The Judas Pair

'Closer, please.'

'As you wish.' He hitched forward until his chest touched the rosewood. We leaned elbows on the top and waited.

'We need your assistance, Muriel,' he said calmly. 'Over here, please, with your handkerchief.'

She came and stood by the desk.

'Hold your handkerchief up above us,' he told her, watching me. 'When Lovejoy tells you, let it fall.'

'But—'

'Do as you're told, my dear,' he said patiently. 'It won't take a moment. You'll be quite safe. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' she quavered.

It was now. No matter what I did, how fast I was, how good my aim, I would die the instant I pulled the trigger. He needn't fire at all. Yet I'd loaded both meticulously. There couldn't possibly be any trick.

I pointed the beautiful Damascus barrel. His gaped back at me. Behind the cavernous muzzle his calm, smiling face gazed into my eyes. We held position, brains and barrels inches apart, me sweating in terror and him enjoying the last few moments of my life. In a blur I saw the single line of awareness—his eyes, his barrel, the black muzzle, then my own ribbed barrel and, in a blur nearest me, the blank silver escutcheon plate just showing above my hand gripping the stock. The silver plate set in the stock. All in a line, from his mad hating brain to my terror-stricken consciousness. Eye to eye, in a line. And, nearest of all to my eye, the silver escutcheon plate. In line with my eye.

'Now,' I said.

The handkerchief fluttered down. I turned my flinter around as the handkerchief fell, pointed the muzzle of my own gun against my forehead, and pulled the trigger.

There was no explosion, but the recoil snapped the barrel forward against my skull and nearly stunned me from the force of the blow. As if in a dream I saw Lagrange's eye splash red and gelatinous over his face. His head jerked back. He uttered a small sound like a cough as he died and the flinter in his hand clumped heavily down onto the desk, firing off as the hair trigger was hauled back by his convulsing hand. The ball sent glass flying from a shattered window. I was missed by a foot or so.

It seemed an hour before the echoes died away and the screaming began. My senses slowly came creeping back.

It was logical. Your eye's in line with the barrel. So if it's your own gun that shoots you through your right eye, aiming it frontward at your own right eye will shoot your opponent. But how?

Amid the moanings and the tears, as poor Muriel wailed and screamed on Lagrange and Margaret tried some hopeless first aid, I examined the pistol I held. It was the one with the silver stock pins—that was probably how to tell them apart. Lagrange had picked the gold-pinned one. Yet mine was still loaded.

I got the green velvet and the case and set to work while somebody phoned the police. It's always important to unload a gun first, no matter how old it is. This I did safely, then dismantled the lock. Any flinter enthusiast lifts the lock out to look. It does the piece no harm and the mechanism's everything.

It was exquisite, delicate as a lady's hand. There were not two lock mechanisms inside as I'd guessed. The standard firing mechanism was actually unworkable. The trigger activated a small air chamber which worked by propelling a missile along a reverse concealed barrel toward the eye of the person holding the weapon. The missile pushed up the silver escutcheon plate on a minute hinge unlocked by the trigger. Highly ingenious. The better your aim the more likely you were to shoot your eye out.

But what was the missile? What exploded into his eye with such force? Clutching the parts, I went out into the hall. An old crone—the one I'd seen on my previous visit—was sobbing information into the telephone.

'Excuse me,' I said politely, taking the phone from her to calm her down. 'When the Reverend came out of the study a few minutes ago, where did he go?'

'Into the kitchen for some ice,' she said, red-eyed, and at last I knew.

You crushed a piece of ice into a sphere in the bullet mold, inserted it into the concealed chamber, and made sure your opponent got the silver-pinned pistol. No wonder the pathologist had never found the bullet. The ice had pierced Eric Field's eye, penetrated his brain from there, and instantly melted away from his body heat, just as the ice ball was now doing in La-grange's silent skull.

Yet… I sat at the hall table examining the weapon further. Who on earth had had the gall, not to mention the authority, to compel the world's greatest gunsmith to make a treacherous pair of weapons like this so long ago? Dueling was crackers, but it was supposed to be an affair of honor. Somebody had wanted to be bold and dashing around the Regency clubs but was unwilling to run any actual risk while going about it. I inserted the turnkey and rotated gently against the spring's weight.

The locks came out and showed their secret beneath the recess. There, engraved in gold was my revelation: REX ME FECIT. The King made me.

It brought tears to my eyes. I had a vision of the old gunsmith in his darkened workshop, all his assistants and apprentices sent away for the night, as in obedience to royal command he fashioned the brilliant device alone. Yet he was determined his complaint should be recorded for others to realize in later years. The old genius had made the Judas pair. They bore all the characteristic features of his consummate skills. But he cleverly recorded the customary Latin inscription to tell the despairing truth why he had: the King had made him. That deranged sick man George the Third, or the Prince Regent, wencher and gambler? Probably the latter.

Before the police arrived I'd substituted a pair of officer's pistols, Joseph Heylin of London, quite well preserved in an altered cutlery box, for the Judas pair. Lagrange's small collection in the morning-room cabinet was easy to find and he'd left the key in. I whisked the Heylin pair outside, where I burned a little black powder in one and loaded the other. Amid the general alarms and excursions nobody took much notice of me wandering about. I swapped both pairs. Going out to wait for the police to arrive, I tucked the Durs case on top of the engine of Margaret's Morris beneath the hood—carefully wrapped, of course, and wedged in good and proper.

And when the pathologist couldn't find the bullet? I was suddenly unutterably weary. I decided to let them all guess till they got tired, as they had of old Eric Field and Sheila. When the Old Bills came hurtling up I was back in