He turned toward Peabody.
“Mr. Bendigo.”
Bendigo looked back sharply. “Yes?”
“As long as we’re going down the Mosaic tables,” said Ellery, “I think I ought to tell you that my father and I have guns with us. Are guns on your contraband list, too?”
Bendigo laughed. “No, Queen. We’re very fond of guns here. You may have all the guns you can carry.” His lips thinned until they almost disappeared. “But no cameras,” he said.
Again their glances crossed.
And this time Ellery was able to smile.
“We understand, Your Highness,” he said gravely.
“Wait!” King Bendigo sat taller on his throne. At the note in his voice Immanuel Peabody, for the first time, looked up from his papers. “I don’t believe you do understand, Queen,” Bendigo said slowly. “No, I don’t believe you do... Sit down and watch what you interrupted. Over there!”
His thumb stabbed toward two chairs at the curved wall.
Ellery felt a twitch of alarm. The drawl had been unpleasantly without inflexion. It reminded him of the voice of the robot officer behind the electrified fence. He was vaguely sorry now that he had come. To conceal his apprehension, he went abruptly to one of the chairs. The Inspector was already at the other, looking gray.
They sat down, tense without knowing quite why.
“You may go ahead now,” said Bendigo curtly to Peabody. Peabody rose. His master leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment. It was theatrical, but it failed to give the reassurance of play-acting. For in another moment Bendigo had opened his eyes and turned them on the large stout man between the two soldiers. And what glittered in the black arctic depths of those eyes made the Queens look at the large stout man really for the first time.
His knees sagged, as if his body were too heavy for his legs. His flabby cheeks were pale and wet, although air conditioning made the office very pleasant. He kept screwing up his eyes, as if he were having trouble focusing; occasionally, he would blink. His whole appearance was that of an exhausted man who feels he must pay the closest attention to the proceedings. Ellery had seen men look like that who were defendants in murder cases.
And it occurred to him suddenly that the rhetorical question he had asked in the car after their experience at the concentration camp was being answered here and now.
Yes, there were courts on Bendigo Island. This was one of them, the highest.
The large stout man with the rubbery knees was about to be tried.
And when Immanuel Peabody began to speak, there was no doubt left. He spoke in the crisp, confident tone of the experienced prosecutor. King Bendigo listened with the aloof gravity of the supreme judge.
Peabody was outlining the charge. It had something to do with the stout man’s failure to carry out certain instructions. Ellery could not follow it closely, for his thoughts were a bottleneck of jammed impressions — the handsome immobility of Bendigo, the slightly nervous fuss the lawyer’s fingers made as he talked, the desperate concentration of the stout man, the glow of the glass brick walls, the powerful mastication of Max’l’s jaws as he rapidly fed himself hulled nuts in the doorway of the open safe, apparently his favorite lounging place. Had Max’l been there all the time?...
Peabody became more specific. He enumerated dates, names, facts. None of them meant anything to Ellery, who was growing more and more confused. All he could gather was that something or some things the accused had done or had not done had resulted in the severance of an important secret contact somewhere in Asia, which in turn had brought about the loss of an armaments contract. At least it seemed to concern an armaments contract, although Ellery was not sure even of that; it might have involved oil, or raw materials, or ships. Whatever it was, the stout man stood accused of a major crime against the Bendigo empire: bungling.
Ellery held down an impulse to laugh.
And at last King’s counsel came to the end of his argument, and he sat down and patted his papers together into a tight, neat pile. Then he leaned back, crossed his dapper legs, and stared with some interest at the stout man.
“Anything to say?” This was evidently the King’s juridical voice, cold, solemn, and above-it-all.
The stout man licked his lips and blinked rapidly, struggling with a great wish to produce sound. But then his lips sagged along the lines of his cheeks, and he lapsed into helplessness.
“Speak up, Norton.” The voice was sharper, more personal. “Do you have anything to say?”
Again the stout man struggled, the sag lifting. He was no more successful this time, but his failure ended with a shrug — the weariest, most hopeless shrug Ellery had ever witnessed.
Ellery felt his father’s fingers on his arm. He sank back.
King made a flicking gesture with his shapely right hand.
The stout man might have been a fly.
The guards took him out, each wrestling an arm. The knees kept buckling, and a step before the door they collapsed altogether.
The trio disappeared.
The splendid office sunned itself. There was a siesta mood over everything. No one said a word.
King Bendigo sprawled on his throne, chin thoughtful, black eyes dreamy.
King’s advocate Peabody kept his legs comfortably crossed, one hand on his neat, tight pile of papers. However, his head was cocked.
The rapid-fire motion of Max’l’s feeding hand had stopped. The hand was suspended before the mouth.
They were waiting. That was it.
But for what?
A laugh that would shatter this dream — wake everyone up and restore the sanity of the world?
A shot?
Nonsense, absurd...
Anyway, the walls were soundproof—
Ellery jumped.
King Bendigo had risen. Lawyer Peabody uncrossed his legs. Max’l’s hand popped to his mouth, dipped for a fresh supply of hulled nuts.
It was over.
Whatever had happened, it was over.
The King was speaking graciously to the lawyer. There was a matter of a tax suit for sixty million dollars pending in the high court of some European country. Bendigo was discussing the incomes of the judges and inquiring for more information of the same personal nature.
Peabody replied busily.
At the door, waiting for his father, Ellery glanced back. The King and his Lord Advocate were seated again, their heads together. They were deep in conversation. The curved wall glowed and the long office was serene. Max was tossing nuts into the air now and balancing under them with his mouth open, like a seal.
Ellery stumbled out.
9
Wednesday night came, and there was still no word of Abel Bendigo. Peabody, whom Ellery chased for half a day, merely looked blank when asked about Abel’s mission to Washington. Karla knew nothing about it.
His talk with Karla left Ellery unhappy.
“It is a long time since I shook at every threat,” she said with a toss of her red hair. “I had to make up my mind early that I had married a unique personality, one who would always be the target of something.” She smiled her crooked little smile. “Kane is better guarded than the President of the United States. By men at least as devoted and incorruptible.”
“Suppose,” Ellery said carefully, “suppose, Mrs. Bendigo, we found that your husband’s life is being threatened by someone very close to him—”
“Close to him!” Karla threw her head back and laughed. “Impossible. No one is really close to Kane. Not even Abel is. Not even I am.”
Ellery went away dissatisfied by this transparent sophistry. If Karla suspected anything, she was keeping it to herself.
As the night wore on and Thursday approached, Ellery’s skin began to itch and he found it difficult to remain in one spot for more than a few minutes. The more nervous he became, the angrier he grew with all of them — with King, for treating the subject of his own death first with amusement, then with contempt, and finally with irritation, as at a minor but persistent infraction of some Company rule; with Abel, for dragging them into the case and then, unaccountably, staying away from them; with Karla, for being candid when candor was meaningless, and inscrutable when candor would have been helpful; with Judah, for being a man who drank brandy from morning to night and smiled vaguely when his bloodshot eye was caught... surely one of the most unsatisfying assassins in history.