Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Then he went away, I seeing nothing but his back, which was not remarkable, except that his neck was thicker than ordinary, with a roll of fat protruding above the collar. And I slept on and off like a fox until evening.”

  CHAPTER X. “And, no boaster though I be—”

  It was past the dinner hour and Narayan Singh caught me looking at my watch.

  “They will think I have gone to the servants’ quarters, sahib. Madame Poulakis knows my real purpose. It is important to hear the end of this.”

  “Jimgrim will invent an excuse for me,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Aye, trust him, sahib. Well, as I lay between sleeping and waking, I thought; for there was nothing else to do. And when the gods have use for a man they give him wise thoughts. So when Madame Poulakis came again and brought note-paper, and I wrote you the note that brought you to the house, I wrote a second note and hid it. That second note was the one that I slipped into your shoe. And at the same time I pretended to recover entirely from the trance and made no small fuss about being a deserter, who could be arrested and put in prison; so that they were all the more eager to get you here, and sent a carriage with the note.

  “Then Narendra Nath gave me more drugs, and tried to put me to sleep again, she maintaining that you sahibs would insist on taking me away if I should be too sane in appearance. Moreover, I was of the same mind, and I did not wish to be taken away, having taken great pity on this woman, who flutters like a bird in the net. The gods had also put into my head a rather high opinion of Narendra Nath. The old man is a charlatan and practises much nonsense, but nevertheless he believes the half of what he says and persuades himself of the other half. Thought I: he loves her, and the poor old fool would help her out of the net if he could contrive it.

  “And while I made believe to fall asleep, she cooked up with Narendra Nath a story to tell you sahibs that should account for my presence without disclosing secrets; for she and he are in terror of disclosing a hint of the secret society’s doings. It was Narendra Nath’s idea to have that music playing while you were in the house. He said it would help to bewilder your minds and make you amenable to the right suggestion. Men whose minds are superstitious are readily trapped in just such ways, and he did not know you are not superstitious.

  “Well, sahib; after you had come and gone again, I spoke to old Narendra Nath as man to man. Said I, ‘My father, you seem to me like one who struggles in a whirlpool, seeking to save another but unable to stem the current, which carries you round and round.’ And he stared at me, making no answer.

  “ ‘Furthermore,’ said I, ‘it must be plain to you that your sorcery doesn’t always work, for here am I, who have deceived you easily, even while drunk. I have heard and I have seen all that took place in this room,’ said I, ‘and I know that you are an honest old man, in so far as you understand honesty, although not nearly as wise as you wish to believe. Whereas,’ I told him, ‘I not only am an honest man but a wise one also, the proof of which is that I became drunk when the gods wished!’

  “ ‘You are not only an impudent trickster,’ he answered me, ‘but a conceited Sikh heretic as well!’

  “ ‘Nevertheless,’ said I, ‘I crave to acquire merit by defending the distressed, which is the essence of the Sikh doctrine.’

  “Said he, ‘If I raise my voice there will come men, who are less merciful than any in your experience!’

  “ ‘I, too, can be merciless,’ I said. ‘I gave nine of them a taste of my quality already, and no boaster though I be, I tell you this house will never hold enough Levantines to keep me prisoner should the gods once cause me to dislike the place. I am the father of typhoons,’ said I, ‘and I know four sahibs, all true friends of mine, who compared to me in cunning and strength and fury are as mammoths to a mouse!’

  “Well, sahib; the old man stared at me, and began to think like a man instead of like an abstraction.

  “ ‘There are five miscreants,’ said he, ‘who direct this present wickedness. They call them the executive committee. They have no books, nor any written rules or records, and it might be that if something were to happen to those five this whole accursed society might fall to pieces. This executive committee is, as it were, the neck between the body and the head of the thing. The head would die and the body would die if the neck were severed!’

  “That was man’s talk, but old Narendra Nath cannot remain a man, sahib, for too long at a time, since charlatanry grows into a habit. He closed his eyes and murmured for a while then, describing a vision he had seem of strangers from the East and from the West, who came and smote a devil with five heads, thus setting free her who is nearest to his old heart. I knew that he made up the vision even while he spoke, for that is the way of self-deception. Was I not born in India? Hah! My mother’s uncle was just such an one as this Narendra Nath, forever seeing visions after the event and claiming to be a prophet!

  “Then came Madame Poulakis again with news that you sahibs had been tracked to the Great Pyramid, where gunmen had doubtless already murdered you.

  “ ‘And that means that they will next come and murder me,’ she said, ‘for they will think me of no further use, as well as dangerous.’

  “But I reassured her on that point, saying that you sahibs are difficult men to murder, and moreover that first they must murder me before they can kill her. And instead of being shocked to discover that I had not been in a trance at all, she seemed overjoyed at it, declaring that she had found a man at last who has brains as well as courage!

  “Then there came more news. I was thrust hurriedly behind that gilded screen, and the music-makers were sent away. Unseen, I could hear all and see a little. There came three men, he of the thick neck not among them, and the first, who had a little black beard of a sort some missionaries wear, said:

  “ ‘Your future is yet before you, Madame Poulakis. Is it true that you are invited to dinner at Shepheard’s Hotel? Then write a note of acceptance, with the request that Meldrum Strange be included in the party. Where is that drunken Indian?’

  “They said I was very sick, and had been put to bed. Narendra Nath said darkly:

  “ ‘He will recover. He is under the influence. It has seemed wise to me to attach him to Madame as personal servant. He will account for her, for I have found in him fine qualities of obedience and faithfulness, which can be trained into the proper channel.’

  “They were pleased at that, sahib; for they understood him to mean that I would slay her at a word from Narendra Nath. And Madame Poulakis, who has a woman’s quickness, made believe to be afraid of me. Whereat those three men, thoroughly believing Narendra Nath to be their tool, insisted that I shall be Madame’s bodyguard, she consenting only with reluctance. Then said the man with the missionary’s face:

  “ ‘This man Strange has surrendered to us. We shall put him and his friends to various tests this afternoon, and if they do not walk into the traps, so that we believe their surrender to be genuine, then tonight there will be initiation.

  “ ‘Thereafter you must marry him, Zelmira. Among the guarantees that we shall insist on will be the settlement of enormous sums on you. So we have brought these papers for you to sign now. They are cleverly drawn. They consist of records of various supposititious transactions of a financial nature extending over a period of years, resulting in a loss to you of more than a million pounds.

  “You will sign these papers now, admitting liability; but you will say nothing about them to Strange. We shall require him to accept responsibility for your debts when he makes the marriage settlement; and when the proper time comes we shall collect, either from him, or from you, or from both of you. In the event of his death these papers would be extremely valuable.

  “ ‘So make yourself attractive,’ he went on, ‘and after the dinner at the hotel bring him and his friends to the house you know of, where the Five will have a final session with him. If he agrees then to our terms, well and good — you will be married at the United States consu
late tomorrow morning. But if we find flaws in his attitude, that will be the last of him and his friends — and incidentally of anyone whose existence might make us nervous. You understand me, Zelmira?’

  “And at that, sahib, one of the three piped up in a thin voice and asked what means would be used for making away with Strange and four others, if that should prove necessary. He said it would be hardly as simple as killing unknown men. And the man with the face like a missionary laughed.

  “ ‘Did you never hear of Sarajevo?’ he demanded. ‘Who slew the Archduke of Austria? A fool of a fanatic. What about this Indian then? He came here from Syria with those friends of Meldrum Strange. What could be simpler than to have him kill them all? The safest tool that can be used is a religious fanatic, or an anarchist fanatic. Let Narendra Nath fill the Indian up with hashish and whisper the right suggestions to him. Then, even if someone else must do the actual killing, that won’t matter; we can come out like honest men and accuse the Indian. What defense will he have? He will be an Indian who ran amok under the influence of hashish, and we will provide him with a lawyer at his trial, who will get him hanged as surely as we sit here!’

  “They all seemed to agree that that was an excellent proposal, sahib, and after they had made Madame Poulakis sign those papers they went away. She became hysterical for a while, but Narendra Nath comforted her, and I made great boastings such as women love to hear. This afternoon they fitted me up with this livery you see. Do I look like a popinjay? Hah! I smell action, sahib! There will be blood on this scimitar before morning, or I am a poorer prophet than Narendra Nath! Tell me, sahib: of what is this Meldrum Strange made — iron or beeswax?”

  “Iron,” said I, “and not much rust.”

  “Good! Then get my news to Jimgrim, and all is well. But how to get the news to him? Those women who accompanied madame are spies.”

  I did not know how to answer him for wondering.

  “There is a spirit in man—” That, and nothing else, occurred to me. Whoever wrote the Book of Job answered with another riddle any question you can ask about humans and their ways. How a Sepoy — a number on the muster-roll of the British Army, and drunk at that — should have been selected by what he called the gods to uncover evil, that was a mystery that seemed to dwarf all others at the moment.

  We’re taught to regard colored people as the agents of the enemy of man. Our missionaries go out to convert them, lest the heathen in their blindness overwhelm the world in another chaos any old night.

  They’ve educated us, these missionaries have, into believing things that aren’t so; and we commit the indecency, in consequence, of being astonished when a man with colored skin acts “white.”

  I ought to have known better. I was so surprised by the resourcefulness and courage of Narayan Singh, to say nothing of his wit, that I could hardly summon presence of mind enough to order him to the kitchen, while I went forward to devise some means of getting an account of his doings to Grim.

  CHAPTER XI. “It’s nice to know a millionaire who isn’t wiser than the rest of us!”

  It was no easy matter to discover a means of getting Grim to leave the dinner-table without exciting comment or arousing the suspicion of the three women who had accompanied Madame Poulakis.

  They were probably already exercised about my absence. In addition to that, there were probably spies keeping watch on us, who might, in fact, already have seen me talking with Narayan Singh, although I did not think so.

  Guests entered the dining-room at Shepheard’s from the corridor at one end, so that anyone expecting me would watch in that direction. Our table was in mid-room, preserved from being conspicuous by a fountain and palms, which shut off the view of people coming in. I figured all that out, and looked for a side door opposite to where Jeremy was sitting. The door I selected was locked, but the gardener had left a hoe under some bushes near-by, and the lock came away without much noise or effort. I opened the door and stepped inside, finding myself behind a screen, as I expected. Watching from between the end of the screen and a palm, I could see our table, and particularly Jeremy, who faced me — was near enough, too, to hear almost every word that was said.

  Being no respecter of sedateness or convention, Jeremy was doing tricks with table-knives, producing day-old chicks out of napkins, and all that sort of foolishness. One of the guests at a near table had a huge dog lying beside him, and Jeremy used his ventriloquial gifts to make the beast talk, getting off comments on Egyptian society from what he called a “dog’s-eye point of view.” The attention of half the people in the room and of everybody at our table was fixed on him. But when Jeremy is doing tricks his own bright eyes are wandering everywhere, and it wasn’t many minutes before he caught sight of me.

  And he’s quick, is friend Jeremy. He didn’t check or falter in the patter he was reeling off — made no signal to me — glanced away, in fact — and finished the trick he was doing to an outburst of laughter and applause. It was his favorite old trick of pulling a live day-old chick in halves and making two of it, after producing chick number one in the first instance from a hard-boiled egg or a billiard ball.

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” he said airily. “I know a much better one. But you’ll believe I’ve had help if I let Grim sit at the table. I’ll prove he isn’t my accomplice. Grim, old top, suppose you go and hide behind that screen, where you can’t see me and I can’t see you. Don’t come back till I call. It’s going to take me several minutes to accomplish this. Now, watch my hands, everybody.”

  Grim got up with an air of thinking the whole business childish, and strolled over to the screen; but the instant he stepped behind it he was like a spring, coiled ready to go off.

  “Quick! Spill it! What’s the news?” he demanded.

  Well, I tried to condense into a fifty-word telegram all that Narayan Singh had told me. Try it for yourself, and judge what luck I had! Jeremy saved the day by purposely blundering his trick and beginning all over again, calling out apologies to Grim for keeping him waiting.

  “Now think!” I said when I had finished “and for the love of Mike tell me what to do; for I’ll be blowed if I can figure it out.”

  I don’t believe that men like Grim do think, as a matter of fact, on such occasions. It’s a species of instinct or intuition, or both combined. Long experience and a habit of meeting emergencies combine to produce a state of mind that figures instantly, like one of those adding machines.

  Grim glanced at the door I had come through, looked me full and fairly in the eye, and gave his orders — terse — quick — unmistakable — as if the automatic wheels inside his mind had cut them out of steel that instant.

  “Let your eye follow a line diagonally across our table from Meldrum Strange to Jeremy. Carry straight on for twenty feet. Small round table. There sits Kennedy. Gray-haired man — evening dress — Intelligence Department — all alone. Go out here; come in the front way; make some excuse; sit down at his table. Tell him everything.”

  Promptly Grim returned to the dinner-table, resuming his bored expression, and I went out into the garden. All the way around the building I racked what brains I have for an excuse to approach this man Kennedy without arousing the suspicion of spies. I’m not a man who can walk into a public dining-room unobserved; I look bigger than ever in evening dress, and I was sweating with anxiety lest some stupidity of mine should upset Grim’s calculations.

  But I was reckoning without the other fellow, which I take it is the cause of ninety-nine per cent. of this world’s difficulties. Kennedy got up and came to meet me the minute I entered the room — a lean-flanked man of fifty-five or sixty, with a sort of literary look due to his iron-gray hair and quiet manners. He had extraordinary bright eyes with heavy gray eyebrows, and a deep cleft in his chin.

  But his most remarkable asset was a penetrating voice that he seemed to have in absolute control; when he first spoke, every word he said carried all over the room, but presently, when he reached his table and sat down, a
lthough to all appearance he was talking normally, and certainly didn’t whisper, I don’t believe the nearest waiter could have heard a word he said.

  “You’re Mr. Ramsden, aren’t you? You can do me a favor, if you’ll be kind enough. They tell me you’ve hunted elephants in the Lado Enclave. My leave starts tomorrow, and I’m going there. Won’t you sit at my table for half an hour and give me some pointers?”

  I told him that my friends would have to be asked to excuse me first; so he took my arm, and made his own excuses to the party, begging for what he was pleased to call the “use” of me for half an hour. None of the women liked it, but they couldn’t very well refuse, and Jeremy had their attention again almost before we had turned away.

  The moment Kennedy and I sat down together I began on him.

  “Grim has just told me to take you entirely into confidence,” I said. “I don’t know why. If you’re off elephant hunting a thousand miles from here—”

  “I’m not,” he answered. “However, there’s no hurry; wait until I’ve ordered you some wine and sent for your dinner to this table. I’ve been watching that little side-play behind the screen.”

  “I understand there are others watching,” I warned him.

  “No, I think not. There were five, just before dinner began; one waiter, a headwaiter, an ex-Englishman in evening dress, a Cairene cotton-jobber, and an Italian. They’re in the lock-up. It’s now eight-thirty. By nine o’clock your party — the men, I mean, yourself included, would also have been under arrest for your own protection unless one of you had made this move. Ever since Meldrum Strange called on the High Commissioner we’ve been considering some such step. We have Poulakis junior under lock and key, and fortunately we bagged him without any of his gang knowing anything about it. Caught him in the house of a woman whom he visits now and then, and locked them up together. She’s an agent of ours. He talked.”