by Talbot Mundy
“I thank you, gentlemen. It will take time to study your statements. There appears to be no need to detain you any longer. Should your presence be required, I will send for you.”
He bowed to Grim, signed to the man at the door to open it and pass us out, picked up the piece of tube again, examined it, set it down once more and gave an order rather irritably:
“When do they ever clean these windows? Bring my magnifying glass, and turn on the electric light.”
Before we had time to reach the door the light over the Prefect’s desk was turned on and he made a sudden exclamation that made us turn to see what caused it. As we did so, a fuse blew and the light went out. Less than a second later the piece of tubing on the Prefect’s desk turned white-hot — set fire to the papers — and appeared to burn up with them. A revolver went off in a drawer — six shots almost simultaneous. There was a fusillade of pistol shots as apparently every cartridge in the building went off and a box of cartridges exploded in a cellar with a din like a machine-gun battery. There was shouting and a great noise of hurrying feet. Then the wooden desk itself caught fire. The sudden heat was so intense that the Prefect backed away into a corner and when a man came rushing in with a fire extinguisher he could not get near enough to make proper use of the thing. It was Jeff who put the fire out. He is afraid of nothing except cats and elevators. He found another extinguisher and a man’s overcoat out in the passage; shielding himself with the overcoat he charged in close and sprayed a stream of fluid right into the heart of the fire. It was out then; of course, in a moment; but the overcoat had caught fire; Jeff threw it on the floor and stamped on it while the other man sprayed it with the few last drops of his extinguisher. Jeff burned his trousers and his eyebrows, but was otherwise not hurt.
Then the Prefect examined the desk, or rather what remained of it. He let no one else touch it — made us all stand back. There was something he saw that he seemed unable to believe — or, perhaps, that he thought no one else would believe unless he took every possible precaution against interference.
“Bring a camera,” he commanded. “Camera and flashlight.”
A man came in with a large, old-fashioned instrument and exposed a dozen plates from different angles; it took several minutes because he had to reload his flashlight apparatus each time he used it. The smoke of the last explosion of magnesium powder had hardly reached the ceiling when what remained of the desk collapsed into a heap of charred dust.
“And not a trace left of that brass tube,” said the Prefect. “Not only are all my records of this case destroyed, but that brass has vanished. You may come and look now, all of you. Observe, please, that the locks and screws are there, among the ashes, but there is not even one fragment of that piece of tubing.”
The locks seemed to have been fused by the terrific heat and several of the screws had become stuck together. A shapeless lump of metal that I thought might be the brass tube turned out to be the fused wreck of the telephone instrument.
It was Grim who suggested that the ashes should be analysed, weighed, and their metallic contents separated.
“Dorje has invented something new, that’s all. Where did that brass tube come from?”
“It was part of Haroun ben Yahudi’s cargo,” said the Prefect. “Invoiced as scrap brass. This piece was found in his cabin.”
“Where is the rest of it?”
“That is what we hope to discover. That is why I let him go. He is being watched. I hope he will show us where it is.”
“He said,” said Grim, “that Guido Georges Marie de la Tournée sold it to an absolute stranger for cash.”
“Did he produce the money?” Jeff asked.
The Prefect shrugged his shoulders. “He showed money. But whence he had it — ?”
Someone ran in from the switchboard to say that the Prefect was wanted at once on the ‘phone.
“Who is he? What does he want?”
“It is Eighty-one. He says that Arab who just now walked out of here has been murdered!”
“Did he catch the murderer?”
“He says, no. A man ran from a side-street and plunged a knife into the Arab’s heart. Several people saw it. Eighty-one has held two witnesses. But the murderer ran back up the side-street and vanished.”
The Prefect walked into another room to use a telephone. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Grim, there and then, about the Princess Baltis. But Grim drew Jeff aside and whispered. Then the Prefect returned.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I must invite you to write those statements again. It embarrasses me to put you to so much trouble, but you see, everything was burned up — everything. A devastation. It will be necessary to reconstruct this problem from the very beginning and your statements may be of some assistance. However, I need not ask you to stay here and write them. Have the goodness to write them, if possible, without consulting one another and I will send a messenger for them to your hotel this afternoon. Meanwhile, please preserve silence. Let me emphasize that. Silence, gentlemen, I pray you. You are men of experience, who will readily understand the paramount importance of a most discreet silence in such matters as this. In fact, if you were men of less — shall I say distinction — it would be my duty to take routine measures to prevent you from talking with anyone.”
He bowed us out; and for a man who must have been half-distracted by the day’s events he showed exceptional sang-froid.
As we passed into the street Grim smiled. It was a sour smile. There was discontent behind it. “Without meaning to, I make men like Haroun trust me,” he remarked. “Do you realize that I sent Haroun to his death? If he had not appealed to me, he would be in a police cell this minute, alive and safe. It isn’t that the brave old fellow had to die. Death’s nothing — and anyhow, Haroun killed his dozens. What hits me between the wind and water is that Haroun depended on me to protect him.”
“He had no right to,” said Jeff.
Grim glanced at him and smiled again: “Who wants his rights? To hell with rights! They’re only relative at best. The only thing a decent fellow asks is friendship and a clean death, standing up.”
CHAPTER 5. “Imagine what would happen if—”
In the taxi I told Grim about the Princess Baltis. He interrupted before I was half through with my account of her: “She’s no more a princess than I’m a Hottentot. She’s a French citizen, born of Franco-Siamese and Chinese parents — educated at the Sorbonne — wealthy — older than she looks — she must be thirty-two or thirty-three, and looks twenty-three — but at that age she was already the best spy the French Government ever had. She was a spy at seventeen. The Germans sentenced her to death in Belgium, but she escaped; one German officer was shot and one got life imprisonment for letting her slip, and at that they very likely had nothing at all to do with it. She’s clever, and no one knows how she escaped.”
We lunched at the hotel, where I finished my account of the interview. Grim added:
“If she is in league with Dorje, we’ve a clue to work on. She’s the only spy in the French service whom they haven’t ever suspected of double-dealing. They think the world of her. They give her anything she asks for. Not the slightest use reporting her; they simply wouldn’t believe it, and she’d frame up a charge against us as quick as winking.
“Haroun said,” he went on, “that his secret orders were to obey Guido Georges de la Tournée until he docked in Marseilles. Guido drove him almost crazy. He said he lost his wind a hundred times because Guido insisted on keeping at least five miles away from any ship that was big enough to have electric light on board. Can you believe it? He sailed that dhow ‘round by the Cape to avoid close quarters in the Suez Canal. By the time he docked he was so fed up with Guido that he threatened to destroy his dhow, in exchange, I suppose, for the insult. What do you deduce from that?”
“Guido put that brass thing in Haroun’s cabin,” I suggested.
Jeff said: “And when he saw Haroun coming up the steps at the top of the hil
l he supposed Haroun had found him out. So he jumped rather than face Haroun’s knife.”
“Or he may have thought,” said Grim, “that the dhow was already destroyed and Haroun was out for vengeance. It’s obvious that Guido climbed the hill to watch the cruiser blow up. He evidently knew it would blow up as soon as that brass thing was delivered on board. Did you notice that nothing happened in the Prefect’s office until the electric light was turned on? Then a fuse blew, and the thing went white-hot, and every cartridge in the place exploded. Add that to the fact that Guido, on the voyage, was afraid to go near ships that had electric dynamos — and we get what? Some new kind of energy-converter. And it must be extremely simple, or Dorje couldn’t manufacture it in quantity and ship it as scrap-brass. Apparently electric current leaps toward it, becomes changed in some way, sets off any explosive within a certain distance, but destroys the thing itself. Imagine what would happen if they could distribute a few thousand of those things, close to arsenals, for instance.”
Jeff summed it up: “An automatic fire-bug that destroys its own evidence. Nice for the insurance companies!”
“Grim,” I said, “you’ve got to go and see that Princess.”
“No,” he answered, “you go. Take Jeff with you. Go and be Jimgrim until she finds you out. I leave this evening by plane for London, where they’ll probably give me information and perhaps carte blanche.”
So Jeff and I went in search of her, not relishing our job. “Tell me more about her,” Jeff demanded as we strode along together.
“She considers you a great oaf and she believes I’m wonderful.”
“All right, let’s play that hand,” he answered promptly. “She dealt it.”
“Any man can make a smart woman think him a fool,” I objected.
“Play the fool with her and make her think you’re clever,” he retorted. And that was all the advice I could get from him. As we approached the address she had given he shoved one fist into his pocket and strode along beside me as if we were off for a day’s fishing. Even when we entered the apartment hallway and started up the stairs he was whistling softly to himself, whereas I was alternately hot and cold with nervousness. I did not in the least relish the prospect of matching wits with a woman said to be the cleverest spy in Europe. Nobody minds getting stabbed — shot — strangled in a good cause; but who likes to appear ridiculous!
We were admitted by a middle-aged, dull-looking French maid into an apartment furnished in the late empire-period style that always makes me irritable for some incomprehensible reason. There was a long corridor, with windows on the left hand looking into a garden, and on the right hand was a row of gilded doors with heavy brocade curtains. A tall grandfather clock ticked solemnly. There was an atmosphere of old-world peace, belied by an equally evident tension; it was too quiet; one’s footfall was smothered in three-pile carpet, so that it felt like walking into ambush; and at the end of the corridor there was a gilt-edged mirror that aroused my suspicions — as it turned out, justly.
The corridor turned to the right. We were ushered into a room beyond the wall on which the mirror hung and I noticed at once that there was a big ornately decorated cabinet against the wall within the room, at exactly the place where the mirror hung outside. It was particularly noticeable because the cabinet seemed out of balance with all the other furniture; it needed shoving three or four feet further to the left, where its bulk and ornate grandeur would have seemed less prominent. Another thing I noticed was that the cabinet was the only modern reproduction in a room that was otherwise filled with what were apparently genuine period pieces.
The Princess rose out of a gilded chair to welcome us. She had changed her costume and was now dressed in peach-colored silk, with a turquoise necklace, and I think she looked even younger than when I had seen her earlier that day. The windows were all curtained and the light was so dim and diffused that it was difficult to see the small scar on her upper lip; it was even difficult to tell the color of her eyes, that looked like pools of languid mischief. She contrived to create the impression of a rather bored woman who invited, even challenged, us to entertain her.
“So you have come, Jeemgreem. And you have brought your famous and inseparable R-Ramsden. Introduce him to me.”
Jeff shook hands with her, as his way is, bluntly.
“You are like a siege-gun,” she remarked, “safe and reassuring until you go off. I do not wonder that Jeemgreem takes you wherever he goes. And where is the other one — Cr-rosby, did you say his name is?”
“Doctor Crosby has gone to London,” I answered.
I thought I detected a change in her eyes, but she recovered instantly and the tone of her voice was agreeably bantering:
“Ah, well — if Jeemgreem thinks so much of him he must be wonderful, but I must have patience until I meet him. Do be seated. Jeemgreem, what a surprising man you are. You do not in the least look like the hero of a thousand thrills! Your reputation thrills me, but you look like a shopkeepaire.”
“Can’t help my looks,” I answered.
“R-Ramsden, on the other hand, looks just as one expects. One would say to him — or rather, one can imagine Jeemgreem saying to him ‘Smash that obstacle,’ or ‘Slay these men’; and one can see it done as soon as spoken. Of all the wonderful things I have seen, I find it hardest to believe that this great R-Ramsden so worships you as to follow you even into Tibet.”
“No one asked you to believe it,” I retorted.
“Yes,” she said, “I must believe it. Because oth-air-wise” — her voice changed slightly— “my confidence might prove to be misplaced. I make mistakes — not often. Those that I make, like the surgeons and the doctors, Jeemgreem, I provide with funerals at someone’s else expense. Did Haroun leave the Prefecture?”
“Yes,” I said, “and your man killed him.”
She was taken off-guard, but recovered instantly.
“Was it not quick? Jeemgreem, does that not suggest to you that it is very unwise ever to trifle with me?”
“It suggests,” I said, “that you and Jeff and I don’t play the same game. We play ours straight.”
“And was that not straight? Straight from the shoulder? Haroun ben Yahudi had disobeyed. He had permitted de la Tournée to steal for his own use two of Dorje’s weapons. Two were missing from the barrels in which they were delivered. One caused that warship to blow up. And now they tell me that the other set on fire the Prefecture. Let me assure you that Dorje believes in swift discipline as well as in obedient daring.”
I managed to catch Jeff’s eyes and I saw that the big man was growing restless. Probably he considered I had blundered, and I, too, suspected I had. The Princess was altogether too cocksure of her own upper-hand; she was daring to give me information that would hang her unless I kept it secret. We were evidently in a trap of some kind.
“Don’t let her move,” I said to Jeff; and with an air of huge relief he went and stood between her and the window, close enough to pounce on her if she should make a sound or movement.
I walked over to the cabinet that I had noticed when I came in. For a few moments it puzzled me. There was nothing in front that would come open. However, I examined the side nearest the door of the room and found a small sliding panel, which opened easily. Inside, the cabinet was black; and there was an arrangement of mirrors, which included the large mirror on the corridor wall outside. The latter was made of “peephole” glass; that is to say, it was transparent toward whichever side happened to be brightly lighted; and since the windows in the corridor provided plenty of light, and the cabinet was black-dark, it was possible to look into the mirror facing me and see reflected in it the whole length of the corridor and anyone who might be entering through the front door. Doubtless the Princess had watched us enter, just as, now, I watched the interesting movements of five men.
There were five doors in the corridor. The doors stood ajar; and there was a man in every one of them. First one and then another would stick his head
out. They appeared to speak to one another, but only a few abrupt words at a time. And the startling thing was, not that they were there but that they looked like gentlemen. If they had been thugs they might have been just as dangerous, but not nearly so alarming.
Over my shoulder I told Jeff what I saw. Then I turned the key in the door. I set a heavy piece of furniture against it and I piled another piece on that; against that barricade I shoved a heavy, brass-inlaid table. Then I returned to the cabinet to make one more survey of the ambush and noticed that one of the men was wearing, under neat civilian clothes, the boots of a French infantry officer.
I told Jeff. He beckoned me, and I stood guard over the Princess. Jeff went to the nearest window, threw the curtains back, forced the window open, tearing out two long nails with which it had been secured against just that contingency, glanced outside, and grinned at me.
“All right,” he remarked. “The road’s clear. Now, let’s talk to her.”
But I had acted “Jeemgreem” just about as long as I could stand the strain, so I passed the buck to Jeff:
“You carry on. I’ll watch the corridor.”
I returned to the cabinet, where I could glance into the mirror and detect the slightest movement of the ambuscade without missing what Jeff and the Princess said and did. The ambuscade was patient and apparently not expecting to be summoned into action just yet; I saw one man produce a small blackjack and slap the palm of his hand with it, but he tucked it out of sight again; then he produced a cigarette case, but another man gestured to him not to smoke, so he put that away too.
The Princess spoke first: “In every life that I have lived on earth, that I remember, R-R-Ramsden, you have made your clumsy and ridiculous attempts to interfere with me. And you have always suffered for it. Will you nevaire learn?”
“It is you who learn slowly,” Jeff answered, so promptly that I almost suspected him of believing her absurd claim to remember the details of dozens of previous lives.