Puzzle of the Silver Persian (2 page)

Rosemary Fraser, across the room, whispered something to her companion, and both girls laughed. Loulu Hammond guessed that the Fraser girl had suggested that Todd’s nose could stand a bit more grinding from an artistic point of view.

Rosemary and Miss Noring were standing up, the former pulling the collar of her squirrel coat around her ears. “How frightfully chilly it is in here,” she said as she went out.

“She’d be warm enough if she were wearing something underneath that coat besides a suit of lounging pajamas,” Loulu Hammond said to herself. She had caught a glimpse of crimson silk trousers beneath the squirrel coat.

“High hat, eh?” said Andy Todd indignantly to the bar steward. But Peter Noel did not answer. He was staring after the two who had gone and straightening his tie.

The two girls came out into the main social hall. It was a wide, low room well aft in the ship, and furnished with a bad piano, a good gramophone, ten bridge tables, and two easy chairs. Along one wall were five old ladies at five writing desks, scratching away with pens that were no doubt honorably retired from the post offices of America. Each rose from time to time to drop a fresh sheaf of stamped fat envelopes in the near-by letter box, though it would not be opened until the ship reached London.

A few bridge tables were in use, and half a dozen children were chasing each other and screaming merrily. One fat-faced youth of seven or eight was quietly whittling at the leg of the piano, his tongue protruding in the intensity of his labor.

“How horribly dull,” said Rosemary Fraser. “Candy, why didn’t we wait for the
Bremen?”

Candida Noring agreed. “Not a man on the boat, my dear. That cute English boy is under age, and Hammond is married…”

“Not too married, if I know the look in his eye,” said Rosemary. She looked back toward the smoking room. “No, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there isn’t a single solitary man on the boat worth developing…”

“You surely don’t mean Cecil Rhodes’ gift to Oxford?”

“Him!” said Rosemary. “Too,
too
sick-making.” She headed for the door. “Let’s take a turn or two of the deck and then go down and fight over who has to take the upper berth.”

Two hours later Rosemary thumped her pillow. “He has the strangest eyes!” she decided aloud.

Candida Noring put down her book and leaned over the edge of the top berth. “Who, in heaven’s name?”

“You wouldn’t have noticed,” said Rosemary comfortably, and opened her fountain pen. From beneath her pillow she took a leather-bound book, unlocked it with a tiny golden key, and pressed her cheek against the smooth creamy pages with their faint blue rule.

At the head of the first page she wrote
“Friday, September Thirteenth,”
then was thoughtful for a long while and finally began:
“There’s a man on board, diary, and when he looks at me…
”

At the moment when Rosemary was filling the creamy pages with her round script, back in the tiny smoking room Tom Hammond was having his fifth cognac. The others had gone, and the bar steward was leaning on his counter and talking swiftly and agreeably.

“You said just now that you are with a manufacturing chemist,” Noel began after lighting himself a cigar. “You know, I had a bit of that thrown at me when I was with the Chilean navy—in ’27 and ’28. There was only one cruiser, with three-inch guns that were falling to pieces and full of bird’s nests besides. It was up to me and four greaser rear admirals to concoct a powder weak enough to fire salutes with and still not blow the guns to bits. We were just getting there when the government overturned and some new rear admirals took charge. I got the sack and some of the new greasers got blown sky-high…” He looked happy when Hammond asked a question.

“Me? I was a rear admiral too. We were all rear admirals on board except for two captains and a cook. Gold epaulettes and a hundred Mex dollars a month. Great run while it lasted.”

Hammond looked a little envious. “You’ve been around.”

“Sure!” Noel grinned. “This is just marking time for me, this job. I’m pulling strings to get into the Chinese flying corps in Manchuria—”

There was a knock on the pantry door. The stewardess, Mrs. Snoaks, stood outside.

“Two more gin and bitters for the fussy couple in 44,” she ordered. “Colonel Wright says please will you use Booths instead of Gordon’s like you did last time?”

“The Colonel will drink what I mix,” said Peter Noel viciously. He rattled with his rack of bottles. “Now, when I was with the White Russians, in their Secret Service—”

But Tom Hammond was departing. “See you tomorrow,” he called back. The social hall was empty now. He took a turn or two of the boat deck, found the wind so high that his pipe became overheated in a moment, and he knocked it out. Then he went back below and followed the corridor to C cabin. It was the best on the ship, with a real bath, four portholes, and a genuine double bed. Two berth settees lined the wall, and on one of them was a tumble of bedclothes from which protruded a small fist, threatening even in relaxation. Tom Hammond walked softly, so as not to call down on himself the Vesuvius of trouble which was condensed in his eight-year-old son.

Loulu Hammond, propped against pillows in the big bed, smiled at him. “If you wake Gerald you may have the joy of beating him. He did twenty dollars’ worth of damage to the ship’s piano tonight.”

“It was your idea, bringing him,” Tom said. He slipped into a silk dressing gown. “For myself, I’d rather travel with a goat. The twenty can come out of your allowance, for you should have been watching him.”

“I was too busy watching you with your eyes glued on the little snip in the squirrel coat,” said Loulu. “Spend a pleasant evening?”

“She didn’t come back to the bar,” Tom said quickly. “But I saw her just now, stretched out in the
gayest
pair of red pajamas…”

“What?” Loulu sat up straight in bed.

“Through the porthole, when I took a turn around the promenade deck,” he went on. “The curtain was blowing.”

Tom Hammond was ready for bed. Loulu put down the
New Yorker
she had been reading—it was her Bible whenever she was out of the city—and her husband reached for the light switch.

Tom drew back his hand as if something had snapped at him. Gerald Hammond raised his rumpled, triumphant head from the blankets and shouted in a soprano voice that penetrated half the ship: “Daddy saw red pajamas! Daddy saw red pajamas!” He took a fresh breath. “Daddy saw—”

Tom Hammond got his hand across the mouth of his son and heir, but not before an impatient maiden lady in the next cabin had been awakened and had rapped sharply on the wall for silence. She had just managed to doze off, after eight hours of
mal de mer,
and now she was unwillingly awake again, conscious of the endless and persistent rocking of the billows.

“And this was a trip for pleasure!” moaned Hildegarde Withers. Which was hardly the exact truth. She had been left in such a nervous state as an aftermath of her participation in the unraveling of the murder mystery at Catalina Island in the late summer, that her physician had refused to allow her to go back to her desk at Jefferson School that fall. Luckily, the unexpected payment of a comfortable reward by the millionaire owner of the island permitted her to indulge a long-standing desire to see Europe.

She took up a worn linoleum-bound copy of
Alice
and tried to forget that eight more days of the unfriendly Atlantic lay between the ship and the muddy mouth of the Thames. The book opened at the Hatter’s tea party.
“‘I didn’t know it was your table,’ said Alice. ‘It’s laid for a great many more than three.’”

Miss Hildegarde Withers smiled grimly, and wondered if she would ever sit in her chair at the ship’s table this trip.

At any rate, her place was vacant at dinner the next evening. The rest of the arbitrarily arranged group at the doctor’s table was there intact, however.

Dr. Waite, bald and sniggering, was a good master of ceremonies, for all that. The head steward always put the “young crowd” at the doctor’s table, plus one or two steadier women for balance. This evening saw them properly arranged—on the doctor’s left was the Honorable Emily Pendavid, then her nephew Leslie, then haughty Rosemary, then Tom Hammond and Loulu—minus Gerald, who gulped his food at a wall table with the rest of the children, under the eye of the stewardess—next Andy Todd, with Miss Withers’ vacant chair on his left, and beyond that the tanned face of Candida Noring, and the doctor again.

Dr. Waite was talking, and he could out-talk Andy Todd. “What a crowd and what a voyage
that
one was!” he finished. “Dancing until eleven or twelve every night.”

Loulu Hammond said something about the pace that kills. But Andy Todd wanted to know where there was any room for dancing.

“Pull up the rug at one end of the social hall,” advised Dr. Waite wickedly. “Turn on the Victrola and leap to it. If the bridge players object, let them go complain to the Old Man. He’s on the side of youth and beauty, and he may come down off the bridge and trip a few fantastics himself.”

Candida Noring had been on the bridge and met Captain Everett, who stood eighteen stone. “God forbid!” she said fervently.

There was dancing in the social hall that night, in spite of the slow, shuddering roll of the vessel. The bridge players, instead of raising objections, paired off in sedate couples and got onto the floor. From time to time they overruled Leslie Reverson, who was self-appointed selector of the records, and played a waltz or one-step.

The five old ladies at the five writing desks glared disapprovingly, but after a little while they finished their letters and went off to bed. The doctor appeared on the scene, danced with the Honorable Emily, with Loulu Hammond, and finally with Candida. He sought for Rosemary, who had watched coolly as a spectator up to this point, but found her dancing in the corridor with Tom Hammond. Their cheeks were very close together, and the bar steward had closed up his bar for lack of patronage and was watching them.

Loulu Hammond was in the arms of Leslie Reverson, who danced beautifully and impersonally. She swung, when the music began again, into the strong and somewhat smothering arms of Andy Todd.

Andy didn’t bother to be diplomatic. “Shall we go on deck and look at the moon?” he leered. “You needn’t mind your husband, he’s having a good time.”

“What good taste he has,” said Loulu sweetly. But she didn’t go to look at the moon with Andy Todd. There was an easy chair beside the doctor.

He lit her cigarette, nearly burning off her eyelashes in the process. “You know,” he observed generally, “it’s funny what people will do when they get on shipboard. They just seem to cut loose, sort of.”

“They run hog-wild and dance until eleven or twelve, don’t they?” agreed Loulu. She was thinking of something else.

“And romance! Say, there’s nothing like a shipboard love affair,” continued the medico.

Andy Todd and young Reverson both approached to ask Loulu for the next one, and Leslie was vaguely surprised and pleased to find that he had won. Andy wheeled uncertainly and saw that Rosemary Fraser was approaching—alone. She looked like a princess in a wine-colored dinner dress, and carried her squirrel coat over her arm.

“Miss Fraser!” he shrilled, in the high tenor which he could never control. “Can I have this dance?”

“Sorry,” said Rosemary. “But I never dance.” She passed lightly out onto the deck, as if to an appointment there. Slowly a red flush rose along the neck of Andy Todd, mounting to his ears. Loulu felt so sorry for him that she was very nice to him all the rest of the evening—and regretted it whole-heartedly for the rest of her life.

One by one the dancers began to leave the floor, yawning. The doctor and the Honorable Emily withdrew into a corner and began to have a heart-to-heart talk about fits. She herself complained of fainting spells, and she had always had her doubts, she confessed, about Leslie—him being so quiet and all. Even Tobermory, she complained, had thrown a fit last summer.

“Worms,” diagnosed Dr. Waite sagely. The Honorable Emily brightened. She wondered if Leslie had worms too.

The ship’s bell struck eight tinny times for midnight. Loulu fell to playing rummy with Candida Noring. Once she looked up startled, to hear light running footsteps on the boat deck above her head. She relaxed again. It couldn’t be Gerald. He was asleep, and for good measure locked in the stateroom.

Andy Todd heard the footsteps, too. He was prowling around the long boat deck, throwing away cigarette after cigarette. Once he heard the beating of wings above his head, and a slow, fat bird fluttered into his face and then swooped away into the night. Even the gulls were crazy tonight, muttered Andy.

He rounded a corner and was nearly tripped by the darting figure of a small boy. Gerald, it appeared, had broken loose again. He neatly nabbed the urchin.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Kids like you should be in bed.”

“This is more fun,” gasped Gerald, wriggling. “We’re playing a new game.” Another youth appeared, with flashlight clutched in his fist. “It’s Virgil,” said Gerald. “I gotta go with him. Lemme go, we’re playing Trap the Neckers.”

Andy Todd found a quarter and displayed it. “What sort of game is that?”

Gerald took the quarter. “Tell you for a dollar,” he bargained. He got a cuff on the ear. “Well,” he temporized, “we try to find a couple necking. Virgil says there’s lots of them do it. Then we sneak up real close and flash the light on ’em and run.”

“Oh,” said Andy Todd. He was still a little red behind the ears. Finally he bent down and gave Gerald Hammond definite instructions, instructions which would have displeased that lad’s young mother exceedingly. “A dollar, remember. I’ll be in the social hall for an hour or so.”

He saw the merry lads run back along the dimly lit boat deck and heard the faint slick of their rubber-soled shoes. Then, well satisfied with himself, Andy Todd went below, where the charming Mrs. Hammond was more charming to him than ever. He made a willing third at the rummy game.

The stewardess entered the social hall a few minutes later, and beckoned to Dr. Waite. “It’s the lady in 49,” she informed him when he had followed her into the hall. “You know, the old maid school teacher who’s a bad sailor.”