The Ape Who Guards the Balance (3 page)

“How nice,” I said. “That explains the pretty color in your cheeks. Fresh air and exercise! There is nothing like it.”

Ramses turned on his heel and stalked out of the room, followed by David.

By the time we assembled for dinner, the two of them had made it up. Nefret was especially sweet to Ramses, as she always was after one of their arguments. Ramses was especially silent, as he seldom was. He left it to me to describe the demonstration, which I did with my customary vivacity and little touches of humor. However, I was not allowed to finish, for Emerson does not always appreciate my little touches of humor.

“Most undignified and vulgar,” he grumbled. “Striking constables on the head with placards, pushing rudely into a man’s house! Romer is an unmitigated ass, but I cannot believe that such behavior serves your cause, Amelia. Tactful persuasion is more effective.”

“You are a fine one to talk of tact, Emerson,” I replied indignantly. “Who was it who tactlessly knocked down two constables last spring? Who was it whose tactless remarks to the Director of Antiquities led to our being refused permission to search for new tombs in the Valley of the Kings? Who was it—”

Emerson’s blue eyes had narrowed into slits, and his cheeks were becomingly flushed. He drew a deep breath. Before he could employ it in speech, Gargery, Nefret and David all spoke at once.

“More mint jelly, sir?”

“How is the
History
coming along, Professor?”

Nefret addressed her question to me instead of to Emerson. “When are Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Walter and little Amelia expected? Tomorrow or the next day?”

Emerson subsided with a grunt, and I replied sedately, “The following day, Nefret. But you all must remember not to call her ‘little Amelia.’ ”

Ramses scarcely ever smiled, but his expression softened a trifle. He was very fond of his young cousin. “It will be difficult. She is a dear little thing, and a diminutive suits her.”

“She claims that two Amelias in the family make for confusion,” I explained. “I suspect, however, that what puts her off is the fact that your father is inclined to call me Amelia only when he is vexed with me. He generally uses my maiden name as a term of commendation and—er—affection. Now, Emerson, don’t glare at me, you know it is true; I have seen the poor child start convulsively when you bellow ‘Curse it, Amelia!’ in that tone of voice.”

Again Nefret intervened to prevent a profane utterance from Emerson. “Is it settled then that she is coming out to Egypt with us this year?”

“She has won her parents over, with David’s help. Evelyn said his gentle persuasion was irresistible.”

David flushed slightly and bent his head.

“She is the only one of their children who is interested in Egyptology,” I went on. “It would be a pity if she were prevented from developing that interest only because she is female.”

“Ah, so that is how you got round them,” Ramses said, glancing from me to his silent friend. “Aunt Evelyn would find that argument hard to resist. But Melia—Lia—is very young.”

“She is only two years younger than you, Ramses, and you have been going out to Egypt since you were seven.”

In my enjoyment of the pleasures of familial intercourse I had forgotten my odd foreboding. Yet, had I but known, Nemesis was even then almost upon us. In fact, he was at that very moment in the act of ringing the bell.

We were about to rise from table when Gargery entered the dining room. His look of frozen disapproval warned me, even before he spoke, that he was displeased about something.

“There is someone from the police to see you, Mrs. Emerson. I informed him you were not receiving callers, but he insisted.”

“Mrs. Emerson?” my husband repeated. “Not me?”

“No, sir. Mrs. Emerson and Mr. Ramses were the ones he asked for.”

“Curse it!” Emerson jumped up. “It must have something to do with your demonstration this afternoon. Ramses, I told you to restrain her!”

“I assure you, Father, nothing untoward occurred,” Ramses replied. “Where is the gentleman, Gargery?”

“In the library, sir. That is where you generally receive policemen, I believe.”

Emerson led the way and the rest of us followed.

The man who awaited us was no uniformed constable but a tall, stout individual wearing evening dress. Emerson came to a sudden stop. “Good Gad!” he exclaimed. “It is worse than I thought. What have you done, Amelia, to warrant a visit from the assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard?”

It was indeed Sir Reginald Arbuthnot, with whom we were well acquainted socially as well as professionally. He hastened to reassure my agitated spouse. “It is Mrs. Emerson’s evidence that is wanted, and that of your son, Professor. The matter is of some urgency, or I would not have disturbed you at this hour.”

“Hmph,” said Emerson. “It had damned well better be urgent, Arbuthnot. Nothing less than cold-blooded murder would excuse—”

“Now, Emerson, you are being rude,” I said. “It was good of Sir Reginald to come round himself instead of summoning us to his office. You ought to have deduced from his attire that he was called away from a dinner party or evening social event, which would not have eventuated had not the situation been serious. We were about to have coffee, Sir Reginald; take a chair, if you please, and join us?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Emerson, but I am rather pressed for time. If you could tell me—”

“Nothing is to be gained by haste, Sir Reginald. I expect the thieves have already got clean away with their loot. I trust Mr. Romer was not injured?”

Taking advantage of the thunderstruck silence that followed, I pressed the bell. “But I believe,” I continued, as Gargery entered with the coffee tray, “that you would do better to take a glass of brandy, Sir Reginald. Exhale, I beg. Your face has turned quite an alarming color.”

His breath came out in a miniature explosion. “How?” he gasped. “How did you—”

“I recognized the leader of the gang this afternoon—or thought I did. I concluded I must have been mistaken, since I had no reason to believe the individual in question was in England. However, your presence here suggests that a crime has taken place, and that that crime is connected with the demonstration this afternoon, since it was Ramses and I whom you wanted to interview. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to reach the only possible conclusion.”

“Ah,” said Sir Reginald. “The only possible . . . I think, Mrs. Emerson, that I will take advantage of your kind suggestion. Brandy. Please!”

Emerson, whose eyes had been the widest of all, turned and walked with slow, deliberate strides to the sideboard. Removing the stopper from the decanter, he splashed brandy generously into a glass. Then he drank it.

“Our guest, Emerson,” I reminded him.

“What? Oh. Yes.”

Sir Reginald having been supplied, Emerson poured another brandy for himself and retreated to the sofa, where he sat down next to Nefret and stared at me. Ramses, his countenance as blank as ever I had seen it, politely carried coffee to the others. Then he sat down and stared at me.

They were all staring at me. It was very gratifying. Sir Reginald, having imbibed a sufficient quantity of brandy, cleared his throat.

“Mrs. Emerson, I came to inform you of a startling piece of news which reached me scarcely an hour ago, and you appear to know all about it. May I ask how you knew?”

“I hope you don’t suspect
me
of being a member of the gang,” I said, laughing.

“Oh—well—no, certainly not. Then how—”

It is better not to commit oneself before one knows all the facts. I said, “I will be happy to explain, Sir Reginald. But first you had better tell the others precisely what happened this afternoon.”

Mr. Romer’s butler was the key witness, from whom the police had heard the story. He had not opened the door; in fact, his master had ordered him to lock it. He did not know how the lock had been forced. Caught off guard, he was overpowered by two heavy-set muscular women who had borne him to the ground and bound him hand and foot with ropes they took from their reticules. The other invaders had instantly fanned out into the back regions of the house. Not a word had been spoken; the procedure had been planned with the precision of a military operation.

Lying helpless on the floor of the hall, he had seen a man wearing a long cloak and slouch hat bound up the stairs. Shortly thereafter another individual, whom he took to be his master, had descended the stairs and gone to the front door. Opening it, he had addressed those without in the words I have reported. It had been his master’s look, his master’s voice, his master’s very garments, but instead of coming to the aid of his unfortunate servant, the soidisant Mr. Romer had gone back up the stairs.

For the next half hour, only voices and sounds of brisk activity told him of the whereabouts of the invaders. When they reappeared they were carrying luggage of all varieties, including a huge traveling trunk. The bearers were persons dressed in the livery of Mr. Romer’s footmen, but their faces were not the ones of the footmen he knew. They began carrying the baggage out. They were followed by the man who looked like his master, now wearing Mr. Romer’s favorite fur-trimmed overcoat. The woman with him was one of the intruders; she was dressed like a lady, in a long mantle and large flowered hat. Arm in arm they left the house, and the door closed behind them.

It took the poor man over an hour to free himself. Creeping timidly and stiffly from room to room, he found the other servants locked in the cellar. The footmen were attired only in their undergarments. Mr. Romer, bound to a chair in his library, was in the same embarrassing state of undress. The cabinets which had contained his lordship’s superb collection of Egyptian antiquities were empty.

“In short,” Sir Reginald concluded, “the individuals who had entered the house assumed the livery of the footmen and carried the trunks, which contained Mr. Romer’s collection, to a waiting carriage. The constable at the gate suspected nothing. He actually helped the driver load the luggage into the carriage. As for the individual whom the butler took to be his master—”

“He was the man in the slouch hat and the cape,” I said. “I blame myself, Sir Reginald, for not informing Scotland Yard at once. However, I hope you will do me the justice to admit that none of your subordinates would have believed me.”

“Very possibly not. Am I to take it, Mrs. Emerson, that you recognized this person, at a distance, and despite a disguise that deceived his lordship’s own butler?”

“Not to say recognized,” I replied. “The modern fashion of beards and mustaches affected by so many gentlemen makes an impostor’s task laughably easy. It was rather an indefinable sense of familiarity in his posture, his gestures—the same sense of familiarity that had struck me when I saw the individual in the velvet cloak and slouch hat. He is a master of disguise, a mimic of exceptional ability—”

“Amelia,” said Emerson, breathing heavily through his nose, “are you telling us that this man was—”

“The Master Criminal,” I said. “Who else?”

Our first encounters with this remarkable individual had occurred when we were working in the ancient cemeteries near Cairo. Tomb robbing and the sale of illegal antiquities are of long standing in Egypt; the former profession has been practiced since pharaonic times. However, during the early 1890s there had been a dramatic increase in these activities, and it was obvious that some genius of crime had taken over the iniquitous underworld of antiquities dealing. I should say that this conclusion was obvious to Emerson and me. Police officials are notoriously dim-witted and resistant to new ideas. It was not until we found Sethos’s secret headquarters that they were forced to admit the truth of our deductions, and even now, I am told, certain individuals deny that such a man exists.

Though we had foiled several of Sethos’s most dastardly schemes, the man himself had always eluded us. It had been some years since we had last seen or heard of him; in fact, we had believed for a time that he was dead. Other miscreants, suffering from the same misapprehension, had attempted to take control of the criminal organization he had created. It now seemed evident that Sethos had rebuilt his organization, not in Egypt but in Europe—specifically, in England.

I was in the process of explaining this to poor confused Sir Reginald when I was again interrupted. I had been expecting an outburst from Emerson, whose violent temper and command of bad language have won him the affectionate Arabic soubriquet of “Father of Curses.” However, on this occasion the interruption came from Ramses.

“Something told me by Miss Christabel Pankhurst, though without significance to me at the time, tends to substantiate your theory, Mother. Mrs. Markham and her brother did not join the group until after we left London in June. A number of other ‘ladies,’ friends of theirs, became active in the movement at the same time. They must have been the ones who entered the house with her. I was struck, at the time, by the fact that Mrs. Pankhurst did not form part of the delegation.”

“Yes, but . . . but . . .” Sir Reginald stuttered. “All this is unsubstantiated, unproven.”

“The proof,” said my annoying offspring, anticipating me as he usually did, “is in the outcome. The thieves were not ordinary burglars; they were after Mr. Romer’s antiquities, which form one of the finest private collections in the world. The Master Criminal specializes in Egyptian antiquities, and the notion of using a suffragist organization in order to gain entry to the house of a virulent opponent of votes for women is characteristic of Sethos’s sardonic sense of humor.”

“But,” said Sir Reginald, like a broken gramophone record, “but—”

“If it was Sethos you will never catch the bastard,” said Emerson. It was symptomatic of his state of mind that he did not even apologize for bad language—to which, I must confess, we had all become accustomed. He went on, “But I wish you luck. Nothing would please me more than to see him in the dock. We have told you all we know, Sir Reginald. Hadn’t you better get at it instead of lolling around drinking brandy?”

               
(i)
    
From Manuscript H