It was octagonal, draped in black velvet from floor to ceiling, with a high remote black ceiling that may have been of velvet too. In the middle of a coal black lustreless rug stood an octagonal white table, just large enough for two pairs of elbows and in the middle of it a milk white globe on a black stand. The light came from this. How, I couldn’t see. On either side of the table there was a white octagonal stool which was a smaller edition of the table. Over against one wall there was one more such stool. There were no windows. There was nothing else in the room, nothing at all. On the walls there was not even a light fixture. If there were other doors, I didn’t see them. I looked back at the one by which I had come in. I couldn’t see that either.
I stood there for perhaps fifteen seconds with the faint obscure feeling of being watched. There was probably a peephole somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it. I gave up trying. I listened to my breath. The room was so still that I could hear it going through my nose, softly, like little curtains rustling.
Then an invisible door on the far side of the room slid open and a man stepped through and the door closed behind him. The man walked straight to the table with his head down and sat on one of the octagonal stools and made a sweeping motion with one of the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.
“Please be seated. Opposite me. Do not smoke and do not fidget. Try to relax, completely. Now how may I serve you?”
I sat down, got a cigarette into my mouth and rolled it along my lips without lighting it. I looked him over. He was thin, tall and straight as a steel rod. He had the palest finest white hair I ever saw. It could have been strained through silk gauze. His skin was as fresh as a rose petal. He might have been thirty-five or sixty-five. He was ageless. His hair was brushed straight back from as good a profile as Barrymore ever had. His eyebrows were coal black, like the walls and ceiling and floor. His eyes were deep, far too deep. They were the depthless drugged eyes of the somnambulist. They were like a well I read about once. It was nine hundred years old, in an old castle. You could drop a stone into it and wait. You could listen and wait and then you would give up waiting and laugh and then just as you were ready to turn away a faint, minute splash would come back up to you from the bottom of that well, so tiny, so remote that you could hardly believe a well like that possible.
His eyes were deep like that. And they were also eyes without expression, without soul, eyes that could watch lions tear a man to pieces and never change, that could watch a man impaled and screaming in the hot sun with his eyelids cut off.
He wore a double-breasted black business suit that had been cut by an artist. He stared vaguely at my fingers.
“Please do not fidget,” he said. “It breaks the waves, disturbs my concentration.”
“It makes the ice melt, the butter run and the cat squawk,” I said.
He smiled the faintest smile in the world. “You didn’t come here to be impertinent, I’m sure.”
“You seem to forget why I did come. By the way, I gave that hundred dollar bill back to your secretary. I came, as you may recall, about some cigarettes. Russian cigarettes filled with marihuana. With your card rolled in the hollow mouthpiece.
“You wish to find out why that happened?”
“Yeah. I ought to be paying you the hundred dollars.”
“That will not be necessary. The answer is simple. There are things I do not know. This is one of them.”
For a moment I almost believed him. His face was as smooth as an angel’s wing.
“Then why send me a hundred dollars — and a tough Indian that stinks — and a car? By the way, does the Indian have to stink? If he’s working for you, couldn’t you sort of get him to take a bath?”
“He is a natural medium. They are rare — like diamonds, and like diamonds, are sometimes found in dirty places. I understand you are a private detective?”
“Yes.”
“I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.”
“And I think I need not detain you any longer.”
“You’re not detaining me,” I said. “I’m detaining you. I want to know why those cards were in those cigarettes.”
He shrugged the smallest shrug that could be shrugged. “My cards are available to anybody. I do not give my friends marihuana cigarettes. Your question remains stupid.”
“I wonder if this would brighten it up any. The cigarettes were in a cheap Chinese or Japanese case of imitation tortoiseshell. Ever see anything like that?”
“No. Not that I recall.”
“I can brighten it up a little more. The case was in the pocket of a man named Lindsay Marriott. Ever hear of him?”
He thought. “Yes. I tried at one time to treat him for camera shyness. He was trying to get into pictures. It was a waste of time. Pictures did not want him.”
“I can guess that,” I said. “He would photograph like Isadora Duncan. I’ve still got the big one left. Why did you send me the C-note.”
“My dear Mr. Marlowe,” he said coldly, “I am no fool. I sin in a very sensitive profession. I am a quack. That is to say I do things which the doctors in their small frightened selfish guild cannot accomplish. I am in danger at all times — from people like you. I merely wish to estimate the danger before dealing with it.”
“Pretty trivial in my case, huh?”
“It hardly exists,” he said politely and made a peculiar motion with his left hand which made my eyes jump at it. Then he put it down very slowly on the white table and looked at it. Then he raised his depthless eyes again and folded his arms.
“Your hearing — “
“I smell it now,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of him.”
I turned my head to the left. The Indian was sitting on the third white stool against the black velvet.
He had some kind of a white smock on him over his other clothes. He was sitting without a movement, his eyes dosed, his head bent forward a little, as if he had been asleep for an hour. His dark strong face was full of shadows.
I looked back at Amthor. He was smiling his minute smile.
“I bet that makes the dowagers shed their false teeth,” I said. “What does he do for real money — sit on your knee and sing French songs?”
He made an impatient gesture. “Get to the point, please.”
“Last night Marriott hired me to go with him on an expedition that involved paying some money to some crooks at a spot they picked. I got knocked on the head. When I came out of it Marriott had been murdered.”
Nothing changed much in Amthor’s face. He didn’t scream or run up the walls. But for him the reaction was sharp. He unfolded his arms and refolded them the other way. His mouth looked grim. Then he sat like a stone lion outside the Public Library.
“The cigarettes were found on him,” I said.
He looked at me coolly. “But not by the police, I take it. Since the police have not been here.”
“Correct.”
“The hundred dollars,” he said very softly, “was hardly enough.”
“That depends what you expect to buy with it”
“You have these cigarettes with you?”
“One of them. But they don’t prove anything. As you said, anybody could get your cards. I’m just wondering why they were where they were. Any ideas?”
“How well did you know Mr. Marriott?” he asked softly.
“Not at all. But I had ideas about him. They were so obvious they stuck out.”
Amthor tapped lightly on the white table. The Indian still slept with his chin on his huge chest, his heavy- lidded eyes tight shut.
“By the way, did you ever meet a Mrs. Grayle, a wealthy lady who lives in Bay City?”
He nodded absently. “Yes, I treated her centers of speech. She had a very slight impediment.”
“You did a sweet job on her,” I said. “She talks as good as I do.”
