Bengal Fire, page 21
Finally the inspector asked for and received the forecast of flying conditions from the government meteorologists, and exchanged communications with C.I.D. agents at all airports in the Calcutta region.
His plans completed several hours before his scheduled boarding of the Alfonse Daudet, the inspector allowed himself the relaxation of following Babu Gundranesh Dutt—which resulted in the premature capture of Jacques Vrai in the graveyard.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
“Just a little soiree I’m civinc—in celebration o£ the Diwali Pooja,” Prike explained to his involuntary guests as he conducted them from the Lower Circular Road cemetery to his home half a mile west.
The inspector’s compound was alive with uniformed constables when he arrived with Jacques Vrai, Marvin, Evelyn Branch, and the two Babus. At the entrance to the drawing-room he removed Jacques Vrai’s handcuffs. Inside, sitting in stiff silence, were Antoinette Vrai, George Linnet, Chitterji Rao, the police surgeon and four C.I.D. men in civilian clothes. One of the detectives had a gray-bearded Mohammedan with him.
Disregarding the tense atmosphere of expectancy that stifled conversation, Prike bustled about politely, seated everyone, called his khidmatgar, ordered drinks, and behaved generally as if he were quite in earnest over the social character of his soirée. Then he said:
“I should like every one to roll up one sleeve, please. Did you bring your sphygmomanometer, doctor?”
“Ready, inspector,” said the police surgeon, opening his bag, taking out an array of bulbs, tubes and gauge, fitting the ends of a stethoscope into his ears.
“What is this,” muttered Marvin, “a lie detector?”
“I’m interested in the blood pressure of my guests,” said Prike. “Will you keep a record, doctor.”
Evelyn Branch leaned close to Marvin. “Why don’t you roll up your sleeve?” she whispered. “Is that where you’re hiding it?”
“Hiding what?” Marvin didn’t look at her.
“Don’t dissimulate. Not with me. I saw you pick up something in the graveyard.”
“You were seeing things.”
“Lee Marvin, if you—”
“Shut up!” said Marvin.
“Chitterji Rao,” said Prike, as the police surgeon was taking the Household Officer’s blood pressure, “I’m sorry to hear that His Highness is having such an unfortunate Diwali. My agent at Jharnpur tells me that the Bengal lights burning on the Diwali boat, launched in the name of the Maharajah from the riverside temple there, were extinguished immediately by a gust of wind. Too bad that the goddess Kali could not see fit to favor the Maharajah’s great project. Perhaps if she had been properly propitiated with a nao-ratna, a sufficiently valuable one—”
“His Highness takes no stock in religious superstitions,” purred Chitterji Rao.
“Ah?” Prike showed mock surprise. “Then why do you suppose that, after the auguries of the Diwali lights foretold failure, the Maharajah took off from the Calcutta airdrome in a plane carrying enough petrol to reach Siam.”
“You must be mistaken.”
“Rather the Maharajah was mistaken,” Prike said. “His plane was forced down by a rainstorm at Dacca, an hour ago. It seems inevitable that His Highness will go to Delhi next week, to explain to the Viceroy something of these plans for which he was so anxious to have divine assistance.”
“What—what plans?” asked Chitterji Rao. His olive skin had assumed a queer, greenish pallor.
“Hadn’t you heard, my dear Chitterji Rao, that the Maharajah of Jharnpur has ambitions to free India from the odious British yoke?” asked Prike, still feigning surprise. “Yes, His Highness planned to re-establish the great Mogul Empire, with himself on the throne. We British would be eliminated by a second Sepoy Rebellion—which has been making excellent progress, I might add.”
“Ridiculous!” declared Chitterji Rao.
“Admittedly,” said Prike, “and foolhardy. Particularly for a man as vain as His Highness.” The inspector opened a briefcase. Half a dozen of the brass belt buckles he had found in the Chandernagore godown jangled in his hand. “Why didn’t he content himself with buying machine guns? Why did he have to see his rebels bearing the insignia of Akbar II into battle? Only the Maharajah of Jharnpur, who has so long flaunted his Mogul blood, would claim to be the successor to the great Akbar. I’m afraid the belt buckles were a fatal error—not at all worthy of the Maharajah’s cleverness in employing neutrals to avoid suspicion on the early organization of rebellion. His impresario has been an American, the late Mr. Hoyt. His arms and munitions he has bought in Japan. His arsenal was on French soil at Chandernagore—through the courtesy of Jacques Vrai.”
“No! Not true!” Jacques Vrai’s yellow teeth gleamed defiance. He sprang to his feet.
“No?” Inspector Prike again seemed mildly surprised. “The arsenal was connected by a tunnel with your wine cellar.”
“Ten days ago I did not know the tunnel was there. I swear it!”
“Then that gives you another reason for killing Hoyt —and Julius—and stabbing Dormer.”
“No, no! I killed no one. I—I—” He stopped, transfixed by the black, menacing stare of Antoinette. He shook his head violently, as though to rid himself of her in-fluence, flung out his hands in a gesture of resignation, sat down weakly.
“I lound the muddy prints of a woman’s high heels on the floor of the godown,” said Prike calmly, looking at Antoinette.
“Of course!” Jacques Vrai raised his head. “She was there. She knew about it. Otherwise, how do you suppose she could make Hoyt marry her? She—”
He stopped. Antoinette was glaring at him, her face dark, her eyes clouded with the fumes of hate. “This is your hour, little one.” The corners of her mouth twisted downward in her disdain for Jacques. “Tell him! You have wanted to be an honest man for so long. This is your chance! You can be, oh, so honest now! Tell the truth! Tell everything!”
Jacques Vrai’s chin went up a trifle.
“I am telling the truth,” he said. “I stole the Maharajah’s parure from Marvin’s flat yesterday, oui. I frightened that simple-minded Babu into keeping them for me, yes. I was going to run away tonight, yes. But I stole so that I could begin again an honest life. When I stole before in Nouvelle Calédonie, it was for Antoinette. I loved her. But I tried to use the money to become honest. I bought the hotel. No use. Antoinette was bored. She humiliated me. She wanted excitement. She wanted Hoyt—because he was more cunning than she, slyer, smarter. Together they would make a fine pair of crapules! Together they would go to America. It was always her marotte, America. So she got him. She found the tunnel in the cellar. She found the guns. But that was not enough. She could not make him marry her until she found that letter, two weeks ago. She is blacker than the blackmailer!”
“It would seem,” said Prike, approaching Antoinette, “that you have a letter for me.”
Antoinette laughed with a strange, cold hysteria.
“I assume you have it on your person,” continued Prike. “You would have normally transferred it to an intimate hiding-place, after my announcement this morning that I was going to search your room. May I have it, please?”
Antoinette did not reply.
“Mathilde,” said Prike calmly, “if you don’t give me the letter, I shall look for it myself. And for the first time in your life you will not enjoy being undressed— because I shall do it publicly.”
Antoinette stopped laughing. She glared at Prike for an instant, then crossed her legs, brazenly gathered her green skirt about her hips, withdrew a folded paper from under her girdle, threw it at Prike.
“All right,” she declared. “Takel It is no good to me now, anyhow. It is true, Harry Hoyt would have married me to get it back. But now he is dead, what use is it? It is not signed.”
Inspector Prike stooped, picked up the letter, unfolded it, began reading aloud:
Dear Hoyt: The proposition still sounds well. And you can tell the boss that the more I study the figures, the more it looks like success. After all, we’ll have the man-power. There are only 60,000 British soldiers in India, and 170,000 sepoys. We’ll have twenty-one troops of native cavalry to five white troops. They have all the artillery, of course—forty eight field-batteries—and six squadrons of planes. But we’ll overcome that with the sheer number of our Japanese machine guns. Keep ’em coming, as long as there’s money to buy ’em, and you can fool the customs. We need another ten thousand at least before we start sending ’em up-country.
And speaking of money, I’ve been thinking over a crack you made to me a couple of weeks ago. You aren’t figuring on getting any money out of me, are you? If you ever shake me down, I won’t hesitate a second about cutting your—
The page ended in the midst of the threat. Prike turned it over. It was blank.
“I think it is sale—at least, it is polite—to assume that the next word was throat,” he said. “And I don’t need the signature to tell me who wrote it. I know.”
There was a commotion in the compound outside, as a car drove up. Ten seconds later, the door to Inspector Prike’s drawing-room burst open. Deputy Inspector Robbins marched in, proudly pushing before him the short, lynx-eyed Henry Kobayashi, well manacled.
“Here’s your Raffles at last!” Robbins announced. “I told you I’d dig him up, inspector. Know where I found him? Hiding in the dark-room of a Jap photographer in Chandernagore. Put up a fight, too, but here he is.”
The cocky little Japanese had lost all his American aggressiveness. His face was flushed, his manner subdued.
“Please take his blood pressure, doctor,” said Prike to the police surgeon. “And you, Robbins, take off his cuffs.”
The surgeon came over to roll up Kobayashi’s sleeve, wrap his apparatus around his forearm.
“What good did you think running away was going to do, Mr. Kobayashi,” Prike asked.
“Hell, it was my only chance,” said Kobayashi. “The cards were stacked against me. I thought if I could stay under cover I might get a chance to clear myself. I wanted to stay out of sight till I could get proof from Japan that Hoyt was using the name of my Osaka outfit to frame me, in case of slip-ups.”
“Slip-ups, my eye!” exclaimed Deputy Inspector Robbins. “He’s your Raffles, inspector!”
Inspector Prike gave his subordinate a friendly pat on the shoulder. Then he produced the soiled scrap of paper he had found in Harrison Hoyt’s ghari in Dharmtolla Street. He showed it to Henry Kobayashi.
“What do you make of this, Kobayashi?” Prike asked.
Kobayashi frowned at the paper, shook his head. “Raffles 82335 he…. Can’t make it out,” he said.
“Hoyt wrote this,” said Prike, “as he was dying of suffocation produced by sodium nitrite introduced into his gin and bitters at his bachelor dinner. He knew he was dying—he wasn’t even able to finish writing legibly— and evidently was trying to give some clue to what had happened. Can you make anything of it, Colonel Linnet?”
George Linnet’s square jaw worked with an almost imperceptible side motion as he leaned forward to study the paper. He shook his head in the negative.
“Even if I read the numbers like this: Eight—twenty-three—thirty-five?” pursued Prike.
“Doesn’t mean a thing to me,” said Linnet.
“It does to me,” Prike announced, “particularly since I have received from Singapore the register page for August 23, 1935, for the Hotel Raffles. On that date adjoining rooms at the Raffles were occupied by Harrison Hoyt and George Linnet.”
“Well?” Linnet’s jaw stopped working.
“You told me last night, colonel, that you had not seen Hoyt for three years, yet he evidently met you in Singapore not very many weeks ago. Was that when you first threatened to kill him, colonel?”
“That’s all bunk! I—”
“I’m very much afraid, Colonel Linnet,” said Prike, slipping his hands into his coat pockets, “that your dream of being known to history as the military genius whose brilliant strategy drove the British out of India and re-established the Mogul Empire is definitely ended. Tomorrow morning you will be formally charged with murder.”
“Murder?” Linnet’s shoulders straightened. “You’re crazy!”
“I have a holograph letter,” said Prike, “which handwriting experts will surely attribute to you. Even I can note the similarity with your signature on the hotel register. Your letter makes it quite clear that Hoyt was working his usual blackmail game. He involved you in a plot, and then was on the point of exposing the plot unless you gave him money. When the shipment of arms was seized in Singapore, the day before you arrived in Calcutta, you thought he was making good his threat, so you killed him.”
“Not I!”
“Yes, you did. Hoyt was afraid of you. The reason he did not meet the steamer Bangalore Thursday was that you were aboard. He was not avoiding Evelyn Branch, because he went to see her that same night. And by the way, colonel, it was not very gallant of you to plant one of Kurt Julius’s silver buttons in Miss Branch’s room, after you had fed him sodium nitrite and knew he would be dead by morning. I know that you suggested to her that Lee Marvin had left the button, hoping that she would involve Marvin, but I am a little surprised that you should jeopardize a woman in order to misdirect suspicion from yourself.”
“What are you talking about, inspector?”
Prike turned his back for a moment. He addressed the surgeon.
“Doctor, what did you find out about the systolic and diastolic tension of my guests?”
“They’re all about normal, inspector,” said the surgeon, “except one case of hypertension. Mr. Linnet, there, runs up a pressure of about 180.”
“I thought he would,” said Prike. “I thought he had been treated at some time for high blood pressure. He seems so familiar with the action of nitrites. By the way, colonel, what was it that Kurt Julius wanted to tell me, that you had to kill him? Too bad he waited so long, or we might have kept the knife out of Rufus Dormer’s back. I suppose you had to try to kill Dormer, too, when you found him dodging through the godown door that Jacques Vrai had left open, and found he knew about your arms cache.”
“You’re insane!”
“On the contrary,” said Inspector Prike. “You were insane in the case of Dormer. Of course, I realize that you had to act quickly, and without the clever preparation you used on Hoyt and Julius. Nevertheless, Colonel Linnet, you should not have used the knife that you did, because stamped into the blade, very near the hilt, are the tiny letters, E.B.—which I know stand for Ejército Boliviano. You told me yourself, colonel, that you served with the Bolivian Army in the Gran Chaco, so I expect to have no trouble in court, proving ownership of the knife.”
“It must have been stolen from me. I was with you, inspector, when Dormer was stabbed.”
“You were not,” countered Prike. “You were with me when I heard Dormer’s cry of pain. But before that he must have been moaning and shrieking for ten minutes— or as long as it would take a badly wounded man to crawl the length of that tunnel. I tried the acoustics of the tunnel this morning, Linnet, and I found that a man sitting in the bar of the Hotel Dupleix could hear no sounds made anywhere in that tunnel except at the opening behind the wine casks—where we found Dormer.”
“That’s pretty far-fetched!”
“If you insist upon being stubborn,” said Prike grimly, “I shall ask you to remove the glove from your left hand.”
The muscles tightened about Linnet’s jaw. “I have an infirmity, inspector.”
“Yes, I know. You have three fingers missing. Then perhaps you will watch my demonstration.” From his briefcase Prike took one gray glove and three over-sized fountain pens. “Notice that by unscrewing the upper segment of the barrel of each of these pens,” he continued, “I am able to remove quite easily the rubber reservoirs and the pen-points. The tubular reservoirs, you will note, fit nicely into the fingers of the glove— thus. You will also note that the tubes in the two shorter fingers are long enough so that the pen—or open end— extends down to the usual opening in the palm of the glove. Now, if these rubber reservoirs were filled with a saturated solution of sodium nitrite, and the man wearing the glove exerted pressure with his only good digits —the thumb and little finger—it would seem quite simple to expel some of the solution into a glass of gin and bitters which he was about to pick up by the brim with his left hand.”
“Pure supposition.”
“Not at all.” Prike beckoned to one of his detectives. “Jenkins, is that your man from the bazaar?”
“Yes, inspector.” Jenkins pushed the bearded Mohammedan forward.
“Mr. Susti,” said Prike, “I understand that on Thursday afternoon you sold three Jumbo fountain pens to one man. Is that man here tonight?”
“Woh admi hai,” said the Mohammedan.
He pointed to Linnet.
“That’s all,” said Prike. “Thank you.”
George Linnet stood up stiffly. He looked about him, a haunted expression coming into his eyes as they traveled from one tense face to another. Suddenly he faced Prike and saluted.
“At your service, inspector,” he said. “You win.”
Prike’s response was a curt nod. Then he clapped his hands twice.
“Khidmatgar,” he said, when a servitor appeared, “ask my guests what they will have to drink. Give them anything they want—except gin and bitters. For myself, bring brandy.”
“Just a minute, inspector.” Lee Marvin was on his feet. “May I speak to Chitterji Rao?”
“Why?”
“It’s about that nao-ratna. Chitterji Rao promised a reward to Miss Branch here if she could return it to him by midnight tonight. It’s not quite midnight.”
“Has Miss Branch recovered the nao-ratna, then?”
“Yes,” said Marvin. “She—she found it.”
“Where did I find it?” the girl asked.
Marvin hesitated. Then he grinned.
“In my pocket,” he said.
