The Quest of Julian Day (11 page)

One of these beauties arrested my attention quite early in the proceedings. She was on the small side, only about five feet two in height, but she had a lovely little figure and one of the strangest faces I have ever seen. She was dressed as Cleopatra and wore a delicate gold fillet with the royal serpent and vulture rising above her low brow. The diadem brought out the lustre of her dark hair which was curled up from the nape of her neck behind. Her skin was a golden-bronze, and she had a large, mobile mouth; but it was her eyes which were so extraordinary. They were blue and set very far apart; so that it gave one a queer sensation to look at her and one could not be quite sure if she were focusing them on one or not. In some way that I could not analyse there seemed to be something Chinese about her.

She was evidently somebody of note as several of the Egyptians—big, heavy-jowled, elderly men—whom one could spot as important officials in spite of their fancy-dress, were always hovering about her, and her jewellery was superb.

Harry danced with Clarissa while I made a tour of the rooms, then I danced with her while he knocked back a good ration of the excellent Pol Roger which was on tap in the splendid library running the whole length of the block on the sixth floor. After that all three of us went round together looking for McPherson with the idea of getting him to introduce Harry to some of the Egyptians; but when we found him none of them happened to be about and he was very much occupied in looking after some newly-arrived guests, so we had to content ourselves with his promise that he would do so later and, as it was half-past one, we went in to supper.

Luck really did serve us then. We had hardly started when
Zakri Bey came in with the girl who had those extraordinary, wide-spaced eyes, and they sat down at the table next to us with their backs to myself and Clarissa.

She was chatting away with her usual vivacity and I think a couple of hours in this gay assembly had put Sir Walter's murder, and the reason for our being here, right out of her pretty head. I tipped her off not to talk so much, so that I could listen to the people just behind us, and kicked Harry under the table so that he should get what was on and recognise Zakri Bey when he saw him again.

Zakri was talking to ‘Cleopatra' in Arabic and from such scraps of their conversation as I could catch they were only exchanging the usual pleasantries.

By turning my head a little I could see them in profile in a mirror on the opposite wall, and without openly staring at it I kept watch on their reflections as constantly as I could. The mirror was a good twenty feet away and I found it a queer sensation to see them talking at that distance and at the same time to hear their voices within a foot of the back of my neck.

I strained my ears to bursting point for the best part of fifteen minutes and I was just beginning to fear that there was no hope of my overhearing anything of value when Zakri suddenly put his brown hand on ‘Cleopatra's' arm and nodded towards the door.

‘That's the fellow,' he said. ‘The tall young man dressed as a Red Indian. He is an expert in such things and will be able to decipher it for us.'

I positively itched to turn my head and have a look at the young man in Red Indian dress; but I managed to check the impulse and my eye fell upon Harry's face opposite. It was comical enough, under the heavy grease-paint make-up and shiny pink skullcap topped by the absurd tufts of false hair that go with the costume of a clown, but his mouth was now hanging open in a positively ludicrous fashion. As he caught my glance he shut it and, bending across the table, whispered:

‘Can you beat it? Lemming's here. He's just come in. Look! Behind you, there, with a little Dutch girl. He's tricked out as an Indian Chief, but I'd swear it's him.'

Naturally Harry had not understood Zakri's remark of a moment earlier because the Egyptian was speaking in Arabic.
But those two pieces of information coming right on top of each other made me fairly jump for joy. The whole thing was as plain as a pikestaff, now. Lemming had not only taken Harry's three thousand and passed the story about Cambyses' lost army on to O'Kieff, but he was also actively co-operating with the enemy. The odds were that he had either come out to Alexandria on an earlier ship, or by air, so as to meet O'Kieff in Egypt and act as technical adviser to his expedition. Now that O'Kieff had secured the tablet it was to be handed over to Lemming for deciphering.

I made an angry face at Harry to stop his talking further and stole another glance in the mirror. Lemming was just sitting down at a table with the girl in Dutch costume, on our side of the room but at the far end and near the door. He was a tall young man of about thirty; a little thin, but his beaky nose, lean jaw and dark eyes suited his Red Indian get-up to perfection.

Zakri and ‘Cleopatra' were now talking about some mutual friends in Paris so I listened with only half an ear, while doing my best to cover the fact that I was listening at all by carrying on a jerky conversation with Clarissa. As she was quite capable of talking enough for two at any time that part of my job was fairly easy. We had eaten all we wanted of the good things provided by the McPhersons but I meant to outsit Zakri and the girl, just in case they let fall something else, and a few minutes later my luck proved to be in again.

A huge fellow arrayed in the gorgeous costume of the Mamelukes came up to their table, smiling all over his face, and said to her:

‘I see you've finished supper, and this is my dance, Princess, I think.'

She smiled back at him and stood up at once but Zakri detained her for a moment to ask:

‘What time do you think you'll leave here?'

She shrugged, glanced at a wrist-watch encrusted with diamonds, and said. ‘It's a quarter-past two. I think by four I shall have had enough of it.'

‘If you're quite sure about that I'll tell him to call at your house for it at four-thirty, on his way back to his hotel.'

‘Yes,' she nodded. ‘Tell him four-thirty, and I will be there.'

Although I was positively seething with excitement I managed to contain myself until Zakri had spoken to Lemming and had followed the other two out of the supper-room. Then I told Harry and Clarissa what was on foot.

‘A darned good thing I'm painted up like this,' Harry remarked, ‘otherwise Lemming would have been certain to know me again and would probably have tumbled to it that we've been keeping an eye on Zakri.'

‘It's lucky I've got my back towards him, too,' added Clarissa. Then she glanced at me. ‘Well, Bright-Eyes, what sort of plot is the big brain hatching now?'

‘The plot's already made without any hatching,' I grinned. ‘All we have to do for the moment is to find out who the Cleopatra woman is and where she lives.'

‘My hat!' murmured Harry admiringly. ‘You do think fast!' while Clarissa gave me one of her naughty looks, which I knew quite well meant precisely nothing at all, as she purred:

‘All this he-man stuff is just
too
exciting, Julian. In a moment I shall be begging you to run away with me.'

‘Let's dance again, then, and talk it over,' I said with a smile. ‘In the meantime your nice, complacent husband can go and dig out our kind host and find out all he can about the “lady in the case”.'

I knew there was no risk of Lemming's clearing off for another hour at least and Harry agreed to meet us at the buffet up in the library when he had seen McPherson, while Clarissa and I went off to dance.

Half an hour later Harry rejoined us with the information that ‘Miss Cleopatra' was the Princess Oonas Shahamalek and that she lived in one of the big houses at the east end of the Rue Sultan Hussein, which is the Park Lane of Alexandria. She had been a widow for two years although only twenty-one and was said to be fabulously wealthy. Her mother had been a Persian which, perhaps, accounted for the vague suggestion of the Chinese I had noticed in her face.

In my excitement in getting on to Zakri Bey again I quite
forgot, for the time being, that I was a hunted man, wanted for murder by the police, and the three of us cheerfully knocked back the best part of a bottle of McPherson's admirable Pol Roger to a continuation of our luck. I had forgotten, too, that I had never had any sort of training for the desperate type of game I proposed to play and it dawned on me only when I decided it was time for us to go in search of Lemming that, although the plan I had evolved seemed fine in theory, it was going to be quite another matter to put into practice.

It was a fairly safe bet that the Egyptologist-turned-crook would leave the party unaccompanied, as he had this business call to make before returning to his hotel, and I had visualised myself holding him up before he made that call, as the first step in my new campaign. It occurred to me now that half the cars in Alexandria were parked down in the street below and that at least a dozen policemen would be keeping watch on them; added to which, from four o'clock on, any number of guests would be leaving the party. I could hardly stand outside waiting for Lemming with a gun in my hand, or slog him on the head when he appeared and carry him away over my shoulder, with such a crowd of people about. Some more subtle means of securing his person had to be thought out.

As he was a visitor in Alexandria the odds were all against his having his own car and I felt that I could reasonably gamble on his leaving in a taxi; so, having asked the Belvilles to rout round for him and keep him under observation until I returned. I went downstairs and out into the street. Just as I had feared, there were scores of cars about and practically every taxi in Alexandria was lined up in one huge rank. Walking along the line I picked out two decent-looking fellows, both of whom had good cars, and beckoned them over to me. Then I produced my wallet and put up a little proposition to them.

At first they were a bit dubious; but money talks in Egypt and they both entered into the spirit of the thing when I explained that the whole affair was only a practical joke against a man who had pinched a young woman off me for the supper-dance.

Returning to the
Palaccio
I located Harry and Clarissa sitting out on a couple of chairs on the top landing. They told
me they had run Lemming to earth up on the roof-garden where he was engaged in a petting-party with the blonde in the Dutch peasant dress.

‘He was re-braiding one of her plaits when we spotted them, giggled Clarissa. ‘The bow must have come off its end in the scramble and he's taking his time to tie it on again.'

I lit a cigarette and we waited patiently for them to appear. Our position was a good one strategically since, in addition to the marble staircase, McPherson had installed a lift in his converted block of flats by which they might easily have slipped down to the hall had we not kept an eye on its sixth-floor gate as well as on the stairs.

At last they came down from the roof-garden. Lemming looked pretty hot, but that may have been due to his feathered head-dress; and the Dutch maiden's make-up was distinctly out of gear, disclosing the fact that she was by no means as young as one might have thought at the first sight of her two long golden pigtails.

She retired to put her face to rights and Lemming hung about until she reappeared, upon which we followed them down to the ballroom, where they danced again, but at a quarter-past four he evidently made up his mind to tear himself away from this blonde siren as we saw him with her in the doorway scribbling a note of her address, or a date, in a little book.

Leaving the Belvilles to keep an eye on him as he was making his good-byes I promptly shot down in the lift, hurried out into the street, signalled up my two chariots from the rank and halted them just outside the front door. Three minutes later I was back in the palace waiting for friend Lemming to come downstairs. The hall was full of people and directly he reached it I went straight up to him, bowed, first touching my forehead then my chest, and smiled the ingratiating smile of the average Arab servant.

‘Forgive me please, sir,' I said with a lisp, ‘but you are Mr. Lemming, yes?'

‘Yes. Lemming's my name.' He stared at me in mild surprise.

‘The Princess Oonas has sent a car for you, sir. If you please, I lead you to it.'

‘That's very nice of her. I won't be a moment,' he replied turning away.

Harry and Clarissa had followed him down to the hall. I had told them nothing of my scheme so far as I did not wish to involve them in it until I was reasonably certain that it was going to work. As Lemming left me to get his coat from the cloakroom I stepped up to Harry and whispered, ‘There are two cars outside. If I can get him into the first without any fuss take the second one and follow us.'

There were twenty or thirty people in the hall, guests and servants, and in my dragoman's get-up it was quite impossible for anyone who had not actually noticed me dancing upstairs to tell if I were with either one or the other. When Lemming reappeared with a light fawn coat over his Red Indian costume I bowed to him again and, without showing the least suspicion, he allowed me to lead him out to the first of the waiting cars.

I had carefully chosen the best-looking vehicle I could find among the strange assortment on the rank. Nearly all of them had once been private cars and this was a quite presentable-looking Renault. If Lemming remarked on the taximeter that had been affixed to it I meant to tell him that the Princess' own car had gone back to the garage before I was sent to fetch him; but, if he did notice the meter, he refrained from commenting on it.

In a fever of impatience to get away I held the door for him while, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harry and Clarissa getting into the car behind. Next moment I had clambered into the seat beside the driver and we were off.

All went well for the first ten minutes, after which friend Lemming began to get uneasy. Leaning out of the window he craned his head forward and shouted in my ear.

‘Hi! Where are you taking me?'