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

by E. Hoffmann Price

  When he finally reined in his winded horse, he had only to return to the village. He could not have been recognized in the treacherous alternation of moonlight and blackness. He still had a chance at Khalil Sultan’s rug.

  * * * *

  When Farrell reentered the village, the disturbance had subsided. He ascended to the cubicle in the serai.

  It was empty. Zobeide’s sleeping rug was unoccupied. That was unaccountable. He wondered where she was at that hour.

  Gruff voices, and a heavy tramping rumbled from the courtyard. He stepped to the gallery. The darkness was broken by the yellowish flare of torches.

  The men were armed. Shirkuh was leading them. He was advancing up the stairway. His face was long and grim. Something was wrong! There had been some upset.

  Not a chance for flight. Brazen it out. Farrell met the emir at the doorway. He came alone, except for the two followers who carried a large, bulky bundle.

  An exchange of salutations; but Farrell could not believe what followed…

  Shirkuh was handing him the prayer rug of Khalil Sultan!

  “You came to get this, after outwitting the men I sent to waylay you in Bagdad. Tonight you put me in debt to you. Therefore take this, and my men will escort you to the limits of my territory. Your life is on my head…provided that you never return.”

  Farrell fingered the silken fabric, that hung over his arm, but he was thinking of Djenane, who would vainly await him.

  “Your courtesy leaves me without words,” said Farrell.

  “I trust,” countered the emir, “that there is no reason why you cannot leave at once?”

  “Yes,” said Farrell, “there is Zobeide, who should go with me.”

  “I have done well by Zobeide,” said the emir, then clapped his hands.

  His two retainers set their bulky bundle upright, full in the glow of the smoldering charcoal.

  Farrell’s numbed brain was now beyond all comprehension.

  “Zobeide,” continued Shirkuh, “told me tonight that my daughter interested you more than Khalil Sultan’s prayer rug. This was not until after you saved my life. So I told my men to take you alive…which explains their poor marksmanship. In trying to square you, they missed the horse as well.”

  He stripped the wrappings from the tall bundle, revealing a great glass urn which glowed in the firelight like a monstrous bead of amber.

  “A jar of honey,” said Shirkuh, speaking very slowly. “Honey to sweeten your trip. A final gift to remove the last trace of dishonor on my house.”

  It was a jar of honey, yet it was more like an amber bead, and like a mass of amber, something was embalmed in its pale golden depths.

  Djenane Hanoun, lovely in death as she had been in life, seemed to smile from the golden depths. About her throat was a fine, silken cord. Shirkuh had blotted out the dishonor of his house: an old custom in the Orient.

  “Go,” he said, his voice like a whetstone kissing a blade. “I give you the daughter of an emir in exchange for Zobeide, whose suspicions you should have anticipated.” And that night Farrell rode from the hills with his treasures from Kurdistan…and as he rode, he no longer pondered on Shirkuh’s honor, but on the wisdom which had told him how death could be sweeter than life.

  CHASTE GODDESS

  Originally published in Spicy-Adventure Stories, October 1936.

  From their window, they could see the blue hills of Keddah, and below them, the myriad masts and lateen sails of Malay prahus and Chinese junks; but Glenn Farrell and Nadja were not interested in scenery.

  Though they occupied the costliest suite in the Pacific and Oriental Hotel, they were not welcome in the best clubs of Penang: which did not break their hearts. The four thousand mile honeymoon was over, and perilous adventure was ahead.

  Nadja’s black hair swept sleekly back from a low, broad forehead to a lustrous knot at the nape of her neck. Her skin was tawny, and the disarrayed folds of a severely tailored dressing gown revealed glimpses of contours whose feminine sleekness could not quite mask the cat-like ripple of muscles.

  Nadja, for all her Slavic loveliness, was no toy. Her long, shapely legs, and her supple arms that moved with the languor of sleepy serpents, were designed to match her full, firm breasts and the red curve of wanton lips.

  Once they nailed Draupadi’s ruby—

  But first, they had to find the pear-shaped gem that was the subject of the sheaf of newspaper clippings, covering the past three months, which they were scrutinizing.

  “Street fighting in Singapore, where it was stolen,” summarized Farrell. “Rioting in Moulmein. Disturbances in Malacca. But not a whisper as to the thief.”

  “It’s pleasant here.” Nadja’s mockery was in her greenish eyes rather than her purring voice. “Maybe the thief will come up to offer it to you.”

  Farrell’s aquiline, sun-bronzed face crinkled in an amiable grin. Then he explained, “Hong Li will attend to that. He is Grand Master of the Sa Tiam, a society of thieves. There’s nothing you can steal in this country without giving him a cut—”

  Farrell resumed, “You stay here. I’m digging in at a native section where a white woman would be too conspicuous. Hong Li already knows I’m in Penang, but he won’t make contact until I get out of this silk hat hotel.”

  “Then why come here in the first place?” wondered Nadja.

  “To gain face. Front, we call it in America. My reputation as a connoisseur is greater than my financial standing.”

  “And these frills you bought me—six trunks full—are advance advertising?”

  “Exactly, darling.” said Farrell. “And while I’m gone, don’t join any indoor exploration societies…”

  She probably would play around, but she was discreet. Nadja’s shrewdness in Batum had helped him with a dangerous but profitable deal in jewels that had once belonged to the former Sultan Abdul Hamid.

  * * * *

  That evening Farrell called on Hong Li, a shriveled little Chinese whose gilt and vermillion palace occupied half a block on Leith Street.

  Farrell presented an antique fan on whose face the Emperor Kang Hsi had with his own hands inscribed a verse.

  “This humble person,” he said, “offers a trifling gift to the Honorable Hong, whose taste for art is known even in my country.”

  “My poor house,” countered Hong Li, “is unworthy of this treasure. It is plain that my Elder Brother has a notable appreciation of costly rarities.”

  He was right. The fan had cost a trifle over six hundred U.S. dollars.

  Farrell, questioned about his age, income, and the rest of the things that we call prying and a Chinese includes in courteous interest, mentioned that he had been in Mogôk, looking for rubies.

  Hong Li knew that that meant gems bootlegged from the mines. He beamed. Farrell reached for his tea, and the interview was over.

  Nothing to do but wait for Hong Li to return the call. The odds were that he would mention Draupadi, the Hindu goddess of chastity, who had been robbed of everything but her virtue.

  “And that,” grinned Farrell, taking a short cut down a street where the fronts of the houses were open to the public, “is a drug on the market.”

  Night life in Penang would be fun, if one didn’t have a ruby on the brain.

  But for his preoccupation, Farrell might have sensed that he was being followed.

  Once, glancing back, he saw a slinking shadow duck into the space between two houses. He decided that some member of the Sa Tiam was already checking up on him. Which was great.

  He hailed a rickshaw and headed westward along the water front. Great place. Penang. Colorful and foreign, but a clean little island where a man didn’t get his throat cut unless he insisted. Not a bit like northern Kurdistan, or the Red Sea Coast.

  Or so he thought, until he rounded the turn just before reaching the o
utskirts of the Malay settlement at Bagan Jermal.

  Half a dozen natives were closing in on an eastbound rickshaw. The coolie, screeching and chattering, fled down a cross road. His deserted passenger cried out, but more in wrath than terror.

  By the bright moonlight, Farrell caught the ivory blur of her face. She was white, and her fingernails were giving them hell. He halted his own coolie, leaped to the road, and joined the fracas as the girl was overwhelmed by her assailants.

  He caught glimpses of silken legs, and pale skin revealed by a dress ripped to the waist. The thugs did not sense his arrival until his cane smacked down on a Malay skullcap.

  A chatter of oaths and dismayed outcries, a gleam of steel, then the splintering of Farrell’s stick across an acre of white teeth. He felt a blade graze his ribs. He sidestepped. His fist dynamited a little brown brother.

  Farrell’s coolie joined in with a club. The approach of a Sikh policeman from the Pulau Tikus station ended the party. The Malays fled.

  “See, I ran for help,” declared the girl’s rickshaw coolie, emerging from hiding.

  She answered in Chinese. The fellow looked foolish but remained. Then she thanked Farrell and the policeman, gave the latter her name: Antonia Valles.

  Farrell handed her into the rickshaw, and offered to accompany her to her destination.

  “You’re very kind, but I’m far from presentable now,” Antonia declined. “I’ll be returning.”

  She did not live far from Farrell’s bungalow. His further appraisal of the amber-shadowed curve of pert little breasts that reminded him of matched lotus buds, made her address uncommonly interesting.

  Antonia was Eurasian: her name and coloring and the faint slant of her dark eyes indicated Chinese and Spanish blood. She was pretty and sweet-faced, despite the inevitable bitterness that marked the corners of her luscious mouth. Eurasians, scorned by European and pure Asiatic alike, reach for life and find it a porcupine.

  “I haven’t any address,” she said, as their coolies jogged along, neck and neck.

  Farrell’s shaggy brows rose incredulously.

  “I lost my office job,” Antonia explained. “It was sweet of you to give me a lift. If you’re alone—”

  Then, bitterly: “This is the last night I’m entirely my own. If you were a woman, you might understand why I’d like to share it with—well, a friend.”

  “Maybe I do, anyway,” answered Farrell. No wonder she didn’t want to waste her last morsel of freedom.

  * * * *

  Ling Foo, the number one boy, took Antonia’s suitcase and then approached with brandy and soda.

  “No stenghas for me,” she said, “and no soda.”

  Farrell matched her order. The treacherously mellow brandy burned out some of her sombre mood. Farrell, noting the instinctive reserve with which she guarded the slender, cream-tinted loveliness beneath her kimono, began to feel that it would be foolish for her to spend her last night in prayer and fasting. He was sorry for her.

  She was slight, almost frail, but exquisitely formed. Her long, slanted eyes were a smouldering blackness that became misty as hungry lips returned Farrell’s kiss. She clung to him with a desperation born of a desire to draw the utmost of this last night of freedom from those who prowled in that glaring, hideous street along the water front…

  * * * *

  “Better stay a while,” he said the next day. “You remind me…of a statue of Draupadi I saw in Moulmein.”

  But before she could unravel that subtlety, Ling Foo announced the Honorable Hong Li. Antonia slipped into her room. Not for secrecy, but because the presence of a woman at a meeting of gentlemen was unseemly.

  Farrell and the master of thieves spent forty minutes in exchanging bows and inquiries about each other’s health.

  “Your house is a jewel,” remarked Hong Li.

  “It is unworthy of your presence,” deprecated Farrell. Then, noting the odd accent on the old fellow’s last word, he added, “The friendship of the Honorable Hong is like a pear-shaped ruby.”

  “Alas, it is less than mud,” he deplored. “But my Elder Brother loves rubies?”

  From then on they got along much better than brothers… When Ling Foo served tea, Farrell had an engagement to inspect an unworthy gem which sentimental reasons alone gave to it the trifling value of two hundred thousand dollars, Straits currency.

  Another session of bowing, and Hong Li’s gilded sedan chair carried him back to Leith Street.

  A brother of Hong Li had a pear-shaped ruby. That meant, a member of the Sa Tiam, who steal anything from a pound of rice to a war elephant in full regalia.

  The goddess of chastity had not once been mentioned, but it could not be any other gem. Enough time had elapsed for it to come from the original thief to the Sa Tiam…

  Antonia was becoming a problem. Sending her away was unthinkable; but paying off her debts would be a sucker trick. Farrell had once fallen for that one, and loudly mocked a friend who had bailed out the same girl, several days later.

  He heard Ling Foo tell someone that the master was not in, and was scarcely annoyed. But when the number one boy’s screech was followed by a resonant slap, a spattering of pottery, and a familiar feminine voice husky with wrath, the memory factory became a tangle of cushions and legs.

  They broke as Nadja proved that a woman can move like a leopard. Shapely Nadja was substantial, slavic and savage. She ignored Farrell, except for a smack that popped like a pistol shot, and tore into Antonia.

  The Eurasian girl, though slight, was no slouch with her long nails. When Farrell finally separated them, neither was fit for the public gaze—not until the Scottish plaid pattern of scratches and bites healed up enough to convince a man that she was a woman and not a sieve.

  Farrell told Nadja that Antonia was a present from Hong Li, knowing that she would not believe it. She didn’t, and she said so with dirty-sounding Russian and Turkish words. Then she pulled together the most revealing gaps in her dress and headed back for town.

  “I’ve caused you so much trouble,” deplored Antonia.

  “Better stay,” said Farrell, wryly.

  But Nadja would get over it. His alibi had been plausible. He couldn’t have insulted Hong Li by declining a shapely temporary slave. Once Nadja found some suitable vengeance to salve her pride, the corporation would carry on.

  That night Farrell had a sedan chair haul him to the house of the Honorable Hong. He hated such a conveyance, but “face” demanded it. He was important; he had to be, to dicker for Draupadi’s ruby. There was no danger in calling at the house of the Honorable Hong.

  A street urchin might hand him the ruby in a twist of tobacco, later that night. If the Chinaman collected in advance, well; if he preferred payment after delivery, likewise well. The honor of the Sa Tiam, and its swift vengeance on an island from which no white man could slip away unseen guaranteed good faith on both sides.

  Farrell was quite carefree. One really can’t rob a goddess…they told one in Sunday school that a goddess is a heathen fancy… No one but the British law and the priests of Draupadi could consider it dealing in stolen goods; and a lot they’d know about it!

  He saw nothing amiss when the gatekeeper admitted him into the tortuously landscaped garden of the rich estate. He did not know that the block was infested with bearded Sikh policemen.

  A servant bowed him into the house. The Honorable Hong was happy to receive his Elder Brother—

  But he had scarcely taken half a dozen steps when he heard an old man screech wrathfully and curse in Cantonese. A girl shrieked. Woodwork groaned and snapped.

  Farrell dashed to the disturbance, the servant at his heels.

  A lean, turbaned Arab was grappling with the Honorable Hong. A girl in a peach-colored tunic was belaboring him with a small lacquered screen. A curved khanjar bit into the old man’s dove-g
ray tunic.

  The bearded Arab, poised like a hawk, swooped clear as Farrell bounded across the threshold. He hurled a vase at the American. Farrell caught it on his shoulder. The effort broke his stride. While his flying tackle brought the Arab crashing to the floor, Farrell overreached himself.

  The knife raked his clutching hand. The invader feinted toward the rush of servants, doubled back, plunged through a window, and into the ground. Farrell, leading the pursuit, had a flash of Hong Li, coughing blood, the slender girl trying to staunch his wound. She was his daughter.

  The Arab cleared the wall as a leopard might have; but Farrell was on his heels.

  They were neck and neck in the mud of the side street. The shadows seemed to disgorge every policeman in Malaya: tall, broad men with grim faces, curled beards, booming voices. Good God! If that Arab had the ruby—he had snatched something from the floor—

  Another sliver of time. The madness became a nightmare. Four tall Hindus in massive turbans and Brahmin robes and plump, oily faces cleared the wall and splashed down beside Farrell. Priests!

  If Farrell could only nail that Arab, get the ruby, jam it deep into the mud—

  The slayer’s red blade whistled into the darkness. He had flung it away to soften his capture. The Hindus parted to let him pass. They blocked the charging Sikhs, cried out and pointed at Farrell, plunged after him.

  The law overwhelmed him; and the Hindus seemed to fade like mists.

  * * * *

  It was a tough half hour in the Chinaman’s palace. Hong Li was dead. His daughter cleared Farrell, and cursed the Sikhs for blocking the man who had pursued her father’s slayer.

  “But we were told that this man came to buy stolen goods!” growled a policeman. “Here is the Inspector Sahib.”

  The weather-beaten Englishman with the drooping mustache did not arrest Farrell, but the American was taken to headquarters and all but X-rayed. Then the inspector apologized, but his eyes were wrathful.