“And switched them again in the confusion afterward? Did anyone know where you kept them?”
“The houseboy, a gardener — both natives. My husband treated both of them worse than animals. But there were others. Kusu was not the first young girl from that family that he—”
Pine studied her face, now wet with the tears of released tension.
“For three years — you have been tormented by the idea that you killed your husband.”
“What difference is it really?” She looked up at him. “Nothing changes the fact that I killed him. Even knowing I did not intend to or want to doesn’t lessen it for me.”
“And what if I tell you that you did not kill him, hot even accidentally, that he died precisely the way you told the Benskoten office in Singapore and just the way you wrote to the Colters in London, that he died from drinking and fever and heat and wenching, that he did in fact die from a heart attack? It happens, even at his age.”
“Would to God I could believe that.”
“You can, Mrs. Colter, you can.” He put his hand on her arm. “I searched the porch of that cottage with great care. I found two darts stuck in the wall opposite where your husband was sitting. Both of your shots missed.”
Pine got up to leave. “Of course, I could be wrong,” he said. “It is possible that someone else came by after you ran back to the cottage and did what you failed to do — hit the target.”
“Then I did not kill him? You are certain?”
“Not a chance. Unless you haven’t told me the truth about how many darts you used.”
“Two!” She half shouted it. “Two only — and you found them! What can I say to thank you for lifting me up from this pit?”
“There is no need to. I am rewarded by the sight of the relief on your face.”
He declined to stay for lunch, but was ravenous by the time he had pedaled back to the hotel. While he ate, he wrote a carefully composed letter to Kiri Sembawa.
The ship from Rotterdam to London was well out into the channel chop, pointed toward the mouth of the Thames. Alex Pine stood alone at the lee rail watching the wind feather the tops of the waves into the white spoondrift. He felt inside his jacket for his notebook and took out a slip of paper that had the name and address of a Singapore laboratory printed at the top. He read it again.
The enclosed dart carries traces of a deadly poison used by the Batak people of Sumatra in the hunting of large mammals. It is as yet unnamed, nor has it been determined the plant from which it is extracted. A very small amount of the poison has a paralyzing effect on the heart muscles, and possibly other vital organs, including the brain.
He tore the paper into small pieces that the wind carried away. Then he opened the notebook and let a single innocent-looking dart flutter down to the water. He watched until a wave rolled over and engulfed it.
All You Need Is Luck
by Jean Darling
Peewee firmly believed that money would buy anything...
Coffins held aloft by low trestle tables lined three sides of the long narrow room. From atop their lids candles stretched tiny flames to force back the shadows pressing down from the high-raftered ceiling. Beneath the candles, strips of aluminum foil protected the varnished wood from being scarred by runnels of molten wax. In the center of the floor lay an oblong of green baize.
It was Friday night at Murphy’s Coffin Factory on a quay along the River Liffey and Peewee Slattery’s crap game was open for business.
A ten-pound note secured the use of the premises for the night, blinding the watchman to any clandestine traffic that might detour into the storeroom on the way home after the pubs were closed. But the comfort of a tax-free tenner wasn’t the sole reason the watchman allowed the property to be defiled. The old man, superstitious and slightly simple, lived in awe of the abnormal and Peewee Slattery was unusual to say the least.
His head was large and capped with a shock of auburn curls, his eyes were blue beneath a high intelligent brow; his mouth was wide, his smooth-shaven jaw firm. His arms were long and wiry, his hands well formed. His lean body, broad at the shoulders, tapered to narrow hips. Seated at a table, Patrick William Slattery was handsome enough to turn any girl’s head. But the moment he dropped off the chair onto the floor he was revealed to be a dwarf barely forty-seven inches in height.
But while stares and whispers followed the dwarf as he moved through the streets of Dublin, within the candlelit room Slattery was king. Men knelt on either side of the green baize supplicating him, the god of chance, to favor them with a fistful of bank notes to take home to the missus. Their shadows flickered on the walls, imps lengthening to thrust gleeful fingers into the murk above or plunging malevolently to earth, as they bet, prayed, and cursed as they watched their money inflate the pile growing on the green cloth at Peewee’s feet.
When their money dwindled and the betting grew slack, Slattery would roll up the baize cloth, closing play for the night. “Off yuz go to your homes so,” he’d say. “Be seein’ yuz next Friday, God willin’.” An added “Maybe next week your luck’ll change” would assure the return of most of the losers. And not all the men went away broke. There were always a few winners to advertise the weekly game at Murphy’s Coffin Factory. A few winners were good for business providing they didn’t win too much, an occurrence easily avoided by a prudent switch of the dice.
Between Fridays, Slattery stocked up on candles. He acquired them one at a time from this church and that until there were enough to bum a night away. It seemed fair that God’s candles should provide light for the dwarf’s crap game, that they should shine on these other losers as God’s light had shone on him. Stealthily, Peewee would sneak candles into pockets he himself had sewn into his jacket for the purpose. When at last the coat was stiff with cylinders of white wax, he would scuttle home on his short little legs, always keeping a weather eye out for Detective Sergeant Patrick O’Byrne. The burly plain-clothesman had a knack for materializing at awkward times. Peewee’s criminal activities had always been minor, but O’Byrne had never been too tall to overlook them.
He lived above the old cattle market in the center house of a row condemned to the bulldozer. Seven little brick houses that had the misfortune to lie in the path of the housing estates spreading across Dublin’s north side, wiping away the Georgian character from the outer city. Slattery realized he was as much a chattel of fate as were the little houses — but with a difference. He would be saved, they would not.
Alone behind the cement-blocked windows, the dwarf long ago had hollowed out a cavity in the living-room wall in which to keep his winnings. Banknotes, counted and banded into hundred-pound lots, were stacked behind a flap thick with countless generations of wallpaper. A broken chest of drawers sagged drunkenly against the improvised safe, hiding the triangular tear from view. Every Saturday morning his takings were stacked away with other bundles that were to be the deformed orphan’s key to a new existence in another part of the world.
Money would buy anything, of that he was certain. It would even wipe the disgust from a woman’s face. It would add the stature denied him by nature. Money would buy him a beautiful wife with whom to beget children, long-legged boys and girls to make his life worth living. Yes, money would buy anything, even a family and respect, neither of which had been a part of the dwarfs thirty-two years of life.
Saturday afternoons, when the chest of drawers had been set in place against the wall, Peewee would walk along the North Circular Road, his body pitching from one side to the other. At the Mater Hospital he’d turn down past Dorset Street, past the church and the. Garden of Remembrance into O’Connell Street, past the Carlton Theatre and the post office and over the bridge. Tick-tock, tick-tock, his body swayed from side to side as he skirted the pillared bulge of the Bank of Ireland and crossed to the bottom of Grafton Street.