Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Beatrice?” gasped the older soldier.

  “She is here. Half-dead through one of Bonfadini’s gestures. You know his art. Go quickly. Rouse them, they’ll come. And with them, I may manage to fight my way out—”

  The head of the baron of Melrose disappeared. From the next room came soft sounds of padding feet, light clinking noises of steel against steel.

  These noises ended with the sound of a closing door.

  But would the baron succeed in passing through the corridors of the palace unchallenged? Was it a madness on the part of the Borgia that the life of the father had not been attempted at the same time as that of the son?

  HE forgot these thoughts, and looked down again at the girl. When he kissed her, it seemed to him that the ghost of a smile began on her lips.

  Or was it the smile of death?

  He touched her breast. There was no pulsation of the heart. With a groan of mortal anguish, he dropped to his knees. He pressed his ear against her breast.

  Was it her own heart that he heard beating or the thunder of galloping terror in his breast?

  He began to whisper : “Mercy, God! Mercy!”

  And it seemed to him that the icy fingers of the poisoner were closing over his own temples, over his own throat, stifling the breath.

  That was the moment when he heard a light footfall in the corridor and, after that, a slight moaning sound as the handle of the door was turned.

  He laid the weight of Beatrice on the floor. There was still warmth in her flesh, and yet it seemed to him that there was less warmth than he could have thought necessary to life. The touch of the stone was on the back of his fingers. The touch of her body was on the front of them. Putting her down, like this, was to Tizzo like abandoning her, dropping her out of consciousness, out of existence.

  He leaped towards his bed and found his sword beside it. He was crouched there as the door swung slowly open. At first he could see nothing, hear nothing, until at length he was aware of a slight whispering noise, and after that, a lean body looming, a body with skinny legs that stepped half into the moonlight as though into a bath of silvery water. And above, the body was clothed in a doublet.

  “Strange!” murmured the voice of Bonfadini. “Strange! Very strange!”

  Tizzo leaped at the sound rather than at the sight of the detestable monster. His sword point found a bone in the body of the man, glanced from it, sank through a softness of flesh.

  He saw a glitter of light in the hand of Bonfadini. He reached with his left hand and caught the wrist of the striking hand. The blade of the dagger went over his shoulder and the arm struck with force. He had a glimpse of the contorted face of the man, and then Bonfadini was away.

  He had struck to kill before he leaped off the death that was working in his body; and he left Tizzo with a warmth of blood running down from his sword blade over his hand.

  The man was almost at the door before Tizzo realized what had happened. Bonfadini must not escape from the room. He must die there, inside the room.

  Strange that the poisoner made no outcry. Not a sound had passed his lips, though his agony must have been mortal. Tizzo raced for him, saw the door opened, slammed. He gripped the edge of it with his hand before it had a chance to shut. He thrust the door wide again and saw before him, in the dim light of the hall lantern, the form of the poisoner running fast, but swaying heavily from side to side.

  He could not run far, in that condition. As he dipped out of sight around the corner of the hallway, Tizzo was racing after him at full speed.

  AND it was then that he heard — from an infinite distance, welling up into his mind like a fish rising through dark waters — the outcry of a voice that pronounced his name.

  “Tizzo! Tizzo!” a feeble cry.

  But that was Beatrice.

  If she were alive now, then she would not die at all, if once he could get her away from that place.

  But the first step to that was to overtake Bonfadini and strike him down before he had raised the alarm.

  Still strange, very strange, that he had made no outcry. The place must be filled with men-at-arms and lesser soldiery ready to answer a summons, but Bonfadini had fled as though he were in the desert and only could save his life by the speed of his heels.

  Fast as a greyhound, Tizzo turned the corner of the hall, and there saw Bonfadini rushing before him through an open, lighted doorway. Tizzo followed with a bound. Before him appeared the lofty height of Cesare Borgia, with Niccolò Machiavelli not far away.

  XI. ONE MAN’S POLICY.

  THERE WAS A long sword lying across the foot of the bed of the Borgia, encased in its sheath. This the duke whipped out, the motion causing the blade to scream softly against the metal scabbard. At his feet fell Bonfadini and threw his arms around the legs of his masters. He was bleeding horribly. The great red stain sprang out on either side. He was writhing his legs together in the death agony.

  Niccolò Machiavelli drew a short sword that was hanging at his side and stood on guard without taking a step forward.

  “Ah!” said the duke. “Tizzo — and a short shrift for him! This for you, dog! This, and this!”

  With each gasp of his breast he struck heavily with the full length of the blade, reaching; master strokes which in the bullfight had shorn the head clean from a fierce, wild bull.

  They would have cloven Tizzo in twain if they had reached him, but he avoided those strokes with swift flexions of the body. His own light sword-point reached for the throat of the duke and made him spring back.

  “Niccolò, come in on his back!” gasped the Borgia.

  “I am a man of words, not of action,” said the great statesman. “I cannot use my sword except to save my life.”

  “I’m murdered!” breathed the Borgia. “Help! Help!”

  For Tizzo, dipping under the full sway of a mighty stroke, leaped in. He had had to use his sword blade to parry the blow. The hilt was nearest the target. Therefore he struck with the hilt, and the metal landed full between the masked eyes of the duke. He dropped to one knee. His sword, with a long, shivering sound, fell to the floor.

  And Tizzo, measuring the distance of Machiavelli with a glance, drew back his weapon for the final thrust.

  And then he heard a rain of footfalls in the corridor.

  “Back with them!” said Tizzo. “Send them back.”

  The shiver and the clatter of armor could be too plainly heard. He had the life of the Borgia under the edge of his sword, but that meant his own life, the life of Beatrice lost also.

  The duke, half-stunned, looked wildly up at Tizzo, made a brief gesture of surrender, and then shouted: “Get out from the hall! What do you mean by maundering through the palace at this hour? Out!”

  The footfalls stopped. The metal of armored feet screeched on the stone of the pavement.

  “Pardon, my lord!” called a voice. “We thought we heard a cry for help—”

  “Out! Out!” thundered the duke.

  The footfalls hastily, noisily retreated.

  Cesare Borgia slowly rose to his feet. His sword lay on the floor. He had no weapon now, except the dagger on the table beside him, and Tizzo backed him into a corner of the room.

  “Hush!” said the duke. “Bonfadini is speaking. You have killed him, Tizzo, and I feel that you’ve killed my soul with him. Alessandro! Alessandro! Do you hear me? Can you speak?”

  The gasping voice of the poisoner answered: “Oh, master, I am going to hell such a long time before you.”

  “Every day of my life I shall remember you!” groaned the duke. “Did this cursed devil of a Tizzo murder you?”

  “As I went to look at his dead body, it leaped at me from beside his bed. For once, master, I have failed,” gasped Bonfadini. “Misery — how my heart burns!... My pearls... my uncompleted necklace... my love... ah, Borgia...”

  The last bubbling gasp gave inexpressible proof that he had died.

  Cesare Borgia leaned a hand against the corner of the wa
ll and muttered slowly: “He is gone — Bonfadini... I never dreamed that sword could penetrate that devil’s body... but he is gone and I think that I’m gone with him... Machiavelli, how was it that you would not strike a stroke in my behalf?”

  “My lord,” said the Florentine, calmly, “to admire murder from a distance when there are reasons to enforce it is philosophy and good political thinking. But to assist at murder is a crime. If a thousand Borgias, steeped in crime, were threatened by a Tizzo, still it would be a crime to help the Borgias against him.”

  “This is your praise and your almost worship of me?” demanded the Borgia.

  “MY lord,” said Machiavelli, “I admired you to the limit of mortal power while you were still victorious and always successful. This morning and evening you were a most politic murderer. Now you are a most damnable villain. That is the penalty of every bad man who fails. My lord, I bid you farewell.”

  And Niccolò Machiavelli passed out from the room.

  The duke nodded his head. “Bonfadini is gone, and Machiavelli is gone. At one stroke I lose the right hand of my body and the right hand of my wits. And through you, Tizzo! God mark the day in black when I first laid eyes on you! Who are those swarming and making noise in the courtyard?”

  “Look for yourself, my lord. I am not fool enough to turn my back to you and your murders.”

  The duke turned to the window, muttering: “Bonfadini dead! And that keen Machiavelli leaving me with a curse of impotence. Am I at the end of my tether? No, by heaven! Those are my own men! Those are my own Romagnols! And still the place is in my hands!”

  “They are the Romagnols of my own company,” said Tizzo. “If you doubt it, call down to them. Call the name of my father.”

  “Good Bonfadini accounted for him long ago. He is dead, Tizzo,” said the duke.

  “Call his name, nevertheless,” said Tizzo.

  “Metrose!” called the duke.

  And the deep, hearty voice of the baron rose in answer.

  The duke staggered a little. He turned slowly back towards Tizzo.

  “What sort of damned black magic have you used, Tizzo?” he said. “But still you never can escape from me. My voice can bring a thousand armed men.”

  “True,” said Tizzo. “I never could escape — but they would find you dead. Policy, my lord, policy! That was always your word and the word of Machiavelli whom you admired so much. Policy, my lord, dictates that you should save your life even if the cost spoils some of the charms of your vanity. Tell my father to lead some of my men to my room and take the Lady Beatrice from it. She is ill — for a reason that you may guess after breathing the poisoned air.”

  Cesare Borgia hesitated a moment, and then leaned from the casement to speak.

  It seemed always to Tizzo a miracle that he and his company of the stout Romagnol peasants managed to escape from the town. For, after they marched away from the palace, with the white horse of Tizzo dancing in their midst and Beatrice supported by strong hands as she reeled in the saddle, the duke could have had fifty times their number to crush them.

  Tizzo could not know that the great duke sat, at that time, crossed legged on the floor, holding the thin, cold, white hand of Bonfadini, the poisoner. And even thoughts of vengeance, which always had been the nearest and the dearest to the duke’s heart, were for the moment forgotten.

  THE END

  Other Novels

  Katonah, New York, where Brand moved with his wife and two children in the early 1920’s

  Above the Law (1918)

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS’ REWARD

  CHAPTER II. HANDS UP!

  CHAPTER III. THE MIXED CAST

  CHAPTER IV. BLACK JIM

  CHAPTER V. THE STAGE MAN

  CHAPTER VI. GREEK MEETS GREEK

  CHAPTER VII. JERRY TAKES LESSONS

  CHAPTER VIII. THE SIGN OF THE BEAST

  CHAPTER IX. JERRY DECIDES

  CHAPTER X. A STRAIGHT GAME WITH A FIXED DECK

  CHAPTER XI. BACK TO THE LAW

  CHAPTER I. TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS’ REWARD

  HER EYES WERE like the sky on a summer night, a color to be dreamed of but never reproduced. From the golden hair to the delicate hands which cupped her chin a flower-like loveliness kept her aloof from her surroundings, like a rare pearl set in base metal. Her companion, young and darkly handsome, crumpled in a hand, scarcely less white than hers, the check which the waiter had left. In the mean time he gazed with some concern at his companion. Her lips stirred; she sighed.

  “Two dollars for ham,” she murmured. “Can you beat it, Freddie?”

  “He sort of sagged when we slipped him the order,” answered the dark and distinguished youth. “I guess the hens are only making one-night stands in this country.”

  “They’ve got an audience, anyway,” she returned, “and that’s more than we could draw!”

  She opened her purse and passed two bills to him under the table.

  “Why the camouflage?” he asked, as he took the money.

  “Freddie,” she said, “run your glass eye over the men in this joint. If they see you pay for the eats with my money, they’d take you for a skirt in disguise.”

  A light twinkled for an instant far back in her eyes.

  “Take me for a skirt?” said Frederick Montgomery, in his most austere manner. “Say, cutie, lay off on the rough stuff and get human. The trouble with you, La Belle Geraldine, is that you forget your real name is Annie Kerrigan.”

  Her lazy smile caressed him.

  “Freddie,” she purred, “you do your dignity bit, the way Charlie Chaplin would do Hamlet.”

  Mr. Montgomery scowled upon her, but the dollar bills in the palm of his hand changed the trend of his thoughts at once.

  “Think of it, Jerry,” he groaned, “if we hadn’t listened to that piker Delaney, we’d be doing small big-time over the R. and W.!”

  “Take it easy, deary,” answered La Belle Geraldine, “I’ve still got a hundred iron men; but that isn’t enough to take both of us to civilization.”

  Montgomery cleared his throat, frowned, and raised his head like a patriot making a death-speech in the third act.

  “Geraldine,” he said solemnly, “it ain’t right for me to sponge on you now. You take the money. It’ll get you back to Broadway. As for me — I — I — can go to work in one of the mines with these ruffians!”

  La Belle Geraldine chuckled.

  “You couldn’t do it without make-up, Freddie. And besides, think of spoiling those hands with a pick-handle!”

  Mr. Montgomery regarded his tender palms with a rather sad complacency.

  “There’s no other way out, Jerry. Besides, I can, I can—”

  His voice trailed away drearily, and La Belle Geraldine regarded him with the familiar twinkle far back in her eyes.

  “You’re a born hero, Freddie — on the stage. But we’re minus electric lights out here, and the play’s no good.”

  “We’re minus everything,” declared Freddie with heat, overlooking the latter part of her speech. “This joint hasn’t even got a newspaper in it, unless you call this rag one!”

  He pulled out a crumpled paper, a single sheet poorly printed on both sides. Geraldine took it and regarded it with languid interest.

  “The funny thing,” she muttered, as she read, “is that I sort of like this rube gang out here, Freddie.”

  “Like them?” snorted her companion, as he shook down his cuffs and tightened his necktie. “Say, Jerry, you’re talking in your sleep. Wake up and get next to yourself! Pipe the guy in the corner piling fried potatoes on his knife with a chunk of bread.”

  She turned her head.

  “Kind of neat action, all right,” she said critically. “That takes real courage, Freddie. If his hand slipped, he’d cut his throat. Don’t be so sore on them. As parlor snakes, they aren’t in your class, but don’t spend all your time looking at the stage set. Watch the show and forget the background, Fr
eddie. These boys may eat with knives and get a little too familiar with their revolvers, but they strike me as being a hundred percent men.”

  “You always were a nut, Jerry,” yawned Montgomery. “For my part, give me the still small voice, but not the wilderness. I can see all the rough nature I want in the Central Park Zoo.”

  He pushed back his chair.

  “Wait a minute, Freddie. Hold the curtain while I play the overture. I’ve got an idea. Listen to this!”

  She spread out the Snider Gulch Clarion and read:

  “Attention, men of Snider Gulch, it’s up to us! The citizens of Three Rivers have organized to rid the mountains of Black Jim. Prominent miners of that town have placed two thousand dollars on deposit, and offered it for the capture of the bandit, dead or alive. Men, is Snider Gulch going to be left behind by a jerk-water shanty village like Three Rivers? No! Let’s get together. If Three Rivers can offer two thousand dollars for the capture of Black Jim, Snider Gulch can offer three thousand easy. We’ve got to show Three Rivers that we’re on the map!”

  “How’s that for a line of talk, Freddie?”

  “What’s the point?” he queried. “What do you get out of that monologue?”

  “Wait a minute, the drums are still going out in the orchestra and your cue hasn’t come yet; but before I get through I’m going to ring up the curtain on a three-act melodrama that’ll fill the house and give the box office insomnia.”

  She went on with the reading.

  “We can’t expect to land Black Jim in a hurry. The reward money will probably get covered with cobwebs before it’s claimed. The men who get it will have their hands full, that’s certain. If they can even find his hiding-place, they will be doing their share of work.

  “There are a number of theories about the way he works. Some people think that he lives either in Snider Gulch or Three Rivers and does his hold-ups on the side. No man has ever seen his face because of the black mask he wears over his eyes. All we know is that his hair is black and that he always rides a roan horse. But that ought to be enough to identify him.