by Talbot Mundy
Grim had not budged from where he stood observing the whole episode. He made no remark, either to me or to the babu, when we got into the car that McGowan had left for us, and he was silent all the way to the hotel, which he entered by a back way as if he were one of the hotel servants. He said nothing whatever for nearly an hour as we sat in Jeff’s room with the door ajar while Chullunder Ghose rubbed salve on his injured shin and pitied himself because neither of us took any notice of him.
“In former incarnation this babu was Jeremiah. Specialist in lamentation. Pessimistic optimist, infliction of pain is solitary purpose of omnipotent province. Nevertheless, work head off trying to escape same. What annoys me most is prophetic accuracy of that ignorant child-soldier. Called me bloody babu. Do I not bleed? Yow! I also hurt like agonizing damned in Dante’s paradise.”
Grim appeared not even to be thinking. Even when Jeff came in and the springs complained as he threw himself on to the bed, Grim seemed to take no notice of his first remarks:
“That boy’s in bad. Too many people saw him act as an officer shouldn’t. Mahdi Aububah has vanished.”
Grim came instantly to life then.
CHAPTER 13. “I have ordered sandwiches and claret.”
Grim glanced at me. “Do you mind getting the Princess? No hurry, if she’s in a mood for confidences, but bring her in here as soon as you can.”
The Princess herself opened the apartment door. She appeared, I thought, rather relieved to have me call on her, but she was such a magnificent actress and such an opportunist that she may have been merely concealing disappointment. At any rate, she instantly made up her mind to take advantage of me, and as she had a low opinion of my intelligence amounting almost to contempt she made a rather bad beginning. And because I had been annoyed by the way Grim ordered me around, I made a good one.
“Ah,” she said, “you notice, don’t you, that my trunk is missing. What does that mean?”
I answered:
“I don’t know, unless it was true that McGowan’s men went through it. I have come to say good-bye. I’m off home.”
“You are disgusted? Come — sit down and tell me.” Then, suddenly, as I sat beside her on a comfortable lounge, “Of course, Jeemgreem sent you to extr-r-act my se-crets?”
“No,” I answered. I began to invent lies as wildly as Chullunder Ghose. “The truth is that he wanted me to come and pump you, but I’m fed up. I’m not constituted so that I can keep on mentally torturing a woman. I would have had you guillotined, hanged, imprisoned — whatever is coming to you. Grim won’t do that.”
“Tell me, why not?”
“He doesn’t tell anybody why or why not.”
“Then you don’t know what all this means?”
“All what?”
“So many things. They take away my trunk. If they have opened it, they have found three of those — those things. You know what I mean? Will Jeemgreem — will that man McGowan hand me over to the police, or to the military? There is martial law, is there not?”
“Yes,” I said, “there’s martial law. I dare say they could take you out and shoot you, after a secret trial in which you wouldn’t have a dog’s chance. Such things happen. But I think McGowan took the trunk in order to prevent that. As long as he hides the evidence, they can’t convict you.”
“Then what does this mean? There is a Brigadier-General.”
“Yes, I know him. Go on.”
“To me he came, to ask me about Jeemgreem, and about all of you. Day before yesterday he came to me, secretly, in civilian clothes, giving his wrong name; but my servant discovered his right name. He said there is a cablegram from London about Jeemgreem, and about you others, and about me. He more than hinted that I am beautiful and that he is gallant. Do you see? A threat in one hand, and what he thought was persuasion in the other.”
She paused, wondering, I suppose, how stupid I might be. As a matter of fact, I was thinking nobody could blame the Brigadier for feeling a bit gay in her company; her magnetism had a way of stealing on the senses, aided by the perfume she used. Presently she continued:
“That Brigadier-General told me that unless I appreciate on which side my br-read is buttered someone will certainly look up my record. Therefore I knew he had already done that. It was evident that he intended blackmail.
“Presently he became gallant, like a goat but not so engaging. And he asked me where is Jeemgreem. I did not know, but he did not believe me. He said I had better find out or he will have me deported. What does that mean?”
I said: “It looks as if you will be leaving the country. Pretty soon, too. Military deportations are about as swift as telegrams.”
“Does Jeemgreem — does he do that to me?”
I nodded. “Seems so.”
“Do you agree with it?”
“I was not consulted.”
“Do you understand that he is throwing away pr-r-riceless assistance? That he is acting dishonorably? Let him think — let him say what he likes of me — he struck a bargain, did he not? He snatched me away from my environment, at a time when I could easily protect myself. Now will he send me back there, to be at the mercy of men who have had time to cover up their guilt, of which I then had knowledge? Am I to return discredited? I tell you, I will sooner kill — myself.”
I think she intended to say she would sooner kill Grim, but changed it. Perhaps I betrayed what I thought. At any rate, she produced a small phial of cyanide capsules, taking good care not to let me get hold of it.
“You will let him do this wrong thing?” she demanded. “Do you hate him?”
“I can’t prevent him,” I answered.
“Where is he? Do you know where he is? Then come with me to him and help me to persuade him. Do that, and I will always be your friend — always, whatever happens.”
I fell in with the suggestion, but not too eagerly, lest she should suspect that was just what I wanted. She rushed into her bedroom, put on lipstick, rearranged her hair and changed into a yellow frock as quickly as an actress touching up between cues.
“Now we are friends,” she said, “you and I. We help each other. You shall learn what a friend I can be.”
She took my arm and we walked along the corridor together, her perfume hinting what her eyes and lips left unsaid.
“If you have offended Jeemgreem, I will help you to be friends with him again — yes?”
In her day she had probably bamboozled scores of men by that quick trick of hers of sex-suggestiveness. But she never once impressed me as a woman who actually was free with her favors; her genius lay in suggesting possibilities and she was clever enough to know that the lure of the unattained is usually lost or lessened in attainment. Not that there was any limit to her tactics, with a goal in sight or danger to be out-maneuvered.
Grim greeted us quite casually, although Jeff seemed nervous, as if they had been discussing a plan that Jeff thought too far-fetched. The smile on the face of the babu confirmed that impression; he loves sheer madness; I believe his heaven will be a place where fat adventurers can skate for all eternity on thin ice.
“Jeemgreem—” she began; but Grim interrupted her.
“Have you a turban? Green — yellow — red — it hardly matters. Thirty or forty yards of narrow silk would be about right. Can you? Would you mind bringing it?”
I supposed he was making an opportunity to speak to me, so as soon as she left the room I began to tell him what had happened. However, I had guessed wrong.
“Afterwards,” he said, “if you don’t mind. She might come back too soon and overhear.”
Not one of us spoke again until she returned with a whole piece of purple Lyons silk. She was gone three or four minutes and during all that time Grim studied his own face in Jeff’s shaving mirror. When she came in and gave him the silk he passed it to Chullunder Ghose.
“You do it. Shall I sit here?”
The babu stood behind the chair and began binding the turban on Grim’s head.
“Jeemgreem — what means this about a deportation order?”
“What do you think it means?” he answered.
“You get rid of me?”
“You are no use — as the Princess Sitlab.”
“Is that a kind way — a proper way — a wise way to dispose of me?”
“I can’t think of a better. Can you?”
His coolness seemed to disconcert her even more than the dread of deportation did. The babu, with a face like a Sphinx, went on twisting away at the turban, arranging each fold with exact precision; and Grim’s face seemed to change into some other man’s as he sat there staring at it in the shaving mirror.
“Jeemgreem — I will rather die than go to France.”
McGowan came in, in uniform, sweating and wiping his face on a dripping- wet silk handkerchief. But under cover of the handkerchief I saw him pass a small package to Jeff, who gave it to Chullunder Ghose, who slipped it into Grim’s pocket.
“Hotter than hell,” he remarked. “Good evening, Princess. Well, it’s all right. Tassim had a French governess for his latest lady-love. She’s decidedly out of a job, and she hasn’t been paid for so long that she’s flat broke. Anything to get home to France. A free third-class passage looks to her like a gift from Providence. I’m giving her your trunk, Princess — that big one that we filched from your apartment — saved trouble — it has your name on it. She’ll keep the underwear — the poor girl needs it. Soon as the deportation order comes my men will put her on the train and lock her in; one man will go with her to Port Said, where we have a berth all ready for her on a French boat, which waits for the train and leaves directly afterwards. She can tell her own tale to the French authorities. The Brigadier—”
“May go to the devil,” said Grim. “If he discovers the trick he’ll be too late anyhow.”
Baltis stared at him: “Jeemgreem — what do I do?”
“Change your frock,” he answered. “Put on something much less noticeable. Then come with us.”
“Come where?”
“I intend to show you. Between now and midnight we take a long chance. You, too. You have fifteen minutes. I have ordered sandwiches and claret.”
PART 2. MESSIAH OF TINSEL
CHAPTER 14. “Is it the key to Dorje’s cipher?”
Believe me, Cairo burning kerosene and candles is a very different place from Cairo lighted up. Brown’s Hotel was like an old-time monastery; even the shadows on the walls leaped with a sort of restraint that reacted on people and made them move stealthily. The suggestiveness of that subdued men’s voices, and a feeling of awe, not far from horror, very soon ensued.
Outside, the streets were in almost darkness, although the starlight helped the dim lanterns of the pickets and patrols and there was some light oozing through the cracks of doors and shuttered windows. The authorities had clapped on a curfew regulation and it was working with the surprisingly sudden efficiency with which most things British do function when the first, invariably contemptuous scorn of the unexpected has yielded to common-sense.
No cars were allowed in the streets, no pedestrians, no traffic other than deliveries of food protected by written permit or provided with an escort. We were stopped at least twenty times by men whose bayonets shone in the lantern-light and though McGowan’s uniform was sufficient passport, more than half a dozen officers demanded to know our destination before they would let the car proceed. McGowan gave a different one each time. If reports were actually turned in and coordinated, our behavior must have looked a bit bewildering next day.
Of course, anyone who has his wits about him and is not limited by scruples or under actual restraint can laugh at any restrictions if he cares to. There is no way to hog-tie intelligence. No form of human government can regulate even a tenth of the population, all the time, against its will. I don’t doubt there was plenty of lawlessness under way along those dark streets and in the narrow, polyglot alleys, but there was an astonishing control of the surface of things. Under pretext of protecting them the politicians had been silenced and the men who talk less about liberty, but who do more to preserve it, had once more demonstrated that peace sleeps paradoxically on the points of bayonets. The strategy, so close to panic, of evacuating all the ammunition and then, too soon for the mob-rule maniacs, re-entering the city had succeeded. But I would dearly love to see the official cablegrams that flashed over the wires of the world that night and during the days that followed.
I would like, too, to have been able to read the thoughts of the Princess, who sat beside me on the rear seat of McGowan’s car. She was wearing a hooded cape of striped silk — one of those astonishingly simple adaptations that the French make from exotic models, suggesting without defining Oriental inspiration. She had pulled the hood low over her forehead, so I could hardly see her face, although we sat close because Chullunder Ghose was jammed into the same seat on my right hand. Jeff and Grim were on the folding seats in front of us. McGowan sat beside the driver. After a long silence the babu nudged me and said:
“Sahib, difference between ecstasy and torture is merely poetic distinction and poets are crazy. Am passionately tortured by ecstatic blue funk mixed with curiosity and would not swap with Dorje himself. Feel my emotions.”
He thrust his wrist into my hand. His pulse was going like an airbrake piston. Then the Princess whispered to me:
“I hope we all get killed in a ter-r-iffic climax. I am so excited, I can hardly sit still. Where is Jeemgreem taking us?”
Then Grim, turning suddenly, spoke out of the corner of his mouth:
“To see your sister.”
I could feel the rigor with which she suddenly controlled herself. If Grim wanted her rattled he appeared to have succeeded. He may have purposely prepared her for a shock, because of his theory that people at too great disadvantage almost never do the thing expected of them. Whether he expected her to behave as she did when the actual shock came, I don’t know. I can only report what happened.
In almost total darkness near the hospital two military trucks were waiting for us, one containing a powerful searchlight driven by a gasoline engine and the other jammed chock-a-block with men; their officer was waiting for us on the hospital steps; he saluted McGowan, who gave him directions; he and the trucks vanished.
Then, McGowan leading, we invaded the hospital, where flickering candle- light cast spectral shadows on the white walls. There was someone screaming, in a room at the end of a passage, which enhanced the effect — mystery — gloom — horror. We were in single file. The Princess walked in front of me. I saw her shudder.
“This way,” said a surgeon.
They were ready for us. A nurse unlocked a door as we approached and turned her back as we entered. She had been told we were not to be recognized. The surgeon came in with us, but there was a screen in front of the door and he stood behind that with his hand on the key — obviously a man whom McGowan trusted, but who preferred not to know too much about what was not his concern; he was a cadaverous-looking North-country Irishman, overworked and melancholy.
The room was lighted by two candles, one on each side of the head of a bed, on which was laid out, very beautifully cared for, the body of the woman with whom McGowan and I had talked not very many hours before. In death she resembled our Princess even more closely than she had done in life, but perhaps that was partly due to the candle-light, which softened the lines of suffering. Only the head and shoulders were visible, with dark hair arranged on the pillow a bit too regularly to suggest sleep.
“Dead?” The Princess’s voice suggested the clash of engaging bayonets. Silence then, for I dare say thirty seconds.
“Dead,” Grim answered.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“To prove to you that she is dead.”
“You recognize her?”
“Yes.” Silence again.
“What is your purpose, Jeemgreem?”
“At the moment, to learn whether your statements agree with wh
at she said in the presence of witnesses before she died.”
“She was always a liar. And she hated me. She was my twin sister, and we fought from the day we were born. She hated me because I was the elder. She stole my name Baltis. When I befriended her during the war, because we two so resembled each other that she could pretend to be me and I could seem to be in one place when I was actually engaged in espionage somewhere else, she betrayed me to the Germans. Then, believing I was executed, she found her way to Dorje and again pretended to be me. She made that scar on her lip to heighten the illusion. For a time she deceived even Dorje. And when Dorje found her out, he laughed. ‘A too significant coincidence,’ said Dorje, ‘to be treated according to rule.’ So he did not kill her. He gave her a chance to redeem herself into his favor by doing exceedingly dangerous work.”
Grim turned suddenly and looked into her eyes that shone in the candle- light like fiery jewels, but of no sort known to commerce.
“How do you know it?” he asked her.
For about ten slow seconds she answered his stare. Then: “Dorje said so.”
“When?”
“Not long ago.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere! What Dorje wishes one to know, one knows I tell you.”
Suddenly she looked away from Grim and turned toward the bed, approaching it almost on tiptoe as if reverence for death offset resentment and she wished to make some sort of farewell gesture. From where I stood it even seemed as if her eyes were closed and that her lips moved, as if she were saying a prayer, as she stooped over the dead woman’s face. I saw her draw a very deep breath, as if sighing. And then the light went out. She had blown out the candle and had flattened out the other with her right hand.