The Seven Magical Jewels of Ireland

by Robert Adams

  Seraphino "Sara the Snake" Mineo was well named, for despite his squat, broad muscularity, he was every bit as fast as one. In a trice, he had disarmed Evelyn Mangold and had her writhing on her knees, screaming in agony and abject terror of him. Much as he hated the woman, Rupen Ademian felt a sick disgust to see how much the short, powerful Sicilian relished the infliction of pain on her.

  "Enough! Let her go, man!" He spoke Sicilian Italian this time, his command voice snapping like a whip.

  Sara the Snake recognized the voice of a leader of men at once. He released Evelyn Mangold and spun to face Rupen. Speaking in a deferential tone in the same dialect in which he had received the order, he asked, "You speak my language, then, honored sir?"

  "Only a little," replied Rupen, shrugging and flapping his spread hands slowly. "Just the small amount I learned while fighting the Nazis in Sicily, during the war."

  Rupen saw the very first of Mineo's excessively rare smiles. "I too, fought the tedeschi and the fascists before them, honored sir. All of my brave family, we fought them. Many, they killed, but many more of them did we kill until none of them would dare to come into our lands and hills without carri armati and many lorries full of troops and velivoli flying overhead to guard them, and still we attacked them and fought them and killed them, except for those few we took alive for information or for ransom or for . . . sport."

  "We will leave the woman here until morning," Rupen announced, in English, this time. "She can swap notes with the rats tonight."

  "R . . . r . . . rats?" quavered Evelyn from where she had crawled to huddle on the bunk.

  "Sure, rats, great big brown ones, a whole damn family of them," said Bagrat, with a merry grin. "This is an old smokehouse here, and they live under the floor. That's why we just put in the light, so's you can see them coming for you. Heh, heh, heh."

  Evelyn really began to scream then, piercingly, without pause, for longer than it took to breathe in enough air to scream yet again. She was still screaming as they closed and locked the heavy old door.

  "Are there really rats in there, Bagrat?" Boghos asked.

  "I sorta doubt it, Doc," replied the youngest Ademian brother. "We found where a weasel or a skunk had been denning up in there when we first got the idea of cleaning it out and using it, and if it's critters that rats won't stay anywhere around, it's skunks and weasels. That's one of the biggest reasons it smells so bad in there, you know; there's just no way to get that skunk-weasel smell out quick. But that bitch in there, she thinks it's rats in there, and I guarantee you she'll get damn few winks of sleep this night."

  "She'd not sleep anyway, you know," said Boghos. "Not in this stage of drug withdrawal. By the time our friends get down here on Friday night, she should be malleable enough to tell us anything and everything about her past misdeeds."

  Krystal Foster was in seventh heaven for the first few days she spent in company with the five young women who had been projected into this world with the Ademian band—Jenny Bostwick, Lisa Peters, Kitty Hutchinson, Helen Pappas, and Rose Yacubian. She had done her level best to explain to them just what had happened to them and the men of the band, reciting her own similar experience of years back and trying to give the impression of an assurance that she did not truly feel that everything would be all right for them all when once they had adapted to this strange, primitive world and its people and the incomprehensible language they called English.

  But then the exposure began to pall. Two of the women had had husbands and children in the other world, one had been a new bride of less than six months, and all three were worried, terribly homesick, and skating perilously close to mental derangement, in Krystal's professional opinion. The other two just might make it, she thought, though she could not say she liked either of them, nor did she admire the "talents" that bettered their chances of survival.

  As for the men, Arsen Ademian spent half of his time brooding and the other half drinking copious quantities of ale along with any other alcohol he could lay his hands upon. Greg Sinclair and Mike Vranian did their best to match him gallon for gallon, which meant that all three were nearly comatose much of the time.

  John Othondoyatros, since being granted access to the estate library was usually nosed into one quarto and surrounded by any number of others, as he could read both Greek and Latin. The other Mike, Mike Sikeena, a young man of Lebanese extraction and a onetime United States Marine, could usually be found in company with Buddy Webster, who also had served in that branch of the services. Al and Haigh Ademian, too, were well occupied, all day, every day. They had found and had had borne up to the suite an immense chess set—the board a yard square and fashioned of squares of semiprecious stones framed in gilded silver, the pieces each an exquisite little marble or alabaster statuette, the kings and the queens wearing real golden crowns with tiny gemstones inset, the knights all armored and grasping perfect little swords of real steel, the bishops equipped with steel maces, the rooks complete to the last detail and including infinitesimally small bombards of brass mounted on the tower tops. The pawns were all pikemen, each of them wearing a steel cap and a scale-shirt and bearing a pike. The chess game had been going on ever since the set had been brought upstairs, and as both men were good players and evenly matched, no end was in sight.

  Krystal would have liked to talk with the oldest man, Rupen Ademian, but he seemed to always be closeted with Hal.

  Then, of a day, completely unexpected and unannounced, his grace, Sir Sebastian Foster, Duke of Norfolk, Markgraf von Velegrad, Earl of Rutland, Baron of Strathtyne, Lord Commander of the Royal Horse, and Krystal's husband, came riding into the forecourt followed by his gentlemen, staff, and entourage. He was traveling light this time; only some hundred and fifty horsemen accompanied him onto the archepiscopal estate.

  Krystal's cup then ranneth over, for only a fortnight earlier, the archbishop had arrived; a week later Reichsherzog Wolfgang and his troop of Kalmyks, then, two days ahead of her noble husband, Pete Fairley and the hulking Dan Smith.

  The breaking of Evelyn Mangold was accomplished rather more quickly than had been anticipated, after only a few days of a multi-pronged attack. Early in the morning that followed her first nightlong vigil against the dreaded rats, a woman and an old man brought her food and coffee. Although she could not see their faces well because of the nylon stockings—the only face she ever was allowed to see unmasked was that of Mineo—they were both soft-voiced, gentle with her, and considerate of her, doing what little they could to make her comfortable. They admitted to having no real power in the group that held her captive, admitted to a shared fear of Mineo and the other men, and urged Evelyn, for her own good, to be cooperative with her cruel, merciless, murderous captors.

  Evelyn's next visitor was the doctor, fresh, neat sutures showing on the back of the hand she had gashed with one of his instruments. For a long while he stood just out of her reach, verbally abusing her and tormenting her drug craving with a three-gram vial and a hypodermic syringe, demanding that she confess to the murder of Marge Ademian.

  When he had driven her to a frenzy, when she began to scream invectives and deadly threats and lunge against the ankle chain that restrained her, the doctor opened the door behind him to admit Sara the Snake Mineo, smiling in a way that turned Evelyn's legs to rubber, her bowels to water.

  Mineo would never allow her to actually lose consciousness, stopping the torment just long enough to restore her to full sensibility before he again went to work on her nerve centers with skilled fingers, a knowing touch, and no more mercy than a graven image of some centuries-dead Roman. By the time she had finished cleaning up the mess of vomitus, feces, and urine which her suffering body had voided under his ungentle ministrations, and he had promised, in a soft tone that chilled her very soul, to soon return, it was nearly noon.

  They took turns at her thus for nearly three days before she began to talk about things they wanted to hear, at which point Bagrat and Kogh brought in, loaded, and wired up a ta
pe recorder with seven-inch reels. By the time the two attorneys came out to the old farm—one from Richmond, one from upper New York State—there was a goodly amount of tape for them to hear before they themselves actually questioned the multiple murderess.

  By Sunday night, the conspirators had amassed miles of recording tape on which were detailed confessions of criminal acts spanning fifteen years and nine states, including no less than four cold-blooded murders and one infanticide. For the five homicides and certain of the other crimes, they had typed, signed, attested, and properly witnessed confessions, several copies of each. This time, the legal net would be drawn tight-shut and there would be no way in which Evelyn Mangold could wriggle out and away from the punishments she had so fully earned over the years.

  Rupen did not remarry, and most of his family and friends erroneously thought that it was because he was mourning Marge. In actuality, his period of mourning had ended on the day that Evelyn Mangold, Marge's murderess, had been convicted of another, earlier murder in Troy, New York. He simply could see no point, since he never would be able to sire children, in taking unto himself another wife.

  He tried going back to college, stuck it out for a year, then quietly withdrew, deciding he was now just too old. Succumbing to the blandishments of his father and brother, Kogh, he moved up to Fredericksburg and tried working in the executive offices of the Ademian Corporation. That was a bust, too, so Kogh and Bagrat took him out to the farm one weekend to fish, and outlined to him another proposition, one that needs must be detailed out of the hearing of Vasil Ademian.

  "Rupen, Bagrat and me, we mean to start up a new sideline for Ademian Corp., but we need another body and we think you'd be the ideal man for the job. You can put up money and buy in if you want to or you can just work for us as a salaried employee—salary and commissions and expenses. It's up to you, and I don't give a shit one way or the other, because we've got enough backing to start, anyhow." Kogh snapped his wrist and sent his lure flashing into a clump of weeds, then blasphemed in Armenian as he tried to reel in and snapped the monofilament line just above the leader.

  "I tell you, I'm never gonna learn how to use one these damn spin-casting reels right!"

  Handling his old-fashioned open reel expertly, Rupen sent the lure far, far down the slough toward the river, then reeled it back in a fast, jerky manner, hoping that it looked like the swimming of a small, injured fish. Apparently it did, at least enough for a black bass to rise to it. The conversation was not again taken up until the catch was boated and feebly flopping its last on a bed of ice in the bottom of the big Coleman cooler.

  "We, me and Kogh," said Bagrat, "we've already got the right licensing and all to buy guns at wholesale and import 'em and sell 'em in this country at wholesale or retail. Rupen, it's millions of guns just laying around and rusting away all over the world left over from World War II, ammo, too, billions and billions of rounds of it. A man could come close to naming the price he was willing to pay for most of it, 'cause ain't nobody in their right mind getting ready to fight a war today is gonna try and do it with no bolt-action rifles; they're gonna want semiautos or submachine guns. I figger was we to offer the govermints that is stuck with all these old guns and ammo just a little over what a scrap dealer'd give 'em for the steel and brass and lead and all, they'd plumb jump at the offer."

  Of course, as Rupen quickly discovered in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, it was not anywhere near as simple as his brothers had thought. But he made out and the new enterprise made good, selling by mail out of their warehouse on the banks of the Rappahannock River, shipping out via freight. Rupen often reflected in later years that had his father known that the first major transaction of Souvenirs, Incorporated, had been the purchase of some thousands of stands of arms from the Turkish government arsenal, he would probably have immediately shot all three of his sons with one of those fine, if venerable, Mauser rifles.

  More Mausers came from Ireland, from Spain, from Argentina, from Germany. From France came captured Mausers, along with Lebels; Italy sold Carcanos, Austria sold Steyr-Mannlichers, and Belgium offered tens of thousands of contract Mausers. Then, as Great Britain belatedly rearmed her army with semiautomatic shoulder arms, she made available at rock-bottom prices a veritable flood of Enfield rifles and carbines.

  As the reputation of the firm and of Rupen himself became established, he found himself being offered and sometimes actually buying and shipping back to Virginia some rather esoteric items in the way of military arms, ammunitions, and related equipment. Also, well-heeled collectors in the United States and elsewhere took to placing name-your-own-price-but-get-it-for-me orders with the firm. The filling of these orders sometimes took Rupen to some strange and deadly backwaters of the world, but he usually came out with that for which he had gone in.

  Despite all that had occurred since he'd first marched off to war in 1943, the Rupen Ademian who had come home from Korea still had been a rather insular, small-town American, speaking the languages of his youth—Armenian and English—plus smatterings of Italian, Japanese, and Korean, hardly aware of how much to tip a maitre d' hotel and very often cheated while on R&Rs in Tokyo because of his difficulty with rates of exchange.

  But the Rupen Ademian of 1960 was certainly not the Major Rupen Ademian, USA, of 1953. He had learned that he had an ear for languages and he now was fluent in enough tongues and dialects to make himself understood in almost any part of the globe that his nearly constant travels crisscrossed via airplane, ship, and all manner of other land and water conveyances. He had learned well the lesson that so few men and women ever learn—human nature is human nature, regardless of race, nationality, politics, or sex. He now knew just how much to tip a maitre . . . and how much to offer as bribe to a government minister, who often came more cheaply than anyone would have suspected.

  While he continued to make purchases from hither and yon for the still-brisk mail-order business originally established, a good deal of his and the firm's business of late had been more that of middleman between countries with goods to sell and countries with an urgent desire to buy them, despite alliances, treaties, or a political climate that would have rendered open negotiations either risky or impossible.

  Presently, he was savoring a cup of strong tea with dark rum, having just seen off a large shipment of assorted handguns and ammo gathered from all over Europe and shipped from Hamburg for the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock warehouse. The nucleus of the shipment had been a real find at this late date—cases of late-production but brand spanking new Lugers and Walther P-38s. His agents had also scoured up French MABs and Rubys, some Norwegian 11.25mm Colts, Swedish 7.65mm Brownings and 9mm Lahtis, Polish Radoms, Italian Beretta autos, and Glisenti revolvers, a few dozen Russian Nagant revolvers in poor shape, three different configurations of Spanish Astra pistols, some practically new 7.65mm pistols made by Femaru-Gegyver es Gepgyar of Hungary and stashed away God knew where in the sixteen or seventeen years since their manufacture, some broom-handle Mausers, and a thousand or so assorted flare pistols.

  With the ship slowly moving out toward the North Sea, Rupen had telephoned his local message service and had been informed that a Herr Kobra wished most urgently to arrange a meeting at his, Rupen's, convenience. Was Herr Kobra in Hamburg, by chance? No, but he was in Hanover and could come soon to Hamburg, could Herr Ademian make time and name a place, preferably a public place, to meet with him. So now Rupen sat sipping the rum-spiked tea and wondering just what nationality this Herr Kobra might be to choose such a nom-de-guerre.

  "Cobra" was a Portuguese word, of course, but that would be too simple. Besides, Portugal had no trouble getting modern arms from the West and had long ago sold him and other arms dealers its antiquated Mausers and Lugers. Indian or Pakistani? Maybe; there always was some variety of trouble brewing somewhere on the subcontinent with its unhomogenizable mixture of races, creeds, tribes, and politics. But then cobras were indigenous to Africa, too, and all hell was going to
kick off in various parts of that continent, and that damned soon, or Rupen Ademian had learned nothing in his almost forty years of life.

  Southeast Asia, too, the whole damned peninsula, not to mention the multiple rebellions set to break out against the government of Indonesia. So Cobra was a good cover name. The man who had chosen to bear it could conceivably be from almost anywhere.

  Then a waiter approached his table, diffidently. "Mein Herr Ademian, a Herr Kobra has telephoned and leaves word that he will be unable to keep his appointment with you. He says that he at your hotel will be in one hour."

  In his car, Rupen drew his cunningly concealed PPK and checked it carefully. Pulling up coat and shirtsleeves on his left arm, he examined the little razor-edged knife and the mechanism that would spring it into his hand. Finally, he very carefully checked out the custom-made "fountain pen" nestled among the others; this one fired a single 4mm explosive bullet and had saved his life on at least two sticky occasions in the past.

  CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

  The elder of the two men who had met in a Northumberland graveyard on a recent dark night moved about the suite of rooms assigned to the men and women brought out from York by Archbishop Harold. In his guise of a humble, unspeaking servant, none of the occupants really took notice of him. There were so very many servants, after all, in the sprawling, multistoried, palatial country residence, and still more of them arriving with each new party of guests.

  The pretended servant was worried. The projector hidden in the graveyard many miles from here had been carefully set and painstakingly calibrated and would perform that act of projection of all living persons within the bounds of the suite upon his activation of the remote-control device secreted on his person. But it needs must be done soon, very soon, else he must travel back down to that graveyard and reset the projector.