarly but not affectionately known to the Indian police, gravitated to Sierra Leone some time ago, and picked up a few tricks from the Leopard Men of the Protectorate and adjacent Liberia. Some of them went back to Mother India and introduced the innovation of the ‘cat’s-paw’—a fur glove studded with steel claws—to their contemporaries. I heard that there had been an outbreak of killin’s in which the victims had apparently been mauled by leopards in the Madras Presidency a couple of years ago. That seems to be where these young men fit in. Unquestionably they visited a gatherin’ of the Criminal Tribesmen when ‘cat’s-paws’ were bein’ distributed, and the old scoundrel who conducted them decided to turn a dishonest rupee by sellin’ them the devilish paraphernalia.

  “You remember what happened to him. Young Ambergrast thought it odd that Criminal Tribesmen should have turned on one of their fellows. It was only to have been expected. The fellow had, to all intents sold a lodge secret, and secret societies resent that sort of thing, some more vigorously than others. It seems that this particular renegade didn’t live long to enjoy his perfidious gains.

  “The roomal—the Thugs’ stranglin’ towel, you know—did for him, but there remained the matter of the young outlanders to be settled. By buyin’ these ‘cat’s-paws’ and employin’ them not for legitimate crimes, but to terrorize unwillin’ native girls into compliance, these young white men had put an affront on the whole criminal clan. They’d made the Crims ‘lose face.’ Loss of face is almost as bad as loss of caste in the East, and something drastic had to be done about it. Accordingly—” He raised his hands as if he looped a cord, then drew them together with a snapping motion. “Exeunt omnes, as Shakespearian stage directions say.”

  “Then ye think, sor,” Costello began, but Das forestalled him.

  “I’m almost sure of it, Lieutenant. The man or men entrusted with the job of giving these youngsters the happy dispatch is probably some member of the Criminal Tribes who has lost caste, and must regain it by their murder. He or they will stop at nothing, and if there are several of them killing, some will not deter the others, for they believe implicitly that the surest, quickest route to Paradise is to be killed while in the commission of a crime, just as they lose caste by being caught.”

  “An’ have ye anny idee how th’ thafe o’ th’ wor-rld gained entrance to th’ pore young felley’s room, sir? It looked to me as if ’twould take a bir-rd to break into it, or git out; but as ye say, they are a clever lot and may know some tricks we ain’t hep to.”

  “I have a very definite idea, Lieutenant,” Ram Chitra Das replied. “Where’s Ambergrast at present?”

  “In jail, an’ safe, we hope.”

  “He’s safer there than anywhere, but if we want to catch our birds we’ll have to bait our trap. D’ye think he’s managed to raise bail by this time?”

  “I dunno, sor, but I’ll tellyphone if ye’d like.”

  “That might be a good idea. Tell them to detain him on any sort of pretext till they hear from you, then send him back to his rooms in a squad car.”

  RAM CHITRA DAS, DE Grandin and I crouched in an angle of the wall that ran along the alley back of the Lotus Club. The numbing cold gnawed at our bones like a starved dog, and as the sky began to lighten faintly in the east a sharp wind lent an extra sting to the air. “Mille douleurs,” the little Frenchman murmured miserably, “one little hour more of this and Jules de Grandin is a stiffening corpse, pardieu!”

  “Quiet, old thing!” Ram Chitra Das whispered. “We’ve invested so much time and discomfort already, it would be a shame to let him slip past us now. He’s almost sure to come. Those johnnies waste no time and nearly always work in darkness. D’ye think Costello’s on the job inside?”

  “I left him and a plainclothes man in the room next to Ambergrast’s,” I answered. “They’ve left their door on a crack, and nothing bigger than a mouse can creep past them. If there’s a squeak from Ambergrast’s room they’ll—”

  “If the fellow we’re expectin’ gets into that room they’ll hear no squeak,” Ram Chitra Das broke in grimly. “Those Bagrees can clip an earring from a sleeping woman’s head and never make her miss a snore, and when it comes to usin’ the roomal—they can kill a man as quickly as a bullet, almost, and with no more noise than a fly walking on the ceiling. I’ve seen some of their work, and—by George, I think we’re havin’ company!”

  Stepping noiselessly and sure-footedly as a cat on the frozen slush, a man was coming toward us. He was an undersized, emaciated fellow bundled in an overcoat much too large for him, and with a derby hat at least three sizes too big thrust incongruously down on his head. As nearly as I could determine he was dark-skinned, but I was certain that he was no Negro. For a moment he paused like a hound at fault, scanning the windows in the second story of the clubhouse, then walked unerringly to a spot beneath the partly opened window of the room where Ambergrast slept.

  “Watch this,” Ram Chitra Das commanded in an almost soundless whisper. “If it’s what I think it’ll be, it’s goin’ to be good.”

  The man came to a halt, drew a small flask from his pocket and uncorked it, letting some of its contents spill on the ground. “That’s the libation,” Das murmured. “They always pour a little out to Bhowanee as an offerin’ before they drink the sacred mhowa as a part of ceremonial murder.”

  The fellow drained the contents of the flask and put the empty bottle in his pocket then, unconcernedly as a lad about to go swimming, stripped off his overcoat, his sweater, trousers and shoes, and stood in the raw winter wind unclothed save for a loin-cloth and his absurd derby. This was last of all to come off, and we saw he wore a close-wrapped turban of soiled white cloth under it.

  “Mordieu, he mortifies the flesh, that one,” de Grandin whispered, but checked on a sharp breath as the dark-skinned man unwound a length of rope from his waist, coiled it on the frozen snow at his feet and bent above it, making swift, cryptic passes with his hands.

  I knew I did not see it—yet there it was. Slowly, like a snake that wakes from torpor, the rope seemed to come alive. Its end stirred, twitched, rose a few inches, fell back to the ground, then reared once more, this time remaining up. Then inch by stealthy inch it rose, seeming to feel its way cautiously, until it stood as straight and stiff as a pole, one end upon the frozen ground the other less than a foot from Ambergrast’s window.

  “Grand Dieu des porcs, it cannot be!” de Grandin whispered incredulously. “Me, I have heard of that rope trick a thousand times, but—”

  “Seein’ is believin’, old chap,” Ram Chitra Das cut in with a low chuckle. “You’ve heard old, seasoned travelers say the rope trick is a fake and can’t really be done—but there it is, for you to make a note of in your diary.”

  The little dark man had begun to climb the upright rope. Agilely as a monkey he went up hand over hand, and it seemed to me his toes were as prehensile as a monkey’s too, for instead of trying to twist his ankles in the cord to brace himself he grasped it with his feet.

  He was opposite the partly opened window and was loosening the towel bound about his waist above the loin-cloth when Das stepped quickly forward, both hands raised and shouting, “Darwaza bundo!” in a strident voice.

  The effect was electrical. The rope collapsed like a punctured balloon, and the man grasping it was hurled to the ice-covered bricks with crushing force. Half-way between the window and the ground he twisted in the air, both arms outspread, hands clutching futilely at nothingness, mouth squared in helpless, hopeless terror, turned end over end and struck the icy pavement shoulders first.

  “Grab him!” Ram Chitra Das shouted as he leaped upon the fallen body, snatched the towel from the man’s hand and began to knot it into a fetter. “Don’t bother,” he added disgustedly, as he rose and dusted snow from his knees. “He’s out cold as yesterday’s kipper.”

  “AND THAT IS MOST indubitably that,” Ram Chitra Das informed us as we faced each other over coffee and sandwiches in the study. “I feared th
ere might be several of ’em, but Sookdee Singh—our little Bagree playmate—tells me he did all those killin’s by his naughty little self. Quite an enterprisin’ young chap, I’d say.”

  “Can you put credence in his word?” de Grandin asked.

  “Ordinarily, no. This time, yes. A Bagree thinks no more of lyin’ than he does of breathin’, but when he dips his hand in blood and says, ‘May Bhowanee’s wrath consume me utterly if I tell not the truth,’ you can believe him. I borrowed a sponge from the hospital operatin’ room and made the beggar smear his finger in the blood and swear to tell the truth before I’d make him any promises.

  “But what could ye promise him, sor?” Costello demanded. “We’ve got dead wood on ’im. He’ll take th’ rap for murther, sure as shootin’—”

  “I’m afraid not, Lieutenant. He was pretty badly smashed up in his fall, a fractured rib went through his lung, and the doctor at the hospital tells me he can’t last the day. That gave me my hold on him.”

  “I don’t see how—” Costello began, but the Indian continued with a smile.

  “Those Criminal Tribesmen are devout Hindus, although the ethics of their devotion may be open to question. However, they share one thing with their more honest co-religionists. They feel it a disgrace to be buried, cremation bein’ the only honorable method of disposin’ of their bodies. If their ashes are committed to the Ganges they are just that much nearer heaven—somethin’ like a Christian’s bein’ buried in consecrated ground, you know.

  “That’s where I got my leverage. I promised him that if he told the truth and the whole truth—if he ‘came clean’, I believe is the way you Americans would put it—I’d see his body was cremated and his ashes shipped to India to be thrown in the Ganges. I couldn’t have offered him any greater inducement.”

  “If it’s not a trade secret, would you mind telling me what it was you shouted to make that rope collapse?” I asked.

  “Not at all. I said ‘Darwaza bundo!’ which means merely ‘Shut the door!’ in Hindustani. It didn’t really matter what I said you know. In order to perform his tricks an adept has to concentrate his whole mind on them, and the slightest deviation—even for a second—breaks the charm. The shock of hearing himself suddenly addressed in his native tongue was so great that it diverted his attention. Only for a split-second, of course, but that was enough. Once the rope went soft, there was nothin’ he could do about it till he had it coiled upon the ground once more and started his charm from the beginnin’.”