Murder in Peking Read online

  “It’s still incredible,” said Thurston. “You must be a very remarkable young woman. But about this underglaze red, you know, I think you are—Hang it! They’re calling us to dinner. You’re hungry, I suppose?”

  “Well, I am—rather.”

  “We must talk of this again.”

  “I’d love to,” said Allie Colchis.

  The dinner was particularly gay, largely because of the conversation of the man from Hollywood. He had emerged from an early fit of self-consciousness and answered all questions fired at him. There are always twenty questions that everybody wants to ask about the pictures. Blanche Windom wanted all the scandal and contributed some of it herself, which Lilleso amusingly refuted. It was positively not the truth, he said, that Kitty Clive could not play without a shot of ‘coke’; she simply preferred to be a little drunk before the camera.

  The questions hurtled at him thick and fast.

  “Oh, yes,” smiled the director, “that remarkable effect in the last reel of ‘Lovely Laughter.’ That was quite an accident; but of course the director got credit for a stroke of genius. By mistake, somebody had left a rubberplant in a corner of the stage; it had been left over from another scene. And, of course, the confounded cat had to be hiding behind the plant, and at the psychological moment it came out and walked across the stage.” He laughed heartily. “Everingham was furious, until somebody pointed out the significance of the thing; then he pretended he had intended it all the time.”

  Ellis Thurston, who was seated beside the Chinese girl, whose name he discovered to be Yi Li, had no further opportunity to discuss the subtleties of porcelain with an expert. The native girl—amazingly—taught languages and composition in the National University of Peking. A little haltingly, they compromised on palmistry and fortune-telling.

  The conversation became general and Pilgrim, saddled with Mrs. Milam, an amiable tourist from Covena, Kansas—a schoolmate of Kate Webber—found himself babbling of his supposed achievements. His companion, it appeared, was crazy about detective-stories, which she obtained from a rental library near the Covena General Hospital. She supposed Mr. Pilgrim was quite wealthy, considering all the books he had written? Pilgrim quickly undeceived her.

  He looked around for respite. Across the table a voice was saying: “In art, you know, a certain glow of enthusiasm may in some sort supply the want of genius.” It was Jerome Street, the painter, in earnest discourse with the horse-faced woman who wrote travel articles for a London syndicate—er—Linda Lucas, wasn’t it? Pilgrim thought the artist’s observation was very sound; he wondered if its implications were autobiographical. Did everybody talk about himself?

  The speech for which he had been waiting sounded rather too loudly in a sudden lull. “How do you think of all the things you write?” his partner was asking. “I should think your mind would be a perfect maze.”

  “Daze,” said Pilgrim. “Typographical error—ha ha! Fortunately,” he continued, with happy inspiration, “I have friends who help me out. Thurston, for instance. Mysterious women and sinister assassins are part of his daily life; they follow him around the world. He looks under his bed every night before he goes to sleep. My next story will probably be about him.”

  Everybody seemed to be listening.

  “What’s that about Thurston?” asked Tatter-shall, the explorer. “First I’ve heard of it.”

  Young Mr. Johnson, sitting beside the novelist’s pleasing niece, looked up with interest. The eyes of Allie Colchis were round as the proverbial saucers.

  “Oh, Dr. Thurston, do tell us about the mysterious women and the sinister assassins,” said the Chinese girl in coaxing tones.

  Thurston, faintly embarrassed, pretended to peer beneath the table in search of assassins.

  “I’m afraid Pilgrim is overstating the case, as usual,” he shrugged. “However, if any of the rest of you are interested in mysteries—”

  3.

  Three curious incidents had occurred during the latter stages of his journey, Thurston said; he wondered what the dickens they meant, and apparently they didn’t mean anything that was antecedently probable. There had been no difficulty whatever until he reached Japan; then he had come back early to his hotel in Tokyo, one evening, and found an intruder in his room. He was a Japanese and apparently a stupid one; he simply pretended that he had blundered into the wrong bedroom. Later, on opening his bags, Thurston had discovered that somebody had been through them.

  “Even then,” said the storyteller, “I wasn’t greatly troubled. The Japanese are quite hysterical about spies and their system of espionage is notorious. Nothing is ever taken; they simply want to know who you are and what your business is in their precious country. I forgot the incident in an hour, and never would have thought of it again if it had not been for a second and similar one.”

  He had crossed Japan without further interference, he said, loitering in Kobe for a day or two, then taken a steamer for Shanghai. The second incident had occurred on the liner.

  “This,” he smiled, “is where the ‘mysterious woman’ comes in, to make it a better story. I hadn’t seen her before; I never saw her again. As before, I entered my room suddenly, and there she was—calmly seated at my little table, smoking a cigarette, and reading my private papers, which she had taken from one of my bags. Obviously, they weren’t so very private or they wouldn’t have been left there. She was good-looking enough, I’ll say that for her; too good-looking. And her English was all right too—just the slightest accent of something else. I put her down as a Russian because I thought she looked like a Russian. Well, I was courteous—you can’t hit a beautiful woman on the jaw. And I’ll be an Eskimo if she hadn’t made a mistake, too! Wasn’t I Mr. Hartley? she asked. And wasn’t this No. 101? Oh, she was sorry!”

  Thurston leaned back in his chair and laughed.

  “She had met a Mr. Hartley on the stairs, it appeared—like the young woman in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’—and he had told her to go to his cabin and wait for him. I asked her if Mr. Hartley had invited her to open his bags and read his correspondence, and she gave me a look that withered me and sailed out of the cabin like a ship under canvas. I almost felt ashamed of myself.”

  But he had not connected the second experience with the first, he said. The Japanese incident had seemed to explain itself. The episode of the liner, however, was a neat little mystery that had puzzled him considerably. He had not reported it; he had simply kept an eye open for the woman, he said. But the run was a short one, and he had not seen her again.

  There followed, then, what might be called the ‘Episode of the Peiping Express.’

  “I was in Shanghai for about a week, looking up acquaintances, and finally I entrained for Peking. By good fortune, the wagonlits coaches were not crowded and I had a compartment to myself. You know how the infernal things are arranged: there’s a door into the corridor that you lock at night, and another door into the two-compartment washroom, which you forget to lock. That leaves you at the mercy of the fellow in the next compartment. If he happens to want to slip in and steal your box of sandwiches, there’s nothing to stop him.”

  Thurston shook his head in a gesture that reproached his own innocence and folly.

  “There was no assassin quartered next door,” he said. “In point of fact, the compartment was empty, otherwise what happened probably could not have happened. I locked my corridor door about eleven, slid under the covers of the crosswise bunk, with a light behind my head, and read a magazine till midnight. Then I snapped off my light and went to sleep. When I woke it was with the conviction that something had touched me. I didn’t move—I don’t think I did. I just opened my eyes and lay there—listening. The train was rattling along through the darkness, and there wasn’t a glimmer in the universe. My blinds, of course, were fastened down. But in a minute I knew that there was someone in the room with me.”

  Lora Pilgrim and the Chinese girl squealed with happiness and horror, and Hope Johnson smiled and n
odded.

  “I reached around as softly as I could and found the light switch; but my visitor heard me. Something big was blundering toward the door into the next compartment, and I couldn’t wait. I snapped on the light and at the same moment bounced out of bed and hit myself a crack on the head with the washroom door, which was just closing. The fellow was half-way through the washroom when I recovered and jumped after him, and he was all the way through before I really had a sight of him. Then he looked back and I saw his face. He was laughing! The other compartment was black, but my own light shone through the washroom and into the farther doorway. It wasn’t a good light, but it was good enough. All I saw was his face—a sort of white blob in the darkness. It seemed to hang there for a moment, like a balloon—gray, amorphous and, as it seemed to me, quite horrible—then the door of the other room closed softly and it was gone.”

  Thurston’s story, beginning modestly, had taken fire as he went along and at the end had become a vivid and dramatic recital. His reward, for some moments, was the satisfying one of complete silence. Then the questions fell thick and fast.

  “Oh, yes,” he responded, “I looked out into the corridor; but he must have made good time, for when I had unlocked my own door he was out of sight.”

  “And you didn’t discover who he was or what he wanted?”

  “He was a Chinese, of course—I forgot to tell you that. At least, I’m quite certain he was Chinese. The face I recall is like that of some sinister old buddha, seen by moonlight in a ruined temple—wraithlike and chalkish, against a background of darkness; rather like a stone-rubbing, if you know what I mean. Effect of the light, I suppose. As for what he was doing, I suppose he was after whatever it is I am supposed to be carrying that somebody else wants to take away from me. He’d broken the lock on one of my bags, but hadn’t actually opened it.”

  “The curious lighting might explain the smile you thought you saw,” contributed Tattershall, twisting his monocle.

  “He didn’t smile—he laughed. I heard him.”

  “Didn’t he carry a long knife, Dr. Thurston? Didn’t you see one glistening in his hand?”

  Thurston shook his head. “Sorry to spoil the story,” he smiled; “but I haven’t the faintest idea, Lora.”

  “Surely there were some traces of his presence in the next room? He must have stood there, listening, for some time—waiting for your light to go off—waiting for you to get to sleep.” The faintly impatient inquiry about traces emanated from young Mr. Johnson, who had been an absorbed listener from the beginning. His head was cocked alertly to one side—a characteristic mannerism that the company came to know in after days.

  “Possibly there were—I didn’t look for any.” Thurston was apologetic. “When I didn’t see the fellow in the corridor, I locked my own door and went off to look for the porter. I found him asleep in another empty compartment, near the end of the coach, and brought him back with me. Then I sent him into the room next door. There was nobody there now, he said; so I risked my own head for a minute, and certainly the room was empty. After that I went back to my own compartment, locked both doors, and managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep before daylight.”

  Pilgrim applauded lightly. “You told that very well, Thurston,” he said. “A very competent bit of narration. That porter—he was a Chinese, of course?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Might it not have been he who—?”

  “I thought of that, myself,” said Thurston; “but I decided against it. Of course he knew about the empty compartment next door, but so might anybody else who had wandered along the corridor. Anyway, he didn’t look like the fellow whose face I saw. The intruder was big—fattish, potato-faced, ghoulish—you know? Most unpleasant! The porter was an ordinary young Chinese.”

  Blanche Windom had been for some minutes bursting with her own question. At length she brought it out.

  “And precisely what is it, Dr. Thurston, that you are carrying around that is so valuable?”

  “Nothing, really! There’s some curious mistake about it all, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, well,” she pouted, “if you won’t tell, I suppose you won’t. But I think it’s mean of you. Surely, here among friends—”

  “On my honour,” protested Thurston, “I haven’t an idea what these people want. I’ve been over it with Pilgrim a dozen times. We can’t make head nor tail of it.”

  Tattershall was reminded of the case of a man named Hepperley who had been followed all over the world by a gang of criminals who supposed him to be somebody else.

  “They murdered him, at last,” said the explorer, brightly. “He’s been dead now for fifteen years.”

  “That’s a cheerful thought!” Kate Webber pushed back her chair as she spoke and stood up. “If you must be murdered, Dr. Thurston, could you arrange the spectacle somewhere away from these premises?” She added: “They’re serving coffee in the living-room, and afterward anybody who wants to can have a look around the temple. Or we can run up and visit Lucy Stuck, if you like; she has a temple half a mile above me.”

  As they started for the living-room, crossing a diagonal strip of courtyard into the main building, Thurston drew Pilgrim to one side.

  “By the way,” he said, “I’d go easy, if I were you, about the fellows who’ve been trailing me in Peking. No need to alarm the women, you know; they might think we were all in danger, even here.”

  The novelist agreed. “You’re probably right,” he answered. “I’m sorry if I seemed to set them on you to-night.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Thurston. “It’s the only story I have—I’d probably have told it anyway.”

  4.

  The sleeping quarters in the temple were scattered. There were in effect three dormitories, represented by separate buildings, each divided into cubicles; but additional space upon occasion was provided in the living-room itself and in the library behind it. Time was when the court had been a closed circle of shrines and sanctuaries; but several of the halls were now storerooms for old tablets and moulting idols, shut away by the priests when the monastery was dismantled for foreign tenants. The galleries that connected them with the rest were long unused and blocked with heavy timbers. In general, the court had somewhat the appearance of a college quadrangle.

  Behind the foreign community, and higher up by reason of the climbing rock, still flourished in its own walls the old life of the temple. There a band of priests still boiled their rice and burned their incense in honour of the gods; at the proper hours one heard the bong of their sonorous bells and sometimes the thumping of their painted drums. There, too, in a diminutive courtyard of its own, a garden bloomed and sacred carp swam lazily in a rank pool of lotus; and in the highest corner of the enclosure a small pavilion offered a soaring view of mountain, plain, and sky.

  It was in this pavilion that Thurston and Allie Colchis continued their discussion of Sung porcelains. To the curator of the great Bainbridge Walker Museum it appeared incredible that so lovely an apparition could be at the same time so shrewd an expert. She was a blonde of singularly luminous whiteness, so active in its quality that it seemed to proceed from her and illuminate all objects in her neighborhood. She should have been a motion-picture queen.

  “You are the most extraordinary woman I have ever met,” he told her bluntly; “and the most attractive.” A startling idea seized him, with the force of an inspiration, overwhelming all other considerations. “I should think myself very fortunate,” he said, “if I could persuade you to marry me.”

  Miss Colchis was shocked. She stammered incoherently.

  “Don’t answer at once,” continued Thurston. “We have known each other only a few hours, and I can hardly flatter myself that I have made you love me. In point of fact, I have not mentioned love. I am a man of forty past, and I’m not certain that I believe in it. Companionship is something far, far better—and what better basis for a long companionship,” he added, smiling, “than a common passion for the art
of China?”

  She took herself in hand. “I’m sorry, Dr. Thurston—if you are serious, I’m very sorry indeed.”

  “You can’t?”

  “I’m so sorry,” she repeated gently.

  “I see,” said Thurston; “and I’m sorry too. Forgive me!” He took her hand and pressed it. “I won’t trouble you in that way again.”

  A sense of intrusion touched them both at the same moment; they turned sharply from the rail. Frank Lilleso, the director from Hollywood, was peering playfully around the entrance columns. He came forward, grinning, when he saw that he was discovered.

  “Heart spoke to heart in the hush of the evening,” said the man from Hollywood sententiously. “That’s the way it looked, anyway. Sorry if I’m an ass!”

  Thurston, annoyed, made no reply; but Allie Colchis laughed in spite of her embarrassment. “You are an ass,” she retorted.

  “I said I was sorry. Shall I go away?”

  “We were just about to leave, I think,” she told him.

  He lounged against the rail beside them. “Street and I have been all over the temple with a flashlight. Even the mummy-rooms! Like going through the dark ages with a dark lantern.”

  “Good heavens! Do they have mummies here, too?”

  “I meant the idols. Funny old boys with the paint peeling off their tummies. We got some wonderful effects with the flashlight. Just one eye and a nostril in the darkness, eh? Give you the willies if you didn’t know they were just mud and fibre.”

  Thurston chuckled. He had recovered his good-humour and was listening with an amused smile. “China is a virgin field for you, I take it,” he observed.

  “Positively chaste,” agreed the director. “I’d like to shoot a picture here. Half the time I think I am. Tramping up and down these terraces I can’t get over the feeling that I’m walking round on a set.”

  “What has become of all the others?” asked Miss Colchis as he bent forward to light her cigarette.