The Satanist (48 page)

“It’s a big achievement for a little boy, brought up as you must have been in an Indian reservation, to have become a Colonel in the United States Air Force.’

‘Yeah. It weren’t easy; but I made it. I owe that mainly to my Grandaddy. He was the medicine-man of the tribe. I’ll
bet he beat hell out of my Ma when he knew the games she had been up to in the forest; because, of course, no brave would take her as his squaw after she’d had a child that way, and she must have been worth quite a few head of cattle to him. But he brought me up. Taught me all he knew, and by the time I was fourteen I was a better medicine-man than he was.

‘Nominally all the redfolks are Christians these days; but that’s only lip-service to gip free blankets and baccy out of the padres. They know what’s best for them and still practise the old religion on the side – totem rites, palavas at the full of the moon, and the rest. My Grandaddy could kill or cure plenty and he wanted me to follow him as Our Lord Satan’s top priest in the reservation. But he was old and ailing so he had to give me the red feather of initiation much earlier than he would else have done. I earnt it though. Makes me sweat now to recall some of the ordeals I went through. All the same, I took to making magic like a heron takes to diving for the fish.’

As he paused, Mary asked: ‘And did you succeed your grandfather?’

‘No me. Leastways, only for a few weeks. Taking dimes off our poor folk for curing cattle, or causing some old joker to turn up his toes a bit sooner than nature meant him to, was too narrow an alley for me to be happy playing ball in for long. One night I lit out with a travelling circus, and I never went back.’

‘At sixteen I was already as big as most men ever come, and still growing. Add to that I met few people I couldn’t hypnotise into doing what I wanted. I’d brought Grandaddy’s ceremonial feathers with me and I made the circus boss let me put on an act of my own. It was lassooing, bow and arrow, and throwing the tomahawk. I got a programme girl to stand in for me to shoot and throw round. Poor kid, she was so scared she near died of fright every time before we went on. She needn’t have feared. Once she had her back to the target I could hold her there with my eyes, as rigid as an iron bar, and long as she didn’t
move she was in no danger. But she hadn’t enough of what it takes to keep me for long with her under a blanket. I decided to team up with the Gipsy Lee of the outfit and move into her caravan. She was near twice my age but she had “it” all right, all right. Trouble was she had a husband. Sid was his name. So I carved a little wooden doll and scratched
SID
on it. Then I talked magic talk to it all night long and took it out in the morning and buried it. Within a week Sid caught a cold and started coughing. That was before the days of penicillin. In a fortnight pneumonia had taken him, and I was in the caravan teaching his woman the quick way to forget him.’

At the mention of the doll, Mary had guessed what was coming, so she had time to glance away and repress a shudder at this confession of cold-blooded murder. Now happily launched on his life-story, the hook-nosed giant went on.

‘Come the fall, the circus went into its winter quarters at Detroit. Gipsy, as was her custom, took a room for telling fortunes. She was mighty good at it. Could have done far better for herself that way all year round, but she had real gypsy blood in her and preferred a roving life. What I knew of magic put me wise to it that she was pulling in power from some source outside herself. One night I got out of her the how and why. She was an initiate of a Satanic Lodge there in the city. I made her take me along. That’s how I became a Brother of the Ram.’

He poured Mary another cocktail, and resumed. ‘It was by way of a guy I happened on in that Lodge that I got my first real break. He ran a big brothel. Seeing I was strong as a young bull, he asked me if I’d like to take a hand breaking in new girls. Most of those that get to the houses know what to expect; but there’s some that don’t, and make trouble. They have to have their heels rounded off, and it’s strong men’s work to do that. After I’d been at this dame busting game for a while it hit me that I was a sucker to do it for another guy when I might be going it for myself.

‘Gipsy was making enough to keep me, but I felt it would
be good to have some extra dough to throw around; and setting up as a knife-thrower in a booth wouldn’t have paid the sort of dividends I had in mind. Within three months I had a string of five girls working the streets for me. From then on I never looked back. I made Gipsy cut out the fortune-telling and set her up as the Madame in a place of our own. By the time I was nineteen I’d gone into the export business, and was shipping as many as eight judys a month down to S.A. The Feds were always after us, of course, but Gipsy had only to look at a girl to judge if she was too hot to handle, and as a seer myself I always got wise to it in advance if danger threatened our organisation. Time war broke out I had tie-ups with all the big operators in the States and was one of the biggest shots in the racket.’

Revolting as his disclosures were, Mary had to simulate interest, so she said: ‘No wonder you have lots of money. But this doesn’t explain how you became a Colonel in the United States Air Force.’

‘It was the yen to fly, honey,’ he smiled, ‘and ambition. From the time I was a kid in the reservation, I’d thought nothing could thrill like being a bird-man. The war was my chance. I’d a partner who’s half Puerto-Rican and half Jew. I told him to carry on and he knows that if he bilked me for ten cents I’d have him die in a fit. I flew out to California where no one knew me, and joined up. As a pilot I proved a natural, as I knew I would. Soon as they let me go into battle I became an ace overnight. They gave me a commission and decorations. Maybe you noticed them on my tunic. Everything from the Purple Heart to the Legion of Merit – the whole works.’

‘And that decided you to stay in after the war?’

‘That, and ambition. The old set-up is still working. Must be hundreds of judys back in the States earning me a dollar or two every night; but dollars isn’t everything. I wanted to go places and meet people as a guy who is somebody apart from what he can spend. As Colonel Henrik G. Washington, I am that’

He then told her of some of his experiences during the
war, and of how he had at times used his occult powers to restore the morale of other pilots who, after many missions, had nearly reached breaking point; and also that he devoted a percentage of his income to helping the widows of ex-comrades who had been killed while serving with him. He mentioned this last matter as casually as he had spoken of breaking down the resistance of unfortunate girls who had been trapped into brothels, and Mary found it quite beyond her to reconcile such opposite traits in one personality.

The Negro Jim, dressed in a spotless white housecoat, duly announced dinner and waited on them while they ate an excellent meal. Afterwards ‘Wash’ entertained Mary for two hours with long-playing records, mostly pieces by serious composers of whom she had never heard, and it was obvious to her that he knew very much more about music than she did. They then went up to bed.

On the Monday morning they were called at six and by half past seven Wash, now again a truly martial figure, was ready to be driven to his office. He had told Mary that there was no point in her getting up until she felt like it; so she had drifted off to sleep again. But before leaving he shook her into wakefulness and said:

‘Look, honey; make yourself at home in the house, but don’t go outside it. My General’s not a bad scout about giving leave to London or Paris, so his officers can blow steam off, but he’s a stickler for them setting a good example while in the area; so I don’t want it to get around that I’ve got a dame here as a house guest.’

As soon as he had gone she set about planning her escape. It looked as if he had no suspicion that she might wish to, but of that she could not be certain, and it was possible that he had told his boys to keep an eye on her. Anyway, they might think it strange and stop her, or telephone to him, if she got up at once and walked out of the house. Anxious as she was to get away, she decided that her chances would be better if she remained there during the morning while the boys were doing their routine jobs, then
try to slip away unseen early in the afternoon as soon as they had settled down for their easy.

At eleven o’clock she got up, and when she was dressed went downstairs to the sitting-room, where she put on a record. It had been playing for only a few minutes when Jim appeared accompanied by an older, fatter Negro, in a white apron and chef’s cap, who introduced himself as Buster. Both gave her friendly grins; the one asked her what she would like to drink and the other what she would have for lunch. Having asked for their suggestions, she made her choice and they left her to go about their work.

At the unexpectedly early hour of half past twelve, Jim came in to tell her that lunch was ready. She remembered then that Americans both started and finished their day’s work earlier than the British; so Wash might be expected back in mid-afternoon. A little nervous now that she might be leaving herself too narrow a margin to get clear away, she got through the meal quickly, then went back to the sitting-room and, leaving its door ajar, waited there listening impatiently until all sound of movement should have ceased.

By half past one, the house had fallen completely silent. Tiptoeing across the hall, she let herself out of the front door. As she walked down the drive, she did not dare to look back for fear that one of the boys was watching her from a window. He might take such a gesture as an indication that by going out she was disobeying his master’s orders. Every moment she expected to hear the sound of running footsteps coming after her but only her own crunched faintly on the gravel.

When she reached the road, she glanced quickly from side to side. In the distance to her left there were low hills and below them, about two miles away, the roofs of some big aircraft hangars. To her right there was flatter country and the road ran along one side of a long shallow valley into which three aircraft were gliding. The hangars obviously formed part of the U.S. Air Force base, so turning her back on them she set off at a swift pace in the opposite direction.

She still had her handbag and in it ample money to get
to London; but as soon as she came to a village she meant to telephone to Colonel Verney. There was no reason whatever to suppose that during the past forty-eight hours Ratnadatta had disposed of those incriminating shoes, and if he could be caught with them still in his possession she would have won her fight against at least one of Teddy’s murderers. She would tell the Colonel too about the house in Cremorne, so that he might rope in the whole Satanic crew and, perhaps, find evidence there against others of them. But what about Wash?

The thought of the genial but evil giant presented her with an unexpected problem. Her sense of justice compelled her to admit that she had no personal cause for complaint against him. He had not taken her by force. Even his carrying her off from London had been largely due to her own folly in overplaying her hand with him. He obviously believed that she had been perfectly willing to stay with him and was thoroughly enjoying herself. More, he had both rescued her from Ratnadatta and saved her from initiation.

To that it had to be added that he was not a Satanist in the same sense as the others. He had not thrown off the tenets of a decent upbringing and all moral scruples to join a Lodge in order to acquire wealth or satiate his lust in wild orgies. He had been brought up from his childhood to worship the Devil, to practise magic and follow a creed, the only dictum of which was, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the Whole of the Law.’ It was evident that he had never regarded the world as anything but a jungle in which the strongest and most determined were fully justified in living well at the expense of weaker animals. That his mind had developed from infancy completely lacking all moral sense must be taken at least as some mitigation of his having shown no trace of scruple in bull-dozing his way to affluence by criminal means.

But what a calendar of crimes lay at his door. Murder, rape, and the unlimited terrorisation of innumerable people. His house, his servants, the
de luxe
equipment of
his kitchen, his gramophone records and champagne, were all still being paid for from the earnings of scores of unhappy women in the United States, and the shipping of scores of others, still more greatly to be pitied, to a living hell in the brothels of South America. As Mary thought of the misery she had suffered herself during her black year in Dublin, her blood boiled, and she knew that she must not even consider giving such a man an hour’s warning, but do her utmost to ensure that, like the others, he was arrested with the least possible delay.

While these thoughts had been agitating her mind she had walked nearly two miles, but there was still no sign of a village. Another half mile of open road lay before her with hedges and fields on either side, except in one place a few hundred yards distant where, among a few fruit trees, she could see a cottage.

Suddenly she heard the blare of a klaxon horn in her rear. Looking back, she saw a large car hurtling towards her at seventy miles an hour. Another minute and, as she jumped to the side of the road, she caught a glimpse of the driver. He was the hook-nosed giant that, two minutes before, she had been planning to have arrested. With a screech of tyres suddenly braked, the car pulled up fifty feet beyond her.

Mary had a moment only in which to make up her mind. Two courses were open to her. She could jump the ditch, scramble through the hedge and run for it across the fields, or stay where she was and accept capture. To do the former was to proclaim that she had deliberately set out to escape, whereas if she did not take to her heels she might still bluff it out.

Had he pulled up behind her she might have reached the cottage before he could catch her, but to do so from where she stood she would have to pass him. She could still get to it by making a detour through the hedge and round to its back, by way of the field, but, if she did succeed in outrunning him to it, there might not be anyone there to whom she could appeal for help. Realising the small start she would have and the huge stride that his long legs would give him, with bitter reluctance she decided to stay where she was.