The Gadget Had a Ghost

III

Coghlan breakfasted on coffee alone, next morning, and he had the dour outlook and depressed spirit that always followed an evening with Laurie these days. The trouble was, of course, that he wanted to marry her, and resolutely wouldn’t even consider the possibility.

He drank his coffee and stared glumly out into the courtyard below his windows. His apartment was in one of the older houses of the Galata district, slicked up for modem times. The court­yard had probably once been a harem garden. Now it was flag-stoned, with a few spindling shrubs, and the noises of Istanbul were muted when they reached it.

There came brisk footsteps. Lieutenant Ghalil strode crisply across the courtyard. He vanished. A moment later, Coghlan’s doorbell rang. He answered it, scowling.

Ghalil grinned as he said, “Good morning!”

“More mystery?” demanded Coghlan suspiciously.

“A part of it has been cleared up in my mind,” said Ghalil. “I am much more at ease in my thoughts.”

“I’m having coffee,” growled Coghlan. “I’ll get you some.” He got out another cup and poured it. He had an odd feeling that Ghalil was regarding him with a new friendliness.

“I have a letter for you,” said the Turk cheerfully.

He passed it over. It was a neatly typed note, in English, on a letterhead that Coghlan could make out as that of the Minis­try of Police—which is officially based in Ankara rather than Is­tanbul, but unofficially has followed the center of gravity of crime to the older city. The signature was clear. It was that of a cabinet minister, no less. The note said that at the request of the American, Mr. Mannard, Lieutenant Ghalil had been ap­pointed to confer with Mr. Coghlan on a matter which Mr. Coghlan considered serious. The Minister of Police assured Mr. Coghlan that Lieutenant Ghalil had the entire confidence of the Ministry, which was sure that he would be both cooperative and competent.

Coghlan looked up, confused.

“And I thought you the suspicious character!” said Ghalil. “But you surely did the one thing a suspicious character would not do—call in the police at the beginning. Because you thought me suspicious!” He chuckled. “Now, if you still have doubts, I can report that you wish to confer with a person of higher rank. But it will not be easy to get anyone else to take this matter seriously! Or in quite so amicable a manner, orders or no, in view of the implied threat to Mr. Mannard and my comparative assurance that you are innocent so far—” he smiled slightly— “of any responsibility for that threat.”

Coghlan had been thinking about that, too. He growled:

“It’s ridiculous! I’d just barely told Mannard about it last night, when he had an accident and almost got himself killed, and a third party who was along had the nerve to warn me—”

Ghalil tensed. He held up his hand.

“What was that?”

Coghlan impatiently told of Mannard’s tripping on the stairs. “A coincidence, obviously,” he finished. Then, placing the de­fense before any offense: “What else?”

“What else indeed?” agreed Ghalil. He said abruptly, “What do you think of 80 Hosain? You saw it last night.”

Coghlan shrugged his shoulders. The carload of them—Mannard, Laurie, Appolonius the Great and Coghlan—had driven deep into the Galata quarter and found 80 Hosain. It was a grimy, unbelievably ancient building, empty of all life, on a wind­ing, narrow, noisome alleyway. When the car found it, there were shabby figures gathered around, looking curiously at police outside it. Ghalil himself came to ask what the people in the car wanted. Then the whole party went into the echoing deserted building and up to the empty back room on the second floor.

Coghlan could see and smell that room now. The house itself had been unoccupied for a long time. It was so old that the stone flooring on the ground level had long since worn out and been replaced by wide, cracked planks now worn out themselves. The stone steps leading to the second story were rounded in their centers by the footsteps of past generations. There were smells. There was mustiness. There was squalor and evidences of neglect continued for a millennium. There were cobwebs and dirt and ev­ery indication of degradation; yet the door-lintels were carved stone from a time when a workman was an artisan and did the work of an artist.

The back room was empty of everything but the grime of ages. Plaster had fallen, revealing older plaster behind it, and on the older plaster there were traces of color as if the walls had been painted in figures no longer to be made out. And there was one place, on the western wall, where the plaster was wet. A roughly square spot of a foot-and-a-half by a foot-and-a-half, about a yard above the floor-level, glistening with moisture.

In Coghlan’s living-room, with Ghalil looking interestedly at him, Coghlan frowned.

“There was nothing in the room. It was empty. There was no ‘Gadget’ there as Duval’s book declared.”

Ghalil said mildly:

“The book was of the thirteenth century. Would you expect to find anything in a room after so long a time, so many lootings, the use of twenty generations?”

“I was guided only by Duval’s book,” said Coghlan with some irony.

“You suspect that wet spot on the wall, eh?”

“I didn’t understand it,” admitted Coghlan, “and it was— peculiar. It was cold.”

“Perhaps it is the gadget,” said Ghalil. He said in mild reproof, “After you left, I felt it as you had done. It was very cold. I thought my hand would be frost-bitten, when I kept it there for some time. In fact, later I covered the spot with a blanket, and frost appeared under it!”

Coghlan said impatiently, “Not without refrigerating appara­tus, and that’s out of the question!”

Ghalil thought that over. “Yet it did appear.”

“Would refrigerating apparatus be called a gadget?” Coghlan wondered.

The Turk shook his head. “It is peculiar. I learn that it is traditional that a spot on the plaster in that room has always been and will always be wet. It has been considered magical, and has given the place a bad name—which is one reason the house is empty. The legend is verifiable for sixty years. Refrigeration was not known in small units so long ago. Would that coldness be another impossibility of this affair?”

Coghlan said, “We talk nonsense all the time!”

Ghalil thought, again. “Could refrigeration be a lost art of the ancients?” he asked with a faint smile, “and if so, what has it to do with you and Mr. Mannard and this—Appolonius?”

“There aren’t any lost arts,” Coghlan assured him. “In olden times people did things at random, on what they thought were magical principles. Sometimes they got results. On magical rea­soning, they used digitalis for the heart. It happened to be right, and they kept on. On magical reasoning, they hammered copper past all sanity. It got hardened, and they thought it was tem­pered. There are electroplated objects surviving from a thousand years and more ago. The Greeks made a steam turbine in the classic age. It’s more than likely that they made a magic lantern. But there could be no science without scientific thinking. They got results by accident, but they didn’t know what they were do­ing or what they’d done. They couldn’t think technically . . . so there are no lost arts, only redefinitions. We can do everything the ancients could.”

“Can you make a place that will stay cold for sixty years—let alone seven hundred?”

“It’s an illusion,” said Coghlan. “It must be! You’d better ask Appolonius how it’s done. That’s in his line.”

“I would be pleased if you would examine again that cold place on the wall at 80 Hosain,” said Ghalil ruefully. “If it is an illusion, it is singularly impenetrable!”

“I promised,” said Coghlan, “to go on a picnic today with the Mannards. They’re going up along the Sea of Marmora to look at a piece of ground.”

Ghalil raised his eyebrows.

“They plan a home here?”

“A children’s camp,” Coghlan explained with reserve. “Man­nard’s a millionaire. He’s given a lot of money to the American College, and it’s been suggested that he do something more. A camp for slum-children is projected. He may finance it to show what can be done for children’s health by the sort of thing that’s standard in the United States. He’s looking over a site. If he puts up the money, the camp will be handled by Turkish person­nel and the cost and results worked out. If it’s successful, the Turkish Government or private charities will carry it on and ex­tend it.”

“Admirable,” said Lieutenant Ghalil. “One would not like to see such a man murdered.”

Coghlan did not comment. Ghalil rose.

“But—come and examine this refrigeration apparatus of an­cient days, please! After all, it is undoubtedly mentioned in a memorandum in your handwriting of seven hundred years ago! And—Mr. Coghlan, will you be careful?”

“Of what?”

“For one, Mr. Mannard.” Ghalil’s expression was wry. “I do not believe in things from the past any more than you do, but as a philosopher and a policeman I have to face facts even when they are impossible, and possibilities even when they are insane. There are two things foretold which disturb me. I hope you will help me to prevent them.”

“The murder of Mannard, of course. But what’s the other?”

“I should regret that, and I guard against it,” Ghalil told him. But I would be intellectually more disturbed if you should cut your thumb. A murder would be explicable.”

Coghlan grinned. “I won’t. That’s not likely!”

“That is why I dread it. Please come to 80 Hosain when you can. I am having the room examined microscopically—and cleaned in the process. I even have it garrisoned, to prevent any preparation of illusion.”

He waved his hand and went away.

An hour later, Coghlan joined the excursion which was to inspect a site for a possible children’s camp. An impressive small yacht lay at dock on the shore of the Golden Horn. There was a vast confusion everywhere. From Italian freighters to cabin-cruisers, from clumsy barges to lateen-rigged tubs and grimy small two- and three-passenger rowboats—every conceivable type of floating thing floated or moved or was docked all about. The yacht had been loaned as a grand gesture by its owner, so that Mannard would make a gift of money the yacht’s owner preferred to spend otherwise.

Laurie looked relieved when Coghlan turned up. She waved to him as he came aboard.

“News, Tommy! Your friend Duval telephoned me this morn­ing!”

“What for?”

“He sounded hysterical and apologetic,” Laurie told him, “be­cause he’d been trying to reach Father, and couldn’t. He said he could not tell me the details or the source of his information, but he had certain knowledge that you intended to murder my father. He nearly collapsed when I said sweetly, ‘Thank you so much, M’sieur Duval! So he told us last night!’ “ She grinned. “It wasn’t quite the reaction he expected!”

“If he were an honest man,” Coghlan mused, “that’s just ex­actly what he’d have done—tried to warn your father. But he couldn’t say why he thought a murder was in the wind, be­cause that’s unbelievable. Maybe he is honest. I don’t know.”

Appolonius the Great came waddling down to the dock, in a marvelous yachting costume. He beamed and waved, and the sun­light gleamed on his wristwatch. A beggar thrust up to him and whined, holding out a ragged European cap. The beggar cringed and gabbled shrilly. And Appolonius the Great paused, looked into the extended cap with apparent stupefaction, and pointed; whereupon the beggar also looked into the cap, yelped, and fled at the top of his speed, clutching the cap fast. Appolonius came on, shaking all over with his amusement.

“You say?” he asked amiably as he reached the yacht’s deck. “Indeed I cannot resist such jests! He held out his cap, and I looked, and feigned surprise—and there was a handful of jewels in the cap! True, they were merely paste and trinketry, but I added a silver coin to comfort him when he discovers they are worthless.”

He waddled forward to greet Mannard. There was around the yacht that pandemonium which in the Near East accompanies ev­ery public activity. Men swarmed everywhere. Even the yacht carried a vastly larger crew than seemed necessary, there being at least a dozen of them on a boat that three American sailors would have navigated handily. Sailors seemed to fall all over each other in getting ready for departure.

The party of guests was not large. There was a professor from the College. A local politico, the owner of the proposed camp­site. A lawyer. The Turkish owner of the yacht glowed visibly as last-minute baskets of food came aboard. He was not paying for them.

Coghlan and Laurie sat at the very stern of the yacht when at last it pulled out and went on up the Golden Horn. There was little privacy, because of the swarming number of the crew, and Coghlan did not try for greater privacy. He looked at the panorama of the city which had been the center of civilization for a thousand years—and now was a rabbit-warren of narrow streets and questionable occupations. Laurie, beside him, watched the unfolding view of minarets and domes and the great white palace which had been the Seraglio, and the soaring pile of Hagia Sophia, and all the beauty of this place, notorious for its beauty for almost two thousand years. There was bright sunshine to add to it, and the flickering of sun-reflections on the water. These things seemed to cast a glamor over everything. But Laurie looked away from it at Coghlan.

“Tommy,” she said, “will you tell me what was in that mys­terious message that you wouldn’t tell last night? You said it was about me.”

“It was nothing important,” said Coghlan. “Shall we go up to the pilot-house and see how the yacht’s steered?”

She faced him directly, and smiled.

“Does it occur to you that I’ve known you a long time, Tommy, and I’ve practically studied you, and I can almost read your mind—I hope?”

He moved restlessly.

“When you were ten years old,” she said, “you told me very generously that you would marry me when you grew up. But you insisted ferociously that I shouldn’t tell anybody!”

He muttered something indistinct about kids.

“And you took me to your Senior Prom,” she reminded him, “even if I had to make my father leave Bogota two months early so I’d be around when it was time for you to pass out the invita­tion. And you were the first boy who ever kissed me,” she added amiably, “and until—well—lately you used to write me very nice letters. You’ve paid attention to me all our lives, Tommy!”

He said:

“Cigarette?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’m working up to something.”

“No use talking,” he said sourly. “Let’s join the others.”

“Tommy!” she protested. “You’re not nice! And here I am trying to spare you embarrassment!” She grinned at him. “You wouldn’t want my father to ask what your intentions are!”

“I haven’t any,” he said grimly. “If I were only a rich woman’s husband I’d despise myself. If I didn’t, you’d despise me! It wouldn’t work out. And I wouldn’t want to be just your first husband!”

Her eyes grew softer, but she shook her head reproachfully. “Then—how about being a brother to me? You ought to sug­gest that, if only to be polite.”

Coghlan had known her a long, long time. Her air of comfort­able teasing would have fooled people. But Coghlan felt like a heel.

He muttered under his breath. He stood up.

“You know damned well I love you!” he said angrily. “But that’s all! I can’t turn it off, but I can starve it to death! And there’s no use arguing about it! You’ll be leaving soon. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t come near you here! Nobody could be crazier about anybody else than I am about you, but you can’t wear me down. Understand?”

“I wouldn’t want to break your spirit, Tommy,” said Laurie reasonably. “But I’m getting desperate!”

Then she smiled. He growled and strode irritably away. When his back was turned, her smile wavered and broke. And when he looked back at her a little later she was staring out over the wa­ter, her back to the others on the yacht. Her hands were tightly clenched.

The yacht steamed on up the Bosphorus. There were the hills on either side, speckled with dwellings which looked trim and picturesque from the water, but would be completely squalid at close view. The sky was deepest azure, and this was the scene of many romantic happenings in years gone by. But the owner of the yacht talked expansively to Mannard in the thickest of Turkish accents. The professor from the American College was deep in discussion with the lawyer on the responsibility of the municipal government for the smell of decaying garbage which made his home nearly uninhabitable. The owner of the site to be inspected spoke only Turkish. That left only Appolonius the Great.

Coghlan brought up the subject of the cryptic and quite in­credible message in the Alexiad.

“Ah, it is a mystification,” said Appolonius genially. “It is also, I think, an intended swindle. But Mr. Mannard has spoken to the police. They will inquire into those persons. It would be un­professional for me to interfere!”

Coghlan said shortly:

“Not if it’s a scheme for a swindle.”

“That,” acknowledged Appolonius, “disturbs me. As you know, I have recently received a large sum from a source that would surprise you, to bribe my people to freedom. I do not like to be associated with downright scoundrels! Therefore I stand aside—lest it be considered that I am a scoundrel too!” Coghlan turned away, considering.

This was not a cheerful day for him. He doggedly would not go back to Laurie. It had cost him a great deal to make the deci­sion he’d made. He wouldn’t change it. There was no use talk­ing to her. Thinking about her made him miserable. He tried, for a time, to put his mind on the matter of 80 Hosain; to imagine some contrivance, possible to the ancients, which would amount to apparatus to produce cold. In Babylonia the ancients had known that a shallow tray, laid upon blankets, would radiate heat away at night and produce a thin layer of ice by morning on a completely windless and cloudless night. The heat went on out to empty space, and the blanket kept more heat from rising out of the earth. But Istanbul was hardly a place of cloudlessness. That wouldn’t work here. The ancients hadn’t understood it, anyhow. He gave it up.

The yacht drew nearer to the shore as the Sea of Marmora ex­panded from the Bosphorus. It tied up to a rickety wharf, with seemingly innumerable sailors clumsily achieving the landing. Mannard went ashore to inspect the proposed campsite. Sailors carted ashore vast numbers of baskets, folding tables, and the other apparatus for an alfresco luncheon. Coghlan smoked dourly on the yacht’s deck.

Laurie went ashore, and he sat still, feeling as ridiculous as a sulking child. Presently he wandered across the wharf and moved about at random while the lunch was spread out. When the ex­ploring party came back, Coghlan allowed himself to be seated— next to Laurie. She casually ignored their recent discussion and chatted brightly. He sank into abysmal gloom.

The matter of the proposed children’s camp was discussed at length in at least three languages. Luncheon progressed, with sailors acting as waiters and bringing hot dishes from the galley of the yacht. The owner of the land rose and made a florid, perspiring speech in the fond hope of unloading land he could not use, at a fancy price he could. The professor from the American College spoke warmly of Mannard, and threw in a hint or two that his own specialty could use some extra funds. Coghlan saw clearly that everybody in the world was out to get money from Mannard by any possible process, and grimly reiter­ated to himself his own resolution not to take part in the un­dignified scramble by trying to marry Laurie.

The sailors brought coffee. Coghlan drank his while the speech­making went on. Mannard talked absorbedly to the lawyer, and to the owner of the land. The children’s camp seemed to be practically assured. That, to Coghlan, was one bright spot in a thumping bleak day.

He saw Mannard start to drink his coffee, then feel the cup with his hands and give it to a sailor to be taken back to the yacht to be replaced with hot coffee. It had gotten cold.

Laurie chatted brightly with Appolonius. He beamed at her. A sailor came back with Mannard’s cup. He felt it, as he al­ways did. He lifted it toward his lips.

There was a violent cracking sound. Echoes rang all about. Voices stopped.

Mannard was staring in stupefaction at the coffee-cup in his hand. It was broken. It had been smashed by a bullet. Coffee was spilled everywhere, and Mannard absurdly held the handle of the cup from which he had been about to drink.

Coghlan was in motion even as he saw in his mind’s eye the phrase in his own handwriting on a yellowed sheepskin page:

“Make sure of Mannard. To be killed.”