Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Yes. Mauser.”

  “Where?”

  “In my overcoat:”

  “Registered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful not to show it. Don’t use it.”

  “You bet.”

  “There’ll be men in the shrubbery. Two of them are my men,” said Lewis. “The other is Bulah Singh’s, stationed there to watch you and report your movements. Take no notice.”

  “Okay. Good-bye. And thanks for the help.”

  “Give my best to Tom Grayne.”

  “Sure. Any special message for Old Ugly-face, in case I meet him?”

  “Give him my love,” said Lewis.

  “Swell. I’ll do that.”

  “One moment, Gunning. Just one last word of advice! In any emergency, remember that one man — like the fool at Sarajevo with a pistol — can wreck the world as easily as a careless surgeon can kill a patient. So in tight places, don’t let yourself get hypnotized by appearances. Listen to the inner voice. Obey that.”

  Andrew grinned genially. “Same to you! Take good care of Elsa.”

  They shook hands. “Good luck,” said Lewis. “You will find your road to the border littered with intelligently unobservant spotters, who have been told to mind their own business. You won’t be questioned if you just say nothing. Don’t mention my name.”

  “I won’t mention any man’s name,” Andrew answered.

  He strode to the front door. Bompo Tsering opened it and they leaned together into a blast of rain. Lewis slammed the door shut behind them, like a cannon shot starting the game.

  CHAPTER 19

  Andrew trudged and splashed beside Bompo Tsering, out through the front gate and along the high stone wall. He took the middle of the road to make sure of being seen by Bulah Singh’s spies and to avoid the extra drenching from the overarching trees. A Ford car, badly in need of paint, loaded above window level with the dunnage that Elsa would need, stood parked in an alley.

  Curled on the loads was another of Andrew’s men — a gaunt, dish- faced countryman from somewhere north of Koko Nor — homesick for the sky-high steppes where he was weaned on wild ass meat and barley. He said nothing. Even when Andrew turned a flashlight on him he said never a word. Andrew climbed in and took the wheel. Bompo Tsering scrambled to the front seat beside him. The chilled, damp engine started at the eighth or ninth try.

  “So! By-um-by, at last. Our going!” said Bompo Tsering. To use English was the only way to get on even terms with Andrew. It was condescension — a polite hint that Andrew’s Tibetan was something less than perfect. “Oh, the happy, blessed country! By-um-by soon there now.”

  Andrew was unresponsive — busy peering through the storm for wash- outs on the winding road. But Bompo Tsering was in talkative mood, which was a fact well worth making note of, after his recent dumbness.

  “Gunnigun.” He never could master the pronunciation of Andrew’s name — had given up trying — had renamed him.

  “Yes.”

  “Your being peling—” He paused for effect. Peling means foreigner: a comprehensive word, as packed full of significance as the Greek word barbaros— “too much often many times your doing damn-fool thing.”

  “This time not doing. My much happy.”

  “Forgotten your dugpas already? Left ’em behind, eh? Not scared of ’em now?”

  “Dugpas being only spirits — can manage. Something else being much worse too bad. My thinking, making sorry. By-um-by now, your not doing, making too glad.”

  “What were you thinking that made you sorry?”

  “Your sending me my buying all this more stuff. My obedient. My buying. But my thinking this more stuff must meaning Ladee Elsa coming also! Uh-uh! No good. My sorry. Too much damn-fool God-damn saying no-no! Also catching maybe ‘nother baby — no good — no good! Uh-uh! Too much bad trouble — bad luck.”

  “She never hurt you, did she?”

  “My ‘fraid before. Now she not coming, my too much happy.”

  In proof of his high spirits Bompo Tsering began singing an endless nostalgic wail about the wonders, sacred and profane, of the Home of the Gods, on the Roof of the World, where the blessed snow — and dust-storms hide the holy treasures from the eyes of pelings, and the fortunate count their blessings beneath skies of azure. It was a good song, no more mendacious than the latest Broadway and Hollywood smash hit. He made it up himself, and believed every word of it, singing in time to the slap of a broken link against a rear mudguard; singing in the rain, in the dark, with his heartstrings thrumming like a harp within him to the call of his cruel homeland. The gaunt man from Koko Nor joined in the chant, selecting phrases that he liked and repeating them over and over, forcing Bompo Tsering to do the same, so that the song became a weirdly measureless duet.

  Andrew preferred that to conversation. He could think through the song without listening to it. Conversation might have made it difficult to hide the tart sub-flavor of the memory that Bompo Tsering had opened a window of Nancy Strong’s house, only a few moments before someone else fired a shot through the opposite window, missing Elsa by less that a foot. There was mud on the boots of the man from Koko Nor. There was no imaginable reason why Bompo Tsering should be Nancy Strong’s enemy. But by Bompo Tsering’s own admission, it was a relief to believe that Elsa was staying behind. The truth, like Bulah Singh’s spy in the bushes, was lurking somewhere amid dark facts. It seemed worth discovering.

  The smashing of Old Ugly-face’s photograph, and Nancy Strong’s conviction that the bullet had been meant for herself, were subjects for a kind of speculation that Andrew was in no mood for. Rain, and his job at the wheel, induced no taste for the occult, though he couldn’t avoid it. Even less to his taste would be to question Bompo Tsering and be regaled with circumstantial lies or, worse yet, irrelevant lies, like red herrings drawn crosswise on the trail of facts. Steering through the storm suggested the kind of thinking that was needed. As methodically as he had laid all his plans for the journey, he reviewed the facts. The hard ones. The bulky, lumpy ones with sharp outlines. They were like the milestones on the road. The essential, first, number one fact was that he didn’t want to get rid of Bompo Tsering. The man was as indispensable as he could afford to let one man be. The shot had fortunately missed, so there was no murder to avenge. It had missed at slightly above stomach level, to the left. Bompo Tsering was a bad shot, who almost always missed high right. Besides, Bompo Tsering had certainly not had time to run from one window to the other and fire the shot.

  The rain and the roar of cascading water aided concentration on the problem. Attention to the dark road, the almost automatic alertness at pedals and steering wheel, produced a black-out of all unrelated thoughts — almost like a blackboard, on which Andrew chalked in white the facts that he selected one by one, of which the first was the mud on the boots of the man from Koko Nor. It was the wrong color to have come from the place where he loaded the car. It was the color of the flower-bed earth in Nancy Strong’s garden. Perhaps a coincidence. More probably proof of guilt.

  But the man from Koko Nor was an ignorant herdsman, secretive by instinct, who would do what he was told. He was tolerably patient, but certainly prone to violence if told the proper story. Bompo Tsering could have told it. Andrew knew more facts about Bompo Tsering than the latter suspected. Originally Tom Grayne’s headman and only loaned to Andrew for the journey, Bompo Tsering’s loyalty to Tom was indisputable. It held unplumbed depths of selfless devotion, only qualified by Tibetan indifference to Western views of what is important and what isn’t. Andrew’s own loyalty to Tom, which had a different basis, had been nevertheless a bond of union between himself and Bompo Tsering — a sort of bridge across which gradually some of the Tibetan’s loyalty had transferred itself to Andrew. So divided allegiance was a fact to be carried in mind. Bompo Tsering was quite capable of sabotage for what he might believe was for Tom’s or Andrew’s own good. And there was more than one fork to the divided allegiance; quite
a number of forks, all of them likely to confuse and distort the reasoning of an otherwise faithful headman. Andrew’s mental blackboard began to be chalked up with the “knowns” of a compound equation that made the “unknown” look insoluble. But order came out of them after a while.

  For instance: Bompo Tsering was a devout Tantric Buddhist, happy in his religious convictions, superstitious to the verge of devil worship, and amused — not horrified, but moved to laughter — by the discovery that other people, and especially pelings believed in ridiculous other religions or possibly none. Bompo Tsering’s actions, especially when he had time to think about them, frequently were guided by a wish to scandalize and mock, as well as to serve and instruct his ignorant employer. Literal obedience, even good smart discipline, wasn’t difficult to get from Bompo Tsering up to a point that varied with the occasion; but his subtle reasoning processes could invent and justify extremely tricky means of gaining secret ends without incurring much risk of detection. That fact went up on the board while Bompo Tsering got out to remove a fallen tree from the road and got in again after tying a prayer rag to a bush as a precaution against having to repeat such disagreeable labor. Pelings can’t be taught that it is invisible devils who make the difficulties, so that all one needs to do is to forestall the devils with fluttering scraps of rag.

  He resumed his song when Andrew got the car going again. He sang now about a legendary sorceress who merited death but was blessed by a holy hermit, so that she changed her mind, and became harmless, and so escaped the arrow of ill fortune that her previous misdeeds had launched against her on the bowstring of the Higher Law. The man from Koko Nor grew silent. Andrew noted the fact and the words of the song; he connected the two, and went on thinking about Bompo Tsering.

  There was Bompo Tsering’s domestic situation to consider. His love life, such as it was. That was another divided allegiance — between local tribal custom and the almost universal Buddhist contempt for women, nowhere recommended in the Ancient Teaching, but invented, like the doctrine of original sin, by sex-obsessed ecclesiastics, who relegate women to the category of dogs and other graceless lingerers on the Path to Bliss. But there are notably extreme exceptions. Bompo Tsering was one of several brothers all married to the same woman; she was priestess, wife and matriarch in one — an almost absolute tyrant, whose husbands took turns at home and spent the intervals wandering, working, earning to support their common proprietress.

  So Bompo Tsering had mixed views about women. Probably he believed — although Andrew had never discussed it with him — that Tom and Andrew shared Elsa in some such domestic design as his own. Certainly his mental attitude toward Elsa was mixed of contempt and respect; veiled and made indistinguishable by his Tibetan good humor and by his conviction that it doesn’t much matter what pelings think or do, as long as they don’t steal Tibet. He had even found it amusing to obey Elsa when it wasn’t too inconvenient. But he was rather self-conscious about it, rather ashamed. And he had never made any secret of his superstitious prejudice against women on expeditions. As such they were bringers of bad luck. So the fact went on the blackboard with the others, that Bompo Tsering felt no important loyalty to Elsa. There would be room in his consciousness for almost any other emotion that the circumstances, or a prejudice, or someone, might suggest. Who might be the someone? Who could have persuaded him to cooperate in the attempt to shoot Elsa? He undoubtedly had not fired the shot. But he certainly did cause the diversion that brought Elsa into full view from the opposite window. Was that a coincidence?

  Several possibilities crowded into Andrew’s mind. He rejected at once, as too improbable, the idea that Bulah Singh might have hypnotized Bompo Tsering. And it was a certainty that Bulah Singh did not want Elsa murdered. But it was no secret from Andrew that one of Bulah Singh’s spies had been camping all winter on Bompo Tsering’s trail, had lost money to him, and had had a thousand opportunities to suggest that secret favors beget favors in return. Tibetans have a passion for intrigue; they always crave what is withheld and over-reach themselves to get it, enjoying the bartering more than the actual profit. That spy might easily have convinced the homesick Bompo Tsering that Bulah Singh could close the passes into Tibet against every member of Andrew’s party, unless compensated by a valuable proof of reciprocity, paid in advance. Such talk would have tickled Bompo Tsering’s undisciplined loyalty. It would have awakened his delight in mysterious byplay. It would have spurred his eagerness to get started homeward. It would have excited his high opinion of himself as a diplomat. The nicely motivated murder of anyone of whom he disapproved would no more trouble Bompo Tsering’s conscience, than it would Bulah Singh’s. Tibetans are pious people, but they amazingly indulge in clandestine trickery for which the threatened penalty, in which they thoroughly believe, is millions of years in a merciless, fantastically realistic hell. They behave as if they want to go to hell.

  But there was this difference: the Sikh was unsentimental; he hadn’t any of the juice of magnanimity. Bompo Tsering, on the other hand, would be unlikely to murder anyone against whom he had no ground for fear, mistrust or hatred. Bompo Tsering wouldn’t murder Nancy Strong. But to cause Elsa to be killed because, in his opinion, she might bring bad luck, might seem to him a praiseworthy act, especially if the idea of killing someone — anyone — were suggested to him, in the first instance, by the agent of a man whom he had reason to fear. Scruples have a way of disappearing under pressure — squeezed out.

  But fear of Bulah Singh might also — almost certainly would — inspire a delicious, amusing desire to doublecross that gentleman. It would be a typical Tibetan reaction to a blackmailer’s effort to make him a cat’s-paw. Loyalty to Andrew — certain knowledge that Andrew detested Bulah Singh — would be an added inducement to put a hot one over on the Sikh.

  Andrew watched for a chance to discover whether his thought was leading in the right direction. During a pause in the endless song Bompo Tsering spat through the window and then shot a question:

  “Gunnigun! Why you not being much happy, same like we making singsong? Blessed happy land soon by-um-by not too far.”

  “I’m thinking about Bulah Singh” said Andrew. “He might overtake us.”

  The reaction was instantaneous. Bompo Tsering unbosomed himself of triumph that came like steam from a safety valve. There was pressure behind the words. He selected them, from Andrew’s special vocabulary reserved for use in tight places, when yaks and ponies give up and men malinger:

  “Hot damn! Son of a bitch! Bastard! Bugger no good! God-damn cockeye! Kick ‘um!” Then, profoundly mysterious: “Gunnigun! You by-um-by no more caring about Bulah Singh. My fixing ‘um. So. Hot damn!”

  Inexperience would have thrust into that opening with sharp questions. But Andrew knew his man. The half-hint, that had steamed off the kettle of truth, was a relief to Bompo Tsering’s nerves; but it was also a trick to discover what line Andrew’s thought was taking. If Andrew had betrayed even veiled curiosity, the truth would have retired into its hole like a mouse that smells cat. The right strategy was to change the subject.

  “Watch for leopards,” said Andrew. “The headlights dazzle ’em. If one of ’em should get out from under the wheels in time, he’d likely as not jump in on us.”

  Bompo Tsering began singing about leopards. Andrew resumed his review of the facts.

  Bulah Singh believed Elsa was staying behind. But Elsa would be no use to the Sikh while under Nancy Strong’s protection. Nancy Strong was in Bulah Singh’s way. She probably knew or guessed too many of his secrets. She had very likely offended him deeply; she was notorious for befriending victims of police brutality. It wasn’t in the least improbable that Bulah Singh wanted Nancy Strong murdered, and wanted the job done at exactly the right moment to coincide with other moves on the board. He was evidently a time-table plotter, and pretty good at it. The bullet might have been meant for Nancy — might have been — in the beginning. But artful beginnings often have boomerang ends.


  Not to be wholly ignored was Nancy Strong’s conviction that the shot had been intended for herself. The photograph business was beyond the pale of Andrew’s tolerance; he didn’t let his mind go wandering into that metaphysical swamp. But he did trust Nancy’s intuition. He had good reason to trust it. Her bare word that she knew the bullet had been meant for herself was at least as good as anyone’s who might choose to contradict her. Only so far there was no proof! The bullet missed. Had it been aimed at the wrong target, contrary to someone’s orders?

  If Bulah Singh, personally or through his agent, had supplied Bompo Tsering with a pistol and had persuaded him, by threats and promises, to shoot Nancy Strong, then it was not unthinkable that Bompo Tsering might have told off the man from Koko Nor to do the job, but to shoot Elsa instead. His oriental mind would calculate that after the event Bulah Singh would be too deeply implicated to dare anything except to smother enquiry and expedite the expedition’s departure northward in every way possible. A bit subtle. A bit complicated. But not too improbable.

  It would explain Bompo Tsering’s almost irrepressible triumph. He might even have been clever enough to contrive that Bulah Singh or his agent was overheard when he made the murderous proposal — or to make the Sikh think he had been overheard. He might believe he had completely outwitted Bulah Singh — by instructing the peasant from Koko Nor to shoot Elsa, not Nancy. Tibetans can’t be expected to think of everything. It had probably never occurred to Bompo Tsering that Elsa’s death by an assassin’s bullet would have blown all secrets galley-west and have made the return to Tibet impossible.

  Andrew wondered how much Lewis had guessed, or suspected, or knew about that shot through the window. He rather wished he had questioned Lewis about it. The man was a nut. Any man who can run a bughouse — and study hypnotism and world politics — and be an authority on poisons — and boss a very important branch of the secret intelligence — and believe in Jesus — couldn’t be anything else than a nut. But he was a good guy. He liked Lewis — trusted him.