Bengal Fire, page 13
“His Highness has lost nothing, inspector.”
“What, then, were you doing at Hoyt’s safe?”
“Ah, that. The trinket in question has been located. I appreciate your concern, but must ask you not to trouble further about that matter.”
“Would you put that in writing—so that I can’t be accused of dereliction of duty? Will you write a chit saying that the nao-ratna, which I believe contains the Bosa pearl, has been recovered.”
“Gladly. Won’t you come this way, inspector?”
Inspector Prike preceded Chitterji Rao into a long corridor lit with flickering oil lights in blue glass bowls. His manner, still leisurely despite the constant activity of his alert eyes, suddenly changed when he had gone a dozen feet. The casual little man became in an instant a tense, compelling personification of efficient energy. Opposite the narrow, marble stairway that wound upward from an alcove in the corridor, he stopped abruptly. On the first marble step was a dark, purplish stain no larger than an eight-anna piece. With one precise movement he stopped, whipped out his flashlight, touched the dark spot with his forefinger. It was liquid, as viscous as coagulating blood. Immediately the inspector was bolt upright.
“Shall we climb the stairs, Chitterji Rao?” The metallic ring of his voice made the words a command rather than a question.
“Most certainly, inspector.”
The inspector’s flashlight sent an expanding yellow disk rippling up the marble stairs ahead of him. The glow illuminated the garish colors of mural figures painted in the Persian style, but Prike ignored them. His eyes were seeking more stains on the white marble. He found one on the second landing, two more at the head of the staircase. The inspector’s forefinger touched each spot. He seemed particularly interested in the last two. Although side by side, one was almost dry, the other still liquid.
“Blood, inspector?” Chitterji Rao asked in bored tones as he looked down superciliously at the stooping detective.
“Your perspicacity is amazing, Chitterji Rao.”
“I’m afraid the explanation will disappoint you. The Risalder of the guard had a nosebleed just before you arrived.”
Inspector Prike did not comment. He emerged from the stairway to the roof of the palace. He had some difficulty in picking up the trail of blood again, for the roof was still wet from the recent rain. At the end of five minutes he discovered one blurred stain, then another. In an angle of the parapet he found a sticky little puddle as though the person who was bleeding had remained for some time in one place. Again the red trail led off across the roof toward a pointed dome which raised its dark mass toward the stars like an immense inverted turnip. The inspector’s flashlight explored the curved surfaces of the dome, traced a lotus petal motif carved into the stone base, paused upon a bronze door set into the center of one of the great stone petals.
“What’s in here, Chitterji Rao?”
“Nothing. The architect intended these domes for lumber rooms. They have never been used.”
The flashlight roved over the green patina of the bronze door, pausing upon a heavy ring at one edge. There was blood on the ring.
“Open this,” said Prike.
“I will have to see if the keys can be found. They are never used—”
Inspector Prike grasped the bronze ring, twisted it, pulled. The door creaked open.
There was a rush of air and a flurry of something dark catapulting past Prike’s head.
Prike’s gun was automatically in his hand. The flashlight beam with the muzzle picked up the panicky, swooping flight of a squeaking bat.
The beam swept back into the vaulted interior of the dome, darted over the mildewed walls and the floor. Prike started across the threshold, stumbled against something yielding, caught himself. He focused his flashlight downward, dropped quickly to his knees.
An exclamation of genuine surprise escaped Chitterji Rao. Inspector Prike was kneeling on the stone floor beside the prone figure of a Hindu whose purple turban, half unwrapped from his head, was knotted tightly about his throat.
Prike loosened the garroting strip of muslin. His fingers sought the man’s pulse. The Hindu was alive.
As he released the unconscious man’s wrist Prike noticed that the tightly clenched fingers clung to a long tuft of silken, wheat-colored hair.
Chapter Seventeen
STRANGE RESCUE
Evelyn Branch was not by nature a face-slapper. Neither was she a hair-puller or a blue-murder-screamer. She did not become vocal at the sight of a mouse, and, growing to maturity in the last years of Prohibition, she had always managed a defense against the ardors of the most enthusiastic hip-flask swain—without violence. But as she was being rushed over the roof of the Alipore Palace, she felt that her situation was getting too physical for mere talk. Even if the dawn did come up like thunder in this part of the world, she saw no reason for this lightning speed.
“What—what’s the hurry?” she gasped, as the stars before her were blotted out by the dark mass of the pointed dome.
The only reply of the man in the purple turban was a chilling low-pitched laugh. His laugh, his grip on her arm, the ominous bellowing of trumpets, the clank of arms and the mysterious, torch-lit confusion below, set the girl’s imagination aflame with all the stories she had ever read of Oriental cruelty: the massacres of the Sepoy Rebellion, the butchery of the Europeans at Delhi, the slaughter of women and children by Nana Sahib at Cawnpore. By the time the key grated in the lock and the heavy bronze door swung open, Evelyn had had enough. She reverted, for the moment, to the primitive.
She set her heels, pulled back, screamed. The inexorable arm of the man with the purple turban dragged her through the door. She fought. Her hands beat vainly though quick, desperate arcs. Her elbows struck the door frame. Her heels screeched on the stone floor. She kicked.
Then her fingers caught in the soft twist of a turban. She tugged, felt the folds come loose into her hands. She doubled a length of the cloth, looped it out frantically in front of her, drew it taut. A choking gasp answered. Long fingers touched her face, wormed into her hair, entwined themselves, jerked savagely. She winced with pain, but she didn’t scream this time. She had a job to do now. She twisted the loop tighter.
Suddenly a gray shadow fluttered in the darkness beside Evelyn, hurtling toward her through the half-opened door. There was a thwack of flesh on flesh, a grunt. Evelyn gave a little cry as she felt hair uprooted. Then she was free.
In a daze she saw the Hindu crumple to the floor. She saw a small, scrawny figure in white pounce upon him, knot a fold of the turban about his throat. Then the scrawny figure straightened up, pushed her roughly before him, clanged the door shut upon the prostrate Hindu. As he faced her and she made out his drawn, wizened features by the dim starlight, she recognized her unkempt rescuer as a European. His rumpled white drills were covered with dark stains, apparently blood from cuts on his face which had been freshly reopened by his recent exertion. He was hardly the answer to a maiden’s prayer, but she was certainly glad to see him.
“Thank you,” breathed Evelyn.
“Thank me?” The scrawny European snorted derisively. “You’ve nothing to thank me for.”
“The Green Knight turns out to be purple, but you’ve done very well as Sir Gawain—”
“Rot! You were better off as you were. Don’t think the age of chivalry is reborn. I’m not helping you. I’m helping myself. I need you. Come along now.”
The frowzy man with the gashed face shoved the girl unceremoniously before him. Evelyn glanced back at him. He was not a very reassuring sight. At home she would have shrunk from him, but here he was Occidental, someone she could at least understand.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
“You should be.”
“But you’re one of my own race.”
Again the European snorted. “All the more reason for you to beware,” he sneered. “A Hindu is forbidden by his religion to take the life of any living thing, even a louse. The great civilizers of the West spread their culture by killing. First they kill men’s souls—”
“You’re being terribly clever.”
“I’m being frank. Apparently you haven’t been in Calcutta long enough to know of Rufus Dormer, the outcast, the renegade white man, the miserable Englishman who is so low that he borrows money from Indians, the deplorable journalist who hasn’t even a bearer to bring his tiffin and who keeps from starving only because his office serves tea and biscuits without charge every day at three. Look at me!”
Dormer leaned so close to the girl that his face almost brushed hers. Instantly she recoiled. Contact with the man, the mere touch of his fusty clothes was repulsive. The ferret eyes leering at her from beneath a shaggy mop of uncombed hair, the contemptuous twist of his lips were more potent arguments than Dormer’s own words.
“All right. I’ll despise you, if that makes you any happier,” she said. “Now can you get me out of this place?”
Dormer clamped his bony fingers on the girl’s elbow.
“That’s exactly what I intend to do,” he said.
“But how are you going to get out?”
“The same way I came in.”
Dormer dabbed his bleeding face with his grimy sleeve. He hurried the girl back down the narrow marble stairs, through the indigo gloom of the long corridor. He seemed perfectly familiar with the palace as he made devious turnings, paused at the entrance to a courtyard when he saw a squad of Jharnpur soldiers, doubled back, darted into a short, black passageway. A breath of hot, foul air made Evelyn gasp. Then she found herself in a large room which was obviously the quarters of pariah menials.
Several dozen sweepers and other low-caste servants, emaciated black men and wrinkled women, lay sleeping on the stone floor like heaps of dirty rags. One white-haired, toothless old man, his naked torso glistening like mahogany in the wavering saffron light of a single wick floating in a bowl of coconut oil, slept with his head pillowed on the dirty, gray flanks of a humpbacked bullock. Brass pots and earthenware chatis, half-buried among the silent forms of the sleepers, indicated that the same room served for eating and sleeping. The air fairly quivered with the stench of rancid ghi, sweat, and bullock dung.
Dormer murmured something in Hindustani. His voice was scarcely more than a whisper yet half a dozen heads raised instantly. Dormer continued speaking. More heads were raised. Wan smiles appeared on brown faces. The old man with the white hair arose and came forward. Dormer took a handful of crumpled and broken cigarettes from his pocket and gave them to him. Mumbling contentedly, the old man crossed the room. Dormer and the girl, stepping gingerly over the sleeping menials, followed. The old man took a key from his soiled dhoti and opened a door. A second later Dormer and Evelyn Branch stood outside the rear of the palace.
“In India,” Dormer muttered, “bribery may be accomplished with kindness. In our superior Western civilization bribery is sordid and mercenary. You’re about to see just how sordid an Occidental can be. Come.”
So grateful was Evelyn to fill her lungs again with air that had no taste that she did not protest when Dormer urged her hastily along a narrow street, through a grove of wind-stirred palms, past a tank which rocked restless stars on its dark bosom. They turned a corner where a closed third-class ghari was waiting. The girl opened the door, turned, and extended her hand.
“Thanks again, Mr. Dormer,” she said. “You’ve been ery kind—and not at all sordid, really.”
“Just a moment. I’m going along.”
“There’s no need—”
“Oh, yes, there is! I was outside the room when Chitterji Rao counted out ten hundred-rupee notes for you. I want half.”
“You left your keyhole a moment too soon,” said Evelyn, “or you’d know that I didn’t get the money. Chitterji Rao put it back in his wallet when that ungodly horn-blowing started, and I was whisked away by the Purple Knight—”
“We’ll see about that,” said Dormer. “You’ve got money coming to you, anyway. I heard you bargain with Chitterji Rao for fifteen thousand dibs. Get in.”
“Are you seeing me home, then?”
“I am not. Get in.”
“To Mr. Marvin’s, then?”
“No. Get in.”
The girl hesitated, then obeyed. As the door closed, the distant baying of jackals quavered through the night from the direction of Baligunj. The ghari started. Evelyn shuddered.
Dormer sensed her movement in the darkness of the ghari. He said, “I’m glad you’re revising your attitude toward me. I much prefer revulsion to mistaken gratitude. It is a more appropriate prelude to what you are about to experience.”
There was a moment of silence. The girl did not dare ask further details of her destination. She preferred not to suffer in anticipation; yet she felt she had to talk.
“You seem to go in and out of the Maharajah’s palace without much difficulty,” she said lightly. “I suppose you’re an intimate of His Highness.”
Dormer laughed bitterly. “I go to the palace at least once each cold weather,” he said, “in a purely professional capacity. His Highness usually manages to make unpleasant news once a year. But my friendship at the palace is restricted to those unfortunate and unwashed menials we have just left. I find them fundamentally much more pleasant people than their betters. Perhaps we feel a certain kinship in our paralleled positions in society. Perhaps they are amazed that my membership in the ruling race does not compel me to kick them or call them suwar-ka-bachcha. Perhaps they are beaten dogs wagging their tails in gratitude at being thrown a scrap of kindness. Whatever the motive, they are always ready to do me a favor, as you have just seen.”
“And what is your motive for taking me with you?”
“Sordid, as I told you. Money.”
The girl laughed with genuine amusement in spile of her uneasiness. “I hope you’re not thinking of holding me for ransom,” she said. “I’m flat broke, myself, and there’s no one in the world who would pay a thin dime to get me back.”
“The problem of turning a dishonest penny from your peculiar situation,” said Dormer, “is exclusively mine.”
“But you must know someone more solvent who could help you, if you’re in financial difficulties.”
“No one in Calcutta would help Rufus Dormer to the extent of a single square two-anna bit. And I happen to be in urgent need of a sum that amounts to nearly three months of my magnificent salary.”
“Was that what you were after at the palace?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you get the money—or were they watching things too closely?” The girl’s tone was matching the sarcasm of Dormer’s.
“I’m not a thief. Robbery is beneath my talents. I simply had to leave the palace before the conclusion of my mission, because of—an unexpected visitor.”
“Inspector Prike?”
On an impulse, the girl flung out the name of the detective she had seen arrive at Alipore. By the startled movement in the dark beside her, she knew that she had made a bull’s-eye. When Dormer said nothing, she had a momentary feeling of superiority which she could not resist following up.
“Why were you avoiding Inspector Prike? Are you a fugitive from justice?” she asked.
“There is no justice in India,” Dormer replied, “and I am not a fugitive.”
“Then why did you run away?”
“I have my own reasons for not wishing to see Inspector Prike.”
“Are you—?” Evelyn stopped short. She sat up very straight, frightened by her own thought. She raised her finger tips to her cheek; they were icy. “Did you kill Harrison Hoyt?” she resumed in a strained voice.
Dormer chuckled grimly. The ghari, rumbling and lurching along Chowringhee, jogged past a street lamp. The yellow glow struck through the closed shutters of the box-like vehicle and crawled across Dormer’s face like phantom prison bars. For a brief instant Evelyn saw the thin black mustache lift in a crooked, cynical grin. She thought she could read guilt in his glittering eyes.
Abruptly she sprang from her seat. She was certain she was riding with a murderer. Her hand stabbed for the door handle.
Dormer reached out, hurled the girl away from the door. She fell against the back of the seat, breathless and trembling. Dormer grabbed her arm, twisted it. The ghari rattled on.
“So you think I killed Hoyt?”
“You act like it.”
“Our Hindu friends would say that Hoyt was killed by his own Karma. No one is to blame but his own rotten acts.”
“Then it’s Harrison Hoyt’s Karma that you’re running away from?”
“Mind your own business!”
“I am. You seem to have made yourself very much my business—”
“Shut up!” Dormer gave the girl’s arm a savage twist. Evelyn gasped with pain. “Shut up! You’ll speak when I speak to you. Otherwise—”
Dormer paused on a note of menace, then chuckled sadistically as he felt the girl’s arm tremble in his grasp. He released his pressure a little.
The sky was beginning to pale in the East as the ghari rolled northward.
Chapter Eighteen
THREE JUMBO FOUNTAIN PENS
From Chitpur bridge to Tolly’s Nallah, all Calcutta was drinking early-morning tea. And in the tea of Inspector Prike there was a liberal infusion of very old brandy.
The fact that Inspector Prike had uncorked his precious 1900 Armagnac so early in the morning indicated that he had reached a dead end in his investigation. Not that he was baffled. He was satisfied that the principal elements of his case were already at hand. All he needed was proper co-ordination of his facts, reinterpretation of some clue he had read incorrectly, possibly the discovery of some key piece that would allow him to fit the puzzle together. To this end he had always found brandy an excellent stimulus of the subconscious—particularly when he had had only three hours sleep. Many a criminal in the past had had reason to regard the appearance on the breakfast-table of the 1900 Armagnac—which Prike himself imported directly from Les Landes—as an evil omen.
