by Talbot Mundy
“Who are the lawyers?”
“Zezwinski and Zoom.”
Joan Angela laughed.
“Zezwinski and Zoom wrote me the other day from their San Francisco office suggesting there’s a flaw in the title to part of my ranch.”
“Is there?” I asked.
“There might have been once,” she answered. “An old friend of my dad’s named Collins called my attention to it. It didn’t mean anything to him, but after we’d talked it over, he gave me a receipt by which he waived for ever any claim that he might have to any portion of my ranch. It’s in my strong-box. Mr. Collins died, and his estate got into the courts. I dare say Zezwinski and Zoom have been hired by some of the heirs to make all the trouble possible, but I didn’t even bother to answer their letter. Suppose you ask Moustapha to come and see me in my room as soon as we’re through supper? I’ll ask Mr. Ramsden to help interview him.”
The proprietor agreed, but hesitated: “Is Mr. Ramsden a lawyer?” he asked.
“No, merely white. He’ll do.”
“All right, Miss Leich, that goes with me. I’ll tell M. Pasha you’d like to see him.”
“And Tom, don’t say anything. I don’t want it all over town that—”
“Trust me!”
So, twenty minutes later, the door of Joan Angela’s sitting-room was opened by a page-boy, who ushered in Noureddin Moustapha Pasha. The Egyptian’s smile vanished almost before the door was closed behind him — the moment, in fact, that he saw me. He had evidently expected a tete-a-tete.
Neither clothes nor nationality appear to me to matter much, and I’m not quite such a born fool as to expect a foreigner’s ideas of right and wrong to agree with mine exactly. You can always make allowance for another fellow’s standards, provided he has them and believes in them, just as, for instance, a man who makes cloth by the yard can sell it by the metre if he must. But there are men of all creeds and colours, who can mouth morality like machines printing paper money, but who you know at the first glance have only one rule, and that an automatic, self-adjusting, expanding and collapsing one, that adapts itself to every circumstance and always in the user’s favour. This man was clearly one of those.
A handsome man, not very dark-skinned, but looking more like a dark man who had bleached indoors than a pale man who had bronzed a little in the open. He was immaculately dressed in one of those grey tweed suits that they get such an awful price for from the men who want to look like wealthy sports. He had a little black moustache, the thin neck of the city-born Egyptian, a rather prominent nose that carne within an ace of being shapely, and bright, dark eyes.
The worst of him to look at was his feet and fingernails; the first were much too small for his height, and encased in shoes that might not have disgraced a woman, and his fingernails were polished until they shone with a feminine pinkiness.
Another way he had of being objectionable was to assume that he understood you perfectly, and that you and he were on a basis of good fellowship merely because he was willing that such should be the case.
“Ah-ha! Miss Leich,” he began. “I thought you would come round to my viewpoint; but you needn’t have come all this way to see me, really. However—”
“What is your viewpoint?” she asked him blandly.
“That you should sell me that Egyptian property. You have no earthly right to it, you know. Egypt for the Egyptians — that is our motto nowadays.”
“And America for any person who cares to come over here and help himself, I suppose?” she retorted.
“You don’t suppose I came to this country for nothing, do you?” he asked. The tart note came into his voice as suddenly as if someone had kicked him.
“Nobody ever does,” she answered. “If you had come to pay the war debts you’d be a novelty.”
She was enjoying the interview, and as that fact gradually dawned on him all the man’s acrid jealousy, that is the underlying secret of Egyptian character, began coming to the surface. He threw diplomacy to the winds, and from that moment bore in mind only one circumstance, as his restless eye betrayed-namely, that I was capable of taking him with one hand and dropping him down the elevator shaft. He and I had exchanged no words, but had no misunderstandings.
“I will make my wants known,” he said, “and it makes no difference who hears. The fact is my friend Mrs. Aintree employs the same firm of attorneys—”
“Zezwinski and Zoom?”
“Yes. We have compared notes. We were drawing up articles of incorporation of a small company, to be financed partly in the United States, for the exploitation of that real. Estate of which you happen to possess the title.”
“Forehanded, weren’t you?” remarked Joan Angela.
“Remarkably so. It transpired that legal rights could be purchased which would give the purchaser a claim to that section of your ranch, Miss Leich, on which the most profitable oil-wells have been drilled— ‘brought in’ I believe is the expression. I purchased those rights for cash through Zezwinski and Zoom, who represent the estate of the man who originally owned the rights — an estate now in litigation. My purchase was agreed to by the various litigants, and will be confirmed by the courts of California, I don’t doubt. So, you see, I am no longer in the position of one who invites you to sell your Egyptian land to me. I now come to you and say: Unless you hand me the title to those thousand acres in the Fayoum, I will enforce my claim against your California property! You are no longer in a position to please yourself, Miss Leich!”
“Do you think it was sportsmanlike to go behind my back and buy up those rights?” she asked, trying to look serious.
“It was legal,” he retorted.
“Do you realize what those rights would be worth, if anything?” she asked him. “D’you mean to tell me you’ll trade a million dollars’ worth of rights in California against a thousand acres in the Fayoum? Either you know the rights you have bought behind my back are worthless and you’re merely trying to blackmail me, or — and I suppose it’s possible — you set a higher value on those one thousand Fayoum acres than you do on all my oil! There’s nothing doing, Moustapha Pasha! If you think there’s any value to those California rights you’ve bought, instruct your lawyers and bring suit. I’ll fight.”
He rose from his chair about as lividly angry as a rattler at a picnic.
“I am not a man accustomed to letting my plans be upset by a—”
“By a woman?”
“I shall proceed to enforce my rights.”
“Be a man!” she said, nodding.
He was about to make some acrid answer to that when the telephone rang to announce the arrival of a bevy of Joan Angela’s women friends, who had only just heard of her appearance on the scene. She invited them all up to the room, so the Egyptian and I had to make ourselves scarce.
“We will meet again,” he said stiffly, bowing himself out.
We were only one flight up, but he refused to walk downstairs. He would have considered it infra dig. However, you don’t have to agree with a man on all points before holding him awhile in conversation, so I sat down beside him on one of the row of rockers that faced the front window in the lobby.
“Do you know that young woman well?” he asked me.
“I saw a good deal of her several years ago,” I answered guardedly.
“Oh. So you are not her friend?”
“You’d have to ask her that.”
“Her lover, perhaps?”
“We’re all in love with her. It’s a sort of religion, or perhaps a cult, in this part of the world.”
“What are you? How do you stand toward her?” he asked, eyeing me sharply sideways.
“I’m an acquaintance.”
I would have kicked the brute for his insolence, if Joan Angela hadn’t notified me that she wished to ditch him herself. One doesn’t lightly deprive her of her privileges.
“Do you know her well enough to tell her the plain truth?” he asked.
“I know her a lo
t too well to lie to her,” I answered.
“Tell her this, then, for her own good. In my country I have power as well as wealth; the terms are synonymous in Egypt.”
“You need brains over here, if you hope to keep the one or get the other,” I answered.
“And it is brains that she will find in opposition to her! I am no fool!” he said, suddenly sitting sharply upright and facing me. “You tell her that! She has to deal with a man who is not accustomed to being refused by women! I tell you, I get my way! I know ropes! When I engage lawyers, they are smart ones, and I make them earn their fees! Do you know Egypt? You have heard of me? Then tell that young woman what you have heard of me! Tell her what happened when an American firm brought suit against me! Perhaps you heard of that too? I could have acquired her Fayoum property without troubling to cross what you call your herring-pond. It is only a question of paying lawyers.”
It occurred to me to let him ram his conceited head into trouble in his own way, and then, like the devil in Mr. Kipling’s poem, I thought of holy charity.
“Suppose you listen to me for one minute,” I suggested. “I won’t argue, but I’ll warn you. When you’re dealing with crooks and cowards, it may be the best plan — although I doubt that gravely — to be a crook and a coward, too. But as far as concerns Miss Leich, you are dealing with another kind of person altogether. Listen to me, now; don’t get impatient. I’m going to pin you in that chair and make you listen if you don’t act sensibly. Sit still.
“There’s nothing to stop you from getting title to that land in the Fayoum except your own indecency. Miss Leich doesn’t want it. She doesn’t need money. All she would insist on is a square deal. If you happen to know that that land is very valuable — that there’s gold on it, for instance, or oil, or something of that sort — all you need do is to lay your cards face-upward on the table.”
“You mean she’d sell?”
“I don’t know what she’d do. She’d give you a square deal of some kind.”
“All right,” he urged. “You get me title to that thousand acres and I’ll pay you. Suppose we agree on the amount of the commission now?”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I’m not in the commission business.”
“You want money, don’t you?”
“Not at present.”
“Well, then, what do you want?” he demanded. “What is your motive in buttonholing me, if you don’t want to do business?”
“I’m doing my best,” I said, “to resist a temptation to thrash you! I’m taking pity on you if you’d only realize it.”
“You talk of thrashing me and of taking pity in the same breath! You talk like the British Government! However, I believe I did not invite you to sit next to me.”
Like Dulcy in the drama, I counted ten. It works occasionally. Then:
“It’s a matter of common hospitality,” I said “You’re a stranger in a strange land, and I’m warning you. If you’ve business to do, you can do it but you’ll have to do it straight or you’ll suffer; for it simply happens that you’ve picked on a woman who belongs to a crowd that is honest. And they’re so honest that they’ll smash you all to pieces if they catch you playing under the table.”
“Such hypocrites, I suppose you mean!” he answered, getting out of his chair.
And at that he walked away with a sneer as perfect as a tom-cat’s that gives elbow-room, but no more, to an Airedale terrier.
CHAPTER IV. Zoom of the Zee-Bar-Zee
I met Mr. Zoom of Zezwinski and Zoom the next morning on my way to breakfast; he was taking the air with a half-dozen dogs. He believes in keeping himself before the public eye, does Ollie Zoom — enjoys a reputation for giving two-dollar bills to hoboes, provided that someone is looking, and rather poses as the man behind the legislature — a pose that costs him a lot less than running for office. In fact, he cultivates an atmosphere of influence based on clandestine information, and walks to the office in golf stockings to show what a democrat he can be, in spite of everything.
Ollie Zoom likes nothing better than to be accosted by a stranger in the street. It gives him a chance to get off some real, free, genuine Western stuff rather suggestive of a five-cent chromo of the Grand Canyon, or, if you prefer the simile, of a chain-store Camembert cheese, all smell and no flavour. He liked immensely to have me admire his German police-dogs, and told me all about their pedigrees, what they had cost to import, and which prizes he proposed to win with them. They were a melancholy-looking lot of brutes that lacked nothing so much as an honest job of work, but I flattered Zoom unrighteously about them and he grew chesty. When he learned that I was recently from New York he became at once a Colonel Cody in his own imagination. He had asked me pointblank where I came from, which no genuine Westerner would ever do.
“Ah! New York — that’s where you see the best dogs, of course, and the best of everything that money can buy. But you can’t buy life; that’s what I always say, you can’t buy life. Out here there’s life and lots of it. We’re not effete; we’re free and easy; there’s room to turn around in. What were you thinking of doing out here?”
I answered with one of those true statements of fact that act like bait in a wolf-trap.
“I represent an Eastern capitalist.”
The wolf walked straight in.
“Got any connections here?” he asked sharply, suddenly.
“No.”
“Well, say — you’ve come to the right city and met the right man! I’m Zoom of Zezwinski and Zoom — the Zee-bar-Zee, as the boys all call us. Here’s my card; suppose you come and see me at my office; at that corner, first flight up where you see that long row of big windows. Light, my boy! That’s my medicine. Let there be light! Who d’you represent?”
“The god of good appetites,” I answered. “I’m on my way to breakfast.”
“Hah! Nothing like this climate for making you hungry, eh? Punish a meal and then see me at nine-thirty! Suit you all right? I’ll make a point of being there. There’s nothing between the Coast and Utah I can’t tell you all about. See you later, then.”
He went one way and I the other, but I stopped on the stone bridge that crosses the Truckee River and pretended to watch the water, for the fun of seeing him stand and pretend to fool with his dogs in order to watch me. It was just as well I did that, because Joan Angela came out on the hotel steps and if I had walked straight along he would have seen me talking to her; but he proved less patient of the two, and I remained on the bridge until he turned a corner.
Joan Angela is one of those women who are good to see at eight in the morning. Lots of them look lovely by eleven o’clock, and, of course, in the afternoon and at night they are all adorable. But Joan comes out as if the dew were on her, and is wide awake and full of laughter from the start-hungry in the bargain!
She hurried me in to breakfast with the wife of the man who keeps the hotel cigar-stand, and we three had a table in a corner to ourselves. Joan Angela resumed an argument over the ham and eggs.
“You see, dear,” she said, “if you keep on being angry, when your husband comes you’ll make him angry too. Sam doesn’t stop to think. He’ll just use his gun and there’ll be trouble. I know Sam’s popular and so are you; and of course any jury around here would bring it in an accident, or self-defence, but what’s the use?”
“He ought to be shot! He’s no better than a coyote!”
“Exactly. Then give him the range,” advised Joan Angela. “The law is off coyotes. He’ll fall foul of someone whose business it is to go after his kind.”
“But think of the brute’s impudence!”
She was a pretty little woman, but her eyes were, and her forehead was, all netted up with angry wrinkles.
“Why should you of all people take the part of such a reptile? What is he, anyway? Some kind of prince? Does he think that any woman over here, just because she happens to be running her husband’s shop while he’s away, will be tickled to death to—”
“Ne
ver you mind,” laughed Joan Angela. “I’ve had lots and lots of that kind of proposal! He comes from Egypt, where they think that any woman who shows herself in public is doing it to attract them. They don’t know any better.”
“He’ll learn as soon as Sam gets back!”
“Sam need never know. Why, those Egyptian pashas used to get introductions to me and make me the most amazing offers. It’s really funny if you stop to think. There was one of them, a big, fat man like a Turk with a bulbous nose, who swore he’d turn Bolshevist and upset the world if I wouldn’t be his fourth wife. I told him he’d better be a Bolshevist than nothing. I called him Mafeesh Pasha — mafeesh means ‘nothing’ in their language. The nickname stuck, and ruined all his political chance: forever.”
“This brute didn’t even offer to make me his fourth wife,” said Sam’s sole partner, beginning to smile at last. “I could have treated that as a joke but—”
“It is a joke. His very name is a joke. Moustapha It suggests a sort of sly tom-cat with stage whiskers. He’s not worth getting Sam in trouble over. Would you have Sam get a rep for shooting tom-cats?”
“Speaking of cats,” I said, “I was talking with Zoom, of the Zee-bar-Zee, just now. Got a date with him at half-past nine. Are you quite sure about that title to your oil ranch?”
“Absolutely,” said Joan Angela, looking straight and frank at me with level brows. She comes of a crowd not given to deceiving either themselves or other people.
So I kept that appointment with Zoom after breakfast, and was ushered into an office hung with pictures of the West intended to convey the impression that Mr. Zoom held options on it all. There pictures of Mr. Zoom standing in the foreground of vast oil-well areas, and of Mr. Zoom inspecting mining properties. And on Mr. Ollie Zoom’s great, flat, mahogany desk there were samples of ore that would make your mouth water, if you didn’t know how easily such things can be obtained. Mr. Zoom produced cigars and turned his chair so as to have the light behind him, crossing one knee over the other with a sort of “make yourself at home and let’s talk intimately” gesture. He had good control of his face; his expression suggested no more than a friendly interest, but the corners of his mouth would have undeceived a widow with insurance money to invest-or so you’d think.