Читать книгу Captains of Souls - Edgar Wallace - Страница 12

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"I SAW your friend Ronald Morelle today," said Moropulos, sending a writhing ring of smoke to the ceiling. Sprawling on a big morris chair, his slippered feet resting on the edge of a fender, he watched the circle break against the ceiling. A pair of stained grey flannel trousers, a silk shirt and a velvet coat that had once been a vivid green; these and an immense green silk cravat, the colour of which showed through his beard, constituted his usual morning neglige. Ambrose Sault, busy with the body of an unfinished safe, which in the rough had come from the maker's hands that morning, released the pressure of his acetylene lamp and removed his goggles before he replied. He was working in shirt and trousers, and his sleeves were rolled up, displaying the rope-like muscles of his arm. He looked across to his indolent companion and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. "Mr. Ronald Morelle is neither a friend nor an acquaintance, Moropulos. I don't think I have ever seen him. I have heard of him."

"You haven't missed much by not knowing him," said Moropulos, "but he's a good-looking fellow." He flicked the ash of his cigarette on to the tiled hearth. "Steppe is still annoyed with me." Sault smiled to himself. "You think he is justified? Perhaps. I was terribly drunk, but I was happy. Some day, my dear brother, I shall get so drunk that even you will not hold me. I move toward my apotheosis of intoxication certainly and surely. Then I will be irresistible and I shall have no fear of those brute arms of yours." He sucked at the cigarette without speaking for a long time.

Sault went back to his work. "I have often wondered!" said Moropulos at last.

"What?"

"Whether it would have been better if I had followed the advice of my head man that morning I pulled you aboard the sloop. You remember Bob the Kanaka boy? He wanted to knock you on the head and drop you overboard; you were too dangerous, he said. If a Government boat had picked us up and you had been found on board as well as certain other illicit properties, I should have had a double charge against me. I said 'no' because I was sorry for you."

"Because you were afraid of me," said Sault calmly, "I knew you were afraid when I looked into your eyes. Why do you speak of the islands now... we haven't talked about the Pacific since I left the boat."

"I've been thinking about you," confessed Moropulos, with a quick, sly glance at the man. "Do you realize how—not 'curious'...what is the word?"

"Incurious!" suggested Sault, and Moropulos looked at him with reluctant admiration. "You are an extraordinary hombre, Sault. Merville says you have the vocabulaire...that is English or something like it...of an educated man. But to return...do you realize how incurious I am? For example, I have never once asked you, in all our years of knowing one another, why you killed that man."

"Which man?"

Moropulos laughed softly. "Butcher! Have you killed so many? I refer to the victim for whose destruction the French Government sent you to New Caledonia."

Sault stood leaning his back against the table, his eyes fixed on the floor. "He was a bad man," he said simply. "I tried to find another way of... stopping him, but he was clever and he had powerful friends, who were Government officials. So I killed him. He hired two men to wait for me one night. I was staying at a little hotel on the Plassy Road. They tried to beat me because I had reported this man. Then I knew that the only thing I could do was to kill him. I should do it again."

Moropulos surveyed him from under his lowered brows. "You were lucky to escape 'the widow', my friend," he said, but Ambrose shook his head.

"Nobody was executed in those days; capital punishment had not been abolished, but the Senate refused to vote the executioner his salary. It had the same effect. I was lucky to go to New Caledonia. Cayenne is worse."

"How long did you serve?"

"Eight years and seven months," was the reply.

Moropulos made a little grimace. "I would sooner die," he said, and lit another cigarette. Deep in thought he smoked until Ambrose made a move to pick up his Crooke's glasses. "Don't work. I hate to see you—and hate worse to hear you. What do you think of Morelle?"

"I don't know him; I have heard about him. He is not a good man."

"What is a good man?" Moropulos demanded contemptuously. "He is a lover of ladies, who isn't? He is a cur too...Steppe walks on him. He is scared of Steppe, but then everybody is, except you and I." Ambrose smiled. "Well, perhaps I am...he is such a gorilla. But you are not."

"Why should I be? I am stronger than he."

Moropulos looked at the man's bare arms. "Yes...I suppose it comes down to that. The basis of all fear is physical. When will the safe be finished?"

"In a week. I am assembling the lock at home. I shall make it work to five letters. The only word I can spell. I shouldn't have known that but I heard a man spell it once...on the ship that brought me home. He was a steerage passenger and he used to take his little child on the deck when it was fine, and the little one used to read scripture stories to him. When she came to a hard word he spelt it. I heard one word and never forgot it."

"I'll be glad when the thing is finished," the Greek meditated. "We have a whole lot of papers that we never want to see the light of day, Steppe and I. We could destroy them but they may be useful—correspondence that it isn't safe to keep and it isn't wise to burn. You are an ingenious devil!"

In the Paddington directory, against "Moropulos, 49 Junction Terrace', were the words, 'mining engineer'. It was a courtesy status, for he had neither mined nor engineered. Probably the people of Junction Terrace were too occupied with their own strenuous affairs to read the directory. They knew him as one who at regular periods was brought home in the middle of the night singing noisily in a strange language. Cicero's oration was Greek to Cassius; the melodious gibberish of Mr. Moropulos was Greek to Junction Terrace, though they were not aware of the fact.

No. 49 was a gaunt, damp house with a mottled face, for the stucco had peeled in patches and had never been renewed. Moropulos bought it at a bargain price and made no contingency allowance for dilapidations. The windows of the upper floors were dingy and unwashed. The owner argued that as he did not occupy the rooms above it would be wicked waste of money to clean the windows. Similarly he dispensed with carpets in the hall and on the stairs. His weekends he spent in more pleasing surroundings, for he had a cottage on the borders of Hantshire where he kept hens and grew cabbage-roses and on Sundays loafed in his garden, generally in his pyjamas, to the scandal of the neighbourhood. He had a whimsical turn of mind and named his cottage 'The Pantheon', and supported this conceit by decorating his arcadian groves with plaster reproductions of the great figures of mythology, such figures as Phidias and Polycletus and Praxiteles chiselled. He added to this a wooden pronaos which the local builder misguidedly surmised was intended for the entrance to a new cinema. When they discovered that the erection had no other purpose than to remind Moropulos of departed Hellenic splendours, the grief of the villagers was pathetic. Here he was kept, reluctantly, tidy. He owned a small American car which supplied him with the transportation he required, and made his country home accessible. It was Friday, the day he usually left town, but he had lingered on, hoping to see some tangible progress in the construction of the safe. "You never seem to get any further," he complained. "You have been fiddling with that noisy lamp for two hours and, so far as I can see, you've done nothing. How long will it be before anything happens?" and then before Sault could reply he went on: "Why don't you come to my little Athens, Sault? You prefer to stay in town. And you are a man of brains! Have you got a girl here, eh?"

"No."

"Gee! What a time that fellow Ronnie must have! But they will catch him some day...a mad father or a lunatic fiance, and ping! There will be Ronnie Morelle's brains on the floor, and the advocates pleading the unwritten law!"

"You seem to know a lot about him."

Moropulos ran his fingers through his beard and grinned at the ceiling. "Yes...I can't know too much. We shall have trouble with him. Steppe laughs at the idea. He has him bound to his heel...is that the expression, no? Well, he has him like that! But how can you bind a liar or chain an eel? His very cowardice is a danger."

"What have you to be afraid of?" asked Sault. "So far as I can make out, you are carrying on an honest business. It must be, or the doctor wouldn't be in it." His tone was sharp and challenging. Moropulos had sufficient nous not to accept that kind of challenge. "I can understand that you have papers that you wish to keep, in such a way that nobody but yourselves can get at them. All businesses have their secrets."

"Quite so," agreed the Greek, and yawned. "Ronnie will pay," he said, "but I am anxious that I should not be asked to contribute to the bill. I have had a great deal of amusement from watching him. The other night I was in the park. I go there because he goes. I know the paths he uses. And there came with him a most pretty young lady. She did not know him."

"You guessed that?"

"I know, because later, when she complained, she did not know his name. Ronnie!" he mused. "Now I tell you what I will undertake to do. I will make a list, accurate and precise, of all his love affairs. It will be well to know these, because there may come a day when it will be good to flourish a weapon in this young man's face. Such men marry rich women." Sault was working and only muttered his reply. He was not then interested in Ronnie Morelle.