CHAPTER XXIX.

ADOLPH ZARA

The party that presently invaded us proved to consist of Nanette and a brunette girl friend whom I had not seen before. They were escorted by a young medical officer on leave from Mesopotamia--a very charming type of Scotsman--and Milton, one of Nanette’s Madeira conquests, whom, you may recall, I had met again recently under rather odd circumstances. I thought that this evening was probably his reward for the weary job of scouting that he had performed on that occasion.

He was not a happy man. The fact was beginning to dawn upon him that at the Savoy, the Hippodrome, and wherever else they had gone, he had been wasting his fragrance on the desert air. I pictured him driving to my apartment as one consciously heading for his doom.

The poor fellow was rather pathetically young, and, regarding every acquaintance of Nanette’s as a serious rival, he had awakened to the fact that he had three score or so of deadly enemies in London. Presently:

“Whisky and soda?” said I; “or have you reached the Bass stage?”

“Neither, thanks,” he returned, and glared around my modest bachelor apartment as one who finds himself in the chamber of Bluebeard.

Nanette had sped to O’Shea like an arrow to its target. As I turned aside from the peevish Milton, “I hadn’t dared to hope I should see you again to-night,” I heard her say.

The other man and the pretty brunette were jointly occupying my most comfortable armchair, therefore, conquering a perfectly stupid pique which Milton had inspired:

“Well,” said I, holding out my cigarette case, “we seem to have no alternative but to--look on, Milton.”

He rejected the olive-branch, and, rudely ignoring my proffered case, crossed to the settee where Nanette and O’Shea sat side by side.

“I say, Nanette,” he exclaimed, “what about going on to Chelsea?”

Nanette barely glanced up as she replied:

“No, I don’t want to dance any more to-night, Jim.”

“Why not dance here?” cried her friend, pointing in the direction of the piano. “Do you play, Mr. Decies?”

“Not dance music,” I confessed gladly.

“But Jim does,” she went on. “Go on, Jim! Just one.”

“Jim” crossed to the piano, offering an excellent imitation of an ox approaching Chicago. He crashed into a piece of syncopation that put years on the instrument. I had never heard the item before and trust that I shall never hear it again. I saw O’Shea smilingly shake his head; then Nanette ran across to me, and off we went around the furniture, I wondering which would burst first, a wire in my reeling piano or a blood-vessel in the empurpled skull of the player.

Nanette danced because she was too happy to keep still, even with O’Shea beside her. I danced because I had no choice in the matter. It was an odd business, pointedly illustrating the part that Terpsichore plays in this modern civilization of ours.

Nanette was dancing with me, but she wanted to dance with O’Shea. The other pair didn’t want to dance at all. They just wanted to be alone together. And Milton didn’t want to be the band. In fact, the whole thing was a sort of neutral territory, or sanctuary, in which the various protagonists found temporary refuge.

I don’t know what momentous decision Nanette’s girl friend was shirking, but when Milton threatened to weaken:

“Go on, Jim! Please go on!” she cried, avoiding the ardent gaze of her partner.

Milton, the most ferociously reluctant musician I have ever seen at work, made a renewed assault upon the keyboard. He was watching Nanette, who rarely took her eyes off O’Shea; and a vein rose unpleasantly upon his forehead. He perpetrated some discords that set my teeth on edge.

How long this might have continued I hesitate to guess. Milton’s gorge was rising tropically. I doubt that his destruction of my piano would have ceased while life remained in the instrument, but an interruption came.

Nanette and I had navigated an awkward channel behind the armchair and were beating up toward the settee and O’Shea. The man from Mesopotamia had ingeniously steered his partner into a little book-lined recess at the farther end of the room. I had my back to the open window and Nanette was facing it. Suddenly she grew rigid.

Her face became transfigured with an expression of horror that I can never forget. She pulled up dead--staring, staring past me, into the darkness of the street beyond.

“What is it, Nanette?” I began, when the music ceased with a crash and I saw Milton bound to his feet.

Unconsciously, I had gripped Nanette hard. But, in the next instant, she wrenched herself free from my grasp, turned, and with a queer sort of smothered cry threw herself upon O’Shea!

I twisted about.

Not two feet behind me an arm protruded into the room! The hand grasped a strange-looking pistol--for at that time I had never seen a Maxim Silencer. I heard a muffled thud. Something came whizzing through the air in my direction. (I learned later, when clarity came, that it was a valuable Ming vase that had stood upon the piano.)

“Hold him, Decies!” yelled Milton.

It was Milton who had hurled this costly projectile at the dimly seen arm in the window. The vase went crashing out into the street. I heard a second thud. Milton fell forward across the instrument--and then slid down on to the carpet. The hand clutching the pistol had vanished.

A sort of vague red mist was dancing before my eyes. Came a rush of footsteps. Nanette was slipping from O’Shea’s arms. His face as he looked down into hers was a mask of tragedy. I heard her utter a little moan and I saw a streak of blood upon one white shoulder.

Then followed chaos.

A very weak voice, which vaguely I recognized as that of Milton, said:

“Don’t worry about me, Doc. Look after Nanette.”

I saw O’Shea stoop and lift Nanette. I saw her pale face. When, cutting through the tumult like a ray from a beacon:

“The window, Decies! Watch which way he goes!”

Automatically, I obeyed O’Shea. I strained out, looking to right and to left of the ladder. It was boarded over, but I realized that a desperate man, given sufficient agility, could have climbed the rungs from underneath, as evidently the assassin had done.

At first, the street seemed to be empty from end to end; then I saw the figure of a man emerge from shadow into a patch of light cast by a street lamp--one who walked swiftly in the direction of Berkeley Square. I withdrew my head and stared, only half believing, about the room.

Milton, looking deathly, lay propped up against the piano. He met my glance, and:

“Seen him?” he demanded.

I turned, as the military surgeon who had been bending over Nanette looked up at her friend, who stood beside him.

“Know anything about nursing?” he jerked.

The girl was very pale, but:

“Yes,” she answered bravely, meeting his eyes, “a little. Tell me what to do, and I will do it.”

He nodded, smiling, whereat I was reassured, and then:

“Have you a manservant in the house, Mr. Decies?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Dig him out. I can manage. You fellows are in the way. Get after the swine who did this.”

But O’Shea had already started for the door. His expression was one I had rather not have seen. There is a savage hidden in every Celt, if one digs deep through.

The other members of the group by this time were safely housed in cells. I thought that if we were destined to overtake Adolf Zara, he was likely to enjoy the distinction of spending the night in a morgue.