The Philo Vance Megapack

by S. S. Van Dine

  “And forgot to return it,” Vance concluded. “I do hope it cured your insomnia.” He smiled ironically. “You are an outrageous liar, Hani. But I do not blame you altogether—”

  “I have told you the truth.”

  “Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.” Vance sat down, frowning.

  “I do not speak Italian.…”

  “A quotation from Bruno.” He inspected the Egyptian speculatively. “Clawed into the vulgate, it means that, although you have not spoken the truth, you have invented your lie very well.”

  “Thank you, effendi.”

  Vance sighed and shook his head with simulated weariness. Then he said:

  “You were not gone long enough to have made any extensive search for the opium. You probably found it in the first place you looked—you had a fairly definite idea where you’d find it.…”

  “As I told you—”

  “Dash it all! Don’t be so persistent. You’re becoming very borin’.…” Menacingly Vance rose and stepped toward the Egyptian. His eyes were cold and his body was tense. “Where did you find that tin of opium?”

  Hani shrank away and his arms fell to his sides.

  “Where did you find the opium?” Vance repeated the question.

  “I have explained, effendi.” Despite the doggedness of Hani’s manner, his tone was not convincing.

  “Yes! You’ve explained—but you haven’t told the truth. The opium was not in your room—although you have a reason for wanting us to think so.… A reason! What is it?… Perhaps I can guess that reason. You lied to me because you found the opium—”

  “Effendi!… Don’t continue. You are being deceived.…”

  “I am not being deceived by you, Hani.” (I had rarely seen Vance so earnest.) “You unutterable ass! Don’t you understand that I knew where you’d find that opium? Do you think I’d have sent you to look for it if I hadn’t been pretty certain where it was? And you’ve told me—in your circuitous Egyptian way you’ve informed me most lucidly.” Vance relaxed and smiled. “But my real reason for sending you to search for the sleeping-powder was to ascertain to what extent you were involved in the plot.”

  “And you found out, effendi?” There were both awe and resignation in the Egyptian’s question.

  “Yes…oh, yes.” Vance casually regarded the other. “You’re not at all subtle, Hani. You’re only involved—you have characteristics in common with the ostrich, which is erroneously said to bury its head in the sand when in danger. You have merely buried your head in a tin of opium.”

  “Vance effendi is too erudite for my inferior comprehension.…”

  “You’re extr’ordin’rily tiresome, Hani.” Vance turned his back and walked to the other end of the room. “Go away, please—go quite away.”

  At this moment there was a disturbance in the hall outside. We could hear angry voices at the end of the corridor. They became louder, and presently Snitkin appeared at the door of the breakfast-room holding Doctor Bliss firmly by the arm. The doctor, fully clothed and with his hat on, was protesting volubly. His face was pale, and his eyes had a hunted, frightened look.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” He addressed no one in particular. “I wanted to go out to get a bit of fresh air, and this bully dragged me downstairs—”

  Snitkin looked toward Markham.

  “I was told by Sergeant Heath not to let any one leave the house, and this guy tries to make a getaway. Full of hauchoor, too.… Whaddya want done with him?”

  “I see no reason why the doctor shouldn’t take an airin’, don’t y’ know.” Vance spoke to Markham. “We sha’n’t want to confer with him till later.”

  “It’s bully with me,” Heath agreed. “There’s too many people in this house anyway.”

  Markham nodded to Snitkin.

  “You may let the doctor go for a walk, officer.” He shifted his gaze to Bliss. “Please be back, sir, in half an hour or so. We’ll want to question you.”

  “I’ll be back before that—I only want to go over in the park for a while.” Bliss seemed nervous and distraught. “I feel unusually heavy and suffocated. My ears are ringing frightfully.”

  “And, I take it,” put in Vance, “you’ve been inordinately thirsty.”

  The doctor regarded him with mild surprise.

  “I’ve consumed at least a gallon of water since going to my room. I hope I’m not in for an attack of malaria.…”

  “I hope not, sir. I believe you’ll feel perfectly normal later on.”

  Bliss hesitated at the door-sill.

  “Anything new?” he asked.

  “Oh, much.” Vance spoke without enthusiasm. “But we’ll talk of that later.”

  Bliss frowned and was about to ask another question; but he changed his mind, and bowing, went away, Snitkin trailing after him sourly.

  115 Doctor Mindrum W. C. Bliss, M.A., A.O.S.S., F.S.A., F.R.S., Hon. Mem. R.A.S., was the author of “The Stele of Intefoe at Koptos”; a “History of Egypt during the Hyksos Invasion”; “The Seventeenth Dynasty”; and a monograph on the Amen-hotpe III Colossi.

  116 According to the Bliss-Weigall chronology the period between the death of Sebknefru-Rê and the overthrow of the Shepherd Kings at Memphis was from 1898 to 1577 B.C.—to wit: 321 years—as against the 1800 years claimed by the upholders to the longer chronology. This short chronology is even shorter according to Breasted and the German school. Breasted and Meyer dated the same period as from 1788 to 1580. These 208 years, by the way, Vance considered too short for the observable cultural changes.

  117 As legal adviser, monetary steward and constant companion of Philo Vance, I kept a complete record of the principal criminal cases in which he participated during Markham’s incumbency. Four of these cases I have already recorded in book form—The Benson Murder Case, The ‘Canary’ Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case, and The Bishop Murder Case.

  118 Sergeant Ernest Heath, of the Homicide Bureau, had worked with Markham on most of his important cases. He was an honest, capable, but uninspired police officer, who, after the Benson and the “Canary” murder cases, had come to respect Vance highly. Vance admired the Sergeant; and the two—despite their fundamental differences in outlook and training—collaborated with admirable smoothness.

  119 Kha-ef-Rê was the originator of the great Sphinx, and also of one of the three great Gizeh pyramids—Wer Kha-ef Rê (Kha-ef-Rê is mighty), now known as the Second Pyramid.

  120 Popularly, and incorrectly, called the Memnon Colossi.

  121 Captain Dubois was then the finger-print expert of the New York Police Department; and Doctor Emanuel Doremus was the Medical Examiner.

  122 The daughter of this particular Pharaoh—Nefra—incidentally is the titular heroine of H. Rider Haggard’s romance, “Queen of the Dawn.” Haggard, following the chronology of H. R. Hall, placed Intef in the Fourteenth Dynasty instead of the Seventeenth, making him a contemporary of the great Hyksos Pharaoh, Apopi, whose son Khyan—the hero of the book—marries Nefra. The researches of Bliss and Weigall seem to have demonstrated that this relationship is an anachronism.

  123 The ancient Egyptian name of Heracleopolis.

  124 This unusual name, I learned later, was the result of his father’s interest in Egyptian mythology while in Maspero’s service.

  125 I learned from Vance that Doctor Bliss had read, in the British Museum, the Abbott Papyrus of the Twentieth Dynasty, which reported the inspection of this and other tombs. The report stated that, in early times, Intef V’s tomb had been entered but not robbed: the raiders had evidently been unable to penetrate to the actual grave chamber. Bliss, therefore, had concluded that the mummy of Intef would still be found in the original tomb. An old native named Hasan had showed him where two obelisks had stood in front of the pyramid of Intef (Intef-o); and through this information he had succeeded in locating the pyramid, and had excavated at that point.

  126 This colored portrait (with the Queen’s name spelled Nefertiti) appears in “Kings and
Queens of Ancient Egypt.”

  127 I learned subsequently from Scarlett that Mrs. Bliss’s mother had been a Coptic lady of noble descent who traced her lineage from the last Saïte Pharaohs, and who, despite her Christian faith, had retained her traditional veneration for the native gods of her country. Her only child, Meryt-Amen (“Beloved of Amûn”), had been named in honor of the great Ramses II, whose full title as Son of the Sun-God was Ra-mosê-su Mery-Amûn. (The more correct English spelling of Mrs. Bliss’s name would have been Meryet-Amûn, but the form chosen was no doubt based on the transliterations of Flinders Petrie, Maspero, and Abercrombie.) Meryet-Amûn was not an uncommon name among the queens and princesses of ancient Egypt. Three queens of that name have already been found—one (of the family of Ah-mosè I) whose mummy is in the Cairo Museum; another (of the family of Ramses II) whose tomb and sarcophagus are in the Valley of the Queens; and a third, whose burial chamber and mummy were recently found by the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the hillside near the temple of Deir el Bahri at Thebes. This last Queen Meryet-Amûn was the daughter of Thut-mosè III and Meryet-Rê, and the wife of Amen-hotpe II. The story of the finding of her tomb is told in Section II of the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for November 1929.

  128 I am not quite sure why Vance added this parenthetical phrase, unless it was because the word simoon comes from the Arabic samma (meaning to be poisoned), and he thought that Hani would better recognize the word in its correct etymological form.

  129 The irrigation to which Scarlett referred was the system that resulted in the Aswân Dam, the Asyût Weir, and the Esneh Barrage.

  130 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge defines ka (or, more correctly, ku) both as “the double of a man” and “a divine double.” Breasted, explaining the ka, says it was the “vital force” which was supposed to animate the human body and also to accompany it into the next world. G. Elliot Smith calls the ka “one of the twin souls of the dead.” (The other soul, ba, became deified in identification with Osiris.) Ka was the spirit of a mortal person, which remained in the tomb after death; and if the tomb were violated or destroyed, the ka had no resting-place. Our own word “soul” is not quite an accurate rendition of ka, but is perhaps as near as we can come to it in English. The German word Doppelgänger, however, is an almost exact translation.

  131 An old Arabic proverb meaning: “The only answer to a fool is silence.”

  THE SCARAB MURDER CASE (Part 2)

  CHAPTER 13

  AN ATTEMPTED ESCAPE

  (Friday, July 13; 3:45 P.M.)

  It was Hani who broke the silence after Bliss’s departure.

  “You wish me to go away, effendi?” he asked Vance, with a respect that struck me as overdone.

  “Yes, yes.” Vance had become distrait and introspective. I knew something was preying on his mind. He stood near the table, his hands in his pockets, regarding the samovar intently. “Go up-stairs, Hani. Take some sodium bicarbonate—and meditate. Divinely bend yourself, so to speak; indulge in a bit of ‘holy exercise,’ as Shakespeare calls it in—is it Richard III?”

  “Yes, effendi—in Act III. Catesby uses the phrase to the Duke of Buckingham.”

  “Astonishin’!” Vance studied the Egyptian critically. “I had no idea the fallahin were so well versed in the classics.”

  “For hours at a time I read to Meryt-Amen when she was young—”

  “Ah, yes.” Vance dropped the matter. “We’ll send for you when we need you. In the meantime wait in your room.”

  Hani bowed and moved toward the hall.

  “Do not be deceived by appearances, effendi,” he said solemnly, turning at the door. “I do not fully understand the things that have happened in this house today; but do not forget—”

  “Thanks awfully.” Vance waved his hand in dismissal. “I at least shall not forget that your name is Anûpu.”

  With a black look the man went out.

  Markham was growing more and more impatient.

  “Everything in this case seems to peter out,” he complained. “Any one in the household could have put the opium in the coffee—which leaves us just where we were before we came here to the breakfast-room.… By the way, where do you think Hani found the can of opium?”

  “Oh, that? Why, in Salveter’s room, of course.… Rather obvious, don’t y’ know.”

  “I’m damned if I see anything obvious about it. Why should Salveter have left it there?”

  “But he didn’t leave it there, old dear.… My word! Don’t you see that some one in the house had ideas? There’s a deus ex machina in our midst, and he’s troublin’ himself horribly about the situation. The plot has been far too clever; and there’s a tutelary genius who’s attempting to simplify matters for us.”

  Heath made a throaty noise of violent disgust.

  “Well, I’m here to tell you he’s making a hell of a job of it.”

  Vance smiled sympathetically.

  “A hellish job, let us say, Sergeant.”

  Markham regarded him with a quizzical frown.

  “Do you believe, Vance, that Hani was in this room after Mrs. Bliss and Salveter had gone up-stairs?”

  “It’s possible. In fact, it seems more likely that it was Hani than either Mrs. Bliss or Salveter.”

  “If the front door had been unlatched,” Markham offered, “it might conceivably have been some one from the outside.”

  “Your hypothetical thug?” asked Vance dryly. “Dropped in here, perhaps, for a bit of caffein stimulant before tackling his victim in the museum.” He did not give Markham time to reply, but went to the door. “Come. Let’s chivy the occupants of the drawing-room. We need more data—oh, many more data.”

  He led the way up-stairs. As we walked along the heavily carpeted upper hall toward the drawing-room door, the sound of an angry high-pitched voice came to us. Mrs. Bliss was speaking; and I caught the final words of a sentence.

  “…should have waited.”

  Then Salveter answered in a hoarse, tense tone:

  “Meryt! You’re insane.…”

  Vance cleared his throat, and there was silence.

  Before we entered the room, however, Hennessey beckoned mysteriously to Heath from the front of the hall. The Sergeant stepped forward past the drawing-room door, and the rest of us, sensing some revelation, followed him.

  “You know that bird Scarlett who you told me to let go,” Hennessey reported in a stage whisper; “well, just as he was going out he turned suddenly and ran up-stairs. I was going to chase him, but since you O.K.’d him, I thought it was all right. A coupla minutes later he came down and went away without a word. Then I got to thinking that maybe I shoulda followed him up-stairs.…”

  “You acted correctly, Hennessey.” Vance spoke before the Sergeant could reply. “No reason why he shouldn’t have gone up-stairs—probably went there to speak to Doctor Bliss.”

  Hennessey appeared relieved and looked hopefully toward Heath, who merely grunted disdainfully.

  “And, by the by, Hennessey,” Vance continued; “when the Egyptian came up-stairs the first time, did he go directly to the floor above, or did he tarry in the drawing-room en route?”

  “He went in and spoke to the missus.…”

  “Did you hear anything he said?”

  “Naw. It sounded to me like they was parleying in one of those foreign languages.”

  Vance turned to Markham and said in a low voice: “That’s why I sent Hani up-stairs alone. I had an idea he’d grasp the opportunity to commune with Mrs. Bliss.” He spoke again to Hennessey. “How long was Hani in the drawing-room?”

  “A minute or two maybe—not long.” The detective was growing apprehensive. “Shouldn’t I have let him go in?”

  “Oh, certainly.… And then what happened?”

  “The guy comes outa the room, looking worried, and goes up-stairs. Pretty soon he comes down again carrying a tin can in his hand. ‘What you got there, Abdullah?’ I asks. ‘Something Mr. Vanc
e sent me to get. Any objection?’ he says. ‘Not if you’re on the level; but I don’t like your looks,’ I answers. And then he gives me the high hat and goes down-stairs.”

  “Perfect, Hennessey.” Vance nodded encouragingly and, taking Markham by the arm, walked back toward the drawing-room. “I think we’d better question Mrs. Bliss.”

  As we entered the woman rose to greet us. She had been sitting by the front window, and Salveter was leaning against the folding doors leading to the dining-room. They had obviously taken these positions when they heard us in the hall, for as we came up-stairs they had been speaking at very close quarters.

  “We are sorry to have to annoy you, Mrs. Bliss,” Vance began, courteously. “But it’s necess’ry that we question you at this time.”

  She waited without the slightest movement or change of expression, and I distinctly received the impression that she was resentful of our intrusion.

  “And you, Mr. Salveter,” Vance went on, shifting his gaze to the man, “will you please go to your room. We’ll confer with you later.”

  Salveter seemed disconcerted and worried.

  “May I not be present—?” he began.

  “You may not,” Vance cut in with unwonted serverity; and I noticed that even Markham was somewhat surprised at his manner. “Hennessey!” Vance called toward the door, and the detective appeared almost simultaneously. “Escort this gentleman to his room, and see that he communicates with no one until we send for him.”

  Salveter, with an appealing look toward Mrs. Bliss, walked out of the room, the detective at his side.

  “Pray be seated, madam.” Vance approached the woman and, after she had sat down, took a chair facing her. “We are going to ask you several intimate questions, and if you really want the murderer of Mr. Kyle brought to justice you will not resent those questions but will answer them frankly.”