Upon the linen lay some particles of glass, evidently portions of a smashed test-tube, and the crushed but clearly recognizable body of a four-inch centipede.
“THERE IS A BLACK dog running through my brain,” he complained as we sat waiting in the study after dinner the next evening. “This case puzzles me. Why should it not be one thing or the other? Why should it be a hybrid? Somewhere”—he spread his hands as if to reach for something—“just beyond my fingertips the answer lies, but I cannot touch it.”
“What puzzles you particularly?” I asked. “What they’ve done with the missing bodies?”
“Ah, non. That is comparatively simple. When the police find the stolen hearse, as they are sure to do in time, they will find the bodies in it. It is the half-caste nature of the case which causes me confusion. Consider him, if you please.” He spread his fingers out fanwise and checked the items on them:
“We come on three dead corpses. There is nothing strange in death. It has been a scientific fact since Eve and Adam first sinned. All indications are that they were murdered. Murder, in and of itself, is no novelty. It has been going on since Cain slew Abel; but surrounding circumstances are unusual. Oh, yes, very. The servant and the woman had been left as they had died, one in his chair, the other on the floor; but the man is carried to the drawing-room and laid out carefully. Is it that the killers first arranged him, and were about to do the same for their two other victims when we were attracted by the young girl’s scream, and interrupted them? There is a thought there.
“Then about the young man and his sister. Both had been drugged with hashish and left in their respective rooms to be killed by poison centipedes. Why? one wonders. Why were they not killed out of hand, like the three others; why were they drugged instead of being bound and gagged when they were left as prey for the vile myriapods?
“And why should they be Spaniards, as they obviously are?”
Despite myself I grinned. “Why, for the same reason that you’re French and I’m American,” I answered. “There’s nothing strange about a Spaniard being Spanish, is there?”
“In this case, yes,” he countered. “If they had been Orientals I could understand some phases of the puzzle—the hashish and the so vile piping heard about the hospital when the attempt to drop the centipede into the young man’s room was made. But their being Spanish upsets all my theories.
“Hashish is a drug peculiar to the East. They eat it, smoke it; sometimes, though not often, they inject it. Alors, we may assume that he who used it on these children was an Eastern, n’est-ce-pas?
“As for the so peculiar music—the ‘funny sound’—which the good Dawkins heard, I know her. She is a very high, shrill sound produced by blowing on a specially prepared reed, and has a tendency to shock the sensory-motor nerves to a paralysis; something like the shrieking of the Chinese screaming boys, whose high, thin, piercing wail so disorganizes the hearer’s nervous system that his marksmanship is impaired and often he is rendered all but helpless in a fight. Our agents in the Lebanon mountains report this music his been used by—mon Dieu, I am the monumental stupid-head! Why did I not consider it before?”
“What in the world—” I began, but before I had a chance to frame my question Nora McGinnis announced from the study entrance:
“Sergeant Costello an’ a young lady an’ man, sors, if yez plaze.”
“Good evenin’, gentlemen,” the big detective greeted. “I brought ’em, as ye asked. These are Señorita and Señor Gutierrez y del Gado de Jerez.”
Though the youngsters had been confined in the hospital it was evident that access to their wardrobe had not been denied them, and their appearance was far different from that of the babbling imbeciles we’d found in Tuscarora Avenue. The lad was positively seal-sleek; if anything, a thought too perfect in his grooming. He wore more jewelry than good taste required and smelled unnecessarily of lilac perfume.
As for Constancia, only the knowledge that she’d been in custody continuously, and so could not have sent a substitute, enabled me to recognize the wild-haired, panic-ridden girl of the previous night in the self-contained and assured young woman who occupied the chair opposite me. I’d forgotten how intensely black her hair was when we’d rescued her. Now it seemed even blacker. Drawn severely back in a French roll and parted low on the left side, it glinted like a grackle’s throat in the lamplight. Dressed with pomade, two curls like inverted question marks were plastered close against her cheeks where a man’s sideburns would be, and were rendered more noticeable by the long pendants of green jade that hung nearly to her creamy shoulders from her ear-lobes. Her backless, strapless evening gown of shimmering black satin fitted almost as tightly as a stocking, covering to some extent but by no means concealing any of her narrow, lissome figure. Her ear-pendants and the emerald clasps of her stilt-heeled sandals were her only jewelry and the only spots of color in her costume. The vivid carmine of her painted lips glowed like a red rose fallen in the snow, for her face, throat, shoulders and tapering arms and hands were dead-white in their pallor as the petals of a gardenia. Despite her immaturity of figure and youthfulness of face—she seemed much younger than on the night we’d first seen her—there was a strange allure about her, and I caught myself comparing her to Carmen in a Paris frock or Francesca da Rimini with Rue de la Paix accessories.
Ankles crossed demurely, hands folded in her lap, she cast a glance from burnished-onyx eyes on Jules de Grandin. “Señor,” she murmured in a throaty rich contralto, very different from her reedy ravings of the other night, “they tell me that our parents are—have been killed. Is it truly so?” Her English was without accent, save for a shortening of the i’s and a slight rolling of the r’s.
“Alas, I fear that it is true, señorita,” de Grandin answered. “Can you tell me any reason anyone should wish them harm?”
Her sultry eyes came up to his beneath their curling fringe of long black lashes, and if it had been possible, I’d have said their darkness deepened. “I cannot tell you who wished evil to them,” she replied, “but I know they lived in fear of someone or some thing. I am seventeen years old, and never in my life have I lived long enough in any place to know it well or call it home or make a lasting friendship. Always we have been upon the move, like gipsies or an army. London, Paris, the Riviera, Zurich, Rome, California, New York—we have flown from one to another like birds pursued by hawks that will not let them rest in any tree. Never have we owned a home—no, not so much as the beds we slept on. I grew up in villas rented ready furnished, in pensions and hotels. We were like the orchid that draws sustenance from the air and never sinks its roots into the soil beneath it. The nearest to a home I ever had was the three years that I was at convent school near Cologne. I think if they had let me stay there I should have found that I had the vocation, but”—her narrow naked shoulders came up in a shrug—“it was like the rest. No sooner had I learned to love it—found peace and contentment there—than they took me away.”
“One sympathizes with you, señorita. You have no idea who or what it was your parents fled?”
“No, caballero. I only know they feared it greatly. We would come to rest in some new place, perhaps a little pension in Paris or Berlin, perhaps a furnished cottage in some English village, or a hotel in Switzerland, when one day Mama or the Padre would come in with fear upon his face, looking backward as he walked, as though an asesino dogged his steps, and, ‘They are here,’ or ‘I have seen them,’ one would tell the other. Then in hot haste we packed our clothing and effects—always we lived with porte-manteux in readiness—and off we rushed in secrecy, like criminals fleeing from the law.
“But I do not think the Padre ever was a criminal, for everywhere we went he was most friendly with the police. Always when we came to live in some new place the cuartel general de policia—the police headquarters—was one of the first places which he visited. Is that the way a fugitive from justice acts?”
“That’s right, sor,” Costello confirmed.
“Colonel Gutierrez came to headquarters when he first moved here nine months ago, an’ asked ’em to give orders to th’ man on his bate to give special attention to his house. Told ’em he’d been burglarized three times in his last residence, an’ his wife wuz on th’ verge of a breakdown.”
De Grandin nodded as he turned back to the girl. “The sergeant called your father Colonel Gutierrez, señorita. Do you know what army he served in?”
“No, señor, he had quit the military service before I was born. I never heard him mention it, nor did I ever see a picture of him in his uniform.”
The Frenchman nodded understandingly. Apparently this conversation, so meaningless to me, confirmed some theory he had formed. “What of the night we found you?” he asked. “Precisely what occurred, señorita?”
Young Gutierrez leaped up and advanced a step toward Jules de Grandin. “Señor,” he exclaimed, as he clasped his slender, ring-laden hands in a perfect ecstasy of entreaty, “we—my sister and I—are in the dreadful trouble. These scoundrels have put the slight upon us. They have slain our parents. Blood calls for blood. It is the rifa, the contienda—the blood-feud—we have with them. We call on you to help us get revenge!”
“Gregorio! Hermanito mio!” the girl called softly as she rose and laid a hand upon her brother’s arm. “Silencio, corazonito pequeño!” To us she added rapidly in English:
“Forgive him, señores. He lives in a small world of his own. He is, alas, un necio dulce—one of God’s little ones.”
There seemed magic in her touch, for the young man quieted immediately, and sat silently with her hand clasped in his as she responded to de Grandin’s query.
“We had finished dinner, and Gregorio and I had been excused while Mama and the Padre had their coffee and liqueur. He—my brother—and I were going to the cinema and were changing from our dinner clothes when I heard a sudden cry downstairs. It was my mother’s voice, pitched high and thin, as if she suffered or were very frightened.”
“A-a-ah?” de Grandin cut in on a rising note. “And then, if you please?”
“I heard no more, but as I ran to see if I could be of help a hand was laid upon my doorknob and two men rushed into my room. One held a cane or stick of some sort in his hand and as I shrank back from him he thrust it at me. There must have been a pin or steel point on it, for it pierced my arm and hurt me dreadfully, but only for a moment.”
“A moment, señorita? How do you mean?”
She looked at him and managed a wan smile. “There was the oddest feeling spreading through me—like a sudden deathly fatigue, or, perhaps, a sort of numbness. I still stood upon my feet, but I had no idea how I kept on them. I seemed to have grown to a giant’s height, the floor seemed far away and unreal, as the earth does when you look at it from the top of a high tower; and I knew that in a moment I should fall upon my face, but even as I realized it I knew that I’d not feel it. I felt as if I never should feet anything again.
“Then I was on the floor, with the cool boards pressing on my cheek. I had fallen, I knew, but I had not felt the impact. One moment I was standing; the next I lay upon the floor, with no recollection how I got there.
“One of the men had a small cage of woven willow, something like the little straw cages that the Japanese keep crickets in, and suddenly he upset it and shook it. Something—several things—came tumbling, squirming, out of it, and I recognized them as great centipedes—the deadly poisonous escolopendras whose bite is terrible as that of a tarantula. Then they laughed at me and left.
“The centipedes were writhing toward the corners of the room as I tried to rise and run, but I could not. The numb, half-paralyzed sensation was gone, but in its stead I seemed to suffer from a sudden overpowering dizziness. And my eyes were playing tricks on me. The lamplight seemed to glow and glitter with prismatic colors, and the edges of the room began to curl in on me, like the petals of a folding flower. I was in deadly terror of the centipedes, but somehow it seemed I was too tired to move.
“Then one of them came running at me from the shadow of the bed. Its eyes looked bigger than the headlights of a motor car and seemed to glow with fire-red flashes. Somehow I managed to sit up and tear the sandals off my feet and beat the floor with them. I couldn’t reach to strike the centipede, for if I leaned this way or that I knew that I would topple over, and then my face would be down on the floor where it was! But when I pounded on the floor with my shoes it seemed to be afraid and ran back to the shadows.
“I have no idea how long I sat there and drummed upon the floor, but presently I heard a woman scream and scream, as though she’d never stop. After a little while I realized it was I who screamed, but I was powerless to stop it. It might have been five minutes or an hour that I sat and screamed and drummed on the floor with my shoes; I could not say. But presently my door was opened and you gentlemen came in. To God and you I owe my life, señores.” The smile with which she swept us was positively ravishing;
“Eh bien, señorita, we are indebted to you for a very lucid exposition of that so trying night’s occurrences,” de Grandin said. “We need not trouble to interrogate your brother. From all that we have seen we may assume that his experiences were substantially the same as yours.
“You have heard about the attempt on his life at the hospital?”
“But yes,” she answered tremulously. “Is there no safety for us anywhere? What have we done to anyone? Why should anybody wish to harm poor us.”
“Please understand me, señorita,” he returned. “It is for your own safety, not because we think of you as criminals, that we have arranged to lodge you in the city prison. Even in the hospital you are not safe, but in the prison with its fast-locked doors and many guards your safety is assured. As for who it was that orphaned you and then administered a drug and tried to kill you with the poison centipedes, I do not know, but I shall find out, never fear. I am Jules de Grandin, and Jules de Grandin is a very clever fellow.”
“BE TH’ WAY, SOR,” Costello whispered as he prepared to escort the young people to the safety of the prison, “they’ve found th’ missin’ hearse. It wuz in th’ bay, where it’d been run off Whitman’s Dock. The plates wuz missin’, but Joe Valenti, th’ Eyetalian undertaker, identified it.”
“Ah, that is good. The bodies were in it, of course?”
“No, sor, they weren’t. Th’ Harbor Squad’s draggin’ th’ bay on th’ off chance they mighta dropped out, but I don’t think they’ll find ’em. Th’ hearse doors wuz all shut when it wuz fished up, an’ hardly any water had seeped in. ’Tain’t likely th’ bodies fell out of it.”
THE SERGEANT CAME TO dinner three nights later, and did full justice to the ragout irlandais which Nora had prepared for his especial benefit. Not until the meal was over and we had adjourned to the study would de Grandin speak about the case; then, as he took his stance before the empty fireplace: “My friends,” he announced as he drew a sheaf of papers from his pocket, “I damn think I have the answer to our puzzle. You will remember Señorita Gutierrez knew her father had resigned his commission before her birth, and had never spoken of his military service in her hearing. Perhaps you wondered at it. We old soldiers are not wont to minimize the tales of our adventures. Yet there was good reason for his reticence.
“I have his record here. I have cabled to the Surêté and the Ministère de la Guerre, and they replied at length by air mail via South America.
“Constantino Cristóbal José Gutierrez y del Gado de Jerez was, we knew, a Spaniard; we did not know he quit his country in extraordinary haste with the guardia civil upon his heels. When the Barcelona riots broke out in 1909 he was a young subaltern fresh from military school at Toledo, where he had been educated in the traditions of Pizarro and Cortez. You recall what happened after that uprising? How Francisco Ferrer the great educator was tried by a court-martial? Tiens, when a military court tries a soldier it metes out substantial justice. When it tries a civilian one may wager safely that it was convoked to find him
guilty of all charges.
“Our young sous-lieutenant was among the prosecution’s witnesses and when the trial was completed the sentence sent the defendants to the firing-party.
“The whole world shuddered at the outrage, and the pressure of mankind’s opinion was so great that three years later another military court revoked the first one’s findings, and branded testimony given against Ferrer and his co-defendants as perjury.
“Gutierrez, now a captain, took offense at this supposed reflection on his veracity, challenged one of the court to a duel and killed him at the first pass. His opponent was a major, partly crippled by a wound he had received in Cuba, very wealthy and of an influential family. Captain Gutierrez killed his own career in the Spanish army when he killed his adversary, and had to flee in greatest haste to avoid arrest.
“Eh bien, he landed where so many disappointed soldiers land, in the Foreign Legion. He had the blood of the Conquistadores in him, that one. Embittered, bold and reckless, he was the légionnaire par excellence. By the end of the Great War he was a colonel.
“Then, as now and always, the Riffs and Druses were in revolt, actual or prospective, and Colonel Gutierrez when assigned to the Intelligence proved successful in obtaining military information from the captured rebels. The Spaniard has a flair for torture, my friends. Cruelty is as native to him as delicacy is to a Frenchman. Some few of Colonel Gutierrez’ prisoners escaped, some he released when they had served their turn. All went back home crippled and deformed, and his popularity with the hillmen waned in inverse ratio to the number of their tribesmen he disfigured.
“Tenez, at length an elderly Druse gentleman named Abn-el-Kader fell into our brave colonel’s none too gentle hands, and with him was captured his daughter Jahanara, called lalla aziza, the beautiful lady. She was indeed a lovely creature, just turned thirteen, which in the East meant budding into womanhood, with copper-red hair rolling low upon her snowy forehead and passionate, dreamy, wistful eyes into which a man looked once, then never cared to look away again.
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