Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [165]
“I should think it would have to be,” Marsh replied.
“And this . . . their marriage certificate? Oh, that utter bastard.”
Marsh, however, was already looking at the means of turning his anger into action. “This will simplify things somewhat,” he said grimly.
“I agree,” I said, with feeling. Instead of having to watch the crowd of nearly 350 guests and servants to see which of our suspects made for the exit, then track him unnoticed through house and countryside, by motorcar and train, until he led us to his hiding place, we could now simply wait in the Armoury for him to show. Ali might shadow a nervous hare across a barren hillside unseen, needs be, and would have no problems in the corridors of Justice Hall, but with the hiding place known, the potentially disastrous complexities of Holmes’ plan were sliced through like the Gordian knot. It was a tremendous relief.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The time had come; the inevitable could be delayed no longer; I had to join the party.
Life has ill prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers. My parents had entertained a certain amount in my childhood, but those were quiet affairs, with intelligent conversation the main interest. Conversation in the Great Hall was far from intellectual; the level of hilarity was already such that a stentorian bellow was required to make polite response of one’s name. A band had started up in one corner of the gallery, jazz music loud enough to be appreciated in New Orleans and punctuated by the cries of the distraught parrots. Painted Cleopatras danced with laurel-leafed Caesars (never mind that they were thirteen hundred years too late for Tutankhamen), archaeologists with belly-dancers; women with elaborately outlined eyes linked arms with men wearing masks of various creatures that obscured vision as well as visage and had already begun to be pushed onto the tops of heads. Six men with eyes like Rudolph Valentino’s and wearing little more than loin-cloths (their eyes, unfortunately, bore the only resemblance to the actor) were clustered together, attempting to invent an Egyptian dance-step, eliciting gales of mad laughter from a dozen equally heavily painted young women in gauze drapes. Drinks of many unlikely hues rested (briefly) in glasses of various shapes, and I could only anticipate that the place would be reduced to sprawled heaps of comatose human beings in masks long before that eggs-and-champagne breakfast to which Iris had referred. I settled my abayya on my shoulders and resolutely pushed my way out into the pulsing mass of humanity.
If I regarded the exercise as an investigation into the social dynamics of crowds, I found, I could keep from being overwhelmed. If I smiled vacantly and nodded at the shouted attempts at conversation of my neighbours, if I kept an untasted drink in one hand so as to forestall a dozen others being pressed on me, if I kept my elbows clamped against my sides so as to protect my ribs, and most of all if I kept moving along the edges of the room, the sheer hysterical energy of the place did not come crashing in upon me and send me gibbering for the open air.
The band added a weirdly humming stringed instrument—to simulate Egyptian harmonies, I supposed—and fifty people joined the six Valentinos in their dance. With a splash and a chorus of whoops, a nearby thicket of papyrus began to leap about violently as a dripping Caesar rose from his lily-pond: jumped, pushed, or fallen? It hardly mattered, to him least of all. A young woman danced by me with one of the artificial jungle-vines wrapped around and around her diaphanous costume, which she may have intended as an exotic belt but which made her look as if she had just escaped from being tied to a post. A red-headed boy went past, doing a brisk