E. Hoffmann Price's Exotic Adventures Page 5

  When he reached the street, two Chinese were waiting. One was Tsang Li’s son, Tsang Yat; the other was the major-domo. The former said, “I am grateful for your attempt to aid my revered parent. His tong brothers will avenge his death, but they will wait until you have fulfilled your mission.”

  “Thank you,” acknowledged Ward. “I shall no longer stay at the address I gave your highly enlightened and very learned parent. It is possible that you will not recognize me the next time we meet.”

  “Wisdom drips like pearls from your mouth,” said Tsang Yat. “You anticipated my advice.”

  And when he was alone, Ward telephoned Ling Fu, to whom he gave certain instructions. Then he was connected with Marley Hampton’s suite. He said to Win, “You were more than right this morning. But from the looks of things, I’m suspected of carrying the ball. So your father shouldn’t be in any danger, unless he asks for it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t dine with you for another day or so.” Then, before she could question him, he added, “Read the morning paper carefully and you’ll understand.”

  He met Ling Fu in the Chinese cemetery at the head of Washerman Street. And there, in the walled enclosure where gilt inscribed tombstones marked the graves of Chinese buried until their bones could be exhumed for shipment back to their ancestral cemeteries, Ward stripped down and put on the secondhand garments which Ling Fu had purchased at the all too appropriately named “louse bazaar.”

  When he emerged from the cemetery, he appeared to be a Syrian Arab. His grayish eyes were not inconsistent with his pose; neither was his nose entirely wrong. And juice from several bottles of pickled walnut—the British sahibs import them from London as an accompaniment to curry—stained his skin. It was all very nicely done, except that his scalp had been nicked in a dozen places when Ling Fu shaved his head, as befits a Moslem.

  Presently he was creeping up an odorous alley whose mouth gaped at the entrance of the Vishnu Temple. Somewhere inside a taper cast a wavering light. There was no outward sign of life, yet the shadows of the temple were vibrant with animation that was unseen and unheard; the great pile of ornately carved masonry seemed sentient, waiting to swallow up and destroy.

  For him to enter in the guise of an Arab would be as perilous as though he came as a white man; but Ward, now that he knew Mahmud’s part in the game, was using his disguise for more than avoiding observation by the local police. By offering himself as bait, there was a possibility of playing hide and seek with the Hindus who had been waiting for him at Tsang Li’s house. He was playing for a chance to draw the pursuit from Mahmud, and to himself.

  The Hindus, having failed to find the treasure in Ward’s possession, had, of course, decided that the Arab must have it. Thus, if Ward’s approach worked, he would deflect their pursuit and so win time enough to pick up Mahmud’s trail.

  “And that,” he told himself, as he worked his way to the temple entrance, “will just about level off for the way they tried to pin me to the back of my rickshaw!”

  The humid air of the courtyard was sweetened by the lingering fumes of incense, but the reek of sacrificial blood became heavier as he skirted the wall. It was like the stench of a slaughter house. It reminded him that those dark gods craved blood; that when Vishnu returned to recreate the world, his white stallion would be red to the fetlocks.

  He heard a subdued, chilling shiver of bronze. It was the muted, eerie clang of a gong in some deeply buried crypt, and the shuddering sound sent frost racing down his spine. A vagrant breeze brought faint rustlings from the leaves of the jasmine in the corner, but the sweetness that swirled toward him was still foul with scent of stones soaked with the blood of centuries. Somewhere, men were chanting. It was more like the somber mutter of drums than human voices.

  Someone was intoning a mantra in the sacred Sanskrit. The priests were in conclave. And later, they would discuss what they had learned of the night’s disturbances; nor would they have missed much. Ward snaked forward. If he could add their suspicions to his own, he would again have the lead—unless a knife first found him or Mahmud.

  Invading the holiest crypt of the temple was an insane venture, but Mahmud had done it, and returned. Ward brushed the sweat from his forehead, licked his dry lips, and paused for breath before skirting the lotus-dotted pool—

  Then, without any warning, soft, clinging folds of silk enveloped, him. The gloom behind him blossomed with cunning hands. Wiry and desperate as he was, Ward had not a chance to struggle. The dismaying unexpectedness of the attack, coming from behind him, from ground he had just explored, had for an instant robbed him of the split-second swiftness that might otherwise have leveled the odds. But iron fingers sank into his muscles, probing nerve centers and constricting them so that he was paralyzed. Thumbs sinking into his carotid artery made his senses reel. Twenty seconds or less would bring certain death—

  As roaring blackness enveloped him, and he himself seemed to be an immeasurable distance from his body, the irony of it stabbed him like a hot blade. He was dying from that same relentless hold which Ling Fu had tried to teach him. It leaves not a mark on the victim—

  The next sound he heard was a singsong voice. Before he realized that he was back in the alley that faced the temple entrance, he understood what Tsang Yat was saying, “Esteemed friend, this violence was necessary. We could not risk startling you. You might have cried out in surprise, or perhaps killed some of us.”

  “The Honorable Tsang Yat,” Ward’s servant interposed, “had extremely up-to-date statistics. So this awkward person recommended publishing same, with speed and privacy.”

  A gulp of ng ka pay fairly cauterized Ward’s tonsils, but the pungent stuff revived him, and he listened to Tsang Yat continue, “One of my late father’s servants was quick-witted enough to follow the Arab, while you were wrestling with those Hindus outside our gate. But he could not enter the house. And it is forbidden for peaceful Chinese to incriminate their tong by being involved in suspicion of temple robbery. Later, when the loot is restored, there will be dealings with Mahmud.”

  From the viewpoint of the Sa Tiam society, this was reasonable enough. To intervene at present would compromise the entire guild of thieves, whose protector and legal advisor Tsang Yat had become; but to kill Mahmud, later on, would be purely a family matter, and thus entirely ethical. So Ward listened, and finally he said, “Ling Fu, I’ll handle this myself. You better stay out. It’s just me plus one Arab.”

  Chapter V

  Mahmud’s house was near the Alir Mosque, not far from the Kyaikpane Wharf. To the right, as Ward headed north, were several rice mills; to the left, the government timber depot, where patient elephants would, at dawn, begin their daily task of stacking teak logs that came floating down the Salween. But now there was no activity, only a treacherous gloom above which towered the gilded peak of the Kyaikpane Pagoda. Beyond it were the innumerable masts of Chinese junks, house boats, swift Malay proas. These Ward could not see as he advanced, but yet he knew that they were there; he could smell them, their cargoes and their inhabitants, and the salty tang of the tidal inlet that meandered through that low-lying, marshy ground.

  He identified Mahmud’s place by the adjoining rice warehouse. And, empty-handed, Ward made his first move against a man desperate enough to slay Tsang Li in his own reception room. Shadow-silent, he scaled the palm-stake palisade of the warehouse. Somewhere, a watchman was snoring. But the corrugated iron roof did not betray Ward’s progress. Presently, he was creeping along the crest of a stone wall, whose height commanded the Arab’s squat, two-storied home.

  There Ward listened, strained his eyes; but his nostrils warned him of his peril. The stale, acrid odor of hashish blended with the smell of the house. No wonder Mahmud was savage as a tiger, insanely daring in theft and slaying. While he might now be in a comfortable stupor, he might equally well have senses abnormally sharpened, and be deadly as half a dozen normal men.

&n
bsp; It was only Ward’s grim persistence that drove him on, inch by inch. Once accustomed to the gloom, he perceived the parapet of the roof top, which he could reach by letting himself down the face of the wall until he had scarcely more than a foot to drop.

  For a moment he clung there, startled by some one’s dry, racking cough. The sound seemed to come up from the trapdoor that opened from the flat roof to the second-story rooms. No mistaking the cough of a hashish smoker.

  It was repeated. Ward’s knees bent as he absorbed the drop. If Mahmud was soddenly drugged, searching the house would be easy. But concentration on the apartments below distracted Ward from the snares of his own level. A cord, stretched ankle high, almost tripped him. He was still recovering when earthenware shattered to bits in the courtyard below. He had stumbled across a primitive burglar alarm.

  But what cut off his retreat was the woman whose scream stabbed the darkness. He recoiled from the trapdoor just as a broad-bladed parang whipped by and clashed against the parapet. The steel flicked his robe, and the air stirred by its passing fanned his cheek. Ward groaned, pitched forward, and lay there gurgling and threshing.

  “Oh, dog and brother of a dog!” The girl was young, her voice tense with terror, and the shock of an apparently successful killing. A shudder rippled through her exultation as she came nearer, reviling his religion and ancestors. “Pigs befoul thy grave and thy father’s grave, thou profaner of a true believer’s harem!”

  He could have retreated. Her outcries had not aroused Mahmud. But that was not Ward’s game. Once he fled, his quarry would be warned; nor was there any certainty that the loot was actually in this house. So he played his next card.

  “Ya sitti! Praise Allah that the blood of one seeking sanctuary is not on thy head!” His voice was now normal, and not that of one mortally wounded. The girl recoiled, and in the perceptibly thinning darkness—the false dawn was at hand—he could just see the gleam of her great black eyes, the whiteness of her teeth, and the contours of her unveiled face. “Enemies hunt me. Where is Mahmud? Quick—tell me where he—”

  Without waiting for her to recover, he plunged toward the trapdoor, staking all on one bold move.

  “My father is—is—below.”

  “And hasn’t heard this noise?” Ward turned his face so that he could not see her unveiled.

  His speech, and his claiming sanctuary, which any Moslem may demand of another, gave her confidence. Mahmud’s daughter struck a match, whisked a veil over her face, and regarded him over its edge. By the wavering flame Ward saw a jar of water, and a tray with fragments of half-eaten cakes of bread.

  “Eat,” she invited; not because she thought he was hungry, but because that morsel of food would make him a guest, and Mahmud’s protected.

  Unwittingly, she had thrown the issue squarely to him. He knew the Moslem code and respected it for the sake of many a true believer who had been his friend; and though Mahmud was a renegade, Ward could not put himself beyond the pale by accepting the food of the man he was hunting.

  “Not until your father invites me,” he declined. Pride was in his voice and tone. The girl knew that this was not one who would deal with a woman. “Where is Mahmud?”

  “Come with me.” She turned toward the stairs, and he followed. “But I fear his wrath if I awaken him. He is weary.”

  At the foot of the stairs she turned down a passage. He could barely distinguish her trailing white garments in the gloom. Then she halted. A hinge groaned. The girl said, “Wait—I will call him.”

  If Mahmud was as soddenly drunk with hashish smoke as his muttering indicated, he should be easy to handle. The girl’s unexpected presence was a serious obstacle, but Ward was devising a plan to get Vishnu’s loot out of cover, and without violating the laws of hospitality. As for Mahmud and the law—that was no concern of Ward’s. Tsang Li’s men would settle him if the police did not.

  So he crossed the threshold, but confidence trapped him. In mid-stride, she thrust him between the shoulders and one bare foot kicked out to trip him. He lurched, recovered, but too late. The door slammed heavily, and a lock clicked.

  Ward’s laugh was low and bitter. His refusal of bread had aroused her suspicion, and here he was, caged until Mahmud sobered up enough to take things in hand himself. And if the criminal investigation department men had any clues that led to this house, it would be bad for Ward, if he lived long enough to be snared by them. Worst of all, Ling Fu would literally obey orders; the master had said it was to be a lone hand, and that settled the matter. Which is why Chinese are at once the best, and the worst of servants.

  And as true dawn followed the false, Ward surveyed his prison. It was a stout-walled cubicle, and judging by the lurking scent of musk and sandalwood, it had once been part of some Arab’s harem. The iron-barred window with its jalousies confirmed his opinion.

  Moulmein was waking up. From afar he heard the trumpeting of elephants taking their morning bath, and the cries of their mahouts as they prodded the great beasts to work. Fishermen added their voices, and from the Alir Mosque the muezzin called true Moslems to prayer.

  “A-a-a-a-a-alahu Akbar! Al-l-l-l-lahu A-a-a-akbar! God is most great! Come to prayer—prayer is better than sleep and—”

  Somewhere, priests of Vishnu were greeting their god. And below, Mahmud was muttering and cursing. Otherwise, the house was silent. Ward, alternately tugging at the bars, then circling the room in search of some rafter he could dislodge—though both endeavors were equally futile—was wondering how an empty-headed captive would face a passably sober Arab who was murderously handy with a knife.

  Leaning against the sill and wiping the sweat from his forehead, Ward glanced between the jalousies and toward the front of the house. The door opened, and Mahmud’s daughter, basket balanced on her head, stepped out into the vague grayness. Her anklets tinkled as she went to market.

  Ward was soon aflame with thirst. He had sweated himself dry and as the sun rose, its fierce heat made a furnace of the small, locked room, whose door kept the sea breeze from circulating.

  His fingers were bleeding and riddled with slivers. Bit by bit, he was enlarging a chink between the withes which, laid athwart the ceiling joists, supported the layer of earth on which the roof tiles were set. He was not quite tall enough to reach from the floor. Perched on the sill, leaning inward as far as he could, every muscle was strained in keeping himself in position. Thus a task none too difficult under favorable circumstances was an almost useless misery; he could not apply his strength.

  And what urged him on was that Mahmud’s daughter remained away long after marketing time. His first thought was that she had gone for reinforcements to help her half-drugged father; but as that possibility dwindled, he struggled for release so that he could nail Mahmud and thoroughly search the house. His successive changes of strategy had each time gotten him further from his goal, but he had finally gained one move. The master of the house did not know that he had a captive.

  But long before the day was done, Ward was dizzy from hunger and thirst. Mahmud cursing at his daughter’s absence, stirred about below. At last, apparently finding food and drink, he settled down to sleep in hiding. He was prudently keeping out of sight until last night’s violence became an old story.

  * * * *

  The sun set at last, and the slow return of coolness revived Ward. He was too weary even to curse her strategy. When he did think of it, he scarcely blamed her. And he envied Arab wit.

  Then, as night settled, Ward saw men emerging from the shadows. The shape of their turbans identified them: Hindus, and they approached Mahmud’s door. One knocked. There was no answer. Finally, one said in a low voice, “Let us in. Your house is surrounded. Let us in!”

  Mahmud challenged. “Break in, and I’ll slice you crosswise.”

  He could do that, and they knew that he would, if they rushed him. And in the meanwhile, there was no
doubt that he could slip out and escape, no matter how many lurked in the shadows about the house. But the Arab’s chances went a-glimmering when the spokesman of the Hindus said, “We know that you have Vishnu’s treasure. That is why we set the police on that other meddler. And since you were stupid enough not to leave town at once, we have you—”

  “Come and get it,” invited Mahmud, “and the loot is yours.”

  His voice was like the low snarl of a panther about to strike. Ward, about to escape through the hole in the ceiling, paused long enough to hear what followed. A free-for-all would give him his chance, unless it drew the law.

  “You are too anxious,” mocked the Hindu. “We expected as much, seeing that we are no more anxious to meet the police than you are. So we seized Aminah, your daughter. Perhaps you’ve missed her?”

  The vain fury of Mahmud’s curses made Ward wonder if the Arab might not go amuck and attack them; but without doubt he anticipated what the speaker added, “Therefore, bring us the treasure, or she dies in a way you will not like.”

  Long silence. Then Mahmud said, “Allah curse thy father and his father! Sons of lewd mothers, what proof have you?”

  “Her absence is enough. But if you doubt, we will leave her bracelet at your door.” What followed was a muttering that Ward could not understand ; but he sensed that in giving Mahmud the address, the spokesman had instinctively lowered his voice. His farewell, however, was audible enough. “And if you make trouble or try to break in a knife will find her, at the first disturbance.”

  They left him with his wrath. It was wiser to parley with Mahmud in their rendezvous than in his house.