Bengal Fire, page 19
“How do I know this is the truth?” he asked at last. “How do I know you aren’t staging a little performance for my especial benefit?”
“Do I look like an actress? I’ve explained, haven’t I, why I’ve been suspicious of you until now? Blame Harry Hoyt.”
“There are still some things you haven’t explained,” said Marvin. “Why, for instance, did you throw one of Kurt Julius’s buttons at me when you left my flat last night?”
“You mean that lump of silver carved like a tiger’s head?”
“Yes. Why did you throw it at me?”
“That,” said Evelyn lightly, “is a matter of heredity.”
“Heredity?”
“Yes. My father had an awful temper. I’m afflicted congenitally. When you started talking to me like a district attorney, I had an attack.”
“So you deliberately wanted to see me hanged?”
“Hanged?”
“You knew the button belonged to Julius, didn’t you?”
“I’d heard so, yes.”
“Then you must have known that I’d try to discover the connection between your visit and that button, that I’d go out to find Julius and arrive just in time to stumble over his corpse—and be accused of murder.”
“No!” Evelyn paled. She half arose from the bench. “I—I didn’t know Julius was dead. How could I? I never saw the man. I didn’t think— Oh, I’m sorry.” The girl’s full lips curved into a plea for forgiveness.
“Where did you get the silver button?” Marvin pursued.
“Why, I thought you left it in my room. That’s why I brought it back to you. I thought you were trying to make trouble for me because I wouldn’t—well, give you a tumble.”
“Why did you think I left it there?”
“It must have been you—or Harry Hoyt. I found it on the floor.”
“And how did you know it belonged to Julius?” Marvin sat down again.
“Colonel Linnet told me.”
“I see.” Marvin offered the girl a cigarette. She shook her head. Her gray-green eyes watched every change in his expression.
“Did Linnet tell you to bring the button to my flat?” Marvin resumed.
“No. He said I’d better go to the police with it. Julius was certainly mixed up with Harry Hoyt, he said, and the button might be embarrassing to me if Prike found it. He advised me to go right to Prike and tell the whole story.”
“Is Linnet in love with you?”
“George Linnet?” The girl laughed. “I’d hardly call it love.”
“Has he been making passes at you—on the steamer, for instance?”
“Oh, he made love to me on the Bangalore, of course. Isn’t that a regular part of a sea voyage—like bouillon on deck at eleven, and shuffleboard.”
“He kissed you?”
“He did his best. There was a moon in the Bay of Bengal. I’m sure he’s forgotten about it already.”
“Have you?”
“Completely.”
“How did you happen to collide in the river this morning. By prearrangement?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what Rufus Dormer arranged.”
“And that’s another thing. What were you doing with Dormer, anyhow?”
Briefly Evelyn told him of her encounter with Dormer at Alipore, her brief imprisonment in his room, the expedition in search of the nao-ratna.
“He thinks Jacques Vrai is the man who stole the Bosa pearl from you,” she concluded.
“So does Inspector Prike,” said Marvin. “And apparently Vrai has gone back to Calcutta with it. I wonder— Where does Dormer live?”
“I wish I knew. My passport is locked up in his place. I suppose I’ll have to get the police to find it for me.”
“The police would like very much to know Dormer’s address. He moved yesterday. Couldn’t you locate the place, approximately?”
“It’s in the back of some sort of outdoor gambling-dive,” said Evelyn. She described the scene she had watched that morning, and tried to tell the route by which Dormer had driven her there.
“That,” said Marvin when she had finished, “sounds very much like Lal Gupta’s rain game, near the Marwari bazaar. Pardon me just a moment.”
He got up and walked rapidly toward the hotel. Evelyn started after him. As he reached the veranda she caught his sleeve.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“That’s not a polite question for a lady to ask a gentleman, or vice versa.”
“I know where.”
“Do you? Then don’t ask.”
“You’re after Inspector Prike’s permission to leave Chandernagore.”
“Well?”
“You’re going to look for Dormer’s room. You’ve decided that Dormer and Jacques Vrai might have been partners in crime, since Dormer is so well informed. You’re going to Dormer’s on a chance that Vrai might be there—with the Bosa pearl.”
“Well?”
“I’m going with you.” She still clung to his sleeve.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’ve got to get my passport.”
“I’ll bring you your passport. I’ll give it to you at dinner tomorrow. You’ll have dinner with me, won’t you. Or shall we make it tiffin?”
“I’m going with you,” Evelyn repeated. “Now.”
“No—for two reasons. First, it’s dangerous; Jacques Vrai is likely to prove a tough customer. Second, I don’t want any more interference—”
“All right,” Evelyn announced. “Then I’ll tell Inspector Prike where Dormer lives. That’ll settle everything.”
Marvin looked solemn for several seconds. Then he smiled in capitulation.
“Have it your own way,” he said. “We’ll both go—for your passport.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE SOUL OF A CYNIC
It was late afternoon before a taxi bearing Lee Marvin and Evelyn Brandi drew up in front of Lal Gupta’s rain game. There had been considerable delay about leaving Chandernagore. Inspector Prike was in a surprisingly calm and leisurely mood for a man who had during the course of the morning uncovered an important cache of smuggled arms, had two murder suspects disappear, and a third one stabbed. The inspector insisted on remaining at the Hotel Dupleix for tiffin— to essay Antoinette Vrai’s vaunted cuisine, he said, although Marvin noted he gave much more attention to observing covertly the mutual reactions of the motley guests he had gathered about the table.
After tiffin, Prike left the local situation in the hands of the French authorities, having received their consent to take Antoinette Vrai to Calcutta with him as a reluctant witness. The inspector and Antoinette left in the Maharajah of Jharnpur’s speedboat with Linnet and Chitterji Rao. Marvin and Evelyn Branch took the train at the East Indian Railway station just outside the French frontier. They found a taxi at the Howrah Terminal, crossed the pontoon bridge to Calcutta, and proceeded directly to the gambling-establishment near the Marwari bazaar.
“This looks like the place,” Evelyn said, “although I couldn’t be sure unless we went in. I’d recognize the courtyard, with the little window in back from Dormer’s room.”
“No chance of getting in, I’m afraid,” Marvin said. “They’d think I was from the police. Gambling is illegal in Calcutta—except at the British clubs and race courses. Let’s go around to the street in back.”
The taxi made the circuit of the square, going very slowly. When they turned the second corner, Evelyn saw the narrow, smelly alley between mud walls, with the wooden door at the end.” That’s it!”
“Roko!” ordered Marvin.
The taxi stopped. The pair got out, traversed the passageway. Marvin tried the door. It was locked. He listened for several minutes, but heard no sound inside. He turned to Evelyn. “You haven’t a hairpin, of course.”
“Of course not.”
Marvin went to work with a jackknife.
“You are about to witness,” he said, “the triumph of modern science over modern womanhood.”
It did not take him long to force the cheap lock. The door creaked as it swung inward. Marvin entered cautiously, looked about the bare room, peered under the crude cot. Evelyn laughed behind him. “Are you looking for Jacques Vrai?” she demanded.
“No. I’m still looking for trouble.”
“Don’t be whimsical,” said Evelyn.
Marvin dragged the battered pasteboard suitcase from under the bed. “Is this where Dormer hid your passport?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Marvin sprang the lock on the suitcase, knelt beside it. Evelyn bent over his shoulder. Marvin picked a little red booklet from a pile of clothing, handed it to the girl. “Here’s your passport,” he said. “Now you can go.”
“Wait. What’s that? What’s that shining in there?”
Marvin’s fingers delved gingerly into the mass of frayed shirts, tattered socks, much-mended underwear and touched something cool and smooth. He drew out a long, flat box of japanned metal.
Evelyn chuckled triumphantly.
The metal box was not fastened. Marvin pried back the lid. An odor of old paper arose from the littered interior. Marvin lifted out a London theater program, dated June, 1923. Something slipped from between the pages and fell at his feet. Evelyn reached for it—a dried, pressed rose whose brittle brown petals crumbled as she touched them.
Marvin dug farther into the box and brought out a lock of hair—a hazel-brown curl tied with a narrow bow of baby blue; a dozen faded photographs, all of the same young woman, pretty in a coquettish way, dressed and coiffed in the style of the years following the war; several snapshots, one of the same woman standing in a garden, holding a very small baby, one of a toddling child of two or three, labeled in ink, Elizabeth Ann, 1926.
“Let me see that,” said Evelyn Branch, holding out her hand.
“It looks to me,” commented Marvin, “as if some rank sentimentalist has had the bad luck to fall into Dormer’s clutches. Wonder if the blackmail has already—”
“What’s that?” interrupted Evelyn, reaching her own fingers into the metal box and taking out a yellowed newspaper cutting.
“I’ll be damned!” Marvin exclaimed.
The newspaper article was from the May 1, 1927, issue of the News of the Globe, London weekly of sex and sensation. It read:
Rufus Dormer, perhaps the most brilliant and talented of the professional scandal-mongers on the staff of our contemporary, “Eavesdropper,” finds himself on the wrong side of the keyhole today.
For the past few years Dormer’s prodigious nose for news of an intimate character, together with the barbed wit of his pen, has caused considerable uneasiness among those of high station and low instincts. Today he is an actor in one of those sordid dramas at which he was so long an amused and amusing spectator.
Dormer is in hospital today—the result of having tried to kill himself last night by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets. His suicidal intent was indicated in a note found by police, giving instructions for the care of his four-year-old daughter. He was heart-broken because his wife, formerly known as Violet Lane, the music-hall dancer, ran away with another man.
The third angle of the triangle is understood to be a prominent impresario whose own domestic troubles last year furnished Dormer with much clever and jocular copy. Dormer will recover.
“He didn’t, though—quite,” mused Marvin.
Evelyn did not comment. She was undoing a packet of letters which had been neatly tied with loving care. The letters were written in the round, uneven scrawl of a child. Dear daddy, I am fine, how are you? It is raining here … one began. And: Dear daddy, thank you [or the dolly it is butifull….
Marvin tried to close the box. “Let’s not read any more,” he said. “I hate being the Peeping Tom on a man’s naked soul, even the soft and sentimental soul of a cynic.”
“I’ve got to find out everything,” Evelyn insisted. She refused to remove her fingers from the rim of the box. “What’s this?”
She pulled out another handful of letters. These proved both mature and matter-of-fact. They were from a woman in Surrey who, from the context, had been taking care of Elizabeth Ann Dormer since her father had gone to India. The letters were all acknowledgments of money representing most of Dormer’s meager salary, that he had been sending to England for the child’s subsistence. They faithfully reported the progress of the girl’s education, recorded her minor ailments, told of her growth. The last one in the packet, dated the previous month, read:
Dear Mr. Dormer: You always used to say that when Elizabeth Ann was grown up enough, you wanted her to go to a better school than there is in this village. If you could see her, I think you would say she is grown up now, Mr. Dormer, so I have been looking out for new schools. I have found a very nice one, not too dear and close enough so she could come home to me week-ends. I know you have been sending me all the money you can, but we will have to have a little more, if you want Elizabeth Ann to go to this school. She will need a few dresses, over and above those I will sew for her. For the half-year, I think £35—
“Thirty-five pounds,” said Marvin aloud, “amounts to about 500 rupees. So that—” He paused. He replaced the letters gently. There was a carefully folded piece of silk in the box, a faded square that looked remarkably like a Union Jack. The muscles of his throat contracted as he dosed the suitcase on the handful of yellowing papers, shutting up the musty smell, just as Dormer had for years shut up his loyalty and devotion beneath a savage pretense of misanthropy and hate for a land which held such painful memories.
Marvin arose. Evelyn was standing very near him, looking at him with eyes that were unusually bright. Suddenly, without his knowing exactly how it happened, she was in his arms and he was kissing her. Dormer, Vrai, the Bosa pearl—nothing mattered then, nothing except that her hands had crept behind his shoulders, that she was clinging to him with honest abandon, that his lips were pressing fervent kisses upon hers, upon her hair, her trembling eyelids.
It was a long minute before he found the breath to say, “I told you it was dangerous to come here.”
The girl leaned back in his embrace. She touched his tanned cheeks with her finger tips.
“I wanted to come, didn’t I?” she said.
“But I could have sworn, when I met you on the dock, that you were still in love with Hoyt.”
“I was—in a way. But the Harry Hoyt I loved was a creature of my own imagination. I didn’t know until I could compare him with the real Hoyt Thursday night, with a perspective of two years’ separation, that he didn’t really exist. I’m grateful to Harry for having come to see me before—before he died.”
“So am I. Dead men are such damned unfair rivals.”
He kissed her again. He could have gone on kissing her indefinitely, had it not been for an interruption.
An impatient hand was knocking at the door.
Marvin’s head went up, startled. Still holding the girl close, he called in a husky voice, “Kauri hai?”
“Main ek tar Dormer K’wasti laya hun,” came the reply through the door panel.
Marvin unwound his arms. There was a frightened query in the girl’s eyes. “What is it?” she whispered.
“Telegram for Dormer.”
“Better take it.”
Marvin opened the door a crack, A post-office chaprassi; leaning against his bicycle outside, handed him a salmon-colored envelope. He took it, closed the door, ripped open the envelope. His eyes narrowed as he read the message:
All is lost Mister Dormer kindly and urgently see me at promptest opportunity.—Gundranesh Dutt.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
GRAVEYARD RENDEZVOUS
The Hindu festival of Diwali, the feast of lights, is said to commemorate the day, many thousands of years ago, when the gods were on more intimate terms with mortals, that Vishnu the Preserver killed a giant and was greeted, on his return at nightfall, by women bearing lamps. Whatever its origin, its celebration in Bengal on the first of Kartik resembles a composite of Guy Fawkes’s Day, the Fourth of July, and the Quatorze Juillet. Bearded old men join with naked brown youngsters in setting off squibs and mines in crude earthenware spheres. House fronts are outlined in oil lamps, and Bengal fire burns from house tops in blue and green and red flares. If a man is poor, he shoots fireworks in honor of Kali, and if he is rich, he prepares a glittering display of lights and pyrotechnics to dazzle Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity. If he is important, with important projects at stake, he makes tiny earthenware boats, sets them afloat in some river, all ablaze with Bengal fire, and watches if they remain alight or sputter out—in order to know if his past favors to his particular goddess will entitle him to success in his next great undertaking. And if a man is neither rich nor poor nor important, but only a modest clerk like Babu Gundranesh Dutt, he shoots off his squibs and burns his Bengal fire just for the fun of the thing.
Gundranesh Dutt, despite his efforts to appear completely Westernized during office hours, took a juvenile delight in the celebration—at home—of those Hindu festivals with definite physical aspects. And Diwali was one of his favorites.
This particular Diwali promised to be an unusual delight for the Babu because Cousin Danilal Dutt of Barrackpore had come down to help celebrate. Cousin Danilal owned a shop near the cantonment and, in addition to being a person of some means, was a great fellow. He was as small and wiry as Cousin Gundranesh was rotund, his bulging forehead was almost as broad as his shoulders, and his steel-rimmed spectacles gave him an ascetic mien. But Cousin Danilal was not in the least severe. No one loved fun more than he, and when he came to Calcutta for Diwali he brought plenty of fireworks from his shop in Barrackpore.
The arrival of Cousin Danilal on Friday night had been somewhat marred by the excitement following the death of the Babu’s employer, the murder of Kurt Julius, and the subsequent detention of Gundranesh Dutt by the police in circumstances which seemed tantamount to accusation of murder and certain disgrace. However, a few hours’ sleep and the dawn of Saturday, with its promise of a gay Diwali, almost eradicated yesterday’s unpleasantness from the Babu’s mind. Not even the prospect of deportation to the Andamans for life could spoil a good Diwali.
