The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (9 page)

“It certainly has had a curious history,” said St. Ives with just the trace of a smile on his face. “A very curious history.”

“Has it?” said Frobisher, stabbing his cigar out into the ashtray. “You didn’t manage to sell it, then?”

“Oh, we sold it,” St. Ives said. “Almost at once. Within the week of our return, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Four days, sir, to be precise,” put in Hasbro, who had an irritating habit of exactitude, one that had been polished and tightened over his eighty- odd years. “We docked on a Tuesday, sir, and sold the ruby to a jeweler in Knightsbridge on the following Saturday afternoon.”

“Quite,” said St. Ives, nodding toward him.

A waiter wandered past about then with a tea towel over his arm. Simultaneously there was another crash downstairs, a chair being upset it sounded like, and an accompanying shout. “What the devil is that row?” demanded Frobisher of the waiter. “This is a club, man, not a bowling green”

“Quite right, sir,” the waiter said. “We’ve had a bit of a time with an unwanted guest. Insists on coming in to have a look around. He’s very persistent.”

“Throw the blighter into the rubbish can,” said Frobisher. “And bring us a decanter of whisky, if you will. Laphroaig. And some fresh glasses.”

“Ice?” the waiter asked.

Frobisher gave him a wilting look and chewed on his cigar. “Just the filthy whisky. And tell that navvy downstairs that Tubby Frobisher will horsewhip him on the club steps at three o’clock if he’s still about.” Frobisher checked his watch. “That’s about six and a half minutes from now.”

“I’ll tell him, sir, just as you say. But the man is deaf as a stone, as far as I can make out, and he wears smoked glasses, so he’s quite possibly blind too. Threats haven’t done much to dissuade him.”

“Haven’t they, by God!” shouted Frobisher. “Dissuade him, is it! I’ll dissuade the man. I’ll dissuade him from here to Chelsea. But let’s have that whisky first. Did I say we needed glasses too?”

“Yes, sir,” said the waiter. And off he went toward the bar.

“So this ruby,” Frobisher said, settling back in his seat and plucking another cigar from inside his coat. “How much did it fetch?”

“A little above twenty-five thousand pounds,” said St. Ives, nodding to Hasbro for affirmation.

“Twenty-five thousand six hundred fifty, sir,” the colonel said.

Frobisher let out a low whistle.

“And it brought almost twice that at an auction at Sotheby’s two weeks after,” I put in. “Since then it’s been bought and sold a dozen times, I imagine. The truth is, no one wants to keep it. It
was owned, in time, by Isador Persano, and we all
know what came of that, and later by Lady Braithewaite-Long, whose husband, of course, was involved in that series of ghastly murders near Waterloo Station.”

“Don’t overlook Preston Waters, the jeweler,” said Priestly with an apparent shudder—a recollection, no doubt, of the grisly horror that had befallen the very Knightsbridge jeweler who had given us the twenty-five thousand pounds.

“The thing’s cursed, if you ask me,” I said, clearing debris from the table to make room for our newly arrived decanter of Scots whisky. Frobisher, sighing heartily, poured a neat bit into four glasses.

“None for me, thanks,” Priestly said when Frobisher approached the fifth glass with the upturned decanter. “I’ll just
nip at this port for a bit. Whisky eats me up. Tears my throat bones to shreds. I’d be on milk and bread for a week.”

Frobisher nodded, pleased, no doubt, to consume Priestly’s share himself. He tilted his glass back and sucked a bit in, rolling it about in his mouth, relishing it. “That’s the stuff what?” he said, relaxing. “If there were one thing that would drag me back in out of the bush, it wouldn’t be gold or women, I can tell you. No, sir. Not gold or women.”

I assumed that it was whisky, finally, that would drag Tubby Frobisher out of the bush, though he never got around to saying so. I got in ahead of him. “Where do you suppose that ruby lies today, Professor?” I asked, having a taste of the Scotch myself. “Did the museum ever get it back?”

“They didn’t want it, actually,” said St. Ives. “They were offered the thing free, and they turned it down.”

“The fools,” Frobisher said. “They didn’t go for all that hocus-pocus about a curse, I
don’t suppose. Not the bloody museum.”

St. Ives shrugged. “There’s no denying that it cost them a tremendous amount of trouble—robbery and murder and the like. And it’s possible that they thought the man who offered it to them was a prankster. No one, of course, with any sense would give the thing away. I rather believe that they never considered the offer serious.”

“I’d bet they were afraid of it,” said Priestly, who had come to fear the jewel himself in the years since our return. “I wish now that we’d buried the bloody thing with Kraken. Do you remember that ghastly cry in the jungle? That wasn’t made by any cannibals.”

Hasbro raised an eyebrow. “Who do you suggest cried out, sir?” he asked in his cultivated butler’s tone—a tone that alerted you to the sad fact that you were about to say something worthless and foolish.

Priestly gazed into his port and shrugged.

“I like to believe,” said St. Ives, always the philosopher, “that the jungle itself cried out. That we had stolen a bit of her very heart, broken off a piece of her soul. I was possessed with the same certainty that we’d committed a terrible crime that possesses me when I see a fine old building razed or a great tree cut down—a tree, perhaps, that had seen the passing of two score generations of kings and, being a part of those ages, has been imbued with their history, with their glory. Do you follow me?”

Hasbro nodded. I could see he took the long view, Priestly appeared to be lost in the depths of his port, but I knew that he felt pretty much the same way; he just couldn’t have stated it so prettily. Leave it to the Professor to get to the nub.

“Trash!” said Frobisher. “Gouge ’em both out, that’s what I would have done. Imagine a pair of such rubies. A matched pair!” He shook his head. “Yes, sir,” he finished, “I’d give my pension just to get a glimpse of one. Just a glimpse.”

St. Ives, smiling just a bit, wistfully perhaps, reached into the inside pocket of his coat, pulled out his tobacco pouch and unfolded it, plucking out a ball of tissue twice the size of a walnut. Inside it was the idol’s eye—the very one.

Frobisher leapt with a shout to his feet, his chair slamming over backward on the carpet. Isaacs, dozing in a chair by the fire, awoke with a start and shouted at Frobisher to leave off. But Tubby, taken so by surprise at St. Ives’s coolness and by the size of the faceted gem that lay before him, red as thin blood and glowing in the firelight, failed to hear Isaacs’s complaint. He stood and gaped at the ruby, his pension secure.

“How…” I began, at least as surprised as Frobisher. Priestly acted as if the thing were a snake; his pipe clacked in his teeth.

There was a wild shout from downstairs. Running footsteps echoed up toward us. A
whump
and crash followed as if something had been hurled into the wall. Then, weirdly, a blast of air sailed up the stairwell and blew past us, as if a door had been left open and the winds were finding their way in.

But the peculiar thing, the thing that made all of us, in that one instant, abandon the jewel and turn, waiting, watching the shadow that rose slowly along the wall of the stairwell, was the nature of that wind, the smell of that wind.

It wasn’t the wet, cold breeze blowing down Baker Street. It wasn’t a London breeze at all. It was a wind that blew down a jungle river—a warm and humid wind saturated with the smell of orchid blooms and rotting vegetation, that seemed to suggest the slow splash of crocodiles sliding off a muddy bank and the rippling silent passage of a tiger glimpsed through distant trees. The shadow rose on the stairs, frightfully slowly, as if whatever cast it had legs of stone and was creeping inexorably along—clump, clump, clump—toward some fated destination. And within the footsteps, surrounding them, part of them, were the far-off cries of wild birds and the chattering of treetop monkeys and the shrill cry of a panther, all of it borne on that wind and on that ascending shadow for one long, teeming, silent moment

And what we saw first when the walker on the stairs clumped into view was the bent tip of an umbrella—the sprung umbrella hoisted by Frobisher’s stroller. Ruined as the umbrella was, I could see that the shaft was a length of deteriorated bamboo, crushed and black with age and travel. And there, at the base, dangling by a green brass chain below the grip that was clutched in a wide, pale hand, was what had once been a tiny, preserved head, nothing but a skull now, yellow and broken and with one leathery strip of dried flesh still clinging in the depression below the eye socket.

We all shouted. Priestly smashed back into his chair. St. Ives bent forward in eager anticipation. We knew, wild and impossible as it seemed, what it was that approached us up the stairs on that rainy April day. It wore, as the waiter had promised, a pair of glasses with smoked lenses, and was otherwise clad in cast-off misshapen clothing that had once been worn, quite clearly, by people in widely different parts of the world: Arab bloused trousers, a Mandalay pontoon shirt, wooden shoes, a Leibnitz cap. His marbled jaw was set with fierce determination and his mouth opened and shut rhythmically like the mouth of a conger eel, his breath
whooshing
in and out. He reached up with his free hand and tore the smoked glasses away, pitching them in one sweeping motion against the wall where they shattered, spraying poor, dumbfounded Isaacs with glass shards.

In his right eye shone a tremendous faceted ruby, identical to the one that lay before St. Ives. Light blazed from it as if it were alive. His left eye was a hollow, dark socket, smooth and black and empty as night. He stood at the top of the stairs, chest heaving, creaking with exertion. He looked, so to speak, from one to the other of us, fixing his stare on the ruby glowing atop the table. His arm twitched. He let go of Bill Kraken’s umbrella, and the thing dropped like a shot to the floor, the jawbone and half a dozen yellow teeth breaking loose and spinning off across the oak planks. His entire demeanor seemed to lighten, as if he were drinking in the sight of the ruby like an elixir, and he took two shuffling steps toward it, swinging his arm ponderously out in front of him, pointing with a trembling finger toward the prize on the table. There could be no doubt what he was after, no doubt at all.

And for me, I was all for letting him have it. Under the circumstances it seemed odd to deny him. St. Ives was of a like mind. He went so far as to nod at the gem, as if inviting the idol (we can’t mince words here, that’s what he was) to scoop it up. Frobisher, however, was inclined to disagree. And I can’t blame him, really. He hadn’t been in Java with us twenty years past, hadn’t seen the idol in the ring of stones, couldn’t know that the sad umbrella lying on the floor had belonged to Bill Kraken and had been abandoned, as if in trade, for the priceless, ruinous gem among the asps and orchids of that jungle glade.

He stepped forward then, foolishly, and said something equally foolish about horsewhipping on the steps of the club and about his having been in the bush. A great, marbled arm swept out,
whumping
the air out of foolish old Frobisher and knocking him spinning over a library table as if he had been made of
papier-mâché.
Frobisher lay there senseless.

St. Ives at that point played his trump card: “Doctor Narbondo!” he said, and then waited, anticipating, watching the idol as it paused, contemplating, stricken by a rush of ancient, thin memory. Priestly hunched forward, mouth agape, tugging at his great white beard. I heard him whisper, “Narbondo!” as if in echo to St. Ives’s revelation.

The idol stared at the Professor, its mouth working, moaning, trying to speak, to cry out. “Nnnn…” it groaned. “Nnnar, Nnarbondo!” it finally shouted, screwing up its face awfully, positively creaking under the strain.

Doctor Narbondo! It seemed impossible, lunatic. But there it was. He lurched forward, pawing the air, stumbling toward the ruby, the idol’s eye. One pale hand fell on the edge of the table. The glasses danced briefly. Priestly’s port tumbled over, pouring out over the polished wood in a red pool. The rain and the wind howled outside, making the fire in the great hearth dance up the chimney. Firelight shone through the ruby, casting red embers of reflected light onto Narbondo’s face, bathing the cut-crystal decanter, three-quarters full of amber liquid, in a rosy, beckoning glow.

Narbondo’s hand crept toward the jewel, but his eye was on that decanter. He paused, fumbled at the jewel, dropped it, his fingers clutching, a sad, mewing sound coming from his throat. Then, with the relieved look of a man who’d finally crested some steep and difficult hill, as if he’d scaled a monumental precipice and been rewarded with a vision of El Dorado, of Shangri-la, of paradise itself, he grasped the decanter of Laphroaig and, shaking, a wide smile struggling into existence on his face, lifted it toward his mouth, thumbing the stopper off onto the tabletop.

Hasbro responded with instinctive horror to Narbondo’s obvious intent. He plucked up Priestly’s unused glass, said, “Allow me, sir,” and rescued the decanter, pouring out a good inch and proffering the glass to the gaping Narbondo. I fully expected that Hasbro would sail across and join Frobisher’s heaped form unconscious on the floor. But that wasn’t the case. Narbondo hesitated, recollecting, bits and pieces of European culture and civilized instinct filtering up from unfathomable depths. He nodded to Hasbro, took the proffered glass, and, swirling the whisky around in a tight, quick circle, passed it once under his nose and tossed it off.

A long and heartfelt sigh escaped him. He stood there just so, his head back, his mouth working slowly, savoring the peaty, smoky essence that lingered along his tongue. And Hasbro, himself imbued with the instincts of the archetypal gentleman’s gentleman, poured another generous dollop into the glass, replaced the stopper, and set the decanter in the center of the table. Then he uprighted Frobisher’s fallen chair and motioned toward it. Narbondo nodded again heavily, and, looking from one to the other of us, slumped into the chair with the air of a man who’d come a long, long way home.