EQMM, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "If that's the case, it's his job to find it, not yours."

  He went to bed unsatisfied by the turn of events. There was something about the whole business he didn't like. Maybe it was just that Irene Duggen had been so cooperative.

  * * * *

  Mainly to mollify Leila, Rand tried to put the Mathers puzzle out of his mind the following day. They toured the city's Turkish Quarter and the Palace of Ras el-Tin, returning to the hotel in late afternoon. The previous day's murder of the Mathers imposter was front-page news, but the police had been unable to identify him as yet.

  "At least Captain Simbel has stopped bothering us,” Leila said.

  "Maybe. Unless he's got someone following us."

  He was only half joking, and on the way back from dinner that night he had a glimpse of someone on their tail. He told Leila to go on up to the room and waited in the shadow of the pillars outside the hotel. After a moment a slender shape appeared and Rand reached out to grab it. “Looking for me?” he asked.

  He recognized Nessim, the young Egyptian who worked in Irene's shop. The man was startled and mumbled some excuse. “I was only out for a walk."

  "You were following us and I want to know why."

  "I—I might have some information to sell you."

  Rand backed him against the pillar. “What sort of information?"

  "Rosco Mathers was probably killed by the man known as Kraken. I can take you to his house."

  "I'm not a policeman. You should tell Captain Simbel if you know anything."

  "The police don't pay for information. If I told Simbel I knew anything he'd beat it out of me before he paid me."

  "I don't pay for information either, Nessim. I didn't even get paid for the job I did."

  "Simbel might pay a reward for his capture."

  "Then you collect it, not me."

  "I must live in Alexandria after his capture. His people would seek me out and kill me. You could be safely away by that time."

  Time.

  What was it about that word? Mathers's father had been the Wizard of Time.

  "How much do you want to take me there?” he asked the young man. In his mind he could almost hear Leila shouting, “No!"

  Nessim took a deep breath. “One hundred British pounds?” In the streets of Alexandria informers came cheap.

  "All right,” Rand said. “Half now and half when we get there. Let me call upstairs and tell my wife I'll be late."

  He used the house phone in the lobby, and told Leila he was going off with Nessim. “Are you out of your mind? You could end up like Mathers."

  "Let's hope that doesn't happen."

  They went in Nessim's cramped little French sedan, bumping over a secondary road out of the city, running close to the sea. “We are heading toward Agami,” Nessim told him. “It is a popular resort area now, surrounded by groves of fig trees, with a long bay for boating."

  "How do you know Kraken will be here?"

  "I don't, but I know the man who sold him the place. It's a perfect hideout in a busy resort area where he can mingle with the crowd and pass unnoticed. I'll park here. We should approach the house from the rear, through the fig orchard."

  Rand followed him through the darkness, moving carefully between the rows of trees. Their goal was a moderate-sized house ablaze with lights, but in the darkness the path was treacherous. Suddenly Nessim cursed and went down. “Cobra!” he shouted.

  Rand flicked on the little penlight he carried and saw the serpent at Nessim's leg. He kicked at it, realizing the utter foolishness of such a move. “Did it bite you?” he asked.

  "In the leg. I stumbled right on it in the dark."

  "Do you have a mobile phone, a cell phone?"

  "Yes.” He was breathing hard, more from fear than pain. The snake had vanished into the darkness.

  "What's your emergency number here?” Rand asked, taking the phone from him and punching in the number Nessim gave him.

  Suddenly a powerful spotlight targeted them from the house. A tall figure with a shotgun appeared on the back porch. “Don't move, either of you,” the man commanded.

  "He's been bitten by a cobra,” Rand shouted. “We need help!"

  "Put down that phone or I'll shoot."

  Rand let it drop without breaking the connection, then stood up with his hands in the air. “Can I help him to his feet?” he asked.

  "Slowly and carefully.” The shotgun never wavered.

  As Nessim stood up he gasped in pain. “It's starting to hurt."

  "He needs immediate treatment or he'll die,” Rand insisted.

  "If he brought you here he deserves to die. You will join him."

  "You don't know who I am."

  "That puts us on a level playing field,” the man with the shotgun said. “You don't know who I am, either."

  "I think I do. I think you're the twice-dead Rosco Mathers."

  * * * *

  He motioned them inside then, keeping the shotgun aimed. Nessim could barely walk and his leg was beginning to swell around the bite. “Sit down,” Mathers ordered. “Before I kill you I'd like to hear what you have to say.” The lights in the room revealed a stout Englishman with a few weeks’ growth of beard. He'd shaved his head and looked quite different from the photo Rand had seen earlier.

  "That snakebite has to be treated,” Rand insisted.

  "First tell me what you know."

  "Knowing and guessing aren't exactly the same thing, but I think this is what happened. You had an especially valuable shipment of arms coming through the port here, in a sealed container. The man known as Kraken wanted to hijack it if he could. He started out by killing you, but he got your double by mistake—a man your ex-wife told us you sometimes used. You knew enough to plant your wallet on the man, dump him in the sea, and go into hiding, pretending to be dead. The body had been in the water several days when it was found, and your wallet was on it. Since you were missing, they accepted that it was you without the need for further forensic testing."

  Nessim had collapsed on the couch, holding his swollen leg. Rand wanted to cut open the wound, but remembered a doctor telling him once that such action could be dangerous. “Go on,” Mathers urged.

  "Kraken, meanwhile, believing you were dead, gained entry to your office and searched for a clue to the location of the arms shipment. He found the coded message but was unable to decipher it. That's where things stood until he learned that a retired British cipher expert was in town. He invited me to your office, pretending to be you, and gave me the message to decipher. When he returned to the office to phone me yesterday, you followed him in and killed him. With him dead, you decided to hide out here, at his house."

  "You knew all this?"

  "It was the clocks,” Rand admitted. “All those clocks on the wall behind your desk. In an earlier photograph they were all set at the traditional twenty minutes past eight, and that was how they were on my second visit, when I supposedly found you dead. I had to ask myself why they'd been changed from the various times they showed on my first visit and who changed them. The one thing the coded message didn't reveal was the number of the cargo container that held the arms shipment, or the recipient's name. That must have come in a separate message to you. They're usually long numbers, difficult to remember, and you didn't want to risk writing them down. So I think you set those clocks, probably using the more accurate hour hand, to indicate the number, with one digit on each clock face."

  "Why couldn't Kraken have done it?"

  "Because he didn't even know what the message said. He hired me to translate it, and died before I could deliver the message to him. But the clocks were set back to their original display by that time. Since Kraken wouldn't have done it, the times must have been altered by his killer, the one who changed them in the first place. That could only have been you, and it told me you were still alive."

  Mathers backed away and lifted the shotgun. “I'm selling that shipment to a wealthy buyer tomorrow. I'll be out of here
then, starting a new life far away. Too bad I'll have to kill you both."

  The words were barely out of his mouth when the window behind him was shattered by a blast of gunfire. Mathers lived only long enough for a startled expression to appear on his face. Captain Simbel and his men were inside a few seconds later.

  "We were behind you,” he told Rand. “Leaving your mobile phone on led us right to you."

  "That's Rosco Mathers, Captain. He killed Kraken and was hiding out here. I'll tell you all about it. And Nessim here needs treatment for a cobra bite on his leg."

  Simbel's men carried Nessim out to the car. Rand ran though it all again, but when he'd finished the captain merely shook his head. “Much too complicated. In my report Mathers stays dead and this man is Kraken. It reads better that way."

  "What kind of a solution is that?"

  Simbel merely smiled. “It is the Alexandrian solution."

  (c) 2008 by Edward D. Hoch

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  Novelette: THE JAILER by Janice Law

  Connecticut resident Janice Law's new story takes us to Old Newgate Prison, originally built as a copper mine and used as a prison from 1773 to 1827. The historical setting is well-evoked and the atmosphere is decidedly creepy, as we would expect from the Edgar-nominated creator of the Anna Peters mystery series. Ms. Law has recent stories out in the anthology Still Waters and in our sister publication, AHMM. She's currently as work on a new mystery novel.

  Left to himself, the idea would never have entered his mind, Amos Bidwell knew, and, therefore, it could not truly be his own. Lead us not into temptation: Doesn't that suggest that we have to be led astray and so are not wholly at fault? Perhaps not at fault at all, he thought, as he worked to settle his conscience. This was not a difficult task, considering what a flexible and slippery thing his conscience was and how vast and particular his knowledge of Biblical texts.

  To give aid to the imprisoned was enjoined somewhere, and he, Amos Bidwell, certainly did that as master of the prison. Now here, he told himself, was simply the case of a prisoner—the very shoemaker, in fact, who was keeping up a steady tap-tapping behind him—requesting a little extra assistance.

  Across the yard Bidwell could see the glow of the forge in the neighboring shed, where two more of his charges were forging nails. Nails, shoes, a little copper ore: It was his pride that the prison paid its way with a modest profit left over for his own use. The laborer is worthy of his hire, as he liked to say and frequently did.

  He had been hired, in fact, on the strength of this facility. Given the peculiar nature of the prison, an old copper mine with healthy but dark underground cells, the governor had felt it vital that the jailer be a man capable of piety as well as command. Bidwell, a soldier in the late Revolution, had the military credentials for the latter and his affection for scripture, suggesting the former, sealed the deal.

  Certainly, he was no worse than the other candidates. He was not cruel; he fed the prisoners adequately; he reduced the number of escapes, and he saw that the workshops turned out a steady stream of goods. But, inevitably, he, too, was a sinner: Adam's curse, as Bidwell liked to say. His share of the general fall from grace was greed. He loved money. The making and spending of it were both agreeable to him, but his real passion was accumulation. He loved nothing more than a hoard of shiny coins. The shoemaker knew that.

  Chad Fuller was a small craftsman who'd fallen on hard times and stolen a few horses. He'd been in prison eight years, and because he was a good shoemaker, he'd managed to accumulate a nice little store of money, which he wore in a bag around his waist. Many times Bidwell had listened to that subdued clinking and thought it a shame that those coins belonged to a felon.

  Then one day out of the blue—literally, they were standing at the door of the shoemaker's shed admiring a blue sky fresh swept of clouds—Fuller made his proposition. “I'm longing for the stars at night,” he said, and Bidwell half guessed what was coming.

  "Alas, Fuller, it will be years before you see the stars at night."

  "Though men have left here—and not just by the gate or the grave."

  Bidwell should have ended the conversation right there and never harkened unto the counsel of the ungodly, as the Good Book so aptly warns. But he told himself that a jailer cannot know too much about his prisoners, that if there was some scheme afoot, he must investigate. “That is true."

  "I will be an old man in a few years and too feeble to start over. I could pay for a little assistance."

  "Much good it would do me,” said Bidwell, tipping his hand in the instant. “I'd lose an experienced shoemaker with no one likely to take your place."

  But Fuller persisted. He had a good store of coins—more than the jailer knew. He was not such a fool as to show all he had, and so on and so forth, until Amos fell into temptation like Eve. The devil beguiled me, she said, and didn't that suggest a supernatural force behind all temptation?

  There was no doubt the shoemaker had led him into evil, and now there was the devil to pay. The shoemaker had delivered a good ten dollars in the best gold coins to him and promised more if he left a rope hanging down into the cavern where the men slept at night. A foolish thing for any jailer to do, and how was it to be accomplished?

  Bidwell had hoped, expected really, that the time would never be right. Then one of his charges was released and two took sick and had to be moved to the upper cells. For a night or so, the shoemaker would be confined alone, and Bidwell agreed he'd leave a rope.

  The main ladder would be drawn up, of course. It led directly to the quarters Bidwell shared with his wife, Lydia, an astute and sharp-eyed lady. But the rope, lowered just that morning to haul up the sick men's blankets for washing, could be left dangling, an oversight possible when there was sickness and records to keep and a thousand other things on a man's mind.

  Then Chad Fuller, who had tempted him, would get away. True, Amos would have gotten as much money as possible from him, but an escape would be to the detriment of the community and to his, Bidwell's, own reputation. There seemed no way around that conclusion. As a result, he was surly with Lydia at dinner and stumbled and nearly bashed his knee on his rounds of the workshops.

  He wanted the money Fuller had promised him, and he wanted to keep the man confined. Two incompatible things unless—Bidwell was locking up the door of the shoemaker's shop when he saw a solution, and, for a moment, he stood quite still, absorbing the idea and the sounds of the twilight. A bat twittered overhead and a dog barked somewhere beyond the high brick walls of the prison. I'm not responsible for the rope, he thought. I gave no guarantees about the rope.

  Before he could think more, he went back to his quarters and through to the shaft. The rope still dangled into the murk, and Bidwell glanced quickly over his shoulder to see if the prisoners in the hospital cells had noticed his entrance. One was snoring, the other twitching and moaning with fever. Bidwell smiled: Out of their heads, both of them, and wasn't that a sign? We are ever in the hands of Providence, he told himself, as he slashed partway through the rope with his knife. Let God decide.

  Bidwell rechecked the prison doors before returning to the apartment he shared with Lydia, who was knitting in front of one of the long windows.

  "You are late.” She put down her needles and stood up. “I must check on the patients."

  "All asleep,” he said quickly. “Nature's best medicine. I looked in on them,” he added, though this was all unnecessary. As jailer, he answered to no one in the prison; if he were longer at his rounds than usual it was no business of hers. But he knew that it was a mistake to have drawn attention to anything unusual, even to so small a thing as checking a sick prisoner at an odd hour. It would behoove him now to be careful.

  She gave him a close look and shrugged. Lydia was several years older than he was, vigorous but not particularly well favored. She had a long, sallow face and a lean, straight frame. She was clever, too, which Bidwell felt unnecessary in a woman and dubio
us in a wife, with the quite unbiblical habit of speaking her mind and broaching opinions on everything.

  Admittedly, the parts of the jail under her command—the kitchen, the hospital cells, the little garden—were well managed. You couldn't fault Lydia for work nor for her chief attraction, the dowry she'd brought him, either, but Bidwell often felt that he had been happier before he came under her gimlet eye. He felt her watching him now, and he had the unpleasant sensation that she was turning over in her mind everything he had said and done for several days.

  "We'll not waste a lamp tonight,” he said, as soon as the pink evening light faded, and they went early to bed with the heavy door between their rooms and the upper floor of the prison bolted shut. Though no sound from below could penetrate that double oak planking, he turned and tossed and waked a half-dozen times in the night, thinking, hearing, not hearing, imagining—what, he couldn't have said. In the morning, his lady remarked that he had spent an uneasy night, as if, she added, there was something on his mind.

  "Nothing except this beautiful morning,” said Bidwell, but his breath was short, and he fumbled with his bootlaces as he hurried to dress. He wanted to be first into the main room to pull up the rope. If it was intact and the shoemaker gone, he'd hide the evidence; if Providence had let the rope part, the cut end must go into the fire. He hadn't thought of that earlier, having left everything in Other Hands, as he phrased it, but now he must bestir himself.

  Fortunately, Lydia was busy filling the washbasins and collecting the chamber pots. In the few minutes in which she crossed the yard, Bidwell hurried to the mine shaft. The ladder was still up. And the rope? He could see the cord running down into the darkness and felt a surge of mingled irritation and relief. But when he stepped closer, the breath almost went out of his body. The rope ended a foot or so below the lip of the opening. And down below, in the faint circle of morning light, was a darkness of blood such as he remembered from the war and the shoemaker's body, twisted as from a bayonet thrust or a cannon ball.