Argosy All-Story Weekly/Volume 124/Number 3/The Gallery Gods

by Murray Leinster

 

The Gallery Gods

By Murray Leinster

THE white-painted fruit steamer steamed out between the forts and turned toward the south. She only touched at Bahia del Toro to drop the mail on her downward trip, though on her return toward the north she paused to take on a portion of her cargo. The Stars and Stripes at her masthead fluttered brightly in the golden sunshine of midday, and the same sunshine made the sea seem bluer, and the palms greener and vividly alive. Half a dozen small launches that had clustered about the white ship scattered and made for different points along the water-front of the city.

El Señor Beckwith was seated in a great cane chair on the veranda of the white house that sprawled over the hillside. He looked at the ship and heaved a sigh. It was not a wistful sigh, nor was there pathos concealed anywhere about it. The sigh was a sign of the satisfaction that filled him. He sat at ease, puffing a long black cigar. At his elbow a glass tinkled musically when he moved. His huge frame, now clad in spotless white duck, was eloquent of content. Only his left thumb, bandaged and in splints, gave the slightest sign of discomfort, and he smiled when he felt the incumbrance of the wrappings. It was a souvenir of the incident that caused his sensation of complete satisfaction. Conway had broken that thumb in his last struggle, two weeks before, in New York. Conway was dead.

There was a clattering of tiny hoofs. One of the house-boys had been down to the wharf to get the New York papers Beckwith had arranged should be sent him. They would contain the details of Conway's death, and Beckwith drew in a pleasurable breath at the thought of reading them.

The little donkey had brought the boy hastily up with his light burden, and now the brown-skinned bey came in to Beckwith. The papers were all there, with all their “magazine sections,” their “rotogravure” illustrations, and all the other minor features on which they prided themselves. As the newspapers were handed to him, Beckwith even noticed a gaudily colored comic section. He flicked it carelessly aside.

These flimsy bundles of print had been brought four thousand miles for him to enjoy this moment. He would read of the death of Hugh Conway, multimillionaire philanthropist, patron of the arts, and other worthy things to the extent of a reportorial vocabulary, killed in the most open and daring fashion by William Beckwith, now at large. He would read of the letter left pinned to the multimillionaire's breast in which that same William Beckwith announced his reasons for killing the millionaire, and the precise fashion in which he intended to escape punishment.

Beckwith smiled cheerfully to himself as he visualized in advance the excited indignation with which the editorial comment would point out the loophole of which he had taken advantage. For weeks to come there would be indignation and anger at his calm defiance of the law and the power of the United States, while here in Bahia del Toro he would live openly and happily, frankly glorifying in the crime he had committed, respected and feared by the people.

There were the newspapers. The murder of Hugh Conway would be good for a scarehead on the front page.

Beckwith spread out the paper with his uninjured hand and ran his eye over the head-lines. Hugh Conway—Hugh Conway. Where was it? Not on the first page. Beckwith glanced at the date with a frown. The date was that of the day after the murder, and surely it should have been a news feature. He looked on the second page. Nothing there. He ran his eye over the third page and the fourth.

He flung the flimsy sheet impatiently aside and picked a second. The date was the same, and the name of the paper was that of one of the most sensational journals in New York. That, at least, would play up the murder in great shape. A new airplane record, a crisis in Europe, a prominent divorce case. Not one word of Hugh Conway. The second page.

Beckwith rumpled the newspaper and threw it away. He bit angrily on his cigar. He had killed Conway, strangled him with his two hands. He took up the third paper, then the fourth. Net a word concerning Conway. Beckwith growled throatily, then an idea struck him.

The police might have concealed the crime for a day or mere, hoping to ensnare him before he escaped. A later paper would tell. Beckwith's brow cleared. Of course that was it. He half smiled as he realized hew typical such an action would be. The police would want to announce the crime and the arrest of the murderer at the same time. Wells, the commissioner of police, was fond of just such tricks. He and Beckwith and Conway had gone to school together, and Beckwith knew Wells down to the ground.

With a leisurely gesture he selected a newspaper of the day following, and unfolded it, only to frown again. The first page was still devoted to commonplace events, and the second likewise. Still another one was barren of news on the topic that was all-important to Beckwith. He impatiently cast them down and examined those of the next day, and the next. When the last of his newspapers had joined the crumpled pile at his feet, Beckwith sat helplessly puzzled.

He was both puzzled and annoyed. His left thumb was bandaged, where Conway had dislocated it in his struggle for life. The cumbrous wrapping was still reminder of that event. Conway was dead, had been dead for three weeks, but for at least one week after his death no mention of him had appeared in any New York newspaper.

Why? Conway was well known and an important figure in the financial world. His murder, surely, would be a news item of the first importance. But not one single paragraph had been devoted to him. Beckwith had strangled him in his own motor-car, then knocked the chauffeur unconscious and escaped to a waiting yacht. The mere melodrama of the feat was enough to make it “copy” for the whole United States, let alone the city of New York. But every newspaper in New York had ignored it, as they had ignored Beckwith's scornful letter, sarcastically giving his address to the police.

Dusk had faded into twilight, and twilight into diamond-studded night. Down in the city the band played faintly in the plaza, while the long lines of dark-eyed señoritas promenaded primly in a duenna-guarded circle, listening decorously to the music, but casting liquid glances at the olive-skinned young men who less primly strolled in the other direction, twirling their budding mustaches for the admiration of the fairer sex. Now and again the muted chords of a guitar tinkled through the air, and now and again bursts of more uproariously amorous festivity came from the section of the town devoted to the cantinas and their less frank adjuncts.

Beckwith put his hat upon his head and sallied into the cobble-stoned street. He would go to the American Club. Soon, he was grimly aware, he would be barred from its precincts, unless his importance under the Garrios government overcame tne normal dislike of the Anglo-Saxon for a murderer. He would go there to-night in any event. The newspapers might not have printed details of Conway's murder, but Melton, the American consul, would surely have been cabled.

Beckwith had told in his sarcastic note to Wells that he would make for Bahis del Toro, and Wells would certainly wire the consulate to find if he had actually appeared. Beckwith grinned as he thought of the touching faith of the civilian American in the efficacy of a demand by a consular representative. Wells would insist that the Nueva Bolivian government turn the criminal over to justice. He would ignore the absence of a treaty of extradition.

The interior of the club was painfully hot, and most of the members sat upon the terrace above the entrance, sipping drinks from glasses that tinkled musically. Two or three cigars glowed fitfully in the obscurity, and the white-clad figure of the mozo moving from chair to chair was wraithlike.

Beckwith stood in the doorway a moment before emerging. The band was good, even for a military band among a musical people. At the moment it was playing a soft and dreamy waltz, while the young people in the plaza below eddied in their endless circles, the women inside, prim and decorous, and the men without, discreetly admiring. Half a dozen sputtering lights detracted from the romance of the scene, but made it possible to catch an occasional glimpse of some darkly beautiful face, outlined in the sharp glow of the arc-lamp.

Beckwith paid no attention to that phase of the scene, but searched among the seated, coatless figures for Melton, the consul. Melton had drawn his chair close to the railing and was looking out and down upon the plaza with a curiously wistful expression. Beckwith caught sight of him when the red glow of his cigar lighted up his face for a moment. With an assumption of indifference, Beckwith dropped into the chair by his side. Melton turned and squinted at him through the darkness until he recognized who it was.

“Oh, hello, Beckwith,” he said casually. “Hot, isn't it?”

He turned and surveyed the prim crowd below him, without waiting for Beckwith's acknowledgment. Melton was silent for a moment or so.

“Beckwith,” he said presently, “do you know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of Springfield, Massachusetts, about November. It's so different.” He half smiled to himself in the darkness. “I remember I used to be going about this time to call on some girl, with a box of candy under my arm.”

“Mozo,” said Beckwith harshly. The boy came and took his order.

“You've been down here ten years,” went on the consul, still in that half-hushed tone of reminiscence. “I've been away five years from the States, but I can still picture it. Crowds of people going into vaudeville houses, others climbing excitedly, on street-cars. I'd give a lot to have a street-car clang a bell at me just about now.”

“I was in New York two weeks ago,” said Beckwith suddenly, half minded to blurt out his reason for going north and what he had done there. “Went up there, but it was all strange. I wasn't comfortable until I got back here.”

“I hope I won't feel strange,” said the consul dreamily. “I'm going back next year, Do you know, I'm thinking about fried fish. They don't have the same kinds of fish down here, and they don't cook them the same way. The first thing I'm going to do when I land in New York, is to eat a meal in a restaurant. And I'm going to have. fried fish and griddle cakes with maple syrup. I don't know why fried fish appeals to me so much,” he added thoughtfully, “because I never cared much for them when I could get them.”

Beckwith moved uneasily.

“Any news lately?” he asked, succeeding very well in keeping his tone casual.

“Nothing but the papers,” answered Melton abstractedly. “Your boy was down at the dock and got a batch of them. I say, Beckwith—”

He launched forth in a vivid description of the joys of living in Springfield, Massachusetts, to which Beckwith listened uninterestedly, but perforce, sipping at his grenadine rickey from time to time. When he left, Beckwith was puzzled, but convinced that there had been no message or inquiry sent to Melton from the States concerning him.

He went slowly up to his white house that sprawled over the hillside, wondering why. As he was entering his own door the obvious solution came to him.

Wells would naturally have tried to keep the murder secret for twenty-four hours. That was one of his favorite tricks, keeping a crime secret to afford himself so much start in his efforts to unravel the mystery, so that the story of the crime and the capture of the criminal could be announced at the same time. Twenty-four hours was usually his limit. Evidently, however, he had been able to extend the time on this occasion. He must have possessed an incredible influence with the newspapers to keep them for seven days from exploiting so succulent a morsel of melodrama.

Beckwith chuckled.. Wells was trying to save his face. He had held off public knowledge of his failure for a week, but would be unable to keep it up much longer. When the next mail came, in seven days more, the newspapers would spread the news of Conway's death and Wells's humiliation, with Beckwith's triumph as their principal theme. A man who so defiantly flouted the law, who sneered at the police to the extent of giving them his address, would surely be made much of by the press, even if they denounced him. The next mail would tell the story, and Wells's humiliation would be the more complete for being delayed. The newspapers would flay him for trying to conceal the crime.

Beckwith went to sleep with a sense of profound satisfaction in spite of his recent disappointment.

The steamer usually made the port of Bahia del Toro about noon, but as early as nine o'clock in the morning of the next steamer day Beckwith was looking down the coast-line for the smudge of smoke that would portend the arrival of the vessel. He swept the horizon with his glasses from time to time, growing more and more impatient. The white hull did not appear until nearly four, however, and it was five o'clock before it turned in between the forts. Beckwith went out in one of the launches to meet it, smiling in anticipation of triumph. He waved gaily to the globe-trotting passengers clustered by the after rail, They would know of Conway's death, and one of the officers of the ship would undoubtedly point him out as the man who had defied the law.

The bundle of newspapers fell into the launch with a heavy thump, and the purser who had dropped them over waved a friendly hand. The little boat backed off from the steamer and sped toward the shore, while Beckwith cut the twine about his package of papers and began to run rapidly through them, glancing only at the first-page head-lines.

The first, no, the second, no, the third. A curious sensation settled upon him. Bewilderment and unreasoning suspicion, then poignant disappointment, finally a persistent hope. He could not examine them all thoroughly in the launch. The wind threatened to blow them overboard, but he put them together in a compact package and waited impatiently until he could go over them in detail at his home.

He hastened to his house, carrying the parcel himself. He hurried into his smoking-room and flung them on the table, then went over them again, and again, each time more minutely, each time with growing incredulity.

Not one newspaper issued on any day of the second week after the murder of Hugh Conway contained one hint of that event. Not one word, line, or paragraph referred to the murder of Hugh Conway by William Beckwith. Not one faintest indication appeared in any issue of any periodical during the second week after that murder of the defiant note written by the murderer to the commissioner of police. There was nothing to make any one suspect that any harm had come to one of the foremost figures in American finance.

Beckwith rubbed his forehead in amazement and perplexity. His dislocated thumb was still tender where Conway had struggled to save his life. His memory of the event was lucid and complete. He knew that he had killed Conway.

During the following week he brooded almost continuously over his problem. He cabled a confidential message to the Nueva Bolivian consul in New York, who knew his influence with Garrios well enough to heed his requests, asking for information about Conway. The consulate replied with a succinct list of his offices as head of this and that corporation, and added that his present whereabouts were unknown.

The message cheered Beckwith immensely. He made a resolution to wait one more week. If there was still no public news of Conway's death, he would write to the New York papers and put them in possession of the facts. He, William Beckwith, had killed Conway with his bare hands, and now resided openly in the city of Bahia del Toro. He would defy the police to punish him, and expose the duplicity of the commissioner of police, who had concealed the crime for no less than two weeks.

The steamer date arrived, but Beckwith was no longer impatient. He was calmly confident that there would be no mention of the crime in the newspapers of this week. Wells might prevent the news from ever becoming public. Beckwith had been so long in the Latin countries, where censorship is ruthless and complete, that he did not realize the impracticability of such a plan.

He watched the steamer arrive and drop the mail-bags over the side without emotion other than an abstract interest. When she came back on her way north again, he would have letters to form a part of her cargo; letters which would upset the smug complacency of the city of New York. A sodden, heavy rain was falling when the steamer made port, and it was barely visible from the house on the hill because of the sheets of falling water. Beckwith stood for a moment on his veranda and strained his eyes through the misty obscurity. The grass was exhaling fresh and fragrant odors in the rainfall. The palm-leaves were dark and glistening with the wet. Outside, the cobblestones of the street were running miniature floods of water to the gutter. Beckwith sat comfortably indoors and smoked one of his thin black cigars, quite tranquil, waiting for the boy to bring him the papers for which he had sent.

Presently, above the humming roar of the rain on the roof and street, he heard the donkey's hoofs. A door opened. A boy's voice spoke in liquid Spanish, and then one of the servants brought him a rain-sodden bundle of flimsy printed sheets.

Beckwith quite calmly cut the twine. The papers on the inside were dry, and he spread one out, looking at it with interest which sought confirmation of a conclusion already made. Wells had concealed the crime.

“Hugh Conway—” The name leaped at him from the head-lines. A shock went over Beckwith so that for a moment he could read no more. His hands were shaking. Triumph welled up in his heart. He laughed for an instant, and steadied his hands against the table before him. He fixed his eyes on the printed page.

A moment later his always frightened half-caste wife was shrinking in terror from the room she had been about to enter. Her husband was in there, staring at a sheet of paper and pouring out imprecations from the dregs of two languages. He seemed so furious that his anger verged on panic.

“Hugh Conway Announces Gift to City's Poor!” The head-lines were those of the “feature section” of one of the larger newspapers which invariably made much of the benevolences of the rich. Below the headline a pen-and-ink portrait of Hugh Conway—Hugh Conway, whom Beckwith had killed a month before—smiled from the page.

Beckwith, with the sensation of unreality one experiences in a nightmare, read the fulsome eulogy of the dead man. But the dead man was not here described as dead. The conventional phrases of the newspaper reporter, “Mr. Conway refused to be interviewed.” “At his home it was said that Mr. Conway did not wish to add anything to the statement of his attorneys, who have completed the arrangements for the gift.” All the evasions and artifices of men who have failed to see an important man were used.

Through the mist of incredulous amazement, Beckwith could gather only one impression. Conway had not been seen. No one had looked upon his living form to write of him recently. Beckwith knew why, of course. Conway was dead. But why, why had this gift been announced as from a living man?

With trembling fingers Beckwith spread out the remainder of the papers. Here and there he saw references to the gift. A monster sum was to be expended for fresh-air outings for the children of the slums. Every reference spoke of the frequent benefactions of the man Beckwith knew was dead, but not one word or line referred to his murder.

True, there was no direct mention of a late interview with him, but on the other hand no faintest hint had escaped the editorial writers of the fact that he had been killed, and that his murderer had gone openly to a country from which he could not be extradited, where he was living in ease and comfort, defying the law to punish him.

When the last of the papers had been gone through, Beckwith was in a frenzy. He had killed Conway, and the papers would not mention it! He felt almost as if he were being cheated, as, in a way, he was. A large part of his triumph was the public knowledge of his superiority to both Conway and Wells. To be deprived of that was infurating, daunting.

Beckwith suddenly got up and went from the house, to walk heedlessly in the pouring rain and try to think what could have happened to set his plans awry. Such few brown-skinned folk as saw him shrugged their shoulders and murmured softly to one another. Los Yanquis were mad, though el Señor Beckwith had seemed less mad than they until now. But behold him walking in the downpour!

When he finally stumbled into his own house again, Beckwith was exhausted both mentally and physically. He made his way, dripping, into the room where he had left his newspapers. His wife rose and fled from the room when he appeared, leaving behind her the picture section at which she had been looking.

She read no English, and but little Spanish, but the brown-tinted pictures gave her childish pleasure. Beckwith paid no attention to her hasty flight, but slumped down in his chair and stared gloomily at the floor. Then, suddenly, a picture on the illustrated sheet grew clear and distinct. It was a picture of Hugh Conway, at the top of his stroke, about to strike a golf-ball. The legend beneath the picture read: “Hugh Conway, well-known multimillionaire, taking a vacation from business cares at Newport. He is shown driving off, from the first tee in front of the clubhouse.”

Beckwith, staring at the picture of the man whose life he had choked cut a month before, caught his breath and began to swear at the printed sheet, hysterically, as he might have sworn at a ghost.

When the fruit steamer stopped on its northern trip, Beckwith took possession of a cabin. He did not quite understand why he was going to New York, but he was feverishly impatient for the ship to leave Bahia del Toro. He had a letter of credit in his pocket, and was determined to find out once and for all what had happened. If Conway had escaped him before, he would not escape again.

In his stateroom Beckwith carried the last batch of papers he had received, and spent much time reading and rereading the items concerning Conway. He weighed again and again each phrase in the accounts of Conway's munificent gift to charity, hoping to find therein some hint of Conway's death. He knew Conway was dead. He had choked Conway's life from him with his two hands. But why, why, why did not the papers announce the murder?

The ship steamed up the coast with incredible slowness. It put into Havana with nerve racking deliberation. There were fresh papers to be secured there, but none of them told of the murder. Beckwith read them minutely, and as the steamer neared New York he came out on deck and paced back and forth, smoking incessantly, torturing his brain for an explanation of the silence of the newspapers.

His nerves were in shreds when they finally reached New York. He watched the forts swing by to his left, and the tall buildings of lower Manhattan rise from the water. The fixed expressionlessness of the Statue of Liberty irritated him. He was all impatience to be re and free to make his final investigations. What had happened that had prevented the press from learning of Conway's death? And why had they printed no word of his murder? The leisurely manner of the customs inspectors drove him nearly frantic. When he was at last free to go ashore he was trembling from sheer nervous tension.

He went down the gangplank, an olive-skinned steward carrying his bags. He pushed roughly through the crowd of people come to meet the voyagers, and closed his ears to the soft Spanish greetings. He failed altogether to see a motion-picture photographer cranking busily. He pressed free of the assembly of people, and turned impatiently to the steward behind him.

“Trouble you to come with me, sir,” said a quiet voice at his elbow.

Two unimpressive figures in civilian clothes stood, one on either side. The hand of each was in his coat-pocket, where a suggestive bulge warned against resistance.

“What the devil!” began Beckwith furiously, and stopped.

Wells was standing there, smiling sarcastically at him—Wells the commissioner of police.

“You're under arrest for Hugh Conway's murder, Beckwith,” he said caustically.

A dozen of more delighted men watched the scene, cameras and note-books busy. Beckwith saw the unmistakable signs of the reportorial trade. There was even a woman or two among them, “sob-sisters” beyond a doubt.

“We might as well made it a nice, dramatic moment, Beckwith,” Wells said dryly. “I got your letter, pinned to Conway's breast. Kind of you to tell me where you were going, and that you couldn't be extradited. I wouldn't have got you but for that. I knew you'd look in the papers for news of your feat; as a matter of fact, you mentioned it in your letter, so I took the boys here into my confidence”—he nodded at the group of newspapermen—“and they agreed to help out. Their owners O.K.'d the scheme; and the murder was kept absolutely secret from the public and the press.

“We gave you two weeks to get worried, and then announced Conway's bequest to charities—it was really in his will—and printed a picture or so of him. You rose to the bait, all right. We couldn't touch you in Nueva Bolivia, but as soon as you boarded the steamer, we had you. We let you come on to New York alone, though, to save trouble. We're much obliged to you, I'm sure.”

Beckwith suddenly understood. He had not won his revenge and freedom after all. He had not proven himself cleverer than Wells. He had lost, utterly and irreparably. He had been lured into the power of the law by nothing more than silence. But the thing that cut deepest into his heart; that made the cup of his humiliation run over, was a final remark of Wells. The reporters were listening intently.

“I guess that's all, boys,” said Wells indulgently. “No more to be said. You'll have a good story for the evening editions. Beckwith couldn't resist playing to the gallery gods.”