Title:      Jimgrim (1930)
Author:     Talbot Mundy (1879-1940)
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          March 2003
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Jimgrim (1930)
Author:     Talbot Mundy (1879-1940)




Part One

The Reincarnated



Chapter One

"As the light is against the darkness, so are you and I against
each other."


It was one of those sun-drunken days in spring for which the South
of France is famous.  There was the usual nondescript crowd at Notre
Dame de la Garde--tourists, beggars, women selling candles and
rosaries--a few citizens of Marseilles in love with the view--a
few youngsters in love with each other.  In the distance the Chateau
D'If stood grimly silent in a sapphire sea.  The funicular railway
kept disgorging passengers, too lazy or too wise to make the climb
on foot, and I envied them.  I never could see why Jeff Ramsden will
insist on walking when there are easier ways to get there.  Churches
don't particularly interest me, and I would rather look at Times
Square on a warm night than at all the views in Europe.  I was
wishing myself on a chair at a cafe window watching the crowd in
the Canabiere, although the street is overrated and the beer is
beastly.  But it is no use arguing with Jeff.

He is a tank of a man-one-eighth of a metric ton of bone and muscle
that can go through anything on earth and come out mildly wondering
why other people got excited.

James Schuyler Grim was studying the view.  I don't know why.  He
stood on the steps of the church of Notre Dame de la Garde--in a
tweed suit and a tourist hat--looking like fifteen frontiers and
a wind howling over the snow.  When you looked at Grim you felt
you'd got to go and buy a ticket to somewhere comfortless, where
unexpected but important things are bound to happen.  And they do.

No matter which way Grim was looking, if anything happened within
the range of his vision you might bet your boots Grim saw it.  There
are two booths, one on each side of the church door, in which sisters
of the sacred order that has charge of the church sell souvenirs
and candles.  Grim was talking to one of the sisters, making jokes
that she was trying to pretend she didn't understand, and trying
not to laugh at, when he suddenly turned away from her and glanced
toward the platform at the top of the funicular railway, where an
iron railing protects the curious tourist from the fate he probably
deserves.  Grim moved so quickly that Jeff and I followed him down
three steps and gazed in the same direction.  It was worth watching--
if you like that kind of thing.

A man in a pepper-and-salt suit, not exactly shabby, but looking
as if he had slept in it, and wearing a brown derby hat that looked
as if he might have found it in an ash-can, suddenly jumped as
if shot.  He was lean;  he had an Adam's apple as big as your fist
and a collar two sizes too large;  his gestures were pantomimic,
and he seemed scared out of his wits.  What seemed to have frightened
him was an Arab, about sixty years of age, wearing a sea-captain's
blue jacket with three gold stripes on the sleeve, who had evidently
come toiling up the steps as we had done, and who had paused on
the top step but one.

The pepper-and-salt man seemed to try to run three ways at once.
He actually did start in our direction, as if the church door
suggested sanctuary;  but either he thought better of it or else
his lean legs got the better of his brain.  At any rate, he vaulted
the iron railing;  and before a sergeant de ville and two uniformed
employees of the funicular railway could lift a finger to prevent
him he jumped.  I don't know how many hundred feet it is from top
to bottom;  plenty, at any rate.  The sergeant de ville and the
other two leaned over to watch, and their shrug when he hit the
roof of the descending car and bounced off was as eloquent as
things French usually are;  it is always easier for me to understand
their shoulders than the things they say.  The sister in the booth
leaned as far as she could over her counter to ask Grim what had
happened.  A woman fainted.  Almost everybody else rushed to the
railing to witness a horror that they would have paid money not
to see if they had stopped to think a minute.  But the Arab sea-dog
smiled and came straight on toward the church door.

We three stood back to let him pass, and I noticed that he eyed
Grim rather strangely, as if he half-recognized him, but he said
nothing.  He stopped to buy a full-sized candle from one of the
sisters, and with that in his hand he strode in.  Then Grim spoke,
sideways, through the corner of his mouth, his lips not moving.

"Recognize him, Jeff?"

"Yahudi.  Haroun ben Yahudi."

"That was his vessel below in the harbor--the lateen rig by the
old wharf--did you see it?"

Grim followed him into the church.  We followed Grim.  It is a
strange scene in there--stranger then because that sea-scarred
Moslem lighted his fat wax candle and set it on the iron bracket
in front of the Virgin's statue along with thirty or forty others
already burning there.  From the roof-beams and against the walls
hang scores of marvellously fashioned models of ships, set there
by sailor-men of fifty generations;  as you look upward at them
they seem to be afloat in air.  And on the walls are countless
slabs set up by mariners acknowledging indebtedness to Notre Dame
de la Garde for perils on the high seas by her favour overcome.
As I think I said, I don't as a rule care much for churches;  but
that one got me by the throat;  it got Jeff too, who is a sentimental
giant.  I don't know whether it got Grim;  he was watching the Arab.
It got the Arab harder than it did me.

He was evidently not a convert to the Christian faith.  His grim
face with the windy, deep-set eyes seemed scornful of much that
he saw, and when a priest went by I thought scorn changed to anger.
He would have spat, but remembered his manners.  He ignored the
altar and he made no genuflections;  he seemed rather to stiffen
himself, as if pride obliged that.  Nevertheless, there was reverence
in him for something that he felt, though his eyes might not see it,
and one could almost share the emotion with him, it was so heartfelt,
simple and intense.  He showed no surprise when Grim touched his elbow.

"Hey, you, Jimgrim," he remarked in English, "you are like the
storms of these seas.  There is no knowing whence you will blow next;
and there are always shoals to leeward.  What now?"

"Pleasant voyage?"

"Now, by Allah's mercy, some men might have thought so--such as
like tales at a fireside.  But I made my landfall.  I suppose you
are one more difficulty.  I will overcome you also."

He strode past us, bought another candle at the church door, came
back, lighted it and stuck it on the bracket near the first one.

"I will overcome you also, Jimgrim.  What now?"

"Why pick on me?" Grim asked him.

"Flint picks on steel, and steel on flint," said Haroun ben Yahudi.

Grim laughed.  "Maybe I'd better buy some candles.  I saw you
overcome that other poor devil just now.  You did that very neatly."

"That one was afraid," said Haroun.

"I am not afraid."

"Then why candles?"

"Mash-allah!  Jimgrim, for a wise one you ask foolish questions.
For a thousand--aye, two thousand years, and longer, seamen have
known the spirit of this place.  Look around you.  Do you think
that none but Christians make vows?  Wallah-hi!  And are only
Christian vows on record?  In the Name of Names I ask you, does
a compass only work for Christians?  Does the North Star change
its station in the sky when Moslems set their course?  I know a
Moslem keel or two that avoided shoals where fish are spawning
in the hulks of broken Christian ships."

"You and I were friends once," Grim said quietly.

"Good friends.  And I wonder at the way of the Almighty.  He,
whose Prophet wrote in plain words all the length and breadth of
wisdom, leaving nothing but its depth to be plumbed by our
understanding, did a strange thing, Jimgrim, when He set you on
one side and me on the other.  Now, were you on my side you might
be a very great one, Jimgrim.  And I tell you, the great in this
life become greater in the next, where many, who thought they
knew what greatness is, are learning otherwise--too late!"

"Who said I'm against you?" Grim asked.

"I did.  As the light is against the darkness, so are you and I
against each other.  And God pity me, I wonder at His ways, who
brought this thing to pass;  because you are another whom fear
is afraid of, and such men are too few."

Then, at last, he acknowledged Jeff's existence.  Their eyes met
and Jeff smiled at him, showing short teeth in an iron jaw.  You
can tell from a glance at Jeff that if he lets his beard grow
three days it will look like chiselled bronze;  the substance of
a beard seems always there, although he blunts good razors on
its shadow.

"What port did you clear from?" Jeff asked, for the sake of politeness.
But when Jeff is trying to be polite he tries too hard.  He is only
lamblike when he expects to have to use his muscles presently on
several times his weight of adversaries.

"Basra."  But Haroun dismissed that fact as unimportant, from
which I gathered either that it had extreme significance or he
was lying.  "Bullram!  Born on the cusp of Aries and Taurus!  How
does Jimgrim ease your sheets when the gusts of anger glow, I wonder?
Lo, a bull's heart in a mountain's hide--a ram's eye for a distance--
and a ram's nose for an enemy!  I would that you, also, were on
my side.  Who is this one?"

The sensation was of being suddenly stripped naked by a connoisseur
in anthropology.  I was conscious of every weakness I possess--and
of Jeff's tremendous loyalty--and of Grim's mercurial alertness.
It was not good.

"Excuse me," said Grim.  "Major Robert Crosby--Captain Haroun
ben Yahudi."

"One of us," Jeff added.  It was the first time he had mentioned
that in my presence.  I felt better.

The old sea-dog eyed me for a moment longer as if he were studying
shoals and tides and changing winds.  Then he turned to Grim:
"I, too, have shipped such.  My mate--I found him in a Baghdad
brothel, drunk and sickening from hunger.  And I have a seaman
whom I took off the beach at Koweit.  Some do well--some otherwise.
I shipped that weakling whom you saw just now scared to hell.  Not
that this is as that one.  This one--Crosby do you say his name
is?--is of the sort that terror stiffens, though it makes him stupid.
Major, you said?  He is young for his rank.  They promote babies
nowadays;  and what airs they give themselves!  Born, unless my
eyes deceive me, under Libra.  Too much judgment--ever weighing
this with that and hesitating lest he put the wrong foot foremost.
However;  it is no light matter for two such men as you to find
a third one.  Were not two of you enough--aye, two too many?"

"Why did you ship that scareling?" Grim retorted.

"Why are you against me, Jimgrim?  Why did you come here looking
for me?  Hay-yeh, when the vultures gather in the sky I know
their purpose."

"You were the last man I was thinking of," Grim answered.

"Yeh-yeh--you were thinking of life and death;  and of why we
come into the world, and why we leave it.  And then I came.  I,
also, was thinking the same thoughts.  Then I saw you.  And I
said to myself, as doubtless you said also:  The Almighty does
not set two such men by chance upon the self-same threshold of
the Life to Come! Therefore, before one or other of us dies--"

It was the first time I had ever seen Jeff go into action.  He
was quicker than a lightweight;  it was incredible that he could
show such speed, with all that bulk and so much Herculean muscle.
The eye hardly followed him.  He seized the Arab's right wrist in
his left hand, jerked it backward, and a big, broad-bladed
sheath-knife clattered on the stone floor.

"Not here, Haroun--and not yet!"

"Very decent of you, Haroun, to have given warning," Grim remarked.
He picked up the knife and Jeff returned it to its owner, who
thrust it back into the sheath under his blue serge jacket.

I led the way out and the three of us stood on the concrete paving
below the church steps, where we could just see the two lateen-rigged
masts of Haroun's ship.  Beyond it, nearly in mid-harbour, a
French warship lay to her mooring--one of those old-fashioned
cruisers with funnels in pairs spaced wide apart.

"You have the right of it," said Haroun.  "That was neither time
nor place.  Doubtless God was displeased by the sacrilege, or else
the knife had struck home.  That would have saved you, Jimgrim,
from a worse fate.  Dorje--"

"Oh, are you taking Dorje's orders?"

"Dorje has a saying, that they are fortunate who die before the
game begins."

"You let his name slip, didn't you?"

"It is on all men's tongues."

"Yours let it slip, though.  What have you to do with Dorje, Haroun?"

The Arab's answer froze on parted lips.  A flash of bluewhite
lightning seemed to leap out of the cruiser's hold, so vivid, that
it hurt the eyes even at a distance.  It was instantly followed
by billowing smoke;  and in the midst of that we saw a deck lift
and the masts fall two ways.  In less than a tenth of a second
the cruiser broke in half amidships.  And then thunder, as the
two ends sank, their swirl obliterated by the smoke of the explosion.

"Remember the Maine," said Jimgrim.

Almost, it seemed, before the thunder reached us boats were racing
toward the scene of the disaster--motor-boats plying for hire,
some filled with passengers--yachts' launches--ships' boats--tugs.
We could see the floating debris and what looked like men's heads.

"Come and lend 'em a hand," said Jeff, but it would have taken
us at least twenty minutes to reach the harbour-front.

We were stormed by a swarm of loiterers and tourists asking us
what had happened.  Jeff answered them politely, so they backed
away from him, believing he suspected them of having sunk the
cruiser. I watched Grim for a hint of what he meant to do.  He
spoke, but I could not catch what he said because of the noise
the crowd was making.  However, I did hear Haroun answer him:

"Mash-allah!  That was also not the time and not the place.  But
it was simple.  To be King of the World, you, Jimgrim, it is
necessary to be simple--and as one-two, one-two as the Word of God."




Chapter Two

"I am an old man, Jimgrim. Help me."


Haroun glanced at each of us in turn, then walked away.

"He will go to the women," said Jeff.  "That's Haroun's one weakness."

"He has another," Grim answered.  "He can't resist the impulse
to crow before sunrise.  That's why Haroun still commands about
two hundred tons of dhow instead of being rotten with money and
having his own way.  I suppose I must tell the Prefect of Police
about him.  Come on to the Prefecture."

We descended in the funicular, to save time.

"I should think the Prefect of Police will be down near the scene
of the accident," I suggested, and Jeff answered irritably because
the elevator made him nervous.

"You would think that.  But French Prefects of Police know their
business.  The place to look for a Prefect, in a crisis, is where he
can be reached instantly by everyone who has to be told what to do."


The French police have a flair for recognizing the value of irregular
procedure on occasion and we were admitted at once to the Prefect's
inner sanctum.  But the Prefect--a neat man with a brown beard, who
looked like a naval officer--went on listening to the telephone,
giving curt answers in a quiet voice and making swift, precise
notes on a sheet of foolscap paper.  Three men in uniform stood
at the other side of the Prefect's desk;  one of them drew near us,
I suppose, to listen.

But there was an interruption.  The door opened and two detectives
entered, escorting Haroun, looking sheepish.

"Eh-h, you, Jimgrim!" remarked Haroun.  There were no handcuffs
on him.  One could not guess whether he had been arrested or merely
"invited" to call on the Prefect, who glanced at him once, swiftly,
and made one more pencilled note between abrupt communications
over the phone.

"Quick work," said Grim.

Then Haroun spoke in Arabic:  "You, Jimgrim, you and I were
friends once."

Grim nodded.

"And a knife is merciful.  By Allah, they would have slain me,
had I slain you, and the account would have been fair between us.
But is it merciful to throw a man such as me into prison, where
there is neither sun nor sea nor wind?  May the All-merciful deal
with me as being guilty of if, if I would have thrown you into
prison--though I would have slain you--yea, and why not?  You,
who lay in wait to trap me, should I not strike?  Would you not
have drawn steel, had I trapped you?"

"What do you ask of me?" Grim demanded.  "Pardon?"

"Nay.  Insh'allah, I will die needing no man's pardon.  May Allah
pardon me, in case I need it.  But a bargain, Jimgrim, is another matter."

Then Grim made one of his characteristic bold strokes, that his
friends sometimes recognized as bluff, but that his enemies mistook
as a rule for a sign of omniscience.

"There is no midway between us two," he answered.  "You are either
friend or enemy.  Which is it?"

"Wallah!  Do you bid me choose now?"

"Now or never.  Choose between me and Dorje."

Haroun hesitated.  Grim--and he must have been guessing--probed
for the source of hesitation.

"Is forgiveness one of Dorje's habits?  Will it please him to hear
of that cruiser--blown up--in the wrong place, at the wrong time?"

"Who shall protect me from his anger, Jimgrim?"

"Not I, at any rate, unless you tell the whole truth.  Who am I
that I should try to sail in two ships?  And can you do that?"

Mash-allah!  One ship is enough for me.  But which one?  If I had
known, Jimgrim, that you were in league against Dorje, I would not
have done his errand."

"Nevertheless, you did his errand."

"Haida sahah.  Truly had I slain you, all might have been well yet,
Jimgrim.  But that big ape Ram-is-den perceived my knife.  And now
I begin to perceive in all this the hand of Allah.  None can fight
against Him.  Nevertheless, if God wills, and I tell the truth,
will you put me in prison, Jimgrim?"

"This is not my country.  I am no keeper of prisons in this place,"
he said.

"Nay, I know it.  But for what did they arrest me, save for drawing
steel at you?  So if you, and those others, say I did not draw steel--?'

"There will then remain only that cruiser to account for!  Surely
that is nothing!" Grim suggested.

"Min jadd!  Jimgrim, as God is my witness, I did not do that;  nor
was it of my contriving, or by my will that it was done."

"Will they believe that?  Or will Dorje believe it?"

"As Allah is my witness.  I perceive I have no chance at all,
unless you believe it, Jimgrim."

Grim thrust home then:  "Chance?  What is it?  If you say you see
the hand of Allah, how can you talk of chances in the same breath?
Can you trim your sails to two winds?"

"This has been an ill wind, Jimgrim."

"No," Grim answered, "but a wrong course.  Haroun, when a wise
man sees the shoals, does he change his course or carry on?"

"You will have me on your side?  But at what price?  I am a man
of honour, Jimgrim.  Death is no great matter."

Grim shrugged his shoulders.  "It is no affair of mine," he answered;
and there was silence, for possibly sixty seconds.  It was so
noticeable that the Prefect looked up from his writing-paper.

"Send for an interpreter," he commanded.

A man left the room and Haroun tried to hide his nervousness;  but
he betrayed it by shifting his feet.  Then he began to strike his
colours, gradually.

"What did he say, Jimgrim?"

No answer.  Grim began to speak to Jeff in undertones. "You have
missed your tide," Jeff answered.  "Lie to your own anchor."

"Nay, I will not!  Tell him I need help.  In the name of Allah,
tell him I demand help."

"What about your bargain?  You spoke of a bargain," Jeff retorted.

"Say then, I will tell him all I know.  But he must save me from
the prison."

Grim, without moving his head, spoke to the Prefect quietly,
in French:

"He will talk. He will tell all he knows."

The Prefect seemed to speak into the telephone.  It probably
needed more civilized eyes than Haroun's to detect that his beard
interfered with the mouthpiece.

"So I gathered," said the Prefect.  "I learned Arabic in Aden."

"May I promise him liberty?"

"Yes, yes.  He can easily be shadowed, and he might commit
illuminating indiscretions."

Haroun almost shouted:  "Jimgrim!  In the Name of Names--"

The Prefect interrupted, laying the receiver on its hook:  "I'll
give you the latest information, gentlemen.  Seventeen survivors,
all in hospital or on the way there--thirty-seven dead recovered--
three hundred and eleven missing.  Divers are already on the scene.
A terrible disaster.  Or an unspeakable atrocity.  It remains to
be revealed, which."

Grim faced Haroun. "What was that you said?"

"I am an old man, Jimgrim.  Help me."

"Truth helps him who speaks it.  Will you tell all you know?"

"I will tell you, face to face, as one friend to another.  To
these others I will not speak.  What am I to them, or they to me?
And they would twist my words against me."

Grim caught the Prefect's eye.  He nodded.  "Very well," said Grim,
"if you will tell me all you know, and answer questions, I will
make no charge against you in the matter of that stabbing."

"But this other matter, Jimgrim?  It was not my doing."

"If you tell me all you know, and if I believe you not guilty, I
will do all I can to help you."

"But the prison, Jimgrim?"

"For the present, if you tell all you know, you shall go free."

"All?  But I will only speak in your ear, Jimgrim.  No spies!  No
listeners!  Your word on that?"

Grim caught the Prefect's eye again.  He nodded.  Grim spoke in
English.  "All right, Haroun.  We will talk where nobody can overhear."

The Prefect ordered a man in uniform to lead Haroun and Grim into
the next room, "where there have been many tales told that newspapers
will never print and judges will never hear," he added drily.




Chapter Three

"I am always Baltis."


It was as clear as daylight that the Prefect did not suspect Haroun
of having sunk the cruiser.  He had on his desk the cargo manifest
of Haroun's dhow--dates, hides and scrap-brass.  All except the
scrap-brass was consigned to reputable merchants;  but the latter
was invoiced to Haroun himself, marked on consignment for sale at
local market price.  As scrap it had been entered by the Customs
duty free, and no one seemed to know after that what happened to it;
however, Grim might elicit the information, and if not Grim, then
someone else.  Meanwhile, it was probably unimportant--merely
something to be checked up on the principle of examining every
minute detail.

A list of Haroun's crew was also on the desk, and all except one
were accounted for.  Two were in jail for a midnight brawl in the
redlight district.  The cook had shipped east as a deck-hand on
an Italian brig engaged in coral-fishing.  Two men were in the
seamen's hospital with boils described as serious.  The remainder
were reported standing by the ship, and, having spent their pay,
offering themselves "without enthusiasm" for 'long-shore jobs on
any terms whatever.  The one man unaccounted for was an
Italian-Greek-Frenchman, on the manifest as Guido Georges Marie
de la Tournee, rating carpenter and super-cargo, wages two pounds
ten a month, a cabin to himself and "captain's rations."

"Interesting," said the Prefect, "on a dhow of two hundred
tons.  There is a body in the morgue--However, I must ask you
gentlemen, if you please without consulting one another, to write
down, each of you, as fully as you can remember, every detail of
today's events as you observed them.  You may set down what was
said to you, and what you said, and what you overheard.  I invite
you also to state frankly why you are in Marseilles and why, with
evident collaboration, you arrived at this prefecture together,
or almost together, at a critical moment.  The formality will be
observed of separating you from one another while you write your
statements, to avoid collaboration, however unintentional that
might be."

At a nod from him men in uniform escorted us to different rooms,
where they supplied us with writing materials, and I heard the
Prefect hurry away in a car with the exhaust wide open.  My statement,
naturally, did not take long.  I signed it and went to stare out
of the window at a sordidly uninteresting street until someone should
come and get it. The official who escorted me into the room had said
"no smoking," so I lighted a cigar in the hope he would smell it
and come back sooner.  However, he did not, and I began to be
abominably bored until a private limousine drew up outside and a
woman, unescorted, opening the door herself, stepped out of it and
entered the prefecture.

I tossed the cigar through a broken window-pane as somebody ushered
her into the room I occupied, quietly closing the door behind her
and, unless I was much mistaken, locking it.  I don't know much
French, but I do know that French officials, and particularly the
police, do nothing without purpose and premeditation;  so I fell
on guard as tensely as if I had had a rapier in my right hand.  She
stared at me.  I stared at her.  And she was well worth looking at.

She was a sort of symphony in jade-green and Chinese yellow.  Her
long skirt made her look taller than she actually was.  Her tightly
fitting green hat with yellow lining framed intriguing features.
She looked vaguely Chinese, but her mouth and her chin might have
been Irish;  they would have made her fortune in the movies, except
for a slight scar on the upper lip that changed its line and added
a sinister touch that rather spoiled her smile.  Her nose was
agreeably impudent--coquettish;  and her eyes, although they did
not slant perceptibly, contained in them the mocking, curious
intelligence of all the Chinese women in the world.  She was
wealthily dressed;  she had a jewelled purse that had probably
cost at least three thousand dollars;  there were jewelled buckles
on her patent-leather shoes, that had Chinese-yellow heels;  and
she was wearing a jade necklace that almost bankrupts me to think
about.  I know jade.  Not even "the Old Buddha" ever had a better
string than that one.  She did not sit;  she stood and stared me
out of countenance, until suddenly she smiled and came toward me.

"Are you Jeemgreem?  Oh, I have so much wished to meet you."

"What made you look for me here?" I retorted.

"Eentuition!"

"May I know who you are?"

"I am the Princess Baltis."

"Wasn't Baltis the name of the Queen of Sheba?"

She nodded.  "I am always Baltis.  Each time I am reborn I am Baltis."

"And always a princess?"

"Always."

I suppressed an impulse to enquire what Solomon was doing now.  She
had the information at her finger-tips, as transpired later, but
for the moment I judged that was dangerous ground.  As "Jeemgreem" it
behooved me to be circumspect and to elicit other, less controversial,
statistics that might forearm Grim.  From the moment she spoke I had
no doubt whatever that her purpose was to trap Grim in a net of some
kind, or else to deduce him along a blind trail.  Intuition sometimes
guides me also, but not always.

"Why are you here?" I asked her, trying to imagine how Grim would
have brought motives to the surface.

"Jeemgreem, someone told me you are in Marseilles."

"What of it?"  I was painfully aware that "Jeemgreem" would have
managed her more subtly;  however, I am a very unsubtle person and
can do no better than my best in an emergency.  "Why do you trouble
yourself on my account?"  I said that because her perfume, and some
sort of mental allurement that she exuded, stirred in me the
self-defensive instinct that is usually impolite.  The words sounded
crass in my own ears.  However, she appeared to misinterpret
bluntness as a sign of superiority to ordinary conversational methods.
She came straight to the point:

"Jeemgreem, you and I can help each other--now as always.  We have
always helped each other.  When I was Baltis Queen of Sheba, were
you not my great ambassador?  You know that, don't you?  Certainly
you know it;  you, too, have the psychic memory.  When I was Baltis,
concubine of Cyrus, were you not my lover?  Did you not die in
the execution ash-pit rather than betray me?  When I was Baltis,
who danced and sang at Cleopatra's court, did I not help you--the
Roman Publius Carfax--to corrupt her army until it surrendered to
Octavianus without a blow?  When I was Baltis, dancing girl in
attendance on Suraj-ud-Dowlah--and you were Major Eyre Coote
commanding Clive's infantry--did I not, for your sake, undermine
the allegiance of Suraj-ud-Dowlah's generals, so that Clive's
little handful of troops defeated him at Plassey?  You know all
this, Jeemgreem.  And there were dozens of other occasions.  Always,
in every life, we have helped each other."

"You seem to have come down in the world," I suggested.

"You, too, Jeemgreem!  You were a general of Genghis Khan.  A
hundred thousand soldiers rode like whirlwinds at your nod in
those days.  But you know what Shakespeare said:  There is a tide
in the affairs of men . . ."

"I agree with Shaw," I said, "that Shakespeare is overrated.  I
don't understand poets."

"You never did!  No, nevaire.  You were always inartistic.  That
is why you have always needed me;  whereas I need your pragmatism
and your power of concentration.  Jeemgreem, our tide is turning--
yours and mine.  Destiny has kept us separated until now, in this
life, because now is the propaire moment.  I have come to warn
you not to interfere with Dorje--as I warned you when you were
Sir Francis Weston, and I was Ann Boleyn."

"Didn't you say your name is always Baltis?" I suggested.

"Always Baltis.  I have always known myself by my own name.  But
I have sometimes kept it secret.  The real reason why Henry the
Eighth of England caused me to be executed was that in a foolish
moment I revealed to him my real name, telling him that I was once
the Queen of Sheba, whereas he was nobody in those days.  He grew
jealous.  He made charges against me.  And they were partly true.
Yes--why not?  I did not love him.  But I did love you, Jeemgreem.
In those days you were vairee handsome, when you were Sir Francis
Weston.  And if you had listened to me, you would have r-r-run
as you will r-r-run now, if you listen to me."

"Do you think me a coward?" I asked.  It was difficult to think
of appropriate remarks to keep the conversation going.  Her apparent
sincerity was a bit bewildering.

"A coward?  I would r-rather call myself a pr-r-rude!" she retorted
with withering scorn.  "Is a tiger a coward, who r-r-runs from a
cage when the door is open for him?  Jeemgreem!  Solomon the Wise
has been reborn into the world, to be King of the World.  I tell
you what all the East knew long ago--that the King of the World
is coming!  The King of the World is Solomon reborn.  He is known
as Dorje!  Dorje the Darling!  Dorje, before whom presently the
kingdoms of the world will bow their necks!"

I nodded.  It seemed the only thing to do.  Then, suddenly, I
thought of another line of questioning:

"Wasn't it a rather strange coincidence that someone should tell
you of my arrival in Marseilles the day after I got here?"

"Coincidence?"  She spluttered with laughter.  "Jeemgreem, I have
hunted for you during three whole years.  I have spent more--much
more than a quarter of a million francs to find you.  When I
learned you were in Tibet I set men to watch all the passes by
which you possibly could recross the mountains.  Even so, you
escaped me.  Then, at last, I heard you were in Berlin--then in
Paris--then that you had booked your passage from Marseilles to
New York, on your way to Callao.  So I came to Marseilles.  This
morning an informant told me you were at L'Eglise de Notre Dame
de la Garde, where you spoke with Haroun ben Yahudi--that fool--
Dorje was a fool to trust him, half-Jew, half-Arab.  Dorje trusted
Haroun because in ancient days he was the captain of the fleet
that brought cedar down from Lebanon when the Temple was building.
Even Dorje makes mistakes."

She paused for breath.  She stared into my eyes and seemed in
doubt whether to take me into her confidence or not--then suddenly
threw caution to the winds:

"There are no witnesses. Jeemgreem--then that terrible--that
horrible, atrocious mistake--that cr-ruiser blown up too soon!
And with my own eyes I saw them capture Haroun.  I learned that
you came to the prefecture.  So I came also.  Jeemgreem, you must
get Haroun out of here before he tells secrets.  I know what they
will do to him.  They will place his thumbs in the jamb of a door,
and they will squeeze until he tells every single word he knows.
Jeemgreem--I have been to such great pains to find you--will you
do that trifle for me?  Will you use your influence--your wits--
your resourcefulness to get Haroun out of these men's clutches?"

I nodded, knowing what Grim had already arranged.

"I may depend on that?  It is a promise, from you to me?  In all our
lives on earth, whatever happened, we have always kept faith, Jeemgreem."

I nodded again.  "He shall not be tortured.  If you watch, you shall
presently see him go away from here."

She let a sigh of almost exquisite relief escape her, narrowing
her eyes as she felt its full surge through her system.  Evidently
Haroun had given her anxious moments.

"And now I must go, Jeemgreem, because if that Prefect returns
he will recognize me, and that--how soon will you come and see me,
Jeemgreem?  Listen--I have no card--write this:  I am staying at
the apartment of Madame la Comptesse de St. Etienne sur Saone,
Place de la Croix des Templars, Marseilles.  You must come soon.
You must come sooner than soon.  Within one--two hours--not later!
I will be there waiting for you.  It is number eighteen.  Stop
your taxi-driver at the corner of La Rue des Capuchins and let
him suppose you are going to dejeuner at the restaurant.  Then,
after he has gone away, walk to la Place de la Croix des Templars.
The apartment is up one flight of stairs.  You will be there?"

"If I may bring my friends," I answered.

"Jeemgreem, you and I must talk alone together."

"Then I won't come."

"When will you leave off being obstinate!  Oh, man's man--you were
always such a cautious fool with women!  Life after life, I have
seen you miss your opportunities because you would not trust me
until you had learned too late that I am wholly to be trusted!
Very well then, bring them.  I suppose you will bring that big
oaf Ramsden?"

"Him and Crosby."

"Who is this Crosby?"

"He may surprise you.  I have known him quite a long time."

"Warn him that he deals with danger!  I am not one to be deceived,
even by your friends, Jeemgreem!"

As she turned away from me she glanced back in a way that would
have brought thrills to the spine of a brass god.  Then she walked
to the door and scrambled on the panel with her gloved fingers,
making almost no sound.  But it opened.  She whispered to someone
and walked out.  Several seconds later I heard her limousine drive
away.  Then, I, too, went to the door.  It was not locked now at
any rate.  A man in uniform stood outside the passage.

"Why did you show her in here?" I demanded, in the best French I
can muster.

"But, Mo'sieur Grim, she said you wished that."

"All right," I answered.  "I have written out my statement.  You
may take it."  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I was
not James Schuyler Grim;  but on second thought it seemed more
tactfully neglectful not to.  "Who else knows that she has been
here?" I demanded.

"Nobody, mo'sieur."

I gave him one hundred francs, on sheer impulse.  If anyone had
asked, I could not have answered why I did it.




Chapter Four

"I'll take this case."


Bureaucracy, of course, inevitably strangles itself with red tape
sooner or later. Mere efficiency becomes the end aimed at, instead
of the means by which ends are attained. However, subject to that
limitation, the speed and accuracy of the Marseilles police dragnet
was almost incredibly good.  Perhaps an hour had elapsed since I
was conducted into that room to write my statement.  In addition
to I don't know what else, the police had meanwhile managed to
identify the body in the morgue as that of Guido Georges Marie
de la Tournee.  They had a full report, all ready for the Prefect,
of how he had committed suicide by leaping from the summit of the
funicular at Notre Dame de la Garde.  They had, furthermore,
identified him as a former Czarist spy of no particular attainments;
and they had dug up a record of his having been deported from India,
Cuba, the Argentine and the United States.  He appeared to have
had French citizenship papers and to have served two short terms
in prison, for assaults committed while under the influence, once
of absinthe, once of hashish, against former employers who, he said,
had insulted him.

His medical report was interesting.  He had been set down by the
prison doctors as "not insane enough for detention" but as evidencing
signs of persecution-mania.  One doctor, probably with time on
his hands, had filled up two sheets of foolscap about him.  As a
surgeon I was allowed to see it, and I formed the opinion that, if
I had been the prison doctor, the man would have been certified as
probably incurably insane.  However, there was another report about
him, and it was more to the point:

A detective had traced his movements since he left an establishment
in the red light district early that morning.  He had got into a
fight with a French sailor on shore leave from the cruiser anchored
in the harbour.  He had taken a mild thrashing without doing much
damage in return, and he had not seemed to resent that particularly;
but two waiters sweeping the front of a cafe had noticed that what
the sailor and his companions had said to him afterwards as he
slunk away had stirred him to almost maniacal frenzy.  According
to one waiter, he had shouted, "You shall all of you pay for it--
all of you!"  But the other waiter had reported him as saying, with
a savage oath in borderland French-Italian, "You are blow-flies out
of one bottle.  I will destroy all of you, bottle and all!"

He had then gone to a cafe, where he drank two stiff glasses of
cheap brandy.  After that he went to Haroun's ship, where he
disappeared through the hatch that led to the cabins below the
poop-deck.  Emerging presently, he loafed around until he found a
warrant-officer about to return to the cruiser in a small steam-launch,
whose owner had offered to take him gratis.  Guido Georges
Marie de la Tournee was seen to give the warrant-officer a package
wrapped in newspaper and tied with tarred string.  He was heard
to ask him kindly to deliver the package to one of the cruiser's
engineers, saying, "I don't know the officer's name but he left
this at Madame Reuben's."

Immediately after that he jumped into a taxi;  and the next that
was known of his movements, he had committed suicide.  The detective
added, however, that someone (name not given) told him that the
explosion on the cruiser took place within two minutes of the
arrival of the launch alongside and that the departing launch only
escaped destruction by a miracle.  He wound up the report with his
not unreasonable conjecture, that there might be some connection
between Guido Georges Marie de la Tournee, the package he had handed
to the warrant-officer, and the explosion on the cruiser, although
he remarked, too, on the obvious impossibility of wrapping in one
small package a sufficient quantity of explosive to wreak so much
havoc.  It was a good report, not shown to us, but read aloud over
the phone by an official, to someone at the military barracks, so
that I got the gist of it.

Then Grim reappeared with Haroun, and by the look in Grim's eyes,
and in Haroun's too, it was easy to see there had been revelations,
but neither of them made any remark.  Jeff Ramsden came in, with
one folded sheet of paper, just as the Prefect returned.  The
Prefect had walked.  There was mud on his shoes.  He appeared
excited, and he was rather out of breath.  He laid on the desk,
on top of the pile of reports, a small brass object that looked
like a section of one-inch pipe with an irregular shaped plug
screwed into either end.  He raised his eyebrows at Grim, who nodded.
Haroun stared at the brass thing on the desk as if he recognized it.
The Prefect beckoned Grim and Haroun back into the room they had
just left, closing the door, and I heard the key turn on the inside.

"What's that thing?" Jeff asked;  and before anyone could prevent
him he had picked up the piece of brass tubing, which appeared
battered and too light to contain anything, but I had time to
notice that one of the plugs was only partly screwed into the end
that Strange held in my direction, before a policeman sharply
ordered him to put it back on the desk.

"Might be a bomb," Jeff hazarded.  But I shook my head.  It was
too small, and not heavy enough.

We were then ordered to sit on chairs with our backs to the wall,
doubtless to prevent any further unauthorized investigations.  We
sat silent for a long time with nothing whatever to entertain us
except our own thoughts and frequent interruptions of them by the
telephone, which was answered by the Prefect's secretary.  Then
suddenly the door opened and Haroun walked out, apparently a free
man;  the Prefect appeared in the doorway, said something sotto
voce to a man in uniform who stood guarding the door opening into
the passage that led to the street, and once more closeted himself
with Grim.  Haroun, not seeming to glance in our direction, made
straight for the street and was let go without comment.

However, he was not so free as he perhaps supposed.  He had hardly
time to reach the street before the Prefect's secretary 'phoned to
someone in the building to follow and not lose sight of him;  reports
of his movements were to be 'phoned to the Prefecture every half-hour.
Ten more minutes passed before Grim came out, still talking to the
Prefect, who walked to the desk, thumbed over the papers, picked
up the piece of brass tubing, shook it, tried to unscrew the plug
that looked loose, failed, screwed it in instead, set it down
again on the pile of papers--and addressed us:

"I thank you, gentlemen.  It will take time to study your statements.
There appears to be no need to detain you any longer.  Should your
presence be required, I will send for you."

He bowed to Grim, signed to the man at the door to open it and
pass us out, picked up the piece of tube again, examined it, set
it down once more and gave an order rather irritably:

"When do they ever clean these windows?  Bring my magnifying glass,
and turn on the electric light."

Before we had time to reach the door the light over the Prefect's
desk was turned on and he made a sudden exclamation that made us
turn to see what caused it.  As we did so, a fuse blew and the
light went out.  Less than a second later the piece of tubing on
the Prefect's desk turned whitehot--set fire to the papers--and
appeared to burn up with them.  A revolver went off in a drawer--
six shots almost simultaneous.  There was a fusillade of pistol
shots as apparently every cartridge in the building went off and
a box of cartridges exploded in a cellar with a din like a machine-gun
battery.  There was shouting and a great noise of hurrying feet.
Then the wooden desk itself caught fire.  The sudden heat was so
intense that the Prefect backed away into a corner and when a man
came rushing in with a fire extinguisher he could not get near
enough to make proper use of the thing.  It was Jeff who put the
fire out.  He is afraid of nothing except cats and elevators.  He
found another extinguisher and a man's overcoat out in the passage;
shielding himself with the overcoat he charged in close and sprayed
a stream of fluid right into the heart of the fire.  It was out then;
of course, in a moment;  but the overcoat had caught fire;  Jeff
threw it on the floor and stamped on it while the other man sprayed
it with the few last drops of his extinguisher.  Jeff burned his
trousers and his eyebrows, but was otherwise not hurt.

Then the Prefect examined the desk, or rather what remained of it.
He let no one else touch it--made us all stand back.  There was
something he saw that he seemed unable to believe--or, perhaps,
that he thought no one else would believe unless he took every
possible precaution against interference.

"Bring a camera," he commanded.  "Camera and flashlight."

A man came in with a large, old-fashioned instrument and exposed
a dozen plates from different angles;  it took several minutes
because he had to reload his flashlight apparatus each time he
used it.  The smoke of the last explosion of magnesium powder had
hardly reached the ceiling when what remained of the desk collapsed
into a heap of charred dust.

"And not a trace left of that brass tube," said the Prefect.  "Not
only are all my records of this case destroyed, but that brass has
vanished.  You may come and look now, all of you.  Observe, please,
that the locks and screws are there, among the ashes, but there
is not even one fragment of that piece of tubing."

The locks seemed to have been fused by the terrific heat and several
of the screws had become stuck together.  A shapeless lump of metal
that I thought might be the brass tube turned out to be the fused
wreck of the telephone instrument.

It was Grim who suggested that the ashes should be analysed, weighed,
and their metallic contents separated.

"Dorje has invented something new, that's all.  Where did that
brass tube come from?"

"It was part of Haroun ben Yahudi's cargo," said the Prefect.
"Invoiced as scrap brass.  This piece was found in his cabin."

"Where is the rest of it?"

"That is what we hope to discover.  That is why I let him go.  He
is being watched.  I hope he will show us where it is."

"He said," said Grim, "that Guido Georges Marie de la Tournee sold
it to an absolute stranger for cash."

"Did he produce the money?" Jeff asked.

The Prefect shrugged his shoulders.  "He showed money.  But whence
he had it--?"

Someone ran in from the switchboard to say that the Prefect was
wanted at once on the 'phone.

"Who is he?  What does he want?"

"It is Eighty-one.  He says that Arab who just now walked out of
here has been murdered!"

"Did he catch the murderer?"

"He says, no.  A man ran from a side-street and plunged a knife
into the Arab's heart.  Several people saw it.  Eighty-one has
held two witnesses.  But the murderer ran back up the side-street
and vanished."

The Prefect walked into another room to use a telephone.  It was
on the tip of my tongue to tell Grim, there and then, about the
Princess Baltis.  But Grim drew Jeff aside and whispered.  Then
the Prefect returned.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I must invite you to write those statements
again.  It embarrasses me to put you to so much trouble, but you
see, everything was burned up--everything.  A devastation.  It
will be necessary to reconstruct this problem from the very
beginning and your statements may be of some assistance.  However,
I need not ask you to stay here and write them.  Have the goodness
to write them, if possible, without consulting one another and I
will send a messenger for them to your hotel this afternoon.
Meanwhile, please preserve silence.  Let me emphasize that.  Silence,
gentlemen, I pray you.  You are men of experience, who will readily
understand the paramount importance of a most discreet silence in
such matters as this.  In fact, if you were men of less--shall I
say distinction--it would be my duty to take routine measures to
prevent you from talking with anyone."

He bowed us out;  and for a man who must have been half-distracted
by the day's events he showed exceptional sang-froid.

As we passed into the street Grim smiled.  It was a sour smile.
There was discontent behind it.  "Without meaning to, I make men
like Haroun trust me," he remarked.  "Do you realize that I sent
Haroun to his death?  If he had not appealed to me, he would be
in a police cell this minute, alive and safe.  It isn't that the
brave old fellow had to die.  Death's nothing--and anyhow, Haroun
killed his dozens.  What hits me between the wind and water is
that Haroun depended on me to protect him."

"He had no right to," said Jeff.

Grim glanced at him and smiled again:  "Who wants his rights?  To
hell with rights!  They're only relative at best.  The only thing
a decent fellow asks is friendship and a clean death, standing up."




Chapter Five

"Imagine what would happen if--"


In the taxi I told Grim about the Princess Baltis.  He interrupted
before I was half through with my account of her:  "She's no more
a princess than I'm a Hottentot.  She's a French citizen, born
of Franco-Siamese and Chinese parents--educated at the Sorbonne--
wealthy--older than she looks--she must be thirty-two or thirty-three,
and looks twenty-three--but at that age she was already
the best spy the French Government ever had.  She was a spy at
seventeen.  The Germans sentenced her to death in Belgium, but she
escaped;  one German officer was shot and one got life imprisonment
for letting her slip, and at that they very likely had nothing at
all to do with it.  She's clever, and no one knows how she escaped."

We lunched at the hotel, where I finished my account of the
interview. Grim added:

"If she is in league with Dorje, we've a clue to work on.  She's
the only spy in the French service whom they haven't ever suspected
of double-dealing.  They think the world of her.  They give her
anything she asks for.  Not the slightest use reporting her;  they
simply wouldn't believe it, and she'd frame up a charge against
us as quick as winking.

"Haroun said," he went on, "that his secret orders were to obey
Guido Georges de la Tournee until he docked in Marseilles.  Guido
drove him almost crazy.  He said he lost his wind a hundred times
because Guido insisted on keeping at least five miles away from
any ship that was big enough to have electric light on board.  Can
you believe it?  He sailed that dhow 'round by the Cape to avoid
close quarters in the Suez Canal.  By the time he docked he was
so fed up with Guido that he threatened to destroy his dhow, in
exchange, I suppose, for the insult.  What do you deduce from that?"

"Guido put that brass thing in Haroun's cabin," I suggested.

Jeff said:  "And when he saw Haroun coming up the steps at the
top of the hill he supposed Haroun had found him out.  So he
jumped rather than face Haroun's knife."

"Or he may have thought," said Grim, "that the dhow was already
destroyed and Haroun was out for vengeance.  It's obvious that
Guido climbed the hill to watch the cruiser blow up.  He evidently
knew it would blow up as soon as that brass thing was delivered
on board.  Did you notice that nothing happened in the Prefect's
office until the electric light was turned on?  Then a fuse blew,
and the thing went white-hot, and every cartridge in the place
exploded.  Add that to the fact that Guido, on the voyage, was
afraid to go near ships that had electric dynamos--and we get what?
Some new kind of energy-converter.  And it must be extremely simple,
or Dorje couldn't manufacture it in quantity and ship it as scrap-brass.
Apparently electric current leaps toward it, becomes changed
in some way, sets off any explosive within a certain distance, but
destroys the thing itself.  Imagine what would happen if they could
distribute a few thousand of those things, close to arsenals,
for instance."

Jeff summed it up:  "An automatic fire-bug that destroys its own
evidence.  Nice for the insurance companies!"

"Grim," I said, "you've got to go and see that Princess."

"No," he answered, "you go.  Take Jeff with you.  Go and be Jimgrim
until she finds you out.  I leave this evening by plane for London,
where they'll probably give me information and perhaps carte blanche."

So Jeff and I went in search of her, not relishing our job.  "Tell
me more about her," Jeff demanded as we strode along together.

"She considers you a great oaf and she believes I'm wonderful."

"All right, let's play that hand," he answered promptly.  "She
dealt it."

"Any man can make a smart woman think him a fool," I objected.

"Play the fool with her and make her think you're clever," he
retorted.  And that was all the advice I could get from him.  As
we approached the address she had given he shoved one fist into
his pocket and strode along beside me as if we were off for a day's
fishing.  Even when we entered the apartment hallway and started
up the stairs he was whistling softly to himself, whereas I was
alternately hot and cold with nervousness.  I did not in the least
relish the prospect of matching wits with a woman said to be the
cleverest spy in Europe.  Nobody minds getting stabbed--shot--
strangled in a good cause;  but who likes to appear ridiculous!

We were admitted by a middle-aged, dull-looking French maid into
an apartment furnished in the late empire period--style that
always makes me irritable for some incomprehensible reason.  There
was a long corridor, with windows on the left hand looking into
a garden, and on the right hand was a row of gilded doors with
heavy brocade curtains.  A tall grandfather clock ticked solemnly.
There was an atmosphere of old-world peace, belied by an equally
evident tension;  it was too quiet;  one's footfall was smothered
in three-pile carpet, so that it felt like walking into ambush;
and at the end of the corridor there was a gilt-edged mirror that
aroused my suspicions--as it turned out, justly.

The corridor turned to the right.  We were ushered into a room
beyond the wall on which the mirror hung and I noticed at once
that there was a big ornately decorated cabinet against the wall
within the room, at exactly the place where the mirror hung outside.
It was particularly noticeable because the cabinet seemed out of
balance with all the other furniture;  it needed shoving three or
four feet further to the left, where its bulk and ornate grandeur
would have seemed less prominent.  Another thing I noticed was
that the cabinet was the only modern reproduction in a room that
was otherwise filled with what were apparently genuine period pieces.

The Princess rose out of a gilded chair to welcome us.  She had
changed her costume and was now dressed in peach-coloured silk,
with a turquoise necklace, and I think she looked even younger
than when I had seen her earlier that day.  The windows were all
curtained and the light was so dim and diffused that it was difficult
to see the small scar on her upper lip;  it was even difficult
to tell the colour of her eyes, that looked like pools of languid
mischief.  She contrived to create the impression of a rather
bored woman who invited, even challenged, us to entertain her.

"So you have come, Jeemgreem.  And you have brought your famous
and inseparable R-Ramsden.  Introduce him to me."

Jeff shook hands with her, as his way is, bluntly.

"You are like a siege-gun," she remarked, "safe and reassuring
until you go off.  I do not wonder that Jeemgreem takes you wherever
he goes.  And where is the other one--Cr-rosby, did you say his
name is?"

"Doctor Crosby has gone to London," I answered.

I thought I detected a change in her eyes, but she recovered
instantly and the tone of her voice was agreeably bantering:

"Ah, well--if Jeemgreem thinks so much of him he must be wonderful,
but I must have patience until I meet him.  Do be seated.  Jeemgreem,
what a surprising man you are.  You do not in the least look like
the hero of a thousand thrills!  Your reputation thrills me, but
you look like a shopkeepaire."

"Can't help my looks," I answered.

"R-Ramsden, on the other hand, looks just as one expects.  One
would say to him--or rather, one can imagine Jeemgreem saying to
him `Smash that obstacle,' or `Slay these men';  and one can see
it done as soon as spoken.  Of all the wonderful things I have seen,
I find it hardest to believe that this great R-Ramsden so worships
you as to follow you even into Tibet."

"No one asked you to believe it," I retorted.

"Yes," she said, "I must believe it.  Because oth-air-wise"--her
voice changed slightly--"my confidence might prove to be misplaced.
I make mistakes--not often.  Those that I make, like the surgeons
and the doctors, Jeemgreem, I provide with funerals at someone's
else expense.  Did Haroun leave the Prefecture?"

"Yes," I said, "and your man killed him."

She was taken off-guard, but recovered instantly.

"Was it not quick?  Jeemgreem, does that not suggest to you that
it is very unwise ever to trifle with me?"

"It suggests," I said, "that you and Jeff and I don't play the
same game.  We play ours straight."

"And was that not straight?  Straight from the shoulder?  Haroun
ben Yahudi had disobeyed.  He had permitted de la Tournee to steal
for his own use two of Dorje's weapons.  Two were missing from
the barrels in which they were delivered.  One caused that warship
to blow up.  And now they tell me that the other set on fire the
Prefecture.  Let me assure you that Dorje believes in swift
discipline as well as in obedient daring."

I managed to catch Jeff's eyes and I saw that the big man was
growing restless.  Probably he considered I had blundered, and I,
too, suspected I had.  The Princess was altogether too cocksure
of her own upper-hand;  she was daring to give me information that
would hang her unless I kept it secret.  We were evidently in a
trap of some kind.

"Don't let her move," I said to Jeff;  and with an air of huge
relief he went and stood between her and the window, close enough
to pounce on her if she should make a sound or movement.

I walked over to the cabinet that I had noticed when I came in.
For a few moments it puzzled me.  There was nothing in front that
would come open.  However, I examined the side nearest the door
of the room and found a small sliding panel, which opened easily.
Inside, the cabinet was black;  and there was an arrangement of
mirrors, which included the large mirror on the corridor wall outside.
The latter was made of "peephole" glass;  that is to say, it was
transparent toward whichever side happened to be brightly lighted;
and since the windows in the corridor provided plenty of light, and
the cabinet was black-dark, it was possible to look into the mirror
facing me and see reflected in it the whole length of the corridor
and anyone who might be entering through the front door.  Doubtless
the Princess had watched us enter, just as, now, I watched the
interesting movements of five men.

There were five doors in the corridor.  The doors stood ajar;  and
there was a man in every one of them.  First one and then another
would stick his head out.  They appeared to speak to one another,
but only a few abrupt words at a time.  And the startling thing was,
not that they were there but that they looked like gentlemen.  If
they had been thugs they might have been just as dangerous, but
not nearly so alarming.

Over my shoulder I told Jeff what I saw.  Then I turned the key
in the door.  I set a heavy piece of furniture against it and I
piled another piece on that;  against that barricade I shoved a
heavy, brass-inlaid table.  Then I returned to the cabinet to
make one more survey of the ambush and noticed that one of the
men was wearing, under neat civilian clothes, the boots of a
French infantry officer.

I told Jeff.  He beckoned me, and I stood guard over the Princess.
Jeff went to the nearest window, threw the curtains back, forced
the window open, tearing out two long nails with which it had been
secured against just that contingency, glanced outside, and grinned
at me.

"All right," he remarked.  "The road's clear.  Now, let's talk to her."

But I had acted "Jeemgreem" just about as long as I could stand
the strain, so I passed the buck to Jeff:

"You carry on.  I'll watch the corridor."

I returned to the cabinet, where I could glance into the mirror
and detect the slightest movement of the ambuscade without missing
what Jeff and the Princess said and did.  The ambuscade was patient
and apparently not expecting to be summoned into action just yet;
I saw one man produce a small blackjack and slap the palm of his
hand with it, but he tucked it out of sight again;  then he produced
a cigarette case, but another man gestured to him not to smoke,
so he put that away too.

The Princess spoke first:  "In every life that I have lived on earth,
that I remember, R-R-Ramsden, you have made your clumsy and ridiculous
attempts to interfere with me.  And you have always suffered for it.
Will you nevaire learn?"

"It is you who learn slowly," Jeff answered, so promptly that I
almost suspected him of believing her absurd claim to remember
the details of dozens of previous lives.

"That r-remains to be seen," she retorted.  "What will you do now?"

I could not have answered the question.  We had no weapons.  We
could not escape by way of the corridor.  If we should climb down
from the window into the garden we would be exposed to pistol shots
and there would still be the high wall to negotiate.  It seemed
extremely probable that at least one of the Princess's accomplices
was a French army officer, and I had proof that at least one of
the police obeyed her orders.  Even the Prefect might be her
accomplice, or at least her dupe.  If she was such a trusted spy
as Meldrum Strange said she was, attempts to expose her would only
meet with blank official incredulity, whereas, she could frame up
any charge against us that she pleased.  However, Jeff seemed
genially undisturbed.

"I don't have to do anything," he answered.  "Grim does the fancy
work.  My share is merely the manual labour."

"I don't think your Jeemgreem is such a genius," she answered.  She
seemed perfectly at ease, and as far as I was concerned she had a
perfect right to be.  As "Jeemgreem" I felt I had shot my bolt and
I could have cursed Jeff for passing the buck back to me.  He noticed
my embarrassment and his next remark was plainly meant to calm me
as much to annoy her, although it actually made me even more nervous
and left her scornful:

"I know what is going to happen.  You haven't known him as long
as I have."

"No?" she answered, lowering her eyelids.  "I have known him fifty
million years.  Is that a slight acquaintance?  But I am frankly
disappointed in him.  He stands staring in that mirror like a
fifty-franc-a-day detective;  whereas, if he were his true self, he would
have known what to do before this.   And he would have done it.
Jeemgreem, I am afraid, is paying for some weakness of former lives
by being a man of straw in this one--a man with a reputation greater
than he can sustain in a real emergency."

"We'll wait and see," said Jeff.

She nodded.  "I am in no hurry."

"Grim never is," he answered.

I supposed he was giving me time to think.  However, the only
thing that I could think of was the open window.  It might be
possible to gag and tie her without making any noise, and then
to escape by way of the garden before the men in the corridor
suspected anything.  But if we should do that, it would ruin Grim's
chance of making use of her in any way.  I kept silent, hoping that
Jeff would drop some hint that I might act on.  Then suddenly I
noticed a movement in the mirror.  Jeff, observing my changed
expression--he said afterwards that I looked as if I had won a
Derby sweepstake;  began talking to the Princess to distract her
attention.  "Reincarnation is rot," he announced, which surpised me,
more than it did her, because I happened to know he believes it.
"If you know so much about your former lives, come on now, tell
me what Jimgrim is going to do.  You ought to be able to guess that
from experience."

I was too busy watching the mirror to hear her answer, although
I remember the tone of her voice was mocking and coolly confident.
There were no sounds from the corridor but I suppose the front
doorbell rang.  The middle-aged, unpleasant-looking maid appeared
and the men vanished, closing the doors, although the man in
military boots left his door ajar about half an inch, so that he
could listen.  The maid opened the door and in walked the Prefect
of Police in uniform.  Grim followed him;  and hard on Grim's
heels came six policemen, the last of whom turned and closed the door
but not before I caught a glimpse of two more men in uniform outside.

I think the maid screamed, although I could not hear her.  I saw
her lips move, and the one door that was ajar was promptly shut
tight.  At a sign from the Prefect, two of the policemen seized
the maid, the door opened again, and they almost hurled her through
it into the arms of the two who waited outside seeming to expect
that.  Then again the door closed.  One policeman went and stood
on guard in front of each door in the corridor;  he at the door
that had been ajar tapped on it, several times, with increasing
vehemence.  I heard Jeff say:

"I never knew Grim to do anything anyone thought he would do."

And I heard her mocking answer:  "I can tell you what he will do
this time.  He will choose between death and obedience."

The door that was being rapped on opened gingerly.  The policeman
entered.  The Prefect, with a nod to Grim, followed and the door
closed.  Grim came forward along the corridor, apparently so
perfectly at ease that I felt like shouting to him to be on his
guard.  However, I contrived not to do anything as ridiculous as
that.  I went to the door and dragged away the barricade that I
had built up.

"What is that fool doing?" asked the Princess.  I unlocked the
door and swung it open.

"Jimgrim!" I announced.

And Grim walked in.  I closed the door behind him.




Chapter Six

"How many wives had Solomon?"


"Destiny!" said the Princess.

"How d'you do?" said Grim.

I walked back to the cabinet to watch the corridor.  It had occurred
to me that the Princess might have unexpected forces in reserve and
Grim would probably be grateful for a timely warning.  The Princess
had sprung to her feet.  She stood confronting Grim with an
expression that baffled analysis as, probably, her emotions did, too.

"So you are Jeemgreem!  Yes, yes, yes--of course you are!   And
I have made myself ridiculous by being taken in by that one!  I
will not forgive myself."  She tossed a scornful glance in my
direction.  "But I will not forgive him, also!"

"Let's waste no time on trivialities," said Grim.  "Be seated,
won't you.  I am here to talk to Dorje."

Jeff drew up a chair and Grim sat down in it, facing the Princess,
not six feet away from her;  but Jeff continued to stand between
her and the window, watching her gestures.  If she had produced
a weapon and if she had been as quick as a leopard, she would have
had no chance to use it.  I think she realized that;  from subsequent
experience of her I feel sure that she had a very deadly weapon
concealed in her dress, but she gave us no excuse at that time
for submitting her to search or any similar indignity.  Neither
did she give the least sign of curiosity as to how Grim had entered
without opposition from her accomplices, although it must have
puzzled and even bewildered her.  She was outwardly all self-assurance,
whatever her inner feelings might be.

"Jeemgreem, you are as handsome as you always were, in all your
lives," she remarked.  "You have not one straight feature, and
not one weak one.  You have understanding eyes.  What experience
you must have had with women!"

"About Dorje--" said Grim.

"I am another woman--one more, Jeemgreem.  I have had experience
with men."

"About Dorje--" Grim repeated.

In the mirror, I saw the man in military boots led out handcuffed
into the corridor, but the Prefect remained in the room for a while.
The policeman led his prisoner to the front door and handed him
over to someone outside, then returned and I saw him knock on
another door.

"As long as you and I have known each other, Jeemgreem, so long
we have both known Dorje, although we have not always known who
he is.  Dorje has been ripening, as it were, through very many
lives, developing his gr-reat wisdom and r-rounding it out.  When
he was Solomon he made many mistakes, of which one was idleness,
due to a sort of conceited pacifism.  When he was Karl Marx he
had to suffer in comparative obscurity, because he was laying his
mines at the r-root of the social structure, making possible the
r-ruin of civilization that is to take place now, so that Dorje
may be King of the World.  Without him as Karl Marx, what could
Lenin have accomplished?  What could Stalin do now?  But they--
those two are little nobodies compared to Dorje, who makes use
of them and will presently destroy what they have done, that he may
rebuild.  Dorje has chosen you to be one of his captains, Jeemgreem."

"How did he hear of me?" Grim asked.

"Smoke, won't you?"  He produced his cigarette case.  "Have one
of mine."

"Yes, let us all smoke.  Let me order some liqueurs, yes?"

"No," Grim answered,

By that time the Prefect had come into the corridor and was giving
orders with gestures imposing utmost silence.  In response to
repeated knocks the doors had opened and all except one of the
men I had seen had been searched and handcuffed.  Only one door
remained closed;  the Prefect ordered it forced and the policemen
did that very cleverly and quietly.  Two of them went in and
dragged a man out by the shoulders, quite dead;  he appeared to
have poisoned himself.  The Prefect sniffed his lips.  I imagined
him saying "cyanide."  The prisoners were marched out through the
front door, two policemen dragging the dead one with his heels
deep in the three-pile carpet.  Then the Prefect and one policeman
began examining the rooms.

"How did he hear of me?" Grim repeated.

"How could he have helped that, Jeemgreem?  Did not you, before
you went to Tibet, delay and annoy Dorje by arresting many of the
men in Palestine--in Syria--in Arabia--in Egypt--in India--who
were Dorje's useful tools and sometimes even Dorje's agents?"

Grim answered:  "In those days I had never heard of Dorje."

"Nevertheless, you compelled him to hear about you.  And Dorje
has a psychic memory that is even more remarkable than mine.  He
thought about you and remembered you in many past lives, weighing
this and that peculiarity of yours and studying your merits and
defects.  It is of paramount importance to him that he shall
choose none except excellent men for his actual council.  But do
you not see the advantage possessed by Dorje over those who are
opposed to him?  Which of the kings and generals and presidents
opposed to him can choose their captains and confederates by
studying them in the light of their behavior in former lives?
Those who are not themselves incompetents and blind fools--do
they not choose rogues and fools who betray and obstruct?  Even
as Karl Marx--so recently as that--Dorje had not developed psychic
memory.  But as Dorje he has it.  He remembered me.  He has
remembered you.  And when he learned that you had gone to Tibet
he suspected you had gone to meet those men who know the psychic
laws, so he supposed you would return ten times as proficient as
formerly.  Therefore he commanded me to find you, which was for
me an agreeable task, because I, also, remember you, Jeemgreem."

"Are you Mrs. Dorje?" Grim asked--and she almost shrieked with laughter.

"How many wives had Solomon?" she answered when her breath came--
or perhaps when she had taken time to think behind that screen of
possibly assumed amusement.

"Are you one of Dorje's wives?" Grim asked her.

She laughed again.  "What were Solomon's wives except hostages
and a machinery for intrigue with foreign courts?"

"Are you afraid of Dorje?" Grim asked.

"Jeemgreem, I have never been afraid, in all my life, of anything--
and of a man least."

In the mirror, I saw the Prefect bring out a chair into the corridor
and sit down making notes in a pocket memorandum-book.  The policeman
continued searching room after room.

"Very well," Grim answered.  "Since you're not afraid of Dorje--"

"Oh-la, la!  I know what comes next!  Jeemgreem, you believe you
have me at your discretion--is it not so?  You are too obvious,
Jeemgreem.  I suppose you have had this place surrounded by some
very stupid gentlemen in uniform.  Therefore, you will now say:
'Betray Dorje, Madame, and assist me to destroy Dorje and to r-ruin
all his plans, or go to the guillotine!'  It does not need a genius
to guess that, Jeemgreem."

"I am not in command of the French police," Grim answered, and
she stared at him for a moment.  Expecting a threat, she was
rather nonplussed by not receiving one.  However, she held her
own line:

"Look at me, Jeemgreem, and use your imagination."

Jeff Ramsden grinned and so did I.  We both supposed she was going
to try to hypnotize Grim, and it would be almost easier to do that
to a locomotive.  Any human being can be hypnotized, of course,
given the right circumstances and provided he is inexperienced
and not on guard.  Grim looked at her.  And he always uses his
imagination;  no need to tell him to do that.

"Do you see this scar on my lip?" she asked him.  "I was born
with it.  It is a memory mark.  It is something like the stigmata
that certain people have, except that this does not bleed.  It is
the mark that shows where I was shot when Bismarck ruled Prussia
and I was spying for that poor incompetent Napoleon.  But see this--"

She leaned forward, turning her shoulders to show him the back of
her neck.

"Do you not see that mark?  Is it not distinct and unmistakable?
That is the mark of the headsman's sword.  When I was Ann Boleyn
they had to bring him in great haste all the way from Calais,
because I had the right to be beheaded with a sword, not with an
axe, and there was not in England one swordsman who could do it,
though my neck was so little.  I died laughing, Jeemgreem, then
as always.  You were Sir Francis Weston, and you loved me--then
as always.  That time, you died under the axe--not smiling, I
believe, since you were always a serious person.  And besides,
they tortured you."

"What is your point?" Grim asked her.

"That the guillotine could not terrify me."

Grim lighted a fresh cigarette and tossed the butt of the smoked
one through the window.

"I don't see that it matters whether you are scared or not," he
answered.  "My point is, that I can link you up with the explosion
on that cruiser--"

"Can you, Jeemgreem?  Can you even link me up with Dorje?  Could
you put me in prison?  If you should succeed in doing that for
one day, could you keep me there?  I will tell you at least three
reasons why you could not."

"Shoot," said Grim, at his favourite game, getting someone else
to do the talking and, as usual, not to be hurried.

"I know too much about too many people, Jeemgreem, and if I should
be thrown into prison there would almost be a stampede by important
personages to get me out again.  Furthermore, although you may have
drawn a leetle net around me, I have agents who will draw a better
one around you and your friends.  You also know too much about too
many people.  If you should suddenly die would Downing Street or
the Quai D'Orsay command that crepe be hung on lamp-posts?"

"Would they mourn you?" Grim suggested, and she laughed back
gaily at him.

"They would be made to mourn.  Because Dorje, who is ruthless
toward traitors, avenges his friends.  If any government should
kill me--well, you know what happened to that warship;  and you
saw what happened to the records at the Prefecture.  We have a
weapon, Jeemgreem, that no government can guard against!"

Grim sat silent, tempting her, I think, to continue boasting.  So
far she had said nothing that a lunatic could not have said, and
her claim to remember incidents of past lives was no pronounced
symptom of sanity.  In the mirror, I saw that somebody had rung
the doorbell;  the Prefect himself answered the door.  A man in
uniform gave him an envelope.  He closed the door, frowned at
the envelope, shook it as if it might contain something dangerous,
hesitated, and then suddenly opened it.  He read what it contained
and, I thought, did not look disagreeably disturbed, although he
raised his eyebrows and made an extremely eloquent, though enigmatic,
gesture with his shoulders.  He looked almost amused as he copied
the message into his memorandum book.  Then, returning it into
the envelope, he came forward and flourished it toward the mirror.
He evidently knew all about that cabinet.

I went to the door and opened it.  He handed me the message without
showing himself in the doorway.  I closed the door and handed it
to Grim, to whom it was addressed.  Grim read it, as he always
reads everything, with one swift photographic glance, and handed
it to Jeff, who studied it for sixty seconds and then passed it
back to me.  It was addressed to Grim in care of the police and
marked "Urgent.  Please find him."  Its contents were brief.  The
signature was O and I don't know who "O" was--some confidant of
Grim's.  It was dispatched from Geneva.  "My office and all its
contents have been destroyed by a fire of unknown origin.  The
secret, confidential and other records are a total loss.  This is
irreparable.  Perhaps you will now believe that Dorje is what I
told you."

I returned to my observation post.  Through the open window we
could hear newsboys at the top of their lungs announcing special
editions about the warship disaster.  It seemed to me highly
improbable that the Prefect would remain indefinitely in the
corridor while excitement in the streets gained headway, and
since he knew about that mirror he might wish to signal to us
through it--perhaps to beckon me outside for instructions.  However,
he was betraying no impatience, beyond that he glanced once or
twice at his watch;  he sat examining his notebook, rocking his
chair on two legs, tapping his teeth with a pencil.

"Princess."  Grim seemed to have made his mind up what to do, and
I think she realized it because her attitude became vaguely less
relaxed and insolent.  "If I wished to get you out of the way, I
would not take the trouble to bring you to trial.  I don't understand
French criminal procedure, and I do understand that you have what
is known in the United States as 'pull.'  But a pull on a trigger--
you understand me?"

"You would shoot me?  You have not the disposition.  You are too
moral.  I am not in the least disturbed about your shooting me."

I thought, and I could tell by his face that Jeff did too, that
Grim had gone off on the wrong foot.  Certainly the Princess
thought so.  She looked triumphant again and rather scornful.
Grim looked at his wits' end and as if he were trying to hide
the fact.

"I don't have to pull triggers," said Grim.  "There are plenty
of others who would do that quite cheerfully.  I have decided,
however, to save your life--on conditions."

"You?  Save my life?  You are cr-razy!  I do not need to move in
order to kill all three of you this instant!"

"So I thought," said Grim.  "Let's settle that first.  Jeff, do
you mind watching her while I--"

He turned his back to her and walked toward the south wall of the
room, the wall that she sat facing.  He had been able to watch
her eyes from where he was sitting;  she had glanced in that
direction once or twice too often and too obviously carelessly
to escape Grim's omnivorous eye for detail.  I watched her face
while Grim walked straight toward the wall.  She and I appreciated
at the same moment that Grim, by talking like a mere dime-novel
blow-hard, had tempted her to crow--and sneer--and give away a
secret that she would have given perhaps all she had to keep
from him.

"Stop!" she said.  "I surrender.  What do you wish me to do?"

However, Grim went forward.  There was a mirror facing him--one
of those half-globular abominations in a gilt frame that distort
whatever is reflected in them.  He had raised his hand to feel
the panel on the wall beside it, when the wall moved--outward,
toward him.  There was a secret door there.  To protect himself
he stepped behind it as it swung open.  Out came three men, one
an officer in uniform.  They were armed, or at any rate one of
them was;  I could see the bulge of a revolver on his hip.  Grim
glanced at me.

"Vache!"  I think the officer in uniform said that, but it may
have been one of the others.  I was on my way to the door.  I
opened it and beckoned the Prefect, who summoned the man who was
searching bedrooms.  The two came and stood in the doorway, the
Prefect smiling to himself and the other man making a rather
nervous exhibition of his automatic.

"Colonel Zalinsky," said the Prefect.  "Monsieur Albertini.
Monsieur Hugo.  You are under arrest.  Colonel Zalinsky, you will
receive an escort to the barracks.  Monsieur Albertini, Monsieur
Hugo, you will accompany me."  He approached the two men in civilian
clothes and asked them for their weapons, speaking to them very
civilly.  They hesitated, glancing at the Colonel, who merely
scowled and scratched at his moustache, so they handed them over--
two pistols, and the Prefect laid them on a settee.  Jeff unloaded
them.  The Prefect went to the secret door and opened it wide;
there was a nicely ventilated closet in there, provided with a
window in the outer wall and with a cushioned bench that could
have seated half a dozen people.  He examined the place and then
ordered his man to make use of the 'phone in the corridor:

"Request a prisoner's escort for Colonel Zalinsky, who is under arrest."

Then Grim, with a gleam in his eyes that always reminds me of John
Paul Jones' retort  "I haven't started yet!" approached the Princess.

"Did I understand you correctly to say you surrender?" he asked.

"I did not say that.  If you had stopped, yes.  But you did not."

"Very well then, go with these men.  Monsieur le Prefect, I regret
that I can be of no more service to you.  It appears I was mistaken
when I said that the Princess Baltis, who is so notoriously of the
secret service, probably was employing her talents to uncover a
grave conspiracy.  Knowing how a secret service sometimes operates
without taking the local police into confidence, I presumed on your
very flattering familiarity with my record, and you were kind enough
to permit me to ascertain whether or not the Princess is on the
same dangerous and important mission as myself.  I have even presumed
to send a telegram to Paris to a certain Major Bonfils, with whom
I have worked in Syria.  I have put him to the inconvenience of
travelling here by aeroplane, and I shall have to apologize to
him also."

He was talking, rather obviously, to give the Princess time to think;
and she was thinking furiously, behind an almost Chinese mask of
inscrutability.  Colonel Zalinsky glared at her, his lips moving
but no word coming forth;  the sort of threats that he intended
would be, in any event, more convincing if suggested.  Spoken words
so often steal the thunder of a thought.  The other two men scowled
and tried to whisper to each other, but the Prefect courteously
stepped between them.

"Of what am I accused?" Zalinsky demanded suddenly, and Albertini
echoed him:  "We also, we demand to know that!"

"Of conspiracy against the Republic," said the Prefect, "and of
acts of commission and of omission that were contributory to the
explosion on the cruiser L'Orient."

"Ludicrous!" Zalinsky looked maliciously relieved.  "You have not
one scrap of evidence.  Who accuses me?"

But his relief was short-lived.  Grim's acid had eaten through
the immense assurance of the Princess Baltis.  Even in defeat,
however, she was debonair and changed sides with the gesture of
a reigning beauty bestowing prizes at a carnival.

"Moi, J'accuse!"  Then, in rapid French that it was very difficult
for me to follow:  "It is true, and this Jeemgreem is altogether
too astute!  I have brought these traitors to the door of justice--
and, I suppose, those others also, who were out there--you have
arrested them, yes?  I have wormed my way into their confidence,
and I will tell all I know.  Nevertheless, I assure you that this
Jeemgreem by impetuously interfering has upset many calculations
and has brought exposure too soon.  You have caught moths--flies.
Eagles you have let go.  Wolves--lions--tigers remain at liberty!
I am forbidden to name the source of my instructions, but you
force me to speak!  If you had arrested me--mon Dieu!--that would
have given warning to so many people, that--"

There was a knock at the door.  The Prefect's man opened it.

"Major Bonfils."

The Princess Baltis stood stock-still.  I watched her closely and
neither her face nor her eyes showed the least trace of emotion.
She even breathed steadily.  But it is hardly an exaggeration to
say that there vibrated from her something like the magnetism of
a leopard that sees sudden danger.




Chapter Seven

"No longer Number Seventeen?"


I can read and write French fluently;  and I can speak it so that
Frenchmen understand me when they genuinely try, which is not often.
But to follow closely a four-cornered, quickfire exchange of verbal
thrust and counter-thrust interspersed with professional argot and
the latest idioms and catch-words, is beyond my powers.  So I can
only give a resume of what happened after Bonfils came in, and
the greater part of it is summarized from scraps of Grim's subsequent
conversation.  Jeff talks better French than I do, but even Jeff was
a bit bewildered by the speed, and it took both of us weeks to
extract all the details, as a rule one detail at a time, from Grim,
who can be as laconic as a stone jug and who hardly ever fully
realizes that others are not so quick as himself to pick the fine
points from a maze of irrelevant suggestions, hints and purposely
confused statements of probable fact.

Looking back, it is easy enough to summarize.  The main point was
that the Princess Baltis, having thoroughly established herself
in the confidence of the French secret service, had done what almost
all spies do eventually, and that Bonfils knew she had been playing
false.  But it was also true that she knew a lot too much about
too many important people;  and in peacetime it is no simple matter
to dispose of anyone entrenched in that position, since a secret
service never courts publicity, and, ever since the Dreyfus scandal,
the French have been particularly touchy on that point.

But there was another complication.  Bonfils and Grim had been
intimate friends and they had helped each other in the Near East,
although employed by mutually suspicious governments.  They
understood each other's methods almost perfectly, and Bonfils
knew that Grim has very little personal use for nationalism.
Bonfils, as a Frenchman, would have liked to see France recognized
as the paramount power in the world and he habitually employed
his talents toward that end.  Grim--a citizen of the United States--
ex-major in the British Army--decorated by five governments and
trusted, as a rule, by all of them--has never had the slightest
interest in what he calls "parish pump politics" and rather agrees
with Doctor Johnson of dictionary fame, that patriotism is the
last resource of the scoundrel.  Grim is the deadly enemy of so-called
patriots who ruin other countries that their own may flourish,
and then rob their own for the sake of self-importance.  He holds
that vice and virtue know no boundaries, but that the world is at
the mercy of the ignorant, who think they do.  He also holds,
that in all countries, at all times, there are conscienceless
individuals, possessed of a certain psychic sense, who understand
how to manipulate crowd-opinion and who never hesitate to do so,
in order to make brave and decent men act damnably in the name
of patriotic common-sense.

So Grim is not easy to deal with, from the point of view of a
secret service bent on snatching credit for itself and for its
own nationals.  But on the other hand, Grim was already involved;
he understood the situation of the Princess Baltis;  he already
knew the nature of the problem to be tackled;  and his first words,
in French, as Bonfils entered the room, amounted, in the circumstances,
to a statement of his intention not to expose the Princess but to
use her as an ally, subject of course to Bonfils' approval.

"Congratulate the Princess.  She has netted a few of the small
fry very neatly.  She offered now to help us catch the big ones.
Can you spare her?"

Bonfils smiled engagingly.  He was a rather small man with a big
man's shoulders and a poet's way of using them, so that one word
conveyed an essay on things unsaid.

"Cordially!"

Bonfils' smile had malice--meant for the Princess, and she knew it;
however, he had the subtle courtesy to pretend it was meant for
Zalinsky.  He turned it on all three prisoners, and the two civilians
looked embarrassed, but Zalinsky showed his teeth under the long
moustache that almost hid the ferocity of a telltale upper-lip.
I did not catch Zalinsky's words;  he spoke sotto voce and extremely
rapidly;  but it was a threat, as obviously as a rattler's warning
is.  I learned from Grim, that evening, that what it amounted to
was a promise to create a much worse scandal than the affaire Dreyfus.
Bonfils made no audible answer.  Then the military escort came;
Zalinsky was informed that a car awaited him;  he swaggered off;
and hardly sixty seconds after that the two civilians were not so
courteously hustled downstairs to a motor-van provided by the Prefect.

Then the fun began--genuine fun, in which Bonfils vied with Grim,
and the Prefect competed with both of them, in efforts to force
the Princess Baltis so to compromise herself that she would never
be able again to escape from the toils they intended to weave around
her.  And she broke their toils as swiftly as they wove.  She was
like Penelope, who baffled all the suitors in Odysseus' absence.
It was surprising that she did not claim to have been Penelope in
a previous life, but that was about the only argument she did not
use;  and probably the only reason why she did not use it was that
it would have suggested Dorje as Odysseus and herself as being
faithful to him.

Taxed with having admitted to Grim, and to Jeff and myself, her
sympathy for Dorje and her complicity in Dorje's plans, she retorted
reasonably that she had supposed we were Dorje's agents and that
she had therefore assumed that attitude in order to tempt us to
trust her and reveal Dorje's secrets.  How should she know we were
authorized agents of the French Government?  And since we were
nothing of the kind it was obviously impossible to find fault with
her for not knowing it.  Besides, were we not intimates of Meldrum
Strange?  And had not she herself been sent by Bonfils to extract
from Strange's files a document considered scandalously anti-French?
If Strange was an abominable person, why were we, his self-confessed
friends, not equally fit subjects for her genius, forever ready as
it was to labour diligently for the sake of the Republic?

Taxed with interference without orders into an intrigue that she
had neglected even to mention to her superiors, she retorted with
the most marvellously impudent alibi that even a secret service
ever listened to.  She hinted--so adroitly that she avoided
compromising herself, and yet so convincingly that the thrust
went straight home--that the secret service itself had been
corrupted by Dorje's agents, so that she had not felt justified
in making a report until she knew to whom it could be made without
risk of playing into Dorje's hands.

She herself turned cross-examiner.  Did Bonfils not know--or had
he not at least suspected for two or three years--that someone by
the name of Dorje was attempting to destroy civilization in order
to get the entire world into his own control?  Did he or did he
not know it?  If he did not, what kind of an espionage officer
did he consider himself?  If he had known it all along, by what
right had he virtually shelved herself, who had never failed him?
Why had he not at once sent for her and assigned her to a task
for which she was much better fitted than anyone else in the service?
And since he had not sent for her, was she not justified in wondering
whether he, too, had been won over by Dorje's agents?

Bonfils told her why she had been dropped from the list of active
agents during the past year or so.  "You are too notorious.  Too
many people recognize you.  To employ you is to advertise that we
are conducting an investigation."

She exploded--ridiculed him--mocked him:  "Nevertheless, you have
the impudence to tell me that I worked without your knowledge?
If I am so obvious to other people, how is it that you say you
did not know I had employed myself in this affaire Dorje?
Furthermore, was it not you yourself who embraced me and commended
me because, in the affaire Habibullah, I acted without waiting
for orders?  Mon major, you are inconsistent."

She put up an equally vivid defence against the Prefect's charge
that she had guilty knowledge of the presence in Marseilles of
those strange instruments that did such damage.  Had she warned
him, he could have captured them before they were distributed and
hidden.  She accused the Prefect of having interfered and ruined
her last chance of discovering what had become of that shipment
of "scrap-brass."  She almost blamed him for the warship disaster;
she entirely blamed him for the fire at the Prefecture that had
destroyed so many valuable records.

"You, too!  Do you dare to say you did not know me?  After what
has been said by Major Bonfils, have you the effrontery to declare
that you did not suspect me of being engaged on an affaire outside
your province, in which it would be an impertinence for you to
interfere unless invited?  Why did you not consult me?  Why did
you not assure yourself before you came crashing into my delicate
plans, with your long nose and your big feet and your drove of
idiots whom it pleases your conceit to call detectives?"

Grim was the only one she spared.  She misunderstood Grim.  First
and last she feared his malice, all the more suspecting it because
no trace of it appeared.  As a matter of fact, his lack of malice
was his greatest strength and weakness;  keeping him clear-visioned
and able to weigh one set of circumstances with another, misleading
many a rash opponent into one rash step too many.  But those to
whom he had a right to look for support in a tight place left him
in the lurch for fear he might desert them.  Too many people think
that malice is an essential ingredient of courage.  Certainly the
Princess Baltis thought so, and she was on perpetual watch for it
in Grim, undoubtedly believing he possessed a brand of it that would
bowl her over should he loose it.

Me she roasted mercilessly, calling me a keyhole peeper.  She
insisted that my permanently bloodshot eye was ruined by the
draughts from keyholes and that my knowledge of French was picked
up in unmentionable places.  She demanded to know why she should
not have suspected me;  and, since flattery is the best weapon
to use against all defectives, why she should not have flattered
me by pretending to mistake me for Jeemgreem?  She roasted Jeff,
too.  She called him a buffalo--Jeemgreem's elephant--a monster,
tearing out the nails from window-frames--a "Type" who should be
showing off his strength for centimes in the streets of Paris.
Every word of that abuse was hurled at us with intent to suggest
by inference that Grim was a bird of a totally different feather.

Then she turned again on Bonfils, perfectly aware by that time
that if he could find a way to avoid exposing her he intended to
do it.  Her tongue and her very mercurial mind had probed the
situation.  Bonfils was not afraid of her, but others were, of
whom some were Bonfils' seniors in the service.  Bonfils had hardly
hinted at a tenth of one per cent of what he knew;  but then,
neither had she.  And what both of them knew, in addition to
numberless dangerous secrets, was that Dorje's scope was world-wide;
he was not in France or even on French territory;  no pursuit of
him, no check on him was possible without co-operation among many
nations, difficult to attain in principle and much more difficult
to put in practice.  Every possible weapon would have to be used
against him.  To throw her into the discard might prove fatal to
success, as well as disastrous to dozens of people whose secrets
she knew.  She led her ace, defiantly:

"Enfin--s'il vous plait, me mettez aux arrets!"

"You insist?" asked Bonfils--coolly enough;  he was not easily
bluffed into showing his hand.

"Why not?  You accuse me.  You insult me.  You invade my domicile.
You have submitted me to forcible detention in my own chair while
you amuse yourselves at peep-holes.  Then let l'affaire Dorje wait
while you prefer proper charges against me--in secret.  My improper
friends will have the impropriety to disregard the secrecy;  but
what does it matter who else is implicated, or on whose neck falls
the axe, provided Number Seventeen is punished for the crime of
having acted without orders from those who had condemned her to
inactivity and oblivion, not--no, no, not from jealousy--but
because she had served France too often and too well!"

It was a masterpiece.  It would have been a simple matter for
the authorities to accuse her of treason and try her in secret.
But if, as she suggested, she had friends who would avenge her
by revealing scandals, of which every government on earth has
plenty that it would be suicidal to make public, then Bonfils
was in a predicament.  And she was right, too, about the paramount
importance of a campaign against Dorje.  If Dorje was what he
appeared to be, then her own importance could be measured solely
by the value of the information she could produce against him,
no matter what her own previous complicity might have been.  The
question was, could she--would she betray Dorje?  Was she any
longer to be trusted?

With an eloquent motion of eyes and shoulders Bonfils beckoned
the Prefect and Grim outside into the corridor for a consultation
leaving Jeff and me to watch the Princess.  I was feeling a bit
irritated by her remarks about me, so I kept my distance.  On the
contrary, Jeff seemed to have enjoyed her criticism;  he urged
her to be seated and himself sat for the first time, facing her
near the open window.  Jeff is the last man in the world whom one
would suspect of delicate intuition, but as a matter of fact he
helps Grim far more by his diplomatic skill than by his physical
strength and courage, which are sometimes a source of embarrassment.
Unerringly he had spotted the lady's weakness, although I don't
know how.  Perhaps his own prodigious loyalty to Grim enabled him
to do it, since loyalty--like love between a man and a woman--is
a spiritual force that stirs and strengthens understanding.

"Would you like a tip from me?" he asked her.

I was standing where I could see her very clearly in the bright
light from the window.  For the first time, I thought she showed
genuine terror, although she did her utmost to conceal it.  Jeff
exudes good nature.  It had touched her, and like an animal at
bay she saw an opening but suspected it because it looked too o
pportune.  Jeff looked almost too guileless.

"Advice costs the giver nothing, but when was it not expensive to
take?" she retorted.

"You're right.  I wouldn't take advice from you," said Jeff, "if
it cost me a fortune not to.  But I thought you might be more
astute than I am."

"That is quite true.  I am more astute than you are."

But Jeff appeared to have lost all interest.  "Then you don't need
my advice," he answered.

"Tchutt!  You talk like a woman.  What is it?  If I listen to you,
need I do what you say?"

"I have changed my mind," Jeff answered.  "Why should I advise you?"

"Because I ask it!  Are you so ungallant that you can see me, in
what must look to you like an extremity, and yet withhold from me
whatever you think might help me?"

"It was a mere idea," said Jeff.

"Ideas are the source of actions.  Tell me then, what is it?"

"Put your faith in Grim, that's all.  Fool anybody else, but don't
play tricks with him;  there's neither fun nor money in it."

"Phooh!  You think your Jeemgreem is a paragon perhaps--a
reincarnation of all the strength of all his former lives, and
all the weaknesses forgotten?  A dangerous man to deceive?"

"I don't have to think about that," said Jeff, "I know it."

That was a typical Jeff Ramsden statement.  When he praises Grim
he has no more use for modesty than a buffalo has for a bicycle.
However, underneath exaggeration Jeff moves subtly toward his
objectives;  he was aiming at her strangely erroneous fixed idea
that Jimgrim packs a deadly species of malice among his equipment.
And even I, who am not a connoisseur of such matters, could guess
that she, to put it mildly, had not yet dismissed the desire, and
perhaps the intention to make Grim love her.  She was not by many
a dozen the first ambitious woman to conceive that plan or something
like it.

"Bah!  He hates me," she said suddenly.

"I never knew him to hate anyone," Jeff answered.  "Grim likes people.
That's why he understands 'em.  That's why the worst crooks trust him."

"Yes, and then he betrays them to the police."

Jeff laughed.  "I have seen Grim eat with murderers and sleep with
rebels.  He doesn't consider it his business to bring them to
justice, and I'll bet you Grim has saved more criminals from gun
and gallows than any other ten men living.  But he can protect
himself--none better."

"Then you advise me I should trust him?"

Jeff nodded.  Grim came in then, leaving the door slightly ajar,
and we could hear Bonfils and the Prefect talking rather noisily
in the corridor.  I think the Princess was intended to understand
that neither Bonfils nor the Prefect had an ear to a keyhole.  Grim
walked straight up to her.

"You'll have to go to Paris," he said, offering her a cigarette
and lighting hers and his with one match.  "A lot depends on you,
of course, but probably they'll overlook things if you undertake
to help us run down Dorje.  You will leave by 'plane, this afternoon,
with Bonfils."

For as long as sixty seconds the two looked into each other's eyes
and neither spoke.  Then Grim said:

"Dorje has lost the fight on this front.  Nobody knows yet where
the rest of those brass gadgets are, but they'll be traced.  You
can probably help.  I advise you to give them a list of everyone
you know who is in sympathy with Dorje or in any way connected
with him."

"But I have no list," she answered.

"All right, tell the names you can remember.  After that, your
usefulness in France is at an end;  and even if it weren't you
would be shot or stabbed as an informer.  So you join my crew
and work with me.  Is that agreeable?"

"You mean--you send me against Dorje?"

"No.  I will lead you against him."

"Jeemgreem, if I swear to you--"

He interrupted, flicking the ash from his cigarette.  "Oaths," he
remarked, "are ashes--of emotion.  Nobody was ever bound by one.
A fellow does things, or he doesn't;  it depends on the fellow
himself.  Dorje probably will do his best to scupper you for
having joined us, but you must take your chance of that.  We shall
all be taking chances."

"Jeemgreem--do you realize--what terr-r-iffic chances?"

"Probably not.  Thank heaven, few of us do realize the long odds
that we're up against or most of us would quit before the game
starts.  But let me make a few points just a mite more clear to you."

I was afraid he was going to threaten her.  She was just of the
type that instantly responds to threats by seeming acquiescence
and by secretly swearing to teach the threatener a lesson.  She,
too, thought he was about to threaten and her face assumed a
sweetness that disguised a very different emotion.  But Grim took
us all by surprise.

"I know that Dorje has the jump on us, and that it is going to
be very difficult to checkmate him.  I regard you as the most
important member of my crew.  I'm going to have to look to you
for information and advice.  I can't waste time mistrusting you.
You will find when you reach Paris that a body not unlike yours
has been found in the river, removed to the morgue and identified
as that of the Princess Baltis.  There will be a verdict of suicide--
a verdict comprehensible to anyone who knows anything about your
recent doings.  It may possibly reach Dorje's ears.  Let's hope so.
It releases you from momentary danger, and it saves the face of
the authorities who might have a hard time otherwise in explaining
to one another why you are not under close arrest.  You are dead.
You are no longer the Princess Baltis."

"Am I not--no longer Number Seventeen?"

"No number.  Find a new name.  Get a passport--Bonfils will attend
to that.  Meet me in Cairo at Brown's Hotel."

"You leave at once?"

"No.  But you do.  They won't want you in Paris a minute longer
than they have to keep you there.  Go straight to Cairo, hold your
tongue, and wait for me."

He took no notice of her excitement;  she was as breathless as a
caught fish.  He turned to Jeff and, taking Jeff's arm, walked to
where I was standing.

"You two fellows mind going to Cairo?  I'll take a 'plane to London.
Whoever gets to Cairo first waits for the rest.  Are we all agreed?
Then so long."  But he turned again toward the Princess Baltis.
"Madame Anonyme--au revoir.  J' espere que vous etes bien re-encarnee
encore une fois."

"Jeemgreem," she retorted, "vous etes incroyable.  Mais je commence
de le croire, quand-meme que tout le monde le dit!"




Chapter Eight

"Am sadist. Masochism to the devil!"


"Am most absqueamious babu."

It was a full, rich baritone, outside the door of Jeff's bedroom
in Brown's Hotel.  I did not recognize the voice, but evidently
Jeff did, for I heard his answer:

"You fat rogue, come on in.  I'm glad to see you."

I followed, having fretted for more than a week in Cairo with
nothing to do except wonder what was keeping Grim in London.  Jeff
had remained almost incommunicado all that time, because people
know him and they know that where he is Grim will presently appear.
He preferred not to answer questions.  People don't know me, so I
had wandered about a bit;  but I don't care much for Cairo or
tourists, and I had not gone far for fear of missing Grim's arrival,
so I was rather naturally bored.

"Am squeamish, so abstain from politics--verb very sap.  This
babu greets you, sahib.  You should see my passport.  Red ink--
green ink--certifying me as almost abstract personage, so guileless
and incompetent--so useless as to be above suspicion.  Let me
show you."

"Datum your passport.  You may have forged it for all I know, and
who cares?  Why are you here?"

"Jimgrim cabled me from London, one word--'Cairo.'  Here I am,
delivered right side up, in one piece.  What next?"  He was wearing
a black alpaca jacket and beneath that the rather sketchy orthodox
Bengali costume that revealed enormous hairy legs.  He was immensely
fat.  His feet were encased in new red Damascus slippers, which
he kicked off as he passed the threshold.  He had a huge head and
large alert brown eyes that viewed me with suspicion.  Jeff
introduced him:

"Babu Chullunder Ghose--an old friend."

I had heard of him.  Who has not, who has heard of Jeff and Grim?
But it seemed incredible that this mountain of obesity could be
the brave man who had scaled the passes into Tibet and had brought
Jeff's journal back with him.  He looked incapable of walking five
miles.  He was sweating and his feet looked fat and useless.  But
he was a good-looking man, with a buttery ivory skin and rather
heavy jaws blackshaded with the roots of whiskers.

"No use asking how you are," said Jeff.  "You're broke, of course,
but otherwise--"

"Am worse than broke.  Am indigent."

"But otherwise top-chop.  What's going on in India?"

"Simonization process, sahib.  Spraying worn-out car of Juggernaut
with juice of observations made by Royal Commission.  Have you
ever seen an old Ford held together by the new paint?  Let us hope
much.  Let us not be too prophetic.  Did you mention whisky?"

Jeff ordered drinks.  Chullunder Ghose sat cross-legged on Jeff's
writing-table like a big fat Buddha.  Rolling his handkerchief
into a ball he tossed and caught it in his bare toes.  I decided
that his feet were neither fat nor useless.

"How did you get here?" Jeff asked.

"Flew.  Never again!  This belly of mine contains no gyroscope.
Lost one stone, five pounds, seven ounces.  During a number of
hours lost also all belief in Providence, under whatever name.
Nevertheless, recovered somewhat after landing.  But I still
need whisky."

"How did you find me?"

"Came here first, naturally;  Rammy sahib's habits are as spots
on leopard--changeless.  Clerk at desk, without looking in register,
said no Jeff Ramsden staying here.  Dam-liar.  Had you not been here,
he would have looked in register.  I told him greatest art is lying,
therefore he should marry and study art.  He told a Sudanese to
show me to the front door, but I had already seen that.  So, since
they would not let me use the elevator, and since I had seen a
letter addressed to you in a pigeon-hole numbered 118, I walked
upstairs.  In all the universe, I wonder, is there any sweeter
music than the melody of cracked ice in a tall glass?  Strange,
that whisky should be vilified by almost all religions except this
babu's.  A Hedonist with epicurean tendencies.  After you, sahib.
Yes, please--just above the pretty--quite a bit above it--and now
fill her up-ah!  Sahibs, may the world not lack the crazy men we
need to keep us crazy also!"

That was talk.  He only sipped his whisky, eyeing me over the top
of the glass.  He seemed to be waiting for Jeff to hint I might
be trusted, before asking questions that perhaps I had no right
to hear.

"Jeff, sahib, did you ever almost die of curiosity?" he asked at last.

"Don't doubt I died of it lots of times," Jeff answered.

"That's what kills us all and gets us born again.  Crosby is curious
too.  He'll listen in."

The babu bowed in my direction with the gesture of a Buddha
bestowing benison.  "Am flattered.  May your honour not regret
same.  Who is the Princesse Chalawan de Sitlab en Siam?"

"I never heard of her," said Jeff.  "Why?"

"It is the why-ness of things that brought this otiose babu through
space, like Arjuna's arrow--air--sick--very.  Why Cairo?  Why should
Jimgrim wish to see me?  Why should a polylinguistic princess by
the name of Chalawan de Sitlab, occupying semi-regal suite in this
hotel, suborn its servants to inform her instantly when visitors
approach your honour?"

"How the devil do you know that?" Jeff asked.

"Am blameless.  Devil that resides in Jimgrim urging, this babu
was victim of impulse.  Never yet has Jimgrim sent for me to kiss me.
Inference is obvious that Jimgrim is again on war-path, meaning that
this babu will work and not get paid for it--except, of course, as
stipulated--stipulation not yet argued.  Have wife who thinks money
is only proof of masculine fidelity.  Am sole support of seven
married sons, whose offspring suggest astronomical figures, and
whose contempt for this progenitor increases in proportion to his
debts.  Consequently, must please Jimgrim.  So, when was approached
in corridor by negroid lackey asking if I visit one-eighteen, lied
instantly--quicker than trigger of automatic.  Walked full length
of corridor looking at numbers on doors, turned at the end of
corridor and saw said individual considering me from mat in front
of door of Suite A squatting on it.  Naturally, went at once to
Suite A which is at opposite end of corridor.  Screen in front of
door.  Door open to admit draught--maybe--possibly--perhaps;  but
it is easier to hear when door is not shut.  Do I bore you, sahib?"

"Bore ahead.  We're listening."

"Must please Jimgrim, same being easy if you give him all he wants;
but that is less easy.  Jimgrim asks three questions and expects
to be told everything from A to Z and from Einstein to twice two,
all in form of telegram of ten words.  Demanded to be told,
accordingly, who lives in Suite A!  Sudanese outpost on mat,
probably unable to pronounce suborner's name, instructed me to
go to hell in Arabic.  Stepped around screen, announcing self in
tone sufficiently immodest to avoid arrest for burglary.  Was
confronted by Syrian maid, who told me name of her employer.  Said
employer, radiantly visible in mirror through crack of door of
inner room, spoke rapidly to maid in Arabic, to this babu in
Hindustanee, to someone else invisible in French.  Unless mirror
lied (as I did) she is lovelier to look at than a daffodil in
lotus-coloured lingerie.  She asked me, was I from Jimgrim?  Naturally,
I answered No, since truth is deadly and a half-truth even more so.
So she asked me, did I come from Dorje?  To which I naturally answered
Yes, not knowing Dorje and being curious concerning everything to
which I am ignorant.  Then she summoned the maid and slammed the
door.  Plenty of time for observation.  Noticed locked trunk.  Name
Baltis rather heavily obscured by red paint.  Baltis--Sitlab backwards!
Syrian maid--mystery--mystery--her Highness will be pleased to speak
with me--alone--this afternoon--at four-fifteen.  Thus mystified,
this babu departed thence and hied him hither.  Rammy sahib, in the
name of all the devils in the universe, is our Jimgrim after Dorje?"

Jeff nodded.

"Oh my amiable aunt!  Have you seen the papers?  An explosion on
a warship--a fire in Marseilles--a fire in Parisa--fire in Geneva--
an explosion of a magazine in Toulon--a fire in Lisel--a fire in
Brest--a fire in Toulouse--and then silence!"

"Censorship," said Jeff.

"And Jimgrim--leads us against Dorje?  Oh, my infinite emotions!
Yes, please.  We shall not drink many before Dorje gets us."

"You said you don't know him."

"Rammy sahib, who does?  More--twice that much--fill her up with
soda--thank you.  Who knows who or where he is?  All Asia brags
that he is just beyond the skyline--coming--always coming.  The
King of the World is coming--they have said that for a hundred
years--for a thousand years.  Dorje is the genius who saw his
chance to capitalize on all that advertising!  It is what I myself
have often thought of doing--would have done same, only I lack
romantic appearance.  There is something about me that makes men
doubt my heroism.  Doubters are not good diehards.  Furthermore,
I am afraid of consequences.  Dorje is afraid of nothing."

"How do you know all this?" Jeff asked him.

"Oh, for God's sake!  Have I not been wooed by a woman who said
she was one of Dorje's thousand concubines?  Did she not tempt me
to be one of Dorje's million mouths?  This babu has mouth which
eats, I told her.  May I eat for Dorje?  But she requested me to
feed her, saying Dorje expects help from every man.  She ate my
dinner--and then told me that I may speak for Dorje or be silent;
but that if I speak against him silence will descend upon me with
a permanence suggested by a death certificate."

"Why should they pick on you?" Jeff asked him.

"Why not?  Is this babu not notorious for helping everyone except
himself?  Am form and substance of Gray's Elegy--am mute inglorious
Milton--personage called goat in U.S.A.--embodiment of hope eternal,
which is but a pseudonym for Sisyphus or back-seat on a bicycle
built for two.  Such pitiable optimists as this babu build all the
empires--and then die in agonies of unrewarded zeal.  That is why
Dorje picked on me."

"Do you mean that Dorje personally picked you?"

"Why not?  Winning consists in being won for.  Verb sap.  So if
Dorje cannot pick winners, kites and crows will presently be picking
Dorje.  Self am best bet in the universe, provided quid pro quo is
adequate.  But there were too few quids and too much quo."

"Have you a room?" I asked him.

"Not yet, sahib."

So I went down to the desk and had a chat with Dougherty, who
used to run a Raines Law joint in New York and is familiar with
several angles of the hotel business.  He made no bones at all
about letting Chullunder Ghose have a room that has been used
scores of times for some of the more refined and guileless
diplomatic interludes.  "It is the end room on that corridor and
seems utterly above suspicion.  On the one hand is a public lavatory,
and on the other a sort of butler's pantry and some linen-closets.
Anyone might talk in there until doomsday without being overheard,
if it were not for a narrow passageway between the closets and
the outside wall that was once used to connect that room with the
next one along the corridor.  The passage has been boarded up at
one end.  The holes in the boards are usually plugged up, but not
always.  I myself had used those rooms in 1916 to discover a
medical secret that was thought important to the Allies."

"I suppose you were seen to enter this room?"  I suggested, when
I had told Chullunder Ghose of the arrangement.

"Yes, sahib, not improbably--although I told that Sudanese that
he was wanted inside, and I locked him in, not wishing him to mind
my business.  I was in here before they could summon anyone by bell
to let him out.  But he who brought drinks--"

"Suliman," said Jeff, "has worked for me at intervals for fifteen
years.  I don't think he would talk about what goes on in here--
not unless someone bribed extremely high and scared him at the
same time."

Babu Chullunder Ghose began to grow excited.  Again he pulled out
his handkerchief and caught it between his toes repeatedly.

"Tell me about this princess, sahibs!  Tell me all you know about
her.  Then find someone who will summon her to visit me in that room."

So we told him all we knew, and that took less time than one might
suppose.  His vivid imagination leaped from one fact to another
with such rapidity that we could hardly keep up with him.  He
cracked his toes.  He cracked his big fat fingers.  He blew his
nose--and wiped his face--and threw his handkerchief--and caught
it with his foot--then suddenly resumed his Buddha-like composure
along with his normal air of what be calls Uriah-Heepishness.

"Am failed B.A. Calcutta, lynx-eyed examiners having prevented
this babu from using most ingeniously folded notes.  Am failed
promoter of so many enterprises that I suspect the akasic record
has forgotten half of them.  Am so well used to failure in all
personal affairs that I could write a book about it.  But its
publishers also would fail.  Am a merciful man;  why bankrupt
publishers?  Paradoxically flat broke, am physically fat, not
flat.  Nobody loves fat men.  Nevertheless, what woman but
confides in them?  They love but never trust the lucky lean ones.
They trust but never love us solidly embowelled drums of wisdom.
Failure, am I?  Sahibs, set me in a room with all the lovely women
in the world--and I will tell you all their secrets quicker than
a bird can pick the teeth of crocodiles!!"

The problem was to get him into that room unseen by the Princess
or her servants.  The more we could tell Grim about her, the better
for Grim and the worse for her, if she were contemplating treachery.
But she was no fool, and she undoubtedly knew which rooms we occupied.
If she should learn that Chullunder Ghose had visited Jeff's room,
it would be all up with any hope of getting her to confide in him.
We solved it by going ourselves to call on her.  We told the servant
on the mat--humiliated and suspicious from having been locked in--
that there was a box of flowers for her Highness in the lobby.  He
made the mistake of being insolent, which gave us an excuse to kick
him downstairs;  and that gave Chullunder Ghose any amount of time
to get into the end room unseen.  Then we knocked and the Syrian
maid took our cards but said her mistress could see nobody that
afternoon.  After that I went down to the desk and arranged with
Dougherty to send word to the Princess that the gentleman from
India would receive her at four-fifteen in room 195.  Then we hid
in the passage between the linen closets and the wall;  it was
tight quarters and abominably hot, but there was just room for
the two of us to peer through the holes in the wooden partition.

As a matter of fact, my prejudices at the moment were in favour
of the Princess.  I could not help remembering her remarks about
my being a keyhole peeper, and although Jeff's bulk made the
discomfort in that narrow passage almost unendurable, the fact
that he seemed to have no compunctions about what we were doing
was the only relief to the strain of my self-respect.  Knowledge
that she was a crook of unimpeachable impudence did not compensate
for the distasteful nature of the job.

However, almost from the moment she entered the room that aspect
of the situation vanished.  I was glad I was listening.  So was
Jeff.  We ceased even to be conscious of the stifling heat,
although sweat streamed into our eyes and our joints ached with
the strain of keeping still in awkward attitudes.  We could see
fairly well, and hear almost perfectly because Chullunder Ghose
had thoughtfully set two chairs between us and the window.

"Why should I come to see you?" she demanded.  "Why did you not
come to my apartment?"

I could not have answered her as Chullunder Ghose did.  She was
too beautiful and too regally dressed to be treated with anything
less than politeness, by anyone not incorrigibly hard-boiled.  But
the babu was boiled in India, where insults are the salt of
diplomatic conversation.

"Fortunately you obeyed me," he answered.  "What have you to say
for yourself?"

She retorted:  "I don't know you.  Give the password."

"It has been changed," he answered, "since you failed--and deserted
your post--and brought this situation on us.  If there is any reason
why you should not die before you do us any further injury, I am
commissioned to hear it."

"But who are you?" she demanded.

"Your judge.  Sit down and say what you have to say;  I will listen
unless you take too long about it."

She sat down facing him.  Chullunder Ghose assumed an expression
of placid indifference.  If she looked beautiful in his eyes, he
contrived perfectly not to suggest it.

"Give me proof," she demanded.  She seemed a totally different
woman to the one I had seen in Marseilles.  Then she had been,
if anything, over-confident.  "How did you find me here?  How did
you know I was coming?"

"I am not here to answer your questions," said Chullunder Ghose,
"but to receive your answer.  Have you anything to say?"

She made up her mind.  She sat back relaxed in the chair.

"If you are who you pretend to be, you may tell Dorje I have
changed sides.  As for you, if you think you can kill me, try it.
I have met a man who is greater than Dorje."  Then, lazily, as
if she no longer cared for anything, she let her eyes wander
around the room;  they dwelt on the papered wooden partition,
behind which Jeff and I lurked, for perhaps a second longer than
on any object.  "Dorje," she said, "has elements of greatness, but
he won't last.  He never did finish anything.  When he was Solomon,
the wealthiest king in the world, he went to pieces.  As Karl Marx
he could only sow seeds.  He has sown them again.  And another
will reap.  Tell Dorje that."

"May I tell him who is this paragon?"

She appeared to weigh this carefully, as if she felt tempted to
name the individual before whose rising splendour Dorje's destiny
had waned.  However, she smiled at last, as if enjoying what
she foresaw:

"Dorje will know soon enough.  As for you, let me out of this
room before I lose patience with you."

She had the gift of absolutely regal insolence, but Chullunder
Ghose had the equally great one of sublime cheek.  Smiling as if
fifty murderers were at his beck and call, he got up, bowed to
her and started toward the door;  but before he opened it he could
not resist one Fat Boy shot to make her flesh creep:

"Sad, that one so beautiful and talented must die so horribly,
and so soon.  How pleased I would have been to modify at least
the method, even though your life is forfeit."

She sneered as he opened the door for her.  "You sound," she said
"like one of Dorje's agents!  He invariably uses sentimental fools
who forget the countersign!"

We gave her time to reach her own apartment and then joined
Chullunder Ghose.  He was wiping his face with a towel, comically
forlorn but as shrewd as ever.

"Sahibs, if I were Dorje I would drown her, because if Dorje were
King of the World she would look for someone to defeat him.  If
I were God she would never have been invented, so the world would
be less interesting.  If I were you, I would go now back to Rammy
sahib's room and wait for what she does next, because she will
do it swiftly.  And if I were Jimgrim, I would not believe her
when she says she is now against Dorje, any more than she believed
me when I told her I am Dorje's agent.  Furthermore, she knew
there was someone behind that panel.  Oh, I like her!  This babu
is once again a slave of Hanuman, who is a god of fortunately
futile love-affairs.  I hope she dies in torments before she
disillusions me.  Am sadist.  Masochism to the devil!  But make
haste, sahibs, because she is not lethargic like a cobra or a
mongoose or electricity.  The speed of light lags like a hearse
when she thinks.  And take my word for it:  if she were off with
the old love Dorje, she would not have hinted at the new love
Jimgrim;  she would be too anxious to guard Jimgrim from Dorje's
anger.  Did I not say I would pick her secret like a pop out of
a weasel?  And the whole world for a battleground--oh, why was
I not born into Jimgrim's shoes!"



Chapter Nine

"Emperor Jimgrim--how does that sound?"


When we returned to Jeff's room there were two Arabs seated on
the mat outside the door.  They were dressed for the desert and
looked as hard-bitten as two dry bones.  Their faces, framed in
the flowing headgear that would make a Sphynx out of a tailor's
dummy, were further obsc