Where the Pavement Ends Part 18

Whereupon Cloots very quickly and expertly fired once from the hip. The shot burst with a racketing smash against the eardrums. To any on the platform it might have just sounded as a clap of hands, no louder. But within these solid blank walls it multiplied like a volley, then dwindled and pa.s.sed. A weft of smoke went drifting across the taper, and that too pa.s.sed. The chapel fell quiet. There had been no visible result.

At one side stood the white man, half crouching in the act, tense and expectant; and by the doorway stood the headman of Apyodaw, planted in the same position he had held throughout, with the rectangle of fading daylight behind him--a little brown figure in neutral tinted silks....

"They do not strike the big bell until the last ray of the sun,"

explained Moung Poh Sin, without the least quiver of emotion, without the least break of intonation. "We have yet some moments to wait."

Cloots glared at him, astonished, unable and unwilling to believe, picturing the collapse, waiting from one tick of time to the next to see the fellow crumple on the stones. But nothing happened, nothing came of it, and he brought up his arm and the glittering, compact fistful of steel, and this time he took deliberate aim.

Again the shot and smas.h.i.+ng echo. Again the still pause.

"They will be making ready now," said Moung Poh Sin evenly. "They will be swinging out the striker of the big bell."

All shadows about the paG.o.da had run long and black like spurts of jet and its western edge was no more than lined with copper; only the topmost peak caught a last radiance and spread and shed a faint ruddy glow and a patch of that lay on the threshold of the chapel....

Cloots had fallen back to the wall with sagging jaw, with eyes fixed and starting in their sockets. He was stricken; he was beaten. For he had come to the end of things known and conceivable. He had reached the end of the white man's resource and had made the ultimate appeal of the white man's civilization--and had failed. Beyond lay the incredible and the impossible. It was rather a galvanic impulse than any reasoned operation by which he brought up his weapon in both shaking hands, steadied an elbow against his side and fired a third and last despairing shot.

From somewhere, from under their feet as it seemed, there issued a vast booming vibration; the air fluttered to a single gigantic, metallic stroke. And it was then and not until then that Moung Poh Sin moved at last and drew from the silken folds at his waist a broad, short-shafted knife and all with perfect precision and deliberation advanced to do what he was there to do.

"The time has come," said Moung Poh Sin....

Outside it had gone quite dark.

Those two busy officials of colonial administration whose duty it was to gather up and to sort out the threads of local crime in that far Eastern port wasted no time and few words about their work. They had been on many cases together. Moreover, this particular case offered a bare simplicity in its few apparent details. Also, since it concerned the death of a white, it called for urgent action, and they went at it with precision and dispatch while the police guard held the entrance against a wondering throng.

"How long has he been dead?" asked the a.s.sistant inspector.

"Some ten minutes, I should say," returned the medical examiner. "He's still warm."

"Instantaneous?"

"As nearly as possible. His heart's been split in half, you might say, with this _dah_." The doctor indicated a short iron dagger buried to its iron handle in the victim's left breast. "One jab, and no bungling about it."

"Done by a native," remarked the inspector, bending over.

"Evidently. But what kind of a Buddhist was he, giving himself to the frozen Buddhist h.e.l.l by taking a life?"

"Not much of a Buddhist. That's a hill weapon. They're hardly what you'd call orthodox in the hills."

"Quite true," agreed the doctor. "Buddhism is a modern novelty to the hills. What's a matter of three thousand years? They've got a system rather older."

"And we've got a story here, if we could only read it, that's older than any system."

"But still--to kill a man in a shrine, eh?"

"Yes. He must have had a pretty good reason."

Something in the other's tone made the doctor look up.

"You knew this chap?"

"Slightly," said the inspector. "Name of Cloots. He's been cruising about after jade and ruby mines one time and another, living among the people. Kind of a prospecting tramp and adventurer--you know the type.

Rather an obnoxious beast, if he's the one I've heard about."

The doctor sought no further comments on Cloots--that was quite sufficient and might serve for an epitaph. He preferred to jot down certain necessary official entries in his little book, and as the light was bad he moved away toward the altar. Meanwhile the inspector remained by the body, outsprawled there in a crimson pool, until an exclamation brought him spinning around to find his colleague standing under the glimmer of the lone taper and looking singularly pale, he thought.

But the doctor's question was quietly put.

"Have you any notion what became of the murderer?"

"It's a queer business," admitted the inspector, frowning. "I wish I could begin to learn something of the capabilities of these people.

There must have been three hundred about the platform and the stairs.

And we can't dig up a clue to save ourselves."

"No theory yet?"

"What theory can there be? You see the material as well as I. A corpse, a knife, and an empty shrine. It's a clear get-away, without a witness."

"Quite so. But aren't you forgetting this witness?"

The doctor laid a finger on the image of the Buddha. There it sat behind the taper and the offerings and the veiling vapor of the incense. There it sat cross-legged in its niche, with the left hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the knee--with the calm and pa.s.sionless and inscrutable regard of the tradition--a life-size image, whose painted garments in gilt and old rose, whose set and peaceful features had been dimmed to a uniform human tint. A very ordinary image....

At least so it seemed to the bewildered inspector. Until he saw it sag a trifle. Until he saw it give flaccidly under the doctor's touch. And then he saw that the actual image had been displaced and jammed back into the niche for a support and that this--this was a subst.i.tute.

"Dead!" he breathed.

The doctor dropped the wrist he had been thumbing.

"Dead," he affirmed rather shakily. "And not only dead, but cold!...

Inspector, I'm not a fanciful man, would you say? I'm not one to believe much in deviations from the normal--in aberrations from the positive, eh?--even under the Temple of the Slanted Beam. But I'd swear in any court--west of Suez, I mean--I'd take my solemn oath the fellow was dead when he climbed to that altar!... It's the plain evidence. It's as certain as anything I know, if I know anything.... Dead?... He was dead the first of the two! He was obliterated, wiped out, blasted out of existence, _a full five minutes before he ever killed that white chap there on the floor_!"

"Capabilities," stammered the inspector. "Would you call that suspended animation, now--or what?"

"I'd call it suspended extinction, if there were such a thing in medical science. As it is, I'll call it suspended judgment and let it go at that."

They stayed staring at Moung Poh Sin for a while.

"'There are more things 'twixt'--" began the doctor.

"Twixt East and West," suggested the inspector.

"Quite so. And if you doubt my word for it--look!"...

He lifted aside the narrow-edged coat to show the naked, rugged breast beneath; and there, a little to the left, within a s.p.a.ce that might have been covered with a lotus leaf were three smooth, round bullet holes where the late headman of Apyodaw had been drilled through the heart--three times.