The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (61 page)

IT
is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery
that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some
reason, treated as a sort of calamity. This story, I am happy to say, has to
begin with a murdered millionaire; in one sense, indeed, it has to begin with
three murdered millionaires, which some may regard as an embarras de richesse.
But it was chiefly this coincidence or continuity of criminal policy that took
the whole affair out of the ordinary run of criminal cases and made it the
extraordinary problem that it was.

It
was very generally said that they had all fallen victims to some vendetta or curse
attaching to the possession of a relic of great value both intrinsically and
historically: a sort of chalice inlaid with precious stones and commonly called
the Coptic Cup. Its origin was obscure, but its use was conjectured to be
religious; and some attributed the fate that followed its possessors to the fanaticism
of some Oriental Christian horrified at its passing through such materialistic
hands. But the mysterious slayer, whether or no he was such a fanatic, was
already a figure of lurid and sensational interest in the world of journalism
and gossip. The nameless being was provided with a name, or a nickname. But it
is only with the story of the third victim that we are now concerned; for it
was only in this case that a certain Father Brown, who is the subject of these
sketches, had an opportunity of making his presence felt.

When
Father Brown first stepped off an Atlantic liner on to American soil, he discovered
as many other Englishman has done, that he was a much more important person
than he had ever supposed. His short figure, his short-sighted and undistinguished
countenance, his rather rusty-black clerical clothes, could pass through any
crowd in his own country without being noticed as anything unusual, except
perhaps unusually insignificant. But America has a genius for the encouragement
of fame; and his appearance in one or two curious criminal problems, together
with his long association with Flambeau, the ex-criminal and detective, had
consolidated a reputation in America out of what was little more than a rumour
in England. His round face was blank with surprise when he found himself held
up on the quay by a group of journalists, as by a gang of brigands, who asked
him questions about all the subjects on which he was least likely to regard
himself as an authority, such as the details of female dress and the criminal
statistics of the country that he had only that moment clapped his eyes on.
Perhaps it was the contrast with the black embattled solidarity of this group
that made more vivid another figure that stood apart from it, equally black
against the burning white daylight of that brilliant place and season, but
entirely solitary; a tall, rather yellow-faced man in great goggles, who
arrested him with a gesture when the journalists had finished and said: ‘Excuse
me, but maybe you are looking for Captain Wain.’

Some
apology may be made for Father Brown; for he himself would have been sincerely apologetic.
It must be remembered that he had never seen America before, and more
especially that he had never seen that sort of tortoise-shell spectacles before;
for the fashion at this time had not spread to England. His first sensation was
that of gazing at some goggling sea-monster with a faint suggestion of a
diver’s helmet. Otherwise the man was exquisitely dressed; and to Brown, in his
innocence, the spectacles seemed the queerest disfigurement for a dandy. It was
as if a dandy had adorned himself with a wooden leg as an extra touch of
elegance. The question also embarrassed him. An American aviator of the name of
Wain, a friend of some friends of his own in France, was indeed one of a long
list of people he had some hope of seeing during his American visit; but he had
never expected to hear of him so soon.

‘
I
beg your pardon,’ he said doubtfully, ‘are you Captain Wain? Do you — do you know
him?’

‘
Well,
I’m pretty confident I’m not Captain Wain,’ said the man in goggles, with a face
of wood. ‘I was pretty clear about that when I saw him waiting for you over
there in the car. But the other question’s a bit more problematical. I reckon I
know Wain and his uncle, and old man Merton, too. I know old man Merton, but
old man Merton don’t know me. And he thinks he has the advantage, and I think I
have the advantage. See?’

Father
Brown did not quite see. He blinked at the glittering seascape and the pinnacles
of the city, and then at the man in goggles. It was not only the masking of the
man’s eyes that produced the impression of something impenetrable. Something in
his yellow face was almost Asiatic, even Chinese; and his conversation seemed
to consist of stratified layers of irony. He was a type to be found here and
there in that hearty and sociable population; he was the inscrutable American.

‘
My
name’s Drage,’ he said, ‘Norman Drage, and I’m an American citizen, which explains
everything. At least I imagine your friend Wain would like to explain the rest;
so we’ll postpone The Fourth of July till another date.’

Father
Brown was dragged in a somewhat dazed condition towards a car at some little distance,
in which a young man with tufts of untidy yellow hair and a rather harassed and
haggard expression, hailed him from afar, and presented himself as Peter Wain.
Before he knew where he was he was stowed in the car and travelling with
considerable speed through and beyond the city. He was unused to the impetuous
practicality of such American action, and felt about as bewildered as if a
chariot drawn by dragons had carried him away into fairyland. It was under these
disconcerting conditions that he heard for the first time, in long monologues
from Wain, and short sentences from Drage, the story of the Coptic Cup and the
two crimes already connected with it.

It
seemed that Wain had an uncle named Crake who had a partner named Merton, who was
number three in the series of rich business men to whom the cup had belonged.
The first of them, Titus P. Trant, the Copper King, had received threatening
letters from somebody signing himself Daniel Doom. The name was presumably a
pseudonym, but it had come to stand for a very public if not a very popular
character; for somebody as well known as Robin Hood and Jack the Ripper
combined. For it soon became clear that the writer of the threatening letter
did not confine himself to threatening. Anyhow, the upshot was that old Trant
was found one morning with his head in his own lily-pond, and there was not the
shadow of a clue. The cup was, fortunately, safe in the bank; and it passed
with the rest of Trant’s property to his cousin, Brian Horder, who was also a
man of great wealth and who was also threatened by the nameless enemy. Brian
Horder was picked up dead at the foot of a cliff outside his seaside residence,
at which there was a burglary, this time on a large scale. For though the cup
apparently again escaped, enough bonds and securities were stolen to leave
Horder’s financial affairs in confusion.

‘
Brian
Horder’s widow,’ explained Wain, ‘had to sell most of his valuables, I believe,
and Brander Merton must have purchased the cup at that time, for he had it when
I first knew him. But you can guess for yourself that it’s not a very comfortable
thing to have.’

‘
Has
Mr Merton ever had any of the threatening letters?’ asked Father Brown, after a
pause.

‘
I
imagine he has,’ said Mr Drage; and something in his voice made the priest look
at him curiously, until he realized that the man in goggles was laughing silently,
in a fashion that gave the newcomer something of a chill.

‘
I’m
pretty sure he has,’ said Peter Wain, frowning. ‘I’ve not seen the letters, only
his secretary sees any of his letters, for he is pretty reticent about business
matters, as big business men have to be. But I’ve seen him real upset and
annoyed with letters; and letters that he tore up, too, before even his secretary
saw them. The secretary himself is getting nervous and says he is sure somebody
is laying for the old man; and the long and the short of it is, that we’d be
very grateful for a little advice in the matter. Everybody knows your great
reputation, Father Brown, and the secretary asked me to see if you’d mind
coming straight out to the Merton house at once.’

‘
Oh,
I see,’ said Father Brown, on whom the meaning of this apparent kidnapping began
to dawn at last. ‘But, really, I don’t see that I can do any more than you can.
You’re on the spot, and must have a hundred times more data for a scientific
conclusion than a chance visitor.’

‘
Yes,’
said Mr Drage dryly; ‘our conclusions are much too scientific to be true. I reckon
if anything hit a man like Titus P. Trant, it just came out of the sky without
waiting for any scientific explanation. What they call a bolt from the blue.’

‘
You
can’t possibly mean,’ cried Wain, ‘that it was supernatural!’

But
it was by no means easy at any time to discover what Mr Drage could possibly mean;
except that if he said somebody was a real smart man, he very probably meant he
was a fool. Mr Drage maintained an Oriental immobility until the car stopped, a
little while after, at what was obviously their destination. It was rather a
singular place. They had been driving through a thinly-wooded country that
opened into a wide plain, and just in front of them was a building consisting
of a single wall or very high fence, round, like a Roman camp, and having
rather the appearance of an aerodrome. The barrier did not look like wood or
stone, and closer inspection proved it to be of metal.

They
all alighted from the car, and one small door in the wall was slid open with considerable
caution, after manipulations resembling the opening of a safe. But, much to
Father Brown’s surprise, the man called Norman Drage showed no disposition to
enter, but took leave of them with sinister gaiety.

‘
I
won’t come in,’ he said. ‘It ‘ud be too much pleasurable excitement for old man
Merton, I reckon. He loves the sight of me so much that he’d die of joy.’

And
he strode away, while Father Brown, with increasing wonder, was admitted
through the steel door which instantly clicked behind him. Inside was a large
and elaborate garden of gay and varied colours, but entirely without any trees
or tall shrubs or flowers. In the centre of it rose a house of handsome and
even striking architecture, but so high and narrow as rather to resemble a
tower. The burning sunlight gleamed on glass roofing here and there at the top,
but there seemed to be no windows at all in the lower part of it. Over
everything was that spotless and sparkling cleanliness that seemed so native to
the clear American air. When they came inside the portal, they stood amid
resplendent marble and metals and enamels of brilliant colours, but there was
no staircase. Nothing but a single shaft for a lift went up the centre between
the solid walls, and the approach to it was guarded by heavy, powerful men like
plain-clothes policemen.

‘
Pretty
elaborate protection, I know,’ said Wain. ‘Maybe it makes you smile a little, Father
Brown, to find Merton has to live in a fortress like this without even a tree
in the garden for anyone to hide behind. But you don’t know what sort of proposition
we’re up against in this country. And perhaps you don’t know just what the name
of Brander Merton means. He’s a quiet-looking man enough, and anybody might
pass him in the street; not that they get much chance nowadays, for he can only
go out now and then in a closed car. But if anything happened to Brander Merton
there’d be earthquakes from Alaska to the Cannibal Islands. I fancy there was
never a king or emperor who had such power over the nations as he has. After all,
I suppose if you’d been asked to visit the tsar, or the king of England, you’d
have had the curiosity to go. You mayn’t care much for tsars or millionaires;
but it just means that power like that is always interesting. And I hope it’s
not against your principles to visit a modern sort of emperor like Merton.’

‘
Not
at all,’ said Father Brown, quietly. ‘It is my duty to visit prisoners and all miserable
men in captivity.’

There
was a silence, and the young man frowned with a strange and almost shifty look on
his lean face. Then he said, abruptly:

‘
Well,
you’ve got to remember it isn’t only common crooks or the Black Hand that’s against
him. This Daniel Doom is pretty much like the devil. Look how he dropped Trant
in his own gardens and Horder outside his house, and got away with it.’

The
top floor of the mansion, inside the enormously thick walls, consisted of two rooms;
an outer room which they entered, and an inner room that was the great
millionaire’s sanctum. They entered the outer room just as two other visitors
were coming out of the inner one. One was hailed by Peter Wain as his uncle — a
small but very stalwart and active man with a shaven head that looked bald, and
a brown face that looked almost too brown to have ever been white. This was old
Crake, commonly called Hickory Crake in reminiscence of the more famous Old
Hickory, because of his fame in the last Red Indian wars. His companion was a
singular contrast — a very dapper gentleman with dark hair like a black varnish
and a broad, black ribbon to his monocle: Barnard Blake, who was old Merton’s
lawyer and had been discussing with the partners the business of the firm. The
four men met in the middle of the outer room and paused for a little polite conversation,
in the act of respectively going and coming. And through all goings and comings
another figure sat at the back of the room near the inner door, massive and
motionless in the half-light from the inner window; a man with a Negro face and
enormous shoulders. This was what the humorous self-criticism of America
playfully calls the Bad Man; whom his friends might call a bodyguard and his
enemies a bravo.