King of Kings

by Wilbur Smith

  The duke looked pleased. He leaned back in his chair. “Give me forty-eight hours, Horatio. I have had dealings with the Italian royal family in the past—some of the younger members, at any rate. If, before those forty-eight hours are over, I can give you a letter from the Italian consul here in Cairo, confirming that King Umberto is happy for you to sell this treasure to me instead of him . . . ?”

  He signed his note with a flourish and handed it to Horatio. Horatio read it, nodded briefly, then folded it and slipped it into his pocket.

  “If you can show me such a letter, then of course, Your Grace, the carving is yours. But forgive me, it is a vain hope.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. Now I shall put this wonder into my safe, and you may spend a day or two in Cairo without worrying about it further. Perhaps you would be so good as to turn your back.”

  The duke picked up the wrapped carving and waited while Horatio stood and turned to face the door. He heard the ticks of the combination wheel, the bolt being released and turned back in time to see the duke placing the carving on a thick pile of card folders in the red plush interior. The duke then shut the steel door and closed the section of bookshelf over it. Horatio marveled at the design. If he had not seen it open, he would never have spotted it.

  “Thank you, thank you, Your Grace.”

  •••

  Two days later, when Horatio returned to the house, he still had the countenance of a happy man. When he saw the letter from the Italian consulate, however, he looked startled again.

  “I would never have believed . . . And yet here it is! The king agrees that I sell the carving to you, Your Grace. Yet I was assured the purchase was of great personal interest to him.”

  The duke made no attempt to explain.

  “The price you agreed with the king was, I understand, twenty thousand pounds. I shall happily write you a check for forty, as agreed, but as we are both men of business, I wonder if you might take twenty thousand in paper money and a further ten in diamonds. It is a little unorthodox, I know, but I believe the arrangement might suit you better. I have both the diamonds and the notes on hand.”

  Horatio went scarlet. He would lose ten thousand, but the remaining fortune would be his in currency more discreet and immediate. “Indeed, Your Grace.”

  “Then take your money.” The duke lifted a briefcase from the floor beside him, placed it on the desk, opened it and turned it around to face Horatio. Horatio picked up the small velvet pouch that lay on top of the neat bundles of notes, pulled at the drawstring, then tipped the diamonds into his hand. They sparkled on his palm, each a cluster of rainbows.

  “Would you like to have their value assessed, Horatio?” the duke asked with a glimmer of amusement.

  Horatio swallowed and tipped them back into the pouch. It went into his breast pocket and he closed the case and set it down next to him.

  “That will not be necessary, Your Grace. I am content. But may I beg one last favor? When I placed that carving into your care, I did not know it would be my last chance to see it. May I look on that face once more before I go? I think a man of your understanding will know what it would mean to me to have a chance to bid it farewell.”

  The duke looked at him sideways, then laughed. “Of course, Horatio. It is your love of such beautiful things that has made you such a useful man to know. If you would be so kind as to turn your back again.”

  Horatio did, and on the duke’s command turned back to look once more on the face of Caesar. He touched the carving with his forefinger.

  “Thank you, Your Grace.”

  He blinked rapidly and bent down to pick up the case of money, then turned and walked out of the room without looking back.

  •••

  Horatio left Cairo four hours later. The first-class compartment on the train to Alexandria was wonderfully cool, but he was still shiny with sweat and chewed the skin around his fingernails like a nervous schoolgirl. The train ticket had been waiting for him in a thick envelope at the reception of Shepheard’s Hotel, along with the news that a passage had been booked for him on the next sailing back to London from Alexandria. The envelope also contained a short note, written in a flowing masculine script. It told him that his most pressing gambling debts in London had been paid and was signed only with the initials: P. B.

  The men who guarded the gates of the Duke of Kendal’s home in Cairo had grown used to Abdul, a local beggar and comic drunkard, over the last few weeks. He would appear in the late evening and tell dirty jokes and stories for the price of a drink. Occasionally he had a pack of grubby cards showing buxom ladies in various states of undress, which he would sell for a similar price. Sometimes the guards took the cards without paying, and beat Abdul for the whining old sinner he was. Still he amused them. Tonight he staggered up the road toward them singing, and the two men on the gate grinned at each other as he approached. He stumbled against them.

  “My friends, my brothers! Have you got the price of a drink for your good friend Abdul?”

  “You’ve had enough already, you heathen,” the larger of the two men said. “Get away, or I’ll crack your ribs for you again.”

  Abdul mewled and shrank away. “Oh, you lion, I’m still carrying those bruises, they have bloomed all over me like roses.” He wet his lips and leaned forward again. “But I have a secret to tell you! You know Asha, the little beauty who works in the kitchens? Would you like to know a juicy bit about that lovely minx?”

  The guard looked unsure, but could not resist and he nodded.

  “I shall whisper it to you.” Abdul crept close to him and laid a filthy palm on the guard’s shoulder. He bent down a little so Abdul could put his mouth close to his ear. “She thinks you are a bully and coward, and beater of old men and women. I told her I would send you to hell, and such was her joy she kissed my hand.”

  “Wha—?” The guard began to pull away. The blade Abdul used on his throat was so sharp, he didn’t even know his windpipe had been severed until he tried to call out. The other guard turned as he crumpled to the ground and let out a curse. Before the second guard could draw his sword, Abdul had used his knife again. The second guard clasped desperately at his throat, as if he could seal the wound with his fingers, and fell by his friend in the dust, spluttering on his own blood. Abdul waited until he was dead, then gave a low whistle as he plucked the gate key from the corpse’s belt. From the far side of the roadway two other men appeared. They wore dark brown tunics and loose trousers very similar to those worn by the dead guards. Together they dragged the corpses into the shadow on the inside of the wall and then the new arrivals took their positions.

  One of the men handed a leather satchel and a roll of cloth to Abdul. “Effendi, may Allah the Merciful go with you.”

  “Thank you, Yakub,” the beggar said, handing him the key. “I will signal when I am clear.”

  Yakub watched him disappear into the shadows and in the moments before he was lost to sight, Abdul transformed like a djinn. The drunken beggar had disappeared, replaced by a young man, six feet tall and quick and lithe as a leopard. The cringing posture vanished. Just before he disappeared around the corner of the house, he turned back and Yakub could swear he caught a flash of those ice-blue eyes. Yakub looked out into the road as a good guard should, glad he had chosen to serve a man like Penrod Ballantyne.

  •••

  Penrod had been watching the arrangements of the house very carefully while he had been playing the role of Abdul. He knew he had between twelve and fifteen minutes before the guards on patrol would pass this way again. He unrolled the cloth bundle and lifted a short bow from its wrappings, strung it, then from the shadows shot an arrow up and over the upper branch of a sycamore that shaded the pathways around the house from the heat of the day.

  Its lower branches had been pruned away, on Pinkerton’s advice, no doubt, but the arrow Penrod fired had a long coil of fishing line attached to it. The arrow arched over a solid branch about twenty feet from the ground
and fell silently to earth again on the other side, burying its head deep into the soil.

  Penrod retrieved it and used the fishing line to pull a manila climbing rope over the branch so it hung to the ground on either side. He grasped it just above head height and twisted the two lengths between his feet, forming a brake, then hauled himself upward, gathering the rope up behind him when he reached the branch.

  He had selected an unoccupied room on the first floor as his point of entry. A young maid in the house had been encouraged to take a romantic interest in one of Yakub’s servants, the same man now pretending to guard the main gate. Through her, Penrod had learned who was in the house and where they slept. The only rooms occupied on the first floor were those of the duke and his secretary Carruthers. The duke spent his evenings at the club, leaving to dine at eight, and rarely returning before three o’clock in the morning. Carruthers would take a light supper on his own and extinguish his reading lamp before midnight. This chamber, halfway down the eastern flank of the house, was empty, and below the window was the sloping roof of one of the bay windows on the ground floor.

  It was a distance of some ten feet from the end of the branch to the smooth roof, but Penrod had the advantage of height. He landed lightly and waited for a moment to see if he had been heard. The house remained quiet.

  The window was latched. Penrod worked one of the small glass panes free, teasing away the putty with his penknife, and caught it carefully by its edges as it came loose. Then he lifted the sash and slipped inside, shutting the window carefully behind him in case any of the patrolling guards thought to look up.

  The next stage of his plan was the most dangerous. The duke’s office was always kept locked, and only two people had the key: Carruthers and the duke himself. Yakub had wanted to persuade the maid to take a copy of the key, or steal it while Carruthers slept, but Penrod would not risk it, not after seeing the beating Agatha’s maid had received. When he slept, Carruthers placed it on the table by his bed with his watch and wireframe glasses.

  Penrod let himself into Carruthers’s room on the other side of the landing. The secretary appeared to be sleeping peacefully in his canopied bed and the thin sickle of the moon cast only the barest of lights across the room. In the landing and hallway the gas was kept lit until the duke himself had retired to bed, so Penrod waited for his eyes to adjust.

  He moved silently to the side table by the sleeping man’s head. Carruthers stirred and Penrod felt his feathery breath on his fingertips as he took up the key. It clicked on the walnut veneer.

  “Is someone there?” His voice was heavy with sleep. Penrod did not move, letting himself disappear into the warm silence of the room like a fakir. Carruthers turned over and soon his breathing resumed the gentle rhythms of sleep.

  •••

  The guard outside the office sat with his back to the study door, giving him an unobstructed view of the entrance hall and passage leading to the back of the house. It would be impossible to reach him with a knife. A gunshot would wake the household. Penrod crouched at the top of the stairs, took the bow from his back and nocked an arrow. The man who crafted these arrows was an artist. The haft was of straight-grained cedar, half an inch in diameter with a narrow bodkin head, and the goose feather fletching was bound to the haft with a tight spiral of silk. The bow was of English ash, and for a fleeting moment as Penrod drew the arrow, he had a vision of woodland, mossed banks, running streams and dark fairy tales. He released and the arrow flew through the wrought iron banisters with a low hiss and buried its iron point deep in the man’s throat. He gasped, choking on his own blood, but hardly had time to lift his hands to the shaft before his eyes glazed, his hands dropped and his body slumped forward.

  Penrod put the bow across his shoulder, ran lightly down the stairs, unlocked and entered the study without glancing at the guard, then closed the door behind him. He felt over the row of green leather volumes for the Decline and Fall and the catch, which would reveal the safe. The fake section of the bookshelf swung away.

  It had taken a lot of time and trouble to find Horatio, an expert who knew the duke but who had both the intelligence to play the role Penrod had in mind for him, and a weakness for gambling, which meant Penrod could bribe him into compliance. Once Penrod had discovered the make and model of the duke’s safe from a careless assistant, keen to make a sale, in Pinkerton’s Cairo office, Horatio was contacted and then confined to a room above a sweatshop in Limehouse with a London safecracker for five hours a day listening to the dials spinning on a matching model. When the safecracker reported that Horatio could give an accurate estimate of how far the dial was turned between numbers during the combination sequence, Penrod sent the curio dealer further instructions, and a ticket for Cairo. The mask of Caesar had been procured by Penrod’s former lover, Bakhita. Once the wife of a grain trader, she had become a trader of antiquities along the upper reaches of the Nile and as her reputation grew, desert travelers shared their news with her, as well as the small artifacts they found lost among the desert sands. This news she shared with Penrod and he had learned to trust her skill and her discretion. The carving was quite genuine. Penrod knew he needed something to provoke the duke’s lust, and nothing less would be certain of doing so.

  After his first meeting with the duke, Horatio had gone wandering in the spice bazaar, as instructed. As soon as Yakub was sure he was not being followed, he had scooped him up and questioned him closely. Horatio was quietly confident. The pattering clicks of the combination dial had become a very familiar music to him during his weeks of training and he could share what it told him about the distance between the two-digit numbers that formed the sequence of the combination, even if he could not supply any of the numbers themselves. The partial information Horatio provided created an elegant problem for Penrod and he had wagered everything on his ability to solve it. He lay among the opium fumes in his room at one of Yakub’s boarding houses and let the numbers play in his head. He was sure they would not have been chosen at random. After all, the duke was a man of monogrammed silk handkerchiefs and books and cigarettes stamped with his coat of arms. The numbers of the combination would be personal and contain some hint of vanity. When at last the solution flashed across his mind, Penrod was proved right. 13 48 18 75. The pairs of numbers gave the year of the creation of the dukedom and that of the current Duke’s own succession. Horatio’s second visit provided a confirmation, and then Penrod released him, confused by his adventure, but rich and swearing never to gamble again. Horatio and Penrod had never met, and never would. The only direct communication between them had been the final note of dismissal Horatio had read on the train taking him to Alexandria.

  The tumblers clicked obediently into place and Penrod opened the steel door. The interior was just as Horatio had described to Yakub and Adnan. The mask, still in its snowy wrappings, was resting on a stack of folders and three black ledgers.

  Penrod had learned swiftly that the duke’s international mining and processing enterprises were sustained and supported by the systematic use of bribery, blackmail and coercion. For months Penrod moved discreetly through the duke’s past, finding fear and silence, but just occasionally he would meet a man or woman with nothing left to lose who would share what they knew about the duke’s networks and activities. Kendal had discovered early that investments in high-class brothels and gambling dens yielded more than financial rewards. Men of power and influence, or members of their families, were seduced into the duke’s establishments and their worst excesses documented and photographed, then when the duke needed permits and permissions, favorable customs deals, or to have his rivals undercut, Carruthers would make a polite visit to the gentleman making the decision with his dossier of depravity under his arm and explain to his trembling interlocutor what was to be done. Attacks on workers who tried to unionize went uninvestigated, murders of rivals were hushed up, reports on accidents attached no blame to the company, governments across Europe paid over the odds for the raw ma
terials they were sold, and each detail of every corrupt deal was neatly documented in the ledgers Penrod now held in his hands. The duke had built an empire on the blood and foolishness of others. Penrod set the ledgers and folders on the desk, then, with a grim smile, placed the wrapped mask in the open safe again. Penrod slipped the ledgers and folders into his satchel, closed the safe and spun the dial, then closed the false bookcase over it.

  Somewhere upstairs a bell rang. Penrod heard a footstep outside in the corridor, then a shout. The body outside the office door had been seen. Sounds of alarm began to spread through the house. It was pointless to attempt an escape through the window—thanks to Horatio he knew about the iron window fittings. He had only one exit, and that was the way he had come.

  He opened the door. Wilson Carruthers was standing at the top of the stairs in his striped silk dressing gown, still confused with sleep. One of the house servants was bending over the body slumped in its chair, two more were by the main door, calling into the darkness for help from the patrolling guards. Penrod darted left, heading through the back of the house toward the kitchens. One of the servants sleeping on the floor made a brave grab at his ankle, but Penrod kicked up with his heel and felt the crunch of the man’s nose breaking. The doors to the gardens would be locked, but the windows here were not reinforced. He sprinted into the back kitchen, leaped from the floor to the table, then across to the dresser, which reached to the high ceiling. He clambered up, kicked out the glass of the high narrow windows and dived through the opening, rolling forward to break his fall on the other side. He crossed the garden and followed the perimeter wall around to the guardhouse, then whistled to Yakub, who quietly opened the gate, even while he yelled to the guards at the house he’d seen a shadow racing toward the rear of the garden. Then he and his man dropped their weapons and followed Penrod silently out into the road, closing the gate behind them.