Chapter 10: At the Ritz

When Victor Cleves telegraphed from St. Augustine to Washington that he and his wife were on their way North, and that they desired to see John Recklow as soon as they arrived, John Recklow remarked that he knew of no place as private as a public one. And he came on to New York and established himself at the Ritz, rather regally.

To dine with him that evening were two volunteer agents of the United States Secret Service, ZB-303, otherwise James Benton, a fashionable architect; and XYL-371, Alexander Selden, sometime junior partner in the house of Milwin, Selden & Co.

A single lamp was burning in the white-and-rose rococo room. Under its veiled glow these three men sat conversing in guarded voices over coffee and cigars, awaiting the advent of 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves, recently Professor of Ornithology at Cambridge; and his young wife, Tressa, known officially as V-69.

“Did the trip South do Mrs. Cleves any good?” inquired Benton.

“Some,” said Recklow. “When Selden and I saw her she was getting better.”

“I suppose that affair of Yarghouz upset her pretty thoroughly.”

“Yes.” Recklow tossed his cigar into the fireplace and produced a pipe. “Victor Cleves upsets her more,” he remarked.

“Why?” asked Benton, astonished.

“She’s beginning to fall in love with him and doesn’t know what’s the matter with her,” replied the elder man drily. “Selden noticed it, too.”

Benton looked immensely surprised. “I supposed,” he said, “that she and Cleves considered the marriage to be merely a temporary necessity. I didn’t imagine that they cared for each other.”

“I don’t suppose they did at first,” said Selden. “But I think she’s interested in Victor. And I don’t see how he can help falling in love with her, because she’s a very beautiful thing to gaze on, and a most engaging one to talk to.”

“She’s about the prettiest girl I ever saw,” admitted Benton, “and about the cleverest. All the same--”

“All the same--what?”

“Well, Mrs. Cleves has her drawbacks, you know--as a real wife, I mean.”

Recklow said: “There is a fixed idea in Cleves’s head that Tressa Norne married him as a last resort, which is true. But he’ll never believe she’s changed her ideas in regard to him unless she herself enlightens him. And the girl is too shy to do that. Besides, she believes the same thing of him. There’s a mess for you!”

Recklow filled his pipe carefully.

“In addition,” he went on, “Mrs. Cleves has another and very terrible fixed idea in her charming head, and that is that she really did lose her soul among those damned Yezidees. She believes that Cleves, though kind to her, considers her merely as something uncanny--something to endure until this Yezidee campaign is ended and she is safe from assassination.”

Benton said: “After all, and in spite of all her loveliness, I myself should not feel entirely comfortable with such a girl for a real wife.”

“Why?” demanded Recklow.

“Well--good heavens, John!--those uncanny things she does--her rather terrifying psychic knowledge and ability--make a man more or less uneasy.” He laughed without mirth.

“For example,” he added, “I never was nervous in any physical crisis; but since I’ve met Tressa Norne--to be frank--I’m not any too comfortable in my mind when I remember Gutchlug and Sanang and Albert Feke and that dirty reptile Yarghouz--and when I recollect how that girl dealt with them! Good God, John, I’m not a coward, I hope, but that sort of thing worries me!”

Recklow lighted his pipe. He said: “In the Government’s campaign against these eight foreigners who have begun a psychic campaign against the unsuspicious people of this decent Republic, with the purpose of surprising, overpowering and enslaving the minds of mankind by a misuse of psychic power, we agents of the Secret Service are slowly gaining the upper hand.

“In this battle of minds we are gaining a victory. But we are winning solely and alone through the psychic ability and the loyalty and courage of a young girl who, through tragedy of circumstances, spent the years of her girlhood in the infamous Yezidee temple at Yian, and who learned from the devil-worshipers themselves not only this so-called magic of the Mongol sorcerers, but also how to meet its psychic menace and defeat it.”

He looked at Benton, shrugged:

“If you and if Cleves really feel the slightest repugnance toward the strange psychic ability of this brave and generous girl, I for one do not share it.”

Benton reddened: “It isn’t exactly repugnance--” But Recklow interrupted sharply:

“Do you realise, Benton, what she’s already accomplished for us in our secret battle against Bolshevism?--against the very powers of hell itself, led by these Mongol sorcerers?

“Of the Eight Assassins--or Sheiks-el-Djebel--who came to the United States to wield the dreadful weapon of psychic power against the minds of our people, and to pervert them and destroy all civilisation, --of the Eight Chief Assassins of the Eight Towers, this girl already has discovered and identified four, --Sanang, Gutchlug, Albert Feke, and Yarghouz; and she has destroyed the last three.”

He sat calmly enjoying his pipe for a few moments’ silence, then:

“Five of this sect of Assassins remain--five sly, murderous, psychic adepts who call themselves sorcerers. Except for Prince Sanang, I do not know who these other four men may be. I haven’t a notion. Nor have you. Nor do I believe that with all the resources of the United States Secret Service we ever should be able to discover these four Sheiks-el-Djebel except for the astounding spiritual courage and psychic experience of the young wife of Victor Cleves.”

After a moment Selden nodded. “That is quite true,” he said simply. “We are utterly helpless against unknown psychic forces. And I, for one, feel no repugnance toward what Mrs. Cleves has done for all mankind and in the name of God.”

“She’s a brave girl,” muttered Benton, “but it’s terrible to possess such knowledge and horrible to use it.”

Recklow said: “The horror of it nearly killed the girl herself. Have you any idea how she must suffer by being forced to employ such terrific knowledge? by being driven to use it to combat this menace of hell? Can you imagine what this charming, sensitive, tragic young creature must feel when, with powers natural to her but unfamiliar to us, she destroys with her own mind and will-power demons in human shape who are about to destroy her?

“Talk of nerve! Talk of abnegation! Talk of perfect loyalty and courage! There is more than these in Tressa Cleves. There is that dauntless bravery which faces worse than physical death. Because the child still believes that her soul is damned for whatever happened to her in the Yezidee temple; and that when these Yezidees succeed in killing her body, Erlik will surely seize the soul that leaves it.”

There was a knocking at the door. Benton got up and opened it. Victor Cleves came in with his young wife.

Tressa Cleves seemed to have grown since she had been away. Taller, a trifle paler, yet without even the subtlest hint of that charming maturity which the young and happily married woman invariably wears, her virginal allure now verged vaguely on the delicate edges of austerity.

Cleves, sunburnt and vigorous, looked older, somehow--far less boyish--and he seemed more silent than when, nearly seven months before, he had been assigned to the case of Tressa Norne.

Recklow, Selden and Benton greeted them warmly; to each in turn Tressa gave her narrow, sun-tanned hand. Recklow led her to a seat. A servant came with iced fruit juice and little cakes and cigarettes.

Conversation, aimless and general, fulfilling formalities, gradually ceased.

A full June moon stared through the open windows--searching for the traditional bride, perhaps--and its light silvered a pale and lovely figure that might possibly have passed for the pretty ghost of a bride, but not for any girl who had married because she was loved.

Recklow broke the momentary silence, bluntly:

“Have you anything to report, Cleves?”

The young fellow hesitated:

“My wife has, I believe.”

The others turned to her. She seemed, for a moment, to shrink back in her chair, and, as her eyes involuntarily sought her husband, there was in them a vague and troubled appeal.

Cleves said in a sombre voice: “I need scarcely remind you how deeply distasteful this entire and accursed business is to my wife. But she is going to see it through, whatever the cost. And we four men understand something of what it has cost her--is costing her--in violence to her every instinct.”

“We honour her the more,” said Recklow quietly.

“We couldn’t honour her too much,” said Cleves.

A slight colour came into Tressa’s face; she bent her head, but Recklow saw her eyes steal sideways toward her husband.

Still bowed a little in her chair, she seemed to reflect for a while concerning what she had to say; then, looking up at John Recklow:

“I saw Sanang.”

“Good heavens! Where?” he demanded.

“I--don’t--know.”

Cleves, flushing with embarrassment, explained: “She saw him clairvoyantly. She was lying in the hammock. You remember I had a trained nurse for her after--what happened in Orchid Lodge.”

Tressa looked miserably at Recklow, --dumbly, for a moment. Then her lips unclosed.

“I saw Prince Sanang,” she repeated. “He was near the sea. There were rocks--cottages on cliffs--and very brilliant flowers in tiny, pocket-like gardens.

“Sanang was walking on the cliffs with another man. There were forests, inland.”

“Do you know who the other man was?” asked Recklow gently.

“Yes. He was one of the Eight. I recognised him. When I was a girl he came once to the Temple of Yian, all alone, and spread his shroud on the pink marble steps. And we temple girls mocked him and threw stemless roses on the shroud, telling him they were human heads with which to grease his toug.”

She became excited and sat up straighter in her chair, and her strange little laughter rippled like a rill among pebbles.

“I threw a big rose without a stem upon the shroud,” she exclaimed, “and I cried out, ‘Niaz!’ which means, ‘Courage, ‘ and I mocked him, saying, ‘Djamouk Khagan, ‘ when he was only a Khan, of course; and I laughed and rubbed one finger against the other, crying out, ‘Toug ia glachakho!’ which means, ‘The toug is anointed.’ And which was very impudent of me, because Djamouk was a Sheik-el-Djebel and Khan of the Fifth Tower, and entitled to a toug and to eight men and a Toughtchi. And it is a grave offence to mock at the anointing of a toug.”

She paused, breathless, her splendid azure eyes sparkling with the memory of that girlish mischief. Then their brilliancy faded; she bit her lip and stole an uncertain glance at her husband.

And after a pause she explained in a very subdued voice that the “Iagla michi,” or action of “greasing the toug,” or standard, was done when a severed human head taken in battle was cast at the foot of the lance shaft stuck upright in the ground.

“You see,” she said sadly, “we temple girls, being already damned, cared little what we said, even to such a terrible man as Djamouk Khan. And even had the ghost of old Tchinguiz Khagan himself come to the temple and looked at us out of his tawny eyes, I think we might have done something saucy.”

Tressa’s pretty face was spiritless, now; she leaned back in her armchair and they heard an unconscious sigh escape her.

“Ai-ya! Ai-ya!” she murmured to herself, “what crazy things we did on the rose-marble steps, Yulun and I, so long--so long ago.”

Cleves got up and went over to stand beside his wife’s chair.

“What happened is this,” he said heavily. “During my wife’s convalescence after that Yarghouz affair, she found herself, at a certain moment, clairvoyant. And she thought she saw--she did see--Sanang, and an Asiatic she recognised as being one of the chiefs of the Assassins sect, whose name is Djamouk.

“But, except that it was somewhere near the sea--some summer colony probably on the Atlantic coast--she does not know where this pair of jailbirds roost. And this is what we have come here to report.”

Benton, politely appalled, tried not to look incredulous. But it was evident that Selden and Recklow had no doubts.

“Of course,” said Recklow calmly, “the thing to do is for you and your wife to try to find this place she saw.”

“Make a tour of all such ocean-side resorts until Mrs. Cleves recognises the place she saw,” added Selden. And to Recklow he added: “I believe there are several perfectly genuine cases on record where clairvoyants have aided the police.”

“Several authentic cases,” said Recklow quietly. But Benton’s face was a study.

Tressa looked up at her husband. He dropped his hand reassuringly on her shoulder and nodded with a slight smile.

“There--there was something else,” she said with considerable hesitation--”something not quite in line of duty--perhaps--”

“It seems to concern Benton,” added Cleves, smiling.

“What is it?” inquired Selden, smiling also as Benton’s features froze to a mask.

“Let me tell you, first,” interrupted Cleves, “that my wife’s psychic ability and skill can make me visualise and actually see scenes and people which, God knows, I never before laid eyes upon, but which she has both seen and known.

“And one morning, in Florida, I asked her to do something strange--something of that sort to amuse me--and we were sitting on the steps of our cottage--you know, the old club-house at Orchid!--and the first I knew I saw, in the mist on the St. Johns, a Chinese bridge humped up over that very commonplace stream, and thousands of people passing over it, --and a city beyond--the town of Yian, Tressa tells me, --and I heard the Buddhist bells and the big temple gong and the noises in streets and on the water--”

He was becoming considerably excited at the memory, and his lean face reddened and he gesticulated as he spoke:

“It was astounding, Recklow! There was that bridge, and all those people moving over it; and the city beyond, and the boats and shipping, and the vast murmur of multitudes ... And then, there on the bridge crossing toward Yian, I saw a young girl, who turned and looked back at my wife and laughed.”