Bat Wing, Sax Rohmer [top 20 books to read .txt] 📗

you have prepared and it will have to do.”

He took up a letter which lay unsealed upon the table. “This is the Rokeby affair,” he said. “I have decided to hold it over, after all, until my return.”

“Ah!” said Innes, quietly glancing at each envelope as he took it from the basket. “I see you have turned down the little job offered by the Marquis.”

“I have,” replied Harley, smiling grimly, “and a fee of five hundred guineas with it. I have also intimated to that distressed nobleman that this is a business office and that a laundry is the proper place to take his dirty linen. No, there’s nothing further to-night, Innes. You can get along now. Has Miss Smith gone?”

But as if in answer to his enquiry the typist, who with Innes made up the entire staff of the office, came in at that moment, a card in her hand. Harley glanced across in my direction and then at the card, with a wry expression.

“Colonel Juan Menendez,” he read aloud, “Cavendish Club,” and glanced reflectively at Innes. “Do we know the Colonel?”

“I think not,” answered Innes; “the name is unfamiliar to me.”

“I wonder,” murmured Harley. He glanced across at me. “It’s an awful nuisance, Knox, but just as I thought the decks were clear. Is it something really interesting, or does he want a woman watched? However, his name sounds piquant, so perhaps I had better see him. Ask him to come in, Miss Smith.”

Innes and Miss Smith retiring, there presently entered a man of most striking and unusual presence. In the first place, Colonel Menendez must have stood fully six feet in his boots, and he carried himself like a grandee of the golden days of Spain. His complexion was extraordinarily dusky, whilst his hair, which was close cropped, was iron gray. His heavy eyebrows and curling moustache with its little points were equally black, so that his large teeth gleamed very fiercely when he smiled. His eyes were large, dark, and brilliant, and although he wore an admirably cut tweed suit, for some reason I pictured him as habitually wearing riding kit. Indeed I almost seemed to hear the jingle of his spurs.

He carried an ebony cane for which I mentally substituted a crop, and his black derby hat I thought hardly as suitable as a sombrero. His age might have been anything between fifty and fifty-five.

Standing in the doorway he bowed, and if his smile was Mephistophelean, there was much about Colonel Juan Menendez which commanded respect.

“Mr. Harley,” he began, and his high, thin voice afforded yet another surprise, “I feel somewhat ill at ease to—how do you say it?—appropriate your time, as I am by no means sure that what I have to say justifies my doing so.”

He spoke most fluent, indeed florid, English. But his sentences at times were oddly constructed; yet, save for a faint accent, and his frequent interpolation of such expressions as “how do you say?”—a sort of nervous mannerism—one might have supposed him to be a Britisher who had lived much abroad. I formed the opinion that he had read extensively, and this, as I learned later, was indeed the case.

“Sit down, Colonel Menendez,” said Harley with quiet geniality. “Officially, my working day is ended, I admit, but if you have no objection to the presence of my friend, Mr. Knox, I shall be most happy to chat with you.”

He smiled in a way all his own.

“If your business is of a painfully professional nature,” he added, “I must beg you to excuse me for fourteen days, as I am taking a badly needed holiday with my friend.”

“Ah, is it so?” replied the Colonel, placing his hat and cane upon the table, and sitting down rather wearily in a big leathern armchair which Harley had pushed forward. “If I intrude I am sorry, but indeed my business is urgent, and I come to you on the recommendation of my friend, Senor Don Merry del Val, the Spanish Ambassador.”

He raised his eyes to Harley’s face with an expression of peculiar appeal. I rose to depart, but:

“Sit down, Knox,” said Harley, and turned again to the visitor. “Please proceed,” he requested. “Mr. Knox has been with me in some of the most delicate cases which I have ever handled, and you may rely upon his discretion as you may rely upon mine.” He pushed forward a box of cigars. “Will you smoke?”

“Thanks, no,” was the answer; “you see, I rarely smoke anything but my cigarettes.”

Colonel Menendez extracted a slip of rice paper from a little packet which he carried, next, dipping two long, yellow fingers into his coat pocket, he brought out a portion of tobacco, laid it in the paper, and almost in the twinkling of an eye had made, rolled, and lighted a very creditable cigarette. His dexterity was astonishing, and seeing my surprise he raised his heavy eyebrows, and:

“Practice makes perfect, is it not said?” he remarked.

He shrugged his shoulders and dropped the extinguished match in an ash tray, whilst I studied him with increasing interest. Some dread, real or imaginary, was oppressing the man’s mind, I mused. I felt my presence to be unwelcome, but:

“Very well,” he began, suddenly. “I expect, Mr. Harley, that you will be disposed to regard what I have to tell you rather as a symptom of what you call nerves than as evidence of any agency directed against me.”

Paul Harley stared curiously at the speaker. “Do I understand you to suspect that someone is desirous of harming you?” he enquired.

Colonel Menendez slowly nodded his head.

“Such is my meaning,” he replied.

“You refer to bodily harm?”

“But yes, emphatically.”

“Hm,” said Harley; and taking out a tin of tobacco from a cabinet beside him he began in leisurely manner to load a briar. “No doubt you have good reasons for this suspicion?”

“If I had not good reasons, Mr. Harley, nothing could have induced me to trouble you. Yet, even now that I have compelled myself to come here, I find it difficult, almost impossible, to explain those reasons to you.”

An expression of embarrassment appeared upon the brown face, and now Colonel Menendez paused and was plainly at a loss for words with which to continue.

Harley replaced the tin in the cupboard and struck a match. Lighting his pipe he nodded good humouredly as if to say, “I quite understand.” As a matter of fact, he probably thought, as I did, that this was a familiar case of a man of possibly blameless life who had become subject to that delusion which leads people to believe themselves threatened by mysterious and unnameable danger.

Our visitor inhaled deeply.

“You, of course, are waiting for the facts,” he presently resumed, speaking with a slowness which told of a mind labouring for the right