by Talbot Mundy
A policeman with the water streaming from his black cape nodded to him.
“Oh, hello Smithers. Nice day for your job!”
“H-awful! But we ‘as to get used to it.”
“When do they close the Aliens Registration Office at Bow Street?”
“Five o’clock I think, but you’ve plenty of time. I didn’t know you were a foreigner.”
“American, born in London, Smithers. Dual citizenship. Two sets of very suspicious officials to convince I’m not a traitor to the human race.”
Tom Grayne grinned, but as a matter of fact he savagely resented the indignity of having to report in person and register his address every month. He had a right to British citizenship if he should choose to claim it. He chose not. As he saw it, he had a right to be and to do what he pleased, and to go where he pleased, provided he didn’t make a nuisance of himself. He detested bureaucracy, hated to ask favors, loathed having to explain himself, and liked people who didn’t put on artificial lugs.
He wasn’t unreasonable about anything else, so far as he knew, but by the time he turned out of the Strand toward Bow Street police station he was feeling hostile, and he was glad of it. He wanted to punch somebody. But there was nobody to punch except a few poor devils trudging through the rain, and a policeman leading along a prisoner. One does not punch policemen profitably, and besides, a police man especially in London is what he pretends to be, so he doesn’t stir antagonism, or shouldn’t. But the smug stride of that particular one, and the melancholy resignation of his prisoner, who trudged beside him un-handcuffed, goaded Tom’s already pugnacious disposition and aroused his sympathy at the same time. He felt an almost irresistible impulse to horn in and be a nuisance.
Even so, he might have gone about his own business, down in the basement, but there was something familiar about the prisoner’s appearance that held his attention. He hesitated. He didn’t recognize the prisoner. He had never seen him before; he was positive about that. But he felt the same sort of wordless and unreasoned impulse that makes a man choose something unusual for dinner. He followed through the main door to the desk, where an alert-looking sergeant stood ready to book the new arrival. Tom was just in time to overhear the charge. Then he knew instantly that his hunch had been right. Memory overflowed.
“Thö-pa-ga — of the Josays Sept of the Kyungpo — whatever that means — country of origin Tibet — home town Lhasa.”
“How d’you spell it? Here, give me that warrant. Go on.”
“Last known address—”
“Yes, all right, that’s written here.”
“Charged with noncompliance with the Aliens Registration Act, under section—”
“Yes, that’s on the warrant.”
“Arrested at eighty-eight Oxted Street.”
“Say anything?”
“Said nothing.”
“All right. Cell eighteen.”
“Bail!” said Tom Grayne, suddenly, as if he were making the high bid at an auction.
“Who are you, sir?”
Before Tom could answer a man entered who looked much more Mongolian than the prisoner. The prisoner might have passed for a New Orleans quarter-breed at first glance. He was a good-looking fellow, with a sad face and an air of patient resignation. But this other man looked like a devil. His head was framed in the hood of a long, black, glistening waterproof. He had brilliant, sunken eyes, high cheek-bones and a skin like dirty parchment. He was several inches more than six feet tall, and fairly broad in proportion. More like a figure of death than a human being. He spoke rapidly to the prisoner, who stared sullenly but didn’t answer. The desk-sergeant caught one word, thrice repeated:
“Shang-shang? Sounds like Chinese.”
Tom unbuttoned his overcoat in an unconscious gesture. This was something he could lend a hand at. He interpreted:
“Tibetan. Something like a cross between a harpy and a nightmare, with eight legs.”
“Is there one in the Zoo?” the sergeant asked.
“No, nor in Nuttall’s Dictionary. A shang-shang is employed by magicians in Tibet to terrify people to death and then to hound them into hell after death.”
“Never heard of that one,” said the sergeant, “although we’ve some strange superstitions in London — more than you might suppose. We had some witches in here a week ago, arrested for alleged practises that ‘ud make your hair stand on end if you weren’t used to horrors — and bunkum.”
Slowly, in Tibetan, through thin peculiarly mobile lips that seemed to enjoy the flavor of the words, and with his face thrust close to Tom Grayne’s, the man who looked like death spoke:
“You-who-know-the-meaning-of-a-shang-shang — if-you- do-not-wish-to-add-experience-to-hearsay — let-alone-that- one-who-is-a-stranger-to-you!”
“Go to hell,” Tom answered, in plain English. He added the equivalent in the Tibetan language.
“What’s your name, you?” said the sergeant.
The tall Tibetan produced a soiled card from an inner pocket. The sergeant laid it on the desk and speared it with a pencil-point.
“Doctor Noropa, eh? What kind of doctor? Medicine? Law? Music? Philosophy? We’d a man in here the other day who called himself a doctor of blackmail. What do you want here? You a friend of the prisoner?”
Instead of answering, the tall man turned and walked out. The sergeant wrote on a slip of paper the name and address that were on the card and handed the paper to a man in uniform at a desk behind him.
“Check that. Have him followed. Step lively. — And now you, sir” — he stared penetratingly at Tom Grayne— “I think you mentioned bail. Are you a householder?”
“No. Is there any charge against the prisoner besides not having registered as an alien?”
“No, not at present. But that one’s serious. He’s liable to imprisonment and subsequent deportation. If you’re not a householder—”
“Phone,” said Tom Grayne. He went to the coin-in-the-slot machine, in the booth in the corner. The prisoner laid the contents of his pockets on the desk; he had been marched off to a cell before Tom was out of the booth.
“Sergeant, I have phoned to Professor Mayor at an address in Bloomsbury. He will be here with a solicitor’s clerk as fast as a taxi can bring him.”
“Professor Mayor, eh?” The sergeant’s manner changed perceptibly. “Of Bloomsbury? Not Clarence Mayor? The Home Office Expert?”
“British Museum — specialist on Tibetan manuscripts and works of art.”
“That’s the man. The Home Office calls him in on special cases. Does he know the prisoner?”
“I think not. But he is as interested as I am.”
“What makes you so interested, if I may ask?”
“Tibet is my subject.”
“Ever been there?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Tom Grayne went outside, and below to the basement. He reported no change of address. There was no one else in the office. The uniformed clerk behind the long counter was civil and inclined to make conversation:
“With all the hotels and boarding-houses there are in London, I can’t help wondering why you stay at that ad dress, sir. Not that it’s any concern of mine. I’m merely curious.”
“I don’t mind telling you,” said Tom Grayne. “It’s inexpensive and I can live there as I please. I live hard, so as to keep fit. There are no luxuries in the country I hope to re visit before long, and the climate might easily kill a man who’d lived soft. I even practise not eating for days at a time.”
“Some folk,” said the clerk, “starve ‘emselves just to annoy the police. We’d one man in the cells who wouldn’t eat because, he said, he was a high-caste Hindu, but he turned out to be a Scotch bigamist.”
Tom returned to the upstairs office and waited for Mayor, who came in presently wiping rain from gold-rimmed spectacles and followed by a stoop-shouldered lawyer’s clerk in a bowler hat, who went straight to the desk.
“Silly fellow!
” said Mayor, wiping his pinkish, boyish-looking old cheeks with a big silk handkerchief. “Befriending shang-shang victims? What next? Thö-pa-ga, you say his name is? Wasn’t he at Oxford?”
“Yes. I thought you’d be interested.”
“If I weren’t, I shouldn’t have left a comfortable fireside, tea, buttered toast and a book.”
“Come and have supper at my place and we’ll find out why this fellow was in hiding.”
“Good heavens! Your place? You live in a fish-shed, don’t you?”
“Not quite. I can make you comfortable. Good grub. I have a notion it might be dangerous to take him to your house.”
“Dampness — fog — rats! Tom Grayne, I haven’t your fortitude. However, perhaps it’s wiser. Very well. I’ll risk my health and my opinion of you.”
The formalities of bailing out the prisoner took time. Mayor was at the desk for several minutes. After that, he went into the phone booth, talked for a long time and emerged chuckling as if he had played a good joke.
“Can you accommodate four, Tom? I’ve invited O’Mally.”
“Who is O’Mally?”
“Horace Farquarson O’Mally of Harley Street, you ignoramus. Consulting physician to half the crowned heads and multimillionaires in the world.”
“Okay. What’s he good at?”
“He likes Chateau Yquem. You’ll have to stop and get some at a place I’ll show you. He can smell a vintage from a mile off.”
Thö-pa-ga was under bail by the time O’Mally arrived, very fashionably dressed. Top hat, spats, a monocle. He looked as tough as a prize-fighter, with Chesterfieldian manners.
“Came away in the middle of an operation, I suppose?” said Mayor. “Or did you leave another death-bed?”
“Who told you my patients ever die?” O’Mally answered, in a voice like a disciplined thunder-storm. “Is this the man?” He refixed his monocle, stared at Thö-pa-ga for about two electric seconds, and then faced Tom Grayne.
“Our host,” said Mayor.
“I have heard of you,” said O’Mally. “How do you do?” He shook hands.
“Don’t you tell him how you are,” said Mayor. “Let him find out. He will cut you open if you let him.”
No one spoke to Thö-pa-ga; he stood looking orientally calm, incurious, melancholy. The solicitor’s clerk snapped his little handbag shut and vanished into the rain.
“My car is waiting,” said O’Mally.
Mayor laughed: “I once rode in a royal wheelbarrow. I knew a gardener at Windsor Castle when I was a small boy. I know how to behave. My feet are wet; will they ruin the carpet?”
O’Mally and Mayor raised their hats to the Law, or the desk, or the King or somebody — perhaps to the sergeant; he looked pleased. Tom Grayne thrust his arm through Thö-pa-ga’s and followed, into a Rolls Royce limousine that bore an almost microscopical coat of arms on the door panel.
CHAPTER 2.
“Thö-Pa-Ga is Time-Is-Come.”
ALL London was streaming homeward for the night. The limousine with its oddly assorted passengers sped along streets that were rivers of liquid fire, with the traffic incredibly borne on the surface. They stopped for several minutes at a wine shop favorably known to Mayor, whence Tom Grayne emerged with a brown paper parcel. Thence they headed for Kew and the River, where Tom gave intricate directions to the chauffeur, and at last they had to leave the limousine to thread their way on foot, in almost darkness, through pools of slush, beneath dripping eaves. O’Mally didn’t seem to mind that his top hat was being ruined, but Mayor was plaintive; he had to be lent a hand along the slippery and rather rotten planking of a wharf. But at the end of the wharf was shelter.
Tom unlocked the door of what looked in the dark like a fish- or net-shed. But when he lighted a couple of oil lamps the place was cosy enough. There was a big stove; he had that going in a minute. There was everything a man of Tom Grayne’s disposition needed, and nothing he didn’t need. Bunks, cooking-pots, shelves of books, a sink, two tables, a few chairs, two big lockers.
“Umn! No woman, eh,” O’Mally remarked.
“Good job, too,” said Mayor. “Can you imagine the kind of woman Grayne would select?”
“He would choose an actress,” said O’Mally. “Each of them would try to make the other famous and there’d be the usual divorce. Or am I in poor form this evening?”
“Some one died on you?” Mayor asked.
“This place,” said Tom, “was rented by a retired sea captain, who fixed it up to suit himself. But some one thought he had money and murdered him. He died on that bunk with his throat cut, and I read about it in the paper — front-page illustration with an X to mark the spot, and so on — three-day mystery. I came to look and found the landlord sure he’d never get another tenant because people are afraid of ghosts. So I rented it cheap.”
“And the ghosts?” asked Mayor.
Thö-pa-ga shuddered. Tom was already cooking supper. Coffee was on. A pot of stew was simmering and beginning to smell delicious. Tom laid the table. Mayor opened the paper package.
“I told you Chateau Yquem!”
“I liked the shape of those bottles better. It’s Berncasteler Doktor ‘21. Help yourself.”
O’Mally took the corkscrew from its nail on the wall and pulled a cork expertly. He shook down his clinical thermometer and inserted it in the neck of the bottle.
“Good enough,” he remarked after a minute. “I am now in no hurry.”
“No more patients?” Mayor asked. “Have they all found you out?”
“I am on vacation — first in nearly four years. I catch the eight o’clock boat train for Harwich to-morrow evening. Going to Moscow. A man of whom I’m jealous has cut off a dog’s head and kept it alive for three days, during which it eats and reacts to sight and sound. That interests me. Where’s a wine glass? These they?” He produced cut glasses from an old sea captain’s wine chest. “Are they clean?”
“Boiled.”
“What’s that delicious smell?” asked Mayor.
“Lobster mulligan. Or do you mean the toasted barley? I eat barley. So, I think, will our friend.”
Mayor was pulling off his boots and socks. Thö-pa-ga was doing nothing, saying nothing, seated on one of the bunks with the palms of his hands on the edge, as if he expected to have to jump up at a second’s notice.
“May I have that dish-pan nearly full of hot water, and then some mustard,” said Mayor. “Unlike O’Mally, I’m important. Serious things might happen if I were to catch a bad cold.”
O’Mally filled a wine glass. “Yes,” he said, “if you should die, and this mysterious gentleman from Tibet should take it into his head to disappear, they would confiscate the house you have pledged as security.” He walked over to the Tibetan. “Drink this.”
Thö-pa-ga shook his head.
“Abstainer? Never mind. It’s medicine. Drink it”
“What do you suppose is wrong with him?” Tom Grayne asked, stirring the mulligan.
“I know,” O’Mally answered. “It requires no thought whatever. Come along, young fellow — you understand English, don’t you? Drink this.”
The Tibetan hesitated, smiled wistfully and then suddenly obeyed. He swallowed the wine at a gulp. The wind howled under the eaves and he shuddered either at that or at the feel of the wine as it went down. O’Mally nodded.
“My professional advice would be: return as soon as possible to Tibet.” He was watching Thö-pa-ga’s eyes. “He will talk presently. He has been wanting to talk all the way from Bow Street. He has been thoroughly frightened, and he is suffering from—”
“Words of one syllable, please!” said Mayor. “I can use twenty-one-syllable Sanskrit words, but mine mean something.” Mayor was sloshing his feet in the dish-pan and the steam from the hot mustard-and-water had dimmed his spectacles. He wiped them, to watch Thö-pa-ga.
“He is suffering from being too near sea level,” said O’Mally. “If he really is from Tibet, he is used to a minim
um altitude of twelve or fourteen thousand feet. It is as if he had taken to deep-sea diving without the proper physique and training. Barometric pressure for prolonged periods, plus a constitutional lack of resistance to micro-organisms that don’t exist at high altitudes, produce a mental and physical change. But those are a vicious circle; one produces the other. He will die if he doesn’t return to Tibet.”
“I would rather die,” Thö-pa-ga said suddenly, in good English. The wind howled. They all shuddered.
“Damn our English climate!” Mayor exclaimed. “They say it’s worse in Tibet, but I don’t believe it!” It wasn’t the wind that had made him shudder. He knew that.
Tom Grayne struck the stew-pot with an iron spoon:
“Yesterday’s mulligan, warmed up — canned soup added — homemade barley bread baked by a Stornoway fisherman’s widow, New Zealand butter, American cheese, celery and white wine. Come and get it.”
They drew up chairs to the table. Thö-pa-ga elected to eat mulligan. Tom Grayne munched barley alone.
“Wise enough, if you vary your diet now and then. But it’s hell to be wise,” said O’Mally. “Are you in training?”
“Yes, for Tibet. The important thing is not to eat too often. Discipline your belly.”
“Don’t forget the sugar. When do you go to Tibet?”
There was no time to answer. There came a peremptory knock at the door. It sounded authoritative, like a police man’s, only there was a suggestion of deliberate rhythm, as if it might be a prearranged signal. A weird howl of wind drove squalling rain against the side of the hut. Beneath, the river sucked and splashed amid wharf-piles. Thö-pa-ga froze motionless.
“Now I understand why I came,” O’Mally remarked. He poured wine for Thö-pa-ga. “This is very interesting.”
Tom Grayne went to the door and opened a peephole. He could see nothing; it was all dark outside.
“Who’s there?” he demanded.