“Both of which are probably true, I imagine.”
“Thank you. Do you know what I am—what my occupation is, I mean?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Have a guess. I’ll give you until the fish arrives. That will probably be some considerable time. The service in this hotel is largo.”
“You aren’t a solicitor?”
“God forbid.”
“A novelist?”
“I’ve been talking to you for five minutes, and I haven’t yet mentioned one of my masterpieces. Therefore I cannot be a novelist. Try again.”
“A low comedian?” said Mr. Minto, being facetious.
“Perfectly correct,” said the little man. “Not on the stage, I may say. I’m with the circus. Perhaps you have noticed there is a circus in the town this week? There are posters of it everywhere, even on the Norman ruins. I’ve spoken to the publicity manager about it, but he won’t listen to me. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the posters were true, but they’re not. They’ll all exaggerations and more than half of them are downright lies. Isn’t there a law about posters, Mr. Murdo?”
“Minto.”
“Minto. I’m sorry. There ought to be. If I were to advertise this grape-fruit as the Sweetest Grape-Fruit in the World, I’d soon get into trouble about it, wouldn’t I? The sugar, please, if you don’t mind…thank you. But if people advertise a circus turn as the Most Daring Act of its Kind in the World, no one bothers to question it. Whereas it’s nothing of the kind. There are probably a hundred similar acts, or more daring acts, being performed in lesser-known circuses and not being advertised nearly as well. However, that’s by the way. There’s my card. I’m a clown. You may have heard of me. The name is Dodo.”
Mr. Minto took the card solemnly and studied it. “Dodo, Carey’s World-Famous Circus and Menagerie. London Address: 3 Hanover Gardens, S.W.I.”
“It must be a very interesting life,” said Mr. Minto.
“It’s a very difficult one,” said the little man. “In the music-halls, for instance, you can be certain of the same audience night after night. Or, at any rate, of the same sequences of audiences. You know that on Monday night the only people who matter are the newspaper critics, and so you play to their level.”
“Up to it?” said Mr. Minto.
“Down to it. From Tuesday to Friday, you get the ordinary lower- and middle-class audience, and you play as intelligently as possible. On Saturday you get an audience who have come merely for a night out, most of whom have had already too much to drink, and who don’t care what happens as long as the intervals are timed to suit the licensing hours. So you play down again, even lower than to the critics.”
“I see,” said Mr. Minto, and poured out another cup of coffee.
“But in the circus you never know what kind of house you’re going to have. It’s especially difficult with children. You may have a house packed with children, and you think that this is going to be easy. All you have to do is to fall down as many times as possible, landing in a pail of whitewash whenever you can—and you’ll be a riot. And what happens? You find that these wretched children have been to the cinema twice already that week, have been lapping up Noel Coward epigrams, and are bored to tears with whitewash. They want a good smutty line, and the smuttier the better. Sad, Mr. Purdoe, but true.”
“Minto,” said Mr. Minto once again. “But surely—”
“Again, you have an evening performance, when there are very few children in the house. You decide to put on a rather more subtle performance. It falls completely flat. And if you do try landing on your backside, just to see how they take it, they hold up the show for five minutes, laughing themselves silly.”
“But—”
“On the other hand—was your haddock all right?…there’s something a little peculiar about this one—on the other hand, you may find yourself in a town where children are still children and still laugh at the throwing of custard-pies. I’ve never played in this town before, for instance. When the circus was here last year I was away, helping to bury my brother-in-law. It was the only thing I ever did for my brother-in-law that I didn’t regret immediately afterwards. Now, I’m going on in the opening performance this afternoon without having any idea what kind of children are bred in this town. They may be custard-pie children. Or they may be what I call Lonsdale children—the playwright, not the peer. Or they may be the sticky, half-way-in-between kind. They’re the worst. I’ll have found out before the end of the performance, of course, and I will be able to alter my tactics in time for the next show. Which will probably have just the very opposite kind of audience. It’s very tantalizing.”
The little man pushed his fish away with a melancholy air.
“What kind of a circus is Carey’s?” asked Mr. Minto.
“Between you and me and the gatepost,” said the clown—“though where the gatepost comes into it I can’t quite make out—between you and me, Carey’s Circus is a hotbed of crime.”
“Crime?” said Mr. Minto. It was not a word of which he was particularly fond.
“There’s more crime going on in Carey’s Circus than in the whole underworld of London, and I happen to know the underworld of London pretty well. I lived in it for three years, and a tamer and more respectable lot of people you couldn’t find. Except when a gang of foreign crooks crop up and start giving the place a bad name. No, Mr.—”
“Minto.”
“No, Mr. Minto, if it’s crime you’re after, Carey’s is the place for it. Theft, immorality, blackmail—you’ll find all the pretties there. There was an act with us last season—Raquel and Varconi. A couple of high-wire artists. They weren’t very good on the high wire, and Raquel wasn’t particularly good off it. She was Mrs. Varconi. She was living with Carey, the proprietor of the circus, for a while. Varconi heard about it, and the act smashed up. But not before Carey had a very ugly scar down his left arm…from Varconi’s knife. There might have been murder that night. There has been murder once, but that was hushed up.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Minto. “And I always thought that circus people were just one big, happy family.”
“You’ve been reading the novelists who join up with a circus for a fortnight and then go home and write a book about it,” said the clown. “There’s crime going on at Carey’s right now—plenty of it. I could tell you of one certain piece of blackmail, of a repeat performance of the Raquel and Varconi business that’ll be coming to a head very soon…and of something a good deal worse.”
“Go on. Tell me,” said Mr. Minto. “I lead such a quiet life myself…this is all very exciting for me.”
“Well—I’m not boring you? I’ve talked all about my own life. I haven’t let you say a word, have I?”
“The only important words I have to say this week are after my sister’s wedding,” said Mr. Minto. “I’ve got to propose the toast of the happy pair, blast them. Carry on with Carey’s crime. Maybe I’ll write a book about it myself.”
“Why? Are you an author?”
“No. I’m a detective,” said Mr. Minto, who liked to be honest about these things. “I’m from Scotland Yard. Detective-Inspector Minto, to give me my full title.”
The little man stopped in the middle of raising a forkful of sausage to his mouth, and stared at Mr. Minto. He seemed a little shaken.
“Are you really?” he said. “Well, of course, that doesn’t make any difference. It’ll be all the more interesting from your point of view, won’t it?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Well, what I was going to tell you was…dear me!”
“Anything the matter?”
“I’ve just remembered—I have to be down at the circus at nine-thirty. I’d no idea it was so late. We’ve got a new band, and we’re running through some of the acts this morning to get them sure of their cues. I’m so sorry. Perhaps some other time.…Good m
orning.”
And, having folded his serviette and collected his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the clown left the dining-hall at what seemed to Mr. Minto an unnecessary speed.
“What a terrible drawback to have to go through life with,” said Mr. Minto to himself. “Being a detective. It makes them all shut up just when they’re going to open out.”
Chapter Four
Anton stood waiting his turn, wrapped in a dressing-gown of apricot silk. The wings of a circus are even more draughty than the wings of a stage, and in Carey’s they were merely two canvas alleyways leading from the ring out to the caravans and tents where the performers, human and animals, idled away their time before and after their acts. It was in the left-hand alleyway that Anton was waiting, standing behind the heavy curtain of red plush which the artists pushed aside to enter the big tent. Between that and the other entrance, the circus band was thumping out a Strauss waltz while Miss St. Clair and her Educated Ponies went through a series of rather jerky manoeuvres supposed to be an old-fashioned waltz. The band, by keeping strictly in time with the ponies’ hoofs, was usually able to persuade the audience that the animals were waltzing in perfect time; today, with a new band, Miss St. Clair’s ponies seemed a little less educated than usual, and appeared to have lost a good deal of their sense of rhythm.
On the other side of the band platform, a long tunnel of steel sections had been stretched out through the alley, connecting the ring with the cage in which Anton’s seven tigers were housed. At a certain chord from the band (or, more likely, at an uncertain chord, for the new trombone player had not yet accustomed himself to fitting in his blowing with the rapid succession of acts in the ring below him) the door of the cage would be opened, and the seven tigers—after a good deal of prodding and poking—would slouch lazily down through the tunnel and into the ring.
Anton walked across to find out what mood the animals were in. The tigers were very like Dodo’s audience: you never knew quite how they were going to behave. Four of the seven were reliable; they had been with Anton since they were five weeks old and he could take them on a shopping expedition along the main street of any town, knowing that they would behave themselves a great deal better than any of the pedestrians. He had once done this, when the circus was in Edinburgh, parading the four cubs along the full length of Princes Street on the end of four chains which looked much too slender for their job; and the Princes Street cafés have never done such business in their lives, for the good people of Edinburgh decided unanimously on a nice quiet cup of coffee as soon as they saw the four beasts strolling along the pavement.
The cubs were all right; they had been caught young enough to have the intelligence drilled out of them, and a fearful obedience installed in its place. The other three tigers were different; they still knew perfectly well that the whole idea of being subdued and made to go through stupid tricks by a single puny man was absurd. Three full-grown man-eaters in a cage with a nearly-naked and unarmed man…one of these days they would do a great deal more than merely growling and snarling and reaching out their paws to try and cuff this helpless mortal.…
Peter, the oldest and largest of the seven, was the one who would do it. The duel between Anton and Peter was always the star turn of the act, and the audience, sitting back and telling each other how clever this fellow Anton was, never realized how slender was the borderline between Anton’s mastery of Peter and Peter’s conquest of that mastery. Peter was always left to the end of each trick: when the other six had been cowed and placed meekly in their positions on top of the bright yellow boxes, there was always the long battle with Peter until, with a last vicious snarl, he climbed up on his own box and completed the picture.
Less than a month ago, when Anton was putting his tigers, one by one, through a hoop of flaming rope—and fire is the thing a tiger hates more than any other—there had been a tense struggle before Peter could be persuaded to follow the others. The act had played four minutes longer than its scheduled time that night, and Anton had not enjoyed those four minutes at all. He knew, however, that if he gave in and contented himself and the audience with putting six of his seven beasts through that flaming hoop, Peter would realize that he was getting on top…and God alone knew what would happen at the next performance. So he carried on until the thing was done; and the attendant standing outside the cage put back his revolver and mopped his forehead, and Anton, after bowing and salaaming to a packed house, ran out of the ring, sweating.
He put his arm through the bars of the cage and scratched the ear of one of the cubs, who was lying asleep on the floor of the cage and could not be bothered to do its silly tricks twice today in this heat. Most of the others were sleeping, too, or stretched out blinking their eyes in the sun and occasionally flogging their tails to keep off the flies. Peter was pacing backwards and forwards along the full length of the cage. He was in one of his moods all right. Anton called to him by name; he paid no attention, but continued to trek silently up and down the cage.
“Peter!” said Anton. “Peter…come along, Peter.…All right, if you’re going to be high-hat…”
He went on scratching the cub, which woke up, stretched itself, and rumbled with pleasure, for Anton had hit on exactly the right spot for scratching.
“Is that good, Rene? That good, old girl?…Are you very itchy there, eh?”
Peter sprang. One quick, enormous bound from the other side of the cage to within six inches of Anton’s face. Its claws could not have been an inch from Anton’s hand as he drew it out between the bars. He could feel its breath in his face. It stood over the drowsy cub, staring straight into Anton’s eyes.
“Now then, Peter!” said the trainer. “What’s the matter with you today? Touch of liver, eh?”
He walked back to the other alleyway and lit a cigarette. It was satisfying to note that his hand was perfectly steady as he held it up to shield the flame of the match. He peered through the heavy plush curtains: Miss St. Clair was on her second-last movement, the Rumba. Anton smiled; it was funny to think that this was the dance that was thought most of by the audience, when it was by far the simplest to do. Pull back the bit in the ponies’ mouths as tightly as you could, give them a little encouragement with a jab from your heels in their flanks, tugging them back as hard as possible at the same time…and the result was an unsteady, jerky motion which, with a little help from the band, was at once recognized as a perfect Rumba step. Not that Miss St. Clair was getting very much help from the band today, for the trumpeter seemed to have got My Muchacha mixed up with Moment Musicale. Two minutes, and Miss St. Clair would be off and Anton on.
A young man in grey flannels and a canary sweater came up to him.
“I’ve been wanting to see you, Anton,” he said. “What did you mean last night?”
“You know damn’ well, Lorimer,” said Anton.
“I’m sorry—I don’t. As far as I can remember, you said, ‘Good God—are you another of them?’ Another of what, if it isn’t a rude question?”
“What were you doing at Joe’s caravan at that time of night—if that isn’t a rude question?”
“That’s a personal matter.”
“Exactly. You take my tip, Lorimer, cut out the personal matter before it finishes you and your act.”
“I still don’t get you. Is there something shady going on at Joe’s caravan?”
Anton turned to face him.
“What did you do after I left you?”
“I went and knocked up Joe.”
“Exactly. I thought so. And you got what you were after, I suppose?”
“I did not. I got a first-class, grade ‘A’ sock on the chin. I wasn’t after it. I wasn’t even expecting it, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken it as easily as I did. The funny thing is that I’m beginning to doubt if I really got it. I went to play hell with Joe about it this morning, and one of us is a liar. His little story is that I was found
out for the count on the other side of the field, half a mile away from his ruddy caravan. Tight, so it seems.”
“That’s a polite way of putting it, isn’t it?”
“What the devil are you getting at?”
“You know, Lorimer.”
“I don’t. Honest to God, Anton, I don’t. I’ll tell you quite frankly—I went to have a heart-to-heart talk with Joe…about…well, about Loretta. You know the way she’s been playing about with Carey lately. I didn’t want a repeat of that Raquel and Varconi business. I got down to the field round about one o’clock. I saw a couple of blokes—I don’t know who they were—going up to his caravan. They gave a queer sort of whistle, and the door opened and they went off without a word.”
“Whistle, eh?”
“That’s right. Then I started off again to get in and see Joe, and I realized that he had company. You, in fact. Then you came out and saw me, and said your little piece about me being ‘another of them’. You cleared off, and I was going to do the same thing when Joe had another visitor. The place was quite busy, I tell you. Same whistle—same funny business at the door—same lack of idle talk. I saw who this one was, though. It was Dodo.”
“What?”
“Dodo—the clown.”
“Good God! I can’t believe that he’s…”
“That he’s what?”
“Never mind. Carry on. What happened then?”
“I thought it might be rather fun to look into the business. I hopped up the caravan steps and—like a damned fool—gave the whistle. Joe opened the door and socked me. At least, that’s what I thought happened. Joe doesn’t seem to agree with me, and he’s been very pleasant to me all day. Maybe I’m going potty and imagined the whole thing. I can’t have dreamt it, because Loretta says I wasn’t in bed the whole night. She’s full of nasty insinuations about where I spent the evening.”
Anton threw away his cigarette.
“Lorimer,” he said, “is that the truth? You’ve no idea what has been going on at Joe’s—honestly?”
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