by Talbot Mundy
Tom eyed him with curiosity. “You skeptics,” he said, “are always credulous. Where would Elsa get dope?”
“Damned if I know. Perhaps you gave it to her for Thö-pa-ga. Would a Tibetan have written in the ashes, with a stick or his fingers, in English: ‘Now it’s your turn to be left flat. How do you like it?’ Waspy little devil! She’ll be singing to another tune though, before those Tibetans have finished, unless you accept my offer.”
“You haven’t made any offer,” said Tom. “You weren’t doped. You were drunk. On the way up here I saw the broken whisky bottle where you threw it. Frazzled nerves, and your last bottle of Scotch. One slug might make you pye-eyed at this altitude. You drank a whole bottle and fell asleep. Are the fumes still in your head? Or are you going to listen to sense?”
“The point is: have you any sense?” Dowlah retorted. “Are you vain enough to think I have been talking for your entertainment? Do you flatter yourself that I enjoy your company? Or that I have the slightest intention of accepting favors from you? I wish you in hell.”
Tom grinned. “Same to you. I’ll bet on my wish. You’ll starve here, betting on Noropa, until Lobsang Pun turns up, and he’ll send you to hell with bells on. You haven’t food, tent, money, horse or weapon. What’s your offer?”
“I know where the Thunder Dragon Gate is.”
“So do I! Down in the valley. Less than a day’s march. I’ve had that doped out since day before yesterday. This must be the valley that explains the fifty-mile discrepancies on all the maps.”
“But I know how to get in!”
“Says you, Dowlah.”
“And I know what to do when I get there.”
“I know what to do with you, unless you come clean, Dowlah. I’m not going to let a crook like you keep me awake much longer. Speak up.”
“Very well. I will tell you enough to satisfy you that I know a great deal more.”
Dowlah stared at the night. There was a wistful melancholy in his eyes, as if he were bidding silent farewell to a treasured secret. He leaned forward as if he couldn’t force himself to say it aloud; he must whisper it. Suddenly he scraped up embers with his naked hands and pitched them at Tom’s face. As quick as a snake he made a grab for the Mauser — and took the consequences.
“Cry out when you’ve had enough,” said Tom.
Ready for anything, he had dodged most of the embers, a bit singed, nothing serious. He took Dowlah by the neck and rubbed his face in the hot ashes.
“If you want to be killed, try one more trick!”
He kicked the fire together, holding Dowlah by the neck to examine his face by the light.
“Help yourself to cooking grease from that can. Smear on plenty.”
Dowlah spat ashes. He snarled: “I won’t forgive that.”
Tom gave him tea to wash the ashes from his mouth.
“Dowlah, you’re a busted flush and a rotter. But I’ll give you a break if you act sensibly. You’ve taken crazy chances. It’s a cinch you’ve a card up your sleeve, or think you have. You count on some one in the Thunder Dragon Gate. Who is he?”
Dowlah tied a handkerchief over a scorched eyelid. It made him look like a colored-supplement pirate. Tom fetched a bundle of wood and began feeding the fire.
“Sixty seconds,” he remarked. “I’ll count ’em. One — two—”
Dowlah interrupted: “You do show an occasional spark of intelligence. Yes. You have guessed it.”
“Do I count? My limit’s sixty.”
“I have the goods on Naosuki. Do you know who he is?”
Tom laughed outright. “Must be good goods! Naosuki is the man who faked the Soviet Army mobilization plans that were sold to Germany. He sent the genuine ones to Japan. All the insiders were laughing about it. Goods on Naosuki, have you? Just now he goes by the name of Chou Wang. I’ve never met him, but that’s the ninth or tenth name that I’ve heard of him using. He’s the toughest and trickiest secret mischief-maker that Japan ever turned loose. He’s the man who played the fiddle for the recent dance in Sinkiang that cost China a province. Before that, in China, he was too smart even for Borodin. Dowlah, are you still so full of whisky that you really believe you can blackmail Chou Wang? What’s to stop him from having you bumped off? He’d no more hesitate to do that than to kill a bed-bug.”
Dowlah snorted disgust. “What is the use of talking to a fool like you!”
“It’s your only chance,” Tom answered. “Tell me the truth and make me believe it. I promised old Abdul Mirza to give you a break if you’d give me half an excuse.”
“Oh. What did Abdul Mirza tell you?”
“Plenty. Do I start counting? All right. One — two—”
“I was in trouble some years ago,” said Dowlah. “Never mind what. Abdul Mirza suggested to me that the best way to regain prestige with the Indian Government would be to distinguish myself as a secret agent. Damn his eyes, they had already made him ruler of my state, to all intents and purposes. I was deeply in debt. Even my house in Delhi belongs to a swine of a money-lender. He even holds a bill of sale on the furniture. Instead of increasing my income, Abdul Mirza cut it to the bone, to relieve taxation. He is one of those humbugging democrats who wants to be loved by multitudes. However, I have a natural gift for this game. I did pretty well. But no better than rather well, until I got in touch with Naosuki. Yes, he is Chou Wang at the moment. I did him lots of favors. You know how it is. You’ve sold your country’s secrets scores of times, I don’t doubt.”
“I never knew ’em,” said Tom. “Our State Department keeps the secrets, along with the gold, in a locked tin box.”
“Don’t be a sententious hypocrite!” Dowlah retorted. “There isn’t an international spy in the world who doesn’t make a business of selling anything he knows to whoever will pay. How much! That’s the only question. I could never get enough money, but what I craved was intellectual excitement. Chou Wang was the man to provide that. I excited him, and he me. All of us have our Elsa Burbages on the job. Few of them are quite as smart as yours; but very few of us are such blundering boobies as you. Through a woman in Singapore, who found a fool of your type in a responsible position, I obtained for Naosuki photostatic copies of some plans of the new British naval base. They’re in Japan now. He has very likely sold copies of them to several nations. In exchange, he supplied me with details of some of the Japanese defenses of Formosa. Very opportune. I turned those over to the British Secret Intelligence in the nick of time to allay their suspicions of me.”
“What’s the idea of bragging to me that you’re a worse crook than I thought you?” Tom asked.
He stirred the fire. Dowlah’s uncovered eye glittered with contemptuous malice. He lighted a cigarette before he answered:
“Tom Grayne, unless you can develop enough sense to agree with me, you will be dead, or worse, by to-morrow night. Have you ever been tortured? If you kill me now, I shall have ceased to care who knows my secrets. When they kill you, you will cease to remember them. Is that clear? You ass, you said you wish to be convinced. I am convincing you. In simple phrases. Adapted to your mulish intellect. For my own purpose. To persuade you that I mean what I say in all seriousness, and that I know what I’m talking about.”
“Go ahead,” said Tom. “I’ll listen.”
“What I did not turn over to the British Secret Intelligence was Naosuki’s private code and some plans of the fortifications of Kobe that reveal his finger-prints under the microscope. He sent those to me in exchange for certain details of the new American anti-aircraft guns.”
Tom grinned. “How did you get those?”
Dowlah grinned back. “If you want that information, buy it! I will sell it to you. Naosuki is afraid of nothing on earth except myself and the Japanese Secret Intelligence. The Japanese are a strange people, as I daresay you know. Naosuki is an unmitigated blackguard, who would rather die, of any kind of torture, than be shown up as a traitor to his own country. Traitor he is. So you see, I have him.
Have you enough intelligence to understand that?”
“If he should kill you, how could you betray him?” Tom retorted. “Left the evidence in India, I suppose, to be sent to Japan in case you and he quarrel? Dowlah, you’re not so bright. How can you communicate with India? Seems to me, Dowlah, that you’ve lost your senses along with your number. Too much liquor? All you nervous numbers seem to go by that route.”
Dowlah leaned forward and tapped Tom’s knee.
“Naosuki knows that unless my secret agent in India should hear from me, at frequent intervals, my agent will convey that evidence to Tokyo and give it to the Japanese Government.”
“Hell! Hasn’t Naosuki any agents? Do you kid yourself that his man can’t shadow your man, and kill him?”
“No, Mr. Tom Grayne, I never kid myself, as you poetically phrase it. I have stolen a march on Naosuki. My messenger is already on the way to Tokyo. He may be there already. Naosuki’s number is up, but he doesn’t suspect it. By wireless, and secret lines of communication by way of India, it will take the Japanese two or three weeks to reach Chou Wang and kill him, or make him kill himself, or make his subordinates kill him. But they’ll do it. They never fail to kill their traitors. By that time, thanks to Naosuki, you and I will have possession of the Thunder Dragon Gate and Thö-pa-ga. I hate to do it, but I’m going to have to okay you with Naosuki, in exchange for the protection of your Mauser until we connect with him. That is my offer.”
Tom stirred the fire and added fuel. “What do you propose to do with the Thunder Dragon Gate?” he asked.
“Even you may appreciate that when you get there. Ditch Elsa. Have her, if she’s alive. I don’t care what you do with her. But if you’ve any sense at all you will give her to Thö-pa-ga and let her make a fool of him. Thö-pa-ga is the whole problem. There is nothing more to it than Thö-pa-ga. I will put one thought into your thick head and let it try to find lodgment. Suppose you should return to America and offer your opulent government a continuous, day after day, week after week, authoritative, psychologically skilful anti-Japanese propaganda to reach the whole of Asia, but especially China, how much would they pay?”
“Oh. I’m the salesman, am I?”
“And no sales resistance!” said Dowlah. “You know there’s a world war coming. If Mussolini doesn’t start it, some one else will. All Europe, India, Africa. Japan’s opportunity to gobble China! Bang goes America’s trade, along with all the capital invested in China. America’s alternatives are guns or propaganda. The Thunder Dragon Gate is worth at least a billion to any government. And think of the chance for us to make a splash in the world — ten times the splash that Lenin made!”
“Yes, I’m thinking of that,” said Tom. “I draw a modest salary, for taking chances now and then to stop that kind of splash before it happens.”
“You? You think you can stop it?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to keep a promise I made to Abdul Mirza. He gave me money for you, but I gave some of it to your destitute men and to Su-li Wing. I’m giving you what’s left.”
“How much?”
“Eight thousand five hundred rupees.”
“Keep it! I daresay that’s as much as you earn in a couple of years. In exchange for it, lend me a pony and escort me either as far as the Djaring-dzong Monastery, or until Noropa’s messengers meet us on the way. After that, you may go to the devil.”
“Here’s your money,” said Tom. “I’m going to the tent now, to sleep with the Tibetans. Don’t try to hire ’em to murder me. I might get rough. Offer them a fair price in the morning and perhaps they’ll take you with them.”
“Where to?”
“Damned if I care, Dowlah. Good night.”
CHAPTER 32. “This is a dreadful place.”
DOWLAH, a mere fire-lit shadow at daybreak, called from the mouth of the cave.
“To your death, you idiot!”
The Tibetan headman remonstrated:
“Tum-Glain, turn back with us. We dare not go with you down into that valley. Nobly Born, it is from down yonder that come the shang-shangs. It is bad luck even to speak of the place. But we like you. We wish to save you from terrible things. Perhaps Your Honor hasn’t heard that shang-shangs kill a man in this world, and then hound him in the next, so that he can’t reincarnate. Down yonder they give dead men’s bodies to the shang-shangs instead of feeding them to the dogs and vultures as is decent. Give that man Dowlah a pony. You wait here. Let it happen to him. Perhaps then—”
Tom interrupted. “Do as I said in the night. Delay him. Later, if he wants a pony, let him have one and follow me, if he wishes. As for you, I have praised you in that letter that I have given you for Lobsang Pun. The sooner you deliver it, the sooner you will receive his commendation and his blessing.”
“But if His Holiness Lobsang Pun Rinpoche should not be coming this way, then what?”
“His Holiness is too shrewd not to come,” Tom answered. “The point is that he should come quickly.”
Dowlah shouted again from the mouth of the cave.
“Grayne, I want to talk to you. Come up here for a few minutes.”
Tom continued talking to the headman:
“Don’t rob him. Money or valuables taken from a killer, such as he is, are very evil and produce nothing but bad luck. Hold him here until the sun warms the morning a bit. Then let him have a pony and go his own way. You go yours. Is there another road than this that the Holy Lobsang Pun might follow?”
“Oh, yes, there is a shorter way than this one. It turns off this side of that monastery where they let down the basket. It saves a great distance, and it rejoins this road not far from where the dead horse lay. But it is a sacred road, and only holy people dare to use it. That is why the Böns didn’t use it. Even those rogues wouldn’t have dared to bring foreigners by that route.”
“But you are the Holy Lobsang Pun’s servants, so you may go and meet him along that road? Do that. If you meet him, bid him make haste.”
“Nobly Born, Dowlah may follow and kill you! Better let us take him with us.”
Tom laughed. He answered with a Tibetan proverb: “The dog that follows in order to steal, by his bark betrays the men who come to slay.”
He shook hands with all the Tibetans and started on his way with the two best ponies, lightly loaded. No tent. The loads were principally food, Elsa’s bags and his own.
In the distance, from above, the sharp descent had looked almost straight. It actually wound like the narrow track of a snake between fifty-foot cliffs that had once contained a glacier. It was choked with smooth boulders, and in many places so steep and difficult that he had to lend the ponies his strength to save them from crashing headlong.
At the end of ten miles he had descended something like four thousand feet. There he rested on a sloping acre of moraine that provided the first clear view of the valley into which the trail led. Down below there, spring had already greened scant herbage on the banks of aquamarine-colored streams.
The serene splendor produced an almost hypnotic sensation of unreality. Much warmer, and the air much easier to breathe. Ponies sweating. No sign of the Monastery of Djaring-dzong. It probably faced southward, around a corner to the right, where there was a vague haze. Not smoke. It looked more like steam from hot springs, hardly moving on a breath of wind. The westerly gale, that blows all day long on Everest, seemed not to touch that valley.
Tom hadn’t long to rest. He had twice caught sight of Dowlah, miles behind, once riding, and once scrambling be side his miserable pony down a fifty-foot glissade. The Tibetans must have been impatient to get started up the steep grade and got rid of him sooner than Tom anticipated.
Uphill from the valley were coming three men, who might be the rescue-party that Dowlah had said he expected. Be cause of turns and intervening crags and boulders, they had been invisible until they were quite near. They were riding yaks, brutes that can climb like goats. One man had a bow and arrows; the others had heavy, old-fashioned,
long-barreled guns with two-legged metal supports on which to rest the weapon when in use.
The man with the bow and arrows seemed to be the leader. He vaulted off his yak, stuck out his tongue at Tom respectfully, placed his hand behind his ear and walked straight forward with a letter in his hand.
“Nobly Born, are you Rajah Dowlah?”
Rajah Dowlah’s name was on the outside of the sealed parchment envelope. It had been written with a brush dipped in Chinese ink. The handwriting was unmistakably Elsa’s. Tom almost snatched the letter from the Tibetan’s hand, broke the wax seal and tugged it from the parchment envelope. It was in code, difficult to read because of the brush strokes. He lay on a rock in the sun to work it out with the aid of a pencil. The Tibetans began transferring his loads to the yaks.
DEAR TOM,
I know you’re not dead, although Noropa and the others all say you are. There is a man here who says he killed you in Darjeeling, but I saw the blow, so I don’t believe him. I know you’re coming. I know it. I will stick this out to the very end, to give you all the possible chances. I couldn’t think of any other way than this to get a message to you, but if Dowlah gets it he can’t read it, so no matter. Dowlah is expected by a man named Chou Wang, who is a devil. This is a dreadful place. There have been murders and a kind of civil war is going on. The Abbot, who is a Yellow-hat and a friend of Mu-ni Gam-po, is Chou Wang’s prisoner. Chou Wang has some people here who look to me like Japanese. They are well armed. But they are in fear of their lives from a faction of Red-hats and Böns who occupy the other half of the monastery and are supposed to obey a man named Pavlov. There seems to be no Pavlov, but I think he is a man who was murdered or else escaped after either he or Su-li Wing shot the woman who was being kept here for Thö-pa-ga. So says Noropa, who, however, seldom tells the same tale twice running and is obsequious one minute, insolent the next. Chou Wang hates my influence over Thö-pa-ga, who is being a brick and is respected by all except Chou Wang, who bullies him. He bullies everybody. He scoffs at the idea of substituting me for the Tibetan woman who was shot, but Thöpe and I are playing that hand for lack of a better. Chou Wang had Noropa flogged severely for not having killed Dowlah, whom Chou Wang fears, I don’t know why. Now Noropa is spying on Thöpe and me, toadying to Chou Wang, but I think he would like to kill Chou Wang, whom he certainly hates. But he would kill me if Chou Wang ordered it, as Thö-pa-ga believes he intends. Chou Wang interrogated me so menacingly about Dowlah that I had to pretend to weaken to avoid violence. He even threatened torture. Thinking me weak, he became care less, so I caught on that he would like to trap Dowlah, who he fears is too cunning to come within reach. I doped out that they both pretend friendship for each other but are actually enemies and from something that Chou Wang said about Su-li Wing, it appears that she obeyed Chou Wang’s orders to betray Dowlah to the Indian Government. Chou Wang accused me of being Dowlah’s accomplice. Then I thought of pretending to write to Dowlah asking him to come and take me away. Chou Wang jumped at that. He thinks I am very simple and scared out of my wits. But I insisted Thöpe must see the letter before it goes. Thöpe shall show it to Chou Wang. I am writing two letters, and when Chou Wang has read the one to Dowlah Thöpe will destroy it and substitute this. Perhaps Chou Wang will kill me, when he thinks I have done what he wants. But we may be able to defeat Chou Wang by my pretending to be Thöpe’s wife or mistress. It appears these monks won’t stand for murdering Thöpe’s woman. But it’s awkward. Thöpe takes it seriously. He insists you are dead and that you came to him in a dream and said so. He wants me to be another Nancy Strong and live with him in Tibet, and I daren’t be too stand-offish or he might blow up. Thöpe has my pistol safely hidden and not even Chou Wang dares to touch Thöpe or search him. Some of these monks seem decent although madly superstitious, and I think I could persuade them to send me safely away. But that wouldn’t be right, because I think Thöpe can get me inside the Thunder Dragon Gate, and that may make it possible for me to smuggle you in, though I don’t yet know how. Tom, I can’t imagine you dead. I know you’re not dead. I know it. I can’t imagine you doing any thing but win through. I know you will. I’m counting on it. I’m positive you’re not far away. You shall not fail through any cowardice of mine. I have described you, not Dowlah, to the messengers, though Dowlah’s name is on the envelop. So, if you get this, you will know I am almost at the end of my tether but counting on you. Tom, if you should come too late, this is good-by and God bless you. ELSA
