by Talbot Mundy
“What’s under the floor?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” said the man in black pants.
“Drag that next bale away.”
He helped him do it, and uncovered a trapdoor.
Hope ran ace-high again. He was the same alert, astute Aloysius Ticknor who had started forth that morning dreaming of high politics. Even his two dogs, sniffing for rats in a corner, seemed to appreciate the change, for they left their pressing business to come and wag their tails at him.
“Open her up!” he ordered.
Might as well be broke for burglary as trespass. Besides, all successful men take chances.
But the trapdoor would not raise. It was fastened down with one long nail driven in to the head. The man in black pants produced a crowbar from a corner and lent the strength of his stocky shoulders.
“I’ll remember that in your favor,” said Ticknor, not supposing that the Jew’s readiness to help might be due to anything but the instinct of self- preservation.
Some men can convince themselves of anything they want to believe. Ticknor would have betted a year’s pay that minute on there being loot under the floor, and another year’s pay on top of that that both Aaronsohn and this man knew it.
So he was not surprised, he was merely elated and self-complacent when the nail came splintering out of the wood and the door creaked back at last. He did not stop to consider why the hinges should have yielded so reluctantly, or to study the rust on the ancient nail. There was too much down below to interest him — rifles, cartridges, revolvers, bayonets — the plunder of months from Ludd encampment!
That was a minute of triumph, worth ten times the sting of Aaronsohn’s sarcastic insolence. Lord, wouldn’t Jenkins be pleased! And think of Aaronsohn’s chagrin! And the provost-marshal’s, who had had his eye well wiped!
He jumped down into the cellar, struck a match and looked about him, but did not trouble to go as far as the end wall because there was hardly headroom and he had to stoop. Beside there might be snakes and vermin. So he did not notice a door at the end, communicating with the smaller shed next door, nor see the print of footsteps leading from it.
He climbed out again, sweating and dusty but almost busting with pleasure at his good luck. The Jew in black pants, peering down into the hole beside him, felt it incumbent to translate his thoughts into speech that might be understood.
“Well, I never! Those Arabs, mister, there is nothing they stop at! As a snake in the grass so is an Arab!”
“Lies about Arabs won’t help you, my lad! You’d better stay here. Understand me?”
“Sure I stay here.”
Ticknor laughed.
“You’re a strange race. I never saw such perfectly acted conscious innocence. Talk of Chinamen — they’re not in it with you.”
He went to the door and looked up and down the street, hoping to catch sight of a soldier or policeman — anyone at all who might be sent to bring the provost-marshal’s men; or better yet, sent running with a note to Jenkins.
There was no one in uniform in sight. He scribbled a note on the back of a private letter, replaced it in its envelope, readdressed it to the brigadier, contrived to seal it after a fashion by relicking the old gum, and beckoned a small boy who was sitting smoking outside a shop on the opposite side of the street fifty yards away.
Preferring not to advertise his find too widely for the moment, he judge it better to do his talking inside the building. So the small boy got a good view of the trapdoor, and a glimpse of what lay underneath.
“Listen. Do you know General Jenkins?”
The small boy nodded. There were few things he ever forgot, once he had rubbed acquaintance with them.
“Do you know how to find him?”
He nodded again.
“Take this letter to him, but don’t show it to anybody else. If you come back quickly with an answer I’ll give you five piasters.”
The bribe was enormous. The small boy took the envelope and started off at a run. Ticknor returned to the trapdoor to gloat over his discovery and smoke a cigarette of triumph.
So again he missed something that might have given him thought. The boy stopped at the shop near which he had been sitting, and called through the open door.
“Oh, Jimgrim!”
A man in Arab costume came and stood in the shadow between the door- posts.
“Over there in the big shed there is a trapdoor. It is open. Underneath are rifles. An officer gave me this.”
“Who is it for?”
“General Jenkins.”
“All right. Run with it.”
Suliman sat and pulled his boots off, for they were a concession to convention, not adjunct to speed. Stringing them around his neck by the laces he set off as fast as youth would let him.
Jimgrim turned back into the shop, smiling with tired eyes, to resume his conversation with a real Arab where it had broken off.
“Now, Ibrahim Charkas. Let’s have that over again. No lies this time or I’ll wring your neck.
CHAPTER XI
“There is money...take it and go away.”
WHEN Jim received the hundred-piaster note from Suliman he went at once into Mahommed Kaftar’s coffee-shop and steamed it over the kettle until it fell into the original three pieces — two ragged halves and a strip of gummed paper. Then he drank coffee leisurely until the paper dried, turning it over on his knee and chuckling to himself.
“Mustn’t say a word against Jenkins — um-m-m!”
Sir Henry Kettle’s and General Anthony’s injunction began to fit, still vaguely, into something suggestive of strategy based on information.
“Give a rascal rope enough and he’s sure to hang himself.”
But one must take precautions lest he trip too many others with the rope before the end comes. He made up his mind to see Ibrahim Charkas at once, not that there would be any obvious advantage to the community in saving that evasive rascal from the consequence of dallying with Jinks’ spider web; but he did have instructions to discover who stole that TNT, and if one thing should lead to another, and that to Jinks’ downfall, he would still be obeying orders.
Ibrahim Charkas ran one of those nondescript Arab stores in which everything was sold from sewing thread to tinned biscuits and souvenir photographs. He had even sold whisky until the provost-marshal interfered. Loss of the surreptitious liquor trade had cost him the custom of Sikhs and Gurkhas in addition to a staggering fine, so that business was not what it used to be and the stock in trade looked the part.
Dogged at a little distance by Suliman, who would not have traded his employment just then for a promise of paradise, Jim strolled up-street looking like an Arab whose wives were attending to business for him, lord of the earth and of leisure. There were plenty of other Arabs in the street and he had to be careful, but he watched his chance outside Charkas’ shop to toss Suliman a coin in which to buy breakfast and tell him to wait until call. Then he went in ostensibly for cigarettes.
Charkas came out obsequiously from a little room in the rear to greet him, for the day was past when the store would support an assistant, except for a mere fetch-and-carry nonentity, who could hardly be trusted to sweep the place out least he steal whatever he could reach. Just then the nonentity was away on some kind of errand.
“Shu bitrid, ya khawaja?” (“What do you want, sir?”)
Jim countered in English, and opened with his heaviest gun, laying down the two portions of the bank-note on a table at the back of the shop.
“Just take a look at those. When did you see them last?”
Charkas did not seem to know which to be surprised at more — the question or being addressed in English.
“Who are you that prefer a foreign language to your own?”
“None of your business! This is your business — this note — it’s important — when did you see it last?”
“How should I know? I never saw it. I don’t accept torn money.”
“Look again
. It was pasted together when you saw it last. I know where you had it from, but how did you get rid of it?”
“To whom should I pay a hundred piasters? Tee-hee-hee! Absurd! The business of this store is no longer that much in a week.”
“Did you ever see this?” Jim asked him, turning over the strip of paper in both hands so as to show first the signature of Charkas on one side and then Jenkins’ name on the other. “It came of the back of that note.”
Charkas began to look like a cornered rat. The pupils of his eyes became pin-points, and narrow teeth showed prominently between his thin, parted lips. He made a quick motion with his hand, but Jim was quicker and seized him by both arms. Jim put his foot on it, and then picked up the strip of paper he had had to let fall.
“Better not try to make a hanging matter of it. Better use your head. It’s fairly easy to make sense out of this writing. It’s a letter from you to General Jenkins describing what certain men are doing, what they intend to do, and stating why you need more money. Jenkins gave you that hundred piasters. What did you do with it?”
There naturally flashed across Charkas’ mind his recent interview with Jenkins, of which Jim knew nothing, any more that Jim knew that the man from whom the hundred-piaster note had been taken did not come by it from someone else, who in turn might have had it from a third man. Charkas decided that Jenkins must have betrayed him, more than making good the threat not come to his aid if needed. But he was still cautious.
“Who are you?” he asked again.
In strategy there is no sounder rule that to follow up one surprise with another one, the second if possible more unexpected than the first. The first one destroys confidence; the second promotes hysteria.
“I’m a man who found in Jerusalem the TNT that was stolen from the railway here.”
Charkas turned to look about wildly for a weapon. Swift murder and sudden flight were all he could think of. He looked twice longingly toward a desk in the dingy back office.
“Come in here,” he said mysteriously.
Jim kicked the knife into the corner and followed him so quickly that he reached the desk abreast of him. Their hands closed on the lid simultaneously. Jim’s right hand forced Charkas into a chair. With his left he raised the lid.
“Thought so!”
“There was a revolver and a dagger with a wavy edge.
“Which would you have used? Um-m-m! I guess you’re scared enough to have fired and alarmed the town. Let’s see what else is in here — sit still, now! Don’t move or I’ll get a rope out of the store and tie you.”
He put his foot on the Arab’s lap to keep him from bolting while he searched through a litter of papers at random. They were mostly bills, receipts and private letters. Nothing of obvious importance.
“There is money at the back,” said Charkas. “Take it and go away.”
Jim whistled. Charkas shuddered. There is nothing in the world some Arabs hate so much as that. They say only the devil whistles. One can never know beforehand for certain, of course, but Charkas was hardly the kind of man one would expect to believe in that superstition.
Adding the shudder to the offer of the bribe; Jim drew a false conclusion that led nevertheless to discovery. Supposing that Charkas’ anxiety was for the papers in the desk, he went on searching; whereas the man actually was past fear on that account, thinking now of nothing but how to escape; and his nerves were in such a state that the whistle tortured him.
Jim found the money, glanced at it and tossed it aside. Then he turned over the papers again, stacking them one on top of the other, and presently whistled again.
“What in thunder did you keep this for?” he asked, removing his foot from Charkas’ lap as he turned his back to the desk and laughed. “Are you the ringleader of thieves here, and keep the proof of it to show like a Government certificate?”
Suddenly a fragment of Charkas’ native wit returned and he remembered why he had kept it.
“That is the memorandum informing General Jenkins that two tons of TNT were in a truck in the siding.”
“So I see. Well?”
“General Jenkins gave it to me — into my hand!”
If Jenkins proposed to betray him, then two could play at that game. All the bitterness and venom that the Arab mind inherited from Ishmael and cultivated under Turkish rule came to the surface. Revenge looked sweeter at that minute than safety. Thoughts of flight vanished.
“General Jenkins gave me that hundred-piaster note. He has given me other sums from time to time. I will swear to it in court. He has been paying me to organize the thieving.”
“Why?”
“In order to blame it on the Zionists. He hates Zionists. He is pro- Arab.”
“And he gave you that memorandum so that you could steal the TNT?”
“So that my men could steal it, yes.”
Jim tried not to look incredulous. It would take more than Charkas’ word to convince him that Jenkins would be such a fool as that.
“When did he give it to you?”
“On the third, I think it was. Yes, on the evening of the third.”
“At what time?”
“Five o’clock.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, because I met the afternoon train and walked up to his office afterwards.”
“This is dated the third at four o’clock. He could only have just received it. Was he in the office when you went there?”
“He reached it just ahead of me. The messenger brought the note; he signed for it, read it, and handed it to me.”
Jim laughed.
“You mean he turned away and you stole it off his desk — now don’t you?”
Charkas denied that hotly — swore by the God of his fathers and by Mohammed and all the saints in paradise that Jenkins had given him the paper. But that was too obviously stupidly untrue. A blundering, fatuous schemer Jenkins might be, but not such a simpleton as that. There was proof on that slip of paper in Jim’s pocket that Jenkins had known a lot about the thieving — probably proof enough to ruin him; but Jim’s task was to let the brigadier ruin himself. In all likelihood Anthony would refuse to listen if he should come with the blackest proof imaginable.
“Look here,” he said, “you’re all in — d’you realize it? You’ve only got one chance — king’s evidence. Come across with a clean story and I’ll do my best for you.”
The rat instinct for sudden flight crossed the Arab’s mind again. He rolled his eyes toward the door secretively, but Jim saw that and put his foot back on the man’s lap.
“Stay put!” he laughed, shoving him once or twice hard in the stomach. “Come on, spill the story. Who’s the iblis?”
Charkas looked relieved. He even chuckled.
“He is an Egyptian. I do not know his name, but he is a great charlatan, who left Egypt because of the police. Now he is very much disturbed — tee-hee-hee! He is expert at encouraging thieves. He gives them magic against bullets — tee-hee-hee! — and he demands two-thirds of all the plunder in return.
“But he cannot dispose of his share of the plunder without assistance; and he does not know where the men who come for it have hidden it. Tee-hee! He is very much exercised.”
“I happen to know where they have hidden it,” said Jim.
Charkas snickered scornfully.
“I don’t believe you. How could you know?”
“I was with the iblis most of last night, and I went with the men who came at dawn to hide the stuff away. The iblis is waiting for me now to come back and tell him where they hid it.”
Charkas threw his hands up in despair.
“You must be a bigger devil than the iblis himself!”
“Maybe. We’ll discuss that later if you like. The point is, are you going to come across, or would you rather I’d arrest you now and take you straight to Jenkins?”
“What do you want of me?”
“The names of all your men. Here’s a pencil. Here’s paper. Write them down
.”
Charkas hesitated for a moment, then tried to wet the pencil on his dry lips and obeyed him.
“I will make a full confession because you have promised I shall escape imprisonment by doing so.”
Jim laughed again.
“I dare say your sentence will be cut in half,” he answered. “That’s the best you can hope for. You can withdraw all you’ve said if you like, plead not guilty and take the consequences.”
“No, no, no! I will confess and plead guilty.”
It was at this point that Suliman called out through the doorway and Jim went out to speak with him, first pocketing the Arab’s dagger and revolver, but forgetting the knife he had kicked into a corner. Charkas had not forgotten it, but when Jim returned to the inner office he was back in the chair again.
“Here is the list of names,” he said, offering the sheet of paper.
Jim started to read it. All the light there was came through the office door and a dusty glass window set in the partition. He turned to let the light fall on the paper, and suddenly sprang backward.
The knife missed his stomach by a fraction of an inch. The blow was so savage that Charkas could not check it; his fist swung three-quarters of a circle and drove the knife nearly to the hilt into the wall behind.
“Nice sort of scorpion, aren’t you! Leave the knife sticking there. Now sit back and tell me your story all over from the beginning.”
This time Charkas was really convinced of helplessness, and beyond that he lied about everybody else and tried to present himself as a more or less innocent weakling involved in crime unwillingly by Jenkins, told a moderately truthful tale.
By the time he had finished the brigadier himself came clattering down- street on horseback, jubilant at the news of Ticknor’s discovery. Ten minutes of so later a platoon of British Tommies marched up, sweating freely, and took charge of the Zionist store-shed. Jenkins rode away again, red-faced with triumph, and Ticknor followed him on foot.
It was not ten minutes after that when Catesby came hurrying in search of Jim. He had shed his disguise and was back in uniform; and he had overtaken Suliman, who was returning tired and breathless for his five piasters from Ticknor. Suliman pointed out the shop door and followed Ticknor back again up- street.