falsification of the gendarme! And there was a boy--a red and yellow
boy--who said he had seen thy camel's head above the roofs! I am thy
friend!"
He twisted his writhing snakelike fingers together. Hassoun regarded him
coldly.
"Thou knowest the fate of informers and provocateurs--of spies--thou
infamous Turk!" he answered through his teeth.
"A Turk! A Turk!" shrieked Sardi Babu frantically, beating the breast of
his blue blouse. "Thou callest me a Turk! Me, the godson of Sarkis Babu
and of Elias Stephan--whose fathers and grandfathers were Christians
when thy family were worshipers of Mohammed. Blasphemy! Me, the godson
of a bishop!"
"I also am godson of a bishop!" sneered Kasheed. "A properly anointed
bishop! Without Tartar blood."
Sardi Babu grew purple.
"Ptha! I would spit upon the beard of such a bishop!" he shrieked,
beside himself.
Hassoun slightly raised his eyebrows.
"Spit, then, infamous one--while thou art able!"
"Here, here!" growled Burke in disgust. "Keep 'em still, can't you?
Now, what's all this about a camel?"
* * * * *
"That's the very scuttle, sir," asseverated Scraggs to the firm, as Tutt
& Tutt, including Miss Wiggin, gazed down curiously out of their office
windows at the penthouse upon the Washington Street roof which had been
Willie's target of the day before. "I don't say," he continued by way of
explanation, "that the camel stuck his head out because Willie hit the
roof with the bottle--it was probably just a circumstance--but it looked
that way. 'Bing!' went the ink bottle on the scuttle; and
then--pop!--out came the camel like a jack-in-the-box."
"What became of the camel?" inquired Miss Wiggin, cherishing a faint
hope that--pop!--it might suddenly appear again in the same way.
"The police took it away last night--lowered it out of the window with a
block and tackle," answered the scrivener. "A sort of breeches buoy."
"I've heard of camel's-hair shawls but not of camel's-hair breeches!"
murmured Tutt. "I suppose if a camel wore pants--well, my imagination
refuses to contemplate the spectacle! Where's Willie?"
"He hasn't been in at all this morning!" said Miss Wiggin. "I'll
warrant--"
"What?" demanded Mr. Tutt suspiciously.
"--he's somewhere with that camel," she concluded.
* * * * *
Now, Miss Minerva, as her name connoted, was a wise woman; and she had
reached an unerring conclusion by two different and devious routes, to
wit, intuition and logic, the same being the high road and low road of
reason--high or low in either case as you may prefer. Thus logic:
Camel--small boy. Intuition: Small boy--camel. But there was here an
additional element--a direct personal relationship between this
particular small boy and this particular camel, rising out of the
incident of the ink bottle. She realized that that camel must have
acquired for William a peculiar quality--almost that of a possession--in
view of the fact that he had put his mark upon it. She knew that Willie
could no more stay away from the environs of that camel than said camel
could remain in that attic. Indeed we might go on at some length
expounding further this profound law of human nature that where there
are camels there will be small boys; that, as it were, under such
circumstances Nature abhors an infantile vacuum.
"If I know him, he is!" agreed Mr. Tutt, referring to William's probable
proximity to Eset el Gazzar.
"Speaking of camels," said Tutt as he lit a cigarette, "makes me think
of brass beds."
"Yes," nodded his partner. "Of course it would, naturally. What on earth
do you mean?"
"I mean this," began Tutt, clearing his throat as if he were addressing
twelve good and true men--"a camel is obviously an unusual--not to say
peculiar--animal to be roosting over there in that attic. It is an
exotic--if I may use that term. It is as exotic as a brass bed from
Connecticut would be, or is, in Damascus or Lebanon. Now, therefore, a
camel will as assuredly give cause for trouble in New York as a brass
bed in Bagdad!"
"The right thing often makes trouble if put in the wrong place,"
pondered Mr. Tutt.
"Or the wrong thing in the right place!" assented Tutt. "Now all these
unassimilated foreigners--"
"What have they got to do with brass beds in Lebanon?" challenged Miss
Wiggin.
"Why," continued Tutt, "I am credibly informed that the American brass
bed--particularly the double bed--owing to its importation into Asia
Minor was the direct cause of the Armenian massacres."
"Tosh!" said Miss Wiggin.
"For a fact!" asserted Tutt. "It's this way--an ambassador told me so
himself--the Turks, you know, are nuts on beds--and they think a great
big brass family bed such as--you know--they're in all the
department-store windows. Well, every Turk in every village throughout
Asia Minor saves up his money to buy a brass bed--like a nigger buys a
cathedral clock. Sign of superiority. You get me? And it becomes his
most cherished household possession. If he meets a friend on the street
he says to him naturally and easily, without too much conscious egotism,
just as an American might say, 'By the way, have you seen my new
limousine?'--he says to the other Turk, 'Oh, I say, old chap, do you
happen to have noticed my new brass bed from Connecticut? They just put
it off the steamer last week at Aleppo. Fatima's taking a nap in it now,
but when she wakes up--'"
"What nonsense!" sniffed Miss Wiggin.
"It's not nonsense!" protested the junior partner. "Now listen to what
happens. Some Armenian--the Armenians are the pawnbrokers of Asia
Minor--moves into that village and in three months he has a mortgage on
everything in it, including that brass bed. Then the Turkish Government,
which regards him as an undesirable citizen, tells him to move along;
and Mister Armenian piles all the stuff the inhabitants have mortgaged
to him into an oxcart and starts on his way, escorted by the Sultan's
troops. On top of the load is Yusuf Bulbul Ameer's brass bed. Yusuf
looks out of his doorway and sees the bed moving off and rushes after it
to protect his property.
"'Look here!' he shouts. 'Where are you going with my brass bed?'
"'It isn't yours!' retorts Mister Pawnbroker. 'It's mine. I loaned you
eighty-seven piasters on it!'
"'But I've got an equity in it! You can't take it away!'
"'Of course I can!' replies the Armenian. 'Where I goeth it will go. The
Turkish Government is responsible.'
"'Not much,' says Yusuf, grabbing hold of it, trying to pull it off the
cart.
"'Hands off there!' yells the Armenian.
"Then there is a mix-up and everybody piles in--and there is a
massacre!"
"That's a grand yarn!" remarked Mr. Tutt. "Still, it may be--"
"Bunk!" declared Miss Wiggin. "And what has that got to do with camels?"
"My point is," affirmed Tutt, waving his index finger--"my point is that
just as a Yankee brass bed in Turkey will make certain trouble, so a
Turkish camel in New York is bound to do the same thing."
A door slammed behind them and Willie's voice interrupted the
conversation.
"Mr. Tutt! Mr. Tutt!" he cried hysterically. "There's been a murder
down there--and we--I'm--partly responsible. I spent the night with the
camel and he's--she's--all right--in Regan's Boarding Stable. But
Kasheed is in the Tombs, and I told them you'd defend him. You will,
won't you?"
Mr. Tutt looked at the excited boy.
"Who killed whom?" he asked correctly. "And where does the camel come
in?"
"Somebody killed Sardi Babu," explained Willie. "I don't know exactly
who did it--but they've arrested Kasheed Hassoun, the owner of Eset el
Gazzar."
"Who?" roared Tutt.
"The camel. You see, nobody knew she was in the attic until I saw her
stick her head out of the hole in the roof. Then I told Murphy and he
went up and found her there. But Kasheed thought Sardi had told on him,
you see, and nobody would believe him when he said he hadn't. The judge
fined Kasheed twenty-five dollars, and he--Kasheed--accused Sardi of
being a Turk and they had a big row right there in court. Nothing
happened until the cops had got Eset out of the window and she was over
at Regan's. I stayed there. Her head is bright red from the ink, you
know. Then somebody went over to the restaurant where Sardi was and
killed him. So you see, in a way, I'm to blame, and I didn't think you'd
mind defending Kasheed, because he's a corker and if they electrocute
him Eset will starve to death."
"I see," said. Mr. Tutt thoughtfully. "You think that by rights if
anybody was going to get killed it ought to have been you?"
Willie nodded.
"Yes, sir," he assented.
And that is how a camel was the moving cause of the celebrated firm of
Tutt & Tutt appearing as counsel in the case of The People against
Kasheed Hassoun, charged with the crime of murder in the first degree
for having taken the life of Sardi Babu with deliberation and
premeditation and malice aforethought and against the peace of the
People of the State of New York.
* * * * *
"And then there's this here Syrian murder case," groaned the chief clerk
of the district attorney's office plaintively to his chief. "I don't
know what to do with it. The defendant's been six months in the Tombs,
with all the Syrian newspapers hollering like mad for a trial. He killed
him all right, but you know what these foreign-language murder cases
are, boss! They're lemons, every one of 'em!"
"What's the matter with it?" inquired the D.A. "It's a regular
knock-down-and-drag-out case, isn't it? Killed him right in a
restaurant, didn't he?"
"Sure! That part of it's all right," assented the chief clerk. "He
killed him--yes! But how are you going to get an American jury to choose
between witnesses who are quite capable of swearing that the corpse
killed the defendant. How in hell can you tell what they're talking
about, anyway?"
"You can't!" said the D.A. "Send the papers in to Pepperill and tell him
on the side it'll make him famous. He'll believe you."
"But it'll take ten weeks to try it!" wailed the chief clerk.
"Well, send it down to old Wetherell, in Part Thirteen. He's got the
sleeping sickness and it will be sort of soothing for him to listen to."
"Might wake him up?" suggested the other.
"You couldn't!" retorted the D.A. "What's the case about, anyhow?"
"It's about a camel," explained the subordinate hesitatingly.
The D.A. grinned. Said he: "It is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than for a just prosecutor to convict a Syrian of
murder. Well, old top, send for a couple of dozen Korans and hire rooms
for the jury over Kaydoub, Salone & Dabut's and turn 'em loose on
_kibbah arnabeiah, kashtah_ and _halawee_."
Mr. William Montague Pepperill was a very intense young person,
twenty-six years old, out of Boston by Harvard College. He had been born
beneath the golden dome of the State House on Beacon Street, and from
the windows of the Pepperill mansion his infant eyes had gazed smugly
down upon the Mall and Frog Pond of the historic Common. There had been
an aloof serenity about his life within the bulging front of the
paternal residence with its ancient glass window panes--faintly tinged
with blue, just as the blood in the Pepperill veins was also faintly
tinged with the same color--his unimpeachable social position at Hoppy's
and later on at Harvard--which he pronounced Haavaad--and the profound
respect in which he was held at the law school in Cambridge, that gave
Mr. W. Montague Pepperill a certain confidence in the impeccability of
himself, his family, his relatives, his friends, his college, his
habiliments and haberdashery, his deportment, and his opinions,
political, religious and otherwise.
For W.M.P. the only real Americans lived on Beacon Hill, though a few
perhaps might be found accidentally across Charles Street upon the made
land of the Back Bay. A real American must necessarily also be a
graduate of Harvard, a Unitarian, an allopath, belong to the Somerset
Club and date back ancestrally at least to King Philip's War. W.
Montague had, however, decided early in life that Boston was too small
for him and that he owed a duty to the rest of the country.
So he had condescended to New York, where through his real American
connections in law, finance and business he had landed a job in a
political office where the aristocrats were all either Irish, Jews or
Italians, who regarded him as an outlandish animal. It had been a
strange experience for him. So had the discovery that graft, blackmail,
corruption, vice and crime were not mere literary conventions, existing
only for the theoretical purposes of novelists and playwrights, but were
actualities frequently dealt with in metropolitan society. He had
secured his appointment from a reform administration and he had been
retained as a holdover by Peckham, the new district attorney, by reason
of the fact that his uncle by marriage was a Wall Street banker who
contributed liberally without prejudice to both political parties. This,
however, W.M.P. did not know, and assumed that he was allowed to keep
his four-thousand-dollar salary because the county could not get on
without him. He was slender, wore a mouse-colored waistcoat, fawn tie
and spats, and plastered his hair neatly down on each side of a glossy
cranium that was an almost perfect sphere.
"Ah! Mr. William Montague Pepperill, I believe?" inquired Mr. Tutt with
profound politeness from the doorway of W.M.P.'s cubicle, which looked
into the gloomy light shaft of the Criminal Courts Building.
Mr. Pepperill finished what he was writing and then looked up.
"Yes," he replied. "What can I do for you?"
He did not ask Mr. Tutt his name or invite him to sit down.
The old lawyer smiled. He liked young men, even conceited young men;
they were so enthusiastic, so confident, so uncompromising. Besides,
W.M.P. was at heart, as Mr. Tutt perceived, a high-class sort of chap.
So he smiled.
"My name is Tutt," said he. "I am counsel for a man named Hassoun, whom
you are going to try for murder. You are, of course, perfectly familiar
with the facts."
He fumbled in his waistcoat, produced two withered stogies and cast his
eye along the wall.
"Would you--mind--if I sat down? And could I offer you a stogy?"
"Sit down--by all means," answered W.M.P. "No, thanks!"--to the stogy.
Mr. Tutt sat down, carefully placed his old chimney pot upside down on
the window ledge, and stacked in it the bundle of papers he was
carrying.
"I thought you might forgive me if I came to talk over the case a little
with you. You see, there are so many things that a prosecutor has to
consider--and which it is right that he should consider." He paused to
light a match. "Now in this case, though in all probability my client is
guilty there is practically no possibility of his being convicted of
anything higher than manslaughter in the first degree. The defense will
produce many witnesses--probably as many as the prosecution. Both sides
will tell their stories in a language unintelligible to the jury, who
must try to ascertain the true inwardness of the situation through an
interpreter. They will realize that they are not getting the real
truth--I mean the Syrian truth. As decent-minded men they won't dare to
send a fellow to the chair whose defense they cannot hear and whose
motives they do not either know or understand. They will feel, as I do
and perhaps you do, that the only persons to do justice among Syrians
are Syrians."
"Well," replied Mr. Pepperill politely, "what have you to propose?"
"That you recommend the acceptance of a plea of manslaughter in the
second degree."
Deputy Assistant District Attorney William Montague Pepperill drew
himself up haughtily. He regarded all criminal practitioners as
semicrooks, ignorant, illiterate, rather dirty men--not in the real
American class.
"I can do nothing of the kind," he answered sternly and very distinctly.
"If these men seek the hospitality of our shores they must be prepared
to be judged by our laws and by our standards of morality. I do not
agree with you that our juridical processes are not adequate to that
purpose. Moreover, I regard it as unethical--un-eth-i-cal--to accept a
plea for a lesser degree of crime than that which the defendant has
presumptively committed."
Mr. Tutt regarded him with undisguised admiration.
"Your sentiments do you honor, Mr. Pepperill!" he returned. "You are
sure you do not mind my smoke? But of course my client is presumed
innocent. I am very hopeful--almost confident--of getting him off
entirely. But rather than take the very slight chance of a conviction
for murder I am letting discretion take the place of valor and offer to
have him admit his guilt of manslaughter."
"I guess," answered Pepperill laconically, indulging in his only
frequent solecism, "that you wouldn't offer to plead to manslaughter
unless you felt pretty sure your client was going to the chair! Now--"
Mr. Tutt suddenly rose.
"My young friend," he interrupted, "when Ephraim Tutt says a thing man
to man--as I have been speaking to you--he means what he says. I have
told you that I expected to acquit my client. My only reason for
offering a plea is the very slight--and it is a very slight--chance that
an Arabian quarrel can be made the basis of a conviction for murder.
When you know me better you will not feel so free to impugn my
sincerity. Are you prepared to entertain my suggestion or not?"
"Most certainly not!" retorted W.M.P. with the shadow of a sneer.
"Then I will bid you good-day," said Mr. Tutt, taking his hat from the
window ledge and turning to the door. "And--you young whippersnapper,"
he added when once it had closed behind him and he had turned to shake
his lean old fist at the place where W.M.P. presumably was still
sitting, "I'll show you how to treat a reputable member of the bar old
enough to be your grandfather! I'll take the starch out of your darned
Puritan collar! I'll harry you and fluster you and heckle you and make a
fool of you, and I'll roll you up in a ball and blow you out the window,
and turn old Hassoun loose for an Egyptian holiday that will make old
Rome look like thirty piasters! You pinheaded, pretentious, pompous,
egotistical, niminy-piminy--"
"Well, well, Mr. Tutt, what's the matter?" inquired Peckham, laying his
hand on the old lawyer's shoulder. "What's Peppy been doing to you?"
"It isn't what he's been doing to me; it's what I'm going to do to him!"
returned Mr. Tutt grimly. "Just wait and see!"
"Go to it!" laughed the D.A. "Eat him alive! We're throwing him to the
lions!"
"No decent lion would want him!" retorted Mr. Tutt. "He might maul him a
little, but I won't. I'm just going to give him a full opportunity to
test his little proposition that the institutions of these jolly old
United States are perfectly adapted to settle quarrels among all the
polyglot prevaricators of the world and administer justice among people
who are still in a barbarous or at least in a patriarchal state. He's
young, and he don't understand that a New York merchant is entirely too
conscientious to find a man guilty on testimony that he would discount
heavily in his own business."
"Go as far as you like," laughed Peckham.
"Oh, I'm only going as far as Bagdad," answered Mr. Tutt.
Deputy Assistant District Attorney Pepperill complacently set about the
preparation of his case, utterly unconscious of the dangers with which
his legal path was beset. As he sat at his shiny oaken desk and pressed
the button that summoned the stenographer it seemed to him the simplest
thing in the world to satisfy any jury of what had taken place and the
summit of impudent audacity on the part of Mr. Tutt to have suggested
that Hassoun should be dealt with otherwise than a first-degree
murderer. And it should be added parenthetically that W.M.P., in spite
of his New England temperament, had a burning ambition to send somebody
to the electric chair.
In truth, on its face the story as related by Fajala Mokarzel and the
other friends of Sardi Babu the deceased pillow-sham vender was
simplicity itself. Besides Sardi Babu and Mokarzel there had been Nicola
Abbu, the confectioner; Menheem Shikrie, the ice-cream vendor; Habu
Kahoots, the showman; and David Elias, a pedler. All six of them, as
they claimed, had been sitting peacefully in Ghabryel & Assad's
restaurant, eating _kibbah arnabeiah_ and _mamoul_. Sardi had ordered
_sheesh kabab_. It was about nine o'clock in the evening, and they were
talking politics and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
Suddenly Kasheed Hassoun, accompanied by a smaller and much darker man,
had entered and striding up to the table exclaimed in a threatening
manner: "Where is he who did say that he would spit upon the beard of my
bishop?"
Thereupon Sardi Babu had risen and answered: "Behold, I am he."
Immediately Kasheed Hassoun, and while his accomplice held them at bay
with a revolver, had leaned across the table and grabbing Sardi by the
throat had broken his neck. Then the smaller man had fired off his
pistol and both of them had run away. The simplest story ever told.
There was everything the law required to send any murderer to the chair,
and little Mr. Pepperill had a diagram made of the inside of the
restaurant and a photograph of the outside of it, and stamped the
indictment in purple ink: Ready for Trial.
Contemporaneously Mr. Tutt was giving his final instructions to Mr.
Bonnie Doon, his stage manager, director of rehearsals and general
superintendent of arrangements in all cases requiring an extra-artistic
touch.
"It's too bad we can't cart a few hundred cubic feet of the Sahara into
the court room and divert the Nile down Center Street, but I guess you
can produce sufficient atmosphere," he said.
"I could all right--if I had a camel," remarked Bonnie.
"Atmosphere is necessary," continued Mr. Tutt. "Real atmosphere! Have
'em in native costume--beads, red slippers, hookahs, hoochi-koochis."
"I get you," replied Mr. Doon. "You want a regular Turkish village.
Well, we'll have it all right. I'll engage the entire Streets of Cairo
production from Coney and have Franklin Street crowded with goats, asses
and dromedaries. I might even have a caravan pitch its tents alongside
the Tombs."
"You can't lay it on too strong," declared Mr. Tutt. "But you don't need
to go off Washington Street. And, Bonnie, remember--I want every blessed
Turk, Greek, Armenian, Jew, Arab, Egyptian and Syrian that saw Sardi
Babu kill Kasheed Hassoun."
"You mean who saw Kasheed Hassoun kill Sardi Babu," corrected Bonnie.
"Well--whichever way it was," agreed Mr. Tutt.
When at length the great day of the trial arrived Judge Wetherell,
ascending the bench in Part Thirteen, was immediately conscious of a
subtle Oriental smell that emanated from no one could say where, but
which none the less permeated the entire court room. It seemed to be a
curious compound of incense, cabbage, garlic and eau de cologne, with a
suggestion of camel. The room was entirely filled with Syrians. One row
of benches was occupied by a solemn group of white-bearded patriarchs
who looked as if they had momentarily paused on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
All over the room rose the murmur of purring Arabic. The stenographer
was examining a copy of Meraat-ul-Gharb, the clerk a copy of El Zeman,
and in front of the judge's chair had been laid a copy of Al-Hoda.
His honor gave a single sniff, cast his eye over the picturesque throng,
and said: "Pst! Captain! Open that window!" Then he picked up the
calendar and read: "'People versus Kasheed Hassoun--Murder.'"
The stenographer was humming to himself:
_Bagdad is a town in Turkey
On a camel tall and jerky_.
"Are both sides ready to try this case?" inquired Judge Wetherell,
choking a yawn. He was a very stout judge and he could not help yawning.