The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri Read online

  “I’ll do exactly that,” said Mr. Jennings promptly, obviously pleased at this additional leverage by which he could comb humanity with a fine-toothed comb. “And you — will you say ?. K. on this thing?”

  “Probably — but not yet,” replied Carson. “Give me the early part of this afternoon to see Miss Desmond and find out if she will sanction the use of her grandfather’s name. After all, old Professor Desmond is her grandfather and not mine, you know. If she says yes, I’ll handle the affair on behalf of the Desmond family. Leave me the whereabouts of where you’re staying, and I’ll ring you this afternoon in plenty of time to get your copy in the evening papers for you and the ad in turn on tonight’s broadcast. You can then give me word for word over the phone what you want inserted — and we’ll endeavor to complete the ad so that you can avoid the publicity which you dislike so much. Is this satisfactory?”

  Mr. Jennings rose, demonstrating experience which told him when an interview was over. He took up his broad Western hat. His shifty face smiled agreeably. “Quite hunky dory, young man. I’ll look for your ring. Call the National Hotel on Van Buren Street. Ask for Mr. Jake Jennings. And let’s not forget that we need speed on this thing. Every moment is valuable in a case like this.” He grimaced, a bit painfully. “If Mr. Snake ever gets across the city into the outskirts where there’s plenty of scrub and country, it’s good night so far’s recovering it goes. He — or she — whatever it is — will be right in his element.”

  Carson rose. “Yes, that’s true. Well, I’ll see Miss Desmond and ring you up and let you know our decision.”

  Mr. Jennings bowed himself out of the small office. Carson sank back in his swivel chair. He sat thinking perplexedly for several minutes. The clock on the wall suddenly striking brought him to his senses. He raised the receiver of his desk phone. He dialed it quickly for Central 1991. He waited until a clicking followed, then a girl’s voice.

  “Mr. Gordon’s office,” she informed him.

  “Is Mr. Gordon in yet?” he inquired.

  “Just got in,” she replied, evidently recognizing the voice in which twice that morning the same query had come over the wire to her. “I’ll put him on the wire.”

  Carson waited. Then a pleasant masculine voice — a booming voice — a voice which suggested the corporation attorney — answered.

  “Ramsey Gordon speaking.”

  “Mr. Gordon, this is Clifford Carson, the recently appointed investigator for this section of the new Government Bureau for the examination of supposed fraudulent mining stocks. My superiors at Washington tell me that you are to be my legal advisor on matters pertaining to the Chicago end of the bureau.”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Gordon cordially.

  “Then I’d like to come over and make your acquaintance,” said Carson. “And incidentally, Mr. Gordon, I’ve been trying to get you since late yesterday afternoon, in fact, because I want also to have your legal advice about a rather unusual and unfortunate situation here in Chicago involving a convict — or at least a one-time convict in the Joliet penitentiary — and a girl who is very close to me. However, for your opinion on this peculiar situation I expect to be billed.”

  “Then come right on over after lunch, Mr. Carson,” said Ramsey Gordon. “And when you need any casual legal advice on personal matters, don’t hesitate to ask for it. As counsel for several of its miscellaneous departments, the honorable Government is paying me a rather fair yearly stipend, you know. So we don’t have to confine our relationship altogether to mining stocks, you see.”

  Carson smiled at the friendly man-to-man-like invitation. Then, making an appointment for one o’clock, he hung up.

  With this vital legal meeting taken care of, he fell once more to thinking upon the visit of Mr. Jennings of North Dakota and of that latter gentleman’s strange — and it was to be admitted — lucrative proposition offered. Neither he nor Marcia had much money, considering the unfortunate fact that when this new department in American matters internal had been created by a special and last-minute Act of Congress, following out the findings of its committee on mines and mining, it had quixotically provided that its head would be a dollar-a-year man until precisely one year from the date of the act, at which time the salary would automatically become six thousand dollars per year with a rising scale. So, safely entrenched as he was by his Civil Service ratings, and by seniority — considering that he was the first man in the bureau! — it was but a simple question of hanging on, of expending his own meagre savings as wisely as possible over that one year; and then cashing in on a salary that more than made up for the lone dollar the first year had provided — a salary that meant luxury, even opulence, for him and Marcia.

  From all of which pleasant considerations Carson’s mind traveled back again, quite naturally, to Mr. Jennings’ offer, dealing as it did, too, with that valuable commodity — money. And realizing as he did that generous but straitened old Grandfather Desmond, when he returned, would never consent to accept one penny of this two hundred and fifty dollars that might be earned by his granddaughter and the man whom she was going to marry, Carson felt compelled to wonder whether the sum in question wouldn’t materially add to the little apartment they expected to furnish — and to live in — during these slim days when his salary was to stand at only one dollar per year, while they waited for a real pay envelope which Congress had decreed would thereafter be five hundred dollars on the first day of every month. And as his lips unconsciously framed themselves around the word “Zuri,” the object of Mr. Jennings’ quest, he rose suddenly and made his way through a door which led to an adjoining room.

  Here, however, was a room which marked the general nature of the investigations carried on in it as clearly as the tinier outside office failed utterly to give any clue as to the kind of business which the two-room suite harbored. Large and square, it was fully four times the size of the outer office. Great mineralogical maps, printed on canvas and rolling up and down upon shadelike rollers from boxlike receptacles containing as many as a half-dozen together, were ranged about the walls at the proper height for convenient scrutiny. Each roller box carried a row of electric bulbs which could be snapped on and off by a turn-screw on the end, and which would focus their radiance directly upon any map unrolled. One entire wall was covered with a giant map of the United States, bearing not only thousands of colored pins, but dozens of tints and combinations of tints, each of which evidently denoted the nature of mineral deposits of some sort. A huge glassed bookcase held over a hundred books on mining, mineralogy, metallurgy, and the kindred sciences. Charts of statistics of various sorts which opened out like great swinging scrap books were ranged at different open spaces on the walls. A great square table lighted by an indirect ceiling light held the center of the room. Some distance from it was a small mahogany bookcase holding in it a complete set of encyclopedias.

  To this case Carson repaired at once, and from it withdrew the leather volume which carried the letters X to Z. He turned over its pages to the regions of ZU’s — and very soon he found what he was searching for, brief and not particularly illuminating. It ran:

  ZURI: — A member of the Colubridae inhabiting India. The Zuri is also called the Tiger Snake because of its marked resemblance, due to protective mimicry, to the Indian mammal, the tiger. It is one of the very commonest serpents of that portion of the globe, and occurs in all lengths from seven to eighteen inches, seldom exceeding an inch and a half in diameter. The Zuri is poisonous, although not fatally so, and divested of its poison sacs is one of the serpents much used by American snake charmers to give color to their exhibitions. Its appearance is as striking as that of the equally well-known but differently colored Puff Adder, Coral Serpent, and Bushmaster, being a bright yellow, almost golden-orange in color, with very black but narrow rings circling its body from the tip of its tail to its head, most of which black rings are perfectly formed, with occasional broken ones here and there in defective specimens. The lower-caste East Indians ha
ve a superstition somewhat similar to the American four-leaf clover belief: namely, that to find a Zuri snake with but one broken ring among those girdling its body brings good fortune. For this reason Indian boys frequently spend hours hunting the Zuri in the belief that they will secure luck by finding the proper specimen.

  This was all the encyclopedia gave. Carson closed up the volume and returned the book to the case. He stood for a moment ruminating on what he had just read.

  “One of the commonest, if not the most common, serpents in India,” he said slowly to himself, “and as such worth, in these modern days of efficient trans-oceanic shipping when they can shoot over a crate containing a thousand if necessary, not more than twenty-five dollars at the very greatest. And the gentleman from North Dakota offers one thousand dollars for one — dead or alive! And his name is Jennings. Jake Jennings! Somewhere in Mr. Jennings’ pile of wood a gentleman of pronounced Ethiopian extraction is hiding — and yet — well, what is it after all to me, to Marcia, or even to Grandfather Desmond? Two hundred and fifty dollars is just exactly two hundred and fifty times the annual salary of this job — or half the monthly salary next year.” He shook his head. “I can’t see but that Marcia and I might just as well have Mr. Jennings’ superfluous two hundred and fifty dollars as somebody else. We need it — that’s certain!”

  After which presumably sound financial decision, he went back to the outer office, jammed his hat on his head and started out to lunch so that he could go promptly to Ramsey Gordon’s at one o’clock and secure an opinion upon a very unusual, if not strange, legal situation devolving about a man who once carried, embroidered on the jacket which he daily wore, the scarlet digits 9317 — and thence out to Marcia’s to discuss with her the elaborate plans of Mr. Jake Jennings from North Dakota for the spending of one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars.

  And at that very moment, as it happened, the actual object of his thoughts, Mr. Jennings himself, stood in the cool dim interior of a little importing shop in Chicago’s Chinatown, in the windows of which baskets of li-chee nuts and cans of preserved ginger with bright labels, not to mention strings of dried oysters and starfish pickled in jars of brine, vied in interest to white passersby with curious idols of jade and handworked tapestries of scarlet cloth carrying dragons worked out in multitudinous gold and silver threads, as well as ivory backscratchers and quaint bronze incense burners. He was, moreover, withdrawing from his finger the curious gold ring which thus far had been adorning it, while the proprietor, a sad-faced old Chinaman of extremely dignified bearing, with black skullcap from beneath which his tired old eyes, sunken with age, gazed forth through silver-rimmed spectacles with a far-away expression, inspected him impassively with hands inserted in the sleeves of his rich blouse of black silk. The very singsong intonations of his voice, as he addressed Mr. Jennings, together with his air of great venerableness, marked him as one whose spirit would always be that of the old China — the China of oxcarts and ancestors, of ancient ways and elaborate courtesies, as one who would ever hold in contempt the hectic modern world of bobbed-haired Chinese flappers and oblique-eyed sheiks dancing to the jazz music over at Wun Sang’s tea-garden on 22nd Street.

  “Ong Jin feel mos’ exalted,” he was chanting in extremely idiomatic English which, however, was fairly well enunciated with the exception of the “r’s,” the ever-present stumbling block of his race. “Mos’ exalted,” he was repeating, “to behol’ an’ convelse once mo’ with the mos’ honolable C. Buckman. And fo’ why does Honolable C. Buckman deign visit Ong Jin’s humble ‘stablishment today?”

  “Whoowie! — what a memory you’ve got, old boy,” Jennings was saying admirably. “Three years — or is it four? — since we last did business?” He thrust forth the ring he had just removed from his finger. “Well, Ong, it’s the same old thing. Here’s my Ling-Cha ring — and I want mazuma, gelt, coin, rocks, or what have you!”

  With a resigned gesture the old man reached forth and took the ring. Withdrawing from his blouse pocket a hard rubber jeweller’s magnifying eyepiece that would have been worthy of the most efficient American pawnbroking establishment, he raised his silver spectacles to his forehead, and stuck the eyepiece somehow into the depression in his head which housed his left eye. Thus optically prepared, as it were, he unlatched in the wall behind him, by a twist of one long-nailed talon, a small solid door or wicket, about ten inches square, indisputably of heavy sheet iron, painted jet black, and set in a powerful iron frame that was part of the wall itself. He swung it inward on its hinges, and clear around to the wall itself, letting instantly into the dim store a bright shaft of clear north daylight that projected itself down from a blue September sky the single square patch of which was, at this moment, untinged with even a single cloud. In this shaft of pure achromatic light he held the ring, surveying it most carefully through the eyepiece, turning it this way and that, and seemingly studying more the hand-carved hieroglyphics around the flat band, the peculiar stout prongs which held the stone, and the Buddhas themselves, than the old-fashioned square flat diamond, although he did not neglect to give this, too, a more than cursory inspection. Turning at length in great silence, he closed the tiny iron window behind him, locking it with a twist of his fingers, and the sudden destruction of the square beam of light rendered the little shop once more dim and secluded from the great world outside. Facing his customer again, he dropped his eyepiece back into the pocket of his blouse and pulled his silver spectacles back down upon his face.

  “How much, Honol’ble C. Buckman? Remembel — I make loan on Ling-Cha ling only undel the law of Eng Chew Yat Fo.” He nodded sagely to the ring as though the “law,” whatever it was, pertained to this bauble only.

  “Two hundred and fifty, Ong, same as four years ago,” said Mr. Jennings tensely. “As for your old law of Eng Chew Yat Fo — I’ll play with you on that basis. I always have in other cities anyway. So it’s hunky-dory with me. You see, Ong, I’m raising all the money I can get in the world, from every possible source, for an important deal — a really big deal, Ong, which, if it goes over — and things, I tell you, is far more in my favor for it going over than not going over — I can redeem under Eng Chew Yat Fo. Fact is, Ong, I’ve come to a Chinese pawnbroker because I can get double what I can get from a white man on that there trinket, and — ” Mr. Jennings was not averse, it seemed, to projecting a bit of blarney. “ — and in coming to you, I know I’m coming to one square-shooter!”

  The old Chinese gave a scornfully dignified smile. “You’ sobliquet of old Ong as one who p’opel missiles in a lectan-gula’ manna’ is somew’at pelplexing to Ong’s mind, but he wan’ you to rememba loan is unda law of Eng Chew Yat Fo. That is all.”

  “And I say, Ong, it’s ?. K. by me. Your law of Eng Chew Yat Fo — the Volstead Law — the Jones Five-and-Ten Law, and the Law of Averages to boot!”

  “Velly well.” The old man peered toward a queer chart on the wall, a Chinese calendar perhaps, for its white surface contained scores of columns of black hieroglyphics, interspersed between which were depictions of moons in all degrees of fullness and fractions thereof, as well as facing in different directions, with man-in-the-moon visages that were distinctly Mongolian in cast. “So be it. It is now the thi’d moon of Woo — you call him Septembel. That make him the sixth change of moon flom now.”

  “C’rrect,” agreed Mr. Jennings. “Or I guess so. Early November sometime. I’ll watch the moon though, if I have to keep my head out of the window every night.”

  The old Chinese made a world-weary gesture that was that of the pawnbroker the world over — a half shrug of his bent shoulders, his arms raised stiffly from his body halfway, palms down. Turning silently, he drew aside a black curtain which hung a number of feet to one side of the square iron window, a curtain which was on rings and which carried embroidered on its surface in bright-colored silks a number of fishes and birds sporting gaily with one another, and this simple action revealed a powerful teakwood door whose equ
ally powerful frame, made of four huge eight-by-eight-inch beams of the dark, heavy, unwarpable Eastern wood, was cemented tightly in the wall. Withdrawing from somewhere inside his crinkled neck a long intricate key, amazingly replete with notches of every size and degree, he inserted it in the keyhole of the teakwood door, and swung it open, revealing now a stout closet or cabinet lined with the same wood, on a rack in which was a velvet tray containing various rings of various queer types, some jade bracelets, and a few highly ornate ornaments of gold looking much as though they might be stomachers belonging to Chinese dowagers. Drawing open a little wooden cash-drawer set within a frame inside this impregnable depository, he counted off in a droning singsong voice of monosyllabic gutturals, twenty-five worn ten-dollar bills in good American money. With the money still hanging from one lean long-nailed talon, he took from a pigeonhole a small oblong of thin shaved wood, about two inches wide by four inches long, an oblong around whose edge a bright scarlet band had been painted, and with a tiny brush sticking in a pot of ink on the worn counter itself, he drew a simple complicated hieroglyphic upon one end of the miniature shingle. Even as its dry surface sucked up the ink, the intricate character drying almost immediately, he added on the opposite end a quarter-moon, with a small cryptic Chinese sign under it, and then, waiting the barest moment for this too to dry, broke the thin shingle squarely in two in its middle over the edge of the counter so that hieroglyphic remained on one half, and moon on the other. Placing the serrated edges of the two jagged pieces of wood together a second, as though to make sure that they matched or fitted, which they did, he handed the former half to Mr. Jennings with the same casualness with which a Chinese laundryman might pass over to a customer the half of the usual flimsy scarlet paper ticket, and dropped the half with the moon on it into a wooden cigar box within the walled cabinet. This done, he closed the teakwood cubicle and locked it carefully. Money still in hand, he took up an ancient decrepit abacus board with its glistening taut parallel wires carrying their rows of round wooden discs, smooth and shining from decades of handling, and as he spoke the discs clicked and flew from one side of the frame to the other as though they were in truth living things.