From London Far (25 page)

‘At least you still relish a sound cigar.’ Don Perez smiled urbanely. ‘And you race about Scotland on hazardous missions with what is doubtless an attractive and intelligent girl. Is your heart then so little romantic? I suggest that the quadrangles of Oxford and the reading rooms of great libraries have never quite satisfied you. Your generation was brought up under the shadow of Pater. As undergraduates you taught yourselves that your business in life was to burn with a hard, gem-like flame. Not the fruit of experience, you know, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point–’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ exclaimed Meredith. ‘If Pater passed swiftly from point to point it was no more than from his own rooms at Brasenose to those of some other don. And if he counted his pulses it was because he was rather scared of all the great husky undergraduates he had to scurry past on the way. Have you ever looked at a portrait of him? Only a man chronically scared of life would have hidden behind that immense moustache. And I don’t think I’m particularly scared myself even though I’ve fallen into a den of thieves. Don’t talk nonsense about Pater to me.’

What this speech lacked in logic it more than made up for in simple feeling, and after he had delivered himself of it Meredith felt much better. He even began to enjoy his cigar. The people who had paid for it – to wit, the lawful owners of sundry stolen works of art – would scarcely grudge it, he thought, to an honest man engaged in the task of restoring their property. Not that there now appeared to be the slightest chance of his succeeding – for here was Don Perez with, as it were, his grotesque proposal in one hand and a loaded revolver in the other. At any moment he might ring the bell and commission that second coffin.

‘I don’t suppose’ – Don Perez, quite unruffled, seemed prepared for debate into the small hours – ‘that you have ever much studied that aspect of the history of art which collectors call provenance? Who owned the picture last, you know, and who before that. The ideal is to trace it right back to the studio. Well, there are very few major works of art which have changed hands in what you would term an honest manner as often as in a dishonest one. Indeed, there is possibly no study that gives one a queerer angle on human conduct. Unless, of course, one takes jewels, in which I have never greatly interested myself. The history of great jewels is almost invariably one, not of simple theft, but of blood. Recently, and rather exceptionally, the Society acquired and disposed of the Taprobane Diamond. Not only had it been responsible, in its comparatively short career, for the deaths of three men and one very beautiful woman. On two other occasions, as I happen to know, its transfer had taken place amid such sinister passions that the immediate consequences were a good deal more horrible than simple homicide.’ And Don Perez looked reflectively at that spot on his dining-room floor from which the disgraced Properjohn had lately lugged the body of Bubear. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it would interest you to hear about that. But it is one of those stories which I must keep for my memoirs.’

Meredith was very willing that he should keep it. His cigar was not only stolen; it was, in a sense, soaked in blood. He took another puff at it. Unquestionably, it was just the same cigar. And from this Meredith conjectured that his nerves remained in tolerably good order. So why not, he thought, continue to play for time? It had been his role ever since this affair started. And even if the effort led nowhere – or led, rather, inevitably to a coffin or a sack – he might as well, as he followed that road, continue to exercise what acquired skill in delaying tactics he now possessed. It was the nearest he could get to that burning with a hard gem-like flame.

So Meredith watched the cigar smoke wreathing upwards and pondered. Should he make some tentative move towards closing with the offer made by Don Perez on behalf of the International Society? But that would be rash.

‘What I haven’t seen for a long time’, Meredith said, ‘is a really distinguished liqueur brandy.’

Don Perez rose at once. It is not easy simultaneously to play the gracious host and keep one’s guest covered with a firearm. But this talented man had no difficulty in achieving it. Within a minute he had produced the brandy, poured it into two great rummers, and drawn a couple of arm chairs hospitably up to the fire. ‘And now to return’, he said, ‘to the very interesting point of the morality of our proceedings. I will admit at once that there are aspects of the business which are liable a little to offend people like ourselves.’

People like ourselves
. This was something for Meredith to digest. Perhaps there was a sense in which, if one regarded the community at large, Don Perez and he would appear to stand tolerably close together. Were they not both a sort of cultured parasite, each pursuing his own socially irresponsible fancy? And what were those aspects of the business which might a little offend? Meredith half expected his host to be looking once more at the spot where Bubear had fallen. But Don Perez, his rummer cupped in one hand and his revolver conveniently disposed towards the other, was gazing mildly into the fire.

‘For example,’ said Don Perez, ‘there is this Pantelli whom Properjohn has been expecting tonight. We have to work in with him, although I cannot approve his trade. Hiding all over Europe, as you know, are men stained with the most abominable crimes. They have taken booty of one sort or another with them – including works of art – and Pantelli makes a business of negotiating these for them in order to build up funds abroad. It is not a nice profession.’

‘Decidedly not.’ Meredith sniffed at his brandy. ‘One would be very unhappy at conniving at the escape of murderers.’

‘Precisely so.’ Don Perez nodded gravely. ‘By the way, Mr Meredith, I suppose it is quite certain that we shall not see Vogelsang – the real Vogelsang – again?’

As a quick home thrust this was not at all bad. ‘No,’ said Meredith. ‘Nor Bubear either.’

Don Perez sighed. ‘These necessities are sometimes imposed upon one out of sheer pressure of brute fact.
Necessitas non habet legem
, as Sallust observes.’

‘Publilius Syrus,’ said Meredith mildly. And even as he made this donnish correction there came upon him one of those obscure promptings to which he had been intermittently subject ever since his adventures began. ‘This Pantelli’, he said, ‘appears to be concerned at the moment with a couple of reputed Giorgiones. Just how is he going about it?’

‘Very sensibly.’ Don Perez spoke without hesitation – and this made Meredith feel that the sack or coffin must by now be in the next room. ‘Very sensibly, indeed. He has paid us a substantial commission in advance and we have agreed to take him straight to Neff’s man – who is at present, I believe, in Tampico – and he will then make his own deal. Neff, as you may have gathered, is the biggest collector we have contacted so far.’

‘And the Giorgiones themselves?’

‘We ferried them some time ago and they are waiting at Depot 10. Pantelli has only to send a cable,
Herbert ill expect George only
, and we will have them forwarded on to Neff’s own place.’

‘I see. And did you think of
George only
– and all those passwords about London and Berlin – yourself?’

‘As a matter of fact, I did.’ Don Perez Sierra y Campo looked faintly abashed. ‘Properjohn, I know, disapproved. But Properjohn has gone – only, I assure you, to make boxes and crates – and the passwords remain. A little romantic mystification suits my taste. And now I think I shall make coffee.’

It must, Meredith felt, be getting uncommonly late. What was happening at the castle? Was it not likely that Don Perez, even before he sat down to dinner with the man he pretended to accept as Vogelsang, had ordered some assault upon it for the purpose of seizing a girl who now knew far too much about his organization? Jean had already narrowly escaped the Firth of Forth. Meredith was determined that she should escape the Sound of Moila. So he must either get clear at once from the headquarters of the International Society or continue to play for time and occasion by affecting to be drawn towards its President’s outrageous proposal. ‘I cannot see’, he said, with an irony which he tried to make sound uncertain, ‘that I am at all fitted to discharge the responsible office you suggest for me. It would appear chiefly to require a first-hand acquaintance with low life and criminal practice.’

But Don Perez, after pausing to look slightly pained, brushed this aside. ‘I design’, he said, ‘a radical change in the scope of the duties. You must not take Properjohn as a criterion. Indeed, I think we must have you called Secretary-General, with several men like Properjohn (although more efficient, of course) working under you. The fact is that our superior clients like to feel that they are in contact with an organization characterized by a little polish, erudition, scholarship – that sort of thing. Hitherto I have been obliged to carry all that myself. But you…’

And Don Perez talked on. He must, Meredith reflected, have a thoroughly stupid side to him or he would scarcely imagine that a middle-aged man with whom orderly living had become second nature was to be won over by a little blarney and a little wine. There was, of course, the further point that it was acquiescence or death, but this only made the man’s proposal the stranger. For what reliance could he propose to place upon an associate who had entered his organization under duress?

And suddenly Meredith saw that the answer to this was simple. The first job the new Secretary-General would be given would be of the kind from which no turning back was possible. It would not be some bit of minor organizing from which he could bolt with his denunciations to the police. It would be the perpetration of an absolute crime which would put him in the power of the Society for ever. Likely enough, he would be required to seek out his predecessor Properjohn amid his blameless crates and boxes and murder him, like an incoming priest or king performing his unholy ritual in
The Golden Bough.
Yes, that would suit Don Perez’s taste even more than the passwords. And all this decidedly made the prospect no more encouraging. If he were invited to liquidate Properjohn, the game would be at an end.

Meredith looked at his host and found him still at a full tide of easy eloquence. He was talking so eloquently that it was reasonable to suppose that at the moment he had nothing important to say, and here then was a good opportunity to take fleeting stock of the situation, particularly in its physical and topographical aspects. Don Perez’s dining-room (since he was, after all, the invalid uncle of the Laird of Carron) was in a separate group of rooms on the first floor. Which meant that liberty lay not merely outside its windows, but some twenty feet below them. Or perhaps – for the whole building, Meredith remembered, had little elevation – no more than fifteen feet. And although underneath these particular windows there might lie a flagged path, or a rockery, or even some sort of area or basement, the reasonable chance was that there would be a flowerbed or grass. Once landed there – and the drop should hold no terrors for one who had graduated from Bubear’s warehouse – there was a whole moorland into which to vanish. If necessary, one could go right over Ben Carron and find the fairly sizeable town which lay somewhere on the other side. But it would be better to take the risk of making straight for Moila, of somehow getting across the Sound, and of endeavouring to hold the castle until help was summoned.

There was the wretch Higbed, of course – but Meredith no longer considered that his first duty lay in endeavouring to rescue him. The man could scarcely have been dogged by furniture vans and brought all the way to Carron Lodge or its environs simply to have his throat cut; and Properjohn’s little plan for him, whatever it was, must be reckoning on the live man and not a corpse. Higbed therefore, though conceivably uncomfortable, was presumably safe for the time. Meredith looked at the windows.

Or rather he looked at the curtains – not here of Hunting Stuart – which concealed them. It was conceivable that the windows themselves were heavily barred or even that armed retainers lurked in their recesses ready to jump out and aid their employer.

Meredith looked at the doors, of which there was one at each end of the room. That through which he had come gave upon a tolerably long corridor and a flight of stairs leading down to a hall. As a means of escape, he distrusted this altogether. The other, through which an elaborate dinner had been brought, presumably led to a servants’ staircase, a hatch or perhaps a lift, and then to sundry offices. And this, too, Meredith did not care for. In fact, a window was the thing.

At this point he became aware that Don Perez was pouring out more brandy – which Meredith by no means proposed to drink – and had returned to the particularly idiotic theme of those enchantments of the flesh which were to open up before the new Secretary-General. How, Meredith wondered, could a clever scoundrel be so absurd? But it would be well to display himself as a little moved by these seductions. ‘Well, I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m getting a bit old for that sort of thing.’ And Meredith looked at Don Perez glumly enough, since he felt that a particularly nasty piece of play-acting lay in front of him. He remembered his embarrassed speculations as he first walked down Bubear’s whitewashed corridor, and the extremely disconcerting quality of his confused encounter with the Horton
Venus
. Perhaps Don Perez, in his Mephistophelean role, was going to draw a curtain and reveal some modern Helen of Troy who should stand as bonus to his first year’s wages. For was anything too fantastic to be conceived of in this bizarre retreat?

But Don Perez, it seemed, had no exhibits. He simply talked. He talked women. He kept on talking women with all the freedom and erudition of an Aretino. And presently Meredith was wondering whether there was not something in this absurd-seeming technique after all. Might it not be like the apparently crude repetitiveness of modern advertising – in other words a scientifically valid means of penetrating to and influencing the subliminal operations of the will, the very depths of the mind? Might not this sort of sustained talk, suitably compounded with old brandy, not merely seduce but permanently condition even a mature personality? For it was a sort of suggestion therapy which had the hidden ape and tiger on its side. As in the skilled indoctrination of cruelty to the abominable possibilities of which the world had recently awakened, a little would go a long way.