The King is Dead (4 page)

‘Now tell me she's a raving beauty, and I'll take on Blue Shirt with one hand behind my back!'

‘A knockout, the General said. He had to visit the island several times.'

Ellery muttered, ‘And the Court Jester? Of course, there's a Court Jester.'

‘Max is his name,' nodded the Inspector. ‘An ex-wrestler, big as a house. Follows King around, works him out, bodyguards him, keeps him laughing. Everything but the cap and bells. Shut up, will you? I'm an old man.'

And the Inspector shut the other eye, decisively.

Abel Bendigo joined them at lunch. He seemed less preoccupied. The two middle-aged secretaries did not appear.

The stewards had set the table for only two, and Ellery remarked that in an organization as perfectly oiled as this it seemed a mighty slip — or was one of them to be starved?

‘I never eat lunch,' said the Prime Minister with a smile. ‘Interferes with my afternoon work. A glass of buttermilk sometimes, or yoghurt. But don't let that stop you gentlemen. The chef was detached from my brother's Residence staff especially for the occasion.'

The lunch was superb, and the Inspector tackled it with gusto. Ellery ate absently.

‘Are your brothers as Spartan as you are, Mr. Bendigo?' asked the Inspector. ‘My, this is delicious.'

‘Very nearly. King has simple tastes in food, as I have, and Judah —' Abel Bendigo stopped smiling — ‘Judah hardly eats at all.'

‘Judah?' said Ellery, looking up.

‘Another brother, Mr. Queen. Will you have some brandy? I'm told this is exceptional, though I don't drink myself.'

‘Judah,' said Ellery. ‘And Abel. The “King” doesn't seem to follow, Mr. Bendigo. Or was he a king in Israel from the womb?'

‘I think,' said Bendigo, ‘he was.' And he looked up. The Queens looked up, too. Blue Shirt and Brown Shirt loomed there.

‘What now?' asked the Inspector humorously. ‘The execution?' Nevertheless he quickly swallowed the last of his brandy.

Bendigo said slowly, ‘We've come about halfway, gentlemen. From here until we land these two men will remain with you. I'm sure you'll understand, if not appreciate, the necessity to stick to rules. I regret it, but I must ask you to make no attempt to get your bearings. These men are under the strictest orders to prevent it.' He got up suddenly. ‘You'll see me on the island.' Before either could open his mouth the Prime Minister had retired to his compartment again.

The twins did not move.

‘Halfway,' muttered the Inspector. ‘That means about eight hours out. At, say, three hundred m.p.h., the island's around twenty-four hundred miles from New York. Or is it?'

‘Or is it?' said Ellery, looking up at Brown Shirt.

Brown Shirt said nothing.

‘Because, of course, we can be flying around in circles … Funny way Bendigo put that parting crack of his, Dad. Why
you'll see me on the island
instead of the more natural
I'll see you on the island?'

Hours later, in the middle of a nap, Ellery was answered.

He awoke at a touch to find himself in total darkness, and when he heard his father's outraged exclamation he knew that they had both been blindfolded.

3

When the dark cloths were removed, the son and the father found themselves standing with Brown Shirt and Blue Shirt beside the big ship, on a great airfield.

The mid-afternoon sun rode an intense sky, and they blinked in the backwash of glare.

Abel Bendigo was close by, talking to an undersized man. Behind the undersized man stood a squad of tall soldiers, at attention. The undersized man had prim shoulders and large hips and he was dressed in a beautiful black and gold military uniform. The black cap he wore sported a linked-globe-and-crown insignia above the visor and the legend PRPD. This officer, who was smoking a brown cigarette, turned from time to time to stare at the Queens with the friendliness of a fish. Once he shook his head as if it were all too much for him to bear. However, he bore it — whatever it was — with resignation. The Prime Minister talked on.

They faced a camouflaged administration building. Men in black and gold suits moved above in the glassed circle of the control tower. Ground crews swarmed about a dozen large hangarlike structures, also camouflaged. Planes flitted about, field ambulances raced, commissary trucks trundled; all were painted black and gold. A very large cargo ship was just taking the air.

A high wall of vegetation surrounded the field, screening off the rest of the island. The vegetation seemed semitropical and much of it had the underwater look of Caribbean flora. And Ellery had never seen a sky like this in the North Temperate Zone. They were in southern waters.

He had the queerest feeling that they were also in a foreign land. Everyone about him looked American and the airfield buildings betrayed a functional vigour inseparable from advanced American design — Frank Lloyd Wrightism at its angriest. It was the air that was alien, a steel atmosphere of discipline, of trained oneness, that was foreign to the American scene.

And then there was the flag, flapping from a mast above the control tower. It was like no flag Ellery had ever seen, a pair of linked globes in map colours surmounted by a crown of gold, and all on a black field. The flag made him uncomfortable and he looked away. His glance touched his father's; it had just come from the flagpole, too.

They said nothing to each other because the Shirts were so attentively at their elbows, and because there was really nothing to communicate but questions and doubts which neither could satisfy.

The Prime Minister finished at last, and the hippy little man in the splendid uniform waved the squad of soldiers away. They wheeled and marched to the administration building and disappeared. Bendigo walked over with his companion. The Shirts, Ellery noted, stiffened and saluted. But it was not Abel Bendigo they saluted; it was the hippy little man.

‘Sorry to have kept you waiting,' Bendigo said, but he did not explain why. ‘This is the head of our Public Relations and Personnel Department, Colonel Spring. You'll probably be seeing something of each other.'

The Queens said a word or two.

‘Anything I can do, gentlemen,' said Colonel Spring, offering a limp white hand. His eyes remained fishy. His whole face was marine — greenish white and without plasticity, like the face of a drowned man.

‘Isn't the question rather, Colonel,' Ellery asked ‘anything
we
can do?'

The underwater eyes regarded him.

‘I mean, your P RP D seems to lean heavily to the military side. What are our restrictions?'

‘Restrictions?' murmured Colonel Spring.

‘Well, you see, Colonel,' remarked Inspector Queen, ‘there's never any telling where a thing like this can lead. How free are we to come and go?'

‘Anywhere.' The white hand fluttered. ‘Within reason.'

‘There are certain installations,' said Abel Bendigo, ‘which are out of bounds, gentlemen. If you're stopped anywhere, you'll understand why.'

‘And you'll be stopped,' said the Colonel with a smile. ‘You're going directly to the Home Office, Mr. Abel?'

‘Yes. Excuse us, Colonel.'

The little officer rather deliberately ground the butt of his
cigarillo
under his boot heel. Then he smiled again, touched his visor with his delicate fingers, and turned curtly away.

The Shirts instantly followed.

‘Valuable man,' said the Prime Minister. ‘Gentlemen?'

The Queens turned. A black limousine had come up on silent treads and a footman in livery was stiffly holding the door open. To the front door was attached a gold medallion, showing two linked globes surmounted by a heavy crown.

Like a coat of arms.

The airport was on high ground, and when the car drove through the screen of vegetation the Queens had a panoramic view of half the island.

They realized at once why this island had been selected as the site of a government-in-hiding. It was shaped like a bowl with a mound in the centre. The shoreline, which was the edge of the bowl, was composed of steep and heavily wooded cliffs, so that from the sea no evidence of human occupancy or construction in the interior would be visible. The mound in the middle of the bowl, where the airfields lay, was at approximately the same elevation as the wooded cliffs at the shoreline. Between the central airfields and the cliffs on the rim, the ground sloped sharply to a valley. It was in this valley, invisible from the sea, that all the building had been done.

The sight was startling. It was a large island, the valley was great, and as far as the eye could see the valley was packed with buildings. Most of them seemed industrial plants, vast smokeless factories covering many acres; but there were office buildings, too, and to the lower slopes of the hillsides clung colonies of small homes and barracklike structures which, Abel Bendigo explained, housed the workers. The small homes were occupied by minor executives. There was also, he said, a development of more spacious private dwellings on another part of the island; these were for the use of the top executives and the scientific staffs and their families.

‘Families?' exclaimed the Inspector. ‘You mean you've got housewives and kids here, too?'

‘Of course,' replied the Prime Minister, smiling. ‘We provide a normal, natural environment for our employees. We have schools, hospitals, recreation halls, athletic fields — everything you'd find in a model community in the States, although on a rather crowded scale. Space is our most serious problem.'

Ellery thought preposterously:
Lebensraum
.

‘But food, clothing, comic books,' said Inspector Queen feebly. ‘Don't tell me you produce all that!'

‘No, though if we had the room we certainly would. Everything is brought in by our cargo fleets, chiefly airborne.'

‘You find planes more practicable than ships?' asked Ellery.

‘Well, we have a problem with our harbour facilities. We prefer to keep our shoreline as natural-looking as possible —'

‘There's the harbour now, Ellery!' said the Inspector.

‘I'm sorry,' said Bendigo, suddenly austere. He leaned forward to say something to the chauffeur in a low tone. The car, which was speeding along inside the rim of woods, immediately turned off into a side road and plunged down to the valley again. But Ellery had snatched a glimpse, through a break in the vegetation, of a horseshoe-shaped bay very nearly landlocked, across the narrow neck of which rode a warship.

The chauffeur had gone slightly pale. He and the footman sat rigidly.

‘We didn't really see anything, Mr. Bendigo,' said Ellery. ‘Just a heavy cruiser. One of your naval vessels?'

‘My brother's yacht
Bendigo
,' murmured the Prime Minister. Inspector Queen was staring down into the valley with glittering eyes. ‘Yacht my sacro-iliac,' he snapped. ‘These food and other supplies, Mr. Bendigo. Do you give the stuff away or how do you handle it? What do you pay your people off in?'

‘Our banks issue scrip, Inspector, accepted by Company stores as well as by individuals all over the island.'

‘And when a man wants to quit, or is fired, does he take his Bendigo scrip with him?' asked Ellery.

‘We have very few resignations, Mr. Queen,' said the Prime Minister. ‘Of course, if an employee should be discharged, his account would be settled in the currency of the country of his origin.'

‘I don't suppose your people find unions necessary?'

‘Why, we have unions, Mr. Queen. All sorts of unions.'

‘No strikes, however.'

‘Strikes?' Bendigo was surprised. ‘Why should our employees strike? They're highly paid, well housed, all their creature comforts provided, their children scientifically cared for —'

‘Say.' Inspector Queen turned from the window as if the thought had just struck him. ‘Where do all your working people come from, Mr. Bendigo?'

‘We have employment offices everywhere.'

‘And recruiting offices?' murmured Ellery.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Your soldiers, Mr. Bendigo. They are soldiers, aren't they?'

‘Oh, no. The uniforms are for convenience only. Our security people are not —' Abel Bendigo leaned forward, pointing. ‘There's the Home Office.'

He was smiling again, and Ellery knew they would get no more information.

The Home Office looked like a rimless carriage wheel thrown carelessly into a bush. Trees and shrubbery crowded it and its roofs were thickly planted. From the air it was probably invisible.

Eight long wings radiated like spokes from a common centre. The spokes, Abel Bendigo explained, housed the general offices, the hub the executive offices. The hub, four storeys high, stood one storey higher than the spokes, so that the domed top storey of the central building predominated.

Not far away, Ellery noticed some mottled towers and pylons and the glitter of glass rising from the heart of a wood. The few elements of the structure that could be seen extended over a wide area, and he asked what it was.

‘The Residence,' replied the Prime Minister. ‘But I'm afraid we'll have to hurry, gentlemen. We're far later than I'd intended.'

They followed him, alert to everything.

They entered the Home Office at the juncture of two of the spokes, through a surprisingly small door, and found themselves in a circular lobby of black marble. Corridors radiated from the perimeter in every direction. An armed guard stood at the entrance to each corridor. They could see office doors, endless lines of them, each exactly like the next.

In the centre of the lobby rose a circular column of extraordinary thickness. A door was set into it at floor level, and Ellery guessed that it was an elevator shaft. Before the door was a metal booth, behind which stood three men in uniform. The collars of their tunics bore the gold initials PRPD.