turned out to be a guest room and a lumber room respectively. That left two on the ground floor. The first, hard by the front door, I took to be Mr. Maccabee's personal domain, which only left the one by the back door, across the hall from the kitchen. My deduction was correct.
The door was ajar, so I stepped in, turned up the gas, and looked about. The room had built-in bookcases on all sides, from floor to ceiling. Two comfortable chairs in studded green leather flanked an Arabian octagonal table, with an oil lamp. There was a fireplace in marble, with a fendered grate, and a faded Persian carpet that dominated the room in an abstract design of red and green. A ladder on rollers navigated most of the shelves, by means of a circular track. It was all a bibliophile could want. I ran a finger along one shelf, and it came away clean. Mac must dust the shelves weekly.
I haven't mentioned the books, of course. Hundreds of books, thousands, in fact. Any subject, any language; novels, philosophy, classics, language primers, and instructional books on just about everything. There was a shelf full of manuscripts, another of ragged scrolls, and a third fronted with glass to preserve the ancient volumes therein. I settled on Eliot's Daniel Deronda, as I thought it might be pertinent to the case, and was just about to sit down when there was a warning growl from behind me. I was about to sit on Harm. I let dozing dogs lie and moved to the other chair.
I was almost immediately engrossed in the book and was coming to the part when Daniel comes into the casino and inadvertently makes Gwendolen lose her money, when the door burst open. It was Mac, in a pajama sleeping suit and robe. He had his shotgun in hand, but all form of menace was gone for he (oh, how priceless) was wearing a silk hair net.
'Oh, it's you,' he said, simply.
'Yes. Barker woke me, and I couldn't get back to sleep. I thought I might try reading.'
'Of course.'
I was aching to mention the net, but I controlled myself. 'Thank you for the brandy and milk. It did the trick.'
'Not at all, sir.' It came to him suddenly. He ripped the net off his head and stuffed it into a pocket of his gown. 'I'll leave you to your reading then. Deronda, is it? Did the Guv suggest it?'
'No, I chose it on my own. Is it a good book, from your point of view?'
'Oh, yes. Not bad, really, for a Gentile author.' He let me alone after that. There are some people one can get along with immediately, and some that one never shall. I began to think Mac might be one of the latter. At first, I had assumed it was because he was Jewish, but I'd gotten along well enough with Zangwill and Moskowitz. No, I decided it was just Mac.
Around midnight the rest and reading had settled my spirit enough that I was hungry again. Harm and I decided to raid the larder. It proved to be a roomy cupboard in the kitchen with louvered doors and shelves stacked to the ceiling. Dummolard went in for glass-domed servers; there must have been a half dozen. I saw mutton pie, game pie, some sort of quiche covered with rashers of bacon, and a venison stew. The dog and I agreed on the quiche.
Considering how cold and aloof Harm had been to me over the last week or two, I was amazed at the sudden transformation in him. He now wanted to be my best friend. While I searched for a plate and silverware, the Pekingese began making aerial leaps a Chinese acrobat would envy. When I sat down with my slice, he stood beside my knee on his back limbs, waving his paws and gurgling like a baby. What can one do after such a performance? I split the pie with him, then we mutually agreed we needed a second slice. After that, we each had some water and went back to reading. That is, I went back to reading while he dozed in the other chair.
I must confess I thought him useless as a watchdog, snoring in the chair as he was. At less than a stone, he didn't meet my standards in regard to size, though my ankles attested to the sharpness of his teeth. I noticed, however, that at the slightest sound, the settling of the house, perhaps, or a late-night cab passing through the Elephant and Castle Circle outside, he woke from his slumbers and looked about with those goggly eyes of his. The little dog taught me a lesson about Barker, and all the satellites that revolved around him: they may look harmless enough, and perhaps even a trifle ridiculous, but there are hidden abilities behind the outward appearance. Did I dare hope that the same could be said of me?
15
It was not a good morning. Dummolard made me coffee and an omelet in the kitchen, but neither of us was in a garrulous mood. He moved about, the stump of a cigarette in his teeth, ready to bite off my head at the first comment. I'd had a small disagreement with my employer the night before, had not endeared myself to the butler, and now I was in danger of angering the cook.
Barker came down the stairs, as steady as the eight twenty from Brighton. He greeted me formally and led me outside to the curb. Racket at least had a smile for me, though Juno seemed unimpressed. Perhaps she associated me with the shot last night. The new glass and patch on the woodwork of the cab were as evident as Racket had predicted. Barker and I rode to the office in Craig's Court in relative silence. He asked but one question.
'How's Deronda coming along?'
'Fine, sir. How did you know I was reading it?'
'I saw the book on your table just now before I came down,' he responded.
'Is it all right for me to borrow it?'
'The library is open to you, lad.'
In the office, I felt more like an actor than an agent's assistant. I hadn't sat at my desk more than once or twice, hadn't used any of the materials in the top drawers, and hadn't even opened the bottom ones.
Barker drafted a letter to a Sыretй inspector in French. Then we attempted a letter to a retired criminologist in Vienna but bogged down completely. I didn't know a word of German, and when he wrote down a word for me, I couldn't read his horrid scrawl. We agreed to send it in English and hope that the old duffer could find a translator.
Finally, Barker finished his office business, or perhaps he merely took pity on me, and we climbed into another cab. Barker yelled 'Chelsea' over our heads, and we were off.
'What is in Chelsea?' I asked.
'Aesthetes,' he responded. I had read in The Times how that district of the West End was rapidly filling up with artists, poets, authors, and let us not forget the wealthy female patrons who feted them. In drawing rooms there, Mr. Whistler was slinging paint for all he was worth, and the arbiters of taste and fashion walked those gilded streets. I noticed a picturesque fellow in a velveteen suit leaning against a building, looking as if he had barely enough energy to smoke the cigarette that hung limply between his thick lips.
We disembarked in front of a fashionable-looking residence in Cheyne Row, with a brass doorknocker in the form of a sunflower. Our rap brought to the door a Sikh manservant in a suit and a turban of an unrelieved peach color, which in no way diminished his fierce appearance. He took our card and led us through an overdecorated hall, awash in Liberty wallpaper and heavy furniture. He carried our card into a room and emphatically closed the door behind him. After a moment, he opened it again, bowed, and ushered us in. The room was a book-crammed study, filled mostly with classics, less modern and more academic than the outside of the residence would lead one to expect. A white-haired gentleman sat at his desk, scribbling away at his journal. He set down his pen and turned at our approach. I was unprepared for his appearance. It was Walter Rushford, my old tutor from Oxford.
I had read in the newspaper that he was settled now here in London, probably in the same article about the aesthetic movement. A wag therein had called him 'Old Nebuchadnezzar,' after the Babylonian king from Daniel, for at the pinnacle of his fame and genius, with his books flying out of the bookshops, and with invitations to speak the length and breadth of England, he had suddenly gone quite thoroughly mad. Some called it a brainstorm brought on by overwork, some a natural extension of his genius, and others a punishment for his radical beliefs. No one would say exactly what form this madness took (perhaps he ate grass like his biblical predecessor), but the outcome was swift: he was quietly sent to a sanitarium outside of London. Now that I found myself confronted with him, I was busy worrying that he would recognize me, and wondering what he would say when he did.
