“It’s no trick,” said Jan. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“Hmmm. It’s just barely possible . . . See here, give me the straight of this and no lying! What are you up to?”
Jan spread his hands hopelessly. “I’m not up to anything! One minute I am sleeping in a jail and the next I am leaning on the helm of this ship. How I can tell you when I don’t know myself—”
“Jail? For God’s sake, where?”
“Why, in Seattle, of course.”
“Where?”
“Seattle, Washington.”
“That’s one port I never heard of anyway. Go ahead and talk, Tiger, and make it good. I know you’ve seen plenty of jails but that particular one has escaped me. Go on. What did you do to get in jail?”
“I didn’t do anything! They thought I’d killed a Professor Frobish that came to see me but I didn’t do it. He wanted to open a copper jar and I wouldn’t let him so he came back at night and did it anyway. I was asleep in a chair but I woke up too late to stop him. And when the ifrit came out—”
“Copper jar? ifrit? Go on!”
“Well, the ifrit almost cut him in half with an executioner’s sword and then flew away.”
“You’re talking about Earth!”
“Of course.”
“Earth, by all that’s . . . See here, what was the name of this ifrit?”
“Z . . . let’s see . . . Zon . . . Zongri. Yes, that was it, Zongri.”
“Zongri! Good God, Tiger, if you’re making this up . . .”
“I’m not!”
“But Zongri was captured and entombed by Sulayman thousands of years ago! I remember hearing about it. He was king of the Barbossi Isles and he refused to change faith with the others.” Suddenly he grew very agitated and stalked about the room. Abruptly he again confronted Jan. “See here, did this Zongri say anything to you? Did he do anything . . . ?”
“Yes. He said he was going to sentence me to Eternal Wakefulness—”
“Hush!” said the captain, going swiftly to the port and slamming it shut. He closed the door and then came back to the bed with the air of a conspirator. “Zongri said that?”
“Yes. And then I was arrested and taken to jail because they thought—”
“To Shaitan with that! Oh, the fool, the fool! Eternal Wakefulness!” The captain slammed a fist into his palm with the wish that Zongri was in between. “It’s like him. He almost runs my ship on the rocks! He was at the bottom of the war with Sulayman and all our woes since. And now . . .” He eyed Jan. “Tiger, if you are telling me lies . . .”
“It’s true! I swear it’s true.”
“Hmmm. Perhaps. If it weren’t for the change in you I wouldn’t credit any of it. But you speak so well. . . . Hmmm. You swear to this, you say?”
“Certainly.”
“All right. So be it. Mr. Malek!”
The mate clattered down the ladder and thrust his head in the door.
“Mr. Malek, you will take Tiger down to the brig and post a reliable marid over him. Understand that Tiger is not to talk to anyone, you hear? Absolutely no one! When we get into port we’ll find out what to do with him.”
Malek took hold of Jan’s collar and jerked him to his feet.
“Count on me,” said Malek. “He won’t see a soul.”
“Your head will answer for it if he does.”
“That’s all right with me,” said Malek, jerking Jan down the passageway and into the bowels of the ship.
Chapter Four
Sympathy
Jan went round and round his small cell like a white rat spinning about a pole. And his head went faster than he. He shook the bars and yelled at the departing mate, but Malek had no further heed for him. Growing terror caused him to shout at the guard, but the marid, too, was most indifferent. And so it was that Jan dizzied himself by pacing the walls. He could stand a berating, perhaps, and even face a flogging without really cracking, but this situation was the stuff of which madness was made. He had long since ceased to doubt that he was here because, after all, he was here. And what in the name of God did they mean to do with him?
Again he besought information from the marid. The guard was small, with a solitary eye in the middle of his head and a twist to his back, garbed in a single cloak. His lack of shoes was backed by ample reason. He had hoofs.
“Be quiet,” said the marid at last. “Better you sleep.” And with that he faced the other way and was wholly deaf.
At long, long last Jan wearied himself to exhaustion. He sank down on the pile of blankets and buried his face in his arms, striving to gather and tie the loose ends of his nerves.
His strange position was bad enough, but not even to be himself . . . ! Who and what was this “Tiger”? True, he had some slight resemblance to Jan Palmer, but that was not enough. Tiger was known here, known for a bad actor, it seemed. But if Jan Palmer was now Tiger, where was Tiger?
He could not answer that and the weight of it was the proverbial straw. His mind went wholly blank and he lay in apathy. Once or twice he reasoned that this was still the jail. But each time he lifted his head to prove it, there was the marid in all his evil dignity. Yes, and in the damp air was the hissing sound of the clean hull carving through the waves, that and the song of wind through rigging far, far above.
This was a sea, an unknown sea. This was a brig of a ship, the like of which had not sailed the seas for a hundred years and more.
It was too much. And at last Jan dozed, drifting more deeply into slumber.
To no avail.
He had no more than shut his eyes when he was startled by the slam of iron-barred doors and the rattle of dishes which immediately followed. Voices were hollow in the concrete hall and Jan sat up. He looked carefully all around him.
It was no marid at the door but a blue-coated policeman engaged in shoving a tray of food under the door.
“You gonna sleep forever?” said Diver Mullins, scraping halfheartedly at his lathered face. “Y’rolled and tossed all night long. I hardly got a chance to close m’eyes.”
“I . . . I’m sorry,” said Jan, blinking at the cell around him and experiencing an uplift of heart. Thankfully he took a deep breath only to choke on the disinfectant in the air. But that hardly lessened his thankfulness.
It was quite plain to him now that the ship and the ifrits had been of the substance of nightmares. And, more than that, when he looked in the glass and found that Jan Palmer’s sickly visage gazed back at him, he wanted to shout for joy.
“Geez, for a gent that’s about to be stretched,” said Diver Mullins, “you sure can put on the happy act.”
“Beg pardon?” said Jan.
“It ain’t right,” said Diver petulantly. “You commit a moider after supper and you wake up singin’ like a canary bird.”
“Murder?”
“Don’t tell me,” said Diver, “that you went and forgot about it.”
Jan groaned and sank back on his bunk. He held his face in his hands to steady himself as the black ink of memory drowned him. Murder. He was in here for murder. An ifrit named Zongri had killed a man named Frobish and now they were going to hang a hopelessly innocent Palmer for the deed.
“Now I done it,” said Diver. “I’d ruther you’d chirp than beller, my fine-fettered friend. Cheer up. They only hang a man once.” So saying he hauled the tray close to him and speared the soggy hot cakes with every evidence of appetite. “C’mon and eat.”
Jan, mechanically ready to obey almost anybody, accordingly hitched a stool up to the table and took the offered plate. He even went so far as to butter the dough blankets and convey a forkful to his mouth. And then he found out what he was doing and gagged. He crawled to his bed and sprawled upon it, face down.
“They ain’t as bad as that,” said Diver. “’Course, in lotsa jails they serve lots better belly paddin’, but my motto is to take what y’can get your hooks into and don’t ask too many questions. Nobody never measured me for a noose or even
said they was going to, so I ain’t had a lot of experience. But, hell, you hadn’t ought to let it get you down like that. You get borned and then you live awhile and then somebody knocks you off or you get pneumonia or something and there you are. Now, take me, I don’t have the faintest notion of how I’ll meet m’Maker. The information ain’t to be had. But you, now, that’s different. It’s all cut and dried and you ain’t got to worry about it anymore. So that’s that. C’mon and have some hot cakes before they get cold.”
As Jan made no move to answer the invitation, Diver philosophically conveyed the second portion to his own plate and, with the usual appetite of the very thin, put them easily down and finally, having cleared the tray, looked mournfully under the napkins to locate more. His search unavailing, he slid it back into the corridor and fell into a conversation with a counterfeiter across the block. With great leisure, as men do when they know they have lots of time to pass, they discussed the latest inmate with great thoroughness and Diver, after fishing for coaxing, finally laid aside an air of mystery and divulged Jan’s story.
“Hophead, huh?” said the counterfeiter.
“Yeah, guess so. He don’t eat nothin’ and that’s another reason. He evidently is feelin’ the mornin’ after, no doubt.”
“I know where I can get him some,” said the counterfeiter confidentially.
“Yeah? When he gets over his fit I’ll ask him if he wants it. He had nightmares last night fit to shake the place down.”
“Yeah, I heard him.”
“Snow’s pretty awful stuff.”
“Ain’t it,” said the counterfeiter. “Why, oncet I had a sniffer in my outfit—Goo-goo, the boys called’m—and this here Goo-goo . . .”
Jan tried not to listen, even stuffing his ears with the edge of the blanket, but one story led to another and finally they got on the subject of being hanged.
“So they sprung the trap three times on this gent,” said the counterfeiter, “and it wouldn’t sag with him. They’d take him off and put him back and try her again and still she wouldn’t work. Well, the guy fainted finally, but they brought him around and put him on the trap once more. Well, sir, this time she sure worked. He dropped like a rock and the rope snapped his spine like you’d crack walnuts. But how do you like that, huh? Three times and it don’t work.”
“Leave it to the Law,” said Diver. “They can’t even hang a man straight.”
“Somebody coming,” said the counterfeiter.
The block fell silent, watching the approach of the visitors. All but Jan clung to the bars, for he was in a state of coma induced by the late conversations.
“Hiyah, Babe,” said a jailbird down the row.
“Geez, some looker,” said Diver, now that he could see the party.
A series of such comments and calls ran the length of the place and then the party stopped before Jan’s door while a jailer, with much important key rattling, got the lock open.
Diver backed up and gave the prostrate Jan a wicked kick to wake him. Resentfully, Jan sat up, about to protest, but all such thought left him when he found that Alice Hall stood before him.
She had carried herself like a sentry through the block just as though the jailbirds did not exist and now, with a tinge of pity upon her lovely face, she stood taking off her gloves and studying Jan just as though she were about to begin an operation to change his luck.
“Well, well, well, my boy,” said a very, very, very, very hearty voice—one which the owner fondly thought capable of carrying him, someday, to the Senate. “What are they doing to you?”
Jan dragged his eyes away from Alice and woke up to the presence of two others in his cell—Shannon, Bering Sea Steamship’s legal department head, and Nathaniel Green. Shannon was very plump and so fitted his manner to the recognized one for all plump men. He was very hearty, very well met and very reassuring, though there were those (who had no doubt lost cases to him) who said it was all sham. The fellow’s mouth, in its absence of a sufficient chin and nose, looked like nothing if not a shark’s. One supposed he had to turn over on his back to eat, so tightly and immobilely did his fat neck sit in his collar.
Jan looked nervous and was not at all sure that he wanted to talk to these two gentlemen. He resented their presence all the more because Alice Hall was there, and how badly he wanted to have her sit on the small stool and hear his flood of grief and then give him very sound advice in return. Didn’t her brave face have a tinge of pity in it?
“Have you out in no time,” said Shannon, sitting down on Diver’s bunk so that Diver had to hastily get out of his way.
“Don’t mind me,” said Diver resentfully.
Shannon twirled his hat and paid no attention to anything save the crown of the bowler. He was getting serious now, evidently opening up a whole weighty library of immense legal tomes in his head. “Yes, my boy, serious as this is, we should have no difficulty in getting you freed, eh, Mr. Green?”
“Of course,” said Green swiftly. He hadn’t seated himself at all, and looked as though he was about to hurry off on some important errand or other. “Must be done. The company, you understand, is in no such position that it can bear this publicity. Look,” and he jerked a sheaf of papers out of his pocket and tossed them to the bunk beside Jan where they fanned out into blazing headlines, “MILLIONAIRE SHIPOWNER SLAYS PROFESSOR” and the like.
Jan shuddered when he saw them and drew back.
“Ha, ha, I don’t blame you,” said Shannon. “But people forget. Never mind that sort of thing. The point is, we want your version of this . . . er . . . crime. Then, we’ll demand a bail to be set and take you home.” He got serious once more. “Now, to begin, just how did this thing happen?”
It was Alice Hall’s cue. She sat down at the rickety table and spread her notebooks to take down the discourse. Jan looked hopelessly at her, hating to have her take his words so coldbloodedly.
“We haven’t much time,” said Nathaniel impatiently, glancing at his watch.
“I . . . I don’t know how to begin,” said Jan.
“Why, at the beginning, of course,” said Shannon. “Nothing simpler. When was the first time that you saw this Frobish fellow?”
Jan told them and then, with much prompting, managed to get the story out in its entirety. Very wisely he refrained from following it up with the events of the night just past. And all the while he spoke, Alice Hall inscribed his words as emotionlessly as though she listened to a dictaphone record. Not so the other two. With increasing frequency Shannon glanced knowingly at Green, and Green stared impatiently at Jan as though about to accuse him of lying.
Then, when Jan was through, Shannon’s tone was very different from his first. Shannon patted Jan on the knee consolingly as one will a sick animal or perhaps an angry child. “There, there, my boy, we’ll do what we can. But . . . er . . . don’t you think you might . . . ah . . . modify these statements somewhat? After all, if I wish to have bail set for you, I have to have something I can tell the judge. It’s not that we don’t believe you . . . but . . . well, courts are strange things and you’ll have to trust to my advice and experience in the matter. I shall enter a plea at my discretion. Perhaps,” he added to Nathaniel, “I can think of something logical.”
Green glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to be getting back to the office. I’ve a million things to do before noon.”
“Could I speak with you a moment?” said Shannon.
Green irritably acquiesced and they stepped out into the hall where they spoke in low whispers, looking toward the cell now and then. Alice Hall kept her eyes on her notes.
“They don’t believe me,” said Jan.
The girl looked searchingly at him. “You wonder about it?”
“Why . . . but what happened, happened. I wouldn’t lie!”
The shadow of a smile went across her features. “Of course not.”
“But it did happen that way!” wailed Jan. “And I’ll tell you something else. Last night . . .” But
there he stopped and nothing could persuade him to finish.
“You shouldn’t keep any of it back,” said Alice. “Those gentlemen, presumably, mean to get you out of here and if you know anything else you should tell them.”
“I don’t know anything else.”
She shrugged. “All right, have it your own way.”
“Don’t be angry.”
“I’m not. Why should I be?”
“But you were.”
“Maybe I was. What of it?”
“But why should you be angry?”
“No reason at all,” she said with sudden bitterness. “You have a story and you’ll stick to it. If you’re going to act that way I can tell you truthfully, though it’s none of my business, that you’ll hang. I don’t know—and I don’t care, I’m sure!—whether you committed this murder or not. But I do know that you’ll have to get yourself out of it the best you can.”
“What do you mean?”
“I suppose Green hasn’t been waiting . . . !” She suddenly cooled her heat and gave her attention to her notes.
“You mean you think they won’t help me?”
“I have nothing to say.”
“But you were saying something,” pleaded Jan. “If you know anything that might help me . . .”
“Help you! Nobody can help you! Nobody will ever be able to solve your problems but yourself. I’ve worked with your company long enough to know that you know nothing about it and care less. You keep yourself locked up in your room, scared to death by an aunt, a secretary and the head of your father’s firm. You let Nathaniel Green do what he pleases with accounts—but why am I talking this way? It can do you no good now. I should have spoken months ago. Maybe I was hoping you’d wake up by yourself and find out that you were a man instead of an infant. But you haven’t and now, unless a miracle happens, you’ll never have the chance. There! I’ve said it.”
Jan was stunned and scarcely heard Green and Shannon come back until Shannon cleared his throat noisily.
“My boy,” said Shannon, “Green and I have talked this thing over. It is quite apparent that you mean to stick to your story.”