Читать книгу The Man From Sing Sing - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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Ambouyna Kotinzi, on the following morning, leaned over the verandah which guarded her own particular little corner of the deck and called to Reuben Argels, who was passing.

“Mr. Argels, stop, if you please. I wish to speak to you.”

He swung around—a typical New Yorker, in his neat, grey tweed clothes, his carefully chosen linen and tie, his perfectly polished brown shoes. Ambouyna was dressed in the flimsiest of négligées, over which she had flung a fur coat. She was bareheaded and the sun was finding streaks of almost purple colour in her smooth, black hair. A wonderful necklace of pearls encircled her throat. She still had—perhaps more than ever this morning—that languid, fascinating lure in her deep-set beautiful eyes.

“You may enter,” she invited, with a wave of the hand. “Suzette, admit Monsieur.”

Argels turned down the little corridor and was ushered into what was termed “the royal suite,” occupied by Ambouyna Kotinzi for the voyage. An open door brought him a glimpse of a recently vacated bedroom and a waft of perfume from the bathroom. He stepped out on to the balcony. She pointed to a chair.

“You should feel very honoured,” she said, as he raised her fingers to his lips. “You are the first man who has entered my suite.”

“It was an honour,” he remarked, with a somewhat forced lightness, “perhaps vouchsafed to me because my days upon this earth are supposed to be numbered.”

“I did not know that you were ill,” she sympathised. “You certainly look very tired.”

“I am not ill,” he assured her, “but an enemy has smiled upon me and his friends seem all of the opinion that, therefore, I must die.”

“Foolish!” she murmured. “I did not imagine that you were so superstitious.”

He looked thoughtfully out into space and his really wonderful dark eyes were at their best when, as now, searching the unexplored places.

“Why not?” he meditated. “I am not of New York. I have made myself one, but I am not of the race of moneymakers, although I can hold my own amongst them. Every one treats this affair of Moran Chambers in the most absurd fashion.”

“Explain to me,” she begged. “I am supposed to be sympathetic.”

Her voice thrilled him and for a moment he yielded to the sweetness of it. Then all his suspicions came back with a rush. His face darkened.

“No one would accept my point of view,” he declared bitterly. “Every one believes that I acted as I did simply to spite Moran Chambers. Mr. Andrew Pulwitter, the famous financier, who is doubtless a friend of yours, declines to enter into partnership with me, and a mysterious person, who I think climbed out of the nether regions of the boat, has pricked my shoulder, when I must admit he could easily have stabbed me to the heart. You, probably, are preparing a special concoction of poison for me.”

“It is an idea,” she remarked blandly. “Suzette, tell Francis to prepare a couple of special Martinis.”

She pushed a box of cigarettes towards him. He lit one and smoked thoughtfully for a moment.

“Is it within the rules of the game,” he asked, “to enquire why you are treating me so kindly this morning?”

“You may ask anything,” she rejoined. “I am not to be regarded as other human beings. You must know that. I am in a generous and uncertain mood this morning. As a matter of fact, I do not dislike you, Mr. Argels. I accept neither flowers nor presents from any one, which is why I sent yours back. If you had not done this terrible thing to Moran, which, I will admit, made me very, very angry at the time, although even that I did not quite understand, we might perhaps have become friends.”

He ventured to look across at her. She returned his gaze frankly and smilingly. Surely, he thought, she was the most beautiful woman on earth.

“Some day,” she suggested, “you shall tell me all about this horrible law case and why you gave the evidence that you did. Perhaps I shall understand. I am not very good at business. Tell me this, to start with. Why do you hate Moran?”

She suddenly felt the queer effect of those almost black eyes boring into hers. She leaned a little forward. A streak of Orientalism seemed to have escaped from him, with the protruding lips, the warm breath, the perfume of his bath salts and upon his handkerchief, stronger even than the odour of the cigar which he had been smoking.

“You ought to guess that,” he said. “You are not the woman I thought you, if you do not know.”

The tables were suddenly turned. She was no longer playing with him a little contemptuously, some slight pity, perhaps, in her heart. He was, for those few seconds, at any rate, the master. She felt a catch in her throat. He was content not to press her for speech, content with that brief victory.... A dark-visaged maître d’hôtel appeared with cocktails and caviare sandwiches upon a gleaming silver tray. He advanced towards his mistress. She shook her head.

“You shall choose,” she decided, waving the tray towards her companion. “In that way, you will have no fear that the spirit of Lucrezia Borgia has descended upon me.”

He accepted the nearer glass. She broke a caviare sandwich in two, bit into her own portion, and handed him the other. The servant laid the salver upon the table and disappeared. She commenced to talk at once, almost feverishly.

“So you had a bad night’s sleep,” she remarked.

“A distressing one,” he sighed. “Having made all my plans so carefully, it is humiliating to be outwitted by that long, simple-looking Scotchman.”

She was beginning to recover herself. She lit a cigarette and laughed across at him.

“Tell me what happened,” she begged. “I do need so to be amused.”

“Well,” he reflected, “I suppose there are elements of humour in the affair. I woke at half-past two this morning to find that dour Scotchman seated before my treasure chest, with my automatic in his hand, and all the missing papers relating to the Moran Chambers case in his possession. I couldn’t get them back again, either. He had the laugh on me all the time.”

“This was after you had been stabbed on the shoulder?” she asked.

“All in one evening,” he assented.

She yawned and settled herself a little more comfortably in her chair.

“I must treat Mr. Andrew Pulwitter with more respect,” she observed, “if he has really succeeded in outwitting you. For the moment, however, I am not in the mood for serious conversation. I have spent the night without dreaming of Moran, which is always to the good. Is there a woman in your life, Reuben Argels?”

“Not before I saw you,” he answered meditatively.

“You have a delightful way,” she murmured, “of making banalities sound convincing.”

“It is the spice of truth in them,” he explained, “just like the dash of absinthe in this cocktail.”

She looked dreamily out across the foam-flecked sea. A fitful sunshine was making diamonds of the bright spray. They were rolling along with a pleasant, graceful motion.

“What were your feelings for me, Mr. Argels, when you sent me that diamond bracelet and the wonderful little note?” she asked abruptly. “Of course, I had to send the diamonds back, but I kept the note for some days. You were very eloquent.”

“I believe,” he confessed, “that I was very much in love with you.”

“And you mean to say that you are not now!” she exclaimed indignantly.

“I hope not. I have fought hard enough to cure myself.”

“Didn’t your heart jump when I called you in here?”

“There may have been some disturbance,” he admitted. “I wasn’t quite sure what new form of danger I was called upon to face.”

“I do not find you so gallant as your letters indicate,” she pouted.

“You may find that I have a worse vice,” he warned her. “I may be persistent.”

She held her head.

“It is too great a strain upon me,” she complained, “to fence with any one so apt. My knowledge of your language is not sufficient.”

“Of what nationality are you?” he enquired. “One reads so many stories in the papers.”

“My father was a Dutch colonial,” she told him; “my mother a Frenchwoman whom he met in Paris on one of his holidays. I was christened after the island upon which I was born, in the Dutch East Indies.”

“Ambouyna,” he murmured. “A musical name.”

“You may call me by it if you like, when we are alone.”

“You are very gracious,” he acknowledged.

They sat in silence for a few moments. She was curled up in her chair and apparently entirely at her ease. His own attitude it was less easy to divine.

“Tell me,” she asked him lazily, “how am I getting on? You have gathered, of course, that I am trying to turn your head, to make you my slave, and when you are properly fastened to my chariot wheels, get you to sign a confession concerning the false evidence you gave at the trial, and take Moran Chambers’ place in Sing Sing?”

“A pretty comprehensive programme for the time,” he remarked. “We are due in Marseilles in six days, you know.”

She made a grimace at him. Somehow or other, the flicker of her lips, the laughter in her eyes, seemed to possess the gift of rendering void those few feet of intervening space.

“You are most ungallant,” she complained—“especially after all those nice things you wrote in that note. You should have been my helpless slave from the moment I spoke to you. I wore a flame-coloured frock, too, and it was arranged that I should be seated not far from you. More journalists than I could count have written that in a flame-coloured frock the man does not exist who could resist me.”

“I am allowed to resist,” he reminded her, “but I am already beginning to feel the bonds cutting into my flesh. I ask myself, though,” he went on, a little bitterly, “whether it is worth while. Your second string—the dour Scotchman—has already won so great a victory that I might almost be looked upon as a beaten man.”

“You have not the air.”

“That is because I am brave,” he assured her. “Don’t you hear that little gentle tap-tap all the time over your head? That is the wireless ticking out copies of the documents and letters found in my steel chest.”

“To be serious for a moment,” she asked, looking steadily across at him, “will their publication really help to bring about Moran’s freedom.”

“There are other considerations,” he replied enigmatically. “By-the-by,” he went on, “if you have any interest in this ship’s cabal, now that one of the triumvirate has brought off such a success, couldn’t you continue the proceedings unaided?”

“Please explain,” she begged. “I am stupid at understanding sometimes.”

“I don’t like fellows in black clothes and rubber shoes, who steal up behind one in the darkness and make holes in one’s body,” he confessed. “Andrew Pulwitter has won his victory and has nothing else to gain from me. Your attacks may be more dangerous than either of theirs, but they have their compensations. Couldn’t you call off that midnight assassin?”

“But I do not know what you are talking about and I am sure that I am not succeeding,” she objected. “You do not appear in the least fatuous. You are not growing violent. You do not try to make mad love to me. You have not the air of unhappiness.”

“Love doesn’t take me in any of those ways,” he confided.

“How does it take you?” she asked. “Please tell me. I must know when I am meeting with some little success.”

“You shall know,” he promised her, “even if I have to throw myself at your feet.”

Andrew Pulwitter came along the deck. He paused before the balcony and his eyes twinkled as he looked at Argels.

“That’s good work, lassie,” he remarked to Ambouyna. “Keep him caged.”

“The fortune of war,” Argels sighed, gazing with fascinated eyes at the pile of Marconigram receipts which Pulwitter was carrying.