by Talbot Mundy
“See here,” Strange began, with his right fist set characteristically on the table in front of him. “I made my conditions plain this afternoon. Negotiations are to be between my organization and yours. One of my men, who entered this house ahead of us, is missing. Where is he? He has got to sit here on this side of the table before negotiations can begin!”
“Pardon me, Mr. Meldrum Strange,” said the thick-necked man, with that sort of suave inflection that suggests sarcasm without exactly expressing it. “Do you consider yourself in a position to dictate to us?”
“I do! If you think you can deal with me on any but my own conditions, you’ll discover your mistake,” Strange answered, pulling out a cigar case. “Produce my friend Grim, or there’ll be no conference!”
He proceeded to chew the cigar. One of the five pushed over a box of matches. Strange ignored it.
“Well, Mr. Strange,” said the thick-necked man, “I may as well tell you first as well as last that your friend Grim has been in here and has been examined. The examination was unsatisfactory — to him, I mean. Your organization will have to get along without him.”
“Just exactly what the Hell d’you mean by that?” demanded Strange.
The thick-necked rascal smiled.
“We asked him two questions. The first was, whether he is willing, in the possible event of your rejecting our proposal, to cut your throat in our presence. The second was whether he is willing to commit suicide. He answered both questions in the negative. His answer to the first made it clear to us that he is not to be depended on; his answer to the second proves him to be a man who is blind to his own best interest. Suicide is easy; murder is unfortunately sometimes — well — you know how ill-mannered and rough the underworld can be!”
CHAPTER XIII. “Ho!”
“My dear Mr. Strange—”
Meldrum Strange snapped his jaw shut and sat bolt upright. The cigar dropped to the floor; he had bitten off the end of it.
“I’ll have no dealings with you whatever until you produce Major Grim!” he said sharply.
“My dear Mr. Strange,” the thick-necked man repeated, “you have put yourself entirely in our power. Do let me impress that on your mind! You have no weapons. We have an assortment of them. Your party consists of three. There are three men sitting on that bench. If they should fail, there are plenty more in the next room, and we five are not exactly impotent or without experience. No noise that you might make would do you any good, for the houses to right and left are each more than a hundred yards away, and incidentally they are both empty. So, unless we come to terms—”
“You have my ultimatum!” answered Strange. “Produce Major Grim!”
All five men smiled; and the masked men on the bench moved restlessly, perhaps to call attention to themselves. The man with the thick neck took up the argument again.
“Of course, Mr. Strange, we appreciate that we are dealing with a gentleman of iron nerve and resolution. In fact, we pay you the highest compliment in our power when we invite you to apply for membership in our society. Permit me to elaborate that. Our rule is that applicants for membership must pass through a great number of degrees, entailing severe tests as each higher degree is reached. There is a system of constantly increasing guarantees. We require every member to be so involved in illegal transactions that his liberty and even his life rests on our discretion. Hitherto there have been hardly any exceptions to that rule; but we have decided to make you an exception. You see, Mr. Strange: it is our experience that only men of high character, whose habit is to keep their given word, and at the same time to be ruthless in their dealings, are fit to share the control of our society. We consider you that kind of man.”
Strange pulled out another cigar and started to chew it, but made no answer. The thick-necked man continued:
“We have decided after due deliberation that all we shall require from you — without specifying for the moment the financial part; that we will come to later — is an apparent crime. To a man in your peculiar circumstances murder would be exceedingly distasteful and might even result in undermining your nerve. In our profession we find the study of psychology extremely useful. And after all, what courts consider evidence is the principal thing. So, if you and your two friends will carry the bodies of the two men whom you shot in the Pyramid passage, and throw them into the Nile in the presence of witnesses, whom we have ready, we will be satisfied.”
“You say we killed two men?” Strange demanded.
“Well, not exactly. You killed one. The other was injured, and if we had taken him to hospital there might have been inconvenient inquiries. The corpses are downstairs. The way to the Nile lies straight down the garden belonging to this house.”
“Hell!” exclaimed Jeremy. “I hoped we were in for a real initiation, with red-hot pokers and a black goat! Soon as I’m a member there’ll be changes made! I know stacks of ways of making an initiation hum. We’ll have it creepy, and—”
The whole executive committee waved aside the interruption.
“Permit me to continue,” said the chairman. “Mr. Strange, we may as well outline the whole of our requirements to begin with. You must agree and give the required guarantees, or share the fate of Major Grim. Now, among the guarantees we require that you shall marry Madame Zelmira Poulakis, and settle on her cash or negotiable securities to the amount of a million pounds. She is a charming widow, on whose account you will have no qualms when introducing her as your wife into United States society. At the same time she appreciates and understands our point of view and is sufficiently controlled by us to make her a suitable consort for you. She is waiting close at hand, with witnesses, to sign a marriage contract.”
“You lucky old stiff!” laughed Jeremy, nudging Strange in the ribs. Accidentally he nudged the spot that the bullet had touched in the Pyramid passage, and Strange swore explosively.
“For the treasure chest of the Society,” the chairman went on, “all that we require from you is half a million pounds. We propose to make further enormous sums with your aid in the United States. An agent of ours in the United States, who has access to the income tax returns, has informed us that your accumulated resources amount to nearly a thousand million dollars. We have no wish to impoverish you. Our plan is that you shall select certain stocks dealt in on the New York Stock Exchange and, after notifying us, accumulate them steadily. We shall buy the same stocks. What is called a bull market will ensue, and we will all unload on the public when you give the signal.”
Meldrum Strange began to smile at last, and I think the chairman mistook that for a symptom of complaisance.
“You see,” he said, “we are not requiring you to engage in a business that you don’t thoroughly understand. This Society likes nothing so well as to see its individual members prosperous — although too much prosperity is not always good for the lower ranks and is seldom permitted for that reason. We like power. We enjoy the power that the secret use of money and influence provides. We keep the power in the right hands. We keep an absolute hold over all our members. Subject to that, you may say we have no use for an indigent or helpless member.”
“You’ve heard my condition,” said Strange. “Produce Major Grim before I’ll as much as consider your proposal.”
The chairman didn’t answer, but changed his tone.
“Mr. Strange, permit me to show you the reverse side of this exceedingly attractive medal. Let us suppose that you are unwise enough to reject this offer. What then? Well, in the first place, your two friends will be killed at once. You will see that happen, and for the sake of its effect on you the process will be painful and somewhat prolonged. After that, you will be given your choice between a swift, quite painless death or one even more atrociously disagreeable than theirs that you will have witnessed. For the privilege of dying painlessly, you will have to pay whatever sum we name, signing before witnesses such papers as we shall set before you; and, as it won’t make much difference to a dead man how much money
he has paid to escape torture, the sum demanded will be — er — well — immodest!
“Let us clearly understand one another, Mr. Strange. This business will be settled in this house this night, one way or the other, and you have no alternative but to join our Society or die. Moreover, you can only become a member on the terms we stipulate.”
Undoubtedly psychology did form one of the principal ingredients in that executive committee’s method. They had their moves worked out carefully. The chairman brought his speech to an end by rapping on the table with an ebony ruler, and the answer to that was as instant as if the actors in the drama had been drilled for weeks.
We heard the voice of Narayan Singh raised in a babel of Punjabi, pitched high and quarrelsome, behind the door we had entered by. It was followed by a terrific pounding on the door; but as that only made the executive committee smile, none of us was much disturbed by it. Nevertheless, something was going to happen, that was obvious. Something staged in advance.
The voice behind the door was that of a fanatic declaiming. The words seemed a jumble of jabbering nonsense, out of which “kill — kill — kill” in its various tenses emerged in a frequent scream. Then the speech changed to English.
“I tell you I have killed him! Let me show them! They called me a coward! They said I did not dare! They said I loved him! They lied! They lied! Let me through to prove they lied! I will show them the corpse! I will cut the head from the shoulders in their presence! Open that door and let me show them, or I will slay you! Open, I say! Open!”
The pounding on the door resumed more fiercely, to the accompaniment of blasphemous torrents in three languages, such as the half-breeds use in Bombay when the drink is in and they revile both sets of ancestors; only it was worse than I ever heard from a half-breed, for it had more imagination. The chairman leaned over the table and smiled at us.
“That is your Indian friend,” he said. “No doubt he looked nice and mild this evening in attendance on Madame Poulakis. We selected him on purpose, because of his known previous loyalty to you. A little hypnotism goes a long way with Indians, but a little drug that we use in such cases goes longer yet! It makes even a white man murdering mad. But you shall see for yourselves.”
He made a sign to the men on the bench and one of them walked over to the door, where he tapped a signal. A moment later we heard the key rattling in the lock, and then, knocking down the screen before him like a whirlwind, Narayan Singh strode in with blazing eyes, brandishing his scimitar and dragging Grim by the collar with his left hand.
Grim hung inert and dropped to the floor like a sack when Narayan Singh let go of him. I couldn’t detect the slightest sign of breathing, and when I stooped to feel his back — for he lay face-downward — Narayan Singh swore savagely and lunged with his scimitar within two inches of my neck.
You wouldn’t have believed he was the same man who had talked with me in Shepheard’s Hotel an hour or so before. There was spittle running down his beard. His mouth was all awry with frenzy. His breath came in volcanic gasps, as if the fires of Hell were burning in him, and every muscle in his body seemed to be twitching in unnatural excitement. We three jumped to our feet; there was no sitting down in face of that ghastliness — at least, not for us; the committee seemed to like it.
“Yah!” he yelled, brandishing the scimitar until the air whistled and the blade rang. “I am Hathi the elephant, and I am musth, and whom I love I kill! I am the wrath of all the gods! I slay! I am the sword of the Avenger! I work for Yum!”
I don’t know what the next amazement of the program would have been. Incredulity fought against the evidence of eyes and ears. There lay my good friend Grim stone dead, so what was the use of recalling what the Sikh had said when sober? He was drunk and drugged now — worse than a blood-crazed wolf. It crossed my mind to shoot him, but Meldrum Strange without meaning to or knowing what had crossed my mind stepped between us.
“You swine!” he thundered, facing the committee. “You dogs! You dirty, cowardly, sneaking, filthy swine! Kill me and be damned to you! That suits me perfectly. Kill me and see what happens! If there’s a God, as I believe, the whole foul pack of you will hang!”
“But you see, we’re not superstitious,” smiled the chairman, veiling savagery under a quiet sneer. “Very well, we shall have to kill you, for you mustn’t escape to tell tales about us. We always keep our promises. Guards!”
The three men rose together from the bench and started for us — in no hurry — they seemed very sure of themselves.
Jeremy and I drew our pistols. Instantly one of then shouted for help; but he only got one word out, for I drilled him clean and he dropped. The crack of my repeating pistol turned chaos loose.
Grim came suddenly to life almost between my legs — Narayan Singh turned sane and sober. Grim rushed the table on all fours — upturned it on the committee of five — and shoved me with all his might, saying nothing. Jeremy and Narayan Singh took either end of it, and shoved too, upsetting all five chairs. I heard Narayan Singh laugh, and the pistols going like a machine-gun as the scrambling committee tried to shoot through the table-top, or under, or around it — loosing off like crazy men as they struggled among the chairs, hoping to kill with a chance shot, or summon help, or both.
But I couldn’t stop to help or look, I had my hands full. One of the three guards rushed for the right-hand door and tugged at it, shouting to someone on the other side, and the third man opened fire on me at a distance of twelve feet. I shot him, but too low, for he lay on the floor and continued to blaze away at me. He got me in two places, and I felt the bone of my left forearm go numb. Meanwhile, the third man had dragged the door open; and a dozen men, all masked, came running in with knives and pistols. It looked like our good-by, whatever else it might be.
* * * * *
I stepped in front of Meldrum Strange, who was out of breath from shoving at the table, and managed to drop three men, one after another, as they entered; a fourth fell over the first three, and that ended my present usefulness, for my pistol was empty, and with my left arm out of action I couldn’t reload it, although I had a spare clip in my vest pocket. I shouted to Jeremy, who cut loose in my stead, and the room began to look like a shambles. Meldrum Strange reloaded my pistol, fumbling with excited fingers, and the enemy beat a retreat to consider a new method of attack, slamming shut the door they had entered by, and smashing a panel in order to shoot through it from cover.
But everything happened at once. None of us was clear afterward as to the exact sequence of events. I balked the hole-in-the-door game by picking up the bench the three men had sat on throughout the interview and upending it against the door — a temporary stop-gap, but a good one while it lasted. Strange came and added his weight to mine. They smashed a second panel, but we lifted up the bench and held it crosswise. It seemed there was a narrow passage outside that prevented them from bringing all their weight to bear against the door, and we two held it shut for I dare say two minutes.
Meanwhile Grim and Narayan Singh, both without firearms — for the men downstairs had deprived Grim of his pistol at the front door — were beginning to have the worst of it. They had the table shoved all the way back against the third door with its legs against the wall; and in the space so left, crouching among upset chairs, the committee of five were about impregnable. Narayan Singh was alert with his scimitar to swipe at the first hand or head that showed, and Jeremy stood back with pistol ready, but it was likely to be only a matter of seconds before a volley of shots should end that situation.
Then two things began to happen simultaneously. Men began trying to burst open the door behind the table, but the table, committee, and chairs added to the weight of Grim and Narayan Singh prevented that for the moment, until it dawned on the five that they only had to set their legs against the wall and shove in order to release the door and admit their friends.
Just as they commenced doing that, the door by which we had entered the room burst open and five scre
aming women struggled in, forcing along in front of them the masked man who had admitted us. He was trying to help four of them restrain Zelmira Poulakis, who was using a long thing like a hat-pin to some purpose. And just as the struggling potpourri of women forced him backward into the room the man drew his revolver and aimed at Zelmira’s head point blank. Jeremy shot him promptly, drilling a hole exactly through his temples.
That staggered the four women for a moment — three of them were the same who had attended our dinner-party — and Zelmira shook herself partly free of them. She was a wild sight with her bronze hair down and her clothes ripped nearly off her, bleeding where the other women had torn her with their finger-nails, but beautiful in spite of it — or maybe because of it, for there was courage there, as well as frenzy; furious action in place of masked intrigue.
“Kill those five — the committee of five!” she screamed. “Kill those monsters! Are you men! Kill those devils before you die!”
Strange and I could no longer hold that door we had propped the bench against. They burst it off its hinges and we sprang back to the center of the room. I shot the first two men who entered, Jeremy shot another, but the rest rushed, and when my pistol was empty a second time three of them closed with me. I had only one hand to fight with. Three more of them pounced on Strange, and one man, standing in the door, fired on Zelmira, but missed her and killed one of the other women.
“Kill those five! Oh, kill them!” Zelmira Poulakis screamed. “Never mind the others! Do a good deed! Kill those five monsters!”
Then the door behind the table burst inward and half a dozen men stepped forward cautiously between the upset chairs and the scrambling committee. The committee got to their knees to shoot over the table-edge and it looked as if the end had come.
“There they are! Kill them!” Zelmira screamed.
I saw them killed. I was down under three men, struggling to break the neck of one, whose head was in chancery under my right arm. A second lay still on top of me, for Jeremy had brained him with the butt-end of his pistol, and the third was trying to hold my legs, which is no job for a weakling. I turned my head to see what was happening to Strange, whom Jeremy was doing his best to preserve alive until the last possible second, when that scimitar flashed across my line of vision — flashed like Summer lightning under the hanging lamp.