In India, in the year 1757, a French private plucked a great jewel from the God with the Diamond Eyes. But, fleeing in the night, he carried away with him the curse of the dying priest: “Despoiler of the god, for your sacrilege the atonement unto alt generations shall be death.
In the whirl of Fate’s wheel both Europe and America saw the Diamond Eye and the doom that slept within it — and now its disaster is stalking again...
London, 1939
Maxine Murray stepped out of the lift, hurried down the hall toward the door inscribed: Watts and Fraser, Barristers. “Did it come yet?” she blurted out before she was fairly inside.
The switchboard girl stared at her in amazement. “Did what come, Miss?”
“I’m Miss Murray, of the Puss-Kat Club. I — Mr. Watts has been expecting a package from America for me. He promised to call but I just couldn’t stand the suspense another minute.”
The phone-girl’s arched eyebrows expressed her opinion of Americans and their helter-skelter ways. “Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” she drawled. She plugged in a cord languidly: “A Miss Murray here, sir, asking for a package from Amurrica... Yes, sir, I’ll send her in.”
In the inner office a lanky young Englishman, typical solicitor type, was having tea at his desk. He rose immediately.
“Ah, just in time, Miss Murray. Join me?”
“Hello, Mr. Watts. No thanks — do sit down and finish.” She took a chair and leaned forward eagerly. “I’ve been counting the boats for the past three weeks, haven’t been able to sleep planning what I’d do with it. The Queen docked last night — don’t tell me it didn’t come over on that!”
He crinkled his forehead. “Oh yes, the legacy arrived, Miss Murray. It’s in the office safe right now.”
“But why are you acting so disillusioned? You promised to call my flat the moment it got here. I’ve been waiting all day.”
“I didn’t have the heart,” he said, letting his spoon drop back on the tray. Then as she stared wordlessly, his honest face showed concern. “Miss Murray, try not to be too disappointed. My colleague and I have already examined the contents of the pouch, and — well I’m sorry to say the whole bequest isn’t worth a continental.”
“O-oh!” She slumped back in her chair and let her arms fall limply.
“Here, see for yourself—” He came back with a padlocked pouch, dumped its contents out. “It really wasn’t worth the expense of sending over. And it’s very fortunate that you didn’t borrow on it to make the trip over there personally, as you wanted to do at first. That lawyer in the States had no business cabling us to locate you and all that, and thereby arousing false hopes on your part, without waiting until the estate had been examined and appraised.” He flicked several packets of yellowed bonds with his thumbnail.
“And you’re quite sure none of them is worth anything at all?” she asked forlornly.
“Absolutely certain. They’re not even known, not listed in Wall Street — or anywhere else. Confederate bonds, shares in forgotten mines, in railroads that are no longer in existence. One issue in particular, they told me, was blotted out as far back as the Black Friday panic in New York. 1876, wasn’t that?”
Maxine Murray just held her forehead expressively.
“As for the so-called jewels, the trinkets and heirlooms that impressed you when you visited Logan Manor as a child — here they are, you can see for yourself. Simply a lot of junk. They would dazzle a child, of course, and probably account for the unwarranted legend of vast secret wealth that attached to Mrs. Logan all her life in that small town. You yourself recalled it when we first notified you, if you remember. There’s where the trouble came in. It simply shows how little rustic gossip of that sort is to be relied on.” He paused, drew in a deep breath. “The thing to do is to look at it sensibly. After all, until we contacted you several months ago, you didn’t even remember this eccentric old lady’s existence. You probably hadn’t thought twice about her in all the years since you’d come away from home.
Well then, let’s put it this way. You’re really no worse off than before. Just a bit let down, I daresay, as anyone would be.”
She managed to smile up at him quizzically. “I’m not so sure about that. Only two nights ago I turned down an advantageous offer to go to Australia. Told my agent I was coming into a fortune, didn’t have to worry about my next engagement.”
“Oh, I say, I am sorry!” He spoke so sincerely that her smile broadened. “If there’s anything we’ve done here in this office to mislead you—”
“Oh, it’s not your fault How could it be? You simply showed me the cable. I had no business letting my imagination run wild, counting my chickens before they were hatched.” She’d gotten over it by now. “Well, no use crying about it. At least Mrs. Logan meant well. No doubt she really believed she had something of value to bequeath me.”
She began to finger the ornaments one by one. “Here’s her wedding ring. And look at this thing! Did you ever see anything like it before in your life? What on earth—”
“Meant for a brooch, I should say, judging by the setting and the cross-pin behind it.”
“Yes, but look at that crystal sticking straight out of it like a unicorn’s horn. If that were only a diamond, now—”
The barrister joined her in laughing. “Yes, if that were a diamond it would be a different story.” He turned it this way and that. “I’m not an expert on precious stones, myself, but it looks like a chunk of quartz, judging by its size alone. Probably backed with silver to make it gleam a bit. What a curious old character this Mrs. Logan must have been, to hang onto stuff like this.”
“My mother, whose girlhood chum she was, told me she’d never been quite right in her mind after Major Logan’s death. He was killed by a runaway team less than a week after their marriage. Stopped all the clocks in the house, kept the blinds down, left his things just the way they’d been — that sort of thing, trying to make time stand still.” She stood up, held out her hand. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mr. Watts. I’ve got to get back and sing for my supper. Thanks for your trouble, and next time I’ll know better than to build castles in the air just on the strength of a vague cablegram.”
“What shall I do with this stuff, Miss Murray? Do you want to take it with you?”
“No, hardly.” She riffled the ornaments under her hand. “Wait — on second thought I will take this oddity, this dunce’s cap of a brooch. If I shine it up with a bit of cloth I may be able to wear it in my hair at the club tonight. I’ve been needing something to finish off my costume.” She dropped it into her handbag. “The rest you may—” She spaded both hands down toward the wastebasket beside his desk.
He went to the door with her. “Goodbye, Miss Murray. Sorry about this. If there’s any way in which we can be of further service—”
“No, thanks,” she called back cheerfully on her way out to the lift. “One inheritance like this is enough.”
“An American,” the maharajah’s secretary answered his question. “Quite a pretty piece too, isn’t she?”
“I was not thinking of that, although it is true she is charming,” Sir Hari Duggarawath remarked in his clipped Oxford accent, adjusting his monocle and looking out across the club-floor. “I am interested in that bit of decor she is carry out about in her hair. Have you very good eyes, Ramm? Can you see it from here? Watch when she turns her head about — there.”
“Of course I can see it. How could I miss it? If it was any bigger it’d make a fair-sized headstone.” Mr. Johan Ramm stopped eating to center his polite brown gaze upon his employer: “Why do you keep following it with your eyes like that?
You’re not thinking it’s real, are you?”
The maharajah did not answer for a moment. He was a plump, brown, placid little man, and the jeweled turban above his evening clothes served only to give him a sort of comic importance. He smiled inanely and waved a fat hand.
“Does it matter?” he said.
Johan Ramm shrugged. By now he had become accustomed to the cryptic ways of royalty. Another of those stupid whims, he thought, remembering frantic chases in pursuit of out-of-season delicacies, a glass slipper, some silly piece of bric-a-brac. Another scavenger hunt with His Highness pointing the quarry and Johan Ramm to attend the dirty details.
He kept his handsome face expressionless but a spark of anger burned within him. Mr. Ramm was tall and suave and sartorially impeccable. His lean features had enabled him to pose as a Latin personage upon occasion, and his bearing sometimes confused new acquaintances into believing that he was the great man and Sir Hari the humble servant. A natural error, Mr. Ramm would have said, for Johan Ramm had polished his wits and his personality in Chicago and Shanghai and Cairo, among other ports of call, and therefore made his brain sharper than that of any fat little kingling who buried himself in the back-of-beyond for eleven months of the year.
“It is hardly logical,” Mr. Ramm said drily, “that any one would wear a real jewel of that size around the floor of a night club. Why that girl doesn’t earn more than— Oh, come off of it!”
Sir Hari smiled blandly.
“Whether anyone would or would not is hardly the question. Nor how much the young lady’s wages are. Logic is not your forte, Ramm. As you know, I am not entirely inexperienced where diamonds are concerned.” (His collection was famous all over the world.) “Let me explain why I think it is not paste nor glass, even judging from this distance. Now the whole object of paste is to imitate, pretend to be the real jewel, isn’t that so?”
Another of his damned lectures, Ramm thought. He rested his chin on palm and feigned a mild interest.
“Imitations of smaller stones have some chance of passing for the real thing,” the maharajah went on. “But when a thing is that size, what is the point in making an imitation of it, when it would not be believed anyway? Secondly, it is rather dull, do you notice? Just winks dimly once in a while, as though it were all encrusted. There again — dull imitations are never made. The whole purpose of paste is to reproduce the dazzle, the flash of the real stone. A dull imitation defeats its own purpose. So I say again, that ornament our young lady is wearing so casually in her hair has every chance of being a real diamond.”
“You could talk a beach-pebble into the Kohinoor,” Ramm said grudgingly. “All right, suppose it’s real? Why are you so interested? Haven’t you enough diamonds already?”
“More than I know what to do with. But those are mere diamonds—” said the maharajah enigmatically. “She is coming around this way again. We will resume the topic later.” He became very interested in eating a dessert that had been standing untouched for the past half-hour. “Don’t let her see you staring,” he hissed beneath his breath.
Maxine Murray swayed by them with scarcely a glance at the two dusky faces dimly visible in the twilight gloom beyond the perimeter of the blinding spotlight that accompanied her. She was too busy giving an erratic lilt and variation to an old ballad, swinging the melody out:
“When a body
Meets a body
Coming through the rye—”
The maharajah peered after her as she swept on along the polished floor that gave her reflection upside-down as though she were gliding on a mirror. His face was expressionless.
Ramm tried to resume the discussion. “What’d you mean just then: the ones you’ve got already are mere diamonds? First you argue the brooch on her is a diamond, then you make it sound like another kettle of fish.”
The maharajah shuddered. “Stop using those stupid American expressions,” he said. He waved a. plump hand. “There is too much smoke in this place.”
Evidently His Highness did not wish to continue on the subject of diamonds just then, and Johan Ramm had learned long ago to respect these conversational moods. A wise man knows when to keep his mouth shut.
Maxine Murray had finished her number, was taking bows. The applause was cordial but not overwhelming. The English are reserved even in their night-clubs. Then too, they were just a little puzzled. Swing, of all the musical and terpsichorean phenomena that had come over from New York, was the hardest for them to grasp. She retired, the supper-entertainment came to an end and general dancing began.
The maharajah sat impatiently drumming his fingers on the edge of the table, as though waiting for something. Suddenly he stopped, as though the something had taken place. He got up with deceptive aimlessness, but when Ramm made a move to follow suit, he motioned him to remain where he was. “I — ah — think I’ll stretch my legs a bit. Sit here, we’re not going yet.” He flung down his ruby-clasped cigarette-case as an inducement for the other to remain.
As soon as his back was turned Ramm not only, helped himself to a cigarette, but emptied one entire compartment of the case into his pocket. This was such a long-standing custom by now, he thought no more of it than if they had been his own.
He lounged around in his chair, puffing away complacently, and noticed that Maxine Murray had appeared again. Not to entertain this time, but to have a bite by herself at an unobtrusive little table against the wall. She had thrown a cloak around her gown to escape attention, and the ornament was no longer in her hair. She read an evening paper while she munched’
Sir Hari returned a few minutes later, casual as ever, but with a childishly smug expression on his face. He took out his monocle, polished it, hitched his head at Ramm to draw a little closer.
“What’s up?” the latter asked bluntly. The maharajah made a deprecating gesture. “Nothing. Why should anything be up? I simply strolled a bit to stretch my legs. I — ah — I lost my bearings, wandered into some passageway or other back there where I had no business to be.” He smiled slyly, “You know how stupid I am sometimes. I opened the wrong door by mistake — an empty dressing-room belonging to that young lady over there. She had left her most unusual ornament behind on the dressing-table. I couldn’t resist studying it a moment, to satisfy my own curiosity and settle our little dispute once and for all.”
John Ramm was beginning to grin broadly, as if he were discovering a hitherto unsuspected kinship with his employer.
“It is indisputably a genuine diamond,” the maharajah went on, tapping a fingernail on the tablecloth to emphasize the point. “Of very great age, very crudely cut, practically no polish at all. But I have seen too many in my time not to know one, rough or polished.”
Ramm gave a low expressive whistle. “Let’s have a look,” he said.
The maharajah instantly stiffened, stared over at him coldly. “Hold on,” he said resentfully. “Do you think I helped myself to it?”
Ramm saw he’d made the mistake of applying his own standards of conduct, hastily tried to repair the blunder. “I was clowning,” he mumbled apologetically. “Can’t you take a joke?”
“I don’t care for that brand of humor. I admit it was cheeky of me to handle the thing without the owner’s knowledge, but there’s a vast difference between doing that and appropriating it.” Sir Hari helped himself to a cigarette from the case he had left on the table, saw that it had been half-emptied, but. made no comment.
“I’ll tell you what I want you to do, Ramm,” he went on when he’d regained his temper somewhat. He glanced across the other’s shoulder. “She’s finished at the table, gone inside again. There’s another show yet, so she won’t be going home for a bit.” He reached inside his dinner-jacket, brought out a billfold. “I want you to go back there and look her up. Not just yet — wait till I’ve gone back to the hotel. I want you to buy that brooch for me. But be careful how you go about it. Leave me out of it entirely. As soon as they hear the word ‘maharajah’, they imagine that the Bank of England is walking around on two legs. Let her think it’s for yourself. Don’t appear anxious — just casual, take-it-or-leave-it.”
Ramm counted the banknotes that were thrust at him, tucked them away in his own pocket. “Suppose she holds out for more than this?” he said craftily.
The maharajah sighed, like a man who is used to paying double for what he wants. “Then give her what she asks, if you have to. I’ll cash a check at the hotel for the balance. I must have that stone. See that you get it for me.”
“You’ve as good as got it already,” Ramm drawled, lidding one brown eye.
The maharajah stood up. “And remember,” he drawled, “none of your little tricks. You amuse me, Ramm, and you are valuable in your way, but I should hardly call you indispensable. This stone you will secure is so flawed that it has no great commercial value. I merely happen to want it for certain reasons of my own.”
His bearded body-servant rushed up with his cloak and stick. Johan Ramm stood at attention and bowed his employer out. He reseated himself, called for the bill, smoked a thoughtful cigarette. Then he made his way casually “to the flap-doors at the rear of the club. He signalled a page-boy. “Here’s a shilling, boy. Take me back to Miss Murray’s dressing-room. Business, not social.”
Maxine’s smile faded when she opened the door and saw a stranger. “Oh — when he said ‘business’ I thought it might be my agent. I don’t usually receive people back here.”
“This won’t take a jiff,” said Ramm cocksurely.
“Very well, come in. There’s a chair.”
He crossed his legs as though he owned the place, began swinging one foot back and forth. “Pretty good pair of pipes you’ve got,” he said patronizingly. His eyes were busy scanning the dressing-table. The ornament had vanished again; she must have put it away just before he came in. He smiled:
“No offense, but how would you like to take ten pounds for that odd-looking brooch you had in your hair out there just now?”
The girl gave him a long searching look. “What’s odder than the brooch is your coming in here like this and offering to buy it,” she said finally. “Would you mind telling me exactly why you want it?”
“Hard to say. It caught my eye just now and — well—” He floundered badly; he hadn’t expected to be cross-questioned.
“And whenever anything catches your eye, do’ you rush right up to owners and make an offer? I mean, if you see a car on the road that you fancy, or a man riding a fine horse in the park—”
“No, of course not—” he faltered. “Then why did you do it in this case?” Her eyes snapped. “Is it the brooch you want, or is it your sly little way of suggesting we might be friends? In either case the answer is ‘No!’ I choose my own friends and I’m not exactly a pauper. I may have to work here for a rather meager living. I may have to walk to and from my work to save cab-fare, but that doesn’t mean I’m reduced to peddling the very fastenings off my hair to the first cheeky young toff that walks in here! I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. — whatever your name is, but I’m not selling that brooch or anything else to you. Run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.” She threw the door open.
“No need of going up in the air about it,” he tried to soothe her. “Twenty pounds, then—”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? I didn’t like your Valentino hair the moment I set eyes on you. Either get out of here or I’ll have the porters show you the bum’s-rush!”
“All right, goldilocks, all right,” he, bowed insolently, sauntered past her. “Turn your valves off, I’m going.”
He went to a phone-booth in the foyer, rang the Dorchester House.
“Did you get it?” Sir Hari wanted to know eagerly as soon as he got on.
“Not quite, but I’ve got a very good chance,” Ramm said calculatingly, staring high up on the booth-wall before him. “Why not? What’s the matter?”
“Well, here’s the thing, Your Highness. She’s willing to sell, but she’s a sharp one. It’ll take a good deal more than you planned—”
The maharajah’s voice dropped desolately. “Oh, then she knows how valuable it is. The way she left it lying around, I didn’t think “she did.”
Ramm winked expressively at the wall. “She knows all right, never fear. Pretending not to give a damn about it is part of her little game to attract potential buyers. Then once she’s whetted their interest, up goes the asking-price. See what I mean?”
“Well, give her whatever she wants then. I’ve telephoned long-distance to my viceroy at home since leaving you, and — well, never mind why now, but there are certain developments which make that brooch important.”
Ramm leered at the instrument before him. (“Wonder why you want it so bad, old boy? Think I’ll hang onto it myself a bit first, and try to find out.”) Aloud he said: “I told you before you’d get it, and get it you shall. It will merely mean a little time and patience, and more money than we thought, that’s all. She’ll come around.”
As soon as he’d rung off, he called another number, glancing furtively over his shoulder to make sure no one was loitering outside in a position to overhear. He said in a guarded voice: “Hello, is this the Red Domino? Alf Jenkins there? Just tell him an old chum wants to speak to him... Hello, that you Alf? This is Ramm... Never mind that ‘Gentleman Jack’ stuff, I chucked that name long ago. Any of the old crowd there with you? Smithers? All right, he’ll do. Now look here, I’ve got a little job for you boys. No, no breaking and entering — nothing like that. A simple little job and five pounds apiece. You get out in front of the Puss-Kat Club and watch the door. No later than twelve. There’ll be a girl come out, dunno where she lives, but I do know she’ll be walking to wherever it is. I’ll be standing there in the foyer with my back to her. When you see me spin a lighted butt out into the gutter, that’ll be the girl you want. Keep your eye on her and clean her. Not that she’ll have anything, couple of bob in her purse, piece of glass she wears in her act maybe, but bring along whatever you find. I’m just doing it to settle an old score. Meet you at the Red Dominio later. Carry on, now!”
Bud Gordon, fed up with jollying the plump barmaid and drinking ale, swung out of the pub, turned up his coat-collar against the chill mist, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and struck out toward the docks, where the Aurora was moored. He decided that London had been sadly overestimated as a city in which to spend any length of time. Big as it was, he’d found less to do with himself than in many a smaller port. Not that he was disgruntled about it, for he was an even-tempered, uncomplaining sort of chap; he simply felt he could have spent his time to better account had he stayed aboard and turned in early.
He had a considerable distance to go, but it never occurred to him to do anything but walk it, clammy as the air was. He was in no danger of losing his way. He had an infallible sense of direction, even in a town he’d never seen before. London, most tortuous of cities to the average newcomer, held no difficulties at all for him. Only, of course, he was ignorant of the street and district names.
He was striding along a narrow dingy thoroughfare, that he knew would bring him to a broader, more populous one eventually, which in turn would lead him down to the river, when what sounded like a strangled cry came from somewhere just ahead. It stopped short as though forcibly restrained, and as he came on he could hear the scrape of shifting feet on the pavement, two or three pairs of them.
A voice whined: “She bit me ’and!” And once again that same stifled scream sounded.
But by that time Bud Gordon had bolted ahead and rounded a corner, which gave onto a shadowy lane. Three intertwined figures were weaving back and forth in the uncertain light, as in a weird dance. The middle one was a girl.
Gordon lowered his neck and shoulders and charged. One of the men turned to take him on. “ ’Ullo. ’ere’s company; ’ang onto ’er, Bert, I’ll settle with ’im!” He swung out at Gordon. “Now then! Dincher ever learn to mind yer business?”
Gordon didn’t waste breath in repartee. He swerved his head aside, took the blow over one shoulder, and his own fist shot straight upward from nearly waist-level. His adversary was jolted back with the drive of it. He went buckling over, kicking Gordon inadvertently in the legs as he flattened out. Gordon vaulted over him and went at the second man. But the latter hadn’t waited. He had wrested something from the girl and was already in full flight up the alley. Gordon chased him to the upper end of it, changed his mind and came back again, to make sure the one he had already dealt with didn’t molest the girl further. But the flattened one had scrambled crab-wise to his feet and now he made off in the opposite direction.
The girl leaned against a rough wall, fingering her manhandled throat and apparently unable to decide between self-possessed indignation and frightened tears.
“Brave pair of lads, those two,” Gordon remarked scornfully.
The matter-of-fact calmness of his voice seemed to have a steadying effect on her. She took a deep breath. “Yes, weren’t they? I always thought London was so safe at night. I never heard of anything like that happening here before.”
“You’ll run into footpads in any large city,” he said tolerantly although only a short while ago He had been ready to knock London himself. “They hurt you?”
“They got my bag.” Then as he took a belated step to go after them, she made a gesture of dissuasion. “Don’t bother. Only a few shillings and a cake of rouge in it. Not worth calling a bobby about. They tore my shirtwaist, too. Here, this’ll hold it together until I get home.” She shifted an odd-shaped brooch from the front of her blouse to the shoulder, closing a large rent. “I tried to tell them I hadn’t any money. I would have let them have the bag without any fuss if they hadn’t frightened me by jumping out like that. Well, I guess I’d better be on.”
“You’d better let me walk the rest of the way with you.”
“Yes, I wish you would. I’m not naturally scary, but I’d probably imagine a boogy-man every dark doorway after what just happened.” As they walked along she introduced herself. “I’m Maxine Murray.”
“Bud Gordon,” he said’, touching his cap.
She glanced up at its visor as they passed beneath a street-lamp. “Aurora. Steamship?”
“No, yacht. Raymond Dahlhouse’s skiff.”
“I’ve heard of him. Pays for his cigarettes with hundred-dollar bills.”
Gordon didn’t commit himself, but she could read strong inner disapproval of his employer’s notoriety by the way he briefly shut his eyes. “You’re not English?”
“Biloxi, on the Gulf Coast. But that was y’ars and y’ars ago. And you’re not either.”
“If the States are good enough for you,” he grinned, “I guess they’re good enough for me too.”
She stopped before a typical rooming-house. “Well, here’s the wealthy Maxine’s luxurious domicile. I’d ask you up for a cup of tea, only you don’t know my landlady. They got my key, too; I’ll have to wake her up and I’ll catch it!”’
He stood edging his cap around self-consciously. “Would the invitation still be open if I dropped around sometime, in the afternoon?”
She crinkled her nose at him. “I think so. Try it sometime and find out for yourself.”
His lean jaws shaved almost down to the bone, his shoes, polished like mirrors, Bud Gordon walked back and forth in front of a sweet-shop two days later, bashful as a schoolboy, trying to summon up courage enough to go in. This was navigating uncharted waters, as far as he was concerned. After three tries he finally pushed inside, stepped up to the counter.
“Er — I’m not much on shore-manners,” he said embarrassedly to the counter-girl, “wonder if you’d help me out. When you’re going to a girl’s house for the first time, is it all right to take along some candy?”
The clerk’s coquettish attitude didn’t help to make him feel any more at ease.
“Depends on who’s doing the calling,” she simpered pointedly. “I’d say it’d be quite all right — in this case. I’d like it, if I were the girl.”
“Fair enough,” he said, easing his collar as though it felt constricted. “Then just ladle out some of this stuff and box it up.” He escaped outside finally with a deep breath of relief.
A hatchet-faced middle-aged woman was standing on the doorstep of Maxine Murray’s house when Gordon finally arrived in sight of it, talking to a tall and dapper individual, who had pushed his bowler-hat far to the back of his head in disgusted frustration. Gordon caught a glimpse of darkly handsome features and the flash of a silver ring on a lean finger. As the dapper man turned and strode off he pitched something into the gutter. Gordon made out a room-key lying there as he came up.
“You’ll ’ave an ’ard time reaching ’er there,” the landlady called out after the departing applicant. “It ain’t just around the corner, you know!”
“I’ll locate her, don’t you worry!” the handsome gentleman promised truculently over his shoulder.
“Miss Murray?” said Gordon, stopping the landlady as she was turning to go in.
“What, another one? There was a gent just arsking for ’er a moment ago. She’s gone to Australia — left yesterday morning to play with a show down there. Went real sudden, she did, too.”
Gordon was staring after the bowler-hatted man. “He one of her friends?” he murmured half-aloud. “Thought she had better taste than that—” He raised the candy-box to fling it irritably away.
“ ’Ere! Not on me front walk!” warned the landlady sharply. “I just got through sweepin’ it.”
He changed his mind, ungallantly shoved the box at her instead. “Here, take ’em yourself then!” and strode off scowling, hands deep in pockets.
“Gorblimey! And at my age, too!” She stood staring after him, open-mouthed.
“There’s one of your room-keys lying over here,” Gordon called back, giving it a hearty kick. And to himself, “That’s what I get for’ straying off my course!”
Australia, 1939
The proprietor of the Bon Ton cabaret, in Sydney, came rushing into the windowless cubbyhole without the formality of knocking first, although it was, technically at any rate, a dressing-room. He had an enormous pot-belly and great hanging jowls, and both vibrated as he stopped short just over the threshhold, staring with disapproval at the bowed-down figure under the cheap tin-backed mirror, head buried between arms.
Behind him a blast of raucous laughter mingled with the clink of glassware and the tinny clatter of a piano. He kicked the door shut with his heel, to insure privacy for his displeasure. He tugged at the tongues of his split-open vest, trying to pull them down over a circular width of pink-striped shirt.
“ ’Ere, wot’s this?” he snarled. “Wot’s this me fine lydy, eh?” His jaw locked and his little pig-eyes glinted malevolently. “Cryingk again, eh? Place ain’t good enough for you, I daresy. Is this wot I pays yer fer? Why aincher never out there when I wants yer?”
Maxine Murray raised her head, touched the corners of her eyes with one finger. “What do you want now?” she said, choking back a sob. “I just got through out there a few minutes ago. You didn’t hire me to sing continuously.”
He banged a great ham of a fist on the improvised dressing-table. “I ’ired yer to sing when yer needed, that’s wot I ’ired yer for! And that’s right now! Don’t give me none of yer lip, me duchess! You get out there farst as ever yer can, or you can clear out! Go a’ead, clear out, no one’s stopping you!”
“You know I can’t clear out!” the girl said bitterly, touching a soiled powder-rag to her chin. “You know I’m stranded down here, without any friends or money. But if you had any manhood in you, any decency at all, you wouldn’t overwork me like this!” She stood up, turned away from the table. “All right, I’ll go out there and sing! I’ll sing till I drop!” He changed his tune when he saw she was ready to obey him, began to wheedle and whisper cajolingly. “That’s the girl! There’s a party of swells just come in, off some bloomin’ yacht in the ’arbor. Spending money like water, they are, and very took with the plyce too. Just go out there and keep ’em going. Be nice to them. If they arsk you to sit with them, you know what to order — champyne. But chynge your face. Brighten up a bit. They’re ’appy, they’re ’avin’ a ’igh old time, they don’t, wanter see no weepy fyces. Smile!”
“How’s this?” She grimaced distortedly from ear to ear.
The irony was lost on him. “That’s it! Now go ahead, give ’em all yer got!” Maxine crossed the smoke-filled outer room, with barely a glance at the hilarious slumming-party in evening-dress that occupied a long table in the rear. She stopped beside the wearied piano-player.
“What again?” he groaned. “My fingers are coming off, and nobody’s listening anyway.”
“Sorry, Tommy, it’s not my idea. Run through them in the usual order, starting with London Bridge is Falling Down.” He gave her a chord and she walked out into the middle of the room. The noisy group at the long table quieted a little momentarily to look her over.
A girl in a wispy green evening-dress was resting her chin on the shoulder of a tall blond young man. She placed her hands over her ears. “Another of those songbirds of the Antipodes,” she said loudly. “God help our eardrums!”
Maxine flashed her a dangerously sweet smile. “It will be pretty awful,” she agreed, “but what did you expect in a dive like this — Lily Pons?”
The blond man struck his thigh appreciatively and led the roar of laughter that went up at, the comeback. His features were pleasant and would have been attractive except for the sagging lines of dissipation. His face was well known to the Broadway tabloids — Mr. Raymond Dahlhouse, son and heir of the Chemical tycoon, and more familiarly known as The Clown Prince of the Playboys.
Maxine began to sing. Dahlhouse kept interrupting her through the whole number, but it was the sort of interruption a performer likes. “Say, she’s good! Listen to that, will you? What’s she doing in this hole-in-the-wall?” And when she’d finished: “C’mere, little lady, here’s something for your trouble.” He thrust an American hundred-dollar note into her hand.
She glanced down coolly, asked: “What’s the matter with it?”
Another roar went up, Dahlhouse joining with the rest. “That’s what this party’s been needing all along,” he cried, “New blood. I’d like to have her on the boat with us.”
“I knew this was coming,” the girl in green said waspishly.
“Why not?” Young Dahlhouse began to appraise Maxine as though she weren’t standing less than a yard away. “She’s got looks, talent, sense of humor, refinement—”
“At Nagasaki he wanted to kidnap a geisha,” the girl in green complained to the brunette across the table. “At Apia he collected that Samoan dancer. In New Zealand it was a Maori chief and his whole family. I only hope we don’t put in at the Cannibal Islands!”
Dahlhouse had enough champagne in him to stick to his point. Her opposition probably solidified the whim, whereas if she’d kept quiet he might have forgotten it in another five minutes. “It’s my boat, isn’t it? I’m going to ask who I want aboard. Anybody that doesn’t like it, they know what they can do.”
The brunette leaned over behind his back to warn her fellow-guest in an undertone: “Shut up, you fool! You’ll queer yourself. Besides, he hasn’t asked her yet.”
Dahlhouse caught the last part of it. “No? Well I’m going to ask right now. C’mere, babe. Would you like to sail on my yacht with us, as a member of the party—?”
“Just one happy family,” the girl in green sneered.
“Where to?” Maxine asked, ignoring her.
“I don’t know myself yet. Wait a minute — here’s my captain. He bothers about things, like that for me—”
But Gordon had come in to report. He didn’t see Maxine at first, just walked over to Dahlhouse, touched the visor of his cap.
“Gordon, where’s the next stop on our itin — itin — oh you know what I mean,” Dahlhouse said thickly.
“You get the angle, don’t you, Gordon?” the girl in green put in crudely, hitching her head sidewise.
He turned to look, stared at her in sudden recognition. Maxine glanced casually at the Aurora in gold letters on the headband of his cap and recollection came to her. She remembered London and a walk home through the misty streets.
“Hey, I asked you a question,” Dahlhouse insisted.
Gordon turned back to him again. “Goa, in Portuguese India,” he answered slowly.
“Oh yeah, now it’s coming back to me. And after that Suez, and after that Marseilles, and after that — home.” He was addressing Maxine. “How about it? Don’t pay any attention to these mopes. Nothing under handed about it. I just happen to like your style, that’s all, and what I like, I want around me. You come along as a guest, on an equal footing with anyone else. Sing for us at night, under the Indian Ocean moon.” He tried to raise his champagne-glass to his lips, missed connections, and its contents flushed down his shirt front. “What-d’ye say?”
She seemed about to refuse for a minute. Then she turned and saw the porcine bulk of the Bon Ton proprietor outlined dimly through the smoke-haze. She turned swiftly to Dahlhouse again, almost pleadingly. “Yes, I want to get out of here terribly,” she said in a trembling voice. “Yes, I’d like very much to come, Mr. Dahlhouse.”
“Did you ever play in stock?” the girl in green bit through clenched teeth. Bud Gordon was standing there with his eyes fixed in silent appraisal on the hundred-dollar note that was still gripped in her fingers.
“Thass fine,” Dahlhouse said, on the verge of a crying jag now. “You don’t belong in a place like this — see that right away, with one eye closed. Get your things and come right along with us. We’re leaving with the tide to morrow morning. Isn’t that right, captain?”
Gordon’s eyes flicked over Maxine as if she weren’t there at all. “That’s right, Mr. Dahlhouse.”
“And just to make the invitation binding—” He slipped another hundred-dollar-bill into her hand, tightening her fingers over it.
The girl in green hissed to the other, “Get him out of here before he persuades the piano-player to join our happy throng:”
“Yeah, or runs out of hundreds.”
Maxine turned and ran back into the dingy dressing-room, oblivious of what anyone thought or said. It was like being released from a nightmare.
The bull-necked proprietor had the audacity to swing the door open behind her a moment later, as she was getting her few belongings hastily together. “So yer quittin’ arter all I done for yer?” he whined.
“Yes,” she flared, whirling around on him. “And let me do a little something for you in return!” She picked up an unlidded tin of cold-cream and flung it full in his face. “Take that out of my week’s, wages!”
When she came out again, a small battered grip swinging at the end of her arm, the Dahlhouse party had already left to go down to the dock. Bud Gordon was standing alone at the upper end of the bar, staring grimly down into a whiskey and soda. He didn’t appear to see her until she started to walk by him, then without turning his head he said quietly: “Congratulations.”
She stopped, put the grip down. “What do you mean by that, Captain — Captain—?”
“Don’t waste time trying to get a me captain’s name straight, when there’s a multimillionaire in the offing.”
She stared angrily. “You sound as though I— You think you’ve got me pretty well typed, don’t you?”
He swivelled around, leaned on his elbow against the bar. “You didn’t refuse his — tips, did you? I’ve seen him hand them out halfway across the world. Someday I’ll see a girl refuse one of them, and I’ll take off my hat to her.” And with studied meaning, he pushed his cap so far down on one side of his head that it covered one eye.
She flung her arm out angrily, motioning around the room. “Look at this place! Do you think I want to stay here? Do you know what I’ve gone through here? The show I was with folded up somewhere in Queensland. I didn’t have a roof over my head or the price of a cup of coffee when I walked in here. This offer is a godsend to me! I want to get back home!”
“You’ll get as far as Goa, and then he’ll drop you. You’ll be worse off, you won’t even be in a white man’s country.”
“I’ll take my own chances! Whatever happens later, at least he’s giving me a break now! Why should you resent it? Am I crowding you?”
He looked at her moodily. “You’ve got that way about you that fools people. That fools a fool like me, anyway. The kind of a girl you seemed to be that night I met you in London — well, she wouldn’t go aboard a yacht with those people, no matter how badly she needed to get away. There’s something worse than singing for longshoremen — to my way of thinking, anyway — and that’s being a lush-worker, chiselling from a habitual drunkard. Like those other two you saw with him tonight.”
Maxine’s face was drawn and pale.
“I ought to slap your face for daring to talk to me this way! Well whether it disillusions you or not, Mr. Captain know-it-all Gordon, I’m sailing with your employer on the Aurora “I expected you to,” he said cuttingly. “Hit ’em while the hitting’s good. More power to you. All right. I’ll grab you a cab and tool you down to the harbor.”
“I wouldn’t ride in a cab with you if—” He finished for her, satirically. “If I was the last man in the world. I’ve heard that before somewhere or other. Have it your way, then I’ll ride up in front with the driver.” And as he picked up her grip for her, “Got everything? Sure you didn’t forget your pick and shovel?”
“Never saw nothink like it,” the fat proprietor of the Bon Ton was still relating to anyone who would listen, two nights later. “One minute she’s in ’ere down to ’er last bloomin’ penny. I go in there that very syme night it ’appened and I find ’er cryink ’cause she’s so down’earted. Then in they blow — pop! — and hoff she goes on this swanky yacht. So ’elp me! Didn’t she, Alf? And d’ye think she thanked me arter all I done for ’er? She throws a bloomin’ tin of cauld cream stryte in me fyce, if yer please—!”
A waiter elbowed his way through the ring of spellbound auditors. “There’s a lad down there arsking for that Amurrican girl we ’ad ’ere, boss. Wot’ll I sye—?”
The proprietor trundled down to where the newcomer stood puffing on a’ cigarette. He was dark and dapper and his voice had a faint foreign slur in it: “You have a blonde American girl by the name of Murray working here?” he asked, peering up under his hat-brim.
“We did ’ave. She’s gone now.”
Johan Ramm flung his cigarette down with such force that the coal exploded in a geyser of sparks. He spoke a couple of guttural words.
“You seem to want ’er sort of bad,” suggested the proprietor.
The half-caste burrowed his head into his arms across the top of the bar, went on growling muffled curses through them. He looked up again. “D’ye know I come all the way out here from London after that girl?”
“Wull, you’ll ’ave a bit farther on to go then, me bucko,” said the proprietor unfetelingly. “She’s on ’er way to India, on a yacht with some rich people, nyme of — of Dahl’ouse, I think I ’eard them sihy.”
“Raymond Dahlhouse?” said Ramm alertly. “What port, d’ye know? Bombay? Madras?”
“None o’ them.” The proprietor scratched his chin. “Wait a bit. ’Ere, Alf, what was the nyme of the plyce they said they was going?”
“Goa.”
“Goa,” relayed the proprietor. “Never ’eard of it meself, but that’s it.”
Ramm poked an excited finger into the proprietor’s pink-striped shirt. “Look here, tell me something else. While she was working for you, did she — you didn’t happen to notice a pin on her, about this shape and size? The reason I’m asking, see, is that I want to make sure it’s the same girl.”
The proprietor pinched two fingers together to illustrate. “With a great big spike of glars coming out of it? Oh yus, yus, she ’ad that on every time she come out on the floor. I’d think it was vallyble she ’ung onto it so! All she ’ad, I daresy.”
“That’s all I wanted to know!” Ramm snapped. He stopped at the first cable-office he could find after leaving the Bon Ton, drew out a blank form and engaged in a great deal of laborious composition. Finally he shoved the result over the sill at the clerk. “Send this collect, and make the sparks fly!”
His Highness the Maharajah of Maipur,
Maipur State,
India.
Missed our friend. She is at sea on way to Goa aboard Raymond Dahlhouse yacht. Suggest you make acquaintance of party and offer hospitality before they leave again for next place. She’ still wears her hair the same way. Cable some money. Am taking the next plane up from here myself.
India, 1939
Maxine Murray was leaning over the rail of the Aurora staring pensively at the shore-lights of Goa glimmering like fireflies across the greenish-white phosphorescent roadstead, when a muffled tread passed along the deck behind her. The brilliant disk of the moon cast the yacht’s shadow shoreward. She turned, saw the white blur of a shirt and the glow of a cigarette-coal. It was Bud Gordon, coatless in the insufferable heat.
“Terrible, even out here, isn’t it?” she said involuntarily, though an instant before she had fully intended to keep silent.
He stopped short, surprised. “Oh — I didn’t know you’d stayed aboard. I wouldn’t have ordered the deck-lights turned off if I’d known—”
“Leave them that way for a change. I like it dark, it’s cooler.” She added reflectively: “You try to save all the expense you can for him, don’t you, even though he throws his money away all the time?”
He didn’t answer the remark. “How’ is it you’re not ashore with the others?”
“They’re sampling the city’s night-life and that’s no treat to me. I’ve worked in too many of those places to get any kick out of pub-crawling.”
He just grunted, half-turned to go on again.
She made a half-formed gesture toward him in the dark. “Won’t you stay and talk a minute — even though I’m a parasite, a gold-digger? I’m lonely—” Then as though repenting the appeal, “Sorry, I forgot. We’re enemies.”
He moved over to the rail, rested his muscular forearms on it, stood there parallel to her but the length of a deck-stanchion away. He blew smoke thoughtfully downward and watched it winnow away.
“I’m making you do this. You don’t really want to.”
He didn’t answer.
“I can’t make you out,” Maxine went on. “You’re civil to Marge and the other girl, and I’m not doing any more than they are—”
“You don’t hold it against cats for thieving cream; that’s their nature, they don’t know any better. But when someone who does know better — well, it’s harder to make allowances, that’s all.”
“I see your point—” She stared down at the dark sea, shook her head as though unconvinced. “A man like you doesn’t care so greatly “whether a girl is ethical or not — there must be more to it than that.” She changed the subject abruptly. “Are there sharks in these waters?”
“I wouldn’t go in for a dip if I were you... Well — I’ve got some charts to go over.” The faint gleam of his broad, white-shirted back receded down the deck.
She made a furious sibilant sound with her breath, turned and ran up the other way toward the companionway that led to the cabins, marked by a dark-red bulb.
A few moments later a dark shadow, silent as a fish underwater, approached the anchored yacht from the direction of the shore. Now it was swallowed up in the shadow of the larger craft. There was a faint scraping sound of wood against steel, a warning whisper somewhere at the water-line, a creak from the Jacob’s ladder that awaited the merrymakers’ return. A figure crept stealthily up the ladder, scanned the deserted deck, then stepped aboard. The intruder crouched low and darted furtively on soundless native slippers toward the red bulb of the companionway.
The stairs inside, and the below-deck passageway that gave into the various cabins, were lighted. The intruder descended, turned into the first cabin-door he came to, closed it after him. The mirror inside, as he touched the light-switch, gave back the reflection of Mr. Johan Ramm.
He came out again in a moment or two, leaving the cabin a shambles behind him, and darted into the one next-door. A heavy tread sounded outside while he was in there. He quickly snapped out the light, edged up behind the door, fumbled in his clothing for the hilt of his thin-bladed knife.
The footsteps went on by. He eased the door open on a crack, peered out, saw the back of one of Gordon’s crew go by. He shut the door again, and counted slowly to one hundred before he put on the lights and resumed his task of dismantling the cabin.
He had worked his way to the end of the short passage — all the cabins opened onto it — and was rifling the last one of all, when there was a faint scream outside the open porthole, sounding as if it had risen from the surface of the water itself. Instantly, from the opposite side of the ship, where the moon threw its shadow, came a low-pitched but unmistakable whistle of warning.
Ramm could hear bare feet running along the deck directly over him now, and a shout of “Man overboard! Sharks!” Other footsteps, rubber-soled, joined them. There was a pause, and then a gun boomed.
A voice said hoarsely: “Here, take this and keep them off if you can! I’m going in after her!” There was a heavy splash almost immediately afterwards, so near at hand that a jet of spray sprinkled through the low porthole.
Johan Ramm didn’t wait to hear any more. He doused the cabin-light, whisked out and up the companionway, and crossed the deck like a shadow. It was as deserted as before; the sounds came from around on the other side. The gun went off a second time as he plunged out of sight down the Jacob’s ladder.
A moment later a native skiff shot out of the yacht’s protective shadow into the phosphorescent glare of the moonlight. It darted shoreward with remarkable speed, leaving a trail of carbonated bubbles in its wake as though it were coursing over mineral water.
A short while later Bud Gordon shouldered the door of the last cabin Ramm had invaded. He staggered in dripping, holding Maxine in his arms. She was badly frightened, but unhurt. She kept staring at him peculiarly through the trickle of water that dripped from her taffy-colored hair.
He set her down on the divan, pushed his own hair back out of his eyes, and blew spray off his upper lip. “You all right?” he grunted.
Her eyes wouldn’t leave his face. “Yes, I didn’t go down. It was just the — well, one minute they weren’t there, the next they were coming up behind me from all directions like — like arrows.”
“What’d you go in for?” he demanded roughly. “You want to lose a leg?”
“No,” she said, still staring. “I went in because it was the only way I could test you out. Remember I told you I couldn’t figure why you were so dead-against me, more than the others? Well now I can. You’re in love with me. That’s why you’re so sore at me — and yourself, because you hate to admit it!”
“Why, you—!” He buckled his arm threateningly at her as if he were going to let it fly backhand. “So I’m in love with you, am I! Well, try to make something out of it!” He banged the cabin-door after him so forcefully it nearly sprang its hinges.
She crossed her ankles and hugged her arms around them, smiled meditatively. “He said ‘Oh, darlin’, are you all right?’ when he came up next to me, but he doesn’t remember it any more,” she murmured softly.
It was minutes later before she noticed that the cabin had been ransacked, drawers pulled out of the dresser, her belongings scattered over the floor. “Thieves from the harbor,” she thought unconcernedly. Nothing much mattered, compared to the discovery she had made; she didn’t have anything in here worth taking, anyway.
She set about ridding herself of her wet bathing-suit, reached up to the shoulder-strap, unfastened the brooch she had used, for lack of anything better, to hold the strap together where a button was missing.
It was the red-headed girl, Marge, and not Dahlhouse for once, who discovered the roulette-wheels in the Portuguese hotel where they had all stopped for cooling drinks to break the monotony of sightseeing on the following afternoon. She came flying excitedly back, high heels tapping across the tiled floor, fingers clawing the air in an exaggerated gesture of avarice. “Ray!” she shrieked. “Gimme money, quick! Your favorite fruit! Roulette — right back there!”
There was a stampede after her. An instant later the big circular wicker table was deserted except for six gin-slings and Maxine Murray, fanning herself demurely with a palm-leaf.
Dahlhouse came back for her, dragged her along with him by the wrist. “C’mon, my proud beauty. Why do I always have to coax you?” He thrust one of his usual hundreds, tightly folded, into her hand. “Here’s a stake.”
“Mr. Dahlhouse, I can’t keep doing this! They all give me such lower-than-dirt looks every time they see you—”
“You never saw them turn one down themselves, did you?” he said with one of his rare flashes of insight. “Give the wheel a little flutter — it won’t bite you.” She left him a moment to get the bill changed into local currency at the hotel-desk. By the time she had rejoined them in the gambling room, she couldn’t find a place at the main table; a gallery had formed around the Americans like a solid wall. She edged up to a second, slightly smaller table among a number of strangers. On the third spin she hesitantly put down a handful of escudos on the first numbered square within reach, which happened to be the 17, red.
She had never played roulette before; not only that, she didn’t even have an accurate idea of the exact sum her wager represented. She kept her eyes on the blur of the spinning wheel. It crystallized into sharp outlines, the ball clicked. A languid voice intoned in two languages: “Vinte-dos, negro — twenty-two, black.” Her little sheaf of escudos were raked in.
Maxine thought she had remembered closing her bag after taking out the first sum; when she returned to it to take out more, it was open again. But its contents were untouched, just that brooch she was carrying in it had fallen partly out of its own weight. She thrust the bauble aside, took out a second handful of notes and placed them on the same square. Again the bank raked them in.
She dipped in for more money, found she had no more. As she was turning to move back from the table — she was pinned there by those pressing behind — a well-bred voice said: “Pardon me, may I be of any assistance?” She looked up quickly, but instead of the Englishman she had expected, a native nobleman in brocaded satin jacket was extending a well-filled wallet.
“No, thank you, I couldn’t do that,” she said, taken aback.
“Don’t take it personally. It is simply that your system interests me. I would like to enable you to continue.”
“But I haven’t been using any system that I know of!”
“Well, unconsciously then, you have been following the most sensible system I know. That is, to play the same number consistently until it finally comes in. You are bound to win eventually, you know, but it takes patience and a very elastic bankroll.”
“Then why don’t you try it yourself?”
“I would like nothing better,” he sighed, “but unfortunately I am not in Europe now. It is politically inadvisable for me to be seen gambling in my own country. Allow me to introduce myself, the Maharajah of Maipur. Now please use this for your wagers.”
The girl paled.
“But I have no security to offer, in case I lose it all. I can’t just take your money and—”
“Oh well, if it will make you feel more comfortable,” he said with elaborate indifference, “any nominal belonging or — ornament — will do.”
She flushed embarrassedly, turned out the contents of her bag. “But I haven’t even anything of that sort of any value... Only this old brooch, and of course that won’t do—”
He pursed his lips. “Why not?” he said, scarcely looking at it. “Anything will do, just as a token that the money is borrowed and not gifted. It is the betting system that interests me.” He drew the brooch slightly toward him along the edge of the table, allowing it to rest there.
“Well, here goes, then.” She placed the entire sum he had advanced her on the same square as before: the seventeen, red.
The Maharajah’s fingers, drumming tensely on the edge of the table, underscored the whine of the whirring wheel. They shifted over toward the brooch, then back again, like a pianist playing the scales.
“There was a click. A pause. “Diez-e-siete, Colorado; sev-ven-tinn, red.” A haymow of currency suddenly reared itself over her original bet. The rake kept pushing toward her” now, not pulling away.
The maharajah was smiling composedly as she turned toward him, open-mouthed. A thread of moisture glistened on his smooth cheek. “You see?” he said, speaking with a little difficulty. “A very good system to follow. I don’t suppose you would care to try it out any further? It would be interesting to see just how often—”
“With this antique still as your only security?” She didn’t want to gamble further, but it was his stake after all. “Very well; I know it’s considered poor sportsmanship to quit while you’re ahead—” She put the entire windfall back on 17, red, once more.
“You will break the bank if you win,” he purred.
“And if I don’t, I’ll be just where I was before.”
“Except that you won’t have the brooch.”
She’ stood with her face turned away from the croupier, looking at the maharajah instead. “I can’t bear to watch. It gives you a choked sensation in the throat.”
His eyelids drooped nearly closed; he was looking down at the brooch between them. There was a click as the ball dropped home. A pause. “Seventeen, red.” A gasp went up.
The maharajah looked slightly paler than before, when she had returned the original amount he had backed her with, put the rest in her handbag, and almost as an afterthought, dropped the brooch in on top of it.
“Won’t you come in and meet my friends?” she said. “I see they have left the tables already. Perhaps they aren’t as lucky as I am.”
“Ah yes,” he answered suavely. “I was told Mr. Dahlhouse’s yacht was in port. Even here in India we have heard of him, you see.”
When the introductions had been made, the maharajah joined them at the round wicker table. After Maxine’s phenomenal run of luck had been exhausted as a topic of conversation, Dahlhouse observed to the maharajah, “No offense, but can’t you do something about the, climate here? That’s the only thing I’ve got against the place.”
“I suppose you expect to hear me say that weather-conditions are unfortunately beyond my control,” the latter smiled affably. “However, it so happens that I can do something to relieve your sufferings. Why not be my guests for a few days in Maipur? It is just overnight from here, and yet you will find yourself in a different world. The hill-country, you know. Cool at nights, I can assure you. I could arrange a tiger-hunt if you would be interested, Mr. Dahlhouse?”
“Ah,” said Dahlhouse, his eyes lighting up, “count me in!”
“And the ladies?”
“Brrh! No tigers for me,” one answered quickly. “I’d rather stay here and put up with the heat.”
“Open a charge-account for us in the bazaars before you go, Ray, that’s all we ask,” the redhead suggested facetiously. “We won’t even miss you!”
“And the third young lady?” asked the maharajah, peering intently over at Maxine.
“It sounds exciting,” she answered. “Yes, I’ll come.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting clawed to pieces?” sneered the redhead.
“Sure,” she answered demurely, “that’s why “I’m going.”
Dahlhouse brayed with laughter at the thrust. “Listen, Sir Hari,” he went, on familiarly, as though he had known the other all his life, “if there’s going to be any hunting, you’d better let me bring my captain along. He’s a dead-shot and I’d feel a lot safer with him on the next-elephant-over. Why, I’ve seen him hit a bottle in the water at a distance of—”
“By all means,” answered the maharajah blandly, without paying much further attention to what he was saying, now that his main object had been achieved.
The maharajah’s private limousine met them late the next day at the little wayside station that was the only stop the coastal train made in his domain. A tall man in a pith-helmet stepped forward as they stood staring curiously about on the station-platform. “Mr. Dahlhouse and party? I’m Johan Ramm, his highness’ secretary, sir. If you’ll be good enough to step into the car, I’ll have you up at the residence in a jiffy.”
“What about equipment?”
“His highness will put all you need at your disposal,” Ramm assured them.
As they started off, Maxine turned to peer at him curiously. “Didn’t I once run into you in London, at the Puss-Kat Club, Mr. Ramm? Your face is strangely familiar.”
“No miss, hardly likely. I haven’t been in London for years—”
“I could have sworn—” she said doubtfully, but didn’t pursue the subject further.
“I feel cooler already,” Dahlhouse said, as the high-powered car began to climb slowly but steadily along a winding gravel-road that led up into the hills. “Why so quiet, Bud?” he asked Gordon jovially. “Hate to be separated from your ship for even a couple of days, don’t you?”
“Captain Gordon will probably brace right up as soon as the hunt itself is under way,” Maxine said wickedly, “without my company.”
Ramm stuck his hand out the open car-window, pointing to a wide expanse of velvety blue-green that was becoming visible below them as they ascended. “See that? That’s all jungle. There’s where your tigers are. Practically trackless, most of it. And when we get up a little higher, you’ll be able to see the sea. His highness’ territory takes in a strip of coastline along here, where the ruined city of Mitapur used to be.”
Something flashed in the setting sun at the end of his pointing finger, and Gordon’s eyes, drawn down to it from where he had been staring out along their guide’s arm, saw a silver ring with a flat, highly-polished head. The glitter touched a chord in his memory.
The maharajah was waiting to greet them in a large open courtyard surrounded on three sides by a rambling stucco building. His retinue was gathered around him and ceremonial torches were ablaze, for the swift tropic dusk had already fallen. His hill-residence turned out to be a group of detached wooden guest-bungalows scattered at varying distances around a main building or compound, which included garage, stables, and commissary.
Inside, they had the rare experience of being served with Martinis and canapés that London couldn’t have improved on, while reclining on cushions on a mosaic floor.
John Ramm sought out the maharajah in his private quarters shortly before midnight.
“Have our guests retired, Ramm?”
“Yes, all fagged-out from the train-trip. I turned over the nearest bungalow to Dahlhouse, put the yacht-captain in one of the intermediate ones, and installed the girl in the one highest up and furthest from here, explaining that it had the best view and caught more breeze.”
“Perfect. That’s just the way I want them situated.”
Ramm smiled thinly. “What are your intentions, Sir Hari?”
The maharajah gestured with his cigarette. “Of course, it would be tactless to speak of concrete intentions. However, let us contemplate possibilities. Don’t you think it is possible a, fire might break out in that farthest off bungalow, say tomorrow night. You can see how difficult it would be to save anything in it, it is so far removed from the water-supply. There would be no time for the occupant to rescue any of her belongings, certainly not a mere trinket—”
“You want that brooch very badly, don’t you?” Ramm drawled.
“It is no longer a case of wanting; I must have it. There were riots today in the bazaars down in the capital. Agitators are working my subjects up against me. I have been too modern for my own good, spent too much time in Europe. The only thing that can save me, that can strengthen my hold and renew my popularity, is to play upon their superstitions. I must show them that their gods are supporting me—”
“But why just this certain diamond? You have others.”
Sir Hari’s plump face was etched with thoughtful lines. “It is the size of it,” he said. “I recognized the importance of that from the first. Did you know I was a student of our native folk-lore, Ramm? Whatever my personal belief in such things, politically I cannot afford to flout them. There is a story of an image of the fire-god in Mitapur whose eye was stolen from it, a diamond much like this. He who restores it will be blessed above all men; what is more to the point, he will Hold these people in the hollow of his hand. And so tomorrow night the fire-god will reveal himself to me, in that hill-bungalow. I will have the revelation well-advertised. And when the ashes are sifted afterwards — lo! a miracle. The legendary eye of the god. I will build a new shrine — the old one was swallowed up in the jungle long ago. No more unrest, no more mutterings against me in the bazaars.”
He chuckled in his throat.
“Tomorrow night then?” Ramm asked. “Yes. That will give me twenty-four hours to lay the ground-work for the coming revelation among my subjects. You will be able to obtain waste and oil from the garage. Be very careful how you go about it; this fire must seem to be a supernatural visitation. Goodnight.”
Johan Ramm went out, helping himself absent-mindedly to one of the maharajah’s cigarettes from a box near the door.
“So that’s what was back of it all the time,” he muttered. “Not just a diamond — political pull. And if someone else should turn up and return their bloomin’ idol’s eye — that man would have the pull instead. Could I get away with it? Why not — the Brooke family’s been ruling Sarawak for a hundred years. I wouldn’t have to last that long just long enough to feather my nest. Then hop a plane some night—” He kissed his fingertips mockingly, “Here’s your country back, folks, thanks for the use of it.”
He threw down his cigarette in sudden determination, trod it out, looked around the compound. The pinpoints of light behind the lattices of the maharajah’s private apartments had already gone out. He started toward the garage. “Tomorrow night, hell!” he muttered grimly. “Tonight’s the night!”
The distant howl of some jungle-creature on the still night-air first put the idea into Gordon’s head. It was far-off and he wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it himself, but it occurred to him that Maxine might be nervous up there alone in that exposed bungalow. After all. one of the brutes might just take it into its head to prowl around a human habitation. Wouldn’t be the first time such a thing happened in India. There was an old Colt’s revolver that he’d been carrying around for years aship and ashore with him; he decided to take it up and leave it with the girl. Stubborn to the bitter end, he refused to admit to himself that the chance of having a word alone with her had anything to do with it. As a matter of fact, if he hadn’t had the gun for an excuse, he probably would have found another — matches or the loan of a needle and thread, or something.
He found the Colt at the bottom of his duffle-bag, pocketed it, came out of his bungalow, and started up the hill — in his usual footgear, canvas sneakers without socks.
Clumps of small fir-trees and scrub-pines screened her bungalow until he was nearly at the crest of the rise. There was no path or road as such, simply a sort of rut that in the rainy season must have formed a perfect spillway. But then this place was not used in the rainy season, anyway. The Oriental sky was a jewelled tapestry of stars, he’d never seen so many even out at sea, and the air was nearly as cool as back home on an early Fall night, just before the frost set in. He was thinking of Maxine back home with him on a night like this, wondering if he’d ever have the nerve to ask her, when there was a muffled clash of tin from the underbrush just ahead and some sort of vague light began to glow out. For a minute he thought she’d lit the lamp in her bungalow, but the glow was too irregular.
He broke into a run. The bungalow came into sight, and he was just in time to see a man’s figure outlined for an instant under the veranda-shed. It was a tall man, and he rested his hand against one of the veranda-posts, pausing to look back inside.’ Now, as the light through the screen-door brightened, something flashed on one of his fingers. Gordon remembered the maharajah’s car that afternoon, and Johan Ramm pointing out at the sunset jungle.
He yelled “Hey — what are you doing there?” and bolted forward. The dim figure leaped from the veranda, slipped around the corner of the bungalow. There was a brief crackle of underbrush, then all other sound was swallowed up in the increasing roar of the flames.
It was more important to get her out of there first; Gordon knew who’d done it now, anyway. He turned back, plunged inside. Maxine was just starting awake, coughing dazedly under a tangled mesh of mosquito-netting that had already ignited at one edge from the criss-cross lines of fire. Gordon, ripped away the flimsy cloth, trampled it, lifted the girl and carried her out.
He touched her bare feet to the ground just beyond the veranda. “I’ll see if I can get some of your things,” he said, and went lunging back again. The back wall of the house was a solid curtain of flame now and the heat was punishing. He snatched up a dress and a pair of shoes, and came out again with his eyes stinging. He was ready to turn around and go in a third time, but Maxine held him fast by one arm.
There was a bang like a gun and a blazing roof-timber sagged V-shaped down into the room.
She struggled into the dress over her night-gown. “What did I do, leave the lamp on or something?” she asked.
“No, you didn’t leave the lamp on.” He decided not to frighten her for the present by telling her what he’d seen.
“Well, I didn’t have anything much in there anyway. A couple of extra dresses, and a bottle of perfume Ray bought me at Batavia, and that glass thingamabob. No, wait a minute—” She looked down at the neckline of her dress. “I remember pinning it on this dress when I took my things off. Must have dropped off in there. Never mind, it’s not worth anything anyway.”
He took her by the arm. “Come on. We’ll just have to let the fire burn itself out, I guess. Funny that the servants aren’t swarming around... I’ll turn my place over to you and bunk up with Dahlhouse for tonight. But first there’s someone — I want to see.”
He handed her the revolver at the door of his own bungalow. “Keep this with you.”
He went down to the compound, looked around. Sleep and silence and darkness prevailed; the fire had evidently not been noticed down here. A slight pinkish halo up at the top of the hill was all that could be seen from this distance.
He woke up one of the maharajah’s sleeping foot-soldiers in a doorway, ascertained where Ramm’s quarters were. He tried the door first, without bothering to knock. It was bolted fast, so he thumped his fist against it.
A bolt slid out with amenable haste and the door opened. Johan Ramm was the perfect picture of a man awakened from deep sleep, pajamas, tousled hair, and all. Gordon pushed him out of the way; closed the door, then turned and caught the half-caste by the throat.
His voice rumbled deep in his chest with pent-up rage. “What’s the idea setting fire to Miss Murray’s bungalow — and with her in it — you dirty thieving murderer? Answer me! What’d you do it for?”
A small native coffee-table went over as Ramm tried to free himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve been asleep in bed here for the past—”
“You liar! Hold your hand in front of that lamp! Hold it out or I’ll bust you apart!”
Ramm thrust it out. The middle finger-flashed in the lamplight, not once but repeatedly, it was shaking so with fright.
Gordon narrowed his eyes to murderous slits. “Sure. I knew it was you anyway.” Johan Ramm quailed as he saw him roll up a fist. “Now listen — now see here—”
“So you don’t want the maharajah to know, huh? Well, I won’t wake him up at this hour of the night, but he’s going to hear about it the first thing in the morning, you can bet your bottom dollar. And if he don’t kick you off his payroll and out of here, I’ll do it myself! Until then, here’s a night-cap!”
His fist pounded out, sent Ramm spread-eagling back across the tiled floor.
Dahlhouse, accustomed to late hours even on a tiger-hunting expedition, was still sleeping when Gordon got up the next morning. He dressed quietly without waking the other man, slipped out and went over to the other bungalow, his own former one, to see how Maxine was getting along.
She wasn’t in it.
He turned around and went down to the compound again. It was all pink and blue in the early sunlight, like a confectionery palace. Some of the maharajah’s humbler subjects were stirring already. He saw some of the household women scrubbing clothes on flat stones beside a small, stream, met a stableman coming up with brimming buckets of water.
“Where girl? You know — girl?”
The man showed his teeth, proud that he knew a few words of English “Mem-sahib go horse-ride in joongle.”
“In the jungle! Alone?”
“With Sahib.”
It must be Ramm. Dahlhouse was still asleep; he was the only other white man in the party. Gordon’s face got a little tighter, but he gave no other sign of excitement. “Saddle me a horse, quick! Which way did they go?”
The man gestured vaguely to the west, to where mists were already streaming upward from the blue-green moss-bed Ramm had pointed out yesterday. “Let horse loose. Horse follow others.”
“She’ll never come back alive!” Bud Gordon thought, throwing his leg over a fine black mare the stableman had led out for him. “That devil!” He smacked the sleek rump with his bare hand, started cantering down to the small stream that ran by the compound, and kept along beside that until the jungle-walls had closed in on both banks and nearly met overhead, like a great tunnel.
Maxine and Johan Ramm had come this way before him. An occasional horse-dropping, hoofprints in the soft soil at the creek’s edge, slashed creepers, and broken fronds — these signs pointed the trail. But he couldn’t go very fast without risking being unhorsed or strangled by one of the tenacious vines or lianas frequently laced across the stream-bed.
After about three-quarters of an hour’s splashing and stumbling, half in the stream-bed, half on its slippery banks, the horse whinnied and pricked up its ears. Something or somebody just ahead! He rounded an unexpected bend in the stream and came upon a motionless tableau.
Ramm was sitting perfectly still, his horse’s head turned as though he had coolly waited for Gordon to overtake him. Maxine was on another mount so close beside the half-caste that their stirrups were touching. Her hands were held out of sight, and she was arched helplessly over toward Ramm. His open hand was pressed over her mouth to silence her. All Gordon could see were her eyes. They were rolling mutely upwards. He didn’t understand the message in time, spurred angrily forward to free her.
Something dropped heavily from the leafy covert overhead, unhorsing him. He went rolling into the stream-bed with a native groom on top of him. There was a knife in the attacker’s hand and now the blade was menacing Gordon’s throat.
“Well done,” said Johan Ramm. “Tie his hands, Bikar.”
His wrists were lashed tightly, and a moment later the groom had flung him unceremoniously back on his horse. The brown man kept the reins in his own hand as he remounted his own, which had been tethered out of sight.
“Now come on,” Ramm said, leading Maxine’s horse after him by the bridle. “We’ll go in a little deeper — where a shot isn’t likely to be heard.”
Gordon said, “What’s the idea? You can’t get away with this.”
“This is the idea,” chuckled Johan Ramm. There was a glitter as he removed some object from his waistband, tossed it up, deftly caught it in the hollow of his hand again. Gordon recognized that brooch he had seen on Maxine so often. “And as for getting away with it — don’t you think it’s likely that if two greenhorns like you and the little lady went riding too deep in the jungle you might lose your way and never come out alive again? Your horses will find their way back in a day or two — and everyone’ll be able to read the signs.”
“You murdering rat,” Gordon gritted.
It was high noon when Ramm finally drew up in a sun-spotted glade, walled at one end by a sharply-upthrust mound, almost cone-shaped. “This is a good place — the old temple ruins. They’re scared to come too near here — haunted by the gods.” He reined-in the girl’s horse and the groom did likewise with Gordon’s. They pulled their two captives off the saddles by main force. Ramm took an automatic out of a holster hanging by his saddle, broke it, blew into it meaningfully, clapped it shut again. “Tie our horses so they won’t bolt,” he ordered. “Let the other two shift for themselves.” The groom led two of the horses to the upper end of the glade, threshed about among the cane-brakes.
Bud Gordon had been working desperately at his bonds the whole morning. He’d undone them long ago, but kept the cords around his wrists. No mere native groom could expect to show a seaman anything in the way of insoluble knots.
“Right here and now?” he asked quietly, shifting closer to the girl.
“Right you are,” Ramm assured him remorselessly.
“Let’s see what kind of a man you are,” Gordon improvised. “The condemned are always given one last cigarette before they die. I haven’t had a smoke all morning.”
“All right,” said the half-caste accommodatingly. “If she can stand the strain of waiting, so can I.” He took out one of the maharajah’s monogrammed silk-tips, thrust it between Gordon’s lips, still holding the automatic warily.
“There’s a lighter in my jacket-pocket,” Gordon said hopefully, still keeping his hands behind him. He had managed to catch Maxine’s eye for an instant and to gesture her toward the moss-covered mound that reared behind them.
Ramm had taken out the oblong lighter, was holding it up carelessly. Gordon knew that lighter well. He was counting on its habit of flaming defectively when its fuel-content had been agitated too much, as now by his long horseback-ride. “Just push the little thumb-catch down,” he instructed.
A fan-shaped gush of thin flame pinwheeled between their two faces. Gordon blew out his breath with all the lung-power he could master. It deflected it straight into the brown eyes of Johan Ramm. The half-caste gave a scream as he jolted back, momentarily singed and half-blinded. Gordon’s hands whipped out, ripped the automatic out of his relaxed grasp muzzle-first. It exploded through his cuff, burning his wrist, but he did not even feel the pain. He was too intent on his own left fist that smashed into Ramm’s face and knocked him flat.
“The groom, Bud!” Maxine screamed. Gordon twisted around and saw the second man at the far end of the clearing. He was unslinging a rifle from one of the saddle girths.
“Get behind that mound,” Gordon shouted. He snapped a shot at the groom that gashed the bark of a tree just behind the man’s head, then stumbled after Maxine around the slippery uneven base of the massive protuberance, which seemed to be partly rotting logs, partly hewn blocks of granite, and partly topsoil.
“Give me that rifle!” Ramm was yelling to the groom. “You don’t know the first thing about handling it!”
The two Americans were out of sight now. Bud Gordon knew how slight their chances were in a duel of automatic versus rifle, but there was a ray of hope at least. He was a crack shot and he knew he would not miss if Ramm could be lured within range. His fingers gripped tight on Maxine’s arm as he led her among the vine-tangled ruins where a number of peculiar monoliths reared upright, like thick headstones.
“Get down behind one of those,” Gordon warned. He tried to climb up the rear of the chief one, to get the drop on Ramm who was stalking them from the other side. Its smooth, mossy slope defeated him, sent him slipping down again.
At the same instant the rifle boomed out, the sound echoing around them with a vibrant roar. The bullet thudded not far above Gordon’s head and a black fissure, like a snake, leaped halfway up the protecting bulwark and unravelled into a spidery network of cracks. Some loose earth and little stones went cascading down. Gordon drew back, mystified. He began to work his way warily sidewise among the upright and fallen monoliths.
But Johan Ramm, close up under the front of the tumulus, must have seen him first. The rifle boomed out again, sent chips of stone flying sickeningly close to Gordon’s concealed face.
Then there was a sudden explosive crack — a sound that didn’t come from the rifle. Bud Gordon heard Ramm’s voice shrill out in a scream and caught a glimpse of the man’s distorted face and his arms upraised as if to ward off attack from the sky above. The whole top of the mound seemed to have shifted out over Johan Ramm, while its base, around on the other side, reared up into’ the air like an overturned pedestal. A moment later the whole mound disintegrated into a flux of cascading boulders that leveled itself with a rumble like heavy artillery. The ground shook sickeningly and a great haze of dust blotted out the whole glade.
When the dust had finally dissipated into a brownish haze they could make out one of Ramm’s legs protruding motionless from a heap of rubble. The moaning sound they heard was the voice of the groom, rendered helpless by abysmal superstitious terror, wailing and beating his head to the ground at the far end of the clearing.
Bud Gordon wet his lips. The towering mound, he saw now, must have been some great idol of the temple that the jungle ages had mossed over. Ramm’s bullets had brought it toppling down upon him.
The wailing groom had vanished into the jungle. They found the tethered horses and mounted. Neither of them spoke until they drew rein at the edge of the clearing for a final glance behind.
“What did he want with that brooch of mine?” Maxine asked, mystified.
Gordon shook his head, equally baffled. “I don’t understand the whole thing, myself, from beginning to end.”
He touched her hand and they rode away. Behind them the ancient dust settled and a silence reigned in the jungle clearing where the eyeless idol had reclaimed its own.