Peter Cheyney 
Dark Wanton [EPUB ebook] 

LADIES and gentlemen, I present to you Vincente Maria Jesu Callao.
The business of a personal introduction seems necessary because he was the spring— however unconscious— that set in movement the rather peculiar actions of most of the people concerned in the business of the Dark Wanton.
A relatively uninteresting person, he becomes interesting, not for what he was, but rather for what he was not. Callao was born in Andalusia in 1913. There appeared to be some doubt about his parentage— a matter which repercussed on his mother, who was adequately catered for by her husband with a seven-inch Spanish sailor’s knife five days after the birth of the child. His education was nondescript, but with the passage of years he developed certain attributes, many of which made him attractive to women. He developed little else except perhaps the one sincere thing in his life— an honest love of music and the making of music.