"031 (B060) - The Majii (1935-09) - Lester Dent.palmdoc.pdbTXT" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"You'll eat the rest of that apple, or I'll skin you alive!" labored a squeaky, enraged voice.
Chairs upset. Blows whacked. There were gasps, grunts, much puffing.
Doc walked in.
The combatants were circling each other warily. Each had done some damage on the other. This might have seemed strange, in view of the fact that one was slender, lean of waist, while the other was a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound colossus who might conceivably be mistaken for a bull ape.
The slender man was "Ham," sometimes designated as Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, cleverest lawyer and snappiest dresser ever turned out by Harvard.
The human ape was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, world-famed industrial chemist, better known as "Monk."
These two were members of a group of five remarkable men who had long been associated with Doc Savage in his remarkable career of helping those in trouble and righting wrongs.
To all appearances, Monk and Ham were going through one of the more violent stages of their eternal quarrel. No one could recall one having spoken a civil word to the other, but it was only occasionally that they came to blows.
"What now?" Doc Savage asked in a tone which showed no particular interest.
"This shyster!" Monk jerked a thumb at Ham. "He tried to feed Habeas another one of them apples filled with pepper."
"I'll break Habeas of robbing my coat pockets!" Ham gritted.
"You'll eat the apple yourself!" Monk assured him.
Habeas Corpus, object of the mъlщe, was under a chair, long snout and enormous ears protruding. Habeas's ears were so huge that it was doubtful if he could have gotten them under the chair without difficulty. Habeas was Monk's pet pig.
Doc Savage said, "Would a little excitement interest you fellows?"
The abruptness with which Monk and Ham put aside their private quarrel was a give-away. Their scrapping was nothing more than a habitual amusement, even if it did seem that they often earnestly endeavored to murder each other.
DOC SAVAGE explained about the woman in the hospital, repeating exactly what he had been told.
"It is strange," Monk muttered when the bronze man finished.
"It is," Doc agreed, "more than that. Some one did something to that woman, did something horrible. Perhaps it was done to shut her mouth. It might conceivably be done to kill her."
"What was it?" Monk asked. Monk had a small, childlike voice which sounded ridiculous for a being of such homely bulk.
"Rather not say yet," Doc told him. "In fact, it is doubtful if my explanation could be put clearly enough for you to exactly agree that the thing I think happened is possible."
"Um," said Monk.
Ham murmured. "I gather we are going to mix in this affair?"
"We are," Doc told him. "Did you notice, until last night, various strange-looking brown men were loitering in the streets about this building?"
"Huh?" Monk exploded.
"They were," Doc said. "I watched them for some time, secretly, but there was nothing to show that they were observing us. They disappeared last night, about an hour after the time this woman was stricken at the gem-making sщance of the mysterious Rama Tura."
Ham went over to the massive inlaid table which was a part of the reception room furniture, and picked up an innocent-looking black cane. He separated this near the handle sufficiently to show that it was in reality a sword cane.
"Brown men," he said. "From the newspaper accounts, this Rama Tura is also a brown man."
"Exactly," Doc agreed.
"It begins to smell like a shenanigan of some kind," Monk said, small-voiced.
MONK came near not getting into Rama Tura's Temple Nava jewel-making sщance that night, simply because he had garbed himself, largely to disgust Ham, as disreputably as he could.
His suit was a horrible, baggy-checkered thing which had been faded and burned by laboratory chemicals during the course of his experiments. He had not shaved.
They had secured entrance cards indirectly, through wealthy persons whom Doc Savage knew. Monk argued. Finally, he was admitted.
Ham had no trouble whatever. Ham was his usual sartorial perfection. He wore full dress, and more than one man with an eye for dress eyed him enviously. He carried his plain black sword cane.
They waited with the crowd at the elevators, and neither glanced through the door. Had they done so, they might have seen Doc Savage in the crowd of curious who were not being admitted.
The bronze man did not stand out from the crowd in his usual fashion. He wore a light, enveloping topcoat, a snap brim hat and spectacles. He walked with a stoop. There was not enough light to show the bronze color of his skin.
Doc moved away from the vicinity, and shortly afterward, was probing into the back of a large, plain roadster. When he left the machine, he had secured a metal box larger than a suitcase.
He went to the rear of the building which housed Temple Nava. As he expected, it had a freight entrance, which was deserted at this hour. The job of picking the ponderous lock delayed him some little time.
He closed the door carefully behind him, still carrying his metal case, and one of the freight elevators carried him up to Temple Nava. He operated the controls himself.
The freight elevator admitted Doc into a rough corridor, which in turn gave into Temple Nava. There was a guard at the door, a lean, swart man of Jondore.
He was standing where he could not see the freight elevators, and there was so much noise in Temple NavaЧthe jabbering of the crowdЧthat he had not heard the cage arrive.
Doc Savage moved through the darkness until he stood close to the lookout. Then Doc set his throat and chest muscles carefully. He had practiced ventriloquism until he was fairly adept. He also spoke the language of Jondore, which was a rather common one in the Orient.
The look-out seemed quite surprised when a guttural voice from inside the temple seemed to call, "You at the back doorЧover here a moment."
The guard walked away in obedience to the summons. Doc ducked inside. When the guard returned, looking baffled, Doc Savage was on the stage which stood at one end of the temple, but which Rama Tura was not using for his present purpose. The stage was dark, deserted, with the curtains down.
Doc Savage climbed with his metal box. A few minutes later he was high off the floor, crouched precariously, cutting a round hole in the curtain.
He had tied the metal box to the perch with a stout cord, and now he opened it and drew out a small cinema camera which differed from other cameras in that it had a lens of several times the usual size.
Doc suspended this in front of the hole, lashing it there. It made almost no noise when he started it. The film magazines were very large, and would run more than an hour, taking pictures through a lens so fast that it would function in light little stronger than that given off by a candle.
Doc next cut a peephole for his own eye.
RAMA TURA was just beginning the discourse that preceded his performance, using the same trend of statements, if not the same words that he had employed the previous night.
Monk and HamЧMonk had managed thatЧoccupied adjacent seats. As was to be expected, Rama Tura's line of talk did not register on Ham. It struck him as little better than the sales patter of a street corner astrologer. Ham curled a lip.
"It seems to appeal to the rest of these stuffed shirts," Monk told him in a stage whisper. "You oughta like it."