by Talbot Mundy
“Do you believe I can get it?”
“Yes, if you will trust me.”
“I have trusted you before,” said Ram Dass, “but never to this extent. However, there is no fool like an old one. I will go in with you.”
“Not you. Go on now, ahead of me!” the babu answered; and he shoved him up the steps so violently that the palace servants noisily rebuked them both and Ram Dass felt he had to go in, to preserve his dignity, since otherwise the servants might honor themselves by thinking they had overawed him. Then Chullunder Ghose hurried to Copeland.
“From now on, sahib, until hell and high water permit, you will kindly believe nothing unless I tell it to you! As, for instance, do you see an elephant? It is one! And you are to ride it — now, immediately! Get out. The mahout will set a ladder for you; climb it, and don’t forget the rifle and the little black bag. The villager shall carry up your bedding, but don’t let him appropriate it, you will need it badly. I will tell the villager where to go, and where to wait for me. If the mahout refuses to obey him, beat both of them with the butt end of your rifle and then beat the elephant — since that will cause the elephant to run, and the mahout to make the best of it; and it will make that villager believe you know what you are doing.”
“Maybe it’s as well I don’t know?”
“Verb. sap., sahib! Sappier and verbier than you guess! Hurry! Hurry!”
It would have been harder to persuade Copeland not to ride the elephant, in that holiday mood in which he found himself. It was a monster of a beast that swayed into the rain round the palace wall and halted beneath the portico. It seemed the Rajah had said nothing about trappings, so the chief mahout had compromised on a sort of semi-royal turn-out, with a howdah that had canvas weather-curtains and enough enameled woodwork to suggest that, at the very least, a royal favorite was being sent for a ride in the rain to cool her disposition. Copeland climbed the ladder, drew the curtains, and reached for his pipe.
“O.K. with me,” he chuckled.
Chullunder Ghose watched the villager climb up with Copeland’s luggage, then beckoned him down and took away the ladder.
“Run away,” he ordered.
“Why?”
“You are a liar, a thief, a murderer, a greedy fool, a treacherous and dirty-minded ingrate, and a devil destined to be reborn in the belly of a worm. Besides, I don’t trust you.”
“Naturally. But you like me,” said the villager, “and that is why you take advantage of me. What now?”
“To the devil with you,” said the babu. “Run and fetch me a man I may trust.”
The villager turned his back and ran into the rain. He turned again and ran back.
“This is he! And now what?”
“This fellow looks like a talker to me,” said the babu.
“Uh-uh! This one’s name is Silent Shadow!”
“Are you deaf and dumb?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can’t hear me tell you to lead this elephant to the grain-barns that belong to Ram Dass, and to wait for me there. So you can’t tell anyone I told you what to do. But you will do it.”
“The mahout might not obey me.”
“He is not deaf. I am not dumb. So he will obey me; otherwise the sahib in the howdah will instruct him with the butt end of a rifle.”
“Is he such an one, that sahib?”
“He is such an one as cuts out livers. He extracts eyes. He cuts off noses. Legs and arms are so much trash to him, he mows them off. He can make a man unconscious in a moment, and the man may wake up with a noseless, blind head on a legless, armless body — and no liver either. That is the exact truth, so observe a careful attitude towards him.”
“Certainly. I will make him like me as much as you do. Does your honor mean the barns of Ram Dass that are on the outskirts of the city, eastward from here? Very well. And now, since I am dumb, you had better command the mahout to tell his elephant to pick me up and set me in the howdah.”
“You will walk,” said the babu.
“In this rain?”
“And being a silent shadow, you will observe whoever follows. If you speak to nobody until you see me — under any provocation, mind you — and if, when I give you leave to speak to me, your speech is satisfactory to me, I may consider you for permanent employment.”
“Don’t doubt, I will satisfy you. Let me have a little money for my victuals.”
“You shall eat, at my expense, when I eat. Lead on.”
“Atcha! By the size of your honor’s belly, I believe you eat good food and plenty of it.”
Chullunder Ghose aimed a kick at him to get him started. Then he ordered the mahout to follow and called up to Copeland to beat the mahout if he should dare to disobey the villager.
“And if anyone asks you questions, say you are the Residency doctor — locum tenens — temporary — just come — out for a look at the scenery. They won’t believe you, but they wouldn’t believe you if you told the truth.”
Copeland laughed. “They’d have to search me! I don’t know the truth!”
“Nobody does,” said the babu. “You shall see me when you see me. So long.”
The elephant swayed away majestically and the babu returned up the palace steps. He was nervous again.
“You scowl at me?” said the attendant.
“Open the door wider!” the babu commanded. “Do you take me for a sardine? Yes,” he added, “things are going too well. I suspect you of soaping a stone for me to slip on!”
Curiously cautious all at once, he peered round the door before he entered, but there was no one lurking there in ambush.
“A hyena smells its own breath, and fears its own shadow,” said the attendant, smiling acidly. He had received no slipper money — the extortion customary in the East, where slippers are supposed to be kicked off at the outer door and left in the attendant’s charge. Chullunder Ghose’s slippers lay beside the plainer ones of Ram Dass, on the top step. He returned. He picked them up. He handed them to the attendant.
“You shall hold them for your greater honor,” he remarked, “and if I catch you having set them down, you beshirm, I will ram them down your gullet! Where is Ram Dass?”
Slightly cowed, but surly, the attendant pointed and another man came forward to escort the babu, who smiled, but his smile was noticeably thin, as if it had been pasted on his fat face. He was down into the depths of the fear that follows closely on audacity and sometimes overtakes it.
“Things are going too well!” he repeated half aloud, and the escorting servant answered: “Sahib?”
“I said, ‘Hurry up, you father of a snail!’”
He was as irritable now as he was normally serene. The palace gloom affected him. He started at the least sound. The corridor draught made him shudder.
“Where is the library? Where was Syed-Suraj shot to death?” he suddenly demanded.
They were passing the library door. The servant pointed to it. “There is still a broken window, so the room is disused for the present.”
“But I wish to see it,” said the babu.
“Nay, it is forbidden.”
Chullunder Ghose, however, tried the doorknob. The door was not locked. He pushed it open, glanced inside, and suddenly stepped into the room, slamming the door in the servant’s face. There was a key inside. He turned it.
“Bohut salaam!” he remarked in his usual calm voice, bowing from the hips, not lowering his eyes. His nervousness had gone as utterly as if it were a cloak that he had left behind him in the corridor. Here was real, unexpected, unimagined danger. He could face this. The Rajah, with his right hand in the mirror-paneled closet, turned to face him with a sneer as savage as a startled cat’s.
CHAPTER 18. “I know devils when I see them!”
There was brandy on the table. There was brandy in the Rajah’s eyes too. They blazed. He had swallowed almost half a bottle of the stuff. A mere matter of twenty minutes, plus the alcohol, had changed a worried unregenerate into a
calculating savage.
“Who invited you in here?” he demanded, and the babu guessed he had to answer well and swiftly or receive a bullet in the belly.
“You did! Your dilemma did! Unless you act exactly as I tell you, it is absolutely certain that the blood of Syed-Suraj will be avenged on your head! I am here to save you from it.”
That was stark bluff, and the Rajah suspected it was. But he was as eager to conceal what he was doing with his right hand as the babu was to see what he was doing. If there was a pistol in the closet, it was strange that the Rajah did not pull it out and use it. The babu’s wits worked furiously, and he was gaining control of his face. He smiled inscrutably — a poker smile that might mean triumph; or it might not.
“Has not Ram Dass asked you for his money?” he said slowly. “You are rightly afraid of Ram Dass. So am I afraid of him. He is the one man rich and important enough, and determined enough, to force an intervention by the British. He would do it for revenge if he believed you cheated him. But can you pay him back his money?”
“It is not due,” said the Rajah, trying to withdraw his hand without disturbing something, or without opening the closet door so wide that the babu could see what was in there. Probably he hoped, too, that Chullunder Ghose might think there was a firearm on the shelf.
“But Ram Dass says you did cheat,” said the babu. “He asserts you borrowed under false pretences, not intending to repay. Why did you borrow the money — such a little sum of money? And where is it?”
That was calculated impudence. The brandied dignity of royal breeding boiled up, and the Rajah withdrew his hand to strike, or to make a gesture with it. Keys clashed, and something fell forward off a closet shelf and stuck between shelf and door as the Rajah tried to slam the door shut with his foot. The babu moved a trifle sideways, and the Rajah followed his movement, as a cornered snake does, so that the pressure of his foot against the closet door was relaxed and something fell to the floor with a crash.
It was an unlocked, decorated metal box. It spilled its contents. There were seed-pearls and a lot of semi-precious stones — trash for the most part; but there also was an aigrette set with diamonds that was probably one of the jewels of State. The Rajah tried to hide it with his foot, but he was too late.
“You propose to offer that to Ram Dass as security?” the babu asked, sure of himself now. “You had much better traffic with me. I am a poor man.”
“What do you mean?” The Rajah’s eyes glowed sullenly, but there was a flicker of indecision and a hint of half-awakened hope about the way he showed his teeth through slightly parted lips.
“You haven’t tried to tempt me, have you?” said the babu.
“Blackmail?”
“Never! A reward for saving you from abdication and the Andamans, however, might be — well, it might make matters easier.”
“I have no money at the moment.”
“None? Not any? None of what you had from Ram Dass?”
“I have only three thousand rupees of it left. And as for you, you dog, I wouldn’t trust you with it. You would pocket it and then betray me.”
“Why, of course I would, if I could do it!” said the babu. “I don’t love you and you don’t love me. But how do you suppose I am to pacify Ram Dass, unless I let him see what happens to his money, or some part of it, and tell him why it happens? And if Ram Dass is a witness, how shall I be able to betray you without ruining myself? So I suggest that you should let me talk to Ram Dass, and then pay that money to me in his presence. It is very little money. It is scandalously little. But if it’s all I can get I will have to accept it.”
“Yes — and then collaborate with Ram Dass to betray me!” said the Rajah.
“I would tell you not to be a fool, if you were not a royal personage,” the babu answered. “I am under orders, as I told you, to prevent an abdication if it can be done. And Ram Dass simply wants his money. Promise him the elephant-feed contract and—”
“I did. I offered that just now,” the Rajah interrupted. “He refused to listen.”
“Let me talk to him.”
The Rajah hesitated, blustering to hide his fear that fifty of his crimes were known to the babu. It would be no use buying him off on two or three counts, only to be blackmailed on a dozen others.
“You dog of a devil!” he sneered. “It might be wiser in the end to shoot you as you deserve! And besides, this is inconvenient. I need that money.”
“So do I,” the babu answered smiling. “However, keep it — keep it! Anyone who won’t pay that small sum of money to be saved from abdication and the Andamans is, after all, no patron for a man of influence like me! It may be better to report to my employers that this is a situation too explosive to be saved except by drastic measures.”
“I will try you,” said the Rajah. “But if I even suspect you of playing a trick, you fat hog—” He snapped his fingers by way of illustration.
“Bring the money,” said the babu. “Let us waste no more time.”
But the Rajah had to go and get the money, so he turned the babu over to a servant.
“Keep an eye on the fat brute!” he ordered. “See that he waits in the corridor. During my absence he is not to speak to Ram Dass.”
So the babu stood and stared out of a window, and because it was raining outside and the murky clouds shut off the sun, someone had turned on the hideous electric chandelier that dangled like a trained icicle from the corridor ceiling. The window-glass, due to the stronger light on the inside, became a moderately clear reflector of the corridor. The babu watched it. Suddenly he ducked. His foot slipped on the polished marble and he fell on his back. He rolled sideways as far as the wall and got up cautiously, first on his hands and knees, with his back to the window. However, he could only see a very slight sway of the curtains at the far end of the corridor where, in the window- glass, he had detected the long tube of a blowpipe. And in the window-pane behind him was a neat hole surrounded by feathery cracks, such as nothing on earth could have made but a sharp dart.
“Am I so unpopular?” he asked the servant. “Stand here and observe me! How can you observe what I am doing if you shrink behind that statue?”
He compelled the man to stand between him and the curtains; and the fellow’s nervous shudder and his furtive glances were enough proof that he knew about the blowpipe and expected at least another shot. The babu watched him like a lynx.
“If you should move your right hand, I would break your neck!” he warned him. “Not that you are not a pleasant fellow, nicely scented up with musk to save your nose from turning upward, but I dislike a knife in my belly.”
Then the Rajah returned, not more than glancing at the babu as he beckoned him and opened a door on the right-hand side of the corridor. He looked as if he had another stock of brandy somewhere and had swallowed a lot of it — perhaps to make it easier to part with money.
“Wait for me. We will go in here together!” said the babu. “Your assassins are such rotten shots that they might hit the wrong man unless I protect you! How you would laugh if you knew how important to me your royal life is!”
“You are drunk, you fat fool!” said the Rajah.
“Yes, Your Highness. I am so drunk that I do not notice that you, not the servant, have opened the door. Has he a pistol? A dagger? What has he?”
Sullenly the Rajah jerked his head. The servant slunk away along the corridor. The Rajah entered the room and the babu followed him. Ram Dass was standing in a big bay window, dwarfed and as shabbily aged as a mendicant by the high ceiling and the rich cut-velvet hangings. He looked sorry for himself and eager to be back amid the grain-sacks in his comfortable store; but he perked up at sight of the babu. As he bowed to the Rajah he raised both hands respectfully to his wrinkled forehead and glanced between his fingers at Chullunder Ghose. But there was no answering signal, and for a moment here was silence. The Rajah seemed not to know what to say. However, it was up to him to speak first, so he turned contemptuously
on Chullunder Ghose.
“It is beneath my dignity to repeat your conversation,” he sneered. “Tell this merchant what you have suggested.”
Then, as naively as if he were a bagman selling rubbish to a fool, Chullunder Ghose unfolded his proposal to the gravely nodding Ram Dass, who stroked a graying beard and puckered wise eyes.
“Ram Dass, sahib, as your honor knows, this babu is the underpaid employee of a government that sends me into trouble but repudiates me if I can’t keep out of it. I know His Highness owes you money, but he can’t pay me to turn my coat and do him certain little favors, if he pays you also. And, besides, he has not enough money for you at the moment. He has only three thousand rupees. And that is my price.”
“I demand my money,” Ram Dass answered.
“Either that, or I go to the Residency. And if Major Smith won’t ask for an investigation, I myself will go to Delhi and demand a hearing at the Foreign Office.”
He was so sour and vehement that he almost deceived Chullunder Ghose. He made the Rajah swear and stutter.
“Tell him!” he commanded. “Tell him what you told me!”
“In a moment. Ram Dass, sahib, only this babu in all the world can save His Highness from flattering the Kaiser and the King of Spain by imitating them. But he would have no money and less liberty, so he would rather imitate the Czar of Russia. And that would do nobody any good, since who would pay his debts? So he proposes to pay me a little money in your presence, and to assign to you all the contracts that are at his disposal. In return we are to lend him our united influence, and you are not to press him for the money he recently borrowed, until it is due. I beg your honor to agree.”
“I want my money now,” said Ram Dass.
“But he can’t pay!”
“I won’t pay until it is due,” said the Rajah.
“And unless he pays me something there will be a calamity,” said the babu. “All his creditors will have to whistle for a dividend from nothing, properly prorated after the attorneys have been satisfied. He is to bribe me in your presence to prevent my double-crossing him. Is that clear?”
