A Hundred Thousand Dragons

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  ‘Adler Madison, New York,’ read out Ashley. ‘That’s not very informative. Can you tell me anything about him?’

  Bonner shrugged. ‘Very little, I’m afraid. I have, of course, gone into the matter since Inspector Rackham telephoned. Mr Madison arrived, I believe, on the Berengaria which docked in Southampton at six o’clock on Friday morning. He said as much to the clerk. He arrived at the hotel before midday and took a single room with a bathroom. He told the clerk he was uncertain how long he would be staying. As far as I can ascertain, he had a bath and went out, returning late that evening. He certainly didn’t dine here. The next day he left the hotel immediately after breakfast and that, gentlemen, is the last anyone saw of him. His things are still in his room.’

  ‘Did he hand in any valuables for safe-keeping? His passport, for instance?’ asked Rackham.

  ‘I’m afraid he didn’t,’ said Mr Bonner apologetically. ‘I’ve enquired.’

  ‘Did he speak to anyone in the hotel?’ asked Ashley. ‘Mention where he was going or anything like that?’

  Mr Bonner shook his head. ‘The only people he spoke to were the desk clerk and the porter who carried his bags to his room. Neither of them can remember anything about him, apart from the fact that he was a man of forty or thereabouts, tall and grey-haired.’

  ‘Was the room booked in advance?’ asked Jack.

  Bonner nodded. ‘Yes. It was arranged in advance by a Mr Vaughan of Chavermere, Sussex.’

  The three men exchanged glances. ‘Well, that ties up, at any rate,’ said Ashley. ‘D’you know, Haldean,’ he said in an undertone, ‘to be fair to him, everything Vaughan told us stacks up.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Will you show us Mr Madison’s room, Mr Bonner?’

  ‘Certainly.’ He led the way out of the lobby up the main staircase to the wide first-floor corridor of the hotel. ‘This is Mr Madison’s room,’ said the manager.

  Ashley intervened. ‘Excuse me, sir, can I try this key?’ He opened his briefcase and took out a key with a blackened fob.

  It turned in the lock. ‘Bingo!’ muttered Jack.

  Ashley put the key back in his briefcase with quiet satisfaction. ‘That’s what I expected, but I’m glad it fitted, all the same.’

  Mr Bonner led them into a single room looking out over the Embankment. It was furnished with a neatly made bed, a gleaming mahogany chest of drawers, an armchair and a wardrobe. A desk, containing a blotting pad, a small collection of books and a box of thin black American cigars, stood under the window. A travel clock, its hands pointing to 3.36, stood on the table by the bed. The bathroom was at the rear of the room. Depressingly, from a detective point of view, both the bedroom and the bathroom had obviously been thoroughly cleaned.

  Jack looked in the bathroom. The only personal belongings were a safety razor, a toothbrush and a plain toiletry set. He went back into the main room. ‘What’s in the wardrobe?’

  The wardrobe contained two coats, four suits, five shirts and a set of evening wear, all bought from Altman and Levy’s, the New York store. ‘There’s no names on any of these clothes,’ said Jack. ‘They’re all ready-made.’

  ‘That’s an interesting economy,’ said Rackham. ‘Granted that he was well-off enough to stay here, I’d have expected him to have his clothes made by a tailor.’

  Mr Bonner smiled deprecatingly. ‘You wouldn’t credit the petty economies practised by the wealthy, Inspector, especially if –’ he coughed apologetically – ‘if they are what is sometimes termed self-made men.’

  ‘We don’t actually know he was well-off,’ said Ashley. ‘After all, Vaughan paid for him to come over here and for him to stay in the hotel.’

  ‘Well, never mind his clothes,’ said Rackham. He started to hunt through the chest of drawers. ‘I’d like to see his passport, though.’ He searched rapidly through the drawers without result. ‘He might have taken it with him.’

  Jack started to search in the desk. ‘It’s not here, Bill, but look at this. You know you thought he might not be well-off?’ He held out two envelopes he had taken from the desk. One contained a hundred American dollars and the other a hundred and fifty pounds in English notes.

  Ashley whistled. ‘He can’t be that hard up, not with that amount of money lying about.’

  Jack sat by the desk, looking at the books. There was an anthology of poetry in English, a copy of Nietzsche in German, a couple of American detective stories and a book he recognized as a genuine rarity, Charles Montague Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. He picked it up. On the inside cover was written Adler Zelig Yohann Madison!

  He frowned. Why the exclamation mark? He turned as Ashley gave a little grunt of surprise. He had taken out a large flat cardboard box from the bottom of the bedside drawers and laid it on the bed.

  Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, was a leather-covered sketchbook. Ashley opened the book at random. Every page was filled with postcard-sized paintings, three or four or more to a page.

  ‘These are rather nice,’ said Jack in appreciation. He turned the pages of the book. ‘They’re very well drawn.’ They were coloured drawings rather than watercolours and they were all scenes of the Near East. Some of the places were well-known; the pyramids, the sphinx, the statues at Abu Simbel. Other places he didn’t recognize but they were all desert scenes, some by moonlight, some in brilliant sun. Some showed Bedouin camps or caravans, full of life and movement. There were Turkish and German soldiers and Arabs in white robes and colourful headscarves. Interestingly enough, there were no British troops.

  ‘Who painted the pictures, Jack?’ asked Ashley.

  ‘Simes,’ said Jack, looking at the neat signature at the bottom of each picture. He turned to the front of the book.

  ‘He’s the chap who painted that picture Vaughan showed us, isn’t he?’ said Ashley. ‘The one of the ruined city.’

  Jack nodded. ‘That’s right. I’ll explain it all later, Bill, but Vaughan said this bloke Simes was a friend of Madison’s.’

  He turned to the front of the book. ‘Blimey,’ he said in surprise. ‘His full name’s a bit of a mouthful. Ingulf Eberhard Simes. He must be another German. A German-American, at least. He’s a pretentious sort of beggar,’ he added, looking at the front page. In large italics, Simes had written the title of the book; A Tide In The Affairs Of Men: Pictures From The East by I.E. Simes, R.A. and, underneath, a few lines of poetry.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said, and read the poem aloud. ‘A hundred thousand dragons lie, Underneath an Arabian sky. The Silent Ones, when asked, will measure, the hidden way to dragons’ treasure. With a body once so fair, a princess guards the dragons’ lair.’

  There was a pause as Jack, Ashley and Rackham digested the poem. Mr Bonner looked totally blank.

  ‘What’s all that about?’ asked Rackham. ‘Dragons and princesses? What have dragons and princesses got to do with it?’

  Jack shrugged. ‘Search me. A hundred thousand dragons lie . . . Do you know anything about dragons, Mr Bonner?’

  The manager, rather surprised to be appealed to, shook his head vigorously. ‘Indeed, no. Dragons are the emblem of Wales, of course, but Mr Madison was American, not Welsh.’

  ‘The Chinese have dragons,’ said Jack musingly. ‘And princesses, too.’

  ‘St George fought a dragon,’ put in Rackham.

  ‘I shouldn’t think there’s much saintliness kicking about,’ said Jack. ‘Besides that, I don’t think, strictly speaking, St George’s dragon really is a dragon. It’s something to do with the Latin word. Apparently the word for snake is usually translated wrongly as dragon, which means poor old St George is a lot more credible but a lot less fun.’

  ‘Do they have dragons in Arabia?’ asked Ashley.

  Jack shrugged. ‘I haven’t a clue. They sound like the sort of thing that’d crop up in the Arabian Nights.’ He paused, staring blankly at the book. ‘The trouble is, it sounds as if it should mean something, but God knows what.’ He flicked through the pages of the book onc
e more. ‘There aren’t any dragons in it. Or princesses either, come to that. I don’t know. It’s all a bit over the top for a book of watercolour drawings. The pictures are nice enough but they’re not great art.’

  ‘What about the title?’ asked Ashley. ‘A tide in the affairs of men . . . That’s Shakespeare, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Julius Caesar, I think, although I can’t swear to it.’

  ‘Well, between Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, princesses and dragons, we seem to have found a real mare’s nest, if you ask me.’ Ashley scratched his chin. ‘Who the devil is this bloke?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Jack. He tapped the book with his finger. ‘I want to know more about Simes. With a name like Ingulf he doesn’t sound very British, but the R.A. after his name could mean Royal Academy. There’s a chance it’s the Royal Artillery, I suppose.’

  ‘He must have been a pretty rum artilleryman,’ said Bill Rackham with a smile. ‘Quite apart from his blessed princesses and so on, you pointed out there were no British soldiers in his paintings.’

  Jack grinned. ‘I suppose R.A. could be an American abbreviation of some sort.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got anything on file about Simes back at the Yard, have you?’ asked Ashley.

  ‘I’ll certainly check,’ said Rackham. ‘We might be lucky.’

  ‘We’d better take the book with us,’ said Ashley. He rewrapped the book, replaced it in the box and looked round the room in dissatisfaction. ‘I must say I’d hoped to find a bit more about Mr Madison, but there’s no passport, no notebooks, no diary or letters.’

  ‘There’s his full name,’ said Jack, picking up the copy of Travels in Arabia Deserta. ‘Adler Zelig Yohann Madison, with an exclamation mark.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Do you think our Mr Madison’s having a laugh?’

  ‘It’s doesn’t appeal to my sense of humour,’ said Ashley. ‘I don’t know what to make of it all, and that’s a fact.’

  Rackham turned to Mr Bonner. ‘Can we take the personal bits and pieces with us – that clock and his toothbrush might have his fingerprints on, for instance – and leave the clothes and so on to be packed up by the hotel? We’ll give you a receipt for the various items, and we’ll have Mr Madison’s cases picked up in due course. That means you’ll be able to use the room once more.’

  ‘Certainly, gentlemen,’ said Bonner. ‘I’ll give instructions for Mr Madison’s things to be packed up right away.’

  Once back at Scotland Yard, Rackham requested the Records Office to see if there was any record of Simes. While they were waiting, Jack opened the watercolours and pulled out his notebook.

  Rackham looked over his friend’s shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’

  Jack had jotted down a collection of letters and two names; Adler Zelig Yohann Madison and Ingulf Eberhard Simes. ‘I’m trying to see if there’s a connection between them,’ he said, tapping the pencil on the book.

  ‘Apart from them knowing each other, you mean?’

  Jack lit a cigarette. ‘They certainly do know each other, but I wondered if the connection ran a bit deeper than that. It could be nothing but coincidence, but both have got English surnames and German Christian names.’ He frowned. ‘It’s the exclamation mark Madison put against his name which is getting to me. It’s a bit self-conscious, as if he’d done something clever.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ asked Ashley. ‘There’s nothing very clever about writing your name in a book.’

  Jack raised an interrogative eyebrow. ‘Don’t you see what I’m getting at? It would be clever if he’d just invented the name. We know there’s something dodgy about Madison. I was trying to see if I could turn Simes into Madison and vice-versa.’

  ‘You think they’re the same person?’ asked Rackham in sudden comprehension. ‘By jingo, that’s a thought. Do the names have the same letters?’ He looked at the paper and shook his head. ‘Well, if they do, I can’t see it.’

  ‘No, neither can I,’ said Jack, regretfully.

  The door opened and a uniformed constable came in carrying a buff-coloured folder. ‘I believe you wanted see if we had anything on Simes, sir.’

  ‘We’ve got something?’ asked Rackham eagerly.

  ‘Yes sir. It’s from the New York Police.’ The constable gave the folder to Rackham and left the room.

  Rackham opened the folder. ‘By God! Simes is wanted for murder.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Ashley. ‘Murder!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rackham, reading the notes rapidly. ‘Simes was an inmate of Blackwell’s Island Prison. He was a model prisoner until the end of last month. Mind you, he seems to have spent a fair old time as a patient in the hospital. He went down with influenza which left him an invalid for quite a while. He recovered though, which was a bad break for one of the guards, poor devil. On March the twenty-first – that’s only a few days ago – Simes killed a guard and escaped. His present whereabouts are unknown. The New York police sent us notification in case he should turn up over here.’

  ‘They weren’t expecting him to land up in Britain, were they?’ asked Ashley.

  Rackham read on and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. Look, here’s some notes on his background. He’s a German-American born in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1883. He served in France in 1918 and the Army of Occupation in Germany in 1919 with the American 15th Light Field Artillery, Second Division. He was discharged in January 1920. In July 1920 he set up as an art and antiques dealer in Manhattan. Madison is an art dealer, isn’t he? That’s something they’ve got in common. He’s thought to have links to a gang who specialized in the theft of fine art.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Robbery seems a bit more violent in New York than we’re used to over here. That was never proved but he’s suspected of dealing in stolen artworks. What he was actually had up for was selling forgeries.’ He grinned. ‘In December 1921 he tried to sell a Mr Abraham P. Fisher, a noted art collector, a Manet that Mr Fisher already owned, and Mr Simes’ misdeeds came to light. Well, well.’

  ‘I don’t believe that army record,’ said Jack. ‘Not if Simes painted those watercolours. They’re all pictures of the East, not France and Germany. Is there a photo of him, Bill?’

  ‘No,’ said Rackham. ‘There aren’t any fingerprints either. I’ll wire New York again. If Simes was in prison, they must have that information. We should be able to lift some prints from his things. Once we get his photograph, we can show it to the Savoy people and Mr Vaughan. If you’re right, Jack, and Madison and Simes are the same person, that’s one part of the mystery cleared up. With a murder charge hanging over him, he’d want to get out of America in double-quick time.’

  ‘Can I see his photograph, once you get it from New York?’ asked Jack.

  ‘I’ll send you a copy.’ He looked at Ashley. ‘I’ll send one to you as well, of course.’

  ‘Bill,’ asked Jack thoughtfully, ‘you know the book of paintings we found? I can’t help feeling there’s more to it than meets the eye. I wondered if it contained a secret message.’

  ‘A code, you mean? Maybe. It’s obscure enough to, that’s for sure. I could let an expert take a look at it, I suppose.’

  ‘Good. There might be nothing in it, but I can’t help feeling there is. A hundred thousand dragons . . .’

  ‘One would be enough to be going on with,’ said Rackham with a grin. ‘Never mind dragons for the moment.’ He looked at Ashley. ‘I was thinking about what Oxley, Vaughan’s butler, overheard when Craig lost his temper. He said, I’ll have nothing to do with any damned Hun and especially you, you filthy Kraut. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  Ashley nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Rackham leaned forward. ‘D’you know, I think that’s a very suggestive remark. To my mind that phrase, Especially you, you filthy Kraut, suggests that Craig didn’t just loath Germans but loathed Madison in particular.’

  Jack sat up. ‘Bill! That’s it! They knew each other.’

  Ashley smacked his fist into his palm. ‘You�
��re right! All the servants thought Madison was an American. For Craig to work out so quickly that Madison was German means he must have known him. That accounts for the quarrel. We know there’s something not right about Madison. I’ll bet those two had some unfinished business. Vaughan knows more than he’s telling us, I’ll be bound. The question is, where did they know each other from?’

  ‘From Arabia?’ suggested Jack. ‘After all, Craig’s a noted Arabian traveller and Vaughan said Madison had been in the Hejaz during the war . . .’

  He broke off suddenly. As he said the words, a possibility so awful came into his mind, his stomach turned over. The nightmare that had whispered to him ever since he had seen Craig that day in Claridge’s grew to a scream. It was more than a possibility; he was horribly, sickeningly, absolutely certain. Eyes like ice, he had. They went right through you. That’s what Doris, the maid had said. Eyes like ice . . .

  ‘Oh, my God.’ He didn’t know he had spoken out loud.

  ‘Jack?’ said Rackham. ‘Jack, what is it?’

  He couldn’t find the words. ‘Nothing,’ he managed eventually. ‘Absolutely nothing.’ He didn’t want them to guess anything was wrong. He tried hard. ‘It just reminded me of something, that’s all.’

  Ashley leaned forward. ‘Haldean,’ he said, his voice very earnest. ‘You know something about Craig. What?’

  He couldn’t tell them. This was his nightmare. If he had to come clean, he would, but he had to be certain. ‘I’m sorry, Ashley. I might be wrong.’

  Rackham and Ashley exchanged worried glances. Jack was sitting in a posture of rigid isolation, completely unmoving, apart from his right hand which clenched and unclenched on the leg of his grey suit. Rackham moved forward impulsively, then stopped. He saw his friend’s shoulders tense and could only guess the effort it took him to straighten up and look him in the eyes.

  ‘The photograph,’ said Jack with studied carelessness. ‘When you get a photograph from New York of . . .’ He stumbled the words. ‘. . . of Simes, then I’ll know. I have to know.’

  He tried to smile. It was a miserable failure of a smile, but Bill Rackham suddenly knew he’d seen raw courage.