The Play
AS Heinrich crossed to the house, Bony wondered why it was that the man he had pushed under the bed had not been missed. It was more than an hour since he had dragged the body along the passage to the bedroom, and the only acceptable explanation was that Benson and his sister, as well as the butler, assumed the absent man to be doing something or other.
The girls should by now have reached the gate and passed outside, and Shannon should have been at the gate when they arrived. The escape had not been discovered and, therefore, the prison key had not been missed. Replacing the key, however, had been too long deferred, for these people must not be alarmed before the arrival of Inspector Mulligan.
Opportunity to replace the key was withdrawn when Heinrich, having stepped into the small hall, closed the side door. The house front was now an unrelieved void against the sky, and the situation for Bony was even more complicated, as he could not keep track of the butler’s movements. No matter what his intentions, he had become an unknown quantity.
Several minutes passed, and Bony crossed to the house and tried the door, to find it locked. He had his hand still clasped about the door-handle when he caught movement outside the main entrance. Flat on the ground to obtain a sky-line, he saw the man. Heinrich had not put on a light in the main hall; he was walking swiftly across the circular space towards the outbuildings.
That Heinrich had missed the key seemed certain. Probably on finding the key not hanging from its nail he was in doubt that he had relocked the padlock fastening the bolt, or was thinking he might have dropped the key near the door. He would surely ascertain with his flashlight aimed through the barred window that the prisoners were not within.
Pistols, of course, were out of the question. They are old-fashioned when the success of an operation is dependent upon silence. Heavy-gauge fencing wire is more efficacious. As Heinrich stood before the prison door directing his light to the bolt, Bony was standing less than a dozen paces behind him.
Bony watched the butler look for the key about the ground before the door. Heinrich spent but a few seconds in this search before abruptly striding round the building to the window in the back wall. He was maintaining elevation at the window with one arm, whilst directing the beam of the flashlight inside with the other, when Bony slipped round the corner. He was still clinging to the high window, still searching the interior with his torch, when the wire hissed.
The wire neatly split the man’s scalp at the back of his large head. It was not fatal, merely producing lights and a numbness down his neck and into his shoulders. He dropped to the ground, spun round, and dived the right hand into a side pocket. Then the wire hissed for the second time and felldownwise upon his face. The torch rose high in an arc, and Heinrich sucked in air to shout. Bony, who had leaped to one side to gain the proper angle for thecoup degrace, rendered it, and Heinrich, clawing at his throat, collapsed.
Bony jumped for the torch, switched it out, jumped back to the almost invisible body and listened. He heard nothing. Running round to the front of the prison, he stood there listening and regarding the bulk of the observatory with its two illumined windows high up in the wall. There was nothing to indicate an alarm, and he went back to Heinrich, finding the man lying upon his back, and then he committed the only mistake of the night. He did not assure himself whether the man was alive or dead.
Again at the front, the observatory windows led him to see a faint line of illumination indicating a skylight in the dome, and there were the iron rungs inset into the wall which would take him up to the line of illumination.
A minute later he was mounting the iron ladder which followed the curve of the dome beside a glazed skylight. Beneath the skylight were drawn linen blinds, and he went on up, hoping to find one not fitting and finding one not completely drawn. Lying upon the ladder and gazing down upon the incomplete tableau beneath the dome, he suffered disappointment.
He could not see the stage, for some dark material completely roofed it. He could see that the magnificent curtain had been drawn to either side and that three wide and low steps led upward from the auditorium. In a corner to the left of the door stood the great organ, with Simpson seated before its banked keyboard. He was playing, his head thrown back, the music score unread. The three observable walls were masked by heavy draperies in alternating ribbons of black and purple, and Bony could see the possibility of hiding behind one of the bulging folds if he risked stealing in through the door and was unnoticed by the organist.
The question tore through his mind: What of the actors? The girls had said that all the people at the homestead were seated about the dining table, with the exception of the two men expected back from Dunkeld and whom Shannon had killed. Of those at the table, he himself had accounted for one, and the butler was also accounted for. That left two women and eleven men. The two women and ten men were seated in a row approximately midway between the door and stage, and the eleventh man was playing the organ.
There could be no actors, no entertainers. The people below could not be watching a film play in such brilliant lighting. He could not see their faces clearly, but they were sitting passively and regarding something upon the stage.
The music ended with a series of thunderous chords and Simpson left the organ to occupy the end chair. After an appreciable period the man at the other end rose to his feet, and Bony knew him to be Carl Benson.
Benson walked to the stage and disappeared beyond Bony’s view. He remained there for at least a minute-it might have been two-when he reappeared and resumed his chair. Bony counted twenty before Benson’s neighbour, one of the women, rose and stepped up to the stage, so passing from Bony’s view. She was there as long as Benson, returning to her chair with the stiff action of a sleep-walker. When her neighbour, a man, went to the stage, Bony realised the opportunity of entering the building and concealing himself behind the draperies.
On reaching the door, he could see four chair backs at Benson’s end of the line. Those four chairs were occupied, and with great care he pushed the door farther inward until he could see the vacated chair and, between the chairs, the stage. There were no actors other than a man in evening-dress standing with his back to the “audience”.
Bony drew away. The man on the stage was turning round. He came down the steps, marched slowly to his chair, his face white, his eyes wide. A pause, and his neighbour rose and walked forward, and during that short walk Bony slipped in round the edge of the door and in behind the wall drapery, coming to rest with his back against the wall, where two sections of the drapery met and provided a fold.
He could part the draperies and look through, and now he had a clearer view of the stage and the chance to study it.
The back and sides were draped with cloth of gold. Dwarfing the man standing with bent head, and seemingly about to fly out from the back wall, was a huge, black, double-headed eagle. The man was standing on the edge of a marble dais, and upon the dais was set a block of stone as green as uranium and semi-translucent. Upon the green stone rested a black casket with raised lid.
Simpson was the last to make the pilgrimage, for that is what it appeared to be, and on his return he crossed to the organ and began to play a portion of Wagner’stetralogy, theRing of theNibelung. Concluding, “DeutschlanduberAlles ” was like a fluid of sound pouring about the company, now standing, as the curtains slowly moved to contact at centre.
When the last notes swooned into silence Benson raised one hand, and the reason for the signal Bony never knew, for in that instant there broke into the silence the shrill ringing of a bell placed somewhere above the door. Benson’s face registered leaping anger, Simpson spun round on his organ seat and joined the startled company. The bell continued ringing imperatively, not to be denied. Benson glared, took in the company as though counting heads and shouted:
“Where is Heinrich? Jim, find out what your people want.”
The bell stopped as Simpson strode to the door which Bony had been careful to leave ajar. He pulled back the door and Heinrich almost collided with him as he staggered in, gazing wildly about like a man both blind and drunk, and, on seeing Benson, tottered forward.
“What is the matter with you, Heinrich?” Benson demanded harshly, a seemingly unnecessary question, as Heinrich’s head appeared to have been mauled by a chaff-cutter. The man swayed drunkenly upon his feet, tried but failed to articulate, closed his eyes as though about to faint, and then, with all credit, exerted tremendous effort to remain upright. No one offered assistance. No one brought him a chair. Not one of those astounded by the appearance of the man was more astounded than Napoleon Bonaparte. The man who had given the toast spoke:
“With your permission, Carl, I will attend to Heinrich. Odgers! Assist Heinrich to the house.”
Benson said, as though the butler’s state was of minor importance:
“Thank you, Dr. Harz. Jim, did I not say- The telephone, quickly. Ladies and gentlemen, please return to the house. Conrad, be pleased to have your aeroplane in readiness for flight.”
The sound of the butler’s dragging feet on the gravel came in through the open doorway as the last of the company passed from Bony’s range of vision. He heard a woman say:
“Why was not Bertram with us this evening?”
“He complained of a sick headache, Cora,” replied her brother. “He said he would retire and take aspirin and join us when he felt better. His absence may now be significant. We must-”
The voice faded, was cut off by a slight thud. Air pressure informed Bony that the door had closed.
He listened and could hear nothing. Without disturbing the draperies, he was unable to see the door or the organ beyond it. He was waiting tensely, holding his breath the better to hear, was concluding that he was entirely alone, when the lights went out. He relaxed, leaning back against the wall, his mind winnowing facts from impressions and classifying probabilities and possibilities.
Benson had ordered Simpson to find out what his people wanted, and it was certain that the order was connected with the ringing bell, although it had not sounded like a telephone bell. It meant that someone at the hotel was calling up the homestead and that the instrument in the house actuated the summoning bell in the observatory.
Who could be ringing from the hotel? Unless Mrs. Simpson and her daughter had returned, who else could be there? Only the old man, and he could not leave his bed. It would not be Mulligan, for even if Mulligan was thus early he would not make that mistake.
Glen Shannon! Improbable, because Shannon ought to have returned from Dunkeld, ought to have opened the double gates for Mulligan, ought to have reached the Baden Park boundary gate long before this. Perhaps the bell had not been a telephone summons, but an alarm set off by Shannon tampering with the boundary gate, trying to gain an entry in readiness for the arrival of the police cars.
Bertram! No, because Bertram was dead. Of that there was no doubt. He ought to have made equally sure that Heinrich was dead before leaving him at the back of the prison hut. He had then made a mistake which might be costly before the night was out, for doubtless they would get the butler to talk, or write if he could not speak, and tell what had befallen him.
Time! He wondered about the time, how close it was to daybreak. How long had he been here? It might be almost four o’clock, perhaps after four, and at any minute Mulligan would arrive to go through the place like a tornado and sweep everyone and everything into his net.
Before that happened Bony had yet more to do. He still had to uncover Benson’s secret and the motives for abduction and murder and the hospitality extended to these obviously German people. That upon the stage might inform him.
Within and without the observatory the silence was unbroken as he slid along the wall, parting the draperies with his hands so that they fell into place. Coming to the door, he felt for a handle or pull, found neither, discovered how closely the door fitted into the frame, decided that, like the gate, it was electrically controlled.
It was just too bad, for he would be a prisoner when Mulligan and his boys arrived. But-he was close to the hub of the mystery. An utterly fantastic idea had been simmering in his mind for an hour, but were it proved reality, for him fame would be undying.
He located the box of matches in one of his pockets, felt within the box, and found half a dozen matches and one fairly long cigarette end, of which he had no memory. He blamed himself for not having brought the butler’s flashlight, despite the fact that he could not have foreseen how the situation would develop.
Aided by the flame of a match, he crossed the auditorium and was near the stage curtain when the match expired. With his hands he found the curtain, the cool surface of satin caressing his fingers. He found the parting, then the steps with a foot, passed up the steps, and permitted the curtains to fall back into place. Another match he struck and held high when the tiny flame had taken steady hold upon the splinter of wood.
Somewhere an engine was pumping water. The sound was monotonous, and he wished it would stop. It did not permit him to hear with the keenness demanded by the situation, for he must know instantly if the door opened and anyone entered the building. When the noise of a motor-engine came to him he realised that the pumping was that of his heart.
Before him towered the giant two-headed eagle, and between it and himself was the casket set upon the block of green stone. The match went out as he placed one naked foot upon the dais.
Striking another match, he turned to leave the stage, hesitated, and was for ever grateful that he did not make the second mistake in this one night. In the ensuing darkness he felt with a foot for the dais, stepped upon it, and slid forward, first one foot and then the other, until he encountered the uranium-green stone.
Owing to the power of the fantastic idea which had been with him for more than an hour, he mussed the striking of the next two matches and was left with only one.
Careful-careful, now. Hold the box and the match away from you, or the rain will put it out. Rain! It slidticklingly down his face and gathered at the point of his chin, from which it dripped. Somewhere out in the warm and lovely night powerful aero engines puttered and hesitated, persisted and broke into rhythm.
He was successful with the match. Glass gleamed beneath the light in his shaking hand. He stooped over the casket, brought his eyes down to the glass, and the match down, too. Jewels winked with eyes of ice-blue and ruby-red. Beneath the glass was a man in uniform. The waxen face was heavy-featured, black-moustached. The vision faded, vanished.
The darkness was impenetrable, and yet the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte was illumined with other visions. He gazed upon newspapers in every corner of the world and saw his name. He stood or sat with people before radios all over the world and with them heard his name. All the world knew of him, the man who solved the world’s greatest mystery.
Even in that moment the training of the half-aborigine did not falter. The spent match, like the others, and the now empty box were put safely into a pocket, and like aC?sar setting forth on his triumph, he stepped from the stage and walked, without colliding with a chair, to the door.
He must show Mulligan, and not Mulligan alone, but Mulligan in company with witnesses, what he had discovered, why the two girls had been abducted and enslaved, why Edward O’Brien had been murdered and his body incinerated, why that fence had been built and to guard what.
But the door was shut and he was unable to open it. He must get out. This very instant. He must contact Mulligan before anything could happen to cheat him of eternal fame.
As he stood at the door, clawing at it to get it open, the lights flashed on.