by Talbot Mundy
I suggested, “There ain’t no such person,” and McGowan rather resented it, or seemed to.
“Too damned obvious,” he answered. “Nearly everybody said that Ulyanov and Bronstein were nothing — not worth giving thought to — until they blossomed forth as Lenin and Trotsky. This bird has studied their game and has gone them one better, that’s all. There isn’t a major government that hasn’t files and files about the Oriental rumor of a King of the World who is likely to come at any minute. It’s a cult. It embraces all religions. We have all of us known for years that even the Mohammedans were listening to it. And we have all known there was something more than communism at the bottom of the unrest that has run like a rot through Asia. But lay our hands on Dorje? Fine-tooth combs catch fleas, but Dorje — no, sir.”
“There ain’t no such person,” I repeated. “I will bet you all the dollars I own against the middle of a doughnut that Dorje is a myth invented by a committee.”
Luckily for me he did not accept that bet. Not another word passed between us until we reached the new public hospital and left the car in charge of McGowan’s orderly. I had no idea why he had brought me to the hospital. The European and Egyptian members of the staff were standing by in good shape and there was no evident symptom of panic except for what one can only describe as atmosphere; that, for lack of a better comparison, suggested the incidence of a baffling epidemic. There was none of the orderly hurry of war-time, when everyone knows what to do and there are only too few individuals to do it. Here there were plenty of individuals, all resolute — baffled — mystified.
We were informed, before we had asked a question, that the operating rooms were reserved for emergency cases only, owing to the lack of electric light. But that did not interest McGowan, who was abrupt and uncommunicative. He gave my name, not his, and led me as fast as I could follow him upstairs into a small room at the end of a corridor. The window-shade was down; he jerked it up. A nurse was in the room; he ordered her out. A screen was around the bed; he removed it.
“See what you make of that,” he said and turned away, as if he had already seen more than enough.
I looked down at a woman swathed in bandages. She appeared to have been burned; the nature of the dressings suggested that. But her face was uninjured. And except that her face was white and tired by agony, it so resembled that of the Princess Baltis that I thought, for at least a minute, it was she — herself — the Princess lying there.
CHAPTER 11. “Stole my name. Says she is Queen of Sheba, I am.”
There was even a scar on the upper-lip. I looked at the scar closely and decided it was not a birthmark; it might even have been inflicted recently, and it seemed slightly larger as well as slightly higher up than that on the lip of the Princess.
“Name? Nationality?” I asked, and McGowan answered without turning his head. He was standing over by the door with his hand on the knob.
“Came from the Cape by way of Kenya, Nile steamer, and by train from Khartoum. British-Indian passport bearing evidence of having been forged in Warsaw, but visas for almost every country in the world apparently okay under the microscope. Name given as Baltis, Maharani of Chota Korinpore, which is a small state in the northern part of the Central Provinces of India. Domicile given as Chandalia, which is the capital of that state. Cabled India, of course, at once; but no reply — yet.”
“Haven’t you other means of checking up?” I asked him.
“London — India Office. No record there of a Maharani by that name. Reply, in code, asks whether we are not confusing her with Baltis understood to be French secret agent.”
“Injuries caused — ?”
“One of those damned brass tubes. Suspected, without proof, of having brought in dozens of ’em in her luggage. Luggage, of course, searched thoroughly; nothing found of the slightest significance.”
“Staying — ?”
“At Mena House Hotel — out near the Pyramids.”
“Where did it happen?”
“Nobody knows. She was found lying in the garden of an unoccupied villa belonging to Tassim Bey, who is under arrest but swears he knows nothing about her.”
“Why me?”
“Want your opinion.”
“Has she said anything?”
“Not one word.”
I decided the woman was listening. It was impossible to be quite sure of that, but I was almost sure that she was not unconscious.
“No use guessing,” I said. “I shall have to examine her injuries. Call in the nurse.”
McGowan stepped outside and closed the door. He returned in a minute and said the nurse was busy at the moment but would come as soon as she had helped another nurse with bandages. He had obviously not spoken to the nurse, knowing I would not have dreamed of removing those excellently applied dressings without the permission of the doctor in charge of the case.
“An anaesthetic,” I said, “is out of the question. And unfortunately in a case like this the agony is excruciating. But if I’m to help her there is nothing for it but immediate examination. Tell the nurse we shall need two or three others to hold her. Oh, hello.”
She had opened her eyes. Her lips moved. “Let me alone. Let me die.”
She seemed unable to move her head, so I drew up a chair and sat where she could not see my face but where I could watch every trace of emotion in hers. Suddenly, outside, not far away, there was a thud like the shock of a howitzer going off; it shook the building; then came the shuddering blast of three explosions one close on another, followed by the high-pitched uproar of a crowd in panic.
She smiled. I have seen many people smile like that on death-beds, and especially criminals. Some drunkards do it, and some drug-addicts. It suggests a peculiar vanity; and I have been told that when a clever cross-examiner detects that smile on the face of a witness he can usually extract the information that he wants by using artfully half-hidden flattery.
“We have caught your twin sister,” I said, “and she tells us that your Dorje is only one of a committee, that her Dorje is the real one. Your Dorje, she says, is a traitor who has spoiled everything by being ambitious for himself.”
“Am I dying?” she asked.
“Undoubtedly. You can’t possibly live.”
“Are we alone?”
“We shall be in a moment.” I turned to McGowan. “Leave the room, please, and close the door after you. Then stand outside and see that no one interrupts us.”
He opened the door, closed it again and drew near, making less noise than a cat. He placed a hand on my shoulder to steady himself and we both leaned as close as we dared, he listening from behind me, but it was difficult to hear what she said. She mumbled, with only occasional spurts of quite distinct speech; and even so, she said nothing at all until I jogged her memory.
“You can talk now. He has closed the door behind him. Your sister said—”
“Bitch! Liar! Younger than me — I am one hour older — stole my name — says she is Queen of Sheba — I am.”
I jogged her memory again.
“Your sister says that you don’t know the real Dorje.”
“He will kill her. Dorje loves me. I will say to him,’She says you are not real!’”
“How will Dorje get the message?”
Silence, in which I heard McGowan’s wrist-watch ticking out of step with mine. I was afraid I had asked the wrong question. McGowan nudged me, but I waited, not daring to add to her reluctance to speak. At last her lips moved:
“Where is Tassim?”
“I will find him,” I answered.
“Who are you?”
I drew a long bow at a venture: “Haroun ben Yahudi.”
“Haroun?” Instantly she spoke in Arabic and I missed some of what she said, but McGowan got all of it. “What are you doing here? Find Tassim. Command Tassim to tell Dorje that woman lies about him. Dorje loves me. He never did love her. Say that to him, Haroun. Make him do it.”
Silence again. Then suddenly: “Haroun, where is your s
hip? Can you put me in it? Take me to him, Haroun.”
She was more than half-delirious now. The effort to speak was burning up the dregs of her vitality. She mumbled and neither of us could distinguish a word of it. Then, suddenly clearly again, in Arabic: “Haroun, bury me at sea if I don’t reach Dorje. But sail swiftly, Haroun. If you reach Karachi Dorje will come to me,”
She tried to sit up then, but the words she would have uttered turned into an almost soundless scream as agonies of pain shot through her, and she died before McGowan could summon the nurse, who eyed us two as if she thought we had done murder. Possibly we had. I don’t know. She might have lived another hour or two without our interference.
“Tassim next,” said McGowan. “He is locked up and he hasn’t said much yet. With this to go on—”
“No,” I answered. “Grim next. Tell Grim and let Grim cross-question Tassim.”
“Right you are. About all we’ve got is Tassim and Karachi, so far.”
“Plus,” said I, “the fact that Dorje is one man and not a committee.”
“Think so?” he answered. “I doubt it now. To me it begins to look almost probable that those two women have been dealing with different men, and neither knew it.”
“We see Grim first?”
“Right you are. Grim sees Tassim.”
However, Grim thought otherwise, and at that we had to spend two hours looking for him, in a city that was more like Dante’s hell than Cairo. Strange sects seem to spring into existence almost in a moment whenever anything cataclysmic happens. The mob lacked nothing now but leadership to make it murderous. Plundering was already beginning. There were outbreaks of fire in a dozen different directions — obviously incendiary fires, because Cairo is not a city that burns readily. Where the smoke was thickest and the tumult worst there were weird processions of mystics chanting that the end of the world was at hand — Copts — Moslems — all sorts. One long procession of men, women and children were all stark naked. The police were a bit pathetic, sticking gamely to their posts but not in the least knowing what to do; I saw one of them arrest a naked woman and then let her go because he saw the futility of it.
We were in no way molested, but officers in uniform were having a hard time of it dodging sticks and stones, and around the jail there was a big mob, composed of the worst elements of the city, held at bay by scared policemen and a small contingent of British infantry, who displayed their machine gun much more openly than they probably would have done if they had had any ammunition. A British officer was shouting at the mob in Arabic, imploring them not to compel him to fire on them. It was about the only thing he could do.
“They can have the jail the minute they make up their minds to take it,” was McGowan’s opinion. “Once some of the tough ones are out of that place there’ll be real trouble.”
Grim was not at Brown’s Hotel but had left a message for us. We found him at the High Commissioner’s residence, where Chullunder Ghose was enjoying an argument under the portico; he had got the goat of one of those rather old- fashioned British subalterns who still believe that hauteur is the correct attitude toward inferior races, and the subaltern’s neck was beet-root color. Grim, still dressed as an Arab, and indistinguishable from one, came out and talked to us; he told us Jeff had recognized a man who might prove to be important and had gone after him. Before we had finished telling him our story Jeff brought in his victim, an enormous man, who looked like a Dervish and who appeared to have made the egregious mistake of offering resistance. Jeff was holding him by one arm, but the arm seemed painful. They were both of them smothered in dust. Jeff grinned, as is usual when he has had, or expects to have, a genuine chance to use his muscles.
“Had to carry him part of the way, but he’s good now.”
He led his man straight in to the High Commissioner, which was, to say the least of it, an unusual proceeding. Grim, apparently in haste to join Jeff, made one of his abrupt decisions. He said to me:
“You go with Chullunder Ghose and turn Tassim inside out.”
He asked McGowan to keep out of Tassim’s sight, and me to do no more than play up to the babu. Then he talked to the babu alone for about two minutes before hurrying into the house to interview Jeff’s prisoner.
So the babu, McGowan and I got into McGowan’s car and drove half across Cairo again, to a place where prisoners can be kept for a day or so without the publicity that might be caused by putting them in the regular jail. It looks not in the least like a prison; it stands in the midst of a garden and thousands pass it daily without suspecting its real purpose. The entrance to it is through a deserted-looking building used by the police for storing all sorts of odds and ends, and along a path between stone walls that are hidden by trees and shrubbery.
We were admitted by a one-armed Sudanese who wore five or six medal ribbons on a non-military smock that looked as if it had been taken from the lost-and-found rubbish bin and then washed threadbare. He saluted McGowan like an automaton and relaxed immediately afterward into an attitude of deferent familiarity. McGowan remained in the passage with him, talking a dialect of Arabic totally unfamiliar to my ear; but Chullunder Ghose and I were led by another Sudanese to the door of a small room facing on an even smaller inner courtyard. He opened the door and locked us in.
Tassim Bey stood up to greet us. He had been seated on a trestle cot, there being nothing else in the room except the floor, on which he could sit. The cot was beneath the only window, which was iron barred and devoid of glass. There were no windows in the other three walls of the courtyard, and only one small door that looked as if it had been locked for half a century or so; there was a short flagged path leading from that door to a well, above which a rusty iron wheel was still hanging from a wooden beam.
Tassim Bey looked to me like a typical upper-class modern Egyptian of the semi-political, traveled, alert, intellectual type. As he stood up he polished his finger nails on the cuff of his smartly cut jacket. He had bored eyes with a slightly simian expression caused by their being set too close together and by their perpetual search for something in which there might be something good for Tassim. Lean, but with a tendency to stomach. Stooped, but with an air of stooping merely because it was the distinguished attitude. Rather pale faced, only slightly olive colored. A nose like Abdul Hamid’s, probably betraying a trace of Armenian ancestry.
No one could have looked more sympathetic than Chullunder Ghose.
“This babu makes obeisance. May your honor very soon receive reward of merit. And may you have vengeance on your enemies. That is my humble prayer.”
“I don’t know you,” remarked Tassim.
“Naturally not. Also, in said sad circs your honor’s icy incredulity is highest form of hot-from-pot good judgment. I admire same. Never mind me. Doubt me all you like — until I tell you.”
“Who is listening?” asked Tassim.
“No one, except this man.” A bit scornfully he jerked his head in my direction.
“Who is outside the door?”
“No one — on my honor. If I could open same, would prove it to you. But let us speak in low tones.”
Tassim sat down, with his hands on his knees.
“I have nothing to say to anyone, except this: I am unlawfully imprisoned.”
“Sahib, same here,” said the babu. “This man and my most respectful self are prisoners as much as you are — held without warrant on charges so unprovable that same are secret.”
“You mean you are both prisoners along with me?”
“Verb sap.”
“And you don’t know why you are imprisoned?”
“Oh, yes. Why is one thing. Justice is another. It being essential that your honor should escape, this babu was ordered to effect same.”
“Ordered by whom?”
“Now, by Jiminy, I don’t know. Am too lately from Karachi, having come as supercargo on dhow running cargo of contraband. Your honor doubtless will permit me not to enter into details — must not speak too
plainly in front of this person; venial very, and to a certain extent one of us, but only partially trusted because we have goods on him. Get me? Nod is good as wink to blind horse.”
“Man or woman?” Tassim asked him.
Seeing I was supposed to be a prisoner, and having promised to play up to Chullunder Ghose, I assumed an air of bored resignation and sat on a coconut fibre mat with my back to the wall. Chullunder Ghose remained standing. “I understand you perfectly,” he answered. “It is, however, forbidden to repeat countersign in this person’s presence. Nevertheless, there are two women, if you are asking for information.”
“Damn!” said Tassim. “Do you speak Arabic?”
“Unfortunately, no. Am very ignorant babu.”
He talks Arabic better than I do, and he knew I could have followed the conversation in that language; but I understood the method behind the prevarication. Such men as Tassim, loathing all things English except money, speak the English language spitefully, which is to say indiscreetly.
“Two women?” said Tassim, lowering his eyelids.
“Both named Baltis.”
“And both of them ordered you to effect my escape?”
“May I sit down?” asked the babu. Evidently the pace was too fast even for him; he was inventing lies at random.
“My God, no,” he answered at last when he was squatted in his favorite position. “Two women — same age — same name — just as much alike as two fleas in an ear. One says one thing, one the opposite. One says learn from Tassim Bey where to deliver the contraband, then kill him to keep his mouth shut and here are pounds Egyptian fifty. See them.”
He dived into an inner pocket and produced the paper money, flourishing it in Tassim’s face. “Said the other release Tassim, he is necessary to me. Might as well tell me to build new pyramid without straw. But there you are; she said it. Fortunately, he said otherwise, or this bewildered babu might have relapsed into state of oh-my-God-ishness, no use whatever.”
“He? Who?” asked Tassim.
“Lord high-hallelujah head man; and you know who that is, so don’t ask me. Trouble is, that this babu delivered contraband from Karachi as per orders. But now where is it? Nobody knows except Tassim Bey, who is in hands of hated English, who also don’t know whereabouts of said stuff, but who intend to torture Tassim. But he tells.”