I'll Grind Their Bones

By Theodore Roscoe

American news reporter John Keats interviews Count Vasil Garganoff, mysterious manufacturing mogul of Hertha Gun Works in Transylvania. When Teutony and Esperench diplomats are found dead, the world suddenly teeters on the brink of war!

"I’ll Grind Their Bones" is a pulp-ish detective story, where the dogged protagonist must investigate the death of two men that escalates into impossible shootings and other mysterious occurrences. The title, taken from a rhyme most typically associated with Jack and the Beanstalk, refers to the casual death of men in violent ways. But Roscoe also escalates this cause up from a simple quest of righteous vengeance to play it instead to very different ends in the largest theater of all: WAR.

"I’ll Grind Their Bones" plays out like an international nightmare showing the insanity and futility of throwing so many innocent lives away in the cause of conflict.

The three countries which become the canvas for this carnage — the aggressor Teutony, the conspirator Esperance, and the unknown threat of Helvania — have clear parallels in real life, and it is telling that Roscoe takes a moment to remove Italy from proceedings so as to streamline this already complex international thrust-and-parry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bold Venture Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370717835

Theodore Roscoe

Theodore Roscoe (1906–1992) wrote for pulp fiction magazines such as Argosy, Wings, Flying Stories, Far East Adventure Stories, Fight Stories, Action Stories and Adventure, while travelling the world. Following World War II he was commissioned by the United States Naval Institute to write detailed histories about the United States Submarine Operations in World War II (1949), and United States Destroyer Operations in World War II, 1953). The submarine and destroyer works were rewritten for public consumption entitled Pig Boats and Tin Cans. Other books on the history of the US Navy include This Is Your Navy, 1950, and The Trent Affair, November, 1861. Roscoe became a Scribner’s author under Burroughs Mitchell with novels To Live and Die in Dixie! and Only in New England. The prolific writer was among the first to see declassified documents connected to the Lincoln assassination, resulting in his work The Web of Conspiracy, which became the basis for a television docudrama.

Book preview

I’ll Grind Their Bones

by Theodore Roscoe

Introductions by Jim Noy

and Audrey Parente

Published by Bold Venture Press

boldventurepress.com

Cover design: Rich Harvey

This book is available in print at most online retailers.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. All persons, places and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: "The Post War Dream: Taking Aim at International Politics" by Jim Noy

Introduction: "Cheers for War Declared" by Audrey Parente

I’ll Grind Their Bones

The Characters

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

About the Author, Thedore Roscoe

About the Editors, Jim Noy and Audrey Parente

Connect with Bold Venture Press

The Post War Dream

Taking Aim at International Politics

Introduction by Jim Noy

If, following the pell-mell insanity of Murder on the Way! (1935) — the first of Theodore Roscoe’s two novels reissued by Bold Venture Press — I’ll Grind Their Bones sounds rather like the kind of luridly violent macho fantasy that the pulp magazine of the 1920s and 30s could well be expected of producing … well, hold fire a moment.

It’s true that what you have here is another pulp-ish detective story, where the dogged protagonist must investigate the death of two men that escalates into impossible shootings and other mysterious occurrences. And it’s true that the title, taken from a bastardization of the rhyme most typically associated with Jack and the Beanstalk, refers to the casual death of men in violent ways. But Roscoe also escalates this cause up from a simple quest of righteous vengeance to play it instead to very different ends in the largest theatre of all: WAR. While the novel Murder on the Way! focused on a small cast confined to a limited area, visiting death and deception upon that most deserving confederacy of dissidents, I’ll Grind Their Bones (1936) plays out more like an international nightmare showing the insanity and futility of throwing so many innocent lives away in the cause of conflict.

The three countries Roscoe uses as the canvas for this carnage — the aggressor Teutony, the conspirator Esperance, and the unknown threat of Helvania — have clear parallels in real life, and it is telling that Roscoe takes a moment to remove Italy from proceedings so as to streamline this already complex international thrust-and-parry: there is insanity enough on show, without allowing international treaties and codicils to add more lambs to the slaughter. It would be easy, as we now know from bitter experience, for what unfolds here to be much, much worse.

Like Murder on the Way!, the story I’ll Grind Their Bones originally saw life as a serial — published in the Argosy magazine, the seven parts appearing between 27th April and 8th June 1935 under the title War Declared — and was then reworked, retitled, and published as a novel in its own right, copyrighted to Theodore Roscoe.

This was a period in history where Germany, under the tutelage of Adolf Hitler, had already established itself as the root of much dissent in Europe: March of 1933 had seen the German Reichstag, through implementation of the Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich (also known as the Enabling Act), enshrine Hitler as a legal dictator, and the ensuing eight months would see the boycotting of Jewish businesses, the burning of books seen to promote anti-German ideas branded Jewish intellectualism by Joseph Goebells, the abolition of all other political parties in the country, and Germany resigning her seat at the League of Nations under international pressure following these acts and more.

June of 1934 brought the removal of Hitler’s political opponents in the infamous Night of the Long Knives, and in August he was established as German Führer and stamping his foot hard atop a powder keg that was only a few short years from exploding. When put in this context, Roscoe’s story of the easy escalation of violence between countries desperate to see conspiracy and opposition at every turn takes on a horrible prescience.

It was into no somnambulant, care-free world that Roscoe hurled this trigger warning, but rather a hyper-aware political system still reeling from the effects of the sickeningly-christened ‘Great War’ of 1914-18 — witness how many times those dates are referred to by characters throughout the story — and all too aware of the parallels Roscoe would have been drawing (and it’s not like he tries too hard to hide them, either).

What is undeniable in reading the extended descriptions of war, when they come, is Roscoe’s sheer fury — not one to waste your time with preaching, instead he intersperses his sweeping descriptions with moments of pure personal horror to draw a picture unvarnished by agenda-pushing rhetoric which is simply a visceral, bracing, appalled representation of the damage done.

If satire is a way to allow you to see something without having to look at it, Roscoe has created here a borderline anti-satirical style bolstered by the absurdity of contrasts: of generals sitting in sound-proofed cars, casually plotting and celebrating victories while their armies are slaughtered below, and a sense of unreality as we are led helter-skelter through the streets in search of a solution that is both no part of, and integral to, the violence surrounding it.

I will preserve for you the later stages of the book, where, following the admission of the various parties involved that war really isn’t the answer to anything, Roscoe provides his own answer which is also no answer at all. Our protagonist John Keats is told at the key revelation I am depending on you, my American friend, to report what you see here today to every newspaper in the world, and it’s difficult not to see this as Roscoe’s response to the carnage he has stirred to life all too believably.

And then, of course, we must not forget the mysteries placed amidst the butchery — how can a man be shot from within a room where no-one else is present? How can an assailant simply vanish into darkness? In the middle of such waste stirred into action through the credible human emotions on show, we are given a wealth of inexplicable crimes and events that simply must feed into the wider scheme and yet appear to have no place there, and no-one to perpetrate them in the first instance anyway.

And then, of course, these mysteries are unraveled, and a sense of sanity is allowed to bloom at the heart of the wholesale lunacy that has persevered for so long throughout the narrative.

The lunacy is kept at bay on the page, but what unfolded in reality just three short years later shows how close to the truth Roscoe came here. It is to be hoped that this at-times sobering reflection on events yet to occur gives people some pause before we ever walk such a path again.

Jim Noy,

May 2017

Cheers for War Declared

Additional notes about the author

Introduction by Audrey Parente

Theodore Roscoe was humble, self-effacing, and unpretentious, with a droll sense of humor. He had a keen knowledge of literature, art, and the state of world affairs from extensive travels. As his authorized biographer, I tried to make a case about his writing ability being high-literature buried in the pulps.

Roscoe gave me a cartoon while I was working on his biography for Starmont House. The doodle shows Roscoe put to the rack, in the form of "The Argosy" press. The drawing, entitled The Crucifixion, was done in 1938 by his friend, architect Claude Bragdon, on Hotel Shelton stationary while the two sat together at the hotel bar.

The cartoon, a sort of private joke between the two, was apparently Bragdon’s depiction of Roscoe’s side of the conversation — complaints about his sometime mistreatment by editors.

Roscoe related to Bragdon how they took literary license in their columns about how he gathered material for his stories and about his travels and his life. Meanwhile, the editors were pressuring him for stories because fans were clamoring for his work.

Roscoe said he thought my views of his work were panegyric, pointing to rejection slips he’d received speaking to the contrary. I took a bashing from the critics for my position.

The truth is: I got to know Roscoe really well during more than two years working closely with him and reading his work to create Pulpmaster! The Theodore Roscoe Story.

Despite his self-deprecation, I believe I was not wrong, and this particular story, which first ran as War Declared, a seven-part serial in Argosy from April 27 to June 8, 1935, is one I think proves my theory about the quality of his writing.

Anyone with knowledge of world history leading to World War II will not need a road map to realize Roscoe saw writing on the wall way ahead of his time. His cast of characters is self-evident. And his perspective of the world’s state of affairs, although fiction, was that of a world-class reporter — precocious — certainly not fake news.

During one afternoon on Roscoe’s patio, speaking about various of his writings, with his wife Rosamond lounging nearby, the author told me how he recalled strolling by a New York shop window filled with Foreign Legion memorabilia and a dozen copies of his Argosy cover for The Death Watch.

At Rusty Hevelin’s annual Pulpcon, an Ohio-based pulp fiction collector’s convention, in 1986, guest of honor Roscoe recalled being startled by the words War Declared on a newspaper advertisement on a New York subway train … until he realized he was looking at his own Argosy cover advertisement. An ad for the War Declared issue, he said, appeared in the The New York Sun and flyers were tacked to newsstands in advance of publication.

There was no rejection slip. Instead Fred Clayton, Argosy editor who sent a telegram of acceptance for the manuscript, wrote:

CHEERS FOR WAR DECLARED WHICH EASILY TOPS ANY OF YOUR YARNS…STOP…PUT CHECK THROUGH THIS WEEK…STOP…WIRE REPLY (Fred Clayton, Western Union Telegram to Theodore Roscoe, 4:10 p.m., 21 Jan. 1935.)

Roscoe recast the tale and copyrighted the story in his own name as I’ll Grind Their Bones. The story ran as a Dodge Blue Streak mystery in 1936 and a second time in 1937 published by Harrap.

I like that story, Roscoe told me.

I do also, and I think astute readers will too. When you come to the finale, I hope you will enjoy knowing Roscoe as I do.

Audrey Parente,

June 8, 2017

I’ll Grind Their Bones

Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum

I Smell The Blood Of A War To Come

Legions Alive Will Soon Be Dead

I’ll Grind Their Bones To Make My Bread

Mother Goose, 1936

Song of the Armament Maker

The Characters

John H. W. Keats, correspondent at large for the Universe News Agency. A realist.

Count Vasil Garganoff, Rumanian munitions magnate. A recluse.

Crazy Hooper, Longinus Cassius with a camera. An epicure.

Alexandra Frantsovna, Soviet representative of Tass. A woman.

Anton Stehli, of the Swiss Syndicate. A pacifist.

Paul Emmerich, of the Illustrierte Tageblatt. A conservative.

Raoul Dubail, of the Service Etoile. A cynic.

Philip Shepler, of the London Observer. An innocent bystander.

Kurt Nielsen, of the Scandinavian Press. A hedonist.

Baron Sigismund Von Speer, Teutony’s Iron Premier. A dead man.

Victor Yvon Cesaire Gatreau, Foreign Minister of Esperance. Another dead man.

General Gottlieb Von Neumann, of the Teuton High Command. A militarist.

Major William Cranford Aspirin, owner of the Universe News. A fat man.

Felix Von Falkenberg, Field Marshal of the Teuton Armies. A provocation.

Peter III, King of Helvania and the Helvanians. A king.

August Schnitzler, Reichsmeister of Teutony. A mighty fortress is our God.

The Setting: Europe.

The Time: Tomorrow.

The characters in this book are fictional

1

TWILIGHT shadowed over Teutony, and omens were afoot in the dusk. Suspense. The air over Europe was charged with it, as it had been charged throughout that sullen July afternoon with electric particles gathering to flash. All day John Keats had suffered that tension in the back of his mind, that here it comes feeling he’d experienced as a boy squirming on the curbstone, waiting for the circus parade. That sensation you had in a theatre when the signal finally buzzed in the orchestra pit, the house lights dimmed, the audience settled forward in hush, the curtain started up. First-string newspaper men have a nose for such things. That is why they are first-string newspaper men; and that was why John Keats, whose nose was worn a bit hard and thin at the bridge and a shade bent, as if it perhaps scorned a meeting with that which direct eyes observed just ahead, was there in the Teutonic capital.

The assignment was routine stuff, but the mood was something he couldn’t put his finger on. Like the feeling he’d had that morning in Transylvania when he had entered that tower room and the tall shadowlike man turned slowly from the fireplace to greet him. Queer, that interview. Which had opened in deaf silence and closed with a shot …

THERE were only the four of them in the room — the obsidian Negro whose eyes were like the dog’s; the Great Dane; the figure that was a shadow before the fire; and John Keats, correspondent, Universe News.

Always there had been something morbid inspired in Keats by the presence of a huge dog, and the room, itself, was a presentiment. A vault-dim chamber, long and lofted. Below its muffled Gothic windows one felt a sombre drapery of purple walls, green bartizans overlooking a stale moat and shelves of forested mountain. Garganoff Keep.

Flying over this coign of Transylvania in the great Intercontinental Airliner, Keats had looked down on the castle several times before, and some of its character had been communicated even at that perspective. A frown congealed to stone atop a cliff; cloaked towers with heads together in conspiracy.

Once through the lower reception hall with its populace of bowing lackies and velveteen-clad attendants, once beckoned past the Russian majordomo who sported a Bond Street morning coat on his Cossack’s figure and a funguslike wen on the base of his head, Keats had found himself in the sunless atmosphere of a catacomb. Ascending a maze of corridors, staircases, galleries, he had trailed the slipper-hushed heels of the blackamoor while the escorting mastiff sniffed his trouser-cuffs, to the room in one of those conspiring tower-heads where the night-robed occupant waited before the fireplace, back to the door.

Count Garganoff, the Negro lipped at Keats.

Then the tall dark figure wheeled around so slowly from the hearth, as if his balance were difficult from wine and any moment he might fall, that John Keats eyed him in a sort of fascinated expectancy which competed with an urge to look back over his shoulder. The room had a way of creeping up behind him as he advanced to take a chair.

Candles glimmering in sconces up the streaky walls were pallorous vigil lights playing court to a skeletal chandelier that swooped down from the cloudy ceiling, its bones burning high and hazy in the upper gloom like an astral materialization levitated in the dusk. The fireplace flickered chilly as a grate in a mortuary chapel; a flat-topped ebony desk with an invalid’s wheelchair behind it was like a coffin awaiting its inheritor; and high-backed chairs ranged along the wall were mourners carved in black wood.

Seated facing the desk, Keats fidgeted; had to curb uneasy fingers on his hatbrim. Damn it, he was fiddling like cub reporter at an inquest. Suppose this Balkan recluse was the richest miser in creation, the so-styled Mystery Man of Europe? He had interviewed eccentrics before, all the way from Mussolini to George Bernard Shaw. He grinned without enthusiasm at the dog watching him with its sorrowful Negro eyes and the Negro watching him with sorrowful dog eyes, and began to remember stories he’d heard.

In London — See Garganoff? Not a chance. Keeps himself shut up in that moldering old castle like a sick pearl in a clam.

In Rome — But scarcely a handful have ever seen the great munitions king face to face.

In Belgrade — It is said it was his mother, the Countess Hertha, who kept him locked up in seclusion as a child and gave him this hermit complex. She it was who built the tremendous cannon factories and bequeathed him the business.

In Bucharest — They say he once refused a royal command to appear before Queen Marie. Only twice in his life has he left the Keep.

In the village below the mountain, where one of the many Hertha Gun Works factories belched smoke by day and fire by night — "I wouldn’t go up to his castle, sir, for a million lei!" That was Popescu, the plump inn-keeper, crossing himself nervously and wagging dire ominations. "The Crusaders, sir, six hundred years ago, they wouldn’t stop at the place. As for him up there — all my life in this village I never set eye on Vasil Garganoff. They say he lives alone in the north tower with a Negro man-servant, a Russian, and a monstrous great dog. That he never goes out save at night. That he’s sick. Sick! You know what the village thinks, sir?"

John Keats had listened to the village’s thoughts. Popescu confided them in gaudy whisper. "We think it strange, we do. The old Countess Hertha never allowing visitors to see the boy, years ago. The way now he never goes out but in the dead of night, and then only to walk alone in the walled gardens behind the Keep. I’m not saying I believe it, sir, but these mountains — did you ever hear of the loup-garou, the werewolf, sir? And there’s a story that the black man, the Russian, and the dog are sorcerers. And him! But it’s got to be nights of no moon and a fair-haired child they’ve caught — he can drink the blood of a little boy and regain his youth, yes sir. Change himself into a girl, maybe, or a little child. Loup-garou — "

Well, that was a new name for an armament manufacturer. Lycanthrope! Keats had chuckled. This forgotten corner of Rumania, these Transylvanian mountains had always been the home of Dracula stories. Old wives’ tales filtering darkly down the forest from the feudal overlord’s demesne; and Rumanian peasants not the least superstitious of serfs. Werewolves and vampires —

Popescu’s words could not help echoing to mind as the tall dark figure faced about from the onyx fireplace and tottered stiffly to the wheelchair behind the coffinish desk. Keats fancied he could hear a creaking of joints under the black cloak that, shroudlike enveloped the old Croesus from collar to floor, the hem sweeping the carpet like the robe of a bishop. The loose folds of the mantle, falling in black columns, gave the Count’s head perched aloft an undersized appearance, making him seem taller than he was. His shadow angled on the wall was that of an elongated wine bottle stoppered by a small cork. Concealed beneath the cloak, the old man’s arms appeared to be folded; the Negro had to help him down. Lowered into the wheelchair, he collapsed full length, clumsily, as if his knees had given out. Locomotor ataxia? Keats wondered. A solicitous rug was arranged across the footboard of the wheelchair, which was swerved to face the desk. There was some difficulty with the legs under the black cape. A jerk of the undersized head banished the Negro into obscurity behind the chair.

Then, You are the American, John Keats, representing the Universe News Agency?

The voice, anticipated as a purple rumbling, surprised by issuing bloodlessly thin from the throat, as if the speaker suffered severe tonsillitis. Keats had to clear his own throat in sympathy, making formal acknowledgment. At your service, Count Garganoff.

The man said, Good, without lifting a fixed gaze from the ebony mirror of the desk-top. He might have been consulting some ouija apparent in the polish, awaiting a sign. Keats wondered if his own face was reflected in the wooden plane and the old man was studying his expression; his features stiffened in annoyance. Why the air of séance? After what seemed a long interval, Count Garganoff raised his head to fix his eyes on Keats; the room deepened in hush; the only sound was the ivory clicking of the dog’s breathless tongue.

John Keats told himself that if this was the face you must wear after harvesting a billion dollars and shutting yourself up with it in a castle, he’d prefer his two hundred a week.

Never had he confronted a visage so extraordinary. Despite Popescu, Bucharest, Rome, and London, he had not been prepared for a countenance a thousand years old and at the same time (he knew he was imagining this) inexplicably young. An animated death mask crowned by wisps of childishly silken blond hair above a domish forehead devoid of any wrinkle. The texture of the skin was porcelain; the chin, smoothly rounded, wore a dab of straw-colored goatee unconvincing as the toy beard on a doll. Under colorless eyelashes the eyes were piercing, blue-black beads; an English monocle glued to the left eye mirrored a candle-flame in its glass, the yellow flicker like an astronomical body caught in the lens of an astrologer. Without a trace of emaciation, the face irradiated a shocking pallor of complete senescence, and in that deathly white mask only the eyes and mouth were vital, the lips bowed and carmine, glossy as exposed veins, in effect lurid as make-up on a dying girl.

Caught staring, Keats forced his startled gaze to focus on the decoration hooked at the creature’s collar. Ribbon of blue supporting a golden badge, double-headed eagle superimposed on a crucifix. Order of St. Andrew of Russia. That face and that bauble!

You are admiring my decoration, Garganoff observed, his voice reminding Keats of the reedy husking of a polite marionette. Sent me by Czar Nicholas many years ago. However, you did not call here to talk of decorations. My secretary, Zmeinogorsk, informs me you have made repeated efforts to arrange an interview. Why did you wish to see me?

Keats began in a professional tone, The Universe News, your Excellency, has been publishing interviews with all the important men of Europe. We —

I know all that, my dear sir. Please come to your point.

As I informed your secretary, Keats went on blandly, suppressing asperity at the other’s interruption, I’m on my way to report the conference which is taking place between Baron von Speer and Victor Gatreau at the Hotel Metropole in the Teutonic capital tonight.

You wish, then, to know if I will attend?

The Press was given to understand that Monsieur Gatreau had dispatched you an invitation. We feel that this unusual parley, coming at a time when Europe is dangerously —

I, the red lips snapped, "am not going. You may inform your papers that Count Garganoff is wholly unacquainted with the dignitaries involved or the purpose of their proposed camarilla. Why the Esperench minister should invite me to dine with him and the Teuton Premier in the Teutonic capital, I do not know. As I am ill — as you see, quite incapacitated with rheumatism — a trip to Teutony would just now be impossible. You may also state that I would prefer these blundering statesmen to omit me from their proceedings in the future. Now that you have had your answer, my dear sir, will you permit me to ask you a few questions?"

The Dane growled a faint drum-roll out of its throat, and Keats controlled an impulse to pull his shoes under his chair. Over a period of many years, the astonishing voice was speaking on, I have granted but four interviews. Do you know why I have admitted you to this one?

Keats’s features were unable to conceal surprise. Universe News will appreciate your confidence, Count Garganoff.

"Zut! I am not talking now for publication. I admitted you, Monsieur Keats, because I wished to talk with you. The red lips parodied an ingratiating smile. I wished to speak with you, my dear sir, because some of your recently syndicated articles in the European papers have commanded my respect and attention. Particularly your diligent work in disclosing various recent arms scandals, your exposure of interlocking directorates between numerous European and American munitions firms. You have gone a long way to prove that arms-makers have fostered, even started, wars in an effort to create markets for their products."

Asmodeus was purring at him now. Keats said warily, I’m merely a reporter, Count Garganoff, trying to do my job.

The aged doll-head nodded agreeably. And a very shrewd job it is, my dear young sir. I thoroughly enjoyed your articles on the Briey scandal, the collapse of the Naval Limitations conference, your diatribe against the many munitions combines which control newspapers and are therefore scarcely notable for their editorials advocating peace. I have been most interested, Garganoff pursued, in your literary attacks on the Hertha Gun Works.

The dog drum-rolled in its throat. Keats’s lips stiffened.

You consider them attacks, your Excellency?

I would scarcely have called them encomiums. I refer to the articles written by you that hinted that my agents were stirring up border scares to stimulate sales. In particular, that assassination last month in Helvania.

I made no accusations, Keats reminded. I only reported the truth. That the assassins were former employees of your Transylvanian torpedo plant.

The candle blinked in the monocle. You are, of course, considered an authority on Helvanian state affairs.

Keats shook his head. I haven’t covered Helvania for a number of years, Count Garganoff.

"But you are well aware that my Hertha Gun Works has not been supplying Helvania with munitions. I do not like cynical inferences that my company tries to foment warlike emotions. The reputation of the Hertha Works is, in a way, my reputation. I like to say that my business is founded on honor. However, — the speaker paused to make an ironic mouth — I greatly admire your insight in ferreting out the faults of my competitors. It has caused me to respect so trenchant and facile a pen."

The moon in the eyeglass was eclipsed by another blink. Screwing his body in the wheelchair, Garganoff jerked his chin imperiously at his ebon servitor. The Nubian’s hand flicked in and out of his jacket, producing a dove-colored envelope; flipped the envelope on the desk where it skated across the polish and came to rest an inch from the edge, exactly in front of Keats.

John Keats could feel his mouth going dry. A sleepy heaviness lay on his eyelids. Casually he picked up the envelope. His pupils dwindled.

Garganoff inclined back in his chair, face slanted, eyelids three-quarters closed like a tilted doll’s. From one who admires your literary talent, he said huskily.

The envelope was bulky. Unsealed. Keats pried back the flap with a thumb, grinned down at the contents. A crisp green slab belted with a fat rubber band. American currency. He fanned the edges with a finger, counting. Thousand-dollar bills. Twenty of them.

He said dryly, I see, and shied the envelope back on the desk, not forgetting to tuck in the contents.

Garganoff nodded, sniffed amusedly, made another head-bob at the black individual behind his chair. Another envelope skidded over the desk to Keats. He waited a minute before touching it, then picked it up gingerly, awarding it a harder grin.

Thirty-thousand more, Garganoff declared in his bad-cold voice. I am more than an admirer, Monsieur Keats. I am a patron. Surely fifty thousand dollars will compensate you for a long vacation — let us say a two-year leave of absence — from your strenuous literary activities.

Keats snapped his fingers and shot the envelope in a carom against its smaller twin. His lips formed pleasantly, but his voice had roughened. Thank you, Count. More than generous. And of course the minute I stepped outdoors with that money on me, a Rumanian detective would arrest me, evidence and all, for blackmailing you.

Garganoff hitched his long body in the wheelchair, his underlip outthrust in a plaintive pout. Come now. For an American you reveal a sensibility for European intrigue far beyond the ordinary. You are blunt, my dear young friend. And then you hardly do justice to the honor of an old and respected house.

Once more he twisted his head at his Nubian golem; and obedient to this signal