The Cave of Ali Baba

The Columbia Network takes pleasure in bringing you... Suspense! Columbia's play theater of outstanding thrillers, produced and directed by William Speer, and scored by Bernard Herman.

The notable melodramas from fiction and stage and screen, from the world's great literature of entertaining excitement, resented each week to bring you to the edge of your chair, to keep you in... S-S-Spence! Tonight's adventure in suspense is from the pen of Dorothy Sayers.

She called it the Cave of Alibaba. Like the tale told by Sheherazade, a distinguished ancestor in the storytelling art, Miss Sayers thrill her deals with forty thieves and with two magic words. For your uneasy listening then, suspense presents the Cave of Alibaba.

On a Saturday afternoon in January in the grim and narrow house in Lambeth, a man sat eating kippers and reading the daily paper. He was smallish and spare with brown hair rather too regularly waved and a strong brown pointed beard.

His double-breasted navy blue suit, his socks, tie and handkerchief, were all scrupulously matched, and his brown boots just took trifle too highly polished. He did not look a gentleman, not even a gentleman's gentleman, yet there was something about his appearance which suggested that he was accustomed to the manner of life in good families.

A superior butler, perhaps. Yet not old enough to be retired. A footman who had come into a legacy, yes. He had just finished eating, and he was sipping his coffee when a slight noise at the front door caught his ear.

Swiftly, too swiftly for a quiet little man sitting, eating kippers and reading his paper on a Saturday afternoon. He sprang up, he touched through the small hallway, and he flung the door open. Of course, no one in sight.