Quests of Simon Ark (6 page)

He said it as if he meant it; but somehow I had the feeling that his life had never really been in danger. I had the feeling that it would be awfully difficult to kill Simon Ark …

And so we departed from the little town in Maine, and journeyed back toward the slightly warmer wilds of Manhattan. A search of the house had turned up nearly a hundred thousand dollars in contributions from Zadig’s swindled followers, and we began to think that Hager had possibly been thinking of that, too, when he plunged the knife into his partner’s side.

“One thing, though, Simon,” I said as the train thundered through the New England night. “Just where did Douglas Zadig ever come from? What happened in that London mist ten years ago?”

“There are things that are never explained,” he answered simply. “But several explanations present themselves. The copy of the novel in French suggests—now that we know the man’s true character—that even at this early age he was trying to fool the public into thinking him French instead of English. I don’t know the real answer, and probably never will; but if a young man had avoided military service during England’s darkest hours, he might well have had to think up a scheme to protect himself in a postwar world full of returning veterans.”

“Of course!” I agreed. “He was a draft-dodger; that would explain why his fingerprints weren’t on file with the army, or elsewhere!”

But Simon Ark was gazing out the window, into the night, and he replied in a quiet voice. “There are other possible explanations, of course, but I prefer not to dwell on them. Douglas Zadig is dead, like Kasper Hauser before him, and there are some things better left unexplained, at least in this world.”

And after that he said no more about it …

C
ONSIDERING THE FACT THAT
Sir Francis Bryan was, during his lifetime, one of the most notorious men in the British Isles, it is unusual that he should have become one of the forgotten men of history, overlooked by virtually every modern encyclopedia and textbook.

Since my business is publishing, it was this fact, more than any other, that took me to England that winter on a strange quest. And before my long search was ended I was to find my very life threatened by a murder that took place over four hundred years ago …

The first thing I heard, as I left the big four-motored plane at London airport, was a small portable radio playing one of Gershwin’s old tunes, “A Foggy Day.” It was indeed a foggy day in London town, and for a time there’d been some doubt about our ability to land the plane. They told me such fog was common in London during the winter months, and I guess that was supposed to settle any complaints I might have voiced.

Actually, it had just turned December by the calendar; but in a city like London, where the annual mean temperature was only around 51 degrees, anything past the middle of November could be considered winter.

Had I been planning a sight-seeing visit to the tightly sprawling city on the Thames, I’m sure I’d have picked a better month than December. But this was a business trip; and though the whole thing had been my idea in the first place, I hadn’t much choice over the time of the year.

And so there I was, in London in the middle of a mild fog, bound for a meeting with a girl bearing the unusual name of Rain Richards.

I’d first seen the name at the bottom of a letter sent to our London office, and forwarded to me in New York. Since I was a married man approaching the age of forty, I had not even considered the fact that Miss Rain Richards might be young and beautiful and intelligent. But she was all three of these—and much more besides—as I realized the moment she’d opened the thick oak door of her house in the London suburbs.

She was tall and slim, with the stature of a fashion model, and yet there was something about her that hinted at a darkness beneath the surface. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said after I’d introduced myself. “Please come in.

She led me down a narrow, dusky hall into a large room that might have been a study. Three walls were hung with a variety of small arms—guns, revolvers and automatics of all types. I judged there to be close to a hundred of them in the collection.

“Yours?” I motioned toward the walls, never dreaming that they were.

“Yes,” she surprised me by saying. “Shooting is a hobby with me.”

“Interesting. Now, about this matter, Miss Richards …”

“You can call me Rain.”

“That really is your name? I could hardly believe it when I saw the letter.”

“I was born in India during the monsoon,” she said, by way of explanation. “I guess my folks had a sense of humor or something.”

From the looks of her, I would have guessed her age to be about twenty-seven, but it was hard to tell. I might have been five years off in either direction. She lit a cigarette as she talked, and casually blew smoke out her nostrils. “But you don’t want to hear about me, of course. You’ve come about my letter.”

“That’s correct. You were quite right in saying that we’d be interested in this book you mention. Suppose you tell me a little more about it.”

She relaxed deep into the chair and began to talk, with a soft toneless voice that flowed through the room like a glistening stream.

“You’ve heard of Sir Francis Bryan? Good! Very few people have, you know. I myself first became interested in Bryan while I was at your Columbia University. One day I came across a line in Milton which refers to him as the ‘Vicar of Hell,’ and that started me searching. It was a hard, long job, because most modern historians seem to have completely forgotten Bryan. But I finally found a few facts.”

She paused long enough to take another draw on her cigarette, and then continued. “Bryan lived during the first half of the sixteenth century, and he was a friend and advisor to Henry VIII. He was also a cousin of the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, and when she was put on trial, which resulted in her execution death in 1536, he deserted her in order to remain in Henry’s good graces. This deed caused Thomas Cromwell to refer to him in a letter as ‘the Vicar of Hell,’ a name that stuck with him until his death—though some historians credit Henry with first calling him that.”

“But what about this unsolved murder you mentioned in your letter?” I asked her.

“Oh yes. Well, in 1548, James Butler—an Irishman and the Ninth Earl of Ormonde—was poisoned while visiting here in London. Because they feared that his widow might marry an enemy of the crown, and thus strengthen his land-holdings, certain highly placed persons persuaded Francis Bryan, himself a widower, to woo and marry her—for the good of the country. Bryan succeeded in this last duty for his country, and he moved to Ireland to take over his new lands. However, he lived only two years, and died mysteriously in 1550.”

“So you have two mysterious deaths on your hands—James Butler and Bryan himself.”

“Yes,” she continued, in an earnest voice that he was beginning to like. “Now my researches have turned up further information, unknown thus far to any of the historians. Sometime during the seventeenth century, about a hundred years after these deaths, there was published a large volume which claimed to give a somewhat shocking solution to these deaths. The book was immediately suppressed by the government, and all copies were seized and destroyed.”

“Then what makes you think you can turn up a copy, three hundred years later?”

She rose from the chair and began striding back and forth across the room, her long legs moving quickly beneath the tight folds of her skirt. “Two weeks ago I received a letter from a man who’d heard of my quest. He offered to obtain a copy of the suppressed book for ten thousand pounds.”

I relaxed and felt for my own American cigarettes. “So that’s why you contacted a book publisher. You expect us to put up … what? Around $30,000? Put up around $30,000 for a book that might not even exist!”

“No; I simply want you to go with me to see this man. He refused even to see me unless I brought someone along who could offer that kind of money. Actually, ten thousand pounds isn’t very much for a book that may have been written by another Boswell.”

I sighed, and puffed on the cigarette. “I suppose not,” I admitted. “At least it’s worth talking to this fellow.” Actually, since I’d crossed the ocean on this mission already, I had no intention of going back empty-handed. But there was no reason for letting Rain Richards know that—at least not yet.

“Good,” she said; “let me call him.”

She placed a call to a number in the Kensington Gardens section of London, “At least that’s where he told me he was located,” and waited until a man’s voice answered. “Hello? Mister Hugo Carrier? This is Rain Richards. I have an interested party over from the States. Can we get together sometime tonight? Oh …well, how about first thing in the morning? Fine…Let me jot down the address…Good, we’ll see you around ten in the morning.”

She hung up and turned back to me. “He can’t see us until ten in the morning; will that be all right with you?”

“Guess it’ll have to be. I’ll stop by here for you around nine-thirty.”

“Fine,” she replied, the hint of a smile lingering on her face. “Till then…”

I left her in the doorway and walked back toward my hotel. With the coming of night, the fog seemed even thicker, but I found Waterloo Bridge after nearly an hour of walking and hailed a cab for the remaining distance.

Back in my hotel room, I found myself preoccupied with the memory of the girl named Rain. I took out a book and started to read, but it didn’t help. I found myself comparing her with my wife, Shelly, and presently I took out my wallet and gazed at the photo of Shelly—the one I’d taken at the beach some three years ago.

Finally, unable to settle the troubled thoughts of my own mind, I climbed into bed and dropped off into a sound sleep…

The morning dawned, bright and sunny, with only a slight mist to remind me of the fog of the night before. It was almost like a morning in New York, when the canyons of Manhattan seem like valleys for the flowering river of mist.

Now that I realized just how far Rain lived from the center of London, I took a cab the entire distance. She met me at the door, looking as young and cool as I remembered her. “Come in,” she greeted me. “I’m just doing a little shooting downstairs. You may watch, if you like.”

I followed her to the basement, where I found a sandbagged area, with targets on the far wall, that apparently served as her shooting gallery. On a shelf in front of her were a number of hand guns, and I recognized a U.S. Army .45 and .25 pocket automatic, and several foreign pistols.

“This is my favorite,” she said, choosing a tiny weapon from the shelf. “A .41 caliber Derringer. Watch!”

She brought the gun up to eye level with a single sweeping motion that my eye could hardly follow. There was a deafening roar as both of its twin barrels spouted flame, and I could see the bull’s eye of one of the targets fly away at the bullets’ impact.

“You’re quite a shot.”

“I had to be. I was in Burma when the Japanese invaded; they killed my folks.”

“I’m sorry…”

“I’m over it now,” she said. “I’m back in jolly old England, where everybody’s respectable; and the war seems a long ways back. I suppose I’m lucky that my family had money back here, so I can devote myself to foolish projects like searching for lost manuscripts, and such.”

As she spoke, she traded the Derringer for a tiny Colt .25 automatic and let go with five quick shots at another target. We walked over to examine it together. Four of the bullets had circled the bull’s eye; the fifth was off to one side.

“That should have been in the center,” she complained. “Well, what say we go to see Mister Carrier? It’s nearly ten now.”

I agreed and she put away the guns. “Have to clean them later—that’s one part of it I don’t like. Here, I’ll take the Derringer with me; never can tell when it’ll come in handy.”

She dropped it into her purse and I raised my eyebrows lightly. “Do you have a permit for that?”

“The bobbies don’t carry guns around here. Somebody has to have one, or there’s no telling what would happen.”

I shrugged and followed her out. The trip to Hugo Carrier’s tiny flat on the other side of London was made in a swift little MG with Rain at the wheel. It was my first ride in one of them, but it seemed to handle well under her command.

Presently we came to a halt before a run-down block of apartments off Bayswater Road. “This is the address he gave me; he’s on the second floor.”

We climbed the shadowy stairs to the first landing, and in the dim light of a single naked bulb read the names on the doors. “Here it is,” I said. “Hugo Carrier.”

I knocked at the door and waited, but no one came. I knocked again.

“It’s only five minutes after ten,” Rain said. “He must be here.”

“Maybe he’s still asleep.” I tried the knob of the door, more as a reflex action than for any other reason. It swung open at my touch, and in that instant I already knew what we would find inside.

But I was unprepared for the horror that met our eyes. For there, pinned to the opposite wall of the room, was the body of a man. His arms were spread in a cross, and the hands pinned to the wall with long arrows through each palm. A third arrow protruded from the man’s chest.

Behind me, Rain Richards screamed…

The room seemed filled with the quiet men from Scotland Yard, popping their flashbulbs and dusting for fingerprints. We told our story for the tenth time to the inspector, who seemed to be in charge.

“You hadn’t previously met this man, Miss Richards?” he wanted to know.

“No,” she shook her head. “I’d only talked to him on the phone.”

“And have you any knowledge of this mark on the floor?” He was pointing to something that Rain and I had missed in the first shock of our discovery. It was a sort of pentagram, in a circle, drawn in red on the floor in front of Carrier’s body. There was no doubt that the design had been drawn with the dead man’s blood…

They took us down to the Yard for further questioning, but they seemed to be getting nowhere. Presently we were introduced to still another questioner, an Inspector Ashly.