Full Moon (3 page)

“When?”

“To-night. I will have her house surrounded in case of accident. But mind,
no accidents! I want facts, not fireworks. I don’t want her arrested. I want
her to bolt. If there’s a trap, walk straight into it and use your wits. I’ve
a suspicion I know why Wu Tu wants you, and if I’m right you’re in no
immediate danger. You may be kidnaped. If not, make for Gaglajung by train
to-morrow morning. I’ll wire Mount Abu and have a proper bandobast all ready
waiting for you at Abu Road Station. Take your time about reaching
Gaglajung—camp close to villages each night and encourage
gossip—learn all you can before you get there.”

Blair scowled. “I would rather go to hell than force myself on
Henrietta.”

“Yes, hell may have its compensations. You’ll be gazetted as on special
leave, from tomorrow morning. Use the new code for telegrams. Keep me
posted.”

“Do I work alone, sir?”

“Howland of the C.I.D. will keep in close touch with you with two or three
of his men, so look out for signals. I will have Y-Six and Y-Eighty-one on
your heels; they won’t let you out of sight for a minute, once you reach
Gaglajung. And you’re to work with Chetusingh.”

“I’d rather pick my own man.”

“What’s wrong with Chetusingh? You trained him. He knows more about this
than you do.”

“That’s the trouble. He’s a bit inclined to rush his fences. He and I work
better when he knows less and listens to me.”

“He has orders to work with you, but to take his own line if he thinks
that necessary. Pick him up at the Afghan
dera
; he’ll go with you
to-night. Better not go in uniform. Chetusingh is playing Pathan. You’d
better do the same. Wu Tu will see through it at once, but it will make you
less noticeable getting into the house, and once you’re in it won’t matter.
Here are two special passes; I’ve a very special reason for your using them.
They’re bait for Zaman Ali. Don’t get killed now. You’re a valuable man. And
don’t forget: Facts not fireworks! Colonel—let’s see, no, they’d just
gazetted him a brigadier— Brigadier-General David Frensham alive or
dead! What happened to him—how? When? where? Hold your tongue, learn
all you can, and keep me posted. Good night, Blair my boy, and good
luck.”

Blair Warrender shook hands and walked out, cursing his luck in silence.
It was bad enough that the commissioner almost never told more than half what
he knew; one had to work more or less in the dark and learn to like it. But
to have to thrust himself on Henrietta Frensham and invade her
privacy—extract her secrets—spy on her—

“Good God! I supposed I’d never see her again. Well, orders are orders.
Here goes.”

He sent to his quarters, tubbed, changed and went to the Byculla Club,
where he dined with a bishop.

Though the end of my fate be tears, saith the widow, shall I
take the end for the beginning? Short though this life be, I will laugh while
I may, and not know sorrow only.

—From the Ninth (unfinished) Book of Noor Ali.

THE bishop did his best to understand Blair Warrender. They
sprawled in deep chairs in the starlight. The bishop wiped sweat from his
face. Warrender ordered a drink from a soft-footed servant in ghost-white and
did his utmost to explain himself.

“I’m a policeman. I’m not in politics. It’s my job to try to understand
what’s going on. I’m not permitted prejudices.”

“All the same, you have them,” said the bishop. “Mind you, we’re not
discussing religion, or even conventions, least of all politics. But surely
you are prejudiced against the type of woman represented by this Wu Tu?”

“There is no worse public danger.”

Warrender signed the chit for the drink with his left hand; his right was
feeling in his pocket. He pulled out a sketch done in crayon.

“The woman you have in mind,” he said, “looks something like this. Her
place is a sort of vacation resort, a pleasure palace, if you wish to call it
that, where she herself presides. Her real purpose is political intrigue,
and, through it, power for herself. There was rather a long pause while the
bishop examined the sketch. “If she’s like that,” he said, “one can imagine
her hold over Chetusingh. But that only makes it more difficult. I am asking
,you to save him from her. What is that woman—Chinese?”

“No. The sketch exaggerates the Chinese touch, although it’s there. She is
Portuguese; Chinese-Sikh-French—born in Hongkong. She’s a British
subject. Anything else you’d care to know about her? I could tell you her
bank balance and the names of her correspondents in Berlin, New York, Paris.
Or about the young Chinese widows who help her to entertain.”

The bishop stirred uneasily. “These racial mixtures almost baffle one’s
hope for humanity! If she looks like that she should be at Hollywood playing
vampire parts. Beautiful, yes. But that’s the pity of it. She suggests to me
an octopus. She reached out one subtly mysterious tentacle and drew
Chetusingh into her maw. May God have mercy on him.”

“What do you propose?” asked Warrender. “There’s no law I know of against
a woman being beautiful and witty.” The bishop handed the sketch back. “Who
drew that?”

“I did.”

“Possibly you, too, admire her too much. You didn’t do that from memory.
She must have posed to you for it. Well, you have talent.”

“In my profession,” said Warrender, “all a fellow’s talents come in
usefully. Besides, there’s the inevitable retirement to bear in mind. When my
day comes to draw a pension I mean to take up painting—and live. I’d
rather be a duffer at that than die of boredom. However, what do you
suggest?” He returned the sketch to his pocket.

“Less reprehensible people than Wu Tu are in prison,” the bishop answered
at last. “Such women break laws when it suits them. By breaking down
character they induce other people to break laws. Like you, I am not in
politics. But she is. It happens I know that. I have been told so by
perplexed Indian Christians, who come to me for advice on their personal
problems. To be in her kind of politics, but out of prison, suggests to
me— I can only say tolerance on the part of the police. That may be
convenient for the moment. It probably is. But—”

There was another long pause. The anger in Blair’s eyes became less
latent, but he sat still. The bishop again mopped the sweat from his face;
then he drew out a cigar case, opened it, snapped it shut and returned it to
his pocket without taking a cigar. “You are Chetusingh’s friend,” he said,
“and he yours. I know you are his hero. He has admitted that to me many times
in my house, before this Jezebel got hold of him. You have your public duty
to perform, of course. But you are one of the few men in India to whom a wide
discretion in the course of duty is absolutely necessary and is therefore
permitted.

“It would be useless to deny that; I know it is true. What higher duty
have you than you owe to a friend and comrade of an alien race, who has
adopted our religion, in the teeth of a malignant opposition from his family
and from his whole clan, simply because he admired our principles and our
adherence to them? You can save Chetusingh from that woman by using your
authority against her. Do it. Warrender, in the name of common decency, if
for no other reason.”

“Have you spoken with Chetusingh?” Blair asked him.

“Yes. But I haven’t his confidence since he fell into that woman’s
clutches. He used to ask my advice. Now, on the rare occasions when I see
him, he is either flippant or silent and, I think, resentful.”

“Rajput pride is touchy stuff,” said Blair. “You may have flicked him on
the raw.” He passed his cigarette case to the bishop and their eyes met
straight for a moment. His were baffling, although the bishop’s were as easy
to understand as plain print: he was hiding nothing. “I will do what I can,”
he said after a moment, and there was nothing obscure about that remark. It
was a full stop.

“Bless you,” said the bishop. He lighted the cigarette. The flame of the
match revealed embarrassment as he snatched at thought after thought for a
change of subject. “By the way,” he asked off-handedly, “any news about
Brigadier-General Frensham?”

“No.”

“They tell me it’s in headlines in the London papers.”

“Yes.”

“Three months missing, and no trace—no clues—is it another of
these insoluble mysteries?”

“Perhaps,” said Blair. “Good night, sir.”

“Good night. You forgive my confidences?”

“Nothing to, forgive. I won’t discuss them.”

“Sphinx! Well—I enjoyed the dinner immensely. Good night.”

Blair walked to police headquarters, answering the salutes of constables
on duty with a nod and a stare that seemed to act like a tonic. They
stiffened. Responsibility in some way sat more valiantly on their shoulders
for having seen him. At headquarters. Indian subordinates stirred as a
tuning-fork answers a master-tone. He spoke to one dark-eyed veteran, who
stood at ease with the familiarity of friendship, and who nodded—deep
unto deep.

“All has been ready,” the Indian answered, “since the chief telephoned at
eight-thirty.” Later, at nearly eleven o’clock, a Pathan walked out,
muttering, through the side-street entrance to the detention cells. It was an
unusual hour, but he could hardly be anything else than a released, prisoner.
He swaggered with the sulky-jaunty truculence, of a Pathan recovering lost
dignity, but he looked rather lost and feckless without a weapon. He thrust
his way between the passers-by, and took the street past the King Edward
Memorial Hospital toward the
dera
of the Kabuli Afghans, where the
horse-traders stay who come down from the North to sell fat-rumped ponies to
inexperienced British subalterns, and to spread through teeming slums and
credulous bazaars amazing tales of Northern Asia in arms. As he stood for a
moment, etched and shadowed by the naked electric light outside the
dera
entrance, a bearded Afghan, on his way out of the
dera
,
paused and stared.

“By God, what wonders next?” the Afghan exclaimed. “O Ismail, what
knife-feud brought thee hither? It was in Poona I last saw thee. Was the
Poona hasheesh too strong? Or did the Sellers of Delights neglect thee when
they had thy money? What now?”

“Get thee back to Kabul, to thy wife!” Ismail retorted. He pushed past the
Afghan, swaggering through into the shadowy saddle- and spice-smell of the
dera
, vanishing along a corridor, under a stairway. A key that creaked
noisily turned behind him. Then the Afghan followed and stood listening, but
all he heard was the thump of a mattress or something like it against the
door on the inside. He could see nothing through the keyhole, so he went away
about. h!s business with the slippered, awkward gait of a middle-aged man who
has spent two thirds of his life on horse- or camel-back.

Near midnight, he whom the Afghan had addressed as Ismail walked out of
the
dera
with another Pathan and the two walked solemnly along the
empty streets until they reached the dismal quarter where the mill-hands
sleep like corpses in the gutter; thence, on through even narrower, shuttered
and winding alley-ways toward a more prosperous section, where a Hindu temple
loomed, its shadow lit by little lamps that looked choked by the hot
dark.

Near there a police patrol stopped them: it was only three days since some
Moslems had butchered a sacred cow in that temple entrance, and there are
more ways than that of defiling Hindu temple steps. But both men shelved
passes, and the signature on them worked like magic. The police did not even
wait to watch which way they went.

They took a rather wider street, where tired trees loomed against the
stars. Near the end of the street they made peculiar signals on the door of a
balconied house. There were beggars lurking in the shadows, as always near
such houses: some of them stirred like graveyard ghouls, observed for a
moment and then dozed again: they wasted no importunity on Pathan
night-errants. But there was one near the door, all eyes, amid smelly rags,
in shadow. He might be a Bauriah—one of the criminal tribe that shams
asceticism to impose on poetry. He spoke:

“Protectors of the poor, nine who have entered this house gave me nothing.
The Allknowing seeth. The Allseeing knoweth. Alms! Alms!”

“Allah is all around thee! Allah protect thee! Await His pleasure!”
answered the Pathan who had been addressed as Ismail. He gave him
nothing.

The heavy door opened inward cautiously. The two passed in, in silence,
into darkness, standing still until the outer door was shut and bolted,at
their backs. Then an inner door opened suddenly into an electric lighted
hall, where a number of low-caste, well-dressed servants lurked around a
heavy wooden stairway, and on the tiles, beside a heavy mat, was a row of
slippers, some new, some old. but none of Bombay craftsmanship. Both Pathans
kicked off their footgear: he knew as Ismail tripped on the mat, uncovering a
pair of imported brown-and-white shoes that looked incongruous in that place,
but he appeared not to notice them.

“See that I get my own again,” he ordered, scowling so fiercely that the
custodian of slippers cringed. Then he led up the dark teak stairway without
ceremony. But a drumstick, pulled by a cord from below, thumped on a gong up
above to announce him, and a door at the stair-head opened before he reached
it.

A young Chinese girl, as insolent as fate, in a jacket and trousers of
blue-and-amber flowered silk, confronted him beneath a gilded dragon. Behind
her, down a long corridor, there was mandarin-palace
loot—jade—crystal —lacquer—gossamer
curtains—rose-hued light from hidden electric bulbs—a smell of
sandalwood— a haze of incense—weird, dim music. She herself
looked like an antique, sloe-eyed, with a black fringe straight across her
forehead. She was smoking a cigarette in a long jade tube. Her intensely
intelligent eyes —no other gesture—observant, indifferent,
self-assured— directed both men toward a doorway twenty steps along the
corridor on the left hand. She closed the stair-head door behind them and
followed, blowing smoke-rings.