“Good evening,” she exclaimed, taking their hands. Her voice had the same coloring; it was a vivid contralto, with the merest trace of Southern Europe. She was not so young, Ellery saw, as he had first thought. Early thirties? “I am so happy to receive you both. Can you forgive me for having neglected you?”
“After seeing you, madam,” said Inspector Queen with earnestness, “I can forgive you anything.”
“And to be repaid with gallantry!” She smiled, the slightest smile. “And you, Mr. Queen?”
“Speechless,” said Ellery. Now he saw something else — a sort of grotto deep beneath the sunny seas of her eyes, a place of cold sad shade.
“I have always adored the flattery of American men. It is so uncomplicated.” Laughing, she took them across the room.
King Bendigo stood at an Italian marble fireplace taller than himself, listening in silence to the conversation of his brother Abel and three other men. The lord of Bendigo Island looked fresh and keen, although Ellery knew he must have had a long day at his desk. The jester, Max’l, was at a table nearby helping himself to canapés with both murderous hands. Occasionally, while his great jaws ground away, he looked around at his master like a dog.
In an easy chair opposite King sprawled a slight dark man in rumpled clothing. On his sallow face, with its intelligent features, he wore a slight dark mustache; it gave him a gloomy, almost sinister, look. It was an odd face, with a broad high forehead, a nose sharply and crookedly hooked, and a chin that came to a premature point. A bell-shaped dark green bottle stood at his elbow and he was rolling a brandy snifter between his palms as his head lolled on the back of the chair. From the slits of his deeply sunken eyes he was studying Ellery, however, with remarkable alertness.
King greeted them graciously enough, but in a moment he had turned aside with Abel, and it was Karla Bendigo who introduced the other men. The slight dark man in the easy chair was Judah Bendigo, the middle brother; he did not rise or offer his hand. He merely squinted up at them, rolling the snifter between his palms. Either he was already drunk, or rudeness was a hereditary Bendigo trait. Ellery was glad when they had to turn to the group at the fireplace.
One of the three was small, stout, and bald, with the unemotional stare of a man to whom nothing has value but the immediate moment. Their hostess introduced him as Dr. Storm, Surgeon-General of Bendigo Island and her husband’s personal physician, who lived on the premises. It did not surprise Ellery to learn that the second man, a tall lean swarthy individual with a catty smile, was also a permanent resident; his name was Immanuel Peabody, and he was King Bendigo’s chief legal adviser. The third man of the group looked like a football player convalescing from a serious illness. He was young, blond, broad-shouldered, and pale, and his face was rutted with fatigue.
“Dr. Akst,” Karla Bendigo said. “We seldom see this young man; it is a rare pleasure. He buries himself in his laboratory at the other side of the island, fiddling with his dangerous little atoms.”
“With his what?” said Inspector Queen.
“Mrs. Bendigo insists on making Dr. Akst out to be some sort of twentieth-century alchemist,” said the lawyer, Peabody, smiling. “A physicist can’t very well avoid the little atom, but it’s hardly dangerous, Dr. Akst, is it?”
“Say it is dangerous, Doctor,” said Karla playfully. But she flashed a glance at the lawyer. It seemed to Ellery the glance was resentful.
“Only in the sense that an experimenter,” protested Peabody, “is always monkeying with the unknown.”
“Can we talk about something else?” asked Dr. Akst. He spoke with a strong Scandinavian accent, and he sounded younger than he looked.
“Mrs. Bendigo’s eyes,” suggested Ellery. “Now there’s a subject that’s really dangerous.”
Everyone laughed, and then Ellery and the Inspector had cocktails in their hands and Immanuel Peabody began to tell the story of an old criminal trial in England, in which testimony about the color of a woman’s eyes delivered the defendant to Jack Ketch. But all the while Ellery was wondering if his father knew that the tired young man with the humorless Scandinavian voice was one of the world’s most famous nuclear physicists. And he thought, too, that in trying to gloss over the nature of Dr. Akst’s work on Bendigo Island Immanuel Peabody had only succeeded in calling attention to it. For the rest of the evening Akst made a point of effacing himself and, playing the game, Ellery ignored him.
Karla Bendigo did not refer to him again.
Dinner was sumptuous and interminable. They dined in the adjoining room, a place of suffocating grandeur, and they were served by an army corps of servants. The courses and wines came in a steady parade, many of the delicacies blue-flamed in chafing dishes, so that the whole incredible feast was like a torchlight procession in a medieval festival.
Immanuel Peabody kept pace, with fat and deadly little Dr. Storm not far behind, Peabody telling with the utmost cheerfulness gruesome stories of criminal lore, with Dr. Storm’s surgically bawdy. To these last, Max’l was the most appreciative listener; he winked, leered, and guffawed between gulletfuls, missing nothing. Max’l wore his napkin frankly under his chin and he ate with both elbows guarding his plate; he removed one of them only to batter Ellery’s ribs at a particularly gusty witticism of Dr. Storm’s.
To the Queens’ disappointment, neither had been placed beside King or Karla Bendigo. The Inspector was trapped between the loquacious lawyer and the wicked little Surgeon-General, while Ellery sat diagonally across the table between the taciturn physicist, Akst, and Max’l — the father being talked to death, the son given Coventry on one side and a beating on the other. The arrangement was deliberate; nothing here, Ellery knew, happened by chance.
Since most of the lawyer’s and the physician’s conversation was directed toward the Queens, they found little opportunity to talk to the Bendigos. Karla murmured to Abel at her end of the field-long table, occasionally sending a word or a crooked little smile their way, as if in apology. At the other end sat King, listening. Once, turning suddenly, Ellery found their host’s black eyes fixed on him with amusement. He tried after that to cultivate at least an appearance of patience.
It was a queer banquet, full of tense and mysterious undercurrents, and not the least of them swirled about Judah Bendigo. The slender little man slumped to the left of his brother King, ignoring Max’l’s feeding antics — Max’l sat between Judah and Ellery — ignoring Storm’s sallies and Peabody’s forensic yarns, ignoring his food... giving all his attention to the bottle of Segonzac cognac beside his plate. No servant touched that bottle, Ellery observed; Judah refilled his own glass. He drank steadily but slowly throughout the evening, for the most part looking across the table at a point in space above Immanuel Peabody’s head. His only recognition of the menu was to drink two cups of black coffee toward the end, and even then he laced them with brandy. The first cup emptied his bottle, and a servant quickly uncorked a fresh bottle and set it beside him.
The dinner took three hours; and when at exactly 10.45 p.m. King Bendigo made an almost unnoticeable gesture and Peabody brought his story to an end within ten seconds, Ellery could have collapsed in gratitude. Across the table his father sat perspiring and pale, as if he had exhausted himself in a desperate struggle.
The rich voice said to the Queens, “Gentlemen, I must ask you to excuse Abel and me. We have work to do tonight. I regret the necessity, as I’d looked forward to hearing some stories of your adventures.” Then why the devil, thought Ellery, did you order Peabody and Storm to monopolize the conversation? “However, Mrs. Bendigo will entertain you.”