by Sax Rohmer
“Any improvement, Martin?”
Martin Brown studied the work.
“Do you ever clean your brushes?”
“Whenever I think of it; but I don't clean them in my mouth as you do.”
Brown let loose a bellow of deep laughter.
“Try it,” he said, when the storm had subsided. “Paint hasn't such a bad flavor as you'd suppose.
“Yes, B.B.—there's some improvement. But use clean brushes. Let me sell you some!” He obliged with an encore bellow. “Come into the factory.”
Through the small shop one entered a fairly large studio, which in turn gave access to a garden. The studio was bewilderingly untidy. French windows were wide open to the sunlit garden and a number of birds busily finished the remains of a frugal lunch which Martin Brown had thrown onto the steps. A charcoal sketch was removed and the bimbashi's work set on an easel in its place. There followed a short, trenchant lecture.
“It won't do,” Martin Brown concluded. “It is far from hot. But you are not past praying for.”
“Thanks, Martin,” said the bimbashi with humility, and began to fill his briar pipe. “Has nobody at all inquired about the Buddha?”
“Nobody?” growled the painter. “You make me laugh. It's the bane of my existence. I really can't put up with this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?”
The doorbell jangled, and Martin went into the shop. A choleric, elderly gentleman of military appearance was there; he wore a crossword check suit and undeniably yellow gloves.
“Good afternoon. What can I do for you?”
“You can answer a simple question, sir,” was the hoarse reply. “It concerns that figure in the window—”
“Do you want to buy it?”
“Buy it! Damn it, sir! I could buy a dozen for a pound in Singapore! I merely wish to know how, at a time when patriotic people are saving up for the war effort, you dare to ask a hundred pounds for—for—”
“That is my client's price.”
Following a snorting sound, came the visitor's final words. “In my opinion you should either be locked up or medically examined!”
The bell jangled, the door banged, and Martin Brown came back.
“You said, 'What sort of thing?'“ he remarked. “Well,that sort of thing. It's only a question of time for me to slosh one of 'em, and then I shall have confirmed an opinion already favored around here, that I am a dangerous lunatic.”
Bimbashi Baruk nodded sympathetically.
“I think,” the painter continued, extracting a jar of beer from behind a canvas stretcher, “that in fairness I should know the facts. A man who is trying to build up an honest business excites the wrong kind of interest by asking a hundred pounds for a thing that is worth about fourpence.”
“It cost me ten shillings.”
“You were swindled. I have never been able to make out what you are doing here, in the first place. You appear to spend your time haunting all the pubs in the neighborhood. But when it comes to trying to sell a bit of old junk for the price of everything else I have in the shop—”
“I agree. You are right. I will explain, Martin.”
And behind the bimbashi's explanation of his presence in England a remarkable story lay. This was the story.
It began more than two years back—in fact, just before France was overrun—on the French Riviera, where Bimbashi Baruk was spending a short leave. During this time he made the acquaintance of Janson Runmede, the famous Harvard physicist who had once assured New York reporters that Einstein reallyhad a theory. Runmede was living in a villa at Cap d'Ail and was popularly believed to be engaged upon abstruse experiments. Here, one evening, the bimbashi attended a small dinner party which formed the prelude to a tragedy. Those present were Dr. Runmede, his secretary, Ann Mertsham, Mr. and Mrs. Vandersen of Philadelphia, Bimbashi Baruk, and a Mrs. Vivian. Mrs. Vivian was a lustrous brunette, whose exact nationality he failed to determine but whose eyes held for the distinguished American an expression of rapturous surrender which embarrassed even the bimbashi.
However, it was a pleasant evening. The dinner —excellent—was cooked and served by members of the staff of a near-by hotel. John Vandersen had a grand fund of anecdote, and his wife was a good teamer. Ann Mertsham would have been a pretty girl without her spectacles, but her persistent intelligence was a trifle exhausting, the bimbashi thought. Mrs. Vivian rather defeated him, until he decided that she didn't matter, provided that Runmede didn't permit her to matter.
The Vandersens were first to leave. Ann Mertsham lived at the big hotel in sight of the villa garden, and as it appeared that Mrs. Vivian lived there also, these two later set off together, observing a septic politeness to each other, frigid as the crescent moon which sailed above Cap d'Ail. Runmede detained Baruk.
“It's not fifteen minutes into Monte Carlo,” he said—the bimbashi, who loved a gamble, was quartered there—“so let's have a leisurely old-fashioned and a quiet chat.”
They had their whisky and their chat, and it was largely his memories of that final hour with Runmede which marked out Bimbashi Baruk's course some two years later.
Windows opening on the garden were thrown wide and lamplight played theatrically upon golden fruit gemming an orange tree, shadows of its branches painted on a mosaic terrace by the bold brush of the moon. Except for a chorus of crickets, a disturbing mosquito hum and, once, the deep note of a steamer's whistle from Villefranche, the night was still. Cap d'Ail long ago had ceased to be fashionable, and the villas immediately above and below Runmede's on that steep little street which tortuously wound down to the sea were vacant.
“Bit lonely at night, isn't it?” the bimbashi suggested.
A breeze stirred the curtains and bore with it a fragment of conversation from Ann Mertsham as, with Mrs. Vivian, she walked back to the hotel. “One instinctively distrusts these sudden winds from the Alps...”
Perhaps her words subconsciously prompted Dr. Runmede, for as he replied he closed shutters and windows.
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I have been warned that some crook or another has been seen around. But I don't mind. I've had my nose pretty close to the grindstone for a long while; I have had to listen to people, and I have had to talk quite a lot. Here I can please myself.” Big and blond, he was more like a physical instructor than a professor of physics. “There's nothing here to attract a thief, and if one dropped in I guess I could offer him a fairly stiff rough house.”
Bimbashi Baruk often recalled those words, later, but what he said at the time was: “You are just enjoying a long vacation?”
“Just enjoying every minute of it. A Harvard group put up a substantial sum two years back to finance an inquiry of mine, and I worked like a pack mule to justify their confidence. I may have overdone it a bit. Certainly I needed this rest.”
He said no more about his work, although the bimbashi would have been glad to listen, but talked of life on the Cote d'Azur, the queer people one met and, casually, of Mrs. Vivian. He had run into her, apparently, at the Sporting Club at Monte Carlo. She was lonely, rather down on her luck and, according to his own account, he had cultivated the acquaintance in a mood compounded more of quixotic chivalry than of passion. “She's amusing, anyway,” he concluded.
It was not until Bimbashi Baruk was leaving that Dr. Runmede suddenly reverted to the subject of his isolation. A hired car was waiting at the lower or garden entrance, and as Runmede led the way down, he asked:
“Did you ever read 'The Purloined Letter' by Edgar Allan Poe?”
“Yes,” said the bimbashi, conscious of confusion.
“I know what the Britisher calls a 'sahib' when I meet one. You are a sahib. I'm going to take you into my confidence. There is one thing in this villa which, to a man who could understand its value, would represent a considerable fortune. Listen: What was the first object you noticed when you stepped into the front lobby?”
The bimbashi, whose powers of observation were inher
ited from a line of desert hunters, remembered immediately that he had noticed a figure which stood in a niche facing glazed double entrance doors. Some eight inches high, it was that of a man obese but joyous, arms upflung, one hand, the right, having been rather crudely restored. A more or less standardized Chinese ornament, he thought, and said so.
“Sure. You see it as you come in,” said Runmede. “Can't miss it. Some people would lock it in a safe. Others would bury it. But Edgar Allan Poe would have put it just there. I don't have to emphasize the fact that this is between ourselves. Good night.”
Heavy clouds swept the face of the moon, creating a weird lighting effect, so that as Bimbashi Baruk looked back, Runmede's tall figure was alternately exhibited and obliterated as he stood there at the gate. Less than half an hour later, according to medical evidence, Dr. Runmede was murdered on that very spot. The villa was ransacked and found in wild disorder by Marcelle, the daily help, when she arrived in the morning. But, on the evidence of Ann Mertsham, nothing had been stolen except the laughing Buddha.
THE MANNER of the killing was not far to seek. The murderer had rung the bell at the lower entrance, and Dr. Runmede, thinking no doubt that one of his guests had returned for a belonging mislaid, had gone down and opened the gate. He had been struck on the head by some blunt weapon, a sandbag or a loaded tube, and had died of concussion. Marcelle almost stumbled over his body, which lay just inside the gate. It was unlikely that he had made any outcry, but, since a squall was raging at the time, no outcry would have been heard.
From its very outset the case presented unusual features, and Foubert of the Service de Surete was sent down post haste. With him, from Paris, came Mr. Lord, of the United States Intelligence. The villa had been sealed by the local authorities and guards posted. Everyone present at that last dinner party was closely interrogated—with one exception. The bimbashi's evidence was recognized to be significant.
“Was this figure in its place when you left, monsieur?” he was asked.
“I left by another door.”
Ann Mertsham was positive on the point that nothing else was missing. Every scrap of paper in the villa had been examined by the thieves—and it was clear that the examination had been scientifically carried out—but nothing had been removed, although desk drawers were left lying on the floor, bureaus open, and cabin trunks and handbags with broken locks lay about Dr. Runmede's bedroom.
“It is the work of expert agents,” declared the officer from Nice. “Paris must be advised.”
But before the arrival of Messrs. Foubert and Lord one highly curious fact came into possession of the police: Mrs. Vivian had disappeared! Ann Mertsham deposed that they had parted in the hotel lobby, Ann going to bed. But the management asserted—and proved—that Mrs. Vivian had given up her room at noon that day and had removed her baggage. She had left no forwarding address.
An intensive search was instituted, but no trace of her could be found. The Italian frontier post at Ventimiglia denied that she had crossed that night. “But what does one expect?” the examining magistrate exclaimed. “Almost certainly, but yes, that is where she went. Almost certainly, it is from there she came. This is a crime political, gentlemen.”
Ann Mertsham was unable to add anything to Bimbashi Baruk's evidence regarding the laughing Buddha. Dr. Runmede had bought it, or had had it given to him, since they had come to Cap d'Ail. He was far from secretive and she had always had access to all documents; in fact, she had recently sorted, filed and stored them; hence her certainty that none was missing. Inspector Brun, of Nice, threw fresh light upon the history of the absent Mrs. Vivian.
“She was also known as Mme. Byas, and was formerly associated with the Byas-Ardopolis group, a gambling syndicate, which went broke. Not a desirable friend for the poor Dr. Runmede, you understand. But beautiful? Ah, yes, but certainly.”
“Just the sort of woman who might be employed as a spy,” the bimbashi agreed. “Except that I can't make out what she was looking for. But if she is innocent, why doesn't she come forward?”
Then the celebrated Paris detective arrived, and shattered the bimbashi's illusions upon that subject.
M. Foubert was a little, fat, round man, who resembled an overpainted cherub of the Flemish school, and who took snuff. He had an oddly sly smile. Mr. Lord, tall, grim, angular and taciturn, was the only American known to Bimbashi Baruk who used a monocle. His voice suggested the presence of steel filings. Their arrival coincided with the discovery by Inspector Brun that a certain Jean Caron, of Monaco, who owned a motor boat and was licensed to carry passengers, had set out on the evening of the tragedy, telling a friend that he was going to Cap d'Ail. He had never returned. It was feared that his craft had foundered in the violent squall.
“One asks,” said Inspector Brun, “if Mme. Byas was on board.”
But it was Mr. Lord, following an uncommunicative period during which he studied Bimbashi Baruk as an Egyptologist studies an unfamiliar scarab, who finally enlightened him concerning the probable purpose of the murderer.
“Professor Runmede had been at work for more than two years on an atomic bomb,” he explained. “Its general principle is known to three governments; but there remained just one formula—some question of stresses—which he had failed to complete. The British War Office has a bomb, I believe, which, dropped in Times Square, would remove Times Square. But the Runmede bomb, if perfected, under similar conditions would obliterate a large part of New York City. That missing formula is the thing we must assume to have been hidden in the Chinese image.”
The unforeseen collapse of France occurred so soon afterward that Bimbashi Baruk lost touch with the inquiry and the inquirers. His military duties wholly absorbed him. No trace had been found of Jean Caron, Mrs. Vivian or the motor boat. A crime that would have held world interest for several weeks was forgotten amid the greater horrors of war. The bimbashi, however, was unable to forget the fact that an instrument of destruction, possession of which might well decide the issue, was perhaps already in being. But two years had elapsed before the Cap d'Ail mystery flashed again across his path.
Walking through the streets of Port Said one evening on his way back from the docks, he was brought up as if by a blow outside the window of a dirty little junk shop. Among a litter of objects such as are offered for sale by those itinerant merchants whose boats besiege all incoming and outgoing liners, stood a laughing Buddha. The upflung right hand had been carelessly restored and from a gilded girdle part of the gilt was worn off!
Almost beyond possibility of error, here stood the figure stolen from Dr. Runmede. But the shop was closed—nor could the bimbashi discover to whom it belonged, nor where this person might be looked for. Dusk had fallen before he gave up the quest. “A fool is a fool all the time,” he said to Martin Brown; “but even a wise man is wise only part of the time.”
He went to a hotel, called up Cairo and explained that a matter of great urgency would detain him in Port Said overnight. Early on the following morning he returned to the shop near the docks, found it open—and the laughing Buddha missing! Mohammed Abd el-Musir, the proprietor, extended apologetic palms.
“How could I know, sir, that you wished to buy this thing? Give me two days, one day, and I will obtain another.”
He was an aged but agile Egyptian, whose long face, short beard and small, pointed ears lent him a pleasing resemblance to a camel. Bimbashi Baruk fixed a threatening stare upon Mohammed; he knew how to handle camels.
“This is a serious matter, O Mohammed. It is a matter of thePolice. Listen, then, attentively. To whom did you sell the Buddha?”
The bimbashi's manner, his elegant Arabic, the word “Police,” reduced Mohammed Abd el-Musir to a state of abject servility.
“To a soldier on the transport which sailed at dawn, my lord. I went out in my boat.”
“To what regiment did this man belong?”
But Mohammed did not know.
“Very well. Tell me: Where did you get t
he figure and how long have you had it?”
“I have had it for many months, my lord, and no one ever wished to buy it except this soldier, who said that it reminded him of his wife's mother. I swear in the name of the Prophet (may God be good to him) that I acquired it by honest trading.”
“From whom?”
“From a French sailor. It chances, my lord, that I can even tell your excellency his name, for the following reasons—”
“Forget the reasons. Tell me his name.”
“It was Jean Caron. He was mad, I think, for he believed that the piece had great merit and threatened to slay me when I offered him a just price. But, when he had visited many other dealers and had been thrown out of the great bazaar of Simon Artz, he came back most disgustingly drunk. It was then that I learned his name and also how he had once owned a vessel of his own in Monaco, which was lost with his passenger, a woman. He is now an ordinary seaman in a ship trading between Marseilles and Port Said. And so”—Mohammed spread eloquent palms—“the thing is worth very little. I buy it for a little less than it is worth, and this morning I sell it for a little more.Ma'lesh!”
Such evidence was indisputable. Mrs. Vivian had returned to Runmede's villa that night and had stolen the laughing Buddha. She was, therefore, an Axis agent. Why her unknown accomplices had ransacked the house he was unable to imagine, since Mrs. Vivian evidently knew the real hiding place of the formula. Had she double-crossed them?
Jean Caron was not in the plot. This conclusion was based on his subsequent behavior. Mrs. Vivian had probably been drowned, and Caron had recovered the figure which she had had in her possession. Learning later of the Cap d'Ail murder, he had become convinced that the Buddha was worth a large sum. Accordingly he had disappeared until a time when he thought that it might safely be offered for valuation. That the Buddha itself possessed no value but contained something which possessed much, was an idea which had never occurred to the poor Jean. The circumstances of its sale clearly pointed to this. Bimbashi Baruk took instant steps. The transport carried the first battalion of a London regiment homeward bound to England, after eighteen months in the desert. He presented his case to the responsible authorities. They experienced no small difficulty in grasping its urgency, since they knew nothing of thedramatis personae and had never heard of Dr. Runmede. The merciful return to Cairo of the bimbashi's old friend Colonel Roden-Pyne saved the situation. Colonel Roden-Pyne knew all about the Runmede bomb —and the bimbashi had great trouble in dissuading him from sending radio instructions to the officer in charge of the craft. This, he pointed out, was risking too high a stake upon that officer's tact. A matter so delicate demanded delicate handling. After infuriating delays, therefore, it was arranged that Bimbashi Baruk should be sent by air to meet the transport on arrival. (This occurred during that long lull which followed the evacuation of Libya, and he welcomed any chance of action.) He arrived in good time—to learn that the ship had been lost off the Irish coast!