E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre d'Artois: Occult Detective & Associates

by E. Hoffmann Price

  If Farrell did not strike, he would be branding himself as an impostor; and if he struck, those along the wall would overwhelm him. Farrell was neatly trapped by his own cleverness.

  There was no retreat. He drew his knife. Hassan smiled. Despite his age, he radiated a consuming energy and fierceness.

  “Steady!” he warned in a low, mocking voice, “they will kill you before you reach me.”

  “No matter,” retorted Farrell, “you have pronounced the Forbidden Name.”

  Farrell sensed that if he retreated from his stand, the end would be more disastrous than if he drove through to a finish. Those who sat along the wall had risen to their feet and drawn long, curved knives.

  Hassan’s smile was whimsical, and sinister.

  Farrell lunged full to the chest. Hassan chuckled as he recoiled before the impact. The blade snapped and tinkled to the floor. Hassan, it seemed, very prudently wore a shirt of chain mail beneath his white kaftan.

  “And now that you’ve made a very fair attempt,” he purred, “can you let well enough alone, or must you attempt to tear me to pieces with your bare hands?” He gestured to his henchmen, who retreated. Then he resumed, “Suppose you forget your Lord Peacock. You have courage, although your wits are rather dull. You might have known that every silver peacock is not attended by priests from the Sinjar Hills.”

  Hassan’s voice was now gently mocking, as though he were with exceptional broadmindedness letting a pagan peacock-worshipper live instead of having him cut to pieces.

  “Now tell me what you’re doing here, blustering into this rather private place and quoting from a book whose very mention is enough to tempt any true Moslem to cut your throat?”

  “The peacock,” improvised Farrell, “was stolen from Mount Lalesh. I heard, in one way and another, that it is here. And to assure my friends that it is in good hands—”

  Farrell shrugged, and gestured. Hassan nodded and smiled.

  “In this city,” he counseled, “the less you know of peacocks, the better. It is not here, and never was. Now, since you were so ready to stab an unarmed old man who had pronounced a forbidden word, I think that if we can settle our religious difference we might come to an understanding. Ay, wallah! Stab an unarmed old man—and in the face of a dozen armed retainers… Hmmmm…not bad…

  “Who are you?”

  Farrell started at the abrupt question that had popped at him from the old man’s musing.

  “Ayyub the son of Yusuf,” he replied promptly, assuming a name that he had used, years ago, in his wanderings as a native.

  “Very well, Ayyub bin Yusuf,” said Hassan, again stroking his white beard. “In spite of your outrageous beliefs, there is a place prepared for you in Paradise.”

  Hassan’s smile was as ambiguous as his speech. Farrell’s glance shifted at the armed retainers along the wall. A dozen thirsty blades—place in Paradise, indeed!

  Then a familiar memory began clamoring for recognition. Those staring eyes with their dilated pupils—

  Hassan’s smile widened.

  “La, billah!” he reassured as he noted Farrell’s side glance. “That’s not the road I had in mind. You still think that because you stabbed an unarmed old man, I am resentful. By no means, ya Ayyub! To the contrary.”

  He extended his hand, palm up, toward Farrell.

  “I hold Paradise in the hollow of my hand,” he said in his rich, sonorous Arabic. “Yea, even al-jannat. I am the keeper of the gateway. You have but to believe, and abandon your infidel heresies.”

  An old familiar exhortation, and Farrell recollected those he had seen in Syria and Egypt who had dilated eyes that stared at sights and wonders that were not perceptible to the un-drugged. Hasheesh! The riddle was being resolved.

  Farrell stared at the inscrutable eyes of Hassan, but could not guess whether the old man was leading up to some monstrous, fatal jest, or whether in his extravagant Oriental figures of speech he was seeking a recruit to his entourage of hasheesh addicts.

  “And to convince you, you shall see the place that is prepared for true believers. A glimpse of its coolness and its fountains. I, even I, Hassan, am keeper of the gateway, and I will let you see for yourself.”

  Farrell’s increasing interest was unfeigned. He concealed, however, his determination to plunge through to the end, and instead pretended to have doubts.

  “While we believe in Muhammed, upon whom be the Peace, and in the One True God—whose name be exalted—it is not well to slight Malik Tawus, Lord of the World and all its evils! But, nevertheless…” Farrell paused, perplexed and indecisive.

  Hassan’s smile became more assuring.

  “Try and see, ya Ayyub…rich wine and the lovely brides of the garden, and coolness to the eyes. And if you still refuse, why, then, you refuse.”

  “Done!” agreed Farrell. “Provided that no one pronounces the Forbidden Name in my presence, until—”

  “I understand,” said Hassan. “That will be arranged. These stubborn Yezidees!”

  Hassan clapped his hands.

  “Ya Abbas!” he shouted.

  A panel at the left of the dais opened and a tall negro entered.

  “Ayyub is our new brother. Take him to the Gateway!”

  * * * *

  The negro led Farrell to a narrow, high ceiled reception hall along whose walls extended a low platform, about two feet wide and covered with rugs and cushions, on which half a dozen Syrian Arabs lay stretched out in a drugged stupor.

  Abbas, the negro, returned presently with a tray of sweetmeats and a pitcher of wine. History was repeating itself: the fanatic Ismailian sect of Islam was blossoming out in New Orleans under the guidance of a master criminal. Farrell knew that he was expected to drink himself into a stupor; then, overcome by the hasheesh drugged wine, he would be carried into a synthetic paradise which to the distorted perceptions of an addict would seem real. After an interval in paradise, he would again be drugged, and upon awakening would find himself in the ante-room again, having supposedly returned from what might be called a week-end excursion to the Moslem paradise.

  Then Hassan, if he had not in the meantime learned Farrell’s true identity, would give him a knife, and name a victim whose death would be the price of a return to the delights of the garden. For several centuries, during the Crusades, the Ismailians, or Assassins, as they were called, were the plague of Syria, Egypt, and Persia; and now, in modern guise, they were invading New Orleans to practice extortion from wealthy business men instead of from emirs and sultans as they had in the old days.

  Farrell tasted the wine. It reeked with hasheesh. He knew not what eyes might be regarding him. Hassan’s ready acceptance might have been to submit him to the test of wits upset by drugs, and a will conquered by the hypnotic power of the infusion of hasheesh. Yet such a trap could not be evaded. Farrell therefore drained the pitcher without taking it from his lips; and as he gulped the drugged wine, he contemplated a trick that might in a measure counter-act the full effect of its insidious poison.

  “Ya Abbas!” he yelled drunkenly as he set down the empty pitcher. “Shewayya khamr! More wine!”

  He lurched and reeled about the room. Then he began singing bawdy songs in Turki. He tossed sweetmeats at his unconscious comrades, and finally sent the serving tray sailing against the wall.

  Abbas came running.

  “More wine!” demanded Farrell.

  And more wine he received. He had already taken enough to drug two men, but he had drunk so rapidly that its effect had not enough time to develop.

  “Hold on,” he muttered to himself as he gritted his teeth. “Can’t pass out! Got to stay safe and sane; one boner, and it’s lights out! And if she’s alive, she’s in that hell’s hole of a garden.”

  Farrell shuddered at the possibility—worse, probability, that Lydia was in Hassan’s synthetic paradise, a
nd at the mercy of Hassan’s drugged assassins.

  He drank more. He reeled, staggered, and dropped into a corner. His actions would establish him as a Kurd gone mad with wine to which he was not accustomed.

  “A bit of mustard and warm water would help,” he reflected. “And I’d give a thousand bucks for ten cents worth of syrup of ipecac…oh, hell, or even a feather…”

  But Farrell’s improvised emetic worked famously. Neither his companions, even if their unconsciousness was feigned, nor watcher from the outside could have suspected the trick. He rose, relieved of his excessive draughts of wine, then, consistently, howled for more. He seized the pitcher that Abbas brought, tripped, fell flat, spilling the drugged wine over himself, the couch, and the floor.

  “Good camouflage,” he said to himself. “Now fake passing out…damn it, hope I’ve not soaked up enough of the stuff to make it real.”

  Farrell was alarmed; for he did feel the effect of the drug. His heart beat seemed very slow and heavy, with incredible pauses when it seemed to have stopped entirely. In the dim light he regarded his outstretched hand, still clutching at the pitcher. He marveled at the monstrous fingers. The room alternately contracted to the size of a match-box, and expanded to rival the dome of the Capitol. But despite these and other disturbing illusions, Farrell knew that he had established himself without having become soddenly drugged. And he understood how an ignorant, fanatical Moslem, passing from hasheesh illusions into sleep, and thence to an awakening in a synthetic paradise, could scarcely do other than believe that he had by special dispensation been translated alive to a true paradise.

  CHAPTER VII

  The Garden of Evil

  While Farrell retained consciousness, his perception of time became as distorted as the fixtures of the room. Thus he did not have any idea of how much time had elapsed before someone turned a light full on his face, seized him, and carried him away. For a moment Farrell wondered if the sudden transition from the New Orleans humidity to the dim coolness into which he had been dropped was not, like the distortions of time and space, another illusion. He heard faint, sobbing music as from a great distance. He sensed that others were being carried into the coolness after him.

  At times Farrell’s senses left him. He knew not whether the blank intervals had been five second or five hours, yet it seemed that his unconscious moments were fleeting. Someone was supporting his head and offering him a cold, sour drink that refreshed him and cleared his rambling wits and reeling senses. His head sank back upon a cushion before he could catch more than a glimpse of a gracious, feminine form disappearing around a cluster of broad leafed plantains.

  Then Farrell saw stars twinkling in a blue vault above him. His mind was now clear enough to realize that the paradise into which he had been translated had an artificial dome and an efficient cooling system; but to Hassan’s thoroughly drugged followers the miniature celestial vault and the “coolness to the eyes” would be miraculous.

  A fountain sprayed mistily in the neon-bluish twilight. The air was fragrant with the heavy sweetness of cape jasmine and the fumes of burning myrrh. Faint, wailing music and the purr of a tom-tom came from somewhere in the shadows. This fantastic reality, blending into the wild illusions of hasheesh intoxication would indeed seem to be an awakening in the Prophet’s paradise, al-jannat. Hassan had devised well.

  Half a dozen or more Syrian girls with great languorous eyes emerged from the further end of the garden to greet Hassan’s guests. They approached with tinkling anklets and undulant, swaying pace as they sought their hasheesh muddled companions to revive them with chilled drinks and warm caresses.

  Farrell seized the flagon a slender, black haired girl offered him, drained its pungent draft, then thrust her aside. He had not seen Lydia’s red-gold hair; he hoped, and he feared to find her in the den of illusion. Farrell clambered to his knees, rose, then splashed heavily into the fountain. She laughed and passed on to the next guest. He reeled dizzily about the dim court and past the rows of shrubbery that screened the further end of the garden. There he saw that the walls were pierced with low archways that led to small alcoves carpeted with rugs and strewn with cushions.

  One alcove had an occupant. She lay on a silken rug. Her face was buried in a heap of cushions. Farrell’s heart stopped for a moment as he perceived that her hair was reddish, and that her arms were white. He shook her gently by the shoulder.

  “Ya sitti,” he began in Arabic, for he dared not risk a word in English until he knew who she was.

  She shivered and emerged from her cushions. Her laugh terrified Farrell more than the thirsty blades of the assassins. It was Lydia, exotically arrayed for the entertainment of the hasheesh drugged guests of the garden. Her fingers closed about the stem of a heavy goblet at her side. Farrell jerked his head aside but the glass struck him a glancing blow. He recovered and seized her in his arms.

  “I’m Glenn Farrell,” he whispered into her ear. “Pull yourself together.”

  She laughed hysterically.

  “Glenn—”

  He stopped her further utterance by laying his hand across her lips. The mention of his name would be fatal to them both, if pronounced audibly.

  “Glenn Farrell,” he whispered. “Don’t you remember me?”

  She regarded him, wide eyed and incredulous, then recognized him.

  “Oh, they’ll kill you, those devils!”

  “Not a word!” he exclaimed hoarsely. “Pull yourself together.”

  He heard the approaching footsteps of someone who paused from time to time as he advanced, apparently seeking someone or something. It was the firm tread of a sober man, not a hasheesh drugged assassin.

  Hassan, perhaps, inspecting his synthetic paradise; death seeking an impostor.

  “Kiss me!” he whispered. “Play it up, or we’re finished!”

  And as her arms encircled him, he murmured extravagant endearments to her in Arabic, thankful that she could not understand the Oriental frankness.

  Desperate love-making, indeed! Farrell had to ignore the approach of the visitor and carry on in his role of a recruit having his first glimpse of the luxury of the garden. But when the footsteps halted at the entrance of the alcove, Lydia screamed. Her mock embrace closed on Farrell in terror.

  “Ah, you have finally accepted the attentions of the Brethren?” murmured a suave voice in English almost free of accent. “That is excellent—and prudent.”

  Farrell extricated himself from Lydia’s arms and confronted the intruder.

  The speaker continued his stare for a moment, smiled thinly, and passed on.

  Farrell’s first glance had sufficed to identify Hassan’s second in command as the Kurd whose entrance into Aswad’s dining room had been greeted with such marked respect. A door closed, and a lock clicked as the Kurd left the garden.

  “Who’s that bird?” whispered Farrell.

  “Nuri,” replied Lydia.

  “What?” gasped Farrell, though he had understood clearly. He had been right; perhaps fatally right.

  “Nuri,” she repeated. “Oh, this terrible place. I don’t know what you must be thinking after I left you that night—”

  “I know,” interrupted Farrell. “I exchanged a few shots and then chased them to the L.&N. crossing. Good Lord, I thought that train would smack you into the middle of next week!

  “But who are Gordon and Rubenstein?”

  “Oh, then you know—well, they were the agents I worked for in New York. They asked me to carry the peacock to New Orleans. Their story was plausible, and I asked no questions. I was badly in need of money and they paid well. They spoke of their partner, Nuri. And here I am in this terrible den. And those drunken beasts… Good Lord!”

  Farrell began to see how the disjointed fragments would fit together. Nuri, Gordon, and Rubenstein, smuggling the peacock to Parr; and Nuri, one of Hassan’s assassins,
had double crossed his partners.

  “Tell me about this dump,” Farrell demanded, abandoning his speculations in favor of action. “How long do I stay here in this hop-head’s paradise?”

  “They’ll bring in some drugged wine that lays the visitors out cold. And then that big negro drags them out. But what kind of an awful place is this?”

  Farrell explained very briefly about the Ismailians of the time of the Crusades, and of the terror they had spread throughout the Near East with their extortion and assassination.

  “And here we are,” he concluded with a wry smile, “in a modern version of the original hasheeshin heaven. This place must be artificially cooled. There must be air ducts leading from a refrigeration unit, and an exhaust line for stale air. We might work our way through the exhaust. Let’s go!”

  Farrell took her by the hand.

  “Pretend you’re looking for something,” he whispered.

  He led the way, searching the garden and muttering in Arabic about a bracelet. He stopped at times to shake one of the brethren and demand the adornment. But they were too far gone in intoxication and too interested in their companions to pay any attention. Farrell continued his mutterings and went on, making a circuit of the wall.

  “Look!” he finally exclaimed as he found the outlet and indicated a sheet metal lined shaft that pierced the wall of the garden. “I can crawl through! Just barely make it. You can go through easily. Go back to your alcove and see if you can find anything we can use to make a rope. Hurry, it’s our only chance!”

  Farrell crawled into the ventilating shaft. Ahead of him, as he cleared a turn, he saw a barred window, and across the street, a light. He was on the third floor of the building. Below, on the second, was an iron railed balcony.

  Farrell drew his remaining knife and set to work picking at the mortar of the bricks in which the bars were embedded. For a moment he thought of firing a shot to attract the patrol of detectives that Healy should have posted. But he would not be able to fight his way back through Hassan’s audience hall, through the ante room, and finally, through the barred doors that opened into the restaurant. With a rope, however, they could drop from the air shaft to the balcony, even though the latter was somewhat out of line.