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Page 18
"In!" repeated the tall man, looking down at the card.
His servant silently retired, and following a short interval
rapped again upon the door, opened it, and standing just inside
the room announced: "Mr. Paul Harley."
The door being quietly closed behind him, Paul Harley stood
staring across the room at Nicol Brinn. At this moment the
contrast between the types was one to have fascinated a
psychologist. About Paul Harley, eagerly alert, there was
something essentially British. Nicol Brinn, without being
typical, was nevertheless distinctly a product of the United
States. Yet, despite the stoic mask worn by Mr. Brinn, whose
lack-lustre eyes were so unlike the bright gray eyes of his
visitor, there existed, if not a physical, a certain spiritual
affinity between the two; both were men of action.
Harley, after that one comprehensive glance, the photographic
glance of a trained observer, stepped forward impulsively, hand
outstretched. "Mr. Brinn," he said, "we have never met before,
and it was good of you to wait in for me. I hope my telephone
message has not interfered with your plans for the evening?"
Nicol Brinn, without change of pose, no line of the impassive
face altering, shot out a large, muscular hand, seized that of
Paul Harley in a tremendous grip, and almost instantly put his
hand behind his back again. "Had no plans," he replied, in a
high, monotonous voice; "I was bored stiff. Take the armchair."
Paul Harley sat down, but in the restless manner of one who has
urgent business in hand and who is impatient of delay. Mr. Brinn
stooped to a coffee table which stood upon the rug before the
large open fireplace. "I am going to offer you a cocktail," he
said.
"I shall accept your offer," returned Harley, smiling. "The 'N.
B. cocktail' has a reputation which extends throughout the clubs
of the world."
Nicol Brinn, exhibiting the swift adroitness of that human dodo,
the New York bartender, mixed the drinks. Paul Harley watched
him, meanwhile drumming his fingers restlessly upon the chair
arm.
"Here's success," he said, "to my mission."
It was an odd toast, but Mr. Brinn merely nodded and drank in
silence. Paul Harley set his glass down and glanced about the
singular apartment of which he had often heard and which no man
could ever tire of examining.
In this room the poles met, and the most remote civilizations of
the world rubbed shoulders with modernity. Here, encased, were a
family of snow-white ermine from Alaska and a pair of black
Manchurian leopards. A flying lemur from the Pelews contemplated
swooping upon the head of a huge tigress which glared with glassy
eyes across the place at the snarling muzzle of a polar bear.
Mycenaean vases and gold death masks stood upon the same shelf as
Venetian goblets, and the mummy of an Egyptian priestess of the
thirteenth dynasty occupied a sarcophagus upon the top of which
rested a basrelief found in one of the shrines of the Syrian fish
goddess Derceto, at Ascalon.
Arrowheads of the Stone Age and medieval rapiers were ranged
alongside some of the latest examples of the gunsmith's art.
There were elephants' tusks and Mexican skulls; a stone jar of
water from the well of Zem-Zem, and an ivory crucifix which had
belonged to Torquemada. A mat of human hair from Borneo overlay a
historical and unique rug woven in Ispahan and entirely composed
of fragments of Holy Carpets from the Kaaba at Mecca.
"I take it," said Mr. Brinn, suddenly, "that you are up against a
stiff proposition."
Paul Harley, accepting a cigarette from an ebony box (once the
property of Henry VIII) which the speaker had pushed across the
coffee table in his direction, stared up curiously into the
sallow, aquiline face. "You are right. But how did you know?"
"You look that way. Also--you were followed. Somebody knows
you've come here."
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