"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 296 - A Quarter of Eight - Walter Gibson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

A QUARTER OF EIGHT
by Maxwell Grant

As originally published in "The Shadow Magazine," October 1945.


There were four interesting-looking pieces of an old Spanish coin -
representing undreamed-of riches and undreamed-of danger! Only The Shadow
could
cope with the fearful legacy to which a couple of innocent victims fell heir.


CHAPTER I

FOUR men were in Sargon's back room that night.
What their names were didn't matter, because nobody used his right name
in
Martinique - not if he could help it.
These were the times when the island was dominated by the Vichy
government, when a man's life was valued only in terms of his wits. What these
men were was known only to themselves - individually.
In those days, almost everything was illegal in Fort de France, the
capital of Martinique. Tension smoldered like the hidden fires of Mount Pelee,
the towering volcano which twenty years before had all but blasted the island
off the map.
What might blast Martinique next was anybody's guess.
Men who used their boats to carry supplies to waiting Nazi submarines
might, on the return trip, bring in weapons from Free French freighters, for
distribution among the local Underground. Yet no one could question this
inconsistency; it might simply be a cover-up.
The greater a man's value to one side, the greater his value to the
other.
That was the law on Martinique, during this fateful period while the outcome
of
the war seemed hanging in the balance. It was policy for a man to think only
of
himself.
Simon Sargon followed that policy to the letter.
It was against all regulations to allow clandestine meetings on one's
premises, so Sargon didn't allow them. To prove the fact he left his back door
unlocked every night, so that the gendarmerie could look in for themselves and
see that all was empty. Only the gendarmes never looked in, because Sargon had
forgotten to tell them that he alone, of all the distressed merchants in Fort
de France, lacked the sense to lock and barricade his store.
Sargon couldn't help anyone's wandering into the place. That would be his
alibi if he ever needed it. Sargon always turned in early, and it wasn't until
long after his lights were out that these four men stole indoors to discuss
their plans for the morrow.
Sworn comrades, these four, but only until they found out too much about
each other. It was that uncertainty of the future that disturbed them now, for