Nude in Mink by Sax Rohmer (classic literature books txt) 📖

Why do you tie my hands?”

Sumuru shook her head reprovingly.

“Because I am—what did you call me?—a female demon, I suppose. Really, I begin to despair of you. A beautiful spirit in a beautiful body is so rare—and so many physically fine men are such fools.”

“Where is Claudette?” Donovan spoke threateningly. “Answer me!”

“You shall see her … if you wish. But please refrain from hurling stupid charges at my head. There can be no evidence to associate me with Miles Tristram, for I never entered his house. I interviewed him elsewhere. He was foolish enough to defy me. I entrusted the matter to Dolores. A pretty girl, and highly accomplished. Ariosto is devoted to her, and she to him. She is Spanish.”

“Are you felling me that this girl poisoned Tristram in cold blood?”

“Spanish blood is never cold, Mr. Donovan. She carried out her orders with natural enthusiasm. Sir Miles, an ugly character, had a steel dispatch box locked in his desk. He was awaiting Dr. Maitland’s visits in order to show him its contents. Dolores brought this box away with her—”

“Leaving a dead man and a valuable sapphire behind!”

Sumuru extended her gloved hands.

“Money means little to me, personally … As for the actor, Forrester, well—your statement is ludicrous. One of my servants called upon him. He was a nuisance. No, I am not interested in money. Yet, one can do so little without a sound financial background. I managed this while still quite young. An attractive girl can, you know, if she keeps her eyes fixed inflexibly upon that objective.”

“Is that so?” Donovan growled.

Sumuru nodded.

“Many men have desired me. But the only men to whom, temporarily, I have given myself, have been unusually wealthy. Love I have never encouraged. Today, I am quite unusually wealthy, too—and free.” She opened her handbag and took out a small onyx case studded with diamonds. “Will you try one of my cigarettes?”

“Thank you: I prefer my own. What brand are yours—Lucrezia Borgia’s?”

Sumuru’s laughter rippled like a peal of silver bells.

“How absurd you are! I assure you I am entirely harmless, if no one interferes with me. I merely set a different valuation on human life—that’s all. Surely the late war must have taught you that to think otherwise than lightly of one brief span of physical existence is mere sentiment?”

She lighted her cigarette with a curious gold lighter which produced no visible flame.

“Is nothing sacred in your eyes?” Donovan asked harshly.

“Many things. Beauty especially. But we live so many lives. Don’t you know that? I fear your American education has left you lamentably ignorant. All the things that really matter seem to have been omitted from the curriculum. Am I slandering Harvard or Yale?”

“Neither. You are merely talking rubbish.”

“Sturdy Yankee common sense. Common is the operative word. Not in its implication of vulgarity, for, if gauche, you are never vulgar, but in the sense of superficial knowledge common to all. Plato would have put you in the infants’ class—if he had had one!”

“I should have guessed Pluto, rather than Plato, to be your guardian spirit!”

Sumuru laughed again—and her laughter rang with the careless gaiety of that of a young girl.

Donovan knew, in this moment, that Sumuru was ageless. Even as she laughed, he felt his courage oozing away. He grew terribly afraid of her. Her very beauty appalled him. It was the beauty of a poised cobra.

“I begin to despair of you,” she said. “Yet I worship beauty—and you have physical beauty.”

“Do you count assassination beautiful?”

Sumuru sighed.

“It may well be. You see, American and English morality, although they differ so widely in sex matters, are alike in what you call the sanctity of human life. Your police will comb continents for someone who has killed a possibly worthless man or woman. But your airmen will blanket a town with explosives.”

“That’s in war!”

“How irrational! You are sentimentalists—but not for the many; only for the few. You allow a Duce to shower death on innocent natives; a Fuehrer to rape his sleeping neighbours; a Comrade to drive thousands into labour camps. The sanctity of human life, I suppose, prohibits your destroying these reptiles? Armies, bombs, wholesale destruction, could be avoided. A sum, less than a war costs daily, would be sufficient to ensure the removal of any such as these.”

A sort of crazy logic in this woman’s views, and perhaps the magic of her voice and the witchery which was Sumuru, began to get hold of Donovan. He found himself considering her arguments, seriously; found himself wondering, if perhaps, men’s ideas of international amity were all cross-eyed.

He tried to recapture his just anger, to shake off the spell of Sumuru.

“You will do the same again,” she went on, dreamily puffing her cigarette. “You will watch ugliness preparing scientific weapons which, this time, will quite destroy the present phase of European and American civilisation. You will do nothing until it is too late. Your leaders, who may have virtue, will not understand the difference between beauty and ugliness. So, you will be obliterated, together with the ignorant fools who will plan, are planning now, this holocaust. But if I, or anyone else, stepped in and removed the cause before the menace had time to mature, do you know what you would do to me—if you could catch me? Put me on trial for murder!”

She flicked ash into a tray.

“Murder, my dear Mark Donovan—when your soldiers and diplomats would be planning organised slaughter of the entire population dominated by these insane scoundrels! No, my friend: the rulers of the future must be trained from childhood to rule. They must know. They must see. They must be immune from your sloppy sentimentalism, from your common greed, from your snobbish fear of stamping out an evil thing simply because it wears decorations and calls itself a Premier or a Marshal.”

“Stop! I’ll listen to no more poisonous nonsense! Where is Claudette?”

Sumuru dropped her half smoked cigarette in the tray, and stood up.

“Shall we go and see her? … Or would you prefer to send for a policeman?”

2

In Chief Inspector Ives’ office at Scotland Yard, a transfigured Maitland faced the inspector across his neat desk.

“I think that was managed very neatly, Ives! My departure for the North was made so spectacular that I don’t think it can possibly have been overlooked by Sumuru.”

“I agree,” said Ives. “Although nobody was spotted who might have been on the look-out.”

They grey, clean-shaven, and now bespectacled Maitland, shook his head.

“The gang is too clever for that. But I believe someone was there all the same. Do you think it safe for me to take up my new role, Inspector? Could I possibly be recognised?”

Ives surveyed him critically.

“I doubt it. Clean-shaven, near-white hair, and those spectacles—I should hardly know you, myself, Doctor.”

“Don’t call me ‘doctor’.” snapped Maitland. “I am plain Mr. Sandford—”

He paused as Ives’ telephone buzzed. The inspector bent to the instrument…

“Inspector Ives here… What’s that?… Yes! I see… Hold on… Listen, Doctor—sorry!—there’s something afoot, I think! Mr. Donovan has just driven away from Bruton street with a lady—in a Rolls sedanca de ville!”

“Good God! Is he being covered?”

“Yes. Motor cyclist… Wait a minute… Are you there, Thomson? Did this lady arrive in the car? Oh, I see. It drove up when she and Mr. Donovan came out… Very smart woman, you say, and wearing a hat with a veil… H’m.”

Maitland was standing at Ives’s elbow.

“They are on no account to be stopped, Ives! But we must know…”

Ives raised his hand…

“What’s that, Thomson? They have driven over to the former Embassy?… We’ve got ‘em this time, Doctor! We’ve got ‘em! Mr. Donovan and the woman have gone into the house we’ve been watching for days past—and I got the O.K. from the Foreign Office an hour ago to inspect the premises! If the woman is Sumuru! What do you want us to do now?”

“Nothing—until I get there! Come on! Ives—the trick has worked!”

3

A graceful Rolls sedan stood at the door in charge of a dark-skinned chauffeur. His manner to Sumuru was obsequious. As Donovan followed her in:

“Don’t bother to memorise the registration number,” she said. “It isn’t mine.”

He became aware, as the car glided smoothly off, of a faint, peculiar perfume which he knew he should never forget. Sumuru seemed to read his thoughts.

“You have noticed that my fur is perfumed with spikenard? The secret of its preparation is supposed to be lost, you know, although it was highly prized in, the days of the Caliphs.”

Donovan did not reply. He was wrestling with his conscience.

The drive was a short one; yet, throughout it, he was keenly conscious of the intense vibrations which emanated from his companion. Her personality was electrical and infinitely disturbing .

He found himself standing before a tall building. A flag hung limply above the door.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“I thought you might like to see the house for which your industrious friend, Inspector Ives, has been searching the neighbourhood. It was occupied, until recently, by members of the embassy staff of what, I suppose, you would call a friendly nation. Officially, it remains theirs, although the occupants actually left a week ago.”

Donovan found nothing to say.

“Shall we go in?” Sumuru asked, in her soft voice. “Or are you still thinking about policemen? I saw one on the corner of George Street.”

Donovan went in.

Sumuru opened the door with a key.

A lobby, in bronze and marble, bore indications of having been stripped of many of its appointments. As Sumuru closed the door Donovan turned and looked at her.

She was smiling.

“Is this another of your borrowed houses?”

“In a sense, it is. Why?”

“I have good reasons for feeling anxious.”

“Yes—I suppose that is true. But you must remember that you came here voluntarily. You are my guest, while you remain. Is it sufficient?”

And looking into those mocking, wonderful eyes, Donovan knew that it was.

As he wrote, afterwards… “This may be hard to understand. No doubt one who reads will say: What a fool! After such previous experiences, why trust this woman? … I can only reply: You have not met Sumuru. A criminal I recognised her to be, one outside the law; one having crimes of many of which I knew nothing, chargeable upon her. But her serenity, her calm courage, her consciousness of power, set her high above any criminal I had ever know in my crime reporter days, had ever heard of since. One would as soon think of doubting a commander-in-chief. Her word, I knew, was inviolable. Why?

“I have tried to explain…”

A marble staircase led up to a balcony. There was evidence to show that a carpet had been removed from it quite recently. As Donovan stared doubtfully around, Sumuru threw a door open.

“Wait in there,” she said. “I will send Claudette to you.” She brought her lips close to Donovan’s ear. “Make love to her, Mark. She is made for love. Don’t waste the golden moments.”

Sumuru left him closing the door. He heard her fading footsteps on the marble stairs.

He found himself in a small but lofty apartment chiefly notable for a fine Adam mantelpiece. A mahogany desk upon which were writing materials and a lamp with a green glass shade stood before one wall. Several good rugs remained on the polished floor, and he saw two armchairs.

There was nothing else.

Immediately, Donovan crossed and tried the knob. The door had not been locked, and he looked out for a moment into the empty lobby. He was tremendously strung up. His heart was beating too fast. He