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  “Nobody can be that foolish, Doctor Jones,” he said. “Not even you. Therefore, I must conclude that you are working in concert with Sir Mortimer.”

  “I didn't even know he was gonna be here!” I protested. “I even brung these flowers along for the lucky lady of my choice.”

  “An excellent disguise,” said Doctor Ho, nodding approvingly. “Who would suspect such a naive, bumbling idiot of being a master spy?”

  “I ain't no master spy,” I said. “I'm just an innocent man of the cloth, bringing spiritual comfort across the face of Asia to all you unwashed heathen.”

  “Please do not insult my intelligence, Doctor Jones,” said Aristotle Ho. “Do you think I am unaware of your exploits since last we met? You killed one of my most trusted agents, General Chang, in hand-to-hand combat atop the Great Wall, and then made off with my jade.” He paused and glared at me. “You fooled me the first time we met, but now I know just how dangerous you are.”

  “Sir Mortimer,” I said, “tell him I ain't working for you!”

  “You know, you fooled me too, Doctor Jones,” said Sir Mortimer admiringly. “Who are you working for—the United States government or some private organization of super assassins?”

  “Thanks a heap, Sir Mortimer,” I said glumly.

  “Enough talking,” said Doctor Ho. “Now you shall see what happens to those who are foolish enough to attempt to hinder me in my goal of world conquest! Open the door!”

  One of his henchmen pulled the door open, and we marched into this huge chamber that had about three hundred men in it, all of ’em wearing red robes with weird designs on ’em. A couple of men were laying on stone alters, but since their heads were missing I figured they weren't in any real serious pain at the moment. The second the guys wearing the robes saw us they pulled out their swords and knives, but then Doctor Ho raised his hand and everyone stood stock still.

  “I have captured these two spies,” he announced. “What shall we do with them?”

  Well, just about everyone in the room screamed “Death!", but I did hear one voice say “Let's rape them first!", which implied to me that at least one other person had come looking for a little secret sex himself.

  “How shall we kill them?” demanded Doctor Ho.

  “The Death of a Thousand Cuts!” yelled a batch of ’em.

  “Do you know what the Death of a Thousand Cuts is?” Doctor Ho said to me.

  “Sounds like trying to shave with a hangover,” I opined.

  “I am afraid not, Doctor Jones,” he said. “First, we will string you up and hang you a few feet above the floor. Then we will start slicing you to ribbons, but we will not deliver the fatal blow until the thousandth cut. The pain will be exquisite, I assure you.”

  “I got a better idea,” I said. “If you really want to string this out, why not give me one cut tonight? Then I could go back to my hotel and sleep it off, and I promise to show up each of the next nine hundred and ninety-nine nights.”

  “What kind of fool do you take me for?” demanded Doctor Ho.

  “Do your worst!” bellowed Sir Mortimer. “I will show you how an Englishman dies.”

  Well, I wasn't right anxious to show anyone how an American died, so I turned back to Doctor Ho again.

  “This is silly,” I said to him. “I ain't no spy, and you probably ain't go no followers what can count all the way up to a thousand. Why don't we just shake hands and let bygones be bygones? I'll even buy you a drink back at the Janata Hotel.”

  “You have heard the verdict of my Thuggees,” replied Doctor Ho sternly. “They demand blood.”

  “As long as Sir Mortimer seems bound and determined to bleed, why not settle for him?” I suggested. “I'll even do some of the cutting, just as a gesture of Christian goodwill.”

  “I admire your coolness in the face of an excruciatingly painful death, Doctor Jones,” said Aristotle Ho. “Under other circumstances we could have been great friends.”

  “It still ain't too late,” I said. “I feel a burst of friendship coming over me right this second.”

  He shook his head. “You are much too dangerous to be allowed to live.” He turned to his men. “Prepare them both for the Death of a Thousand Cuts.”

  “Remember,” said Sir Mortimer, as they dragged us to the center of the room, “we represent the civilized world. Don't give them the pleasure of screaming in agony no matter how terrible the pain. Keep a stiff upper lip.”

  I was about to point out the difficulty of keeping a stiff upper lip once they chopped if off, but by then we were surrounded by Thuggees who placed us on a large platform and ripped our jackets and shirts off and started to tie our hands behind our backs when Doctor Ho stepped forward again.

  “One moment,” he said, and everything came to a stop. “I know you think me a barbaric fiend, Sir Mortimer,” he continued, “but actually I am one of the more civilized fiends I know. To that end, I will allow you to make a last statement, if you so desire.”

  Sir Mortimer was already getting into his impersonation of the strong, silent type, and he just glared at Doctor Ho without saying a word.

  “Doctor Jones?” said Aristotle Ho. “Have you any last words?”

  I looked up toward the ceiling. “Lord,” I said, “pay attention now: this is Your friend and admirer Lucifer Jones suggesting that if You ever plan to manifest Yourself, You couldn't pick a much more opportune time than this here moment to bring the temple crumbling down.”

  Doctor Ho threw back his head to laugh, but before a sound had a chance to come out we heard a great crashing noise and the whole temple started shaking. A couple of seconds later the ceiling started caving in, and half the Thuggees were buried under it while the rest lit out for the hills with a speed and grace that would have done Jim Thorpe proud.

  Suddenly there was no one left except me and Sir Mortimer and Aristotle Ho, and he just glared at us furiously for a second, and then said, “You have thwarted me today, Lucifer Jones, but you haven't heard the last of me!” And then, before we could say anything, he melted into the shadows.

  “Thanks a lot, Lord!” I shouted. “Now I owe You a favor!”

  Then we heard a mournful trumpeting, and we raced up what remained of the stairs, and there was old Akbar beating his head against a wall of the temple. He'd been pushing against the pillar where I left him until it finally collapsed on top of the Thuggees’ private meeting room, and since nobody had told him to stop he'd just proceeded forward a few feet until he came to the wall, which wasn't near as thick and was already starting to buckle.

  “Well, Doctor Jones,” said Sir Mortimer. “Once again we've put a crimp in that insidious fiend's plan to conquer the world! Well done, sir!”

  “Well, that's what he gets for leading an innocent gentleman on with promises of secret sex,” I said righteously.

  “I must be on my way, to report the night's proceedings to my government,” he said. “It was nice collaborating with you again.” He paused. “Allow me to give you one last piece of advice: do not return to your hotel tonight. There's always a chance that Aristotle Ho will be waiting there for you.”

  Well, I hadn't planned on returning anyway, since there was a dead certainty that the desk clerk and the hotel manager would be waiting there for me, and I had a feeling that they wouldn't accept payment in elephants, so I bade Sir Mortimer good-bye, got atop old Akbar again, and making a vow not to be duped by Doctor Aristotle Ho ever again, I headed off in search of fame, fortune, and maybe a little public sex with an obliging lady of quality.

  * * * *

  8. The Flame of Bharatpur

  Twenty-five rupees didn't buy a lot of food, even back in 1930, so Akbar and I kept pretty much to the countryside, eating whatever we could find in the fields, and heading in a kind of westerly direction. After a couple of weeks we hit the Rajasthan province, and the landscape got a little prettier, and we started passing an occasional old temple, and here and there we came to deserted cities, but since I st
ill didn't know how to make him come to a stop I didn't get no chance to examine them.

  It was when we were nearing Jaipur, where I had every hope of finding a used elephant lot and trading old Akbar in for a grubstake and maybe finding a friendly little game of chance, that we came across a field of tall grasses backing up to a forest. I was about to head for the trees in the hope that some of ’em might have something nourishing hanging down from their branches when I saw a movement in the grass off to my left, and I heard this voice whispering “Help me!", so I steered Akbar in that direction.

  Then, when we were about twenty yards away, I heard a great big "Oof!" kind of sound, like something had had all the air squoze out of it, so I jumped off Akbar to see what was the matter, and what I found was that he had accidentally stepped on this tiger and crushed it flatter than a board.

  I walked over to where the voice had come from, and found a white man, all torn up and bleeding, lying in the grass.

  “Thank God!” he whispered when he saw me.

  “What seems to be the problem, Brother?” I asked, kneeling down next to him.

  Well, he was kind of delirious, and he kept mumbling about a tiger hunt and jealous lovers and murder and some kind of flame or fire, and finally I figured I'd better get him to a doctor right quick, so I called Akbar over and told him to lift us up, and once I laid the man across Akbar's neck and perched myself on his head, we made tracks for Jaipur, where we went to the nearest hospital. I left Akbar pushing his head against the wall of the emergency room, while I turned the patient over to a couple of doctors who carted him off and went right to work on him. I decided to hang around for awhile, inasmuch as I didn't have no place better to go anyway, and before long I made fast friends with a pretty little nurse who rustled up some hospital grub for me, and then after a couple of hours one of the doctors hunted me up to say that the patient was going to live and wanted to see me, and not to do anything to wear him out, as if he was expecting me to arm-wrestle him or something.

  I entered the room and walked over to the bed, where the fellow I had saved was all covered in bandages.

  “I'm told that I owe you my life,” he said weakly.

  “All in a day's work,” I said, “me being a servant of the Lord and all.”

  “Well, your intervention was divinely inspired,” he said. He reached out a hand to me. “My name is Geoffrey Bainbridge.”

  “The Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones, at your service,” I replied, taking his hand kind of gingerly. “Just out of idle curiosity, Brother Bainbridge, what in tarnation were you doing, alone and unarmed, in tiger country?”

  “It's a complicated tale of desire and deceit, Doctor Jones,” he said.

  “That's my very favorite kind of tale, Brother Brainbridge,” I said. “Take all the desire and deceit out of the Good Book and you wouldn't have more than a handful of chapters left.”

  “It all revolves around the Flame of Bharatpur,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe I should begin at the beginning,” he said. “I'm a bachelor, Doctor Jones. Some months ago, while judging a livestock show, I made the acquaintance of Lady Edith Quilton, the widow of Lord Randolph Quilton, who owns the largest estate in all of Rajasthan. We struck up a friendship, and shared many an afternoon tea together, and finally I proposed marriage to her.” He paused. “I shall be perfectly honest with you, Doctor Jones. While I enjoy her company and admire her adventurous spirit, the real reason I wanted to marry her was to gain possession of the Flame of Bharatpur.”

  “I take it this Flame of Bharatpur is worth a bundle of money?” I said.

  “The Flame of Bharatpur is perfection itself,” he said. Suddenly he frowned. “But even as I was pressing my suit, another gentleman entered her life.”

  “He wanted the Flame of Bharatpur too?” I asked.

  “He wants everything she owns,” replied Bainbridge. “She is quite the wealthiest woman in the province, and he is a low, deceitful fortune hunter.”

  Well, truth to tell, I couldn't see much difference between a selective fortune hunter and a generalized one, but I just sat there and listened to Bainbridge pour out his story.

  “We disliked one another at first sight, although we continued to behave in a civilized manner toward each other. But things reached a head this morning. Lady Edith organized a tiger hunt, and I found myself sharing a howdah with this villain. Feigning enthusiasm, he drove our elephant far ahead of the others, and when the beaters flushed a tiger, he grabbed my rifle and pushed me out of the howdah, racing off and leaving me to face the tiger's charge unarmed and on foot. The brute knocked me down and raked me with its claws, and was about to finish me off when you providentially arrived.” He leaned his head back against the pillow, all wore out from telling his story. “And now, although I owe my life to you and can never repay you, I must nevertheless ask you one last favor, Doctor Jones.”

  “What did you have in mind, Brother Bainbridge?” I asked, just kind of figuring to humor him until he drifted off to sleep.

  “I realize that it was wrong of me to propose a loveless marriage simply to gain possession of the Flame of Bharatpur,” he said. “But I cannot leave poor Edith to the mercies of her current suitor, and I will be in no condition to confront him for weeks or possibly even months. You must prevent that filthy fortune hunter from possessing the Flame of Bharatpur, even if it means marrying her yourself.”

  “Well, now, that's a right interesting proposition, Brother Bainbridge,” I said. “And now that I come to mull on it, I can see that it's my Christian duty to save this poor woman from such a scoundrel, even if it means I got to spend the rest of my life helping her manage her fortune rather than bringing the word of the Lord to these poor deprived brown heathen.”

  “Then you'll do it?” he said.

  “Brother Bainbridge,” I said, “it's as good as done.”

  “You are truly one of nature's noblemen,” he said, and suddenly he was sound asleep, and I kind of tiptoed out of his room before he could wake up and change his mind, and a couple of minutes later me and Akbar were headed off to Lady Edith's estate on the edge of town.

  I didn't know her exact address, but when I came to a house that was just a little bit smaller than Buckingham Palace and had even nicer gardens, I knew I'd hit paydirt, so to speak. I figured Akbar might prove to be a bit of a social handicap, especially since he'd recently developed a taste for flowers, so I pointed him down the road, wished him well, and took my leave of him. Last I saw of him he was just vanishing over the top of a small hill, and with no one to tell him to stop, I figured he'd keep going until he hit the Indian Ocean, by which time he could probably use a little seaside vacation.

  Then I wandered up the long, winding driveway and knocked on the front door. A couple of Indians, dressed all in white, let me in, and one of them escorted me to the drawing room while the other went and fetched Lady Edith. While I was waiting for her I decided to take a look around and see just what I was marrying into. I knew right off that Lady Edith liked the ballet, because there were a bunch of paintings of ballerinas hanging on the wall, all done by some Frenchman, and I could see that her late husband had an eye for the ladies, because there were also a few paintings of half-naked island girls by yet another Frenchman, which were so racy I would have thought she'd toss ’em out once her husband departed this mortal coil, but I couldn't see no signs of conspicuous wealth until I noticed a little glass case in the corner. I walked over to it and there, setting on a little gold pedestal, was the biggest, reddest ruby I ever did see, and I knew right off that this had to be the Flame of Bharatpur that all the fuss was about.

  I heard a little feminine cough behind me, and turned to find myself facing a vigorous-looking woman of about fifty years. She was decked out in riding togs, and she held a leather crop in her hand.

  “Just admiring your taste in gemstones, ma'am,” I said. “You must be Lady Edith.”

  “I am afraid you have the adva
ntage of me, Mr...?”

  “Reverend, ma'am,” I said. “The Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones at your service, fresh from risking life and limb to save Geoffrey Bainbridge from a tiger attack.”

  “My goodness!” she said. “Is he all right?”

  “The doctors say he'll be up and around in a couple of months,” I said.

  “How did it happen?”

  “Well, it's a long story, ma'am, and being the modest Christian gentleman that I am I hate to set myself up as a fearless hero what dragged poor Geoffrey from the jaws of death and dispatched a tiger with my bare hands, so it's probably best left untold.” I paused. “I do bring a message from him, though.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Due to the delicate nature of one of his injuries, he regrets to inform you that he's no longer on the marriage market, and he hopes you'll understand and won't think no less of him for it.”

  “The poor man!” she said. “We wondered what happened to him when he didn't show up for lunch after the hunt.”

  “He was probably preoccupied with bleeding to death at the time,” I said. “It was just a stroke of providence that I came by when I did.”

  “You must tell me all about it,” she said.

  “Well, I'd enjoy doing so, Lady Edith, but Geoffrey ain't the only one what missed out on lunch, and I think now that I've delivered his tragic message to you, I'd best be getting back to town to hunt up some dinner.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “You will have dinner here, with us, Reverend Jones. It's the very least I can do for such a noble and courageous man.”

  “Well, I'd surely like to, Lady Edith,” I said, “but I also ain't got no place to stay, and I'd better scare me up a room before all the hotels are sold out for the night.”

  “I won't hear of it,” she said. “I'll have my servants make up a room for you right now.”

  “I couldn't impose on you like that, ma'am,” I protested. “Even though I give all my money to the poor, I usually hold enough back to rent a cot in some flophouse.”

  “You're staying here, and that's all there is to it,” she said firmly.