Fire, Burn!

by John Dickson Carr

  “Ah! That’s when both red and black make the same number. Thirty-one, thirty-four, what you like. Fortunately, it don’t happen often.” My lord frowned a little. “In that case, the bank rakes in all the money.”

  “The bank rakes in …” Cheviot was beginning, astounded in his turn, when he caught himself, coughed, and nodded.

  “Simple, ain’t it?” inquired my lord.

  “Very. Shall we go on up?”

  On the landing they faced a door which clearly was of thick iron, without any peep-hole. Cheviot, who was reflecting, hardly saw it.

  Rouge-et-noir was not only simple; it was simple-minded. With six packs of cards being dealt, the same number for red and black would come up more often than the punters, obtuse in their lust for play, seemed to imagine; and then the bank won all. The bank, in fact, took no risk whatever: the punters were merely betting against each other.

  “Now my game,” exulted my lord, “is roly-poly. I’ll break ’em tonight; you see if I don’t. Besides, there’s always an attraction at the roulette-table. Kate de Bourke.”

  “Oh, yes,” Cheviot agreed, as though the name were well known to him. “Kate de Bourke.”

  My lord winked.

  “She’s Vulcan’s property,” he said, “but she’s anybody’s woman. Always at the roulette-table, you’ll have remarked. If her name wasn’t first Katy Burke, then mine’s not—well, never mind. Hair like a raven! Plump as a partridge! Dusky as—”

  He paused. Some signal by bell-wire must have been sent by the footman below.

  Without noise, without any sound of its felt-covered bars inside, the four-inch-thick iron door swung open. Another footman stood there: Cheviot found himself looking at dead eyes and a face-scar covered with powder.

  Out of the broad, high gaming-room stirred a breath of thick, stuffy, almost unbreathable air, heat-laden and foul. The room must occupy the full width of the house.

  There were no windows. Curtains of yellow velvet, with looped pelmets in scarlet, muffled most of the wall-space down to a deep-piled scarlet carpet with yellow rings for its pattern. In the wall towards his left, Cheviot saw a marble fireplace where a too-large fire roared and shimmered. Against the other wall, towards his right, white-draped tables bore silver platters of sandwiches or lobster-salad, bowls of fruit, and long ranks of bottles.

  But, most of all, he was conscious of the fever pulsing here, as high crowns of wax-lights shone down on the gaming-tables.

  Two tables—each one eighteen feet long, rounded at the ends, and covered in green baize with bright markings for the stakes—were set with their long sides longways towards the iron door.

  The nearer table they had marked out for rouge-et-noir, with large red triangles at one end and large black triangles at the other. A little obscured from Cheviot’s view, the far table resembled an ordinary modern roulette-bank except that the wheel appeared of cruder design.

  At each table, facing him, one croupier sat in the centre. Beside each stood a second croupier, holding a long-handled wooden rake.

  “By-by!” said my lord, waving to Cheviot and moving soundlessly away on the thick carpet. His voice seemed to ring loudly.

  For there was silence here except for the mutter of a croupier’s voice, the slap of cards upturned, the skitter of the ball in the wheel, or the rattle of the rake drawing in ivory counters.

  Cheviot, his eyes moving to spot Vulcan’s blacklegs and bruisers, approached the table. It was pretty well patronized, mostly by men in flawless evening-clothes, wearing their hats, and sitting close to the table in flimsy imitation-Chippendale chairs.

  The croupier, sweeping his glance along to see that both red and black were covered in white ivory counters stamped from five pounds to a hundred, dealt rapidly for black.

  Cheviot moved close to the table as the cards flicked over.

  “Six!” muttered the croupier. “Deal to red.”

  A young-old man, who looked about forty but was more probably twenty-one or -two, breathed hard and drew his chair closer.

  “Got it already!” he whispered. “Red’s bound to get under that! Bound to! I’ll wager another—”

  “Sh-h!”

  The croupier dealt to the other side. His wrist turned quickly, but not so quickly that anyone failed to see the pips of the cards.

  He dealt the queen of diamonds, the knave of clubs, and the ten of hearts, each counting ten. He hesitated, and then turned up the eight of clubs.

  “Seven!” he said. “Black wins.”

  The young-old man, his face sagging as though pulled down from under the eyelids, muttered something and started up from his chair. Beside him a stoutish, bluff-looking man, with the air of a retired naval officer and the whitest of linen shirt-frills, reached up gently and pulled him down again.

  Cheviot circled round the table and approached the roulette-bank. The fire popped and spat, its shifting light reflected in the rows of bottles across the room.

  There was a little cry from someone at the roulette-table as one play ended. The counters rattled under the rake. This table was crowded. Footmen moved soundlessly over the carpet, carrying salvers and offering claret, brandy, or champagne.

  As he neared the roulette-table, Cheviot stopped and glanced up. All along the back wall, about fourteen feet up and a little back from the roulette-bank, ran a narrow gallery whose handrail also resembled gilded iron scroll-work, but was more probably gilded wood. This gallery, with its own set of yellow-velvet curtains and scarlet pelmets, had a narrow staircase curving down at each end to the gaming-room floor.

  “That’s it,” he thought.

  The yellow curtains did not conceal three doors facing out on the gallery. The middle one was of heavy polished mahogany, bearing the gilt initial V.

  “Vulcan’s private office. If he’s thrifty, and Freddie’s description was accurate, and my plan has any value …”

  He looked down again at the thronged roulette-table. Two women sat there.

  One of them, from my lord’s description, must be that Kate de Bourke who belonged to Vulcan.

  She sat at the right-hand end of the table, her back towards the white-draped ledges of sandwiches and lobster-salad. Kate was smallish, handsome, and surly. Her shining black hair was drawn back, exposing the ears and terminating in a long coil. No flash lit up her vivid eyes, of strong whites against dark-brown iris and dead-black pupil. In her right hand she held a pile of counters, absent-mindedly dropping them one atop another on the table. She dreamed sullen dreams, her thick lips compressed.

  The other woman …

  Cheviot’s glance ran along the far side of the table, to a chair just to the right of the first croupier.

  The other woman was Flora.

  “Lay your wagers, ladies and gentlemen.” Thin, automatic, sing-song: the croupier. “Lay-your-wagers; lay-your-wagers; lay-your-wagers.”

  Flora had been conscious of his presence long before he was conscious of hers; perhaps from the time he entered. She sat with eyelashes lowered, in a dark-blue velvet gown bordered with gold: low-cut, but with shoulder-straps and, as with most evening-gowns, having at the shoulders short blue-and-gold cloth projections like narrow epaulettes.

  A little pile of ivory counters stood on the green-covered table before her. Flora’s heavy yellow hair was dressed as it had been the night before, and as Kate’s was now. Just behind her chair, watching, on guard every second, stood her liveried and muscular coachman.

  Briefly, she raised her eyes towards Cheviot.

  Contrition, apology, appeal were in that glance. As soon as they looked at each other, it was with an intimacy as great as though they were in each other’s arms.

  “What are you doing here?” her glance said, with a little of apprehension.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Flora looked down again, disturbed, touching the counters. The coachman recognized Cheviot and drew a breath of relief.

  Carelessly Cheviot strolled round the side of
the roulette-table, where many persons were snatching glasses from the footmen before placing their bets.

  The gambling-fever, rising all about him, did not touch him at all. He could never understand the strange minds of those who, of an evening, would occupy themselves with cards when there were books to be read. True, there were other temptations. Except for his self-discipline, he could easily have gone to the devil with drink and women.

  In fact, as a very young man during another life now gone, he very nearly had done so. When he came down from Cambridge, some girl raved and refused to marry him because of his determination to enter the police instead of reading law. He was too stubborn to yield, but he had gone on a drinking-bout of dangerous duration. The girl had said—

  Cheviot’s mind wavered and grew dark.

  Memory submerged; he could not even remember her name or what she looked like.

  The foul air, the roaring fire, the movement of guests who did not even play but strolled slowly round the yellow-hung room, darkened his eyesight and made his head spin.

  He counted to ten, and his sight grew clear. So long as he could remember police-work, it didn’t matter. If that failed him too—

  He found himself on the other side of the roulette-table, sauntering past it. There was the board, in yellow squares with black or red numbers on either side of the clumsy wheel. It had—

  His wits jumped to complete alertness.

  When the roulette-ball fell into the number marked zero, the bank won every stake on the board. This wheel had not only a zero, but a double-zero. There was something else too.

  “Lay your wagers, ladies and gentlemen! Lay-your-wagers; lay-your-wagers-lay-your-wagers!”

  Cheviot edged into the group, his thigh against the table, between Flora and the first croupier. The coachman bowed respectfully and stood aside.

  Cheviot did not speak to Flora. Gently he put his hand on her shoulder. The flesh was warm and damp, and the shoulder trembled slightly. Again she gave him only the quickest of backward looks. Flora’s face was a little flushed and moist where the rice-powder had run beneath the heat of melting wax-lights.

  “Good evening,” Cheviot said loudly, to the nearer of the two croupiers, and to draw attention to himself.

  The croupier looked up to nod and smile, showing decayed teeth. He said, “Good evening, Mr. Cheviot,” and returned to his sing-song whisper as punters thrust out counters on the table.

  Cheviot leaned past to address the second croupier.

  “To begin with,” he said, even more loudly, “let me have a modest two hundred. In fifty-pound counters, if you please.”

  From his hip-pocket he took out the money he had drawn from Groller’s Bank. A thousand pounds, in five-pound notes, makes a sizeable lump of money.

  Instantly a dozen pairs of eyes slid round towards him; slid round, then grew opaque or filmed.

  At the rouge-et-noir table he had already spotted nine of Vulcan’s blacklegs or bruisers. There were at least four among those who lounged in the room and watched. With the twelve at the roulette-bank, on both sides of an eighteen-foot-long table with the wheel in the middle, that brought the number up to twenty-five.

  There were probably more, say four or five: thirty among a hundred and twenty guests.

  The second croupier, who had before him an immense heap of notes and gold as well as piles of counters, merely nodded. Shoving the rest of the money into his hip-pocket, Cheviot proffered forty five-pound notes and received four counters stamped fifty each. He was careless or clumsy in receiving them.

  One counter slipped out of his hand. It fell on the carpet beside the first croupier, who presided over the wheel. Bending down to get it, Cheviot took a quick look at the croupier’s right foot beside the imitation-Chippendale chair.

  Then he straightened up.

  “Tonight,” he declared in a ringing voice, “I am inspired.”

  And, remembering Sergeant Bulmer’s collar-numerals, he reached out and planked down a hundred pounds on the black thirteen.

  This time there was a sharp stir round the whole table.

  “Jack—!” Flora began, in instinctive protest.

  Again he pressed her shoulder, reassuringly.

  It was as he had hoped. Whenever a man shows supreme self-confidence in backing a number against ruinous odds, there is a rush to follow him.

  Faces were thrust out, reddened with claret or brandy. Hands scrabbled among ivory counters. The character known to Cheviot only as my lord, his nose fiery with more drink, tossed a twenty-pound counter on the black thirteen. So did a stout young man with yellow side-whiskers, at the far side of the table, whom Cheviot vaguely remembered seeing at Lady Cork’s ball.

  Others, more cautious, backed red or black, odds or evens, above the line or below it. At most they quartered four numbers, with the exception of a very tall, lean young gentleman who stood up with the black-browed air of a man playing Hamlet and dropped counters totalling sixty pounds on the red six. Then, his hat jammed over his eyes, he sat down again.

  The board was laden, the game heavy; and the croupier’s drone changed.

  “The game is finished!” he said, standing up and speaking almost clearly. “Nothing-more-goes; nothing-more-goes; nothing-more-goes.”

  With one hand he spun the red-and-black wheel in one direction. With the other he tossed the little ivory ball in the direction opposite.

  Dead silence, except for the skittering noise of the ball.

  It fell into the wheel, bounced out again, and swirled round the outer ebony rim. It hesitated, running backwards and forwards on the rim. It began to slow down.

  As it did so, Detective Superintendent Cheviot was again apparently careless with his two remaining counters. One dropped on the carpet. He bent to retrieve it; looked quickly at the croupier’s right foot; and straightened up.

  The ball stopped, as the wheel slowed down to a shade of motion. The ball swayed a little, and then bounced with a click into zero.

  Round the table ran a hiss of indrawn breath, a murmur like one stifled groan, the intense swallowing of oaths and curses.

  That was the point at which Cheviot sensed the presence, behind him, of someone watching.

  Just under the shadow of the high gallery above, against yellow curtains with red pelmets, stood Vulcan himself.

  13

  The Gathering of the Damned

  BUT HE DARED show no curiosity. He did not even turn his head round. Only a blur, at the corner of his eye, gave him the impression of a very big and broad man, with a shining bald head, and in immaculate black and white.

  Smiling, self-assured, Cheviot faced the table.

  As the long-handled rake darted out to sweep in all the counters, there were many persons who looked daggers at him: concealed daggers, thumb on the blade.

  But my lord, his flushed face expressionless, merely shrugged his shoulders and drew out a red-silk purse. Beside him sat an obvious blackleg, a powerfully built man with a piebald wig to hide head-scars, who whispered encouragement in my lord’s ear.

  Equally expressionless was the stout young man, with the yellow side-whiskers, who had danced last night at Lady Cork’s. Beside him, too, a blackleg breathed flattering encouragement; this was a bony middle-aged man with a lined face and false teeth which tended to surge forward when he talked.

  “Jack!” whispered Flora, who had loyally staked fifty pounds on the black thirteen. “Don’t you think it time to …?”

  “I do indeed, madam.” Cheviot’s gallantry was of the heaviest sort. He glanced towards the white-draped ledges of food and wine, well beyond the far end of the table, and threw his two remaining counters on the green cloth. “Some refreshment, I think?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Flora rose up, and he drew back her chair.

  “Our luck will be better afterwards,” Cheviot added, addressing the muscular coachman. “In the meantime, will you hold Lady Drayton’s chair and guard our stakes?”

  “Yes, Robert,
do!” urged Flora.

  “I will,” said the coachman, nodding grimly. “Depend on it, sir and madam: I will.”

  In looking at the far end of the table, Cheviot could not help seeing Kate de Bourke.

  Alone, aloof, speaking to nobody, Kate sat with her elbows on the green cloth and toyed with ivory counters. She wore a light-green gown, emphasizing into relief her broad-fleshed charms. Only once, when Cheviot made his bet, had she lifted her eyes for a speculative look at him. Afterwards she toyed with the counters again.

  Click, click, click-click, went those same counters, as Cheviot sauntered past under the gallery with Flora on his arm.

  Round swung Kate’s dark head, for a short, hard appraisal of Flora, before returning to her dream.

  Flora’s golden head was just above the level of his shoulder. In her dark-blue gown bordered with gold, in elbow-length white gloves and a gold-dusted reticule in one hand, her beauty dimmed the tawdry room.

  But she kept her head down, gaze on the carpet, and spoke softly.

  “Jack.”

  “Yes?”

  “Last night,” Flora burst out, still softly, “you were so patient. And I was so hateful and odious and spiteful. How shamed I was afterwards! Shamed and shamed and shamed!”

  “My dear, don’t agitate yourself. We are consulting together. But we must have an understanding now. Last night, for instance, I had heard no gossip about—”

  “—yet nevertheless,” Flora interposed in exactly the same tone, “you might have visited me today.”

  “Visit you? I did! I nearly broke the bell-wire. But no one answered.”

  Flora’s tone was almost airy as she lifted her head.

  “Oh, as to that! I had gone deliberately to see my aunt at Chelsea, and told the servants not to answer if you rang. But you might at least have put a note through the letter-slot, to show you’d been there.”

  Cheviot stopped and studied her.

  “Good God, Flora, must you always be so perverse?”

  “Perverse?” The blue eyes widened and sparkled; they melted his anger even as she began to be angry. Then Flora herself was stricken. “Perverse,” she added in a whisper. “Yes. I own I am. Dearest, dearest, what am I doing now?”