The King is Dead

4

The shirts were waiting for them in the lobby. Ellery found himself passing the security desk with a stiff back. But the three uniformed men paid no attention to them.

Brown Shirt said, “This way,” and Blue Shirt held the outer door open.

Outside, the son and the father breathed again. The sun was low in the west and the western sky was strawberry, copper, and mother-of-pearl. A small, powerful black car gold-initialed PRPD was at the entrance. Blue Shirt took the wheel and Brown Shirt got into the rear seat between them.

Neither Queen felt talkative. Each gazed through his window at the countryside. They might have been traveling along the Mohawk Trail in a quiet fold of the Berkshires, with a city of mills and small homes at their feet, except for the pelagic vegetation and the memory of what they had just heard and seen.

“Who,” inquired Ellery, “is at whose orders?”

“We’re taking you to the Residence, Mr. Queen,” replied Brown Shirt. “Mr. Abel has arranged everything.”

“How free are we to move about?”

“You’ve been given a temporary A-2 rating, sir.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Inspector Queen, astonished.

“You may go anywhere you want sir, except those installations marked Restricted.”

“From what we’ve seen, that sounds risky. We’re not known on the island.”

“You’re known,” Blue Shirt assured him from the front seat.

The Inspector did not look assured.

The car entered a densely wooded area. There were flashes of flying color everywhere, but these were the only evidences of wild life.

“Beauty for its own sake?” asked Ellery sceptically.

“Karla likes them,” said Brown Shirt.

“Mrs. Bendigo?” The Inspector was scrutinizing the woods closely without seeming to do so.

“King’s queen,” said Ellery.

He had seen it, too, but he and his father continued to look at opposite terrains. There were camouflaged gun emplacements in these woods. Big guns, of the coast artillery type. Probably the whole wooded area bristled with them. And how much of this jungle itself, Ellery wondered, was real?

They came upon King Bendigo’s home suddenly.

They could see only a little of it because of the trees and shrubs which choked it. The landscaping was positively untidy. Some of the trees were taller than the buildings, and there were heavy branches that actually brushed windows. Even the towers had been so treated that, while they were visible against the sky from the ground, to an airborne eye they must blend into the greenery.

Secrecy again. The original planners had probably been responsible for the camouflage, but then why, when he leased the island, hadn’t Bendigo had these trees and the encroaching underbrush cleared away? Was he afraid someone would try to take his precious mid-ocean anchorage away from him?

The Residence stood only four stories high, like the Home Office, but it covered a wider area. The section immediately before them would have been a courtyard had it not been overgrown with shrubbery planted at random. Even the paved driveway ran between two erratic files of trees whose upper branches twined overhead to form a ceiling. Embracing all of this were two projections of the building, running outward from a sort of parent body. From the angle formed by the arms, Ellery suspected others. Brown Shirt, who remained spokesman of the duo, confirmed this and explained the oddity of the architecture. The building was constructed on a plan similar to that of the Home Office, except that where the Home Office had eight arms, the Residence had five.

They were received in a great hall by flunkies in livery. Black and gold. With knee breeches and stocks. The Inspector goggled.

Here, at least, the functional temporized with fussier modes. The furniture was massively modern, but there were medieval French and Swedish tapestries on the walls and a sprinkling of old masters among new, the new chiefly abstractions. Everything in the hall was immense, the hall itself being three stories high; and it was only here and there that one saw a traditional object — such as the classic canvases — as if someone in the household insisted on at least a smattering of an older environment.

A footman conducted them through one of the five portals into a wing, and just inside this corridor Blue Shirt indicated a small elevator. They were whisked up one floor, and they got out to be marched along a soundless hall to a door. The door was open. In the doorway, dwarfed by its dimensions, stood a small man in a black suit and a wing collar. He bowed.

“This is your valet,” said Brown Shirt. “Whatever you need to supplement what you’ve brought with you, gentlemen, just inform this man and he’ll provide it at once.”

“Jeeves?” said Ellery tentatively.

“No sir,” said the valet Britannically. “Jones.”

“Your point, Jones. Does protocol demand evening clothes at dinner?”

“No, sir,” said the valet. “Except on given occasions, dining is informal. Dark suit and four-in-hand.”

“They’ll take my tan gabardine and like it,” said the Inspector.

“Yes, yes, Dad,” said Ellery soothingly. “Here, Jones, where are you off to?”

“To draw your tubs, sir,” said Jones; and he sedately vanished.

The Queens turned to find the Shirts receding shoulder to shoulder.

“Here, wait!” cried the Inspector. “When do we get to see—?”

But they were already far down the corridor.

Their sitting-room was almost a grand salon, and the two bedrooms were magnificent affairs with lofty ceilings, canopied beds, and historic-looking furnishings. Here, at least, the décor was traditional — ancien régime, as cluttered with gingerbread as any suite in the Tuileries under the Grand Monarch. Fortunately, as Ellery hastened to discover, tradition did not extend to the sanitary arrangements; but he was amused to find the telephones discreetly hidden in buhl cabinets whose surfaces were intricately inlaid with gold, tortoise-shell, and some white metal in the scrollwork, cartouches, and curlicues so dear to the times of Louis Quatorze.

Inspector Queen was not amused at all. He went about from room to room antagonistically examining the grandeur into which they had been thrust; and he reserved his most hostile glare for the valet, who was patiently awaiting an opportunity to undress him. To avoid a homicide, Ellery conveyed Jones to the door.

They bathed, shaved, and dressed in fresh clothes from their suitcases, and then they waited. There was nothing else to do, for they could find no newspapers and the magnificent leather-bound books turned out to be discouraging eighteenth-century works in French and Latin. And from the windows nothing could be seen but foliage. The Inspector occupied himself for some time searching the suite for a secret transmitter, which he was positive was planted somewhere in the sitting room; but after a while he grew tired of even this diversion and began fuming.

“Damn it, what kind of runaround is this? What are we supposed to do, rot here? I’m going downstairs, Ellery!”

“Let’s wait, Dad. All this has a purpose.”

“To starve us out!”

But Ellery was frowning over a cigarette. “I wonder why we’ve been brought to the island.”

The Inspector stared.

“Abel hires us to investigate a couple of threatening letters received, he says, through the mail. The mail undoubtedly is flown here daily from the mainland by Bendigo’s planes. If those letters came through the mail, then, they emanated from the mainland. Why, then, does Abel ask us to investigate on the island?”

“Because he thinks the letters came from the island!”

“Exactly. Someone’s slipping them into the pouches or into the already sorted Residence or Home Office mail.” Ellery ground out his cigarette in a Royal Sèvres dish which was probably worth more than he had in the bank. “Which somebody? A clerk? Secretary? Footman? Guard? Factory hand? Lab worker? For anyone like that, the Prime Minister doesn’t have to make a special trip to New York, with a side visit to Washington, to engage the services of a couple of outsiders. That kind of job could be polished off by Colonel Spring’s department in about two hours flat.”

“So it gets down to... what?” Ellery looked up. “To somebody big, Dad.”

But the Inspector was shaking his head. “The bigger the game, the less likelihood that Bendigo would call in an outsider.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s right? But you just said—”

“That’s right, and that’s wrong, too. So none of it sets on the stomach. In fact,” and Ellery fumbled for another cigarette, “I’m positively bilious.”

That was when the telephone tinkled and Ellery leaped to answer it, almost knocking his father down. Abel Bendigo’s calm twang said he was terribly sorry but his brother King was being a bit difficult this evening and in Abel’s considered judgement it would be a lot smarter not to press matters at the moment. If the Queens didn’t mind dining alone...?

“Of course not, Mr. Bendigo, but we’re anxious to get going on the investigation.”

“Tomorrow will be better,” said the Yankee voice in the tones of a physician soothing a fretful patient.

“Are we to wait in these rooms for your call?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Queen. Do anything you like, go anywhere you please. I’ll find you when I want you.” Perhaps to get by the ironical implications of this statement, the Prime Minister said hurriedly, “Good night,” and hung up.

Dinner was served in their suite from warming ovens and other portable paraphernalia by a butler and three serving-men under the cadaver’s eye of a perfect official who introduced himself as the Chief Steward of the Residence and thereafter uttered not a single word.

It was like dining in a tomb, and the Queens did not enliven the occasion. They ate in silence, exactly what they could not afterward recall except that it was rich, saucy, and French, in keeping with the décor.

Then, in the same nervous silence, and because there was nothing else to do, they went to bed.

There was no note from Abel Bendigo on their plates the next morning, and the telephone failed to ring. So after breakfast Ellery proposed a tour of the Residence.

The Inspector, however, had developed a pugnacious jaw. “I’m going to see how far they’ll let me go. Where do you suppose the royal garage is?”

“Garage?”

“I’m borrowing a car.”

He went out, his jaw preceding him, and Ellery did not see him until late afternoon.

Ellery prowled about the five-armed building alone. It took him all morning to make its acquaintance. Certainly he made the acquaintance of nothing more animate, for he saw none of the Bendigo family during his tour and the servants in livery and minor officials of the household whom he ran across ignored him with suspicious unanimity.

He was stopped only once, and that was on the top floor of the central building. Here there were armed guards in uniform, and their captain was politely inflexible.

“These are the private apartments of the family, sir. No one is allowed to enter except by special permission.”

“Well, of course I shouldn’t want to blunder into anyone’s bathroom, but I was given to understand by Mr. Abel Bendigo that I could go anywhere.”

“I have received no orders to admit you to this floor, Mr. Queen.”

So Ellery meekly went back to the lowlier regions.

He looked in on the state dining-room, the grand ballroom, salons, reception rooms, trophy rooms, galleries, kitchens, wine cellars, servants’ quarters, storerooms, even closets. There was an oak-and-leather library of twenty thousand volumes, uniformly bound in black Levant morocco and stamped with the twin-globes-and-crown, which more and more took on the color of a coat-of-arms. The standardization of the books themselves, many of them rare editions raped of their original bindings, made Ellery cringe. None that he sampled showed the least sign of use.

Shortly before noon Ellery found himself in a music salon, dominated by a platform at one end large enough to accommodate a symphony orchestra. In the center of this stage glittered a concert grand piano sheathed in gold. Wondering if this splendid instrument was in tune, Ellery climbed to the platform, opened the piano, and struck middle C. An unmusical clank answered him. He struck a chord in the middle register. This time the horrid jangle that resulted impressed him as far too extreme to be accounted for by mere neglect, and he raised the top of the piano.

Six sealed bottles, identical in every respect, lay in a neat row on the strings.

He took one out with curiosity. It was bell-shaped, with a slender neck, and of very dark green glass, so dark as to be opaque. The antiqued label identified the contents as Segonzac V.S.O.P. Cognac. The heavy seal was unbroken, as were the seals of its five brothers, at which Ellery sighed. He had never had the good fortune to savor Segonzac Very Special Old Pale Cognac, for the excellent reason that Segonzac Very Special Old Pale Cognac was priced — where it could be found at all — at almost fifty dollars the bottle. He replaced the heavy glass bell on its harmonious bed and lowered the top of the grand piano with reverence.

A man who cached six bottles of cognac in a grand piano was an alcoholic. The middle Bendigo brother, Judah, had been reported by the Inspector’s military tête-à-tête as an alcoholic. It seemed a reasonable conclusion that this was Judah Bendigo’s cache. The incident also told something of the musicality of the Bendigo household, but since this was of a piece with the evidence of the library, Ellery was not surprised.

Apparently Judah Bendigo scorned his brother’s vineyards. Unless the Segonzac label was another possession of the all-powerful King... It was a point Ellery never did clear up.

The discovery in the music salon led Ellery to poke and pry. An alcoholic who hides bottles in one place will hide them in another. He was not disappointed.

He found bottles of Segonzac V.S.O.P. hidden everywhere he looked. Seven turned up in the gymnasium, four around the hundred-foot indoor swimming pool. Ellery found them in the billiard room and the bowling alley. He found them in the card-room. And on one of the terraces, where he lunched in solitude, Ellery felt the flagstone under his left foot give and, on investigating, stared down at another of the bell-shaped bottles nestling in a scooped-out hole beneath the flag.

In the afternoon he toured the vicinity of the Residence. Wherever he went he turned up the dark green evidence of Judah Bendigo’s ingenuity. The outdoor swimming pool, cleverly constructed to resemble a natural pond, was good for eight bottles, and Ellery could not be sure he had found them all. He did not bother with the stables — there were too many grooms about — but he took an Arab mare out on the bridle path and he made it a point to probe tree hollows and investigate overhead tree crotches, with rewarding results. Another artificial stream, this one stocked with game fish, was a disappointment; but Ellery suspected that if he had worn hip-boots he could have waded in any direction through the broken water and found a bottle wedged between the nearest rocks.

“And I didn’t begin to find them all,” he told his father that evening, in their sitting-room. “Judah must carry a map around with him, X marking the spots. There’s a man who likes his brandy.”

“You might have lifted a couple of bottles,” grumbled the Inspector. “I’ve had a miserable day.”

“Well?”

“Oh, I putt-putted around the island. Isn’t that what a tourist is supposed to do?” And while he said this, in a tone of lifelessness, the Inspector rather remarkably took a roll of papers from an inner pocket and waved them at his son.

“I will admit,” said his son, eying the papers, “this enforced vacation is beginning to bore me, too.” He leaned forward and took the papers. “When do you suppose our investigation begins?”

“Never, from the look of things.”

“What’s the island like, Dad?” Ellery unrolled several of the papers noiselessly. Each showed a hasty sketch of an industrial plant. Others were rough detail maps.

“It’s no different from any highly industrialized area in the States. Factories, homes, schools, roads, trucks, planes, people...” The Inspector pointed at the papers vigorously.

Ellery nodded. “What kind of factories?”

“Munitions mostly, I guess. Hell, I don’t know. A lot of places had Restricted signs on ’em with armed guards and electrified fences and the rest of the claptrap. Couldn’t get near ’em.”

There was one series of sketches of rather queer-looking plants, a scale-frame indicating enormous size.

“Meet anybody interesting?” Ellery pointed to the peculiar sketches and looked inquiring.

“Just Colonel Spring’s lads. The working people seem an unfriendly lot. Or they’re shy of strangers. Wouldn’t give me the time of day.” The Inspector’s reply to the silent part of their conversation was a shrug and a shake of the head. Ellery studied the sketches with a frown.

“Well, son, I guess I’ll take me a bath in that marble lake they gave me to splash around in.” The Inspector rose and took his notes back.

“I could use one myself.”

His father tucked the papers away in his clothes, and Ellery knew that unless a body search were made, the sketches would not leave their hiding place this side of Washington, D.C.

That night they passed through the gold curtain.

The feat was accomplished by means of a piece of paper. At six o’clock a footman with over-developed calves delivered a velvety purplish envelope, regally square, and backed out with the kind of bow the Inspector had never seen outside a British period movie.

The bow indicated that it was hardly necessary to open the envelope. But they did, and they found inside a sheet of richly engraved and monogrammed stationery of the same color and texture covered with gold ink writing in a firm feminine hand. Inspector Richard Queen and Mr. Ellery Queen were requested to appear in the private apartments of the Bendigo family at 7 p.m. for cocktails and dinner. Dress was informal. The signature was Karla Bendigo. There was a postscript: She had heard so much of the Queens from her brother-in-law Abel that she was looking forward with delight to meeting them, and she concluded by apologizing — with what seemed to Ellery significant vagueness — for having been “unable to do so until now”.

They had hardly finished reading the invitation before their valet appeared with a dark blue double-breasted man’s suit, dully gleaming black shoes, a pair of new black silk socks, and a conservative blue silk necktie. Ellery relieved the man of them and nudged him out before the snarl formed in the Inspector’s nose.

“Try them on, Dad. Chances are they won’t fit, and you’ll have an excuse for not wearing them.”

They fitted perfectly, even the shoes.

“All right, wise guy,” growled the Inspector. “But the school I was brought up in, if your guests want to show up in their underwear the host strips, too. Who the devil do these people think they are?”

So at five minutes of seven, Ellery in his best oxford gray and the Inspector uneasily elegant in Jones’s finery, the Queens left their suite and went upstairs.

Different guards were on duty in the foyer on the top floor. They were under the command of a younger officer, who scrutinized Karla Bendigo’s invitation microscopically. Then he stepped back, saluting, and the Queens were passed through the portals, feeling a little as if they ought to remove their shoes and crawl in on their stomachs.

“That head will roll,” murmured Ellery.

“Huh?” said his father nervously.

“If we snitch on him. He didn’t fingerprint us.”

They were in a towering reception room full of black iron, hamadryads in marble, giant crystal chandeliers, and overwhelming furniture in the Italian baroque style. Across the room two great doors stood open, flanked by footmen in rigor mortis. An especially splendid flunky wearing white gloves received them with a bow and preceded them to the double door.

“Inspector Queen and Mr. Ellery Queen.”

“Just a little snack with the Bendigos,” mumbled the Inspector; then they both stopped short.

Coming to them swiftly across a terrazzo floor was a woman as improbably beautiful as the heroine of a film. But Technicolor could never adequately have reproduced the snowiness of her skin and teeth, the sunset red of her hair, of the tropical green of her eyes. Even allowing for the art, there was a fundamental color magic that startled, and it enlivened a person that was disquieting in form. A great deal of the person was on display, for she was wearing a strapless dinner gown of very frank décolletage. The gown, of pastel green velvet, sheathed her to the knees; from the knees it flared, like a vase. Despite her coloring, she was not of Northern blood, Ellery decided, because she made him think of Venezia, San Marco, the Adriatic, and the women of the doges. Studying her as she approached, he saw earth in her figure, breeding in her face, and no nonsense in her step. A Titian woman. Fit for a king.

“Good evening,” she exclaimed, taking their hands. Her voice had the same coloring; it was a vivid contralto, with the merest trace of Southern Europe. She was not so young, Ellery saw, as he had first thought. Early thirties? “I am so happy to receive you both. Can you forgive me for having neglected you?”

“After seeing you, madam,” said Inspector Queen with earnestness, “I can forgive you anything.”

“And to be repaid with gallantry!” She smiled, the slightest smile. “And you, Mr. Queen?”

“Speechless,” said Ellery. Now he saw something else — a sort of grotto deep beneath the sunny seas of her eyes, a place of cold sad shade.

“I have always adored the flattery of American men. It is so uncomplicated.” Laughing, she took them across the room.

King Bendigo stood at an Italian marble fireplace taller than himself, listening in silence to the conversation of his brother Abel and three other men. The lord of Bendigo Island looked fresh and keen, although Ellery knew he must have had a long day at his desk. The jester, Max’l, was at a table nearby helping himself to canapés with both murderous hands. Occasionally, while his great jaws ground away, he looked around at his master like a dog.

In an easy chair opposite King sprawled a slight dark man in rumpled clothing. On his sallow face, with its intelligent features, he wore a slight dark mustache; it gave him a gloomy, almost sinister, look. It was an odd face, with a broad high forehead, a nose sharply and crookedly hooked, and a chin that came to a premature point. A bell-shaped dark green bottle stood at his elbow and he was rolling a brandy snifter between his palms as his head lolled on the back of the chair. From the slits of his deeply sunken eyes he was studying Ellery, however, with remarkable alertness.

King greeted them graciously enough, but in a moment he had turned aside with Abel, and it was Karla Bendigo who introduced the other men. The slight dark man in the easy chair was Judah Bendigo, the middle brother; he did not rise or offer his hand. He merely squinted up at them, rolling the snifter between his palms. Either he was already drunk, or rudeness was a hereditary Bendigo trait. Ellery was glad when they had to turn to the group at the fireplace.

One of the three was small, stout, and bald, with the unemotional stare of a man to whom nothing has value but the immediate moment. Their hostess introduced him as Dr. Storm, Surgeon-General of Bendigo Island and her husband’s personal physician, who lived on the premises. It did not surprise Ellery to learn that the second man, a tall lean swarthy individual with a catty smile, was also a permanent resident; his name was Immanuel Peabody, and he was King Bendigo’s chief legal adviser. The third man of the group looked like a football player convalescing from a serious illness. He was young, blond, broad-shouldered, and pale, and his face was rutted with fatigue.

“Dr. Akst,” Karla Bendigo said. “We seldom see this young man; it is a rare pleasure. He buries himself in his laboratory at the other side of the island, fiddling with his dangerous little atoms.”

“With his what?” said Inspector Queen.

“Mrs. Bendigo insists on making Dr. Akst out to be some sort of twentieth-century alchemist,” said the lawyer, Peabody, smiling. “A physicist can’t very well avoid the little atom, but it’s hardly dangerous, Dr. Akst, is it?”

“Say it is dangerous, Doctor,” said Karla playfully. But she flashed a glance at the lawyer. It seemed to Ellery the glance was resentful.

“Only in the sense that an experimenter,” protested Peabody, “is always monkeying with the unknown.”

“Can we talk about something else?” asked Dr. Akst. He spoke with a strong Scandinavian accent, and he sounded younger than he looked.

“Mrs. Bendigo’s eyes,” suggested Ellery. “Now there’s a subject that’s really dangerous.”

Everyone laughed, and then Ellery and the Inspector had cocktails in their hands and Immanuel Peabody began to tell the story of an old criminal trial in England, in which testimony about the color of a woman’s eyes delivered the defendant to Jack Ketch. But all the while Ellery was wondering if his father knew that the tired young man with the humorless Scandinavian voice was one of the world’s most famous nuclear physicists. And he thought, too, that in trying to gloss over the nature of Dr. Akst’s work on Bendigo Island Immanuel Peabody had only succeeded in calling attention to it. For the rest of the evening Akst made a point of effacing himself and, playing the game, Ellery ignored him.

Karla Bendigo did not refer to him again.

Dinner was sumptuous and interminable. They dined in the adjoining room, a place of suffocating grandeur, and they were served by an army corps of servants. The courses and wines came in a steady parade, many of the delicacies blue-flamed in chafing dishes, so that the whole incredible feast was like a torchlight procession in a medieval festival.

Immanuel Peabody kept pace, with fat and deadly little Dr. Storm not far behind, Peabody telling with the utmost cheerfulness gruesome stories of criminal lore, with Dr. Storm’s surgically bawdy. To these last, Max’l was the most appreciative listener; he winked, leered, and guffawed between gulletfuls, missing nothing. Max’l wore his napkin frankly under his chin and he ate with both elbows guarding his plate; he removed one of them only to batter Ellery’s ribs at a particularly gusty witticism of Dr. Storm’s.

To the Queens’ disappointment, neither had been placed beside King or Karla Bendigo. The Inspector was trapped between the loquacious lawyer and the wicked little Surgeon-General, while Ellery sat diagonally across the table between the taciturn physicist, Akst, and Max’l — the father being talked to death, the son given Coventry on one side and a beating on the other. The arrangement was deliberate; nothing here, Ellery knew, happened by chance.

Since most of the lawyer’s and the physician’s conversation was directed toward the Queens, they found little opportunity to talk to the Bendigos. Karla murmured to Abel at her end of the field-long table, occasionally sending a word or a crooked little smile their way, as if in apology. At the other end sat King, listening. Once, turning suddenly, Ellery found their host’s black eyes fixed on him with amusement. He tried after that to cultivate at least an appearance of patience.

It was a queer banquet, full of tense and mysterious undercurrents, and not the least of them swirled about Judah Bendigo. The slender little man slumped to the left of his brother King, ignoring Max’l’s feeding antics — Max’l sat between Judah and Ellery — ignoring Storm’s sallies and Peabody’s forensic yarns, ignoring his food... giving all his attention to the bottle of Segonzac cognac beside his plate. No servant touched that bottle, Ellery observed; Judah refilled his own glass. He drank steadily but slowly throughout the evening, for the most part looking across the table at a point in space above Immanuel Peabody’s head. His only recognition of the menu was to drink two cups of black coffee toward the end, and even then he laced them with brandy. The first cup emptied his bottle, and a servant quickly uncorked a fresh bottle and set it beside him.

The dinner took three hours; and when at exactly 10.45 p.m. King Bendigo made an almost unnoticeable gesture and Peabody brought his story to an end within ten seconds, Ellery could have collapsed in gratitude. Across the table his father sat perspiring and pale, as if he had exhausted himself in a desperate struggle.

The rich voice said to the Queens, “Gentlemen, I must ask you to excuse Abel and me. We have work to do tonight. I regret the necessity, as I’d looked forward to hearing some stories of your adventures.” Then why the devil, thought Ellery, did you order Peabody and Storm to monopolize the conversation? “However, Mrs. Bendigo will entertain you.”

He did not wait for Karla’s murmured, “I will be so happy to, darling,” but pushed his chair back and rose. Abel, Dr. Storm, Peabody, and Dr. Akst immediately rose, too. Abel followed his tall brother through one door, and the doctor, the lawyer, and the physicist trooped out through another. The Queens watched them leave, fascinated. It was exactly as if the long dinner had been a scene in a play, with everyone an actor and the curtain coming down to disperse them in their private identities, each registering relief in his own fashion.

As Ellery drew Karla Bendigo’s chair back, his eyes met his father’s over her satiny red hair.

In three hours, with all the principals present, not one word had been said about the reason for the Queens’ presence on Bendigo Island.

“Shall we go, gentlemen?”

King’s wife took their arms.

At the door, Ellery looked back.

Side by side at the littered table sat Max’l and Judah Bendigo. The ex-wrestler was still stuffing himself, and the silent Bendigo brother was pouring another glassful of cognac with an air of concentration and a hand that remained steady.