Red Snow at Darjeeling, page 15
Two shots thundered in the night.
Woodring’s horse bolted forward.
A third shot roared. A damp shower of bullet-clipped leaves sprayed Woodring’s face.
The horse set his forefeet, slid to a halt. Whinnying with fright, the animal reared, wheeled, lost footing in the mud, slipped, fell. The fall bowled over Emmet-Tansley, pinioned Woodring’s right leg.
Struggling to drag himself free, Woodring saw the flashlight lying in the mud, illuminating a scene of mad confusion. Men were swarming from the thicket. Running legs scissored grotesque patterns of light and shadow upon oriental faces. Oriental voices barked Mongoloid monosyllables.
When Woodring disentangled his foot from the stirrup, he saw Emmet-Tansley sprawled almost at his elbow. A scowling hill-man was standing above him, the cruel curve of a kukri gleaming in his upraised hand. Instinctively, unreasoningly, Woodring lunged. The whole weight of his driving body was behind the straight left thrust that crashed against the hill-man’s chin.
Emmet-Tansley scrambled to his feet, ran right into the arms of Count Vaznilko, who had appeared from nowhere to block the path. Woodring had a glimpse of the mud-spattered envelope in Emmet-Tansley’s hand. He also saw the puffy eyes of Vaznilko leering avidly at the envelope. Then two men crossed his line of vision, loping towards Emmet-Tansley.
One of the two men turned his head to look back, and Woodring’s nerves tingled with the shock of recognition. Unless his imagination was playing him tricks, unless the queer, unreal light of the abandoned flashlamp was creating an illusion, he had glimpsed the black, rain-bright face of Georges Clemenceau Malaswaram!
Another shot pounded on his eardrums, ricochetted shrieking into the night. The flashlight was out.
The floundering horse at last found foothold, came galloping down the trail in wild panic. Before Woodring could get out of the way, the scapula of the flying animal struck him a glancing blow in the chest, catapulted him off the path into a tall fern-brake.
Stunned, Woodring lay a moment in the lush, wet thicket, fighting with himself to stave off unconsciousness. He could hear sounds with the far-off objectivity of a brain emerging from a drugged sleep. He was conscious of an aching head and a growing nausea, of the neighing of the horse and the diminishing tattoo of retreating hoof-beats. All human sounds seemed to have dissolved completely into silence.
He raised himself on one elbow. The weirdness of the sudden hush was emphasised by the soft whisper of the rain on the thick foliage. Painfully he got to his feet. He tried to light matches to examine the terrain of the brief, confused melée, but his matches were water-soaked and useless. He groped his way over twenty yards of churned mud, seeking possible victims of the fray. He found none.
He was cold—chilled to the skin by the soaking rain, cold inside with the emptiness of despair. He had lost. He had given up the key to Shimalghar. For all he knew he had not even saved Ruth.
Forlornly he limped down the trail toward the Lebong Road.
Inspector Prike’s motor-car swung into Lebong Road, the twin beams of its headlights groping through the rain like the feelers of some great luminous insect. A European constable sat in front beside the syce. In back, Prike had not a said a word to his subordinate for several minutes. When he spoke at last, it was with bitter self-reproach.
‘“Robbins,” he said, “I should be asked to resign from the C.I.D. I’ve made a criminal mistake.”
“We all make mistakes, inspector,” said Robbins.
“Not like this,” Prike declared. “I’m like a bridge player with a pianola hand, who takes a finesse to win an overtrick, finds the king on the wrong side of him, and stupidly loses his contract.”
“What have we lost, inspector?” Robbins asked.
“A man’s life, I‘m very much afraid.”
There was a pause. The squeak of the windshield wiper seemed very loud against the glass.
“Hubertson?” ventured Robbins at last.
“Perhaps,” said Prike. “I’m not sure. I refuse to make any more predictions. If you ever hear any one say that Prike is infallible, laugh at them, Robbins.”
“Where are we bound now, inspector?”
“To the Lamasery of the Red Monks, to try to correct an early error. I should have insisted on smoking out Blenn last night, as I first planned.”
“We turned the town pretty well inside out, didn’t we, inspector?”
“We did not,” said Prike. “We showed too much consideration for Government’s policy of respecting the sanctity of native religions and religious edifices. We should have taken apart every Lamasery, every chorten, every Buddhist shrine and temple between here and Jalpaiguri.”
“I shouldn’t think Blenn would be spending all this time in company with native Indians,” said Robbins. “He wouldn’t hobnob with a brown man for a barrel of gold monkeys. He treated ’em worse than a junior engineer in a jute mill treats his sweeper.”
“True, Robbins. But we’ve overlooked the fact that Blenn left Calcutta in a blue funk. He was afraid—afraid of a European, of Christopher Jericho, evidently. The only place he might find reasonable sanctuary would be with some Indian who was under strong obligations. My friend Quombi La is apt to be under exceptional obligations to Blenn until the affair of the photograph is liquidated.”
Prike stopped. He leaned forward. The headlights of another car were boring through the rain, coming towards them at great speed. Prike touched the syce on the shoulder, gave an order.
Prike’s car slowed down, swung abruptly to the right, came to a stop directly across the road.
“Get out, Robbins,” said Prike. “We’ll have a look.”
The onrushing lights grew larger and brighter. The other car came on at undiminished speed. A collision seemed inevitable, when there was a howl of brakes. A wave of mud and water leaped into the air as the tyres skidded. The car sloshed completely around.
Prike and Robbins, guns drawn, jumped on the two running-boards. Reclining urbanely in the back seat, smoking a cigarette through a long ivory holder, was Count Vaznilko. He was alone except for the syce.
“Climb out, please,” said Prike.
“In all this rain?” Vaznilko’s voice was politely incredulous. “My dear man, you can’t—”
“Climb out!’
Count Vaznilko’s alacrity in no way marred the studied dignity of his movements. With an elegant gesture he tapped the end of his ivory holder against the edge of the car door to dislodge the half-smoked cigarette. He then assumed a pose of bored forbearance, a picture somehow spoiled by the fact that one sleeve of his jacket was muddy and torn, and that there was a long bloody scratch across one cheek.
“Search him, Robbins,” said Prike. “I’ll look into the car.”
A few moments later Prike was back, grasping something in his closed left hand.
“Nothing on him, inspector,” Robbins said.
“Where’s the photograph, Vaznilko?” Prike demanded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not a photographer.”
“Miss Carmaine is,” said Prike, “and a very good one. Haven’t you seen Woodring yet to-night?”
“Who is Woodring?” asked Vaznilko wearily. “Never heard of him.”
“Nor of Ruth Ingram either?”
“No.”
“Then how did this handkerchief get into your car?”
Prike opened his hand. A resilient wad of gossamer expanded into a lace-edged handkerchief.
“Probably Miss Carmaine’s,” said Vaznilko.
“Where is Ruth Ingram?” Prike held his arm across the door of the car.
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“How would you like to go back to China, Vaznilko?”
“China? Never been there. I hear it’s a most interesting country.”
“Most,” said Prike. “And the Chinese are a most ingenious people for thinking up exquisite means of executing prisoners. There’s the Death of the Thousand Cuts, for instance. And it’s a strange coincidence, Vaznilko, that a man of your name sold three thousand American machine-guns and considerable ammunition to a Chinese general named Tsao Wu-ching, two years ago. But he neglected to tell the general that the machine-guns were discarded as obsolete by the American Army, and the general didn’t discover the ammunition was defective until he tried to use it against an advancing Communist army in Szechuan. It’s silly of him, of course, but General Tsao still resents having had five regiments wiped out.”
“Why are you telling this to me?” Vaznilko demanded haughtily.
“Because you carry an Albanian passport,” said Prike, “and I believe that Albania has no extra-territoriality rights in China. So that if I decide to send you back, you will be subject to Chinese law, even in the Treaty ports … Now, of course, if you should tell me where you are hiding Miss Ingram.”
Prike paused. The mask of aristocratic unconcern had dropped from Count Vaznilko’s face. The loose lips were white in the glow of the headlamps.
“Let’s not talk of China,” he said, with a shudder. “I’ve just remembered there’s a girl in a deserted bhusti a mile down the road. Perhaps her name is Ruth Ingram. Shall we see?”
“We shall,” said Prike.
Five minutes later the inspector was breaking through the wet undergrowth of a rain-swept grove of palash trees. In front of him, a few inches ahead of the muzzle of Prike’s automatic, walked Count Vaznilko. Slightly to the rear was Deputy-Inspector Robbins, with a flashlight that sent a luminous disc dancing over the crooked, sodden wall of a tumbled-down thatched shanty. The light came to rest on a door hanging at a crazy angle from one rusty hinge.
“You first, my dear Count,” said Prike, prodding Vaznilko in the back with his gun.
The single hinge uttered an unearthly screech as the door swung in. The three men crossed the threshold. A dank, mouldy odour filled the darkness. The flashlight beam swept the debris-littered floor, paused a moment on a broken bed-frame laced with leather strips, made another circuit of the sweating walls. The room was empty.
“Well?” said Prike.
Robbins swung the light until it struck full upon the face of Count Vaznilko. The Count’s cheeks were ashen, his eyes haggard.
“She was here, inspector!” he declared hopelessly. “She was here fifteen minutes ago. I swear it. I brought her here myself. She was in my car until after—until fifteen minutes ago. I don’t know how she could have got away. She … she was tied!”
Prike’s silence was ominous. His relentless stare stabbed into Vaznilko like the prying bistoury of an autopsy surgeon. The last vestige of Vaznilko’s urbane composure was gone. He was cringing, imploring.
“You can’t send me to China, inspector!” he pleaded. “You made a bargain with me. I brought you here in good faith. The girl was here.”
“Put the cuffs on him, Robbins,” interrupted Prike.
The C.I.D. men drove half a mile up the road to the Lamasery of the Red Monks. Leaving their handcuffed prisoner in the car with the European constable, they walked between rows of stone chortens—tall, phallic pillars which loomed through the blur of rain like ghostly ranks of giant sentries. As they approached, weird sounds of Tibetan rites surged from within the monastery. The drone of chanted prayers, the clash of cymbals, the blare of horns and conches, the nervous rumble of a drum.
Prike led the way into the fane. Just inside the doorway were two huge prayer-wheels, like great upright barrels inscribed in carved Tibetan characters with the mystic phrase: Om mani padme, om! Two devotees, only half as tall as the cylinders they were turning, marched around and round while a tiny bell tinkled to mark the revolutions, each turn counting a prayer.
Prike and Robbins walked past the two prayer-wheels until they could look over the bowed, shaven heads of the crimson-robed monks, to the stolid, cross-legged golden Buddha who sat in an ornate niche at the far end of the hall. The deep cadence of the incantation of a hundred Lamas swelled and died away like the boom and ebb of some distant surf.
Inspector Prike uncovered as a compromise with his otherwise sacrilegious action in stalking briskly among the kneeling monks. Almost immediately, a tall, broad-shouldered Lama with a reddish tinge to his round Mongolian face came toward him.
“You are disturbing our ritual, inspector Sahib,” said the Lama.
“Quombi La,” said Prike, “I want to see Blenn.”
“But I have told you a dozen times, inspector Sahib,” protested Quombi La, “that I do not know where he is. Moreover, your men have already searched our monastery twice to-day.”
“Thoroughly,” said Prike, “except for the little shrine in back.”
“But that, inspector Sahib,” said Quombi La, “is our holy of holies. It enshrines a relic of the Thera Veda, our sacred scripture—”
“Yes, I know,” said Prike. “One of the palm leaves on which the original Pali Canons were written. I want to see it.”
“That is impossible, inspector Sahib. No one, who does not profess our religion—”
“In that case I shall have to visit it without your permission,” Prike announced.
“Inspector Sahib—”
Prike was already striding toward a side door, with Robbins at his heels. The ritualistic clamour of horns and drums again swelled above the drone of prayers.
Quombi La reached the inspector as he pushed through the door, walked into the rainy night. The Lama grasped the inspector’s arm, but Prike did not relax his pace. He continued his way toward the silhouette of a little outbuilding shaped like a spiked helmet. A tiny oil light, sheltered by a crimson globe, burned above the doorway.
Just before he reached the shrine, Prike nearly stumbled over a dark heap lying in the mud. He stooped quickly, called sharply.
“Robbins! Your torch!”
The beam of the Deputy’s flashlight slanted down to glisten on a rain-soaked pair of legs. It travelled over the prone figure, pausing briefly on a wax-like hand that held a pistol. Rapidly it moved on to the man’s head, on which the rain had plastered down the thinning, iron-grey hair. The lifeless face stared at the weeping sky, a hard, ruthless face of which the heavy, aggressive jaw hung rigidly open.
“It’s Alexander Blenn!” Robbins exclaimed. “And he’s shot himself! He’s got the gun still in his hand!”
Prike was kneeling in the mud, his earnest lips pressed together in a tight, grim line.
“It’s a .38 automatic, Robbins,” Prike said tersely.
Paul Woodring had managed to catch a ride on a passing tonga for the last mile of his disconsolate return to town, but he was still wet and bedraggled when he walked into the Woodlands Hotel. He had hardly got through the entrance before Stanley Hubertson rushed up to him, and pumped his hand.
“Thank heavens you’re all right,” said Hubertson. “I was afraid something might have happened to you. Everything go off on schedule?”
Woodring stared at Hubertson blankly. “Get me a drink,” he said.
Hubertson guided the dripping youth to a table, called for a double brandy peg.
“I’ve been waiting here most of the evening,” Hubertson said. “I had a devil of a time getting here. The police put a watch on my room, for some reason or other. But I wanted to be here to get the news at first hand.”
“There’s no news,” said Woodring in a monotone.
“At least you’re safe,” said Hubertson. “I thought when Miss Ingram came in that—”
“Ruth back?” Woodring suddenly came to life.
“She came in about twenty minutes ago. She was so upset that she couldn’t speak to me. That’s why I thought perhaps something had happened to you.”
“Beg pardon, sir.” The reception clerk had come over to the table. “Miss Ingram asked to be notified if you came in, Mr. Woodring. She’s coming down.” Woodring didn’t wait to hear more. He went bounding across the lobby and met Ruth at the bottom of the stairs. She was pale, and showed signs of having been under a strain, but there was nothing strained about the smile she gave him. She held out both hands.
“I couldn’t wait to apologise for being such a fool,” she said. “You were right—I am a spoiled brat and a babe in arms. I’m terribly ashamed of having got you into this mess … and terribly grateful to you for what you’ve done. I don’t know what would have become of me if it hadn’t been for your bearer …”
“My bearer?” Woodring raised his eyes above Ruth’s curls and noticed for the first time that Georges Clemenceau Malaswaram was standing diffidently three steps behind her in the stairway.
“Begging pardon, Sahib,” the Tamil apologised, “but informed Memsahib that all was accomplished through Sahib’s instructions. Was—”
“Then that was you I saw to-night,” Woodring exclaimed. “What the dickens were you doing with Vaznilko’s ruffians?”
“Begging further pardon for mingling in Sahib’s private affairs,” said the Tamil, “but took slight liberties of previewing chit arriving this afternoon time, therein observing rendezvous for Lebong Road. Shortly thereafter embarked upon personal reconnoitering, and was able to follow kidnap motor-car by folding self in luggage rack. Releasing Memsahib thereafter relatively simple. Regret, however, abandoning Sahib to own devices in height of bombardment. Was Sahib badly shot?”
“Shot at,” said Woodring. “But they missed me.”
“Was expecting same,” said Malaswaram. “From vantage spot in bushes, was observing Sahib approach on horseback. Also observed Count Vaznilko aiming pistol. Therefore undertook to joggle aim by implanting slight kick to coccyx of Count Vaznilko. Was formerly quite expert kicker, Sahib, while playing rugger in Madras with team of Blenn employees …”
“You—a Blenn employé?” Woodring demanded.
“For ten years, Sahib, have been seventh assistant accountant and third junior translator for Blenn indigo and chinchona estates in Coromandel district.”
“So it was Mr. Blenn himself who planted you with me as bearer?”
Georges Clemenceau Malaswaram lowered his eyes like a bashful girl. “No deception being intended, Sahib,” he said. “Blenn Sahib being simply desirous for supplementary means of secret communication in cases of urgency, enlisted self as liaison contact.”
