I grinned up at him, asking:
“And you didn’t like that?”
“Oh, getting his throat cut was all to the good, but he bled and screamed so filthily.” He raised his nose and sniffed. “That’s honeysuckle somewhere, isn’t it?”
“Smells like it. Was it throat-cutting that you had in mind when you threatened him?”
“When I threatened him,” he drawled. “My dear fellow, I did nothing of the sort. I was in Udja, a stinking Moroccan town close to the Algerian frontier, and one morning a voice spoke to me from an orange tree. It said: ‘Go to Farewell, in California, in the States, and there you will see Theodore Kavalov die.’ I thought that a capital idea. I thanked the voice, told Marcus to pack, and came here. As soon as I arrived I told Kavalov about it, thinking perhaps he would die then and I wouldn’t be hung up here waiting. He didn’t, though, and too late I regretted not having asked the voice for a definite date. I should hate having to waste months here.”
“That’s why you’ve been trying to hurry it up?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Schrecklichkeit,” I said, “rocky skulls, dog barbecues, vanishing corpses.”
“I’ve been fifteen years in Africa,” he said. “I’ve too much faith in voices that come from orange trees where no one is to try to give them a hand. You needn’t fancy I’ve had anything to do with whatever has happened.”
“Marcus?”
Sherry stroked his freshly shaven cheeks and replied:
“That’s possible. He has an incorrigible bent for the ruder sort of African horseplay. I’ll gladly cane him for any misbehavior of which you’ve reasonably definite proof.”
“Let me catch him at it,” I said, “and I’ll do my own caning.”
Sherry leaned forward and spoke in a cautious undertone:
“Be sure he suspects nothing till you’ve a firm grip on him. He’s remarkably effective with either of his knives.”
“I’ll try to remember that. The voice didn’t say anything about Ringgo?”
“There was no need. When the body dies, the hand is dead.”
Black Marcus came out carrying food. We moved to the table and I started on my second breakfast.
Sherry wondered whether the voice that had spoken to him from the orange tree had also spoken to Kavalov. He had asked Kavalov, he said, but hadn’t received a very satisfactory answer. He believed that voices which announced deaths to people’s enemies usually also warned the one who was to die. “That is,” he said, “the conventional way of doing it, I believe.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try to find out for you. Maybe I ought to ask him what he dreamed last night, too.”
“Did he look nightmarish this morning?”
“I don’t know. I left before he was up.”
Sherry’s eyes became hot gray points.
“Do you mean,” he asked, “that you’ve no idea what shape he’s in this morning, whether he’s alive or not, whether my dream was a true one or not?”
“Yeah.”
The hard line of his mouth loosened into a slow delighted smile.
“By Jove,” he said. “That’s capital! I thought—you gave me the impression of knowing positively that there was nothing to my dream, that it was only a meaningless dream.”
He clapped his hands sharply.
Black Marcus popped out of the door.
“Pack,” Sherry ordered. “The bald one is finished. We’re off.”
Marcus bowed and backed grinning into the house.
“Hadn’t you better wait to make sure?” I asked.
“But I am sure,” he drawled, “as sure as when the voice spoke from the orange tree. There is nothing to wait for now: I have seen him die.”
“In a dream.”
“Was it a dream?” he asked carelessly.
When I left, ten or fifteen minutes later, Marcus was making noises indoors that sounded as if he actually was packing.
Sherry shook hands with me, saying:
“Awfully glad to have had you for breakfast. Perhaps we’ll meet again if your work ever brings you to northern Africa. Remember me to Miriam and Dolph. I can’t sincerely send condolences.”
Out of sight of the bungalow, I left the road for a path along the hillside above, and explored the country for a higher spot from which Sherry’s place could be spied on. I found a pip, a vacant ramshackle house on a jutting ridge off to the northeast. The whole of the bungalow’s front, part of one side, and a good stretch of the cobbled walk, including its juncture with the road, could be seen from the vacant house’s front porch. It was a rather long shot for naked eyes, but with field glasses it would be just about perfect, even to a screen of overgrown bushes in front.
When I got back to the Kavalov house Ringgo was propped up on gay cushions in a reed chair under a tree, with a book in his hand.
“What do you think of him?” he asked. “Is he cracked?”
“Not very. He wanted to be remembered to you and Mrs. Ringgo. How’s the arm this morning?”
“Rotten. I must have let it get too damp last night. It gave me hell all night.”
“Did you see Captain Cat-and-mouse?” Kavalov’s whining voice came from behind me. “And did you find any satisfaction in that?”
I turned around. He was coming down the walk from the house. His face was more gray than brown this morning, but what I could see of his throat, above the v of a wing collar, was uncut enough.
“He was packing when I left,” I said. “Going back to Africa.”
VI
That day was Thursday. Nothing else happened that day.
Friday morning I was awakened by the noise of my bedroom door being opened violently.
Martin, the thin-faced valet, came dashing into my room and began shaking me by the shoulder, though I was sitting up by the time he reached my bedside.
His thin face was lemon-yellow and ugly with fear.
“It’s happened,” he babbled. “Oh, my God, it’s happened!”
“What’s happened?”
“It’s happened. It’s happened.”
I pushed him aside and
