The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  He tried to classify them logically in his coolly observant brain—for future reference, as he put it; although he added to himself that he would give a good half of the twenty thousand dollars to know what exactly this reference might eventually point to—the reference, the explanation, and the end, the solution—

  What end? End of what?

  As the moments passed he became conscious of a queer, eerie sensation, like a clay-cold hand gently caressing his spine. It was uncomfortable. He tried to convince himself that it was a draft, the wintry wind booming through the cracked old walls. But he knew that he was lying to himself; knew that it was fear—fear of the unknown—the grayest, most tragic fear in the world! He watched his left hand that held the cigar. It trembled. Then he shook the feeling off suddenly, physically, with a jerk and heave of his broad shoulders, as a cat shakes off raindrops. He turned again to study the few people who seemed to stand out from among the rest of the crowd.

  There was, of course, the man behind the cashier’s desk, with the spade-shaped, flame-colored beard and the bulbous, large-pored nose. He seemed slightly nervous, shuffling with his fingertips the pages of the ledger in front of him, occasionally looking up in the direction of the door as if waiting for somebody to come. There was also the brown-eyed girl—doubtless belonging to some Slav race—who presided over the clothes rack. She gave a little guilty start as her glance crossed Ogilvie’s. Then she turned her back on him and slumped down on her stool, facing the door. The boy in the outer hall, too, was staring at the door, standing quite motionless, tense, like a pointer at bay.

  For a second or two Blaine Ogilvie felt fascinated by the grouping of the three figures; it seemed both tragic and incongruous, like a tableau out of some cheap melodrama.

  Then he looked away from them and toward the other occupants of the room whom he had decided to observe.

  Not far from the black settle by the bar a party of three were sitting around one of the oaken tables, framed on either side by other groups, prosy, uninteresting, small tradesmen or mechanics, as Ogilvie had decided. But these three men were of a different stamp. They sat very quietly, very silently. There was something inhuman about their quietude. One seemed like an elderly roué, handsome in a way, yet amorphous, washed over by the pitiless hand of time and vice. He was smoking a straw-colored cigarette in a ten-inch holder of clear green jade. At his left was a tall, thin man with extraordinarily long arms, the cleaverlike sharpness of his face emphasized by the supercilious upsweep of a heavy black mustache. The third was a youth, not over twenty, dressed in an expensive but foppish manner, with his bench-made brogues, buckskin spats, and a hairy, greenish Norfolk jacket opening over a Tattersall waistcoat of an extravagant pattern. The canary diamond in his purple necktie, if genuine, was worth a small fortune.

  In the center of the room, paying not the slightest attention to the click of the counters at the next table, where some men were playing checkers, a man sat alone, a little hunchback whose pear-shaped head just protruded above the table rim. His face was distinguished by an immense hooked nose, a grave brow curving over a tragic, portentous gaze—the look of a mad prophet—and his dome was surmounted incongruously, ludicrously, by a cap in a check of violent magenta and pea green, set far back on the perspiring head. There was something about him that reminded Ogilvie of the Old Testament; not racially, but rather civilizationally—something like the bitter, pitiless logic of the ancient Hebrew annals.

  And, finally, at Ogilvie’s elbow were two men. One was tall, with a bald, pink head; the face itself, through a trick of the flickering shadows of the swinging kerosene lamps, was indistinct, wiped over with brown and ruby and muddy orange, all but the eyes that, beneath curiously straight and heavy brows, stared hard and shiny blue into vacancy arrestingly expressive of a certain contempt, tinged by a certain pity. The other man would have escaped Ogilvie’s notice had it not been for his companion. For he seemed just an average New York business man, spotlessly neat from the exact parting in his honey-colored hair to the gray, herring-bone tweeds that fitted him without a wrinkle. His face was round like a baby’s, with a nose inclined to be snub, and his fingers, drumming delicately on the table, were plump and excessively well kept.

  There appeared to be nobody else in the restaurant worth considering or studying. Ogilvie tried to determine what these men were whom he had picked out, what they represented—socially, financially, or politically—in the vast macrocosm of New York. Presently, as he watched and thought and weighed, it became clear to him that there was between these men, from table to table, an undercurrent of mutual understanding, expressed by an occasional glance, a faint gesture, even the ghost of a cough. And then suddenly—and it was this which caused fear to rush back upon him—he seemed to notice, to feel more than notice, that all the other people in the room, whom he had dismissed as harmless denizens of the neighborhood, were also involved in this baffling, silent network of mutual understanding, of waiting for something to happen—what—and to whom?

  What were these people expecting? Why had they admitted him? What was Martyn Spencer’s connection with it all? The three thoughts tumbled over each other, then drew together, blended, crystallized into a third: Why was he here? Because Martyn Spencer had paid him twenty thousand dollars. The answer was obvious. But obvious, too, was the fact that he had earned it. For he had come here, and there was nothing in the agreement between him and Spencer that he had to remain here any specific length of time.

  Very well, he thought, the next thing for him to do was to leave the place. He got up unhurriedly, and was about to cross to the entrance hall when the little hunchback in the checked cap spoke two words slowly, without the slightest emphasis:

  “Don’t go!”

  “Why not?” Ogilvie turned and stared at the speaker.

  “Because it would be so very useless, wouldn’t it?”

  The words were quite simple, quite gentle. The hunchback had not moved, nor had any of the other occupants of the room, who continued to converse in low undertones, playing checkers, sipping their drinks, puffing at their pipes and cigars.

  But, somehow, through the mists of Ogilvie’s apprehension, floated down the knowledge that he was standing on the brink of a catastrophe, a catastrophe of which he knew neither the beginning nor the end. Somehow, he knew that, whatever the reasons for their keeping him here, they would not let him go until their object, whatever it was, had been attained. It seemed inevitable, like fate, and a curious, helpless lassitude swept over him. He realized instinctively that it would do no earthly good to argue with these people. He had never seen them before, nor had they seen him, as far as he knew. And yet they were evidently acting according to a carefully preconceived plan. Too, he sensed that, for all the hunchback’s gentle voice, for all the general air of excessive quietude and peace that pervaded the room like a subtle, insidious perfume, it would be useless to bluff, as useless to show fight.

  The odds were against him, and he felt more than ever sure of it when, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that half a dozen men had risen and were approaching him very quietly, very unobtrusively, one stepping close up to him and asking him in flat, low accents to kindly sit down again.

  Ogilvie obeyed. He sat down with a little bow in the direction of the hunchback.

  “Very well, sir,” he said and lit his second cigar. “I fail to see, however, what—”

  “It’s really quite useless,” said the hunchback.

  “Quite, quite useless,” echoed the red-bearded man with a curious sigh.

  “No use arguing—you mean—asking questions?” suggested Blaine Ogilvie.

  “Exactly!” replied the hunchback. “Isn’t that so?”

  He turned to the company, gathering eyes like a hostess, and there came a rumbling, affirmative chorus:

  “Yes—yes—”

  Blaine Ogilvie shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts were in a daze. The whole situation seemed unreal and negative. Momentarily he wonde
red if it were all a dream, from which he would awaken presently to find himself in bed, with the young sun streaming in through the window.

  He smoked on in silence. When, a few seconds later, there was the roar of an automobile outside, followed by the code signal of knocks at the street door, he was more conscious of relief than of heightening fear. He looked up curiously as the door opened and admitted two men. One was short and stocky and rather ordinary, assisting a second man who seemed ill. The sick man was walking with evident effort, leaning heavily on a rubber-tipped stick, the feet dragging haltingly and painfully, the bent body huddled in a thick coat, the hat pulled down over the forehead.

  He stood still for a second, blinking short-sightedly against the yellow light. A thin smile curled his bloodless lips.

  “Is this the place, Hillyer?” he asked, turning to the man who was with him.

  “Yes, Monro,” replied the other, helping him off with his overcoat.

  “And—when—do you suppose—” commenced the first man rather anxiously. “Though I really don’t hope that—”

  “Now, please! Sit down first, Monro! You need rest,” interrupted the other, assisting him into a chair not far from Ogilvie’s.

  The latter felt completely mystified as well as disappointed. It was all so quiet, so well bred, so unexciting and unhurried. He was steadily becoming less intrigued than frankly bored. A faint suspicion came to him that the whole thing was nothing except a well-staged hoax, a practical joke of sorts.

  He turned in his chair and motioned to the green-aproned waiter. The latter approached at a dignified, shuffling run.

  “Yes, sir?” he inquired civilly.

  “Bring me another—”

  Ogilvie did not finish the sentence.

  For there came with utter, dramatic suddenness a crimson flash and a grim, cruel roar—a high-pitched cry cut off in mid-air—the dull sound of a falling body.

  Instinctively he turned in his chair. Startled, frightened, he rose and stared wide-eyed.

  “Oh—”

  Through the pall of silence that had dropped over the restaurant, Ogilvie’s choked exclamation cut with extraordinary distinctness.

  There, curled up like a sleeping dog, in front of his chair, one arm flung wide, the other stretched up and out, with the fingers bent stiffly, convulsively, as if trying to claw at life, to snatch back the breath of it from the black abyss of oblivion, lay the second of the two men who had come in a few moments earlier, the one who had seemed ill. Something trickled slowly from a neatly drilled bullet hole in his left temple, staining his cheek, his chin, his collar a rich crimson. He was dead. There was no doubt of it.

  Murder—thought Blaine Ogilvie. And, if premeditated murder, why had they kept him here? What was supposed to be his connection with it, or, if not his personally, Martyn Spencer’s?

  CHAPTER III.

  BLUECOATS AND A CARVING KNIFE.

  Even at that tragic moment, Ogilvie could not rid his mind of the incongruous impression that the whole thing was unreal. For there was no such excitement as is generally supposed to follow the witnessing of a violent deed. The majority of the occupants of the restaurant had indeed risen, but there were no cries of horror and indignation, no hysterical exchange of comments and counter-comments. All seemed quiet, orderly, and well bred, as if murder were a commonplace, rather negligible occurrence.

  Ogilvie himself had only turned after he had heard the shot fired. He had turned quickly enough, but even so he could not tell who was the assassin. There seemed to be no weapon in evidence, no telltale, guilty attitude.

  Still there could be no doubt that some of the other people in the restaurant must have looked in the direction of the newcomers at the time, must have actually witnessed the killing. Yet there was no sign of it: no pointing, accusing hands reached out, nobody gave way to the natural impulse of those who have witnessed a revolting crime—to hurl themselves upon the criminal, to strike him or do him injury.

  The short, stocky man who had accompanied the murdered man was still sitting at the table, looking down upon the dead body, his face singularly unexpressive of any emotion whatsoever. He had not even dropped the cigar which he was smoking. The party of three whom Ogilvie had noticed earlier in the evening—the man who looked like an elderly roué, the one with the cleaverlike profile, and the youth in the foppish clothes—had got up, as had the party of two—he with the bald, pink head and the staring, contemptuous eyes, and the one who looked like an average business man. The five had joined and moved forward in a compact group in the direction of the door, talking in undertones to each other and looking not toward the murdered man, but—Ogilvie realized with a start—toward him.

  The red-bearded man was still casually shuffling the pages of the ledger with his hairy fingers, while the brown-eyed girl at the clothes rack sat slumped in her chair, perfectly oblivious to everything, apathetic, and the boy in the outer hall leaned against the door jamb, hands in pockets, staring vacantly at nothing in particular.

  Subconsciously, yet with the instantaneous fidelity of a photographic lens, all these physical details impressed themselves upon Ogilvie’s brain, as did the fact that the hunchback was standing in a clear space, halfway between his and the murdered man’s table. For a second, straight through the confusion in his mind, Ogilvie imagined that the latter must have been the assassin, judging from his position. But he dismissed the idea almost immediately, because he recalled that the man had a cigar in his left hand and a glass in his right. He must have risen, just as he was, the moment he had heard the shot or had seen the actual killing.

  Presently, very calmly and unhurriedly, the hunchback crossed the room, exchanged a whispered word in passing with the red-bearded man, and stepped into the outer hall. The girl handed him his coat—Ogilvie noticed that it was next to his own, which was swinging from a peg at the near end of the rack—and the man stepped out into the night. The next moment there was the roar of a motorcar gathering speed, then fading into the memory of sound.

  And still the people in the restaurant remained as they were, quiet and orderly and unexcited. Only the group of five men had moved a little closer toward Blaine Ogilvie.

  The latter was speechless. His thoughts were bunched into too violent a turmoil and commingling for immediate disentanglement. It was the first time in his civil life that he had seen death, and it appeared to him singularly undignified, singularly drab and commonplace. Even war gave it a certain dramatic mise en scène. Yet the shock of it had cut deeply into his inner consciousness.

  That thing there on the floor—with the crimson stain slowly trickling down and thickening blackly—the stiff, convulsive fingers—useless, hopeless, weakly ineffectual—and it had been alive a few minutes earlier—had smiled, breathed, talked, acted—

  It was beginning to affect Ogilvie physically, and he felt slightly ill. The feeling increased, grew to a choking, nauseating sensation, gripped his chest, his throat, caused him to cough violently. Instinctively he turned from the table in the direction of the washroom, whose sign he had noticed on entering at the left of the outer hall.

  He had hardly taken a step when quickly, yet without a word, the group of five men advanced toward him in a solid phalanx, threateningly barring his way. The youth in the Norfolk suit gripped his arm, and it was this physical contact which cleared Ogilvie’s brain and caused him to act. Whatever the reason for Martyn Spencer’s strange bargain with him, whatever the cause of the murder or the personality of the murderer, whatever the beginning and problematical end of it all, it became suddenly clear to him that he must get away as rapidly as possible. Remembering football tactics on the college gridiron, where he had been fully as famous for the almost African power of resistance of his skull as for the sturdy speed of his legs, he bent almost double and made a flying leap in the direction of the door, head well forward and down, like a battering-ram.

  The youth tried to stop him. Ogilvie caught him full in the pit of the stomach with hi
s head. The youth dropped, with a funny, squeaky little noise of pain, while, at the same moment, the other four hurled themselves upon Ogilvie, their fists going like flails. Ogilvie kept his presence of mind and gave a short laugh. He had taken part in a few rough-and-tumble fights and knew that when a number of men turn against one they usually interfere more with each other than they hurt the man whom they attack.

  He fought well, careful to step back a little, with his back to the wall, at his left a table where, a few moments earlier, the waiter had carved a beefsteak.

  He dodged and danced and grappled. His breath came in short, violent bursts. At one and the same time he was trying to land blow, to parry blow, to sidestep kicking feet and crashing elbows, and to make a dash for the door, the night, safety. The odds were against him. A rough knuckle caught him on the left temple, an open palm hit the point of his chin, the man with the bald, pink head dodged within the very crook of Ogilvie’s powerful right arm and grappled, while the others, joined by the youth, who had revived, closed in the next moment like hounds pulling down a stag.

  Ogilvie felt himself seized about the chest under the armpits by a bearlike grasp. He reached back, his fingers closed, something ripped, tore, like cloth. He had no time to think what it was. For a moment he felt as if his ribs were crushing in his lungs. His temples throbbed. Blue wheels whirled in front of his eyes. The roof of his mouth felt parched.

  Straining, cursing, he fell to the floor, one of the attackers on top of him, another booting him in the ribs, a third dancing about on the outskirts of the mêlée, watching his chance for a knockout blow. Bending down, he shot his fist to Ogilvie’s jaw, but the latter jerked his head back in the nick of time, and the next second, with a sudden, hard crunching of muscles, he pinioned the arms of the man who was on top of him to both his sides, spread his strong legs, bridged his massive body, and tried desperately to pull himself up. He was succeeding in this when suddenly the first man, with a wolfish snarl, sank his teeth in his ear.